354. The Evolution of the Earth and Man and The Influence of the Stars: The weather and its causes
13 Sep 1924, Dornach Tr. Gladys Hahn Rudolf Steiner |
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Suppose you have a disc with, let's say, four colors on it—red, yellow, green, blue. If you rotate the disc slowly, you can easily distinguish all the four colors. If you rotate it more quickly, it is difficult but still possible to distinguish the colors. |
What the weather is likely to be can be discovered by watching tree frogs, green tree frogs. I've made tiny ladders and observed whether they ran up or down. The tree frog is very sensitive to what the weather is going to be. |
354. The Evolution of the Earth and Man and The Influence of the Stars: The weather and its causes
13 Sep 1924, Dornach Tr. Gladys Hahn Rudolf Steiner |
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Rudolf Steiner: Good morning, gentlemen! Does anyone have a question? Question: Has Mars' proximity to the earth anything to do with the weather? The summer has been so unbelievably bad! Have planetary influences in general any effect upon the weather? Dr. Steiner: The weather conditions which have shown such irregularities through the years, particularly recent years, do have something to do with conditions in the heavens, but not specifically with Mars. When these irregularities are observed we must take very strongly into consideration a phenomenon of which little account is usually taken, although it is constantly spoken of. I mean the phenomenon of sunspots. The sunspots are dark patches, varying in size and duration, which appear on the surface of the sun at intervals of about ten or eleven or twelve years. Naturally, these dark patches impede the sun's radiations, for, as you can well imagine, at the places where its surface is dark, the sun does not radiate. If in any given year the number of such dark patches increases, the sun's radiation is affected. And in view of the enormous significance the sun has for the earth, this is a matter of importance. In another respect this phenomenon of sunspots is also noteworthy. In the course of centuries their number has increased, and the number varies from year to year. This is due to the fact that the position of the heavenly bodies changes as they revolve, and the aspect they present is therefore always changing. The sunspots do not appear at the same place every year, but—according to how the sun is turning—in the course of years they appear in that place again. In the course of centuries they have increased enormously in number and this certainly means something for the relationship of the earth to the sun. Thousands of years ago there were no spots on the sun. They began to appear, they have increased in number, and they will continue to increase. Hence there will come a time when the sun will radiate less and less strongly, and finally, when it has become completely dark, it will cease to radiate any light at all. Therefore we have to reckon with the fact that in the course of time, a comparatively long time, the source of the light and life that now issues from the sun will be physically obliterated for the earth. And so the phenomenon of the sunspots—among other things—shows clearly that one can speak of the earth coming to an end. Everything of the earth that is spiritual will then take on a different form, just as I have told you that in olden times it had a different form. Just as a human being grows old and changes, so the sun and the whole planetary system will grow old and change. The planet Mars, as I said, is not very strongly connected with weather conditions; Mars is more connected with phenomena that belong to the realm of life, such as the appearance and development of the grubs and cockchafers every four years. And please do not misunderstand this. You must not compare it directly with what astronomy calculates as being the period of revolution of Mars,21 because the actual position of Mars comes into consideration here. Mars stands in the same position relatively to the earth and the sun every four years, so that the grubs which take four years to develop into cockchafers are also connected with this. If you take two revolutions of Mars—requiring four years and three months—you get the period between the cockchafers and the grubs, and the other way around, between the grubs and the cockchafers. In connection with the smaller heavenly bodies you must think of the finer differentiations in earth phenomena, whereas the sun and moon are connected with cruder, more tangible phenomena such as weather, and so on. A good or bad vintage year, for example, is connected with phenomena such as the sunspots, also with the appearance of comets. Only when they are observed in connection with phenomena in the heavens can happenings on the earth be studied properly. Now of course still other matters must be considered if one is looking for the reasons for abnormal weather. For naturally the weather conditions—which concern us so closely because health and a great deal else is affected by them—depend upon very many factors. You must think of the following. Going back in the evolution of the earth we come to a time of about six to ten thousand years ago. Six to ten thousand years ago there were no mountains in this region where we are now living. You would not have been able to climb the Swiss mountains then, because you would not have existed in the way you do now. You could not have lived here or in other European lands because at that time these regions were covered with ice. It was the so-called Ice Age. This Ice Age was responsible for the fact that the greatest part of the population then living in Europe either perished or was obliged to move to other regions. These Ice Age conditions will be repeated, in a somewhat different form, in about five or six or seven thousand years—not in exactly the same regions of the earth as formerly, but there will again be an Ice Age. It must never be imagined that evolution proceeds in an unbroken line. To understand how the earth actually evolves it must be realized that interruptions such as the Ice Age do indeed take place in the straightforward process of evolution. What is the reason? The reason is that the earth's surface is constantly rising and sinking. If you go up a mountain which need by no means be very high, you will still find an Ice Age, even today, for the top is perpetually covered with snow and ice. If the mountain is high enough, it has snow and ice on it. But it is only when, in the course of a long time, the surface of the earth has risen to the height of a mountain that we can really speak of snow and ice on a very large scale. So it is, gentlemen! It happens. The surface of the earth rises and sinks. Some six thousand or more years ago the level of this region where we are now living was high; then it sank, but it is now already rising again, for the lowest point was reached around the year 1250. That was the lowest point. The temperature here then was extremely pleasant, much warmer than it is today. The earth's surface is now slowly rising, so that after five or six thousand years there will again be a kind of Ice Age. From this you will realize that when weather conditions are observed over ten-year periods, they are not the same; the weather is changing all the time. Now if in a given year, in accordance with the height of the earth's surface a certain warm temperature prevails over regions of the earth, there are still other factors to be considered. Suppose you look at the earth. At the equator it is hot; above and below, at the Poles it is cold. In the middle zone, the earth is warm. When people travel to Africa or India, they travel into the heat; when they travel to the North Pole or the South Pole, they travel into the cold. You certainly know this from accounts of polar expeditions. Think of the distribution of heat and cold when you begin to heat a room. It doesn't get warm all over right away. If you would get a stepladder and climb to the top of it, you would find that down below it may still be quite cold while up above at the ceiling it is already warm. Why is that? It is because warm air, and every gaseous substance when it is warmed, becomes lighter and rises; cold air stays down below because it is heavier. Warmth always ascends. So in the middle zone of the earth the warm air is always rising. But when it is up above it wafts toward the North Pole: winds blow from the middle zone of the earth toward the North Pole. These are warm winds, warm air. But the cold air at the North Pole tries to warm itself and streams downward toward the empty spaces left in the middle zone. Cold air is perpetually streaming from the North Pole to the equator, and warm air in the opposite direction, from the equator to the North Pole. These are the currents called the trade winds. In a region such as ours they are not very noticeable, but very much so in others. Not only the air, but the water of the sea, too, streams from the middle zone of the earth toward the North Pole and back again. That phenomenon is, naturally, distributed in the most manifold ways, but it is nevertheless there. But now there are also electric currents in the universe; for when we generate wireless electric currents on the earth we are only imitating what is also present in some way in the universe. Suppose a current from the universe is present, let's say, here in Switzerland, where we have a certain temperature. If a current of this kind comes in such a way that it brings warmth with it, the temperature here rises a little. Thus the warmth on earth is also redistributed by currents from the universe. They too influence the weather. In addition, however, you must consider that such electromagnetic currents in the universe are also influenced by the sunspots. Wherever the sun has spots, there are the currents which affect the weather. These particular influences are of great importance. Now in regard to the division of the seasons—spring, summer, autumn, winter—there is a certain regularity in the universe. We can indicate in our calendar that spring will begin at a definite time, and so on. This is regulated by the more obvious relationships in which the heavenly bodies stand to one another. But the influences resulting from this are few. Not many of the stars can be said to have an influence; most of them are far distant and their influence is only of a highly spiritual character. But in regard to weather conditions the following may be said. Suppose you have a disc with, let's say, four colors on it—red, yellow, green, blue. If you rotate the disc slowly, you can easily distinguish all the four colors. If you rotate it more quickly, it is difficult but still possible to distinguish the colors. But if you rotate the disc very rapidly indeed, all the colors run into each other and you cannot possibly distinguish one from the other. Likewise, the seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter can be distinguished because the determining factors are more or less obvious. But the weather depends upon so many circumstances that the mind cannot grasp all of them; it is impossible, therefore, to mark anything definite in the calendar in regard to it—while this is obviously quite possible in regard to the seasons. The weather is a complicated matter because so many factors are involved. But in old folklore something was known about these things. Old folklore should not be cast aside altogether. When the conditions of life were simpler, people took an interest in things far more than they do today. Today our interest in a subject lasts for 24 hours ... then the next newspaper comes and brings a new interest! We forget what happens—it is really so! The conditions of our life are so terribly complicated. The lives of our grandparents, not to speak of our great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents, were quite different. They would sit together in a room around and behind the stove and tell stories, often stories of olden times. And they knew how the weather had been a long time ago, because they knew that it was connected with the stars; they observed a certain regularity in the weather. And among these great-grandparents there may have been one or two “wiseacres”, as they are called. By a “wiseacre” I mean someone who was a little more astute than the others, someone who had a certain cleverness. Such a person would talk in an interesting way. A “wiseacre” might have said to a grandchild or great-grandchild: Look, there's the moon—the moon, you know, has an influence on the weather. This was obvious to people in those days, and they also knew that rainwater is better for washing clothes than water fetched from the spring. So they put pails out to collect the rainwater to wash the clothes—my own mother used to do this. Rainwater has a different quality, it has much more life in it than ordinary water; it absorbs bluing and other additives far better. And it wouldn't be a bad idea if we ourselves did the same thing, for washing with hard water can, as you know, ruin your clothes. So you see, these things used to be known; it was science in the 19th century that first caused people to have different views. Some of you already know the story I told once about the two professors at the Leipzig University:22 one was called Schleiden and the other Fechner. Fechner declared that the moon has an influence on the earth's weather. He had observed this and had compiled statistics on it. The other professor, Schleiden, was a very clever man. He said: That is sheer stupidity and superstition; there is no such influence. Now when professors quarrel, nothing very much is gained by it and that's mostly the case also when other people quarrel! But both these professors were married; there was a Frau Professor Schleiden and a Frau Professor Fechner. In Leipzig at that time people still collected rainwater for washing clothes. So Professor Fechner said to his wife: That man Schleiden insists that one can get just as much rainwater at the time of new moon as at full moon; so let Frau Professor Schleiden put out her pail and collect the rainwater at the time of the next new moon, and you collect it at the time of full moon, when I maintain that you will get more rainwater. Well, Frau Professor Schleiden heard of this proposal and said: Oh no! I will put my pail out when it is full moon and Frau Professor Fechner shall put hers out at the time of new moon! You see, the wives of the two professors actually needed the water! The husbands could squabble theoretically, but their wives decided according to practical needs. Our great-grandparents knew these things and said to their grandchildren: The moon has an influence upon rainwater. But remember this: everything connected with the moon is repeated every 18 or 19 years. For example, in a certain year, on a certain day, there are sun eclipses and on another day moon eclipses; this happens regularly in the course of 18 to 19 years. All phenomena connected with the positions of the stars in the heavens are repeated regularly. Why, then, should not weather conditions be repeated, since they depend upon the moon? After 18 or 19 years there must be something in the weather similar to what happened 18 or 19 years before. So as everything repeats itself, these people observed other repetitions too, and indicated in the calendar certain particulars of what the weather had been 18 or 19 years earlier, and now expected the same kind of weather after the lapse of this period. The only reason the calendar was called the Hundred-Years' Calendar was that 100 is a number which is easy to keep in mind; other figures too were included in the calendar according to which predictions were made about the weather. Naturally, such things need not be quite exact, because again the conditions are complicated. Nevertheless, the predictions were useful, for people acted accordingly and did indeed succeed in producing better growing conditions. Through such observations something can certainly be done for the fertility of the soil. Weather conditions do depend upon the sun and moon, for the repetitions of the positions of the moon have to do with the relation of these two heavenly bodies. In the case of the other stars and their relative positions, there are different periods of repetition. One such repetition is that of Venus, the morning and evening star. Suppose the sun is here and the earth over there. Between them is Venus. Venus moves to this point or that, and can be seen accordingly; but when Venus is here, it stands in front of the sun and covers part of it. This is called a “Venus transit”.23 (Venus, of course, looks much smaller than the moon, although it is, in fact, larger.) These Venus transits are very interesting because for one thing they take place only once every hundred years or so, and for another, very significant things can be observed when Venus is passing in front of the sun. One can see what the sun's halo looks like when Venus is standing in front of the sun. This event brings about great changes. The descriptions of it are very interesting. And as these Venus transits take place only once in about a hundred years, they are an example of the phenomena about which science is obliged to say that it believes some things that it has not actually perceived! If the scientists declare that they believe only things they have seen, an astronomer who was born, say, in the year 1890 could not lecture today about a Venus transit, for that has not occurred in the meantime, and presumably he will have died before the next Venus transit, which will apparently take place in the year 2004. There, even the scientist is obliged to believe in something he does not see! Here again, when Venus is having a special effect upon the sun because it is shutting out the light, an influence is exercised upon weather conditions that occurs only once about every hundred years. There is something remarkable about these Venus transits and in earlier times they were regarded as being extraordinarily interesting. Now when the moon is full, you see a shining orb in the sky; at other times you see a shining part of an orb. But at new moon, if you train your eyes a little—I don't know whether you know this—you can even see the rest of the new moon. If you look carefully when the moon is waxing, you can also see the other part of the moon—it appears bluish-black. Even at new moon a bluish-black disc can be seen by practiced eyes; as a rule it is not noticed, but it can be seen. Why is it that this disc is visible at all? It is because the part of the moon that is otherwise dark is still illuminated by the earth. The moon is about 240,000 miles from the earth and is not, properly speaking, illuminated by it; but the tiny amount of light that falls upon the moon from the earth makes this part of the moon visible. But now no light at all radiates from the earth to Venus. Venus has to rely upon the light of the sun; no light streams to it from the earth. Venus is the morning and evening star. It changes just as the moon changes but not within the same periods. Only the changes are not seen because Venus is very far away and all that is visible is a gleaming star. Looked at through a darkened telescope Venus can be seen to change, just as the moon changes. But in spite of the fact that Venus cannot be illuminated from the earth, part of it is always visible as a dull bluish light. The sun's light is seen at the semi-circle above—but this is not the whole of Venus; where Venus is not being shone upon by the sun, a bluish light is seen. Now, gentlemen, there are certain minerals—for instance, in Bologna—which contain barium compounds. Barium is a metallic element. If light is allowed to fall on these minerals for a certain time, and the room is then darkened, you see a bluish light being thrown off by them. One says that the mineral, after it has been illuminated, becomes phosphorescent. It has caught the light, “eaten” some of the light, and is now spitting it out again when the room is made dark. This is of course also happening before the room is dark, but the light is then not visible to the eye. The mineral takes something in and gives something back. As it cannot take in a great deal, what it gives back is also not very much, and this is not seen when the room is light, just as a feeble candle-light is not seen in strong sunlight. But the mineral is phosphorescent and if the room is darkened, one sees the light it radiates. From this you will certainly be able to understand where the light of Venus comes from. While it receives no light from this side, Venus is illuminated from the other side by the sun, and it eats up the sun's light, so to say. Then, when you see it on a dark night, it is throwing off the light, it becomes phosphorescent. In days when people had better eyes than they have now, they saw the phosphorescence of Venus. Their eyes were really better in those days; it was in the 16th century that spectacles first began to be used, and they would certainly have come earlier if people had needed them! Inventions and discoveries always come when they are needed by human beings. And so in earlier times the changes that come about when phosphorescent Venus is in transit across the sun were also seen. And in still earlier times the conclusion was drawn that because the sun's light is influenced at that time by Venus, this same influence will be there again after about a hundred years; and so there will be similar weather conditions again in a region where a transit of Venus is seen to be taking place. (As you know, eclipses of the sun are not visible from everywhere, but only in certain regions.) In a hundred years, therefore, the same weather conditions will be there—so the people concluded—and they drew up the Hundred Years' Calendar accordingly. Later on, people who did not understand the thing at all, made a Hundred Years' Calendar every year, then they found that the details given in the calendar did not tally with the actual facts. It could just as well have said: “If the cock crows on the dunghill, the weather changes, or stays as it is!” But originally, the principle of the thing was perfectly correct. The people perceived that when Venus transits the sun, this produces weather conditions that are repeated somewhere after a hundred years. Since the weather of the whole year is affected, then the influences are at work not only during the few days when Venus is in transit across the sun but they last for a longer period. So you see from what I have said that to know by what laws the weather is governed during some week or day, one would have to ask many questions: How many years ago was there a Venus transit? How many years ago was there a sun-eclipse? What is the present phase of the moon? I have mentioned only a few points. One would have to know how the trade winds are affected by magnetism and electricity, and so on. All these questions would have to be answered if one wanted to determine the regularity of weather conditions. It is a subject that leads to infinity! People will eventually give up trying to make definite predictions about the weather. Although we hear about the regularity of all the phenomena with which astronomy is concerned—astronomy, as you know, is the science of the stars—the science that deals with factors influencing the weather (meteorology, as it is called) is by no means definite or certain. If you get hold of a book on meteorology, you'll be exasperated. You'll be exclaiming that it's useless, because everyone says something different. That is not the case with astronomy. I have now given you a brief survey of the laws affecting wind and weather and the like. But still it must be added that the forces arising in the atmosphere itself have a tremendously strong influence on the weather. Think of a very hot summer when there is constant lightning out of the clouds and constant thunder growling: there you have influences on the weather that come from the immediate vicinity of the earth. Modern science holds a strange view of this. It says that it is electricity that causes the lightning to flash out of the clouds. Now you probably know that electricity is explained to children at school by rubbing a glass rod with a piece of cloth smeared with some kind of amalgam; after it has been rubbed for some time, the rod begins to attract little scraps of paper, and after still more rubbing, sparks are emitted, and so on. Such experiments with electricity are made in school, but care has to be taken that everything has been thoroughly wiped beforehand, because the objects that are to become electric must not even be moist, let alone wet; they must be absolutely dry, even warm and dry, for otherwise nothing will be got out of the glass rod or the stick of sealing-wax. From this you can gather that electricity is conducted away by water and fluids. Everyone knows this, and naturally the scientists know it, for it is they who make the experiments. In spite of this, however, they declare that the lightning comes out of the clouds—and clouds are certainly wet! If it were a fact that lightning comes out of the clouds, “someone” would have had to rub them long enough with a gigantic towel to make them quite dry! But the matter is not so simple. A stick of sealing wax is rubbed and electricity comes out of it; and so the clouds rub against one another and electricity comes out of them! But if the sealing wax is just slightly damp, electricity does not come out of it. And yet electricity is alleged to come out of the clouds—which are all moisture! This shows you what kind of nonsense is taught nowadays. The fact of the matter is this: You can heat air and it becomes hotter and hotter. Suppose you have this air in a closed container. The hotter you make the air, the greater is the pressure it exerts against the walls of the container. The hotter you make it, the sooner it reaches the point where, if the walls of the container are not strong enough, the hot air will burst them asunder. What's the usual reason for a child's balloon bursting? It's because the air rushes out of it. Now when the air becomes hot it acquires the density, the strength to burst. The lightning process originates in the vicinity of the earth; when the air gets hotter