The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If you give a public anthroposophical lecture today in our present time - and what is said here in relation to a public lecture must be taken into account in everything we bring from anthroposophy to the outside world, to people who do not join an anthroposophical Society, then we must always bear in mind that although the souls of people today have a great longing for anthroposophy in their depths, in their subconscious, there is very little connection with spiritual truths in those parts of their soul life of which they themselves are aware. Therefore, in a public lecture, it is not important to pay attention to what is popular or unpopular with such personalities. One should never ask oneself what they like or dislike to hear, but one must take into consideration that our age has habits of thought and ways of imagining things that are in many ways directly opposed to what we are working towards through anthroposophical knowledge. I always try to pay careful attention to the aspects that need to be considered when I try to determine the difference between the tone in which a public lecture must be delivered and the tone in which we can speak to our anthroposophical friends. And we should get used to really observing this distinction. Even if people who are still far from anthroposophy are perhaps unpleasantly affected by what they are told, this need not trouble us in any way, as long as we are aware that we have brought them what is good for their souls. But then, when we are among ourselves, we must try to penetrate deeper and deeper into the things. We can, among ourselves, discuss certain very definite truths that are already extraordinarily important and significant for our present time. We must discuss them among ourselves so that they can penetrate deeper and deeper into the spiritual life of the time, and then, so to speak, we can bring them to the outer world in clearly formulated words.

We must understand this matter quite correctly. Let us assume that we are talking about what constantly plays a role in human life, about the fact that all human life on earth is permeated by the Ahrimanic, by the Luciferic forces, or we are talking about certain things that relate to life between death and a new birth. What should prevent us from speaking so readily about these things to the unprepared should not be what often occurs in a society like ours, and what could be called a certain secrecy, where most people do not even have the right idea of why it is done. What should prevent us from speaking about these things to the unprepared is that people who are unprepared cannot take things seriously enough, cannot take them deeply enough. The words Ahrimanic and Luciferic forces should gradually become something so significant for the life of the anthroposophist, something that so deeply moves his feelings and perceptions when these words are spoken that one has the feeling: If you throw these words at the head of the unprepared, the inner power that you are supposed to feel when they are spoken is taken away, and we also harm ourselves if we use these words in ordinary life on every occasion that suits us. For example, when we reach into our wallet and have to deal with money, we are indeed dealing with Ahrimanic forces. But it is not good to apply the word 'Ahrimanic' so readily to everyday situations. When we apply such words to everyday situations, they become dulled for our perception, for our feeling, and we then no longer have the possibility of having words that, when we think or speak them, exert on us that elementary, significant meaning that they are meant to exert. It is extremely important that we do not get too casual about these things in our daily lives, for we will gradually lose the best and most effective that anthroposophy can give us. The more we use anthroposophical words in our daily lives, the more we deprive ourselves of the possibility that anthroposophy will truly become something that supports our soul and deeply permeates our soul. We need only consider the power of habit and we will see that there is a difference when we use words, such as, let us say, the words 'aura' or 'Ahrimanic forces' or 'Luciferic forces', with a certain sacred awe, with a certain awareness that we are speaking of other worlds. If we always feel that we have to stop before using such words, and only use them when it is really important for us to consider our relationship to the supersensible world, then it is quite different from speaking of these things of the higher world in everyday life and constantly using words taken from these worlds.

I had to give this introduction because, in this hour, we want to point out something in the human soul that should always be present in our consciousness, but which we only truly contemplate when it is done with a certain sacred awe. Take in hand the little book 'The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science'. There you will find a description, so to speak, of the processes that take place in a developing human being from seven to seven years. It shows that up to the age of seven, until the change of teeth, we are mainly dealing with the development of the physical body; that in the next period, from the age of seven to fourteen, until sexual maturity, we are dealing with the development of the etheric body and so on. If you consider this development of the human being from seven to seven years, then you are primarily dealing with what the, so to speak, normal beings of the higher hierarchies bring about in human evolution. This is the true progressive evolution that takes place from seven to seven years, so that we can say: the actually progressive divine-spiritual powers guide and direct this evolution from seven to seven years. If only these progressive divine spiritual powers were active in man, then the whole of human life would take a completely different course, a completely different course from the one it actually takes. Above all, man would approach a small child in a completely different way. He would always have the feeling that a spiritual individuality was speaking through the child. One would even always have the feeling that the small child, in everything it does, receives the impulses from higher worlds. And people would certainly have no other feeling than that the child acts out of far higher impulses than those that they themselves can penetrate with their minds. And that would take quite a long time in relative terms.

What seems so desirable to people today, that children should be clever in a human and earthly sense as early as possible, would then seem highly unwelcome to people, because of a child that causes the delight of those around it today because it already or did, would be a child that would be guided by the progressive divine-spiritual powers according to the seven-year periods. If people had only children, they would say, if the child spoke cleverly in the modern sense as early as possible and they were accustomed to the different circumstances: How godforsaken the child is! What is considered delightful today would be seen as a punishment. And a young person of fifteen who was as clever as is expected today would be seen as a completely godforsaken being. For it is only through the progressive divine spiritual powers that the human being is actually called upon to gradually emerge completely with his ego between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-eight; and before that, what he does would appear much more as if higher spiritual, supersensible impulses were working through him. Of course, a certain dreamy life would be characteristic of the children; but this dreamy life would be felt as a blessing from God or the spirit, and there would be no attempt to educate the children to be precocious in the modern sense.

Now, as we know, something else also occurs during these developmental periods of the human being. This is what we have often emphasized: the development of self-awareness in the third, fourth, fifth year, at that point in time that we can generally characterize by saying: it is the point in time up to which a person remembers in later life. It is the occurrence of that moment from which the person begins to say “I” to themselves. You must now actually think of the whole development of man as two currents: as that of evolution, in which the progressive divine-spiritual entities are at work, and in addition the other current, through which man, within the first seven-year period, begins to develop an inner self-awareness, to develop a memory that later allows him to consciously remember back to that point in time. This does not come from the progressive divine spiritual beings. They would let us dream for much longer and would work through us into the world. The fact that we become self-aware so early and say 'I' so early is purely the result of the forces of Lucifer working in people. Thus we are dealing with two currents, with a regular progressive divine-spiritual current, as it were, which would actually only lead us to a clear, distinct sense of self between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-eight, and with a Luciferic current within us. This luciferic current works in us in such a way that it completely crosses the other current, so that it does something completely different in us than what the progressive divine-spiritual beings actually want from us. They work in such a way that we learn to say “I” to ourselves in the midst of the first period, learn to develop our egoity inwardly, soul-wise, and to remember back in our memory.

If we really consider this, we can get an idea of our ongoing development. Imagine for a moment the luciferic influence just characterized away and only what the progressive entities would make of man as a calmly flowing water. We think of this calmly flowing water as an image of the progressive life stream of man under the influence of the actually good divine entities. And now let us take the water that flows so calmly for a walk, then take a blue or red substance, pour it into the calmly flowing water and, choosing a chemical liquid that can be kept separate from the clear water, let a second current flow alongside the first current from a certain point on. Thus, in our own true, calmly progressive, we might say, “Yahweh-Christ” current, the Luciferic current flows with us from about the middle of our first seven-year period. And so Lucifer lives in us. If Lucifer did not live in us, we would not have this second current. But if we only lived in the first stream, then we would have the consciousness until well into our twenties: we are actually a member of the divine-spiritual powers. We attain the consciousness of independence, of inner individuality and personality, through the second stream. Thus we see at the same time that it is full of wisdom that this Luciferic stream pours into us.

But in the second seven-year period, too, something occurs that we can, in a sense, understand as a current that is not connected with the merely progressive divine beings. From a certain point of view, this has already been repeatedly characterized in us. It occurs around the ninth or tenth year, that is, in the second seven-year period. For some, the perceptive people, the experiences come as I have mentioned them, for example, with Jean Paul. For him it occurred perhaps a little earlier, for others it usually occurs around the ninth or tenth year. There can be a significant intensification, one might say a condensation of the sense of self. But the fact that something special is happening can also be established in another way. However, I would not recommend that this other way should become a particular educational rule. It can only be said that once it happens, one might say, of its own accord, it can be observed, but one should not play with it, one should not make it a principle of education. If you let a child, especially around the age of nine or ten, look at himself naked in the mirror, and the child is not jaded by our often strange educational principles today, he will always feel a certain fear in a natural way at the sight of his own body, a certain fear if he has not been made flirtatious earlier through looking in the mirror a lot. This can be observed especially in naturally sensitive children who have not looked in the mirror much before, because during this time something grows in the human being that acts as a kind of counterbalance to the luciferic current that is present in the first period. In this second period, around the ninth or tenth year, Ahriman takes hold of the human being and forms a kind of balance with his current to the luciferic current. We can now accomplish that which does Ahriman the greatest favor if, at this very time, we develop the mind of the growing child, which is directed towards the external sensory world, if we say to ourselves: During this time, the child must be trained in such a way that it comes to its own independent judgment in everything. You know that I am mentioning an educational principle that is now quite generally accepted in pedagogy. The almost universal demand today is to foster independence, especially in these years. They even put adding machines in front of children so that they are not even encouraged to learn the multiplication table by heart. This is based on a certain benevolence of our age towards Ahriman. Our age wishes, unconsciously of course, to educate children in such a way that Ahriman can be cultivated as strongly as possible in the human soul. And when we go through the current educational methods today, we say to ourselves as occultists: These people who advocate these educational methods are only bunglers. If Ahriman himself were to write these educational principles, he would do better! But what is said there about children's independence and their own judgment is a true discipleship of Ahriman. What is implied here will become more and more prevalent in the near future. Ahriman will become a good guide for the external powers and spiritual guides of our age.

Now take a matter such as we have just mentioned. We must regard it as something quite natural and self-evident that it should appeal to man; that man feels Lucifer and Ahriman approaching him. It would be quite wrong to believe that it would be better if we were now to eliminate Lucifer and Ahriman altogether. That would be quite impossible. The following reflection can show you how impossible it would be. If our life were not regulated, as it were, by the interaction of the progressive divine spiritual beings with the Ahrimanic and Luciferic forces, if only the progressive powers were to work on us, then we would come to a certain independence much later and we would also have this independence in such a way that, just as we now perceive colors and light, we would then no longer doubt that divine spiritual entities also really prevail behind colors and light, behind that which we perceive externally. We would perceive the thoughts of the world simultaneously with our sense perceptions. We would only come to our independence in our twenties, but then we would also perceive world thoughts externally. We would then dream away our youth because divine spiritual powers would be working in us, and when these would cease to work from within, they would then confront us from without. We would perceive their thoughts from the outside as we now only receive sensory perceptions. We would therefore, with the exception of a few years, towards the twentieth year, when we would become visible, otherwise never have any proper independence at all. As children we would be dreamy beings, in middle age we would not be able to make our own decisions and determine our own course, but wherever we encountered the outer world we would simply see what we had to do, as the people of ancient Atlantis could still do. Independence flows into us through the working of Lucifer and Ahriman within us.

Of course, it is extremely important that we do not speak in the same way as today's foolish pedagogy speaks about the human being, which always speaks of development, as if one were to extract the inner being from the human being. In an educational sense, we only speak meaningfully about the human being when we know that three things are involved in his soul: the progressive good divine spiritual beings, and Lucifer and Ahriman, and when we can distinguish between them. It is now of particular value to first take the main point of view of the progressive divine spiritual beings and consider above all: What are the requirements when we look at the seven-fold periods of human development? For in this respect we can really help every human being simply by behaving in the right way towards this child of man. If in the first seven years of the child's life we bring about conditions in which it lives in an environment that has a healthy effect on its physical body, we are doing something good for the child under all circumstances. If during the second period we create around the human being good authorities, authorities that may be called such in the noblest sense, so that the human being does not become a clever talker in these times, but rather a being that builds on the people around him as authorities, the child has respect for and devotion to, then we are doing something good for him under all circumstances. We are doing something good when we educate children who, in their ninth or tenth year, do not already want to know everything themselves, but who, when asked, “Why is this or that right or good?” they will say: because their father or mother said it was good, or because their teacher said so. If we educate our children in such a way that the adults around them are seen as self-evident authorities, then we are doing our children a favor in all circumstances. And if we violate these seven-year periods, if we bring about a situation in which children begin to criticize those who are self-evident authorities during this period, if we do not avoid this criticism, then we do something bad for the growing person under all circumstances. And if we do not find the opportunity to speak to a person between the ages of fourteen, fifteen and twenty-one in such a way that we can naturally rise with him to ideals, to ideals that fill the heart with joy, then we are not doing this young person any good either. With people in these years, one must speak of ideals, of what later life must bring under all circumstances to the person growing up properly. One may say: Today, one's heart could really break sometimes when eighteen-year-old boys – pardon me, personalities – come and already carry their feuilletons into the newspapers. If, instead of accepting something from them, one were to talk to them about things that do not yet interfere with their outward lives, but which they are only to realize later, if one were to talk to them about the great ideals of human life and be inspired by them, then one would relate to them in the right way. Actually, anyone who, as an editor, accepts the feature section of a person who has not yet reached the age of twenty, does something worse under all circumstances than someone who, when the young person comes up with this feature section, says to him: Yes, look, that's very nice what you've done. But when you are ten years older, you will have completely different ideas about it. Now put it nicely in your drawer and take it out again in ten or twelve years. The person who does that, then takes a look at the manuscript and talks to the person concerned about the ideals of life that can be associated with it, does something good for him.

I just want to characterize that the things that were said in my writing “The Education of the Child” should always be taken into account in education under all circumstances. Everything else, where Lucifer and Ahriman are involved, does not allow for general rules, it is actually different for every person, because it relates precisely to the personal. In many cases, it is a matter of the educator's personal tact, and one cannot intervene in these matters with all kinds of pedantic rules. I wanted to give you a characterization of what is in the human soul, and how we must take into account Lucifer and Ahriman if we want to understand the full human nature, if we really want to consider everything, not just look at it and say: we must fight Lucifer and Ahriman. If we wanted to fight Lucifer at all costs, we could do so in a very sure way: we would only have to prevent people from developing a memory. For just as it is true that certain lunar beings were brought into our earthly development, it is equally true that all memory is a Luciferic power. So we would simply have to avoid developing our memory! We must, however, realize that we have to develop this memory in the right way. And that is why it was said in that writing that the right period for the education of memory is between the ages of seven and fourteen. In the previous period, we do not particularly need to systematically educate memory, because it develops itself then, because that is when Lucifer is most present in man. We leave the children to themselves. But then, after the change of teeth, when Ahriman has most clearly taken hold of the human being, we begin to train the memory. For by then Ahriman has already created his counterweight to Lucifer, so we no longer work directly in the service of Lucifer when we train the memory. We must not even entertain the idea that we want to fight Ahriman. There would be a very simple way to combat the grossest Ahrimanic effects, but it would not do the human being any good. When the human being gets his second teeth, they would have to be hammered in, because that is when the most intense Ahrimanic effects occur. Of the progressive powers, man has only his so-called milk teeth. What man receives as his independent teeth throughout his life has a purely Ahrimanic effect.

Thus we must realize that much of what is in us at all can only be in us because the forces of Ahriman and Lucifer are in us. Sometimes we even succeed in being quite dissatisfied with our unconscious counteraction to Ahriman. In the course of our lives, we prepare ourselves to have certain powers when we have passed through death, so that Ahriman cannot do too much to us between death and a new birth. But sometimes we clearly show ourselves that we do not even welcome the fight against Ahriman, for example when we regret every tooth loss. But with every tooth that falls out, we gain a power that we can put to very good use. I am not, of course, speaking against the filling or insertion of teeth, because nothing Ahrimanic grows in us through this, at most the gold itself, but that is not the point. So there is no question of this being a bad thing. The fact that we gradually lose our Ahrimanic teeth is due to the fact that in evolution we also receive certain impulses that defeat Ahriman. And regardless of whether we have a tooth inserted again or not, once it has been lost, we have gained an impulse that helps us in the forces that we have to develop between death and a new birth at the very lowest level. It is a small thing at first, but it can show us how, when we approach reality and look beyond the appearance and the great deception that usually surrounds us, we really have to get into the habit of looking at things in life quite differently than they are usually looked at. And even the weakness of old age, for example, is a strength that, by feeling it, we gain directly to have something against Ahriman when we have passed through the gate of death. While we can indeed be angry here between birth and death if we age prematurely, in terms of what we want after death to cope with Ahriman, we have to be glad that we age.

And now you see how wonderfully beautiful it is that our inner spiritual and soul core remains, which, by developing between birth and death, has everything to do with the progressive powers. For this germ, which passes through the gate of death, is there, where it has developed its strongest inner powers of tension, purely dominated by the progressive powers. That which is outside of it, which withers away externally, that is where the Ahrimanic powers are. And we must now consider what the seer of this Ahriman actually is.

When our plants grow out of our soil, wither towards autumn and the leaves fall, then the elemental spirits that Ahriman sends to the earth's surface appear everywhere. There he reaps the first dying; he reaps it through his elemental spirits. When one walks through the fields in autumn and clairvoyantly sees nature dying, then Ahriman is stretching out his forces everywhere, and everywhere he has his elemental messengers to bring him the withering physical and etheric entities. But as human beings, we are actually also in a kind of autumn and winter mood throughout the day. Truly, the soul's summer mood is actually only present when the soul is asleep. It is really the case that the sleeping human body, physical body and etheric body, is of the same value as a plant; and what is outside, the I and the astral body, reflect their rays back onto the physical and etheric body, acting like the sun and stars and causing the forces that we have destroyed during the day to sprout out. Vegetable life grows, and the thinking during the day is actually only there to remove what the night has caused to sprout. When we wake up, we flit over our vegetative life, just as autumn flits over the plants of the earth. And what winter does to the vegetation of the earth, we do in exactly the same way to our physical and etheric body when we wake up, to that which they bring forth in the summer time of the soul, namely during the time when we are asleep at night. When we are awake, it is wintertime, the soul's real wintertime, and if we want to have the soul's springtime, we have to fall asleep. It is so. And from this point of view, it is actually easy to understand why people who do not at least mix something from the soul's summertime into their waking lives dry up so easily. Dry scholars, scrawny little professors, they are those who do not like to take in what is not fully conscious, who do not like to take in something of the soul's summer time. Then they dry up, then they become quite pronounced winter people. And to the seer, the whole development of human daily life presents itself as quite similar to what I have just said for nature. When man forms his ordinary thoughts that relate to the external, when he thinks only in a materialistic way about what happens externally, then his thoughts engage the brain in such a way that the brain secretes substances that Ahriman can put to good use, so that Ahriman actually accompanies the waking life of the day. And the more materialistic we are, the more possessed we are by Ahriman. No wonder it is true that materialism is connected with fear. If you remember the “Guardian of the Threshold”, you will realize how fear is in turn connected with Ahriman.

We should get the feeling that we are indeed facing complicated spiritual worlds in life. And what we should get from anthroposophy is not just that we know this or that, that we know there is Ahriman, Lucifer, a physical body, an etheric body. That is the very least. What we are to acquire from anthroposophy is a certain mood of the soul, a basic feeling for human life, what is actually there in these depths of the soul. Therefore, it is necessary that we keep the words that are connected with these higher things with a certain sacred awe. If we always have them on our lips, then it all too easily happens that their seriousness and dignity become dulled for us.

Thus we see man between birth and death, in his relationship to the progressive spiritual entities, standing in a certain way between Lucifer and Ahriman. And in order that the entire development of man may take place in the right way, this relationship must remain the same between death and a new birth, only that which is inward between birth and death becomes outward between death and a new birth. Inwardly, from the moment we can remember back, Lucifer has joined his claws to the human soul. Inwardly, man knows nothing about it unless he learns something through spiritual science and learns to feel about it. After death, the matter is different. At a certain point in time, Lucifer makes his appearance, just as surely as inwardly between birth and death, outwardly in the life between death and a new birth. So he stands there in full form before us, so he stands by our side, so we walk with him! Just as little as man knows Lucifer before he has stepped through the gate of death, so surely and clearly does he know him when he walks by his side between death and a new birth. Only that in the present cycle of time this consciousness can become a rather unpleasant one. We can pass through the region between death and a new birth in such a way that we have Lucifer beside us, so to speak, and realize his necessity for the world. The time is drawing near when people will only be able to pass through the life after death with Lucifer if they have already properly sensed and recognized the Luciferian impulses in the human soul here in life. Those people – and there will be more and more of them in the future – who want nothing to do with Lucifer, and that is probably the majority, will know all the more about Lucifer after death. Not only will he stand by their side, but he will continually tap their soul-forces, he will vampirize them. This is what man, through ignorance, prepares himself for, to be vampirized by Lucifer. In this way he robs himself of strength for the next life, for he gives it, in a sense, to Lucifer.

It is very similar with regard to Ahriman. With regard to him, the matter is as follows. The two spirits are always there between death and a new birth, but one time one is more present and the other less, the other time it is the other way around. We go there, and then back again in life between death and a new birth. At the time of passing away, Lucifer is especially at our side, and at the time of returning towards a new birth, Ahriman is especially at our side. For he leads us back to the earth, and he is an important personality in the second half of the return journey. And he too can, as it were, do harm to those people who do not want to believe in him in their life between birth and death. He gives them too much of his powers. He gives them what he always has left over, those powers that are connected with earthly heaviness, that bring illness and premature death upon people, that bring all kinds of misfortunes that look like coincidences into earthly existence, and so on. All this is connected with these Ahrimanic powers.

From a slightly different point of view, I presented the matter over in Munich. There I pointed out that after death the human soul can be the serving spirit for the powers that send illness and death from the supersensible worlds into the sensual. What makes life weak is what Ahriman welcomes so much and what makes it possible for him to further weaken our lives. But again, we must not judge one-sidedly. It would be quite wrong to say: So it is very bad that Ahriman has introduced us into life and that we have to suffer from his after-effects in life. — No, that is good, because under certain circumstances an effect of illness can be what contributes most to our ascending development.

It is always the case that when we approach the threshold that separates the supersensible from the sensory world, we must be prepared to modify our judgment somewhat and not to judge as we are accustomed to doing in the ordinary physical world. For it is true, in the physical world, there is indeed Maja in abundance. Where does materialism come from in the physical world, that materialism that says: There is no Ahriman, there is no devil at all! Who shouts the loudest: There is no devil? — He who is most possessed by him. For the spirit we call Ahriman has the greatest interest in having his existence most of all denied by the one who is most possessed by him. “The devil never senses the little people, even if he has them by the collar!” So not believing in Ahriman is a bad Maja, because he has you by the collar most of all when you don't believe in him, because then you give him the greatest power over you. So that you judge wrongly when monists appear and rail against the devil, and you say: They are fighting the devil. No, a materialistic-monistic gathering that rails against the devil is set up to conjure up the devil. And the modern materialists conjure up the devil much more than the old witches are said to have done, much, much more! That is the truth and the rest is Maya. So we must learn to judge differently. And anyone who goes to a monistic meeting that is nuanced in a materialistic way is not telling the truth when they say: People free people from the devil. — They should say: Now I am going to a meeting where the devil is being invoked into human culture with all the powers that people have. That is what we should really come to realize: that we, as we grow into spiritual life, not only learn to absorb concepts and ideas, but we also learn to think and feel differently. And yet, when we face the external world, we remain rational enough not to mix this external world all the time with what is true for the supersensible worlds. When people constantly use words in relation to the external physical world that actually only have the right value for the supersensible worlds, then they take away what is most important: that we learn to distinguish between the sensory and supersensible worlds, that we learn to apply the words in the right sense.

This is the single thing that should be hinted at today, when we have gathered here, for the first time in such large numbers, with friends from outside the city, at our recently established Augsburg branch. And today, when we wanted to gather our thoughts here in our souls, which should help us in our work in this place, a serious word, a very serious word, should also be spoken as a kind of opening word for our Augsburg branch. For then, under the guidance and direction of the masters of wisdom and harmony of feeling, who serve the advancing divine-spiritual beings, the work of a branch will flourish quite surely when this spiritual work harmoniously integrates itself into a larger spiritual stream of work. And our friends from outside have come here to you, my dear friends from Augsburg, in order to develop thoughts of love and devotion for the general anthroposophical cause and for each individual anthroposophical striving person here with you in their souls, and this will remain in these souls, which from this hour has taken its starting point and developed like a source of togetherness in these souls. You will, my dear friends in Augsburg, continue to work here alone from week to week, from time to time, but only seemingly, only outwardly and spatially alone. The fact that many friends are together with you will be the starting point for those strengthening forces that can actually flow That is why it is so wonderful when the opportunity arises for our friends to come together with a young branch in larger numbers. Because then the point at which they come together in time is also an outward sign, which we as human beings need, that from there the will can really go to And if you, my dear friends in Augsburg, who have been working faithfully on anthroposophy for some time now, continue to work faithfully in the future, remember that there will be friends all over the world who will think to you with the intention that your work may be a worthy In this way we practise our togetherness and never lose sight of our togetherness in spirit. Let us always keep it clear, but also strongly present, for only in this way can we really be helped by those powers that prevail over our true work, the forces of the masters of wisdom and of the harmony of feelings. These forces will invisibly flit through your thoughts when you The dear local members have shown through so much in their anthroposophical work and activities how faithfully and truly they want to work with us. And so we are all doing something important when we now, through this gathering, have the opportunity to unite our thoughts in the goal that has brought us together: May the work of our Augsburg sisters and brothers be blessed and strengthened by the powers to which we always appeal! It is in this spirit that I invoke the blessing of the Masters of Wisdom and Harmony of Feelings upon this branch, that blessing which I know is with us in our work if we make ourselves worthy of it.

When we gathered here a year ago, we were still, so to speak, occupied with the thoughts that arose from the intention at that time to gain some insight into the foundations, into the underlying forces of the current catastrophic events. Some time ago, several of our friends expressed the wish that more should be said than had been said so far about the specific, deeper forces that have contributed to these catastrophic events. And we occupied ourselves at the time with the intentions, with the aspirations of certain circles, which seek to introduce their intentions, one might say, in a hidden way into the world, and which proceed from certain goals which, as we have seen, are by no means generally human goals, but are the group-egoistic goals of certain narrower circles, which, however, know how to calculate - in the sense that one has to calculate in the world if one wants to carry out certain things - which know how to calculate with large time periods.

We have been able to refer back to aspirations that are to be pursued, they are to be pursued even further back, but for the time being they are to be pursued in continuous progression until the 1880s, aspirations that have reckoned with the trends and forces asserting themselves in the present cultural world. And perhaps from these considerations we have been able to gain some understanding of the course of events, some understanding that is independent of what dominates the whole world today, independent of the national and other group-egoistic aspirations that lead to such sad consequences. We may have been able to gain a view that is independent of the narrow perspectives that dominate almost all people today, and we may have been able to form, albeit less frequently expressed, certain inner views of what is necessary for the salvation of humanity in the present time.

And it is from what is necessary in the present time that the other endeavors have also emerged, which are currently being tried to be asserted on the basis of our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. In the last year in particular, my public lectures, as friends may have noticed, had a certain basic character. They had the basic character of drawing attention to certain important hidden sides of human nature. Everywhere I was able to lecture this year, I endeavored to awaken a deeper understanding of the human being from this point of view, insofar as the human being is part of the overall human process of the world order. We need only look back at the public lectures that have been held here in Switzerland over the past few months. The aim everywhere, including the more detailed observations that I was able to make in Zurich, was to show how the human being, as a human personality, as a human individual, carries within himself the forces that actually belong to different states of consciousness. How he not only carries within himself forces that belong to his waking consciousness, but also other forces that remain in the subconscious, but which are by no means meaningless, but play their role in the historical development of humanity, which play their role in social and ethical life. Through such endeavors, the idea should be awakened of how necessary it is in the present to strive for a deeper understanding of human nature. In these lectures, even in the public lectures, the connection between the so-called dead and the living was deliberately mentioned. Although such references must still be subtle in public lectures, they have been tried in a more insistent way, especially in recent times.

The underlying tone of these lectures was intended to be one that arises from the, I believe justified, insight that salvation in the development of humanity can only come about in the present if humanity truly takes up certain spiritual-scientific impulses. And in the public lectures, an attempt was made to build a bridge between what humanity now chooses to believe and what leads to deeper truths. The attempt was made to build this bridge in such a way that it can be seen that a way can be found, if good will is applied, from what the individual scientists do not push towards, but what contemporary science as such does. It was attempted to show that actually the scientists of the present time are in discord with the results of their science, that science itself opens up the direct perspective into spiritual-scientific truths. And in particular, it was attempted to show how these spiritual-scientific truths have their significant consequences for practical human life, for all the various branches of this practical human life. The tone of these reflections, including the public ones, was such that, if there was good will for understanding, at least such an understanding could be achieved that one could say: something must happen in terms of human understanding of the world; there must be a kind of reversal of certain directions that have been taken, there must be good will.

It has been shown that suggestions have fallen on fertile ground here and there. But today there is still a formidable obstacle in the way of adopting a new direction. And this obstacle comes in particular from the human desire for mental comfort, which is so decisive today, from the self-chosen difficulty that many people find in getting away from old thoughts, in really activating their thinking, to banish certain ingrained prejudices from their souls and to take in certain new concepts that are necessary for the further course of human development, certain concepts, certain ideas, above all, ideas that engage with reality. The tone was set in the reflections of this year in such a way that this necessary turning to reality, to reality steeped in truth, was emphasized and particularly highlighted.

One might have thought that outside our circles there would be a larger number of people here and there who, inspired by such reflections, would have come to the question: Which paths should one take in this or that field? - that people would have emerged who feel that contemporary thinking has lost touch with true reality.

Admittedly, not much of this has been shown. The thinking, the feeling, the perception of people today is casual, comfortable, lethargic, and also haughty, and self-satisfied with what has been handed down. This can be seen from the fact that few people ask themselves: What can be learned from the events of recent years? How many, many people today still take it for granted that they are building on the same principles, which they call ideals, whose collapse they could clearly see through these catastrophic events. Even today, theories and views are still being expounded that could be known to have been shipwrecked by the events of recent years. Currents continue under the same principles under which they used to work, even though one could see that these currents, in their principles, are far removed from the forces that rule reality and that destroy reality if man does not prepare to include the nature and workings of these forces in his imagination, in his view.

Such things are not said for the sake of criticizing. Nor are they said for the sake of creating pessimism, but they are said because it cannot be emphasized often enough that the most necessary thing in the present is an understanding of true reality, a departure from the straw-like, insubstantial abstractions that have plunged the world into misfortune! Such straw-like, insubstantial abstractions dominate the world today. And it is urgently necessary for the human soul to turn to this direction.

For example, some people today take it for granted when clever people repeatedly declare that it is not people who matter, but rather the ideas that are spread in the world. Such a statement is therefore dangerous because it is a strong temptation. In the real world, everything depends on people, and the best principles and ideas can have no significance if they are represented by people who do not have the strength within themselves to realize what, according to the nature of time, must be realized, who do not have the strength within themselves to find their way to reality with their own hearts and minds. Remoteness from reality is the word that can be used for almost everything that is often proclaimed with grandiose words as an ideal in the world. And a dawn, as humanity must experience it, can only come when, time and again, New Year's reflections come that, on the one hand, reject the impulse of alienation from reality and, on the other hand, attempt to unite man in his soul with reality.

It is almost a truism to say, and yet necessary in the present situation: humanity has come under the influence of insubstantial word sounds, under the influence of insubstantial phrases of principle. People are not very inclined to look into where this or that comes from when they hear it, and so they come into tremendous discord with what is real and essential. For the world is not governed in the right way by the words that are spoken, if these words are not spoken from the heart of reality, if these words are only borrowed from the treasury of words and ideas that now flows on the surface of human existence, the content of which can be repeated without being understood. If one disregards the things that unfortunately have this character and are corrupting the world today, and focuses on something that may be insignificant in the face of great world events but is nonetheless characteristic because it is repeated in great world events, if one wishes to draw attention to something, one can say: It is quite natural in the present cycle of humanity that numerous people make good poems, because such good poems simply arise from the impulses rooted in the languages and the social circumstances of people. One need only, so to speak, put together what is already there, and good things will come out in the old sense. This is the case in the other arts and in the other areas of life.

Today, however, it is much more necessary to be able to pay attention to what may emerge as something new, perhaps in a stammering and imperfect way, than to be able to keep an eye out for what is pleasing and beautiful. That which carries future possibilities within it may emerge in a rather imperfect way; but the important thing would be to discover in this imperfection the impulsive germ for the future. If efforts were made in this direction, we would try to make it a general principle, as we have done in particular in the construction of this building here at Dornach: to break with the old, even at the risk of being quite imperfect in the new. If that were to become a general method, then some good would come to humanity from such a thing.

Above all, it is necessary to break away from the fixed, because the fixed is dying. There is something dying and something coming to life in the historical life of humanity. And it was not without reason that I said in those days: There is something dangerous even in the use of words themselves. One need not go as far as Fritz Mauthner, who in his “Criticism of Language,” in his “Philosophical Dictionary,” enumerates countless sins that people commit by pursuing the cult of the word everywhere. Certainly, Fritz Mauthner carries a correct thought to the point of absurdity when, for example, he asserts that Christianity in Europe is actually essentially a collection of twenty to thirty loan words, that is, it has developed in such a way that people have fallen in love with twenty to thirty words, to which they cling and consider them realities. Of course, we need not go that far. Nor can we entirely agree with Fritz Mauthner when he actually sees the most essential thing in the bringing about of these catastrophic events as being that people have practised idolatry with words, although it is absolutely true that idolatry with words has been practised.

This is something that must stop. The word has gradually become something that floats on the surface of human life and to which one clings. The word has gradually become something that is taken for granted. When you try to get to know more intimately what dominates thinking and thought habits today, then, for example, when I see this, I remember an argument that I often encountered during my childhood and up to the age of twenty-five of youth, of boyhood friends, often encountered: I was often asked by this or that person – please excuse the perhaps somewhat offensive topic that comes up – what the actual difference is between love and friendship when it comes to relationships between young men and young women. And a great deal of emphasis was placed on defining the terms “love” and “friendship” as precisely as possible. These were supposed to be well-nested terms. I really did have – I can say this without being silly – the aspiration not to look at such abstractions, but to look at reality. I always said: in case A I see a relationship between a male and a female individual, and the same in case B; these are all concrete relationships of the most diverse kinds. Whether you call it “love” or “friendship” is all the same to me, because what matters is the objective.

In contrast to what must be lived out in a social relationship between people, another interest does indeed arise. The interest of codification arises, and then, of course, nested concepts and nested words are needed. How could laws be made without adhering to words! But the alternative cannot be to say: no nested words, but direct human life! Such an alternative would be about as clever as it is clever to raise the ideal of establishing a paradise on the physical plane. But the physical plane is not suitable for establishing a paradise. One can raise the demand, but one can never fulfill it.

One can also raise other demands. In recent times, the demand for an international organization has been raised many times. You can make the demand; you can also codify such demands; it can of course come about. But what reality will have to say about that after ten years is another question! Reality takes the paths that you only recognize when you also want to engage with reality in your recognition. Establishing principles, representing principles, these are soon brought together. Founding associations, having programs in these associations, people-pleasing programs, beautiful, admirable programs that cannot be objected to - you can set them up. It is even a thankless task to have to point out that it is so easy to do so. In some cases, you may even - let me say this in parenthesis - come into rather harsh collisions if you have no inclination towards such codification.

For example, the Berlin branch of the Anthroposophical Society, in which I myself am involved, has not yet managed to draw up statutes for fifteen years because we have always considered real life to be more important than statutes, than codified life. You can have the most beautiful statutes, wonderful statutes. They may be quite good, but only for the purpose of enabling one to deal with certain outside powers. They have no significance for the inner life of a matter. A truly living thing actually resists statutes and principles. I am not criticizing the making of statutes, but nevertheless, the making of statutes and the founding of associations often seems to me to be just as clever as when a father and a mother have a baby of a few months and draw up a detailed program for this little child. There you have the clash of life with codification, the clash of life with abstract principles. The world will not cease to be a living being, even if a number of idealists — let us say, in order not to hurt them — are now setting up all kinds of world-blessing programs from intergovernmental organizations.

Spiritual science does not seek abstract ideals, unreal ideas, but spiritual science strives to seek the real impulses from the realm of life, to recognize that which is, because social principles can only be truly put into practice on the basis of what is. To do that, it takes discomfort to even take such things into one's heart, discomfort is necessary. It is convenient for seven or eight people to sit down together today and establish a world-blessing association with magnificent statutes. You can do that. The statutes will always be right if people are reasonably sensible. You can then also win followers, and there is no objection to such things, because the things are of course right. But it would be necessary for the people who often gather under such flags to first sit down for a few months and study the subject for which they want to achieve something. They do not do that. Instead of people spending a few months familiarizing themselves with the issues at hand, one finds that such associations have made a global impact, have gained thousands and thousands of followers, but that after twenty years there are not five among these thousands of followers have in the meantime taken the trouble to study the subject matter of the weekly journal published by the association, in which the same phrases are repeated over and over again, when the readers, who quickly forget and have forgotten history, which has already been so often.

Breaking away from the idolatry of words, breaking away from the idolatry of abstractions, is an essential part of what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science should bring to people. “With words one can argue excellently, with words one can prepare a system.” And one could add: And then one can live comfortably with the system. But life is complicated, and complicated life needs to be considered. And it is perhaps a very good time to point out such a contemplation of life when we are at the end of a year that concludes a series of such sad years for humanity. In such times, we should turn our gaze again to what the basic ideas of spiritual science can inspire in us. These basic ideas of spiritual science admonish us again and again to really study the character of our time.

We try to do many things to study the character of our time. Yesterday I referred to the great teacher and friend of Dante, to Brunetto Latini. In Brunetto Latini we have at the same time a man who, in the age of Dante, pointed in a penetrating way to what was to come for humanity. The initiation writing, one can already call it such, which comes from Brunetto Latini, contains approximately the following: He returns from his mission to Alfonso of Castile. On his way back, he learns that events have taken place in Florence, in his city, which, in his opinion, must end the old splendor and glory of Florence. Brunetto Latini senses, in expressing this, the approach of the fifth post-Atlantic period. After all, this initiation writing was still written at a time when there was still an awareness of the connection between man and the spiritual world in the furthest reaches, at a time when numerous human secrets about the spiritual world were still known, and therefore at a time when there was not yet the tendency towards such insubstantial abstractions as there is today. For in an age in which intellectual life is vibrant, in an age in which the life of feeling is truly present, there is no inclination towards insubstantial abstractions. Insubstantial abstractions are always related to the tendency towards materialism.

Brunetto Latini has this age, in which we now live, before him. He is approaching Florence. He knows that what Florence has become under the impulse of direct human life, of direct intellectual impulses, is to be buried under the advent of institutions that arise from abstraction. He is approaching Florence. He describes how the pain causes him to lose his way in a forest, a desolate forest. When he comes to his senses, he notices a path and a giant female figure in the middle of a magnificent world creation - which is his imagination. We hear that under this giant female figure he addresses “true nature”, not the nature that today's science describes, but “true nature”. This “true nature” teaches him about what lives in man, about the secrets of the human soul, about the secrets of the four human temperaments, about the secrets of the human senses, about the secrets of the elements, about the secrets of the planets. He is then led out beyond the planetary realm into the ocean of world existence as far as the Pillars of Hercules, mind you, at a time when Copernicanism had not yet been discovered, at a time when America had not yet been rediscovered. Then he is made aware that he has to leave all this, that is, the whole visible world. Only then would he recognize the secrets of good and evil; only then would he recognize the God of love and so on. One is tempted to say that this approach by Brunetto Latini is a proper New Year's reflection on the fourth post-Atlantic period in the cosmic New Year season of the approach of the fifth post-Atlantic period.

In the circles from which Brunetto Latini and others had grown, it was known that man has a connection with the spiritual world, and that the mere literal grasping of the spiritual world must lead to disaster. A preliminary climax has also been reached in science in the 19th century by mere literalness. Everything was prepared, but in the 19th century the matter reached its peak. And from science, the corresponding tendencies have spread to the rest of human experience. But now the time has come to find the courage to break with the old idolatry of words, with the old idolatry of even some word contexts and word combinations regarded as natural laws.

The mere fact that a word exists does not accomplish very much in itself. At the beginning of the new era, the Mystery of Golgotha took place. Since that time, Christianity has existed. There were, however, centuries in which this Christianity was sought to be grasped with the whole human soul. But then came other times. Then came the times when human comprehension became weak and was no longer sufficient to understand the Mystery of Golgotha. And now, in the broadest circumference of the Mystery of Golgotha, almost nothing remains but the name of Christ Jesus. But I have shown in these considerations that what is associated with the name of Christ Jesus is, in the light of spiritual science, not much more than an angelic being. And the fact that this is not noticed is due only to the idolatry of words. This idolatry of words has a suggestive power. Anyone who has felt this suggestive power - without becoming an idolater - could experience it in the most diverse fields. Sometimes it is good to make a personal connection without becoming maudlin. In this case, allow me to set an example.

I often think, when I try to characterize the tenor of the present time, of the lectures I once heard on constitutional law. Let me pick out just a very small part of these lectures on constitutional law: Now, gentlemen, what is judicial sovereignty? Judicial sovereignty is the sovereign right that lies within the omnipotence of the state. And now followed that which all falls within this state omnipotence. Gentlemen! What is financial sovereignty? Financial sovereignty is the sovereign right that lies within the omnipotence of the state. What is political sovereignty? Political sovereignty is the right inherent in state omnipotence... - and now followed again that which lies in state omnipotence. What is cultural sovereignty? Cultural sovereignty is the right inherent in state omnipotence.

Now imagine the human soul, made out of straw, presented with these contrived concepts and developing social efficacy – what do you have then? What you see around you now and what you close your eyes to, so that you can consider it something quite sensible, that has only slipped somewhat in recent years, but that is good and must be continued! But truth is not recognized by words, truth is recognized by realities. One can speak beautifully, and of course also truly, about the excellence of a democratic state administration, about the exemplary nature of a democratic state administration. But the insight into whether this is right or wrong is not shown by reality; rather, reality is shown by the fact that such a democratic state administration brings a Mr. Wilson to the head of almost the whole world. That is where reality is to be found. And talking about reality is not very popular. It was not without reason that I pointed out the hollowness of Mr. Wilson's personality in my Helsingfors cycle before this war. You can read about it in the cycle that was held on the Bhagavad Gita and its occult foundations. One of our friends found himself saying at the end of the lecture that it was terrible that something like that comes to influence and power.

Nothing happens in the world with principles. In the world, things happen through realities. In social life, the realities are the personalities. This is something to which spiritual science, in particular, must strongly and vigorously point out, because spiritual science honestly and sincerely wants to help the development of humanity, because it does not want to join in the parade of phrases that dominates the world today. And by this phraseology I do not mean merely that people utter phrases, but I mean something much worse: that people try to realize phrases, that they make phrases into institutions, that they do not decide to call things by their real names.

A great deal would be done in the world if people wanted to call things by their right name. It would lead to many things, as I have often pointed out: that one should not give so much importance to outward appearances, as if the most essential thing about the current catastrophic events were that the so-called Entente is at war with the so-called Central Powers, and that peace must be achieved again! I have often pointed out that this is not the most essential thing, this is not the most important thing, because appearances are often deceptive. What is being fought over in the world is something essentially different. The battle of the reality-seeking phrase against the living reality is fundamentally something much more universal. Only by reflecting on oneself can one see how attached one is to the comfort of the phrase.

There are already some opportunities for this here in this place. For us, who are connected by love to this building and to what is connected with it, for us, to a certain extent, what lies in time is symbolically expressed by the fact that this building has been started like one of the centers from which what humanity must transfer into a future according to the demands of the present, and how this building was interrupted, stands interrupted by that which now stands in the background of all human contemplation and all human works: the great collapse of the institutions of humanity, which, out of a love of phrase, have been growing for centuries.

