The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] Natural scientific thought has deeply influenced the formulation of present-day ideas. It is becoming more and more impossible to describe the spiritual requirements of the “life of the soul” without reference to the methods of thinking and the conclusions of natural science. However, it must be admitted that many people satisfy these requirements without taking into account the trend of natural scientific thought in modern spiritual life. But those who are alert to the pulse of the times must take this trend into consideration. Ideas derived from natural science conquer our thought-life with gathering momentum, and our unwilling hearts follow hesitantly and with apprehension. Not only the number thus conquered is important: there is a power inherent in natural scientific thought which convinces the observant that a modern conception of the world cannot exclude its impressions. Several of the side-growths of natural scientific thought compel us to reject which this method of thought has gained widespread recognition and attracts people as if by magic. The situation is not altered by the fact that isolated individuals can see how true science, through its own power has “long” led beyond the “shallow doctrines of force and matter,” taught by materialism. It appears to be far more important to heed those who boldly declare that a new religion should be built on natural scientific ideas. Even if such people seem shallow and superficial to those who know the deeper spiritual requirements of humanity, nevertheless they should be noted because they claim attention in the present time, and there is good reason to believe that they will win increasing recognition in the future. And those also must be considered who have allowed their heads to take precedence over their hearts. These people are unable to free their intellects from natural scientific ideas. They are oppressed by the need for proof. But the religious needs of their souls cannot be satisfied by these natural scientific ideas. The latter offer too comfortless a perspective for their satisfaction. Why be enthusiastic about beauty, truth and goodness if in the end everything is to be swept away into nothingness like a bubble of inflated brain tissue? This is a feeling which oppresses many people like a nightmare. Therefore scientific ideas also oppress them, pressing their claims with tremendous authoritative force. As long as they can, these people remain blind to the discord in their souls. Indeed, they comfort themselves by saying that true clarity in these matters is denied the human soul. They think in accordance with natural science so long as the experience of their senses and logic demand it, but they keep to the religious sentiments in which they have been educated, preferring to remain in darkness concerning these matters, a darkness which clouds their understanding. They have not the courage to struggle through to clarity.

[ 2 ] There can be no doubt whatever that the method of thought derived from natural science is the greatest power in modern spiritual life. And one who speaks of the spiritual concerns of mankind may not pass it by heedlessly. Nevertheless it is also true that the method by which it attempts to satisfy spiritual needs is shallow and superficial. If this were the right method the outlook would indeed be comfortless. Would it not be depressing to be forced to agree with those who say, “Thought is a form of force. We walk with the same force with which we think. Man is an organism that changes several forms of force into thought-force. Man is a machine into which we put what we call food, and produce what we call thought. Think of that wonderful chemistry by which bread was changed into the divine tragedy of Hamlet!” This is quoted from a lecture of Robert G. Ingersoll, titled The Gods.¹ It is irrelevant that such thoughts, casually expressed, apparently receive little recognition. The main point is that countless people, influenced by the natural scientific method of thought, seem compelled to assume an attitude in line with the above quotation, even when they believe they are not doing so.^c1

[ 3 ] The situation would indeed be comfortless if natural science itself forced us to the credo advanced by many of its newer prophets. Matters would be entirely comfortless for one who has become convinced from the content of this natural science that its method of thought is valid and unshakeable in the realm of nature. Such a person must say to himself, However much people may quarrel over individual questions, though volume after volume may be written and observation upon observation collected about the “struggle for existence”^c2 and its insignificance, about the “omnipotence” or “powerlessness” of “natural selection,” natural science itself moves on in one direction, and must find increasing agreement within certain limits.

[ 4 ] But are the demands made by natural science really as they are described by some of its representatives? The behavior of these representatives themselves proves that this is not the case. Their behavior in their own field is not such as many describe and demand in other fields. Would Darwin and Ernst Haeckel^1a ever have made their great discoveries about the evolution of life if, instead of observing life and the structure of living beings, they had gone into the laboratory to make chemical experiments with tissue cut out of an organism? Would Lyell^1b have been able to describe the development of the crust of the earth if, instead of examining strata and their contents, he had analyzed the chemical qualities of innumerable stones? Let us really follow in the footsteps of these explorers who appear as monumental figures in the development of modern science! We shall then apply to the higher regions of spiritual life what they have applied in the field of the observation of nature. Then we shall not believe we have understood the essence of the “divine” tragedy of Hamlet by saying that a wonderful chemical process transformed a certain quantity of food into that tragedy. We shall believe it as little as a naturalist can seriously believe that he has understood the mission of heat in the evolution of the earth when he has studied the action of heat upon sulphur in a chemical retort. Neither does he attempt to understand the construction of the human brain by examining the effect of liquid potash upon a fragment of it, but rather by inquiring how, in the course of evolution, the brain has been developed out of the organs of lower organisms.

[ 5 ] It is therefore quite true that one who is investigating the nature of spirit can only learn from natural science. He really needs only to do as science does. But he must not allow himself to be misled by what individual representatives of natural science would dictate to him. He must investigate in the spiritual domain as they do in the physical, but he need not adopt their opinions about the spiritual world, confused as they are by their exclusive consideration of physical phenomena.

[ 6 ] We shall act in conformity with natural science only when we study the spiritual evolution of man just as impartially as the naturalist observes the material world. Then in the domain of spiritual life we shall admittedly be led to a method of consideration differing from the purely natural scientific method as geology differs from pure physics or the investigation of the evolution of life from research into purely chemical laws. We shall be led to higher methods which, although they cannot be those of natural science, yet hold good in the same sense. Many a one-sided view of natural science will allow itself to be modified or corrected from another point of view, but this only leads to progress in natural science and thereby one does not sin against the latter. Such methods alone can lead to penetration into spiritual developments like Christianity, or the world of ideas of any other religion. Anyone applying these methods may provoke the opposition of many who believe they are thinking scientifically, but nevertheless he will know himself to be in full accord with a truly scientific method of thought.

[ 7 ] An investigator of this kind must also go beyond a merely historical examination of the documents relating to spiritual life. This is necessary just because of the attitude of mind he has acquired from the consideration of natural occurrences. When a chemical law is explained it is of little value to describe the retorts, dishes and pincers which have led to its discovery. And in explaining the beginning of Christianity, it is of just as much or as little value to ascertain the historical sources drawn upon by the Evangelist Luke, or those from which the book of Revelation of John was compiled.^c3 In this case “history” can be only the outer court to research proper. By tracing the historical origin of documents we shall not discover anything about the ideas in the writings of Moses or in the traditions of the Greek mystics. In these documents the ideas in question are expressed only in outward terms. And the naturalist, investigating the nature of “man,” does not concern himself about the origin of the word “man,” or how it has developed in a language. He keeps to the thing itself, not to the word which expresses it. And likewise, in studying spiritual life we shall have to keep to the spirit and not to its outer documents.

• 1. Robert Green Ingersoll (1833–1899), was an Illinois lawyer, a colonel in the Civil War, attorney general of Illinois, and a nationally-known political speaker. “His public addresses attacking the Bible and Christianity destroyed his political career, and his reputation as a speaker was based on his brilliant oratory rather than clear logic.” Ingersoll's writings and lectures were published posthumously in 12 volumes, New York, 1902.
• c1. The words of Ingersoll are introduced at this point in the book, not only with reference to those people who declare them to be word for word their own conviction. Many people do not do so, and yet their ideas about natural phenomena and man are such that if they were logical they would have to arrive at these statements. It does not matter what anyone declares to be his conviction theoretically, but it matters whether this conviction really follows from his whole method of thought. Someone may even abhor or laugh at the above words; but if he forms for himself an explanation which takes into account only the outer facts without rising to the spiritual background underlying natural phenomena, as a logical consequence he will construct a materialistic philosophy out of it.
• c2. For those who can observe rightly the “Spirit of Nature” speaks powerfully in the facts which are at present being dealt with by the cliches “struggle for existence,” “omnipotence of natural selection,” etc. But not in the opinions which science forms about them today. The first of these circumstances contains the reason why natural science will gain increasingly widespread attention. From the second circumstance it follows that the opinions of science need not be accepted as essential to cognition of the facts. The possibility of being tempted by the latter is, however, immeasurably great at the present time.
• 1a. Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882), English naturalist, whose voyage on the Beagle to the Southern Seas, recorded in his Journal of a Naturalist (1837) prepared the way for his famous work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Presentation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, published November 24, 1859. Next in importance among his books, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, appeared in 1868. The Descent of Man, published in 1871, dealt with “the origin of man and his history” in the light of The Origin of the Species.
  
  Ernst Heinrich Haeckel (1834–1919), German biologist, originally a physician in Berlin, became Privatdozent at Jena, afterward extraordinary professor of comparative anatomy, later professor of zoology, a chair established for him at Jena. This position he occupied for 43 years with intervals for zoological travels to various parts of the world. When Darwin's Origin of the Species appeared in 1859, Haeckel was deeply influenced by it, so that he became “the apostle of Darwinism in Germany.” Among his famous books were General Morphology (1866), Natural History of Creation (1867) and Die Weltraetsel (1899), English title, The Riddle of the Universe (1901). By his 60th birthday he had published 42 works of some 13,000 pages, plus many monographs. Rudolf Steiner knew Ernest Haeckel personally, and in his autobiography, Chapter 15, Steiner recorded a very perceptive impression of the great scientist.
• 1b. Sir Charles Lyell (1797–1875), British geologist, was the author of the famous Principles of Geology, An Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth's Surface by Reference to Causes Now in Operation (Vol. 1, 1830; Vol. II, 1832). His Elements of Geology and his Antiquity of Man appeared in 1838 and 1863 respectively. His life-work, which included journeys to the United States and Canada, the Scandinavian countries, Sicily, Madiera, Teneriffe and elsewhere, resulted in the advancement of modern geology. On the occasion of the observance of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Lyell, Rudolf Steiner wrote an appreciative article on his work which was published in Das Magazin für Literatur, Berlin, November 27, 1897. Steiner also made a number of references to Lyell's work in his lectures (1900–1924).
• c3. It should not be concluded, from remarks such as those regarding the sources of the Gospel of Luke etc., that the author of this book underestimates purely historical research. This is not the case. It is absolutely justified, but it should not be intolerant of the method of thinking which proceeds from spiritual points of view. In this book no value is placed on bringing in quotations at every possible point, but whoever wishes to do so can see clearly that an all-round and really unprejudiced judgment will find no contradiction anywhere between what is said here and what is truly established historically. Admittedly, anyone who wants to be one-sided, and holds this or that theory to be what has been established as certainty, may find that the assumptions of this book “do not hold their own” from the “scientific” standpoint, but are “without any objective foundation.”

[ 1 ] As individual man has to pass through different stages after his birth, as he must ascend from infancy through childhood and so on to the age of the mature adult, so too must mankind as a whole go through a similar process. Humanity has developed to its present condition by passing through other stages. With the methods of the clairvoyant one can discern three principal stags of this development of mankind which were passed through before the formation of the earth took place and before this sphere became the scene of that development. Therefore at present we are concerned with the fourth stage in the great universal life of man. For now we shall relate the relevant facts here. The deeper explanation will appear in the course of the description, insofar as is possible in the words of ordinary language, that is, without having recourse to the form of expression of mystery science.

[ 2 ] Man existed before there was an earth. But one must not imagine—as has already been suggested—that perhaps he had previously lived on other planets and then at a certain time migrated to earth. Rather, the earth has developed together with man. Just as man has passed through three main stages of development, so has the earth, before becoming that which one now calls “earth.” For the time being, as has been indicated above, one must completely liberate oneself from the significance which contemporary science connects with the names “Saturn,” “Sun,” and “Moon,” if one wants to see the explanations of the scientist of the spirit in this area in their proper light. For the present one should connect with these names no other significance than that directly given to them in the following communications.

[ 3 ] Before the heavenly body on which the life of man takes place became “earth,” it had had three other forms which one designates as Saturn, Sun, and Moon. On can thus speak of four planets on which the four principal stages of the development of mankind take place Moon, before that Sun, and yet earlier, Saturn. One is justified, as will appear from the following communications, to assume three further principal stages which the earth, or better the heavenly body which developed into the present earth, still has to pass through. In mystery science these have been named Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan. Thus the heavenly body with which human destiny is connected has passed through three stages in the past is now in its fourth, and will in the future have to pass through three more until all the talents which man has within himself are developed, until he arrives at the peak of his perfection.

[ 4 ] One must realize that the development of man and of his heavenly body does not proceed as gradually as for instance the passage of an individual human being through infancy, adolescence and so forth, where one condition goes over into another more or less imperceptibly. Rather there are certain interruptions. The Saturn condition does not go over immediately into the Sun stage. Between Saturn development and Sun development, and similarly between the subsequent forms of the heavenly body inhabited by man, there are intermediate conditions which can be compared with the night between two days or with the sleeplike condition of a plant seed before it again develops into a full plant.

In imitation of oriental descriptions of this state of affairs, contemporary theosophy calls a stage of development in which life is externally furthered, Manvantara, the intermediate condition of rest, Pralaya. In accordance with the usage of European mystery science, one can use the word “open cycle” for the former condition, and on the other hand, “hidden or closed cycle” for the latter. But other designations are also in common use. Saturn, Sun, Moon, earth, and so forth, are “open cycles,” and the periods of rest between them are “closed” ones.

[ 5 ] It would be quite erroneous to think that in the periods of rest all life is extinct, although today this idea can be encountered in many theosophical circles. Just as little as man ceases to live during his sleep, so little does his life and that of his heavenly body become extinct during a “closed cycle” (Pralaya). It is only that the conditions of life in the periods of rest cannot be perceived with the senses which have been developed during the “open cycles,” just as during his sleep man does not perceive what is taking place around him. Why one uses the expression “cycle” for the stages of development will become sufficiently clear in the course of the following discussion. Only later can we speak about the enormous periods of time which are required for these “cycles.”

[ 6 ] One can find a thread through the course of the cycles by following for a moment the development of human consciousness through them. Everything else can suitably arise out of this consideration of consciousness.

The consciousness which man develops during his life-course on earth will be called—in accordance with European mystery science—the “clear consciousness of day.” The latter consists in the fact that through his present senses, man perceives the things and beings of the world and that he forms conceptions and ideas concerning these things and beings with the help of his understanding and of his reason. He then acts in the world of the senses according to these perceptions, conceptions, and ideas. Man formed this consciousness only in the fourth principal stage of his cosmic development; on Saturn, Sun, and Moon it did not yet exist. There he lived in other conditions of consciousness. As a result, one can describe the three previous stages of development as the unfolding of lower conditions of consciousness.

[ 7 ] The lowest condition of consciousness was passed through during the Saturn development; the Sun condition is higher, then follows the Moon consciousness and finally that of earth.

[ 8 ] These former consciousnesses are primarily distinguished from the earthly one by two characteristics: by the degree of clarity, and by the area over which the perception of man extends.

The Saturn consciousness has the lowest degree of clarity. It is entirely dull. It is difficult to give an exact idea of this dullness, since even the dullness of sleep is somewhat clearer than this consciousness. In abnormal, so-called deep states of trance, modern man can still fall back into this state of consciousness. The clairvoyant in the sense of mystery science can also form a correct conception of it. But by no means does he himself live in this state of consciousness. On the contrary, he ascends to a much higher one, which however in certain respects is similar to the original one. In the ordinary man at the contemporary terrestrial stage, this condition, through which he once passed, has been effaced by the “clear consciousness of day.” The “medium” who falls into a deep trance, however, is transported back into it, so that he perceives in the same way in which all men perceived during the “Saturn period.” Either during the trance or after awaking, such a medium can then tell of experiences which are similar to those of the Saturn stage. One must be careful to say that they are “similar,” not “identical,” for the events which took place on Saturn are once and for all past; only events which have a certain affinity with them still take place in the environment of man. These can only be perceived by a “Saturn consciousness.”

Like the medium, the clairvoyant in the above sense acquires such a Saturn consciousness, but in addition to it he keeps his “clear consciousness of day,” which man did not yet have on Saturn, and which the medium loses in the state of trance. Such a clairvoyant is not in the Saturn consciousness itself, but he can form a conception of it.

While this Saturn consciousness is by some degrees inferior to the one of today with respect to clarity, it is superior to the latter with respect to the extent of what it can perceive. In its dullness it can not only perceive everything which takes place on its own heavenly body down to the last detail, but it can also observe the objects and beings on other heavenly bodies which are connected with Saturn. It can also exercise a certain influence on these objects and beings. (It hardly need be said that this observation of other heavenly bodies is quite different from that which contemporary man can undertake by means of his scientific astronomy. This astronomical observation is based on the “clear consciousness of day” and therefore perceives other heavenly bodies from the outside. The Saturn consciousness, on the other hand, is immediate sensation, an experiencing of what takes place on other heavenly bodies. One does not speak altogether accurately, but still fairly so, if one says that an inhabitant of Saturn experienced objects and events of other heavenly bodies—and of his own—as a man of today experiences his heart and his heartbeat or something similar in his own body.)

This Saturn consciousness developed slowly. As the first principal stage in the development of mankind it passed through a series of subordinate stages, which in European mystery science are called “small cycles.” In theosophical literature it has become customary to call these “small cycles,” “rounds,” and their further sub-divisions—still smaller cycles—“globes.” These subordinate cycles will be dealt with in subsequent discussions. For the sake of greater clarity, we shall first follow here the principal stages of development. For the moment we shall speak only of man, although the development of subordinate and superior entities and objects proceeds concurrently with his own. That which concerns the development of other entities will then follow the discussion of man's progress.

[ 9 ] When the development of the Saturn consciousness was completed, there occurred one of the long rest periods (a Pralaya) mentioned above. After this there developed out of the heavenly body of man what in mystery science is called the “Sun.” On the Sun, the human beings again emerged from their sleep. The previously developed Saturn consciousness was present in them as a predisposition. First they again developed it from this germ. One can say that on the Sun man repeated the condition of Saturn before ascending to a higher one. However, it is not a simple repetition which is meant here, but one in another form. These transformations of forms will be discussed later when we deal with the smaller cycles. At that time the differences between the individual “repetitions” will also become apparent. Now we shall describe only the development of consciousness.

After the repetition of the Saturn condition, the “Sun consciousness” of man appears. This is somewhat clearer than the preceding consciousness, but on the other hand it has lost something with respect to broadness of vision. In the deep, dreamless sleep of his present life, man has a condition of consciousness similar to that which he once had on the Sun. However, he who is not a clairvoyant or a medium cannot perceive the objects and beings corresponding to the Sun consciousness. With the trance of a medium reduced to this condition, and with the higher consciousness of the true clairvoyant, the case here is similar to what has been said with respect to the Saturn consciousness.

The extent of the Sun consciousness is limited to the Sun and the heavenly bodies most closely connected with it. It is only these and their events which the inhabitant of the Sun can experience as—to use once again the simile employed above—man of today experiences his heartbeat. In this way the inhabitant of Saturn could also participate in the life of those heavenly bodies which did not belong to the immediate sphere of Saturn.

[ 10 ] When the Sun stage has passed through the appropriate subordinate cycles, it also enters a period of rest. From this the heavenly body of man awakes to its “Moon existence.” Before ascending higher, again man passes through the Saturn and Sun stage in two smaller cycles. Then he enters his Moon consciousness. One can more easily form an idea of the latter, for there is a certain similarity between this stage of consciousness and a sleep filled with dreams. It must be explicitly stated that here again one can only speak of a similarity, not of an identity. It is true that the Moon consciousness is composed of images such as appear in dreams, but these images correspond to the objects and events around man in a way similar to the ideas of the present “clear consciousness of day.” But everything in this correspondence is still dull, in fact, image-like. One can represent this state of affairs to oneself in approximately the following way. Assume that a Moon-being comes near an object, let us say near salt. (Of course, at that time there was no “salt” in its present form, but after all, in order to be understood, one must remain in the area of images and similes.) This Moon-being—the precursor of present-day man—does not perceive an object with spatial extension and a definite coloring and form outside itself; instead, the approach to this object causes a certain image—similar to a dream image—to arise as it were within this being. This image has a certain coloring which depends on the characteristics of the object. If the object is agreeable to the being and useful for its existence, the coloring is light in yellow nuances, or in green; if the object is disagreeable or is one which is harmful to the being, a blood-like, reddish color nuance appears. The clairvoyant also sees in this way today, only he is fully conscious during this seeing, while the Moon inhabitant had only a dreamlike, dim consciousness. The images appearing “within” these inhabitants had an exactly defined relationship to the environment. There was nothing arbitrary in them. It was possible to direct oneself by them; one acted under the impression of these images as today one acts under the impression of sensory perceptions.

The development of this dreamlike consciousness—the third principal stage—was the task of the “Moon cycle.” When the “Moon” had passed through the appropriate “small cycles,” a period of rest (Pralaya) again occurred. After this, the “Earth” emerged from the darkness.

Today I would like to explain to you the formation of the aura and show you how it gradually develops. You will then easily understand the rest. I will show how the aura has developed since the middle of the Lemurian race. I will give you a kind of description of it so that it will be self-explanatory to you.

The middle of the Lemurian race development is an important point for the human race. Until then, the human body was built up from the outside, so that by the middle of the Lemurian race, the human body was already present as a physical body, etheric body and astral body. These three are present in the aura of the Lemurian ancestor. At the moment we arrive at the middle of the Lemurian race, a black dot becomes visible in the middle of the aura of the Lemurian ancestors.

If you imagine the physical body away, the etheric and astral body remains. This is the Lemurian man. He then receives a black point above the head; it is what we call the actual self of the human being. I will draw the Atlantic man in a moment, following on from this.

The Atlantean human would now look something like this, if this were the physical body /see sketch]. The Atlantean human, according to his aura, looks quite different from the Lemurian human and the present human; the Atlantean human has a black egg shape, and the astral human is the entire aura. Within the astral aura, the black dot expands and becomes a shell for the inner core. The remains of the Atlantean race still have this peculiar aura. The spirit shines within the black dot; it begins to shine. That which begins to shine is blue in itself, but appears, depending on the astral body,

in different shades of blue-red, indigo and so on. So, if you imagine everything away, something like an indigo egg will be visible. In a person who is particularly imaginative, it appears through various green thought forms. In a person who has very pure, abstract thoughts, it appears through the yellow form. Then it also appears in a beautiful coloration that tends more towards violet. This, which the Atlantean human has, becomes larger and larger, so that in an average person of our present race this black egg coincides with the outline of the astral body.