and hotter, it becomes strong enough to burst. At very high levels the air may for some reason become intensely hot—this can happen, for example, as the result of certain influences in winter when somewhere or other the air has been very strongly compressed. This intense heat will press out in all directions, just as the hot air will press against the sides of the container. But suppose you have a layer of warm air, and there is a current of wind sweeping away the air. The hot air streams toward the area where the air is thinnest. Lightning is the heat generated in the air itself that makes its way to where there is a kind of hole in the surrounding air, because at that spot the air is thinnest. So we must say: Lightning is not caused by electricity, but by the fact that the air is getting rid of, emptying away, it's own heat. Just because of this intensely violent movement, the electric currents that are always present in the air receive a stimulus. It is the lightning that stimulates electricity; lightning itself is not electricity. All this shows you that warmth is differently distributed in the air everywhere; this again influences the weather. These are influences that come from the vicinity of the earth and operate there. You will realize now how many things influence the weather and that today there are still no correct opinions about these influences—I have told you about the entirely distorted views that are held about lightning. A change must come about in this domain, for spiritual science, anthroposophy, surveys a much wider field and makes thinking more mobile. We cannot, of course, expect the following to be verified in autopsies, but if one investigates with the methods of spiritual science, one finds that in the last hundred years human brains have become much stiffer, alarmingly stiffer, than they were formerly. One finds, for example, that the ancient Egyptians thought quite definite things, of which they were just as sure as we ourselves are sure of the things we think about. But today we are less able to understand things in the winter than in the summer. People pay no attention to such matters. If they would adjust themselves to the laws prevailing in the world, they would arrange life differently. In school, for instance, different subjects would be studied in the winter than in the summer. (This is already being done to some extent in the Waldorf School.)24 It is not simply a matter of taking botany in the summer because the plants bloom then, but some of the subjects that are easier should be transferred to the winter, and some that are more difficult to the spring and autumn, because the power to understand depends upon this. It is because our brains are harder than men's brains were in earlier times. What we can think about in a real sense only in summer, the ancient Egyptians were able to think about all year round. Such things can be discovered when one observes the various matters connected with the seasons of the year and the weather. Is there anything that is not clear? Are you satisfied with what has been said? I have answered the question at some length. The world is a living whole and in explaining one thing one is naturally led to other things, because everything is related. Question: Herr Burle says that his friends may laugh at his question—he had mentioned the subject two or three years ago. He would like to know whether there is any truth in the saying that when sugar is put into a cup of coffee and it dissolves properly, there will be fine weather, and when it does not dissolve properly there will be bad weather. Dr. Steiner: I have never made this experiment, so I don't know whether there is anything in it or not. But the fact of the sugar dissolving evenly or unevenly might indicate something—if, that is to say, there is anything in the statement at all. I speak quite hypothetically, because I don't know whether there is any foundation for the statement, but we will presume that there is. There is something else that certainly has meaning, for I have observed it myself. What the weather is likely to be can be discovered by watching tree frogs, green tree frogs. I've made tiny ladders and observed whether they ran up or down. The tree frog is very sensitive to what the weather is going to be. This need not surprise you, for in certain places it has happened that animals in their stalls suddenly became restless and tried to get out; those that were not tethered ran away quickly. Human beings stayed where they were. And then there was an earthquake! The animals knew it beforehand, because something was already happening in nature in advance. Human beings with their crude noses and other crude senses do not detect anything, but animals do. So naturally the tree frog, too, has a definite “nose” for what is coming. The word Witterung (weather) is used in such a connection because it means “smelling” the weather that is coming. Now there are many things in the human being of which he himself has no inkling. He simply does not observe them. When we get out of bed on a fine summer day and look out the window, we are in quite a different humor than when a storm is raging. We don't notice that this feeling penetrates to the tips of our fingers. What the animals sense, we also sense; it is only that we don't bring it up to our consciousness. So just suppose, Herr Burle, that although you know nothing about it, your fingertips, like the tree frogs, have a delicate feeling for the kind of weather that is coming. On a day when the weather is obviously going to be fine and you are therefore in a good humor, you put the sugar into your coffee with a stronger movement than on another day. So the way the sugar dissolves does not necessarily depend upon the coffee or the sugar, but upon a force that is in yourself. The force I'm speaking of lies in your fingertips themselves; it is not the force that is connected with your consciously throwing the sugar into the coffee. It lies in your fingertips, and is not the same on a day when the weather is going to be fine as when the weather is going to be bad. So the dissolving of the sugar does not depend upon the way you consciously put it into your coffee but upon the feeling in your fingertips, upon how your fingertips are “sensing” the weather. This force in your fingertips is not the same as the force you are consciously applying when you put the sugar into your coffee. It is a different force, a different movement. Think of the following: A group of people sits around a table; sentimental music, or perhaps the singing of a hymn, puts them into a suitable mood. Then delicate vibrations begin to stir in them. Music continues. The people begin to convey their vibrations to the table, and the table begins to dance. This is what may happen at a spiritualistic séance. Movements are set going as the effect of the delicate vibrations produced through the music and the singing. In a similar fashion the weather may also cause very subtle movements, and these in turn may influence what happens with the sugar in the coffee. But I am speaking quite hypothetically because, as I said, I don't know whether it is absolutely correct in the case of which you are speaking. It is more probable that it is a premonition which the person himself has about the weather that affects the sugar—although this is not very probable either. I am saying all this as pure hypothesis. A spiritual scientist has to reject such phenomena until he possesses strict proof of their validity. If I were to tell you in a casual way the things I do tell you, you really wouldn't have to believe any of it. You should only believe me because you know that things which cannot be proved are not accepted by spiritual science. And so as a spiritual scientist I can only accept the story of the coffee if it is definitely proved. In the meantime I can make the comment that one knows, for instance, of the delicate vibrations of the nerves, also that this is how animals know beforehand of some impending event—how even the tree frog begins to tremble and then the leaves on which it sits also begin to tremble. So it could also be—I don't say that it is, but it could be—that when bad weather is coming, the coffee begins to behave differently from the way it behaves when the weather is good. So—let us meet next Wednesday.25 After that, I think we'll be able to have our sessions regularly again.
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272. Faust, the Aspiring Human: A Spiritual-Scientific Explanation of Goethe's “Faust”: Goethe's Insights into the Secrets of Human Existence
09 Sep 1916, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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Beautiful, but now other words follow: Green the field, fruitful; man and herd At once at ease on the newest earth, Immediately settled on the strength of the hill, Which the bustling, industrious people have rolled up. |
Show me the fruit that rots before it's broken, And trees that turn green every day! I'm not deterred by such a task, Mephistopheles replies, I can serve you with such treasures. |
272. Faust, the Aspiring Human: A Spiritual-Scientific Explanation of Goethe's “Faust”: Goethe's Insights into the Secrets of Human Existence
09 Sep 1916, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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after a eurythmic presentation of the scenes “Midnight” and “Entombment” Once again we have allowed a piece of Goethe's 'Faust' to pass before our minds. In the last lecture here, I tried to develop some of the spiritual-scientific principles that can help us understand it when I spoke about the nature of the lemurs, the fat and scrawny devils. On such occasions, we always try not just to seek out something for the understanding of this poetry, but to gain something from the poetry in terms of general spiritual significance, to look into those true realities that Goethe tried to reach with his “Faust”. Today I would like to tie in a few observations with what has just passed before our soul. It may seem significant to us that this scene, which we have just seen come to an end, is not the last scene of Goethe's “Faust”, but that, as we know, it is followed by that other scene that we performed here some time ago. You remember: mountain gorges, forest, rock, solitude, holy anchorites, chorus, echo, forest that staggers along and so on, where we are led through the devout meditation of the Pater ecstaticus, Pater profundus, Pater Seraphicus, through the chorus of the blessed boys , where we meet the angels again, who in the scene we saw today carry Faust's immortal into the upper regions, where we also meet the trinity of the penitent women, Doctor Marianus, and Mater gloriosa as Gretchen's guide until the final chorus, the actual mystical chorus:
All this follows on from the scene we have seen today, which depicts the battle of the spirits of light with the spirits of darkness for the soul of Faust. When attempting to explain Faust, one often proceeds from scene to scene, sometimes even from sentence to sentence, without asking the questions that could be asked and that would actually shed light on this great, powerful work of literature. Today we have seen how Faust's burial took place, how Mephistopheles-Ahriman has lost his game, how the soul has been carried up into the spiritual regions. From a certain point of view, one might ask: Could the Faust epic not actually end here? Do we not now basically know everything that it is about? Do we not know that Mephistopheles has lost his wager, that all the efforts he has made throughout the lifetime of Faust, which he has been able to accompany, are lost, that Faust's soul has been accepted into the region of light, that thus the words spoken by Lessing with regard to a Faust epic vis-à-vis the spirits of darkness: “You shall not win” have been fulfilled? Could we not believe that with this everything is actually over, that the Faust epic has found its end? — The question presents itself to our soul: Why then does the conclusion known to us now follow on from what we have seen today? — And by raising this question and then dealing with its answer, one touches on significant secrets of human life in its connection with the whole world. The fact that Goethe shaped this conclusion of Faust as he did shows precisely how deeply he penetrated into the foundations of his life in an age when spiritual science had not yet come into being, and into the secrets of human existence. Much, much lies in the scene that was presented today, and even more lies in the fact that this scene is followed by other final scenes. Much of it proves that Goethe knew the deepest secrets of existence, but that he was also compelled to present the secrets of existence in such a way that they are only accessible to those who want to delve deeper into spiritual life, into its essence. Quite deliberately, Goethe expressed much of it in veiled terms, as he himself said, enwrapped in the poetry of Faust. Much of what is said in veiled terms, so to speak, triggers hatred and opposition in dull-witted people who, out of fear and laziness, do not want to approach the knowledge of the spiritual world. However, as a result, Goethe's Faust poetry has remained more or less misunderstood for eighty-four years and will only gradually, when we can live towards the future, reveal itself to humanity in its depths. Yes, it can be said that spiritual scientific knowledge will only be able to trigger those artistic perceptions that can convey an understanding of the Faust poetry. Let us first look back at the hauntingly impressive scene in which Faust beholds the four gray women: Want, Guilt, Hardship, and Worry. Let us be clear about the fact that Faust has this experience with the four gray women at a moment when he has gone through many, many spiritual life experiences, or rather, life experiences that have evoked spiritual understanding in him. Goethe imagines his Faust in the time that is presented for Faust through this final scene, having reached the age of one hundred. Today, Faust first stood before us with all the spiritualized experiences in his soul, as he stands on the balcony of his home, which he created at a workplace from which he wanted to do work for the human future. We look at his soul in such a way that all his feelings of satisfaction, all that he has been able to achieve for humanity by wresting a free country from the sea for free men, are summarized in his soul.
Now, seemingly before his eyes, but in reality in an inner vision, what the appearance of the four gray women forms:
We have to imagine that through the deepening that Faust's soul has experienced, this soul has become capable of having the vision of the four figures — of lack, of need, of worry, of guilt — from the deep inner source itself. This “scene at midnight” is an inward experience in the truest sense of the word, an inward experience as it is evoked in Faust by the soul slowly beginning to detach itself from the body. For that is the strange mystery that Goethe quite evidently intended, that from the moment the three gray women speak the words:
— that from this moment on, death already really spreads over Faust's life. And we only understand this scene correctly if we think of Faust from then on as a dying man, as one in whom the soul is slowly detaching itself from the body. And it would be wrong to think that what follows is meant to be merely realistic in terms of the external senses. It is not. As we see Faust in the room of his palace, where worry has entered, we find, as he sits there, that the soul has already loosened itself to a certain extent from the body, that the experiences of physical life merge with the experiences that the soul has when it has already loosened itself from the body. And only then do we understand the strangely interwoven sentences when we consider this interplay of the spiritual world, in which Faust is already empathizing through his loosening soul, this interplay of the spiritual world with the physical-sensual world, in which Faust is still, because the soul is loosening, has not yet detached itself. Lack, guilt, and need were powerless; they were only the heralds of death. But the consuming worry remains where the vision is transformed in such a way that it is already the vision of the soul released from the body:
If one knows what Goethe felt when he heard the word gespensterhaft (ghostly), he who felt much more concretely than today's dull materialists, then one does not take such a word
not light, but important and essential, and seeks the feeling that Goethe had when he put these words into the mouth of Faust. Among other things, Goethe uses a beautiful word in which he expresses the following. He says: “Sometimes life seems to me as if distant past events were entering into the present consciousness, and then everything that is distant in the past appears like a ghost that has entered the present.” Goethe had a very concrete concept of what he called ghostly. Visionarily, millennia-old times of his own life stood before him, which he often believed he saw moving into his present life like ghosts. These are not assertions that I make out of arbitrariness; this can be strictly proven from what Goethe himself expressed when he spoke intimately about the experiences of his inner life. Now the views and thoughts that Faust has, half in the spiritual world and half still living on the physical plane, flow together. If you could imagine the interplay between these two worlds, that is what it is like for Faust. He is now experiencing something that can actually only be experienced in this interplay between the two worlds, which would not have developed if he had distanced himself more from his physical body. He still feels bound by the events of the beyond to the events of physical life:
And now for the remarkable speech, which to many will seem like a mere contradiction, but which becomes understandable if one understands the experience to take place between physical life and spiritual life. The spiritual world sought to reach Faust throughout his life. Spiritual science in the true sense did not exist at that time. He tried to recognize the spiritual world by means of magic inherited from the Middle Ages, the same magic that brought him into contact with Ahriman-Mephistopheles in the way we have often discussed, and also in the last lecture. This magic, by which he entered the spiritual world, cannot be separated from Mephistopheles. If you look back at what happened around Faust, you will see everywhere that Mephistopheles has set the magical actions in scene. We cannot hope that Faust wants to hold on to this magic now that he is already halfway into the spiritual world:
Those spells that he has drawn from old books and that have already become Luciferian and Ahrimanic because they have been preserved from ancient times. In this way, he now finds, when he really enters the spiritual world, that what he has achieved was not what he was looking for after all. And now he looks back. He begins to look back, as one does when one's soul is relaxed. Now he begins to look back at the life that has just passed. The moment stands vividly before him, the moment before he reached for the medieval books, before he uttered the fateful word:
He has been protected by good powers that have guided him mercifully in the sense of the “Prologue to Heaven” from the fruits of that magic that he would have had to pluck if these merciful workings of special powers had not passed through his path through life. Now he already sees into the spiritual world, now he knows differently. This plays a role. With the present knowledge, he would make the path different:
He could not say this earlier, before he had loosened his soul from his body, not in this way. Then he had to go the whole way of error. Now he looks back and sees that it was indeed the path through the darkness of Mephistopheles. He looks back first to the time in his life when Mephistopheles had not yet crossed his path:
— a man alone
The full weight of what has happened now weighs on his soul.
— so he has spent his life, half naked in the physical world, half already - albeit in the physical body -— transferred by Mephistopheles to the spiritual world, looking into the spiritual world, but always having to return to the physical world, because Mephistopheles cannot find it, nor can he convey it, the access, because he cannot properly find the connection.
Only superstition can be found on this path.
But the path of superstition has always mixed with the strong path that Faust was able to walk through his own strong nature. And now he has the vision that could remain with him as his soul loosens more and more: the vision of worry. And try to feel how Goethe also lets the highest in language resonate in his words here. One would like to say that the whole of world history lies on our soul when we feel the weight of these words. Worry creeps in. Is anyone there? Faust asks.
The answer sounds:
Not a simple answer: Yes! The question demands Yes! I said: The whole of world history forces its way into our soul through the arrangement of the words. For how could one think of those magnificent scenes, where before the court Christ Jesus is asked: “Is it you, the Son of God?” He does not answer simply: Yes – but: “You say it!” Now it is not expressed in an abstract word whom Faust is now experiencing:
But it is in him. It is basically a soliloquy. And it is a deep soliloquy. Only gradually will humanity learn, through inner experiences, the full weight of this soliloquy. With what is to be given to humanity as spiritual science, insights will also come to humanity that will be linked to deep, deep feelings and sensations about life, feelings and sensations that the dull, dull materialism dreams of, nor does the easily acquired worldview that believes that everything has been gained with sentences that characterize the physical or spiritual-real. We have such sentences. We know that they have been achieved through difficult inner experiences. We keep them in our souls, we carry them with us through life. But they are not what they can and must truly be for the human soul if they are not accompanied by all possible moods, by those moods that often make our soul life appear as if it were living over an abyss. And when we have attained spiritual knowledge, we can never lose the concern that comes over us about the relationship of spiritual knowledge to the whole reality of life. Man must feel, especially when he enters the spiritual world, that it is a platitude to speak of it in false asceticism, that this earthly life is only a low one that one would most like to cast off. Man feels the whole deep meaning of this earth-life for eternity precisely through spiritual realizations: that this earth-life must be gone through in order that that which exists can be incorporated into the impulses which we carry through death into the sphere of eternity. But how could it be otherwise than that at the end of a life of trial, just at such a moment, when the soul is loosened, man becomes aware, in serious, grave concern, of what may become of his life just experienced, when he now has to go through the spiritual world with his soul, what the fruits of this life just lived may be. Faust has struggled through much, much. But he is great because now, when he has just entered the spiritual world and is half in it and half still feeling back to his physical existence on earth, he knows in the very significant comparison that arises between the physical and the spiritual in such a life-and-death situation:
Feel the harmony that now arises in his soul: how he has passed through the small and the great world, as it says in “Faust”, and with an overall view that is just opening up, as in the moment he feels a flood of spiritual illumination in his vision, he can survey with wisdom and deliberation all that he has gone through in the rush of the floods of life. And now: what does he see? What does he begin to see? —- He begins to see what he has experienced in the circle of the earth. Think back to what we have discussed about the review that overtakes the soul, which is now slowly overtaking Faust, at the beginning of the life after death. Think of this review. He sees his life on earth. He sees it in such a way that he has to say to himself:
What he had experienced on earth, he now sees. He is already halfway into the spiritual world. You can feel the words in this mood:
That is what one can say when looking back on earthly life. This is not a philosophical confession of materialism, but an immediate experience after death has already taken hold of the soul. Dopes who have become Faust commentators have interpreted this passage as if Faust, in his old age, were once again reverting to a materialistic creed. But now, in this situation, Faust would truly be a fool if he wanted to look back on life and now, with a blink, see that spiritual world, which is often described here by those fools who build this spiritual world in such a way that they simply write about their own kind, as is done in many confessions. He wants to stand firm on the result of his life. And now words of deep significance are actually falling, before which every semblance of materialism must fade, must fade completely. The vague mystics, those dreadful mystics who always speak of wanting to merge with the universe, of wanting to grasp eternity mystically in the chaotic darkness of the universe, which they call universal light, want to wander into eternity. The one who wants to grasp the spiritual life in a concrete way grasps it where it can be grasped in its concreteness. He does not become a fool, losing himself in vague distances that actually contain nothing but emptiness and empty space, and into which the soul dreams itself away. He will not be seduced into roaming into such eternities, but will grasp knowledge concretely. That which he recognizes can be grasped:
Consider how wonderful this sentence becomes when one considers that it marks the beginning of the retrospective view of earthly life: the vision walks along the day on earth. Now he has arrived at the point where he can find the right relationship to those haunting ghosts to which Mephistopheles has seduced him here.