Not without reason, during the weeks in which we were once again able to be together, until now, at the turn of the year, I have maintained a serious tone in our deliberations here at the building site itself and have repeatedly emphasized the necessity, at least in what is left to our discretion, to seek the necessary seriousness of life; in what is left to our discretion in our understanding, in the unprejudiced pursuit of events. That this structure, too, has been delayed for an indefinite period of time is perhaps a small event within the catastrophic events of the present, but it is symptomatic, it is symbolic in a certain respect; symbolic the reason that one could draw a line between what is loved for humanity from the intention of this building and what is loved from the word “idolatry” and what is associated with it.

At the present time, at this turn of the year, the great catastrophic event still looms in the background of everything that can be observed and done. And at this turn of the year we must think back to the turn of the year before. One month after that turn of the year we parted. I still think of the contrast that my words, often harshly characterizing the situation, have found even in our circle. Anyone who knows from what impulse the catastrophic events arose could not have imagined a year before that 1917 would not be even worse than the previous one. That was what people said at the time. Although on the one hand one had to say and could say how infinitely sad it was that a well-intentioned proposal - as I said at the time in my Christmas and New Year's reflection - was shouted down by what calls itself “four-fifths of humanity”, and how, under this shouting down, there was no right mood to look optimistically into this year 1917, so it is, when looking back again, only an unbiased look when one says to oneself: Is there anything that there is a prospect of this or that being achieved out of his or her selfish group interest? Is there anything that can be achieved by such interests and for which the prospect has increased after another year of terrible bloodshed? No! The world situation at the end of 1916 was exactly the same as it is today; for this world situation will only change when reason comes into thinking.

Anyone who believes that anything essential has changed in the past year is mistaken, mistaking the external for the internal. This is not to say that this or that, which a comfortable view of life may initially label as something favorable – until after a few months people see that it is not favorable – cannot be done. But the things lie much deeper; they lie so deep that, according to the experiences that have been made, it is not even possible, especially with regard to the events of the present, to speak the decisive word here either. Humanity has a task at the present time. And after a year like this, one can say a few words about this task.

That these catastrophic events have occurred was certainly not a task for humanity. That these catastrophic events are continuing is certainly not a task for humanity either. This is a task for humanity: to get out of these catastrophic events; to really get out of these catastrophic events and to recognize that it is a task to get out of them.

It does not matter if one wants to continue in the old way in this or that respect. It can already be said: if some socialists believe that what they believed seventeen years ago for the good of humanity can now be used as a universal remedy to get out of the great human calamity, then that is a mistake, a mistake that stems from being out of touch with reality.

These catastrophic events are composed of two things that we are not able to truly understand today in everything that exists outside of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. On the one hand, these catastrophic events have only been made possible by the way in which certain goals have been used to exploit the great antagonism that has developed in humanity over the last three to four centuries between everything that is industrial, commercial and so on imperialism, and socialism, which is opposed to it. That is one thing. The other is that which has emerged through the psychology of nations, which plays a particularly important role in Eastern and Central Europe. Both issues contain problems of the most comprehensive kind for humanity.

We must start where we are least disturbed by the outside world today, where external codification still has the least say, in science and art. Or we could establish a bank based on our principles.

Many things could be mentioned that would show, alongside this wood and concrete construction, a kind of ideal building, but one that is taken from life and from friendship with reality. This wood and concrete construction stands unfinished today; that is a symptom, that is a symbol. These things, neither the real nor the ideal building or buildings, can be completed if there is only understanding in the world for the opposite, for that which must extinguish all individualism, all personality impulses, from humanity. If man must reconquer that which is lost in abstract institutions, in the tyranny of abstract institutions, then much time will be necessary.

Some things must be spoken of only in a roundabout way, if I may put it that way; everyone may try to draw from the things what he can draw. But above all, we should draw the conclusion that, if certain things have been repeated again and again this time, it is not without reason: the admonition to turn away from all that is empty words, even if these empty words have gained an external semblance of reality, and to turn to the truth, to true reality. For it is this true reality that we seek through our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Through it, we want to penetrate into the understanding of what is, of that which must work. And we want to free ourselves from that false idealism - false idealism because it is an abstract idealism - that believes it can work in the world without study, without knowledge and without love for reality.

In the times when one year follows the other, it is so close to the human soul to have more serious thoughts about how one's own soul relates to life and the essence of being. Today, one cannot think of more serious thoughts than those that come from the contrast between a world that is alien to reality and so proud of its friendship with reality, and between what should be striven for through a real friendship with reality, as it strives for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

Let us assume that, in addition to what we can so easily develop, we have a certain inclination to take in spiritual truths because they present our relationship to eternity and the like to our soul in a pleasant way. Let us assume that what is a kind of inclination to deal with spiritual-scientific truths, we also carry a real, inner, strong, devoted impulse: to look at life, at all life in the light of this spiritual science. Let us try to carry over from one year, which was truly not easy to live through, into the next, which will also not be easy to live through, let us try to carry over the will to look at life in the sense of spiritual science, the will to become free from the mere phrase that dominates the world today. For something has already been done if there is at least a small group of people in the world who can make a New Year's reflection to not join in the idolatry of the phrase in their thoughts. This is something. Let us get used to new words, new concepts, new ideas for many things that need them! This is said – since we could have another New Year's Eve reflection within this unfinished building, with whose forms, with whose reality we associate so many thoughts for the future – so that we can grasp the idea of living over into this New Year in such a way that, like a burning impulse, like a fire within us, so that this spiritual science is not just a theory that we cultivate in the privacy of our own rooms, but becomes something that passes into our head, into our heart, into our hands, into everything that is to become and happen in our lives.

In view of the words that may have sounded harsh but that were nevertheless spoken only out of love for humanity, I would like to give you the impulse, I would like to point you to the impulse, to think through this turning point of two years in such a way that the thought can be the starting point for a truly unbiased examination of what is real and what is unreal. For more than humanity thinks today depends on this. And one would truly like to have something other than weak words for a small circle at a time when so much more would be needed in New Year's reflections than what is so often spoken as New Year's reflections today. But let us be aware that spiritual science has a certain right to demand such a desire for otherness from us!

Anyone who wishes to attach any value to the form of spiritual-scientific world view that I will be speaking about today and tomorrow will need to familiarize themselves with the peculiar contradiction inherent in the development of humanity, namely that a spiritual current, a spiritual impulse, can be eminently timely from a certain higher point of view, and that this timeliness is nevertheless at first sharply rejected by contemporaries, rejected in a way that one might say is thoroughly understandable.

The impulse for a new view of the universe of space, which Copernicus gave at the dawn of the new era, was timely from the point of view that the development of humanity at the time of Copernicus made it necessary for this impulse to come. This impulse proved to be quite untimely for a long time to come, in that it was opposed by all those who wanted to hold on to old habits of thought, to prejudices that were centuries and millennia old. To the followers of spiritual science, this spiritual scientific world view appears to be in keeping with the times, and it is out of date from the point of view of those who still judge it from that perspective. Nevertheless, I believe that in the course of today's and tomorrow's lecture I will be able to show that in the subconscious depths of the soul of contemporary humanity there exists something like a yearning for this spiritual-scientific world view and something like a hope lives for it:

As it presents itself at first, this spiritual science wants to be a genuine continuation of the scientific work of the spirit, as it has been done in the last centuries. And it would be quite wrong to believe that this spiritual science somehow developed opposition to the great triumphs, to the immense achievements and the far-sighted truths that natural scientific thinking of the last centuries has brought. On the contrary, what natural science was and is for the knowledge of the external world, that this spiritual science wants to be for the knowledge of the spiritual world. In this way, it could almost be called a child of the scientific way of thinking, although this will still be doubted in the broadest circles today.

In order to give an idea, not a proof, but initially an idea that should lead to understanding, the following is said about the relationship between the spiritual science meant here and the scientific world view: If we look at the great, powerful of the development of natural science knowledge in the last three to four centuries, we say that on the one hand it has brought immeasurable truths across the broad horizon of human knowledge, and on the other hand that this thinking has been incorporated into practical life. Everywhere we see the benefits of this in the fields of technology and commerce, which have been brought to us by the laws and insights of natural science that have been incorporated into practical life. If we now wish to form an idea of the attitude of spiritual science to these advances, we can begin by making a comparison. We can look at the farmer who cultivates his field and reaps the fruits of the field. The greater part of these fruits of the field are taken into human life and used for human sustenance; only a small part remains. This is used for the new sowing of the fruits. Only the latter part can be said to be allowed to follow the driving forces, the inner life and formative forces that lie in the sprouting grain, in the sprouting fruit itself. What is brought into the barns is mostly diverted from its own developmental progress, is, as it were, led into a side stream, used for human food, and does not directly continue what lies in the germs, what the own driving forces are.

Thus, the spiritual science referred to here appears to be more or less what natural science has brought in the way of knowledge in recent centuries. By far the greatest part of this has rightly been used to gain insight into external, sensual-spatial facts, and has been used for human benefit. But there is something left over in the human soul from the ideas that the study of nature has provided in recent centuries that is not used to understand this or that in the sensual world, that is not used to build machines or maintain industries, but that is brought to life so that it is preserved in its own right, like grain that is used for sowing again and allowed to follow its own laws of formation. man imbues himself with the wonderful fruits of knowledge that natural science has brought forth, when he allows this to live in his soul, when he has a feeling for asking: How can the life of the soul be illuminated and recognized through the concepts and ideas that natural science has provided? How can one live with these ideas? How can one use them to understand the main driving forces of human soul life? If the human soul has a feeling for raising these questions with the spiritual treasure acquired, not in theory but with the full wealth of soul life, then what can only now, in our time, when science has been cultivated on its own ground, so to speak, for a while, merge into human culture.

And in another respect too, this spiritual science can be called a child of the scientific way of thinking, only the spirit must be investigated in a different way from nature. Precisely if one wants to approach the spirit with the same certainty, method and scientific basis as natural science approaches nature, then one must transform scientific thinking and shape it in such a way that it becomes a suitable tool for the knowledge of the spirit. These lectures will share some insights into how this can be achieved. Especially when one is firmly grounded in natural science, one realizes that the means by which it works cannot be used to gain spiritual knowledge. Time and again, enlightened minds have spoken of the fact that, starting from the firm ground of natural science, man must recognize that his power of knowledge is limited. Natural science and Kantianism — to mention only these — have contributed to the belief that the cognitive powers of the human mind are limited, that man cannot penetrate through his knowledge into the regions where the source lies, to which the soul must feel connected; where man realizes that not only the forces that can be grasped by natural science are at work, but other forces as well. In this respect spiritual science completely agrees with natural science. Precisely for the cognitive abilities that natural science has magnified, and on which natural science must also stop as such, there is no possibility of penetrating into the spiritual realm.

But in the human soul lie dormant other cognitive faculties, cognitive faculties that cannot be used in everyday life and in the hustle and bustle of ordinary science, but that can be brought forth from this human soul and that, when they are brought forth, when they are, as it were, from the hidden depths of the human soul, then they make something different out of the person: they permeate him with a new kind of knowledge, with a kind of knowledge that can penetrate into areas that are closed to mere natural science. It is (I attach no special value to the expression, but it clarifies the matter) a kind of spiritual chemistry through which one can penetrate into the spiritual regions of existence, but a chemistry that only bears a similarity to external chemistry in terms of secure logic and methodical thinking: it is the chemistry of the human soul itself. And from this point of view, in order to make ourselves understood, I will say the following by way of comparison: when we have water before us, this water has certain properties. The chemist comes and shows that this water contains hydrogen and oxygen. Take hydrogen: it burns, it is gaseous, it is quite different from water. Would someone who knew nothing about chemistry ever be able to tell from looking at water that it contains hydrogen? Water is liquid, does not burn, and even extinguishes fire. Hydrogen burns, is a gas. In short, would someone be able to tell from looking at water that it contains hydrogen? Nevertheless, the chemist comes and separates the hydrogen from the water. Man can be compared to water as he appears in everyday life, as he appears to ordinary science. In him are united the physical and the bodily and the spiritual-soul. External science and the world view that is based on it are quite right when they say: Yes, this person standing before us cannot be seen to have a spiritual-soul within him; and it is understandable when a world view completely denies this soul-spiritual. But that is just as if one were to deny the nature of hydrogen.

However, there is a need for proof that the spiritual-soul can really be represented separately from the human being, separate from the physical body, in spiritual-soul chemistry. This can be. That there is such a spiritual-mental chemistry is what spiritual science has to say to mankind today, just as Copernicanism had to say to a surprised mankind that the earth does not stand still, but moves around the sun at a furious pace, but the sun stands still. And just as Copernican writings were on the Index until well into the 19th century, so too will the insights of spiritual science be on the Index of other worldviews for a long time to come. These are worldviews that cannot free themselves from centuries-old prejudices and habits of thought. And the fact that this spiritual science can already, to a certain extent, touch hearts and souls, that it is not exactly outside the search of our time, we have a small proof of this, which I do not want to boast about, but which may be mentioned as a testimony to, I would say, the hidden timeliness of spiritual science in souls. Are we indeed in a position, already in our time, to build a free school of spiritual science on free Swiss soil; and can we not see, through the understanding of the friends of this spiritual current, the emblem of the same in the new architectural style of the double-domed rotunda, which is to rise from Dornach's heights, near Basel, as a first external monument to what this spiritual science has to offer to modern culture? That this building is already being erected, that the forms of its domes are already rising above the rotunda, allows us today to speak of spiritual science with much more hope and inner satisfaction, despite all the opposition, despite all the lack of understanding that it encounters and must still encounter in wide circles.

What I have called spiritual chemistry is certainly not something that can be achieved through external methods that can be seen with the eyes and that are brought about by external actions. What can be called spiritual chemistry takes place only in the human soul itself, and the procedures are of an intimate soul-spiritual nature, procedures that do not leave the soul as it is in everyday life, but which affect this soul in such a way that it changes, that it becomes a completely different tool of knowledge than it usually is. And they are not some kind of, one might say, miraculous exercises, some exercises taken from superstition, which are thus applied in spiritual chemistry, but they are thoroughly inner, spiritual-soul exercises, which build on what is also present in everyday life: powers of the soul , which are always there, which we need in everyday life, but which, in this everyday life, I would say, are only used incidentally, but which must be increased immeasurably, must strengthen themselves into the unlimited if man is to become truly a spiritual knower.

The one power that is active in our whole soul life, more incidentally, but must be increased immeasurably, we can call it: attention. What is attention? Well, we do not let the life that flows past the soul shape itself; we gather ourselves up inwardly to turn our spiritual gaze to this or that. We pick out individual things, place them in the field of vision of our consciousness, and concentrate the soul forces on these details. And we may say: Only in this way is our soul life, which needs activity, also possible in everyday life, that we can develop such an interest that highlights individual events and facts and entities from the passing stream of existence. This attention is absolutely necessary in ordinary life. One will understand more and more, especially when spiritual science also penetrates a little into the soul, that what people call the memory question is basically only an attentiveness question, and that will throw important light on all educational questions. One can almost say that the more one endeavors to put the soul into the activity of attentiveness again and again, already in the growing and also in the later human being, the more the memory is strengthened. Not only does it work better for the things we have paid attention to, but the more often we can exercise this attention, the more our memory grows, the more intensively it develops. And another thing: Who has not heard today of that sad manifestation of the soul that could be called the discontinuity of consciousness? There are people today who cannot look back on their past life and remember it in its entirety, who do not know afterwards: You were with your ego in this or that experience; who do not know what they have been through. It may happen that such people leave their home because they have lost the consistency in their mental experience; that they leave their home without rhyme or reason, that they go through the world as if with the loss of their own self, so that it takes them years to find their self again and to be able to pick up where their self left off. Such phenomena would never lead to the tragedy that they often do if it were known that this integrity, this consciousness of being fully aware of oneself, also depends on the correct development of the activity of attention.

Thus, the exercise of attention is something we absolutely need in our ordinary lives. The spiritual researcher must take it up, develop it into a special inner soul strengthening, deepen it into what could be called meditation, concentration. These are the technical terms for the matter. Just as in our ordinary life, prompted by life itself, we turn our attention to this or that object, so the spiritual researcher, out of inner soul methodology, turns all soul powers to a presentation, an image, a sensation, a will impulse, an emotional mood that he can survey, that is quite clear before his soul, and on which he concentrates all the soul's powers; but he concentrates in such a way that he has suppressed, as only otherwise in deep sleep, all sensory activity directed towards the outside world, so that he has brought all thinking and striving, all worries and affects of life to a standstill, as otherwise only in deep sleep. In relation to ordinary life, man does indeed become as he otherwise does in deep sleep; only that he does not lose consciousness, that he keeps it fully awake. But all the powers of the soul, which are otherwise scattered on external experience, on the worries and concerns of existence, are concentrated on the one idea, feeling or other that has been placed by will into the center of the human soul life. As a result, the powers of the soul are concentrated and that which otherwise only slumbers, only works for this life as it were between the lines of life, that power is brought to the fore, is shaped out of the human soul; and it actually comes about that through this inner strengthening of the human soul in the concentrated activity, in the attention increased to the immeasurable, this soul learns to experience itself in such a way that it becomes capable of consciously tearing itself out of the physical-sensual body, as hydrogen is dissolved out of water by the chemical method.

However, it is an inner soul development that takes years if the spiritual researcher wants to enable his soul to tear itself away from the physical body through such attention and concentration exercises. But then the time comes when the spiritual researcher knows how to connect a meaning to the word, oh, to the word that sounds so paradoxical to today's world, to the word that seems so fantastic to this world: I experience myself as a spiritual being outside of my body and I know that this body is outside of my soul – well, like the table is outside of my body. I know that the soul, inwardly strengthened, can experience itself in this way, even if it has the body before it like a foreign object, this body with all the destinies that it undergoes in the ordinary outer life. In what he otherwise is, the human being will completely express himself as a spiritual-soul entity separate from his body. And this spiritual-soul entity then displays very different qualities than it does when it is connected to the physical-sensual body and makes use of the intellect bound to the brain.

First of all, the power of thought detaches itself from physical experience. Since I do not want to speak in abstractions, but rather report on real facts, please do not be put off by the fact that I want to describe, unembellished and without prejudice, what may still sound paradoxical today. When the spiritual researcher begins to associate a meaning with the word: You now live in your soul, you know that your soul is a truly spiritual being in which you experience yourself when you are outside of your senses and your brain, then he initially feels with his thinking as if outside of his brain, surrounding and living in his head. Yes, he knows that as long as one is in the physical body between birth and death, one must return again and again to the body. The spiritual researcher knows exactly how to observe the moment when he, after having lived with the pure spiritual-soul, returns with his thinking to his brain. He experiences how this brain offers resistance, feels how he, as it were, submerges with the waves of his earlier, purely spiritual life and then slips into his physical brain, which now, in its own activity, follows what the spiritual-soul accomplishes. This experience outside of the body and this re-immersion into the body is one of the most harrowing experiences for the spiritual researcher.

But this thinking, which is purely experiencing itself and takes place outside the brain, presents itself differently from ordinary thinking. Ordinary thoughts are shadowy compared to the thoughts that now stand before the spiritual researcher like a new world when he is outside his body. Thoughts permeate each other with inner pictorialness. That is why we call what presents itself to the spiritual eye: imaginations - but not because we believe that these only contain something fantastic or imagined, but because what is perceived there is actually experienced is experienced, imagined; but this imagination is an immersion in the things themselves, one experiences the things and processes of the spiritual world, and the things and processes of the spiritual world present themselves in imaginations before the soul. —- Thus thinking can be separated from the physical-bodily life, and the spiritual researcher can know himself in a world of spiritual processes and entities.

But other human faculties can also be detached from the purely physical and bodily. When the thinking is detached, the spiritual researcher experiences himself first in his purely spiritual and soul-like essence, after all that has been described so far. But what he experiences there with the things and processes in the spiritual world is a completely different way of perceiving than the ordinary perception. When we usually perceive things, they are there and we are here; they confront us. This is not the case from the moment we enter a spiritual world in our spiritual and soul experience, which arises around us with the same necessity as colors and light arise around the blind man when he has undergone an operation. No, we do not experience the spiritual world in the same way as the external world. This experience is such that one does not merely have the things and beings of the spiritual world before one, but one submerges oneself in them with one's entire being. Then one knows: one perceives the things and beings by having flowed into them with one's being and perceiving that which is in them in such a way that they reproduce themselves in the images that one sees. One feels that all perception is a reproduction. One feels that one is in a state of constant activity. Therefore, one could call this revival of the imaginative world of thought a spiritual mimic, a spiritual play of expressions. One tears oneself out of the bodily with its soul-spiritual; but this soul-spiritual is in perpetual activity and submerges into the processes of the spiritual world and imitates what lives in them as their own powers; and one feels so connected with the beings that one can compare this submerging with standing before a person and intuiting what is going on in his life, and having such an inner experience of it that one would show the expression of sorrow in one's own countenance if the other were sad, and show the expression of joy in one's own countenance if the other were joyful. Thus one experiences spiritually and soulfully what others are experiencing; one becomes the expression of it oneself. In the spiritual countenance, one expresses the essence of things. One is driven to active perception. One may say: spiritual research makes quite different demands on the human soul than external research, which passively accepts things. The soul is required to be inwardly active and to be able to immerse itself in things and beings and to express itself in the way that things present themselves to it.

Just as the power of thought, as a spiritual-soul power, can be separated out of the physical-bodily in spiritual chemistry, so can another power, which man otherwise only uses in the body, which, so to speak, pours itself into the body, be separated out of this body. However strange it may sound, this other power is the power of speech, the power that we otherwise use in ordinary life when speaking.

What happens when we speak? Our thoughts live within us, our thoughts vibrate with our brain; this is connected to the speech apparatus, muscles are set in motion; what we experience inwardly flows out into the words and lives in the words. From the point of view of spiritual science, we must say that in speaking we pour out what is in our soul into physical organs. The detachment of the speech power from the physical-sensory body arises from the fact that the human being increases attention, as described, and adds something else – again, an activity that is usually already present and must also be increased to an unlimited degree. This power is devotion.

We know it in those moments when we feel religious, when we are devoted to this or that being in love, when we can follow things and their laws in strict research, when we can forget ourselves with all our feelings and thoughts. We know this devotion. It actually only flows between the lines of ordinary life. The spiritual researcher must increase this power to infinity; he must strengthen it without limit. He must indeed be able to give himself up to the stream of existence in such a way as he is otherwise only given up to this stream of existence – without doing anything himself to what he experiences – in deep sleep, when all the activity of his limbs rests, when all the senses are silent, when man is only completely given up and does nothing; but then he has lapsed into unconsciousness in his sleep. But if a person can bring himself by inner volition to do it again and again as an exercise for his soul, to suppress all sensory activity, to suppress all movement of the limbs, to transfer his physical-sensual life into a state that is otherwise only in deep sleep, but to remain awake, to keep his inner and develops the feeling of being poured into the stream of existence, wanting nothing but what the world wants with one: if he evokes this feeling again and again, but evokes it apart from attention, then the soul strengthens itself more and more.

But the two exercises - the one with attention and the one with devotion - must be done separately from each other; because they contradict each other. If attention requires the highest level of concentration on one object - deep meditation - then devotion, passive devotion to the flow of existence, requires an immense increase in the feeling that we find in religious experience or in other devotion to a loved one. The fruits that man draws from such an immeasurable increase of devotion and attention are precisely that he separates his spiritual-soul life from the physical-bodily. And so the power that otherwise pours into the word, that is activated by it not remaining within itself but setting the nerves in motion, this power can be separated from the outer speech activity and remain within itself in the soul-spiritual. In this way, the power of speech – we can call it that – is torn out of its sensual-physical context, and the person experiences what, in Goethe's words, can be called spiritual hearing, spiritual listening.

Once again, the human being experiences himself outside of his body, but now in such a way that he submerges himself in things and perceives the inner essence of things; but also perceives it in such a way that he recreates it within himself, as with an inner gesture, not just with a facial expression, but with an inner gesture, as with an inner gesture. The soul-spiritual, torn out of the body, is thus activated, as when we are tempted, through a special disposition in relation to our talent for imitation, to express through our gesture what occupies us. What is done only by special talents, the soul, which is torn out of the body, does in order to perceive. It plunges into things, and it actively recreates the forces that are at play within them. All this perception in the spiritual world is an activity in which one engages, and by perceiving the activity in which one has to place oneself, because one recreates the inner weaving and essence of things, one perceives these things. In the outer, sensory world, hearing is passive; we listen. Speaking and hearing flow together in spiritual hearing. We immerse ourselves in the essence of things; we hear their inner weaving. What Pythagoras called the music of the spheres is something that the spiritual researcher can truly achieve. He immerses himself in the things and beings of the spiritual world and hears, but also speaks by uttering. What one experiences is a speaking hearing, a hearing speaking in immersing oneself in the essence of things. It is true inspiration that arises.

And a third inner activity, a third kind of inner experience, can come over the spiritual researcher if he continues to develop increased attention and devotion. What occurs to and in the spiritual researcher as he experiences himself outside his body, I would like to discuss it in the following way.

Let us consider the child. I cannot speak about this in detail, I only want to hint at what is important for the purpose of today's lecture: it is a peculiarity of the growing human being that he must give himself his direction in space, that he must give himself the way in which he is placed in space, in the course of childhood. The human being is born unable to walk or stand, initially, as we say here in Austria, having to use all fours. Then he develops those inner powers that I would call powers of uprightness, and through this something comes to the fore in man that so many deeper minds have sensed in its significance by saying: because man can rise in the vertical direction, he knows how to direct his gaze out into the vastness of the celestial space, his gaze does not merely cling to earthly things. But the essential thing is that through inner forces, through inner strength and experience, man develops out of his helpless horizontal life, so to speak, into an upright vertical life. The scientist will readily understand that the inner activity of man is something quite different from the hereditary forces that give the animal its powers of orientation in the world. The forces at work in the animal that bring the animal in this or that direction to the vertical act quite differently in man, in whom a sum of forces is at work that pulls him out of his helpless situation and that works inwardly to instruct him in the direction of space through which he is actually an earthly man in the true sense of the word, through which he first becomes what he is as a human being on earth. These forces work very much in secret. One can only cope with them when one has already delved a little into spiritual science; but it is a whole system, a great sum of forces. They are not all used up in the childlike period of man, when he learns to stand and walk. There are still forces of this kind slumbering within man; but they remain unused in the outer life of the senses and in the outer life of science.

Through the exercises of increased attention and devotion performed by the soul, the human being becomes inwardly aware of how these forces that have raised him as a child are seated within him. He becomes aware of spiritual powers of direction and of spiritual powers of movement, and the consequence of this is that he is able to add to the inner mimic, to the inner play of the features, to the inner ability to make gestures, to the inner gesture, also the inner physiognomy of his spiritual and soul life. When the soul and spirit have emerged from the physical body, when a person begins to understand as a spiritual researcher what is meant by the words: 'You experience yourself in the soul and spirit' — then the time also comes when he becomes aware of the forces that have raised him up, that have placed him vertically on the earth as a physical, sensual being. He now applies these powers in the purely spiritual-soul realm, and this enables him to use these powers differently than he does in his ordinary life; he is able to give these powers other directions, to shape himself differently than he did in physical experience during his childhood. He now knows how to develop inner movements, knows how to adapt to all directions, knows how to give his spiritual self different physiognomies than as an earthly human being; he is able to delve into other spiritual processes and beings; he knows how to connect that he transforms the powers which otherwise change him from a crawling child to an upright human being, that he transforms these in the inner spiritual things and entities, so that he becomes similar to these things and entities and thus expresses them himself and perceives them through this. That is real intuition. For the real perception of spiritual entities and processes is an immersion in them, is an assumption of their own physiognomy. While one experiences the processes in the beings through inner mimicry, while one experiences the mobility of the spiritual beings by being able to recreate their gestures; one is now able to transform oneself into things and processes, one is able to take on the form of the spiritual, and in so doing one perceives it, that one has become it oneself, so to speak.

I did not want to describe to you in general philosophical terms the way in which the spiritual researcher enters into the spiritual worlds. I wanted to describe to you as concretely as possible how this spiritual-soul experience breaks away from the bodily, from physical-sensory perception, and submerges into the spiritual world by becoming active in it. But this has become evident, that every step into the spiritual world must be accompanied by activity, that we must know with every step that things do not reveal their essence to us, but that we can only know that about things and processes of the spiritual world, which we are able to recreate, to search for, by being able to behave actively perceptively. This is the great difference between spiritual knowledge and ordinary external knowledge: that external knowledge is passively surrendered to things, while spiritual knowledge must live in perpetual activity, man must become what he wants to perceive.

Even today, or one could also say, even today, one is forgiven when one speaks of a spiritual world in general. People still put up with that. But it still seems paradoxical in our time that someone can say: A person can detach themselves from all seeing, hearing, all sensory perceptions, all thinking that is tied to the nerves and brain, and then, while everything that is experienced in physical existence disappears completely before them, can feel surrounded, know that they are surrounded by a completely new, concrete world, indeed, by a world in which processes and beings are purely spiritual, just as processes and beings in the physical world are physical. Spiritual science is not a vague pantheism, it is not a general sauce of spiritual life. In the face of spiritual science, if one speaks only of a pantheistic spiritual being, it is as if one said: I lead you to a meadow, something sprouts there, that is nature; then one leads him into a laboratory and says: That is nature, pan-nature! All the flowers and beetles and trees and shrubs, all the chemical and physical processes: Pan-Nature! People would be little satisfied with such Pan-Nature; because they know that you can only get along if you can really follow the individual. Just as little as the external science speaks of Pan-Nature, just as little spiritual science speaks of a general spirit sauce; it speaks of real, perceptible, concrete spiritual processes and entities. It must not be afraid to challenge time by saying: Just as we, when we are in the physical world, first see people around us as physical beings among, one might say, the hierarchies of physical beings, of minerals, plants, animals and human beings, the same fades from our spiritual horizon when we immerse ourselves in the spiritual world; but spiritual realms and hierarchies emerge: beings that are initially the same as human beings, beings that are higher than human beings; and just as animals, plants and minerals descend from human beings in the physical world, there are beings and creatures ascending from human beings into higher realms of existence, individual, unique spiritual entities and creatures.

How the human soul places itself in the spiritual world, what its life is like within this spiritual world according to spiritual research, which in principle has been indicated today; how the human soul has to live in this spiritual world when it lays aside the physical body at death, when it traverses the path after passing through the gate of death, in a purely spiritual world, will be the subject of the day after tomorrow. The lecture the day after tomorrow will deal with individual insights of spiritual science about this life after death.

What spiritual science develops as its method – well, you notice it immediately – it differs very significantly from what our contemporaries can admit as such, based on the thought habits that have formed over the centuries and which are just as stuck in relation to this spiritual science as the thought habits of past centuries were stuck in relation to the Copernican world system. But how should spiritual science think about the search of our time if it wants to understand itself correctly and behave correctly towards this search of our time?

The first objection that can so easily be made from our time is that one says: Yes, the spiritual scientist speaks of the fact that the soul should first develop special powers; then it can look into the spiritual world. But for the one who has not yet developed these powers, who has not yet mastered the art of forming mental images, of separating thought, of separating the powers of speech, of separating the powers of spatial orientation, of separating the powers of orientation in the world of beings, the spiritual world would be of no concern to him! Such an objection is just like that of someone who would say: For someone who cannot paint, pictures are of no concern. — That would be a pity. Only someone who has learned to paint can paint pictures. But it would be sad if the only pictures a person who could paint could understand were those that had to do with the world of nature. Of course, only the painter can paint it; but when the picture stands before man, it is the case that the human soul has the very natural powers within itself to understand the picture, even if it is not able to paint it. And the human soul has a language within itself that connects it to the living art. Such is the case with spiritual science. Only he who has become a spiritual researcher himself can discover and describe the facts, processes and entities of the spiritual world; but when the spiritual researcher endeavors — as has been attempted today, for example, with regard to the spiritual scientific method — to clothe what he has researched in the spiritual world in the words of ordinary thoughts and ideas , then what he gives can be grasped by every soul, even if it has not become a spiritual researcher; if it can only do away with all that comes from contemporary education, from education that pretends to stand on the firm ground of natural science, but in truth does not stand on it at all, but only believes it. If only the soul can rid itself of all prejudices, if it can truly devote itself to the contemplation of a picture as impartially as the mind researcher knows how to tell, then the result of spiritual research can be understood by every soul. Human souls are predisposed to truth and to the perception of truth, not to the perception of untruth and falsity, if only they clear away all the debris that accumulates from prejudice. Deep within the human soul is a secret, intimate language, the language by which everyone at every level of education and development can understand the spiritual researcher, if only they want to.

But this is precisely what the spiritual scientist finds in the search of our time. In past centuries, people believed that they could only know something about the spiritual world through religious beliefs; in recent times, these souls have been able to believe that certain knowledge can only be built on external facts; in our time, souls do not yet know this in their superconsciousness, as one might say – what they can realize in concepts and ideas and feelings, it is not yet settled -, but for the spiritual researcher it is clear: we live in a time in which, in the depths of human souls, in those depths of which these souls themselves do not yet know much, longing for spiritual science, hope for this spiritual science, is being prepared. More and more it will be recognized that old prejudices must vanish. Especially in regard to thinking many things will be recognized. Thus there will still be many people today, especially those who believe themselves to be standing on firm philosophical ground, who will say: Has not Kant proved it, has not physiology proved it, that man cannot penetrate below the sense world with his knowledge? And now along comes a spiritual science that wants to refute Kant, wants to show that what modern physiology so clearly demonstrates is not correct! Yes, spiritual science does not even want to show that what Kant says from his point of view and what modern physiology says from its point of view is incorrect; but time, the still secret search of time, will learn that there is another point of view regarding right and wrong than the one we have become accustomed to. Let us see how the real practice of life – the practice of life that is the fruitful one – relates to these things.

Someone could prove by strict arguments that man with his eyes is incapable of seeing cells, for example. Such a line of argument could be quite correct, as correct as Kant's proof that man, with the abilities that Cart knows, cannot penetrate into the essence of things. Let us assume that microscopic research did not yet exist and it was proved that man cannot see the smallest particles. This may be correct. The proof can be absolutely conclusive in every respect and nothing could be said against the strict proof that man with his eyes cannot see the smallest partial organisms of the large organisms. But that was not the point in the real progress of research; there it was important to show, despite the correctness of this proof, that physical tools can be found, microscope, telescope and others, to achieve what cannot be achieved at all demonstrably if the abilities remain unarmed, which man has. Those are right who say: Human abilities are limited; but spiritual science does not contradict them, it only shows that there is a spiritual strengthening and reinforcement of the human powers of cognition, just as there is a physical strengthening, and that despite the correctness of the opposite train of thought, fruitful spiritual research must place itself precisely beyond such correctness and incorrectness. People will learn to no longer insist on what can be proved with the limited means of proof available; they will realize that life makes other demands on the development of humanity than what is sometimes called immediately and logically certain.

And another thing must be said if the real, not merely the imagined, search of the time is to be related to what spiritual research really has as its task, as its goal. Once again, reference may be made to the truly tremendous progress of natural science. It is not surprising, in view of these great and powerful advances in natural science, that there are minds today that believe they can build a world structure on the firm ground of natural science, which, however, does not reflect on such forces as have been discussed today. Today there is a widespread, I might say materialistically colored school of thought; but it calls itself somewhat nobler because the term 'materialistic' has fallen out of favor: the monistic school of thought. This monistic school of thought, whose head is certainly the important in his scientific field Ernst Haeckel and whose field marshal is Wilhelm Ostwald. This school of thought attempts to construct a world view by building on the insights that can be gained purely from the knowledge of nature. The search of the time will come to the following conclusion in relation to such an attempt: as long as natural science stops at investigating the laws of the outer sense existence, at visualizing the connections in this outer sense existence of the soul, as long as natural science stands on firm ground. And it has truly achieved a great thing; it has achieved the great thing of thoroughly extinguishing the light of life of old prejudices. Just as Faust himself stood before nature and resorted to an external, material magic, so today, anyone who understands science can no longer resort to such material magic. But it is something else that spiritual life itself, in the ways that have been characterized, imposes an inner magic on the soul. But against all these superstitious currents of thought, against everything that seeks to explain external nature in the same way that we might explain a clock, by saying that there are little spirits inside it, and against every explanation of nature that finds this or that being behind natural phenomena, natural science has achieved great things in negation, and as a worldview. And let us take a look at how the so-called scientific view of nature works, as long as the minds can deal with eliminating the old, unhealthy concepts of all kinds of spiritual beings that are invented behind nature. As long as a front can be made against such spiritual endeavors, a scientific worldview thrives on fighting what had to be fought.

But this fight has in a sense already passed its peak, has already done its good; and today the search of the time goes to ask: By what means can we build a world view in which the human soul has space in it? Since this scientific worldview, this Haeckel-Ostwald materialism fails completely when the person understands himself correctly. It will become more and more evident that the champions of the purely materialistic world-view, in their capacity as soldiers, are great in combating ancient superstition, but that they are like warriors who have done their duty and now have no talent for developing the arts of peace, for developing industry, for tilling the soil. Natural science should not be belittled when it becomes a world view in order to combat superstitious beliefs. As long as such world view thinkers can stop at the fight, they still have something in the fight in the soul that sustains them, but when the person then wants to build a real world view in which the soul has a place, then they are like the warrior who has no talent for the arts of peace. He stands before the question of his soul, let us say, in the peacetime of worldly life, and an image of the world does not build itself up.

Such a mood will assert itself more and more in the souls; the spiritual researcher can already see these moods in the depths of the souls. Where these souls know nothing about it, the longings for what spiritual research wants to bring to the world prevail. That is the secret of our time. But if, from a higher point of view, one might say, it is thoroughly in keeping with the times, this spiritual research world view is out of touch with many contemporaries who do not yet look deeply into what they themselves actually want. Therefore, this spiritual science initially brings a world view that is seen as if it does not stand on firm scientific ground. The other world view, that of so-called monism, wants to be built solely on the foundation of external science. This world view, one can see today from its reverse side, where it must lead if the soul really wants to see its hopes and longings fulfilled. In the activity of spiritual research, of which has been spoken, what really elevates the soul to the spiritual community arises for the soul, the spiritual world arises in perceptible activity, in active perception. Through spiritual science, man can again know of the true spiritual world, of spiritual reality. The so-called monistic world view has nothing to say about this. The spiritual search of our time.

But this seeking of our time, this seeking of human souls, cannot be suppressed, and so some of our contemporaries have already become accustomed to placing their thoughts about spiritual things within themselves in such a way that these thoughts run like scientific thoughts: that the external is observed in passive devotion. What has happened? The result is that a part of our contemporaries — those who occupy themselves with it, they know it — have fallen into the habit of wanting to look at the spiritual as one looks at the sensual. I am not saying that some things that are absolutely true cannot come about in this way; but the method of such an approach is different from that of spiritual science. What is called spiritualism wants to look at spiritual beings and processes externally, without active inner perception, without rising into the spiritual worlds, externally passively, as one looks at physical-sensory processes. Whose child is purely external, we may say materialistic spiritualism? It is the child of that school of thought that takes the so-called monistic point of view and succumbs to the superstition of materialism, the mere workings of external natural laws. What — some contemporary will say — spiritism, a child of Haeckel's genuine monism? — The search of the time will be convinced that it is just with this child as with other children. Many a father and mother has the most beautiful ideas about all the things that should develop in a child, and yet sometimes a real rascal can arise. What monism dreams of as a true cultural child is not important; what is important is what really arises. Mere belief in the material will produce the belief that spirits too can only operate and reveal themselves materially. And the more pure monistic materialism would grow, the more spiritualist societies and spiritualist views would flourish everywhere as the necessary counter-image. The more the blind adherents of the Haeckel and Ostwald direction will succeed in pushing back true spiritual science in matters of world view, the more they will see that they will cultivate spiritualism, the other side of true spiritual research. As firmly as the spiritual researcher stands on the ground of the researchable, the knowable, the knowable spiritual life, he can no more follow the method that wants to materialize the spirit and passively surrender to what is spirit, while one can only experience it in the active.

But I would also like to characterize the quest of our time, which cannot yet be understood in terms of another. A man who deserves a certain amount of esteem as a philosopher has written a curious essay in a widely read journal. In it he writes, for example, that Spinoza and Kant are quite difficult for some people to read. You read yourself into them; but the concepts just wander around and swirl around – well, it is certainly not to be denied that it is so for many people when they want to read themselves into Kant or Spinoza, that the concepts swirl around in confusion. But the philosopher gives advice on how this could be done differently, in line with the search of our time. He says: Today we have a device, a technical advance, through which what is presented to the soul in the merely abstract thoughts of Kant and Spinoza can be brought to the soul quite vividly, so that one can passively surrender to it in perception. The philosopher wants to show in a kind of cinematograph how Spinoza sits down, first grinds glass, how then the idea of expansion comes over him - this is shown in changing pictures. The picture of expansion changes into the picture of thinking and so on. And so the whole ethics and world view of Spinoza could be vividly constructed in a cinematographic way. The outer search of the time would thus be taken into account. It is remarkable that the editor of the journal in question even made the following comment: “In this way, the age-old metaphysical need of man could be met by an invention that some people consider to be a gimmick, but which is very much in keeping with the times.

Now, from a certain point of view, it might be entirely appropriate to the search of our time, but only on the surface, if one could read Spinoza's “Ethics” or Kant's “Critique of Pure Reason” in front of the cinematograph. Why not? It would take into account the passive devotion that is so popular today. It is so loved that one cannot believe that the spiritual must have a reality into which one can only find one's way by taking every step with it. That one expresses in oneself, in one's spiritual soul, what the essence of things is, that our time does not yet love. Let us take a look at a billboard! Let us try to guess the thoughts of the people standing in front of it. Not many people will go to a lecture where there are no slides, but only reflections that the souls also create the thoughts that are put forward, as opposed to a lecture where spiritual and psychological matters are supposedly demonstrated in slides, where one only has to passively surrender.

Anyone who looks into the search of our time, where it asserts its deepest, still unconscious hopes and longings, knows that in the depths of the soul, the urge for activity still rests; the urge to find itself again as a soul in full activity. The human soul can only be free, with a secure inner hold, if it can develop inner activity. The human soul can only find its way and find its bearings in life by becoming conscious of itself, by realizing that it is not only that which is passively given to it by the world, but by knowing that it is present when it is able to experience in activity; and of the spiritual world it can only perceive that of which it is able to take possession in activity. In reflecting on what spiritual science offers, the process of comprehension must develop into active participation; but in this way spiritual science becomes a satisfaction of the deepest, subconscious impulses in the souls of the present, and in this way it meets the most intimate search of our time. For with regard to the things touched on here, our time is a time of transition. It is easy to say, even trivial, that we live in a time of transition, because every time is a time of transition. Therefore, it is always correct to say that we live in a time of transition. But if one emphasizes that one lives in a time of transition, it depends much more on what any given time is in transition from. If we now want to describe our time in its transition, we have to say: it was necessary - because only through this could the natural sciences and what has been achieved through them come about - that for centuries humanity went through an education towards passivity; because only in this way, through devotion to materialistic truths, could it be achieved what had to be achieved, especially in the field of natural science. But the fact is that life unfolds in rhythms. Just as a pendulum swings up and then swings down again, swinging to the opposite side, so too must the human soul, when it has been educated in a justifiable way for a period of time to be faithfully and passively devoted, pull itself together again in order to find itself again; in order to take hold of itself, it must pull itself together to become active. For what has it become through passivity? Well, what it has become through passivity, I will say it unashamedly with a radical-sounding sentence that will certainly sound much too paradoxical to many. But on the other hand, it is precisely the assimilation of spiritual science that shows, as it actually is only the fact, that one does not pull oneself together to face the consequences of the scientific world view if one does not emphasize this radical result. They lack the courage to draw the real consequences, even those who claim to stand solely and exclusively on the ground of what true science yields. If they had this consistency, then one would hear strange words murmured through the seeking of the time.