Our present-day human being more or less maintains a balance. He occupies his mind as far as he is interested, and he controls his desires and instincts with his mind. All our external culture is basically there to satisfy urges, instincts and passions. This is expressed by the fact that your astral aura coincides with the mental aura.

If you look at a more highly developed person in the present development, it is somewhat different. The mental aura extends beyond the astral aura; it protrudes somewhat. The I extends even further.

In the case of a chela or an adept, you have the astral body in the middle, then the mental body and only then the black egg, the I, so that the astral is surrounded by the mental and only then covered by the I, so that the astral is used for mental purposes.

The I is a point in the moment of becoming I in the middle of the Lemurian race. The I is now the outermost shell. The brain becomes more and more the center of the whole organism.

In the first race of our Aryan population, the actual center of movement in the mental aura was still located slightly above the physical brain and only gradually migrated into the physical brain. Those who were incarnated as adepts within the Atlantean race were endowed with a much higher intuition, an intuition that was still impersonal. Then this gradually migrated into the being, and only later does the spiritual come out of the personal.

The adepts of the fourth - that is, the Atlantean - race were still God-inspired seers; those of the sixth race will be self-inspired seers!

That is the difference between the beginnings of our own race [i.e., the fifth] and us! This is also a reason why, at the beginning of the theosophical development or movement, the adepts, who are our adepts, could hardly be understood; why they themselves felt that they could hardly be understood. This was because the adepts, who belonged to the earliest population, had a much more spiritual life that had not yet descended into mere rationality. The Westerner wants to understand. Therefore, if you read the “Secret Doctrine,” you will find the passage where the Master says, “You with your Western judgment understand it only with difficulty!

Everything in the aura can be seen by the seer, absolutely everything. The only thing he does not see, and in which no seer can see anything, is the essence of the dark, which signifies the ego, whether it is the black point or the black ring. What is visible is what has been formed from the outside and what has been formed from the inside. What actually constitutes a person's true self cannot be seen by any seer! One can follow exactly what nature has brought forth as I, but one can never see it in its self-uniqueness. For anyone, even for the highest seer, there is the dark point in man. Just as little as one can say “I” to another person, just as little can we see what is in the aura of the other I.

Something about consciousness: You consist of nothing but cells. Each cell has a cell consciousness. Your consciousness is the totality of the cell consciousnesses. The consciousness of which I speak here will never merge into another. Just as you incarnate in a cell body, so a higher consciousness will incarnate in what comes from the various egos. At each seance, the totality of the participants is the body for a higher entity. The actual ego is therefore not visible.

In the Lemurian, there is therefore a dark point; in the Atlantean, there is a circle or an egg-shaped form within the aura; for us, this blackness coincides approximately with the boundary of the aura; for the adept, the mental aura extends beyond the astral aura, and where it does so, it becomes resplendent in the most beautiful sense; it then plays into the blue or violet. The rose-red is the actual creative process, where the ego in the creative forces begins to reshape the world in a spiritual way, and where the adept begins to become a real planetary spirit.

And now something about what is really understood by so-called inanimate nature: the higher spirits also have an ego. If a spirit is so great that it builds a solar system, then it is not to be found in the sun, but at the outermost edge of the system. The solar system appears to be inanimate because the ego has already been externalized. If we could get to the edge of the solar system, we would find the ego there. That is the esoteric reason for the blueness of the sky! Space appears blue because it represents nothing other than the black shell on the outside! And outside this black shell, the spirit appears through the various shells in differently colored regions! So when you look at it, it must appear to you as if you were seeing a black surface through a glass that is illuminated, it appears blue to you. For example, the center of a flame also appears blue. Where the flame is blue, there is a dark space; nothing is burning there. This is easy to see in a candle flame; but in truth it is black. Every flame is bright. The blue of the sky can truly be called a firmament, as Genesis says; this is to be understood as literally as possible, just as the general spirit is outside of the ego. Nothing in the world is without spirit; there is only spirit that has not yet become ego; within is the spirit with which the ego has already been filled. The ego is the boundary between the spirit from outside and the spirit that lives in man. This boundary is the ego of the solar system concerned.

The Genesis is an inspired book; it is not something that has been thought up by people. As long as the mental had not yet been drawn into the human mind, inspiration came from outside. And we call the books inspired from outside the content of the original revelations. These all agree with each other if we look beyond the cover that people have drawn over them. We can go to the Indian books or to the traditions of the decadent tribes in America: they agree because they were received as revelations. This is not only known to occultists, but has obviously always been recognized. Herder also saw through this. The nineteenth century, which was mainly concerned with criticism, measured these things according to human opinions. The correct point of view regarding these books is the one from which it can be said: If we do not understand these books, it is not the book that is absurd, but we ourselves can be absurd.

I would now like to return to the aura of advanced people, for example to Plato in ancient Greece. The development that Plato has achieved will only be reached by the average people of the present race in the next round; that is why such people as Plato are called “artificial fifth-rounders”. Now, however, they also differ significantly from the other people. When the present people have reached the fifth round, their bodies will no longer be physical bodies as they are now, but astral bodies, so that the difference will still be there. Plato was in the physical body of the fourth round what the other people can only be in the astral body of the fifth round!

So Plato was in the physical body of the fourth round, which other people will only be in the astral body of the fifth round! This requires a significant difference in the progress of development. As a result, when earthly development is complete, Plato will be in a very different state from the others. In the fifth round he will perhaps be a Buddha and in the sixth he will be even higher! Let's go back and look at Plato again. During the fourth round, he had already achieved with his physical brain what the average person will be able to achieve with their astral brain in the fifth round. This will enable him to have a corresponding effect in the next round; he has thus acquired an ability that others do not yet have: namely, to have an effect on the physical brain!

This is the same as if an engineer were suddenly transported to a primitive tribe; there he will be able to transform all things to a much greater extent with his artistic skills and knowledge; he will be able to teach this primitive tribe. While someone who grows out of the wild tribe can only take development a small step further, the one who comes into the tribe with a great development will be able to take the tribe much further. A highly developed person will naturally not intervene in the first stages of development, but only later, when development has progressed to a certain point. That is the task of advanced people! They will cross over into the next developmental epoch, but will wait until they can intervene!

[Presumably from the question and answer session:]

By retroactive, I meant that he has acquired abilities that others do not have. The others are bound to the physical brain, and then again bound to a single brain. He will act on the astral brain in the sixth round and on the mental brain in the seventh, so that he can retroactively act on the earlier brains, that he can direct them from outside.

The effectiveness of the Pitri is therefore to be understood as something similar, in which sense the earlier can participate in the construction of the new world body. Those who have completed their development in the normal way, who have become real people, will be able to contribute accordingly to this construction from the outside.

How far have we come at the end of the seventh round? So far that we can rebuild from the outside everything that the spirit has built up from the inside. So when we find new world dust, we will immediately build a body that will correspond to our level of development. We will build the “humans” of future stages of development! But those who have remained behind, who have not come so far, will have to build the lowest forms; they will accordingly be the ones who, as it were, build the walls of the new world system from below, and the developed ones will intervene where there is work for them.

The ego in us can never be lost; it only transforms. At present it thinks, and that is the highest faculty it possesses today. We will animate the next entities again, but not with manasic egos, but with higher egos. We leave the thoughts of the more developed ones to form a new sun; we lay them on the altar of community. A split of a nation into two parts is always preceded by a battle of the Dhyan-Chohans on higher levels.

If you want to understand the beginning of the Bible, you have to know what things refer to. We have spoken of the Hyperboreans. That was not a race so dense that it could not have been reached. - Air beings. Therefore, we need not be surprised if they have left no signs of remembrance, no bones and so on. Only what was physically hardy could leave remains. What takes place in the first chapter of Genesis is even higher than the Hyperborean time. Only up to the astral, above all physical.

Let us review the seven rounds: only the fourth round has produced people like the present ones; the archetype of such a human being was created who could realize himself within the mineral kingdom. Before that, he had gone through the elemental realms.

5. Round plant kingdom
6. Round animal kingdom
7. Round human kingdom

So that one cannot actually say of the present round that man is in the image of God. It is only in the seventh round that he will be God-like in his human nature. Only the physical body has attained perfection. Further development is again the attainment of earlier stages, but in a higher form. Man became physical as he is today when he got warm blood.

We must make a clear distinction between warm- and cold-blooded animals. Fish have no passions. Man has also gone through the state of cold-bloodedness. The Lemurian race were cold-blooded until the appearance of sexuality. We must reach this state again in a higher form. Christianity strives to regain this state of cold-bloodedness. It wants to curb and ennoble the passions. The esotericist says that Christians are Pisces, who overcome everything that comes from warm-bloodedness.

The astral body will only be complete in the next round. When our fourth round has passed, the mineral will no longer be there. Man will not be tied to the ground; he has also developed out of the form of moving in the air: hence the symbol of the eagle. During the sixth round, he absorbs the plant world. Humans and animals will divide in the absorption of the plant world. Animals will process the tendrils; humans the seed power.

In the seventh round, man is then present as the image of God.

So in the first round, only the first elementary realm is present; the mineral kingdom begins.

What makes an object perceptible is the mineral kingdom; man needs higher organs to see beyond the physical; he must develop new senses. During the first four rounds, the world was visible because it gradually developed the mineral. The moment the mineral kingdom flashes, the world shines. Before that, it would have been completely lightless. At first, this light was dark red; everything that is to develop later is still present in the darkness. Everything that was preparing to become mineral earth was light. Everything else that came over from the moon was darkness, with the exception of the mineral. Everything that is light is now the sun, everything that is darkness is the moon.

Heaven is all spiritual. Waters are that from which the earth was formed, its astral basic germ. When we now look at the mineral kingdom, we cannot distinguish one stone from another; nothing is separate. It was only in the second round that individual beings were singled out; this is indicated by the fact that the spiritual was separated from the physical. If the image of the spiritual did not remain, a plant could not be recreated. The stone remains, needs no separation. The

plant needs it; this is the task of the second round. “Waters are the beings, the unified. The division lies in the separation of the spiritual from the physical.

They were plants that we would call sponges or algae today; not what we would call herbs today. They have a different nature, but they are plant-like beings. Especially those that do not yet have the correct green color.

During the third round, everything that not only takes life from the ground but also carries life forward is created. The difference between seed-bearing plants and sponges. The sponge still takes life from the general nature. When we look at the animal's astral body during the third round, it is something quite unfinished, it is merely the mineral ground that is being prepared. The animal has a plant nature, it reproduces and has an astral nature of feeling, it feels. But what concerns us here is only the mineral imprint. So what is created during the third round is the mineral imprint, and it consists of the fact that it has a plant body that carries seeds. The Genesis writer describes only what has remained of plants and animals, the solid shell; he omits the ethereal and astral. – Snail in its shell as an example. He describes what carries seeds.

During the fourth round, the mineral continues to develop to the point where it can become a shell for plants, animals and humans. In the third round, animals could not see the moon and stars because they were not yet mineral; now they will.

What has come from the lunar condenses as a moon body; the sun is condensed light.

We have not yet come to the end of the fourth day, because the round has not expired. What happens later? The birds are the future astral bodies of humans; winged animals are cherubs and angels. This multiplication is not a sexual multiplication.

The sixth round: one must think of the process as having been elevated into the mental realm, where everything becomes pure. God gives plants to man for food: absorption of the plant kingdom. Everything that is now an animal will then, as it were, be summoned into its astral body. The lion first strives towards his kind, he is not yet in his kind. Only in the sixth round will each animal be in its kind; then their earthly development will cease and a higher one will begin. Only now is man the ruler: he must be able to rule magically. Then man will be male-female again. All herbs and tendrils to the animals.

Heaven, the highest spiritual realm, is also completed. God can only rest when man is also complete. The later states are always repetitions of the earlier ones. For our fourth state, we can also imagine that we find the future hinted at in the present. A derived sense is possible because each following one on a higher level repeats the previous one: the first three days of creation correspond to the first three rounds. The four last days of creation on the Arupa-, Rupa-, astral and etheric-physical phase of the earth up to the time in the Lemurian race.

The real original meaning: seven rounds and taken in the most spiritual sense. But then a derived one [gap in the transcript]

because each following one at a higher level repeats the previous one.

Very few knew what the Genesis meant; the point in time when it was first set down in writing coincides with the beginnings of Christianity. Philon Judaeus of Alexandria was the first to give something as we have taken it today. The time when an esoteric teaching was first entrusted to a book coincides with the time when the mystery was overcome. Those who were initiated experienced the sacrificial death of the god in the mysteries, and if they were initiated higher, their own sacrificial death. What had previously been experienced by the individual in the crypt was carried out into the world arena. What was previously only experienced by those who saw was now to be shared with those who believed. While Philo, as far as possible, published the esoteric for the first time, Christianity presents it as a mystical fact. History is made of what was previously experienced only in the mysteries.

This is the central cosmic significance of Christianity and its founder. Everything that came before points to it, everything that came after rejects it. What happened earlier in the mysteries was like a prophecy. Therefore, Christianity is a fulfillment. “I have not come to destroy, but to fulfill.”

The second chapter of Genesis begins where, in our present round, the physical state occurs. In the etheric state, animals and plants did not yet exist, because man is actually the first. The polar race is still etheric, but already physical. As man develops from the etheric human being, who is still male-female, animals and plants arise as waste products. In the beginning, man had all the qualities that are now distributed among the other plants and the animals: the rage of the lion, the cunning of the fox. So the middle of the Lemurian period is an important point in time for all beings. Beings with warm blood did not exist earlier.

Now, the seven days of creation are the seven rounds; the conditions that preceded our physical ones can also / gap in transcript ]

the fourth round begins / gap in transcript ]

In the Egyptian mysteries it was recorded that the seven days are seven rounds. Our own physical development is described in the second chapter. Now the seventh day is meant only with regard to mineral-physical development.

The etheric was there, and in the etheric, like fog figures, people separated out – etheric double bodies.

The lower Indian yogi tries to achieve psychic experiences by changing the breathing process. A body in which the carbonic acid is active is not capable of harboring spiritual things, but it can harbor psychic things. Those who hold the carbonic acid in them longer than is the case in the normal process become more plant-like as a result. The psyche and soul have passed over and now take possession of the etheric body they find, shaped by the gods of form; union of the soul with the dust of the earth, physical mineral etheric body. All matter that is today separated into two celestial spheres is united in the etheric sea. In the center between the present Earth and the Moon was the ether sphere; in it was united what later separated, daughter spheres are from the mother sphere, which is referred to as “Paradiso”. Only through this did the Earth become ripe to attain physical density, through which man has become so. So indeed Paradise existed, from which man was expelled.

Only now, after the separation, do plants develop. Man could not develop further if he did not give up certain parts that became plants. “If they had not chosen a lower existence, I would not have developed higher,” man must tell himself.

The whole of evolution arises from taking and giving. Evil also arises from this, which only lies in time and must be balanced out later. The corresponding good is created for the evil in later time; this is how development comes about.

Now everything that man needs was available on earth. All the life force that man does not need is in the plants; in the middle of the tree of life, what he needs, the life force. It is man's own prana, purified for him by giving up some of it.

The sympathetic nervous system spreads like a tree in his body. Nothing can arise in the universe without its counterpart appearing. Man must now find his complement in the other tree, in the polaric: spinal cord and brain. In addition to mere prana, his organs for knowledge are developing. The human spirits were able to connect with him and take up residence in the tree of knowledge. We will skip the four currents this time.

[Gap in the transcript] you will die. All life that existed until now did not know what we call birth and death today. What was physical was immortal. In order to create an organ for the spirit, [gap in the transcript] a duality was created. The abundance of the human spirit was like a large amount of liquid in relation to a vessel that cannot hold it; the series of lives are the various vessels. It is natural that man, when faced with the choice, should either retain his immortality in the lower realms or purchase it through many lives.

In order for man to turn to the spiritual, it is necessary that birth and death arise. Because the spirit has many facets, it is important that man comes into different situations. The diversity of characteristics would not be achieved and different destinies would not arise if the mother only gave birth to a daughter without the means of sexuality; only now did the mixture come and with it the diversity: the diversity among people and thus the possibility of creating the most diverse destinies. Sexual reproduction is a necessary counterpart to birth and death.

In hermaphrodites, only the characteristics of the ancestor can be inherited; for entirely new characteristics to arise, the mixture of two must be added. Amphimixis is the necessary correlate of birth and death. In the period when humans acquired bones, that is, a mineral basic structure, humans divided into men and women; the Persian Genesis still contains the meaning well.

At this moment, with the physical evolution of man, all warm-blooded creatures arise - “hm entsprechend” means “of the same nature”. In the wake of man, the animals arose.

The sleep into which Adam falls: Before that, man was a physical being into which the spirit was driven from the outside; now what used to come from the outside must sprout within, must break out. Consciousness from the outside can only become inner by man crossing a threshold. He sleeps over.

With the becoming male and female of the human being, the work on the physical plane begins at the same time. Now he is dependent on himself. He used to be connected to higher matter and the spirit.

And now they realize that they are naked. What has now come is matter, because before that it was finer matter in which the sense organs had not yet been formed. Seeing was only possible once eyes had been formed. The moment when the spiritual organs of prehistoric times became sense organs was the moment when man became a special being. He saw himself in his selfhood.

Many people who have heard something superficial about spiritual science or theosophy find it fairly surprising that—after one has spoken already from this viewpoint about the manifold practical topics—one even attempts to speak about occupation and earnings. For many of our contemporaries have received the idea more or less superficially that spiritual science is something that lies far away from all practical life and cannot at all intervene anyhow in this practical life of the daily routine. You do not find the idea as seldom as it expresses itself in the words: oh, this spiritual science, it is something for single people who are tired of life who do not deal with anything practical and have time enough to deal with all sorts of muddled, fantastic speculations as the spiritual-scientific ideas are.

I do not deny from the outset that strictly speaking such a reproach is even justified with many theosophical phenomena that it is often true that those who deal with theosophical matters and ideas really face the everyday life as strangely as possible. However, even among those who have hard to fight and to work in the everyday life and bring themselves through only with pain and misery, those are found who are driven from inner sympathy, from the yearning of their hearts to spiritual science. Among them many a man will be for whom this duality—the everyday occupation, the everyday work from morning to night and then the merging in the great ideas has something marvellous. For others both things stand rather abruptly side by side, the one is very far away, so to speak, from the other.

However, someone who does not regard theosophy or spiritual science only as an idle employment for some daydreamers but as something that is suitable to intervene deeply in our entire cultural movement will also hold the conviction strictly that this spiritual science just leads to the true knowledge of reality. It has also something essential to say to him, where the big questions of the everyday life appear which the human beings concern who work hard from morning to night.

Someone who gets himself not cursorily, but deeper into spiritual science, who not only attains some abstract ideas from it, but also the deepest impulses of life, comes very soon to the insight that one can attain a true and healthy judgment in the broadest sense. However, a few abstract sentences are not sufficient, in least the basic sentence of any abstract brotherhood of humanity. This abstract general brotherhood of humanity is a matter of course for any good and striving human being. However, the task of theosophy or spiritual science is not only to preach this general brotherly love comprising humanity, but also to create the method, the conditions which make a real human brotherhood possible and can also be realised. Admittedly, many people also say this way; but they lack the overview.

If we look at the whole human existence and compare the everyday life of our present to that which was there at all times, we realise—according to the opinion of many people—that certain forms of life have not changed: there were always rich and poor people. There was always hardship and misery on the one, a good life, and contentment on the other side, and no human spiritual movement did change these conditions. Hence, one can also not believe that—as so many people say—an “idealistic” spiritual movement like the theosophical one can state anything considerable just about that which must stir our time concerning occupation and earnings.

However, we consider this topic best of all envisaging both ideas of occupation and earnings spiritual-scientifically. Then it becomes apparent that it is necessary above all to maintain a deepened thinking in order to penetrate this field of our manifold and variform life. There has always been the phrase of “rich and poor” of course. This is not sufficient if one wants to understand life. However, if we look at our environment and compare it to the environment centuries ago or also before shorter intervals, then it is obvious that the way of life has substantially changed that the causes of distress and misery, of poverty were produced by a new way of life. It is obviously very necessary that people think more about these questions of the changed relation to occupation and earnings. He who surveys this life as it has gradually developed for centuries with mature thinking has to say to himself that a certain human class is concerned above all if we want to say anything considerable about this question. This class has come into being in the newest time, and just in this human class, something gains significance more and more that reveals its power and intensity concerning the question of occupation and earnings in our time. If we go even deeper, we realise what it means that humanity advances on one side and cannot pursue its own progress, on the other side, with the necessary knowledge and interest. The modern worker, the industrial worker is in this form, as he exists today, actually, only the result of the development of humanity during the last centuries.

This is connected with the wondrous, the most marvellous progress within the human development. Today we see the earth littered with the productions of human thoughts, human inventions, discoveries, and arts. Where the human beings build up factories and enterprises, where one digs into the earth, where one looks for natural resources and metals, everywhere we face results of the human thinking. We see the progress of the knowledge of nature, the control of the physical principles; everything that the human thinking, human mental work created in the course of the centuries crystallised in our industry, in the threads of all kind which encompass the earth with our modern means of transportation.

All that has given our life the imprint. All that has generated the modern worker, the proletarian worker. With him, only the modern form of our calamity has originated concerning occupation and earnings. There is hardly any class of population that is not touched anyhow by that which has been created for humanity this way.

If we ask ourselves now: was the human thinking, the human interest also capable to create such a social structure which is in any harmony with that which the human mental power has created in the fields of technology and industry? Imagine once hypothetically what would have happened if the human beings had been able to use their mental power which has crystallised in machines, in the international banking and in the traffic system to put those who are placed in this development also into a suitable social structure. We do not mean what a much-cited naturalist means who says that any big, immense progress of human mind, of human science, industry and traffic has contributed nothing at all to the progress of the moral human development. However, if we looked at that what the human beings have produced concerning morality and civilised behaviour, we would stand even today on the oldest viewpoint of barbarity.—I do not join any deeper consideration to this opinion; nevertheless, it is true that all the technical and scientific achievements that we admire today face nothing in the area of the social life, the social structure. We realise that the human thinking is not appropriate to eliminate the disharmony between human longing, human need, and human ideals, even the simple-natural human life-style and what life offers in reality to all human beings concerning the industrial activity.