– now in retrospect
We have to imagine the not yet fully completed, but now incipient review, that review, which is still full of the concern, through which fruits from the experienced earth day can be carried into the spiritual world. And always like this: over, over. Spiritual experience, but because he still clings to the body, also physical experience, so we find Faust. Care still holds him to the physical body. He is meant to enter consciously into the spiritual world, made conscious precisely by the burden of care. That is why he grows into the spiritual world in such a way that, while already bearing the spiritual world in his soul, he still believes that he can command the physical world. Those people who hold the banal contemporary view that man has always been essentially as he is now, do not know that many Greeks died as Faust dies, or rather, as Goethe had Faust die. We can prove from Greek literature that this death was almost a desirable one for the Greeks, like reliving some of the physical existence, while the soul has already been released. In Sophocles you can find words that suggest how the Greeks saw something special in such a death, not a sudden death, but a slow dying, in which consciousness is already dimming for the physical world, but what enters physical consciousness as twilight is gradually illuminated to see fully into the spiritual world. And Goethe did indeed try to incorporate much of the Greek element into the second part of his Faust. We may well imagine that he wanted something of what could be characterized as if he had wanted to depict Faust as a dying Greek. Thus, what he puts into the words in terms of feeling flows over from the spiritual world, even when he is still commanding here. And we can follow this further, follow how Goethe consciously presents what I have been talking about. You saw Faust arrive at the scene where his grave is already being dug. Again, one can say that those commentators who accuse Goethe of bad taste by having the grave dug while Faust is still alive are not very tasteful themselves! That would, of course, be mere bad taste. We see the dying Faust. Then it is not bad taste, but a wonderful imagination, when we see the grave dug not only by the dying Faust but also by those half-spiritual creatures, the lemurs, of whose nature I spoke recently. But how does Faust speak? Well, I will first pass over the words that he speaks as he gropes his way out of the palace and toward the doorpost. I will draw your attention to the words that Faust speaks when he gives the order, so to speak, to dig the ditch that will divert the polluting swamp. At first, one might think that everything is meant physically. But Goethe was well aware that Faust speaks half out of spiritual consciousness, and that is how he wants these words to be understood. And what is revealed from this physical-spiritual, spiritual-physical consciousness? First of all, a wonderful sense of well-being in Faust. Consider what Faust says:
Beautiful, but now other words follow:
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32. Collected Essays on Literature 1884-1902: German Poems of the Present
06 Apr 1886, Rudolf Steiner |
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She lets Balder, our dearest god, awaken again before his eyes "in the green legendary grove of the Orient". Christus, then, is Balder, once overcome by evil, for whose return the German people longed because they already knew him, because they were prepared for him by their own legend of the gods. |
32. Collected Essays on Literature 1884-1902: German Poems of the Present
06 Apr 1886, Rudolf Steiner |
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What may be most comforting to us Germans in the hard-pressed situation in which we currently find ourselves is the awareness that our nation rests on foundations that can never be damaged by any external power. The German nation is one that is not dependent on physical means of power alone for its development. The "strong roots of our power" rest in the depths of the people's soul, which is not accessible to any opponent. And so we experience the joy that, while the external power and living conditions are decidedly unfavorable to us, German poetry is flourishing among us in a way that we have rarely experienced since classical times. The Germans of Austria have the good fortune to possess a poetic phenomenon whose poetry reaches the highest level of art and at the same time must be regarded as the most wonderful outflow of the German national spirit. The fact that we are dealing with a female poet is of no consequence. Those who do not know from the outset are simply like almost all critics: they consider M. E. delle Grazie - the name of our poetess - to be a pseudonym, and it does not even occur to them to think that the powerful Germanic figures of the epic "Hermann" - which is the most important achievement of the brilliant poetess - that this powerful language did not originate from a poet in her prime. We are dealing here with a powerful phenomenon. Delle Grazie is as original as only a spirit formed from the never-ending source of German essence can be, she is as powerful and deep in her characterization as only the German spirit with its loving immersion in the human heart and mind can be. She depicts the Roman depravity that confronts noble German morality with such bitterness as only the noble-minded German is capable of, who on his moral high ground knows no mercy for the unfair, for the bad, but only contempt. The poet has succeeded in creating characters in "Hermann" that are truly of the flesh and blood of our people. The whole poem is borne by the majesty of German sentiment, by the most beautiful idealism.
This is how the poet praises her work. She wants to send this deepest longing and feeling of hers to all German lands:
It is the collapse of Roman rule through the youthful strength of the German people that the epic describes to us. Treachery and deceit fight against German nobility and German manly virtue. Struggle and victory are described with a poetic power that is unique to genius. The poet finds the right tone for every situation. No less for the scenes of battle than for the wonderful depictions of nature, which, when inserted in the right place, give the poetry its greatest advantage. It thus becomes a reflection of Germanic folk life, which also unfolded in an intimate alliance with nature. The crown of the poem, however, is the last song: Peace. Up to this point, Hermann has been presented to us as the hero with the highest martial virtues. Here, in the last canto, we get to know the other side of the German man. He immediately sheds all the roughness of the hero when selfless love pours into his heart. After the brilliant victory, Hermann's union with Thusnelda takes place.
Surrounded by his warriors, the hero celebrates his marriage.
The beautiful song concludes meaningfully with a dream of Hermann's: Germania, "the proud, shining Germania", appears to our hero and reveals the future to him. Here, the poet's brilliant imagination is revealed in the wonderful addition and interpretation she gives to the Balder saga. Our ancestors have created an uplifting divine figure in Balder. Balder is the god of love, of peace, who perished in the battle against evil. Germania announces to Hermann that this Balder will reappear:
She lets Balder, our dearest god, awaken again before his eyes "in the green legendary grove of the Orient". Christus, then, is Balder, once overcome by evil, for whose return the German people longed because they already knew him, because they were prepared for him by their own legend of the gods. Is there a more beautiful way of expressing the idea that it was precisely the German people who were most receptive to pure, unadulterated Christianity, that this noblest of all cultural creations could never take root in the depraved world of the south because they were simply not receptive there? Christianity, transfigured by the Germanic essence, then appears to Hermann as the champion of a new culture that unites German love and the German spirit with the "beautiful form of the Greeks". The goddess then prophetically predicts to him:
Delle Grazie is the singer of that love which expresses itself most purely in the selfless nature of the German. Her poetic mission is to show how pure human love is the source of all that is great, to show how all that is noble and good can ultimately be traced back to the victorious power of this love. What is so far apart in terms of subject matter, such as "Hermann" and the Old Testament story of "Saul", which she turned into a tragedy, is united by this fundamental trait of her poetry. Many objections have been raised against "Saul". But the most important thing has been little noticed. It is the tragic trait of a very special kind that delle Grazie knew how to put into the figure of Saul. In the midst of a people whose religion knows no freedom of spirit, Saul wants to unfurl the banner of love. He wants to oppose the dark Jehovah, the God of revenge and slavery, who does not love his people but only punishes them and is therefore not loved but only feared by them, with the God of nobler humanity. Saul senses Christianity, he senses the basic trait of it, which later found its symbol in the Redeemer, the "image of love-declared humanity". The hero must perish as a result. "Hermann" and "Saul" complement each other; they show how pure love unfolds in different times. That is what is significant about our poet, what is genuinely artistic, that it is problems that reach deep into the workings of the world that she seeks to solve in these, her two most important poems. The latter are followed by a small volume of "Poems". Of these, "The Nile", "Adam and Eve", "Thirst" and "Hashish" can be regarded as masterful. It is always a sign of a poet's original power when the imagination works in such a powerful way, as is the case with delle Grazie. The mere contemplation of a photograph of the ancient colossal statue "The Nile" in the Vatican allows the whole history of Egypt to pass before the poet's mind in the most marvelous poetic images. "Adam and Eve" is a magnificent myth that depicts the longing of the sexes for each other and the delight of the first meeting of man and woman, culminating in a thought of the most far-reaching significance. The voice of God resounds to the first human beings who find each other and see themselves in the midst of the most glorious creation:
The view expressed in the poem "Thirst" is just as magnificent. It describes a journey through the desert. Merchants accompanied by slaves move across the vast sandy expanse. They are longing for an oasis. Not a drop of water has touched their tongues for a long time.
The whole terrible situation of the people is now described.
So the rich merchants. But there are beings in the course who do not fear death, who see it as salvation. They are the slaves. They are not attached to earthly life, because: "What is life for them without freedom?" They feel a different "thirst" than their masters, they thirst for freedom.
The last of the poems in the collection, "Hashish", truly contains all the qualities of the highest poetic power. It shows us how the poet receives poetic consecration at the throne of God himself. The whole thing is a dream that leads her through infinite space directly to the seat of the divine. Poetic talent is revealed above all when the poet succeeds in transforming real objects into images of extraordinary beauty. For example, when she addresses the moon, which she reaches on her journey:
The reader will have seen from the above where delle Grazie's significance lies: in the grandeur of his vision, in his German idealism and in a rich imagination that moves primarily in the regions of the spiritual. We must now mention a fourth of the poet's works, "The Gypsy Woman", a novella. It does not occur to us to defend the deficiency of form and the improbability of the situations in this little work. The son of a landowner is enchanted by the beauty of a girl from this gang at a party where a band of gypsies is providing music and dancing. This girl, an orphan, is not a real gypsy, even according to her comrades. They don't really know how she got into the gang. A rare phenomenon in a gypsy society: a very noble girl, capable of the most beautiful feelings, who has been passionately in love with the landowner's scion ever since they met. After some time, they meet again. The relationship continues, the girl is seduced and then abandoned. The unfaithful man marries Etelka, the daughter of a magistrate. When the couple is blessed by the priest, the gypsy woman appears, mad to assert the rights of her heart. She is thrown into prison. An old gypsy, whose fatherly advice she usually listens to, but not when the seducer approaches, frees her. The madwoman grabs the old man's dagger, rushes into the unfaithful man's house and murders him. She and her liberator flee, pursued by the lord of the manor's people. The old man is killed by a stone thrown at him, the girl plunges the dagger into her own heart. In spite of all the shortcomings of this little work, if you want to be unbiased, you will find the heartfelt tones with which the poet knows how to depict human relationships and the conflicts they entail, even when they take place within a despised, neglected class of people. If we consider that the creator of all this is only at the beginning of her twenties, then no assumption we make about the glorious things she will yet give our people will be too bold. In any case, it is the duty of every German who has a heart and mind for the education of his people to follow the development of this spirit. A nation that produces such blossoms has nothing to fear. Not of the present, not of the future. When we are told from some quarters that the German people have played their part and that it is now the turn of younger peoples, we reply: we have nothing ageing about us as long as such youthful life is developing in our midst. |
8. Christianity As Mystical Fact (1961): Points of View
Tr. E. A. Frommer, Gabrielle Hess, Peter Kändler Rudolf Steiner |
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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. |
8. Christianity As Mystical Fact (1961): Points of View
Tr. E. A. Frommer, Gabrielle Hess, Peter Kändler Rudolf Steiner |
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[ 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 Haeckel1a 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 Lyell1b 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.
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11. Cosmic Memory: On the Origin of the Earth
Tr. Karl E. Zimmer Rudolf Steiner |
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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. |
11. Cosmic Memory: On the Origin of the Earth
Tr. Karl E. Zimmer Rudolf Steiner |
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[ 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. |
90a. Self-Knowledge and God-Knowledge I: The Formation of the Aura II
19 Jan 1904, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
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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. |
90a. Self-Knowledge and God-Knowledge I: The Formation of the Aura II
19 Jan 1904, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
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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. |
90a. Self-Knowledge and God-Knowledge I: The Early Chapters of Genesis
12 Oct 1904, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
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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. |
90a. Self-Knowledge and God-Knowledge I: The Early Chapters of Genesis
12 Oct 1904, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
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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 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. |
66. Mind and Matter — Life and Death: The Beyond of the Senses and the Beyond of the Soul
31 Mar 1917, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
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After a certain time, he goes out again. Now there are green shoots everywhere. If he is observing rationally, will he not say: Yes, then the brown soil that I saw recently did not show me everything that is actually there. |
Goethe made a very beautiful distinction between the green leaf and the colored petal of a flower, which are the same thing, only at different levels of existence, one being only a transformation product, a metamorphosis of the other. |
The head shows that it is a transformed remaining organism; the remaining organism shows that it is a head that has not yet become. In a sense, just as the green leaf is a petal that has not yet become a flower, and the colored petal is a transformed leaf. And that which the human being develops through his remaining organism, that is incorporated into the soul. |
66. Mind and Matter — Life and Death: The Beyond of the Senses and the Beyond of the Soul
31 Mar 1917, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
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The great advances in natural science in recent centuries, but especially in recent decades, are rightly admired, as I have repeatedly mentioned in the lectures on spiritual science given here. And it is only right that the modern man, in order to get to know the present point of human development, likes to put himself in the mindset and the way of thinking from which these results, this progress of natural science, have been achieved. But by putting himself in this way of thinking, the modern man's thinking, his whole mind, takes on certain forms. And without detracting from our admiration for the progress of natural science, it must be said that in recent times this very immersion in the scientific way of thinking has, in many people, produced a kind of inability to be attentive to what knowledge of the nature of the human soul, of the human spirit itself, gives, what knowledge it gives about the most important, most incisive riddles of human existence. If one follows the course of spiritual history from the points of view just mentioned, one not only gets a general idea of the inability just described. If we look in detail at what has been attempted in recent times with regard to the study of the soul, we immediately get the impression that minds that have been trained by the scientific way of thinking often pass by the points where the knowledge of the soul, the knowledge of the most important questions of existence, should open up. As an example today, I will mention the ideas of a thinker of recent times, whom I have often referred to here and who can indeed be considered one of those who have endeavored to go beyond the merely external, sensual existence and point to something that lives in the spiritual behind the sensual. I would like to start with certain thoughts that Eduard von Hartmann, the philosopher of the unconscious, wrote down at the beginning of his psychology, his theory of the soul. He expresses how it is actually impossible to observe the phenomena of the soul, and how the difficulty of a psychology lies precisely in the fact that it is almost impossible to observe the phenomena of the soul. Let us allow Hartmann's thoughts to arise in this direction before our soul. He says: “Psychology seeks to establish what is given; to do so, it must above all observe it. But observing one's own psychic phenomena is a peculiar matter, since it inevitably disturbs and changes what it focuses on to a lesser or greater degree. Anyone who wants to observe their own delicate feelings will, by focusing their attention on them, alter these feelings quite considerably.” Hartmann therefore believes that you cannot observe the soul, because if you want to observe feelings, you have to observe the soul; but when you want to direct your attention to a tender feeling, it disappears into the soul; the soul withdraws, as it were, from the observation of the human being. “Yes, even,” he says, “they can slip away from him underhand. A slight physical pain is intensified by observation.” So he means: pain is a mental experience; but how can we observe it? How can we find out what is there when pain lives in the soul in such a way that when we start observing it, it becomes stronger. So it changes. By observing, we change what we want to observe. Or: “Reciting the most familiar memorized material can falter or become confused in its sequence if the observation is trying to determine the course of this sequence.” He means: It is a mental phenomenon when we recite something that we have memorized. But if we want to start observing what is actually happening while we are reciting, it does not work. So we cannot observe this mental phenomenon of reciting. Or he says: "Strong feelings or even emotions, such as fear and anger, make it impossible to observe one's own psychological phenomena. Often, observation falsifies the result by introducing into what is given only that which it expects to find. It seems almost impossible to objectify one's psychic experiences of the present moment in such a way that one makes them the object of simultaneous observation; either the experience does not allow the simultaneous observation to arise, or the observation falsifies and displaces the experience. We see here a personality that, as it were, recoils from the observation of the soul under the influence of thinking. If I want to grasp the soul, then I change the soul precisely through this soul activity of grasping. And that is why observation is actually not possible at all – so Hartmann thinks. Now this is indeed an extraordinarily interesting example of the wrong track that this research in particular can take due to a certain inability. After all, what would we actually gain if we could truly observe, say, a tender feeling? A tender feeling would remain in the soul exactly what it is. By observing this tender feeling, we would experience nothing other than what this tender feeling is. Nothing about the soul; nothing at all about the soul. And it is the same with the other examples Hartmann cites. For it depends on the fact that what we should actually call soul never shows itself in what the moment offers. Rather, the soul can only truly appear to us when we are experiencing the changes of the individual soul experiences. If we wanted to observe what is present in the soul in a moment, we would be like the person who goes out into the fields at a certain time of year and sees the brown soil of the fields, spread out widely, and says to himself: this brown soil of the fields is what is actually spread out there. After a certain time, he goes out again. Now there are green shoots everywhere. If he is observing rationally, will he not say: Yes, then the brown soil that I saw recently did not show me everything that is actually there. Only by observing the changes that have taken place at different points in time can I understand what it actually is: that it is not just soil that has been spread, but that this soil has contained so many seeds that have sprouted and are sprouting. Thus, the soul presents itself only when we become attentive: a delicate feeling is extinguished when I direct a strong thought of observation towards it. This interaction of the delicate feeling and the strong thought that observes it is the first manifestation of the workings and essence of the soul. So Eduard von Hartmann regrets not being able to observe that which changes, while he should be observing change. If he were to start from a point of view that allows him to look deeper into the life of the soul and into the connection between the life of the soul and the physical life than he is able to, then he would say the following about memorization, for example. He would recognize that memorizing is based on the fact that something of the soul has become engrained in the bodily process as a result of me having activated it many times, so that when I recite what I have memorized, the body automatically carries out what has to happen so that what I have memorized comes out again, so to speak without the soul having to be present. The person who is able to observe soul experiences knows that through memorization the soul element moves deeper into the bodily organization, so that there is more activity in the bodily realm than when we form present thoughts through direct contemplation that we have not memorized. When we form thoughts directly, I would say that we are working at a higher level in the soul than when we recite what we have memorized, where we bring forth more or less automatically what the soul has engraved in the body. But then, when we automatically run what we have buried from the soul into the body, we disturb this automatism when we intervene with a directly present thought that arises at a higher level, namely in the soul. It is when we enter with our thoughts from the soul into the automatism of the body, which takes place when reciting a piece of memorized