| 34. The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy
Tr. George Adams, Mary Adams Rudolf Steiner |
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| Those religions which are founded on spiritual knowledge have always had a feeling for this truth. Hence they have said: With the ‘ I ,’ the ‘God’—who in the lower creatures reveals himself only from without, in the phenomena of the surrounding world—begins to speak from within. |
| A child of five understands the words “yet,” “even,” “of course,” “just”; but now try to give an explanation of them—not to the child, but to his father! In the one word “of course” there lurks a little philosopher! If the eight-year-old child, with his developed speech, is understood by the child of three, why do you want to narrow down your language to the little one's childish prattle? |
| 34. The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy
Tr. George Adams, Mary Adams Rudolf Steiner |
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| [ 1 ] Much that the man of to-day 0 inherits from generations of the past is called in question by his present life. Hence the numerous ‘problems of the hour’ and ‘demands of the age.’ How many of these are occupying the attention of the world—the Social Question, the Women's Question, the various educational questions, hygienic questions, questions of human rights, and so forth! By the most varied means, men are endeavouring to grapple with these problems. The number of those who come on the scene with this or that remedy or programme for the solution—or at any rate for the partial solution—of one or other of them, is indeed past counting. In the process, all manner of opinions and shades of opinion make themselves felt—Radicalism, which carries itself with a revolutionary air; the Moderate attitude, full of respect for existing things, yet endeavouring to evolve out of them something new; Conservatism, which is up in arms whenever any of the old institutions are tampered with. Beside these main tendencies of thought and feeling there is every kind of intermediate position. [ 2 ] Looking at all these things of life with deeper vision, one cannot but feel—indeed the impression forces itself upon one—that the men of our age are in the position of trying to meet the demands involved in modern life with means which are utterly inadequate. Many are setting about to reform life, without really knowing life in its foundations. But he who would make proposals as to the future must not content himself with a knowledge of life that merely touches life's surface. He must investigate its depths. [ 3 ] Life in its entirety is like a plant. The plant contains not only what it offers to external life; it also holds a future state within its hidden depths. One who has before him a plant only just in leaf, knows very well that after some time there will be flowers and fruit also on the leaf-bearing stem. In its hidden depths the plant already contains the flowers and fruit in embryo; yet by mere investigation of what the plant now offers to external vision, how should one ever tell what these new organs will look like? This can only be told by one who has learnt to know the very nature and being of the plant. [ 4 ] So, too, the whole of human life contains within it the germs of its own future; but if we are to tell anything about this future, we must first penetrate into the hidden nature of the human being. And this our age is little inclined to do. It concerns itself with the things that appear on the surface, and thinks it is treading on unsafe ground if called upon to penetrate to what escapes external observation. In the case of the plant the matter is certainly more simple. We know that others like it have again and again borne fruit before. Human life is present only once; the flowers it will bear in the future have never yet been there. Yet they are present within man in the embryo, even as the flowers are present in a plant that is still only in leaf. [ 5 ] And there is a possibility of saying something about man's future, if once we penetrate beneath the surface of human nature to its real essence and being. It is only when fertilized by this deep penetration into human life, that the various ideas of reform current in the present age can become fruitful and practical. [ 6 ] Anthroposophy, by its inherent character and tendency, must have the task of providing a practical conception of the world—one that comprehends the nature and essence of human life. Whether what is often called so is justified in making such a claim, is not the point; it is the real essence of Anthroposophy—and what, by virtue of its real essence, Anthroposophy can be—that here concerns us. For Anthroposophy is not intended as a theory remote from life, one that merely caters for man's curiosity or thirst for knowledge. Nor is it intended as an instrument for a few people, who for selfish reasons would like to attain a higher level of development for themselves. No, it can join and work at the most important tasks of present-day humanity, and further their development for the welfare of mankind.1 [ 7 ] It is true that in taking on this mission, Anthroposophy must be prepared to face all kinds of scepticism and opposition. Radicals, Moderates and Conservatives in every sphere of life will be bound to meet it with scepticism. For in its beginnings it will scarcely be in a position to please any party. Its premises lie far beyond the sphere of party movements, [ 8 ] being founded, in effect, purely and solely on a true knowledge and perception of life. If a man has knowledge of life, it is only out of life itself that he will be able to set himself his tasks. He will draw up no arbitrary programmes, for he will know that no other fundamental laws of life can prevail in the future than those that prevail already in the present. The spiritual investigator will therefore of necessity respect existing things. However great the need for improvement he may find in them, he will not fail to see, in existing things themselves, the embryo of the future. At the same time, he knows that in all things ‘becoming’ there must be growth and evolution. Hence he will perceive in the present the seeds of transformation and of growth. He invents no programmes; he reads them out of what is there. What he thus reads becomes in a certain sense itself a programme, for it bears in it the essence of development. [ 9 ] For this very reason an anthroposophical insight into the being of man must provide the most fruitful and the most practical means for the solution of the urgent questions of modern life. [ 10 ] In the following pages we shall endeavour to prove this for one particular question—the question of Education. We shall not set up demands nor programmes, but simply describe the child-nature. From the nature of the growing and evolving human being, the proper point of view for Education will, as it were, spontaneously result. [ 11 ] If we wish to perceive the nature of the evolving man, we must begin by considering the hidden nature of man as such. [ 12 ] What sense-observation learns to know in man, and what the materialistic conception of life would consider as the one and only element in man's being, is for spiritual investigation only one part, one member of his nature: it is his Physical Body. This physical body of man is subject to the same laws of physical existence, and is built up of the same substances and forces, as the whole of that world which is commonly called lifeless. Anthroposophical Science says, therefore: man has a physical body in common with the whole of the mineral kingdom. And it designates as the ‘Physical Body’ that alone in man, which brings the substances into mixture, combination, form, and dissolution by the same laws as are at work in the same substances in the mineral world as well. [ 13 ] Now over and above the physical body, Anthroposophical Science recognizes a second essential principle in man. It is his Life-Body or Etheric Body. The physicist need not take offence at the term ‘Etheric Body.’ The word ‘Ether’ in this connection does not mean the same as the hypothetical Ether of Physics. It must be taken simply as a designation of what will here and now be described. [ 14 ] In recent times it was considered a highly unscientific proceeding to speak of such an ‘Etheric Body’; though this had not been so at the end of the eighteenth and in the first half of the nineteenth century. In that earlier time people had said to themselves: the substances and forces which are at work in a mineral cannot of their own accord form the mineral into a living creature. In the latter there must also be inherent a peculiar ‘force.’ This force they called the ‘Vital Force,’ and they thought of it somewhat as follows: the Vital Force is working in the plant, in the animal, in the human body, and produces the phenomena of life, just as the magnetic force is present in the magnet producing the phenomena of attraction. In the succeeding period of materialism, this idea was set aside. People began to say: the living creature is built up in the same way as the lifeless creation. There are no other forces at work in the living organism than in the mineral; the same forces are only working in a more complicated way, and building a more complex structure. To-day, however, it is only the most rigid materialists who hold fast to this denial of a life-force or vital force. There are a number of natural scientists and thinkers whom the facts of life have taught, that something like a vital force or life-principle must be assumed. [ 15 ] Thus modern science, in its later developments, is in a certain sense approaching what Anthroposophical Science has to say about the life-body. There is, however, a very important difference. From the facts of sense-perception, modern science arrives, through intellectual considerations or reflections, at the assumption of a kind of vital force. This is not the method of genuine spiritual investigation which Anthroposophy adopts and from the results of which it makes its statements. It cannot often enough be emphasized how great is the difference, in this respect, between Anthroposophy and the current science of to-day. For the latter regards the experiences of the senses as the foundation for all knowledge. Anything that cannot be built up on this foundation, it takes to be unknowable. From the impressions of the senses it draws deductions and conclusions. What goes on beyond them it rejects, as lying ‘beyond the frontiers of human knowledge.’ From the standpoint of Anthroposophical Science, such a view is like that of a blind man, who only admits as valid things that can be touched and conclusions that result by deduction from the world of touch—a blind man who rejects the statements of seeing people as lying outside the possibility of human knowledge. Anthroposophy shows man to be capable of evolution, capable of bringing new worlds within his sphere by the development of new organs of perception. Colour and light are all around the blind man. If he cannot see them, it is only because he lacks the organs of perception. In like manner Anthroposophy asserts: there are many worlds around man, and man can perceive them if only he develops the necessary organs. As the blind man who has undergone a successful operation looks out upon a new world, so by the development of higher organs man can come to know new worlds—worlds altogether different from those which his ordinary senses allow him to perceive. Now whether one who is blind in body can be operated on or not, depends on the constitution of his organs. But the higher organs whereby man can penetrate into the higher worlds, are present in embryo in every human being. Everyone can develop them who has the patience, endurance, and energy to apply in his own case the methods described in the volume, ‘Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment.’ Anthroposophical Science, then, would never say that there are definite frontiers to human knowledge. What it would rather say is that for man those worlds exist, for which he has the organs of perception. Thus Anthroposophy speaks only of the methods whereby existing frontiers may be extended; and this is its position with regard to the investigation of the life-body or etheric body, and of all that is specified in the following pages as the yet higher members of man's nature. Anthroposophy admits that the physical body alone is accessible to investigation through the bodily senses, and that—from the point of view of this kind of investigation—it will at most be possible by intellectual deductions to surmise the existence of a higher body. At the same time, it tells how it is possible to open up a world wherein these higher members of man's nature emerge for the observer, as the colour and the light of things emerge after operation in the case of a man born blind. For those who have developed the higher organs of perception, the etheric or life-body is an object of perception and not merely of intellectual deduction. Man has this etheric or life-body in common with the plants and animals. The life-body works in a formative way upon the substances and forces of the physical body, thus bringing about the phenomena of growth, reproduction, and inner movement of the saps and fluids. It is therefore the builder and moulder of the physical body, its inhabitant and architect. The physical body may even be spoken of as an image or expression of the life-body. In man the two are nearly, though by no means wholly, equal as to form and size. In the animals, however, and still more so in the plants, the etheric body is very different, both in form and in extension, from the physical. [ 16 ] The third member of the human body is what is called the Sentient or Astral Body. It is the vehicle of pain and pleasure, of impulse, craving, passion, and the like—all of which are absent in a creature consisting only of physical and etheric bodies. These things may all be included in the term: sentient feeling or sensation. The plant has no sensation. If in our time some learned men, seeing that plants will respond by movement or in some other way to external stimulus, conclude that plants have a certain power of sensation, they only show their ignorance of what sensation is. The point is not whether the creature responds to an external stimulus, but whether the stimulus is reflected in an inner process—as pain or pleasure, impulse, desire, or the like. Unless we held fast to this criterion, we should be justified in saying that blue litmus-paper has a sensation of certain substances, because it turns red by contact with them.2 [ 17 ] Man has therefore a sentient body in common with the animal kingdom only, and this sentient body is the vehicle of sensation or of sentient life. [ 18 ] We must not fall into the error of certain theosophical circles, and imagine the etheric and sentient bodies as consisting simply of finer substances than are present in the physical body. For that would be a materialistic conception of these higher members of man's nature. The etheric body is a force-form; it consists of active forces, and not of matter. The astral or sentient body is a figure of inwardly moving, coloured, luminous pictures. [ 19 ] The astral body deviates, both in shape and size, from the physical body. In man it presents an elongated ovoid form, within which the physical and etheric bodies are embedded. It projects beyond them—a vivid, luminous figure—on every side.4 [ 20 ] Now man possesses a fourth member of his being; and this fourth member he shares with no other earthly creature. It is the vehicle of the human ‘ I ,’ of the human Ego. The little word ‘ I ’—as used, for example, in the English language—is a name essentially different from all other names. To anyone who ponders rightly on the nature of this name, there is opened up at once a way of approach to a perception of man's real nature. All other names can be applied, by all men equally, to the thing they designate. Everyone can call a table ‘table,’ and everyone can call a chair ‘chair’; but it is not so with the name ‘ I .’ No one can use this name to designate another. Each human being can only call himself ‘ I ’; the name ‘ I ’ can never reach my ear as a designation of myself. In designating himself as ‘ I ,’ man has to name himself within himself. A being who can say ‘ I ’ to himself is a world in himself. Those religions which are founded on spiritual knowledge have always had a feeling for this truth. Hence they have said: With the ‘ I ,’ the ‘God’—who in the lower creatures reveals himself only from without, in the phenomena of the surrounding world—begins to speak from within. The vehicle of this faculty of saying ‘ I ,’ of the Ego-faculty, is the ‘Body of the Ego,’ the fourth member of the human being.5 [ 21 ] This ‘Body of the Ego’ is the vehicle of the higher soul of man. Through it man is the crown of all earthly creation. Now in the human being of the present day the Ego is by no means simple in character. We may recognize its nature if we compare human beings at different stages of development. Look at the uneducated savage beside the average European, or again, compare the latter with a lofty idealist. Each one of them has the faculty of saying ‘ I ’ to himself; the ‘Body of the Ego’ is present in them all. But the uneducated savage, with his Ego, follows his passions, impulses, and cravings almost like an animal. The more highly developed man says to himself, ‘Such and such impulses and desires you may follow,’ while others again he holds in check or suppresses altogether. The idealist has developed new impulses and new desires in addition to those originally present. All this has taken place through the Ego working upon the other members of the human being. Indeed, it is this which constitutes the special task of the Ego. Working outward from itself, it has to ennoble and purify the other members of man's nature. [ 22 ] In the human being who has reached beyond the condition in which the external world first placed him, the lower members have become changed to a greater or lesser degree under the influence of the ‘Ego.’ When man is only beginning to rise above the animal, when his ‘Ego’ is only just kindled, he is still like an animal so far as the lower members of his being are concerned. His etheric or life-body is simply the vehicle of the formative forces of life, the forces of growth and reproduction. His sentient body gives expression to those impulses, desires, and passions only, which are stimulated by external nature. As man works his way up from this stage of development, through successive lives or incarnations, to an ever higher evolution, his ‘Ego’ works upon the other members and transforms them. In this way his sentient body becomes the vehicle of purified sensations of pleasure and pain, refined wishes and desires. And the etheric or life-body also becomes transformed. It becomes the vehicle of the man's habits, of his more permanent bent or tendency in life, of his temperament and of his memory. A man whose Ego has not yet worked upon his life-body, has no memory of the experiences he goes through in life. He just lives out what Nature has implanted in him. [ 23 ] This is what the growth and development of civilization means for man. It is a continual working of his Ego upon the lower members of his nature. The work penetrates right down into the physical body. Under the influence of the Ego, the whole appearance and physiognomy, the gestures and movements of the physical body, are altered. It is possible, moreover, to distinguish the way in which the different means of culture or civilization work upon the several members of man's nature. The ordinary factors of civilization work upon the sentient body and imbue it with pleasures and pains, with impulses and cravings, of a different kind from what it had originally. Again, when the human being is absorbed in the contemplation of a great work of art, his etheric body is being influenced. Through the work of art he divines something higher and more noble than is offered by the ordinary environment of his senses, and in this process he is forming and transforming his life-body. Religion is a powerful means for the purification and ennobling of the etheric body. It is here that the religious impulses have their mighty purpose in the evolution of mankind. [ 25 ] What we call ‘conscience’ is nothing else than the outcome of the work of the Ego on the life-body through incarnation after incarnation. When man begins to perceive that he ought not to do this or that, and when this perception makes so strong an impression on him that the impression passes on into his etheric body, ‘conscience’ arises. [ 26 ] Now this work of the Ego upon the lower members may either be something that is proper to a whole race of men; or else it may be entirely individual, an achievement of the individual Ego working on itself alone. In the former case, the whole human race collaborates, as it were, in the transformation of the human being. The latter kind of transformation depends on the activity of the individual Ego alone and of itself. The Ego may become so strong as to transform, by its very own power and strength, the sentient body. What the Ego then makes of the Sentient or Astral Body is called ‘Spirit-Self’ (or by an Eastern expression, ‘Manas’). This transformation is wrought mainly through a process of learning, through an enriching of one's inner life with higher ideas and perceptions. Now the Ego can rise to a still higher task, and it is one that belongs quite essentially to its nature. This happens when not only is the astral body enriched, but the etheric or life-body transformed. A man learns many things in the course of his life; and if from some point he looks back on his past life, he may say to himself: ‘I have learned much.’ But in a far less degree will he be able to speak of a transformation in his temperament or character during life, or of an improvement or deterioration in his memory. Learning concerns the astral body, whereas the latter kinds of transformation concern the etheric or life-body. Hence it is by no means an unhappy image if we compare the change in the astral body during life with the course of the minute hand of a clock, and the transformation of the life-body with the course of the hour hand. [ 27 ] When man enters on a higher training—or, as it is called, occult training—it is above all important for him to undertake, out of the very own power of his Ego, this latter transformation. Individually and with full consciousness, he has to work out the transformation of his habits and his temperament, his character, his memory ... In so far as he thus works into his life-body, he transforms it into what is called in anthroposophical terminology, ‘Life-Spirit’ (or, as the Eastern expression has it, ‘Budhi’). [ 28 ] At a still higher stage man comes to acquire forces whereby he is able to work upon his physical body and transform it (transforming, for example, the circulation of the blood, the pulse). As much of the physical body as is thus transformed is ‘Spirit-Man’ (or, in the Eastern term, ‘Atma’). [ 29 ] Now as a member of the whole human species or of some section of it—for example, of a nation, tribe, or family—man also achieves certain transformations of the lower parts of his nature. In Anthroposophical Science the results of this latter kind of transformation are known by the following names. The astral or sentient body, transformed through the Ego, is called the Sentient Soul; the transformed etheric body is called the Intellectual Soul; and the transformed physical body the Spiritual Soul. We must not imagine the transformations of these three members taking place one after another in time. From the moment when the Ego lights up, all three bodies are undergoing transformation simultaneously. Indeed, the work of the Ego does not become clearly perceptible to man until a part of the Spiritual Soul has already been formed and developed. [ 30 ] From what has been said, it is clear that we may speak of four members of man's nature: the Physical Body, the Etheric or Life-Body, the Astral or Sentient Body, and the Body of the Ego. The Sentient Soul, the Intellectual Soul, and the Spiritual Soul, and beyond these the still higher members of man's nature—Spirit-Self, Life-Self, Spirit-Man—appear in connection with these four members as products of transformation. Speaking of the vehicles of the qualities of man, it is in fact the first four members only which come into account. [ 31 ] It is on these four members of the human being that the educator works. Hence, if we desire to work in the right way, we must investigate the nature of these parts of man. It must not be imagined that they develop uniformly in the human being, so that at any given point in his life—the moment of birth, for example—they are all equally far developed. This is not the case; their development takes place differently in the different ages of a man's life. The right foundation for education, and for teaching also, consists in a knowledge of these laws of development of human nature. [ 32 ] Before physical birth, the growing human being is surrounded on all sides by the physical body of another. He does not come into independent contact with the physical world. The physical body of his mother is his environment, and this body alone can work upon him as he grows and ripens. Physical birth indeed consists in this, that the physical mother-body, which has been as a protecting sheath, sets the human being free, thus enabling the environment of the physical world thenceforward to work upon him directly. His senses open to the external world, and the external world thereby gains that influence on the human being which was previously exercised by the physical envelope of the mother-body. [ 33 ] A spiritual understanding of the world, as represented by Anthroposophy, sees in this process the birth of the physical body, but not as yet of the etheric or life-body. Even as man is surrounded, until the moment of birth, by the physical envelope of the mother-body, so until the time of the change of teeth—until about the seventh year—he is surrounded by an etheric envelope and by an astral envelope. It is only during the change of teeth that the etheric envelope liberates the etheric body. And an astral envelope remains until the time of puberty, when the astral or sentient body also becomes free on all sides, even as the physical body became free at physical birth and the etheric body at the change of teeth.6 [ 33 ] Thus, Anthroposophical Science has to speak of three births of the human being. Until the change of teeth, certain impressions intended for the etheric body can as little reach it as the light and air of the physical world can reach the physical body so long as this latter is resting in the mother's womb. [ 34 ] Before the change of teeth takes place, the free life-body is not yet at work in man. As in the body of the mother the physical body receives forces which are not its own, while at the same time it gradually develops its own forces within the protecting sheath of the mother's womb, [ 35 ] so it is with the forces of growth until the change of teeth. During this first period the etheric body is only developing and moulding its own forces, con jointly with those—not its own—which it has inherited. Now while the etheric body is thus working its way into liberation, the physical body is already independent. The etheric body, as it liberates itself, develops and works out what it has to give to the physical body. The ‘second teeth,’ i.e. the human being's own teeth, taking the place of those which he inherited, represent the culmination of this work. They are the densest things embedded in the physical body, and hence they appear last, at the end of this period. [ 36 ] From this point onward, the growth of man's physical body is brought about by his own etheric body alone. But this etheric body is still under the influence of an astral body which has not yet escaped from its protecting sheath. At the moment when the astral body too becomes free, the etheric body concludes another period of its development; and this conclusion finds expression in puberty. The organs of reproduction become independent because from this time onward the astral body is free, no longer working inwards, but openly and without integument meeting the external world. [ 37 ] Now just as the physical influences of the external world cannot be brought to bear on the yet unborn child—so until the change of teeth one should not bring to bear on the etheric body those forces which are, for it, what the impressions of the physical environment are for the physical body. And in the astral body the corresponding influences should not be given play until after puberty. [ 38 ] Vague and general phrases—‘the harmonious development of all the powers and talents in the child,’ and so forth—cannot provide the basis for a genuine art of education. Such an art of education can only be built up on a real knowledge of the human being. Not that these phrases are incorrect, but that at bottom they are as useless as it would be to say of a machine that all its parts must be brought harmoniously into action. To work a machine you must approach it, not with phrases and truisms, but with real and detailed knowledge. So for the art of education it is a knowledge of the members of man's being and of their several development which is important. We must know on what part of the human being we have especially to work at a certain age, and how we can work upon it in the proper way. There is of course no doubt that a truly realistic art of education, such as is here indicated, will only slowly make its way. This lies, indeed, in the whole mentality of our age, which will long continue to regard the facts of the spiritual world as the vapourings of an imagination run wild, while it takes vague and altogether unreal phrases for the result of a realistic way of thinking. Here, however, we shall unreservedly describe what will in time to come be a matter of common knowledge, though many to-day may still regard it as a figment of the mind. [ 39 ] With physical birth the physical human body is exposed to the physical