It would be an obligation of all classes of the population just to think about this question because in these questions something world-shaking is contained today. However, the broadest circles, in particular of certain classes, feel this by no means. Just the theosophical movement must be such a one which believes to be able to do something here not with a few abstract dogmas, with a few prescriptions from a think tank, but it must attempt to unfold healthy, profound thinking also in this field, in unselfish devotion, with knowledge of the true human being. The essentials are in this field that the human beings educate themselves internally in order to see the things in this field in the right light.

Those who look down at such an impractical spiritual movement, as the theosophical one is, from a supposedly practical viewpoint with a shrug, nevertheless, shall look once at life and learn with typical symptoms in which way they shall position themselves to such questions. Today the human thinking has become short in certain respect because the human beings have got used to seeing everything in materialistic thought forms.

Somebody deceives himself who stands on spiritual-scientific ground and believes that he can recognise the riddles of existence with a few single concepts, which were sufficient to construct the whole world edifice up to the human being. Yes, for a superficial understanding a few concepts are sufficient; but not for the intimate, precise judgement of life. Spiritual science is uncomfortable. Indeed, it is uncomfortable not for those who keep only to that which is spread in words and confine themselves to an abstract approach to life but for those who penetrate deeper in it. It has nothing to do with a few mechanical mental pictures, but it urges us to attain appropriate special concepts for the most different stages of existence. However, these special concepts are good guides in life.

People open a spiritual-scientific book where the physical world, the astral world and even higher spiritual worlds are brought forward, which are hidden in our world. There they read that the human being consists not only of that what one sees with eyes and can touch with hands, but that one can still live in higher regions Then they say, this is too complicated, there is everything boxed in certain way. The world is simple, and somebody who does not show the world simply causes mistrust with them already from the start. The world is simple, is comfortable!—One can probably say this, but it is not true! These concepts are not suitable to penetrate in the real life. Many people reach with their concepts not farther than the few steps they go daily. It is obvious that such human beings get quite weird ideas of life. Of course, such human beings can only be recognised when they talk or write. I could state manifold examples.

I want to pick out two examples of the large quantity that may show how quickly those persons judge about life who should be destined, actually, or feel to be destined to manage life.

There is a person that wrote a book. Today this is nothing special; it is sometimes difficult to find out those in a society who have not yet written a book. Now this person wrote a book about life. He says in it that he has thought a lot about the functions of the money and its significance for our outer life. Now, however, he only had to learn in a special experience that money is only one kind of means within a certain section of the community, and that it has, actually, no real significance. He would have learnt this once by a journey in South America. He had hundred dollars with himself, but he would have had to starve frightfully, because he could get nothing for his money. When he came to a hut and got something to eat, one said to him, he should retain his dollars; one would have no use for them.

This person has such “clear” concepts that he had to travel to the Brazilian jungle to ascertain them! Further, you know that a councillor Kolb has written a book. All the credit is due to this book. It should be recognised that a councillor brings himself to work as a usual worker in America, for instance, in a bicycle factory, and to live together with the workers in laboriousness. He has also written a book in which he says, I learn now to judge life different from I was used once. If I saw a person begging in the street, I said, why does this fellow not work? Now I knew it!—And he adds meaningfully, yes, one can economise very well and comfortably with the most significant problems of the economists on a theoretical basis; but in life, they appear different.—All the credit is due to somebody if he undertakes such a thing out of his social circles, and all the credit is due to the action to confess this openly and freely!

But now the reverse. If we ignore the man, we look at the fact as such. What does one say if anybody who lives in Europe and has a responsible post on whose measures a lot depends, grief, joy, happiness and misfortune of various human beings if he walks like blindfolded through the world? Has one not to ask, how was he walking, actually, through the world? How did he study it? How did he train himself? If one sees only what he would have to see, then one must ask, have these people walked blindfold through the world, and had they to go only to America to find out that one cannot pay with money in the jungle, and to get to know, why does the begging “fellow” not work? Must one not say that a time in which these symptoms are possible in which the thoughts are so short that such a time also needs clear and certain thoughts of the social structure as one could produce them in admirable way for centuries up to our time concerning machines and industry? If one does not understand theosophy or spiritual science as an abstraction, as a sermon of nice phrases, but as an announcement of that what forms the basis of our whole world in reality, then it gives this real knowledge of human nature.

We want to talk about that in detail. If we look somewhat deeper into the changes that have taken place since centuries and still project with their last extensions into our present, we have to say, occupation and earnings have changed in their relation to the human being very much, very much. Admittedly, various persons know the nice word even today that Goethe pronounced: “Desire and love are the wings of great actions.” Really, desire and love are the wings of great actions! They must also be the wings in the human life if human progress and human bliss shall prosper. Would the artist if he pronounced his most intimate not say any time, I can only work really and produce something fruitful if joy inspires me at work.—That is true, very true! However, how far is our life away from this truth! We come to a sad chapter concerning occupation and earnings putting this question.

Let us compare a hard working miner with an artist who creates his works to the delight of his fellow men. In the mines, for example, in Sicily, you find not only adult workers, but also many children of seven, eight, or nine years working who are ruined most dreadfully and spend their lives below—with few exceptions. If you recognise the impulses by which these human beings are driven to work, then you understand something that is usually understood very hard. There is a dreadful mood of hostility and opposition to life if one experiences those things that are otherwise intended to cause joy of life. The human being who works in such a way—I tell no fairy tales and emphasise expressly that I begrudge describing these realities—, may express his mood, as it is expressed, otherwise, with other human being in a nice, glad song, in a song like this:

A curse upon the mother who born me,
A curse upon the priest who baptised me ...

(Gap in the transcript)

Compare this with the words: “desire and love are the wings of great actions,” and try to realise the necessity of striving for a worldview that can deepen the hearts in such a way that one has to add it to our human material development. For it is something that belongs to the structure of life and has to belong to industry, traffic and technology.

However, we can imagine the emergence of the machines during the last centuries concerning occupation and earnings still in another way. One does not need to go far back; there one finds the proverb “a trade in hand finds gold in every land.” Why? Many people had a deep personal relationship to their work and the product they created. Try to imagine the medieval cities. Try to watch any door lock and any key exactly, and then try to look in the workshops where these things were created. Imagine how people worked there with joy and love, how the worker gave, so to speak, a piece of his soul to the products he created.

On the other side, try to imagine the industrial worker, the worker in the factories who works on a small part only whose coherence with the whole he does not survey. He lacks the intimacy of the coherence between that product and his work. This personal relation is something exceptionally important. It is something that brings these both concepts—occupation and earnings—home to us clearer and clearer. It is something different concerning the acquisition if the human being can take a personal interest in the products, in their form, their appearance etc., than if the only interest in the product is the acquisition, the wage. The one gives the occupation; it expresses itself in the work that becomes the product. The acquisition expresses itself in that what the human egoism receives in recompense for the product. We have to put both concepts side by side this way comparing the craftsman of former times and the modern worker. Today everything is different right down to the last detail that you carry with yourselves and have round yourselves. The whole tragedy of the industrial era concerning occupation and earnings in the human life expresses itself in a nice small poem that an almost unknown poet of our newer time wrote (Heinrich von Reder, 1824–1909, Bavarian officer, poet, and painter):

Gone to rack on a mule track
a smithy stands in woodland solitude;
no longer does the hammer blow
accompanied by merry songs.
Not far away the buildings rise
where sooted blacksmiths
are working so hard.
With the steam mill's nails
the coffin is closed,
it carries the nail smith
impoverished to grave.

In these lines, you have the turnaround during the last centuries concerning occupation and earnings.

We need to take only the lines: “No longer does the hammer blow accompanied by merry songs.” They express this turnaround. We realise everything that concerns occupation and acquisition. Imagine a human being who accompanies the hammer blow with merry songs and then imagine the mood of a human being who stands as sooted worker in the factory. It is not the task of spiritual science to preach the reaction, to restore the old conditions or to prevent things that have developed in the human progress and had necessarily to come. We do not criticise what had to happen inevitably. However, we have to realise that it depends on the human beings to work from their spiritual work for the welfare of the human being and for the human progress.

Many people will now say, nevertheless, we see enough human beings in our surroundings who have prepared themselves well to think about the social question, about what should happen.

There is a certain difference, which is very immense, between that, what spiritual science has to say and the general mood of time. One could characterise this mood with general expressions. Those who have studied say: you theosophists preach that the human beings should become better that they should develop love et cetera. We do not deal with such childish trifles, we do not want to improve the human beings for better life and for their welfare, but we know that it does not depend on the human beings, but that it depends on the conditions.—Many people say this, not only professors, but also people at the “green tables” of socialism. What is announced there is as haughty as what is spread by the other green tables. Everywhere one preaches: improve the conditions, and then it already comes that the human beings are getting better.—One can hear them declaiming this, the quite clever people who appear repeatedly.

I could enumerate many examples of the immediate life. From here, I needed to do only three steps, and I could point to a place where once someone stood who said [about theosophy]: these are brainless ideas! It depends on improving the conditions. If one gives them better conditions of life, the human beings are getting completely better by themselves.—We hear this song singing concerning occupation and earnings in all variations repeatedly. If anything is wrong, one does not think that it depends on the human beings, but one says, one must make a new law, so that the conditions change. If anything is wrong in a field, they say that one has to protect the immature mass that has no right judgement against those who want to slave-drive in this or that area. If one says this, for example, towards some methods of treatment, nevertheless, one would like to ask, is it not more obvious and more natural to say that everybody who understands these matters has the duty to enlighten the human beings, so that they turn out of own judgment to those to whom they should turn? It does not depend on the conditions but only on the development of the human soul.

This kind of materialism, which comes from the atomistic way of thinking and which was transferred to the social conditions, lies deeply in our thinking. Many people discuss such things, however, arguing leads only to endless debates. Someone who knows the secret of dialectic knows that one can talk about the significance of the human being with endless pros and cons. It concerns not only that one can state endless reasons for pros and cons, but that one also feels the weight of the reasons. A human being who was destined to pass sentence in this field because he was an ingenious human being is the Englishman Robert Owen (1771–1858). He was ingenious because he wanted to make the human being happy, but also because he had a warm heart for the social misery. He succeeded in founding an almost prototypical colony. He attained something great with it. He made the matter so clever that he put those people who were addicted to drink or had other vices among the diligent human beings who could work by their example on them. Thereby he got some good results.

This encouraged him to found another colony. Again, he did it in such a way that he wanted to realise certain ideals that fulfilled him. However, after some time the development in the colony was so that he had to realise that those who did not have diligence and industriousness became parasites of the colony. There he said to himself, no, and—it was like a confession—with general institutions, one must wait, until the human beings have been brought to a certain height in theoretical respect. Only by the transformation of the human soul welfare and progress can come, never by mere institutions.

A man said this who was allowed to say it because he had gone out from a compassionate view and was taught by experience. From such facts, one should learn, not from abstract theories. However, what gives an inner and viable thinking in this field? A precise and viable thinking in this field shows us that human beings have made all institutions that press and become awful for the human beings. Human institutions originate there which become the cause of hardship and misery, only because they are made first by human beings. Someone who wants to figure the things out really shall try to study the historical course, to study how the human beings live together today, how the one is placed in life this way, the other that way. Who has placed them there? Not uncertain social powers, but human thoughts, human sensations and human will-impulses. We must put the sentence: the human being can suffer only by the human being. Any other suffering is not real, considered socially.

One cannot demand that the spiritual scientist should criticise the historical necessities. It is necessary to understand that human beings have created the conditions and then brought misery in these conditions solely by wrong thoughts. It is not difficult to realise that a short thinking, a thinking that has no idea of the big, immense world connections can create no institutions that can bring happiness and welfare of humanity. With the dictum that one should be unselfish that one should love the human beings it is in such a way, as if you say to a stove: you are a stove, be a friend and warm; it is your moral duty to warm the room.—It does not become warm! However, if you heat, it becomes warm! Preaching general charity is something that one can put with self-evidence in the world. However, the practical handling, that what enables us to intervene in the outside world so that welfare and blessing develop for humanity depends on the relation from human being to human being.

A materialistic epoch sees that of the human being only which one can touch with the hands and perceive with the eyes. However, the human being is more than this. It is a spiritual, mental, and physical being. Everything that can bring welfare and blessing to the human beings can arise only from the fact that one considers the whole human being, in particular in the more and more complex conditions of the present and future. Spiritual science shows this true nature of the human being, shows his basis, and leads us thereby in quite different way to an understanding of the human being and the world. Only in a life eager to work, we can produce by our occupation in the world. Imagine what it makes up if the workers can accomplish their work like in the poem with a merry song. The single blacksmith was able to do this. He knew the work from its beginning to the ready product. The work cannot arise from the earnings; absolutely no work has arisen from the earnings. Try to look back at the simple work: it took place rhythmically, the hammer blow was rhythmic, and the song accompanied the rhythm. The impulses, which one can compare to joy and love, drove him to the work. The further you go back, the more you find that earnings and occupation are two completely different things.

What the human being performs as a work he works from an impulse towards the thing. Something different is to get earnings. However, this is the reason of our modern misery that earnings and occupation that wage and work have become one, have coincided. Our consideration must culminate in this. A human being who works on a small part in the factory will never have the abandon for the product that the former craftsman had; this is past retrieval. It is never possible in future with our complex conditions that a merry song penetrates the field of work. The song has faded away, the song that joins the product!

We ask, is there another impulse, which can replace it? Let us look at the time when more and more factories were built and more and more human beings were herded together in the sites of modern misery. If we let all that pass by, we realise—even if many things have changed—that one means to attach the future development simply to the past, when joy and love were still the impulses of work. However, humanity could create no substitute that attaches the human being again to the product. This can also not brought back. However, something else can be done. What can replace it? How can joy and love become impulses of the daily work again? How can one create them?

Of course, some people will argue, create impulses for a work that is dirty, bad, and hideous!—There are such impulses. Remember only what mothers do if they do the work because of love for the child. Remember what the human being is able to do if he does anything because of love for other human beings. There is no love for the product of the work necessary; there it needs a tie between human being and human being. You cannot bring back the love for the product within humanity, because it was bound to primitive, simple relations. However, what the future must bring back is the big, all-embracing understanding and love from human being to human being. Not before any human being finds the impulse for his activity from the deepest impulses which only a spiritual world movement can give, not before he is able to do the work because of love for his fellow men, it is not possible to create real impulses for a future development in the sense of the human welfare.

Thus, we have put as an impulse what any occult science knows since immemorial times. There is a spiritual principle; this is, in the social life only that is fruitful for the welfare of the human beings what the human beings do not for themselves, but for all human beings. All work is detrimental which the human beings do only for themselves. This is apparently a hard principle, but this hard basic sentence is the result of true knowledge.

Theosophy or spiritual science has to bring this to the today's humanity: to learn to understand such a sentence again. Something that should enclose all human beings or groups of human beings has become a complete abstraction in the materialistic view. This can no longer provide any moral impulse. Reflect once how one speaks about folk souls or group souls. This is nothing real! The human beings must get clearness again about the fact that there are beings who live in spiritual worlds, and that such group souls live and are reality. We have advanced in our development so far that we have arrived just in our time at views that are exactly the opposite of spiritual science that regards as formalities only, for example, all that what encloses a group, a togetherness in the world.

Spiritual science, however, shows that the entire existence is not included in the physical, in the visible, but that the supraphysical, the supersensible underlies all the visible, so that such things like common spirits and group spirits are no abstractions for us. Thus, it becomes to us a precise concept if we say, it does not depend on the work, and if it is valued ever so much. It depends on the work only in the human coherence if this work is fruitful, productive for the fellow men.

Realise that by a simple example: two human beings live on an island. The one produces things that satisfy the hunger of both, make their existence possible. The other also works a lot; he occupies himself with throwing stones from one place to another. He is very industrious and diligent. However, his work has no significance, is quite unsubstantial. Not that is the point that we work, but that we perform work which is fruitful for the other. The work of throwing stones is fruitful only if it gives pleasure to the person concerned. However, if he is forced by any institution to be paid for the work, then the work is insignificant for the coherence. It must be in a coherence that wisdom and structure regulate. He who looks into the coherence knows that the most important works are performed independently from earnings. Earnings must stand for themselves. It is a separate question how the human beings keep themselves mutually. The impulse of working is not allowed to be grounded in egoism, but it must originate from the regard to the entirety.

Other human beings require what one human being does. If the human beings ask for that which I produce by my work, then my work may correspond to my ability, it may be lower if I have low abilities, it may be significant if I have high abilities. However, if the human beings need this work, it is an impulse for the work that can induce me to a merry song. However, we must have the impulses and the abilities at first to look into the hearts of the human beings and to see that the hearts can become something for us. If we understand to immerse ourselves in the hearts of the fellow men, we know the nature of the human beings; then we also work in community and obtain social thinking. You will say, no one throws stones from one place to the other.—This happens in our relations perpetually, only people do not see it! They see too short.

Someone who learns to think socially soon becomes aware of that. Imagine, you sit somewhere and find a nice picture postcard and then you write twenty postcards without having to inform of something particular. Somebody who looks deeper sees not only the postcards with the pictures, he sees many mailmen going upstairs and downstairs. How much work one would save if the postcards were not written!

However, a quite clever one says: because one writes so many postcards, one brings about that one mailman is no longer sufficient. Another is hired, and this other earns his keep.—No one considers that in this way no productive work is performed. This is the work by which nothing is produced. Because you force a human being to a work and pay a remuneration for it, you create no welfare for humanity. However, one must look into the structure of existence as spiritual-scientific education can only give us. One has to realise that not only a few economists should look into these matters. One has to make any single human being unfold this social thinking. That flows from the spiritual-scientific wisdom as a spiritual-scientific disposition that the human soul becomes open and free that it then sees things, which he thinks and studies to an end, so that one does no longer say, one must create work for the unemployed people. It does not depend on giving this or that person work, but which work is performed, just work which the community needs. If we look at the matter in such a way, we realise that that what must become the impulse of our work must be a feeling of solidarity penetrated by real wisdom, the living social feeling that shall take place in any human soul. Not the abstract love, not that love which talks only about love and cannot see beyond its nose, but only that love which is illumined by knowledge can cause an improvement of the human conditions.

Hence, spiritual science cannot be an accumulation of dogmas, of ideas. The ideas are there for the soul. The point is the living human being. The more this wisdom grasps human beings and inspires them, the more exists true, real love, the more it serves the progress, the welfare of the human beings. Thus, we find that, because the occupation is based on the commitment to humanity, and the earnings are based on the care for the maintenance of the human being, welfare is bestowed on humanity thinking completely in this direction. The spiritual scientist does not assume that one can change this with dogmas overnight. Someone who stands firmly on the ground of spiritual science is clear in his mind that the soul can settle down into the active love, and that—because human beings are there who found the insights—one can work for the welfare of humanity. Then a person like Kolb has not to go to America to find out that one can easily judge about social questions on a theoretical basis, but a current in the public life will open his eyes, so that he will not have to walk blindfold through the world.

This will be the best and nicest fruit of the spiritual-scientific worldview if it does not entice the human beings into sentimental preaching of charity and fraternity but induces them to look at the true and spiritual reality with open and free sense. Humanity will thereby fulfil the Goethean sentence more and more: “from the force that binds all creatures that man is delivered who masters himself.”

This sentence applies in the enclosing sense to the national, professional, and commercial fields. It applies in such a way that only if our social structure is completely controlled by this principle that our work is not subject to wage and earnings but is made independent from acquisition, something fruitful can be created.

Of course, there are people who say, one takes care everywhere to take away all kinds of things from the subjective acquisitiveness and to transfer them on the community. Someone who says this could regard the official as the ideal of the human being, with whom earnings and occupation are separated. However, it depends on the fact that any single human being has the impulses from which the characterised welfare can arise. Community must not hover over the whole as an abstract spectre, as a cloud, but it must live in any single soul which points always to the spiritual height of the universe as it reflects itself in any human soul. Only such a worldview can succeed in realising what is salutary in the human living together.

The great human beings have felt this, a great spirit felt it about whom one talks today again more, some people even more, and the less they understand him. This spirit said that by merging in the real, true unity bliss comes about the human being, and that any misery originates from the variety and the differences. Misery comes above all if the human beings are driven in these differences that nobody does anything else than for his egoism only. Not before the single one feels that he must lay down what he can do on the altar of humanity, if this feeling and this thinking flow through the human being, it can also flow through humanity most intensely. It is true what Fichte (Johann Gottlieb F., 1762–1814) said: all bliss is contained in merging in the true one and any distress and misery in life is based on separateness and differentiation. For the true love can be attained only if the soul is not hardened in separateness and in variety, but if it finds rest and peace in the true community and in the whole spirit.

Published in The Golden Blade, 1975. This lecture is the ninth of fifteen lectures in the volume The Riddle of Humanity. Topics included are: Enlivening the Sense Processes and Ensouling the Life Processes; Aesthetic Enjoyment and Aesthetic Creativity; and Logic and the Sense for Reality.

We have been concerned with getting to know the human being as he is related to the world through the realm of his senses and the organs of his life-processes, and we have attempted to consider some of the consequences of the fact which underlies such knowledge. Above all, we have cured ourselves of the trivial attitude which is taken by many people who like to regard themselves as spiritually minded, when they think they should despise everything that is called material or sense-perceptible. For we have seen that here in the physical world man has been given in his lower organs and his lower activities a reaction of higher activities and higher connections. The sense of touch and the Life-sense, as they are now, we have had to regard as very much tied to the physical, earthly world. The same applies to the Ego-sense, the Thought-sense and the Speech-sense.

It is different with the senses which serve the bodily organism only in an internal way; the sense of Movement, the sense of Balance, the sense of Smell, the sense of Taste, to a certain extent even the sense of Sight. We have had to accustom ourselves to regard these senses as a shadowy reflection of something which becomes great and significant in the spiritual world, when we have gone through death.