material, just as if we were to insert a stick into a machine and disturb its operation. When we grasp such things, which Hartmann regrets, we will immediately see how the various modes of activity of the soul and also of the body interact in man. And Eduard von Hartmann says: “Observation often distorts the soul.” Well, in the course of the last few decades, popular science has basically more or less abandoned actual observation of the soul, at least methodical observation of the soul. But certain flashes of light have emerged. And such flashes of light have been had precisely by those who are not really recognized by regular school philosophers. Nietzsche, for example, had many such flashes of insight. In a certain, increasingly morbid and ingenious grasp of the soul's life, Nietzsche recognized how what takes place on the surface of it differs greatly from what takes place in the depths of human life. One need only read something like Nietzsche's arguments about the ascetic ideal to which some people devote themselves, and one will see what is actually meant here. How is the ascetic ideal often described? Well, you describe it in such a way that you have in mind what the person who devotes himself to asceticism in the usual sense imagines: how the person trains himself more and more to want nothing himself, to switch off his will and, precisely as a result, to become more and more spineless and selfless. From pursuing this train of thought, what is called the ascetic ideal is then formed. Nietzsche asks: What is actually behind this ascetic ideal in the soul? And he finds: The one who lives according to an ascetic ideal wants power, an increase of power. If he were to develop his ordinary soul life as it is, he would have less power – as he perceives it – than he wants. Therefore, he trains his will, seemingly to reduce it. But in the depths of the soul, it is precisely by diminishing the will that he wants to achieve great power, great effects. The will to power is behind the ideal of lack of will, of selflessness. So says Nietzsche. And there is indeed a flash of insight here, which should certainly be taken into account when judging, especially when it comes to self-knowledge of the human being. Let us take a more obvious example than the one Nietzsche discussed in Asceticism. A person once wrote to me and often said: “I devote myself to a certain scientific direction; actually, I don't have the slightest sympathy for this scientific direction, but I consider it a mission, a duty, to work in this direction because humanity needs it in the present. I would actually rather do anything than what I am doing. I was not embarrassed to keep telling the man in question that, according to how he appeared to me, this was a superficial view of his soul about himself. Deep in the subconscious, in those layers of the soul's life of which he knows nothing, there lives in him a greed to carry out precisely that which he said he actually dislikes, that he only accepts as a mission. And in truth, I said, the whole thing seems to me that he regards this as a mission for the reason that he wants to develop these things out of the most selfish motives. So one can see, without going deeper into the soul life, that the superficial soul life almost falsifies the subconscious. But in this falsification lies a remarkable activity of the soul. It was precisely from such trains of thought, as I have cited them, and from a failure to pursue such trains of thought further, as I have followed them up, that Eduard von Hartmann reached his hypothesis of the unconscious. He says: From what takes place in the soul as thinking, feeling and willing, from what one has there as consciousness, one can actually gain no view of the real soul. But because one has only this, one must altogether renounce any view of the real soul-life and can only put forward a hypothesis. — Therefore Hartmann puts forward the hypothesis: Behind thinking, feeling and willing lies the unconscious, which can never be reached. And from this unconscious arise thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will. But what is down there in the unconscious can only be the subject of thoughts that have a greater or lesser degree of probability, but which are only hypotheses. It must be said that anyone who thinks in this way simply blocks their own access to the life of the soul, to that which is beyond the ordinary life of the soul. For Hartmann correctly recognized that everything that enters into ordinary consciousness is nothing more than a mere image. And it is precisely one of Hartmann's merits that he emphasized time and again in the most eminent sense: What falls into ordinary consciousness arises from the fact that the soul, as it were, receives its own content mirrored from the body, so that we only have mirror images in what we experience in thinking, feeling and willing. And to talk about the fact that these mirror images of consciousness contain a reality is quite similar to the assertion that the images we perceive from a mirror are reality. Hartmann emphasized this again and again. We will come back to this point today. But Hartmann, and with him countless thinkers, countless people in general in the last decades and the immediate present, they blocked their own possibility of penetrating into the soul because, I would say, they had an indescribable fear of the path that can penetrate into the soul. This fear remains in the subconscious; in ordinary consciousness it protrudes in such a way that one conjures up numerous reasons that tell one: one cannot go beyond certain limits of knowledge. For anyone who really wants to penetrate into the life of the soul needs not to stop at ordinary consciousness, but to move on to what I have called “visionary consciousness” in the lectures I have given here, a consciousness that is, to a certain extent, higher than ordinary consciousness. I have chosen the following comparison: During sleep, man lives in images. The images of the dream that arises from sleep become conscious to a certain degree. I said in previous lectures: the essential thing is that in these images that he experiences in his dreams, man is not able to relate his will to the things around him. At the moment of waking up, when a person enters from dream consciousness into waking consciousness, what remains of the images and perceptions is basically the same as it is in the dream; only now the person enters into a relationship with their surroundings through their will, and they integrate what otherwise only exists as images in their dream into their sensory environment. Just as a person wakes up from dream consciousness into ordinary waking consciousness, so too can he bring himself, through certain soul activities, to wake up from ordinary waking consciousness to a “visionary consciousness,” whereby he does not integrate himself into the ordinary world of the senses, but with his soul powers into the spiritual world. This intuitive consciousness is the only way by which man can penetrate into the beyond of soul phenomena. I might say that the most enlightened minds of the present believe that one would be committing a sin against knowledge if one were to speak of a human being's ascent to such an intuitive consciousness. And for many of the philosophical minds of the present day in particular, this intuitive consciousness is simply condemned by the fact that such a person says: Yes, it is just like clairvoyance! — Now the thing is that — in order to tie in with something — it is perhaps best characterized by characterizing the tremendous progress that has taken place in man's attitude to reality from Kant to Goethe. In doing so, one does indeed commit a sin against the spirit of many a philosopher. But this sin must be committed at some time. Kantianism is, after all, what began to erect barriers to human knowledge within the development of the continental spirit. The “thing in itself” is to be presented as something absolutely otherworldly, which human knowledge cannot approach. That is what Kantianism wants, and that is what many people in the 19th century wanted with Kantianism, right up to the present day and including the 20th century. In a few short sentences, Goethe has put forward something tremendously significant against this principle of Kantianism. And if one really wants to evaluate German intellectual life, one could consider Goethe's short essay “On the Power of Judging by Intuition”, which is usually printed in the natural scientific writings of Goethe, as one of the greatest achievements of modern philosophy, for the simple reason that what is alive in this short essay is the starting point for a tremendous development of human intellectual life. In this essay, “On the Power of Judgement,” Goethe says something like this: Yes, Kant excludes the human being from the thing in itself and only allows the categorical imperative to enter into the soul, commanding him what he should do. But if, in the moral sphere, one should rise to thoughts about freedom and immortality, why should it be closed to man to raise himself directly in knowledge to that world in which immortality and freedom themselves are rooted? — Goethe calls such a power of judgment, which transports itself into such a world, the contemplative power of judgment. Now, in his contemplation of natural phenomena, Goethe continually exercised this power of judgment. And in the way he observed plant and animal forms, he set a magnificent example of the use of this power of judgment. Kant saw this power of judgment as something demonic, which one should leave alone, which one should pass by. He called the use of this power of contemplative judgment “the adventure of reason.” Goethe countered: “Why should one, after making the effort I have, to recognize how the spirit lives and moves in natural phenomena, why should one not bravely face this adventure of reason?” This is, of course, only the beginning, but it is the beginning of a development that proceeds as I have characterized it in these lectures. Today, too, I would like to point out that in my writings, in “How to Know Higher Worlds?”, in “The Occult Science in Outline”, in my last book, “The Riddle of Man”, you will find information and hints about what the soul has to undertake in order to find within itself, as it were, the strength to awaken from ordinary waking consciousness to observing consciousness in the same way that one awakens from dream consciousness to ordinary waking consciousness. Just as the soul must exert itself by virtue of the natural forces given to it in order to awaken from the dream-life, in which man is passively surrendered to the succession of images, into the waking consciousness, so can it, by taking itself in hand and applying to itself all that I have described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds.” She can strengthen herself to awaken within a world that is now just as different in comparison to the ordinary waking consciousness as the ordinary sense world of the waking consciousness is different from what one experiences in the mere world of images in a dream. Out of the ordinary waking consciousness and into a world of intuitive consciousness: this is the path that the most outstanding thinkers of modern times have avoided so much. And we have the peculiar phenomenon that precisely the most enlightened minds have remained with Kant and have not found the way from Kant to Goethe, in order to advance vividly into the realm of the seeing consciousness, which is only the development at a different level of what Goethe meant by contemplative judgment. But then, when the human being rises to such an awakening in the seeing consciousness, then he first reaches what I have already characterized in my lectures as imaginative knowledge, which is not called “imaginative” because it represents only something imagined, but because one lives in images; but in images that are not taken from the sensual outer world, but from a more powerful, more intense reality than the outer sensual reality. When a person develops the strength within themselves to reach this imaginative knowledge, it means that they truly live in what I have called in earlier lectures the ethereal in the sense of spiritual science. Through ordinary waking consciousness, we become aware of the external sense world. In imaginative consciousness, we enter into a completely different world, in which, so to speak, other things live and move than in the ordinary sense world. Now it is certainly difficult for those who have no idea of this seeing consciousness to form an idea of it. And it will probably be the same for some of my honored listeners who have told me in recent times that these lectures are difficult to understand. They are not difficult with regard to what is communicated, but they are difficult for the reason that they speak of something that is not there for ordinary consciousness. They speak of the results of perception that are based on the research of the seeing consciousness. But one can also gain an approximate idea in the ordinary consciousness of that which is actually the very first of the seeing consciousness. Imagine yourself — and basically anyone can do this — in a very vivid morning dream from which you wake up, and try to remember such a dream in which you have tried, I would even say, to really live in the dream, more or less subconsciously trying to really live in it. Then you will have experienced that what you feel as thoughts, as if they were banished to your body, and of which you have to say to yourself, “I feel my thoughts as though they were thought by me,” you will have to think about that, so to speak, spread out over the images of the dream as they flood in. You cannot distinguish yourself from what is flooding in the images of the dream, as you can distinguish yourself in sensual consciousness, so that you can say, “I stand here and I think about the things that are out there.” You do not perceive something outside and think about it, but you have the direct experience: in what is flooding up and down, the forces live that otherwise live in my thinking. It is as if you yourself were immersed in the surging life, so that the surging, the form of the surging, everything that is there is formed like weaving, living thought forces: objective life and weaving of thought forces. This, what can only be imagined in the dream life, I would like to say, can be perceived very distinctly in the seeing consciousness as a first impression. There really the possibility ceases to think: There outside are the objects and there inside in my head I think about the objects. No, there one feels embedded in something, what one would like to call a surging substantial sea, in which one is a wave. And that, what thought power is, is not only in one, that is outside, that drives this surging and surging, that goes outward, inward. That is to say, one sometimes feels connected to it, sometimes in such a way that the power of thought flows outside without one. What one achieves – whereby, in a sense, a substantial element is connected with what otherwise only lives in us as thought – that is what should really be called ether. For the ether is nothing other than a finer substantiality, but one that is so permeated everywhere that thought is at work in it, that in reality thoughts outside fill the ether itself. Only in this way, through the development of consciousness, does one arrive at what should really be called ether. But then one also arrives at a more intimate relationship between one's own soul and the environment. In sensory observation, one can never enter into such an intimate relationship with one's surroundings as in this experience of the observing consciousness, which now really has no boundaries between inside and outside, but flows in and out - into and out of one's own soul life - that which is ether filled with thoughts and thoughts of the soul. But only when one has entered into this intuitive consciousness can there be a higher self-knowledge. And here I now touch on something that again belongs to the significant results of spiritual research; but it will also be transferred to scientific research, insofar as it will find confirmation of this, as it will find confirmation of those results of spiritual research that I have presented in previous lectures. Man is a complex being, even if we look at him only externally and physically. If Goethe's approach had already been fruitful earlier, if it had not been overgrown by the 19th-century materialism hostile to spirit and soul, Goethe's theory of metamorphosis would also have been applied to man himself. Goethe made a very beautiful distinction between the green leaf and the colored petal of a flower, which are the same thing, only at different levels of existence, one being only a transformation product, a metamorphosis of the other. If we start not from a merely theoretical reception, but from the intuition that lived in Goethe, in that he applied the idea of metamorphosis in the simplest way, to the plant, and now applies this metamorphic applies this view of metamorphosis to man in all the complexity of his being, one comes to recognize that man, by having a head and a remaining organism, is a very remarkable creature. When we observe the human being as he develops from an early age, from early childhood onwards, we encounter many things that are full of meaning and that are still not sufficiently appreciated by science today. Let us just emphasize the fact that in early childhood the part of the human being that develops most physically is the head. The head grows throughout life in such a way that it increases fourfold, while the rest of the organism grows twentyfold from its childhood state. Consider, then, how different the pace of growth is for the head and for the rest of the organism. This is due to the fact that the head and the rest of the organism are two different metamorphoses of one and the same, but in a very peculiar way. The head appears in man, as he begins his physical life, immediately in a certain perfection; the rest of the organism, on the other hand, appears with the greatest conceivable imperfection, and must first develop slowly to the degree of perfection that it is to achieve in physical life. Thus the head and the rest of the organism undergo quite different periods of development. I have already mentioned how spiritual science shows the origin of this. The human head points back to a long preceding spiritual development. When we enter our physical existence through conception and birth, we come from a spiritual world as soul-spiritual beings. What we go through during our spiritual development in the spiritual world contains a sum of forces that initially express themselves primarily in the head; therefore, what appears in the head as something so perfect and needing little further perfection points to a development that the person has already undergone. The rest of the organism is, as it were, the same at an initial stage. It is in the process of developing the powers which, if they could reach full development, would tend to make the whole of the rest of the organism what the head is physically. However paradoxical it may sound, that is how it is. The head shows that it is a transformed remaining organism; the remaining organism shows that it is a head that has not yet become. In a sense, just as the green leaf is a petal that has not yet become a flower, and the colored petal is a transformed leaf. And that which the human being develops through his remaining organism, that is incorporated into the soul. And when a person passes through the gate of death, it enters into a spiritual world, undergoes a development between death and a new birth, and in a later life becomes one of the powers that then develop in the head, just as the head of the present has developed out of the organism of an earlier life on earth. Now you may ask: How can such a thing be known? Something like this can be known as soon as a person enters into intuitive consciousness. For then something really occurs that compels one to see the human being as this duality: the head human being and the human being of the rest of the organism. And the head is, so to speak, a tool of the etheric world, as I have just described it, and the rest of the organism is also a tool of this etheric world. The human being not only has his physical organism as a kind of section of the whole physical world, but he also has, held together by the physical organism, an etheric organism within him that can only be perceived if one ascends to imaginative knowledge, as I have described. But then, when what is ethereal really becomes vivid, then one encounters the great difference between what underlies the etheric body of the human being and the head and what underlies the etheric body of the rest of the organism. And just as the head and the rest of the organism have very different growth rates, so that which lives and is active in the etheric body of the head and that which lives in the etheric body of the rest of the organism has very different inner developments of strength, which evoke different inner imaginations. And when one enters the imaginative world at all, then the imagination of the etheric body of the head interacts with the imagination of the etheric body of the rest of the organism. And this living interaction in the human etheric organism is the content of a higher self-knowledge. The fact that the human being comes to truly recognize himself in this way also enables him to evaluate certain soul experiences in the right way. If what I have stated were not as I have described it, the human being would never be able to have what is called a memory. The human being would be able to form ideas from sensory impressions, but these would always pass by. The fact that a person can remember something that he has once experienced is based on the fact that the etheric body of the head, in interaction with the etheric body of the rest of the organism, causes that which takes effect in the etheric body of the head to bring about changes in the etheric body of the rest of the organism that are permanent and that work their way up into the physical organism. Every time something takes hold in the soul and bodily life of a person that belongs to memory, a change first occurs in the etheric organism that can be imagined through imaginative knowledge; but this change continues into the physical organism. And through this alone we have the possibility of again bringing up certain thoughts, that what is sent from the ether organism of the head into the other ether organism is imprinted in the physical body. Only by the fact that something has made impressions in our physical body are we able to retain it in our memory. But what happens in the physical organism in the manner described, can only be observed by the seeing consciousness. This can only be observed if the observing consciousness continues the exercises that are characterized in the books mentioned, if the observing consciousness rises from mere imaginative knowledge to what I have called “inspired knowledge”. Through imaginative knowledge we enter into a world of surging ether, which is animated by thoughts that permeate it. If we continue the exercises, we will gain more strength in our soul life than is necessary for this imaginative knowledge, and then we will not only perceive a surging thought life in the ether, but we will also perceive beings within this surging thought life, real spirit beings, which do not reveal themselves in any physical body, but which only reveal themselves in the spiritual. But by coming to the real perception of a spiritual world, we also come to the possibility of achieving what can be called: to look at the actual human being as well as at things from the outside, to really face oneself, not just to feel what I have now called one's own thought life in the surging ether, in one's own ether organism, but to perceive oneself among other spirit beings as a spirit being in the spiritual world. When this happens, something occurs that is difficult to even characterize, but that can be understood with some good will. When you imagine something and hold the image in your mind, and later you recall this image, you say you are remembering. But as I have just explained, this is based on something that is happening in the physical organism. It is just that we cannot follow it with our ordinary consciousness. But if we ascend into the consciousness of vision, then we come, as it were, to see what happens behind the memory, what happens in man in the time that elapses from the moment when he conceived a thought that has now disappeared as it were, and lives only down in the physical organism until it is brought up again. All that lives beyond the thought that is remembered is not perceived if one cannot lift oneself out of oneself through the seeing consciousness and, as it were, look at oneself from the other side. So that one not only sees a thought going down and sensing it coming back up, but perceiving everything that happens in between while the thought is going down and coming back up. This is only possible for the inspired consciousness; it is possible for the beholder