environment of the external world. Before birth it was surrounded by the protecting envelope of the mother's body. What the forces and fluids of the enveloping mother-body have done for it hitherto, must from now onward be done for it by the forces and elements of the external physical world. Now before the change of teeth in the seventh year, the human body has a task to perform upon itself which is essentially different from the tasks of all the other periods of life. In this period the physical organs must mould themselves into definite shapes. Their whole structural nature must receive certain tendencies and directions. In the later periods also, growth takes place; but throughout the whole succeeding life, growth is based on the forms which were developed in this first life-period. If true forms were developed, true forms will grow; if misshapen forms were developed, misshapen forms will grow. We can never repair what we have neglected as educators in the first seven years. Just as Nature brings about the right environment for the physical human body before birth, so after birth the educator must provide for the right physical environment. It is the right physical environment alone, which works upon the child in such a way that the physical organs shape themselves aright. [ 40 ] There are two magic words which indicate how the child enters into relation with his environment. They are: Imitation, and Example. The Greek philosopher Aristotle called man the most imitative of creatures. For no age in life is this more true than for the first stage of childhood, before the change of teeth. What goes on in his physical environment, this the child imitates, and in the process of imitation his physical organs are cast into the forms which then become permanent. ‘Physical environment’ must, however, be taken in the widest imaginable sense. It includes not only what goes on around the child in the material sense, but everything that takes place in the child's environment—everything that can be perceived by his senses, that can work from the surrounding physical space upon the inner powers of the child. This includes all the moral or immoral actions, all the wise or foolish actions, that the child sees. [ 41 ] It is not moral talk or prudent admonitions that influence the child in this sense. Rather is it what the grown-up people do visibly before his eyes. The effect of admonition is to mould the forms, not of the physical, but of the etheric body; and the latter, as we saw, is surrounded until the seventh year by a protecting etheric envelope, even as the physical body is surrounded before physical birth by the physical envelope of the mother-body. All that has to evolve in the etheric body before the seventh year—ideas, habits, memory, and so forth—all this must develop ‘of its own accord,’ just as the eyes and ears develop within the mother-body without the influence of external light ... What we read in that excellent educational work—Jean Paul's ‘Levana’ or ‘Science of Education’—is undoubtedly true. He says that a traveler will have learned more from his nurse in the first years of his life, than in all his journeys round the world. The child, however, does not learn by instruction or admonition, but by imitation. The physical organs shape their forms through the influence of the physical environment. Good sight will be developed in the child if his environment has the right conditions of light and colour, while in the brain and blood-circulation the physical foundations will be laid for a healthy moral sense if the child sees moral actions in his environment. If before his seventh year the child sees only foolish actions in his surroundings, the brain will assume such forms as adapt it also to foolishness in later life. [ 42 ] As the muscles of the hand grow firm and strong in performing the work for which they are fitted, so the brain and other organs of the physical body of man are guided into the right lines of development if they receive the right impression from their environment. An example will best illustrate this point. You can make a doll for a child by folding up an old napkin, making two corners into legs, the other two corners into arms, a knot for the head, and painting eyes, nose and mouth with blots of ink. Or else you can buy the child what they call a ‘pretty’ doll, with real hair and painted cheeks. We need not dwell on the fact that the ‘pretty’ doll is of course hideous, and apt to spoil the healthy aesthetic sense for a lifetime. The main educational question is a different one. If the child has before him the folded napkin, he has to fill in from his own imagination all that is needed to make it real and human. This work of the imagination moulds and builds the forms of the brain. The brain unfolds as the muscles of the hand unfold when they do the work for which they are fitted. Give the child the so-called ‘pretty’ doll, and the brain has nothing more to do. Instead of unfolding, it becomes stunted and dried up. If people could look into the brain as the spiritual investigator can, and see how it builds its forms, they would assuredly give their children only such toys as are fitted to stimulate and vivify its formative activity. Toys with dead mathematical forms alone, have a desolating and killing effect upon the formative forces of the child. On the other hand everything that kindles the imagination of living things works in the right way. Our materialistic age produces few good toys. What a healthy toy it is, for example, which represents by movable wooden figures two smiths facing each other and hammering an anvil. The like can still be bought in country districts. Excellent also are the picture-books where the figures can be set in motion by pulling threads from below, so that the child itself can transform the dead picture into a representation of living action. All this brings about a living mobility of the organs, and by such mobility the right forms of the organs are built up. [ 43 ] These things can of course only be touched on here, but in future Anthroposophy will be called upon to give the necessary indications in detail, and this it is in a position to do. For it is no empty abstraction, but a body of living facts which can give guiding lines for the conduct of life's realities. [ 44 ] A few more examples may be given. A ‘nervous,’ that is to say excitable child, should be treated differently as regards environment from one who is quiet and lethargic. Everything comes into consideration, from the colour of the room and the various objects that are generally around the child, to the colour of the clothes in which he is dressed. One will often do the wrong thing if one does not take guidance from spiritual knowledge. For in many cases the materialistic idea will hit on the exact reverse of what is right. An excitable child should be surrounded by and dressed in the red or reddish-yellow colours, whereas for a lethargic child one should have recourse to the blue or bluish-green shades of colour. For the important thing is the complementary colour, which is created within the child. In the case of red it is green, and in the case of blue orange-yellow, as may easily be seen by looking for a time at a red or blue surface and then quickly directing one's gaze to a white surface. The physical organs of the child create this contrary or complementary colour, and it is this which brings about the corresponding organic structures that the child needs. If the excitable child has a red colour around him, he will inwardly create the opposite, the green; and this activity of creating green has a calming effect. The organs assume a tendency to calmness. [ 45 ] There is one thing that must be thoroughly and fully recognized for this age of the child's life. It is that the physical body creates its own scale of measurement for what is beneficial to it. This it does by the proper development of craving and desire. Generally speaking, we may say that the healthy physical body desires what is good for it. In the growing human being, so long as it is the physical body that is important, we should pay the closest attention to what the healthy craving, desire and delight require. Pleasure and delight are the forces which most rightly quicken and call forth the physical forms of the organs. In this matter it is all too easy to do harm by failing to bring the child into a right relationship, physically, with his environment. Especially may this happen in regard to his instincts for food. The child may be overfed with things that completely make him lose his healthy instinct for food, whereas by giving him the right nourishment the instinct can be so preserved that he always wants what is wholesome for him under the circumstances, even to a glass of water, and turns just as surely from what would do him harm. Anthroposophical Science, when called upon to build up an art of education, will be able to indicate all these things in detail, even specifying particular forms of food and nourishment. For Anthroposophy is realism, it is no grey theory; it is a thing for life itself. [ 46 ] Thus the joy of the child, in and with his environment, must be reckoned among the forces that build and mould the physical organs. Teachers he needs with happy look and manner, and above all with an honest unaffected love. A love which as it were streams through the physical environment of the child with warmth may literally be said to ‘hatch out’ the forms of the physical organs. [ 47 ] The child who lives in such an atmosphere of love and warmth and who has around him really good examples for his imitation, is living in his right element. One should therefore strictly guard against anything being done in the child's presence that he must not imitate. One should do nothing of which one would then have to say to the child, ‘You must not do that.’ The strength of the child's tendency to imitate can be recognized by observing how he will paint and scribble written signs and letters long before he understands them. Indeed, it is good for him to paint the letters by imitation first, and only later learn to understand their meaning. For imitation belongs to this period when the physical body is developing; while the meaning speaks to the etheric, and the etheric body should not be worked on till after the change of teeth, when the outer etheric envelope has fallen away. Especially should all learning of speech in these years be through imitation. It is by hearing that the child will best learn to speak. No rules or artificial instruction of any kind can be of good effect. [ 48 ] For early childhood it is important to realize the value of children's songs, for example, as means of education. They must make a pretty and rhythmical impression on the senses; the beauty of sound is to be valued more than the meaning. The more living the impression made on eye and ear, the better. Dancing movements in musical rhythm have a powerful influence in building up the physical organs, and this too should not be undervalued. [ 49 ] With the change of teeth, when the etheric body lays aside its outer etheric envelope, there begins the time when the etheric body can be worked upon by education from without. We must be quite clear what it is that can work upon the etheric body from without, The formation and growth of the etheric body means the moulding and developing of the inclinations and habits, of the conscience, the character, the memory and temperament. The etheric body is worked upon through pictures and examples—i.e. by carefully guiding the imagination of the child. As before the age of seven we have to give the child the actual physical pattern for him to copy, so between the time of the change of teeth and puberty we must bring into his environment things with the right inner meaning and value. For it is from the inner meaning and value of things that the growing child will now take guidance. Whatever is fraught with a deep meaning that works through pictures and allegories, is the right thing for these years. The etheric body will unfold its forces if the well-ordered imagination is allowed to take guidance from the inner meaning it discovers for itself in pictures and allegories—whether seen in real life or communicated to the mind. It is not abstract conceptions that work in the right way on the growing etheric body, but rather what is seen and perceived—not indeed with the outward senses, but with the eye of the mind. This seeing and perceiving is the right means of education for these years. For this reason it matters above all that the boy and girl should have as their teachers persons who can awaken in them, as they see and watch them, the right intellectual and moral powers. As for the first years of childhood Imitation and Example were, so to say, the magic words for education, so for the years of this second period the magic words are Discipleship and Authority. What the child sees directly in his educators, with inner perception, must become for him authority—not an authority compelled by force, but one that he accepts naturally without question. By it he will build up his conscience, habits and inclinations; by it he will bring his temperament into an ordered path. He will look out upon the things of the world as it were through its eyes. Those beautiful words of the poet, ‘Every man must choose his hero, in whose footsteps he will tread as he carves out his path to the heights of Olympus,’ have especial meaning for this time of life. Veneration and reverence are forces whereby the etheric body grows in the right way. If it was impossible during these years to look up to another person with unbounded reverence, one will have to suffer for the loss throughout the whole of one's later life. Where reverence is lacking, the living forces of the etheric body are stunted in their growth. Picture to yourself how such an incident as the following works upon the character of a child. A boy of eight years old hears tell of someone who is truly worthy of honour and respect. All that he hears of him inspires in the boy a holy awe. The day draws near when for the first time he will be able to see him. With trembling hand he lifts the latch of the door behind which will appear before his sight the person he reveres. The beautiful feelings such an experience calls forth are among the lasting treasures of life. Happy is he who, not only in the solemn moments of life but continually, is able to look up to his teachers and educators as to his natural and unquestioned authorities. [ 50 ] Beside these living authorities, who as it were embody for the child intellectual and moral strength, there should also be those he can only apprehend with the mind and spirit, who likewise become for him authorities. The outstanding figures of history, stories of the lives of great men and women: let these determine the conscience and the direction of the mind. Abstract moral maxims are not yet to be used; they can only begin to have a helpful influence, when at the age of puberty the astral body liberates itself from its astral mother-envelope. In the history lesson especially, the teacher should lead his teaching in the direction thus indicated. When telling stories of all kinds to little children before the change of teeth, our aim cannot be more than to awaken delight and vivacity and a happy enjoyment of the story. But after the change of teeth, we have in addition something else to bear in mind in choosing our material for stories; and that is, that we are placing before the boy or girl pictures of life that will arouse a spirit of emulation in the soul. The fact should not be overlooked that bad habits may be completely overcome by drawing attention to appropriate instances that shock or repel the child. Reprimands give at best but little help in the matter of habits and inclinations. If, however, we show the living picture of a man who has given way to a similar bad habit, and let the child see where such an inclination actually leads, this will work upon the young imagination and go a long way towards the uprooting of the habit. The fact must always be remembered: it is not abstract ideas that have an influence on the developing etheric body, but living pictures that are seen and comprehended inwardly. The suggestion that has just been made certainly needs to be carried out with great tact, so that the effect may not be reversed and turn out the very opposite of what was intended. In the telling of stories everything depends upon the art of telling. Narration by word of mouth cannot, therefore, simply be replaced by reading. [ 51 ] In another connection too, the presentation of living pictures, or as we might say of symbols, to the mind, is important for the period between the change of teeth and puberty. It is essential that the secrets of Nature, the laws of life, be taught to the boy or girl, not in dry intellectual concepts, but as far as possible in symbols. Parables of the spiritual connections of things should be brought before the soul of the child in such a manner that behind the parables he divines and feels, rather than grasps intellectually, the underlying law in all existence. ‘All that is passing is but a parable,’ must be the maxim guiding all our education in this period. It is of vast importance for the child that he should receive the secrets of Nature in parables, before they are brought before his soul in the form of ‘natural laws’ and the like. An example may serve to make this clear. Let us imagine that we want to tell a child of the immortality of the soul, of the coming forth of the soul from the body. The way to do this is to use a comparison, such for example as the comparison of the butterfly coming forth from the chrysalis. As the butterfly soars up from the chrysalis, so after death the soul of man from the house of the body. No man will rightly grasp the fact in intellectual concepts, who has not first received it in such a picture. By such a parable, we speak not merely to the intellect but to the feeling of the child, to all his soul. A child who has experienced this, will approach the subject with an altogether different mood of soul, when later it is taught him in the form of intellectual concepts. It is indeed a very serious matter for any man, if he was not first enabled to approach the problems of existence with his feeling. Thus it is essential that the educator have at his disposal parables for all the laws of Nature and secrets of the World. [ 52 ] Here we have an excellent opportunity to observe with what effect the spiritual knowledge of Anthroposophy must work in life and practice. When the teacher comes before a class of children, armed with parables he has ‘made up’ out of an intellectual materialistic mode of thought, he will as a rule make little impression upon them. For he has first to puzzle out the parables for himself with all his intellectual cleverness. Parables to which one has first had to condescend have no convincing effect on those who listen to them. For when one speaks in parable and picture, it is not only what is spoken and shown that works upon the hearer, but a fine spiritual stream passes from the one to the other, from him who gives to him who receives. If he who tells has not himself the warm feeling of belief in his parable, he will make no impression on the other. For real effectiveness, it is essential to believe in one's parables as in absolute realities. And this can only be when one's thought is alive with spiritual knowledge. Take for instance the parable of which we have been speaking. The true student of Anthroposophy need not torment himself to think it out. For him it is reality. In the coming forth of the butterfly from the chrysalis he sees at work on a lower level of being the very same process that is repeated, on a higher level and at a higher stage of development, in the coming forth of the soul from the body. He believes in it with his whole might; and this belief streams as it were unseen from speaker to hearer, carrying conviction. Life flows freely, unhindered, back and forth from teacher to pupil. But for this it is necessary that the teacher draw from the full fountain of spiritual knowledge. His words and all that comes from him must receive feeling, warmth and colour from a truly anthroposophic way of thought. A wonderful prospect is thus opened out over the whole field of education. If it will but let itself be enriched from the well of life that Anthroposophy contains, education will itself be filled with life and understanding. There will no longer be that groping which is now so prevalent. All art and practice of education that is not continually receiving fresh nourishment from such roots as these is dry and dead. The spiritual knowledge of Anthroposophy has for all the secrets of the world appropriate parables—pictures taken from the very being of the things, pictures not first made by man, but laid by the forces of the world within the things themselves in the very act of their creation. Therefore this spiritual knowledge must form the living basis for the whole art of education. [ 53 ] A force of the soul on which particular value must be set during this period of man's development, is memory. The development of the memory is bound up with the moulding of the etheric body. Since the latter takes place in such a way that the etheric body becomes liberated between the change of teeth and puberty, so too this is the tune for a conscious attention from without to the growth and cultivation of the memory. If what is due to the human being at this time has been neglected, his memory will ever after have less value than it might otherwise have had. It is not possible later to make up for what has been left undone. [ 54 ] In this connection many mistakes may be made by an intellectual materialistic way of thought. An art of education based on such a way of thought easily arrives at a condemnation of what is mastered merely by memory. It will often set itself untiringly and emphatically against the mere training of the memory, and will employ the subtlest methods to ensure that the boy or girl commits nothing to memory that he does not intellectually understand. Yes, and after all, how much has really been gained by such intellectual understanding? A materialistic way of thought is so easily led to believe that any further penetration into things, beyond the intellectual concepts that are as it were extracted from them, simply does not exist; and only with great difficulty will it fight its way through to the perception that the other forces of the soul are at least as necessary as the intellect, if we are to gain a comprehension of things. It is no mere figure of speech to say that man can understand with his feeling, his sentiment, his inner disposition, as well as with his intellect. Intellectual concepts are only one of the means we have to understand the things of this world, and it is only to the materialistic thinker that they appear as the sole means. Of course there are many who do not consider themselves materialists, who yet regard an intellectual conception of things as the only kind of understanding. Such people profess perhaps an idealistic or even a spiritual outlook. But in their soul they relate themselves to it in a materialistic way. For the intellect is in effect the instrument of the soul for understanding what is material. [ 55 ] We have already alluded to Jean Paul's excellent book on education; and a passage from it, bearing on this subject of the deeper foundations of the understanding, may well be quoted here. Jean Paul's book contains, indeed, many a golden word on education, and deserves far more attention than it receives. It is of greater value for the teacher than many of the educational works that are held in highest regard to-day. The passage runs as follows:— ‘Have no fear of going beyond the childish understanding, even in whole sentences. Your expression and the tone of your voice, aided by the child's intuitive eagerness to understand, will light up half the meaning, and with it in course of time the other half. It is with children as with the Chinese and people of refinement; the tone is half the language. Remember, the child learns to understand his own language before ever he learns to speak it, just as we do with Greek or any other foreign language. Trust to time and the connections of things to unravel the meaning. A child of five understands the words “yet,” “even,” “of course,” “just”; but now try to give an explanation of them—not to the child, but to his father! In the one word “of course” there lurks a little philosopher! If the eight-year-old child, with his developed speech, is understood by the child of three, why do you want to narrow down your language to the little one's childish prattle? Always speak to the child some years ahead—do not the men of genius speak to us centuries ahead in books? Talk to the one-year-old as if he were two, to the two-year-old as if he were six, for the difference in development diminishes in inverse ratio with the age. We are far too prone to credit the teachers with everything the children learn. We should remember that the child we have to educate bears half his world within him all there and ready taught, namely the spiritual half, including, for example, the moral and metaphysical ideas. For this very reason language, equipped as it is with material images alone, cannot give the spiritual archetypes; all it can do is to illumine them. The very brightness and decision of children should give us brightness and decision when we speak to them. We can learn from their speech as well as teach them through our own. Their word-building is bold, yet remarkably accurate! For instance, I have heard the following expressions used by three- or four-year-old children:—“the barreler” (for the maker of barrels)—“the sky-mouse” (for the bat)—“I am the seeing-through man” (standing behind the telescope)—“I'd like to be a ginger-bread-eater”—“he joked me down from the chair”—“See how one o'clock it is!” ...’ [ 56 ] Our quotation refers, it is true, to a different subject from that with which we are immediately concerned; but what Jean Paul says about speech has its value in the present connection also. Here too there is an understanding which precedes the intellectual comprehension. The little child receives the structure of language into the living organism of his soul, and does not require the laws of language-formation in intellectual concepts for the process. Similarly the older boy and girl must learn for the cultivation of the memory much that they are not to master with their intellectual understanding until later years. Those things are afterwards best grasped in concepts, which have first been learned simply from memory in this period of life, even as the rules of language are best learned in a language one is already able to speak. So much talk against ‘unintelligent learning by heart’ is simply materialistic prejudice. The child need only, for instance, learn the essential rules of multiplication in a few given examples—and for these no apparatus is necessary; the fingers are much better for the purpose than any apparatus,—then he is ready to set to and memorize the whole multiplication table. Proceeding in this way, we shall be acting with due regard to the nature of the growing child. We shall, however, be offending against his nature, if at the time when the development of the memory is the important thing we are making too great a call upon the intellect. The intellect is a soul-force that is only born with puberty, and we ought not to bring any influence to bear on it from outside before this period. Up to the time of puberty the child should be laying up in his memory the treasures of thought on which mankind has pondered; afterwards is the time to penetrate with intellectual understanding what has already been well impressed upon the memory in earlier years. It is necessary for man, not only to remember what he already understands, but to come to understand what he already knows—that is to say, what he has acquired by memory in the way the child acquires language. This truth has a wide application. First there must be the assimilation of historical events through the memory, then the grasping of them in intellectual concepts; first the faithful committing to memory of the facts of geography, then the intellectual grasp of the connections between them. In a certain respect, the grasping of things in concepts should proceed from the stored-up treasures of the memory. The more the child knows in memory before he begins to grasp in intellectual concepts, the better. There is no need to enlarge upon the fact that what has been said applies only for that period of childhood with which we are dealing, and not later. If at some later age in life one has occasion to take up a subject for any reason, then of course the opposite may easily be the right and most helpful way of learning it, though even here much will depend on the mentality of the person. In the time of life, however, with which we are now concerned, we must not dry up the child's mind and spirit by cramming it with intellectual conceptions. [ 57 ] Another result of a materialistic way of thought is to be seen in the lessons that rest too exclusively on sense-perception. At this period of childhood, all perception must be spiritualized. We ought not to be satisfied, for instance, with presenting a plant, a seed, a flower to the child merely as it can be perceived with the senses. Everything should become a parable of the spiritual. In a grain of corn there is far more than meets the eye. There is a whole new plant invisible within it. That such a thing as a seed has more within it than can be perceived with the senses, this the child must grasp in a living way with his feeling and imagination. He must, in feeling, divine the secrets of existence. The objection cannot be made that the pure perception of the senses is obscured by this means; on the contrary, by going no further than what the senses see, we are stopping short of the whole truth. For the full reality consists of the spirit as well as the substance; and there is no less need for faithful and careful observation when one is bringing all the faculties of the soul into play, than when only the physical senses are employed. Could men but see, as the spiritual investigator sees, what desolation is wrought in soul and body by an instruction that rests on external sense-perception alone, they would never insist upon it so strongly as they do. Of what good is it in the highest sense, that children should have shown to them all possible varieties of minerals, plants and animals, and all kinds of physical experiments, if something further is not bound up with the teaching of these things; namely, to make use of the parables which the sense-world gives, in order to awaken a feeling for the secrets of the spirit? Certainly a materialistic way of thought will have little use for what has here been said; and this the spiritual investigator understands only too well. But he also knows that the materialistic way of thought will never give rise to a really practical art of education. Practical as it appears to itself, materialistic thought is unpractical when the need is to enter into life in a living way. In face of actual reality, materialistic thought is fantastic,—though indeed to the materialistic thinker the anthroposophical teachings, adhering as they do to the facts of life, cannot but appear fantastic. There will no doubt be many an obstacle yet to overcome before the principles of Anthroposophy, which are indeed born out of life itself, can make their way into the art of education. It cannot be otherwise. The truths of this spiritual science cannot but seem strange as yet, and unaccustomed to many people. None the less, if they are true indeed, they will become part of our life and civilization. [ 58 ] Only the teacher who has a conscious and clear understanding of how the several subjects and methods of education work upon the growing child, can have the tact to meet every occasion that offers, in the right way. He has to know how to treat the several faculties of the soul—Thinking, Feeling and Willing,—so that their development may react on the etheric body, which in this period between the change of teeth and puberty can attain more and more perfect form under the influences that affect it from without. [ 59 ] By a right application of the fundamental educational principles, during the first seven years of childhood, the foundation is laid for the development of a strong and healthy Will. For a strong and healthy will must have its support in the well-developed forms of the physical body. Then, from the time of the change of teeth onwards, the etheric body which is now developing must bring to the physical body those forces whereby it can make its forms firm and inwardly complete. Whatever makes the strongest impression on the etheric body, works also most powerfully towards the consolidation of the physical body. The strongest of all the impulses that can work on the etheric body, come from the feelings and thoughts by which man divines and experiences in consciousness his relation to the Everlasting Powers. That is to say, they are those that come from religious experience. Never will a man's will, nor in consequence his character, develop healthily, if he is not able in this period of childhood to receive religious impulses deep into his soul. How a man feels his place and part in the universal Whole,—this will find expression in the unity of his life of will. If he does not feel himself linked by strong bonds to a Divine-spiritual, his will and character must needs remain uncertain, divided and unsound. [ 60 ] The world of Feeling is developed in the right way through the parables and pictures we have spoken of, and especially through the pictures of great men and women, taken from History and other sources, which we bring before the children. A correspondingly deep study of the secrets and beauties of Nature is also important for the right formation of the world of feeling. Last but not least, there is the cultivation of the sense of beauty and the awakening of the artistic feeling. The musical element must bring to the etheric body that rhythm which will then enable it to sense in all things the rhythm otherwise concealed. A child who is denied the blessing of having his musical sense cultivated during these years, will be the poorer for it the whole of his later life. If this sense were entirely lacking in him, whole aspects of the world's existence would of necessity remain hidden from him. Nor are the other arts to be neglected. The awakening of the feeling for architectural forms, for moulding and sculpture, for lines and for design, for colour harmonies—none of these should be left out of the plan of education. However simple life has to be under certain circumstances, the objection can never hold that the circumstances do not allow of anything being done in this direction. Much can be done with the simplest means, if only the teacher himself has the right artistic feeling. Joy and happiness in living, a love of all existence, a power and energy for work—such are among the lifelong results of a right cultivation of the feeling for beauty and for art. The relationship of man to man, how noble, how beautiful it becomes under this influence! Again, the moral sense, which is also being formed in the child during these years through the pictures of life that are placed before him, through the authorities to whom he looks up,—this moral sense becomes assured, if the child out of his own sense of beauty feels the good to be at the same time beautiful, the bad to be at the same time ugly. [ 61 ] Thought in its proper form, as an inner life lived in abstract concepts, must remain still in the background during this period of childhood. It must develop as it were of itself, uninfluenced from without, while life and the secrets of nature are being unfolded in parable and picture. Thus between the seventh year and puberty, thought must be growing, the faculty of judgement ripening, in among the other experiences of the soul; so that after puberty is reached, the youth may become able to form quite independently his own opinions on the things of life and knowledge. The less the direct influence on the development of judgement in earlier years, and the more a good indirect influence is brought to bear through the development of the other faculties of soul, the better it is for the whole of later life. [ 62 ] The spiritual knowledge of Anthroposophy affords the true foundations, not only for spiritual and mental education, but for physical. This may be illustrated by reference to children's games and gymnastic exercises. Just as love and joy should permeate the surroundings of the child in the earliest years of life, so through physical exercises the growing etheric body should experience an inner feeling of its own growth, of its ever increasing strength. Gymnastic exercises, for instance, should be of such a nature that each movement, each step, gives rise to the feeling within the child: ‘I feel growing strength in me.’ This feeling must take possession of the child as a healthy sense of inner happiness and ease. To think out gymnastic exercises from this point of view requires more than an intellectual knowledge of human anatomy and physiology. It requires an intimate intuitive knowledge of the connection of the sense of happiness and ease with the positions and movements of the human body—a knowledge that is not merely intellectual, but permeated with feeling. Whoever arranges such exercises must be able to experience in himself how one movement and position of the limbs produces a happy and easy feeling of strength, another, as it were, an inner loss of strength. ... To teach gymnastics and other physical exercises with these things in view, the teacher will require what Anthroposophy alone—and above all, the anthroposophical habit of mind—can give. He need not himself see into the spiritual worlds at once, but he must have the understanding to apply in life only what springs from spiritual knowledge. If the knowledge of Anthroposophy were applied in practical spheres like education, the idle talk that this knowledge has first to be proved would quickly disappear. Whoever applies it correctly, will find that the knowledge of Anthroposophy proves itself in life by making life strong and healthy. He will see it to be true in that it holds good in life and practice, and in this he will find a proof stronger than all the logical and so-called scientific arguments can afford. Spiritual truths are best recognized in their fruits and not by what is called a proof, be this ever so scientific; such proof can indeed hardly be more than logical skirmishing. [ 63 ] With the age of puberty the astral body is first born. Henceforth the astral body in its development is open to the outside world. Only now, therefore, can we approach the child from without with all that opens up the world of abstract ideas, the faculty of judgement and independent thought. It has already been pointed out, how up to this time these faculties of soul should be developing—free from outer influence—within the environment provided by the education proper to the earlier years, even as the eyes and ears develop, free from outer influence, within the organism of the mother. With puberty the time has arrived when the human being is ripe for the formation of his own judgements about the things he has already learned. Nothing more harmful can be done to a child than to awaken too early his independent judgement. Man is not in a position to judge until he has collected in his inner life material for judgement and comparison. If he forms his own conclusions before doing so, his conclusions will lack foundation. Educational mistakes of this kind are the cause of all narrow one-sidedness in life, all barren creeds that take their stand on a few scraps of knowledge and are ready on this basis to condemn ideas experienced and proved by man often through long ages. In order to be ripe for thought, one must have learned to be full of respect for what others have thought. There is no healthy thought which has not been preceded by a healthy feeling for the truth, a feeling for the truth supported by faith in authorities accepted naturally. Were this principle observed in education, there would no longer be so many people, who, imagining too soon that they are ripe for judgement, spoil their own power to receive openly and without bias the all-round impressions of life. Every judgement that is not built on a sufficient foundation of gathered knowledge and experience of soul throws a stumbling-block in the way of him who forms it. For having once pronounced a judgement concerning a matter, we are ever after influenced by this judgement. We no longer receive a new experience as we should have done, had we not already formed a judgement connected with it. The thought must take living hold in the child's mind, that he has first to learn and then to judge. What the intellect has to say concerning any matter, should only be said when all the other faculties of the soul have spoken. Before that time the intellect has only an intermediary part to play: its business is to grasp what takes place and is experienced in feeling, to receive it exactly as it is, not letting the unripe judgement come in at once and take possession. For this reason, up to the age of puberty the child should be spared all theories about things; the main consideration is that he should simply meet the experiences of life, receiving them into his soul. Certainly he can be told what different men have thought about this and that, but one must avoid his associating himself through a too early exercise of judgement with the one view or the other. Thus the opinions of men he should also receive with the feeling power of the soul. He should be able, without jumping to a decision or taking sides with this or that person, to listen to all, saying to himself: ‘This man said this, and that man that.’ The cultivation of such a mind in a boy or girl certainly demands the exercise of great tact from teachers and educators; but tact is just what anthroposophical thought can give. [ 64 ] All we have been able to do is to unfold a few aspects of education in the light of Anthroposophy. And this alone was our intention,—to indicate how great a task the anthroposophical spiritual impulse must fulfil in education for the culture of our time. Its power to fulfil the task will depend on the spread of an understanding for this way of thought in ever wider and wider circles. For this to come about, two things are, however, necessary. The first is that people should relinquish their prejudices against Anthroposophy. Whoever honestly pursues it, will soon see that it is not the fantastic nonsense many to-day hold it to be. We are not making any reproach against those who hold this opinion; for all that the culture of our time offers must tend on a first acquaintance to make one regard the followers of Anthroposophy as fantastic dreamers. On a superficial consideration no other judgement can be reached, for in the light of it Anthroposophy, with its claim to be a spiritual Science, will seem in direct contradiction to all that modern culture gives to man as the foundation of a healthy view of life. Only a deeper consideration will discover that the views of the present day are in themselves deeply contradictory and will remain so, as long as they are without the anthroposophical foundation. Indeed, of their very nature they call out for such foundation and cannot in the long run be without it. The second thing that is needed concerns the healthy cultivation of Anthroposophy itself. Only when it is perceived, in anthroposophical circles everywhere, that the point is not simply to theorize about the teachings, but to let them bear fruit in the most far-reaching way in all the relationships of life,—only then will life itself open up to Anthroposophy with sympathy and understanding. Otherwise people will continue to regard it as a variety of religious sectarianism for a few cranks and enthusiasts. If, however, it performs positive and useful spiritual work, the Anthroposophical Movement cannot in the long run be denied intelligent recognition.
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| 34. Reincarnation and Immortality: The Mystery of the Human Being
09 Oct 1916, Zürich Tr. Michael Tapp, Elizabeth Tapp, Adam Bittleston Rudolf Steiner |
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| That is to say, we learn to perceive not with the ego of our earliest childhood, but the ego that has brought our spiritual nature out of the spiritual world and united itself with what has been inherited in the way of physical forces and substances from our father, mother and ancestors. We go back to this spiritual human being. From the present moment we look back with an awakened consciousness and see through the sense world into the spiritual; we have a spiritual world before us. |
| Eduard von Hartmann therefore says: “In this book neither Hume's absolute phenomenalism nor Berkeley's phenomenalism based on God are reconciled, nor this more immanent or subjective, phenomenalism and the transcendental panlogism of Hegel, nor Hegel's panlogism and Goethean individualism. |
| 34. Reincarnation and Immortality: The Mystery of the Human Being
09 Oct 1916, Zürich Tr. Michael Tapp, Elizabeth Tapp, Adam Bittleston Rudolf Steiner |
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No person with real inner sensitivity would find it any longer necessary to have to speak about a mystery when dealing with human soul life, than he would have to speak about the presence of hunger when dealing with the life of the body. In the way it functions the life process must be so regulated that it induces hunger. It is possible to disregard hunger by the use of certain drugs and to believe that we can get away from it for a time, but in the long run this cannot be done without injury to the body. Similarly, any attempt to conceal the fact that there is a mystery in human life is bound to lead to injury in the soul. Those who disregard the mystery of the human being, either because of their condition in life or a lack of interest, very easily fall prey to a kind of soul hunger and to what happens as a result of this—a sort of atrophy in the life of the soul, an uncertainty and powerlessness, an inability to find one's way in the world. Although no really sensitive person would find it necessary to have to speak about a human mystery in general, he would probably find more reason to consider that the great questions of life take on a new character in each succeeding period of time. As our time is so short, it is not possible to do more than indicate this fact. We can see how the outer conditions of life change from epoch to epoch, how new needs, new questions arise about the way we live. This also happens within the soul, which in its search for a solution to the mystery of man, changes its own finer qualities from epoch to epoch in order to make it possible for man to find such a solution. In this age that has been with us for three or four centuries, and particularly in the 19th century and our own day, which has culminated in the controlling of the world by means of steam, electricity, modern economic and social conditions, in this age there are also questions about the world in which the human being is placed that are of a different kind from those of earlier times. The science of spirit or anthroposophy seeks to approach the solution of the mystery of man out of the needs of modern times. It is a mistake to regard the science of spirit, or anthroposophy, as a renewal of the views of the old mystics. Those who level this sort of criticism, from whatever viewpoint it happens to come, usually construct their own picture of the science of spirit and then criticize this picture, which actually has very little to do with what the science of spirit really is. It is only a caricature of the science of spirit that is criticized. It is of course not possible within the framework of an evening's lecture to mention everything that would be necessary even to provide an outline of the science of spirit. Only a few further points can be added to what I have been saying about this for many years now, even in this city. It is particularly important to remember that the science of spirit does not take its origin from religion or mystical movements—although we should not conclude that it is necessarily opposed to these, as we shall see later—but it arises out of the life of the modern scientific outlook, out of a scientific approach to the world, connected with what is happening in the evolution of present-day natural science. I do not think that anyone who despises the modern scientific outlook can penetrate the mysteries of the world as is done in the science of spirit, even if it is not the results of science that matter so much as the method of approach in conscientiously applying one's thinking to the phenomena of the world. The science of spirit must be well versed in the ways natural science investigates and thinks, and in the way in which it disciplines the inner life of the soul in the art of acquiring knowledge. The science of spirit must absorb this and reckon with it, if it is to keep abreast of the times. It is just in connection with such an approach that the question arises: How is it at all possible for modern science and the outlook which results from it, to arrive at a view of the mysteries of the human being that really satisfies us deep down? If we are really positive thinkers we cannot permit ourselves an answer derived from preconceived opinions, or from one form of belief or another, but only from the facts of present-day scientific development and its method of thought. And so you will allow me to start with the course of scientific thought and research in more recent times. This will be regarded very much from the viewpoint of an admirer of the enormous progress made by the scientific approach in the 19th century, a viewpoint which enables one to realize that the hopes placed in natural science, particularly in the 19th century, for a solution to the great mysteries of man were absolutely honest and genuine. To take one aspect of this, let us look at the rise of the physical and chemical sciences, along with the hopes and aspirations which came with it. We see how people steeped in the scientific outlook began to believe (around the middle of the 19th century) that the inmost being of man can be explained in terms of the physical body just as the working of the forces and forms of nature can be explained in terms of the wonderfully advanced laws of physics and chemistry. The great progress made by physics and chemistry no doubt justified such hopes for a while, and this progress led to the formulation of particular ideas about the world of the smallest particles: atoms and molecules. Even if people think differently about such matters today, nevertheless what I have to say about the atom and the molecule holds good for the whole of the scientific development. The idea was to investigate them and to explain how the substances and physical forces worked in terms of the constitution of the material molecules and atoms, and of the forces and mutual relationships brought about by this constitution. It was thought that if it was possible to explain a process in terms of the smallest particles, it would not be long before the way would be found to understand even the most complicated process, which was seen as a natural process: the process of human thinking and feeling. Now let us examine where this approach with its great hopes has led. Anyone having studied the achievements of physics and chemistry during the past decades can only be filled with admiration for what has been achieved. I cannot go into details, but I will mention the views of a representative scientist, who sought his views in physics and chemistry in investigating the nature of the smallest physical particle, the atom,—Adolf Roland, who specialized in spectral analysis. He formulated his views on the basis of everything that is possible to know about the smallest particles that can be imagined as effective in the material world.—And how remarkable his views are! And how justified they are must be recognized by anyone who has some understanding of the subject. Adolf Roland says: According to everything that can be known today, an atom of iron must be imagined as being more complicated than a Steinway piano. Now this is a significant statement, coming from one so familiar with the methods of modern science. Years ago it was believed that one could investigate the tiniest lifeless beings, or at least produce provisional hypotheses about them, in order to find out something about the world that constitutes the immediate surroundings of our ordinary consciousness. And what, in fact, does one find out? The scientist has to admit that having penetrated this smallest of worlds, he finds nothing that is any more explicable than a Steinway piano. So it becomes quite clear that however far we are able to go by this process of division into the very smallest particles, the world becomes no more explicable than it already is to our ordinary, everyday consciousness.—This is one of the ways of approach, with its great hopes. We see as it were, these great hopes disappearing into the world of the smallest particles. And honest scientific progress will show more and more by penetrating into the smallest particles of space that we can add nothing toward answering the great human mystery to what can be known to our ordinary consciousness. In another sphere there have been just as great hopes, and understandably so, in view of the condition of the times. Just think of the great hopes people had with the advent of the Darwinian theory, with its materialistic bias! People thought they could survey the whole range of living beings, of plants and animals, right up to man. It was thought possible to understand man through having seen how he arose out of the species below him. And in following the transformation of the different species, from the simplest living being right up to man, it was thought possible to find material which would help solve the mystery of man. Once again, anyone initiated into the ways of modern research can only be filled with admiration for the wonderful work that has been done on this subject even to this day. It was thought that we would find the single egg cell, out of which man had evolved, in the appropriate simplest living being, and would then be able to explain the origin of man out of this egg cell, which would be similar to what would be discovered as the simplest animal form in the world. Once again the path was taken to the smallest, this time the smallest living beings. And what has been found there? It is interesting to hear what a conscientious and important scientist of the 80's, Naegeli, had to say. He expressed his view, which has become famous, in the following way: Exact research on the individual species of plants and animals shows that even the tiniest cells of each single species have the most varied differentiation. The egg cell of a hen is just as fully differentiated from that of a frog as a hen itself is different from a frog.—In descending to the simplest living cells, by means of which it was hoped to explain the complications facing our normal consciousness, we do not arrive at anything simpler—as for instance when we study the iron atom—and in the end have to admit that it is just as complicated as a Steinway piano. Thus we have to imagine that the difference between the individual egg cells is as great as is the difference between the various species we see in nature with our ordinary consciousness. Naegeli therefore proves by means of his own scientific conscientiousness that the approach of Darwinism with its materialistic bias is of no value. But now there is another interesting fact. We could, of course, think that Naegeli, the great botanist, was really a one-sided personality, and in any case what he said was spoken in the 80's and that science has progressed and that his views are out of date. But we can also study the very latest developments on this subject, which have been well summed up by a most significant person, one of the most eminent pupils of Ernst Haeckel:—Oskar Hertwig. In the last week or two there has been published his summing up of what he has to offer as a result of his research on—as he calls his book,—Das Werden der Organismen. Eine Widerlegung von Darwins Zufalls theorie. Just imagine, we are confronted by the fact that one of the great pupils of Haeckel, the most radical exponent of materialistic Darwinism, has in the course of his life come to refute this materialistic Darwinism in the most thorough and complete way. I myself often heard from Haeckel's own lips that Oskar Hertwig was the one from whom he expected the most, and whom he expected to be his successor. And now we find today that it is Oskar Hertwig who refutes what he had absorbed as scientific Darwinism from his teacher, Haeckel! And he does it thoroughly, for his work—if I may use the expression—has a certain completeness. This is what I wanted to say, to start with. I shall come back to the question later. I would only like to add that Oskar Hertwig makes use of everything that even the most recent research has brought to light in order to prove that what Naegeli said was absolutely true, so that one can say that the present-day position of biological research shows that a study of the smallest living entities does not tell us any more than does a study of the various species that we can perceive quite normally. For these smallest living entities, the cells, are, according to Naegeli and Hertwig, just as different as are the species themselves. A study of them only teaches us that nothing can be discovered in this way that cannot also be discovered by our normal perception in looking at the ordinary world. Nor is it much different when—I can only mention this briefly—instead of looking at the very small, we look at the very large, the world of astronomy. For here too there has been the most wonderful progress in more recent times, for instance, in the study of the way the heavenly bodies move, which surprised everyone so much in 1859, and which has had such tremendous consequences in astronomy and especially in astrophysics.—And what has been the result? A thing one hears frequently from those who are at home in this subject is: Wherever we look in the world, whether we discover one or the other substance, this is not the main thing, for we find exactly the same substances with exactly the same forces in the universe, in the relatively large, as we find working here on the earth, so that when instead of looking into the very small, we examine the very large we only find what we know from our ordinary experience of space and time in everyday life. It is just in deepening what can be achieved by natural science and in particular in feeling deep admiration for what natural science has achieved that the way for a modern science of spirit or anthroposophy is prepared. But the latter is also well aware that however admirable these achievements of natural science are, however significant they may be for particular purposes, however necessary they may be for sound human progress, they can never penetrate the real mystery of man. This they themselves have proved until now. The science of spirit or anthroposophy therefore takes its cue from natural science and tries to go quite a different way, and this way is not connected with trying to explain what we experience with our normal consciousness by means of a study of the very small or the very large, nor with methods using microscopes, telescopes or anything that can be attained by our senses or instruments which help them, nor by any scientific methods used in the sense world, nor by studying anything other than what we experience in our normal consciousness, but the science of spirit seeks to approach a solution to the mystery of man by a quite different kind of perception, as far as it is possible for human beings to do this. In giving an outline of how one can imagine this other way of looking at the things that surround us, and at the events that happen around us in the world, I will make use of a comparison which will help to make the matter clearer. In ordinary life we are familiar with two states of consciousness, the state of our normal consciousness which we have from the time we awaken in the morning to the time we go to sleep in the evening—this is our normal day consciousness. We are also familiar with the state of our so-called dream consciousness, in which pictures rise chaotically out of depths of the organism that are not accessible to human consciousness, and these pictures appear to be completely without any form of order. It is our experience that makes us aware of the difference between this chaotic dream consciousness and our orderly day consciousness which is encompassed by the real world. The science of spirit or anthroposophy shows us that just as we awaken out of the chaotic dream consciousness into our ordinary day consciousness there is also a further awakening out of our day consciousness to—as I have called it in my book, Riddles of Man—a perceptive consciousness. The science of spirit does not deal with a reversion into a world of dreams, visions or hallucinations, but with something that can enter into human consciousness, into ordinary day consciousness in the same way that this day consciousness replaces our dream consciousness when we awaken. The science of spirit or anthroposophy is therefore concerned with a perceptive consciousness, with a real awakening out of our ordinary day consciousness, with a higher consciousness, if I may use such an expression. And its content is derived from the results of this perceptive, higher consciousness.