We have emphasised that through the sense of Movement we move in the spiritual world among the beings of the several Hierarchies, according to the attraction or repulsion they exercise upon us, expressed in the form of the spiritual sympathies and antipathies we experience after death. The sense of Balance does not only keep us in physical balance, as it does with the physical body here, but in a moral balance towards the beings and influences found in the spiritual world. It is similar with the other senses; the senses of Taste, Smell and Sight. And just where the hidden spiritual plays into the physical world, we cannot look to the higher senses for explanations, but have to turn to those realms of the senses which are regarded as lower. At the present day it is impossible to speak about many significant things of this kind, because today prejudices are so great. Many things that are in a higher spiritual sense interesting and important have only to be said, and at once they are misunderstood and in all sorts of ways attacked. For the time being I have therefore to abstain from pointing out many interesting processes in the realms of the senses which are responsible for important facts of life.

In this respect the situation in ancient times was more favourable, though knowledge could not be disseminated as it can be today. Aristotle could speak much more freely about certain truths than is now possible, for such truths are at once taken in too personal a way and awaken personal likes and dislikes. You will find in the works of Aristotle, for example, truths which concern the human being very deeply but could not be outlined today before a considerable gathering of people. They are truths of the kind indicated recently when I said: the Greeks knew more about the connection between the soul and spirit on the one hand and the physical bodily nature on the other, without becoming materialistic. In the writings of Aristotle you can find, for example, very beautiful descriptions of the outer forms of courageous men, of cowards, of hot-tempered people, of sleepyheads. In a way that has a certain justification he describes what sort of hair, what sort of complexion, what kind of wrinkles brave or cowardly men have, what sort of bodily proportions the sleepyheads have, and so on. Even these things would cause some difficulties if they were set forth today, and other things even more. Nowadays, when human beings have become so personal and really want to let personal feelings cloud their perception of the truth, one has to speak more in generalities if one has, under some circumstances, to describe the truth.

From a certain point of view, every human quality and activity can be comprehended, if we ask the right questions about what has been recently described here. For instance, we have said: the realms of the senses, as they exist in the human being today, are in a way separate and stationary regions, as the constellations of the Zodiac are stationary regions out in cosmic space as compared with the orbiting planets, which make their journeys and alter their positions relatively quickly. In the same way, the regions of the senses have definite boundaries, while the life-processes work through the whole organism, circling through the regions of the senses and permeating them with the effects of their work.

Now we have also said that during the Old Moon period our present sense-organs were still organs of life, still worked as life-organs, and that our present life-organs were then more in the realm of the soul. Think of what has often been emphasised: that there is an atavism in human life, a kind of return to the habits and peculiarities of what was once natural; a falling back, in this case into the Old Moon period. In other words, there can be an atavistic return to the dreamlike, imaginative way of looking at things that was characteristic of Old Moon. Such an atavistic falling back into Moon-visions must today be regarded as pathological.

Please take this accurately: it is not the visions themselves which are pathological, for if this were so, and if all that man experienced during the Old Moon time, when he lived only in such visions, had to be regarded as pathological—then one would have to say that humanity was ill during the Old Moon period; that during the Old Moon period man was in fact out of his mind. That, of course, would be complete nonsense. What is pathological is not the visions themselves, but that they occur in the present earthly organisation of the human being in such a way that they cannot be endured; that they are used by this earthly organisation in a way that is inappropriate for them as Moon visions. For if someone has a Moon vision, this is suited only to lead to a feeling, an activity, a deed which would have been appropriate on the Old Moon. But if someone has a Moon vision here during the Earth period and does things as they are done with an earthly organism, that is pathological. A man acts in that way only because his earthly organism cannot cope with the vision, is in a sense impregnated by it.

Take the crudest example: someone is led to have a vision. Instead of remaining calm before it, and contemplating it inwardly, he applies it in some way to the physical world—although it should be applied only to the spiritual world—and acts accordingly with his body. He begins to act wildly, because the vision penetrates and stirs his body in a way it should not do. There you have the crudest example. The vision should remain within the region to which it naturally belongs. It does not do so if today, as an atavistic vision, it is not tolerated by the physical body. If the physical body is too weak to prevail against the vision, a state of helplessness sets in. If the physical body is strong enough to prevail, it weakens the vision. Then it no longer has the character of pretending to be the same as a thing or process in the sense-world; that is the illusion imposed by a vision on someone made ill by it. If the physical organism is so strong that it can fight the tendency of an atavistic vision to lie about itself, then the person concerned will be strong enough to relate himself to the world in the same way as during the Old Moon period, and yet to adapt this behaviour to his present organism.

What does this mean? It means that the person will to some extent inwardly alter his Zodiac, with its twelve sense-regions. He will alter it in such a way that in his Zodiac, with its twelve sense-regions, more life-processes than sense-processes will occur. Or, to put it better, the effect is to transform the sense-process in the sense-region into a life-process and so to raise it out of its present lifeless condition into life. Thus a man sees, but at the same time something is living in his seeing; he hears and at the same time something is living inwardly in his hearing; instead of living only in the stomach or on the tongue, it lives now in the eye and in the ear. The sense-processes are brought into movement. Their life is stimulated. This is quite acceptable. Then something is incorporated in these sense-organs which today is possessed only to this degree by the life-organs. The life-organs are imbued with a strong activity of sympathy and antipathy. Think how much the whole of life depends upon sympathy and antipathy! One thing is taken, another rejected. These powers of sympathy and antipathy, normally developed by the life-organs, are now poured into the sense-organs. The eye not only sees the colour red; it feels sympathy or antipathy for the colour. Permeation by life streams hack into the sense organs, so we can say that the sense-organs become in a certain way life-regions once more.

The life-processes, too, then have to be altered. They acquire more activity of soul than they normally possess for life on earth. It happens in this way: three life-processes, breathing, warming and nutrition, are brought together and imbued with heightened activity of soul. In ordinary breathing we breathe crude material air; with the ordinary development of warmth it is just warmth, and so on. Now a kind of symbiosis occurs; when these life-processes form a unity, when they are imbued with activity of soul, they form a unity. They are not separate as in the present organism, but set up a kind of association. An inward community is formed by the processes of breathing, warming and nutrition; not coarse nutrition, but a process of nutrition which takes place without it being necessary to eat, and it does not occur alone, as eating does, but in conjunction with the other processes.

Similarly, the other four life-processes are united. Secretion, sustenance, growth and reproduction are united and also form a process embracing activity of soul. Then the two parties can themselves unite: not that all the life-processes then work together, but that, having entered into separate unities of three and four processes, they work together in that form.

This leads to the emergence of soul-powers which have the character of thinking, feeling and willing; again three. But they are different; not thinking, feeling and willing as they normally are on earth, but somewhat different. They are nearer to life-processes, but not as separate as life-processes are on earth. A very intimate and delicate process occurs in a man when he is able to endure something like a thinking back into the Old Moon, not to the extent of having visions, and yet a form of comprehension arises which has a certain similarity to them. The sense-regions become life-regions; the life-processes become soul-processes. A man cannot stay always in that condition, or he would be unfitted for the earth. He is fitted for the earth through his senses and his life-organs being normally such as we have described. But in some cases a man can shape himself in this other way, and then, if his development tends more towards the will, it leads to aesthetic creativity; or, if it tends more towards comprehension, towards perception, it leads to aesthetic experience. Real aesthetic life in human beings consists in this, that the sense-organs are brought to life, and the life-processes filled with soul.

This is a very important truth about human beings, for it enables us to understand many things. The stronger life of the sense-organs and the different life of the sense-realms must be sought in art and the experience of art. And it is the same with the processes of life; they are permeated with more activity of soul in the experience of art than in ordinary life. Because these things are not considered in their reality in our materialistic time, the significance of the alteration which goes on in a human being within the realm of art cannot be properly understood. Nowadays man is regarded more or less as a definite, finished being; but within certain limits he is variable. This is shown by a capacity for change such as the one we have now considered.

What we have gone into here embraces far-reaching truths. Take one example: it is those senses best fitted for the physical plane which have to be transformed most if they are to be led back halfway to the Old Moon condition. The Ego—sense, the Thought-sense, the immediate sense of Touch, because they are directly fitted for the earthly physical world, have to be completely transformed if they are to serve the human condition which results from this going back halfway to the Old Moon period.

For example, you cannot use in art the encounters we have in life with an Ego, or with the world of thought. At the most, in some arts which are not quite arts the same relationship to the Ego and to thought can be present as in ordinary earthly life. To paint the portrait of a man as an Ego, just as he stands there in immediate reality, is not a work of art. The artist has to do something with the Ego, go through a process with it, through which he raises this Ego out of the specialisation in which it lives today, at the present stage in the development of the earth; he has to give it a wide general significance, something typical. The artist does that as a matter of course.

In the same way the artist cannot express the world of thought, as it finds expression in the ordinary earthly world, in an artistic way immediately; for he would then produce not a poem or any work of art, but something of a didactic, instructive kind, which could never really be a work of art. The alterations made by the artist in what is actually present form a way back towards that reanimation of the senses I have described.

There is something else we must consider when we contemplate this transformation of the senses. The life-processes, I said, interpenetrate. Just as the planets cover one another, and have a significance in their mutual relationships, while the constellations remain stationary, so is it with the regions of the senses if they pass over into a planetary condition in human life, becoming mobile and living; then they achieve relationships to one another. Thus artistic perception is never so confined to the realm of a particular sense as ordinary earthly perception is. Particular senses enter into relationships with one another. Let us take the example of painting.

If we start from real Spiritual Science, the following result is reached. For ordinary observation through the senses, the senses of sight, warmth, taste and smell are separate senses. In painting, a remarkable symbiosis, a remarkable association of these senses comes about, not in the external sense-organs themselves, but in what lies behind them, as I have indicated.

A painter, or someone who appreciates a painting, does not merely look at its colours, the red or blue or violet; he really tastes the colours, not of course with the physical sense-organ—then he would have to lick it with his tongue. But in everything connected with the sphere of the tongue a process goes on which has a delicate similarity to the process of tasting. If you simply look at a green parrot in the way we grasp things through the senses, it is your eyes that see the green colour. But if you appreciate a painting, a delicate imaginative process comes about in the region behind your tongue which still belongs to the sense of taste, and this accompanies the process of seeing. Not what happens upon the tongue, but what follows, more delicate physiological processes—they accompany the process of seeing, so that the painter really tastes the colour in a deeper sense in his soul. And the shades of colour are smelt by him, not with the nose, but with all that goes on deeper in the organism, more in the soul, with every activity of smelling. These conjoined sense-activities occur when the realms of the senses pass over more into processes of life.

If we read a description which is intended to inform us about the appearance of something, or what is done with something, we let our speech-sense work, the word-sense through which we learn about this or that. If we listen to a poem, and listen in the same way as to something intended to convey information, we do not understand the poem. The poem is expressed in such a way that we perceive it through the speech-sense, but with the speech-sense alone we do not understand it. We have also to direct towards the poem the ensouled sense of balance and the ensouled sense of movement; but they must be truly ensouled. Here again united activities of the sense-organs arise, and the whole realm of the senses passes over into the realm of life. All this must be accompanied by life-processes which are ensouled, transformed in such a way that they participate in the life of the soul, and are not working only as ordinary life-processes belonging to the physical world.

If the listener to a piece of music develops the fourth life-process, secretion, so far that he begins to sweat, this goes too far; it does not belong to the aesthetic realm when secretion leads to physical excretion. It should be a process in the soul, not going as far as physical excretion; but it should be the same process that underlies physical excretion. Moreover, secretion should not appear alone. All four life-processes—secretion, sustenance, growth and reproduction—should work together, but all in the realm of soul. So do the life-processes become soul-processes.

On the one hand, Spiritual Science will have to lead earth-evolution towards the spiritual world; otherwise, as we have often seen, the downfall of mankind will come about in the future. On the other hand, Spiritual Science must renew the capacity to take hold of and comprehend the physical by means of the spirit. Materialism has brought not only an inability to find the spiritual, but also an inability to understand the physical. For the spirit lives in all physical things, and if one knows nothing of the spirit, one cannot understand the physical. Think of those who know nothing of the spirit; what do they know of this, that all the realms of the senses can be transformed in such a way that they become realms of life, and that the life-processes can be transformed in such a way that they appear as processes of the soul? What do present-day physiologists know about these delicate changes in the human being? Materialism has led gradually to the abandonment of everything concrete in favour of abstractions, and gradually these abstractions are abandoned, too. At the beginning of the nineteenth century people still spoke of vital forces. Naturally, nothing can be done with such an abstraction, for one understands something only by going into concrete detail. If one grasps the seven life-processes fully, one has the reality; and this is what matters—to get hold of the reality again. The only effect of renewing such abstractions as elan vital and other frightful abstractions, which have no meaning but are only admissions of ignorance, will be to lead mankind—although the opposite may be intended—into the crudest materialism, because it will be a mystical materialism. The need for the immediate future of mankind is for real knowledge, knowledge of the facts which can be drawn only from the spiritual world. We must make a real advance in the spiritual comprehension of the world.

Once more we have to think back to the good Aristotle, who was nearer to the old vision than modern man. I will remind you of only one thing about old Aristotle, a peculiar fact. A whole library has been written about catharsis, by which he wished to describe the underlying purpose of tragedy. Aristotle says: Tragedy is a connected account of occurrences in human life by which feelings of fear and compassion are aroused; but through the arousing of these feelings, and the course they take, the soul is led to purification, to catharsis. Much has been written about this in the age of materialism, because the organ for understanding Aristotle was lacking. The phrase has been understood only by those who saw that Aristotle in his own way (not, of course, the way of a modern materialist) means by catharsis a medical or half-medical term. Because the life-processes become soul-processes, the aesthetic experience of a tragedy carries right into the bodily organism those life-processes which normally accompany fear and compassion. Through tragedy these processes are purified and at the same time ensouled. In Aristotle's definition of catharsis the entire ensouling of the life-processes is embraced. If you read more of his Poetics you will feel in it something like a breath of this deeper understanding of the aesthetic activity of man, gained not through a modern way of knowledge, but from the old traditions of the Mysteries. In reading Aristotle's Poetics one is seized by immediate life much more than one can be in reading anything by present day writers on aesthetics, who only sniff round things and encompass them with dialectics, but never reach the things themselves.

Later on a significant high-point in comprehending aesthetic activity of man was reached in Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795). It was a time given more to abstractions. Today we have to add the spiritual to a thinking that remains in the realm of idealism. But if we look at this more abstract character of the time of Goethe and Schiller, we can see that the abstractions in Schiller's Aesthetic Letters embrace something of what has been said here. With Schiller it seems that the process has been carried down more into the material, but only because this material existence requires to be penetrated more deeply by the power of the spiritual, taken hold of intensively. What does Schiller say? He says: Man as he lives here on earth has two fundamental impulses, the impulse of reason and the impulse that comes from nature. Through a natural necessity the impulse of reason works logically. One is compelled to think in a particular way; there is no freedom in thinking. What is the use of speaking of freedom where this necessity of reason prevails? One is compelled to think that three times three is not ten, but nine. Logic signifies the absolute necessity of reason. So, says Schiller, when man accepts the pure necessity of reason, he submits to spiritual compulsion.

Schiller contrasts the necessity of reason with the needs of the senses, which live in everything present in instinct, in emotion. Here, too, man is not free, but follows natural necessity. Now Schiller looks for the condition midway between rational necessity and natural necessity. This middle condition, he finds, emerges when rational necessity bows before the feelings that lead us to love or not to love something; so that we no longer follow a rigid logical necessity when we think but allow our inner impulses to work in shaping our mental images, as in aesthetic creation. And then natural necessity, on its side, is transcended. Then it is no longer the needs of the senses which bring compulsion, for they are ensouled and spiritualised. A man no longer desires simply what his body desires, for sensuous enjoyment is spiritualised. Thus rational necessity and natural necessity come nearer to one another.

You should, of course, read this in Schiller's Aesthetic Letters themselves; they are among the most important philosophical works in the evolution of the world. In Schiller's exposition there lives what we have just heard here, though with him it takes the form of metaphysical abstraction. What Schiller calls the liberation of rational necessity from its rigidity, this is what happens when the senses are reanimated, when they are led back once more to the process of life. What Schiller calls the spiritualisation of natural need—he should really have called it “ensouling”—this happens where the life-processes work like soul-processes. Life-processes become more ensouled; sense-processes become more alive. That is the real procedure, though given a more abstract conceptual form, that can be traced in Schiller's Aesthetic Letters. Only thus could he express it at that time, when there was not yet enough spiritual strength in human thoughts to reach down into that realm where spirit lives in the way known to the seer. Here spirit and matter need not be contrasted, for it can be seen how spirit penetrates all matter everywhere, so that nowhere can one come upon matter without spirit. Thinking remains mere thinking because man is not able to make his thoughts strong enough, spiritual enough, to master matter, to penetrate into matter as it really is.

Schiller was not able to recognise that life-processes can work as soul-processes. He could not go so far as to see that the activity which finds material expression in nutrition, in the development of warmth and in breathing, can live enhanced in the soul, so that it ceases to be material. The material particles vanish away under the power of the concepts with which the material processes are comprehended. Nor was Schiller able to get beyond regarding logic as simply a dialectic of ideas; he could not reach the higher stage of development, attainable through initiation, where the spiritual is experienced as a process in its own right, so that it enters as a living force into what otherwise is merely cognition. Schiller in his Aesthetic Letters could not quite trust himself to reach the concrete facts. But through them pulses an adumbration of something that can be exactly grasped if one tries to lay hold of the living through the spiritual and the material through the living.

So we see in every field how evolution as a whole is pressing on towards knowledge of the spirit. When, at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, a philosophy was developed more or less out of concepts, longings were alive in it for a greater concreteness, though this could not yet be achieved. Because the power to achieve it was inadequate, the endeavour and the longing for greater concreteness fell into the crude materialism that has continued from the middle of the nineteenth century up to the present day. But it must be realised that spiritual understanding cannot reside only in a turning towards the spiritual, but must and can overcome the material and recognise the spirit in matter. As you will see, this has further consequences. You will see that man as an aesthetic being is raised above earthly evolution into another world. And this is important. Through his aesthetic attitude of mind or aesthetic creativity a man no longer acts in a way that is entirely appropriate for the earth, but raises the sphere of his being above the sphere of the earth. In this way through our study of aesthetics we approach some deep mysteries of existence.

In saying such things, one may touch the highest truths, and yet sound as if one were crazy. But life cannot be understood if one retreats faint heartedly before the real truths. Take a work of art, the Sistine Madonna, the Venus of Milo—if it is really a work of art, it does not entirely belong to the earth. It is raised above the events of earth; that is quite obvious. What sort of power, then, lives in it—in a Sistine Madonna, in a Venus of Milo? A power, which is also in man, but which is not entirely fitted for the earth. If everything in man were fitted only for the earth, he would be unable to live on any other level of existence as well. He would never go on to the Jupiter evolution. Not everything is fitted for the earth; and for occult vision not everything in man is in accord with his condition as a being of the earth. There are hidden forces which will one day give man the impetus to develop beyond earth-existence. But art itself can be understood only if we realise that its task is to point the way beyond the purely earthly, beyond adaptation to earthly conditions, to where the reality in the Venus of Milo can be found.

We can never acquire a true comprehension of the world unless we first recognise something which there will be increasing need to recognise as we go forward to meet the future and its demands.

It is often thought today that when anyone makes a logical statement that can be logically proved, the statement must be applicable to life. Logic alone, however, is not enough. People are always pleased when they can prove something logically; and we have seen arise in our midst, as you know, all kinds of world outlooks and philosophical systems, and no-one familiar with logic will doubt they can all be logically proved. But nothing is achieved for life by these logical proofs. The point is that our thinking must be brought into line with reality, not merely with logic. What is merely logical is not valid—only what is in keeping with reality.

Let me make this clear by an example. Imagine a tree-trunk lying there before you, and you set out to describe it. You can describe it quite correctly, and you can prove, beyond a doubt, that something real is lying there because you have described it in exact accordance with external reality. But in fact you have described an untruth; what you have described has no real existence. It is a tree-trunk from which the roots have been cut away, and the boughs and branches lopped off. But it could have come into existence only along with boughs and blossoms and roots, and it is nonsense to think of the mere trunk as a reality. By itself it is no reality; it must be taken together with its forces of growth, with all the inner forces which enabled it to come into being. We need to see with certainty that the tree-trunk as it rests there is a lie; we have a reality before us only when we look at a tree. Logically it is not necessary to regard a tree-trunk as a lie, but a sense for reality demands that only the whole tree be regarded as truth. A crystal is a truth, for it can exist independently—independently in a certain sense, for of course everything is relative. A rosebud is not a truth. A crystal is; but a rosebud is a lie if regarded only as a rosebud.

A lack of this sense for reality is responsible for many phenomena in the life of today. Crystallography and, at a stretch, mineralogy are still real sciences; not so geology. What geology describes is as much an abstraction as the tree-trunk. The so-called “earth's crust” includes everything that grows up out of it, and without that it is unthinkable. We must have philosophers who allow themselves to think abstractly only in so far as they know what they are doing. To think in accordance with reality, and not merely in accordance with logic—that is what we shall have to learn to do, more and more. It will change for us the whole aspect of evolution and history. Seen from the standpoint of reality, what is the Venus of Milo, for instance, or the Sistine Madonna? From the point of view of the earth such works of art are lies; they are no reality. Take them just as they are and you will never come to the truth of them. You have to be carried away from the earth if you are to see any fine work of art in its reality. You have to stand before it with a soul attuned quite differently from your state of mind when you are concerned with earthly things. The work of art that has here no reality will then transport you into the realm where it has reality—the elemental world. We can stand before the Venus of Milo in a way that accords with reality only if we have the power to wrest ourselves free from mere sense-perception.

I have no wish to pursue teleology in a futile sense. We will therefore not speak of the purpose of Art; that would be pedantic, philistine. But what comes out of Art, how it arises in life—these are questions that can be asked and answered. There is no time today for a complete answer, only for a brief indication. It will be helpful if we consider first the opposite question: What would happen if there were no Art in the world? All the forces which flow into Art, and the enjoyment of Art, would then be diverted into living out of harmony with reality. Eliminate Art from human evolution and you would have in its place as much untruth as previously there had been Art.