The Old Testament documents begin with words – I do not want to talk about their inner meaning today; everyone may take the words as they can take them; some may consider them to be an image, others an expression of a fact: everyone can agree on what I have to say about these words – the words are: “You shall be as God, knowing – or discerning – good and evil!” The words resound in our ears, from the beginning of the Old Testament. However you look at it, you have to admit that it expresses something momentous for human nature and the human soul. It is attributed to the tempter, who approaches man and whispers in his ear: “If you follow me, you will be like a god and distinguish good from evil.” It will be possible to surmise that the inclination not only towards good would not express itself in man without this temptation; that without this temptation the inclination would have arisen only towards good, so that all human freedom is in some way connected with what these words express. But they do express that man was, as it were, invited by the tempter to look beyond himself as a different being from what he is: to behave like a god towards good and evil. As I said, however you may think about these words and the tempter, I am certainly not demanding today that you immediately accept him as a real being – although it is quite true for those who see through things, the word: “The devil is never felt by the people, even when he has them by the collar.” But he who is able to eavesdrop a little on the search of the time, hears today in this search of the time his whispering again. It is drawing near. Call it a voice of the soul or whatever you will: there it is — it can be said without any superstition. And for those who have the courage to draw the final consequences of a purely scientific worldview, it brings forth words of great peculiarity, of a strange wisdom. It is just that the people who claim to be on the basis of pure science do not have the courage to draw the final conclusion. They do include in their feelings and thoughts the belief in a distinction between good and evil, which they would actually have to deny if they wanted to be purely on the basis of science. It is a fact that as soon as one places oneself on the ground of mere natural science, not only does the sun shine equally on good and evil, but according to the laws of nature, evil is performed from human nature just as much as good. And so he, the tempter, drawing the conclusion, whispers to man: Don't you see, you are just like highly developed animals. You are like animals and cannot distinguish between good and evil. — This is what makes our time a time of transition, that the tempter speaks to us again in our time with the opposite voice to that with which he spoke according to the Old Testament: You are only developed animals and so, if you understand yourselves, you cannot make any distinction between good and evil.

If one had the courage to be consistent, it would be the expression of a pure, passively surrendered worldview. That time be spared from this voice – let it be said merely figuratively – that knowledge of spiritual life be brought into the seeking of the time: that is the task, that is the goal of spiritual science. Those who still fight against this spiritual science today from the standpoint of some other science will have to realize that this fight is like the fight against Copernicanism. Now that we are also being noticed more in the world through the building of our School of Spiritual Science in Dornach, which used to ignore us, the voices of our opponents are growing louder. And when I recently objected in the writing: “What is spiritual science and how is it treated by its opponents” that the opponents of spiritual science today stand on the same point of view as the opponents of Copernicus, one who felt affected rightly said: Yes, the only difference would be that what Copernicus said are facts, while spiritual science only puts forward assertions. He does not realize, the poor man, that for people of his mind the facts of Copernicanism at that time were also nothing more than assertions, empty assertions, and he does not realize that today he calls empty assertions what, before real research, are facts, albeit facts of spiritual life. And so one can find objections raised by both the scientific and religious communities regarding this spiritual science. Just as people said at the time of Copernicus, “We cannot believe that the Earth revolves around the Sun, because it is not in the Bible,” so people today say, “We do not believe what spiritual science has to say, because it is not in the Bible.” But people will come to terms with what spiritual science has to say, as they came to terms with what Copernicus had to say.

And again and again we must remember a man who was both a deeply learned man and a priest, who worked at the local university and who, when he gave his rector's speech about Galileo, spoke the beautiful words: At that time, the people who believed that religious ideas were being shaken stood against Galileo; but today – as this scholar said at the beginning of his rectorate – today the truly religious person knows that every new truth that is researched adds a piece to the original revelation of the divine governance of the world and to the glory of the divine world order. Thus one would like to make the opponents of spiritual science aware of something that could well have been, even if it was not really so. Let us assume that someone had stepped forward before Columbus and said: We must not discover this new land, we live well in the old land, the sun shines so beautifully there. Do we know whether the sun also shines in the newly discovered land? So it is that those who believe their religious feelings disturbed by the discoveries of spiritual science appear to the spiritual scientist in the face of his religious ideas. He must have a shaky religious concept, a weak faith, who can believe that the sun of his religious feeling will not shine on every newly discovered country, even in the spiritual realm, just as the sun that shines on the old world also shines on the new world. And anyone who faces the facts impartially can be sure that this is so. But in its quest, when time becomes more and more imbued with spiritual science, it will be touched by it in a way that many today still cannot even dream of.

Spiritual science still has many opponents, understandably so. But in this spiritual science one does feel in harmony with all those spirits of humanity who, even if they have not yet had spiritual science, have sensed those connections of the human soul with the spiritual worlds that are revealed through spiritual science. In particular, with regard to what has been said about the new word of the tempter, one feels in harmony with Schöller and his foreboding of the spiritual world. Through his own scientific studies, Schiller has gained the impression that he has to lift man out of mere animality and that the human soul has a share in a spiritual world. On the soil of spiritual science, one feels in deep harmony with a leading spirit of the newer development of world-views when one can summarize, as in a feeling, what today wants to be expressed with broader sentences, with the words of Schiller:

Now the dull barrier of animality fell,
And humanity stepped onto the cloudless brow!
And the exalted stranger, the thought,
Leaped out of the amazed brain!

In confirmation that animality receded and that the human being belongs to a spiritual world, in confirmation of such sentences, spiritual science today stands before the quest of our time.

The expansion, the strengthening, the securing of this innermost essence, this spiritual inner essence of the soul, is to be offered to the search of the time through spiritual science.

at the Anthroposophical College in Zurich

Jakob Hugentobler opens the evening of disputations.

A student: A young, enthusiastic person wants to study astronomy, wants to learn what Kepler, Newton and all those men up to Einstein have produced. He wants to get a clear picture of what is going on in this field. This person wants to get to the bottom of things objectively. He is referred to the field of mathematics, and must either make the effort to penetrate the very complicated states of consciousness of higher mathematics, struggle through to what a Gauss or Beyer have produced, or he will stop halfway. A person in the present day can have worked through everything, can have read Plato, Feuerbach, Averroes, and yet he may lack certain soul dispositions that could open up a certain knowledge to him. He will have to say to himself that he has not yet learned anything about those spiritual worlds that are mentioned in anthroposophy. If you tell him that he needs to prepare himself in a certain direction, he will either be stimulated or not, because from an epistemological, purely psychological point of view, the most diverse variations and laws of life can occur. He thinks he has no right to doubt this or that. He does not wish to offend anyone present, but an aesthetic view of life is not suited to perceiving anything essential. A person who has to struggle through adversity and so on is much closer to the whole movement than those who devote themselves to things as a pastime because they have nothing else to do.

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to make a few comments on what the previous speaker said. It has just been rightly emphasized that need and suffering actually lead the way that should go out into the world, which is characterized by anthroposophy. Now, I would like to take up this last remark in particular. I have often made a similar remark in the course of my lectures, only always, I might say, taken out of some context. I have often said: Man lives his existence in alternating states of joy and pleasure, of pain, need and suffering. If one believes to have attained a certain higher realization – in all modesty – then one must still admit that one tends to emphasize, perhaps for very understandable reasons, the joys and pleasures one has experienced in life and for which one is grateful to the Powers of the Universe. But one does not really owe this realization to them. One owes insight only to the sum of the pains one has gone through. And when one speaks of insight in the true sense, it is something that emerges from the sum of the pains.

However, it is certainly the case that in our external lives we can go through the most diverse pains and hardships - hardships that can weigh us down, that at times, I would say, can even stop us from breathing spiritually. But there are also those that experience the real pains of a worldview - pains that, without wanting to offend anyone, I would say, perhaps a large proportion of people do not know too much about. The experiences one can have on the path of knowledge are of such a nature that they can sometimes take more than just breathing of the soul. It was not in vain that in older times, on paths that we can no longer follow, the old - I would like to call them as they called themselves - the old initiates, that is, the old cognizers, were trained. It was absolutely the case that they were led through pain and suffering, because it is needed for the right preparation for knowledge. And indeed, from all the hopelessness that arises on the path of knowledge, pain and hardship arise, which a person, with a certain indifference in living, can perhaps resolve within himself.

But now it is still necessary for the human being to place himself in a way that is demanded by the time into existence. It has been emphasized in earlier lectures here in Zurich over the last few years that the time suffering, the time need, is ultimately connected with what has been omitted by people in the field of knowledge in recent times. It is just these discoveries, which have indeed celebrated the greatest triumphs in recent times and from which all kinds of technical advances can and have emerged and much more will emerge, but these discoveries were, because they only wanted to move in the realm of necessity, not in the realm of freedom, of which I spoke today, not suitable for generating sociological and social thinking.

This is the great task of our time: we must be able to think not only about nature, which gives us guidance through its solid structure of necessities, but we must also be able to think free thoughts that have strength because they in turn are immersed in necessities. Without such free thoughts, we will decline in the new civilization. We cannot find social ideas if we only have the kind of epistemological foundation that we have in modern times. It is quite true that man enters into certain complicated developments of consciousness when he follows the mathematical-naturalistic endeavors of Kepler, Galilei, Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein. But we must not forget that, although all this has already been pushed beyond the merely mathematical by Gauss, for example, it has only opened up one-sided paths, and that all this does not contain the starting points for ideas that can deal with social need. The same applies to the epistemological positions that, for my part, go from Descartes to Mach and Avenarius. But there is another path, one that opens up through anthroposophical spiritual science! And this is already intimately connected with that which is significant as the kind of knowledge that has brought great triumphs in natural science, but which, as I have tried to show today, leads to anthroposophical research, anthroposophical observation.

The speaker before me was right about the aesthetic world view. But perhaps we need to look at the words 'aesthetic world view' a little more in terms of contemporary history. If we consider the thinking that has developed out of scientific endeavors, we must indeed say that it does not sink its roots into social necessities, that it does not penetrate to the spiritual foundations of existence. From this, a certain mood has arisen, which has been extraordinarily profound, especially in the last third of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th. Anyone who has observed how people have begun to take an interest in certain higher questions could see that people have begun to take an interest in higher questions in the broadest circles. I just want to point out how widespread the discussions were that were connected, for example, with Björnsons “On Our Strength” and so on; many examples could be given in this direction. It may be said that a certain interest in the transcendental world has taken hold precisely in this age.

But how? People preferred to receive things when they were presented to them in an aesthetic form, so to speak, when they did not have to engage with their knowledge, if I may put it that way, when they could enter into it as they could in a drama or a novella and say to themselves: Well, you can get involved with something like that with your imagination. But they didn't feel any kind of obligation to bring things into line with reality. People were happy if they didn't have to bring things into line with reality! There was a certain sensationalism about it, to a great extent. This need developed at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, but people didn't want anything to do with relating it to real life. This flight from real life is something that has emerged more and more – this disconnection, this not taking something seriously, this having only a certain sensational interest in something. Above all, this is what must be taken away from humanity, I would say, if civilization is to continue, if we do not want to end up in the kind of conditions that Oswald Spengler describes in his 'Decline of the West'; that must come. Basically, it is really just a fleeing from the painful sides of existence, in a certain respect a setting aside of the painful side of existence.

It is, I would say, an extremely tragic phenomenon, which emerged in the last third of the 19th century in Friedrich Nietzsche. There is no need to go into what Friedrich Nietzsche says or what he means; one need only go into his life. Consider, my dear audience, the suffering that this soul went through in the succession of three stages of development, and put that in the context of the whole of contemporary history!

You see, Nietzsche grew out of a proper philologist's life, only that he did not devote himself to philology out of a certain external sense of duty, as other philologists did, but rather he sensed the constricting nature of this philological method early on. And from this constricting material he selected that which in the sixties, and even at the beginning of the seventies, and well into the seventies, was still flourishing in the circles in which Nietzsche lived. He immersed himself in what had emerged from Schopenhauer and which, in wide circles, was nothing more than pessimistic talk, talk about misery, in order to numb himself to the misery of life in a certain way. And Nietzsche suffered from all this. And it was really only a yearning to inwardly overcome this unidealistic mood of the development of the times by means of a certain kind of insight. So Nietzsche suffered, roughly until 1866, from what was then the immediate scholarly formation of the times. At first he wanted to counter this scholarly formation of the times with his 'Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music', with his 'Untimely Meditations'. These works were written out of deep pain. But around 1876, he had come to the point where he had to say to himself: This is just another deception; one must go much deeper into human nature. And then he came to say to himself that, actually, man devotes himself to many thoughts — many that are untruthfulness. And now he wanted to overcome untruthfulness through knowledge. Isn't it true that people have preserved ideals from ancient times? Nietzsche also still believed in these ideals in the early days of his work, but in the end he saw the instincts behind the ideals. And so he wrote something like “Human, All Too Human”. It was a second form of time development that he suffered from, only to finally come to the third, where he suffered the problem most deeply in his soul, so to speak, where he felt the emergence of the human from the subordinate natural being weighing on his soul. Because he was unable to penetrate to the spirit, the problem remained: Man is only a transition from worm to superman. And so he could only express this process of the soul in human terms lyrically in his “Zarathustra”, only vaguely hinting at something in his great conception of the “return of the same”, which is to be represented by anthroposophy as repeated earth lives and also as the successive metamorphoses of the world system. He was the personality who suffered most deeply from the education of modern times and was broken by it.

Nietzsche has undoubtedly – for me it is unquestionable! – proved that one can break the body from the soul, because it is, after all, characteristic that an excellent psychiatrist could only give the verdict that it was an atypical case of paralysis regarding Nietzsche's illness. And what was later fabled about Nietzsche's illness, going beyond the usual medical schematizations, is, for anyone who truly looks into what was suffered there, what was suffered under the tension, to grasp the supersensible – it is, for anyone who can look at it impartially, quite unquestionable that this tension could break the body. I would say that it is immediately apparent how this organism was actually destroyed by the soul. And the external symptoms also correspond to this.

Consider this tragic situation as it arose. I will describe it. Nietzsche studied together with Paul Deussen, who later became a scholar of Indian antiquity and Indian philosophy, at the Gymnasium in Schulpforta in Thuringia, and they were very close friends. When Nietzsche was already quite ill in his nineties, Deussen visited him once. Deussen stood before Nietzsche and spoke with him; Nietzsche did not participate in what he said. Then Deussen began to speak of old times, telling all sorts of stories from the past. Nietzsche said, “Yes, you know, I can tell you that a person you don't even know took part in those times; the good, dear Deussen took part in those times.” He said this to Deussen himself, who was standing there before him! What he had experienced in his youth was present in Nietzsche, but what had been at work in his environment in the immediate present had been extinguished.

I cite this one scene – it could be multiplied by many – to make a point. What was being acted out there, of course, is pathological, and can be traced in Nietzsche from a very early stage. Twenty years ago, I wrote a paper, “The Psychopathological in Nietzsche's Writings,” and I was able to go back to his earliest writings, which are ingenious and magnificent, but in which one can see that the dissociation of ideas is already present. But these were ideas that arose entirely from the splitting apart of the time's culture for those who, from the center of human being, wanted to bring this time's culture into harmony with the supersensible. And one would like to say: It is precisely in such a personality, who is broken by the culture of the time - for that is the real problem of Nietzsche - that one sees what it means to struggle, to struggle inwardly with inner needs and sufferings. And it is actually in overcoming such suffering that the path to knowledge lies.

And it was already difficult to walk in the old days, because the aesthetic world view – which is certainly extremely justified in its field, but which does not want to take it seriously with the reality of that for which it has a certain sense, a certain sensationalism —, because this aesthetic world view had become so widespread in the period in which, on the one hand, people were quite willing to struggle through from Newton to Einstein, from Descartes to Mach or Avenarius. But for our time it has now become necessary to struggle through to the other — which is precisely what is being attempted through the anthroposophical path — to struggle through to what every human being can struggle through to. If one says that not every human being can struggle through to it, then that can only be said “cum grano salis”, because after all, not every human being struggles through to higher mathematics either. And I believe that anyone who not only struggles through to higher mathematics but also to a certain inner understanding, for example, of the transition from ordinary geometry and mathematics to synthetic geometry, is, in terms of his soul situation, just as well on the way to finding his way into imaginative knowledge as one has to find the way into function theory.

And it would be possible to proceed much more quickly along this path if the prejudices of the time did not always work against it so much. The belief that it takes a very special mind to make progress in anthroposophy is actually much more widespread than it should be. The truth is that every person can advance along this path just as much as they can along any other scientific path. And I would like to emphasize this because it is absolutely true: hardship and misery lead people to the gate of knowledge, but the point is not only to find, I would say, a certain inner mood, but the real spiritual world. Only through the knowledge of the real spiritual world can one then also achieve, in a social sense, what is necessary in today's world in terms of material life, provided one finds understanding, because, of course, that is what it is all about. Therefore, on the one hand, one must have understanding for the meaning of pain and suffering, but on the other hand, one must also gain understanding for the implementation of spiritual knowledge in concrete terms.

Dear attendees, we have actually had enough of the general talk about a spiritual being in the pantheistic sense – that does not really lead anywhere. Those who only speak in general terms about a spiritual world and want to establish it epistemologically are like someone walking across a meadow and saying: Oh well, I'm not interested when people say that this is a meadow saffron, that one is a lily, that one is a tulip, and so on. I'm not interested in all that, because everything is unified life, everything is plants. So people who have more pantheistic thoughts always want to say: Spirit, spirit, spirit! One can be satisfied if one recognizes the spirit. One can satisfy a certain inner voluptuousness with this pantheism in what I call “modern mysticism”. But what the world needs today is concrete knowledge about the supersensible worlds. And that is what is most resented about anthroposophy today: that it strives for this concrete knowledge. And so people want to believe that it proceeds in the same way as other mystical paths. But anyone who wants to approach this anthroposophy will see that it really does follow paths that can be presented in such a way that anthroposophy can be held accountable before the strictest science, albeit in worlds that one must first open up.

This is only in connection with the very interesting remarks of the previous speaker.

Another speaker: When I first heard about spiritual science, I took the matter seriously as a whole, I would say. Today in the lecture, one had the feeling of simply listening to a scientific lecture. A scientist could have come to such a scientific lecture, but I am a painter or a musician and have to work productively in my field. Someone could have come who says to himself: I want to acquire knowledge in the natural sciences in a higher scientific sense. My question now is: Must not anthroposophy be understood in a much broader sense?

Now I would like to know how one should relate to Anthroposophy in practice. Is it enough to have any profession, to have any mission, is it enough to acquire this knowledge? Or is it necessary to follow this path of how to enter the spiritual worlds and how Dr. Steiner described it, oneself? I would like to ask how one should relate to this.

Rudolf Steiner: May I just make the preliminary remark: In the last lecture, which is announced here, I will speak about the building in Dornach - not only externally about the building, but in such a way that it will be very interesting for a painter or sculptor in particular, but it can also be of interest for all people.

I would compare what one can acquire anthroposophically with climbing a high mountain. You can start from a variety of different points below and you will always reach the summit. In the same way, you can start from a variety of different points in your development. And one still likes to do it even after one has started from one point. We built this Dornach building because we wanted to create something, artistically as well, that is the expression of this anthroposophical world view, just as the nutshell is the expression of the nut itself. Anyone with a sense of morphology will say to themselves: actually, the nut could only have the shell that it has. The same formative forces are contained in the shell as in the edible part of the nut itself.

Now, when the anthroposophical world view is represented at our Goetheanum in Dornach, for me that is the actual nut, the other is the shell. So it had to be built out of the same impulse from which the speech is given inside and so on. It is indeed the case that one can start from the most diverse points. For example, one can follow up the things Dr. Kolisko has said today about the threefold human being. The strange thing about it is that if you follow it up, you will see that, in the end, you enter into a completely different state of mind than the one you started with. The principles that are being discussed are so rooted in life that they not only lead the human being to all kinds of conclusions in the logical process, but they actually work in his soul in a real way. And when one carries out these things - which are real principles - one's soul is brought to life with real forces. And in the end one gets an insight into the human form. What initially appears to be a theory is transformed all by itself into a vivid perception of the human form, and one gets to know and understand the human form from the inside out. This is how an attempt was made to work on the sculpture at the Goetheanum in Dornach in order to understand the human form from the inside out.

And it goes even further! Attempts were also made to treat the material. Only then do the principles of spatial design emerge. It is particularly interesting, for example, when working by hand, to see what a big difference there is between working on a human head, for example when carving out an eye, between a material like clay or marble and a material like wood. You realize: with wood you have to scrape, and it is important that you work into the concave. What is worked in clay must be worked into the convex; you must always keep your eye on working into the convex when you are working in a solid material. By contrast, with soft wood, the idea is to scrape things out.

In this way, I would say, what at first seems theoretical is transformed into a certain artistic creation, into a living into those formative forces that one would like to say are the formative forces of nature itself. And that is the inner transition between our starting point and our final goal, for example, the transition to the artistic. That is the remarkable thing about it: anthroposophy does not stop at a particular soul situation, but leads to other soul situations. And it is the case that in understanding the human being, one first finds the transition from anatomy and physiology, which work abstractly or at most sensually, to the inner formative forces of the human being. Science becomes artistic perception. This transition can certainly be doubted: nature itself is not only in the metaphorical sense, but actually in the real, true sense an artist.

Now, one finds oneself drawn to the artistic. Good, say the people, the epistemologists – knowledge, that must happen logically! Knowledge must not somehow work visually in some sense as intended here, but knowledge must proceed from conclusions – one must, so to speak, proceed along the lines of logic. Fine, but that is only a subjective requirement. If nature does not create in the sense in which we prescribe it, then our logic will escape us precisely what the deeper meaning of nature is. And so we can only come close to nature by entering into this metamorphosis of the soul situation with complete impartiality. That is one thing.

The other aspect, for example, is the transition to the practical. You see, I have written these “Key Points of the Social Question”, and they are widely read in this day and age. But understanding has not yet come far, otherwise people would have to say to themselves: The book is not really meant to be read – excuse me for saying something so paradoxical – but the book is written to be put into practice, to be done in some way, each one individually according to his or her situation. The book is actually written only from the perspective of observation, written in a very practical way. Of course, one has to express oneself through words and sentences, but that is only to point out what is actually meant. And there again is the transition to direct practice.

And that is what anthroposophy actually wants to be: anthroposophy leads to the most practical areas of life just as naturally as it leads to the artistic. It leads to skill. And in the end you actually come to things that some people naturally find quite contestable. I have often said in my lectures – because one feels compelled to express certain truths differently – that I cannot imagine that someone is a good philosopher who is not also a good chemist or potato digger when it comes down to it. It is actually not possible to reason about concepts and ideas if one cannot chop wood when it comes down to it, or perhaps when it does not come down to it. I believe that when you are chopping wood or digging up potatoes, for example, if you are fully present with your whole personality, you might do it more cleverly or at least learn just as much logic as you sometimes do in the logical colleges. You may find this paradoxical, but it is so. And above all, anthroposophy wants to assert that there is a unity in everything, a concrete unity.

Therefore, I would like to answer your question in a very positive way: if you look around at what is already available in our various fields today, you are bound to find points of contact somewhere. And from there, you can go anywhere. Anthroposophy does not want to be one-sided, but you can start at the wrong end, and by what you strive for as a human being, you will get into the right thing, even if you initially say to yourself that it is not really any of your business. The main thing is the will - if it is to make any sense at all to start - to continue now. And there is the window to get straight to my point. And because anthroposophy is far from being pedantic, it should actually be understood that you can start with it wherever you want, and you will reach a goal. One can start from more of such considerations as are given in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” and if one goes far enough, one can arrive from there at every field. Or, one can start more from the scientific point of view, as explained, for instance, in the lecture by Dr. Kolisko, and arrive from there at whatever you need.

The previous speaker explained that he meant something very specific. He finds it very logical that one can reach the summit from all points. One could take an example from artistic circles. It could be a sculptor or a painter: from both could arise what one already has today in terms of profound art, for example expressionism or futurism. He had found, however, that no universal human being such as Goethe, for example, emerged, even if one worked one's way into and lived in what the anthroposophist or the actual rose crosser has: the ascent to the Devachan level. He wonders whether it is necessary to take this one path in particular, to work one's way up through these levels – purely spiritually, intellectually – or whether one could also start from a different philosophical point.

Rudolf Steiner: If we take the examples you have mentioned – Expressionism, Futurism and so on – I would like to say that today one can sometimes find it a bit naive, quite childish, quite paradoxical and so on. Nevertheless, I would like to say that in all of this there is a healthy, justified impulse to turn to the spiritual from a more materialistic world view. I do not want to speak merely of theoretical materialism, but of the materialistic world view. And from this point of view, I can nevertheless, in the many attempts, which, compared to Goethe's versatile genius, may seem very one-sided, nevertheless only find things that have a future. You just have to give it time. I think things have a future. You see, I have to look at it this way: Take a contemporary expressionist; if he is a painter, he will paint a picture in such a way that you won't know whether it is a house or a tree stump, or whether it is supposed to be an elephant or something like that. But that is basically never a question of artistry, if I am to express myself paradoxically. It is really not an artistic question what it should represent – at least not the first question – but rather the question is why you are dealing with this color on this surface and so on. And then you do come across questions, for example, where you see: there is something that is of course not as universal as in Goethe, but which still has a future. Perhaps I may draw your attention to the following.

If I may make this personal comment: I have been thoroughly involved with Goethe for forty years, my first literary endeavor was directed towards Goethe, and since then I have not left this field again. Now, you see, at a very specific time, I became interested in very specific Goethe problems. These are the problems where Goethe did not cope with something, and he actually did not cope with many things. Think of Pandora, think of The Natural Daughter and so on, or something like Nausicaa. So, there is a lot that Goethe actually could not finish. Goethe was an honest man, and not being able to finish something always meant for him to struggle through to a certain point, where he then had to leave things as they were. He did not get through; he could not break through! It is very interesting to see how he got to a certain point with “Pandora”, for example. After that, only sketches came. He had wanted to continue writing Pandora, to carry out what we find hinted at in the sketches. One could say that he could have left it and then worked on the sketch later. But it couldn't have worked that way, because if he had written it eight days later, it would have been something completely different again. And there is no reason to say that Goethe should have worked from such a sketch; he would have changed the whole thing again. Yes, he reached the point where he just couldn't get any further, and it's easy to see why.

It was precisely for this reason that Goethe came very far in his contemplation of a certain external metamorphosis. It is truly magnificent to see how Goethe develops this idea of metamorphosis on his 'Italian Journey', how he applies it to the human being. But he cannot actually apply it to the shaping of the spiritual. And why not? Why can he not go where the spiritual shapes the material itself? For example, it lies perfectly in the direct line of Goethe's thought of metamorphosis – I am never afraid to express these things, they simply belong to what I call not only my conviction but also my knowledge, however be taken as it will, it lies in the direct line of this thought to arrive at the conclusion that the formative forces which today underlie the human head, the metamorphosed formative forces of the organism, are derived from an earlier earth-life. Thus this entire remarkable shape of the skull in relation to the rest of the human organism is the result of a very extensive metamorphosis. But Goethe could not break through to the spiritual! And this is also evident from the fact that he had to stop where he should have become spiritual. He was quite honest - he stopped there. Take the second part of “Faust” yourself: it is simply not quite finished! The fact is that it is simply not completely finished, because the last scenes are such that Goethe took the Catholic concepts and forced them into the matter. It has become something magnificent as a result, but it is something that has been artificially contrived. And when you compare this conclusion with certain other things, you can see the power that Goethe applied to get it done.

And I just said that in this most contestable, abstract final stage lies precisely this moment, where one comes to the breakthrough into the spiritual. No matter how little people are able to do it, it is a beginning, and that is why it is justified to say these things. And so I think one can say: Today it is really a matter of people being able to make something out of the most diverse points that are close to them today, if they are honest with themselves. I believe, for example, that the most natural way would be for people to start from the things they are currently involved in and then come together for something productive. People should start from the areas in which they are currently involved; they will then come together. It is not so bad that they do not understand each other at first - from a certain point on, they do understand each other. It is also a matter of, for example, waiting for the right moments and so on, and fate will see to that. But I cannot find – I have also experienced many things in this regard – that this abstract jumping up – forgive me for expressing myself somewhat clearly – this jumping up from 'plan' to 'plan' is now something particularly promising for the person. In most cases, it is something that does not arise from complete inner honesty. Of course, you can also achieve something in this way, but as a rule you become unworldly in the process. And that is what is actually needed least in our time, in today's difficult times. I do not mean it frivolously, but it is the case. I would like to put it this way: This rushing about from 'plan' to 'plan', there is so much coquetry mixed up in it, so much inner dishonesty, that I do believe that we should strive to start from the point where we are firmly grounded, and then people will also find each other. In a way, this has proved to be practical.

You see, there are some of us who are artists or doctors, such as Dr. Kolisko, for example, another is a philologist - perhaps you will hear one of them here in the course of this lecture - or a mathematician, and yet another is a complete practitioner. We have practitioners among us who are simply striving to create the most practical institutions possible in which the anthroposophical spirit can live. Mr. Molt, a member of the Council of Commerce, is among us today; he has endeavored above all in this direction. Is that not true? Today, it is indeed a problem of time, and so it is necessary to start from where we are today and then seek understanding. This is something that has already proved practical and in which I see something promising, whereas in a world-renouncing striving to go up into the higher worlds, I can see nothing that is really honest. It is quite true that one can only see through the world by striving for it, but it is also true that one must say: The one who starts from a particular area of life is much more likely to achieve a higher level of insight. Above all, he achieves it in a much more concrete way. He can then say something about the higher worlds; he knows what the higher worlds look like. It benefits him to start from a particular area of life, whereas the unworldly ascent does not really lead to anything real, at least not for humanity – for the individual it can lead to something. That is simply speaking out of what corresponds to the course of time. I will certainly not be against the development of the abilities of supersensible knowledge – I have myself described how it should be. But I think that in doing so, man must not neglect the area of life in which he is immersed. That is the case everywhere.

A speaker: Mr. Heisler said in his lecture that Dr. Steiner presumed to gain insights into the higher worlds, and he even quoted Goethe as proof. I have to say in advance that I have not yet read any of Steiner's writings. I would now like to ask whether, if one had knowledge of the deceased – for example, whether they are in agony – one would not also have a certain proof of the existence of God. Anyone who has studied Nietzsche and perhaps has long since lost their belief in a God might find it easier to accept it from within if they could regain their faith through Dr. Steiner's way of speaking about God. This occult field has been taken up again from various sides, for example by Schrenck-Notzing in Munich and so on.

Rudolf Steiner: Today I could only hint at some things in the lecture, but I want to say the following. You see, today we live in an age in which some people are striving to tear open an abyss between knowledge and belief. Some see something healthy only in a science that relates to the purely factual, to recording, systematizing, and permeating with laws. Others, on the other hand, believe that they can only exist in the realm of religion by demanding faith.

Now, this is nevertheless only a characteristic of a passing age. Just as in earlier times man's soul was divided into the most diverse soul powers, so today it is divided into a field of knowledge and a field of faith. But if the soul is completely honest with itself, it cannot really bear this division. One realizes what is at stake when one sees the reason for this division. You see, you can still speak today to a relatively large number of people about life after death or about the divine world teaching based on faith. You can do this without appealing in any way to those inner powers of conviction that lead to proof. You do appeal, though, when you speak of life after death, to human desires, to human fears and so on. The matter is quite different when you speak about what I also spoke about today: about preexistence, about human life, the soul-spiritual life of man before birth or, let us say, before conception. That, in turn, is done through anthroposophy in the broadest sense. We talk more about the prenatal, that is, about life before conception, that is, about the pre-existent life, which, of course, results in life after death as a matter of course.

We talk more about this pre-existent life because people's egoism reaches less into it. People are not at all indifferent to their egoism as to whether they live on after death or not; but out of their egoism they are much less interested in whether they have already lived before they descended to earth. However, if one opens the sources of knowledge for this life in the beyond, in which we were before we came to earth, then the other one arises. You will find it described in detail in my writings, if you look into them. We more or less take this for granted. But at the same time something else occurs. One can speak about the life after death out of a certain faith, but, as I said, it accommodates selfishness and arises from an egoistic knowledge. By speaking about pre-existent life, man is at the same time led into the spiritual-supernatural world through knowledge. And so, when we turn again to the pre-existent life, the abyss between faith and knowledge, which is actually destructive for the human soul, is overcome.

You see, in older worldviews we have knowledge of these things based on a certain instinctive knowledge - we cannot strive for this again, we must strive for conscious knowledge. I must emphasize again and again that anthroposophy speaks in an intense way of the pre-existent life, even of repeated earthly lives. And when Lessing took up this idea of repeated earthly lives in his 'Education of the Human Race', he said: This idea of repeated earthly lives arose in the most ancient times. Should it be any less valuable because it arose in the most ancient times, before it was corrupted by all the various schools? — You see, those who are literary researchers or the like today take it that way — well, let's say aesthetically. They do not respect it very much, they do not want to see it as reality. That is why they say: Lessing is a great man, but the 'Education of the Human Race' was a concoction of old age. Lessing was a great man. But if you read between the lines, it turns out that he actually always adhered to the idea of repeated earthly lives. And it is certainly the case that knowledge of the supersensible worlds and also knowledge of the concrete content of the spiritual, of the spiritual world government in general, is acquired by occupying oneself with prenatal life, not merely with post-mortem life. But in the more recent development of the times, this has gradually been completely lost. We can see this from an external point of view.

You see, we have a word that means “immortal”. We speak of “immortality” when we are properly prepared for it. We use the word “immortality”, but we do not speak of a word that means “unborn, being unborn”. Because as much as we live on after death and are immortal, as much we are unborn. And we should have a separate word for being unborn, a word as natural as “immortality”. But we don't have that. Because people in civilization have completely lost their way in understanding the immortal, it will only be understood again when one can look at being unborn in the same way as at being immortal, because just as as at one pole of life the soul is released when death occurs and ascends into the spiritual world, so birth or conception is the other pole through which the soul reenters the physical world. And just as the soul does not die, it is not born either. Only when one really considers this pre-existent life does faith join with actual knowledge. That is what leads further. This supersensible life must again deal with the pre-existent, it must lead over to the path that really leads to the goal.

As for the remark that anthroposophy is supposed to be presumptuous – yes, that depends, doesn't it, on how you look at it. Well, until 1827 the Catholic Church found it highly inappropriate to admit that a Copernicus once came along and said that the earth moves around the sun. So it was only in 1827 that Catholics were given permission to believe it. Today, official science does not yet give permission to believe in repeated earth lives, just as one was not allowed to believe in the movement of the earth around the sun back then. We can indeed wait until these people allow us to believe in and hold on to those things that are given to us through anthroposophy. Until then, we will have to accept the reproach of presumption, for that is how it is in the world.

Question: What is Anthroposophy's view of vaccination as a means of protection against epidemics?

Rudolf Steiner: This question is somewhat out of keeping with what has been said before. But I will try to say something anyway. The fact is, as has already been stated today, one must not believe that anthroposophy is polemicizing against the justified successes achieved in the newer fields of natural science and medicine. In some cases it can be shown that a certain success, such as that to be achieved through vaccination – for example, against smallpox – has actually been achieved. The fact remains that infectious diseases have been largely reduced by more external, more hygienic measures, which have of course become necessary, and by protective vaccination. Admittedly, numerous vaccinations were not such that one could say that they had had a similar success for other diseases. But one must certainly admit the effectiveness of this principle.

On the other hand, however, this question is something that can be viewed more psychologically. Today there are very many opponents of vaccination. These opponents of vaccination are actually parties whose psychology cannot be approached rationally. They are people who, out of an inner reluctance, act against the way in which it is attempted to work. And they cannot say, out of their realization, that the vaccination methods are ineffective, because there are effects. And anyone who resists is resisting these vaccination methods out of a certain unconsciousness.

Anthroposophy must start from deeper points of view. If you think about the nature of illness together with what has been explained to you here today, namely about repeated earthly lives, if you are convinced that there are repeated earthly lives, then you must also bring together what a person experiences in the case of illness in the present life with what he has experienced in a previous earthly life. When one is willing to see this, when one has the will to see this, regardless of what epidemiology has to say, in the science of infection, regardless of that, one must know that there is a certain connection between what a person has been through in a previous life and what happens when he is now exposed to a particular infection. It is said that something happens by chance. But it is not admitted that man is driven there from the subconscious, where he then comes into contact with the infection story. Regardless of some of what he may experience as a result, one can still come to many other views of what is connected with an illness.

When it is realized that certain illnesses have something to do with the peculiarities of the soul of the person, that in a certain respect they are an overcoming of what the person could not achieve in a previous life on earth, and that these physical disease processes , which one must endure, are a form of compensation – the disease process is also linked to psychological phenomena – then one can also understand why, out of a certain unconsciousness, instinct, some have an aversion to this healing elixir. They actually unconsciously say to themselves that, with what is present as illness, an inner soul development upwards to the spirit should go parallel with the outer healing. And if the vaccination that is used makes it possible for things to succeed completely as one imagines, one would still have to say: Even if one manages through appropriate procedures to extinguish all epidemics , that one limits the illnesses, but the question still arises as to whether something else is not also necessary, which must, so to speak, accommodate this process by simultaneously promoting an inner spiritual development. People should realize that such a procedure is possible. One can acknowledge everything that science says, but one must be clear about the necessity that, in addition to the external healing methods that are available, there must also be something that helps the soul to progress inwardly and that points to earlier spiritual connections, to earlier lives. Anthroposophy will never object to what science brings.

Question: How can one form an imagination oneself? Where can one take its content from, if it is not to be linked to a sensual or a memory-based presentation?

Rudolf Steiner: This is based on a misunderstanding! I said that what is to be used for meditation and what then leads to imagination should be manageable, one should have complete oversight of it, so that reminiscences do not occur, so that the subconscious does not participate in the corresponding soul process. You see, if you take, for example, some experience from the past and then meditate, many elements live in the image of such an experience that you have left more or less unconsidered. These elements emerge from the subconscious, and so you do not fully engage in what you have set out to do. It depends on the manageable. For example, one can meditate by calling up a circle with a triangle inscribed in it before one's soul. It is important that the soul does its exercises on something so manageable. It can also be qualitative things. If one lets such manageable things rest in the soul in order to meditate on them, then there is no danger of reminiscences arising from the subconscious. It is not important that one does not use something sensual or reminiscent for meditation - one can use both, but it must be manageable, it must not be one that then causes all kinds of conscious or unconscious processes. What matters is manageability, not imagining anything at all that encompasses many things.

If someone meditates on the concept of “city”, for example, he has been through so much in life, so much has accumulated in the concept of “city” that he cannot possibly know what is all emerging. An example that is also recorded in the literature: a learned naturalist is walking down the street in the city and comes to a shop window. He stops, looks into the shop window and sees the title page of a treatise on earthworms – something that must interest him, surely? But while he is looking and sees the book on the anatomy of earthworms, he suddenly has to smile. A naturalist who suddenly has to smile while looking at a book about earthworms! It seems quite unlikely to him that he has to smile, and yet he wants to find out how it happened. So he turns away, really away, closes his eyes and now tries to figure it out in the dark. Lo and behold, he hears the sounds of a barrel organ in the distance. He had not taken any notice of it, either unconsciously, where he had gone, or consciously, when he was looking at the book. But the sounds had reached his ears; they lived in him in a certain relationship and even made him smile, quite unconsciously. So, he now hears the tones of the barrel organ, and he thinks it is the same melody that he once learned to dance to thirty years ago. He has never thought of this important event again, that he learned to dance to this melody. But this event has lived in his soul in such a way that he now had to smile – even as a naturalist. So, there is a great deal in the subconscious of a person. And I can tell you: there are mystics who hear angels – which can certainly be reality – but with some mystics who somewhere think they hear something in the world of angels, it is still the case – because these things not only remain in the subconscious as reminiscences, but also undergo metamorphoses – that such supposed angels are sometimes transformed barrel organ tunes! And many a thing that appears to one as a significant revelation is merely the transformed notes of a street organ.

That is what one must know above all. The anthroposophical method is an absolutely reliable method. The more one enters into the spiritual world, the more one resists everything that, because it comes out of things, can bring all sorts of misleading and absurd things. So, it is not a matter of meditating on things that cannot be grasped, but on things that are composed by someone who understands such things, or are chosen by oneself as things that can be grasped. It depends on how you look at a triangle, of which you know it has three sides, it has three angles totaling 180 degrees – you can look at it, not much from the subconscious can come up in the process. The meditations must be so manageable that one does not descend from the arbitrary into the involuntary, into the unconscious, that there does not arise something merely from memory or something that was once a sensation, like the distant sounds of a barrel organ, but something must be present in consciousness that is as manageable as a mathematical idea. In this way one can practise imaginative recognition. Of course, everything that is formed from memory must be imagined in a materialistic way. It is not important that it is formed from memory, but the matter must be surveyed. A speaker at the discussion: Dr. Kolisko mentioned something today that interested me greatly. When he spoke of the three centers, he mentioned, as it were, that the head consumes everything that flows up from the lower organs as vital life force. So the lower organs always create something living, which the head, as it were, eats up again. I would like to know how Anthroposophy thinks about the actual physical body.

Dr. Steiner mentioned today in the case of Nietzsche that the physical body had broken the soul, that is, the soul was not strong enough to overcome the body. From the general point of view, without having the physical body, from one direction I have heard something about it - I got to know Dr. Hanish's method. What use is it to me if I know higher worlds and have a toothache? If I cannot help myself when I have a toothache, what use is it to me to know something about the spiritual world? Do you have to approach the physical body from the material or from the spiritual side?

Eugen Kolisko: First of all, one must become clear about the nature of man. Only then can one understand what health and illness of man actually consist of. If one says: What use is it to me if I know something about the world connection and still have a toothache and am at the mercy of all kinds of illnesses —, then one must realize that this is a very one-sided way of looking at it. What was said earlier can be applied to it in particular: that the human egoistic is present to an extraordinarily strong degree when one says, 'I want nothing to do with the spiritual, because it will not relieve me of my toothache'. Knowledge is something one must undergo, something that simply drives one not to let go, something one must simply continue with – even in overcoming the toothache.

So, a point of view that is so thoroughly permeated by a kind of materialistic, selfish striving – even if it were to speak of supersensible worlds – cannot be recognized. But it is important that we first grasp the essence of the human being in order to move beyond a merely materialistic view of the care of the body, because you cannot care for the body, nor can you work therapeutically, if you do not have an insight into the whole context of the forces that make up the essence of the human body.

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to take the liberty of making a few additional comments and illustrating them with examples. You are probably all familiar with a very frequently used saying that says: There are many, countless illnesses, but only one health. I believe there is nothing more wrong than such a saying. Indeed, there are countless illnesses, but there are also countless forms of health. Every person, no matter how healthy, has their own health, and such a sweeping statement is not acceptable under any circumstances. It is absolutely true to say, even from the most spiritual point of view, that a person must take care of the health of their organism in every way. My spiritual research has led me, for example, to regard the life of imagination in such a way that I see a radical error in believing that brain activity as such could somehow be the basis for mental activity. I see an error in this, which I would like to characterize by the following example: Suppose you have a road that has just been made soft by rain. People walk on it; footsteps dig tracks into it. And now someone comes along and says: Yes, this road is configured, you see all kinds of lines and so on. That must be brought about by forces that come from below, that is brought about by something that is inside, under the earth. When you hear something like that, you are likely to say: That's nonsense, the footprints are engraved from the outside and not from below. So, of course, spiritual research leads me to see something quite right in the brain configurations, and in the nerve configurations that the gentlemen physiologists demonstrate, but they are something that is engraved by the soul and spiritual life and can be felt as an imprint in it. But at the same time, it is a matter of the fact that this entire physical being between birth and death is the firm ground on which consciousness develops; the counterforce must be there. Otherwise, the life of the imagination could not develop in this way; in order for it to be able to reflect back, it must have the counterforce. The mirror needs a base. So, even from the most spiritual point of view, the physical organization of the human being is to be formed as healthily as possible. But now it is a matter of developing real views about a healthy physical constitution - and only this is meant when one has acquired a more comprehensive way of looking at things through spiritual science. A few examples of this - really not to boast, but only to suggest what is the basis of my view of life, which is founded on spiritual knowledge.