—Just as the human being awakens from his dream world, where pictures move chaotically to and fro, into the world of the senses, so now as a scientist of spirit he awakens from the normal day consciousness into a perceptive consciousness, where he becomes a part of a real, spiritual world. Now, first of all, I must give an idea of what this perceptive consciousness is. It is not acquired by means of any particular fantastic, arbitrary act or fantastic arbitrary decision, but it is acquired by a person working as a scientist of spirit, work which takes a long time, that is no less toilsome than work in the laboratory or observatory, which is pieced together out of the smallest fragments, perhaps even with only small results, but which are necessary for the progress of science as a whole. But everything that the scientist of spirit has to do is not done as in the laboratory or observatory with ordinary methods and appliances, but is done with the only apparatus that is of any use to the science of spirit, the human soul. It consists of inner processes of the human soul, which, as we shall now see, have nothing to do with vague or chaotic mysticism, but which demand systematic and methodical work on the human soul. How does one acquire the wish to pursue such spiritual work, such an inner development, such a higher self training? It is possible to do it by taking our ordinary conscious life as a starting point, and gradually coming to a particular kind of conviction that becomes more compelling as one immerses one's mind in the modern scientific outlook. For several hundred years already there have been some personalities with this attitude of mind, and today this is increasingly the case. I cannot mention individual names now, but this inner experience, which gradually emerges under the influence of the scientific way of thinking as a distinct and necessary inner outlook and attitude, will affect increasingly wider circles of people and will become a common conviction with all the consequences that such a conviction is bound to entail. There are two things that we are concerned with here. The first is that we have to acquire a certain view of the human ego, or what we call our self, by means of true and intimate observation, carried out willingly and with discipline. We address this self, we express it in one word, when after a certain point in our childhood development, we begin to use the word “I.” In our honest self-observation based on self-training we ask: What is this ego really like? Where is it to be found in us? Is it possible to find it or, if we are honest and conscientious, do we not have to admit as the great thinker Hume did, who did not arrive at his convictions arbitrarily, but by honest, self-observation, that however much I look into myself, I find feelings, ideas, joy and sorrow, I find what I have experienced in the world, but I do not find an ego anywhere? And how can I in any case—as he quite rightly says—find this ego? If it could be found so easily it would also have to be present when I sleep. But when I sleep, I know nothing about this ego. Can I assume that it is extinguished in the evening and revives again in the morning? Without actually being grasped by the mind, it must be present even when the mind is not working in sleep. This is absolutely clear. And all those who are familiar with present-day literature on this subject will increasingly find this clear and obvious, that this will become more and more the case. How are we to understand this? I would have to speak for hours if I were to go into details to prove what I am now saying.—I can only just mention the one fact that the ego of which we are speaking is present in the same way in our day consciousness as it is in the deepest, dreamless sleep. The ego always sleeps. It sleeps when we are asleep, and it sleeps when we are awake, and we know only about a sleeping ego when we are awake, about what lives, even as far as our waking consciousness is concerned, in a hardly conscious sphere of our soul life. Even when we are wide awake in our ordinary consciousness the ego is still only present as it is when we sleep. The reason we cannot imagine anything like an ego in us is because the rest of our soul life is present and, like the black spot in our eyes, cannot see.—The ego is made dark in our souls in a way, and can only be perceived as something we cannot imagine. The ego is always asleep and there is no difference between the way the ego should be imagined in sleep and when we are awake. It is the same when we consider our minds; for if we train our self-observation properly we realize that our mental images have exactly the same existence in our waking day life as they do in the night in the chaotic mental images of our dreams. In our minds we dream, even when we are awake. These truths that our ego sleeps and that we dream in our minds and imagination, even when we are awake—these truths, it is true, are washed away by our active life in the day. But for anyone able to observe the human soul they prove to be great and shattering truths which stand at the start of every spiritually scientific investigation. And if we were then to ask, to ask one's self-observation: This is all very well, but how do we actually distinguish our ordinary waking life of the day from our dream life and our sleeping life? What happens at the moment when we wake up?—As I have said, I cannot go into details—you can find all the details necessary to understand more completely what I am now saying in outline in my book Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment.—The question arises: What actually happens when we wake up, if our ego really remains asleep and our ideas and images, even in waking life, are like dream pictures? What is the difference between the waking and the sleeping human being? Trained self-observation provides the answer: It is solely the penetration of the will into the soul life which differentiates waking life from sleeping and dreaming. The fact that we are awake and do not dream is due solely to the will pouring into us. It is because of this that we do not have dream pictures rising up without any direction of will, that we unite ourselves to the outer world with our will and with our will become a part of the outer world. It is what awakens the dream pictures to the substance of real-ness that they are images of an outer world, that brings it about that after waking up we are able to incorporate ourselves into the world through our will. However paradoxical this may sound to many people today, it will have to become a basic conviction of a future outlook and will indeed become so, because it is bound to follow from a science based on true self-observation. It is the flashing of the will into our minds that gives us our real connection with the outer world, which we experience with our ordinary consciousness. It is this that provides us with real self-observation in our ordinary consciousness. But we cannot remain in this consciousness if we really wish to fathom the actual nature of the things that surround us and the connection of human beings with the world. There has to be a similar transformation in our soul life, in the ordinary soul life we have in the day, in relation to the transformation that happens in our sleeping and dreaming life when we wake up. And a transformation can come about by working arduously towards a change, firstly in the life of our minds, and secondly, in the life of our will. And I would like to point out at the start that what we call the science of spirit or anthroposophy is not based on anything metaphysical, spiritualistic or anything vaguely mystical, but that it is a true continuation of the well-founded and human scientific way of thinking. And so we can, for instance, link on to the sound beginnings that are to be found in the Goethean outlook upon nature and the world. Allow me this personal remark, because it has something to do with what I have to say. That I am linking on to this Goethean outlook upon nature and the world is due to the fact that my destiny led me to immerse myself in it and to take from it what leads, as we shall see, to real perception into the spiritual world that surrounds us, surrounds us in the same way that the sense world does. What is so noteworthy with Goethe—and which is still not appreciated today—is that for instance he is able to bring physical phenomena that normally are only considered quite apart from the soul being, right into the life of the human soul. It is really quite wonderful to see how Goethe treats the physical aspects in his Theory of Color, which is still looked down upon by most people today, how he starts with the physical and physiological aspects and leads from them to what he expresses so beautifully in the section, “The Physical and Moral Effect of Color.” Naturally, one compromises oneself in many respects if one speaks about Goethe's Theory of Color. It cannot be spoken about as a matter of course because in its present form physics does not allow for any possibilities of discussing a justification of Goethe's theory. But the time will come when Goethe's Theory of Color will be vindicated by a more advanced kind of physics. I can refer to what I have said about the artistic side of this in my book Goethe's Conception of the World, and in my introduction to Goethe's scientific writings. (Published in English as Goethe the Scientist—Ed.) Today, however, I am not concerned with vindicating Goethe's Theory of Color, but only wish to deal with method, with how Goethe manages to evolve beyond purely physical considerations in the chapter “The Physical and Moral Effect of Colors.” Here he describes so beautifully what the human soul experiences when it perceives the color blue. Blue, says Goethe, pours into the soul the experience of coldness because it reminds us of shadow. Blue rooms bestow a feeling of sadness on all the objects in the rooms.—Or let us take what Goethe says about the experience of the color red. Red, says Goethe, produces an experience purely according to its own nature. It can produce the experience of seriousness and worthiness, or of devotion and grace—of seriousness and worthiness in its darker and thicker shades, of devotion and grace in its lighter and thinner shades.—So we see that Goethe does not only deal with the immediate physical nature of color, but he brings the soul into it, the experiences of sympathy and antipathy, as immediate experiences of the soul, as we have in life when we feel joy and sorrow. It may be that the intensity with which Goethe studied the colors is hardly noticeable, but nevertheless he goes through all the colors in a way that one can do if one allows one's soul life to pervade them,—that is, Goethe does not separate the physical from the soul experience. In doing this he laid the foundation for a kind of observation which even today is naturally only in its beginnings, but which will find a serious and worthy further development in the science of spirit. For the human being's relationship to color is exactly the same as exists with the rest of his senses. He is so fully taken up with the perception of something physical, with what works through his eyes and ears, that he does not perceive what radiates through and permeates the physical percept as an element of soul; he does not experience its full power and significance in his inner life. It is like not being able to see a weak light against a strong one. For it is above all the physical object that our eye normally perceives so strongly. Now it is possible to take what is to be found in Goethe in its first beginnings—albeit instinctively with him because of his naturally sound outlook—a stage further. And it can also be looked at from another viewpoint. Goethe never deals with colors only as they exist in the world, but he also deals with the reaction they stimulate, their effect on the organism. How wonderful, even compared with the latest experiments in physics done by Hertwig, Hume and others, are the things that Goethe brought to light about the reaction of the eye, how the colors are not only perceived as long as one looks at them, but then they only gradually fade away. In all this there are in our ordinary perceptions weak beginnings which can be applied much more to the inner life of our mental images and can undergo further development. For in the conscientious and careful development of particular aspects of our cognitive and imaginative life there is to be found an aspect of science that belongs to the science of spirit or anthroposophy. Goethe's attitude to color has to be applied by those who wish to penetrate into the spiritual world by means of the science of spirit to the content of our minds, which for our normal consciousness is really only a world of dream pictures permeated by the will. The scientist of spirit also approaches the outer world in exactly the same way as our ordinary consciousness approaches the pictures in our minds, concepts and ideas. A sound thinking person does not become any different from anyone else. But if he is to receive a revelation of the spiritual world he has to effect a particular kind of perceptive consciousness. And he does this by inducing a certain metamorphosis in the life of his mind. The details of what has to be done you can find in the book already mentioned. I only want to put before you now the main principles. The scientist of spirit gradually manages to free his mental images from their normal task by a particular kind of methodical approach to the content of his mind. The normal function of our mental images is that they enable us to have pictures of the outer world. These pictures are the end result. But for the scientist of spirit they are a beginning, for whatever their significance, whatever kind of picture of the world they give, he immerses himself in its inner life, the inner effects of the picture, the image. And he does this in such a way that he does not look to its content, but to the forces that develop in it, and he does this when his consciousness has been completely brought to rest and becomes alive in the activity of his imagination and thinking. Normally, a scientist starts with nature as it is in the world and ends up with his ideas. The scientist of spirit has to start with the inner activity of his ideas, with a kind of meditative activity, but which is not at all the same as the kind of meditation normally described and which is nothing more than brooding on something that is on one's mind—no, what we are concerned with here is that the soul is brought to rest, its activity is stilled, so that the life of the soul approaches certain ideas that can be grasped and surveyed like a calm sea. They should then become active in the life of the soul, active solely in the life of the mind. After a great amount of meditative work which is certainly not less than work done in the laboratory or observatory, we arrive at a stage where we perceive remarkable things happening, affecting the life of the soul in this inner life of the mind. One of the most important and significant faculties of the soul that we develop in our normal consciousness is our memory, our ability to remember. What is it that our memory, our ability to remember brings about? It enables us to call up at a later time mental images that we have formed at an earlier time. First of all, we have an experience and this is taken into the mind. The resulting image is like a shadow of the original experience. The experience disappears, but the fact of its existence continues.—We carry the image of the experience in us. Years later, or whenever it might be, we can recall it. What we recall out of the total organism of our spirit, soul and body as a memory image is a shadow-like copy of what was imprinted on the memory in the first place. If we pursue the methods actively and energetically that are given and described in my books for the cultivation of the mind, we acquire a much stronger kind of activity in the soul working in the memory. However paradoxical it may appear, I have to describe it, because I do not want to speak about the generalities of the science of spirit, but to deal with the positive and concrete aspect of it, upon which it is based. The scientist of spirit experiences that a mental image is brought alive, and by bringing the peace of his consciousness constantly to bear upon this image he gets to the point where he knows: Now you have exercised the powers of your thinking to such an extent that you can continue no further.—Then something shattering happens. The moment arrives when we know that we cannot continue to use our thinking in the same controlled way, but have to let it go, just as we let an idea or image go that then sinks into forgetfulness and that later can be recalled out of this by our memory. But when an image that we have as a result of an energetic meditative life is let go, it enters into much greater depths of our life than an image that is taken into our memory. The scientist of spirit then experiences—this is only one example, other experiences have to be linked to this, but now I only wish to give a few examples—that he has strengthened an image by the powers of his thinking to such an extent that he can allow it to sink into his being so that it is no longer present. But then it appears later, according to the images we have—this has all to be regulated—these images remain present. We acquire views in the course of time in which these images have to remain present, deep down in the unconscious. Some images remain for a longer period in the subconscious, others a shorter period and we acquire the power to recall them again and again. We do not do this by exerting ourselves in trying to remember an image. Images are recalled by peaceful immersion in ourselves; It is not like the way our ordinary memory works, for here we are dependent upon a mood of expectancy that we bring about at the right moment. We become aware of this mood of expectancy by other things which cannot be described here. We have a mood or feeling of expectancy; we do not do anything to bring about an image or an experience. We simply have this peaceful expectancy, this purely selfless immersion in ourselves and only after hours, weeks or even only after years does there come back what we have perceived in the very depths of our being, as if in a kind of abyss. And then the opposite happens from what takes place in our normal consciousness. With our normal consciousness the experience comes first in all its vividness and then the shadowlike image is produced. Here something quite different happens. We start with something which leads at the same time to self-discipline and self-education, and this is an image which we put before our souls and let it be present in the soul for weeks or months until the moment comes when it can be completely immersed. Then it emerges again—but how it emerges is the surprising thing, for it is not anything as shadowlike as the normal image. This experience is brought about by working on the image in a certain way and we know full well, if we are familiar with things that lead to such results as these, that we are dealing here with something sound and not morbidly introspective. These are not the same forces that lead to hallucinations or visions, or that produce morbid or unsound states of any kind, but they are the forces that produce precisely the opposite and, in fact, have the effect of banishing everything in the nature of hallucinations and visions.—It is the opposite process. The soul, in undergoing this, is not as it is in everyday life with its normal, healthy understanding, but it has to be much healthier and sounder if the exercises which belong to this whole development and which have to be done regularly are to overcome everything that would lead one astray. What this leads up to is something we have not known before—something spiritual, something super-sensible, that we now perceive in ourselves. What is it that perceives? It is what Goethe called the eye or the ear of the spirit, of which he had an instinctive presentiment. From the moment onward when we have had an experience such as I have just described, we know that we do not have only a physical body, but that we have a finer, more inward body that is in no way made up of physical substance. However paradoxical it may appear to many people today when in the science of spirit or anthroposophy we speak of a fine etheric body, a soul body, it is nevertheless a truth—but a truth that can really be investigated only in this way I have described. We now know that we have something in ourselves in which spiritual perception can arise, just as perception can arise in the physical organism in the physical eye. We know that the eye or the ear of the spirit, as Goethe called it, becomes something from which there springs something out of the etheric world, out of the super-sensible body. We cannot use this super-sensible body like a physical body, but we know that it exists and we know that there has to be a science of spirit for us to find it. It does not come into being by means of any arbitrary act of the will, but it comes into being with the help of the most recent philosophical thought. Let me cite a few facts that are especially important in this connection for the formation of a judgment about anthroposophy. The philosophers of more recent times who inherited the work of their predecessors done around the turn of the 18th to the 19th century and in the first half of the 19th century, pointed out, albeit instinctively and not as a result of method, that man does not have only a physical body, which provides the basis for his being, but he also has what one can call an etheric, a soul body. Only the terminology for this fine body was different, a body which exists as a fact for the science of spirit. This kind of assumption led Immanuel Hermann Fichte (1797-1879) to his conception of the process of death, which he expressed in the following way: “For we hardly have to ask how the human being acts in regard to himself” when “going through death ... With this concept of the continuing existence of the soul we are not therefore bypassing our experience and laying hold of an unknown sphere of merely illusory existence, but we find ourselves in the midst of a comprehensible reality accessible to our thinking.” And now Fichte says—and this is what is important—this consciousness points to something beyond itself. “... Anthroposophy produces results founded on the most varied evidence that according to the nature of his being as also in the real source of his consciousness man belongs to a super-sensible world. Our ordinary consciousness, however, which is based on our senses and on the picture of the world that arises through the use of sight, and which includes the whole life of the sense world, including the human sense world, all this is really only a place where the super-sensible life of the spirit is carried out in bringing the otherworldly spiritual content of ideas into the sense world by a conscious free act ... This fundamental conception of man's being raises `Anthropology' in its final result into `Anthroposophy'.” Into an “anthroposophy!” He uses the expression, anthroposophy. We can see from this the longing for the science that today has to become a reality. To cite another example—owing to lack of time I can only quote a few examples—I would like to bring in the important German thinker, Vital Troxler (1780-1866), who also did some important teaching in Switzerland. He speaks out of the same approach, but still instinctively, because the science of spirit or anthroposophy did not exist at that time: “Even in earlier times philosophers distinguished a fine, noble, soul body from the coarse body ... a soul, which contained within it a picture of the body which they called a model and which for them was the inner higher man ... More recently even Kant in his Dreams of a Spiritual Seer dreams seriously as a joke about a wholly inward soul man, that bears within its spirit-body all the limbs normally to be found outside ...” And now Troxler says: “It is most gratifying that the most recent philosophy, which ... must be manifest ... in anthroposophy, climbs to greater heights, and it must be remembered that this idea cannot be the fruit of mere speculation ...” I do not need to quote the rest. He means that there must be a science which leads to the super-sensible, to the qualities of this super-sensible body, just as anthropology leads to the physical qualities and forces of the physical human body. I have dealt with characteristic thinkers on this subject in my book, The Riddles of Man. They did not work out these things as the present-day science of spirit can do, but they spoke out of instinctive longing for a future science of spirit that has now to become a reality through this present science of spirit. Thus also the son of the great Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the important philosopher, Immanuel Herman Fichte. In his Anthropology, the second edition of which appeared in 1860, Fichte says that there can be nothing that persists in matter: “In the elements of matter it is not possible to find the unifying form principle of the body that is active during our whole life. We are therefore directed to a second, essentially different cause in the body. Insofar as this contains what persists in the digestion it is the true, inner, invisible body that is present in all visible matter. The outer manifestation of this, formed out of the never-ceasing digestion may henceforth be called `body' which neither persists nor is a unity and which is the mere effect or image of the inner bodily nature, which casts it into the changing world of substance in the same way that an apparent solid body is made out of the particles of iron filings by a magnetic force, but which is again reduced to dust as soon as the binding force is taken away.” Thus we see that Immanuel Hermann Fichte instinctively finds himself in the position of having to accept a force-body which holds the material components together in a material body in a certain formal structure like a magnetic force. You notice, too, that Fichte also longs for an anthroposophy when he deals with the super-sensible in man and draws our attention to it. Anthroposophy does not appear at a particular time without reason, but it is something that has long been anticipated by the really deep core of our soul life. This can be seen quite clearly in the examples I have given. Now I must turn to the other aspect of the development of our soul life, the development of the will. What I have said so far was concerned with the development of the mind. The will, too, can be led beyond the condition it has in our normal consciousness. If you imagine that someone—I only want to mention the most important things, the rest can be read in my books—that someone were to look at his inner life in the same way that we look at our ordinary life between human beings under normal conditions, the life of the human community, we can notice our reaction when a desire or impulse awakens when we say: Conditions allow this impulse, this desire to take its course; another time the conditions do not allow us, or we do not allow it. We see that we evolve a certain responsibility toward outer life that is rooted in our conscience. We develop quite definite feelings, a particular configuration of our soul life in our conscience, concerning what we do or do not do. Our normal consciousness is subject to our soul life in developing such inner demands or standards—we obey logic, but when it comes to thinking or not thinking, to whether thinking is clear or restricted, how cool and logical our relationship is to this as compared to our relationship to outer life! We accept the one because we can, as it were, grasp it in spirit, as a mental image; we reject the other. But one cannot experience the intensive life that we feel in our human responsibility when it comes to our purely logical and scientific thinking. The second kind of exercise consists in pouring out a certain kind of inner responsibility over our thinking, over our mind, so that we reach the point of not only saying: This opinion is valid, this opinion is properly conceived, I can give it my assent and so on, but also that we manage to preserve a mental image in the same duty-bound consciousness as we have when we do not go through with the one or the other action. Morality—though quite a different kind of morality from the one we have in normal life—is poured out over our mind, over our mental images. Inner responsibility poured out over the life of our mental images results in attitudes where in dealing in certain experiences we allow ourselves some mental images and reject others, in the one case accepting them, in the other rejecting them by a justified but temperate antipathy. From this new aspect, sympathy and antipathy activate our inner life. This again has to be practiced for a long time. I will give an example of how this can be supported by accustoming ourselves to allowing a mental image to be present in our souls in as manifold a way as possible. In ordinary life one person may be a monist, another a dualist, the third a materialist, the fourth a spiritualist and so on. If we learn to immerse ourselves in the life of our mental images our concepts take on a different aspect in the living inner experience of the world of our mental images so that we come to recognize: Of course, there are concepts of materialism, they can be used for a particular province, for a particular sphere of the world. In fact, they must be available, for one can only get something out of immersing oneself in a particular sphere of the world if one has grasped materialism in all its many aspects. For another sphere of the world spiritualistic concepts are needed, for a third, monistic, for a fourth, the concept of idealism and so on. Monistic, dualistic concepts—they enrich the life of our minds and we know that such concepts mean no more than do different photographs of a tree taken from different points. We learn now to immerse ourselves in an inner element, an inner tolerance, that once again is an outpouring of moral substances over our inner life. It is just like someone receiving a picture of a tree that he has actually seen, who would never say, if he received a picture of the tree taken from a different angle, that it was not the same tree. Just as we can have four or even eight pictures which all portray the same tree, so we learn to look at all sorts of ideas, which singly would represent a one sided picture of reality, and to learn about them, to look into them with great care and immerse ourselves in their manifoldness. This is normally underrated when it comes to doing the exercises which have now to be undertaken. This is something that is not much understood today, even by the best, but it does lead to the further development of the will in a way similar to the development of the mind that I have described. We then experience that the will liberates itself from being bound to the body. Just as oxygen can be extracted from water, so the will is released by means of the energetic pursuit of these various exercises that are described, and it becomes freer and freer, and more and more spiritual. By these means we awaken a real, higher man in ourselves that is not just an image of an ideal nor something thought out. We make the discovery which is still a paradox to most people today, but which is quite real for the science of spirit, that a second, more subtle man lives in us, having a quite different consciousness from our normal consciousness. And this consciousness that we can awaken in this way shows us that it is a much more real man than the one that we live in the physical body and move around in. This man in us can make use of the eye of the spirit, as I called it earlier, in the etheric body, in the way I have described. The acceptance of such another consciousness of another more all-embracing man—this has a far more intimate connection with nature and its beings and to the spiritual world than our normal consciousness.