It is just here, in connection with Art, that we encounter a dangerous situation which is always present at the Threshold of the spiritual world. Listen to what comes from beyond the Threshold and you will hear that everything has two sides! If a man has a sense of reality, he will come through aesthetic comprehension to a higher truth; but if he lacks this sense of reality he can be led precisely by aesthetic comprehension of the world into untruth. There is always this forking of the road, and to grasp this is very important: it applies not only to occultism but to Art. To comprehend the world in accordance with reality will be an accompaniment of the spiritual life that Spiritual Science has to bring about. Materialism has brought about the exact opposite—a thinking that is not in accord with reality.

Contradictory as this may sound, it is so only for those who judge the world according to their own picture of it, and not in accordance with reality. We are living at a stage of evolution when the faculty for grasping even ordinary facts of the physical world is steadily diminishing, and this is a direct result of materialism. In this connection some interesting experiments have been made. They proceed from materialistic thinking; but, as in many other cases, the outcome of materialistic thinking can work to the benefit of the human faculties that are needed for developing a spiritual outlook. The following is one of the many experiments that have been made.

A complete scene was thought out in advance and agreed upon. Someone was to give a lecture, and during it he was to say something that would be felt as a direct insult by a certain man in the audience. This man was to spring from his seat, and a scuffle was to ensue. During the scuffle the insulted man was to thrust his hand into his pocket and draw out a revolver—and the scene was to go on developing from there.

Picture it for yourselves—a whole prearranged programme carried out in every detail! Thirty persons were invited to be the audience. They were no ordinary people: they were law students well advanced in their studies, or lawyers who had already graduated. These thirty witnessed the whole affair and were afterwards asked to describe what had occurred. Those who were in the secret had drawn up a protocol which showed that everything had taken place exactly as planned.

The thirty were no fools, but well-educated people whose task later on would be to go out into the world and investigate how scuffles and scrimmages and many other things come about. Of the thirty, twenty-six gave a completely false account of what they had seen, and only four were even approximately correct ... only four!

For years experiments like this have been made for the purpose of demonstrating how little weight can be attached to depositions given before a court of justice. The twenty-six were all present; they could all say: “I saw it with my own eyes.” People do not in the least realise how much is required in order to set forth correctly a series of events that has taken place before their very eyes.

The art of forming a true picture of something that takes place in our presence needs to be cultivated. If there is no feeling of responsibility towards a sense-perceptible fact, the moral responsibility which is necessary for grasping spiritual facts can never be attained. In our present world, with its stamp of materialism, what feeling is there for the seriousness of the fact that among thirty descriptions by eyewitnesses of an event, twenty-six were completely false, and four only could be rated as barely correct? If you pause to consider such a thing, you will see how tremendously important for ordinary life the fruits of a spiritual outlook can become.

Perhaps you will ask: Were things different in earlier times? Yes, in those times men had not developed the kind of thinking we have today. The Greeks were not possessed of the purely abstract thinking we have, and need to have, in order that we may find our place in the world in the right way for our time. But here were are concerned not with ways of thinking, but with truth.

Aristotle tried, in his own way, to express an aesthetic understanding of life in much more concrete concepts. And in the earliest Greek times it was expressed, still more concretely, in Imaginations that came from the Mysteries. Instead of concepts, the men of those ancient times had pictures. They would say: Once upon a time lived Uranus. And in Uranus they saw all that man takes in through his head, through the forces which now work out through the senses into the external world. Uranus—all twelve senses—was wounded; drops of blood fell into Maya, into the ocean, and foam spurted up. Here we must think of the senses, when they were more living, sending down into the ocean of life something which rises up like foam from the pulsing of the blood through life-processes which have now become processes in the soul.

All this may be compared with the Greek Imagination of Aphrodite, Aphrogenea, the goddess of beauty rising from the foam that sprang from the blood-drops of the wounded Uranus. In the older form of the myth, where Aphrodite is a daughter of Uranus and the ocean, born from the foam that rises from the blood-drops of Uranus, we have an imaginative rendering of the aesthetic situation of mankind, and indeed a thought of great significance for human evolution at large.

We need to connect a further idea with this older form of the myth, where Aphrodite is the child not of Zeus and Dione, but of Uranus and the ocean. We need to add to it another Imagination which enters still more deeply into reality, reaching not merely into the elemental world but right down into physical reality. Beside the myth of Aphrodite, the myth of the origin of beauty among mankind, we must set the great truth of the entry into humanity of primal goodness, the Spirit showering down into Maya-Maria, even as the blood-drops of Uranus ran down into the ocean, which also is Maya. Then will appear in its beauty the dawn of the unending reign of the good and of knowledge of the good; the truly good, the spiritual. This is what Schiller had in mind when he wrote, referring especially to moral knowledge:

Nur durch das Morgentor des Schoenen
Dringst du in der Erkenntnis Land.*

* Only through the dawn of beauty canst thou penetrate into the land of knowledge.

You see how many tasks for Spiritual Science are mounting up. And they are not merely theoretical tasks; they are tasks of life.

Genuine knowledge of the impulses holding sway in humanity, knowledge that must be acquired if we wish to take a Position in life in any direction, is possible only if we attempt to go deeply into the differences of soul conditions existing between the members of the human race. In respect to the right progress for all mankind, it is certainly necessary that human beings understand one another, that an element common to all men is present. This common element, however, can only develop when we focus on the varieties of soul dispositions and developments that exist among the different members of humanity. In an age of abstract thinking and mere intellectualism such as the one in which we find ourselves, people are only too prone to look only for the abstract common denominators. Because of this they fail to arrive at the actual concrete unity, for it is precisely by grasping the differences that one comprehends the former. From any number of viewpoints, I have referred in particular to the mutual relationships resulting out of these differences between the world's population of the West and East. Today, I should like to point to such differentiations from yet another standpoint.

When we look at the obvious features of present general culture, what do we actually find? The form taken by the thoughts of most people in the civilized world really shows an essentially Western coloring, something originating in the characteristic tendencies of the West. Look at newspapers today that are published in America or England, in France, Germany, Austria or Russia. Although you will definitely sense certain differences in the mode of thinking, and so on, you will also notice one thing they have in common. If this is the Western region here (see sketch), this the middle one and that the Eastern, this common element, which comes to light everywhere, say, in newspapers as well as in ordinary popular literary and scientific publications, does not derive its impulse from the depths of the national characteristics. In a St. Petersburg paper, for instance, you do not find what arises from the heritage of the Russian people. You do not discover the heritage of Central European peoples by reading a Viennese paper or one from Berlin. The element determining the basic configuration and character (of all publications) has basically arisen in the West, and then poured itself into the individual regions. The fundamental coloring of what has come to the fore from among the peoples of the West has, therefore, essentially spread out over the civilized world.

When things are viewed superficially, one might doubt this; but if you go more deeply into the matters under discussion here, you can no longer doubt them. Consider the attitude, the basic sentiment, the conceptual form, expressed in a newspaper from Vienna or Berlin, or a literary or scientific work from either city. Compare this with a publication from London—quite aside from the language—and you will discover that there is a greater similarity between the publication from London and the book from Vienna, Paris, or even New York or Chicago than there is between the present thoughts and ideas in literary and scientific works from Vienna and Berlin, and the special nuance which Fichte⁵³ for example, poured into his thoughts as an enlivening element. I shall demonstrate this to you by citing just one example.

There is a saying by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the great philosopher who was born at the turn of the nineteenth century, that is so characteristic of him that no one today understands it. It goes, “The external world is the substance of duty become visible.” The sentence means nothing less than this. When we look out into the world of mountains, clouds, woods and rivers, of animals, plants and minerals, all this is in itself something devoid of meaning, without reality, it is merely a phenomenon. It is only there to enable the human being in his evolution to fulfill his duty. For I could not carry out my obligations in a world in which I would not be surrounded by things that I could touch. There must be wood, there must be a hammer. In itself, it has no significance and no materiality. It is only the substance of my duty which has become sense-perceptible. Everything outside exists primarily for the purpose of bringing duty to light.

This saying was coined by a man a century ago out of the innermost sentiments of his soul and character as well as his folk spirit. It did not become generally known. When people talk about Johann Gottlieb Fichte today, when they write books about him and mention him in newspaper articles, they only perceive the external form of his words. No one really understands anything about Fichte. You may take everything you find on him today, either literary or scientific, but it has nothing whatever to do with Johann Gottlieb Fichte. It does, however, have a great deal to do with what arose out of the Western folk spirit, and has spread over the rest of the civilized world.

These more delicate relationships are not discerned. That is the reason why nobody even thinks of characterizing in a deep and exhaustive manner the essential feature of what arises from the spirit of the various nationalities. For it is all inundated today by what arises from the West. In Central Europe, in the East, people imagine that they are thinking along their own ethnic lines. This is not the case, they think in accordance with what they have adopted from the West.

In what I am now saying lies the key to much of what is really the riddle of the present age. This riddle can be solved only when we become aware of the specific qualities arising from the various regions of the world. There is, first of all, the East that today certainly offers us no true picture of itself. If untruthfulness were not the underlying characteristic of all public life in our time, the world would not be so ignorant of the fact that what we call Bolshevism is spreading rapidly throughout the East and into Asia; that it has gone far already. People have a great desire to sleep through the actual events, and are glad to be kept in ignorance. It is therefore easy to withhold from them what is really taking place. Thus, people will live to see the East and the whole of Asia inundated by the most extreme, radical product of Western thought, namely Bolshevism, an element utterly foreign to these people.

If we wish to look into what it is that the world of the East brings forth out of the depths of its folk character, it becomes obvious that it is possible to discover the fundamental nuance of feeling in the East only by going back into earlier times and learning through them. For, in regard to its original character, the East has become completely decadent. Forgetting its very nature, the East has allowed itself to be inundated by what I have described as the most extreme, radical offshoots of Western thought. Certainly, it is true that what was once there is still living within Eastern humanity, but today it is all covered up. What once lived in the East, what once vibrated through Eastern souls, survives in its final results where it is no longer understood, where it has turned into a superstitious ritual, where it has become the hypocritical murmurings of the popes of the Orthodox Russian ritual, incomprehensible even to those who believe they understand it. A direct line runs from ancient India to these formulas of the Russian church ritual, which are now only rattled off to the multitudes in the form of lip service. For this whole inclination which thus expressed itself, which bestowed on the Eastern soul its imprint and also does so today in a suppressed form, is the potential for developing a spiritual state of mind that guides the human being towards the prenatal, to what exists in our life before birth, before conception. In the very beginning, the nature of what permeated the East as a world conception and religious attitude was connected with the fact that this East possessed a concept which has been completely lost to the West. As I have said here before, the West has the concept of immortality, not that of “not having been born,” of “unbornness.” We have the word immortality, we do not have the term “unbornness.” This implies that in our thinking we continue life after death, but not into the time before birth. On the other hand, the East possessed that special soul inclination it had that still included Imagination and Inspiration in its thoughts and concepts. By means of this particular manner of expressing the conceptual content of its soul world, the East was far less predisposed to pay heed to the life after death than to that before birth. In regard to the human being it viewed life here in the sense world as something that comes to man after he has received his tasks prior to birth, as something that he has to absolve here in the sense of the task given him. He was disposed to regard this life as a duty set human beings by the gods before they descended into this earthly body of flesh. It goes without saying that such a world conception encompasses both repeated earth lives and the lives between death and birth; for one can quite well speak of a single life after death, but not of only one before birth. That would be an impossible teaching. After all, one who refers at all to pre-existence would then not speak of one earth life only, which is something that should be obvious to you upon reflection. It was the way they had of looking up into the supersensory world, which was brought about by the whole predisposition of these Eastern souls, but it was one that focused their attention on the life we lead between death and a new birth prior to being drawn down to earthly life. Everything else, everything in the way of political, social, historical and economical ideas was only the consequence of what dwelt in the soul due to the orientation towards the life between birth and conception.

This life, this mood of soul, is particularly fitted to turn the human soul's gaze to the spiritual, to fill man with the super-sensible world. For even here on earth, man considers himself entirely a creation of the spiritual world, indeed, as a being who, in the world of the senses, is merely pursuing his super-sensible life. Everything that became decadent in later ages, the establishment of kingdoms, the social structure of the ancient Orient and its very constitution, developed from this special underlying mood of soul. This soul condition might be said today to be overpowered, because it became weak and crippled, because it was only promulgated as if out of what I would like to call “rachitic” soul members, as for example, in the works of Rabindranath Tagore,⁵⁴ which are like something that is poured into vague, nebulous formulas. In actual practice, we are today inundated by what expresses itself in Bolshevism as the most extreme, radical wing of Western thinking. The West will have to experience that something it did not wish to have for itself is moving over into the East, that in a not very distant future, what the West pushed off on the East will surge back upon it from there. This will result in a strange kind of self-knowledge.

What has this remarkable development in the East led to? It has led the people of the East to employ the holy inner zeal they once utilized to foster the impulse for the supersensory world and to apprehend the spiritual in all its purity, to accept the most materialistic view of outer life with religious fervor. Even though Bolshevism is the most extreme consequence of the most materialistic view of the world and social life, it will, as it moves further into Asia, increasingly transform itself into something that is received there with the same religious zeal as was the spiritual world in former times. In the East, people will speak of the economic life in the same terminology once used to speak of the sacred Brahma. The fundamental disposition of the soul does not change; it endures, for it is not the content (of the soul) that matters here. The most materialistic views can be approached with the same fervor formerly used to grasp the most spiritual.

Let us now turn and look at the West. The West has given rise to the human soul's most recent development. It must be of special interest to us because it has brought forth the view which, rising like a mist, has since spread over the whole civilized world. It is the manner of conception that already found, its most significant expression in Francis Bacon and Hobbes; in minds of more recent times, in the economist Adam Smith, for example; among philosophers, in John Stuart Mill, and among historians, in Buckle, and so on.⁵⁵ It is a form of thinking that no longer contains any Imagination and Inspiration in its conceptions and ideas, where the human being is dependent on directing his conceptual life entirely outwards to the sense world, absorbing the impressions of the latter according to the associations of thoughts resulting from that same world. This came to its most brilliant philosophical expression in David Hume, also in other such as Locke.⁵⁶

There is something very strange here that must, however, be mentioned. When we focus on the West, we must pay heed to how minds like John Stuart Mill, for example, speak of human thought associations. The term “association of ideas” is in fact a completely Western thought form, but in Central Europe, for instance, it has been in such common use for more than half a century that people speak of it as if it had originated there. When psychology is taught in John Stuart Mill's sense, one says, for instance, that in the human soul, thoughts first connect themselves by means of one thought embracing another, or by one thought attaching itself to another, or by one permeating another. This implies that people look upon the thought world and view the individual thoughts as they would little spheres that relate themselves to each other (see drawing). To be consistent one would have to eliminate everything to do with the ego and astral body, inwardly referring only to a mere thought mechanism, something that a great number of people do, in fact, speak of. The soul of man is disemboweled, as it were. When you read a book by John Stuart Mill with its deductive and inductive logic, you feel as if you were mentally placed in a dissecting room where a number of animals hang that are having their innards taken out. Likewise, in the way Mill proceeds, one feels as if man's soul-spiritual being were disemboweled. He first empties the human being of everything within, leaving only the outer sheath. Then, thoughts do, indeed, appear only like so many associated atomistic formations that coalesce when we form an opinion. The tree is green. Here “green” is the one thought, “tree” is the other, and the two flow together. The inner being is no longer alive; it has been disemboweled and only the thought mechanism remains.

This manner of conceiving of things is not derived from the sense world; it is imposed upon it. In my book, The Riddles of Philosophy,⁵⁷ I have drawn attention to how a mind such as John Stuart Mill's is in no way related to the inner world; it is simply given to behaving like a mere onlooker in whom the external world is reflected. Our concern here is that this method of thinking brings about what I have often described as the tragedy of materialism, which is that it no longer comprehends matter. For how can materialism fathom the nature of matter—and we have seen that, by going deeply into the human being, one penetrates into the true material element of the earth—if it first eliminates in thought what actually represents matter? In this regard, an extreme consequence already has been reached.

This extreme consequence could easily be traced today if it were not for the fact that people never look at the whole context of things, only at the details. Imagine where it must lead if all the actual inner flexible aspects of the ego are eliminated, if the human being is emptied of the very element that can enlighten him in the sense world concerning the spirit. Just think, where must this finally lead? It must result in the human being feeling that he no longer has anything of the actual content of the world. He looks outside at the sense world without realizing the truth of what we said yesterday, namely, that behind the external world of the senses there are spiritual beings. When he gives himself up to illusions, he assumes that atoms and molecules exist outside. He dreams of atoms and molecules. If man has no illusion concerning the external world, he can say nothing but that the whole outer world contains no truth, that it really is nothing. Inwardly, on the other hand, he has found nothing; he is empty. He must talk himself into believing that there is something inside him. He has no grasp of the spirit; therefore, he suggests spirit to himself, developing the suggestion of spirit. He is not capable of maintaining this suggestion without rigorously denying the reality of matter. This implies that he accommodates himself to a world view which does not perceive the spirit but only suggests it, merely persuading itself into the belief of spirit, while denying matter. You find the most extreme Western exponent of this in Mrs. Eddy's Christian Science⁵⁸ as the counterpart of what I described just now for the East. This was bound to arise as the final outcome of such conceptions as those of Locke, David Hume or John Stuart Mill. Christian Science as a concept is, however, also the final consequence of what has been brought about in recent times by the unfortunate division of man's soul life into knowledge and faith.

Once people start restricting themselves to knowledge on one side and faith on the other, a faith that no longer even tries to be knowledge, this leads in the end to their not having the spirit at all. Faith finally ceases to have a content. Then, people must suggest a content to themselves. They make no attempt to reach the genuine spirit through a spiritual science. In their search for the spirit, they arrive at Mrs. Eddy's Christian Science, this spirit which has come to expression there as the final consequence. The politics of the West have for some time been breathing this spirit. It does not sustain itself on realities; it lives on self-made suggestions. Naturally, when it is not a matter of an in-depth cure, one can even effect cures with Christian Science, as has been reported, and accounts are given of its marvelous cures. Likewise, all kinds of edifying results can be achieved with the West's politics of suggestion.

Yet, this Western concept possesses certain qualities, qualities of significance. We can best understand them when we contrast them with those of the East. On looking back to the ages when the Eastern qualities came especially to the fore, we find that they were those which, first of all, were capable of focusing the soul's eye on the prenatal life. They were therefore preeminently fitted to constitute what can represent the spiritual part, the spiritual world, in a social organism. Fundamentally speaking, all that we have created in Central Europe and the West is in a certain sense the legacy of the East. I have already mentioned this on another occasion. The East was particularly predisposed to cultivate the spiritual life. The West, on the other hand, is especially talented at developing thought forms. I have just described them in a somewhat unfavorable light. They can, however, be depicted in a favorable light as well, namely, if we consider all that has originated with Bacon of Verulam, Buckle, Mill, Thomas Reid, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Spencer, and others of like mind, for example, Bentham.⁵⁹ On the one hand, we admit that these thought forms are certainly not suited to penetrate into a spiritual world by means of Imagination and Inspiration, to comprehend the life before birth. Yet, on the other hand, we are obliged to say, particularly when one studies how this manner of thinking has pervaded and lives in our Western science, that all this is especially appropriate for economic thinking; and one day, when the economic life of the social organism will have to be developed, we shall have to become students of Western thought, of Thomas Reid, John Stuart Mill, Buckle, Adam Smith, and the rest. They have only made the mistake of applying their form of thinking to science, to epistemology, and the spiritual life. This thinking is in order when we train ourselves by means of it and reflect on how to form associations, how best to manage the economy. Mill should not have written a book on logic; the spiritual capacity he applied to doing this should have been used for describing in detail the configuration of a given industrial association. We must realize that when anyone today wishes to produce a book such as my Towards Social Renewal, it is necessary for him to have learned to understand in what manner one attains to the spiritual sphere in the Oriental sense, and in what manner—although following a much more erratic path—one arrives at economic thinking in the West. For both directions belong together and are necessary to one another.

As far as a view of life is concerned, this Western thinking then does lead to pseudo-sciences like the one by Mrs. Eddy, her Christian Science. We must not, however, look at matters according to what they cannot be, but consider what they can be. For unity must come about through the cooperation of all human beings on earth, not by some abstract, theoretical structure of ideas that is simply laid down, and then viewed as a unity.

At this point, one may ask from where in the human organization this particular thinking of Mill, Buckle, and Adam Smith originates. We find that Oriental thinking has basically arisen from a contact with the world, especially when looking back to the more ancient forms of Oriental philosophy. It is a thinking, a feeling, which gives the impression that, out of the earth itself, the roots of a tree grow and produce leaves. In just this way, the ancient Indian, for example, seems to us to be united with the whole earth; his thoughts appear to us to have grown out of earthly existence in a spiritual manner, just as a tree's leaves and blossoms appear to have grown out of it by means of all the forces of the earth.

It is precisely this attachment to the external world in the Oriental person, the absorption of the spirituality, that I have referred to as lying beyond the sense world. In the West, everything is brought out of the instincts, the depth of the personality—I might say, from man's metabolic system, not the external world. For the Oriental, the world works upon both his senses and Spirit, kindling within him what he calls his holy Brahma. In the West, we have what arises from the body's metabolism and leads to associations of ideas; it is something that is particularly suited to characterize the economic life, something that does not apply until the next earth incarnation. For, with the exception of the head, what we bear as our physical organism is something that does not find its true expression, as we have outlined, until the following life on earth. We have been given our head from our previous earth life; our limbs and our metabolic system are Borne by us into the next earthly incarnation. This is a metamorphosis from one life on earth to the next. Hence, in the West, people think with something that only becomes mature in the following earth life. For this reason, Western thinking is particularly predisposed to focus on the life after death, to speak of immortality, not of eternity, not to know the term, “unbornness,” but only the word, “immortality.” It is the West which represents life after death as something that the human being should above all else be concerned about. Yet, even now, something I might call radical, but in a radical sense something noble, is preparing itself in the West out of the totally materialistic culture. One with the faculty to look a little more deeply into what is thus trying to evolve makes a strange discovery. Although people strive in the most intimate way for life after death, for some kind of immortality, hence, for an egotistic life after death, they strive in such a manner that, out of this effort, something special will develop. While a large part of humanity still harbors an illusion in this regard, something quite remarkable is, oddly enough, developing in the West. Since individual elements of the ideas concerning life after death being developed by the West are reflected to a certain extent in a great majority of Europeans, they, too, have especially perfected this preoccupation with the postmortem life. The European, however, would prefer to say, “Well, my religion promises me a life after death, but in this transitory, unsatisfactory, merely material earth life I need make no effort to secure the immortality of my soul. Christ died to make me immortal; I need not strive for immortality. It is mine once and for all; Christ makes me immortal.”—or something to that effect.