who has made it possible for himself not only to look outward while living in the physical body, but to look even within the body of man himself while living in the spirit. Thus man reaches, on the one hand, a beyond of the soul, which assures him that he lives in the spirit. But man also reaches the beyond of the soul, which works in what lives unconsciously from the disappearance of a thought until the reappearance of the same, what lives down there as what Eduard von Hartmann calls the “unconscious”, and which he believes can never be reached by consciousness. It cannot be reached by ordinary consciousness because the thought is reflected in the organism beforehand; but if one gets behind this reflection, if one goes beyond oneself and lives in the observing consciousness, then one experiences what really happens in a person between the moment of conceiving the thought and the moment of remembering it. And this we will now hold fast, what man can perceive, as it were, beyond that stream through the seeing consciousness, which is usually limited to him by memory. For we see well: there we enter through the seeing consciousness into a beyond of the soul. Let us keep this thought in mind and look at many other endeavors that have emerged in the scientific age from the same point of view. Not only does the scientific world view, I might say, take such erroneous paths to the soul life as I have characterized it, but in a certain respect it also takes erroneous paths when it wants to explore what lies beyond the senses. In this respect, scientific research is indeed in a strange position at present when it forms a world view. It has actually come to the conclusion that everything that lives in consciousness is only an image of reality. It starts from an incorrect idea; but this incorrect idea, despite its incorrectness, gives a certain insight that is correct, namely that everything that lives in consciousness is an image. Scientific research starts from the idea that out there is a reality of vibrating, thoughtless ether atoms, completely without spirit or soul. We have found the ether to be a surging, thought-filled life; the scientific world view starts from the thoughtless, soulless ether. These vibrations impress our senses, effects arise in us, conjuring up the colorful, resounding world for us, while outside everything is dark and silent. Now, however, thinking, on which this world view is based, wants to get behind these images. What does it do? What it does there can be compared to someone -— well, let's say a child - looking into a mirror. Mirror images come towards him, his own and the images of his surroundings. And now the child wants to know what actually underlies these mirror images. What does it do? Yes, what is actually underlying them is behind the mirror, it says; so it will either want to look behind the mirror. But there it sees something quite different from what it was actually looking for. Or it may well smash the mirror to see what is behind the glass. The same is true of the scientific view of the world. It has the whole carpet of sense phenomena before it, and it wants to know what actually lives behind the sense phenomena. It goes so far as to approach the substance, the matter. Now it wants to know what is out there, apart from the senses. But that is merely as if it wanted to smash the carpet, which is like a mirror. She would not find what she was looking for behind it. And if someone were to say: “I have red through the eye, and behind it are certain vibrations in the ether,” he is talking just like someone who believes that the origin of what shines in the mirror is behind the mirror. Just as when you stand before a mirror you see the image of yourself in the mirror, and you are together with what is in the surroundings, and with what also reflects itself of yourself, so you are together in the soul with what is behind the sense phenomena. If I want to know why other things are reflected with me, I cannot look behind the mirror, but I have to look at those who are to my left and right, who are of the same nature as I am, who are also reflected. If I want to explore what is out there behind the sensory phenomena, I must explore that in which I myself am involved; not by breaking the mirror, but by exploring that in which I myself am involved. Indeed, ingenious and wonderful trains of thought have been developed over the airwaves in relation to natural science. But all these trains of thought have led to nothing, to the realization that the path of physical research leads only to the same thing that is seen in the sense perception, only that because some things are too fine or too fast to be perceived by the senses. One comes to no ether. This is clear today after the beautiful research with the pumped tubes, the vacuum tubes, where one thought one had the ether in one's hands; for today one knows that nothing else comes about through these experiments than radiant matter, not what can be called ether. I would even say that ether research in particular is undergoing the greatest revolution today. For one will never arrive at anything other than that which reflects, by way of physical research. If one wants to get further, then one must consider that which reflects with a community — but one can only do that with the seeing consciousness. And that is what lives in the ether that is truly inspired by thought. Therefore, when one asks about the beyond of the senses, one finds only one answer through the seeing consciousness. For when one recognizes the surging thought-inspired ether within oneself through imaginative knowledge, then one also comes to seek it behind the red, behind the sound, behind all external sensory perception; no longer the dead ether of today's physical conception, which is just fading away, but the living, thought-inspired ether. Behind what the senses perceive, lives the same thing that is found in us when we penetrate down into that which lives in us between the grasping of a thought and the remembering of a thought. We do not reach the beyond of the senses by the methods of modern physics, but by finding what is beyond the senses in our own being, by learning to recognize: the same process works in our own being between the grasping of a thought and the reminiscence of a thought, which lives outside and which penetrates my eye when I perceive red. Behind this red is the same thing that is in me between the grasping of a thought and the remembering of a thought. The beyond of the senses and the beyond of the soul leads into the spiritual. I had to lead you through a deducted train of thought today because I wanted to say something in the context of these lectures about the perspective that must arise from spiritual science. I wanted to show how true self-knowledge leads to the beyond of the soul, but also how, when one steps into the beyond of the soul, one also stands in the beyond of the senses, and how one thereby finds the way into the spiritual world through the observing consciousness. And once we enter this spiritual world, the intuitive consciousness discovers that which also plays a role in our soul life and which I have described in the previous lectures as that which, as our destiny, rises and falls in our experiences. In this way, the life of fate is linked to the moral life, to what happens in destiny. When we first know that behind the experience of the senses there is not a spiritless reality, but a reality inspired by the spirit, then our moral life will have just as much place in this spiritual world, which lies beyond the soul and beyond the senses, as the material world, which we perceive all around us, has in this outer world. Spiritual science today, when it develops these things, is still seen as something paradoxical; the things I have described are, so to speak, considered foolishness; and yet they can be considered just as much as facts, simply by looking at them as if one wanted to describe an external event. But this approach of spiritual science is only digging in one epistemic tunnel from one side; from the other side, natural science digs into the mountain. If the two strive in the right direction, they will meet in the middle. And I would like to say: in a kind of negative way, those who cultivate natural science do come to meet those who cultivate the humanities; for remarkable things have come about among natural scientists in recent times. Those who think they are firmly grounded in natural science research because they know what has been discovered up to twenty years ago do not yet know much about what natural scientists actually do. But if you look more closely, you will make some very strange discoveries in the course of scientific thinking. For this very reason, I have today cited Eduard von Hartmann as a thinker who at least points to a beyond the senses and a beyond the soul. He just does not admit that it is possible for the observing consciousness to penetrate beyond the senses and the beyond of the soul. Therefore he says, dipping it into a general sauce of knowledge - knowledge sauce, one says nowadays! -: What lies beyond the senses and beyond the soul is the unconscious. He now puts forward quite questionable hypotheses about it. But these are only truths of thought. Thought does not reach into these worlds. Only the seeing consciousness reaches into them, as I have described. But at least Hartmann does advance to at least a presentiment of the fact that in the beyond of the senses and in the beyond of the soul there is something spiritual, even if he did not bring it to consciousness. When he published his Philosophy of the Unconscious in 1868, he offered a critique of the already then rampant materialistic interpretation of Darwinism. “Materialistic Darwinism” — not what Darwin found in the way of individual facts, that is not under discussion here — believes that it can explain how the more perfect arise from imperfect, simplest living creatures by leaving out everything of a spiritual nature, as they say, through mere selection, through mere struggle for existence. Due to the fact that the perfect ones develop by chance and overcome those that remain imperfect by chance, the perfect ones gradually prevail; this is how something like a developmental series from the imperfect to the perfect arises. As early as 1868, Hartmann explained that such a play of purely external natural necessities, which can also be called chance, is not sufficient to explain the development of organisms, but that certain forces must be at work, even if unconsciously, when a living being develops from imperfection to perfection. In short, he sought a spiritual element in evolution, that spiritual element that can really be found beyond the senses and beyond the soul, he hypothetically assumed. He assumed it only hypothetically, because at that time one had not yet penetrated to the stage of direct intuitive consciousness. When the “Philosophy of the Unconscious” was published, which criticized Darwin's theory of chance in a sharp-witted way, a large number of scientifically minded people came forward to oppose this “dilettante thinker” Eduard von Hartmann. A dilettante philosopher who doesn't understand anything of what Darwinism has brought, and who speaks so glibly from his own intellectual standpoint! And among those who criticized Hartmann at the time was Oscar Schmid, a professor in Jena. Haeckel himself was also among them. Haeckel himself and numerous of his students were now highly astonished that among the many writings that, in their opinion, brilliantly refuted Eduard von Hartmann, who talked such amateurish nonsense, there was also a writing by an anonymous author – by a man who did not name himself. And Haeckel said: He should come forward! And others also said: He should come forward and we would accept him as one of our own! It is so wonderful that a scientific paper has now been published in this way against the nonsense of the “philosophy of the unconscious”! — And a second edition of this paper “The Unconscious in the Light of Darwinism” was published. And the author called himself – it was Eduard von Hartmann! You see, there were reasons why people no longer declaimed: He calls himself us and we consider him one of us. They now kept quiet about him. That was a fundamental lesson that had to be taught to those who believe that the one who talks about the spirit does so because he does not understand their science. It became quite quiet now. But something else was noticed: in 1916 a very interesting work was published that can be said to stand at the pinnacle of the field it discusses. This work is called: 'The Development of Organisms. A Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance'. And this work - well, who wrote it? Well, it is by the often mentioned most brilliant Haeckel student, by Oscar Hertwig, the Berlin professor of biology. We are witnessing the strange spectacle that the next generation of Haeckel's students, the generation of students of which he himself was most proud, is already writing books to refute the Darwinian theory of chance, which at the time when they turned against Hartmann was precisely the one prevailing in the Haeckel circle. And what does Hertwig do, whom I myself knew as one of the most loyal Haeckel students with his brother Richard? He adopts what can be called a “materialistic interpretation of the Darwinian theory” and refutes it piece by piece, quoting Eduard von Hartmann at several points. Hartmann now reappears in Oscar Hertwig's writing “The Becoming of Organisms. A Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance” and is honored again. In the past, when he was not known, people said: He calls himself unconscious, and we consider him one of us. And now we are beginning to come back to what Hartmann still put into the unconscious. Now we are beginning to recognize the spiritual in what is there sensually. However, this book “The Development of Organisms. A Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance by Oscar Hertwig” is indeed strange. For while all earlier materialistic interpretations of Darwinism boiled down to saying: We have perfect organisms, we have imperfect organisms; the perfect ones have developed from the imperfect ones through their external natural forces, Hertwig comes back to to the fact that in the perfect organism, if one goes back microscopically to the first germ, one can prove that Nägeli's view is correct, that in the first germ the perfect organism is already distinguished from the imperfect organism. For there is already something quite different in the perfect organism than in the imperfect one, which one believes the perfect one has developed from. Microscopic research has gone to a limit, but it has achieved nothing more than to come across a mirror, and has not progressed further than the limit of the sensory world. The consequence will be that many people who stand on the standpoint of the natural-scientific world view will not merely state, as Hertwig does: the materialistic interpretation of Darwinism is impossible. Rather, they will acknowledge: If we want to arrive at anything that explains the sense world and lies behind it, then we cannot stop at ordinary consciousness; we cannot get out of the sense world, not even with as many telescopes as we want. We can only get out of the sense world if we arm ourselves with the seeing consciousness. But in general, even philosophers have not yet gone very far in arming themselves with the soul to the point where they would recognize that the seeing consciousness can sprout forth from this ordinary consciousness, just as the waking consciousness sprouts forth from the dream. Today philosophers are even less qualified to penetrate to these things. I have often said that I only act in opposition to those whom I basically respect very much. Therefore, I may say: It is only because of this inability to think in a way that is in accordance with the spirit and reality, that one would strive for this seeing consciousness, that people are considered great philosophers today who, basically, their whole thinking and meditating only swim around in what surges up and down in this ordinary consciousness, without even feeling the need to get beyond mere talk of surging ideas. And so it has also come about that someone who revels in the surface of the surging and swaying ideas, as Eucken did, for example, can be regarded as a great philosopher today. It is just one of the things that one has to characterize by saying that this clinging to ordinary consciousness has also taken away from man the sharpness of thought that allows him to see that there are not such limits to knowledge as Kant states, but such limits that one must reckon with in order to transcend them through the seeing consciousness. That is why those who declaim about all kinds of spiritual worlds, but who, within the ordinary consciousness, come to nothing but what Eduard von Hartmann long ago recognized as mere ordinary consciousness operating in images, are regarded as great philosophers today. And so much could be shown in the present day that would draw attention to the fact that, I would say, the admirable scientific way of looking at things has led us away from the paths that lead to the soul. For some, however, it has been quite the opposite. There are people in the present who sense what I have said today. For example, there is a personality in the present who senses that what lives in the soul between birth and death in the form of thinking, feeling and willing is only something that is conditioned by the body, while the eternal comes from the comes out of the spiritual world, enters into existence through birth, transforms itself in the body so that it works in the body, and then leaves again through death, and that what works in the body is not the true soul. The personality that I mean recognizes this. But it says that in what lives in ordinary consciousness, we only have images. This personality calls it “events”. Behind these lie the primal factors that are experienced in the seeing consciousness as beyond the soul and beyond the senses. But the personality that I mean does not want to go into this seeing consciousness. And so it stands before the occurrences, again, I would like to say, smashing a thick mirror over and over again, and saying: Behind it the primal factors must be. But it rages. And by raging against the mirror surface and not wanting to come to the seeing consciousness, it believes that all philosophy has only raged. With Fichte one can see (I have spoken about this in my book “Vom Menschenrätsel” (The Riddle of Man)) that he did not rave, but that he pointed to the seeing consciousness in an important point. The personality I am referring to now, which does recognize the image-nature of ordinary consciousness, says: “He who cannot laugh (at Fichte) cannot philosophize either.” And as this personality lets all philosophers from Plato and Heraclitus to the present day pass before it in their interrelations, it calls these philosophies “The Tragicomedy of Wisdom”. And there is an interesting sentence on page 132: “We have no more philosophy than an animal, and only the frantic attempt to arrive at a philosophy and the final surrender to not-knowing distinguish us from the animal.” That is the judgment of one personality about all philosophy, about all attempts to penetrate into the beyond of the soul and the beyond of the senses! This is truly a raging man who, in his rage, believes that others are raging. Therefore, because he speaks so beautifully about philosophy, he is currently a university professor of philosophy! Philosophy is currently being taught in such a way as to express itself in such a phenomenon. I know very well that for some people what I am saying seems bitter. I can fully understand that. I can understand all the bitterness and also all the paradoxes. But it must be pointed out once and for all that in the present time there is the necessity to emerge from what is enclosed in the mere sense world and to submerge into what leads beyond the soul, beyond the senses. For it is not the world that sets up limits to our knowledge. What sets up the limits of knowledge is man himself. Sometimes one can make very interesting discoveries, such as what the human being is like when he does not even want to look at what, as a seeing consciousness, leads to the very essence of the soul. I have just given a sample of a philosophical view of a university professor Richard Wahle, who wrote the “Tragicomedy of Wisdom”. I could mention another: the famous Jodl. The man would certainly - he is no longer alive - regard everything that has been said here today, and that is said here at all, as the most complete madness. But he does speak about the soul in the following way: “The soul does not have states or capacities, such as thinking, imagining, joy, hatred, and so on, but these states in their totality are the soul.” Very ingenious! And the whole of Jodl's philosophy is permeated by this ingenuity. Only this definition of the soul is no more valuable than if someone were to say: It is not the table that has corners and edges and a surface, but corners and edges and a surface are the table. And that is the quality of most of the thoughts that now live in that tangle of mere thought-webs, which are, however, only a product of the body because they do not want to penetrate to the observing consciousness, where one first discovers the soul. Today, however, one will still find that such a view takes many revenge. I have called the world-view represented in these lectures Anthroposophy. This is in reference to the “Anthroposophy” of Robert Zimmermann, who was also a university professor, but who was equally opposed to Anthroposophy. For what would Robert Zimmermann have said about the Anthroposophy that is presented here? Well, he would say what he has already said about Schelling: the philosopher must remain within that which can be attained through thought. He must not appeal to something that requires a special training of the soul! One can speak in this way, then one is just practicing an anthroposophy like Robert Zimmermann did. You will find a thicket of thoughts in it; it will not interest you, because not a word is said about all the questions of the soul and the spirit. Of what I have discussed in these lectures, what is connected with the beyond of the soul and the beyond of the senses, what is connected with the question of the immortality of the human soul, with the question of fate — none of this is contained in that anthroposophy. For the whole of the thinking of this last century has, on the one hand, admittedly produced the great advances of natural science, which cannot be sufficiently admired, but on the other hand, it has also produced the attitude of mind towards knowledge that the youthful Renan, when he left college, expressed as his conviction when he had been led astray in his religious ideas by the insights of the modern scientific way of thinking. At that time he said: “The man of the present day is aware that he will never know anything about his highest causes or his destiny.” That is ultimately the confession of many today, except that because the confession has been around for so long, very many have become numb to it and do not feel how such a confession eats away at the soul when it is new. This confession has blocked the paths to the beyond of the soul and to the beyond of the senses that are characteristic of today. Ernest Renan, after all, was someone who felt how it is possible to live with such a blockage. And so, as an old man, he made a strange statement: “I wish I knew for sure that there was a hell, because better the hypothesis of hell than of nothingness."The non-recognition of the observing consciousness does not lead to the knowledge of the origin and essence of man, just as the breaking of a mirror does not lead to the knowledge of those beings who are reflected in it. Renan felt this. He felt that where earlier times sought the spiritual origin of man, his world view posits a nothing. His mind protested against this by him declaring in old age that he would rather know that there is a hell than believe that nothingness is real. As long as only the mind protests in this way, as long as humanity will not get beyond the limitations of the world view that has so far blocked the paths to the beyond of the senses and the beyond of the soul. Only when humanity declares its willingness to develop such strong thinking and imagining that the soul can strengthen itself for what is, in the seeing consciousness, a living continuation of what Goethe suggested in his concept of the contemplating power of judgment, and which Kant regards as an adventure of reason, only when humanity decides to to advance to this realization of thoughts, to the whole soul world, in order to penetrate into spiritual reality with the seeing consciousness, then not only a mere protest of the mind, but a protest of knowledge will arise against the powers of compulsion of that so-called monism, which wants to split man off from a knowledge of his actual being. And I think that today we can already feel the inner nerve that lives in the spiritual-scientific debates in such a way that we are living at the starting point of those upheavals in human soul life that lead out of the realization of the already admired natural scientific world view into the beyond of the senses and the beyond of the soul, into the actual place of origin of the human being, into the spirit. And thus man will again be able to link that which lives in his destiny, in his moral existence, to the origin of the world, just as he can link that which lives in the outer necessity of nature. And in this way man will ascend to a truly unified and also truly satisfying view of nature and soul, because as spirit he speaks to spirit. |