—The acceptance of this also was instinctively foreseen by the more penetrating scientists of the 19th century. Here, too, the science of spirit brings about a fulfillment. I would only like to point out how Eduard von Hartmann worked in this direction, though I do not wish to advocate his philosophy in detail in any way. In his really controvertible work, The Philosophy of the Unconscious, Hartmann referred to the fact that an unknown soul quality is to be found behind the normal consciousness of the human being that—as Eduard von Hartmann describes it—comes to expression painfully in a way, and which has a kind of underground telephone connection with the unconscious spiritual nature of the outer world, and which can work its way up, and does work its way up, through the astral nature and pours out of the unconscious or subconscious into our normal, everyday consciousness. Eduard von Hartmann really pointed instinctively to what the science of spirit teaches as a fact. Only he believed that this other consciousness of the human being could only be arrived at by theoretical hypotheses, analytical concepts and inferences. This was what he was lacking because he never wanted to take the path which is appropriate to his time: not just to formulate the life of the soul theoretically, but to take it actively into training in the two ways that have been described. It has been possible to see from this that the acceptance of this spiritual nature in everything is much more helped by the solution of the mystery of the human being—even from a philosophical viewpoint, if it really remains philosophical—than all that can be done by the rest of science in the ways described above. And this can be proved by what has happened. Just in these matters Eduard von Hartmann proves a remarkable figure. In 1869 he published his Philosophy of the Unconscious. Here he discussed how the spiritual that lives in the soul, hidden, as it were, in the spiritual soul, also lives in nature, and how the materialist today has only a one-sided idea of how the spiritual that lives in the soul also permeates and invades nature. In was 1869 that The Philosophy of the Unconscious was first published. It was the time when people had the greatest hopes of gaining a new view of the world on the basis of the new Darwinian approach, the laws of natural selection and the struggle for existence. Hartmann energetically opposed everything connected with this approach from a spiritual viewpoint, and naturally enough the scientists who were full of materialistic interpretation of Darwinism reacted to what Hartmann said. They said: Well, of course, only a philosopher can speak like that who is not at home in real scientific research and who does not know how conscientiously science works!—And many works were published by various scientists attacking Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious. They all wrote basically the same thing—Hartmann was a dilettante and one should not bother to listen to him any further. One only had to protect the layman who always fell for such things; that is why Hartmann's position should be exposed. Among the many works that appeared there was also one which was anonymous. From start to finish everything was brilliantly refuted. It was shown how from the viewpoint which a scientist had to have, he understood nothing about how science works in its approach to the great mystery of the world!—The scientists were tremendously enthusiastic and were in full agreement with what the anonymous author had written, and it was soon necessary to reprint this ingenious, scientific work. Oskar Schmidt and Ernst Haeckel themselves were full of praise and said: It is a pity that this colleague of ours, this significant scientific thinker, does not say who he is. If he will only say who he is we will regard him as one of ourselves.—In fact, Ernst Haeckel even said: I myself could have said nothing better than what this anonymous author has marshaled from the scientific viewpoint against Hartmann. And lo and behold, a second edition was needed just as the scientists had wished, But now in the second edition the author revealed himself. It was Eduard von Hartmann himself who had written the work! This was a lesson that could not have been executed more brilliantly for people who constantly believe that those who do not adopt their own attitude could not possibly understand anything about their learning and knowledge. It is a lesson from which we can still learn today, and particularly those could learn who, when it comes to opposing what the science of spirit teaches, approach it with a similar attitude. The scientist of spirit or anthroposophist knows quite well the sort of things that can be leveled against anthroposophy, however well it may be presented. He is fully aware of what can be said against it, just as Eduard von Hartmann was able to present what the scientists found to be excellent and to their liking. Such lessons, it is true, are soon forgotten, and the old habits soon return. But we can recall them, and we should learn from them. It is not only with Eduard von Hartmann but also with others that an instinctive feeling has arisen that quite a different kind of consciousness is at work in the depths of the human soul. I would remind you of Myers, the English scientist and editor of the reports of psychic experiments which were published in many volumes and which set out to show how there is something hidden in the human soul that exists alongside our ordinary experience,—what James, the American, called the year of the discovery of one of the most significant facts, namely the discovery of the unconscious in 1886. Today scientists on the whole know very little about such things. They know nothing of Eduard von Hartmann's arguments, nothing about James, nothing about 1886 when Myers discovered the unconscious, the part of us that is of a spirit-soul nature and is connected with the spirit-soul nature of the world, and that rises into and awakens our normal consciousness. It is the same as I have described as awakening as if out of our everyday consciousness, out of a dreaming state, and makes our ordinary consciousness into a perceptive consciousness.—But in Myers and James it is to be found in a chaotic and immature state, rather like a hope or promise.—It becomes a real fact for the first time with the science of spirit or anthroposophy. And so we see—however paradoxical it may appear today—that the development of the inner powers of the soul emerges on two fronts. I can only indicate how what I have described in its first beginnings, when systematically carried out, eventually leads to our being increasingly able to learn to use the spiritual eye in the etheric body by means of the other man that lives in us, and we discover this world of inner processes in ourselves and are able to feel ourselves as belonging to it. How we then learn not only to overcome our conception of space, but also of time. We come to look at time in quite a different way. And, as I have said, we become able not only to carry ourselves back in our memories into the past, but also to gain experience of ourselves at earlier points of time and also to carry ourselves back beyond the time that we normally remember. You all know that we can remember back only to a certain point in our childhood. This is as far as we can think back to. What we experienced in the first years of our childhood we can only be reminded of from outside. But now we can carry ourselves back to the time in our earliest childhood when as human beings we were not yet able to recognize or perceive our powers, to the time when the forces we need for our ordinary consciousness were needed for the initial growth of the body. That is to say, we learn to perceive not with the ego of our earliest childhood, but the ego that has brought our spiritual nature out of the spiritual world and united itself with what has been inherited in the way of physical forces and substances from our father, mother and ancestors. We go back to this spiritual human being. From the present moment we look back with an awakened consciousness and see through the sense world into the spiritual; we have a spiritual world before us. Similarly, when we carry ourselves back in time we then have a qualitative experience of the life that we live in the body and that comes to an end with death. On the one hand, our ordinary perception cuts us off in our normal consciousness from spiritual reality; on the other, our bodily experience cuts us off in our normal consciousness from what exists beyond the gate of death. The moment we reach the time which we can remember back to, we see on the other hand life bordered by death, and we see what death makes of us. What is beyond death is revealed, together with what is beyond birth, only divided, kept apart by our life in the body. The spiritual man, the eternal in us, is experienced in that we see our physical life as a river; the one bank is birth and the other bank is death. Death, however, is revealed together with what exists before birth. We also see maturing in us what leads from this life to a further life on earth. For if we have gone through the gate of death we then see what lives in us. Just as we can say that there is something that lives in the plant which, having gone through the dark and cold time of year, develops into a new plant, so we see how our spirit-soul nature that is within us in this life goes through the spiritual world between death and birth and appears again in a new life on earth. All this becomes accessible to our perception when we develop the powers of the soul in the way that it has been described. Just as we grow accustomed to a physical world through our open eyes and open ears, so we accustom ourselves to a spiritual world, really become concretely aware of a spiritual world that exists around us. We live together with spiritual beings, spiritual forces. Just as we recognize our life, our body, as the expression of our spiritual being which begins at birth, or rather at conception, so we also come to know our physical life on the earth, our physical earth, as a further condition or state of something that has been preceded in planetary existence. We come to see our earth as a metamorphosis, a transformation of an earlier planet, in which we existed as human beings at an earlier stage, not yet with the present-day physical body, but in a spiritual state and with the nature we have today in a spiritual form. The animals have undergone a downward evolution, the human being has evolved in such a way that the point at which man and animal meet is to be found in the spiritual and not in the physical. Man's evolution on the earth is a continuation of the life on an earlier planet, which has been transformed into the present earth, and which will similarly be transformed into the next stage and will enable the human being to take into himself an ego that today is still slumbering in him, but which will become more and more awake in the further course of evolution. The whole world will be spiritualized. When we speak about nature we do not content ourselves with referring to a vague pantheism existing in the outer world, but in looking at the being of the earth we speak of rising stages that we get to know. Nor do we enter into a spiritual world with a vague pantheism, but as a concrete individual and real human being. Today one is forgiven least of all for saying such a thing as this. Nevertheless it is true that a real, concretely spiritual world is opened up to us, the spiritual world that we belong to with our spiritual man, just as with our physical man we belong to ordinary physical reality. And so in bringing about a methodical awakening of inner life the science of spirit or anthroposophy adds knowledge of spirit to natural knowledge and introduces a different picture of the world from the one we have in our ordinary consciousness. In this connection the science of spirit will gradually have to be taken into the hearts of those who are longing for it, but who for the most part do not know that this longing exists in their hidden feelings. But it is there, and it will come to be more and more recognized. It is remarkable how even the most eminent thinkers of our time and of the immediate past have not yet been able to grasp the details of the kind of experience I have been describing. I wanted to cite the great philosopher Eduard von Hartmann who had an idea of what it was about, but who was only interested in reaching another consciousness in the human being theoretically, and who was unable to discover that one cannot find one's way into the spiritual by theories or hypotheses, but only by experience, by working upon one's thoughts in such a way that they are sent out as messengers into an unknown world, from which they return as experience, and that leads one into the spiritual world, as I have described. But the experience of it must be based on accepting the existence of a world of ideas and images as real. Forgive me if I say something personal once more, but it is very much connected with this whole subject. I do not particularly wish to do so, but you will see why I refer to it. In 1894 I attempted in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity to provide the world with just such a philosophical approach as a preparation for the science of spirit, where the individual human viewpoints, which sometimes have such remarkable names, could be understood, not as a choice of mutually exclusive views, but that they could be seen like photographs or different pictures of the same object and that these concepts could be allowed to speak for themselves so that one has a many-sided picture. Eduard von Hartmann studied this Philosophy of Spiritual Activity in 1894, and he sent me his copy in which he had made notes. I would like to read a passage from the letter he sent me. It contains singular, philosophical expressions but what he means is quite clear even without going into what these expressions mean. In the first place he says, for instance: “The title should be `Monism based on the theory of knowledge—ethical individualism,' and not `Philosophy of Spiritual Activity'.” But he has an instinctive feeling for the fact that these two aspects are supposed to throw light on one and the same thing. He thinks, however, that they cannot be brought together. They are in fact brought together in the life of the soul and not by means of empty theories. This is what he meant. And similarly in other points. Eduard von Hartmann therefore says: “In this book neither Hume's absolute phenomenalism nor Berkeley's phenomenalism based on God are reconciled, nor this more immanent or subjective, phenomenalism and the transcendental panlogism of Hegel, nor Hegel's panlogism and Goethean individualism. Between these two aspects there yawns an unbridgeable abyss.” Because all these views exist in such a living way, they all testify to the same thing, they characterize one and the same thing from varying viewpoints! Hartmann has an inkling of this, a feeling for it, but he does not see that what is important is not a hypothetical and theoretical way of putting them together in thought, but a living way of experiencing them as a unity. He therefore goes on to say: “Above all, the fact is ignored that phenomenalism leads with absolute inevitability to soliphism [this may be a coined word, a `typo,' or the translator really meant solipsism - e.Ed] (that is, to a doctrine of being one, a doctrine of the ego), to illusionism and to agnosticism, and nothing is done to prevent this plunge into the abyss of un-philosophy, because the danger is not even recognized.” This danger certainly has been recognized! And Eduard von Hartmann once again instinctively uses the right expression: “plunge into the abyss of un-philosophy.” This is precisely what I have described today! Of course, this plunge into the abyss is not prevented by un-philosophy or by any hypotheses setting out to be philosophical, but only by our real life being led into the other existence, by the unconscious being made conscious, so that what is experienced objectively and independently in the soul can be guided back again into the conscious. You can see here how the science of spirit or anthroposophy has gradually to get to grips with the longings and hopes for such a science, that exist at the present time, but which in themselves cannot get as far as what has to be achieved in the science of spirit, because for this to happen it is imperative to see that intimate work on the soul has to be done which does not remain mystically subjective, but is just as objective as ordinary science and knowledge. What then has been done about this up to now? I have cited Oskar Hertwig to you. Oskar Hertwig is one of those who felt the significance of Eduard von Hartmann! Ernst Haeckel is one of those who mocked most at what Eduard von Hartmann published in his Philosophy of the Unconscious. Oskar Hertwig still cites Eduard von Hartmann continuously and does so in full agreement with what he says, even where Eduard von Hartmann says that the way in which the idea of natural selection is treated as a modern superstition is like a childhood disease, a scientific childhood disease of our times. This is cited by Oskar Hertwig, himself a pupil of Haeckel, as an appropriate statement about natural science by Eduard von Hartmann. And there is much more like this. It all adds up to a clear statement as to what science is unable to recognize and what it would really have to recognize. But what has happened is that the pupils of the great teachers of science of the 19th century have already started to refute everything that existed earlier in the nature of the hopes I have been talking about. Oskar Hertwig is extraordinarily interesting because he shows that science today cannot have any objection to such a philosophy as Eduard von Hartmann's. If the scientists find their way to Eduard von Hartmann, they will also find their way to the science of spirit. But then the general consciousness of humanity too will be able to find its way. The science of spirit will encounter opposition enough from other directions as well. To conclude, I would like to mention briefly the objections that are constantly brought by the adherents of various religious organizations against the science of spirit. It is remarkable how it is just from the religious viewpoint that the science of spirit is attacked. It is said, for instance, that what the science of spirit has to say contradicts things in the Bible or that are held according to tradition.—But is this really what we should be concerned about? Could we think of not wanting to discover America because it cannot be found in the Bible or in Christian tradition? If anyone believes that the power of the greatest thing in the world—Christianity—could be endangered because of some discovery, he cannot have much faith in it! When I hear of how objections can be made by Christians, I recall a theologian, this time not Protestant, but Catholic, a teacher of Christian philosophy, member of a Catholic faculty of theology, who gave his inaugural lecture on Galileo—and we know how the church dealt with Galileo. This really genuinely Christian and Catholic priest, who up to the time of his death never denied that he was a true son of the church, said in his lecture on Galileo: It is with injustice that a really perceptive Christianity turns against the progress of natural science as brought about by such people as Galileo. It is with injustice that Christianity declares certain ideas which are falsely said to be derived from Christianity, to be irreconcilable with natural science. For modern science, thinks this priest and professor of theology, only appears to be irreconcilable with the more limited view of the world held by the ancient peoples, but not with the Christian view, for this Christian view, properly understood, is bound to confirm the discoveries of more and more wonders in the world, and is bound to confirm the glory of the Godhead and the glory of the Christian view; it is bound to confirm the wonders that divine grace has instituted upon the earth. We can say the same about the science of spirit, for there is no contradiction between it and Christianity, properly understood. But contradiction exists only between it and a false teaching that unjustly purports to originate from Christianity. The only thing that the science of spirit cannot be reconciled with is a narrowly conceived scientific view of the world and not with a broadly based Christian view. And the discoveries of the science of spirit, the wonders that it finds in the spiritual world, will not mean an end to the wonders that Christianity teaches us about, but on the contrary will confirm them. Laurenz Mueller, also a genuinely Christian theologian and professor, speaks in a similar vein: Christianity does not contradict and is not intended to contradict a doctrine of evolution properly understood, as long as it does not set out to be a purely causal evolution of the world and to place man only within the framework of a physical causality. The science of spirit does not clash with Christianity, because it does not lead to the deadening of religious life and vision, but, on the contrary, it encourages and fires religious life and vision. And those today who still believe that their Christianity would be endangered by the science of spirit will gradually have to realize that whereas wrongly understood science has driven away more and more souls, both outwardly and inwardly, anthroposophy or the science of spirit, because it kindles religious life, will bring even educated people back to the great mysteries, not only of Christian teaching, but also of Christian deeds and ceremonial services. This will largely be the work of the future, in fact, of the relatively near future. Just in this connection one could wish that things would be better understood and that above all there were more willingness to understand the matter, that one would not formulate a picture without really going into it and then setting up this picture as something contradictory to Christianity. I can only mention this very briefly. I would have to speak for a long time if I had to go into everything in detail—but this could be done—to show that Christianity has not the slightest grounds for turning against such ideas as repeated lives on earth. To finish with, allow me to say a few words about the teachings of natural science. Today natural science has arrived at the point of realizing what it cannot attain. Oskar Hertwig—to keep to our former example—hits upon something in a remarkable way in his book Das Werden der Organismen. Eine Widerlegung von Darwins Zufallstheorie. In a remarkable way he comes to the conclusion that it is not any objective research, nor analytical research into scientific facts, that has led to the materialistic philosophy of Darwinism, but it arises from the fact that the people of this age have borne this materialistic outlook in themselves, have borne the belief in the unspiritual nature of the outer world in themselves, and have applied this to nature. And here it is very interesting to feel the weight of Oskar Hertwig's own words to show the real nature of the situation. Hertwig says: “The principle of utility, the conviction of the necessity of unrestricted commercial and social competition, materialistic tendencies in philosophy, are forces that would have played an important part, even without Darwin. Those who were already under their influence greeted Darwinism as a scientific confirmation of the ideas they already cherished. They could now look at themselves, as it were, in the mirror of science.” “The interpretation of Darwin's teaching,” Oskar Hertwig continues, “which is so ambiguous in its uncertainties, also allows for a varied application in the other spheres of economic, social and political life. Each person can get what he wants from it, just as from the Delphic oracle, and can draw his own conclusions concerning social, hygienic, medical and other questions, and can call on the scientific learning of the new Darwinian biology with its unalterable laws of nature, to confirm his own views. If however these laws of nature are not what they are made out to be”—and Oskar Hertwig sets out to prove, and does prove, that they are not really laws of nature, “could there not also be social dangers when they are applied in various ways to other spheres? We surely do not believe that human society can use for fifty years such phrases as bitter struggle for existence, survival of the fittest, of the most useful, the most expedient, perfection by selection etc., without being deeply and substantially influenced in the whole direction of this kind of ideas.” This is what a scientist is already saying today. He is not just saying that these materialistically formulated ideas of Darwinism are wrong, but that they are injurious, that they inevitably lead to difficulties in the soul life, and to social and political harm. Only the restricted and one-sided views of certain scientists could maintain otherwise. And sometimes this works out in the most terrible way. A great scientist of the present day for whom I have great respect—and it is just because I have respect for him that I cite him now—hints in a remarkable way at how the scientist does not perhaps wish to be understood, but at how he must be understood on the basis of his attitude toward what can be expected of a purely naturalistic view of nature. The scientist, for whom I have the greatest respect, says at the end of a significant book—and these are now his own words that I am quoting: “We live today in the best period of time”—this is what he maintains, it cannot be proved with full validity, but he asserts: “we live today in the best period of time, at least we scientists, and we can even hope for better,” he says, “for in comparing the science of today with the achievements of earlier scientists we can say with Goethe who knew so much about nature and the world:
The pleasure ... is great, to cast The mind into the spirit of the past, And scan the former notions of the wise, And see what marvelous heights we've reached at last.”
—Thus speaks a first class scientist at the end of an important book! I do not know whether many people notice and think about the person whom Goethe makes say this. Is it really Goethe, the one who knew so much about the world and nature, who says this? No, he puts it into the mouth of Wagner And Faust replies to Wagner:
“How strange, that he who cleaves to shallow things Can keep his hopes alive on empty terms And dig with greed for precious plunderings, And find his happiness unearthing worms!”