In the West, particularly in America, something different is preparing itself. Out of the most diverse, occasionally the most bizarre and trivial religious world conceptions, we see something trying to arise which, although it has quite materialistic forms, is nevertheless connected with. something that will be a part of life in the future, particularly in regard to this world-view of immortality. Among certain sects in America, the belief is prevalent that one cannot survive at all after death if one has made no effort in this earthly life, if one has not accomplished something whereby one acquires this life after death. A judgment concerning good and evil is envisioned after death that does not merely follow the pattern of earthly truth. He who makes no effort here on earth to bear through the portals of death what he has developed in his soul will be diffused and scattered in the cosmic all. What a person wishes to carry with him through death must be developed here. A man dies the second death of the soul—to use the saying of Paul—who does not provide here for his soul to become immortal. This is something that is definitely developing in the West as a world concept in place of the leisurely, passive, awaiting what will happen after death. It is something that is emerging in certain American sects. Perhaps today it is still little noticed, but there is a great deal of feeling in favor of viewing life here in a moral sense, and to arrange the conduct of life in such a manner that by means of what one does here, something is carried through the gate of death.

As I said, in the East, the particular attention to the life before birth developed long ago. This made it possible for life on earth to be viewed as a continuation of this prenatal, supersensory life in the spirit. Earthly life thus received its content, not out of itself, but out of the spiritual life. In the West, an attitude is developing today for the future that will have nothing to do with a passive, indifferent life of waiting here for death because the life beyond is guaranteed; instead, the knowledge is growing that man carries nothing through the portal of death unless care is taken on earth to make something out of what one already has here.

Thus, Western thinking is adapted, on the one hand, to organizing economic matters within the social organism; on the other hand, it is suited to develop further the one-sided doctrine of life after death. This is why spiritualism has had a special opportunity for developing in the West, and from there, could invade the rest of the world. After all, spiritualism was only devised to give a sort of guarantee of immortality to those who could no longer attain to any conviction concerning immortality by means of any kind of inner development. For, in most instances, a person actually becomes a spiritualist in order to receive by some means or the other the certain guarantee that he is immortal ,after death.

Between these two worlds lies something that is implied in Fichte's words, “The external world is the substance of my duty become visible.” As I said before, people really have no understanding for this mode of thinking, and what is written today about Fichte could well be compared to what a blind man might say about color. Particularly in the last few years, a tremendous amount of talking and lecturing has been done about this saying by Fichte, but it was all accomplished in such a way that one is disposed to say that Fichte, that out-and-out Central European mind, has really been americanized by the German newspapers and writers of literature. One is confronted with americanized versions of Fichte. There, we find the nuance of human soul life which, in a special way, is supposed to develop the middle member of the social organism, the one that arises from the relationship of man to man. It would be of benefit if some of you would for once make an in-depth study—it isn't easy—of one of Fichte's writings where he speaks as though nature did not exist at all. Duty, for example, and everything else is deduced by first proving that external human beings actually exist in whom the materialized substance of duty can become reality. Here, all the raw material is contained, so to speak, from which the rights and state organism of the threefold social order have to be put together.

What, then, is the actual cause of the catastrophic events in the past few years? The basic reason is that there was no living perception, no feeling, for such matters. Berlin's policies are American. This is fine for America, but it is not suitable for Berlin. This is why Berlin's politics amount to nothing. For, just imagine, since American policies were constantly carried out in Berlin or Vienna, we could just as well have called Berlin, New York, apart from the difference in language, and Vienna, Chicago for all the difference there would have been otherwise. When, in Central Europe, something is done that is completely foreign to it, something originating in the West where it has its rightful place, then the primal essence of the folk spirit is aroused and gives it the lie without the people being aware of it. This was basically the case in recent decades. This was the underlying phenomenon of what happened, the phenomenon that consists, for instance, in the fact that people have trampled Goethe's thinking underfoot, and as another example, have read Ralph Waldo Trine⁶⁰ out of a sort of instinct. Actually, all our aristocratic dandies in politics have shown an interest in Trine, and received their special inner stimulus or whatever from that direction. When affairs came to the boiling point, they even turned to Woodrow Wilson;⁶¹ and he⁶² who would now again like to be President of the German Republic still has that frame of mind that allows his brain automatically to roll out Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points. Thus, in recent times, in the Grand Duchy of Baden, we experienced how a formerly truly representative German personality spouted forth americanisms. This is the best and most immediate example of how matters really stand at present. Indeed, we must be able to see through these archetypal phenomena if we wish to understand what is actually happening today. If we merely pick up a newspaper and read Prince Max von Baden's speeches, simply studying them out of context, then this is something absolutely worthless today. It is a mere kaleidoscope of words. Only when we are able to place such things into the whole context of the world can we hope to understand anything about the world. No progress can be made until people realize how necessary it is today that world understanding be acquired if one wishes to have a say. The most characteristic sign of the time is the belief that when a group of individuals have set up some trashy proposition as a general program—such as the unity of all men regardless of race, nation or color, and so forth—something has been accomplished. Nothing has been accomplished except to throw sand into people's eyes. Something real is attained only when we note the differences and realize what world conditions are. Formerly, human beings could live in accordance with their instincts. This is no longer possible; they must learn to live consciously. This can be done only by looking deeply into what is actually happening.

The East was supreme in regard to life before birth and repeated earthly lives that are connected with it. The greatness of the West consisted in its disposition in regard to life after death. Here, in the middle (see drawing an next page), the actual science of history has originated, although today it is as yet misunderstood. Take Hegel⁶³ as an example. In Hegel's works, we have neither preexistence nor postexistence; there is neither life before birth nor after death, but there is a spirited grasp of history. Hegel begins with logic, goes from there to a philosophy of nature, develops his doctrine of the soul, then that of the state, and ends with the triad of art, religion and science. They are his world content. There is no mention of preexistence or an immortal soul, only of the spirit that lives here in this world.

Preexistence, postexistence—this is really life in the present state of mankind, the permeation of history. Read what has been drawn up particularly by Hegel as a philosophy of history. In libraries, one generally finds the pages of his books still uncut! Not many editions have appeared of Hegel's works. In the eighties of the last century, Eduard von Hartmann⁶⁴ wrote that in all of Germany, where twenty universities exist that have faculties of philosophy, no more than two of the instructors had read Hegel! What he said could not be refuted; it was true. Nonetheless, it hardly needs to be said that all the students were ready to swear to what they had been told about Hegel by professors who had never read him. Do familiarize yourselves with his work and you will find that here, in fact, historical conception has come about, the experience of what goes on between human beings. There you also find the material from which the state, the rights sphere of the threefold social organism, has to be created. We can learn about the constitution of the spiritual organism from the Orient; the constitution of the economic sphere is to be learned from the West.

In this way, we have to look into the differentiations of humanity all over the whole earth, and can gain an understanding of the matter from one side or the other. If the goal is approached directly, namely, if the social life is studied, one arrives at the threefold order as developed in my book, Towards Social Renewal. By thus studying the life of mankind throughout the earth, we come to the realization that there is one part with a special disposition for the economy; there is another with a special aptitude for organizing the state; and yet another with a specific inclination towards the spiritual life. A threefold structure can then be created by taking the actual economy from the West, the state from the Middle, and from the East—naturally in a renewed form, as I have often said—the spiritual life. Here you have the state, here the economic life and here the spiritual life (see above sketch); the two others have to be taken across from here. In this way, all humanity has to work together, for the origins of these three members of the social organism are found in different regions of the earth, and therefore must be kept properly apart everywhere. If, in the old manner, human beings wish to mix up in a unified state what is striving to be threefold, nothing will result from it except that in the West the state will be a unity where the economic life overwhelms the whole, and everything else is only submerged into it. If the theorists then take hold of and study the matter, meaning, if Karl Marx moves from Germany to London, he then concludes that everything depends on the economic life. If Marx's insanity triumphs, the three spheres are reduced to one, the one being of a purely economic character. If one limits oneself to what wishes to be merely the state or rights configuration, one apes the economic life of the West, which for decades has been fashioning an illusory structure, which then naturally collapses when a catastrophe occurs—something that has indeed happened!

The Orient, which possesses the spiritual life in a weakened state in the first place, simply has adopted the economic life from the West and has inoculated itself with something that is completely alien to it. When these matters are studied, we shall see particularly that blessings can only fall upon the earth when, everywhere, one gathers together into the threefold social organism through human activity what by its very nature develops in the various regions.

• 53. Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Appellation an das Publikum ueber die ihm beigemessenen atheistischen Aeusserungen, 1799.
• 54. Rabindranath Tagore: 1861–1941, Indian poet and religious philosopher.
• 55. Francis Bacon: 1561–1626, English philosopher and statesman, founder of empiricism; Thomas Hobbes: 1588–1679, English philosopher; Adam Smith: 1723–1790, English philosopher and sociologist; John Stuart Mill: 1806–1873, English philosopher and political economist, one of the founders of positivism; Henry Thomas Buckle: 1821–1862, English writer on social history.
• 56. David Hume: 1711–1776, English philosopher and statesman; John Locke: 1632–1704, English philosopher.
• 57. Rudolf Steiner: The Riddles of Philosophy, GA 18 (New York, Anthroposophic Press, 1973).
• 58. Mary Baker Eddy: 1821–1910, founder of Christian Science.
• 59. Herbert Spencer: 1820–1903, English philosopher; Jeremy Bentham: 1748–1832, English Jurist, founder of philosophy of utilitarianism.
• 60. Ralph Waldo Trine: 1866–1958, American author.
• 61. Woodrow Wilson: 1856–1924, president of the USA from 1913 until 1921. In an address to Congress on January 8, 1918, he outlined a “Program of World Peace,” condensed in fourteen points.
• 62. Prinz Max von Baden: 1866–1929, became German chancellor in the fall of 1918; on October 5, 1918, he directed a peace offer to President Wilson based on the latter's “Fourteen Points.”
• 63. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: 1770–1831; complete edition of Hegel's works, Berlin, 1832–1844.
• 64. Eduard von Hartmann, 1842–1906.

I have briefly indicated what were the directing forces during the two first periods of the anthroposophic movement; and before going on to describe the third period and what took place in it, I should like, as a basis, to enter more closely into certain features of the first and second periods. For as a matter of fact, in spite of all that has been said by way of explanation, it is still possible to raise the question: What grounds were there for the anthroposophic movement finding itself involved in a connection,—a tolerably external connection it is true—with the theosophic movement?

This question in particular, being a very intricate one, can only find its answer if we examine certain distinctive features in the evolution of the anthroposophic movement.

Taking, to begin with, the first period, which lasted down to about 1907, I might characterize as more or less its distinctive feature, that it was engaged in gradually laying the fundament' for a substantive science of the spirit.

Anyone who tries to look back into those days with the aid of the actual documents, will see, that during that time, bit by bit, in lectures, or lecture-cycles,—and also in what those who assisted worked out further for themselves,—the material was gradually brought to light,—the substantive basic material of spiritual science, and the lines on which it must anthroposophically be conceived.—This period ends, (such things are, of course, only approximate; but that is the case with the historic evolution of everything)—it ends approximately, I might say, with the publication of my Occult Science. — The book Occult Science actually appeared in print some year and a half later; but the essential sub-stance of it, the delivery of the essential substance contained in it, belongs altogether to this first period of anthroposophic effort.

Throughout this period, down to the year 1905 or 1906, there was every justification for a quite definite hope: the hope, namely, that the anthroposophic substance might gradually come to form altogether the life-substance of the Theosophical Society. Down to the years 1905, 1906, it was impossible to say that, gradually, in the course of a quite natural evolution, the theosophic society might not develop into an anthroposophic one.—It was possible to hope so, for the reason, that during these years, in all matters of outward activity, one of the most influential personages in the Theosophical Society, Mrs. Annie Besant, exhibited a certain tolerance, and unmistakably aimed at allowing tendencies of various directions to work alongside one another. That was unmistakably the case, down to about 1905 or 1906.

Now, during this period, one certainly—if one indulged in no illusions—could not fail to see, that such a very leading personage in the Theosophical Society, as Mrs. Annie Besant, had very primitive notions of modern scientific method. Her notions were primitive. But, nevertheless, despite all the marks of amateurishness that were thus introduced into her books, yet, all the same, from the fact that in course of time the theosophic society came, as Theosophical Society, to have its centre in London, and that this Theosophical Society had in course of time become nurtured, one might say, with the wisdom of the East, there was, from all this, a whole assortment of wisdom piled. up in the people who belonged to the society,—undigested wisdom for the most part, and which very often, indeed, existed in the form of most curious notions. But,—putting aside the fact that these notions often went so far as to bear no vestige of re-semblance to their origin and true meaning,—nevertheless, through books such as Mrs. Besant's Ancient Wisdom, or more particularly The Perfecting of Man, or even her Esoteric Christianity, there did flow something which,—traditional as the manner of conveying it was,—yet had its source in ancient fountainhead of wisdom,—even though the channels were not always unexceptionable, through which this stream of ancient wisdom had descended until it came into these books and lectures. Such, then, was the state of things at that time.

And, on the other hand, one must always keep in sight the fact that, outside these particular circles, there was no interest what ever to be found in the world of the day for real spiritual research. There remained simply the one fact: that amongst those who had, so to speak, strayed into this particular group of people, a possibility might be awarded for awakening an interest in genuine, modern spiritual science

In this first period especially, however, there were all sorts of things to contend with. I won't weary you with all the numerous societies which simply borrowed the name of theosophy,—societies which at bottom had uncommonly little to do with any serious spiritual strivings. Striving the people were certainly, many of them; but it was a striving that in part was a very egoistic, in part, an un-commonly trifling one. Trifling side-streams of this sort, however, frequently assumed the name of ‘theosophical societies’. I need only remind you of the so-called theosophic groups which were fairly widespread, namely, in Central Europe, in Germany and Austria, and also in Switzerland, and which gave themselves the name of ‘branches’, though all they really had in common with the Theosophical Society was in an extremely watered-down form, and. saturated again with every conceivable kind of often very foolish occultism.

A person who played a considerable part in the societies of this sort, and one who will be well known to you too still by name—or at least to many of you,—was Franz Hartmann. The depth of ‘spirit’, however, and the depth of ‘earnestness’, so-termed, which existed in these trifling societies, will be apparent merely from an illustration I may give you of the cynical character of the leading personage, whose name I have just mentioned. This gentleman was talking once in company with just a few people, but where I too was present, and said ... (these things have a real psychologic interest also, for one sees from them the kind of thing to which the human soul can come!):—‘Oh,’—said he,—‘there was that quarrel once in the Theosophical Society about that man, Judge, in America.’—(I won't go into the quarrel except to say that the dispute turned upon whether certain messages sent out by Judge had emanated from real initiate sources, namely, from higher personages called. ‘Masters’).—‘Well,’—said Franz Hartmann,’—that affair with Judge; I know all about that! He sent out those “Masters' Letters” in America; he came over to India at the time. We were in India, at headquarters; and he wanted to make himself an authority in America, and be able to say that he was commissioned by the Higher Initiates; and so he wanted to have Masters' Letters. Thereupon I said to him:—'(so Franz Hartmann told the story) ‘Oh, Masters' Letters,—I'll write some for you.—To which Judge answered: Well, but that won't do; for then I can't state that they are Letters from the Masters; for letters of that sort come flying down upon one out of the air; they take shape magically, and flutter down on one's head; and I must he able to say so.’—Whereupon Franz Hartmann said to Judge,—the story is of his own telling!—‘That's easy to manage!—Judge was quite a little fellow, and I said to him,’ (so he told us),—‘You stand on the floor, and I'll get up on a chair and let the letter drop down on your head.—And then he could say with a good conscience that the letters he sent out had come flying down on his head out of the air!’

Well, that is only an extreme instance of this kind of thing, which is by no means so very rare in the world. But, as I said, I won't weary you with an account of these trifling-societies; I merely want to point out that, during the first period especially, the fact that the anthroposophic movement ran alongside the theosophic one, made it in a way necessary to defend one's position before modern scientific thought.

I don't know whether those who joined the anthroposophic movement later on, and who studied Anthroposophy then as scientists from a scientific aspect in this, its more developed third period, ... I don't know whether these people have taken due note of the fact, that a struggle with the modern scientific way of thinking, and one of a quite peculiar kind, took place precisely during the first period of the anthroposophic movement. I will give you two or three instances. They are instances only of what went on in all kinds of matters, but they will show you that, at that time more particularly, the theosophic movement was strongly affected by what I described two or three days ago as a special feature of modern education,—namely, deference to so-called scientific authority.

This deference to scientific authority had made its way into the Theosophical Society above all. One could see, for instance, how Mrs. Besant, in particular, attempted in her books to bring in all sorts of references to the science of the day,—things which had no bearing whatever upon spiritual science; such, for instance, as Weissmann's Theory of Heredity;—they were brought into her books as being confirmations.

I can remember, too, how in Munich, when we had got so far as founding a sort of centre for the anthroposophic movement there, ... as you know, centres gradually came to be founded for the movement: the one in Berlin, and in Munich, Stuttgart, Cassel, Dusseldorf, Cologne, Hamburg, in Hanover, in Leipzig, and in Austria, the Vienna centre, and in a way, too, the one at Prague. In short, various centres came to be formed; and at the time when the centre was being formed in Munich, there were a great number there of these homeless souls, who were already organized in a sort of way; they already belonged to some society or other. Well, putting quite aside now the trifling-societies of the Hartmann stamp, I was going to tell you that when we were founding the branch at . Munich, we had all the time to deal with these various big and little groups which existed there.

There was one group, the Ketterl. The Ketterl consisted of regular men of learning. The business of these people in the Ketterl was, when anything whatever was stated in the field of spiritual science, to supply natural science proofs of it. Their aim, so to speak, was to start with just the natural science views of the day, and thence simply mount up higher to the things, say, that Anthroposophy describes. If Anthroposophy talked of an ether-body, they would say to themselves: Natural science has succeeded in determining some particular form of structure for the atoms or molecules. And now one must set to work and find out how this structure might become partly more complex, but partly also thinner in its combinations; and so gradually proceed from the molecular structure of physical bodies to the molecular structure of the ether. And then one would be able to apply the same kind of calculations to the processes of the ether, as one applies to the pro-cesses of the physical world. And nothing was, strictly speaking, allowed to ‘go through’ in the Ketterl except what bore a natural science visum on its anthroposophic pass.

The treatises written by the members of the Ketterl, — for they wrote treatises as well,—did not really dier much from the scientific treatises of the theoretic physicists of that period; only that with them the formula and definitions, etc., did not stand for processes in the spectrum, or in the electro-magnetic field, but for processes in the etheric field, or the astral field.

There was nothing to be done: the whole connection dissolved in mutual satisfaction, or dissatisfaction; and in the end one lost all contact with these protagonists of the natural science standpoint.

Not so very different, however, from these Ketterl performances were the labours of a man who played a great part in the Theosophical Society and had been an intimate friend, too, of Blavatsky,—a man who was invariably present whenever such things came under discussion. This was Dr. Huebbe-Schleiden; the same who for a long while issued the Sphinx. He, too, was altogether ‘out’ to bring a natural science way of thinking to the proof of what his feelings recognized as theosophy.—I still remember how he fetched me from the station, the first time in Hanover, when I had to give a lecture there.—It was the first anthroposophic lecture that I gave in Hanover, and was an ex-position of Goethe's Story of the Green Serpent and the Lovely Lily. — Then he took me out with him; he lived a little way outside the town, and there was a ride of about half an hour in the tram. He began at once, with immense enthusiasm, to explain to me that anything like positive spiritual knowledge could not possibly maintain itself before the more intelligent spirits of mankind, unless the things were proved in the same way as one is accustomed to have them proved in text-books of physics or other sciences. Then he brought his two forefingers into play; and so it went on for the whole half-hour, he all the while describing movements with the tips of his forefingers, to represent the supposed motions of the atoms: ‘Look; that must go so, and then so; and then one can see: in the one incarnation the atoms are set in motion, and then the wave-current travels on through the spiritual worlds; and now then, one must calculate how the wave-current travels through the spiritual worlds; and then it all becomes changed, and you have the next incarnation.’—Till really one felt oneself back again in the lecture-halls, with the lecturer explaining to one the various wave-currents for red and yellow and blue and green; it was all of a piece with these wave-currents for the transit of the souls through their various incarnation'.

He had a friend,—who afterwards, however, became an exceedingly good, sensible, faithful member of the Anthroposophic Society,—to whom he used always to send his ex-positions, and who possessed, amongst other qualities, that of greatly valuing these expositions. But every now and then the humour of it tickled him, and he once told me that he had again just received half a cwt. of wisdom for-warded to Munich from Dr. Huebbe-Schleiden. They were always very bulky letters that were dispatched from Hanover to Munich!

Well, the peculiar stamp; I was going to say, of this way of thinking, might be seen in the discussions that for a long time were carried on in the Theosophical Society over the so-called Permanent Atom. This Permanent Atom was an appalling thing! But it was taken uncommonly seriously. For the people, you see, who felt the authoritativeness of modern science, could not in the least understand why something, at any rate, that in words at least sounds the same as modern science, shouldn't be introduced into spiritual science. So they said: Take a man who is living in one incarnation and then passes on to the next; his physical body certainly falls to pieces; one single atom only remains, and that goes on through the time between death and new birth; and this one atom then makes its appearance in the new incarnation. That is the Permanent Atom, and goes on through the whole of the incarnations.

Such a thing seems like a joke to you to-day; but you can have no idea with what solemn earnestness these things were carried on during the first period especially, when Anthroposophy was in its beginnings, and how exceedingly difficult it was to meet the argument:—Why, what's the use of all theosophy if it can't be scientifically proved! Not a human being will have anything to say to it unless one can prove it scientifically!—Indeed, during this conversation in the tram, it was laid down as a maxim, that one's expositions must be in such a style that an ordinary sixth form schoolboy can understand theosophy just in the same way as he understands logic. That was what my escort demanded.