About 36 years ago, I was recommended to a family as a private tutor for one boy. Among the four boys in the family, one was about eleven years old at the time. He was considered by everyone, including the family, who were of course also prejudiced, to be a failure. They were unhappy about the boy because when he was supposed to take a test at school at the age of eleven, he could not do anything except draw a huge hole in his paper. And that was the extent of this eleven-year-old boy's knowledge in all subjects. The mother was terribly unhappy, the father somewhat skeptical. The family doctor, who was one of the most excellent practical physicians I have ever met – he was truly an excellent man – had already given up on the boy. Well, I was brought in to educate the three other boys. I took one look at the lad and said to the mother, who was the only one of the entire family who still had understanding, coming only from her motherly heart, that I couldn't promise her anything, but that I would use all my strength, as far as I had it, to make something decent out of the boy after all. “But he's been given up by the family doctor,” the other family members said, looking at me as someone to whom one had to ask whether the other three boys could be entrusted to him – after this opinion about the fourth boy! But the mother then pushed it through – it took some pushing before I got the boy for education. I said I had to have an absolutely free hand, had to be able to do and not do everything that I thought was good. The boy was extremely hydrocephalic. He was really in a very bad way.

Well, basically I just applied a method of mental hygiene. I actually only applied what I would call an economy in teaching concepts, skills and so on. I decided that the boy should be exposed to as much piano playing as I chose and so on, and that he should have other things to the extent that I wanted. I may say that I sometimes studied for three hours in order to be able to work with the boy for a quarter of an hour! But through such mental and pedagogical hygiene the boy could be brought to the point in two years where he could transfer to high school. The head had really become smaller. Now, you may say that it might have been good anyway. But truly, it is not the case that it could have been good on its own; the boy really was hydrocephalic through and through; before, his head did not want to and did not want to get smaller. If he had stayed alive anyway, he would certainly not have gone to high school after two years – based on the results that had been achieved with him so far. It was really a matter of being able to bring the boy so far through two years of intensive work – precisely in this individual care, in the hygienic response to this organism, which was completely out of order and which one had to treat. So, it was not a matter of general rules – although the general matter may be quite correct – but of an intimate knowledge of the human being in general.

As for the saying that only a healthy body can be the expression of a healthy soul, if you wanted to translate this saying into real life, it would be completely wrong. Another example: An important doctor came to me one day and said that he now had a special case that interested him very much. A patient had come to him who had fallen once - it was some time ago - and broken his nose, so that now the nose was somewhat narrowed as a result. He would like to operate on him, but he would like us to talk about it. With a certain deeper knowledge of human nature, one sees things differently than one necessarily sees them from a mere external examination of health. I could say nothing other than to advise the doctor: Do not operate on it, because this is a stroke of luck that rarely succeeds, because the man now gets just as much air as he can tolerate in his lungs. He has just the right width of nasal passage for his particular case, for his constitution. One should leave it just as it is. After all, it has been shown that the man is actually comfortable with the small constriction. There are many other things that could be mentioned. The general principle is quite correct: one must work towards a healthy body, but always in quite different ways.

It can make a strange impression – I have often observed it in naturopaths, who always come and say: Yes, this person has something, there is something irregular in the heart movement, you have to cure that. – In such cases, when you take a closer look, you often have to say: Let it be! Let the man have his heart defect, it may be just what he needs; if you try to cure him, he will become really ill. Because people have a very definite stereotype in front of them, a lot of unnecessary things are often done in this direction. You see, in many cases people apply general methods that are not much different - at least in terms of the logic of the matter, the factual logic of the matter - than it was, for example, with a lady who was a faith healer. A terrible thing! She said all kinds of things that you had to imagine; you would become strong and healthy if you believed in her. You would become hardened, she said. But I have never seen a person look as miserable as this faith healer, who was very careful to make sure there was not the slightest breeze, because every little draft caused her the most terrible conditions.

These are things that must be seen in their reality and not merely from a certain, I might say stereotyped point of view. On the other hand, it is certainly true that one must work towards physical health as much as possible; but the insight into what is healthy must arise from spiritual knowledge. Man must not only pay attention to his own health, but he must also know: I am actually a member of the Cosmos. And isn't it true that the air that is now inside me was outside in the Cosmos a short time ago? And so it is with everything else. As a member of the Cosmos, that is what man must actually look at in the world.

We can only interpret such general things in this way, and I would like to have pointed out only this with these remarks.

Jakob Hugentobler expresses his thanks and closes the event.

[ 1 ] Besides the current of world conception that, through the idea of evolution, wants to bring the conception of the phenomena of nature and that of the spirit into complete unity, there is another that expresses their opposition in the strongest possible form. This current also springs from natural science. Its followers ask, “What is our basis as we construct a world conception by means of thinking? We hear, see and touch the physical world through our senses. We then think about the facts that our senses supply concerning that world. We form our thoughts accordingly concerning the world at the testimony of the senses. But are the statements of our senses really to be trusted?”

Let us consult actual observations. The eye conveys to us the phenomena of light. We say an object sends us red light when the eye has the sensation of red. But the eye conveys sensations of light to us also in other cases. When it is pushed or pressed, or when an electric current flows through our head, the eye also has sensations of light. It is, therefore, possible that in cases in which we have the sensation of a light-sending body, something could go on in that object that has no semblance to our sensation of light. The eye, nevertheless, would transmit light to us.

The physiologist, Johannes Mueller (1801–58), drew the conclusion from these facts that what man has as his actual sensation does not depend on the external processes but on his organization. Our nerves transmit sensations to us. As we do not have the sensation of the knife that cuts us but a state of our nerves that appears to us as pain, so we also do not have a sensation of the external world when something appears to us as light. What we then really have is a state of our optic nerve. Whatever may happen outside, the optic nerve translates this external event into the sensation of light. “The sensation is not a process that transmits a quality or a state of an external object to our consciousness but one that transmits a quality, a state of our nerves caused by an external event, to our consciousness. This Johannes Mueller called “the law of specific sense energies.” If that is correct, then our observations contain nothing of the external world but only the sum of our own inner conditions. What we perceive has nothing to do with the external world; it is a product of our own organization. We really perceive only what is in us.

[ 2 ] Natural scientists of great renown regarded this thought as an irrefutable basis of their world conception. Hermann Helmholtz (1821–94) considered it as the Kantian thought—that all our knowledge had reference only to processes within ourselves, not to things in themselves—translated into the language of natural science (compare Vol. I of this book). Helmholtz was of the opinion that the world of our sensations supplies us merely with the signs of the physical processes in the world outside.

I have been convinced that it is necessary to formulate the relation between the sensation and its object by declaring the sensation to be merely the sign of the effect of the object. The nature of the sign demands only that the same sign be always given to the same object. Beyond this requirement there is no more similarity necessary between the sensation and its object than between the spoken word and the object that we denote with it. We cannot even call our sense impression pictures, for a picture depicts the same by the same. In a statue we represent one bodily form through another bodily form; in a drawing we express the perspective view of an object by the same perspective in the picture; in a painting we depict color through color.

[ 3 ] Our sensations, therefore, must differ more from the events they represent than pictures differ from the objects they depict. In our sensual world picture we have nothing objective but a completely subjective element, which we ourselves produce under the stimulation of the effects of an external world that never penetrates into us. This mode of conception is supported from another side by the physicist's view of the phenomena of sensation. A sound that we hear draws our attention to a body in the external world, the parts of which are in a certain state of motion. A stretched string vibrates and we hear a tone. The string transmits the vibrations to the air. They spread and reach our ear; a tone sensation is transmitted to us. The physicist investigates the laws according to which the physical particles outside move while we hear these tones. He finds that the subjective tone sensation is based on the objective motion of the physical particles. Similar relations are observed by the physicist with respect to the sensations of light. Light is also based on motion, only this motion is not transmitted by the vibrating particles of the air, but by the vibrations of the ether, the thinnest matter that fills the whole space of the universe. By every light-emitting body, the ether is put into the state of undulatory vibrations that spread and meet the retina of our eye and excite the optic nerve, which then produces the sensation of light within us. What in our world picture appears as light and color is motion outside in space. Schleiden expresses this view in the following words:

The light outside ourselves in nature is motion of the ether. A motion can be slow and fast; it can have this or that direction, but there is obviously no sense in speaking of light or dark, of green or red motion. In short, outside ourselves, outside the beings who have the sensation, there is no such thing as bright and dark, nor are there any colors.

[ 4 ] The physicist expels colors and light from the external world because he finds only motion in it. The physiologist feels that he is forced to withdraw them into the soul because he is of the opinion that the nerve indicates only its own state of irritation no matter what might have excited it. The view that is given with these presuppositions is sharply delineated by Hippolyte Taine (1828–93) in his book, Reason. The external perception is, according to his opinion, nothing but hallucination. A person who, under the influence of hallucination, perceives a death skull three steps in front of him, has exactly the same perception as someone who receives the light rays sent out by a real skull. It is the same inner phantom that exists within us no matter whether we are confronted with a real skull or whether we have a hallucination. The only difference between the one perception and the other is that in one case the hand stretched out toward the object will grasp empty air, whereas in the other case it will meet some solid resistance. The sense of touch then supports the sense of sight. But does this support really represent an irrefutable testimony? What is correct for one sense is also valid for the other. The sensations of touch can also turn out to be hallucinations.

The anatomist Henle expresses the same view in his Anthropological Lectures (1876) in the following way:

Everything through which we believe to be informed about an external world consists merely of forms of our consciousness for which the external world supplies merely the exciting cause, the stimulus, in the language of the physiologists. The external world has no colors, tones and tastes. What it really contains we learn only indirectly or not at all. How the external world affects a sense, we merely conclude from its behavior toward the other senses. We can, for instance, in the case of a tone, see the vibrations of the tuning fork with our eyes and feel it with our fingers. The nature of certain stimuli, which reveal themselves only to the one sense, as, for instance, the stimuli of the sense of smell, is still inaccessible to us. The number of the properties of matter depends on the number and on the keenness of the senses. Whoever lacks a sense loses a group of properties without a chance of regaining them. A person who would have an extra sense would have an organ to grasp qualities of which we have no other inkling than the blind man has of color.

[ 5 ] If one glances over the physiological literature from the second half of the nineteenth century, one sees that this view of the subjective nature of the world picture of our perceptions has gained increasing acceptance. Time and again one comes across variations of the thought that is expressed by J. Rosenthal in his General Physiology of Muscles and Nerves (1877). “The sensations that we receive through external impressions are not dependent on the nature of these impressions but on the nature of our nerve cells. We have no sensation of what exerts its effect on our body but only of the processes in our brain.”

[ 6 ] To what extent our subjective world picture can be said to give us an indication of the objective external world, is expressed by Helmholtz in his Physiological Optics:

To ask the question if cinnabar is really red as we see it or if this is only a sense deception is meaningless. A red-blind person will see cinnabar as black or in a dark yellow-gray shade; this is also a correct reaction for the special nature of his eye. He must only know that his eye happens to be different from that of other people. In itself one sensation is neither more nor less correct or incorrect than the other, even if the people who see the red have the great majority on their side. The red color of cinnabar exists only insofar as the majority of men have eyes that are of a similar nature. One can say with exactly the same right that it is a quality of cinnabar to be black for red-blind people. It is a different question, however, if we maintain that the wave length of light that is reflected by cinnabar has a certain length. This statement, which we can make without reference to the special nature of our eye, is only concerned with the relations of the substance and the various systems of ether waves.

[ 7 ] It is apparent that for such a conception all phenomena of the world are divided into two completely separated parts, into a world of motions that is independent of the special nature of our faculty of perception, and a world of subjective states that are there only within the perceiving subjects. This view has been expressed sharply and pointedly by the physiologist, Du Bois-Reymond (1818–96), in his lecture, On the Limits of Natural Science, which he gave at the forty-fifth assembly of German naturalists and physicians on August 14, 1872 in Leipzig. Natural science is the reduction of processes we perceive in the world to motions of the smallest physical particles of a “dissolution of natural processes into mechanics of atoms,” for it is a “psychological fact of experience that, wherever such a dissolution is successful” our need for explanation is for the time being satisfied. Moreover, it is a known fact that our nervous system and our brain are of a material nature. The processes that take place within them can also be only processes of motion. When sound or light waves are transmitted to my sense organs and from there to my brain, they can here also be nothing but motions. I can only say that in my brain a certain process of motion goes on, and I have simultaneously the sensation “red.” For if it is meaningless to say of cinnabar that it is red, it is not less meaningless to say of a motion of the brain particles that it is bright or dark, green or red. “Mute and dark in itself, that is to say, without qualities,” such is the world according to the view that has been obtained through the natural scientific conception, which

...knows instead of sound and light only vibrations of a property-free fundamental matter that now can be weighed and then again is imponderable. . . . The Mosaic word, “And there was light,” is physiologically incorrect. Light came into being only when the first red eye spot of the infusoria differentiated for the first time between light and darkness. Without the substance of the optic and auditory sense this world, glowing in colors and resounding around us, would be dark and silent. (Limits of Natural Science.)

Through the processes in the substance of our optic and auditory senses a resounding and colorful world is, according to this view, magically called into existence. The dark and silent world is physical; the sounding and colorful one is psychic. Whereby does the latter arise out of the former; how does motion change into sensation? This is where we meet, according to Du Bois-Reymond, one of the “limits of natural science.” In our brain and in the external world there are only motions; in our soul, sensations appear. We shall never be able to understand how the one can arise out of the other.

At first sight it appears is if, through the knowledge of material processes in the brain, certain processes and latent abilities can become understandable. I am thinking of our memory, the stream of the association of our thought pictures, the effect of exercise, specific talents and so forth. But a little concentration at this point tells us that this view is an error. We would only learn something concerning the inner conditions of our mental life that are approximately of the same nature as our sense impressions, but we should learn nothing that would explain how the mental life comes into existence through these conditions. What possible connections can there be between certain motions of certain atoms in my brain, on the one hand, and, on the other, such undeniable and undefinable facts expressed by the words: I feel pain; I am delighted; I taste something sweet, smell the scent of roses, hear the sound of an organ, see red, and also the certainty that immediately follows from all this, Therefore I am. It is altogether incomprehensible that it should not be a matter of perfect indifference to a number of atoms of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, etc., what their position is and how they move, how this has been and how it will be.

There is no bridge for our knowledge that leads from motion to sensation. This is the credo of Du Bois-Reymond. From motion in the material world we cannot come into the psychical world of sensations. We know that sensation arises from matter in motion, but we do not know how this is possible. Also, in the world of motion we cannot go beyond motion. For our subjective perceptions we can point at certain forms of motions because we can infer the course of these motions from the process of our perceptions, but we have no conception of what it is that is moving outside in space. We say that matter moves. We follow its motions as we watch the reactions of our sensations, but as we do not observe the object in motion but only a subjective sign of it, we can never know what matter is. Du Bois-Reymond is of the opinion that we might be able to solve the riddle of sensation if the riddle of matter were disclosed. If we knew what matter is, we should probably also know how it produces sensations, but both riddles are inaccessible to our knowledge. Du Bois-Reymond meant to check those who wanted to go beyond this limit with the words, “Just let them try the only alternative that is left, namely, supra-naturalism, but be sure that science ends where supra-naturalism begins.”

[ 8 ] The results of modern natural science are two sharply marked opposites. One of them is the current of monism. It gives the impression of penetrating directly from natural science to the most significant problems of world conception. The other declares itself incapable of proceeding any further with the means of natural science than to the insight that to a certain subjective state there is a certain corresponding process of motion. The representatives of the two currents vehemently oppose each other. Du Bois-Reymond rejected Haeckel's History of Creation as fiction (compare Du Bois-Reymond's speech, Darwin versus Galiani). The ancestral trees that Haeckel constructs on the basis of comparative anatomy, ontogeny and paleontology appear to Du Bois-Reymond to be of “approximately the same value as are the ancestral trees of the Homeric heroes in the eyes of historical criticism.” Haeckel, on the other hand, considers the view of Du Bois-Reymond to be an unscientific dilettantism that must naturally give support to the reactionary world conceptions. The jubilation of the spiritualists over Du Bois-Reymond's “Limitation Speech” was so much the more resonant and justified, as Du Bois-Reymond had, up to that time, been considered an important representative of the principle of scientific materialism.

[ 9 ] What captivates many people in the idea of dividing the world dualistically into external processes of motion and inner, subjective processes of sensation and perception is the possibility of an application of mathematics to the external processes. If one assumes material particles (atoms) with energies to exist, one can calculate in which way such atoms have to move under the influence of these energies. What is so attractive in astronomy with its methods of strict calculations is carried into the smallest elements. The astronomer determines the motion of the celestial bodies by calculating the laws of the mechanics of the heavens. In the discovery of the planet Neptune we experienced a triumph of the mechanism of the heavens. One can also reduce the motions that take place in the external world when we hear a tone and see a color to laws that govern the motions of the celestial bodies. Possibly one will be able in the future to calculate the motion that goes on in our brain while we form the judgment, two times two is four. The moment when everything that can be expressed in mathematical formulas has been calculated will be the one in which the world has been explained mathematically. Laplace has given a captivating description of the ideal of such an explanation of the world in his Essai Philosophique sur les Probabilités (1814):

A mind that would know for a given moment all forces that activate nature as well as the mutual position of the entities of which nature consists would, if its power of comprehension were otherwise sufficient, comprehend in the same formula the motions of the largest celestial body and of the lightest atom. Nothing would be uncertain for such a mind, and the future as well as the past would be within the scope of its perfect and immediate knowledge. Man's power of reasoning offers, with the perfection that it has given to astronomy, a feeble imitation of such a mind.

Du Bois-Reymond says in connection with these words:

As the astronomer predicts the day on which a comet reemerges from the depth of world space after years in the firmament of heaven, so would this mind read in its calculation the day when the Greek cross will shine from the mosque of the Hagia Sophia and when England will burn its last coal.

[ 10 ] There can be no doubt that even the most perfect mathematical knowledge of a process of motion would not enlighten me with regard to the question of why this motion appears to me as a red color. When one ball hits another, we can explain the direction of the second ball but we cannot in this way determine how a certain motion produces the red color. All we can say is that when a certain motion is given, a certain color is also given. While we can explain, apparently, as opposed to merely describe, what can be determined through calculation, we cannot go beyond a mere description in anything that defies calculation.

[ 11 ] A significant confession was made by Gustav Robert Kirchhoff (1824–87) when, in 1874, he defined the task of mechanics: “It is to describe the motions occurring in nature in the most complete and simple way.” Mechanics applies mathematics. Kirchhoff confesses that with the help of mathematics no more can be obtained than a complete and simple description of the processes in nature.

To those personalities who demand of an explanation something essentially more than just a description according to certain points of view, the confession of Kirchhoff could serve as a confirmation of their belief that there are “limits to our knowledge of nature.” Referring to Kirchhoff, Du Bois-Reymond praises the wise reserve of the master, who characterizes the task of mechanics as that of describing the motions of the bodies, and places this in contrast to Ernst Haeckel, who “speaks of atom souls.”

[ 12 ] An important attempt to base his world conception on the idea that all our perceptions are merely the result of our own organization has been made by Friedrich Albert Lange (1828–73) with his History of Materialism (1864). He had the boldness and consistency of thought that does not allow itself to be blocked by any obstacle but follows its fundamental conception to its last conclusion. Lange's strength lay in a forceful character that was expressed in many directions. His was a personality able to take up many things, and he had sufficient ability to carry them out.

[ 13 ] One important enterprise was his renewal of Kant's conception that, with the support of modern natural science, we perceive things not as they require it, but as our organization demands it. Lange did not really produce any new conceptions, but he did throw light into given thought worlds that is rare in its brightness. Our organization, our brain, in connection with our senses, produces the world of sensation. I see “blue,” or I feel “hardness,” because I am organized in this particular way. I combine the sensations into objects. By combining the sensations of “white” and “soft,” etc., I produce, for instance, the conception of wax. When I follow my sensation with my thoughts, I do not move in the external world. My intellect produces connections within the world of my sensations according to the laws of my reason. When I saw that the qualities I perceive in a body presuppose a matter with laws of motion, I also do not go outside of myself. I find that I am forced through my organization to add the thoughts of processes of motion to my sensations.

The same mechanism that produces our sensations also produces our conception of matter. Matter, equally, is only a product of my organization, just as color and tone. Even when we speak of things in themselves, we must be clearly aware of the fact that we cannot go beyond our own realm. We are so organized that we cannot possibly go beyond ourselves. Even what lies beyond our realm can be represented to ourselves only through our conception. We become aware of a limit to our world. We argue that there must be something beyond the limit that causes sensations in us. But we can only go as far as to that limit, even the limit we set ourselves because we can go no further. “A fish can swim in water in the pond, not in the earth, but it can hit its head against the bottom and the walls.” In the same way we live within the realm of our conceptions and sensations, but not in the external things. We hit against a limit, however, where we cannot go any further, where we must say no more than that beyond this is the unknown. All conceptions we produce concerning this unknown are unjustified because we cannot do anything but relate the conceptions we have obtained within ourselves to the unknown. If we wanted to do this, we should be no wiser than a fish that would say, “Here I cannot go any further. Therefore, I want to go into some other kind of water in which I will try to swim in some other way.” But the fact is that the fish can swim only in water and nowhere else.

[ 14 ] This is supplemented by another thought that belongs with the first line of reasoning. Lange, as the spirit of an inexorable desire for consistency, linked them together. In what situation am I when I contemplate myself? Am I not as much bound to the laws of my own organization as I am when I consider something else? My eye observes an object. Without an eye there is no color. I believe that there is an object in front of me, but on closer inspection I find that it is my eye, that is to say, I, myself, that produces the object. Now I turn my observation to my eye itself. Can I do this in any other way except by means of my organs? Is not the conception that I obtain of myself also just my idea? The world of the senses is the product of our organization. Our visible organs are like all other parts of the phenomenal world, only pictures of an unknown object. Our real organization remains, therefore, as unknown to us as the objects of the external world. What we have before us is merely the product of both. Affected by an unknown world through an unknown ego, we produce a world of conceptions that is all we have at our disposal.

[ 15 ] Lange asks himself the question: Where does a consistent materialism lead? Let all our mental conclusions and sense perceptions be produced by the activity of our brain, which is bound to material conditions, and our sense organs, which are also material. We are then confronted with the necessity of investigating our organism in order to see how it functions, but we can do this only by means of our organs. No color without an eye, but also no eye without an eye.

The consistently materialistic view is immediately reversed into a consistently idealistic one. There is no break to be assumed in our nature. We must not attribute some functions of our being to a physical nature and others to a spiritual one, but we are justified to assume physical conditions for everything, including the mechanism of our thinking, and we should not rest until we have found them. But we are as much justified if we consider as mere pictures of the really existing world, not only the external world as it appears to us, but also the organs with which we apprehend this world. The eye with which we believe we see is itself only a product of our imagination. When we find that our visual pictures are produced by the structure and function of the eye, we must never forget that the eye with all its contrivances—the optic nerve as well as the brain and the structures we may still discover in it as causes of our thinking—are only ideas that, to be sure, form a world that is consistent and interconnected in itself, but merely a world that points beyond itself. . The senses supply us, as Helmholtz says, with the effects of the things, not with faithful pictures, and certainly not with the things themselves. Among these effects are also the senses themselves as well as the brain and the molecular movements assumed in it. (History of Materialism, 1887.)

Lange, therefore, assumes a world beyond our world that may consist of the things in themselves or that may not even have anything to do with this “thing in itself,” since even this concept, which we form at the limit of our own realm, belongs merely to the world of our ideas.

[ 16 ] Lange's world conception, then, leads to the opinion that we have only a world of ideas. This world, however, forces us to acknowledge something beyond its own sphere. It also is completely incapable of disclosing anything about this something. This is the world conception of absolute ignorance, of agnosticism.

[ 17 ] It is Lange's conviction that all scientific endeavor that does not limit itself to the evidence of the senses and the logical intellect that combines these elements of evidence must remain fruitless. That the senses and the intellect together, however, do not supply us with anything but a result of our own organization, he accepts as evidently following from his analysis of the origin of knowledge. The world is for him fundamentally a product of the fiction of our senses and of our intellects. Because of this opinion, he never asks the question of truth with regard to the ideas. A truth that could enlighten us about the essence of the world is not recognized by Lange. He believes he has obtained an open road for the ideas and ideals that are formed by the human mind and that he has accomplished this through the very fact that he no longer feels the need of attributing any truth to the knowledge of the senses and the intellect. Without hesitation he considered everything that went beyond sensual observation and rational combination to be mere fiction. No matter what the idealistic philosophers had thought concerning the nature of facts, for him it belonged to the realm of poetic fiction.

Through this turn that Lange gave to materialism there arose necessarily the question: Why should not the higher imaginative creations be valid if even the senses are creative? What is the difference between these two kinds of creation? A philosopher who thinks like this must have a reason for admitting certain conceptions that is quite different from the reason that influences a thinker who acknowledges a conception because he thinks it is true. For Lange, this reason is given by the fact that a conception has value for life. For him, the question is not whether or not a conception is true, but whether it is valuable for man. One thing, however, must be clearly recognized: That I see a rose as red, that I connect the effect with the cause, is something I have in common with all creatures endowed with the power of perception and thinking. My senses and my reason cannot produce any additional values, but if I go beyond the imaginative product of senses and reason, then I am no longer bound to the organization of the whole human species. Schiller, Hegel and every Tom, Dick and Harry sees a flower in the same way. What Schiller weaves in poetic imagination around the flower, what Hegel thinks about it, is not imagined by Tom, Dick and Harry in the same way. But just as Tom, Dick and Harry are mistaken when they think that the flower is an entity existing externally, so Schiller and Hegel would be in error if they took their ideas for anything more than poetic fiction that satisfied their spiritual needs. What is poetically created through the senses and the intellect belongs to the whole human race, and no one in this respect can be different from anybody else. What goes beyond the creation of the senses and of reason is the concern of the individual. Nevertheless, this imaginative creation of the individual is also granted a value by Lange for the whole human race, provided that the individual creator “who produces it is normal, richly gifted and typical in his mode of thinking, and is, through his force of spirit, qualified to be a leader.”

In this way, Lange believes that he can secure for the ideal world its value by declaring that also the so-called real world is a product of poetic creation. Wherever he may look, Lange sees only fiction, beginning with the lowest stage of sense perception where “the individual still appears subject to the general characteristics of the human species, and culminating with the creative power in poetry.”

The function of the senses and of the combining intellect, which produce what is reality for us, can be called a lower function if one compares them with the soaring flight of the spirit in the creative arts. But, in general and in their totality, these functions cannot be classified as a principally different activity of the mind. As little as our reality is a reality according to our heart's desire, it is nevertheless the firm foundation of our whole spiritual existence. The individual grows out of the soil of the species, and the general and necessary process of knowledge forms the only secure foundation for the individual's rise to an esthetic conception of the world. (History of Materialism.)

[ 18 ] What Lange considers to be the error of the idealistic world conception is not that it goes beyond the world of the senses and the intellect with its ideas, but that it believes it possesses in these ideas more than the individual thinker's poetic fantasy. One should build up for oneself an ideal world, but one should be aware that this ideal world is no more than poetic imagination. If this idealism maintains it is more than that, materialism will rise time and again with the claim: I have the truth; idealism is poetry. Be that so, says Lange: Idealism is poetry, but materialism is also poetry. In idealism the individual is the creator, in materialism, the species. If they both are aware of their natures, everything is in its right place: the science of the senses and the intellect that provide proofs for the whole species, as well as the poetry of ideas with all its conceptions that are produced by the individual and still retain their value for the race.

One thing is certain: Man is in need of an ideal world created by himself as a supplement of reality, and the highest and noblest functions of his spirit are actively combined in such creations. But is this free activity of the spirit to be allowed repeatedly to assume the deceptive form of a proof-establishing science? If so, materialism will emerge again and again to destroy the bolder speculations and try to satisfy reason's demand for unity with a minimum of elevation above the real and actually provable. (History of Materialism.)

[ 19 ] In Lange's thinking, complete idealism is combined with a complete surrender of truth itself. The world for him is poetry, but a poetry that he does not value any less than he would if he could acknowledge it as reality.

Thus, two currents of a distinctly natural scientific character can be distinguished as abruptly opposing each other in the development of modern world conception: The monistic current in which Haeckel's mode of conception moved, and the dualistic one, the most forceful and consistent defender of which was Friedrich Albert Lange. Monism considers the world that man can observe to be a true reality and has no doubt that a thinking process that depends on observation can also obtain knowledge of essential significance concerning this reality. Monism does not imagine that it is possible to exhaust the fundamental nature of the world with a few boldly thought out formulas. It proceeds as it follows the facts, and forms new ideas in regard to the connections of these facts. It is convinced, however, that these ideas do supply a knowledge of a true reality. The dualistic conception of Lange divides the world into a known and an unknown part. It treats the first part in the same fashion as monism, following the lead of observation and reflective thought, but it believes that nothing at all can be known concerning the true essential core of the world through this observation and through this thought. Monism believes in the truth of the real and sees the human world of ideas best supported if it is based on the world of observations. In the ideas and ideals that the monist derives from natural existence, he sees something that is fully satisfactory to his feeling and to his moral need. He finds in nature the highest existence, which he does not only want to penetrate with his thinking for the purpose of knowledge, but to which he surrenders with all his knowledge and with all his love.

In Lange's dualism nature is considered to be unfit to satisfy the spirit's highest needs. Lange must assume a special world of higher poetry for this spirit that leads beyond the results of observation and its corresponding thought. For monism, true knowledge represents a supreme spiritual value, which, because of its truth, grants man also the purest moral and religious pathos. To dualism, knowledge cannot present such a satisfaction. Dualism must measure the value of life by other things, not by the truth it might yield. The ideas are not valuable because they participate in the truth. They are of value because they serve life in its highest forms. Life is not valued by means of the ideas, but the ideas are appreciated because of their fruitfulness for life. It is not for true knowledge that man strives but for valuable thoughts.

[ 20 ] In recognizing the mode of thinking of natural science Friedrich Albert Lange agrees with monism insofar as he denies the uses of all other sources for the knowledge of reality, but he also denies this mode of thinking any possibility to penetrate into the essential of things. In order to make sure that he himself moves on solid ground he curtails the wings of human imagination. What Lange is doing in such an incisive fashion corresponds to an inclination of thought that is deeply ingrained in the development of modern world conception. This is shown with perfect clarity also in another sphere of thinking of the nineteenth century. This thinking developed, through various stages, viewpoints from which Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) started as he laid the foundations for a dualism in England. Spencer's dualism appeared at approximately the same time as Lange's in Germany, which strove for natural scientific knowledge of the world on the one hand and, on the other, confessed to agnosticism so far as the essence of things is concerned. When Darwin published his work, The Origin of Species, he could praise the natural scientific mode of thought of Spencer:

Mr. Herbert Spencer, in an Essay (1852), has contrasted the theories of the Creation and the Development of organic beings with remarkable skill and force. He argues from the analogy of domestic production, from the changes which the embryos of many species undergo, from the difficulty of distinguishing species and varieties, and from the principle of general gradation that species have been modified; and he attributes the modification to the change of circumstances. The author (1855) has also treated Psychology on the principle of the necessary requirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. (The Origin of Species, Historical Sketch.)

Also, other thinkers who followed the method of natural science felt attracted to Spencer because he tried to explain all reality from the inorganic to the psychological in the manner expressed in Darwin's words above. But Spencer also sides with the agnostics, so that Lange is justified when he says, “Herbert Spencer, whose philosophy is closely related to ours, believes in a materialism of the phenomenal world, the relative justification of which, within the realm of natural science, finds its limit in a thought of an unknowable absolute.”

[ 21 ] It is quite likely that Spencer arrived at his viewpoint from assumptions similar to those of Lange. He had been preceded in England by thinkers who were guided by a twofold interest. They wanted to determine what it is that man really possesses with his knowledge, but they also were resolved not to shatter by doubt or reason the essential substance of the world. They were all more or less dominated by the sentiment that Kant described when he said, “I had to suspend knowledge in order to make room for belief.” (Compare the first volume of this book.)

[ 22 ] The beginning of the development of the world conception of the nineteenth century in England is marked by the figure of Thomas Reid (1710–96). The fundamental conviction of this man can be expressed in Goethe's words as he describes his own activity as a scientist as non-speculative: “In the last analysis it seems to me that my method consists merely m the practical and self-rectifying operations of common sense that dares to practice its function in a higher sphere.” (Compare Goethe's Werke, Vol. 38, p. 595 in Kürschner's Deutsche National Literatur.) This common sense does not doubt in any way that it is confronted with real essential things and processes as it contemplates the world. Reid believes that a world conception is viable only if it upholds this basic view of a healthy common sense. Even if one admitted the possibility that our observation could be deceptive and that the true nature of things could be different from the picture that is supplied to us by our senses and our intellect, it would not be necessary to pay any attention to such a possibility. We find our way through life only if we believe in our observation; nothing beyond that is our concern.

In taking this point of view Reid is convinced that he can arrive at really satisfactory truths. He makes no attempt to obtain a conception of things through complicated thought operations but wants to reach his aim by going back to the basic principles that the soul instinctively assumes. Instinctively, unconsciously, the soul possesses what is correct, before the attempt is made to illumine the mind's own nature with the torch of consciousness. It knows instinctively what to think in regard to the qualities and processes of the physical world, and it is endowed instinctively with the direction of moral behavior, of a judgment concerning good and evil. Through his reference to the truths innate in “common sense,” Reid directs the attention of thought toward an observation of the soul. This tendency toward a psychological observation becomes a lasting and characteristic trait in the development of the English world conception.

Outstanding personalities within this development are William Hamilton (1788–1856), Henry Mansel (1820–71), William Whewell (1794–1866), John Herschel (1792 – 1871), James Mill (1773–1836), John Stuart Mill (1806 – 73), Alexander Bain (1818–1903) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). They all place psychology in the center of their world conception.

[ 23 ] William Hamilton also recognizes as truth what the soul from the beginning feels inclined to accept as true. With respect to fundamental truths proofs and comprehension ceases. All one can do is observe their emergence at the horizon of our consciousness. In this sense they are incomprehensible. But one of the fundamental manifestations of our consciousness is also that everything in this world depends on something that is unknown to us. We find in this world in which we live only dependent things, but not absolutely independent ones. Such independent things must exist, however. When a dependent thing is found, an independent thing is assumed. With our thinking we do not enter the independent entity. Human knowledge is meant for the dependent and it becomes involved in contradictions if its thoughts, which are well-suited to the dependent, are applied to the independent. Knowledge, therefore, must withdraw as we approach the entrance toward the independent. Religious belief is here in its place. It is only through his admission that he cannot know anything of the essential core of the world that man can be a moral being. He can accept a God who causes a moral order in the world. As soon as it has been understood that all logic has exclusively to do with the dependent, not the independent, no logic can destroy this belief in an infinite God.

Henry Mansel was a pupil and follower of Hamilton, but he expressed Hamilton's view in still more extreme forms. It is not going too far to say that Mansel was an advocate of belief who no longer judged impartially between religion and knowledge, but who defended religious dogma with partiality. He was of the opinion that the revealed truths of religion involve our knowledge necessarily in contradictions. This is not supposed to be the fault of the revealed truths but has its cause in the limitation of the human mind, which can never penetrate into regions from which the statements of revelation arise.

William Whewell believed that he could best obtain a conception concerning the significance, origin and value of human knowledge by investigating the method through which leading men of science arrived at their insights. In his History of the Inductive Sciences (1840), he set out to analyze the psychology of scientific investigation. Thus, by studying outstanding scientific discoveries, he hoped to find out how much of these accomplishments was due to the external world and how much to man himself. Whewell finds that the human mind always supplements its scientific observations. Kepler, for example, had the idea of an ellipse before he found that the planets move in ellipses. Thus, the sciences do not come about through a mere reception from without but through the active participation of the human mind that impresses its laws on the given elements. These sciences do not extend as far as the last entities of things. They are concerned with the particulars of the world. Just as everything, for instance, is assumed to have a cause, such a cause must also be presupposed for the whole world. Since knowledge fails us with respect to that cause, the dogma of religion must step in as a supplement. Herschel, like Whewell, also tried to gain an insight into the genesis of knowledge in the human mind through the observation of many examples. His Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy appeared in 1831.

[ 24 ] John Stuart Mill belongs with those thinkers who are deeply imbued with the conviction that one cannot be cautious enough in determining what is certain and uncertain in human knowledge. The fact that he was introduced to the most diversified branches of knowledge in his boyhood, most likely gave his mind its characteristic turn. As a child of three he received instructions in the Greek language, and soon afterwards was taught arithmetic. He was exposed to the other fields of instruction at a correspondingly early age. Of even greater importance was the method of instruction used by his father, James Mill, who was himself an important thinker. Through him vigorous logic became the second nature of John Stuart. From his autobiography we learn: “Anything which could be found out by thinking I was never told until I had exhausted my efforts to find it out for myself.” The things that occupy the thinking of such a person must become his destiny in the proper sense of the word. “I have never been a child, I have never played cricket. It is, after all, better to let nature take its own course,” says John Stuart Mill as one whose destiny had so uniquely been to live almost exclusively in thinking. Because of his development, he had to experience to the fullest the problems concerning the significance of knowledge. How can knowledge, which for him was life, lead also to the source of the phenomena of the world? The direction in which Mill's thought developed in order to obtain clarity concerning these problems was probably determined early by his father. James Mill had proceeded by starting from psychological experience. He had observed the process by which idea is linked to idea in man's mind. Through connecting one concrete idea to another we obtain our knowledge of the world. We must then ask ourselves: What is the relation between the order in which the ideas are linked and the order of the things in the world? Through such a mode of conception our thinking begins to distrust its own power because man can associate ideas in a manner that is entirely different from the connection of the things in the external world. This mistrust is the basis of John Stuart Mill's logic, which appeared in 1843 as his chief work under the title, System of Logic.

[ 25 ] In matters of world conception a more pronounced contrast is scarcely thinkable than that between Mill's Logic and Hegel's Science of Logic, which appeared twenty-seven years earlier. In Hegel we find the highest confidence in thinking, the full assurance that we cannot be deceived by what we experience within ourselves. Hegel experiences himself as a part, a member of the world, and what he experiences within himself must also belong to the world. Since he has the most direct knowledge of himself, he believes in the content of this knowledge and judges the rest of the world accordingly. He argues as follows: When I perceive an external thing, it is possible that the thing shows only its surface to me and that its essence remains concealed. This is not possible in my own case. I understand my own being. I can then compare the things outside with my own being. If they reveal some element of my own essence on their surface, I am justified in attributing to them something of my own nature. It is for this reason that Hegel expects confidently to find outside in nature the very spirit and the thought connections that he finds within himself.

Mill, however, experiences himself not as a part of the world but as a spectator. The things outside are an unknown element to him and the thoughts that man forms concerning them are met by Mill with distrust. One observes men and learns from his observations that all men die. One forms the judgment that all men are mortal. The Duke of Wellington is a man; therefore, the Duke of Wellington is mortal. This is the conclusion the observer comes to. What gives him the right to do so? This is the question John Stuart Mill asks. If a single human being would prove to be immortal, the whole judgment would be upset. Are we justified in supposing that, because all men up to this time have died, they will continue to do so in the future? All knowledge is uncertain because we draw conclusions from observations we have made and transfer them to things we cannot know anything about, since we have not observed them directly. What would somebody who thinks like Hegel have to say about such a conception? It is not difficult to imagine the answer. We know from definite concepts that in every circle all diameters are equal. If we find a circle in the real world, we maintain that its diameters, too, are equal. If we observe it a quarter of an hour later and find that its diameters are unequal, we do not decide [ 26 ] that under certain circumstances the diameter of a circle can also be unequal. But we say that what was formerly a circle has for some reason been elongated into an ellipse.

If we think like Hegel, this is the attitude we take toward the judgment, all men are mortal. It is not through observation but through an inner thought experience that we form the concept of man. For the concept of man, mortality is as essential as the equality of the diameters is for the concept of the circle. If we find a being in the real world that has all the other characteristics of man, we conclude that this being must also have that of mortality, in the same way that all other properties of the circle allow us to conclude that it has also that of the equality of diameters. If Hegel came across a being that did not die, he could only say, “That is not a man.” He could not say, “A man can also be immortal.” Hegel makes the assumption that the concepts in us are not arbitrarily formed but have their root in the essence of the world, as we ourselves belong to this essence. Once the concept of man has formed within us, it is clear that it has its origin in the essence of things, and we are fully justified in applying it to this essence. Why has this concept of mortal man formed within us? Surely only because it has its ground in the nature of things. A person who believes that man stands entirely outside of the order of things and forms his judgments as an outsider can argue that we have until now seen men die, and therefore we form the spectator concept: mortal men. The thinker who is aware that he himself belongs to the order of things and that it is they that are manifested within his thoughts, forms the judgment that up to this time all men have died; to die, then, is something that belongs to their nature, and if somebody does not die, he is not a man but something else. Hegel's logic has become a logic of things: For Hegel, the manifestation of logic is an effect of the essence of the world; it is not something that the human mind has added from an outside source to this essence. Mill's logic is the logic of a bystander, of a mere spectator who starts out by cutting the thread through which it is connected with the world.

[ 27 ] Mill points out that the thoughts, which in a certain age appear as absolutely certain inner experiences, are nevertheless reversed in a later time. In the Middle Ages it was, for instance, believed that there could not possibly be antipodes and that the stars would have to drop from the sky if they did not cling to fixed spheres. Man will, therefore, only be capable of the right attitude toward his knowledge if he, in spite of his awareness that the logic of the world is expressed in this knowledge, forms in every individual case his judgment through a careful methodical examination of his conceptual connections guided by observation, a judgment that is always in need of correction.

It is the method of observation that John Stuart Mill attempts to determine with cool detachment and calculation. Let us take an example. [ 28 ] Suppose a phenomenon had always occurred under certain conditions. In a given case a number of these conditions appear again, but a few of them are now missing. The phenomenon in question does not occur. We are forced to conclude that the conditions that were not provided and the phenomenon that failed to occur stood in a causal relationship. If two substances have always combined to form a chemical compound and this result fails to be obtained in a given case, it is necessary to inquire what condition is lacking that had always been present before. Through a method of this kind we arrive at conceptions concerning connections of facts that can be rightly considered as being grounded in the nature of things. Mill wants to follow the methods of observation in his analysis. Logic, which Kant maintained had not progressed a single step since Aristotle, is a means of orientation within our thinking itself. It shows how to proceed from one correct thought to the next. Mill's logic is a means of orientation within the world of facts. It intends to show how one obtains valid judgments about things from observation. He does not even admit mathematics as an exception. Mathematics must also derive its basic insights from observation. For example, in all observed cases we have seen that two intersecting straight lines diverge and do not intersect again. Therefore we conclude that they will never intersect again, but we do not have a perfect proof for this statement. For John Stuart Mill, the world is thus an alien element. Man observes its phenomena and arranges them according to what they announce to his conceptual life. He perceives regularities in the phenomena and through logical, methodical investigations of these regularities he arrives at the laws of nature. But there is nothing that leads him to the principle of the things themselves. One can well imagine that the world could also be entirely different. Mill is convinced that everybody who is used to abstraction and analysis and who seriously uses his abilities will, after a sufficient exercise of his imagination, have no difficulty with the idea that there could be another stellar system in which nothing could be found of the laws that have application to our own.