This is the real view of the one who knew so much about the world and nature! And if scientists today do not yet realize what can be built on the basis of the sound foundations to be found in a view of the world, such as also shone through Goethe, one can understand what Oskar Hertwig so rightly says: The materialistic conception of the world and Darwinism with its materialistic bias have arisen out of the general materialistic attitude of the times, their naturalistic methods, their materialistic impulses and feelings, and which have then been applied to nature. But the facts disprove this. The scientist of spirit replies to this out of what he believes to be a deeper knowledge of the world and of man: No, it is not such a narrow view like the one prevalent around the middle of the 19th century that should affect our study of nature, but our views should be formulated according to the highest possible content that spirit and soul can attain, and they should then be applied to nature to see if nature really confirms them. We can then expect that the resultant view will not be anything like Darwinism. This latter believed the world to exist according to certain laws and, as we have seen, nature herself has disproved this belief. The science of spirit strives to study the human soul in its depths, and to draw out of these depths the spirit that exists in the broadest and most embracing sense as the foundation of existence in spiritual beings and forces. It is not a one-sided but a many-sided path that it takes, for there is not only one path it follows, but it follows all the paths on which the human soul is led, from out of its own rich inner life. The science of spirit may be allowed to hope that the questions, the mysteries, which nature has put to it will not be refuted by nature, but that the spirit in nature will affirm them because the spirit that lives in nature also lives in man, and not, as in the other case, to deny what the science of spirit or anthroposophy envisages the real nature of the human mystery to be. |
| 35. Collected Essays on Philosophy and Anthroposophy 1904–1923: The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz
Rudolf Steiner |
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| This unknown judgment is passed by the “guardian” who is with the lion, who calms the lion and, according to the content of a letter that is also unknown to the person entering, speaks the words to the person entering: “Now welcome to me, God, the man I have long wished to see.” The spiritual vision of the “cruel lion” is the result of the spiritual state of the Brother of the Rosicrucians. |
| Attention is drawn to the fact that he himself gave birth to them as the “Father”. And his relationship to the “first gatekeeper” also appears as such to a part of his own self, namely to the one who, before the transformation of his powers of knowledge as the “Astrologus”, was indeed in search of the laws but who was not equal to the temptation that arises when the spiritual seeker comes to a point such as that at which Christian Rosenkreutz found himself at the beginning of the fifth day when he stood before Venus. |
| 35. Collected Essays on Philosophy and Anthroposophy 1904–1923: The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz
Rudolf Steiner |
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Anyone who knows the nature of the experiences that the human soul undergoes when it has opened the entrance gates to the spiritual world needs only to read a few pages of the “Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz Anno 1459” to recognize that the book's account refers to real spiritual experiences. Subjectively invented images reveal themselves as such to those who have insight into spiritual reality, because they cannot fully correspond to this reality either in their own form or in the way they are strung together. — This seems to provide the starting point from which the “Chymical Wedding” can be viewed. We can follow the experiences described from the soul's point of view, as it were, and explore what insight into spiritual realities has to say about them. Unconcerned about everything that has been written about this book, the point of view characterized by it is to be taken up here first. We will take from the book itself what it wants to say. Only then can we talk about questions that many observers ask before a sufficient basis for this is created. The experiences of the wanderer in The Chemical Wedding are divided into seven mental days. The first day begins with the bearer of the experiences encountering imaginations before his soul that allow his decision to begin the journey to mature. The description is written in such a way that it reveals the particular care of the narrator in distinguishing between what the bearer of the experiences understands at the time he has a “vision” and what is still hidden from his insight. Likewise, a distinction is made between what comes to the seer from the spiritual world without his will being involved, and what is brought about by this will. The first experience is not one that is deliberately brought about and is not one that the seer fully understands. It brings him the opportunity to enter the spiritual world. However, he is not unprepared. Seven years ago, he was informed through a 'bodily face' that he would be called to participate in the 'Chymical Wedding'. The expression 'bodily face' cannot be misunderstood by anyone who grasps the entire spirit of the book. It is not a vision of the morbid or down-tuned soul life, but a perception that can be attained through spiritual vision, the content of which stands before the soul with the same character of reality as a perception of the bodily eye. That the bearer of the experiences could have such a “vision” presupposes a state of soul that is not that of ordinary human consciousness. The latter knows only the changing states of waking and sleeping and, between the two, the dream, the experiences of which are not related to anything real. The soul, which experiences itself through this ordinary consciousness, knows itself to be united with a reality through the senses; but when its connection with the senses ceases during sleep, it is not in a knowing relationship with any reality, not even with its own self and its inner experiences. And during the dream, she cannot see clearly what relationship she has to reality. At the time of the 'bodily vision' that he still remembers, the Wanderer in 'The Chemical Wedding' already had a consciousness that was different from the usual one. He has experienced that the soul can perceive even when it is in the same relationship to the senses as it is during sleep. The concept of the soul living separately from the body and knowing a reality in this life has become more valid for him. He knows that the soul can so strengthen its own being that in its separation from the body it can be united with a spiritual world as it is with nature through the bodily sense organs. That such a union can take place, that it lies before him, he has learned through the “bodily vision”. The experience itself of this union could not be given to him through this vision. He has waited for this. It presents itself in his conceptions as the participation in the “Chymical Wedding”. Thus he is prepared for a renewed experience in the spiritual world. At a time of heightened spiritual mood, on the eve of Easter, this renewed experience occurs. The bearer of the experiences feels as if he is being buffeted by a storm. Thus it announces itself to him that he is experiencing a reality whose perception is not mediated through the physical body. He is lifted out of the state of equilibrium with respect to the forces of the world, into which the human being is placed by his physical body. His soul does not live the life of this physical body; it feels only connected with the (etheric) body of formative forces that permeates the physical one. This body of formative forces is not, however, part of the equilibrium of the cosmic forces, but of the mobility of the supersensible world, which is closest to the physical and which the human being perceives first when he has opened the gates of spiritual vision. Only in the physical world do the forces solidify into fixed forms that express themselves in states of equilibrium; in the spiritual world, perpetual mobility reigns. The person undergoing this mobility becomes aware of the raging storm as a result of this mobility. The revelation of a spiritual being emerges from the vagueness of this perception. This revelation takes place through a clearly shaped imagination. The spirit appears in a blue dress studded with stars. One must keep away from the description of this being everything that amateurish esotericists like to add to the “explanation” in the way of symbolic interpretations. One is dealing with a non-sensuous experience, which the person experiencing it expresses for himself and for others through an image. The blue dress studded with stars is no more a symbol of the blue night sky or anything similar than the idea of the rosebush is a symbol of the evening glow in ordinary consciousness. In supersensible perception there is a much more active, conscious activity of the soul than in the case of the senses. — In the case of the wanderer at the 'Chymical Wedding', this activity is exercised through the formative forces body, as in the case of physical seeing through the bodily senses by means of the eyes. This activity of the formative forces body can be compared to the arousal of radiating light. Such light falls on the spiritual being that is revealing itself. It is reflected back by it. Thus the beholder sees his own radiated light, and behind its boundary he becomes aware of the limiting being. The 'blue' comes about through this relationship of the spiritual being to the spiritual light of the body of formative forces; the stars are not reflected, but are absorbed by the being as parts of the spiritual light. The spiritual being has objective reality; the image through which it reveals itself is a modification, brought about by the being, in the radiance of the body of formative forces. This imagination must not be confused with a vision either. The subjective experience of the bearer of such an imagination is completely different from that of the visionary. The visionary lives in his vision through an inner compulsion; the bearer of the imagination adds it to the designated spiritual being or process with the same inner conscious freedom with which a word or a sentence is used as an expression for a sensual object. Someone who has no knowledge of the nature of the spiritual world may think that it is completely unnecessary to clothe this spiritual world, which reveals itself in imageless experiences, in imaginations that evoke the appearance of the visionary. In reply to this, it is true that imagination is not the essence that is perceived spiritually, but it is the means by which this essence must reveal itself in the soul. Just as one cannot perceive a sensual color without the definite activity of the eye, so too can one not experience something spiritual without encountering it from within with a definite imagination. This does not prevent the use of pure concepts, as they are common in natural science or philosophy, when presenting spiritual experiences that are made through imagination. The present remarks are based on such concepts in order to trace the content of the 'Chymical Wedding'. But in the seventeenth century, when J. V. Andreae wrote the book, it was not yet customary to make use of such concepts to such an extent; one directly presented the imaginations through which one had experienced the supersensible beings and processes. In the spiritual form that reveals itself to him, the wanderer at the “Chemical Wedding” recognizes the being that can give him the right impulse for his journey. Through his encounter with this figure, he consciously feels that he is standing in the spiritual world. The way in which he stands in this world points to the particular direction of his path of knowledge. He does not walk in the direction of the mystic in the narrower sense, but in that of the alchemist. In order not to misunderstand the following exposition, one should keep away from the concept of “alchemy” everything that has been attached to it through superstition, fraud, adventurism and the like. Think of what the honest, unprejudiced seekers after truth who coined this term were striving for. They wanted to recognize the lawful connections between the things of nature that are not conditioned by the activity of nature itself, but by a spiritual essence that reveals itself through nature. They sought supersensible forces that are active in the sensual world but do not allow themselves to be recognized in a sensual way. The wanderer of the 'Chymical Wedding' sets out on the path of such researchers. In this sense, he is a representative of alchemical research. As such, he is convinced that the supersensible forces of nature hide themselves from ordinary consciousness. He has brought about experiences within himself which, through their effect, enable the soul to use the body of formative forces as an organ of perception. Through this organ of perception, he gains insight into the supersensible forces of nature. He first wants to recognize the extra-human, supersensible forces of nature in a spiritual form of existence, which is experienced outside the realm of sensory perception and ordinary mental activity. Equipped with the knowledge of these forces, he then wants to see through the true essence of the human body itself. He believes that through knowledge gained by the soul in conjunction with the body of formative forces, which is activated independently of the physical organism, one can see through the human body and thereby come close to the secret that the universe works through this being. For ordinary sensory perception, this secret is veiled; the human being lives in it; but he does not see through what he experiences. Starting from supersensible knowledge of nature, the wanderer in The Chymical Wedding finally aimed to arrive at beholding the supersensible essence of the human being. It is by this path of research that the alchemist, in contrast to the mystic in the narrower sense, strives. He too seeks to experience the human being differently from what is possible through ordinary consciousness. But he does not choose the path that leads to the use of the formative forces independent of the physical body. He starts from the vague feeling that a more intimate interpenetration of the physical body with the formative forces than is possible in ordinary waking life leads away from communion with the world of sense-perceptible beings and leads to communion with the spiritual world of human beings. The alchemist strives to withdraw himself with his conscious being from the ordinary context of the body and to enter into the world that lies behind the realm of sensory perception as the “spiritual nature” of the world. The mystic attempts to lead the conscious soul deeper into the context of the physical, in order to consciously immerse himself in that area of physicality that is hidden from self-awareness when it is filled with the perceptions of the senses. The mystic does not always seek to give a full account of this endeavor. He will only too often seek to characterize his path in a different way. But the mystic is in most cases a poor explainer of his own nature. This is connected with the fact that certain feelings become attached to the spiritual quest. Because the mystic's soul wants to overcome the kind of togetherness with the body that is experienced in ordinary consciousness, a kind of self-rapture takes hold of it, not only a certain contempt for this togetherness, but for the body itself. Therefore, she does not want to admit to herself that her mystical experience is based on an even more intimate connection with the body than that which produces ordinary consciousness. — Through this more intimate connection, the mystic perceives a change in his thinking, feeling and willing. He surrenders to this perception without developing any inclination to elucidate the reason for the change. This change reveals itself to him, despite having descended deeper into the physical, as a spiritualization of his inner life. And he has every right to see it as such. Sensuality is nothing other than the form of existence that the soul experiences when it is in the same connection with the body as that on which ordinary waking consciousness is based. When the soul unites more intimately with the body than is the case in this form of existence, then it experiences a relationship of the human being to the world that is more spiritual than that established through the senses. The perceptions that arise then are condensed into imaginations. These imaginations are revelations of the forces with which the formative body works on the physical body. They remain hidden from ordinary consciousness. The feeling is strengthened to such an extent that the etheric-spiritual forces, which radiate from the cosmos into the human being, are experienced as if through an inner touch. In the will, the soul knows itself to be dedicated to a spiritual work that integrates the human being into a supersensible world context, from which he separates himself through the subjective will of ordinary consciousness. True mysticism arises only when the human being carries his fully conscious soul being into the more intimate connection with the body that is characterized and is not driven by the constraints of the bodily organization to morbidly visionary or downcast consciousness. Genuine mysticism strives to experience the spiritual essence of man, which is too close to the human heart and which is covered by sense perception for ordinary consciousness. Genuine alchemy makes itself independent of sense perception in order to see the spiritual essence of the world that exists outside of man, which is covered by sense perception. Before entering into the inner life of man, the mystic must bring his soul into such a state that it does not expose its consciousness to fading or extinction in the face of the increased counter-pressure that it experiences through its closer union with the body. Before entering the spiritual world that lies beyond the sense realm, the alchemist needs to strengthen his soul so that it does not lose itself in the beings and processes of this world. The paths of research of the mystic and the alchemist lead in opposite directions. The mystic goes directly into the human being's own spiritual nature. His goal is what may be called the mystical marriage, the union of the conscious soul with one's own spiritual being. The alchemist wants to pass through the spiritual realm of nature in order to see the spiritual being of man with the powers of knowledge acquired in this realm after the successful journey. His goal is the “Chymical Wedding”, the union with the spiritual realm of nature. Only after this union does he want to experience the contemplation of the human being. Both the mystic and the alchemist experience a mystery at the very beginning of their paths, which cannot be penetrated within the ordinary consciousness. It relates to the relationship between the human body and the human soul. As a spiritual being, the human being truly lives in the spiritual world; but at the present stage of development within the evolution of the world, he has no ability of his own to orient himself in the spiritual realm. Through the powers of his ordinary consciousness, he can only establish his relationship to himself and to the world outside of himself in the sense of truth if the body instructs him in the directions for soul activity. The body is so incorporated into the world that this incorporation corresponds to cosmic harmony. When the soul lives within the perception of the senses and the ordinary activity of the mind, it is given over to the body with just the strength by which the body can transmit its harmony with the universe to it. If the soul is lifted out of this experience according to the mystical or alchemical direction, it becomes necessary to take precautions so that it does not lose the harmony with the universe gained through the body. If he did not take such precautions, then on the mystical path he would be threatened with the loss of spiritual connection with the universe; on the alchemical path, the loss of the ability to distinguish between truth and error. Without this precaution, the mystic would, through the closer connection with the body, so intensify the power of self-consciousness that he would be overwhelmed by it and no longer be able to experience the life of the world in his own life. Thus he would enter with his consciousness into the region of a spiritual world other than that which corresponds to man. (In my spiritual scientific writings I have called this world the Luciferic.) The alchemist would, without the necessary precautions, come to a loss of discernment between truth and deception. In the great context of the universe, deception is a necessity. Man, however, cannot fall prey to it at his present stage of development because the realm of sense perception affords him protection. If deception were not in the background of human experience, man could not develop the various levels of consciousness. For deception is the driving force behind this development of consciousness. At the present stage of human consciousness, deception must indeed work towards the emergence of consciousness; but it must itself remain unconscious. For if it were to enter into consciousness, it would overwhelm the truth. As soon as the soul enters, by the alchemical path, into the spiritual realm that lies beyond sense perception, it enters into the vortices of deception. It can only preserve its nature in the right way within these vortices if it brings with it from its experience in the sense world a sufficiently developed power of distinguishing between truth and deception. If it failed to develop such a power of discrimination, the whirlpools of illusion would sweep it away into a world where it would have to lose itself. (In my spiritual writings I have called this world the Ahrimanic one.) — Before he begins his journey, the mystic needs to bring his soul into such a state that his own life cannot be overpowered; the alchemist must strengthen his sense of truth so that it will not be lost, even if he is not supported by sense perception and the mind that is bound to it. The bearer of the experiences described in the “Chemical Wedding” is aware that, as an alchemist, he needs a strengthened ability to distinguish between truth and deception on his path. He seeks to gain his support from Christian truth according to the circumstances of life from which he begins his alchemical path. He knows that what connects him to Christ has already brought forth within his life in the sensual world a power in his soul that leads to the truth. This power does not need the basis of the senses and can therefore prove itself even when this basis of the senses is not there. With this attitude, his soul stands before the being in the blue dress, who points him to the path to the “Chemical Wedding”. At first this being could just as well belong to the world of deception and error as to that of truth. The wanderer on his way to the “Chemical Wedding” must distinguish. But his power of discrimination would be lost, error would have to overwhelm him, could he not recall in supersensible experience what binds him in the sense world to truth with an inner power. What has become in this soul through Christ arises out of it. And like its remaining light, the body of formative forces of this Christ-light radiates towards the revealing being. The right imagination is formed. The letter that points him to the path of the “Chemical Wedding” contains the sign of Christ and the words: in hoc signo vinces. The wanderer knows that he is connected to the appearing being through a power that points to the truth. If the power that had led him into the supersensible world had been one tending towards deception, he would have stood before an entity that would have paralyzed his memory for the Christ impulse living in him. He would then have followed only the seductive power that draws man to itself even when the supersensible world leads him forces that are pernicious to his nature and will. The content of the letter, which is handed over to the wanderer after the “Chemical Wedding” by the being that appears to him, contains, in the language of the fifteenth century, a characterization of his relationship to the spiritual world, insofar as he has become aware of it at the beginning of the first day of his spiritual experiences. The symbol added to the words expresses how the mutual relationship between the physical body, the body of formative forces and the soul-spiritual has developed in him. It is significant for him to be able to say that this condition in his human existence is in harmony with the conditions in the universe. He has found, through “diligent recalculation and calculation” of his “annotated planets”, that this condition may occur in him at the point in time at which it is now taking place. Anyone who regards what is being considered here in the sense of the follies of some “astrologers” will misunderstand it, regardless of whether they are a believer in it or an “enlightened” person who smiles condescendingly at it. The author of The Chemical Wedding had good reason to add the date 1459 to the title of his book. He was aware that the soul-disposition of the one experiencing it must be in harmony with the state in which world-becoming has been attained at a certain point in time, if inner soul-disposition and outer world-content are not to result in disharmony. The outer supersensible world-content must meet the soul, which is independent of ordinary sense perception, in harmony, if the consonance of the two is to give rise to the state of consciousness that constitutes the “Chemical Wedding”. Anyone who believes that the constellation of the “annotated planets” contains a mysterious power that determines the state of experience of the person would be like someone who believed that the position of the hands on his watch had the power to cause him to undertake a journey that he had to take from his life circumstances at a certain hour. The letter refers to three temples. What is meant by these is not yet understood by the bearer of the experiences at the time when he receives the hint. He who perceives in the spiritual world must know that he will occasionally receive imaginations, which he must first renounce in understanding. He must accept them as imaginations and allow them to mature in the soul as such. During this maturing, they bring forth in man's inner being the power that can effect understanding. If the observer were to explain them to himself at the moment they reveal themselves to him, he would do so with an unsuitable power of understanding and think inconsistently. In spiritual experience, much depends on having the patience to make observations, to accept them at face value at first, and to wait until the appropriate time to understand them. What the Wanderer experiences on the first day of his spiritual experiences at the “Chemical Wedding” is described by him as having been announced to him “seven years” before. During this time he was not allowed to form an intellectual opinion about his “vision” at the time, but had to wait until the “vision” had had such an effect on his soul that he was able to experience further things with understanding. The appearance of the spirit being in the blue, star-studded dress and the presentation of the letter are experiences that the wanderer has at the “Chemical Wedding” without his soul's own free decision leading to it. He goes on to bring about experiences through such a free decision. He enters into a sleep-like state; one that brings him dream experiences whose content has a reality value. He can do this because, after the experiences he has had, he enters into a different relationship with the spiritual world than the ordinary one through the state of sleep. In the ordinary experience during the state of sleep, the human soul is not bound to the spiritual world by ties that can give its ideas a reality value. But the soul of the wanderer at the “Chemical Wedding” is transformed. It is so inwardly strengthened that it can take up in the dream experience what is connected with the spiritual world in which it finds itself. And through such an experience she first of all experiences her own newly won relationship to the sense body. She experiences this relationship through the imagination of the tower, in which the dreamer is locked up and from which he is freed. She consciously experiences what is unconsciously experienced in ordinary life when the soul, falling asleep, passes from the realm of sense experience into that of supersensible existence. The restrictions and hardships in the tower are an expression of the sensory experiences towards the soul's inner being when it frees itself from the realm of such experiences. What binds the soul to the body in such a way that the result of this bond is sensory experience, these are the life forces that promote growth. Consciousness could never arise under the sole influence of these forces. That which is merely alive remains unconscious. The forces that destroy life, in conjunction with illusion, lead to the emergence of consciousness. If man did not carry within him that which leads him towards physical death, he could live in the physical body but not develop consciousness in it. For ordinary consciousness, the connection between the death-bringing forces and this consciousness remains hidden. But for someone who, like the bearer of experiences in the “Chemical Wedding”, is to develop an awareness of the spiritual world, this connection must come before the “eye of the spirit”. He must experience that connected with his existence is the “hoary man”, the being who, by nature, carries within him the power of aging. Vision in the spiritual realm can only be granted to that soul which, while dwelling in this realm, beholds the power that in ordinary life lies behind aging. This power is capable of snatching the soul from the realm of sensory experience. The value of the dream experience lies in the fact that through it the wanderer to the “Chemical Wedding” is aware that he can now approach nature and the human world with a state of mind that allows him to see what is hidden in both of them from ordinary consciousness. This has matured him for the experiences of the next few days. At the beginning of the description of the second day, it is immediately pointed out how nature appears to him in a new way. But he is not only to look into the background of nature; he is to look more deeply into the motives of human will and action than is possible in ordinary consciousness. The interpreter of The Chemical Wedding means to say that this ordinary consciousness only gets to know the outer side of the will and action, and that through this consciousness people are also only aware of their own will and action. The deeper spiritual impulses that pour out of the supersensible world into this volition and action, and that shape human social life, remain unknown to this consciousness. Man can live in the belief that a particular motive leads him to an action; in truth, this motive is only the conscious mask for one that remains unconscious. Insofar as human beings regulate their social life together according to ordinary consciousness, forces intervene in this life together that do not lie in the sense of evolution and are beneficial to humanity. These forces must be counteracted by others that are seen