34. The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy
Tr. George Adams, Mary Adams Rudolf Steiner |
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An excitable child should be surrounded by and dressed in the red or reddish-yellow colours, whereas for a lethargic child one should have recourse to the blue or bluish-green shades of colour. For the important thing is the complementary colour, which is created within the child. In the case of red it is green, and in the case of blue orange-yellow, as may easily be seen by looking for a time at a red or blue surface and then quickly directing one's gaze to a white surface. |
If the excitable child has a red colour around him, he will inwardly create the opposite, the green; and this activity of creating green has a calming effect. The organs assume a tendency to calmness. |
34. The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy
Tr. George Adams, Mary Adams Rudolf Steiner |
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[ 1 ] Much that the man of to-day 0 inherits from generations of the past is called in question by his present life. Hence the numerous ‘problems of the hour’ and ‘demands of the age.’ How many of these are occupying the attention of the world—the Social Question, the Women's Question, the various educational questions, hygienic questions, questions of human rights, and so forth! By the most varied means, men are endeavouring to grapple with these problems. The number of those who come on the scene with this or that remedy or programme for the solution—or at any rate for the partial solution—of one or other of them, is indeed past counting. In the process, all manner of opinions and shades of opinion make themselves felt—Radicalism, which carries itself with a revolutionary air; the Moderate attitude, full of respect for existing things, yet endeavouring to evolve out of them something new; Conservatism, which is up in arms whenever any of the old institutions are tampered with. Beside these main tendencies of thought and feeling there is every kind of intermediate position. [ 2 ] Looking at all these things of life with deeper vision, one cannot but feel—indeed the impression forces itself upon one—that the men of our age are in the position of trying to meet the demands involved in modern life with means which are utterly inadequate. Many are setting about to reform life, without really knowing life in its foundations. But he who would make proposals as to the future must not content himself with a knowledge of life that merely touches life's surface. He must investigate its depths. [ 3 ] Life in its entirety is like a plant. The plant contains not only what it offers to external life; it also holds a future state within its hidden depths. One who has before him a plant only just in leaf, knows very well that after some time there will be flowers and fruit also on the leaf-bearing stem. In its hidden depths the plant already contains the flowers and fruit in embryo; yet by mere investigation of what the plant now offers to external vision, how should one ever tell what these new organs will look like? This can only be told by one who has learnt to know the very nature and being of the plant. [ 4 ] So, too, the whole of human life contains within it the germs of its own future; but if we are to tell anything about this future, we must first penetrate into the hidden nature of the human being. And this our age is little inclined to do. It concerns itself with the things that appear on the surface, and thinks it is treading on unsafe ground if called upon to penetrate to what escapes external observation. In the case of the plant the matter is certainly more simple. We know that others like it have again and again borne fruit before. Human life is present only once; the flowers it will bear in the future have never yet been there. Yet they are present within man in the embryo, even as the flowers are present in a plant that is still only in leaf. [ 5 ] And there is a possibility of saying something about man's future, if once we penetrate beneath the surface of human nature to its real essence and being. It is only when fertilized by this deep penetration into human life, that the various ideas of reform current in the present age can become fruitful and practical. [ 6 ] Anthroposophy, by its inherent character and tendency, must have the task of providing a practical conception of the world—one that comprehends the nature and essence of human life. Whether what is often called so is justified in making such a claim, is not the point; it is the real essence of Anthroposophy—and what, by virtue of its real essence, Anthroposophy can be—that here concerns us. For Anthroposophy is not intended as a theory remote from life, one that merely caters for man's curiosity or thirst for knowledge. Nor is it intended as an instrument for a few people, who for selfish reasons would like to attain a higher level of development for themselves. No, it can join and work at the most important tasks of present-day humanity, and further their development for the welfare of mankind.1 [ 7 ] It is true that in taking on this mission, Anthroposophy must be prepared to face all kinds of scepticism and opposition. Radicals, Moderates and Conservatives in every sphere of life will be bound to meet it with scepticism. For in its beginnings it will scarcely be in a position to please any party. Its premises lie far beyond the sphere of party movements, [ 8 ] being founded, in effect, purely and solely on a true knowledge and perception of life. If a man has knowledge of life, it is only out of life itself that he will be able to set himself his tasks. He will draw up no arbitrary programmes, for he will know that no other fundamental laws of life can prevail in the future than those that prevail already in the present. The spiritual investigator will therefore of necessity respect existing things. However great the need for improvement he may find in them, he will not fail to see, in existing things themselves, the embryo of the future. At the same time, he knows that in all things ‘becoming’ there must be growth and evolution. Hence he will perceive in the present the seeds of transformation and of growth. He invents no programmes; he reads them out of what is there. What he thus reads becomes in a certain sense itself a programme, for it bears in it the essence of development. [ 9 ] For this very reason an anthroposophical insight into the being of man must provide the most fruitful and the most practical means for the solution of the urgent questions of modern life. [ 10 ] In the following pages we shall endeavour to prove this for one particular question—the question of Education. We shall not set up demands nor programmes, but simply describe the child-nature. From the nature of the growing and evolving human being, the proper point of view for Education will, as it were, spontaneously result. [ 11 ] If we wish to perceive the nature of the evolving man, we must begin by considering the hidden nature of man as such. [ 12 ] What sense-observation learns to know in man, and what the materialistic conception of life would consider as the one and only element in man's being, is for spiritual investigation only one part, one member of his nature: it is his Physical Body. This physical body of man is subject to the same laws of physical existence, and is built up of the same substances and forces, as the whole of that world which is commonly called lifeless. Anthroposophical Science says, therefore: man has a physical body in common with the whole of the mineral kingdom. And it designates as the ‘Physical Body’ that alone in man, which brings the substances into mixture, combination, form, and dissolution by the same laws as are at work in the same substances in the mineral world as well. [ 13 ] Now over and above the physical body, Anthroposophical Science recognizes a second essential principle in man. It is his Life-Body or Etheric Body. The physicist need not take offence at the term ‘Etheric Body.’ The word ‘Ether’ in this connection does not mean the same as the hypothetical Ether of Physics. It must be taken simply as a designation of what will here and now be described. [ 14 ] In recent times it was considered a highly unscientific proceeding to speak of such an ‘Etheric Body’; though this had not been so at the end of the eighteenth and in the first half of the nineteenth century. In that earlier time people had said to themselves: the substances and forces which are at work in a mineral cannot of their own accord form the mineral into a living creature. In the latter there must also be inherent a peculiar ‘force.’ This force they called the ‘Vital Force,’ and they thought of it somewhat as follows: the Vital Force is working in the plant, in the animal, in the human body, and produces the phenomena of life, just as the magnetic force is present in the magnet producing the phenomena of attraction. In the succeeding period of materialism, this idea was set aside. People began to say: the living creature is built up in the same way as the lifeless creation. There are no other forces at work in the living organism than in the mineral; the same forces are only working in a more complicated way, and building a more complex structure. To-day, however, it is only the most rigid materialists who hold fast to this denial of a life-force or vital force. There are a number of natural scientists and thinkers whom the facts of life have taught, that something like a vital force or life-principle must be assumed. [ 15 ] Thus modern science, in its later developments, is in a certain sense approaching what Anthroposophical Science has to say about the life-body. There is, however, a very important difference. From the facts of sense-perception, modern science arrives, through intellectual considerations or reflections, at the assumption of a kind of vital force. This is not the method of genuine spiritual investigation which Anthroposophy adopts and from the results of which it makes its statements. It cannot often enough be emphasized how great is the difference, in this respect, between Anthroposophy and the current science of to-day. For the latter regards the experiences of the senses as the foundation for all knowledge. Anything that cannot be built up on this foundation, it takes to be unknowable. From the impressions of the senses it draws deductions and conclusions. What goes on beyond them it rejects, as lying ‘beyond the frontiers of human knowledge.’ From the standpoint of Anthroposophical Science, such a view is like that of a blind man, who only admits as valid things that can be touched and conclusions that result by deduction from the world of touch—a blind man who rejects the statements of seeing people as lying outside the possibility of human knowledge. Anthroposophy shows man to be capable of evolution, capable of bringing new worlds within his sphere by the development of new organs of perception. Colour and light are all around the blind man. If he cannot see them, it is only because he lacks the organs of perception. In like manner Anthroposophy asserts: there are many worlds around man, and man can perceive them if only he develops the necessary organs. As the blind man who has undergone a successful operation looks out upon a new world, so by the development of higher organs man can come to know new worlds—worlds altogether different from those which his ordinary senses allow him to perceive. Now whether one who is blind in body can be operated on or not, depends on the constitution of his organs. But the higher organs whereby man can penetrate into the higher worlds, are present in embryo in every human being. Everyone can develop them who has the patience, endurance, and energy to apply in his own case the methods described in the volume, ‘Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment.’ Anthroposophical Science, then, would never say that there are definite frontiers to human knowledge. What it would rather say is that for man those worlds exist, for which he has the organs of perception. Thus Anthroposophy speaks only of the methods whereby existing frontiers may be extended; and this is its position with regard to the investigation of the life-body or etheric body, and of all that is specified in the following pages as the yet higher members of man's nature. Anthroposophy admits that the physical body alone is accessible to investigation through the bodily senses, and that—from the point of view of this kind of investigation—it will at most be possible by intellectual deductions to surmise the existence of a higher body. At the same time, it tells how it is possible to open up a world wherein these higher members of man's nature emerge for the observer, as the colour and the light of things emerge after operation in the case of a man born blind. For those who have developed the higher organs of perception, the etheric or life-body is an object of perception and not merely of intellectual deduction. Man has this etheric or life-body in common with the plants and animals. The life-body works in a formative way upon the substances and forces of the physical body, thus bringing about the phenomena of growth, reproduction, and inner movement of the saps and fluids. It is therefore the builder and moulder of the physical body, its inhabitant and architect. The physical body may even be spoken of as an image or expression of the life-body. In man the two are nearly, though by no means wholly, equal as to form and size. In the animals, however, and still more so in the plants, the etheric body is very different, both in form and in extension, from the physical. [ 16 ] The third member of the human body is what is called the Sentient or Astral Body. It is the vehicle of pain and pleasure, of impulse, craving, passion, and the like—all of which are absent in a creature consisting only of physical and etheric bodies. These things may all be included in the term: sentient feeling or sensation. The plant has no sensation. If in our time some learned men, seeing that plants will respond by movement or in some other way to external stimulus, conclude that plants have a certain power of sensation, they only show their ignorance of what sensation is. The point is not whether the creature responds to an external stimulus, but whether the stimulus is reflected in an inner process—as pain or pleasure, impulse, desire, or the like. Unless we held fast to this criterion, we should be justified in saying that blue litmus-paper has a sensation of certain substances, because it turns red by contact with them.2 [ 17 ] Man has therefore a sentient body in common with the animal kingdom only, and this sentient body is the vehicle of sensation or of sentient life. [ 18 ] We must not fall into the error of certain theosophical circles, and imagine the etheric and sentient bodies as consisting simply of finer substances than are present in the physical body. For that would be a materialistic conception of these higher members of man's nature. The etheric body is a force-form; it consists of active forces, and not of matter. The astral or sentient body is a figure of inwardly moving, coloured, luminous pictures. [ 19 ] The astral body deviates, both in shape and size, from the physical body. In man it presents an elongated ovoid form, within which the physical and etheric bodies are embedded. It projects beyond them—a vivid, luminous figure—on every side.4 [ 20 ] Now man possesses a fourth member of his being; and this fourth member he shares with no other earthly creature. It is the vehicle of the human ‘ I ,’ of the human Ego. The little word ‘ I ’—as used, for example, in the English language—is a name essentially different from all other names. To anyone who ponders rightly on the nature of this name, there is opened up at once a way of approach to a perception of man's real nature. All other names can be applied, by all men equally, to the thing they designate. Everyone can call a table ‘table,’ and everyone can call a chair ‘chair’; but it is not so with the name ‘ I .’ No one can use this name to designate another. Each human being can only call himself ‘ I ’; the name ‘ I ’ can never reach my ear as a designation of myself. In designating himself as ‘ I ,’ man has to name himself within himself. A being who can say ‘ I ’ to himself is a world in himself. Those religions which are founded on spiritual knowledge have always had a feeling for this truth. Hence they have said: With the ‘ I ,’ the ‘God’—who in the lower creatures reveals himself only from without, in the phenomena of the surrounding world—begins to speak from within. The vehicle of this faculty of saying ‘ I ,’ of the Ego-faculty, is the ‘Body of the Ego,’ the fourth member of the human being.5 [ 21 ] This ‘Body of the Ego’ is the vehicle of the higher soul of man. Through it man is the crown of all earthly creation. Now in the human being of the present day the Ego is by no means simple in character. We may recognize its nature if we compare human beings at different stages of development. Look at the uneducated savage beside the average European, or again, compare the latter with a lofty idealist. Each one of them has the faculty of saying ‘ I ’ to himself; the ‘Body of the Ego’ is present in them all. But the uneducated savage, with his Ego, follows his passions, impulses, and cravings almost like an animal. The more highly developed man says to himself, ‘Such and such impulses and desires you may follow,’ while others again he holds in check or suppresses altogether. The idealist has developed new impulses and new desires in addition to those originally present. All this has taken place through the Ego working upon the other members of the human being. Indeed, it is this which constitutes the special task of the Ego. Working outward from itself, it has to ennoble and purify the other members of man's nature. [ 22 ] In the human being who has reached beyond the condition in which the external world first placed him, the lower members have become changed to a greater or lesser degree under the influence of the ‘Ego.’ When man is only beginning to rise above the animal, when his ‘Ego’ is only just kindled, he is still like an animal so far as the lower members of his being are concerned. His etheric or life-body is simply the vehicle of the formative forces of life, the forces of growth and reproduction. His sentient body gives expression to those impulses, desires, and passions only, which are stimulated by external nature. As man works his way up from this stage of development, through successive lives or incarnations, to an ever higher evolution, his ‘Ego’ works upon the other members and transforms them. In this way his sentient body becomes the vehicle of purified sensations of pleasure and pain, refined wishes and desires. And the etheric or life-body also becomes transformed. It becomes the vehicle of the man's habits, of his more permanent bent or tendency in life, of his temperament and of his memory. A man whose Ego has not yet worked upon his life-body, has no memory of the experiences he goes through in life. He just lives out what Nature has implanted in him. [ 23 ] This is what the growth and development of civilization means for man. It is a continual working of his Ego upon the lower members of his nature. The work penetrates right down into the physical body. Under the influence of the Ego, the whole appearance and physiognomy, the gestures and movements of the physical body, are altered. It is possible, moreover, to distinguish the way in which the different means of culture or civilization work upon the several members of man's nature. The ordinary factors of civilization work upon the sentient body and imbue it with pleasures and pains, with impulses and cravings, of a different kind from what it had originally. Again, when the human being is absorbed in the contemplation of a great work of art, his etheric body is being influenced. Through the work of art he divines something higher and more noble than is offered by the ordinary environment of his senses, and in this process he is forming and transforming his life-body. Religion is a powerful means for the purification and ennobling of the etheric body. It is here that the religious impulses have their mighty purpose in the evolution of mankind. [ 25 ] What we call ‘conscience’ is nothing else than the outcome of the work of the Ego on the life-body through incarnation after incarnation. When man begins to perceive that he ought not to do this or that, and when this perception makes so strong an impression on him that the impression passes on into his etheric body, ‘conscience’ arises. [ 26 ] Now this work of the Ego upon the lower members may either be something that is proper to a whole race of men; or else it may be entirely individual, an achievement of the individual Ego working on itself alone. In the former case, the whole human race collaborates, as it were, in the transformation of the human being. The latter kind of transformation depends on the activity of the individual Ego alone and of itself. The Ego may become so strong as to transform, by its very own power and strength, the sentient body. What the Ego then makes of the Sentient or Astral Body is called ‘Spirit-Self’ (or by an Eastern expression, ‘Manas’). This transformation is wrought mainly through a process of learning, through an enriching of one's inner life with higher ideas and perceptions. Now the Ego can rise to a still higher task, and it is one that belongs quite essentially to its nature. This happens when not only is the astral body enriched, but the etheric or life-body transformed. A man learns many things in the course of his life; and if from some point he looks back on his past life, he may say to himself: ‘I have learned much.’ But in a far less degree will he be able to speak of a transformation in his temperament or character during life, or of an improvement or deterioration in his memory. Learning concerns the astral body, whereas the latter kinds of transformation concern the etheric or life-body. Hence it is by no means an unhappy image if we compare the change in the astral body during life with the course of the minute hand of a clock, and the transformation of the life-body with the course of the hour hand. [ 27 ] When man enters on a higher training—or, as it is called, occult training—it is above all important for him to undertake, out of the very own power of his Ego, this latter transformation. Individually and with full consciousness, he has to work out the transformation of his habits and his temperament, his character, his memory ... In so far as he thus works into his life-body, he transforms it into what is called in anthroposophical terminology, ‘Life-Spirit’ (or, as the Eastern expression has it, ‘Budhi’). [ 28 ] At a still higher stage man comes to acquire forces whereby he is able to work upon his physical body and transform it (transforming, for example, the circulation of the blood, the pulse). As much of the physical body as is thus transformed is ‘Spirit-Man’ (or, in the Eastern term, ‘Atma’). [ 29 ] Now as a member of the whole human species or of some section of it—for example, of a nation, tribe, or family—man also achieves certain transformations of the lower parts of his nature. In Anthroposophical Science the results of this latter kind of transformation are known by the following names. The astral or sentient body, transformed through the Ego, is called the Sentient Soul; the transformed etheric body is called the Intellectual Soul; and the transformed physical body the Spiritual Soul. We must not imagine the transformations of these three members taking place one after another in time. From the moment when the Ego lights up, all three bodies are undergoing transformation simultaneously. Indeed, the work of the Ego does not become clearly perceptible to man until a part of the Spiritual Soul has already been formed and developed. [ 30 ] From what has been said, it is clear that we may speak of four members of man's nature: the Physical Body, the Etheric or Life-Body, the Astral or Sentient Body, and the Body of the Ego. The Sentient Soul, the Intellectual Soul, and the Spiritual Soul, and beyond these the still higher members of man's nature—Spirit-Self, Life-Self, Spirit-Man—appear in connection with these four members as products of transformation. Speaking of the vehicles of the qualities of man, it is in fact the first four members only which come into account. [ 31 ] It is on these four members of the human being that the educator works. Hence, if we desire to work in the right way, we must investigate the nature of these parts of man. It must not be imagined that they develop uniformly in the human being, so that at any given point in his life—the moment of birth, for example—they are all equally far developed. This is not the case; their development takes place differently in the different ages of a man's life. The right foundation for education, and for teaching also, consists in a knowledge of these laws of development of human nature. [ 32 ] Before physical birth, the growing human being is surrounded on all sides by the physical body of another. He does not come into independent contact with the physical world. The physical body of his mother is his environment, and this body alone can work upon him as he grows and ripens. Physical birth indeed consists in this, that the physical mother-body, which has been as a protecting sheath, sets the human being free, thus enabling the environment of the physical world thenceforward to work upon him directly. His senses open to the external world, and the external world thereby gains that influence on the human being which was previously exercised by the physical envelope of the mother-body. [ 33 ] A spiritual understanding of the world, as represented by Anthroposophy, sees in this process the birth of the physical body, but not as yet of the etheric or life-body. Even as man is surrounded, until the moment of birth, by the physical envelope of the mother-body, so until the time of the change of teeth—until about the seventh year—he is surrounded by an etheric envelope and by an astral envelope. It is only during the change of teeth that the etheric envelope liberates the etheric body. And an astral envelope remains until the time of puberty, when the astral or sentient body also becomes free on all sides, even as the physical body became free at physical birth and the etheric body at the change of teeth.6 [ 33 ] Thus, Anthroposophical Science has to speak of three births of the human being. Until the change of teeth, certain impressions intended for the etheric body can as little reach it as the light and air of the physical world can reach the physical body so long as this latter is resting in the mother's womb. [ 34 ] Before the change of teeth takes place, the free life-body is not yet at work in man. As in the body of the mother the physical body receives forces which are not its own, while at the same time it gradually develops its own forces within the protecting sheath of the mother's womb, [ 35 ] so it is with the forces of growth until the change of teeth. During this first period the etheric body is only developing and moulding its own forces, con jointly with those—not its own—which it has inherited. Now while the etheric body is thus working its way into liberation, the physical body is already independent. The etheric body, as it liberates itself, develops and works out what it has to give to the physical body. The ‘second teeth,’ i.e. the human being's own teeth, taking the place of those which he inherited, represent the culmination of this work. They are the densest things embedded in the physical body, and hence they appear last, at the end of this period. [ 36 ] From this point onward, the growth of man's physical body is brought about by his own etheric body alone. But this etheric body is still under the influence of an astral body which has not yet escaped from its protecting sheath. At the moment when the astral body too becomes free, the etheric body concludes another period of its development; and this conclusion finds expression in puberty. The organs of reproduction become independent because from this time onward the astral body is free, no longer working inwards, but openly and without integument meeting the external world. [ 37 ] Now just as the physical influences of the external world cannot be brought to bear on the yet unborn child—so until the change of teeth one should not bring to bear on the etheric body those forces which are, for it, what the impressions of the physical environment are for the physical body. And in the astral body the corresponding influences should not be given play until after puberty. [ 38 ] Vague and general phrases—‘the harmonious development of all the powers and talents in the child,’ and so forth—cannot provide the basis for a genuine art of education. Such an art of education can only be built up on a real knowledge of the human being. Not that these phrases are incorrect, but that at bottom they are as useless as it would be to say of a machine that all its parts must be brought harmoniously into action. To work a machine you must approach it, not with phrases and truisms, but with real and detailed knowledge. So for the art of education it is a knowledge of the members of man's being and of their several development which is important. We must know on what part of the human being we have especially to work at a certain age, and how we can work upon it in the proper way. There is of course no doubt that a truly realistic art of education, such as is here indicated, will only slowly make its way. This lies, indeed, in the whole mentality of our age, which will long continue to regard the facts of the spiritual world as the vapourings of an imagination run wild, while it takes vague and altogether unreal phrases for the result of a realistic way of thinking. Here, however, we shall unreservedly describe what will in time to come be a matter of common knowledge, though many to-day may still regard it as a figment of the mind. [ 39 ] With physical birth the physical human body is exposed to the physical environment of the external world. Before birth it was surrounded by the protecting envelope of the mother's body. What the forces and fluids of the enveloping mother-body have done for it hitherto, must from now onward be done for it by the forces and elements of the external physical world. Now before the change of teeth in the seventh year, the human body has a task to perform upon itself which is essentially different from the tasks of all the other periods of life. In this period the physical organs must mould themselves into definite shapes. Their whole structural nature must receive certain tendencies and directions. In the later periods also, growth takes place; but throughout the whole succeeding life, growth is based on the forms which were developed in this first life-period. If true forms were developed, true forms will grow; if misshapen forms were developed, misshapen forms will grow. We can never repair what we have neglected as educators in the first seven years. Just as Nature brings about the right environment for the physical human body before birth, so after birth the educator must provide for the right physical environment. It is the right physical environment alone, which works upon the child in such a way that the physical organs shape themselves aright. [ 40 ] There are two magic words which indicate how the child enters into relation with his environment. They are: Imitation, and Example. The Greek philosopher Aristotle called man the most imitative of creatures. For no age in life is this more true than for the first stage of childhood, before the change of teeth. What goes on in his physical environment, this the child imitates, and in the process of imitation his physical organs are cast into the forms which then become permanent. ‘Physical environment’ must, however, be taken in the widest imaginable sense. It includes not only what goes on around the child in the material sense, but everything that takes place in the child's environment—everything that can be perceived by his senses, that can work from the surrounding physical space upon the inner powers of the child. This includes all the moral or immoral actions, all the wise or foolish actions, that the child sees. [ 41 ] It is not moral talk or prudent admonitions that influence the child in this sense. Rather is it what the grown-up people do visibly before his eyes. The effect of admonition is to mould the forms, not of the physical, but of the etheric body; and the latter, as we saw, is surrounded until the seventh year by a protecting etheric envelope, even as the physical body is surrounded before physical birth by the physical envelope of the mother-body. All that has to evolve in the etheric body before the seventh year—ideas, habits, memory, and so forth—all this must develop ‘of its own accord,’ just as the eyes and ears develop within the mother-body without the influence of external light ... What we read in that excellent educational work—Jean Paul's ‘Levana’ or ‘Science of Education’—is undoubtedly true. He says that a traveler will have learned more from his nurse in the first years of his life, than in all his journeys round the world. The child, however, does not learn by instruction or admonition, but by imitation. The physical organs shape their forms through the influence of the physical environment. Good sight will be developed in the child if his environment has the right conditions of light and colour, while in the brain and blood-circulation the physical foundations will be laid for a healthy moral sense if the child sees moral actions in his environment. If before his seventh year the child sees only foolish actions in his surroundings, the brain will assume such forms as adapt it also to foolishness in later life. [ 42 ] As the muscles of the hand grow firm and strong in performing the work for which they are fitted, so the brain and other organs of the physical body of man are guided into the right lines of development if they receive the right impression from their environment. An example will best illustrate this point. You can make a doll for a child by folding up an old napkin, making two corners into legs, the other two corners into arms, a knot for the head, and painting eyes, nose and mouth with blots of ink. Or else you can buy the child what they call a ‘pretty’ doll, with real hair and painted cheeks. We need not dwell on the fact that the ‘pretty’ doll is of course hideous, and apt to spoil the healthy aesthetic sense for a lifetime. The main educational question is a different one. If the child has before him the folded napkin, he has to fill in from his own imagination all that is needed to make it real and human. This work of the imagination moulds and builds the forms of the brain. The brain unfolds as the muscles of the hand unfold when they do the work for which they are fitted. Give the child the so-called ‘pretty’ doll, and the brain has nothing more to do. Instead of unfolding, it becomes stunted and dried up. If people could look into the brain as the spiritual investigator can, and see how it builds its forms, they would assuredly give their children only such toys as are fitted to stimulate and vivify its formative activity. Toys with dead mathematical forms alone, have a desolating and killing effect upon the formative forces of the child. On the other hand everything that kindles the imagination of living things works in the right way. Our materialistic age produces few good toys. What a healthy toy it is, for example, which represents by movable wooden figures two smiths facing each other and hammering an anvil. The like can still be bought in country districts. Excellent also are the picture-books where the figures can be set in motion by pulling threads from below, so that the child itself can transform the dead picture into a representation of living action. All this brings about a living mobility of the organs, and by such mobility the right forms of the organs are built up. [ 43 ] These things can of course only be touched on here, but in future Anthroposophy will be called upon to give the necessary indications in detail, and this it is in a position to do. For it is no empty abstraction, but a body of living facts which can give guiding lines for the conduct of life's realities. [ 44 ] A few more examples may be given. A ‘nervous,’ that is to say excitable child, should be treated differently as regards environment from one who is quiet and lethargic. Everything comes into consideration, from the colour of the room and the various objects that are generally around the child, to the colour of the clothes in which he is dressed. One will often do the wrong thing if one does not take guidance from spiritual knowledge. For in many cases the materialistic idea will hit on the exact reverse of what is right. An excitable child should be surrounded by and dressed in the red or reddish-yellow colours, whereas for a lethargic child one should have recourse to the blue or bluish-green shades of colour. For the important thing is the complementary colour, which is created within the child. In the case of red it is green, and in the case of blue orange-yellow, as may easily be seen by looking for a time at a red or blue surface and then quickly directing one's gaze to a white surface. The physical organs of the child create this contrary or complementary colour, and it is this which brings about the corresponding organic structures that the child needs. If the excitable child has a red colour around him, he will inwardly create the opposite, the green; and this activity of creating green has a calming effect. The organs assume a tendency to calmness. [ 45 ] There is one thing that must be thoroughly and fully recognized for this age of the child's life. It is that the physical body creates its own scale of measurement for what is beneficial to it. This it does by the proper development of craving and desire. Generally speaking, we may say that the healthy physical body desires what is good for it. In the growing human being, so long as it is the physical body that is important, we should pay the closest attention to what the healthy craving, desire and delight require. Pleasure and delight are the forces which most rightly quicken and call forth the physical forms of the organs. In this matter it is all too easy to do harm by failing to bring the child into a right relationship, physically, with his environment. Especially may this happen in regard to his instincts for food. The child may be overfed with things that completely make him lose his healthy instinct for food, whereas by giving him the right nourishment the instinct can be so preserved that he always wants what is wholesome for him under the circumstances, even to a glass of water, and turns just as surely from what would do him harm. Anthroposophical Science, when called upon to build up an art of education, will be able to indicate all these things in detail, even specifying particular forms of food and nourishment. For Anthroposophy is realism, it is no grey theory; it is a thing for life itself. [ 46 ] Thus the joy of the child, in and with his environment, must be reckoned among the forces that build and mould the physical organs. Teachers he needs with happy look and manner, and above all with an honest unaffected love. A love which as it were streams through the physical environment of the child with warmth may literally be said to ‘hatch out’ the forms of the physical organs. [ 47 ] The child who lives in such an atmosphere of love and warmth and who has around him really good examples for his imitation, is living in his right element. One should therefore strictly guard against anything being done in the child's presence that he must not imitate. One should do nothing of which one would then have to say to the child, ‘You must not do that.’ The strength of the child's tendency to imitate can be recognized by observing how he will paint and scribble written signs and letters long before he understands them. Indeed, it is good for him to paint the letters by imitation first, and only later learn to understand their meaning. For imitation belongs to this period when the physical body is developing; while the meaning speaks to the etheric, and the etheric body should not be worked on till after the change of teeth, when the outer etheric envelope has fallen away. Especially should all learning of speech in these years be through imitation. It is by hearing that the child will best learn to speak. No rules or artificial instruction of any kind can be of good effect. [ 48 ] For early childhood it is important to realize the value of children's songs, for example, as means of education. They must make a pretty and rhythmical impression on the senses; the beauty of sound is to be valued more than the meaning. The more living the impression made on eye and ear, the better. Dancing movements in musical rhythm have a powerful influence in building up the physical organs, and this too should not be undervalued. [ 49 ] With the change of teeth, when the etheric body lays aside its outer etheric envelope, there begins the time when the etheric body can be worked upon by education from without. We must be quite clear what it is that can work upon the etheric body from without, The formation and growth of the etheric body means the moulding and developing of the inclinations and habits, of the conscience, the character, the memory and temperament. The etheric body is worked upon through pictures and examples—i.e. by carefully guiding the imagination of the child. As before the age of seven we have to give the child the actual physical pattern for him to copy, so between the time of the change of teeth and puberty we must bring into his environment things with the right inner meaning and value. For it is from the inner meaning and value of things that the growing child will now take guidance. Whatever is fraught with a deep meaning that works through pictures and allegories, is the right thing for these years. The etheric body will unfold its forces if the well-ordered imagination is allowed to take guidance from the inner meaning it discovers for itself in pictures and allegories—whether seen in real life or communicated to the mind. It is not abstract conceptions that work in the right way on the growing etheric body, but rather what is seen and perceived—not indeed with the outward senses, but with the eye of the mind. This seeing and perceiving is the right means of education for these years. For this reason it matters above all that the boy and girl should have as their teachers persons who can awaken in them, as they see and watch them, the right intellectual and moral powers. As for the first years of childhood Imitation and Example were, so to say, the magic words for education, so for the years of this second period the magic words are Discipleship and Authority. What the child sees directly in his educators, with inner perception, must become for him authority—not an authority compelled by force, but one that he accepts naturally without question. By it he will build up his conscience, habits and inclinations; by it he will bring his temperament into an ordered path. He will look out upon the things of the world as it were through its eyes. Those beautiful words of the poet, ‘Every man must choose his hero, in whose footsteps he will tread as he carves out his path to the heights of Olympus,’ have especial meaning for this time of life. Veneration and reverence are forces whereby the etheric body grows in the right way. If it was impossible during these years to look up to another person with unbounded reverence, one will have to suffer for the loss throughout the whole of one's later life. Where reverence is lacking, the living forces of the etheric body are stunted in their growth. Picture to yourself how such an incident as the following works upon the character of a child. A boy of eight years old hears tell of someone who is truly worthy of honour and respect. All that he hears of him inspires in the boy a holy awe. The day draws near when for the first time he will be able to see him. With trembling hand he lifts the latch of the door behind which will appear before his sight the person he reveres. The beautiful feelings such an experience calls forth are among the lasting treasures of life. Happy is he who, not only in the solemn moments of life but continually, is able to look up to his teachers and educators as to his natural and unquestioned authorities. [ 50 ] Beside these living authorities, who as it were embody for the child intellectual and moral strength, there should also be those he can only apprehend with the mind and spirit, who likewise become for him authorities. The outstanding figures of history, stories of the lives of great men and women: let these determine the conscience and the direction of the mind. Abstract moral maxims are not yet to be used; they can only begin to have a helpful influence, when at the age of puberty the astral body liberates itself from its astral mother-envelope. In the history lesson especially, the teacher should lead his teaching in the direction thus indicated. When telling stories of all kinds to little children before the change of teeth, our aim cannot be more than to awaken delight and vivacity and a happy enjoyment of the story. But after the change of teeth, we have in addition something else to bear in mind in choosing our material for stories; and that is, that we are placing before the boy or girl pictures of life that will arouse a spirit of emulation in the soul. The fact should not be overlooked that bad habits may be completely overcome by drawing attention to appropriate instances that shock or repel the child. Reprimands give at best but little help in the matter of habits and inclinations. If, however, we show the living picture of a man who has given way to a similar bad habit, and let the child see where such an inclination actually leads, this will work upon the young imagination and go a long way towards the uprooting of the habit. The fact must always be remembered: it is not abstract ideas that have an influence on the developing etheric body, but living pictures that are seen and comprehended inwardly. The suggestion that has just been made certainly needs to be carried out with great tact, so that the effect may not be reversed and turn out the very opposite of what was intended. In the telling of stories everything depends upon the art of telling. Narration by word of mouth cannot, therefore, simply be replaced by reading. [ 51 ] In another connection too, the presentation of living pictures, or as we might say of symbols, to the mind, is important for the period between the change of teeth and puberty. It is essential that the secrets of Nature, the laws of life, be taught to the boy or girl, not in dry intellectual concepts, but as far as possible in symbols. Parables of the spiritual connections of things should be brought before the soul of the child in such a manner that behind the parables he divines and feels, rather than grasps intellectually, the underlying law in all existence. ‘All that is passing is but a parable,’ must be the maxim guiding all our education in this period. It is of vast importance for the child that he should receive the secrets of Nature in parables, before they are brought before his soul in the form of ‘natural laws’ and the like. An example may serve to make this clear. Let us imagine that we want to tell a child of the immortality of the soul, of the coming forth of the soul from the body. The way to do this is to use a comparison, such for example as the comparison of the butterfly coming forth from the chrysalis. As the butterfly soars up from the chrysalis, so after death the soul of man from the house of the body. No man will rightly grasp the fact in intellectual concepts, who has not first received it in such a picture. By such a parable, we speak not merely to the intellect but to the feeling of the child, to all his soul. A child who has experienced this, will approach the subject with an altogether different mood of soul, when later it is taught him in the form of intellectual concepts. It is indeed a very serious matter for any man, if he was not first enabled to approach the problems of existence with his feeling. Thus it is essential that the educator have at his disposal parables for all the laws of Nature and secrets of the World. [ 52 ] Here we have an excellent opportunity to observe with what effect the spiritual knowledge of Anthroposophy must work in life and practice. When the teacher comes before a class of children, armed with parables he has ‘made up’ out of an intellectual materialistic mode of thought, he will as a rule make little impression upon them. For he has first to puzzle out the parables for himself with all his intellectual cleverness. Parables to which one has first had to condescend have no convincing effect on those who listen to them. For when one speaks in parable and picture, it is not only what is spoken and shown that works upon the hearer, but a fine spiritual stream passes from the one to the other, from him who gives to him who receives. If he who tells has not himself the warm feeling of belief in his parable, he will make no impression on the other. For real effectiveness, it is essential to believe in one's parables as in absolute realities. And this can only be when one's thought is alive with spiritual knowledge. Take for instance the parable of which we have been speaking. The true student of Anthroposophy need not torment himself to think it out. For him it is reality. In the coming forth of