Mill is merely consistent in his bystander viewpoint of the world when he extends it to man's own ego. Mental pictures come and go, are combined and separated within his inner life; this is what man observes. He does not observe a being that remains identical with itself as “ego” in the midst of this constant flow of ideas. He has observed that mental pictures emerge within him and he assumes that this will continue to be the case. From this possibility, namely, that a world of perceptions can be grouped around a center, arises the conception of an “ego.” Thus, man is a spectator also with respect to his own “ego.” He has his conceptions tell him what he can know about himself. Mill reflects on the facts of memory and expectation. If everything that I know of myself is to consist of conceptual presentations, then I cannot say: I remember a conception that I have had at an earlier time, or I expect the occurrence of a certain experience, but I must say: A present conception remembers itself or expects its future occurrence. If we speak, so Mill argues, of the mind as of a sequence of perceptions, we must also speak of a sequence of perceptions that is aware of itself as becoming and passing. As a result, we find ourselves in the dilemma of having to say that either the “ego” or the mind is something to be distinguished from the perceptions, or else we must maintain the paradox that a mere sequence of perceptions is capable of an awareness of its past and future. Mill does not overcome this dilemma. It contains for him an insoluble enigma. The fact is that he has torn the bond between himself, the observer, and the world, and he is not capable of restoring the connection. The world for him remains an unknown beyond himself that produces impressions on man. All man knows of this transcendent unknown is that it can produce perceptions in him. Instead of having the possibility of knowing real things outside himself, he can only say in the end that there are opportunities for having perceptions. Whoever speaks of things in themselves uses empty words. We move on the firm ground of facts only as long as we speak of the continuous possibility of the occurrence of sensations, perceptions and conceptions.

[ 29 ] John Stuart Mill has an intense aversion to all thoughts that are gained in any way except through the comparison of facts, the observation of the similar, the analogous, and the homogeneous elements in all phenomena. He is of the opinion that the human conduct of life can only be harmed if we surrender to the belief that we could arrive at any truth in any way except through observation. This disinclination of Mill demonstrates his hesitation to relate himself in his striving for knowledge to the things of reality in any other way than by an attitude of passivity. The things are to dictate to man what he has to think about them. If man goes beyond this state of receptivity in order to say something out of his own self about the things, then he lacks every assurance that this product of his own activity has anything to do with the things. What is finally decisive in this philosophy is the fact that the thinker who maintains it is unable to count his own spontaneous thinking as belonging to the world. The very fact that he himself is active in this thinking makes him suspicious and misleads him. He would best of all like to eliminate his own self completely, to be absolutely sure that no erroneous element is mixed into the objective statements of the phenomena. He does not sufficiently appreciate the fact that his thinking is a part of nature as much as the growth of a leaf of grass. It is evident that one must also examine one's own spontaneous thinking if one wants to find out something concerning it.

How is man, to use a statement of Goethe, to become acquainted with his relation to himself and to the external world if he wants to eliminate himself completely in the cognitive process? Great as Mill's merits are for finding methods through which man can learn those things that do not depend on him, a view concerning man's relation to himself and of his relation to the external world cannot be obtained by his methods. All these methods are valid only for the special sciences, not, however, for a comprehensive world conception. No observation can teach what spontaneous thinking is; only thinking can experience this in itself. As this thinking can only obtain information concerning its own nature through its own power, it is also the only source that can shed light on the relation between itself and the external world. Mill's method of investigation excludes the possibility of obtaining a world conception because a world conception can be gained only through thinking that is concentrated in itself and thereby succeeds in obtaining an insight into its own relation to the external world. The fact that John Stuart Mill had an aversion to this kind of self-supporting thinking can be well understood from his character. Gladstone said in a letter (compare Gompertz: John Stuart Mill, Vienna, 1889) that in conversation he used to call Mill the “Saint of Rationalism.” A person who practices thinking in this way imposes rigorous demands on thinking and looks for the greatest possible precautionary measures so that it cannot deceive him. He becomes thereby mistrustful with respect to thinking itself. He believes that he will soon stand on insecure ground if he loses hold of external points of support. Uncertainty with regard to all problems that go beyond strictly observational knowledge is a basic trait in Mill's personality. In reading his books we see everywhere that Mill treats such problems as open questions concerning which he does not risk a sure judgment.

[ 30 ] The belief that the true nature of things is unknowable is also maintained by Herbert Spencer. He proceeds by asking: How do I obtain what I call truths concerning the world? I make certain observations concerning things and form judgments about them. I observe that hydrogen and oxygen under certain conditions combine to form water. I form a judgment concerning this observation. This is a truth that extends only over a small circle of things. I then observe under what circumstances other substances combine. I compare the individual observations and thereby arrive at more comprehensive, more general truths concerning the process in which substances in general form chemical compounds. All knowledge consists in this; we proceed from particular truths to more comprehensive ones. We finally arrive at the highest truth, which cannot be subordinated to any other and which we therefore must accept without further explanation. In this process of knowledge we have, however, no means of penetrating to the absolute essence of the world, for thinking can, according to this opinion, do no more than compare the various things with one another and formulate general truths with respect to the homogeneous element in them. But the ultimate nature of the world cannot, because of its uniqueness, be compared to any other thing. This is why thinking fails with regard to the ultimate nature. It cannot reach it.

[ 31 ] In such modes of conception we always sense, as an undertone, the thinking that developed from the basis of the physiology of the senses (compare above to the first part of this Chapter). In many philosophers this thought has inserted itself so deeply into their intellectual life that they consider it the most certain thought possible. They argue as follows: One can know things only by becoming aware of them. They then change this thought, more or less unconsciously, into: One can know only of those things that enter our consciousness, but it remains unknown how the things were before they entered our consciousness. It is for this reason that sense perceptions are considered as if they were in our consciousness, for one is of the opinion that they must first enter our consciousness and must become part of it in the form of conceptions if we are to be aware of them.

[ 32 ] Also, Spencer clings to the view that the possibility of the process of knowledge depends on us as human beings. We therefore must assume an unknowable element beyond that which can be transmitted to us by our senses and our thinking. We have a clear consciousness of everything that is present in our mind. But an indefinite consciousness is associated with this clear awareness that claims that everything we can observe and think has as its basis something we can no longer observe and think. We know that we are dealing with mere appearances and not with full realities existing independently by themselves. But this is just because we know definitely that our world is only appearance, that we also know that an unimaginable real world is its basis. Through such turns of thought Spencer believes it possible to arrange a complete reconciliation between religion and knowledge. There is something that religion can grasp in belief, in a belief that cannot be shaken by an impotent knowledge.

[ 33 ] The field, however, that Spencer considers to be accessible to knowledge must, for him, entirely take on the form of natural scientific conceptions. When Spencer himself ventures to explain, he does so in the sense of natural science.

[ 34 ] Spencer uses the method of natural science in thinking of the process of knowledge. Every organ of a living being has come into existence through the fact that this being has adapted itself to the conditions under which it lives. It belongs to the human conditions of life that man finds his way through the world with the aid of thinking. His organ of knowledge develops through the adaptation of his conceptual life to the conditions of his external life. By making statements concerning things and processes, man adjusts himself to the surrounding world. All truths have come into being through this process of adaptation, and what is acquired in this way can be transmitted through inheritance to the descendants. Those who think that man, through his nature, possesses once and for all a certain disposition toward general truths are wrong. What appears to be such a disposition did not exist at an earlier stage in the ancestors of man, but has been acquired by adaptation and transmitted to the descendants. When some philosophers speak of truths that man does not have to derive from his own individual experience but that are given a priori in his organization, they are right in a certain respect. While it is obvious that such truths are acquired, it must be stressed that they are not acquired by man as an individual but as a species. The individual has inherited the finished product of an ability that has been acquired at an earlier age.

Goethe once said that he had taken part in many conversations on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and that he had noticed how on those occasions the old basic problem had been renewed, “How much does our inner self contribute to our spiritual existence, how much the external world?” And Goethe goes on to say, “I had never separated the two; when I was philosophizing in my own way on things, I did so with an unconscious naïveté and was really convinced that I saw with my eyes my opinion before me.”

[ 35 ] Spencer looks at this “old basic problem” from the point of view of natural science. He believed he could show that the developed human being also contributed to his spiritual existence through his own self. This self, is also made up of the inherited traits that had been acquired by our ancestors in their struggle with the external world. If we today believe we see with our eyes our opinions before us, we must remember that they were not always our opinions but that they were once observations that were really made by our eyes in the external world. Spencer's way of thinking, then, is, like that of John Stuart Mill, one that proceeds from psychology. But Mill does not go further than the psychology of the individual. Spencer goes from the individual back to his ancestors. The psychology of the individual is in the same position as the ontogenesis of zoology. Certain phenomena of the history of the individual are explainable only if they are referred back to phenomena of the history of the species. In the same way, the facts of the individual's consciousness cannot be understood if taken alone. We must go back to the species. We must, indeed, go back beyond the human species to acquisitions of knowledge that were accomplished by the animal ancestors of man. Spencer uses his great acumen to support this evolutionary history of the process of cognition. He shows in which way the mental activities have gradually developed from low stages at the beginning, through ever more accurate adaptations of the human mind to the external world and through inheritance of these adaptation. Every insight that the individual human being obtains through pure thought and without experience about things has been obtained by humanity or its ancestors through observation or experience. Leibniz thought he could explain the correspondence of man's inner life with the external world by assuming a harmony between them that was pre-established by the creator. Spencer explains this correspondence in the manner of natural science. The harmony is not pre-established, but gradually developed. We here find the continuation of natural scientific thinking to the highest aspects of human existence. Linnaeus had declared that every living organic form existed because the creator had made it as it is. Darwin maintained that it is as it is because it had gradually developed through adaptation and inheritance. Leibniz declared that thinking is an agreement with the external world because the creator had established this agreement. Spencer maintained that this agreement is there because it has gradually developed through adaptations and inheritance of the thought world.

[ 36 ] Spencer was motivated in his thought by the need for a naturalistic explanation of spiritual phenomena. He found the general direction for such an explanation in Lyell's geology (compare in Part 2 Chapter I). In this geology, to be sure, the idea is still rejected that organic forms have gradually developed one from another. It nevertheless receives a powerful support through the fact that the inorganic (geological) formations of the earth's surface are explained through such a gradual development and through violent catastrophes. Spencer, who had a natural scientific education and who had for a time also been active as a civil engineer, recognized at once the full extent of the idea of evolution, and he applied it in spite of Lyell's opposition to it. He even applied this idea to spiritual processes. As early as 1850, in his book, Social Statistics, he described social evolution in analogy with organic evolution. He also acquainted himself with the studies of Harvey and Wolff in embryonic development (compare Part I, Chapter IX of this book), and he plunged into the works of Karl Ernst von Baer (compare above in Part II Chapter II), which showed him that evolution proceeded from the development of a homogeneous uniform state to one of variety, diversity and abundance. In the early stages of embryological development the organisms are very similar; later they become different from one another (compare above in Part II Chapter II). Through Darwin this evolutionary thought was completely confirmed. From a few original organic forms the whole wealth of the highly diversified world of formations has developed.

From the idea of evolution, Spencer wanted to proceed to the most general truths, which, in his opinion, constituted the aim of all human striving for knowledge. He believed that one could discover manifestations of this evolutionary thought in the simplest phenomena. When, from dispersed particles of water, a cloud is formed in the sky, when a sand pile is formed from scattered grains of sand, Spencer saw the beginnings of an evolutionary process. Dispersed matter is contracted and concentrated to a whole. It is just this process that is presented to us in the Kant-Laplace hypothesis of world evolution. Dispersed parts of a chaotic world nebula have contracted. The organism originates in just this way. Dispersed elements are concentrated in tissues. The psychologist can observe that man contracts dispersed observations into general truths. Within this concentrated whole, articulation and differentiation take place. The original homogeneous mass is differentiated into the individual heavenly bodies of the solar system; the organism differentiates itself into the various organs.

[ 37 ] Concentration alternates with dissolution. When a process of evolution has reached a certain climax, an equilibrium takes place. Man, for instance, develops until he has evolved a maximum of harmonization of his inner abilities with external nature. Such a state of equilibrium, however, cannot last; external forces will effect it destructively. The evolutionary process must be followed by a process of dissolution; what had been concentrated is dispersed again; the cosmic again becomes chaotic. The process of evolution can begin anew. Thus, Spencer sees the process of the world as a rhythmic play of motion. [ 38 ] It is certainly not an uninteresting observation for the comparative history of the evolution of world conception that Spencer, from the observation of the genesis of world phenomena, reaches here a conclusion that is similar to one Goethe expressed in connection with his ideas concerning the genesis of life. Goethe describes the growth of a plant in the following way:

May the plant sprout, blossom or bear fruit, it is always by the same organs that the prescription of nature is fulfilled in various functions and under frequently changing forms. The same organ, which at the stem expands as a leaf and takes on a most differentiated shape, now contracts again in the calyx, spreads out in the petal, epitomizes in the organs of reproduction and finally once more swells as fruit.

If one thinks of this conception as being transferred to the whole process of the world, one arrives as Spencer's contraction and dispersion of matter.

[ 39 ] Spencer and Mill exerted a great influence on the development of world conception in the second half of the nineteenth century. The rigorous emphasis on observation and the one-sided elaboration of the methods of observational knowledge of Mill, along with the application of the conceptions of natural science to the entire scope of human knowledge by Spencer could not fail to meet with the approval of an age that saw in the idealistic world conception of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel nothing but degeneration of human thinking. It was an age that showed appreciation only for the successes of the research work of natural science. The lack of unity among the idealistic thinkers and what seemed to many a perfect fruitfulness of a thinking that was completely concentrated and absorbed in itself, had to produce a deep-seated suspicion against idealism. One may say that a widespread view of the last four decades of the nineteenth century is clearly expressed in words spoken by Rudolf Virchow in his address, The Foundation of the University of Berlin and the Transition from the Age of Philosophy into that of Natural Science (1893): “Since the belief in magic formulas has been forced back into the most backward circles of the people, the formulas of the natural philosopher have met with little approval.” And one of the most significant philosophers of the second half of the century, Eduard von Hartmann, sums up the character of his world conception in the motto he placed at the head of his book, Philosophy of the Unconscious: Speculative Results Obtained by the Inductive Method of Natural Science. He is of the opinion that it is necessary to recognize “the greatness of the progress brought about by Mill, through which all attempts of a deductive method of philosophy have been defeated and made obsolete for all times.” (Compare Eduard von Hartmann, Geschichte der Metaphysik, 2 part, page 479.)

[ 40 ] The recognition of certain limits of human knowledge that was shown by many naturalists was also received favorably by many religiously attuned souls. They argued as follows: The natural scientists observe the inorganic and organic facts of nature and they attempt to find general laws by combining the individual phenomena. Through these laws processes can be explained, and it is even possible to predetermine thereby the regular course of future phenomena. A comprehensive world conception should proceed in the same way; it should confine itself to the facts, establish general truths within moderate limits and not maintain any claim to penetrate into the realm of the “unknowable.” Spencer, with his complete separation of the “knowable” and the “unknowable,” met the demand of such religious needs to a high degree. The idealistic mode of thought was, on the other hand, considered by such religiously inclined spirits to be a fantastic aberration. As a matter of principle, the idealistic mode of conception cannot recognize an “unknowable,” because it has to uphold the conviction that through the concentrated penetration into the inner life of man a knowledge can be attained that covers not merely the outer surface of the world but also its real core.

[ 41 ] The thought life of some influential naturalists, such as Thomas Henry Huxley, moved entirely in the direction of such religiously inclined spirits. Huxley believed in a complete agnosticism with regard to the essence of the world. He declared that a monism, which is in general agreement with Darwin's results, is applicable only to external nature. Huxley was one of the first to defend the Darwinian conceptions, but he is at the same time one of the most outspoken representatives of those thinkers who believed in the limitation of that mode of conception. A similar view is also held by the physicist Johaan Tyndall (1820–93) who considered the world process to be an energy that is completely inaccessible to the human intellect. According to him, it is precisely the assumption that everything in the world comes into existence through a natural evolution that makes it impossible to accept the thought that matter, which is, after all, the carrier of the whole evolution, should be no more than what our intellect can comprehend of it.

[ 42 ] A characteristic phenomenon of his time is the personality of the English statesman, James Balfour (1840–1930). In 1879, in his book, A Defense of Philosophical Doubt, Being an Essay on the Foundations of Belief, he expressed a credo that is doubtless similar to that held by many other thinkers. With respect to everything that man is capable of explaining he stands completely on the ground of the thought of natural science. For him, there is no other knowledge but natural science, but he maintains at the same time that his knowledge of natural science is only rightly understood if it is clear that the needs of man's soul and reason can never be satisfied by it. It is only necessary to understand that, in the last analysis even in natural science, everything depends on faith in the ultimate truths for which no further proof is possible. But no harm is done in that this trend of thoughts leads us only to belief, because this belief is a secure guide for our action in daily life. We believe in the laws of nature and we master them through this belief. We thereby force nature to serve us for our purpose. Religious belief is to produce an agreement between the actions of man and his higher needs that go beyond his everyday life.

[ 43 ] The world conceptions that have been discussed under the title, “The World as Illusion,” show that they have as their basis a longing for a satisfactory relationship of the self-conscious ego to the general world picture. It is especially significant that they do not consciously consider this search as their philosophical aim, and therefore do not expressly turn their inquiry toward that purpose. Instinctively as it were, they permit their thinking to be influenced by the direction that is determined by this unconscious search. The form that this search takes is determined by the conceptions of modern natural science. We approach the fundamental character of these conceptions if we fix our attention on the concept of “consciousness.” This concept was introduced to the life of modern philosophy by Descartes. Before him, it was customary to depend more on the concept of the “soul” as such. Little attention was paid to the fact that only a part of the soul's life is spent in connection with conscious phenomena. During sleep the soul does not live consciously. Compared to the conscious life, the nature of the soul must therefore consist of deeper forces, which in the waking state are merely lifted into consciousness. The more one asked the question of the justification and the value of knowledge in the light of clear and distinct ideas, however, the more it was also felt that the soul finds the most certain elements of knowledge when it does not go beyond its own limits and when it does not delve deeper into itself than consciousness extends. The opinion prevailed that everything else may be uncertain, but what my consciousness is, at least, as such is certain. Even the house I pass may not exist without me; that the image of this house is now in my consciousness: this I may maintain. But as soon as we fix our attention on this consciousness, the concept of the ego inevitably grows together with that of the consciousness. Whatever kind of entity the “ego” may be outside the consciousness, the realm of the “ego” can be conceived as extending as far as the consciousness. There is no possibility of denying that the sensual world picture, which the soul experiences consciously, has come into existence through the impression that is made on man by the world. But as soon as one clings to this statement, it becomes difficult to rid oneself of it, for there is a tendency thereby to imply the judgment that the processes of the world are the causes, and that the content of our consciousness is the effect. Because one thinks that only the effect is contained in the consciousness, it is believed that the cause must be in a world outside man as an imperceptible “thing in itself.” The presentation that is given above shows how the results of modern physiological research lead to an affirmation of such an opinion. It is just this opinion through which the “ego” finds itself enclosed with its subjective experiences within its own boundaries. This subtly produced intellectual illusion, once formed, cannot be destroyed as long as the ego does not find any clues within itself of which it knows that they refer to a being outside the subjective consciousness, although they are actually depicted within that consciousness. The ego must, outside the sensual consciousness, feel a contact with entities that guarantee their being by and through themselves. It must find something within that leads it outside itself. been said here concerning thoughts that are brought to life can have this effect. As long as the ego has experienced thought only within itself, it feels itself confined with it within its own boundary. As thought is brought to life it emancipates the ego from a mere subjective existence. A process takes place that is, to be sure, experienced subjectively by the ego, but by its own nature is an objective process. This breaks the “ego” loose from everything that it can feel only as subjective.

So we see that also the conceptions for which the world is illusion move toward a point that is reached when Hegel's world picture is so transformed that its thought comes to life. These conceptions take on the form that is necessary for a world picture that is unconsciously driven by an impulse in that direction. But in them, thinking still lacks the power to work its way through to that aim. Even in their imperfection, however, these conceptions receive their general character from this aim, and the ideas that appear are the external symptoms of active forces that remain concealed.

Yesterday I told you the story of Gerhard the Good—which most of you probably know—so that today we can illustrate various points in our endeavour to increase our understanding of the matters we are discussing. But before I interpret parts of this story for you, in so far as this is necessary, we must also recall a number of other things we have touched on at various times during these lectures. From what has been said over the past few weeks you will have seen that the painful events of today are connected with impulses living in the more recent karma of mankind, namely, the karma of the whole fifth post-Atlantean period. For those who want to go more deeply into these matters it is necessary to link external events with what is happening more inwardly, which can only be understood against the background of human evolution as seen by spiritual science.

To begin with, take at face value certain facts which I have pointed out a number of times. I have frequently said that, in the middle of the nineteenth century, an endeavour was made to draw the attention of modern mankind to the fact that there exist in the universe not only those forces and powers recognized by natural science but also others of a spiritual kind. The endeavour was to show that just as we take in with our eyes—or, indeed, with all our senses—what is visible around us, so are there also spiritual impulses around us, which people who know about such things can bring to bear on social life—impulses which cannot be seen with the eye but are known to a more spiritual science.

We know what path this more spiritual science took, so I need not go over it again. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, then, it was the concern of a certain centre to draw people's attention to the existence, as it were, of a spiritual environment. This had been forgotten during the age of materialism. You also know that such things have to be tackled with caution because a certain degree of maturity is necessary in people who take in such knowledge. Of course, not all those can be mature who come across, or are affected by, this knowledge in accordance with the laws of our time, which underlie public life. But part of what must be done at such a time can be the requirement to test whether the knowledge may yet be revealed publicly.

Now in the middle of the nineteenth century two paths were possible. One, even then, would have been what we could describe by mentioning our anthroposophical spiritual science, namely, to make comprehensible to human thinking what spiritual knowledge reveals about our spiritual environment. It is a fact that this could have been attempted at that time, in the middle of the nineteenth century, but this path was not chosen. The reason was, in part, that those who possessed this esoteric knowledge were prejudiced, because of traditions that have come down from ancient times, against making such things public. They felt that certain knowledge guarded by the secret brotherhoods—for it was still guarded at that time—should be kept within the circle of these brotherhoods. We have since seen that, so long as matters are conducted in the proper way, it is perfectly acceptable today to reveal certain things. Of course it is unavoidable that some malicious opponents should appear, and always will appear, in circles in which such knowledge is made known—people who are adherents for a time because it suits their passions and their egoism, but who then become opponents under all sorts of guises and make trouble. Also when spiritual knowledge is made known in a community, this can easily lead to arguments, quarrelling and disputes, of which, however, not too much notice can be taken, since otherwise no spiritual knowledge would ever be made known. But, apart from these things, no harm is done if the matter is handled in the right way.

But at that time this was not believed. So ancient prejudice won the day and it was agreed to take another path. But, as I have often said, this failed. It was decided to use the path of mediumistic revelation to make people recognize the spiritual world in the same way as they recognize the physical world. Suitable individuals were trained to be mediums. What they then revealed through their lowered consciousness was supposed to make people recognize the existence of certain spiritual impulses in their environment. This was a materialistic way of revealing the spiritual world to people. It corresponded to some extent to the conditions of the fifth post-Atlantean period, in so far as this is materialistic in character.

This way of handling things began, as you know, in America in the middle of the nineteenth century. But it soon became obvious that the whole thing was a mistake. It had been expected that the mediums would reveal the existence of certain elemental and nature spirits in the environment. Instead, they all started to refer to revelations from the kingdom of the dead. So the goal which had been set was not reached. I have often explained that the living can only reach the dead with an attitude which does not depend on lowering the consciousness. You all know these things. At that time this was also known and that is why, when the mediums began to speak of revelations of the dead, it was realized that the whole thing was a mistake. This had not been expected. It had been hoped that the mediums would reveal how the nature spirits work, how one human being affects another, what forces are at play in the social organism, and so on. It had been hoped that people would start to recognize what forces might be used by those who understand such things, so that people would no longer be dependent solely on one another in the way they are when only their sense perceptions come into play, but would be able to work through the total human personality. This was one thing that went wrong.

The other was that, in keeping with man's materialistic inclinations, it soon became obvious what would have begun to happen if the mediumistic movement had spread in the way it threatened to do. Use would have been made of the mediums to accomplish aims which ought only to be accomplished under the influence of natural, sense-bound reasoning. For some individuals it would have been highly desirable to employ a medium who could impart the means of discovering the knowledge which such people covet. I have told you how many letters I get from people who write: I have a lottery ticket; or, I want to buy a lottery ticket; I need the money for an entirely selfless purpose; could you not tell me which number will be drawn? Obviously, if mediums had been fully trained in the techniques of mediumship, the resulting mischief with this kind of thing would have been infinite, quite apart from everything else. People would have started to go to mediums to find a suitable bride or bridegroom, and so on.

Thus it came about that, in the very quarter that had launched the movement in order to test whether people were ready to take in spiritual knowledge, efforts were now made to suppress the whole affair. What had been feared in bygone times, when the abilities of the fourth post-Atlantean period still worked in people, had indeed now come to pass. In those days witches were burnt, simply because those people called witches were really no more than mediums, and because their connections with the spiritual world—though of a materialistic nature—might cause knowledge to be revealed which would have been very awkward for certain people. Thus, for instance it might have been very awkward for certain brotherhoods if, before being burnt at the stake, a witch had revealed what lay behind them. For it is true that when consciousness is lowered there can be a kind of telephone connection with the spiritual world, and that by this route all sorts of secrets can come out. Those who burnt the witches did so for a very good reason: It could have been very awkward for them if the witches had revealed anything to the world, whether in a good or a bad sense, but especially in a bad sense.

So the attempt to test the cultural maturity of mankind by means of mediums had gone awry. This was realized even by those who, led astray by the old rules of silence and by the materialistic tendencies of the nineteenth century, had set this attempt in train. You know, of course, that the activities of mediums have not been entirely curtailed, and that they still exist, even today. But the art of training mediums to a level at which their revelations could become significant has, so to speak, been withdrawn. By this withdrawal the capabilities of mediums have been made more or less harmless. In recent decades, as you know, the pronouncements of mediums have come to amount to not much more than sentimental twaddle. The only surprising thing is that people set so much store by them. But the door to the spiritual world had been opened to some degree and, moreover, this had been done in a manner which was untimely and a mistake.

In this period came the birth and work of Blavatsky. You might think that the birth of a person is insignificant, but this would be a judgement based on maya. Now the important thing is that this whole undertaking had to be discussed among the brotherhoods, so that much was said and brought into the open within the brotherhoods. But the nineteenth century was no longer like earlier centuries in which many methods had existed for keeping secret those things which had to be kept secret. Thus it happened that, at a certain moment, a member of one of the secret brotherhoods, who intended to make use in a one-sided way of what he learnt within these brotherhoods, approached Blavatsky. Apart from her other capacities Blavatsky was an extremely gifted medium, and this person induced her to act as a connecting link for machinations which were no longer as honest as the earlier ones. The first, as we have seen, were honest but mistaken. Up to this point the attempt to test people's receptivity had been perfectly honest, though mistaken. Now, however, came the treachery of a member of an American secret brotherhood. His purpose was to make one-sided use of what he knew, with the help of someone with psychic gifts, such as Blavatsky. Let us first look at what actually took place. When Blavatsky heard what the member of the brotherhood had to say, she, of course, reacted inwardly to his words because she was psychic. She understood a great deal more about the matter than the one who was giving her the information. The ancient knowledge formulated in the traditional way lit up in her soul a significant understanding which she could hardly have achieved solely with her own resources. Inner experiences were stimulated in her soul by the ancient formulations which stemmed from the days of atavistic clairvoyance and which were preserved in the secret brotherhoods, often without much understanding for their meaning on the part of the members. These inner experiences led in her to the birth of a large body of knowledge. She knew, of course, that this knowledge must be significant for the present evolution of mankind, and also that by taking the appropriate path this knowledge could be utilized in a particular way.

But Blavatsky, being the person she was, could not be expected to make use of such lofty spiritual knowledge solely for the good of mankind as a whole. She hit upon the idea of pursuing certain aims which were within her understanding, having come to this point in the manner I have described. So now she demanded to be admitted to a certain occult brotherhood in Paris. Through this brotherhood she would start to work. Ordinarily she would have been accepted in the normal way, apart from the fact that it was not normal to admit a woman; but this rule would have been waived in this case because it was known that she was an important individuality. However, it would not have served her purpose to be admitted merely as an ordinary member, and so she laid down certain conditions. If these conditions had been accepted, many subsequent events would have been very different but, at the same time, this secret brotherhood would have pronounced its own death sentence—that is, it would have condemned itself to total ineffectiveness. So it refused to admit Blavatsky. She then turned to America, where she was indeed admitted to a secret brotherhood. In consequence, she of course acquired extremely significant insights into the intentions of such secret brotherhoods; not those which strive for the good of mankind as a whole, disregarding any conflicting wishes, but those whose purposes are one-sided and serve certain groups only. But it was not in Blavatsky's nature to work in the way these brotherhoods wished. So it came about that, under the influence of what was termed an attack on the Constitution of North America, she was excluded from this brotherhood.

So now she was excluded. But of course she was not a person who would be likely to take this lying down. Instead, she began to threaten the American brotherhood with the consequences of excluding her in this way, now that she knew so much. The American brotherhood now found itself sitting under the sword of Damocles, for if, as a result of having been a member, Blavatsky had told the world what she knew, this would have spelt its death sentence. The consequence was that American and European occultists joined forces in order to inflict on Blavatsky a condition known as occult imprisonment. Through certain machinations a sphere of Imaginations is called forth in a soul which brings about a dimming of what that soul previously knew, thus making it virtually ineffective. It is a procedure which honest occultists never apply, and even dishonest ones only very rarely, but it was applied on that occasion in order to save the life—that is the effectiveness, of that secret brotherhood.

For years Blavatsky existed in this occult imprisonment, until certain Indian occultists started to take an interest in her because they wanted to work against that American brotherhood. As you see, we keep coming up against occult streams which want to work one-sidedly. Thus Blavatsky entered this Indian current, with which you are familiar. The Indian brotherhood was very interested indeed in proceeding against the American brotherhood, not because they saw that they were not serving mankind as a whole, but because they in turn had their own one-sided patriotically Indian viewpoint. By means of various machinations the Indian and the American occultists reached a kind of agreement. The Americans promised not to interfere in what the Indians wanted to do with Blavatsky, and the Indians engaged to remain silent on what had gone before.

You can see just how complicated these things really are when you add to all this the fact, which I have also told you about, that a hidden individual, a mahatma behind a mask, had been instituted in place of Blavatsky's original teacher and guide. This figure stood in the service of a European power and had the task of utilizing whatever Blavatsky could do in the service of this particular European power. One way of discovering what all this is really about might be to ask what would have happened if one or other of these projects had been realized.

Time is too short to tell you everything today, but let us pick out a few aspects. We can always come back to these things again soon.

Supposing Blavatsky had succeeded in gaining admission to the occult lodge in Paris. If this had happened, she would not have come under the influence of that individual who was honoured as a mahatma in the Theosophical Society—although he was no such thing—and the life of the occult lodge in Paris would have been extinguished. A great deal behind which this same Paris lodge may be seen to stand would not have happened, or perhaps it would have happened in the service of a different, one-sided influence. Many things would have taken a different course. For there was also the intention of exterminating this Paris lodge with the help of the psychic personality of Blavatsky. If it had been exterminated, there would have been nothing behind all those people who have contributed to history, more or less like marionettes. People like Silvagni, Durante, Sergi, Cecconi, Lombroso and all his relations, and many others would have had no occult backers behind them. Many a door, many a kind of sliding door, would have remained locked.

You will understand that this is meant symbolically. In certain countries editorial offices—I mean this as a picture!—have a respectable door and a sliding door. Through the respectable door you enter the office and through the sliding door you enter some secret brotherhood or other working, as I have variously indicated over the last few days, to achieve results of the kind about which we have spoken. So the intention was to abolish something from the world which would have done away with, at least, one stream which we have seen working in our present time. Signor d'Annunzio would not have given the speech we quoted.

Perhaps another would have been given instead, pushing things in a different direction. But you see that the moment things are not fully under control, the moment people are pushed about through a dimming of their consciousness, and when occultism is being used, not for the general good of mankind—and above all, in our time, not with true knowledge—but for the purpose of achieving one-sided aims, then matters can come to look very grave indeed.

Anyway, the members of this lodge were, from the standpoint of the lodge, astute enough not to enter into a discussion of these things. Later on, certain matters were hushed up, obscured, by the fact that Blavatsky was prevented by her occult imprisonment from publicizing the impulses of that American lodge and giving them her own slant, which she would doubtless otherwise have done. Once all these things had run their course, the only one to benefit from Blavatsky was the Indian brotherhood. There is considerable significance for the present time in the fact that a certain sum of occult knowledge has entered the world one-sidedly, with an Indian colouring. This knowledge has entered the world; it now exists. But the world has remained more or less unconscious of it because of the paralysis I have described.

Those who reckon with such things always count on long stretches of time. They prepare things and leave them to develop. These are not individuals, but brotherhoods in which the successor takes over from the predecessor and carries on in a similar direction with what has been started.

On the basis of the two examples I have given you, of occult lodges, you can see that much depended on the actual impulses not being made public. I do not wish to be misunderstood and I therefore stated expressly that the first attempt I described to you was founded on a certain degree of honesty. But it is extremely difficult for people to be entirely objective as regards mankind as a whole. There is little inclination for this nowadays. People are so easily led astray by the group instinct that they are not objective as regards mankind as a whole but pay homage to one group or another, enjoying the feeling of ‘belonging.’ But this is something that is no longer really relevant to the point we have reached in human evolution. The requirement of the present moment is that we should, at least to some degree, feel ourselves to be individuals and extricate ourselves, at least inwardly, from group things, so that we belong to mankind as human individuals. Even though, at present, we are shown so grotesquely how impossible this is for some people, it is nevertheless a requirement of our time.

For example, let me refer to what I said here a few days ago. A nation as a whole is an individuality of a kind which cannot be compared with human individualities, who live here on the physical plane and then go through their development between death and a new birth. Nations are individualities of quite a different kind. As you can see from everything we find in our anthroposophical spiritual science, a folk spirit, a folk soul, is something different from the soul of an individual human being. It is nonsense to speak in a materialistic sense, as is done today, of the soul of a nation while at the back of one's mind thinking of something resembling the soul of an individual—even though one, of course, does not admit this to oneself. Thus you hear people speak of ‘the French soul’; this has been repeatedly said in recent years. It is nonsense, plain nonsense, because it is an analogy taken from the individual human soul and applied to the folk soul. You can only speak of the folk soul if you take into account the complex totality described in the lecture cycle on the different folk spirits. But to speak in any other sense about the folk soul is utter nonsense, even though many, including journalists, do so—and they may be forgiven, for they do not know what they are talking about. It is mere verbosity to speak—as has been done—for instance of the ‘Celtic soul and the Latin spirit’. Maybe such a thing is just about acceptable as an analogy, but there is no reality in. We must be clear about the meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha. So often have we said that the Mystery of Golgotha was accomplished in such a way that what has been united with earth evolution ever since is there for all mankind, but that if an individual speaks of a mystical Christ within him, this is no more than idle talk. The Mystery of Golgotha is an objective reality, as you know from much that has been said here. It took place for mankind as a whole, which means for every individual human being. Christ died for all human beings, as a human being for human beings, not for any other kind of being. It is possible to speak about a Christian, about one whose attitude of mind is Christian, but it is complete nonsense to talk of a Christian nation. There is no reality in this. Christ did not die for nations, nations are not the individualities for whom He died. An individual who is close to the Being of the Mystery of Golgotha can be a Christian, but it is not possible to speak of a Christian nation. The true soul of a nation, its folk soul, belongs to planes on which the Mystery of Golgotha did not take place. So any dealings and actions between nations can never be interpreted or commented upon in a Christian sense.

I am pointing out these things simply because it is necessary that you in particular, my dear friends, should understand just how important it is today to arrive at clear-cut concepts. This can only be done by applying spiritual science, and yet mankind as a whole strives to fish in muddy waters with concepts that are utterly nonsensical and obscure. So the important thing is, above all, to arrive at clear-cut concepts, to see everything in relation to clear-cut concepts, and also to understand that in our time certain occult, spiritual impulses have been working, chiefly through human beings. This is fitting for the fifth post-Atlantean period.

Now if Blavatsky had been able to speak out at that time, certain secrets would have been revealed, secrets I have mentioned as belonging to certain secret brotherhoods and connected with the striving of a widespread network of groups. I said to you earlier that definite laws underlie the rise and evolution of peoples, of nations. These laws are usually unknown in the external, physical world. This is right and proper, for in the first place they ought to be recognized solely by those who desire to receive them with clean hands. What now underlies the terrible trials mankind is undergoing at present and will undergo in the future is the interference in a one-sided way, by certain modern brotherhoods, with the spiritual forces that pulse through human evolution in the region in which, for instance, nations, peoples, come into being. Evolution progresses in accordance with definite laws; it is regular and comes about through certain forces. But human beings interfere, in some part unconsciously, though if they are members of secret brotherhoods, then they do so consciously.

To be able to judge these things you need what yesterday I called a wider horizon; you need the acquisition of a wider horizon. I showed you the forces of which Blavatsky became the plaything, in order to point out how such a plaything can be tossed about, from West to East, from America to India. This is because forces are at work which are being managed by human beings for certain ends, by means of utilizing the passions and feelings of nationality, which have, however, in their turn first been manufactured. This is most important. It is important to develop an eye for the way in which a person who, because of the type of passions in her—in her blood—can be put in a certain position and be brought under the sway of certain influences. Equally, those who do this must know that certain things can be achieved, depending on the position in which the person is placed. Many attempts fail. But account is taken of long periods of time and of many possibilities. Above all, account is taken of how little inclination people have to pay attention to the wider—the widest, contexts.

Let us stop here and turn to yesterday's story. It tells us about the time around the tenth century, when the constitution of souls was still that of the fourth post-Atlantean period. We saw how the spiritual world intervened in the life of Emperor Otto of the Red Beard. His whole life is transformed because the spiritual world makes him aware of Gerhard the Good. From Gerhard the Good he is to learn the fear of God, true piety, and that one must not expect—for largely egoistic reasons—a blessing from heaven for one's earthly deeds. So he is told by the spiritual world to seek out Gerhard the Good. This is the one side: what plays in from the spiritual world.

Those who know that age—not as it is described by external history, but as it really was—are aware that the spiritual world did indeed play in through real visions such as that described in connection with Emperor Otto the Red, and that spiritual impulses definitely played a meaningful part. The one who wrote down this story says expressly that in his youth he had also written many other stories, as had other contemporaries of his. The man who wrote down the story of Gerhard the Good was Rudolf von Ems, an approximate contemporary of Wolfram von Eschenbach. He said he had written other stories as well but that he had destroyed them because they had been fairy tales. Yet he does not consider this story to be a fairy tale but strictly historical, even though externally it is not historical—that is it would not be included in today's history books which only take physical maya into account. In the way he tells it, it cannot be compared with external, purely physical history; and yet his telling is more true than purely physical history can be for, on the whole, that is only maya. He tells the story for the fourth post-Atlantean period.

You know, for I have repeatedly said this, that I am not taking sides in any way but simply reporting facts which are to provide a basis on which judgements may be formed. Only those who do not wish to be objective will maintain that what I shall attempt to say is not objective. Someone who does not wish to be objective cannot, of course, be expected to find objectivity in what is, in fact, objective. The fact that the spiritual world plays into human affairs is not the only important aspect of the story of Gerhard the Good. It is also significant that a leading personality receives from the spiritual world the impulse to turn to a member of the commercial world, the world of the merchant. It is indeed a historical fact that, in Central Europe, at that time the members of the ruling dynasty to which Otto the Red belonged did start to patronize the merchant classes in the towns. In Europe this was the time of the growth of commerce.

We should further take into account that at that time there were as yet no ocean routes between Orient and Occident. Trade routes were definitely still overland routes. Merchants such as Gerhard the Good who, as you know, lived in Cologne, carried their trade overland from Cologne to the Orient and back again. Any use of ships was quite insignificant. The trade routes were land routes. Shipping connections were not much more than attempts to achieve with the primitive ships of those days what was being done much more efficiently by land. So in the main the trade routes were overland, while shipping was only just beginning. That is what is characteristic of this time, for comprehensive shipping operations only came much later.

We have here a contrast arising out of the very nature of things. So long as Orient and Occident were connected by land routes, it was perfectly natural that the countries of Central Europe should take the lead. Life in these Central European countries was shaped accordingly. Much spiritual culture also travelled along these routes. It was quite different from what came later. As the centuries proceeded, the land routes were supplanted by ocean routes. As you know, England gradually took control of all the ocean connections which others had opened up. Spain, Holland and France were all conquered as far as their sea-faring capacities were concerned, so that in the end everything was held under the mighty dominance which encompassed a quarter of the earth's dry land, and gradually also all the earth's oceans.

You can see how systematic is this conquering, this almost exterminating, of other seafaring powers when you remember how I told you some time ago that in the secret brotherhoods, especially those which grew so powerful from the time of James I onwards, it was taught as an obvious truth that the Anglo-Saxon race—as they put it—will have to be given dominance over the world in the fifth post-Atlantean period. You will see how systematic the historical process has been when you consider what I have also mentioned and what was also taught: that this fifth post-Atlantean race of the English-speaking peoples will have to overcome the peoples of the Latin race.

To start with, the main thing is the interrelation between the English-speaking peoples and those whose languages are Latin in origin. Recent history cannot be understood without the realization that the important aim—which is also what is being striven for—is for world affairs to be arranged in such a way that the English-speaking peoples are favoured, while the influence of any peoples whose language is based on Latin fades out. Under certain circumstances something can be made to fade out by treating it favourably for a while, thus gaining power over it. This can then make it easy to engulf it.

In those secret brotherhoods, about which I have spoken so often, little significance is attached to Central Europe, for they are clever enough to realize that Germany, for instance, owns only one thirty-third of the earth's land surface. This is very little indeed, compared with a whole quarter of the land surface plus dominance over the high seas. So not much importance is attached to Central Europe. A great deal of importance was attached, however—especially during the period when present events were being prepared—to the overcoming of all those impulses connected with the Latin races.

It is remarkable how short-sighted the modern historical view is and how little inclination there is to go more deeply into matters which are quite characteristic of situations. I have already pointed out that what has so long been practised as a pragmatic view of history is not important, reporting as it does on one event, followed by another, and another, and yet another. What is important is to recognize the facts characterized by the many interrelationships in the events which follow one another. What matters is to point out what is characteristic about the facts, namely, what reveals the forces lying behind maya. Pragmatic history must today give way to a history of symptoms.

Those who see through things in this way will be in a position to form judgements about certain events which differ considerably from those of people who reel off the events of world history—this fable convenue—one after the other, as is done in historical science today. Consider some of the things you know well in connection with some others about which I shall tell you. First of all, a simple fact: In 1618 the Thirty Years War began because certain ideas of a reformative kind developed within the Czech Slav element. Then certain aristocrats belonging to these Slav circles took up the movement and rebelled against what might be called the Counter-Reformation, namely, the Catholicism from Spain which was favoured by the Habsburgs. The first thing usually told about the Thirty Years War is the story of the rebels going to the town hall in Prague and throwing the councillors Martinitz and Slavata and the secretary Fabrizius out of the window. Yet this is quite insignificant. The only interesting point is perhaps that the three gentlemen did not hurt themselves because they fell onto a dunghill. These are not things which can bring the Thirty Years' War to life for us or show us its real causes.