through supersensible consciousness and incorporated into social activity. The Wayfarer of the “Chymical Wedding” is to be led to the knowledge of such forces. To do this, he must see through people to the being that really lives in them, which is quite different from the one present in their belief or corresponds to the place they occupy in the social order determined by ordinary consciousness. The image of nature that reveals itself to ordinary consciousness is very different from that of a social human order. The supersensible natural forces, which spiritual consciousness gets to know, are related to the supersensible forces of this social order of man. The alchemist strives for a knowledge of nature that will become for him the basis of a true knowledge of human nature. It is the Way to such knowledge that the Wanderer to the “Chemical Wedding” must seek. But not one such Way, but several, are shown to him. The first leads into a region where the intellectual conceptions of ordinary consciousness, gained through sense perception, impinge upon the course of supersensible experience, so that insight into reality is killed through the interaction of the two experiential circles. The second holds out the prospect that the soul can lose its patience if it has to submit to long periods of waiting for spiritual revelations, in order to allow what must initially be accepted only as an incomprehensible revelation to mature fully. The third demands men who, through their already unconsciously attained maturity of development, are allowed to see in a short time what others must acquire in a long struggle. The fourth brings man to an encounter with all the forces from the supersensible world that cloud and frighten his consciousness when he wants to snatch himself from sensory experience. Which path is to be taken by the one or other human soul depends on the state into which the experiences of ordinary consciousness have brought it before it begins the spiritual journey. It cannot “choose” in the usual sense, because its choice would arise out of the sense consciousness, which is not entitled to decide in supersensible matters. The impossibility of such a choice is realized by the Wayfarer after the “Chemical Wedding.” But he also knows that his soul is sufficiently strong for behavior in a supersensible world to be led aright when such an inducement comes from the spiritual world itself. The Imagination of his deliverance “from the tower” gives him this knowledge. The imagination of the “black raven”, snatching the food given to the “white dove”, evokes a certain feeling in the soul of the wanderer; and this feeling, produced out of supersensible, imaginative perception, leads to the path whereon the choice of ordinary consciousness would not have dared to lead. On this path, the wanderer arrives where people and human relationships are to be revealed to his gaze in a light that is not accessible to experience in the sense body. He enters through a portal into a dwelling within which people behave in a way that corresponds to the super-sensible forces pouring into their souls. Through the experiences he has within this dwelling, he is to awaken to a new life, which he will be responsible for leading when a sufficiently large area of these experiences is covered by his super-sensible consciousness. Many critics have expressed the opinion that the “Chymical Wedding of Christiani Rosencreutz” is nothing more than a satirical novel about the doings of certain sectarians or adventurous alchemists or the like. But perhaps a truly correct view of the experiences that the author of the book has his wanderer undergo “before the gate” will show that the satirical mood that the work displays in its later parts can be traced back to soul experiences, the seriousness of which takes on a form that appears to be mere satire, which only wants to remain in the realm of sense experience. It would be well not to lose sight of this in considering the further experiences of the wanderer after the “Chemical Wedding”. The second mental day's work brings the spiritual seeker, whose experiences Johann Valentin Andreae describes, to experiences through which it is decided whether he can attain the ability of true spiritual vision, or whether a world of spiritual error shall embrace his soul. For his perception, these experiences take the form of imaginations of entering a castle, in which the world of spiritual experience is administered. Not only the genuine, but also the fake spiritual seeker can have such imaginations. The soul reaches them when it follows certain lines of thought and modes of perception, through which it is able to imagine surroundings that are not conveyed to it through sensual impressions. From the way Andreae describes the society of unreal spiritual seekers, within which the “Brother of the Red Rose Cross” still finds himself on the “second day”, one recognizes that he is well aware of the secret of the difference between the real and the unreal spiritual seeker. Whoever has the opportunity to correctly judge such inner testimonies of the spiritual insight of the author of The Chemical Wedding will be in no doubt as to the true character of this writing and of Andreaes's intention. It is obviously written to provide enlightenment for people who are seriously striving for an understanding of the relationship between the world of the senses and the spiritual world, and of the forces that can arise for the human soul from the knowledge of the spiritual world for social and moral life. Andreae's unsentimental, humorous and satirical style of presentation does not speak against, but for, the deeply serious intention. Not only can one feel the seriousness within the seemingly light-hearted scenes, but one also has the feeling that Andreae is describing like someone who does not want to cloud the mind of his reader with sentimentality about the secrets of the spiritual world, but who wants to create in the reader a spiritually free, self-aware and rational attitude towards this world. If someone, through the exercise of thought and feeling, has brought himself to imagine a supersensible world, such ability is by no means a guarantee that these imaginations will lead him to a real relationship with the spiritual world. In the field of imaginative experience, the Brother of the Rose Cross sees himself surrounded by numerous souls who, although they live in ideas about the spiritual world, cannot come into real contact with this world because of their inner condition. The possibility of this real contact depends on how the spiritual seeker attunes his soul to the world of the senses before approaching the threshold of the spiritual world. This attunement produces a state of mind in the soul that is carried across the threshold and reveals itself within the spiritual world in such a way that it either accepts or rejects the seeker. The right frame of mind can only be attained if the seeker is willing to discard everything at the threshold that determines his relationship to the world within the reality of the senses. In order to dwell in the spiritual world, those impulses of the mind through which man feels the character and validity – the weight – of his personality from his external circumstances and fate must become ineffective. If this necessity, by which man feels transported into a kind of psychic childhood, is difficult to fulfill, then the other necessity, to suppress the kind of judgment by which one orients oneself within the sense world, is even more contrary to ordinary feeling. One must come to the realization that this way of judging is gained in the sense world, that it can only have validity within it, and that one must be prepared to learn the way one has to judge in the spiritual world from the spiritual world itself. When the Brother of the Rose Cross enters the castle, he develops a mood of soul that arises from a sense of these necessities. He does not allow himself to be led into a chamber to spend the first night in the castle, but remains in the hall to which he has come through his participation in the events of the second day. In this way he protects himself from carrying his soul into a region of the spiritual world with which the forces at work within him are not yet able to unite worthily. The soul mood that prevents him from penetrating further into the spiritual realm than the second day has brought him is effective in his soul throughout the night and equips him with the capacity for perception and will that he needs the following day. Those intruders who have come with him without the ability of such a state of mind must be expelled from the spiritual world the following day, because they cannot develop the fruit of this mood. Without this fruit it is impossible for them to connect the soul with the world through real inner powers, of which they are, so to speak, only externally embraced. The events at the gates, the encounter with the lion, the reading of the inscriptions on the two pillars at the entrance, and other happenings of the second day are so vividly described by the Rose Cross Brother that one can see his soul weaving in the described mood. He experiences all this in such a way that that part of it remains unknown to him which speaks to the ordinary mind bound to the sense world, and that he only absorbs that which enters into a spiritual pictorial relationship with the deeper powers of the mind. The encounter with the “cruel lion” at the second gate is a step in the self-knowledge of the spiritual seeker. The Brother of the Rose Cross experiences it in such a way that it acts as an imagination on his deeper powers of mind, but that it remains unknown to him what it means for his position within the spiritual world. This unknown judgment is passed by the “guardian” who is with the lion, who calms the lion and, according to the content of a letter that is also unknown to the person entering, speaks the words to the person entering: “Now welcome to me, God, the man I have long wished to see.” The spiritual vision of the “cruel lion” is the result of the spiritual state of the Brother of the Rosicrucians. This soul condition is reflected in the formative part of the spiritual world and gives the imagination of the lion. In this reflection, an image of the observer's own self is given. In the field of spiritual reality, the observer is a different being than in the realm of sensory existence. The forces at work in the realm of the sensory world shape him into a sensory human image. In the spiritual realm, he is not yet human; he is a being that allows itself to be expressed imaginatively through the animal form. Within this existence, the drives, affects, feelings and impulses of the will that live in the human being's sensory existence are held in chains by the life of perception and imagination bound to the sense body, which are themselves a result of the sense world. If man wishes to step out of the sense world, he must become conscious of what in him is no longer fettered by the gifts of the sense world and must be brought onto the right path by new gifts from the spiritual world. Man must see himself before the sensuous incarnation. This insight comes to the Rose Cross Brother through the encounter with the lion, the image of his own being before the incarnation. It should be noted here, just to avoid any misunderstanding, that the form of existence in which the underlying essence of man beholds itself in a spiritual way before becoming man has nothing to do with animality, with which popular Darwinism thinks the human species is linked by descent. For the animal form of the spiritual vision is one that, by its very nature, can only belong to the world of formative forces. Within the sense world, it can only exist as a subconscious element of human nature. The fact that the part of his being that is held in bondage by the sense body is still in the process of becoming human is expressed in the frame of mind in which the Brother of the Rose Cross finds himself upon entering the castle. He faces what he has to expect with an open mind, and does not cloud it with judgments that still come from the mind bound to the world of sense. Such clouding he must later notice in those who have not come with a rightful soul mood. They too have passed by and seen the “cruel lion”, for this depends only on their having received the corresponding currents of thought and modes of perception into their souls. But the effect of this spiritual vision could not be strong enough in their case to persuade them to abandon the way of judging to which they were accustomed in the sense world. Their way of judging appears to the spiritual eye of the Brother of the Rose Cross within the spiritual world as vain boasting. They want to see Plato's ideas, count Democritus' atoms, pretend to see the invisible, while in truth they see nothing. These things show that they cannot connect the inner soul powers with the world that has embraced them. They lack consciousness of the true demands which the spiritual world makes upon man when he would see it. The Brother of the Rose Cross can in the following days connect his soul-forces with the spiritual world because on the second day he admits to himself in accordance with the truth that he cannot see and do what the other intruders claim before themselves or others to see and do. The feeling of his powerlessness later becomes the power of spiritual experience for him. He must allow himself to be bound at the end of the second day because he is to feel the bonds of mental powerlessness in the face of the spiritual world until this powerlessness as such has been exposed to the light of consciousness for as long as it takes to transform itself into power. Andreae wants to show how the seven “sciences and liberal arts”, into which knowledge gained within the sensory world was divided in the Middle Ages, are to serve as preparation for spiritual knowledge. The seven liberal arts were usually considered to be: grammar, dialectics, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. From the description in the “Chymische Hochzeit” one recognizes that Andreae thinks both the brother of the Rose Cross and his rightful companions as well as the unlawful intruders as being equipped with the knowledge that can be gained from these liberal arts. However, the newcomers possess this knowledge to a varying extent. The rightful ones, especially the Brother of the Rose Cross, whose experiences are described, have acquired this knowledge in such a way that through its possession they have developed the strength in their souls to receive from the spiritual world the unknown, which must still remain hidden for these “free arts”. Their soul is so prepared by these arts that it not only knows what can be known through them, but this knowledge gives it the weight by which it can gain experience in the spiritual world. The weight of these arts has not become the weight of the souls of the unlawful arrivals. They do not have in their souls the true world content of these “seven free arts”. On the third day the Brother of the Rose Cross participates in the weighing of souls. This is described by means of the imagination of a scale by which the souls are weighed in order to find out whether they have acquired, in addition to their own human weight, a weight equal to seven others. These seven weights are the imaginative representatives of the “seven liberal arts”. The Brother of the Rose Cross has in his soul not only the substance that can match the seven weights, but also a surplus. This benefits another personality, which is not considered sufficient for itself, but which is protected from expulsion from the spiritual world by the true spiritual seeker. By describing this process, Andreae shows how familiar he is with the secrets of the spiritual world. Of all the powers of the soul that develop in the world of sense, love is the only one that can remain unchanged during the transition of the soul into the spiritual world. Helping weaker people according to the strength one possesses, that can happen within the world of sense, and it can also be done in the same way with the possessions that a person receives in the spiritual realm. From the way in which Andreae describes the expulsion of the unlawful intruders from the spiritual world, it is evident that he wants to use his writing to make his contemporaries aware of how far far removed from the spiritual world and thus from true reality a person can be who, although he has familiarized himself with all kinds of descriptions of the path to this world, is still unaware of a real inner transformation of the soul. An unbiased reading of the “Chymical Wedding” reveals as one of the aims of its author to tell his contemporaries how pernicious for the true development of humanity are those who intervene in life with impulses that relate to the spiritual world in an unlawful way. Andreae expects right social, moral and other human community goals from a rightful recognition of the spiritual foundations of existence, especially for his time. Therefore, in his description, he sheds a clear light on everything that is harmful to human progress because it draws such goals from an unlawful relationship to the spiritual world. On the third day after witnessing the expulsion of the illegitimate newcomers, the brother of the Rose Cross senses that the possibility is beginning for him to use the ability to reason in a way that is suitable for the spiritual world. The possession of this ability presents itself to the soul as the imagination of the unicorn, which bows down before a lion. The lion then calls forth a dove with his roar, which brings him an olive branch. He swallows it. If one were to treat such a picture as a symbol and not as a real imagination, one could say that it visualizes the process in the soul of the spirit-seeker, through which he feels able to think spiritually. But this abstract idea would not express the soul process that is actually at stake in its full essence. For this process is experienced in such a way that the periphery of personal experience, which for the sense being extends to the boundary of the body, is extended beyond this boundary. In the spiritual realm the seer experiences beings and processes outside his own nature just as man experiences the processes within his own body through the ordinary waking consciousness. When such an expanded consciousness occurs, then mere abstract conception ceases, and imagination presents itself as the necessary form of expression of what is experienced. If one nevertheless wishes to express such an experience in abstract ideas, which is necessary in particular in the present day for communicating spiritual-scientific knowledge on a large scale, then one must first bring the imaginations into the form of ideas in an appropriate manner. Andreae omits this in The Chymical Wedding because he wishes to present, without alteration, the experiences of a spiritual seeker from the middle of the fifteenth century; in those days one did not translate the experienced imaginations into ideas and concepts. When imaginative knowledge has matured to the point reached by the Brother of the Rose Cross on the third day, then the soul itself with its inner life can enter into the region of reality from which the imaginations have come. Only through this ability does man arrive at a new way of seeing the entities and processes of the sense world from a point of view situated in the spiritual world. He sees to what extent these flow out of their true sources in the supersensible realm. Andreae remarks that the Brother of the Rosycross acquires this ability to a greater extent than his companions. He is able to see the library of the castle and the burials of the kings from the point of view of the spiritual world. That he is able to do this depends on his being able to exercise his own will to a high degree in the imaginative world. His comrades can only see what comes to them through the power of others, without such strong exercise of their own will. The brother of the Rose Cross learns more at the “burials of the kings” than is written in all the books. The vision of these burials is brought into direct connection with that of the glorious “Phoenix”. In these visions the secret of death and birth is revealed. These two borderline processes of life only take place in the material world. In the spiritual realm, birth and death are not followed by creation and decay, but by the transformation of one form of life into another. One can only recognize the essence of birth and death by looking at them from a point of view outside the material world, from a realm in which they themselves do not exist. The fact that the Brother of the Rose Cross penetrates to the “burials of the kings” and beholds in the image of the Phoenix the arising of a young royal power from the dead body of the old kings is recorded by Andreae because he wants to describe the particular spiritual path of a seeker of knowledge from the middle of the fifteenth century. This is a turning point in time with regard to the spiritual experience of humanity. The forms in which the human soul could approach the spiritual world through the centuries were changing at this point into others. In the sphere of external human life, this change was manifested by the emerging scientific way of thinking of the new time and the other upheavals in the life of the peoples of the earth in this epoch. In the realm of the world in which the spiritual seekers search for the secrets of existence, the passing away of a particular direction of the human soul forces and the appearance of another reveal themselves at such turning points. Despite all the other revolutionary events in the historical development of humanity, the character of spiritual insight had remained essentially the same since the times of Greco-Roman life until the fifteenth century. The spiritual seeker had to carry the instinctive mind rooted in the mind, which was the essential soul power of this age, into the field of spiritual reality and transform it there into the power of spiritual insight. From the middle of the fifteenth century onwards, this soul power was replaced by the mind, which was operating in the light of full self-awareness and liberating itself from instinctive forces. To raise this to the level of intuitive consciousness is the task of the spiritual seeker. In Christian Rosenkreuz, as the leading brother of the Rosicrucians, Andreae portrays a personality who has entered the spiritual world in the way that came to an end in the fifteenth century. The experiences of the “Chymical Wedding” present this ending and the emergence of a new way to his mind's eye. He must therefore penetrate into secrets which the rulers of the castle, who would like to continue to administer the spiritual life in the old way, want to conceal from him. Andreae wants to characterize for his contemporaries the greatest spiritual researcher of the end of an expired epoch, but who sees through the death of this epoch and the rise of a new one in the spiritual field. He found that they were content with the traditions of the old epoch, that they wanted to open up the spiritual world in the sense of these traditions. He wanted to tell them: your way is a fruitless one; the greatest who has walked it in the end has seen through its fruitlessness. Recognize what he has seen through, and you will acquire a feeling for a new way. Andreae wanted to place Christian Rosenkreutz's spiritual path as the legacy of the spiritual research of the fifteenth century in his time, in order to show that the initiative must be taken for a new kind of spiritual research. In the continuation of efforts, as they began with Johann Valentin Andreae, the spiritual researcher still stands in them, who understands the signs of his time. He encounters the strongest resistance from those spiritual seekers who want to pave the way into the supersensible world by renewing or reviving old spiritual traditions. Andreae speaks in delicate terms of the insights that must arise from humanity's contemplative consciousness in the epoch that began in the mid-fifteenth century. Christian Rosenkreutz advances to a great globe, through which the dependence of earthly events on extraterrestrial, cosmic impulses penetrates his soul. This marks the first glimpse of a “cosmology” that has its beginning with the Copernican view of the world, but which sees in it only a beginning that can only give what is valid for the sensory world. In the spirit of this beginning, the more recent scientific conception continues to research to this day. In its world picture, it sees the earth surrounded by “heavenly processes”, which it only wants to grasp with intellectual concepts. In the terrestrial area itself, it seeks the forces for the essential processes of the earth event. When it examines the conditions under which the germ for a new being arises in a mother being, it looks only at the forces that can be found in the hereditary current of the earthly ancestors. She is not aware that in the formation of the germ the “heavenly surroundings” of the earth are at work in the earthly process, that in the mother being is only the place where the extraterrestrial cosmos develops the germ. This way of thinking seeks the causes of historical events exclusively in the facts that preceded these events in earthly life. It does not look up to the extraterrestrial impulses that fertilize earthly facts, so that the events of one epoch give rise to those of the next. In this way of thinking, only the inanimate earthly processes are influenced by the extraterrestrial. For Christian Rosenkreutz, the prospect of an organic, spiritual “celestial science” opens up, which can no longer have anything in common with the kind of ancient astrology that rests on the same foundations for the supersensible as Copernicanism does for the sensual. One can see how Andreae treats imaginative life quite appropriately in the “Chymical Wedding”. Everything that comes to him from Christian Rosenkreutz as revealed knowledge, without the intervention of his own will, is brought to him by forces that find their representation in images of the feminine. The path that the spirit-seeker's own will paves for itself is illustrated by images of guiding boys, by the masculine. Whether man is a woman or a man in the sense of the senses, the masculine and the feminine are at work in him as polar opposites. It is from this point of view that Andreae characterizes. The relationship between the conceptual and the volitional is brought into the right relationship when this relationship is presented in images that recall the relationship of the masculine and the feminine in the sensory world. Again, to avoid misunderstandings, it should be noted that the imagination of the male and female should not be confused with the relationships of man and woman in the sensual world itself; just as little as the imagination of the animal form, which arises in the seeing consciousness, has to do with the animal nature to which popular Darwinism relates humanity. At present, many a person believes that they can penetrate the hidden secrets of existence through sexual physiology. A superficial acquaintance with genuine spiritual science could convince him that this endeavor does not lead to the secrets of existence, but away from them. And in any case, it is nonsense to bring the opinions of such personalities as Andreae into any kind of relationship with ideas that have something to do with sexual physiology. Andreae clearly points out important things that he wants to include in his “Chymical Wedding” in his characterization of the “virgin”, to whom he brings the spiritual seeker into a particularly close relationship. This “Virgin” is the imaginative representation of a supersensible knowledge that, in contrast to the “seven liberal arts” acquired in the sensible field, must be taken from the spiritual realm. This “Virgin” gives, in a somewhat mysterious way, her name, which is “alchemy”. Andreae is thus saying that true alchemy is a different kind of science from those that arise from ordinary consciousness. In his opinion, the alchemist performs his operations with sensible substances and forces not because he wants to know the effect of these substances and forces in the realm of the senses, but because he wants to let a supersensible reality reveal itself through the sensual process. He wants to look through the sensual process to a supersensible one. What he does is different from the investigation of the ordinary natural scientist in the way he looks at the process. One of the experiences of the “third day” is the complete overcoming of the belief that the way of judging to which man is accustomed in the sense world can also be a guiding force in the supersensible world in its unaltered form. In the society in which Christian Rosenkreutz dwells, questions are put which lead to a reluctance to decide on an answer. This is to draw attention to the limitations of ordinary judgment. Reality is richer than the possibility of decision, which lies in the mind trained on the sense world. After describing these experiences, Andreae introduces a “duchess”; he thus relates Christian Rosenkreutz to the supersensible kind of knowledge characterized by her, to theology. The effect of this knowledge on the human mind is characterized. It is of particular importance that after all these experiences, the spiritual seeker is still haunted by the dream in the following night, which shows him a door that he wants to open and which resists him for a long time. This image is reflected in his soul by the idea that he should not regard all his previous experiences as valuable for their immediate content, but only as a producer of a force that must submit to further efforts. The “fourth day” is crucial for the spiritual seeker's position in the supersensible world. The spiritual seeker encounters the lion again. The old inscription that the lion presents to him essentially contains the challenge to approach the source from which inspiration flows from the spiritual world. The soul that wishes to remain in merely imaginative experience could, so to speak, only allow itself to be addressed by the spiritual world and use the strength of its own will to bring the revelations to its understanding. If the full power of the human 'I' is to enter the supersensible world, then this 'I' must carry its own consciousness into this world. The soul must rediscover the 'I' with its sensory experiences in the spiritual world. In the supersensible, so to speak, the memory of the way the sensory world is experienced must arise. Andreae presents this by placing a 'comedy' among the experiences of the 'fourth day', that is, an image of events in the sensory world. In beholding this image of the world of sense, which is gained within the supersensible realm, the “I” of the spiritual seeker is strengthened, so that he feels the close connection between the soul element that experiences in the supersensible and that which is active in the sense world through the body. From this insight into Andreae's appropriate mode of presentation, it can be concluded that he seriously wanted to talk to his contemporaries about a path to the spiritual world that is appropriate to the epoch of human development that began in the sixteenth century, at the beginning of which the author of the “Chymische Hochzeit” (The Chemical Wedding) feels he is. The fact that the realization of what Andreae presented to his contemporaries as ideal demands initially faced severe obstacles is rooted in the devastating impact of the turmoil of the Thirty Years War and all that it brought to recent times. But progress in the evolution of mankind is only possible if personalities like Johann Valentin Andreae counter the inhibiting forces of a certain