Then I arrived at his house; and he took me up into the loft.—And now I will ask those who now, in the latest period of the anthroposophic movement, are endeavouring to combat the Atomic doctrine, to guess what I found at that time in the loft of Dr. Huebbe-Schleiden's house in Hanover?—We went up a narrow stairs and there, above, in the loft, ... But in telling the story one can't of course say often enough that he was a most kind and charming, and really quite sensible, altogether nice old gentleman! ... up there, lying in the loft, were monster models of Atoms! They were made of wire, however,—very complicated. One model in each case represented the atom of some physical substance: Hydrogen or Oxygen; and the next model, which was again more complicated, represented the atom as an etheric substance; and the third model, which was more complicated still, was the atom of the astral substance. And if you take up certain books by one of the leaders of the Theosophical Society,—Leadbeater's books,—you will find in them magnificent diagrams of models such as these. It is a fact which I wish just to mention, for the consideration more particularly of those amongst us who are making war on the Atomic doctrine, that this same Atomic doctrine was never anywhere in such high bloom as amongst those who, so to speak, came into our ranks out of the Theosophical Society. And when the younger members, such as Dr. Kolisko and the others in our Stuttgart laboratories, wage war to-day upon the Atom, one would like just to remind them that, in those days, there were people with whom one really wouldn't have known how possibly to get from one incarnation to the next, if one hadn't had at least one permanent atom.

This is just an illustration of the very strong authority exercised by so-called scientific thought in these particular circles. Scientific thought, of the natural science kind, these people were quite capable of! They simply couldn't think that anything could possibly have any value unless it were conceived on the lines of natural science thought.—And so on this side too, again, there was no real under-standing. It was only as the second period of the anthroposophic movement began to draw on, that there came to be, in the circles at least that had entered our ranks, a gradual decline in this pursuit of the Atom; and the people passed on, little by little, to those things that continued further to be cultivated in the anthroposophic movement.—On the other hand it must be said, that the people who did not trouble very much about this pursuit of the Atom, and to whom modern science was after all a matter of more or less indifference, who had only, as homeless souls, found a stimulus in the theosophic movement,—that these people were decidedly more open-minded. And every time, for instance, that I stayed in Munich, I was able to deliver a lecture of a more intimate character in a circle that gathered round Frau von Schewitsch, a lady who had formerly been a great friend of Blavatsky's, and was then living in Munich. There it was certainly easier; for there one found a real striving of the soul.

I don't wish to uphold the one circle nor to disparage the other; I only wish to instance the various things on one side and another with which the anthroposophic movement had to deal.

Only just consider, though! that, at that time, the first demand we met with, and amongst our own ranks too, was that everything taught in Anthroposophy should be justified by the aid and methods of the natural science thought of those days!—And yet that was mild, com-pared with what is demanded of one by the outside world nowadays! My dear friends, a good number of you have to-day heard a lecture from Dr. Bluemel; and I think you will have been well able to understand his clear expositions, and have carried away a certain impression. Rut suppose there had been someone sitting there who said: ‘Oh, those explanations of his! What do I care about all that! I don't believe in it; I don't accept any of it; I won't examine the proofs of it!’—And another person were to say: ‘Well, but just look and see whether the things are true; test them with your common sense and the faculties of your own soul!’—‘That, I am not prepared to do,’ answers the other. ‘I can't trouble for the moment about that! It may be right or it may be wrong: I won't go into that question; but I call upon Dr. Bluemel to betake him to a psychological laboratory; and there I will test him with my psychological apparatus and see whether he is a mathematician or not.’—That is, of course, rubbish, and very thin rubbish too; but it is exactly the same as the demand made by the outer world of to-day, that an investigator of anthroposophic truths should let himself be tested in a psychologic laboratory in order to determine whether he has a right to state the results of his research and to expound them. It is exactly the same.

To-day one may make the most nonsensical statements, one may talk sheer nonsense, and people don't see it. Even those people who are indignant don't see that it is sheer nonsense; they think it is just deliberate malice, or something of the kind. For they simply can't conceive that the state of society could possibly permit of one's being an official representative of science, and talking in reality utter nonsense. The people can't conceive such a thing. So chaotic, in fact, is the spiritual life of our day.

The things, therefore, which it will be necessary to take into consideration when discussing the life-conditions of the anthroposophic movement will be altogether examples drawn from the phenomena and from the actuating forces of civilized life at the present day. Things of the kind, such as I am here describing, must be understood by every person who wishes to be acquainted with the life-conditions of the anthroposophic movement.

Well, undeterred by all these conflicting things, the work of the first period, as I was saying, was to set forth the principal human truths, the principal cosmic truths. And my Occult Science represents a sort of compendium of all that had been taught in the anthroposophic movement down to that time. As to the way the work was accomplished, it went I might say as well as it went, simply for the reason that there was never an abstract, but always a concrete will behind it,—because one never aimed, so to speak, at more than just what the course of circumstances gave one to aim at.

For example, let me give you a case like this.—We started in those days, as you know, a paper, quite at the beginning of the anthroposophical movement: the Lucifer-Gnosis. It was called Lucifer to begin with, and then, after five or six numbers had appeared, a Vienna periodical called enosis wanted to amalgamate with it. As another little fact, I may mention that I wanted simply to express the external union of the two papers by entitling the sub-sequent paper Lucifer cum Gnosis. Well, that, for in-stance, was a 'thing to which Huebbe-Schleiden simply wouldn't consent. He thought it would imply a sort of unnatural marriage bond between Lucifer and Gnosis. Lucifer cum enosis: one couldn't possibly say such a thing! Well, I didn't care; and so we called it Lucifer-Gnosis, and hyphenated them.—They were sharp enough in those days when it came to keeping an eye on us!

Well, this paper, Lucifer-Gnosis was started. We began, of course, with quite a small number of subscribers; but the list grew with comparatively great rapidity; and we never had really a deficit, for we only printed as many copies as we were about able to sell; and as for distribution, the office-apparatus was as follows:—When one number of the paper had been written and printed, the printed copies were returned to me at my house in big packets, and ‘Frau Doctor’ and I ourselves stuck on the labels; I wrote the addresses myself; and then we each took a clothes-basket and. carried the things to the post. We found it worked very well. My business was to write the things and to give the lectures. ‘Frau Doctor’ did all the organization of the society, but without any secretary; for if she had had a secretary she would. only have had to work for him too. So we did it quite alone, and never aimed at more than could be aimed at,—quite concretely. One went just as many steps forward as the actual circumstances put before one. For instance, the clothes-baskets we carried were not bigger than so that we just didn't quite collapse under them ... only nearly; we simply had to make the journey oftener, as the subscribers' list got bigger.

Well, after we had performed this interesting occupation for a while, Lucifer-Gnosis then passed over to Altmann's publishing firm in Leipzig. And then, Lucifer-Gnosis ceased to appear; not for the reason that it couldn't carry on any longer, for it had at the time many more subscribers than it needed; only I had no more time to write it. In fact, by then, the applications for lectures, and the whole spiritual administration altogether of the society, took up a great deal of time,—the whole thing, you know, slowly and gradually grew and developed;—and the consequence was that Lucifer-Gnosis failed to make its appearance. First, there were great gaps,—the January number appeared in December; and then from a year it came to a year and a half; and the subscribers made an awful fuss. Altmann, the publisher, got nothing but letters of com-plaint. So that I saw no way out except to tell him: ‘We simply must shut up altogether, and tell the sub-scribers that, however long they wait, they won't get any more!’

Well, that of course, too, was inherent in the course of the movement; one never aimed at more than the concrete advance brought with it. And that is one of the life-conditions of a spiritual society. To post up far-reaching ideals in so many words is the very worst thing for a spiritual society. Programme-making is the very worst thing for a spiritual society.

In this first period, then, the work was simply so carried on that, to begin with, by 1907—8—9, the groundwork was laid for a spiritual society suited to this modern age.

Then came the second period, in which the relations with natural science were in the main settled.—The theologians had not yet come on the field in any way. They were everywhere so tight-seated in their saddles that they didn't concern themselves about the thing at all.

The discussions with natural science being over, one could now turn to the other task before one. This was the discussion of relations with the Gospels with Genesis and the Christian tradition generally: with Christianity, as such.

The line was already sketched out in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact, which lies at the very start, for it had come out in 1902. But the elaboration, so to speak, of the anthroposophical understanding of Christianity, the building up of such an understanding was, in the main, the business of this second epoch, on to about the year 1914. It was the time when the lecture-cycles were held in Ham-burg, Cassel, Berlin, Basle, Berne, Munich, Stuttgart, on various portions of the Christian tradition.—For instance, at that time, too, there was worked out, amongst other things, what only exists so far on paper as a general sketch, in The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind.

It was the time, therefore, when in the main the Christian side of Anthroposophy was worked out with reference to the Christian tradition historically handed down.

And then, in this period, came what I might call the first extension of Anthroposophy towards the side of Art, with the performance of the Mystery-Dramas in Munich. All this, again, came strictly under the sign of not attempting more than arose out of actual circumstances.—And in this period there came then the incidents which led to what, for the Anthroposophists, was really a matter of indifference, namely, the exclusion from the Theosophical Society. For, as I said yesterday evening, to Anthroposophy it could be a matter of indifference whether she were included. or excluded; for she went her own road from the very first;—those who chose to go that same road could go with her. And Anthroposophy from the first had never troubled herself in any way internally, as regards her spiritual investigations, about what had been produced by the Theosophical Society. Only, even on the external road, it became ever more and more difficult to keep company.

At first there was undoubtedly a hope, from the circumstances, some of which I have indicated,—a hope namely, that the tide of theosophic movement as united in the Theosophical Society, might really become entirely anthroposophic. And amongst the other circumstances which seemed to justify such a hope, there was also this:—that, as a fact, the peculiar manner in which research was pursued in the Theosophical Society, led to severe disillusionments on the part, especially, of those persons whose judgmatic powers were at all of a higher order.

And here I am obliged to confess as my own experience, the first and second time when I went to London, that the behaviour of the leading personages was that of people who were extremely sceptical in their dealings with each other, who felt themselves on altogether insecure ground, but all the same wouldn't abandon this ground, because they did not know where else to look for security.—There were many disillusioned people, very plentifully filled with doubts, especially amongst the leaders of the Theosophical Society. And undoubtedly a momentous factor in the developments which took place in the Theosophical Society was the remarkable change which Mrs. Annie Besant underwent between the years 1900 and, say, 1907.

She had at first a certain tolerance. She never, I think, understood anything at all of this Anthroposophy which had come on the scenes.—I don't think she understood it at all. Rut she didn't interfere with it. She even, in the beginning, defended it against the hard-and-fast dogmatists,—that is to say, she defended its rights of existence. One can't say anything else: for that is the fact.

But now I have something to say, which I beg may be very carefully borne in mind in the Anthroposophical Society too. With any such spiritual society,—and such as the theosophical one was, too, at that time,—there is a certain sort of purely personal ambition, certain sympathies and antipathies of a purely personal tinge, which are absolutely incompatible with it. And yet there are such numbers of cases precisely of this kind, where someone really has his will set on some particular thing! He wills it from some ‘subter-ground’ of his being,—wills, for instance, to make an idol of a particular person. He wills it on some ground that lies in the under-regions of his being. What is impelling him, the emotional impulse,—it may be perhaps a brain-emotion,—is something that he won't admit to himself. But he begins now to weave an artificial astral aura round this person whom he is bent on idolizing: such a person is very ‘advanced’.¹ And if one wants to say something very special in addition: ‘Oh, he, or she, knows three, not to say four, of their former earth-lives! in fact, they have talked to me about my own former earth-life! Ah, that person knows a very great deal!’ And then comes a most spiritual interpretation of what—to use Nietzsche's words—is ‘humanly all too human’. Were one to give it a humanly-all-too-human designation, one would simply say, ... well, perhaps not downright, ‘I am quite silly about that person!’ but, without going so far, one might, at any rate, say, ‘I find him, or her, attractive. There's no denying it: I certainly find him, or her, very attractive!’ And then all would be well,—even in an occult society.—Of course Max Seiling, for instance, was in a way extremely entertaining, especially when he skipped about so excitingly on the piano; it was pleasant to go to tea with him, and so forth. Well and good; and if people had confessed this to themselves it would have been wiser; if only they had confessed to themselves: ‘I like that sort of thing.’—Wiser than extolling him to the skies, as they did in the Munich group.

All such things, you see, are in direct contradiction to the life-conditions of any society of this kind. Yet precisely a model example of how to fall into this sort of thing was Mrs. Annie Besant. For example, there turned up one day (I prefer to tell these things more through actual examples), there turned up one day a name.—I had never really troubled much about the literature of the ‘Theo-sophical Society’, in fact, I read next to nothing of this literature; and so my first acquaintance with the name,

¹ English in the original.

Bhagavan Dâs, was when I one day received a thick, type-written manuscript. The manuscript was arranged thus: in two columns, the left column type-written, the right one left blank. Enclosed with it was a letter from Bhagavan Dâs (it was about the year 1905, I think), in which he wrote that he would like to enter into correspondence with various people about the contents of this manuscript which he proposed to reveal to the world.—Well, really, at that time the anthroposophic movement had already grown so extensive that I didn't find time at once to read this manuscript. He said one was to write any comments one had to make on the right-hand side, and then send it track to him.—I used to go about a bit in those days, and I found that there were other people as well to whom the manuscript had been sent. And then it dawned ever more and more clearly upon me, that this Bhagavan Dâs was, in fact ... in fact, that he was ... an altogether occult personage, one who drew from the very depths of all that was spiritual! This was pretty much the opinion circulated about Bhagavan Dâs by the people round Mrs. Besant.—Well, since the thing came from India, and he was closely in touch with Indian headquarters, and enjoyed such fame,—at the Amsterdam Congress, for instance, one heard everywhere: ‘Bhagavan Dâs’, ‘Bhagavan Dâs’; it was really as though it were a fountain gushing a perpetual flow of wisdom! And so I decided to look at the thing. A most appalling amateurish hotch-potch! Fichte-Philosophy, Hegel-Philosophy, Schopenbauer-Philosophy, everything conceivable jumbled up together without rhyme or reason! And through the whole there ran, like the endless burden of a song, Self and Not-Self. And then, again, there would come a disquisition on something from Fichte, and then again, Self and Not-Self. It was, in short, something appalling! I never troubled about the thing again;—I didn't write anything on the blank side.—Things, however, like this showed, you see, how things were gradually drifting into personal currents. For it was simply on purely personal grounds that this particular Bhagavan Das was so lauded to the skies. You can read his books still to-day, and you will find they bear out the truth of what I have just said.—For, of course, you know, he manufactured books.—Things like this showed how the personal element became introduced into what were ostensibly objective impulses. And once that had come in,—and it began to come in strongly about 1905,—then the slide inevitably went on downhill. All the rest was, in the main, simply a consequence.

By this I don't mean to say that in every kind of society, if one happens to write nonsense, the whole society is bound to go to grief. But spiritual societies are ruled by different laws, by laws of internal necessity; and there things of this kind must not be practised, especially not by the persons who are leaders. Or else, you see, the downhill slide inevitably takes place. And it did take place.

And then came the ridiculous business at Olcott's death,—the ridiculous business that went on then, and was even then the beginning of the end of the ‘Theosophical Society’,—what they called the ‘appointment by the Masters’. But that at least could in so far be smoothed over that one could say: Well, yes! there are one or two people, certainly, who undoubtedly act on peculiar principles of their own, and so bring ridiculous things into the society.—Then, however, came the affair with Leadbeater, which I don't care to discuss now. And then it came to picking out that boy who was to be educated, you know, as the Christ, or to become the Christ, and all the rest of it. And when that couldn't be accepted by people who refused to take part in such nonsense, then these people were excluded.

Well, the anthroposophic movement kept on its own straight course throughout all these things, without practically troubling itself very much about these things as a movement. For say, you know, that in 1911, on the 24th of March, one was engaged in studying the Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind; and on the 25th of March there came the ridiculous reports from Adyar or somewhere, from the ‘Theosophical Society’, one didn't on that account need, on the 25th of March, to alter the continuation of what one had done on the 24th. The internal course of things remained, therefore, in reality unaffected;—that is a fact to keep firm hold of. And one really didn't need, even at that time, to be greatly thrilled by what proceeded from this or that quarter amongst the leading personages in the ‘Theosophical Society’; any more than I was at all specially overcome with astonishment when it was reported lately that Leadbeater,—of whom you have heard a good many other things—has now, in his old days, become a bishop of the Old Catholics, and that one of his associates, who in those early days was also at the Munich Congress, has become actually an Old Catholic Archbishop. There is—you'll agree—no cause to be astonished at such things. For the line, by now, was not a straight one; it was all going crooked and queer;—so why shouldn't this happen, too?

One didn't even need to make any special change in one's personal relations with the people,—I mean, in actual intercourse with them. I gave a lecture afterwards (two years ago it was, I think), in Amsterdam; and at the end of the lecture one of the same gentlemen came up to me, quite in the old friendly way, who had delivered a lecture in Munich at the Congress of 1907. He looked exactly the same as he did then; only in the meantime he had become an Archbishop of the Old Catholics. He wasn't wearing archbishop's robes; but he was one.

Such were the things, in short, that went on in a certain field of modern culture; in which, on the other hand, these homeless souls, from internal necessity, found a very real attraction. One must not forget that it was in this stream of movement, nevertheless,—although one can characterize it in no other way,—that those souls were to be found who were the most earnestly striving after a link between the human soul and the spiritual world. And one simply is not presenting an honest picture of the course taken by the life of modern culture, unless one for once puts these con-trasts really plainly.

And so, before going on tomorrow to describe our latest period, and with it the life-conditions inherent in the nature of the Anthroposophical Society, I was obliged to-day, my dear friends, to add these few remarks for your attention.

Last time I talked to you about the moon flying out of the earth and how that is connected to life on earth in the first place. I can already imagine that you will have many questions. We can deal with them next Saturday. Think about some of them by then. But today I still have a few things to discuss. Some questions may arise.

We have said: As long as the moon was inside the earth, what can be called the reproductive power of animal beings was quite different than later, after the moon had flown out. I have told you that in the time when the moon was still inside the earth, the moon gave the earth those forces that are, so to speak, maternal forces, feminine forces. So we can imagine that there was a time when the moon was still inside the earth. I will sketch this out for you very schematically.

When the moon was still inside the earth, it was not in the center, but a little to the outside (see drawing, left). If you look at the Earth today, you will also notice that on one side, more towards where Australia is located, there is a lot of water on the Earth, while on the side where Europe and Asia are located, there is a lot of land. So the Earth actually does not have land and water equally distributed, but the Earth is such that on one side it actually has the most land and on the other side the most water. So the material on Earth is not evenly distributed (see drawing $.149, right). It was also not evenly distributed when the moon was still inside the Earth. The moon was just lying on the side where the Earth has the inclination to be heavy. Of course, if there is a solid material, it is heavy there. So I have to draw it the way I have marked it there with white chalk.

Now you have to imagine that at that time fertilization took place in such a way that the moon, which was inside the earth, gave these giant creatures the strength to, so to speak, provide reproductive material. You can't say that back then the animals would have laid real eggs. These giant oysters were actually just a slimy mass themselves, and they just secreted a piece of themselves. So that such a gigantic oyster, as I described to you last time, which could originally have been as large as the whole of France, had a mighty shell on which one could have walked around, and towards the interior of the earth a mass of slime. The lunar forces worked on this slime, and a piece of it was secreted. That then swam further into the earth. And when the sun shone on it again – I have explained this to you vividly using the example of the dog – an egg shell was formed, and because this egg shell was formed, the slimy mass of the oyster was again inclined to secrete a piece of itself, and then a new animal could arise. So the female forces came from the moon, which was in the earth, and the male forces from the sun, which shone on the earth from the outside. Now, gentlemen, I am describing a very specific time, the time when the moon was still inside the earth.

Now you have to imagine the following. Today, when the moon is outside, outside the earth, it has a completely different effect. You also know that when carbonic acid is inside a person – I told you this last time – it has a completely different effect than when it is outside, where it is a poison. If you recall animal reproduction today, you must say: the animals have to produce eggs, and these eggs must then be fertilized in some way. So what the moon used to give when it was inside the earth is now in the animals. The animals have these lunar forces within them.

And the moon also gives forces from the outside. I told you last time: even poets know that the moon gives forces to the earth. But these are forces that stimulate the imagination, that make you more alive inside. These are forces that no longer affect reproduction, but that radiate in from the outside and can no longer effect reproduction at all.

So you have to imagine it: what the moon was able to give the earth when it was still inside, these reproductive powers, the animals have appropriated them, inherited them, and now they plant them from one animal to another. So when you look at the eggs of the animals, you have to say to yourself: the lunar forces are inside. But those lunar forces are still inside that worked when the moon was still in the earth. Today the moon can no longer do much other than stimulate the head. So today the moon works on the head. But in those days it worked precisely on reproduction. You see, that is a considerable difference. It makes a big difference whether something is inside the earth or outside of it.

Reproduction is a very strange thing. But again, we have to say that all understanding of nature depends on understanding reproduction. Because through it, the individual animals and the individual plants still arise today. If it were not for reproduction, everything would have died long ago. If you want to understand anything about nature, you have to understand reproduction. But reproduction is something peculiar on earth.

Just imagine: the elephant has the peculiarity of only being able to produce a single young at around fifteen or sixteen years of age. Take an oyster, on the other hand; it is a small, slimy animal. If you imagine this as being huge, you will have roughly the same creatures that I showed you for that time. So, you can learn something from an oyster. But the oyster is not like the elephant, which has to wait so many years to produce a young one. A single oyster can produce a million oysters in a year. So an oyster has a different relationship to reproduction than an elephant.

Now, gentlemen, another interesting animal is the aphid. You know that it occurs on the leaves of trees and can be found as a rather harmful population of the plant world. People suffer a lot from it. An aphid is, as you know, much smaller than an elephant, but it can produce several thousand million offspring in just a few weeks – a single aphid! An elephant, for example, needs about fifteen or sixteen years to produce a single offspring, but the aphid can reproduce in just a few weeks to produce several million from a single individual.