The reformative party elected Frederick, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, as counter-King of Bohemia in 1619. Then followed, as you know, the battle of the White Mountain. Up to the election of the Elector Palatine, all the events were caused by the passionate feelings of these people for a reform movement, by a rebellion against arbitrary acts of power such as the closure or destruction of Protestant churches at Braunau and Kloster Grab. There is not enough time for me to tell you the whole story. But now think: Frederick, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, is elected King. Up to this point the events are based on human passions, human enthusiasm, it is even justified to say human idealism—I am quite happy to concede this.

But why, of all people, was the Elector Palatine of the Rhine chosen as King of Bohemia? It was because he was the son-in-law of James I, who stands at the beginning of the renewal of the brotherhoods! Here, then, we may discern an important finger in the pie if we are trying to look at history symptomatically. Attempts were being made to steer events in a particular direction. They failed. But you see that there is a finger in the pie. The most significant sign of what kind of impulses were to be brought to bear in this situation is that the son-in-law of one of the most important occultists, James I, was thrown into this position.

You see, the fact is that the whole of recent history has to do with the contrast between the ancient Roman-Latin element and that element, not of the English people—for they would get on perfectly happily with the world—but that element which, as I have described sufficiently, is to be made out of the English people if they fail to put up any resistance. It is the conflict between these two elements that is at work.

Meanwhile something else is manipulated, for a great deal can be achieved in one place by bringing about events in another.

Let us look at a later date. You might pick up a history book and read the history of the Seven Years War. Of course the history of this war is read just as thoughtlessly as any other. For to understand what is really going on and investigate what forces of history are playing a part, you have to look properly at the various links between the different circumstances. You have to consider, for instance, that at that time the southern part of Central Europe, namely Austria, was linked with every aspect of the Latin element and even had a proper alliance with France, whereas the northern part of Middle Europe—not at first, but later on—was drawn to what was to be made, by certain quarters, into the English-speaking, fifth post-Atlantean race.

When you look closely at the alliances and everything else that went on at that time—those things which were not maya, of course—you discover a war that is in reality being waged about North America and India between England and France. What went on in Europe was really only a weak mirror image of this. For if you compare everything that took place on the larger scale—do extend your horizons!—then you will see that the conflict was between England and France and that North America and India were already starting to have their effect. It was a matter of which of these two powers was cleverer and more able to direct events in such a way that dominion over North America or India could be snatched away from the other. At work in this were long-term future plans and the control of important impulses. It is true: The influence snatched by England from France in North America was won on the battle fields of Silesia during the Seven Years' War!

Watch how the alliances shift when the situation becomes a little awkward and difficult; watch the alliances from this point of view!

Now, another story. It is necessary to look at these things, and once one is not misunderstood, once it is assumed that one's genuine purpose is to gain a clear picture of what is going on in the world, once one strives to be objective, it will not be taken amiss when such stories are told; instead it will be understood that our concern is for comprehension and not for taking sides. In fact, it is precisely those people who feel they are affected by a particular matter who ought to be particularly glad to learn more about it. For then they are lifted above their blindness and given sight, and nothing is better for a person than real insight into how things work in the world. So let us now take an example which can show you a different side of how things work.

Through circumstances which you can look up in a history book, the kingdoms of Hanover and England were once linked. The laws of succession in the two countries were different—we need not go into this in detail—and as a result of this, when Victoria came to the throne of England, Hanover had to become separate. Another member of the English royal house had to take the throne of Hanover. The person elected, or rather the person jostled onto the throne of Hanover was Ernst August, Duke of Cumberland, who had previously been connected with the throne of England. So this Ernst August came to the throne of Hanover at the age of sixty-six. His character was such that, after his departure to become the king of Hanover, the English newspapers said: Thank goodness he's gone; let's hope he doesn't come back! He was considered a dreadful person because of the whole way he behaved. When you look at the impression he made on his contemporaries and those who had dealings with him, a certain type of character emerges which is striking for one who understands characters of this kind. The Hanoverians could not understand him. They found him coarse. He was indeed coarse, so coarse that the poet Thomas Moore said: He surely belonged to the dynasty of Beelzebub. But you know the saying: The German lies if he is polite. So they had a certain understanding for coarseness, but they did presuppose that someone who is coarse is at least honest. Ernst August, however, was always a liar as well as being coarse, and this the Hanoverians could not understand. He had other similar traits as well.

First, Ernst August repealed the Hanoverian constitution. Then he dismissed the famous ‘seven professors’ of Göttingen University. He had them sent straight out of the country, so that it was not until they reached Witzenhausen, which lay beyond his majesty's borders, that their students were permitted to take leave of them. I need not tell you the whole story. But what is the explanation? Those who seek no further for an explanation of this extraordinary mask merely find Ernst August coarse and dishonest. He even cheated Metternich, which is saying much indeed, and so on. But there is something remarkably systematic in all this. And the systematic aspect is not changed by the fact that he lived most of his life up to the age of sixty-six in England, where he was an officer of the Dragoons.

An explanation may be found in the fact that in his whole manner he was manifesting the impulses one has when one is a member of the so-called ‘Orange Lodge’. His whole manner was an expression of the impulses of the Orange Lodge, of which he was a member.

What we must do is learn to understand history symptomatically and widen our horizons. We need to develop a sense for what is important and what really gives insight. So I told you the tale of Gerhard the Good in order to demonstrate how, through such phenomena as the Orange Lodge, and so on, what had been Central Europe was quite systematically drawn over to the West. I am not uttering any reproach, for it was a historical necessity. But one ought to know it and not apply moral judgements to such things. What is essential is to develop the will to see things, to see how human beings are manipulated, to see where there might be impulses by which people are manipulated. This is the same as striving for the sense for truth. I have often stressed that this is not something that enables one to say: But I really believed it, it was my honest and sincere opinion! No indeed. One who possesses the sense for truth is one who unremittingly strives to find the truth of the matter, one who never ceases to seek the truth and who takes responsibility for himself even when he says something untrue out of ignorance. For, objectively, it is irrelevant whether something wrong is said knowingly or unknowingly. Similarly it is irrelevant whether you hold your finger in the candle flame through ignorance or on purpose; either way you burn it.

At this point we must understand what happened at the transition from the fourth post-Atlantean period-when commerce was still just under the influence of the spiritual world, as is indicated in the story of Gerhard the Good—to the fifth period, when everything commercial was drawn over into the occult sphere which is guided by the so-called ‘Brothers of the Shadow’. These brotherhoods guard certain principles. From their point of view it would be extremely dangerous if these principles should be betrayed. That is why they were so careful to prevent Blavatsky from making them public or causing them to pass over into other hands. They were, in fact, to be passed over from the West to the East; not to India but to the East of Russia.

Someone with a sense for what lies behind maya can understand that external institutions and external measures can have differing values, differing degrees of importance in the total context. Consider an incident in recent history. I have told you so many occult, spiritual things that I have, in a way, ‘done my time’ and am now free to go on and give you some indications out of more recent history. No one should say that I am taking this time away from that devoted to occult matters; these things are also important.

So let us take an example from more recent history. In 1909 a meeting was arranged between the King of Italy and the Tsar of Russia. So far there had not been much love lost between these two representatives, but from then on it was considered a good thing to manoeuvre them into each other's company. So the meeting at Racconigi took place. It was not easy to arrange. In the description of all the measures he had to take to prevent ‘incidents of an assassinatory nature’ you can read how difficult it was for poor Giolitti, who was Prime Minister at the time.

Then there was the question of finding a suitable personage who would pay Rome's homage to the Tsar. This had to be a personage of a particular kind. Such things have to be prepared well in advance so that when the right moment arrives they can be set in train on the spot. For a really ‘juicy’ effect to be achieved, not just any personage would do for the purpose of paying Rome's homage to the Tsar—the homage of the Latin West to the self-styled Slav East. It would have to be a special personage, even one who might not easily be persuaded to undertake this task. Now ‘by chance’, as the materialists would say, but ‘not by chance’, as those who are not materialists would say, a certain Signor Nathan—what a very Italian name!—was at that time the mayor of Rome. For many reasons his attitude was rather democratic and not at all one that would make him inclined to pay homage to the Tsar, of all people. He had only taken Italian citizenship shortly before becoming mayor of Rome. Before that he had been an English citizen. The fact that he was of mixed blood should be taken into account; he was the son of a German mother and had assumed the name of Nathan because his father was the famous Italian revolutionary Mazzini. This is a fact.

So persuading him to pay homage to the Tsar made it possible to say: See how thoroughly democracy has been converted. Here was someone who was not an ordinary person but one who had been anointed with all the oils of democracy, but—also someone who had been well prepared. From that moment onwards certain things start to become embarrassing. Today it is known, for example, that from that moment onwards all the correspondence within the Triple Alliance was promptly reported to St Petersburg! Human passions also played some part in the matter, since a special role was carried out in this reporting by a lady who had found a ‘sisterly’ route between Rome and St Petersburg. Such things can obviously be ascribed to coincidence. But those who want to see beyond maya will not ascribe them to coincidence but will seek the deeper connections between them. Then, when one seeks these deeper connections, one is no longer capable of lying as much, is no longer capable of deceiving people in order to distract them from the truth, which is what matters.

For instance—I am saying this in order to describe the truth—it would obviously have been most embarrassing for the widest circles if people's attention had been drawn to the fact that the whole invasion of Belgium would not have taken place if that sentence I have already mentioned, which could have been spoken by Lord Grey—Sir Edward Grey has now become a lord—if that sentence had really been spoken. The whole invasion of Belgium would not have taken place. It would have been a non-event, it would not have happened. But instead of speaking about the real cause, in so far as this is the cause because it could have prevented the invasion, it was obviously more comfortable to waste people's time by telling them about the ‘Belgian atrocities’. Yet these, too, would not have happened if Sir Edward Grey had taken this one, brief measure. In order to hide the simple truth something different is needed, something that arouses justified human passions and moral indignation. I am not saying anything against this. Something different is needed. It is a characteristic of our time, even today when it is particularly painful, to make every effort to obscure the truth, to blind people to the truth.

This, too, had to be prepared carefully. Any gap in the calculation would have made it impossible. The whole of the periphery, which had prudently been created for this very purpose, was needed.

But these things were very carefully prepared, both politically and culturally. Every possibility was reckoned with; and this was certainly necessary, since the most unbelievable carelessness sometimes prevailed, even in places where such a thing would be least expected. Let me give you an example, an objective fact, which will allow us to study this carelessness.

At one time Bismarck had a connection with a certain Usedom in Florence and Turin. I have told you before: Modern Italy came into being by roundabout means and actually owes her existence to Germany; but this is connected with all sorts of other things. What I am saying has profound foundations, and in politics all sorts of threads interweave. Thus at one time threads were woven which were to win over the Italian republicans. In short, at a certain time one such link existed between Bismarck and Usedom in Florence and Turin. Usedom was a friend of Mazzini and of others who enjoyed a certain prominence in nationalistic circles. Usedom was a man who posed very much as a wise person. He employed as his personal secretary somebody who was supposed to be a follower of Mazzini. Later it turned out that this personal secretary, of whom it had been said that he was initiated into Mazzini's secret societies, was nothing but an ordinary spy. Bismarck tells this tale quite naively and then adds, as an excuse for having been so mistaken: But Usedom was a high-grade Freemason. Many things could be told in this way and often it would turn out that those involved are totally innocent because the ones who pull the strings remain in the background.

You cannot maintain that there is no point in asking why such things are permitted to happen by the wise guides of world evolution—why human beings are, to a large degree, abandoned to such machinations, by making the excuse that there is no way of getting to the bottom of these things. For, indeed, if one only seeks them honestly, there are many ways of finding out what is going on. But we see, even in our own Society, how much resistance is put up by individuals when there is a question of following the simple path of truth. We see how many things which should be taken objectively in pursuit of knowledge, when they would best serve the good of mankind, are instead taken subjectively and personally. There are—are there not?—within our Society groups who have studied very attentively an essay of, I believe, 287 pages which they have taken utterly seriously and about which they are still puzzling, as to whether the writer—who is well enough known to us—might be right. In short, within our own circles we may sometimes discover why it is so difficult to see through things. Yet it is, in fact, not at all difficult to see through things if only one strives honestly for the truth. For years so much has been said within our Society. If you were to bring together all that has been said since 1902 you would see that it contains much that could help us to see through a great deal that is going on in the world. Yet our anthroposophical spiritual science has never been presented as belonging to a secret society. Indeed the most important things have always been dealt with in public lectures open to anybody. This is a contrast which should be noted.

I might as well say now: If certain streams within our Anthroposophical Society continue to exist and if, for the sake of human vanity, they continue to interpret to their own advantage certain things which have been said behind closed doors—for no more reason than one would exclude first-year students in a university from what is told to those in their second year—then, eventually there will be nothing esoteric left. If things are not taken perfectly naturally, if people continue to stand up and say: This is secret, that is very esoteric, this is occult, and I am not allowed to speak about this!—if this policy continues to be followed by certain streams in our Society, if they continually fail to understand that any degree of vanity must stop, then everything mankind must be told about today will have to be discussed in public. Whether it is possible to make known certain things, the needs of the moment will tell. But the Anthroposophical Society is only meaningful if it is a ‘society’, that is, if each individual is concerned to make a stand against vanity, against folly and vanity and everything else which clothes things in false veils of mysticism, serving only to puzzle other people and make them spiteful. The mysteriousness of certain secret brotherhoods has nothing to do with our Society, for we must be concerned solely with bringing about what is needed for the good of mankind. As I have often said, our enemies will become more and more numerous. Perhaps we shall discover what our enemies are made of by the manner in which they quarrel with us. So far we have had no honest opponents worth mentioning. They would, in effect, only be to our advantage! The kind of opposition we have met hitherto is perfectly obvious through their ways and means of operation. We might as well wait patiently to discover whether further opponents will be from within our circle, as is frequently the case, or from elsewhere! I have just had news of opposition from one quarter which will empty itself over us like a cold shower. A forthcoming book has been announced during some lectures. The author, a conceited fellow, has never belonged to our Society but has been entertaining the world with all sorts of double egos and such like. He has now used the opportunity of the various national hatreds and passions to mount an attack on our Anthroposophy of a kind which shows that his hands are not clean.

So we must not lose sight of these things and we must realize that it is up to us to hold fast to the direction which will lead to truth and knowledge. Even when we speak about current issues it must only be in pursuit of knowledge and truth. We must look things straight in the eye and then each individual may take up his own position in accordance with his feelings. Every position will be understandable, but it must be based on a foundation of truth.

This is a word which must occupy a special place in our soul today. So much has taken place in our time which has puzzled people and which should have shown them that it is necessary to strive for a healthy judgement based on the truth. We have experienced how the yearning for peace only had to make itself felt in the world for it to be shouted down. And we still see how people actually get angry if peace is mentioned in one quarter or another. They are angry, not only if one of the combatants mentions peace, but even if it is mentioned in a neutral quarter.

It remains to be seen whether the world will be capable of sufficient astonishment about these things. Experience so far has been telling, to say the least. In April and May 1915 a large territory was to have been voluntarily ceded, but the offer was rejected so that war could be waged. Since world opinion failed to form an even partially adequate judgement about this event, there seems to be really nothing for it but to expect the worst. We might as well expect the worst, because people seem bent on telling, not the truth, but what suits their purposes. Their thinking is strange and peculiar to a degree. Yet to tackle things properly the right points have to be found.

Let me read you a short passage written by an Italian before the outbreak of the present war, at a time when the Italians were jubilant about the Tripoli conflict—which I am not criticizing. I shall never say anything against the annexation of Tripoli by Italy, for these things are judged differently by those who know what is necessary and possible in the relationships between states and nations. They do not form judgements based on lies and express opinions steeped in all kinds of moralistic virtues. But here we have a man, Prezzolini, who writes about an Italy which pleases him, which has evolved out of an Italy which did not please him. He starts by describing what this Italy had come to, how it had gone down in the world, and he then continues—directly under the impression of the Tripoli conflict:

‘And yet, totally unaware of this economic risorgimento, Italy underwent at the same time the period of depression described above. Foreigners were the first to notice the reawakening. Some Italians had also expressed it, but they were windbags carrying on about the famous and infamous “primacy of Italy”. The book by Fischer, a German, was written in 1899, and that by Bolton-King, an Englishman, in 1901. To date no Italian has published a work comparable to these, even to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of “unification”. The exceptional good sense of these foreigners is notable for, truly, outsiders have neither wanted, nor do they now want, to know anything about modern Italy. Then, as now, people's judgement, or rather prejudgement of Italy amounted to saying: Italy is a land of the past, not the present; she should “rest on her past glory” and not enter into the present. They long for an Italy of archives, museums, hotels for honeymooners and for the amusement of spleen and lung patients—an Italy of organ-grinders, serenades, gondolas—full of ciceroni, shoe-shiners, polyglots and pulcinelli. Though they are delighted to travel nowadays in sleeping cars instead of diligences, they nevertheless regret a little the absence of Calabrese highwaymen with pistol and pointed velvet hat. Oh, the glorious Italian sky, defaced by factory chimneys. Oh, la bella Napoli, defamed by steamships and the unloading thereof; Rome filled with Italian soldiers; such regret for the wonderful days of Papal, Bourbon and Leopoldine Rome! These philanthropic feelings still provide the basis for every Anglo-Saxon and German opinion about us. To show how deeply they run, remember that they are expressed by people of high standing in other directions, such as Gregorovius and Bourget. The Italy who reformed herself and grew fat, the Italy who is seen to carry large banknotes in her purse—this is the Italy who has at last gained a proper self-confidence. We should forgive and understand her if she now reacts by going a little further than she ought in her enthusiasm. Ten years have hardly sufficed for the idea of the future and strength of Italy to pass from those who first saw it, to the populace at large who are now filled and convinced by it. It would have been in vain had our great thinkers piled up volumes of journals, statistical papers, philosophical works and books of modern art.’

This is the attitude, my dear friends! ‘It would have been in vain had our great thinkers piled up volumes of journals, statistical papers, philosophical works and books of modern art.’ All this would be worthless, he thinks, to raise up a people. This modern man has no faith in the worth and working of culture and spiritual values!

‘It would have been in vain had our great thinkers piled up volumes of journals, statistical papers, philosophical works and books of modern art; neither the people nor the foreigners would ever have been convinced, at least not before the passage of very many years.’

So this man has no confidence in creating spiritual culture in this way.

‘A great and brutal force was needed to smash the illusion and give every last and miserable village square a sense of national solidarity and upward progress.’

To what does he attribute the capacity to achieve what no spiritual culture could produce? He says:

‘It is the war which has served to do this.’

There you have it! This is what people believed. Tripoli was there and it had to be there. Moreover, they also said: War is needed to bring the nation to a point which it was not found necessary to reach by means of spiritual culture.

Indeed, my dear friends, such things speak to us when we place them side by side with another voice which says: We did not want this war; we are innocent lambs who have been taken by surprise. Even from this side comes the cry: To save freedom, to save the small nations, we are forced to go to war. This man continues:

‘We young people born around the year 1880 entered life in the world with the new century. Our land had lost courage. Its intellectual life was at a low ebb.’

These were the people born around the year 1880.

‘Philosophy: positivism. History: sociology. Criticism: historical method, if not even psychiatry.’

This may indeed be said in the land of Lombroso!

‘Hot on the heels of Italy's deliverers came Italy's parasites; not only their sons, our fathers, but also their grandsons, our elder brothers. The heroic tradition of risorgimento was lost; there was no idea to fire the new generation. Among the best, religion had sunk in estimation but had left a vacuum. For the rest it was a habit. Art was reeling in a sensuous and aesthetic frenzy and lacked any basis or faith. From Carducci, whom papa read to the accompaniment of a glass of Tuscan wine and a cheap cigar, they turned to d'Annunzio, the bible of our elder brothers, dressed according to the latest fashion, his pockets full of sweets, a ladies' man and vain braggart.’

Yet this marionette—of whom it is said here that he was ‘dressed according to the latest fashion, his pockets full of sweets, a ladies' man and vain braggart’—this marionette had made clear to the people at Whitsuntide in 1915 that they needed what no work of the spirit could give them!

When times are grave it is most necessary to make the effort to look straight at the truth, to join forces with the truth. If we do not want to recognize the truth we deviate from what may be good for mankind. Therefore it is necessary to understand that precisely in these times serious words need to be spoken. For we are in a position today in which even one who is seven-eighths blind should see what is happening when the call for peace is shouted down. Someone who believes that you can fight for permanent peace while shouting down the call for peace might, conceivably, hold worthwhile opinions in some other fields; but he cannot be taken seriously with regard to what is going on. If, now that we are faced with this, we cannot commit ourselves to truth, then the prospects for the world are very, very bad indeed.

It is for me truly not a pleasant task to draw attention to much that is going on at present. But when you hear what is said on all sides, you realize the necessity. We must not lose courage, so long as the worst has not yet happened. But the spark of hope is tiny. Much will depend on this tiny spark of hope over the next few days. Much also depends on whether there are still people willing to cry out to the world the utter absurdity of such goings on—as has been done just now, even in the great cities of the world.

The world needs peace and will suffer great privation if peace is not achieved. And it will suffer great privation if credence continues to be given to those who say: We are forced to fight for permanent peace; and if these same people continue to meet every possibility for peace with scorn, however disguised in clever words. But we have reached a point, my dear friends, when even a Lloyd George can be taken for a great man by the widest circles! We may well say: Things have come a very long way indeed!

Yet these things are also only trials to test mankind. They would even be trials if what I permitted myself to express at the end of the Christmas lecture were to happen, namely, if it were to be recorded for all time that, in the Christmas season of the nineteen hundred and sixteenth year after the Mystery of Golgotha, the call for ‘peace on earth among men and women who are of good will’ was shouted down on the most empty pretexts. If the pretexts are not entirely empty, then they are indeed more sinister still. If this is the case, then it will be necessary to recognize what is really at work in this shouting down of every thought of peace: that it is not even a question of what is said in the periphery, but of quite other things. Then it will be understood that it is justified to say that what happens now is crucial for the fortune or misfortune of Europe.

I cannot go further tonight because of the lateness of the hour. But I did want to impress these words on your heart!

Goethe who gave simple expression to so much that men find great and moving, once wrote: “Each man should consider with what part of himself he can and will influence his time!”

When we allow such a saying—with all that we know may have passed through Goethe's mind as he said it—to affect us, we are initiated into the whole relationship of man to history. For most people, of course, the search for their own particular standpoint, from which they can deploy their powers in the development of humanity in accordance with the spirit of the age in which they live, is more or less unconscious. Yet even a superficial examination of human development shows that men have increasingly been compelled to organize their lives in a conscious manner. Instinctive living was a feature of earlier civilizations. The transition to increasing consciousness is itself a factor in history. Nowadays, indeed, we can see that the increasing complications of life require man to participate in the development of humanity with a certain degree of consciousness, however humble his position. It is unfortunate that as yet we really have very few points d'appui in the study of mankind's historical development to help us in our efforts to reach this point of view.

As a scientific discipline, this study is of fairly recent origin, after all. Its novelty is apparent, one might say, in the historical writing that has been published.

Historians have produced magnificent things. In developing from the unscientific chronicle-writing that still prevailed even in the eighteenth century, however, history, falling as it did within the age of natural science, attempted increasingly to take on the forms appropriate to that science. Thus the historical attitude gradually became identified with the concept post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Although this way of looking at human history as cause and effect does indeed carry us a long way, yet to the unprejudiced observer there remain countless facts in history which are not consistent with a simple causal interpretation. And at this point we are struck by an image that can symbolize history: the image of a flowing river. We cannot simply derive its features at a given point from what lies a little farther upstream, but must realize that in its depths there operate all kinds of forces that may come to the surface at any point, and may throw up waves which are not determined by those that went before.

So, too, human history seems to point to unspoken depths, to resemble a surface on which countless forces impinge from below. And human observation can scarcely presume to gain a complete picture of the particular features of a given epoch. For this reason, the study of history will doubtless have to come more and more to be what I would call symptomatological. In the human organism itself, which is such a richly differentiated whole, a great deal has to be discovered about its health and ill-health by observing the symptoms through which the organism expresses itself. In the same way, we must gradually accustom ourselves to study historical symptomatology. We must learn to interpret surface features precisely, and, by including more and more symptoms in our interpretation, contrive to allow the vital essence of historical development to work on us. In this way, by a spiritual comprehension of the forces of human history—which in all kinds of indirect ways also affect our own soul—we can find our own place in the development of mankind.

A view of the world and of life such as I have put before you is particularly fitted to reveal how, even in one's most intimate inner experiences, what is historically symptomatic is manifest. What I have described to you, the awakening of cognitive capacities that are not present in ordinary consciousness, being dormant deep down in the soul—this awakening of capacities appropriate to modern man leads us to see that we must develop these cognitive powers differently nowadays from the way they were developed in earlier times. Not only this: when we do develop these powers, the spiritual vision that results is something quite different to the man of today from what it was, for example, to the men of the ancient East, which we touched on the day before yesterday in describing yoga exercises.

Looking at these ancient Oriental attitudes, as they were developed by men who sought to elicit, from within, powers of cognition reaching into the super-sensible sphere, we conclude: everything we know about it indicates that such knowledge, in gaining a place within the soul, took on a permanent and enduring character there. What men think in ordinary life, what they absorb from the experiences of earthly existence, and what then takes root as memories—these have permanence in the soul; and we are simply unhealthy in spirit if we have any considerable gaps in our capacity to remember what we have experienced in the world from a given point in childhood onwards. To this state of mental permanence were admitted all the insights into the spiritual world gained by ancient Oriental methods. They deposited memories, as the ordinary experiences of the day deposit memories. The characteristic of the early Oriental seer was precisely that he found himself increasingly absorbed into a lasting communion with the spiritual world, as he made his way into it. Once inside the divine and spiritual world, he knew himself to be secure. He knew that it also represented something enduring for his soul.

The opposite, we may say, is true of anyone today who, by virtue of the powers to which mankind has advanced since those early days, rises to a certain spiritual vision. He develops his views on the spiritual sphere to the point of experiencing them; but they cannot possibly become memories for him in the way that the thoughts we experience daily in the outside world become memories.

It is certainly a great disappointment to many who struggle to gain a certain spiritual vision by modern methods to find that, although they do gain glimpses of this spiritual world, these are transitory, like the sight of a real object in the outside world, which we no longer perceive when we go away from it. In this mental activity, there is no incorporation into memory in the ordinary sense, but a momentary contact with the spiritual world. If we later wish to regain this contact, we cannot simply call up the experience from our recollection. What we can do, however, is to recollect something that was an ordinary experience in the physical world: how by developing our powers we achieved our experience of the spiritual world. We can then retrace our steps and repeat the experience, exactly as we return to a sensory perception. This is one of the most important factors that authenticate this modern vision: that what we see does not combine with our physical being; for if thoughts are to gain some permanence as memories, they must always be combined with our physical being, held fast by our organism.

Perhaps I may interpolate a personal observation here by way of explanation. Anyone who has some contact with the spiritual world, and wishes to communicate what he has experienced, is unable to make this communication from memory in the usual sense. He always has to make a certain effort to attain again to direct spiritual observation. For this reason, even if someone who speaks out of the spiritual world gives a lecture thirty times, no lecture will be an exact repetition of the one before: each must be drawn direct from experience.

Here is something which, in my view, can remove certain anxieties that might arise in troubled minds about this modern spiritual vision. Many people today, with some justification, see the grandeur of the most significant riddles of existence in the very fact that they can never be completely solved. Such people are frightened of a philistinism of spiritual vision which might confront them with the assertion that the riddles of existence could be finally “solved” by a philosophy. Well, the view of life we are discussing here cannot speak of such a “solution,” for the reason that has just been given: what is always being forgotten must constantly be re-acquired.

But therein lies its vitality! We are brought back again to life as it is revealed externally in nature, as opposed to what we experience inwardly on seeing our thoughts become memories. Perhaps what I want to say will sound banal to many people; but it is not meant to be banal. No one can say: I ate yesterday and so I am full, I do not need to eat today or tomorrow or the day after; similarly, no one can say of modern spiritual vision: It is complete, it has now become part of memory, and we know where we are with it once and for all.

Indeed, it is not just that we must always struggle afresh to perceive what seeks to manifest itself to man; but that, if we dwell continuously over a long period on the same concepts from the spiritual world, seeking them out repeatedly, it will even happen that doubts and uncertainties appear; it is characteristic of true spiritual vision that we should have to conquer these doubts and uncertainties again and again in the vital life of the soul. We are thus never condemned to the calm of completion when we strive towards spiritual vision in the modern sense.

There is another point, too. This modern spiritual vision demands above all what may be called “presence of mind.” The spiritual visionary of ancient Oriental times could take his time. What he achieved was a permanent possession. If man as he is today wishes to look at the spiritual world, he must be spiritually quick-witted, if I may so put it; he must realize that the revelations of the spiritual world appear, only to vanish again at the next moment. They must therefore be caught by “presence of mind” at the moment of their occurrence. And many people prepare themselves carefully for spiritual vision, but fail to attain it through omitting to train this “presence of mind.” Only by doing so can we avoid a situation in which we only become sufficiently attentive when the thing itself is past.

I have now described to you many of the features that the modern seeker after the spiritual world encounters. In the course of my lectures, other features will become apparent. Today, I should like to point to just one more of them, since it will lead directly to a certain historical view of humanity.

When we try as modern men in this sense to find our way with certainty into the spiritual world, without becoming eccentrics, it is best for us to start from concepts and ways of thinking we have obtained from a fundamental study of nature and by immersion in a fundamental natural science. No concepts are quite so suitable for the meditative life I have described as those gained from modern science—not just for us to absorb their content, but rather to meditate upon it. As modern men, we have really learnt to think through science. We must always remember that we have learnt through science the thinking that is suited to our present epoch. Yet what we gain in thinking techniques from modern science is only a preparation for a true spiritual vision.

No logical argument or philosophical speculation will enable us to use ordinary thinking, trained on the objects of the outside world and on experiment and observation, as anything more than a preparation. We must then wait until the spiritual world approaches us in the way I have been describing. For each step we take in the observation of the spiritual world we must first become ripe. We cannot of our own volition do anything except make of ourselves an organ to which the spiritual world is willing to reveal itself. Objective revelation is something we must wait for. And anyone who has experience in such things knows that he has to wait years or decades for certain kinds of knowledge. Again, it is precisely this that guarantees the objectivity of what is real in the spiritual world—that is, of knowledge.

This again was not so for those in ancient times in the Orient who sought through their exercises the way into the super-sensible world. The nature of their thinking from the beginning was such that they needed only to extend it to find the way into the spiritual world which I described two days ago. Even in ordinary life, therefore, their thinking needed only to be extended to lead to a certain clairvoyance. But because it developed from the ordinary life of the times, this was a rather dream-like vision, whereas the vision towards which we as modern men strive operates with complete self-possession, like that which is active in the solution of mathematical problems. It is just when we turn our attention to the intimate experiences of spiritual research that we see in this change the expression of great transformations in human nature as a whole in the course of historical times. I mean times that are “historical” in the sense that they are approachable not only by anyone who can examine the history both of men and of the cosmos through spiritual vision, but also by anyone who examines the external documents quite straightforwardly. In these external documents, too, we can look at early periods in the spiritual life of humanity and perceive how they differ from the position within this spiritual world which we and our time must aspire to.

By virtue of the fact that our thinking cannot just be extended automatically to bring us to spiritual vision, but can only make us ready to see the spiritual world when it appears to us, it is suited to operate within the field of experiment and observation, within the field that natural science has made its own. Yet just because we perceive what inner rigour and strength our thinking has achieved, we shall be all the more likely to apply it to our training, and thus be able to await the revelation of the spiritual world in the true sense of the word. Even here, it is apparent that our thinking today is rather different from that of earlier times.

I shall have opportunities later on for historical digressions. Much that refers to the outside world can then be deduced from what I have to say today. Today, I shall speak rather about the inner powers of man's development. This is a subject that brings us in the end to thinking and to the transformation of this thinking in the course of man's development. But in the last analysis all external history is dependent on thinking, and what he achieves in history man produces from his thoughts, together with his feelings and impulses of will; and therefore, if we want to find the deepest historical impulses, we must turn to human thinking.

But the thinking employed today for natural science on the one hand, and for achieving human freedom on the other, differs quite considerably from that which we find in earlier ages of mankind. There will, of course, be many people who will say: thinking is thinking, whether it occurs in John Stuart Mill or in Soloviev, in Plato, Aristotle and Heraclitus or in the thinkers of the ancient East. Anyone with an intuitive insight into the way thoughts have functioned within humanity, however, will conclude: our thinking today is fundamentally something very different from that of earlier epochs. This raises an important problem in human development.

Let us examine our present-day way of thinking. (I shall have an opportunity later to give evidence from natural science for what I am now expounding historically.) What we call thinking actually developed from the handling of language. Anyone with a sense of what is operative in a people's language—of the logic, familiar to us from childhood, operative in the language—and with enough psychological awareness to observe this in life, will find that our thinking today actually derives from what language makes of our soul's potentialities. I would say: from language we gradually separate thoughts and the laws thoughts obey: our thinking today is given us by speech.

Yet this thinking that is given us by speech is also the thinking that has come of age in human civilization since the days of Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno, in periods when humanity has been devoting its attention principally to the observation of nature in the modern sense. The thinking that is applied to observation and experiment inevitably becomes a part of us; we refine what we absorb with language as part of our common heritage until it becomes a thought-structure by which we then apprehend the outside world.

But we need only go back a relatively short distance in human history to encounter something quite different. Let us go back, for example, to the civilization of Greece. Anyone who can enter the world of Greek art, Greek literature, Greek philosophy—can catch, in fact, the mood of Greece—will discover quite empirically that the Greeks still experienced thoughts closely interwoven with words. Thought and word were one. By the concept logos, they meant something different from what we mean when we speak of a thought or a thought sequence. They spoke of thought as if the element of speech was its natural physical aspect. Just as in the physical world we cannot conceive our soul as spatially separated from our physical organism, so too in Greek consciousness thought was not separated from word. The two were felt as a unity, and thought flowed along on the waves of words.

But this produces an attitude to the outside world quite different from ours, where thought has already separated from word. And thus, when we go back into Hellenic civilization, fundamentally we have to adopt a quite different temper of soul if we are to penetrate into the real experiences of the Greek soul. By the same token, all the science, for example, that was produced in Greece no longer seems like science by modern standards. The scientist of today will say: the Greeks really had no natural science; they had a natural philosophy. And he will be right. But he will have perceived only a quarter, so to speak, of the problem. Something much more profound is involved. What this is we can explore only by regaining spiritual vision.

If we make use of the way of thinking which is particularly apt for scientific research, and to which we now train ourselves by inheritance and education, and develop what we call scientific concepts, then in the nature of our consciousness we separate these concepts strictly from what we call artistic experience and what we call religious experience. It is a fundamental characteristic of our age that modern man demands a science which involves no element of artistic creation or outlook, and nothing that claims to be the object of religious consciousness and religious devotion to the temporal or the divine. This, we conclude, is a characteristic of our present civilization. And we find this characteristic increasingly well developed the further West we go in our examination of the foundations of human civilization. This is the characteristic: that modern man keeps science, art and religious life separate in his soul. He even endeavours to form a special concept of science, to prevent art from invading science, to exclude the imagination from everything that is “scientific,” except for that part concerned with inventions; and then to put forward another kind of certainty—that of faith—to play its part in religious life.

If you try, in the manner I have described, to rise to a spiritual perception, then, starting of course from the trained scientific thought of the present, you arrive at what I have characterized as vital, plastic thinking. With this plastic thinking, too, you feel equipped to comprehend, in what I will call a qualitatively mathematical way, what cannot be comprehended with ordinary mathematics and geometry: living things. With vital thinking you feel yourself equipped to apprehend living things.

When we look at the purely chemical compounds in the inorganic world, we find that all their materials and forces are in a state of more or less unstable equilibrium. The equilibrium becomes increasingly unstable and the interaction increasingly complicated, the further we ascend towards living things. And as the equilibrium becomes more unstable, so the living structure increasingly evades quantitative understanding: only vital thought can connect up with a living structure in the way that mathematical thought does with a lifeless one. We thus arrive (and as I have previously indicated, I am saying something now that will be shocking to many people) at an epistemological position where ordinary logical abstract thinking is continually being converted into a kind of artistic thinking or artistic outlook, yet one as exact as ever mathematics or mechanics can be.

I know how, impelled by the modern spirit of science, people shrink from transposing anything exact into the artistic sphere, which represents a kind of qualitative mathesis. But what is the good of epistemology insisting that we can only arrive at objective knowledge by moving from one logical deduction to the next, and by excluding from knowledge all these artistic features—if nature and reality do in fact operate artistically at a certain level, so that they only yield to an artistic mode of comprehension?

In particular, we cannot examine what it is that shapes the human organism from within, as I described the day before yesterday—that operates in us as a first approximation to a super-sensible man—unless we allow logical thinking to flow over into a kind of artistic creation, and unless from a qualitative mathematics we can recreate the creative human form. All we need is to retain the scientific spirit and absorb the artistic spirit.

In short, we must create from the science of today an artistic outlook, whilst maintaining the whole spirit of science. In so doing, however, we approach the reconciliation of science and art that Goethe sensed when he said: “The beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws of nature—laws which, but for its appearance, would have remained eternally hidden from us.” Goethe was well aware that, if we seek to comprehend nature or the world as a whole solely with the kinds of thought that prove to be healthy and correct for the inorganic world, then the totality of the world simply will not yield to our enquiry. And we shall not find the bridge from inorganic to organic science until we transpose abstract cognition into inwardly vitalized cognition, which is at the same time an inward freedom of action.

In thus turning, within the mental endeavour of today, to a comprehension of living things, we also come closer to what was present in the Greek mind, not in the controlled and conscious way at which we aim, but rather instinctively. And no one can really understand what was being expressed even in Plato, still less in the pre-Socratic philosophers, unless he is aware of the presence there of a co-operation between the artistic and the philosophical and scientific elements in man. Only at the end of the Hellenic age—in philosophy, for instance, with Aristotle—does thought become separated from language and later develop via scholasticism into scientific thought. Only at the end of the Hellenic age is thought sifted out. Earlier on, thought is an artistic element in Greece. And, fundamentally, Greek philosophy can only be understood if it is also apprehended with an artistic understanding.

But this now leads us to see Greece in general as the civilization where science and art are still linked together. This is apparent both in its art and in its science. Naturally, I cannot go into every aspect of this in detail. But if you will look at Greek sculpture with sound common sense and a sound, spiritually informed eye, you will find that the Greek sculptor did not work from a model as is done today: his plastic creation sprang from an inner experience. In forming the muscle, the bent arm, the hand, he made what he felt within him. He felt an inner, living, second man—what I will call an ethereal man; he experienced himself through his soul and in this way felt his outward envelope. His inner experience went over into the sculpture. Art was a revelation of this vision. And the vision, which was carried over into the thought living in the language, became a science that retained an artistic character by being one with what the spirit of the Greek language made manifest to a Greek.

We thus enter, with Greece, a world accessible to us otherwise only if we advance from our own science, divorced from art, to a kind of knowledge that flows over into the artistic sphere. I would say: what we now evolve consciously was once instinctively experienced. Indeed, we can actually see how, in the course of history, this association of art and science gradually passes into the present complete separation of the two.

As humanity developed through Roman times into the Middle Ages, the higher levels of education and training had a quite different basis from that which later prevailed. Later, in the scientific age, the main concern was to communicate to men the results of observation and experiment. In our education, we live almost entirely by absorbing these results. Looking back at the period when some influence of Greek civilization was still at work, we can see that even scientific training touched man closely then and was aimed rather at developing abilities in him. We see how in the Middle Ages the student had to work through the seven liberal arts, as they were called: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. What mattered was abilities. What you were to become as a scientist you achieved through the seven liberal arts—and yet these were already well on the way to becoming knowledge and science, as later happened.

If you study the now much-despised scholasticism of the Middle Ages, which stands at the meeting-place of earlier times and our own, you will see what a wonderful training it provided in the art of thinking. One could wish that people today would only assimilate something of the best type of medieval scholasticism, which fostered in men a technique and art of thinking. This is particularly necessary if, as indeed we must, we are to arrive at clear-cut concepts. By starting from the attitude of today, however, with its strict separation of science, art and religion, and tracing human development back through the Middle Ages, we approach the civilization of Greece. And the further we go back in this, the more clearly we see the fusion of science and art.

Yet even in Greek civilization there is something separate from science and art: religious life. It affects men quite differently from scientific or artistic experience. The vital element in art and science exists objectively in space and time: the content of religious consciousness is beyond space and time. It belongs to eternity; admittedly, it is brought to birth by space and time, but we cannot approach it by remaining within space and time.

We can see even from the external documents what spiritual science today needs to discover about these things. And I should like to draw attention to a work which has just appeared in Austria and which is extraordinarily helpful in this connection. It is Otto Willmann's History of Idealism, a book that stands head and shoulders above many other currently concerned with similar problems. (One can judge such things dispassionately, even if they spring from views opposed to one's own, provided that they lead to something beneficial to spiritual life.)

In Greece we find on the one hand this unity of art and science, and on the other hand the religious life to which the Greek devotes himself. In popular religion, it is true, this is represented plastically, but in the religious mysteries it is gained by initiation in a deeper sense. But everywhere we can see that religion plays no part in the soul-powers evolved in science and art. Instead, in order to partake of the religious life, the soul must first take on that temper of piety, that universal love, in which it can comprehend revelations of the divine and spiritual realm with which man can unite in religious devotion.

Let us now look across at the Orient! The further back we go, the more we find that its spiritual life is something different again. Here, once more, we can be guided by what we have gained through our modern spiritual training: we ascend from experience of the vital concept to that inner pain and suffering which we have to overcome in order that our whole self may become a sense-organ or spiritual organ; and we cease to experience the world in the physical body alone, by existing in the world independently of our physical body. In so doing, we exist in the world in such a way that we learn to experience a reality outside space and time. We thus experience the reality of the spiritual sphere and its influence on the temporal in the way I have described. But if by overcoming pain and suffering within ourselves we do gain spiritual vision, we shall have brought into knowledge something of this other element—the element which, whilst remaining intact as real knowledge, real spiritual cognition, is continually leading knowledge into religious experience. And while continuing to experience what has survived from ancient times as a religious element in venerable traditional concepts, we also experience a similar spiritual element of more recent origin, if we work our way up to a cognition that can exist in the sphere of religious devotion.

Only then do we understand how deep in man lie the springs of the unity of religion, art and science in the ancient East. They were once united: what man knew and admitted to his corpus of ideas was another aspect of what he set up to shine before him in artistic beauty; and what he thus knew and comprehended, and made to radiate beauty, was also something spiritual to which he made his devotions and which he treated as subject to a higher order. Here we see religion, art and science united.

This, however, takes us back into an age where not only did thought live on the waves of words, but where also it was man's experience that thought inhabited regions deeper even than words, and was connected with the innermost texture of human nature. For this reason, the Indian yogi elicited thoughts from breathing, which goes deeper than words. Only gradually did thought raise itself into words and then, in modern civilization, beyond words. Originally, however, thought was connected with more intimate and deeper human experience, and that was when the unity of religious, artistic and scientific life could unfold in complete harmony.

Today, there remains in the Orient an echo of what I have described to you as a harmonious unity of religion, art and philosophy, as it appears for instance in the vedas. But it is an echo which requires to be understood—and which we cannot easily understand simply from the standpoint of that isolation of religion, art and science which exists in Western civilization. We do truly understand it, however, if by a new spiritual science we rise to an outlook that can again produce a harmony of religion, art and science. In the Orient, meanwhile, we still have the remnants of that early unity before us. If you look, you will see that just where the East touches and influences Europe, the echo still persists. A past historical epoch remains present at a certain spot on the earth. We can perceive this presence in a great philosopher of Eastern Europe, in Soloviev.