world current with truly progressive ones. Whether Andreae succeeded in describing to Christian Rosenkreutz a spiritual seeker who, from the path he has taken from the spiritual experiences of a bygone era, can effectively point to the new one that corresponds to the new era, can only be asserted if it is possible to show that the last “days” of the “Chymical Wedding” report experiences that open up the perspective into this new period; if Christian Rosenkreutz can carry his “I” over into this period. The most significant experience for Christian Rosenkreutz on the “fourth day” is his presentation before the kings and their subsequent beheading. The author of The Chemical Wedding interprets the nature of this experience through the symbols that stand on a small altar. In these symbols, the human soul can see its relationship to the universe and its becoming. In such symbols, the spiritual seekers have always sought to make the soul understand how its own essence lives in the essence of the cosmos. The book points to the thought content of the human being, which, in accordance with the human organization, is an influx of objective world-creative thoughts into the soul. In the “Little Light” it is indicated how the world-creative thoughts are effective in the universe as light ether and how they become knowledge-producing and enlightening in man. Cupid's intervention by blowing out the little light refers to the view of the spiritual seeker, who sees two opposing forces in the essentiality that underlies all existence and becoming: light and love. But this view can only be correctly understood if we see in physical light and in the love active within the physical world the materially effective revelations of the primal spiritual forces. Within the spiritual power of light, the creative thought element of the world lives out itself, and within love, the creative will element. A “sphere” is among the symbols to suggest how human experience is part of the all-experience. The clock speaks of the soul's interweaving with the passage of time in the cosmos, just as the sphere speaks of its interweaving with the cosmos's spatial existence. The Brünnlein, from which blood-red water flows, and the skull with the snake, point to the way in which birth and death are conceived by the spirit-recognizer in the universe. Valentin Andreae uses these symbols in his description in a similar way to how they have been used since time immemorial in the meeting places that served such societies, through which the people admitted to them were to be initiated into the secrets of life. By using them in this way, he shows that, in his opinion, they are imaginations that are truly based on the development of the human soul and that can inspire the soul to feel the secrets of life. The question arises: What does the “King's Hall” represent, where Christian Rosenkreuz is led, and what does he experience through the presence of the kings and their decapitation? The symbols point to the answer. The spiritual seeker should see how he is grounded in the essence of the universe with his own being. He must see what is in him in the world, and what is in the world in himself. He can only do this if he recognizes in the things and processes of the world the images of that which is active and alive in him. He comes to see what is going on in him not only through images drawn from the soul, but he sees the experiences of this soul through images that represent the evolution of the universe. The kings present themselves before Christian Rosenkreutz to show him: thus live the powers of your soul within yourself; and the experiences of the kings reflect what must happen in the soul under certain conditions. Christian Rosenkreutz stands before the events in the “King's Hall” in such a way that his soul beholds itself in them. The beheading of the Magi is an event within the development of his own soul. He has come to the “King's Hall” with the powers of knowledge, which still only have the nature that the entity was able to acquire before entering the spiritual world. However, by becoming familiar with this world, these powers of knowledge gain experiences that also relate to the material world. Not only does the spiritual world shine before the soul, but the material world also reveals itself in forms that cannot be fully grasped by those who stop at the material level of observation. One of the things these experiences reveal is the ambivalence of the human condition. The forces that underlie physical growth also show themselves to be effective in phenomena that are usually described as psychological. The power of memory and the impulses that give rise to imagination prove to be based on physical conditions that are similar to those of growth. Only the forces of growth work in such a way that they are in an ascending development in human childhood and adolescence, that they then decline and, through their decay, cause death in themselves, while the forces that form memory and imagination assume the possibility of decaying within themselves from a very early point in life. In each waking period, these forces undergo the descending development that extends to decay, which the whole organism undergoes from the second half of life until death. In each sleep period, this decay is compensated for, and memory and imagination experience a resurrection. The soul organism is superimposed on the human total organism like a parasite on a host. The soul organism can provide the conditions for memory and imagination because, in the course of the day, it undergoes the path to death that the total organism takes in the course of life on earth. In this way, for the spiritual seeker, the soul organism becomes a metamorphosis of the total organism. The soul organism appears as that part of the whole organism which brings forth the forces that reveal life from birth to death in a more intense way, so that they provide the basis for the life of imagination. Into the daily decay of the soul organism's forces, the creative thought-being of the world pours in and thus becomes a life of imagination in the human being. The essential thing is that the spiritual seeker recognizes the material basis of the soul processes as the transformed general material processes of the whole organism. The paradoxical fact is that on the path to the spirit one first sees the material conditions of soul life. This fact can be the starting point for an attempt. One can stop at the discovery that the soul processes reveal themselves in their material form. Then, in seeking the spirit, one can be driven into a materialistic world view. But if one really sees through what is at hand, then the opposite occurs. One recognizes in the material basis of the soul life the effective spiritual powers that reveal themselves through the material formations, and thus prepares the possibility of also recognizing the underlying spirit in the entire organism and its course of life. Christian Rosenkreutz is thus confronted with the important experience that an alchemy taking place in the natural process reveals to him. The material processes of the whole organism are transformed before his spiritual eye. They become such that the soul processes shine through them like the light that reveals itself in the external process of combustion. But these soul processes also show him their limits. They are processes that correspond to what leads to death in the whole organism. Christian Rosenkreuz is led before the “kings” of his own soul being, before his powers of knowledge. They appear to him as that which the whole organism metamorphoses out of itself. But the life forces of growth are only transformed into powers of knowledge by absorbing death into themselves. And therefore they can only carry the knowledge of what is dead within them. Death is integrated into all processes of nature in that the inanimate lives in everything. The ordinary process of knowledge is directed only towards this inanimate. This process grasps the inorganic because it is dead; but it only grasps the plant and every living thing to the extent that they are tinged with the inanimate. Every plant contains inorganic processes in addition to what it is as a living being. These grasp the powers of knowledge in the ordinary view; they do not grasp the living. This only becomes visible insofar as it presents itself in the inanimate. Christian Rosenkreutz observes the death of his “soul kings”, his powers of knowledge, as they arise from the metamorphosis of the material forces of the whole organism, without the human being passing from natural alchemy to artificial alchemy. This must consist in man's giving his powers of knowledge a character within the soul that they do not have through mere organic developmental processes. What is essential in the ascending growth, what death has not yet gnawed at, must be awakened in the powers of knowledge. The natural alchemy must be continued. This continuation of natural alchemy forms the fifth day's work of the “Chymical Wedding”. The spiritual seeker must penetrate with insight into the processes that nature brings about in bringing forth growing life. And he must introduce this natural creation into the powers of knowledge, without allowing death to prevail in the transition from the processes of growth to the processes of the soul. He receives the powers of knowledge from nature as dead entities; he must give them life by giving them what nature has taken from them when she has carried out the alchemical transformation into powers of knowledge with them. When he sets out on such a project, temptation draws near to him. He must descend into the sphere in which Nature works, conjuring up life out of that which, by its very nature, strives towards death, through the power of love. In doing so, he exposes himself to the danger of his vision being seized by the instincts that prevail in the lower realm of matter. He must come to know how an element akin to love lives in matter, which is imprinted with death, and which underlies every renewal of life. This process of the soul, exposed to temptation, is meaningfully described by Andreae in that he lets Cupid drive Christian Rosenkreutz before Venus. And it is clearly indicated how the characterized spiritual seeker is not held back from his further path by temptation, not only through his own soul power, but through the rule of other powers. If Christian Rosenkreutz had only to walk his own path of knowledge, he could also conclude with temptation. That this is not the case points to what Andreae wants to describe. Christian Rosenkreutz is to point the way from a past epoch to a dawning one with his spiritual path. It is the forces at work in the course of time that help him to permeate his “I” with the powers of knowledge that correspond to the new era. In this way he can begin the ascent to the “Tower” by taking part in the alchemical process by which the dead powers of knowledge experience their resurrection. Thus on this ascent he has the strength to hear the siren song of love without falling prey to its temptations. He must allow himself to be influenced by the spiritual elemental force of love; he must not allow himself to be misled by its manifestation in the sensual realm. In the Tower of Olympi, the dead forces of knowledge are brought into line with the impulses that in the human organism only come into play in growth processes. It is pointed out how Christian Rosenkreutz is allowed to participate in this process because his soul development is to take place in the sense of the changing temporal forces. He goes out into the garden while he should be sleeping, looks up at the starry sky and says to himself: “Because I had a good opportunity to reflect more deeply on astronomy, I found that on this particular night such a conjunction of the planets is taking place, the like of which cannot soon be observed elsewhere.” In the experiences of the sixth day, the imaginations are described in detail, which bring to life in the soul of Christian Rosenkreutz how the dead powers of knowledge, which the organism develops in the ordinary course of its life, are transformed into the powers of supersensible insight. Each of these imaginations corresponds to an experience that the soul undergoes in relation to its own powers when it experiences how that which previously could only penetrate into itself with the dead becomes capable of awakening living knowledge within itself. Another spiritual seeker would describe the individual images in a different way from Andreae. But what matters is not the content of the individual images, but the fact that the transformation of the soul forces takes place in the human being by having the process of such images as a reflection of this transformation in a sequence of imaginations. In The Chymical Wedding Christian Rosenkreutz is portrayed as the spiritual seeker who senses the approach of the age in which humanity will direct its gaze at natural processes differently than in the one ending with the fifteenth century, in which humanity no longer, when observing nature, , in this observation itself the spiritual content of natural things and natural processes, in which it can come to a denial of the spiritual world if it does not consider a path of knowledge possible by which one can see through the material basis of the soul life and yet still absorb the essence of the spirit into knowledge. To be able to do this, one must be able to spread the spiritual light over this material basis. One must be able to see how nature proceeds by shaping her forces of activity into a soul organism through which the dead is revealed, in order then to divine from the nature of nature itself the secret of how spirit can be juxtaposed to spirit when nature's creative activity is directed towards the awakening of the dead powers of knowledge to a higher life. In this way, knowledge is developed that is placed in reality as spiritual knowledge. For such knowledge is a further sprout on the living being of the world; through it, the evolution of reality continues, which prevails from the very beginning of existence up to the life of man. Only that which is present in nature in a germinal state and is retained in the working of nature itself at the point where, in the metamorphosis of existence, the powers of cognition are to develop for the dead, is developed as higher powers of cognition. That such a continuation of natural activity beyond what it itself achieves in human organization leads out of reality and into the formless is not an objection that will be raised by anyone who understands the development of nature itself. For this consists everywhere in hindering the progress of the growth forces at certain points, in order to bring about the revelations of the infinite possibilities of form at certain stages of existence. In the same way, a formative potential is also held within the human organization. But just as such a potential is held within the green leaf of the plant, and yet the formative forces of plant growth then go beyond this form in order to bring forth the green leaf in the colored petal at a higher level, so too can the human being progress from the form of his powers of knowledge, which are directed towards the dead, to a higher level of these powers. He experiences the reality of this progression by becoming aware within himself of how he thereby takes up the soul organ in order to grasp the spirit in its supersensible revelation, just as the transformation of the green leaf into the colored floral organ of the plant prepares the ability that is realized in the formation of the fruit. After the completion of the art-alchemical process, Christian Rosenkreutz was appointed “Knight of the Golden Stone”. One would have to go into great detail in a purely historical account if one wanted to point out the name “güldener Stein” and its use from the relevant serious and the far more fraudulent literature. That is not the intention of this essay. However, it is possible to point out what can be gained from a study of this literature as a result of this use. Those serious personalities who have used the name wanted to use it to point to something in which dead stone nature can be viewed in such a way that its connection with living becoming is recognized. The serious alchemist believed that artificial natural processes could be brought about, in which dead, stony matter is used, but in which, if they are properly observed, something of what happens when nature itself weaves the dead into the living becoming can be recognized. By observing very specific processes in the dead, the aim was to grasp the traces of creative natural activity and thus the essence of the spirit that prevails in the phenomena. The symbol for the dead, recognized as a manifestation of the spirit, is the “golden stone”. Anyone who examines a corpse in its immediate present essence becomes aware of how the dead is incorporated into the general process of nature. But the formation of the corpse contradicts this general process of nature. This formation could only be a result of spiritual life. The general process of nature must destroy what has been formed by spiritual life. The Alchemist is of the opinion that ordinary human knowledge of nature as a whole involves something of which it only grasps as much as is present in a corpse. A higher knowledge should be found for natural phenomena, which relates to them as spiritual life does to a corpse. This striving is for the “güldenen Stein” (the golden stone). Andreae speaks of this symbol in such a way that one can see that he believes that only someone who has gone through the experiences of the six days he describes can grasp how to proceed with the “güldenen Stein”. He wishes to intimate that anyone who speaks of this symbol without knowing the nature of the transformation of the powers of knowledge can only have a mirage in mind. He wishes to portray Christian Rosenkreuz as a personality who can legitimately speak about something that many speak about without authorization. He wishes to defend the truth against the false talk about the search for the spiritual world. Christian Rosenkreuz and his comrades, after they have become the true workers with the “golden stone,” receive a symbol with the two sayings: “Art is the handmaid of nature” and “Nature is the daughter of time.” In the spirit of these guiding principles they are to work out of their spiritual knowledge. The experiences of the six days can be summarized in these sentences. Nature reveals her secrets to him who, through his art, is able to continue her work. But this continuation cannot succeed for anyone who, for his art, has not first eavesdropped on her in the sense of her will, who has not recognized how her revelations come about through her infinite possibilities of development being born out of the womb of time in finite forms. The relationship in which Christian Rosenkreutz is installed as king on the seventh day characterizes how the spiritual seeker now stands in relation to his transformed cognitive abilities. Attention is drawn to the fact that he himself gave birth to them as the “Father”. And his relationship to the “first gatekeeper” also appears as such to a part of his own self, namely to the one who, before the transformation of his powers of knowledge as the “Astrologus”, was indeed in search of the laws but who was not equal to the temptation that arises when the spiritual seeker comes to a point such as that at which Christian Rosenkreutz found himself at the beginning of the fifth day when he stood before Venus. He who succumbs to this temptation cannot enter the spiritual world. He knows too much to be completely removed from it, but he cannot enter either. He must stand guard before the gate until another comes who succumbs to the same temptation. Christian Rosenkreutz initially believes that he has succumbed to it and is therefore condemned to take over the office of the guard. But this guardian is, after all, a part of his own self; and by surveying this part with his transformed self, he has the opportunity to overcome it. He becomes the guardian of his own soul life; but this office of guardian does not prevent him from establishing his free relationship with the spiritual world. Christian Rosenkreutz has become a knower of the spirit through the experiences of the seven days, and he is allowed to work in the world through the power that has come to his soul from these experiences. What he and his companions accomplish in their outer life will flow from the spirit from which the works of nature itself flow. Through their work, they will bring harmony into human life, which will be a reflection of the harmony at work in nature, overcoming the opposing disharmonies. The presence of such people in the social order should be a continually active cause for maintaining the health of life in the social order itself. Valentin Andreae points to Christian Rosenkreuz and his companions as an answer to those who ask: What are the best laws for the coexistence of people on earth? Andreae answers: Not what one expresses in thoughts, that it should happen in one way or another, can regulate this coexistence, but what people can say who strive to live in the spirit that wants to express itself through existence. In five sentences, what guides souls that want to work in the sense of Christian Rosenkreutz in human life is summarized. It should be far from them to think in a different spirit than the one that is revealed in the work of nature, and they should find the human work by becoming the continuers of the works of nature. They should not place their work in the service of human desires, but should make these desires mediators of the works of the spirit. They should serve people lovingly so that the active spirit may be revealed in the relationship between people. They should not be deterred in their pursuit of the value that the spirit can give to all human work by anything that the world can give them in terms of value. They should not fall into the error of mistaking the physical for the spiritual, like bad alchemists. Such people believe that a physical means of prolonging life or something similar is a supreme good, and forget that the physical has value only as long as it proves itself through its existence as the rightful revealer of the spiritual that underlies it. At the end of his description of the “Chymical Wedding”, Andreae hints at how Christian Rosenkreutz “came home”. In all the externals of the world he is the same as he was before his experiences. His new situation in life differs from the old one only in that from now on he will carry his “higher self” within him as the ruler of his consciousness, and that what he will accomplish can become what this “higher self” may work through him. The transition from the last experiences of the seventh day to the finding of oneself in the familiar surroundings is no longer described. “Here about two quart of leaves are missing.” One might imagine that there are people who would be particularly curious about what should have been on these missing pages. Well, it is that which can only be experienced by those who know the nature of the transformation of the soul as their own individual experience. Such a person knows that everything that leads to this experience has a general human significance that is shared as one shares the experiences of a journey. The reception of the experience by the ordinary person, on the other hand, is something very personal, is also different for each person and cannot be understood by anyone in the same way as by the person who has experienced it. The fact that Valentin Andreae omitted the description of this transition to the familiar situation can be taken as further proof that the “Chymische Hochzeit” expresses true connoisseurship of what is to be described. The preceding remarks are an attempt to characterize what is expressed in the “Chemical Wedding”, merely from such a consideration of its content as it arises from the author of this presentation. The judgment should be substantiated that the writing published by Andreae should point in the direction that one should follow if one wanted to know something about the true character of a higher kind of knowledge. And as a fact, these remarks would like to show that the special kind of spirit knowledge that has been demanded since the fifteenth century is described in the “Chymical Wedding”. For anyone who understands the content of this writing in the same way as the author of this exposition, it is an historical account of a spiritual current in Europe that goes back to the fifteenth century and is directed towards gaining knowledge about a context of things that lies behind the external phenomena of the world. There is, however, a fairly extensive literature on the effectiveness of Johann Valentin Andreae, in which the question is discussed whether the writings published by him can be considered real proof of the existence of such a spiritual current. In these writings, this current is presented as the Rosicrucianism. Some investigators are of the opinion that Andreae was only indulging in a literary joke with his Rosicrucian writings, intended to ridicule the dreamers who show themselves wherever higher knowledge is spoken of in a secretive way. Rosicrucianism would then be a fantasy of Andreae's, intended to mock the ravings of giddy or fraudulent mystics. The author of these remarks does not believe that he should approach his readers with much of what has been said in this direction against the seriousness of Andreae's intentions, because he believes that a proper consideration of the content of the “Chymical Wedding” makes it possible to form a sufficiently well-founded view of what is intended by it. Certificates taken from a field outside this content cannot change this view. Those who believe that inner reasons can be recognized in their full weight hold that external documents should be evaluated according to these reasons, and not the inner according to the outer. If, therefore, these remarks are made outside of the purely historical literature on Rosicrucianism, this is not intended as a negative judgment of historical research itself. It is only meant to indicate that the point of view adopted here makes a detailed discussion of Rosicrucian literature unnecessary. Only a few more remarks should be added. It is well known that the manuscript of the “Chymische Hochzeit” was completed as early as 1603. It was not published until 1616, after Andreae had published the other Rosicrucian writing “Fama Fraternitatis R. C.” in 1614. This writing, above all, has given rise to the belief that Andreae only spoke in jest of the existence of a Rosicrucian society. This belief is supported by the fact that Andreae himself subsequently referred to Rosicrucianism as something he would not want to advocate. Some of his later writings and notes in letters, which he made, cannot be interpreted in any other way than that he only wanted to tell a tale about such a school of thought in order to “fool” the curious and enthusiastic. However, in the exploitation of such testimonies, it is usually disregarded what misunderstandings writings like those published by Andreae are subject to. What he himself later said about them can only be correctly judged when one considers that he was compelled to speak after opponents had appeared who heretically denounced the designated school of thought in the worst possible way, that “followers” had appeared who were visionaries or alchemist swindlers, and who distorted everything that was meant by Rosicrucianism. But even if one takes all this into account, if one wanted to assume that Andreae, who later showed himself to be a more than pietistic writer, soon after the appearance of the Rosicrucian writings had a certain shyness about being considered the confessor of what was expressed in these writings, one cannot gain a sufficiently well-founded view of this personality's relationship to Rosicrucianism through such considerations. Yes, even if one wanted to go so far as to deny Andreae's authorship of the “Fama”, one would not want to do so with respect to the “Chemical Wedding” for historical reasons. The matter must also be considered from another historical point of view. The “Fama Fraternitatis” was published in 1614. Let us leave open for the moment whether Andreae intended this writing to address serious readers, in order to speak to them of the school of thought known as Rosicrucianism. But two years after the publication of the “Fama”, the “Chymical Wedding” was published, which had already been completed thirteen years earlier. In 1603, Andreae was still a very young man (seventeen years old). Did he, as such, already have the maturity of mind to play a prank on the starry-eyed enthusiasts of his time by mocking them with a construct of his imagination in the form of Rosicrucianism? And even if he was willing to speak of a Rosicrucianism that he seriously believed in in the “Fama,” which, incidentally, had already been read in manuscript form in Tyrol in 1610, how did he, as a very young man, come to write the “Chymische Hochzeit,” the document that he then published two years after the “Fama” as a message about the true Rosicrucianism? The questions regarding Andreae seem to become so entangled that it becomes difficult to find a purely historical solution. One could hardly object to a mere historical researcher who tried to make credible that Andreae had found the manuscript of the “Chymische Hochzeit” and the “Fama” - perhaps in the possession of his family - and had published them in his youth for some reason, but later wanted nothing to do with the school of thought expressed in them. But if this were a fact, why did Andreae not simply make it known? From a spiritual scientific point of view, one can come to a completely different conclusion. From Andreae's own judgment and maturity at the time he wrote the “Chymical Wedding”, one does not need to deduce its content. In terms of content, this writing proves to be one that was written out of intuition. Such a work can be written by people who are predisposed to do so, even if their own judgment and life experience do not speak into what is written down. And yet what is written down can still be a message from a reality. The content of the “Chymical Wedding” demands to be understood as a message about a real spiritual current in the sense indicated here. The assumption that Valentine Andreae wrote it intuitively throws light on the position he later took up to Rosicrucianism. As a young man he was predisposed to give a picture of this spiritual current without his own mode of cognition playing a part in it. But this mode of cognition developed in the later pietistic theologian Andreae. The intuitive side of his nature receded in his soul. He himself later philosophized about what he wrote in his youth. He does this as early as 1619 in his writing 'Turris Babel'. The connection between the later Andreae and the intuitive writer of his youth did not come clearly before his soul. If Andreae's attitude towards the subject-matter of the “Chymical Wedding” is considered in the light just indicated, one is compelled to consider the contents of this writing without reference to what its author himself expressed at any time about his relation to Rosicrucianism. Whatever of this spiritual current could reveal itself at Andreae's time, revealed itself through a personality suited for the purpose. Those who are convinced from the outset that it is impossible for the spiritual life active in world phenomena to be revealed in this way will indeed have to reject what is said here. But there could also be people who, without starting from superstitious prejudices, come to the conviction of such a form of revelation precisely through calm consideration of the “Andreae case”. |