the butterfly from the chrysalis he sees at work on a lower level of being the very same process that is repeated, on a higher level and at a higher stage of development, in the coming forth of the soul from the body. He believes in it with his whole might; and this belief streams as it were unseen from speaker to hearer, carrying conviction. Life flows freely, unhindered, back and forth from teacher to pupil. But for this it is necessary that the teacher draw from the full fountain of spiritual knowledge. His words and all that comes from him must receive feeling, warmth and colour from a truly anthroposophic way of thought. A wonderful prospect is thus opened out over the whole field of education. If it will but let itself be enriched from the well of life that Anthroposophy contains, education will itself be filled with life and understanding. There will no longer be that groping which is now so prevalent. All art and practice of education that is not continually receiving fresh nourishment from such roots as these is dry and dead. The spiritual knowledge of Anthroposophy has for all the secrets of the world appropriate parables—pictures taken from the very being of the things, pictures not first made by man, but laid by the forces of the world within the things themselves in the very act of their creation. Therefore this spiritual knowledge must form the living basis for the whole art of education. [ 53 ] A force of the soul on which particular value must be set during this period of man's development, is memory. The development of the memory is bound up with the moulding of the etheric body. Since the latter takes place in such a way that the etheric body becomes liberated between the change of teeth and puberty, so too this is the tune for a conscious attention from without to the growth and cultivation of the memory. If what is due to the human being at this time has been neglected, his memory will ever after have less value than it might otherwise have had. It is not possible later to make up for what has been left undone. [ 54 ] In this connection many mistakes may be made by an intellectual materialistic way of thought. An art of education based on such a way of thought easily arrives at a condemnation of what is mastered merely by memory. It will often set itself untiringly and emphatically against the mere training of the memory, and will employ the subtlest methods to ensure that the boy or girl commits nothing to memory that he does not intellectually understand. Yes, and after all, how much has really been gained by such intellectual understanding? A materialistic way of thought is so easily led to believe that any further penetration into things, beyond the intellectual concepts that are as it were extracted from them, simply does not exist; and only with great difficulty will it fight its way through to the perception that the other forces of the soul are at least as necessary as the intellect, if we are to gain a comprehension of things. It is no mere figure of speech to say that man can understand with his feeling, his sentiment, his inner disposition, as well as with his intellect. Intellectual concepts are only one of the means we have to understand the things of this world, and it is only to the materialistic thinker that they appear as the sole means. Of course there are many who do not consider themselves materialists, who yet regard an intellectual conception of things as the only kind of understanding. Such people profess perhaps an idealistic or even a spiritual outlook. But in their soul they relate themselves to it in a materialistic way. For the intellect is in effect the instrument of the soul for understanding what is material. [ 55 ] We have already alluded to Jean Paul's excellent book on education; and a passage from it, bearing on this subject of the deeper foundations of the understanding, may well be quoted here. Jean Paul's book contains, indeed, many a golden word on education, and deserves far more attention than it receives. It is of greater value for the teacher than many of the educational works that are held in highest regard to-day. The passage runs as follows:— ‘Have no fear of going beyond the childish understanding, even in whole sentences. Your expression and the tone of your voice, aided by the child's intuitive eagerness to understand, will light up half the meaning, and with it in course of time the other half. It is with children as with the Chinese and people of refinement; the tone is half the language. Remember, the child learns to understand his own language before ever he learns to speak it, just as we do with Greek or any other foreign language. Trust to time and the connections of things to unravel the meaning. A child of five understands the words “yet,” “even,” “of course,” “just”; but now try to give an explanation of them—not to the child, but to his father! In the one word “of course” there lurks a little philosopher! If the eight-year-old child, with his developed speech, is understood by the child of three, why do you want to narrow down your language to the little one's childish prattle? Always speak to the child some years ahead—do not the men of genius speak to us centuries ahead in books? Talk to the one-year-old as if he were two, to the two-year-old as if he were six, for the difference in development diminishes in inverse ratio with the age. We are far too prone to credit the teachers with everything the children learn. We should remember that the child we have to educate bears half his world within him all there and ready taught, namely the spiritual half, including, for example, the moral and metaphysical ideas. For this very reason language, equipped as it is with material images alone, cannot give the spiritual archetypes; all it can do is to illumine them. The very brightness and decision of children should give us brightness and decision when we speak to them. We can learn from their speech as well as teach them through our own. Their word-building is bold, yet remarkably accurate! For instance, I have heard the following expressions used by three- or four-year-old children:—“the barreler” (for the maker of barrels)—“the sky-mouse” (for the bat)—“I am the seeing-through man” (standing behind the telescope)—“I'd like to be a ginger-bread-eater”—“he joked me down from the chair”—“See how one o'clock it is!” ...’ [ 56 ] Our quotation refers, it is true, to a different subject from that with which we are immediately concerned; but what Jean Paul says about speech has its value in the present connection also. Here too there is an understanding which precedes the intellectual comprehension. The little child receives the structure of language into the living organism of his soul, and does not require the laws of language-formation in intellectual concepts for the process. Similarly the older boy and girl must learn for the cultivation of the memory much that they are not to master with their intellectual understanding until later years. Those things are afterwards best grasped in concepts, which have first been learned simply from memory in this period of life, even as the rules of language are best learned in a language one is already able to speak. So much talk against ‘unintelligent learning by heart’ is simply materialistic prejudice. The child need only, for instance, learn the essential rules of multiplication in a few given examples—and for these no apparatus is necessary; the fingers are much better for the purpose than any apparatus,—then he is ready to set to and memorize the whole multiplication table. Proceeding in this way, we shall be acting with due regard to the nature of the growing child. We shall, however, be offending against his nature, if at the time when the development of the memory is the important thing we are making too great a call upon the intellect. The intellect is a soul-force that is only born with puberty, and we ought not to bring any influence to bear on it from outside before this period. Up to the time of puberty the child should be laying up in his memory the treasures of thought on which mankind has pondered; afterwards is the time to penetrate with intellectual understanding what has already been well impressed upon the memory in earlier years. It is necessary for man, not only to remember what he already understands, but to come to understand what he already knows—that is to say, what he has acquired by memory in the way the child acquires language. This truth has a wide application. First there must be the assimilation of historical events through the memory, then the grasping of them in intellectual concepts; first the faithful committing to memory of the facts of geography, then the intellectual grasp of the connections between them. In a certain respect, the grasping of things in concepts should proceed from the stored-up treasures of the memory. The more the child knows in memory before he begins to grasp in intellectual concepts, the better. There is no need to enlarge upon the fact that what has been said applies only for that period of childhood with which we are dealing, and not later. If at some later age in life one has occasion to take up a subject for any reason, then of course the opposite may easily be the right and most helpful way of learning it, though even here much will depend on the mentality of the person. In the time of life, however, with which we are now concerned, we must not dry up the child's mind and spirit by cramming it with intellectual conceptions. [ 57 ] Another result of a materialistic way of thought is to be seen in the lessons that rest too exclusively on sense-perception. At this period of childhood, all perception must be spiritualized. We ought not to be satisfied, for instance, with presenting a plant, a seed, a flower to the child merely as it can be perceived with the senses. Everything should become a parable of the spiritual. In a grain of corn there is far more than meets the eye. There is a whole new plant invisible within it. That such a thing as a seed has more within it than can be perceived with the senses, this the child must grasp in a living way with his feeling and imagination. He must, in feeling, divine the secrets of existence. The objection cannot be made that the pure perception of the senses is obscured by this means; on the contrary, by going no further than what the senses see, we are stopping short of the whole truth. For the full reality consists of the spirit as well as the substance; and there is no less need for faithful and careful observation when one is bringing all the faculties of the soul into play, than when only the physical senses are employed. Could men but see, as the spiritual investigator sees, what desolation is wrought in soul and body by an instruction that rests on external sense-perception alone, they would never insist upon it so strongly as they do. Of what good is it in the highest sense, that children should have shown to them all possible varieties of minerals, plants and animals, and all kinds of physical experiments, if something further is not bound up with the teaching of these things; namely, to make use of the parables which the sense-world gives, in order to awaken a feeling for the secrets of the spirit? Certainly a materialistic way of thought will have little use for what has here been said; and this the spiritual investigator understands only too well. But he also knows that the materialistic way of thought will never give rise to a really practical art of education. Practical as it appears to itself, materialistic thought is unpractical when the need is to enter into life in a living way. In face of actual reality, materialistic thought is fantastic,—though indeed to the materialistic thinker the anthroposophical teachings, adhering as they do to the facts of life, cannot but appear fantastic. There will no doubt be many an obstacle yet to overcome before the principles of Anthroposophy, which are indeed born out of life itself, can make their way into the art of education. It cannot be otherwise. The truths of this spiritual science cannot but seem strange as yet, and unaccustomed to many people. None the less, if they are true indeed, they will become part of our life and civilization. [ 58 ] Only the teacher who has a conscious and clear understanding of how the several subjects and methods of education work upon the growing child, can have the tact to meet every occasion that offers, in the right way. He has to know how to treat the several faculties of the soul—Thinking, Feeling and Willing,—so that their development may react on the etheric body, which in this period between the change of teeth and puberty can attain more and more perfect form under the influences that affect it from without. [ 59 ] By a right application of the fundamental educational principles, during the first seven years of childhood, the foundation is laid for the development of a strong and healthy Will. For a strong and healthy will must have its support in the well-developed forms of the physical body. Then, from the time of the change of teeth onwards, the etheric body which is now developing must bring to the physical body those forces whereby it can make its forms firm and inwardly complete. Whatever makes the strongest impression on the etheric body, works also most powerfully towards the consolidation of the physical body. The strongest of all the impulses that can work on the etheric body, come from the feelings and thoughts by which man divines and experiences in consciousness his relation to the Everlasting Powers. That is to say, they are those that come from religious experience. Never will a man's will, nor in consequence his character, develop healthily, if he is not able in this period of childhood to receive religious impulses deep into his soul. How a man feels his place and part in the universal Whole,—this will find expression in the unity of his life of will. If he does not feel himself linked by strong bonds to a Divine-spiritual, his will and character must needs remain uncertain, divided and unsound. [ 60 ] The world of Feeling is developed in the right way through the parables and pictures we have spoken of, and especially through the pictures of great men and women, taken from History and other sources, which we bring before the children. A correspondingly deep study of the secrets and beauties of Nature is also important for the right formation of the world of feeling. Last but not least, there is the cultivation of the sense of beauty and the awakening of the artistic feeling. The musical element must bring to the etheric body that rhythm which will then enable it to sense in all things the rhythm otherwise concealed. A child who is denied the blessing of having his musical sense cultivated during these years, will be the poorer for it the whole of his later life. If this sense were entirely lacking in him, whole aspects of the world's existence would of necessity remain hidden from him. Nor are the other arts to be neglected. The awakening of the feeling for architectural forms, for moulding and sculpture, for lines and for design, for colour harmonies—none of these should be left out of the plan of education. However simple life has to be under certain circumstances, the objection can never hold that the circumstances do not allow of anything being done in this direction. Much can be done with the simplest means, if only the teacher himself has the right artistic feeling. Joy and happiness in living, a love of all existence, a power and energy for work—such are among the lifelong results of a right cultivation of the feeling for beauty and for art. The relationship of man to man, how noble, how beautiful it becomes under this influence! Again, the moral sense, which is also being formed in the child during these years through the pictures of life that are placed before him, through the authorities to whom he looks up,—this moral sense becomes assured, if the child out of his own sense of beauty feels the good to be at the same time beautiful, the bad to be at the same time ugly. [ 61 ] Thought in its proper form, as an inner life lived in abstract concepts, must remain still in the background during this period of childhood. It must develop as it were of itself, uninfluenced from without, while life and the secrets of nature are being unfolded in parable and picture. Thus between the seventh year and puberty, thought must be growing, the faculty of judgement ripening, in among the other experiences of the soul; so that after puberty is reached, the youth may become able to form quite independently his own opinions on the things of life and knowledge. The less the direct influence on the development of judgement in earlier years, and the more a good indirect influence is brought to bear through the development of the other faculties of soul, the better it is for the whole of later life. [ 62 ] The spiritual knowledge of Anthroposophy affords the true foundations, not only for spiritual and mental education, but for physical. This may be illustrated by reference to children's games and gymnastic exercises. Just as love and joy should permeate the surroundings of the child in the earliest years of life, so through physical exercises the growing etheric body should experience an inner feeling of its own growth, of its ever increasing strength. Gymnastic exercises, for instance, should be of such a nature that each movement, each step, gives rise to the feeling within the child: ‘I feel growing strength in me.’ This feeling must take possession of the child as a healthy sense of inner happiness and ease. To think out gymnastic exercises from this point of view requires more than an intellectual knowledge of human anatomy and physiology. It requires an intimate intuitive knowledge of the connection of the sense of happiness and ease with the positions and movements of the human body—a knowledge that is not merely intellectual, but permeated with feeling. Whoever arranges such exercises must be able to experience in himself how one movement and position of the limbs produces a happy and easy feeling of strength, another, as it were, an inner loss of strength. ... To teach gymnastics and other physical exercises with these things in view, the teacher will require what Anthroposophy alone—and above all, the anthroposophical habit of mind—can give. He need not himself see into the spiritual worlds at once, but he must have the understanding to apply in life only what springs from spiritual knowledge. If the knowledge of Anthroposophy were applied in practical spheres like education, the idle talk that this knowledge has first to be proved would quickly disappear. Whoever applies it correctly, will find that the knowledge of Anthroposophy proves itself in life by making life strong and healthy. He will see it to be true in that it holds good in life and practice, and in this he will find a proof stronger than all the logical and so-called scientific arguments can afford. Spiritual truths are best recognized in their fruits and not by what is called a proof, be this ever so scientific; such proof can indeed hardly be more than logical skirmishing. [ 63 ] With the age of puberty the astral body is first born. Henceforth the astral body in its development is open to the outside world. Only now, therefore, can we approach the child from without with all that opens up the world of abstract ideas, the faculty of judgement and independent thought. It has already been pointed out, how up to this time these faculties of soul should be developing—free from outer influence—within the environment provided by the education proper to the earlier years, even as the eyes and ears develop, free from outer influence, within the organism of the mother. With puberty the time has arrived when the human being is ripe for the formation of his own judgements about the things he has already learned. Nothing more harmful can be done to a child than to awaken too early his independent judgement. Man is not in a position to judge until he has collected in his inner life material for judgement and comparison. If he forms his own conclusions before doing so, his conclusions will lack foundation. Educational mistakes of this kind are the cause of all narrow one-sidedness in life, all barren creeds that take their stand on a few scraps of knowledge and are ready on this basis to condemn ideas experienced and proved by man often through long ages. In order to be ripe for thought, one must have learned to be full of respect for what others have thought. There is no healthy thought which has not been preceded by a healthy feeling for the truth, a feeling for the truth supported by faith in authorities accepted naturally. Were this principle observed in education, there would no longer be so many people, who, imagining too soon that they are ripe for judgement, spoil their own power to receive openly and without bias the all-round impressions of life. Every judgement that is not built on a sufficient foundation of gathered knowledge and experience of soul throws a stumbling-block in the way of him who forms it. For having once pronounced a judgement concerning a matter, we are ever after influenced by this judgement. We no longer receive a new experience as we should have done, had we not already formed a judgement connected with it. The thought must take living hold in the child's mind, that he has first to learn and then to judge. What the intellect has to say concerning any matter, should only be said when all the other faculties of the soul have spoken. Before that time the intellect has only an intermediary part to play: its business is to grasp what takes place and is experienced in feeling, to receive it exactly as it is, not letting the unripe judgement come in at once and take possession. For this reason, up to the age of puberty the child should be spared all theories about things; the main consideration is that he should simply meet the experiences of life, receiving them into his soul. Certainly he can be told what different men have thought about this and that, but one must avoid his associating himself through a too early exercise of judgement with the one view or the other. Thus the opinions of men he should also receive with the feeling power of the soul. He should be able, without jumping to a decision or taking sides with this or that person, to listen to all, saying to himself: ‘This man said this, and that man that.’ The cultivation of such a mind in a boy or girl certainly demands the exercise of great tact from teachers and educators; but tact is just what anthroposophical thought can give. [ 64 ] All we have been able to do is to unfold a few aspects of education in the light of Anthroposophy. And this alone was our intention,—to indicate how great a task the anthroposophical spiritual impulse must fulfil in education for the culture of our time. Its power to fulfil the task will depend on the spread of an understanding for this way of thought in ever wider and wider circles. For this to come about, two things are, however, necessary. The first is that people should relinquish their prejudices against Anthroposophy. Whoever honestly pursues it, will soon see that it is not the fantastic nonsense many to-day hold it to be. We are not making any reproach against those who hold this opinion; for all that the culture of our time offers must tend on a first acquaintance to make one regard the followers of Anthroposophy as fantastic dreamers. On a superficial consideration no other judgement can be reached, for in the light of it Anthroposophy, with its claim to be a spiritual Science, will seem in direct contradiction to all that modern culture gives to man as the foundation of a healthy view of life. Only a deeper consideration will discover that the views of the present day are in themselves deeply contradictory and will remain so, as long as they are without the anthroposophical foundation. Indeed, of their very nature they call out for such foundation and cannot in the long run be without it. The second thing that is needed concerns the healthy cultivation of Anthroposophy itself. Only when it is perceived, in anthroposophical circles everywhere, that the point is not simply to theorize about the teachings, but to let them bear fruit in the most far-reaching way in all the relationships of life,—only then will life itself open up to Anthroposophy with sympathy and understanding. Otherwise people will continue to regard it as a variety of religious sectarianism for a few cranks and enthusiasts. If, however, it performs positive and useful spiritual work, the Anthroposophical Movement cannot in the long run be denied intelligent recognition.
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56. Occupation and Earnings
12 Mar 1908, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
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—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. |
56. Occupation and Earnings
12 Mar 1908, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
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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, (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 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. |