And then there are tiny animals called vortices. If you look at them through a microscope, they are just a tiny lump of mucus, and they have a thread that they wriggle along. They are very interesting animals, but they consist only of a tiny lump of mucus, like if you took a thread out of an oyster, and they swim around like that. These little Vorticelles are now able to produce a hundred and forty trillion offspring in four days – a single one! – so many zeros would be needed to write it on the blackboard. The only thing that can compete with that now is Russian currency!

So you see, there is a considerable difference in reproductive capacity between an elephant, which has to wait fifteen or sixteen years to produce a single young, and such a small Vorticella, which in four days multiplies to such an extent that one hundred and forty trillion offspring grow.

So you see, there are really very significant natural secrets here. And there is a very interesting French tale, which on the surface doesn't have much to do with it, but inwardly it does. There was an important French poet — his name was Racine. And this Racine, it took him seven years to write a play like “Athalie”. So he wrote a play like 'Athalie' in seven years. And in his time there was another poet who was terribly proud compared to Racine and said: Racine needs seven years to write a play; I write seven plays in one year! And so he came up with a fable, a story, and this story, this fable goes: the pig and the lion were once arguing; and the pig, who was proud, said to the lion: I have seven young ones every year, but you, lion, you only produce one in a year. — Then the lion said: Yes, but the only one is a lion, and your seven are pigs. And with that, didn't Racine want to brush the poet aside. He didn't exactly want to tell him that his plays were pigs, but he compared them, because he said: Well, you do seven plays like that every year, but in seven years I do one Athalie – which is world-famous today.

You see, you can say: Even in a fable like that, in a story like that, there is something to be said for taking fifteen or sixteen years, like an elephant, to have a young one, rather than being a Vorticelle, which reproduces in four days to have a hundred and forty trillion young. People already talk a lot about the fact that rabbits have so many young; if they only started talking about the Vorticelle – it's impossible to imagine such a reproductive capacity!

Now, we have to find out why such tiny animals produce so many young, while it takes an elephant so long.

Now I have told you: the sun is the actual basis for fertilization. So, even today, we still need the sun for fertilization. And I have also told you: if there is a heavenly body outside, like the moon, it only affects the head at most, but no longer affects the abdominal organs, so no longer directly affects the reproductive powers. Today, the reproductive powers must be inherited from one being to another. But, gentlemen, in a certain sense, what happens in today's reproduction is still dependent on the moon. And I will explain this to you in the following way, by going back to the sun again.

You see, we have to ask ourselves: Why does an elephant need fifteen or sixteen years to develop its reproductive ability to the point where it can have a calf? Now you all know that the elephant is a pachyderm, and because it is a pachyderm, it takes so long. A thick skin allows the sun's forces to pass through it less strongly than if you were a plant louse and were very soft and the sun's forces could get in everywhere. So the elephant's low fertility is actually related to its thick skin.

You can also tell by the fact that Think back to those huge floating oysters. Yes, a second oyster would never come into being if it only depended on the sun shining on that scale armor, on that thick skin! But this oyster, as I told you, releases a little mucus; the mucus does not yet have an oyster shell, so the sun can come upon it. And by drying the mucus and thereby creating a new oyster, it has a fertilizing effect on that oyster. Yes, when the sun's rays come from the outside, gentlemen, they can only create shells. How is it that the forces of the sun can still have a fertilizing effect?

You see, we have to look at something else to help you understand how the story actually fits together. You may know that when the farmers have harvested the potatoes, they dig quite deep pits and put the potatoes in them. Then they cover the pits again. And then later, when the winter is over, they dig up the potatoes from these pits again, because they have remained good in there. If they had simply kept the potatoes in the cellar, they would have perished. They stay quite good in there.

Where does this actually come from? It is a very interesting thing. The farmers don't know much about it. But, gentlemen, if you were a potato yourself and were buried in this pit, you would actually feel extremely good in there, if you didn't need something to eat. You see, the warmth of the sun in summer remains in there, and what the sun shines on the earth in summer, that draws more and more downwards. And if you dig into the earth in January, the warmth of the sun and all the other solar forces from summer are still there at a depth of one and a half meters.

That is the strange thing. In summer, the sun is out and warms from the outside, and in winter, the sun's power moves down and can be found further down. But it cannot go very deep down; it flows back up again. If you were a potato and were lying down there, you would be quite comfortable; you wouldn't need to heat up, because first of all there is still the warmth from the summer inside, and secondly it comes up quite warmly from below because the solar forces radiate back again. And these potatoes are actually terribly comfortable. It is only there that they really enjoy the sun. In summer they don't get much of the sun, it's even unpleasant for them. If they had heads, they would get headaches when the sun shines on them; it is actually unpleasant for the potatoes. But in winter, when they are buried in the earth, they can really enjoy the sun.

From this you can see that the sun does not only work when it shines on something, but it continues to work when its energy is absorbed and stopped by something.

Yes, gentlemen, now a peculiarity occurs. I have told you: When a body is outside the earth, it has a killing effect, either - like carbonic acid - like a poison, or like the sun here, which produces dandruff when it shines on it; it hardens the living being on which it shines. But in winter, it is not true that the sun works from the outside; it works from inside the earth. There it leaves its strength behind, working in the interior of the earth. And there it also renews the reproductive forces in the interior of the earth, so that the reproductive forces today, in our time, also come from the sun, but not from direct sunlight, but from what remains in the earth and then radiates back in winter.

It is a very interesting thing. It is just like when we breathe in carbon dioxide: then it is a poison. But when the carbon dioxide is inside our body and goes through the blood, we need it. Because if we had no carbon, we would have nothing at all inside us. We need it inside; then it is beneficial; from the outside it is a poison. Sunlight from the outside causes peeling in animals; sunlight absorbed from within and reflected back generates life and makes the animals capable of reproduction.

But, gentlemen, now imagine that you are not a potato but an elephant. You would have an awfully thick skin and would only let a little of the warmth that the earth has from the sun in. That is why it would take you an awfully long time to produce an elephant calf if you were an elephant. But imagine you were a plant louse or an oyster; in that oyster you would be just a mass of mucus near the earth's surface. The elephant is not such a mass of mucus. The elephant is closed off on all sides by its skin, so it lets this warmth, which comes from below, into itself only very slowly.

Now, you see, it is like this: animals like aphids, which also live close to the ground and on plants, have no thick skin at all; they can absorb what evaporates from the earth with the spring with terrible ease, so their reproductive powers are always quickly refreshed. And the vortices even more so, because they live in the water and water retains the warmth of the sun much more intensely, so that the stored solar warmth in the vortices produces the hundred and forty billion at the right season; that is, when they have absorbed enough of what the warmth of the sun is in the water, they can reproduce themselves terribly quickly. So we can say: Today, the Earth gives its beings the ability to reproduce by storing the forces of the sun within itself during the winter.

Now let us move on from there to the plants. You see, with plants it is like this: you know that plants also reproduce through so-called cuttings. So when a plant grows out of the earth, you can cut a cutting somewhere. You have to cut it out properly, then you can plant it and it will grow into a plant. Certain plants reproduce in this way. Where does that come from? The reason why plants have the power to reproduce even through a piece of themselves is because they have the seed in the earth during the winter. That is a very important thing for plants. If you want to somehow encourage plants to grow properly, it is the case, isn't it, that they actually have to be in the ground during the winter. They have to grow out of the ground at all. There are summer fruits, and we could talk about them later. But in the main, the plants have to develop their seeds in the soil, and then they can grow. Sometimes you can also make bulbous plants grow in water, but you have to take special measures for that, don't you. In nature, it is mainly the case that plants have to be placed in the soil and have to get their strength to grow from there.

What happens, gentlemen, when a seed is placed in the earth? There this seed is really placed in the beneficence of absorbing these forces given by the sun to the earth. The plant seed, in particular, really absorbs these forces that come from the sun into the earth.

With animals, it is much more difficult. Those animals that are actually in the earth, such as earthworms and the like, also easily absorb this power. That is why they all reproduce very prolifically, all the animals that are either very close to the earth or in the earth. Worms are also such that they have an awful lot of offspring, and for example just such worms, which unfortunately can also get into the human intestines, produce an awful lot of offspring, and man must constantly exert his own powers so that these worms do not produce an awful lot of offspring. So that if you have worms inside you, you have to use almost all your vital forces to kill these horror stories that you have inside you.

Yes, but plants are able to grow out of the ground (see drawing); down there is the root, then they grow out of the ground, and then they have the leaves, then they develop the flowers and new seeds. But, gentlemen, you know very well that when the flower begins to develop, the plant no longer grows upwards. That is very interesting. The seed of the plant, the germ, is placed in the soil; the stalk grows out of it, leaves, green leaves, and then the flower comes. There the growth is stopped, and the plant now quickly produces the seed. If it did not produce the seed quickly, the sun would use all its strength on these petals, which would be infertile. The plant would get a huge, beautiful flower at the top, with many colors, but the seed would not be able to develop. The plant finally gathers all its strength to produce the seed quickly.

You see, the sun that comes from outside has the peculiarity of making plants beautiful. When we find beautiful plants in the meadow, it is the external sun with its rays that brings out these beautiful colors. But it would make the plants die with it, just as it makes the oyster die with the oyster shell, dries up.

That is why you can see this all over the world. You can see this effect of the sun particularly well when you come to hot, equatorial regions; there all the birds are in the most wonderful colors. That is the effect of the external sun. These feathers are all beautifully colored, but they no longer contain any life force. The life force is most dead in the feathers.

And so it is with the plant. When it grows out of the ground, it has abundant life force. Then it loses more and more of it and in the end it has to gather all its strength; it still puts the very little bit of life force into the seed. And the sun makes beautiful leaves, colorful flowers, but in doing so it kills the plant. There is nothing of reproductive capacity in the colored petals.

But what does the plant do when its seed is placed in the earth? It does not just allow itself to be placed in the earth, but it brings forth growth in the leaves; it brings that forth. If I draw something green, the forces of the sun, that is, warmth, light and so on, develop it. So the forces of the sun rise up in the plant. The plant takes these with it in the seed, while the solar forces that come from outside kill the plant, so that a very beautiful flower arises. But in the middle of it all there is still the seed, which comes from the solar warmth stored up in the middle of winter. The seed does not come from this year's sun. That is just a misconception. The beautiful blossom comes from this year's sun; but the seed comes from the solar warmth of the previous year, which still has the strength that the sun first gave to the earth. The plant carries this through its entire body.

This would not be so easy for animals. The animal depends on the fact that this solar warmth comes more from outside, more from the earth, and is only refreshed. This is because the animal does not absorb the forces of the sun as directly as the plant. But the plant carries the warmth of the previous year's sun through its own body up to the seed in the flower, which has accumulated in the earth.

If you look at this story correctly – it is extraordinarily interesting, wonderfully interesting – then you say to yourself: plants and animals reproduce. They could not reproduce if the sun did not work. If there were no sun, they could not reproduce. But the sun, which is out there in the sky, apart from the earth, it is precisely what kills the ability to reproduce. It is the same as with carbonic acid: when we inhale carbonic acid, it kills us; when we have it inside us, it invigorates us. When the earth receives the sun's rays from outside, its animals and plants are killed; when the earth can give the animals and plants from its interior what is in the sun, they are invigorated and stimulated to reproduce. You can see that in plants; they develop seeds capable of reproduction only from the power of the sun, which they take with them from before, from the previous summer. What makes the plant beautiful this year comes from this year's sun. It is like that in general: the inner life grows from the past, and one becomes beautiful through the present,

Now, gentlemen, the elephant with its thick skin, but the little warmth from the earth and the little sun inside, which he gets from the earth, would be of little use to him, because he is a pachyderm. These forces do not pass through him so easily. He must have stored up a great deal of his own semen from earlier. He has stored up lunar forces. He needs them, of course, for maternal, for female reproduction. He has stored them up. The moon has emerged from the earth, and the animals that reproduce have the lunar forces within them.

You see, there is something that must be taken into account. Of course, someone could come and say: There is such a stupid fellow who says about the former, the earlier lunar forces, that such old forces still live in the eggs, in the reproductive forces. This stupid fellow claims that the present reproductive forces are from the past. – I would simply say to that person: Have you never seen that something that is alive now has something in it that is from the past? – I would show him a boy who looks so much like his father that he is, as they say, the spitting image. Yes, if you then go back – the father could even have already died; someone could have known the father when the father himself was a boy as small as the boy is now, and the person in question could say: Yes, the boy is the spitting image of his father. – But he looks just like him, the way the father was when he himself was a little boy. What you saw there thirty or forty years ago is still in the little boy now! The forces of the past are always still in what lives in the present. And so it is with the reproductive forces. What is in the present comes from the past.

You know, it was considered a particularly strong superstition that the moon should affect the weather. Well, there is also a great deal of superstition in that. But once upon a time there were two scholars in Germany, at the University of Leipzig, one of whom – his name was Fechner – said to himself: perhaps there is a grain of truth in this superstition that the moon affects the weather. So he made a note of what the weather was like at full moon and what the weather was like at new moon, and found that There is a difference; it rains more when the moon is full than when it is new. That is what he found out. You don't have to believe that yet. Such notes are not very convincing. In real science, you have to work much, much more precisely. But he did say that you just have to continue such investigations and see if it doesn't come out that the moon affects the weather.

Now at the same University of Leipzig was another man who thought he was much cleverer – Schleiden was his name. He said: Now even my colleagues are starting to talk about the moon having an effect on the weather. Gosh, that's not true, we have to fight against that with all our might! – Then the Fechner said: Well, the dispute will remain between us men, but we also have women. – You see, that was still in earlier times. When the two university professors lived in Leipzig, the university professors' wives still had an old custom in the city. They put their troughs, their vats, in the rain to get water to wash in. They collected it because water was not easy to come by in old Leipzig. There were no water pipes back then. So Professor Fechner said: Yes, our wives should sort this out. Professor Schleiden and Professor Fechner should do it this way: so that they always get the same amount of rainwater, Professor Schleiden can put out her troughs at the new moon, and my wife can put out her troughs at the full moon! — He said to himself: according to my calculations, she will then get the most rainwater.

Well, you see, the women didn't go along with it. They didn't want to go along with their husbands' science. They couldn't be convinced at all. So it came about in a curious way that a person, even when science is in the form of a man, does not believe in it, like Mrs. Schleiden, and does not say to herself: I get just as much water at the new moon as at the full moon. Instead, she wanted to put out her watering troughs even at the full moon, despite her husband's terrible ranting against Fechner.

That is something that proves nothing. But, you see, it is strange that even today, high and low tides are still connected with the sun and moon. So that one can say: tides occur quite differently during one quarter of the moon than during any other quarter of the moon. That is connected. But, gentlemen, it does not happen because the moon shines on the sea somewhere and that causes a flood, but that is an old story.

When the moon was still inside the earth, it developed its powers and caused the tides. And the earth still has these remnants of the forces themselves, through which the tide arises. No wonder, the earth is already doing it independently. Today it is a superstition to believe that the moon has an effect on the earth. But it once had an effect on the earth when it was still inside, when everything still had an effect on the earth; and the earth is still in this context inside. That is why it determines the tides. But that is only seemingly the case. Just as I look at my watch, I also say: it throws me out at ten o'clock to the hall. — So today the phases of the moon coincide with the tides, because once they were interdependent.

And so it is with the reproductive powers, insofar as they depend on the moon, insofar as they are feminine. And so it is with the reproductive powers, insofar as they depend on the sun, that is, they come from the solar power that is inside the earth.

But all the animals that reproduce so prolifically, up to the trillions, that is, those that can use these solar forces stored up by the sun through the earth, are lower animals. The higher animals and humans have these reproductive powers protected within. Some of the solar power still comes in and constantly refreshes these powers. Without this refreshment, they would not be there either. But from what solar power is inside the earth today, they would not be able to have their reproductive powers properly.

The plant can have them because it carries what lives in the earth from winter into summer through its own body. The plant has the reproductive power from the previous year.

But the elephant cannot have them from the previous year. It has it from a time millions of years ago, and it has it in its reproductive seed, which it in turn inherits from the elephant father to the elephant son. There it is inside. But from what time does it have it inside! Well, just as the plant has the reproductive power of the previous year within it, so the elephant has the reproductive power of millions of years within it. That is why the plant and the lower animals can reproduce from it, because they can still use the power stored up by the earth. These are tremendously strong reproductive powers. Those animals that depend on storing very ancient forces within themselves can only reproduce weakly.

But let us now go back to the time when there were such giant oysters: No sooner had such an oyster reached the point of being illuminated by the sun than it lost its inner strength and could only use the one that came from the earth. But it could still use it because the oyster was open at the bottom. When this oyster was as large as present-day France, it was open at the bottom and could absorb the earth forces that came from the sun. When these animals had then transformed themselves into megatheriums, into ichthyosaurs, when the sun shone on them from above, and they were no longer open from below, they were dependent on the reproductive power that they had within themselves, which was at most refreshed by the sun.

Yes, gentlemen, there must have been a time when animals acquired reproductive powers that they could not get when the sun shines from outside. There must have been a time when the sun was inside the earth, when not just a little of the sun's energy came into the earth, which remains in the earth in winter, for example, for the potatoes; but there was a time when the whole sun was inside the earth.

Now you will say: But the physicists say that the sun is so terribly hot, and if the sun were inside the earth, it would have burned everything. — Yes, gentlemen, you only know that from the physicists. But the physicists would be extremely astonished if they could see what the sun really looks like. If they could build a balloon and go up there, they would not find that the sun is so hot, but the sun is full of life forces, and it develops heat as the sun's rays pass through air and everything. That's where it develops heat first. So when the sun was once inside the earth, it was full of life forces. It could not only give the little life force that it can give today, but when the sun was once inside the earth, these living beings, animals and plants that were there at the time, could get enough of what the sun gave them, because the sun was inside the earth itself. But then these oysters did not develop any shells either, but were just slime.

And now imagine: there was the Earth, the Moon in it, the Sun was inside the Earth, oysters developed that had no shells, but were slime. Mucus formed; it smeared off, separated, and an oyster formed again, and again an oyster formed, and so on. But they were so huge that they could not be distinguished from each other. They were adjacent to each other. What must the earth have looked like back then? It was similar to our brain, where the cells also lie next to each other. There, too, one cell lies next to the other; only that they die, whereas in the past, when the sun was inside the earth, oyster cells, huge cells, were one next to the other, and the sun developed its powers, which it was constantly developing because it was inside the earth. Yes, gentlemen, now consider this: there was the earth (see drawing), here a giant oyster, there another giant oyster, again one, all such giant slime balls next to each other, and they were always reproducing. And today's oysters reproduce so quickly that they can have a million offspring in a short time; the oysters of that time reproduced even more quickly. Gosh, no sooner had the old oyster arrived than the young were already there, and they had young of their own and so on. The old ones had to dissolve again. If someone had looked at it from the outside, how this huge lump of earth was there like a big brain, of course much softer, much slimier than a brain today, how a giant oyster reproduced so quickly - but each one could have had a million offspring again - he would have seen: everyone had to defend themselves against the others because they bumped into each other. And if someone had come, an especially curious one, and had watched from a foreign star, he would have seen: There below, floating in space, is a giant body, but it is all life, constantly producing life, not just consisting of millions of nested oysters, but constantly reproducing. And what would he have seen? Exactly the same thing – only on a gigantic scale – as can be seen today when a human being's tiny egg is examined in the early stages! There, too, it is only a very small-scale process. There are also these small cell mucus vesicles that multiply rapidly.

166 otherwise the human being would not be able to reach his size in the first few weeks in which he is carried. The cells are so small that they have to multiply very quickly. If you had looked at the earth at that time, you would have seen the image of the earth: a giant animal, and within it the forces of the sun and the moon, in the whole earth inside.

You see, I have now shown you how to go back to the time of the earth's development when the earth, sun and moon were still one body. But, gentlemen, I would like to say: in Faust, if you have read or ever read it, Gretchen, who is sixteen years old, says to Faust when he is explaining his religion: “The pastor also says something like that; but it is a little different.” So you could also say: “Yes, the professors also say something like that, but it is a little different.” You say: “Once the sun was one body with the earth and the moon.” — That's what they say; because they say, isn't it: This sun, it was a giant body; then it turned, and then the earth split off as it turned. Then the earth turned further, and then the moon split off again. —- So basically, they also say that all three were once one body.

Then people come and say: That can be proved; it is already being proved to schoolchildren. It can be demonstrated terribly nicely. You take a small drop of oil – which floats on water – and then you take a sheet of card and cut out a small circle, push a pin through the top; afterwards you put it into the water and turn the head of the pin. The little oltröpfelchen split off and go around like that. There you have it, they say, there you see it: that happened once in the world! There was a huge gas ball in the world, just gas; but the story turned, and it was mobile. And then the outer things were just split off, our earth from the sun, just as these oltröpfchen were split off. They can prove that in school. And the children, who believe in authority, say: It happened quite naturally; there was once a huge ball of gas that was rotating, and that's how the planets were split off. We saw it ourselves, how the droplets were split off.

But now you must also ask the children: Did you see the schoolmaster up there turning the pinhead? So you have to imagine a giant schoolmaster who turned the gas ball at that time, otherwise the planets would not have been able to split off! — The giant schoolmaster - in the Middle Ages he was depicted: that was the Lord God with the long beard. That was the giant schoolmaster, and these people forget him.

But it is no explanation to assume a giant gas ball that rotates, and that could only rotate if a giant world schoolmaster had once existed. That is no explanation. But, gentlemen, it is an explanation when you come to the conclusion that the sun and the moon were connected to the earth and that it moved itself. That could move. A ball of gas cannot move by itself. But what I have explained to you here could move. In those days it did not need a world school master, but it was alive in itself. The Earth was once a living being, and indeed one such as a seed is today, and it contained the Sun and the Moon. The Sun and the Moon emerged from the Earth, leaving their inheritance behind, so that today the germinating power, protected in the maternal and paternal bodies of the human being, these powers, which once could come directly from the Sun, still reproduce and today develop the animals, the seeds and eggs in themselves, carry the ancient solar power in their egg and seminal fluids, carry it within themselves as an inheritance from ancient times, from the times when the earth itself still had the sun and moon within it.

You see, that is a real explanation, and only if you understand it that way can you really understand. Then you realize that there was once a time when the moon flew out and the earth flew out of the sun with the moon. We will discuss this matter further next Saturday at nine o'clock. It will still be a bit difficult, but nevertheless I believe that history looks like this so that you can understand it.