This philosopher of the second half of the nineteenth century has a quite special effect on us. When we look at the philosophers of the West, John Stuart Mill or Herbert Spencer or others, we find that their standpoint has grown out of the scientific thinking I have described today. In Soloviev, however, something survives which presents religion, art and science as a unity. When we first begin to read Soloviev, it is true, we notice that he uses the philosophical language he found in Kant or Comte; he has complete command of the modes of expression of these philosophers of Western and Central Europe. But when we become at home in his mind and in what he expresses by the use of these modes, our awareness of him changes. He arouses a sense of the past; he seems like someone who has come to life again from the discussions that preceded the Council of Nicaea. We perceive, in fact, the tone that prevails in the discussions of the early Christian fathers; and in those early centuries of Christianity there certainly did survive an echo of the unity of religion and science. This unity, in which volition and thought also flow together, informs Soloviev's East European philosophy of life.

And if we look at the culture and civilization around us today, we do indeed find in the more Westerly parts just that separation of religion, art and science; what really belongs to our moment of history, the real basis of our activities and our picture of the world, is the discipline that is strictly built up on scientific thinking, whereas in art forms and religious matters we take over older traditional material. We can see today how few new styles are produced in art, and how everywhere old ones live on. The vital element in our time is what is vital in scientific thinking. We must wait for a time that will have lively imaginal thinking as I have described it—a thinking that will again lead to what is vital and will be capable of artistic creativity in new styles, without becoming insipidly allegorical and inartistic.

Scientific thought, we find, is thus the motive impulse of the immediate present, especially the further West we move; while in the East we find an echo of an earlier unity of religion, art and science.

This religious strain forms part of the temperament of East Europeans, with which they look at the world. They are able to understand the West only indirectly, via a spiritual development like that contained in our spiritual science movement; they have no direct understanding of the West, precisely because people in the West attempt to distinguish sharply religion and art from scientific thought.

We who live between the two must allow the world of the senses to obtrude on us and must entertain the thought appropriate to it; but we cannot help also looking inward and experiencing our inner self, and for the inner self we need religious experience. But I would say: more deeply buried in human nature than the religious experience we need within us and the scientific experience we need for observing the outside world, is the link between the two, artistic experience.

Artistic experience is thus something which today is not a first demand on life. We have seen that Western civilization is concerned with scientific thoughts, and Eastern civilization with religious ones. We have seen that we are part of an artistic tradition, but that we cannot feel entirely at home in it, indeed that the artistic tradition itself is in many ways a revival. And yet one must say: the yearning for a balance of this kind is certainly present in the central region between East and West. We see it, for example, when we look at Goethe.

For what was Goethe's great longing when, with what I would call his predominantly artistic talents, he was faced by the riddles of nature? His artistic sense transformed itself naturally into his scientific outlook. One could say: in Goethe, the representative Central European, we find art and science all of a piece; all of a piece, too, is Goethe's life when we follow its development and know how to locate it properly within the history of recent times. Goethe made himself at home in the collaboration of art and science. There thus arose in him a longing that can only be understood historically: the urge towards Italy, to a more southerly civilization. After looking at the works of art he found in the South, he wrote to his friends in Weimar something that followed on from the philosophy and science he had come to know there in Weimar. In Spinoza he had found divine power represented philosophically. That did not satisfy him. He wanted an extended and spiritualized approach to the world and to spirituality. And in the sight of the Southern works of art he wrote to his friends: “Here is necessity, here is God!” “I have an idea that the Greeks operated according to the laws by which nature herself operates; I am on their track.” Here Goethe is trying to merge science and art.

If in conclusion I introduce a personal note, I do so only to show you how a single pointer can reveal the way in which the Middle region can take up a position between East and West. I encountered this pointer some forty years ago here in Vienna. In my youth I made the acquaintance of Karl Julius Schröer—he was then lecturing on the history of German literature from Goethe onwards. In his introductory lecture he made a number of important points; and he then said something entirely characteristic of the longing that instinctively inspired the best minds in Central Europe. Schröer's words, too, were instinctive. Yet in fact he expressed a longing to combine art and science, to combine Western scientific thought and Eastern religious thought in artistic vision; and he summed up what he wanted to say in the, to me, significant words: “The Germans have an aesthetic conscience.”

Of course, this does not describe an actual state of affairs. It expresses a longing, the longing to look at art and science together. And the feeling when we do look at them together has been finely expressed by another Central European, one whom I have just characterized: when we can look at science and art together, we can then raise ourselves to religious experience, if only the science and art contain true spirituality in Goethe's sense. This is what he meant by saying:

Whoever has science and art.
Has religion too;
Whoever does not have them,
Let him have religion.

Anyone with an aesthetic conscience attains to scientific and religious conscientiousness too. From this we can see where we stand today.

I do not like using the word “transition”—all periods are transitional—but today, in a time of transition, what matters is the kind of transition. In our time we have experienced and developed to its supreme triumph the separation of religion, art and science. What must now be sought, and what alone can provide an understanding between East and West, is the harmonization, the inner unity of religion, art and science. And this inner unity is what the philosophy of life of which I have been speaking seeks to attain.

These lectures were given by Rudolf Steiner during a period of intense productive activity, involving many journeys. In March and April, 1911, he had given fundamental lectures in Prague and in Italy. In June he gave in Copenhagen the short but pregnant course on “The Spiritual Guidance of Humanity.” In August the first performance was given in Munich of his second Mystery Play, “The Soul's Probation.” In October the course “From Jesus to Christ” was given in Karlsruhe; here he gave the fundamental spiritual concepts for the understanding of the Resurrection of Christ. With the exception of the course on St. Mark's Gospel, which followed in September 1912, the great courses on the Gospels had already been given during the preceding years, from 1908 onwards. Dr. Steiner had lectured also in many places about the renewed experience of the Christ in the twentieth century; in the Karlsruhe course he described in detail the work of Christ as lord of human destiny—a theme taken up again in these Nurnberg lectures.

For some years the most significant figure among the group of students of Rudolf Steiner resident at Nurnberg had been Michael Bauer, the friend and biographer of the poet, Christian Morgenstern. Not long before these lectures were given, Michael Bauer had come to know Dr. Friedrich Rittelmeyer, who had become widely known in Germany as a preacher and pastor, working from Nurnberg. Through Bauer, Rittelmeyer came to Rudolf Steiner himself.

These lectures may well have been among the first by Rudolf Steiner that Rittelmeyer could have heard. Certainly we may find in them an indication of the great mysteries of destiny that worked in these encounters, and which led towards the foundation, eleven years later, of the Christian Community. For example, Rudolf Steiner describes in these lectures the meaning of the altar in early Christianity.

The theme of Faith, Love and Hope appears in a wonderful way in the second Mystery Play. At about this time Rudolf Steiner gave lectures under this title in other places also, for example in Vienna.

A. B.

This evening and tomorrow evening we are going to attempt a coherent study of the being of man, and of his connection with the occult foundations of the present time and the near future.

From various indications I have given here you will have grasped that to-day we are, to some extent, facing a new revelation, a new announcement to mankind. If we keep in mind the recent periods of man's evolution, it may well be that we shall best understand what is approaching if we connect it with two other important revelations. In doing so we shall be considering, it is true, only what has been revealed to mankind in times relatively near to our own.

These three revelations—the one now to come and the two others—may be best understood when compared with the early development of a child. Observing the child rightly, we find that on its first coming into the world it has to be protected and cared for by those around it; it has no means of expressing what is going on within it or of formulating in thought what affects its soul. To begin with, the child cannot speak, cannot think; everything must be done for it by those who have received it in their midst. Then it starts to speak. Those who watch it attentively—this is mentioned in my book, The Education of the Child—will know that first it imitates what it hears; but that in the early days of talking it has no understanding which can be attributed to thinking. What the child says does not arise out of thought, but the other way round. It learns to think by talking; learns gradually to apprehend in clear thought what previously it was prompted to say out of the obscure depths of feeling.

Thus we have three successive periods in the child's development—a first period when it can neither speak nor think, a second when it can speak but not yet think, and a third when it becomes conscious of the thought-content in what it says. With these three stages in the child's development we may compare what mankind has gone through—and has still to go through—since about 1,500 years before the Christian era.

The first revelation of which we can speak, as coming to mankind during the present cycle of time, is the revelation proceeding from Sinai in the form of the Ten Commandments. Anyone going more deeply into the significance of what was revealed to mankind in these commandments will find great cause for wonder. The fact is, however, that men take these spiritual treasures so much for granted that little thought is given to them. But those who reflect upon their significance have to know how remarkable it is that in these Ten Commandments something is given which has spread through the world as law; something which in its fundamental character still holds good to-day and forms the basis of the law in all countries, in so far as, during the last 1,000 years, they have gradually adopted modern civilisation. Something all-embracing, grand, universal, is revealed to mankind as if in these words: There is a primal Being in the spiritual world whose image is here on earth—the Ego. This Being can so infuse His own power into the human ego, so pour Himself into it, that a man is enabled to conform to the norms, the laws, given in the Ten Commandments.

The second revelation came about through the Mystery of Golgotha. What can we say about this Mystery? What can be said was indicated yesterday in the public lecture, “From Jesus to Christ”. It was shown there how we have to trace back all men in their bodily nature to the original human couple on earth. And as we can understand men in their bodily nature only as descending through the generations from this couple, so, in order rightly to understand the greatest gift coming to our ego, we have to trace this fact, that must sink more and more into our ego during earthly existence, back to the Mystery of Golgotha.

It need not here concern us that in this connection the old Hebrew tradition has a different conception from that of present-day science. If we trace back men's blood-relationship, their bodily relation, to that original human couple, Adam and Eve, who once lived on earth as the first physical personalities, the primal forebears of mankind, and if we must therefore say that the blood flowing in men's veins goes back to that human pair, we can ask: Where must we look for the origin of the most precious gift bestowed on our soul, that holiest, most valuable gift, which accomplishes in the soul never-ending marvels and makes itself known to our consciousness as something higher than the ordinary ego within us? For the answer we must turn to what arose from the grave on Golgotha. In every human soul that has experienced an inner awakening there lives on what then arose, just as the blood of Adam and Eve continues to live in the body of every human being.

We have to see a kind of fountainhead, a primal fatherhood, in the risen Christ—the spiritual Adam who enters the souls of those who have experienced an awakening, bringing them, for the first time, to the fullness of their ego, to what gives life to their ego in the right way. Thus, just as the life of Adam's body lives on in the physical bodies of all men, what arose from the grave on Golgotha flows in like manner through the souls of those who find the path to it. That is the second revelation given to mankind; they are enabled to learn what happened through the Mystery of Golgotha.

If in the Ten Commandments men have received guidance from outside, this guidance may be compared to what happens to the child before it can either speak or think. What is done for the child by its environment is achieved by the old Jewish law for all mankind, who until then have, as it were, lacked the power of speaking and thinking. People, however, have now learnt to speak—or, rather, have learnt something that may be compared with a child's learning to speak: they have gained knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha through the Gospels. And the way in which they first understood the Gospels may be compared with how a child learns to speak. Through the Gospels there has come to human souls and human hearts some degree of understanding for the Mystery of Golgotha, which has found its way into human feelings and perceptions, and into the soul-forces arising in us when, for example, we allow the deeply significant, intuitive scenes and pictures drawn from the Gospels by great painters to work upon us. It is the same with traditional pictures—pictures of the adoration of the Child by the Shepherds or by the Wise Men from the East; of the flight into Egypt, and so on. All this leads back in the end to the Gospels; it has reached men's understanding in such a way that they may be said to have learnt to speak, in their fashion, about the Mystery of Golgotha.

In this connection we are now moving towards the third period, which may be compared with how the child learns the thought-content in its own speech and can became conscious of it. We are approaching the revelation which should give us the full content, the thought-content, of the Gospels—all they contain of soul and spirit. For at present the Gospels are no better understood than the child understands what it says before it can think. In the context of world-history people are meant to learn through Spiritual Science, to reflect upon the thoughts in the Gospels; to let the whole deep spiritual content of the Gospels work upon them for the first time. This indeed is connected with a further great event which mankind can feel to be approaching, and which they will experience before the end of this twentieth century. This event can be brought before our souls in somewhat the following way: If once again we enter into the nature of the Mystery of Golgotha, we realise that those elements of the Christ which rose from the grave of Golgotha have remained with the earth, so that they can directly affect every human soul, and can in each soul awaken the ego to a higher stage of existence. Speaking thus of the Mystery of Golgotha we may say: Christ then became the Spirit of the earth and since that time has remained so. In our day, however, a change in relation of the Christ to men is coming, an important change connected with what all of you have come to know something about—the new revelation to men of the Christ.

This revelation can also be characterised in another way. For this indeed we must turn to what happens when a man goes through the gate of death. (This is something that could not be described in books, but must now be spoken of.) When a man has passed through the gate of death, has experienced the backward survey over his previous earthly life and has come to the point when his etheric body is laid aside and the time has come for his Kamaloka, he is first met by two figures. Usually only one is mentioned, but to complete the picture—and this is a reality for every true occultist—we must say that before his Kamaloka the man is confronted by two figures. What I am now telling you holds good, it is true, only for men of the West, and for those who, during the last 1,000 years, have been connected with Western culture. The man after death is confronted by two figures. One of these is Moses—the man knows quite clearly that it is Moses who stands before him, holding out the tables of the law. In the Middle Ages they spoke of Moses “with his stern law”. And in his soul the man is keenly aware of how far in his inmost being he has transgressed against this law. The other figure is “the Cherubim with the flaming sword”, who pronounces judgment on these transgressions. That is an experience a man has after death. Thus, in accordance with our Spiritual Science, it can be said that there is a kind of settlement of the man's karmic account by these two figures—Moses with the stern law and the Cherubim with the flaming sword.

In our time, however, a change is approaching, an important change which can be described in this way. Christ is becoming Lord of Karma for all those who, after death, have experienced what has just been discussed. Christ is entering upon His judgeship. Let us look more closely into this fact. From the world-conception of Spiritual Science we all know that a karmic account is kept of our life; that there is a certain balancing of the deeds standing on the credit side of the account the sensible deeds, the fine deeds, those that are good—and, on the other side, the bad, ugly, lying deeds and thoughts.

Now it is important, on the one hand, that in the further course of a man's earthly life he should himself adjust the balance of this karmic account. But this living out of the result of his good and splendid deeds, or those that are bad, can be done in many different ways. The particular adjustment in our future life is not always determined after the same pattern. Suppose someone has done a bad action; he must compensate for it by doing a good one. This good action, however, can be achieved in two ways, and it may require the same effort on the man's part to do good to a few people only as to benefit a considerable number. To ensure that in future, when we have found our way to Christ, our karmic account will be balanced—inserted in the cosmic order—in such a way that the settlement of it will benefit as many people as possible—that will be the concern of Him who in our time is becoming Lord of Karma—it will be the concern of the Christ.

This taking over by Christ of the judging of a man's deeds is a result of His direct intervention in human destiny. This intervention is not in a physical body, but on behalf of those men on earth who will increasingly acquire the capacity of perceiving Him. There will be people, for instance, who, while carrying out some deed, suddenly become aware—there will be more and more cases of this from now on, during the next 3,000 years—of an urge to refrain from what they are doing, because of a remarkable vision. They will perceive in a dreamlike way what appears to be an action of their own; yet they will not be able to remember having done it.

Those who are not prepared for such a thing to happen in the course of their evolution will look upon it merely as imagination run wild or as a pathological condition of the soul. Those, however, who are sufficiently prepared through the new revelation coming in our time to mankind through spiritual science—through, that is, this third revelation during the latest cycle of mankind—will realise that all this points to the growing of new human faculties enabling men to see into the spiritual world. They will also realise that this picture appearing to their soul is a forewarning of the karmic deed that must be brought about—either in this life on earth or in a later one—to compensate for what they have done.

In short, people will gradually achieve, through their own efforts, the faculty for perceiving in a vision the karmic adjustment, the compensating deed, which must come about in future. From this fact it can be seen that in our time, too, we should say, as did John the Baptist by the Jordan: Change your state of soul, for the time is coming when new faculties will awake in men.

But this form of karmic perception will arise in such a way that here and there the figure of the etheric Christ will be directly visible to some individual—the actual Christ as He is living in the astral world—not in a physical body, but as for the newly awakened faculties of men He will manifest on earth; as counselor and protector of those who need advice, help or solace in the loneliness of their lives.

The time is coming when human beings, when they feel depressed and miserable, for one or other reason, will increasingly find the help of their fellows less important and valuable. This is because the force of individuality, of individual life, will count for more and more, while the power of one man to work helpfully upon the soul of another, which held good in the past, will tend constantly to diminish. In its stead the great Counselor will appear, in etheric form.

The best advice we can be given for the future is, therefore, to make our souls strong and full of energy, so that with increased strength, the further we advance into the future, whether in this incarnation—and certainly this applies to the young people of to-day—or in the next, we may realise that newly-awakened faculties give us knowledge of the great Counselor who is becoming at the same time the judge of a man's karma; knowledge, that is, of Christ in His new form. For those people who have already prepared themselves here for the Christ-event of the 20th century, it will make no difference whether they are in the physical body, when this event becomes a widespread experience, or have passed through the gate of death. Those who have passed through will still have the right understanding of the Christ-event and the right connection with it, but not those who have thoughtlessly passed by this third great forewarning to mankind given through Spiritual Science. For the Christ-event must be prepared for here on earth in the physical body. Those who go through the gate of death without giving even a glance into Spiritual Science during their present incarnation, will have to wait until their next before gaining a right understanding of the Christ-event. It is an actual fact that those who on the physical plane have never heard of the Christ-event are unable to came to an understanding of it between death and rebirth. They, too, must wait until they can prepare for it on their return to the physical plane. When, therefore, their present incarnation ends at death, these men in their essential being remain unconcerned in face of the mighty event referred to—the taking over of the judgeship by Christ and the possibility of His intervening, in an etheric body, directly from the astral world in the evolution of mankind, and His becoming visible in various places.

It is characteristic of human evolution, however, that old attributes of men, not closely connected with spiritual evolution, gradually lose significance. When we consider human evolution since the Atlantean catastrophe we can say: Among the great differentiations prepared during the Atlantean Age, present-day men have become accustomed to those of race. We can still speak, in a certain sense, of an old Indian race, of an old Persian race, of an Egyptian or a Graeco-Latin one, and even of something in our own time corresponding to a fifth race. But the concept of race in relation to human evolution is ceasing to have a right meaning. Something that held good in earlier times will no longer do so in the sixth culture-epoch which is to follow our own—namely, that it is essential to have some spatial centre from which to spread the culture of the epoch. The important thing is the spreading of Spiritual Science among men; without distinction of race, nation, or family. In the sixth culture-epoch those who have accepted Spiritual Science will come out of every race, and will found, throughout the earth, a new culture no longer based on the concept of race—that concept will have lost its significance. In short, what is important in the world of Maya, the external world of space, vanishes away; we must learn to recognise this in the future course of our spiritual-scientific movement.

At the beginning this was not understated. Therefore we see how, when we read Olcott's book, The Buddhist Catechism, which once did good service, we have the impression that races always go on like so many wheels. But for the coming time such concepts are losing their significance. Everything subject to limitations of space will lose significance. Hence anyone who thoroughly understands the meaning of human evolution understands also that the coming appearance of Christ during the next 3,000 years does not entail Christ being restricted to a body bound by space, nor limited to a certain territory. Neither will His appearance be limited by an inability to appear in more than one place at a time. His help will be forthcoming at the same moment here, there, and everywhere. And as a spiritual being is not subject to the laws of space, anyone who can be helped by Christ's direct presence is able to receive that help at one end of the earth just as well as another person at the opposite end. Only those unwilling to recognise the progress of mankind towards spirituality, and what gradually transforms all the most important events into the spiritual—only these persons can declare that what is implied by the Christ-being is limited to a physical body.

We have now described the facts concerning the third revelation and how this revelation is already in process of throwing new light on the Gospels. The Gospels are the language, and, in relation to them, Anthroposophy is the thought-content. As language is related to a child's full consciousness, so are the Gospels related to the new revelation that comes directly from the spiritual world—related, in effect, to what Spiritual Science is to become for mankind. We must be aware that we have in fact a certain task to fulfil, a task of understanding, when we come—first out of the soul's unconscious depths, and then ever more clearly—to discern our connection with Anthroposophy.

We must look upon it, in a sense, as a mark of distinction bestowed by the World-Spirit, as a sign of grace on the part of the creative, guiding Spirit of the world, when to-day our heart urges us towards this new announcement which is added, as a third revelation, to those proclaimed from Sinai and then from the Jordan. To learn to know man in his entire being is the task given in this new announcement—to perceive ever more deeply that what we are principally conscious of is sheathed around by other members of man's being, which are nevertheless important for his life as a whole.

It is necessary for our friends to learn about these matters from the most various points of view. To-day we will begin by first saying a few words about man's inner being. You know that if we start from the actual centre of his being, from his ego, we come next to the sheath to which we give the more or less abstract name of astral body. Further out we find the so-called etheric body, and still further outside, the physical body. From the point of view of real life we can speak about the human sheaths in another way, and to-day we will take directly from life what can, it is true, be learnt only from occult conceptions, but can be understood through unprejudiced observation.

Many of those who, on account of their so-called scientific world-conception, have become arrogant and overbearing, now say: “The ages of faith are long past; they were fit for mankind in their stage of childhood but men heave now progressed to knowledge. To-day people must have knowledge of everything and should no longer merely believe.” Now that may sound all very well, but it does not rest on genuine understanding. We must ask more questions about such matters than merely whether in the present course of human evolution knowledge has been gained through ordinary science. These other questions must be put: Does faith, as such, mean anything for mankind? May it not be part of a man's very nature to believe?

Naturally, it might be quite possible that people should want, for some reason, to dispense with faith, to throw it over. But just as a man is allowed for a time to play fast and loose with his health without any obvious harm, it might very well be—and is actually so—that people come to look upon faith merely as a cherished gift to their fathers in the past, which is just as if for a time they were recklessly to abuse their health, thereby using up the forces they once possessed. When a man looks upon faith in that way, however, he is still—where the life-forces of his soul are concerned—living on the old gift of faith handed down to him through tradition. It is not for man to decide whether to lay aside faith or not; faith is a question of life-giving forces in his soul. The important point is not whether we believe or not, but that the forces expressed in the word ‘faith’ are necessary to the soul. For the soul incapable of faith become withered, dried-up as the desert.

There were once men who, without any knowledge of natural science, were much cleverer than those to-day with a scientific world-conception. They did not say what people imagine they would have said: “I believe what I do not know.” They said: “I believe what I know for certain.” Knowledge is the only foundation of faith. We should know in order to take increasing possession of those forces which are forces of faith in the human soul. In our soul we must have what enables us to look towards a super-sensible world, makes it possible for us to turn all our thoughts and conceptions in that direction.

If we do not possess forces such as are expressed in the word ‘faith’, something in us goes to waste; we wither as do the leaves in autumn. For a while this may not seem to matter—then things begin to go wrong. Were men in reality to lose all faith, they would soon see what it means for evolution. By losing the forces of faith they would be incapacitated for finding their way about in life; their very existence would be undermined by fear, care, and anxiety. To put it briefly, it is through the forces of faith alone that we can receive the life which should well up to invigorate the soul. This is because, imperceptible at first for ordinary consciousness, there lies in the hidden depths of our being something in which our true ego is embedded. This something, which immediately makes itself felt if we fail to bring it fresh life, is the human sheath where the forces of faith are active. We may term it the faith-soul, or—as I prefer—the faith-body. It has hitherto been given the more abstract name of astral body. The most important forces of the astral body are those of faith, so the term astral body and the term faith-body are equally justified.

A second force that is also to be found in the hidden depths of a man's being is the force expressed by the word ‘love’. Love is not only something linking men together; it is also needed by them as individuals. When a man is incapable of developing the force of love he, too, becomes dried-up and withered in his inner being. We have merely to picture to ourselves someone who is actually so great an egoist that he is unable to love. Even where the case is less extreme, it is sad to see people who find it difficult to love, who pass through an incarnation without the living warmth that love alone can generate—love for, at any rate, something on earth.

Such persons are a distressing sight, as in their dull, prosaic way, they go through the world. For love is a living force that stimulates something deep in our being, keeping it awake and alive—an even deeper force than faith. And just as we are cradled in a body of faith, which from another aspect can be called the astral body, so are we cradled also in a body of love, or, as in Spiritual Science we called it, the etheric body, the body of life-forces. For the chief forces working in us from the etheric body, out of the depths of our being, are those expressed in a man's capacity for loving at every stage of his existence. If a man could completely empty his being of the force of love—but that indeed is impossible for the greatest egoist, thanks be to God, for even in egoistical striving there is still some element of love. Take this case, for example: whoever is unable to love anything else can often begin, if he is sufficiently avaricious, by loving money, at least substituting for charitable love another love—albeit one arising from egoism. For were there no love at all in a man, the sheath which should be sustained by love-forces would shrivel, and the man, empty of love, would actually perish; he would really meet with physical death.

This shriveling of the forces of love can also be called a shriveling of the forces belonging to the etheric body; for the etheric body is the same as the body of love. Thus at the very centre of a man's being we have his essential kernel, the ego, surrounded by its sheaths; first the body of faith, and then round it the body of love.

If we go further, we come to another set of forces we all need in life, and if we do not, or cannot, have them at all—well, that is very distinctly to be seen in a man's external nature. For the forces we need emphatically as life-giving forces are those of hope, of confidence in the future. As far as the physical world is concerned, people cannot take a single step in life without hope. They certainly make strange excuses, sometimes, if they are unwilling to acknowledge that human beings need to know something of what happens between death and rebirth. They say: “Why do we need to know that, when we don't know what will happen to us here from one day to another? So why are we supposed to know what takes place between death and a new birth?” But do we actually know nothing about the following day? We may have no knowledge of what is important for the details of our super-sensible life, or, to speak more bluntly, whether or not we shall be physically alive. We do, however, know one thing—that if we are physically alive the next day there will be morning, midday, evening, just as there are to-day. If to-day as a carpenter I have made a table, it will still be there tomorrow; if I am a shoemaker, someone will be able to put on tomorrow what I have made to-day; and if I have sown seeds I know that next year they will come up. We know about the future just as much as we need to know. Life would be impossible in the physical world were not future events to be preceded by hope in this rhythmical way. Would anyone make a table to-day without being sure it would not be destroyed in the night; would anyone sow seeds if he had no idea what would become of them?

It is precisely in physical life that we need hope, for everything is upheld by hope and without it nothing can be done. The forces of hope, therefore, are connected with our last sheath as human beings, with our physical body. What the forces of faith are for our astral body, and the love-forces for the etheric, the forces of hope are for the physical body. Thus a man who is unable to hope, a man always despondent about what he supposes the future may bring, will go through the world with this clearly visible in his physical appearance. Nothing makes for deep wrinkles, those deadening forces in the physical body, sooner than lack of hope.

The inmost kernel of our being may be said to be sheathed in our faith-body or astral body, in our body of love or etheric body, and in our hope-body or physical body; and we comprehend the true significance of our physical body only when we bear in mind that, in reality, it is not sustained by external physical forces of attraction and repulsion—that is a materialistic idea—but has in it what, according to our concepts, we know as forces of hope. Our physical body is built up by hope, not by forces of attraction and repulsion. This very point can show that the new spiritual-scientific revelation gives us the truth.

What then does Spiritual Science give us? By revealing the all-embracing laws of karma and reincarnation, it gives us something which permeates us with spiritual hope, just as does our awareness on the physical plane that the sun will rise tomorrow and that seeds will eventually grow into plants. It shows, if we understand karma, that our physical body, which will perish into dust when we have gone through the gate of death, can through the forces permeating us with hope be re-built for a new life. Spiritual Science fills men with the strongest forces of hope. Were this Spiritual Science, this new revelation for the present time, to be rejected, men naturally would return to earth in future all the same, for life on earth would not cease on account of people's ignorance of its laws. Human beings would incarnate again; but there would be something very strange about these incarnations. Men would gradually become a race with bodies wrinkled and shriveled all over, earthly bodies which would finally be so crippled that people would be entirely incapacitated. To put it briefly, in future incarnations a condition of dying away, of withering up, would assail mankind if their consciousness, and from there the hidden depths of their being right down into the physical body, were not given fresh life through the power of hope.

This power of hope arises through the certainty of knowledge gained from the laws of karma and reincarnation. Already there is a tendency in human beings to produce withering bodies, which in future would become increasingly rickety even in the very bones. Marrow will be brought to the bones, forces of life to the nerves, by this new revelation, whose value will not reside merely in theories but in its life-giving forces—above all in those of hope.

Faith, love, hope, constitute three stages in the essential being of man; they are necessary for health and for life as a whole, for without them we cannot exist. Just as work cannot be done in a dark room until light is obtained, it is equally impossible for a human being to carry on in his fourfold nature if his three sheaths are not permeated, warmed through, and strengthened by faith, love, and hope. For faith, love, hope are the basic forces in our astral body, our etheric body, and our physical body. And from this one instance you can judge how the new revelation makes its entry into the world, permeating the old language with thought-content. Are not these three wonderful words urged upon us in the Gospel revelation, these words of wisdom that ring through the ages—faith, love, hope? But little has been understood of their whole connection with human life, so little that only in certain places has their right sequence been observed.

It is true that faith, love, hope, are sometimes put in this correct order; but the significance of the words is so little appreciated that we often hear faith, hope, love, which is incorrect; for you cannot say astral body, physical body, etheric body, if you would give them their right sequence. That would be putting things higgledy-piggledy, as a child will sometimes do before it understands the thought-content of what is said. It is the same with everything relating to the second revelation. It is permeated throughout with thought; and we have striven to permeate with thought our explanation of the Gospels. For what have they meant for people up to now? They have been something with which to fortify mankind and to fill them with great and powerful perceptions, something to inspire men to enter into the depth of heart and feeling in the Mystery of Golgotha. But now consider the simple fact that people have only just begun to reflect upon the Gospels, and in doing so they have straightway found contradictions upon which Spiritual Science alone can help to throw light. Thus it is only now that they are beginning to let their souls be worked on by the thought-content of what the Gospels give them in language of the super-sensible worlds. In this connection we have pointed out what is so essential and of such consequence for our age: the new appearance of the Christ in an etheric body, for his appearance in a physical body is ruled out by the whole character of our times.

Hence we have indicated that the Christ, in contradistinction as it were to the suffering Christ on Golgotha, is appearing now as Christ triumphant, Christ the Lord of Karma. This has been fore-shadowed by those who have painted Him as the Christ of the Last Judgment. Whether painted or described in words, something is represented which at the appointed time will come to pass.

In truth, this begins in the 20th century and will hold good until the end of the earth. It is in our 20th century that this judgment, this ordering of Karma, begins, and we have seen how infinitely important it is for our age that this revelation should come to men in such a way that even concepts such as faith, love, hope, can be given their true valuation for the first time.

John the Baptist said: Change your mood of soul, the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. That is, take to yourselves the human ego that need no longer abstain from approaching the spiritual world—a saying which points clearly to what is here in question, namely, that with the event of Palestine the time came for the super-sensible to pour light into the ego of man, so that into his ego the heavens are able to descend. Previously, the ego could come to men only by sinking into their unconscious. But those who interpret everything materialistically say: The Christ, reckoning with the weaknesses, errors and prejudices of His contemporaries, even foretold, like the credulous people of His time, that the millennium would be realised or that a great catastrophe would fall upon the earth. Neither of these events, however, came about. There was indeed a catastrophe, but perceptible only to the spirit. The credulous and superstitious, who believe Christ to have foretold how His actual coming would be from the clouds, interpreted His meaning in a materialistic way.

To-day, also, there are people who thus interpret what is to be grasped only in spirit, and when nothing happens in a material sense they judge the matter in just the same way as was done in the case of the millennium. How many indeed we find to-day who, speaking almost pityingly of those events, say that Christ was influenced by the beliefs of His time and looked for the impending approach to earth of the Kingdom of Heaven. That was a weakness on Christ's part, they say, and then it was seen—and remarked upon even by distinguished theologians—that the Kingdom of Heaven has not come down on earth.

It may be that men will meet our new revelation, too, in such a way that after a time, when the enhancement of men's faculties is in full swing, they will say, “Well, nothing has come of all these predictions of yours”, not realising that they just cannot see what is there. Thus do events repeat themselves. Spiritual Science is meant to gather together a large number of people, until fulfilment comes for what has been said by those with a right knowledge of how during this century the new revelation and the new super-sensible facts are appearing in human evolution. They will then continue their course in the same way, becoming ever more significant throughout the next 3,000 years, until important new weighty facts are once more revealed to mankind.

When you consider the fundamental basis of our anthroposophically oriented science of the spirit in comparison with other so-called world views—and there are many now appearing—you will note especially one characteristic. This is the fact that spiritual science as a view of the world and of life endeavors actually to apply to the whole of human life, to everything that the human being encounters in life, what it seeks to establish through research in the spiritual worlds. Whoever has a feeling for what is essential in the urgent problems and impelling forces of our present time will probably be able to achieve for himself an understanding of the fact that the tremendous need of the present and of the immediate future is to be found just here, that is, in connecting directly with life itself the comprehensive ideas constituting world conceptions. Among the causes that have brought about the present catastrophic situation of humanity, not the least significant is the fact that the world views held by human beings, whether rooted in religion, science, or aesthetics, have all gradually lost their connection with life in the course of time. There has existed a tendency—we might call it a perverse tendency—to separate the so-called daily practical life, in the most comprehensive sense of the word, from what men seek in their effort to satisfy their needs in the realm of religion and world conceptions. Just reflect how life during the last centuries has gradually taken on such form that people have carried on their external activities, were practical men as the saying goes, and conducted their lives according to practical principles, and then applied half an hour each day more or less, or no time at all, or Sunday, to the satisfaction of those needs of the heart and soul that impel them to seek for a connection with the divine spiritual element permeating the world.

All this will be utterly changed if an anthroposophically oriented science of the spirit can take possession of the minds and hearts of men. This will take on such a character that thoughts will stream forth from this world view that will be applicable to life itself in all its aspects, thus enabling us to judge life with true insight. The principle of the Sunday vesper sermon shall by no means be that of our anthroposophically directed world conception, but the whole of life shall be permeated on all days of the week and on Sunday forenoon as well with what can be given to humanity by the anthroposophical comprehension of the world. Because such has not been the case up to the present time, the world has gradually drifted into chaos. People have neglected to direct their attention to what has really been happening in their immediate vicinity and they are now surprised because the results of this oversight are clearly manifest. They will be still more surprised in the future as these results become more clearly manifest.

Under no circumstances should we fail to pay attention today to what is spreading among people over the entire earth. With the powers of judgment that enable us to see into the great impulses at work in world events, we must endeavor to find our way into what confronts human hearts and minds today, in part in such an enigmatic way; that is, into what is threatening to transform the social structure into a chaos. It will not do to continue further in such a way that we decide simply to let come what may without endeavoring to penetrate into things with a sound power of judgment.

It is necessary to abandon the basic maxim that says,“This is an everyday matter, this is secular, it belongs to the external life; we turn our backs on this and direct our attention toward the spiritual and divine.” This must come to an end. The time must begin in which even the most trivial everyday matter must be brought into connection with the spiritual and divine; that is, the time in which what is derived from the spiritual life shall no longer be viewed only from the most extremely abstract point of view.

In the course of these reflections, I have stated that a favorable change in the social movement cannot come about in any other way than through an increase in the interest that a person feels in another human being. A social structure is something men create in company with one another. Its ills cannot be healed unless the person knows that he is really within this order, unless he is within the social structure in his attitude of mind. The unsound element in the present epoch, which has brought about this catastrophe, lies in the neglect of people to acquire any sort of attitude of mind toward the way in which a person belongs to a social community. The interest that binds us as human beings to other human beings has come to an end in spite of the belief frequently manifested by people that they do have such an interest. Most certainly the past theosophical maxim, “I love all human beings; I have an interest in all human beings,” is not effective; it is abstract; it does not lay hold upon real life and laying hold upon real life is what really matters. This must be understood in a deeper sense. A lack of understanding of real life has been the characteristic of recent centuries. Now, these recent centuries have brought about the present situation without a realization of this process on the pap of humanity, and they will cause future situations. In the historic life of humanity, conditions cannot be what they should be unless people accompany what is happening, what occurs among them in the social life, with their thinking. But the events that have occurred over a relatively long time cannot be accompanied thus unless we acquire a sound sense for certain phenomena.

To an objective observer it has been all too obvious that administrations and governments have been conducted and are being conducted according to fundamental principles that were really out of date centuries ago, whereas life has naturally moved forward during recent centuries. An essential element that has entered into the evolution of humanity is modern industrialism, which has created the whole modern proletariat. But this genesis of the modern proletariat has not been accompanied by thinking. The leading classes have continued to live in the old manner, administering their positions of leadership as they have been accustomed to do for centuries. Without their doing anything about it, without their having even accompanied the process of world history with their thinking, the modern proletariat has evolved out of the existing facts, actual occurrences, and the rise of modern industrialism. This began essentially with the invention of the mechanical loom and spinning machine in the eighteenth century. Thus the destiny of world history for the present and the immediate future depends upon what is going on in the world in the heads of the modern proletariat—what haunts them, you may say, like a specter. This proletariat is striving for power through majority control and it is to be considered in its actions just as we consider the results of natural events and elemental occurrences. It should not be looked upon as something to be criticized that may please or displease us. The proletariat must be judged in its actions somewhat as we judge an earthquake or a tidal wave of the sea, or anything else of the kind.

We are now seeing the preliminary stages of what takes its rise from the modern proletariat—or, better expressed, from the tendencies and feelings of the modern proletariat. Like the action of an advance guard we observe what is known to us in a certain aspect in Russian bolshevism. This Russian bolshevism as I have often declared, is not in harmony with the original disposition of the Russian people. It has been introduced from without. But this is not a matter of any consequence if we wish to face the facts since it actually exists within the regions that formerly constituted the Empire of the Czar. It has taken root there, and it must be observed like a phenomenon of nature that has the tendency to spread. In observing such a thing as Russian bolshevism it is most important of all to disregard secondary phenomena. We must pay attention to the matter of main importance. The fact that bolshevism had its beginning in 1917, and that it was accompanied by certain external phenomena, may have been determined by certain obvious causes. I have said to you that even the incompetence of Ludendorff and also various other things have not been free of responsibility for the actual outbreak of bolshevism. But all this must be eliminated if we wish to view things in a fruitful way, and we must pay attention to the active forces that are alive in this Russian bolshevism. We must simply ask ourselves as a mere matter of fact what the objective of Russian bolshevism is and how it is related to the whole evolution of humanity. Beyond question, it is not something ephemeral and transitory. Rather, it is a phenomenon of far-reaching consequences in world history. It is exceedingly important that we should examine the basic structure as visualized by Russian bolshevism in order to be able to reflect upon it in a certain way as it emerges from deeper impelling forces of the world.

If we consider the fundamental characteristics of Russian bolshevism, we must conclude that its first endeavor aims at the destruction of what we have characterized in the marxian sense as the bourgeoisie. It is a fundamental maxim, so to speak, to destroy, root and branch, as something harmful in the evolution of humanity according to their point of view, everything that has taken its rise in the evolution of history as the bourgeois class. Bolshevism is to arrive at this objective in various ways. First, it aims at the removal of all class distinctions. Bolshevism does not direct its efforts toward such factual removal of the distinctions into classes and ranks as I have presented them to you. Bolshevism itself thinks in a wholly bourgeois manner, and what I have introduced to you is not conceived in a bourgeois but a human manner. Bolshevism intends to overcome the differentiation among classes and ranks in its own way. It says to itself that the contemporary states are constructed on the basis of the bourgeois conception of life, so the forms of the contemporary states must disappear. Everything that is a subordinate outgrowth of the bourgeois social class in the contemporary states such as the police system, the military system, the system of justice must disappear. In other words, what has been created by the bourgeoisie for its security and its administration of justice must disappear with the bourgeois class. The whole administration and organization of the social structure must pass into the hands of the proletariat. Through this process the state, as it has existed until now, will die away and the proletariat will administer the whole human structure, the whole community life of society.

This cannot be achieved by means of the old system of arrangements that the bourgeois class had created for itself. It cannot be achieved by the election of a Reichstag or any other sort of body of representatives of the people, chosen on the basis of any sort of suffrage, as this has been done under the conception of life characteristic of the bourgeois class.

If such representative bodies continued to be elected, only the bourgeois class would perpetuate itself in these bodies. In other words, such representative bodies, under whatever system of suffrage chosen, would not render possible the attainment of the goals that are there striven for. Therefore, the matter of importance is that such measures shall now really be applied as have their origin in the proletariat itself, such as cannot come to birth in any middle class head, since a middle class head inevitably conceives only such regulations as must be abolished. Nothing whatever can be expected, therefore, from any kind of national or state assembly, but something is to be expected solely from a dictatorship of the proletariat. This means that the entire social structure must be handed over to a dictatorship of the proletariat. Only the proletariat will have the inclination actually to eliminate the bourgeois class from the world because, should persons of the bourgeois class be members of representative bodies, they would have no inclination to eliminate themselves from the world. That is what is really necessary, that the whole bourgeois class shall be deprived of its rights. Thus, the only persons who can exercise an influence upon the social structure must be those who belong to the proletariat in the true sense, that is, only those who perform labor, who are useful to the community.

Consequently, according to this proletariat world conception, a person who causes others to perform any sort of service for him, and remunerates them for this, cannot have the right to vote. That is, whoever employs persons, engages persons to serve him and remunerates them for their service, has no right to participate in any way in the social structure, and has no right, therefore, to a vote. Neither does anyone possess the right to vote who lives on income from his property or who profits from income. Nor does a person who is engaged in trade have the right to vote or one who is a distributor and does not perform any practical labor. In other words, all who live by means of income, who employ other persons and remunerate them, who are engaged in trade or are middle men, are excluded from being representatives of the government when the dictatorship of the proletariat takes control. During the continuance of this dictatorship of the proletariat, there is no general freedom of speech, no freedom of assembly, no freedom to organize, but only those who are engaged in actual labor can hold meetings or form organizations. All others are deprived of freedom of speech, the right to assembly, and the right to organize societies or unions. Likewise, only those enjoy the freedom of the press who perform practical labor. The press of the bourgeois class is suppressed, and not tolerated.

These are, in a general way, the guiding principles, we may say, during the transitional stage. After these principles have been dominant for a certain length of time the proletariat world conception expects from their operation that only men engaged in practical labor will exist. Only the proletariat will continue to exist. The bourgeois class will have been exterminated.

To these things, which have primary importance for the transitional period, will then be added those that have permanent significance. To these belongs, for example, the universal obligation to work. Every person is under obligation to produce by labor something useful to the community.

A decisive principle of a permanent character is the termination of the right to private ownership of real estate. Larger estates are handed over to agricultural communes. According to this proletariat world view, there will exist in future no private ownership of land. Industrial establishments, establishments of entrepreneurs are confiscated and passed under the control of society, being administered by the centralized administration of the workers, at the head of which is the Supreme Soviet for the national economy. This is simply bolshevism in Russia. Ranks are taken over by the state. A universal system of bookkeeping is instituted, embracing the entire community and comprising all production. All foreign trade of this single communal entity is made communal, that is, the establishments are taken over by the state.
These are, in a general way, the fundamental principles constituting the ideal of Trotsky and Lenin, and you will see clearly in them the cardinal points of what is willed by the modern proletariat.

It does not suffice, of course, to be informed each day by the newspapers that a certain number of bloody deeds have been done by bolshevism. If we compare the bloody deeds done by bolshevism with the immense number of those done by reason of this war, the deeds of bolshevism obviously become an insignificant affair. The really important thing is to see what has been hitherto overlooked and neglected in order that the evolution of humanity may in the future be followed with our thinking. It is really necessary that we fix our attention, first in our hearts and then with our minds, upon these things that are so intimately connected with the progressive evolution of humanity. It is precisely the mission of the science of the spirit to fix our attention upon these things with our minds and hearts. The time must come to an end in which lazy pastors and priests preach to the people from the pulpit every Sunday theoretical stuff having no connection with life for the so-called warming of their souls. On the contrary, a condition must begin in which everyone who desires to participate in spiritual life shall be in duty bound to look into life, to establish an immediate connection with life. No small share in the responsibility for the misfortune of the present time rests upon the fact that those who have been custodians of the religious feelings of humanity for a long time past have preached to people from their pulpits such things as actually have no relationship whatever with life. They have directed discourses for the sole purpose of providing the people with insipid stuff for their hearts and souls that affected them in a pleasant way but never grasped life. It is for this reason that life has remained without spirit and has finally fallen into chaos. You may seek for much of the responsibility, for which recompense is required at present, precisely in the stupid discourses of those who have been the custodians of the religious feelings of people and who have had no relationship with life. What have they achieved of all that must take place in the epoch during which a whole new humanity in the form of the proletariat has evolved? What have these people achieved who have proclaimed useless stuff from their pulpits, such stuff that it has been desired by people only because they wished to delude themselves with all sorts of illusions regarding the realities of life? This is a serious time and things must be viewed in a serious light.

What has been said regarding the necessity for individuals to acquire an interest in one another must not be regarded only in a manner harmonizing with the mood presented in the Sunday vesper sermon. It must be considered according to the profound indication it gives in regard to the social structure of the present age.

Consider a concrete example. How many people there are today who have an abstract and confused conception of their own personal lives! If they ask themselves, for example, “What do I live on?”—for the most part, they do not do this, but if they did it once, they would say to themselves, “Why, on my money.” Among those who say to themselves, “I live on my money,” there are many who have inherited this money from their parents. They suppose they live on their money, inherited from their fathers, but we cannot live on money. Money is not something on which we can live. Here it is necessary at last to begin to reflect. This question is intimately connected with the real interest that one individual has in another. Anyone who thinks he lives on the money he has inherited, for example, or has acquired in any way whatever except by receiving money for work, as is the custom today—whoever lives in this way and supposes that he can live on money has no interest in his fellow men because no one can live on money. We must eat, and what we eat has been produced by a human being. We must have clothing. What we wear must be made through the labor of people. In order that I may put on a coat or a pair of trousers, human beings must expend their strength in labor for hours. They work for me. It is on this labor that I live, not on my money. My money has no value other than that of giving me the power to make use of the labor of others. Under the social conditions of the present time, we do not begin to have an interest in our fellow men until we answer that question in the proper way, until we hold the picture in our minds of a certain number of persons working for a certain number of hours in order that I may live within the social structure. It is of no importance to give ourselves a comfortable feeling by saying, “I love people.” No one loves people if he supposes that he is living on his money and does not in the least conceive how people work for him in order to produce even the minimum necessary for his life.

But the thought that a certain number of persons labor in order that we may possess the minimum necessities of life is inseparable from another. It is the thought that we must recompense society, not with money but with work in exchange for the work that has been done for us. We feel an interest in our fellow men only when we are led to feel obligated to recompense in some form of labor the amount of labor that has been performed for us. To give our money to our fellow men only signifies that we are able to hold our fellow men on a leash as bound slaves and that we can compel them to labor for us.

Permit me to ask whether you cannot answer out of your experience the question how many men realize that money is only a claim upon human strength employed in labor, that money is only a means for gaining power. How many persons really see clearly that they could not even exist in this physical world but for the labor of other persons upon which they depend for what they demand for their lives? The feeling of obligation to the society in which we live is the beginning of the interest that is required for a sound social order.

It is necessary to reflect about these things, otherwise we ascend in an unwholesome way into spiritual abstractions and do not rise in a wholesome way from physical reality to spiritual reality. The lack of interest in the social structure has characterized precisely these last centuries. During recent centuries, men have gradually formed the habit of developing a real interest in the matter of social impulses only with regard to their own respected persons. In greater or lesser degree everything has borne in a roundabout way only upon one's personality. A wholesome social life is possible only when interest in one's own respected personality is broadened into a genuine social interest. In this connection the bourgeoisie may well ask themselves what they have neglected.

Just consider the following fact. There is such a thing as a spiritual culture. There are cultural objects. To select one example, there are works of art. Now, ask yourselves to how many people these works of art are accessible. Or, rather ask yourselves to how many persons these works of art are utterly inaccessible. For how many persons do these works of art actually not exist. But just calculate how many persons must labor in order that these works of art may exist. One or another work of art is in Rome. One or another bourgeois can travel to Rome. Just add up the total of how much labor must be performed by creative workers, etc., etc.,—these etceteras will never come to an end—in order that this bourgeois, when he travels to Rome, may see something that is there for him because he is a bourgeois, but is not there for all those persons who are now beginning to give expression to their proletariat conception of life. This very habit has taken form among the bourgeois of looking upon enjoyment as something self-evident. But enjoyment should really never be accepted without repaying its equivalent to the whole of society. It is not because of any element in the natural or spiritual order that some part of society should be deprived. Time and space are only artificial hindrances. The fact that the Sistine Madonna remains forever in Dresden, and can be seen only by those persons who are able to go to Dresden, is only a by-product of the bourgeois world conception. The Sistine Madonna is movable, and can be taken to all parts of the world. This is only one example, but the necessary steps can be taken to make sure that whatever is enjoyed by one may also be enjoyed by others.

Although I have given only one example, I always choose them to exemplify and clarify everything else. We need only to strike such a note, as you see, in order to touch upon many matters that people have really not thought of at all, but have simply taken as something self-evident. Even within our own circle, where this could so easily be understood, people do not always reflect that everything we receive obligates us to return an equivalent to society and not simply enjoy.

Now, from all that I have presented to you as examples, which could be multiplied not only a hundredfold but a thousandfold, this question will be obvious to you. “How can the situation be otherwise if money is really only a means for acquiring power?” This is already answered in that fundamental social principle I introduced last week because that is a peculiarity of what I introduced to you as a sort of social science taken from the spiritual world. It is just as certain as mathematics. In connection with the things I have presented to you, there is no question of anyone's looking into practical life and saying, “Now then, we must first investigate whether things really are so.” No; what I introduced to you as a social science derived from spiritual science is much like the theorem of Pythagoras. If you consider Pythagoras's theorem, if you know that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides of a right angle triangle, it is impossible that anything should exist within the world of experience to contradict this. On the contrary, you must apply this fundamental principle everywhere. So it is with the fundamental principle I introduced to you as underlying social science and social life. Everything that a person acquires in such a way that it is received in exchange for his work within the social system has an unwholesome effect. A wholesome condition results within the social system only when the human being has to support his life, not by his own work, but from other sources within society. This seemingly contradicts what I have just said, but only seemingly. What will render work valuable will be the fact that it will no longer be remunerated.

The goal toward which we must work—of course, in a rational and not a bolshevistic way—must be that of separating work from the provision of the means of existence. I have recently explained this. When no one is any longer recompensed for his work, then money will lose its value as a means for acquiring power over work. There is no other means for overcoming the misuse that has been perpetuated with mere money than by forming the social structure in such a way that no one be recompensed for his work, and that the provision of the means of existence shall be achieved from an entirely different source. It will then naturally be impossible to use money for the purpose of compelling anyone to work.

Most of the questions that now arise appear in such a form that they are confusedly understood. If they are to be lifted into a clear light, this can happen only by means of spiritual science. Money must never in future be the equivalent for human labor, but only for inanimate commodities. Only inanimate commodities will be acquired in future by means of money, not human labor.

This is of the utmost importance. Now, just consider the fact that in the proletariat world conception the idea that labor is a commodity stares us in the face in all sorts of forms. Indeed, the fact that labor in modern industrialism has become in the most conspicuous way a commodity is one of the fundamental principles of marxism, one of those fundamental principles by means of which Marx was most successful in winning followers among the proletariat. Here you see that a demand appears from an entirely different quarter and in a confused and chaotic fashion, that must, nevertheless, be fulfilled, but from an entirely different direction. This is characteristic of social demands of the present, that, to the extent that they appear instinctively, they are due to entirely justified and sound instincts. They arise, however, from a chaotic social structure. For this reason they are in a confused form that necessarily leads to confusion. So it is in many fields. It is necessary for this reason really to lay hold upon a spiritual-scientific view of the world because only this can result in true social healing.

Now, you will ask whether this will bring about a change. For example, if a person inherits his money, he will still continue to purchase commodities with the money he inherited, and the labor of other persons is surely concealed in these commodities. So nothing is changed, you will say. Certainly, if you think abstractly, nothing is changed. But, if you will look into the whole effect that comes about when the provision of the means of existence is separated from labor, you will form a different opinion. In the sphere of reality, the situation is not such that we simply draw abstract conclusions, but there things produce their actual results. If it actually comes about that the provision of the means of existence is separated from the performance of labor, inheritances will no longer exist. This will produce such a modification of the social structure that people will not come into possession of money in any other way than for the acquisition of commodities. When something is conceived as a reality, it has all sorts of effects. Among other things this separation of the provision of the means of existence from labor has one quite peculiar effect. Indeed, when we speak of realities, we cannot so express ourselves as to say, “But I do not see why this should be so.” You might just as well say, “But I do not see why morphine should cause sleep.” This also does not come to you as a conclusion out of a mere interrelationship of concepts. It becomes manifest only when you actually trace the effect.

There is something extremely unnatural today in the social order. This consists in the fact that money increases when a person simply possesses it. It is put in a bank and interest is paid on it. This is the most unnatural thing that could possibly exist. It is really utterly nonsensical. The person does nothing whatever. He simply banks the money, which he may not even have acquired by labor but may have inherited, and he receives interest on it. This is utter nonsense. But it will become a matter of necessity when the provision of the means of existence is separated from labor that money shall be used when it exists, when it is produced as the equivalent of commodities that exist. It must be used. It must be put into circulation and the actual effect will be that money does not increase but that it diminishes. If at the present time a person possesses a certain sum of money, he will have approximately twice that amount in fourteen years under a normal rate of interest, and he will have done nothing except merely to wait. If you think thus of the transformation of the social order, as this must occur under the influence of this one fundamental principle that I have presented to you, then money will not increase but will diminish. After a certain number of years, the bank notes I acquired before the beginning of those years will no longer have any value. They will have matured and become valueless.

In this way the trend will become natural in the social structure toward bringing about such conditions that mere money, which is nothing more than a note, an indication that a person possesses a certain power over the labor of human beings, will lose its value after a certain length of time if it has not been put into circulation. In other words, it will not increase, but will progressively diminish and, after fourteen years or perhaps a somewhat longer time, will reach the zero point. If you are millionaires today, you will not be double millionaires after fourteen years but you will be broke unless you have earned something additional in the meantime.

Of course, I am aware that people wriggle as if they had been bitten by fleas when this is mentioned at the present time—if you will permit such a comparison. I know this, and I would not have employed this comparison but for the extraordinary movements I observed in the audience!

Since, however, the situation is such that this matter causes people to feel as if fleas had bitten them, we have bolshevism. Just search for the true causes and there they are. You will never be able to free the world of what is coming to the surface unless you determine really to penetrate into the truth.

The fact that the truth is unpleasant makes no difference. An essential part of the education of humanity today and in the immediate future will consist in putting an end to the belief that truths can be controlled according to subjective estimates, subjective sympathies and antipathies. But spiritual science, if it is grasped with a sound human intelligence, can solve this problem of money because it can also be considered spiritually.

Nothing is accomplished by that vague way of talking I have heard even among anthroposophists who hold money in their hands and say, “This is Ahriman.” At present money signifies an equivalent for commodities and labor. It constitutes a claim upon something that actually occurs. If we pass over from mere abstractions to realities, if we reflect, then, when a person has ten one hundred mark notes and pays these to someone, he causes the labor of a certain number of persons to pass as an equivalent from hand to hand. Because these notes possess the power to cause a certain number of persons to work, he then actually stands within life with all its branches and impulses. He will no longer continue to be satisfied with the mere abstraction, the unthinking abstraction, of the payment of money, but he will ask himself, “What is the significance of the fact that I cause ten one hundred mark notes to pass from hand to hand, thus bringing it about that a certain number of persons endowed with head, heart and mind must perform labor? What is the significance of that?”

The answer to such a question can be afforded, in the last analysis, only by a spiritual observation of the matter. Let us take the most extreme example. Suppose someone who has never put forth an effort in behalf of humanity has money. There are such cases. I will consider this extreme instance. Someone who has never put forth an effort in behalf of humanity has money. He buys something for himself with this money. Indeed, he is enabled to fashion for himself an altogether pleasant life by reason of the fact that he possesses this money, which is a claim upon human labor. Fine! This person is not necessarily a bad human being. He may even be a good man; indeed, he may be an industrious person. People frequently simply fail to see into the social structure. They do not possess an interest in their fellow men, that is, in the real social structure. People suppose that they love human beings when they buy something for themselves with their inherited money, for example, or when they even give it away. When it is given away, the only result is that we cause a certain number of persons to work for those to whom the money is given. It is simply a means for acquiring power. The fact that it is a claim upon labor makes it the means for acquiring power.

But this situation has simply come into existence and developed to this stage. This is a reflection of something else. It is a reflection of what I mentioned in the preceding lecture. I there called your attention to the fact that the Jehovah divinity has controlled the world for a certain length of time through the fact that he won a complete victory over the other Elohim, and that he can no longer save himself from the spirits thus aroused. He drove his companions, the other six Elohim, from the field. Because of this, what the human being experiences even in the embryo has acquired complete dominance in human consciousness. The six other forces, which are not experienced by man in the embryo, have thereby been rendered inactive. They have thereby come under the influence of lower spiritual entities. In the fifth decade of the last century, as I have said, Jehovah could no longer save himself. Since the Jehovah wisdom acquired in the embryonic state renders it possible to grasp the conception of providence only in external nature, crass atheistic natural science has invaded the world. The reflection of this, the fact that money simply passes from one person to another without any transfer of commodities, consists in the circulation of money apart from the circulation of commodities.

No matter with what energy a person may exert himself in any field, the ahrimanic power lives in what seems to be produced by money as money. You cannot inherit without having a certain amount of ahrimanic power transferred with the money. There is no other possibility of possessing money within the social structure in a wholesome way than by possessing it in a Christian way; that is, by acquiring money only by means of what one develops between birth and death. In other words, the way in which a person comes into possession of money must not be a reflection of what is related to Jehovah even though the fact that we are born, that we pass from the embryo into the external life, is something that pertains to him. The reflection of this, I say, is the fact that we inherit money. Those characteristics that we inherit with the blood are inherited through the laws of nature. Money that we inherit and do not earn would be a reflection of this.

The fact that Christian consciousness has not yet taken its place in the world, that the social structure is still brought about by means of the ancient Jehovah wisdom or its specter, the Roman conception of the state, has brought about everything that has led to one aspect of the present unfortunate situation.

I said that the matter must not be considered so abstractly when money produces money, but we must view it in its reality. Whenever money produces money it is something that occurs only on the physical plane, whereas what constitutes the human being is always connected with the spiritual world.

What are you doing, then, when you perform no labor but you have money that people must work to get? The human being then has to bring to market what constitutes his heavenly share and you give him only what is earthly. You pay him with the merely earthly, the purely ahrimanic. You see, this is the spiritual aspect of the matter. Wherever Ahriman is at work, only destruction can come about.

This, again, is an unpleasant truth. But it does not help at all when a person says to himself, “Now, really, I am otherwise a respectable individual and I am doing nothing wrong, therefore, when I use my income to pay for this or that.” The actual fact is that you give Ahriman in exchange for God. Of course, we are frequently compelled to do this within the present social structure, but we should not play the ostrich game and conceal this fact from ourselves. Rather should we face the truth because what the future is to bring depends upon our doing so. Much of what has broken in upon humanity with such calamitous results has occurred for the reason that people close their eyes and the eyes of their souls in the presence of the truth. They have fabricated for themselves abstract concepts of right and wrong, and have been unwilling to deal with the real and the concrete. In regard to this we shall speak further tomorrow, when we shall lift our discussion into spiritual heights.

We will soon depict the scene of the second part of Goethe's “Faust”, which precedes the final scene, which, as you know, has already been depicted. The scene begins with the holy anchorites:

Woods, they sway in,
rocks, they weigh on them,

Goethe calls it “Faust's Ascension” and the scene that now follows is usually called the “Entombment”. But we will begin where, in the broader sense, this entombment of Faust is depicted.

When one comes to the various parts of Goethe's “Faust”, one must repeatedly and repeatedly fall into a certain astonishment at the infinite depth that lies in the second part of Goethe's “Faust”, in particular, deep in that one is dealing with an objectivity in the representation of the spiritual world that can be justified by spiritual science. And it is remarkable that Goethe presented the spiritual world with such objectivity at a time when spiritual science as such did not yet exist. I do not need to dwell at length on the question that was once put to me when I gave a lecture many years ago on Goethe's “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”, and a theosophical authority of the old school asked me whether I thought that Goethe knew everything that was said from the spiritual science to justify the deeper secret of the poem of the green snake and the beautiful lily. I could only reply whether the person in question believed that the plant also knows exactly what the botanist makes about it in order to be able to grow in the right way according to the botanical laws. When one hears such a question, one is usually aware of how clever the questioner feels. But if one thinks such a question through to its conclusion, then one realizes how endlessly foolish people often are, who think of themselves as being so clever. So we need not concern ourselves further with the question of whether Goethe, for instance, also studied spiritual science somewhere in the way we can study it today, even if objections can very easily be made from a point of view that considers this question. We want to go straight to the matter itself.

We are presented with three types of figures in addition to those familiar to us from the rest of the Faust legend. We are presented with three types of figures that have to do with the period of time that elapses between the death of Faust and the ascent of his soul into the spiritual regions. The first type of figures presented to us are the lemurs; the second type of figures presented to us are the thick devils with short, straight horns, and the third are the scrawny devils with long, crooked horns; both types of devils are “of the old devil's grist and grain”.

Now we can ask: What spiritual instinct, what deeper wisdom, would lead us to present these three figures in the Entombment and before the Ascension of Faust? This “Entombment” is introduced in such a way that Faust has grown old in his evolution, and, as Goethe himself stated, has become a hundred years old. So, at the beginning of this scene, we are dealing with the old, hundred-year-old Faust, who is still chained to Mephistopheles, but in such a way that Faust can now believe that Mephistopheles has become his servant. Faust has made the decision to wrest a piece of land from the sea, to cultivate this piece of land, and thereby create the basis for an area that will be beneficial to humanity, where this humanity, part of humanity, can develop in peace and freedom. This land is, so to speak, because it was wrested from the sea by Faust's labor, Faust's creation. It is to be made complete by draining a swamp that is there through a ditch, so that the air will also be purified, so that the health of the people who are to develop in peace and freedom will not be endangered by the polluting vapors of the swamp. Faust now believes that Mephisto has become his overseer in this beneficial work and commands the host that is to perform the last work. Faust has already gone blind, as was shown in the previous scene. So he does not see what Mephistopheles is doing on the external physical plane, and it is understandable that he later confuses the words “digging” and “grave”. While Faust is of the opinion that a ditch should be dug to drain the swamp water into the sea in order to purify the air, Mephistopheles has the grave of Faust dug by his lemurs. As a centenarian, Faust thus still experiences the deception, becomes entangled in the web of lies of Mephistopheles, who has the grave dug and, through the similarity of names, deceives Faust into imagining that a ditch is being dug.

There are already many secrets in it. I do not want to get involved in these things today, perhaps it can be discussed another time. But I would prefer us to make ourselves clear about the nature of these three beings. Right at the beginning of the scene, which takes place in the forecourt of the palace that Faust has built for himself, Mephistopheles appears, as already mentioned, as the overseer of the workers, whom Faust believes he has assembled, while Mephistopheles calls his lemurs. Mephistopheles characterizes the lemurs not in a particular scenic remark, but in the scene itself:

Come, come! Enter, enter!
You shivering lemurs,
Made of ligaments, tendons and bones
Half-natures patched together!

So they are described to us as creatures that are held together only by the ligaments that hold the limbs of the human body together, anatomical tendons and bones. So what is not even present in the human organism in the form of muscles holds these figures together, they are patched together out of it. They are not full-natured, not whole-natured, they are half-natured, since they only have what is not blood, not muscle, not nerve, but what tendons, ligaments and bones are. They are patched together out of it. Furthermore, they are characterized by the fact that they later express themselves in chorus. And what they express indicates two things to us. First, how they actually come to do a job there under the supervision of Mephistopheles; but at the same time, this also tells us something about their nature. The lemurs express themselves in such a way that one hears in their quivering tones:

We will help you immediately,
And, as we have half heard,
There is even a wide land,
We shall get it.

So the lemurs are also deceived at first: they have half heard that they are to be given a wide country. They are to dig the grave according to Mephistopheles' plan. But they have half heard and not fully heard that they are to receive a wide country. To this end, they bring sharpened stakes to work with.

Sharpened stakes, they are there,
The long chain for measuring;
Why we were called upon,
we have forgotten.

It sounds in their half-nature, which is patched together from tendons, ligaments and bones, there is still something that sounds and rattles from a call. But what the content of the call is, what they are actually supposed to do there, they have forgotten. They are truly characterized by this. One can say that they are there, but they do not know why they are there. They know half of it, why they are there, they have heard something, but they do not know what they have heard. They have heard a call, but they have forgotten it again. So there they are in front of us, these lemurs, and Mephistopheles immediately reprimands them. He says: “This has nothing to do with the wide land you wanted; only act according to your own dimensions, according to such dimensions as are appropriate for one who consists only of legs and tendons:

The longest one lies down lengthwise.

So the one lemur has to lie down lengthwise, and now he instructs them how to dig the grave.

In the next chorus of lemurs, we are told that there is still something in them of a half-remembered memory that they were once something like human beings, that they come from something like human beings:

How young I was and live and love,
Methought it was quite sweet;
Where there was cheerful sound and merry mirth,
There moved my feet.

— That is behind them, and only half conscious.

Now the treacherous age has struck me
With his crutch;
I stumbled over the door of the grave,

Why was it open just then!

So they half-remember that they come from dead people. Mephisto first tried to come to terms with them, he needs them first.

Now I ask you to remember that I have indeed said many times that we do not carry our physical bodies with us without further ado, and that we only discard them like an empty shell. It is not only our shell, I often said, it is our tool. It contains the forces through which we are connected to the mineral earth. Now I ask you to consider the following: we are, with our physical body, formed on Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth, with what we now have between birth and death. Let us imagine all that has been implanted in us by Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth, I would say, summed up and suggested by everything I am drawing here, and let us imagine that which is incorporated into the earth in that we receive an ego as a tool in the earth, that this ego is incorporated as a physical tool. Let us imagine that within.

During the time on earth, our physical body again receives what was demanded of it on Saturn, what was formed during the time of the sun and moon. But because the I works in it, what the human being has not through Saturn, Sun and Moon, but only through the development of the Earth, is incorporated. This is the external physical expression of the I. From this, the I emerges in death. What remains of Saturn, Sun and Moon has no place in earthly life; it has nothing to do with the forces of earthly development. The physical forces of the evolution of the earth would never have produced our muscles; they had to be produced by the physical forces of the evolution of the moon. But during the evolution of the earth, the impulses of the ego did indeed produce the bones, and the bones only during the Atlantean evolution, through the salt deposits in the Atlantic Ocean, the ligaments, the tendons. All this is integrated only through the forces of the earth. In this way we carry the earth within us, in our bones, tendons and ligaments. The spirit of the earth lives in them. The same forces live in them that are present in all the mineral, natural or technical domains of the earth. In the composition of our bones, tendons and ligaments, everything that can arise from the mineral-physical natural and technical effects of the earth lives. When we now go through the gate of death, we leave behind our Saturn, Sun and Moon parts. These are destroyed by the fact that they cannot exist in the earth. Bones, tendons and ligaments must destroy the forces of the earth itself, regardless of whether the person is buried or cremated; this makes no difference, the special forces of the earth must destroy them.

Thus, because Faust has died, that which is subject to the special forces of the earth is handed over to the earth, to that earth to which all dead people are also handed over, insofar as they are made of bones, tendons and ligaments. A deep spiritual insight into nature is expressed in this formulation that Goethe gave to this scene, an infinitely deep knowledge of nature! For one should not believe that one has exhausted what remains of us when one says: Well, the physical body falls away from us, and our soul — as we have always described it — continues into the spiritual worlds. — No, there are secret spiritual forces in the whole physical body that remain on the earth. The earth can only retain that which it has produced itself, but it retains only the forces from bones, tendons and ligaments. Bury the human being and let him decay, burn him - in the earthly body itself, despite decay or burning, what remains for all future is always present in the forces in bones, tendons and ligaments! We hand over our skeleton, so to speak, to the earth, and it remains there until the earth itself has reached the goal of its evolution. Our skeleton is taken up by the skeletons of all those who have died before us, and enters into the community of those who have died before us. It would be a superficial view to say: “Everything is transitory here.” Only the form is transitory. The forces that prevail in them are contained in the earth's activity. And if you take the physical forces at work on earth today, if you look straight into the earth, the forces in it that have come about because people have been buried in the earth, or because they have somehow been destroyed, their bodies have somehow been destroyed. The forces that formed the human being are now in the earth, working in the interior of the earth, they are there, they are preserved.

So we can say: Mephisto is initially faced with the task of dealing with the path of the physical body, with the path, with the paths that the physical body wants to take. - That's where he needs the lemurs, I would say, who are not ghostly, but under ghostly beings, phantom beings that are always united with the earthly body as the remains of dead people. He needs them.

Do you know what would happen if what has been ours since Atlantean times were to disappear in our bones, tendons and ligaments? Even today the earth would be close to it, and it would soon be more likely that all people would be born with so-called “English limbs,” with weak and powerless limbs. People would be born rickety, because the earth only has a certain amount of the strength that lies in our bone movements and tendon development. And what we give back in death always goes into later human bodies in a mysterious way. Otherwise, people would be born rickety. And if one is born rickety, it is a sign that one has not entered into a right relationship in one's total karma with those forces that the earth gives again and again and again, and receives back again and again from the bones, tendons and ligaments of humanity.

Thus an infinitely deep, spiritual thought of nature is expressed in the fact that Mephisto has summoned these underworldly spectres, these pure phantom beings, in whose ranks Faust's phantom also enters. We must, of course, grasp the scene quite spiritually. The interpreters of Faust always believed that there were bone men walking around. But they are only the forces that lie in the bones, tendons and ligaments, the supersensible forces. The scene is to be grasped entirely spiritually, only through spiritual vision, in the manner of spiritual vision. These lemurs have what is in man in that he has an I. But the I is outside. But the I is outside. So all the qualities that only came in through the I are gone, are only half present, only echoes. Therefore they are there and also not there. We human beings are only there when we send our I into our bones, tendons and ligaments. They no longer have that. We only understand what we have heard when we send our ego through our bones, tendons and ligaments. They only have the echo; they hear and do not know what they hear; they have heard a call and have only half heard it, have forgotten it because the memory lies in the system that is put together by bones, tendons and ligaments. So, because Mephistopheles first has to deal with the paths that Faust's physical body takes, he, who is a spirit but wants to assert his rights on earth, naturally comes into the necessity of having to deal with the lemurs, as they are meant here, because from them he could snatch the spiritual part of Faust's physical body. After all, the physical body is also based on a spiritual one. He could grasp this spiritual.

Now, to understand the whole, let us recall something we can find in the chapter of the book 'How to Know Higher Worlds?' where the Dweller of the Threshold is mentioned. There you will find that when a person undergoes higher spiritual development, the individual powers that are otherwise united in him in ordinary human knowledge, diverge. I characterized them there according to their abilities. Will, feeling and thinking go their separate ways, each becoming something in itself. Mephisto, who remained behind on the lunar evolution with his own nature, was still familiar with the lunar evolution. That is how you have to understand him. He, Mephisto, is familiar with the lunar development in his practical view of life. But even in the atavistic view of the moon, the limbs of the human being were still separate and not yet united by the ego. So if Mephisto, in his way, wants to grasp the spiritual essence of Faust, he must actually grasp it in its threefold nature. He must grasp it as the spiritual essence of the physical body; there he must deal with the lemurs. Then he must want to grasp it as the second link in the etheric body, which separates soon after death. He is familiar with that, so he must want to grasp it. And then he must want to grasp it in what passes over into the spiritual world and has detached itself from the etheric body. What has been united through the ego does not yet correspond to his realm; he is not yet at home there, Mephisto; the separateness still exists. So he must instinctively attach importance to achieving what the spiritual is of the physical body; there he must let the lemurs work. Now, because he only knows the soul in separation, he wants to catch for himself - he does not know what - the etheric body, which leaves the human being through the lower limbs. So he puts the Dickteufel there to catch the etheric body for him. Then - he does not know how it should be. Perhaps he can grasp Faust's spiritual essence at the third link, at that which wants to ascend into the spiritual world? That is where he places the Dürrteufel. And so he wants to grasp Faust's spiritual essence. But he must, I would say, with devilish instinct, bring together the threefoldness that can convey to him the physical body directly in its spirituality – etheric body, soul-spiritual –.

Etheric body - you see, physics cannot quite cope with the ether that is present because the ether has a strange property that distinguishes it from ordinary materiality. It is not heavy, it has no weight. The usual gravity of the earth cannot hold the ether. Mephisto wants to hold it. He wants to hold it through spiritual beings. Because the ether has already become spiritual, it should also be held by spiritual beings. To do this, he needs the thick devils, who, as spiritual beings, have a certain heaviness. They must therefore be thick-bellied creatures with huge, thick bodies – small, of course, because if they were towering, they would reach too far into the upper regions. They must be designed to be small and stout, their spiritual nature must be earthly, their spiritual nature must be such that it can sustain on earth that which seeks to fly spiritually.

They must therefore be small and stout, and everything in them that is the physiognomic expression of humanity must be clumsy. They must have enormous strength in their somewhat stocky bodies. Therefore, the limbs that are more spiritualized are small; in reality they would have to have small hands, stumps, arm stumps. It is difficult to portray, can only be portrayed if the actors make every effort to move only the lower part of the arms; of course, this must be practiced and learned. But the nose, too, is difficult. It is developed, the nose that has become a horn in the devils, it is difficult; so it is, together with the forehead, the heavy organ that does not connect man with the air, but that works and is formed by its own weight.

Mephisto needs such creatures to be able to hold back the etheric body, which we know takes a different path because it is not weighed down by the earth, in the rest of the earth. He must therefore hire them so that when the etheric body appears from the lower regions of Faust's body, they can grasp it. Therefore he hires them:

Fresh meat! Double your step,
You gentlemen from the straight, crooked horn,
From the old devil's grist and grain
You bring the hellish maw at the same time.
Hell has many a maw! many!
According to rank and dignity, she devours;
But in this last game, too, one will

Canines gape; from the gorge's vault
The fire stream wells up in rage,
And in the boiling smoke of the background
I see the flame city in eternal glow!

This is, of course, the same flame city that appears in Dante!

The red surf... and so on.

Here they come, the fat devils with short, straight horns! He now describes them:

Now, bloated villains with fire cheeks!

So they are in the state in which the lunar creatures still breathed fire. They are “pot-bellied villains with fire-cheeks” who “are really fat from the brimstone of hell”.

Block-like, short, never moving necks!

So everything is immobile; mobility is already semi-spiritual. They are all clumsy and awkward, all so that they force the spirit into heaviness, because they are supposed to hold the light ether. And there he posts them:

Here below lurks, whether it glistens like phosphorus:

- whether the etheric body comes out, which they are supposed to catch —

That is the little soul, Psyche with the wings,

- he sees it as the soul! —

You pluck it out, and there is a nasty worm;

So he wants the etheric body in the form of a dragon, doesn't he.

With my stamp I will seal her,
Then away with her in a fiery whirlwind!

He says very aptly now, by placing the devil's advocate there:

Pay attention to the lower regions,
you windbags, that is your duty;
Whether she likes to live there,

You can't really know.

How should he know, since he has the three members of the soul; he does not really know what to start with!

She likes to be at home in the navel,

That is the region where the etheric body must leave the person first.

Take care, for she will wipe you out there.

So there we have the fat devils with short, straight horns who want to try to shape the spiritual so that it develops earthly heaviness.

Mephisto wants to conquer the third part through the Dürrteufel. They must be very thin guys, again difficult to represent! Very thin, and all spiritual, so nose and forehead together to a horn united, which overcomes the matter as possible, in devilish way overcomes, so crooked and long, because they should achieve it, to become quite spiritual, to overcome the earth heaviness completely. Therefore, they are “Firlefanze”, as spinning tops, move quickly like spinning tops. They must now be employed to catch that which goes into the spiritual world - the third. So they are supposed to chase after the forces that develop precisely out of heaviness, so to speak. That which they are not supposed to get into the heaviness of the earth, they are supposed to develop, like a spinning top, counter to the heaviness, through their long, flexible limbs, which should actually grow out of them. That is how they should develop. That is how Mephisto sets them up:

You winged giants of Firlefanze!
Reach into the air, try without rest;
Arms straight,

— straight means long in this case, that they become thin and long.

The arms are stretched, the claws are sharply pointed,

– so long claws instead of fingers come out –

so that you can catch the fluttering, the fleeting.

– the soul that goes to the spiritual worlds –

She must feel ill at ease in the old house,
And the genius

- in contrast to the etheric body: the genius, which is always soul-spiritual -

And the genius, it wants to get out right at the top.

There you can see how, according to the way man is constituted, the function of the lemurs on the physical body, the thick devil on the etheric body, the dry devil for the spiritual-soul is sharply, clearly outlined!

Now the heavenly host is approaching, the heavenly host, that is, the beings who belong to the spiritual worlds. And the matter is presented in such a way that none of those who can serve Mephisto – the lemures, the thick- and scrawny devils – achieve anything. The heavenly host is coming:

Follow the messengers,
heavenly relatives,
slow flight;
forgiving dust,
animating dust;
to all natures
friendly traces
work in floating
its dwelling train.

These are beings that have not experienced the earthly either, but do not claim to have an effect on the earthly sphere, but only on the spiritual and mental aspects of the human being. Mephistopheles is out of place, he has remained a ghost, a moon ghost, and has an effect on the earth. They have remained in their own sphere. They must therefore appear to him as beings who have not even become human, but are still pre-human, immature, less than children.

I hear discordant notes, nasty strumming,
From above it comes with unwelcome day;
It is the mischievous, girlish banging,
As sanctimonious taste may love it.

And so on. Of course, Mephisto is well aware of the close kinship between him and the angels as spiritual beings. They have both remained spiritual beings. That is why he calls them devils in his own way, but devils in disguise.

They are devils, but in disguise.

Now the battle begins between the host of angels and the demons and goblins down there who are striving for Faust's soul. Mephisto is standing there and must take part in this battle. He instructs his devils because he senses something. What does he actually sense? Yes, he knows the trinity as a soul quality. But that is not capable of grasping the I-unity. He does not believe that in Faust the I-unity is so strong that it holds the trinity together. That is his great error. While he is actually always talking about the trinity of the soul, the unity of the soul is asserted at this moment from the spiritual world, holding everything together. If this unity, this unity of the ego, were not there, the lemures would be able to draw the soul of the physical body to themselves, without it having remained connected to the whole world, to the whole cosmos. The Dürrteufel would be able to grasp the soul, the genius. But because they are held together by the ego in the human being between birth and death, each one goes its way: the body to the earth, the etheric body to the etheric region, that which is soul to the spiritual region, but they remain destined for each other. There remains a connection. And as soon as the connection, which is brought about by the character of the ego, is there, the devil can do nothing. But he is positioning himself quite correctly.

Why do you cower and flinch? Is this the custom of hell?

— the thick-skinned and scrawny devils sense that a different element is coming.

So stand firm and let them scatter.

They scatter roses, namely, as a symbol of spiritual love coming from above.

To his place, every Gauch!
They think, with such flowerbedecking
They can snow in the hot devils;
That melts and shrivels at your breath.

Now they begin, because he commands them:

Now blow, Püstriche! —

Now they blow away the love torment that surrounds them. This is a hot glow for them, which they cannot endure. Now they blow, but they blow too hard because they cannot find the right measure. They have not been taught about what is formed through the evolution of the earth.

— Enough, enough!....

That you never know the right measure!

He also only knows them insofar as he observes them on earth; he does not know them from his own nature, the right measures. But because he was with Faust for so long and saw what Faust needed, he recognizes the measures of men again for a while.

— Enough, enough!
Before your breath the whole flight pales. —
Not so violently! Shut your mouths and nostrils!
Truly, you have blown too strongly.
That you never know the right measure!
That not only shrinks, it browns, dries, burns!
It is already floating along with poisonous clear flames;
Brace yourselves against it, press close together! The strength goes out! All courage is gone! The devils scent the flattery of strangers.

To him, love is only flattery, he turns everything into something purely selfish. And so we see how, through this struggle that unfolds here, how in the imagination – for the whole thing takes place in the imagination of Mephisto, who for a while transports himself back to his old time on the moon – how, for the imagination of Mephisto, the possibility presents itself that he could have the soul in its trinity, while it was actually snatched from him by the unity.

The interesting thing is that in this scene in particular we also find an awareness of the inner spiritual evolution of humanity. Think of what I have often said, that only a certain narrow-mindedness can believe that as far back as people go, they have always looked the same; so spiritually, one imagines the Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, all more or less the same as present-day people, while great developments have been undergone. People who only think about the last few centuries know nothing about what human beings have gone through in the course of the centuries in evolution. But spiritual beings notice this because they look at things spiritually. And so it is so wonderful that we can see from Mephisto's words here to Faust precisely what he, Mephisto, who is of course an old fellow, has gone through the whole evolution of the earth — you know how he says at one point that he once found “crystallized human race”! — yes, Mephisto sees how it has changed:

The body lies, and the spirit seeks to flee;
I quickly show it the blood-written title.

So, what does he actually want? Faust has died. He wants the soul, of which he only recognizes the trinity. We remember that Faust made a contract with Mephisto, even written in blood, a contract. What does Mephisto actually want, MephistoAhriman? What does he want? He wants to invoke his contract. If he shows the contract at the moment when the soul comes out, he believes that the soul cannot escape him. Well, I would rather not speak further on this point in view of some contemptuous words that have been spoken in this troubled time. Since our friends are already being accused of not thinking clearly about contracts, I do not want to develop a contract theory now that could be exploited in turn. Perhaps it could even be said, if I do not take the side of Mephisto in this scene, but rather the side of Faust: Faust would be a real Pan-Germanist in terms of his view of contracts! I do not want to talk further about the plight one could get into, because either one would have to take sides for Mephisto-Ahriman, or one would expose oneself to danger because Faust does not go into the blood-written title, to chalk this up to us as a pan-Germanistic view. So we prefer to remain silent about all the deeper wisdom that would have to be developed if one were to talk about Faust and Mephisto's contract. Let's leave it!

But evolution with its inner meaning comes to us in the words of Mephisto, who points out that times change and with them the impulses that are in the development of humanity. In the past, when the old times were there, he still understood quite well how to catch souls – today we call it superstition, but we know that they were somewhat clairvoyant times. Then the souls were still easily accessible in their trinity; then he could still catch the souls if the matter was well prepared – and after all, he prepared them quite well in Faust. But now, as the fifth post-Atlantic period approaches and the unity of the soul is being established through the ego, he has not yet undergone his full training.

But unfortunately we now have so many means
to withdraw souls from the devil
we come up against the old ways,
we are not recommended

The little people never sense the devil,
even when he has them by the collar.

There he is, but he is not recommended. And so he gets the helpers he needs, who he believes can help him get what he wants: the soul in its trinity. But the fact that it no longer exists in its trinity, in its original form, allows it to slip through his fingers.

It is a curious thing with this Mephisto-Ahriman. The beings that belong to the spiritual world come down into his spheres, and - yes, he actually falls in love with these beings. Goethe quite rightly describes a love scene between Mephisto and the angels. The devil has understanding. And a love affair between Mephisto and the angels is truly an absurd love affair, that is what Mephisto also calls it, it is truly an absurd love affair. But how is it that this absurd love affair can still affect him? That feelings of love arise in him at all? If he had not lived at Faust's side for so long and wanted to beguile Faust by stimulating such feelings in Faust in a particularly enticing way, they would not have crossed over to him. And so here again you have a deep wisdom, a wonderful wisdom. The devil actually has no erotic or other love in the earthly sense. He doesn't have it. Love affair is of course absurd for him, because we know that the earth is the cosmos of love. He is from the cosmos of wisdom. But he is out of place, he wanders around on earth and always wants to incorporate the earth into his realm. This means that he repeatedly finds himself in a position to incorporate into himself qualities that are developed on earth and that no longer fit his nature. In order to gain a soul, he must prepare this soul for the devil, that is, make it suitable for the qualities that Lucifer implanted at the beginning. But in doing so, he himself becomes infected by these qualities and once again makes himself incapable of keeping this soul. You see here in the big picture what happens on a small scale. Imagine that man is also capable of arousing passions, but if he develops them to a certain point, they destroy his organism at the same time. So you can only do it to a certain point. The devil must, as it were, vampirically absorb human qualities into himself so that he can arouse the passions in Faust. But in doing so, he destroys his own true devilish nature. This is how the absurd affair with the angels comes about, and he becomes inattentive and does not even realize that the angels are snatching his soul away. This darkening of consciousness, this transition of consciousness into the subconscious, had to occur in him.

Since we will have the performance today, I cannot say more. I think that enough has been said for the time being to convey a little of the understanding of the trinity inherent in this scene. I think we see, especially when we devote ourselves to such a contemplation, how infinitely deep that is of which Goethe says that he has secretly incorporated it into the second part of 'Faust'.

Those people who were able to evoke in themselves the idea that spiritual wisdom is at work through the evolution of humanity, that it has only receded somewhat in our time, that this spiritual wisdom often only a shadow in all kinds of legitimate or illegitimate occult societies, such people, as isolated individuals, always knew what profound wisdom is contained in Goethe's “Faust,” real wisdom, concrete world wisdom. That is why they have expressed themselves in this sense. And one such man dedicated a short poem to the memory of Goethe at the Feast of St. John in 1880, a poem in which he wanted to express how much he felt at one with him in spiritual wisdom, a man who, due to the erudition of the materialistic age, actually had very little of Goethe in him, very little of substance. And since spiritual science had not yet been born when this man wrote, he only had a vague feeling that this spiritual science lives in Goethe like an instinct. The Faust commentary that he wrote as a result, Oswald Marbach, did not become significant. But in the poem that he dedicated to the great mason's wisdom festival, the Manenfest, to the manes of Goethe — as one used to say in the past when speaking of the immortal part of man, the Manen, the same spirit lives that lives in the Manas – it shows that, as it were half-consciously only in lonely souls, there was always the connection with the great that lived in Goethe's poetry. And so he, who felt connected with the Manes of Goethe, with the individuality of Goethe, says at the Feast of St. John, the masonic feast in 1880:

To you, brother, father, exalted master!
To you, to whom we now, for over a century,
As a sign of our most loyal love in the alliance of free spirits,
We extend our tightly entwined hands; —
To you, the greatest of spirits and the freest of the free!
To whom we aspire to be like; —
We consecrate ourselves to you! We consecrate our sons to you,
That our building may one day be crowned with perfection!

You have striven as we have; but your striving
For self-knowledge, which leads to wisdom,
Was always inspired by the most vital life,
By strength of the creator, which proceeds to action,
To works that lift themselves up to the light,
Around which the splendor of beauty spreads eternally:
You wrestled with God like Israel,
Until you, as victor, conquered yourself!

What mysteriously unites us with you
Will not be revealed to the uninitiated by a single word;
But let it be proclaimed loudly before all the people
Through the purest love, tireless deeds,
Through clear light that ignites spirit in spirit,
Through eternal life's evergreen seeds. —
Onward, O Master! Wherever You have gone,
We follow You with the most ardent longing.

May there come a time again when such words may and can be truth!