The Rudolf Steiner Archive

From an awareness that was as much borne of rich experience as of deep artistic experience, Goethe coined the eloquent word:

When nature begins to reveal her secrets, one feels an irresistible yearning for her most worthy interpreter, art.

A true understanding of what is meant by such a statement makes it difficult to want to talk about art. Goethe also said that art is the mediator of nature's secrets, but that one should not talk about it through words. On the other hand, one must talk about what can flow from the artistic. I don't want to talk about it the way official science talks about it, but rather like one talks about a dear friend, where one has the need to say what one has to say out of sympathy, out of love.

The artist has an aversion to art history or even to art criticism. When you try to penetrate it, it becomes all too understandable that the artist is afraid to have what he experienced with art burned or singed. If you assume a moral original sin, then you have to assume two original evils for art. One is the taste to create in art only for the senses. Those who do this will reject the spiritual in art. The other is that an equally unrefined taste wants to represent the abstract, the merely conceptual. This symbolic art is no more supported by the artistic than the sensual is. The art of ideas leads to a straw-like, papery representation of the ideal. Both are aberrations from true art. What leads to true art must be grounded in something in the human being. It must also be something that arises from human freedom in human will.

Many see art only as a luxury, not as a condition of daily existence. I would like to recall what I said about the dream life eight days ago, about the relationship between the dream life and the imagination. During sleep, the soul is separated from the body. Through spiritual science, the otherwise dormant consciousness can become so strong that the person perceives the spiritual world, that he not only experiences dull things during sleep, but also undergoes the most diverse entities and experiences. One can say that the dream life comes from the soul approaching the waking life, but not absorbing it.

The polar opposite of the dream life is the soul's inclination towards artistic imagination and artistic creation. It is incorrect to assume a direct relationship between the two, but one can point from one to the other. In the dream it is the soul removed from the body, in artistic creation the soul is in the body – thus the other way round. Here the soul seeks a relationship with the spiritual; it wants to reach out to the spiritual, to the eternal, the imperishable, as in a dream to the corporeal, the temporal. These are two polar opposites. Just as the soul half awakens to the physical body in a dream, so too to the spiritual in artistic fantasy.

Just as sleep can be without dreams, so the artistic element can be added to ordinary life out of freedom, but it can also be left out.

There are moods in life. You visit a friend, are received in a red room, he does not come right away, you expect something; then he comes, tells all sorts of banal stuff, you are disappointed because you were expecting something solemn; that's how it is in the subconscious. Or in a blue room, you are disappointed in the deepest sense of the word because you find that he talks like a wheel. In your subconscious, you expect him to leave you alone in a blue or violet room. But he talks. I'm deliberately choosing grotesque examples. Or at a banquet where the dishes have a reddish tint, you expect that when people eat, they are not only hungry but also gourmets. If the dishes are blue, you expect them not only to eat, but also to have a pleasant conversation. Or you meet a lady on the street who has a frizzy head and are disappointed if you find that she is not snappish. From a lady in a pleasant blue dress, you expect her to be measured; if she is not, you feel lied to. These are inner secret moods, undertones that permeate life. There is a sensual, supersensible element that, in our emotional life, is comparable to dreams and remains hidden from our consciousness, just as the activity of the sleeping person's will includes the element of will.

A supersensible essence is integrated here, and it does not matter whether it is called the connective tissue or the etheric body.

The individual organs differentiate the human being in such a way that the supersensible connecting element no longer resonates so uniformly. The human being experiences as a whole human being what is only seen through the eye. This does not come to light in ordinary consciousness. We can give it nourishment, which satisfies it, like the senses. This is particularly evident in music.

I have shown that the life of imagination is bound up with the nervous system, but the life of feeling is bound up with the whole rhythmic experience. This is more closely related to the sense of hearing than to the other senses, to the sense of feeling, even to the sense of imagination, to thinking. There is an inclination in man to keep focusing on the sense of hearing.

In every healthy, complete human nature, there is a constant urge to bring up in a healthy way what leads to vision, not to physical vision. The vision wants to come up, it appeals to free will, it does not exert any force, but it is there. The artist has a constant tendency towards the visionary, which wants to be satisfied. But it remains latent. What can satisfy it? It is always present, even if a person has only sensory perceptions. But it cannot be satisfied with that. When the musical element strikes the ear, the whole supersensible person takes it in, and so the visionary urge is satisfied.

The same applies to Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, which can lead one into deep, natural secrets: the green leaf transforming itself into the petals of a flower and so on.

When we look at the human being, we can see it falling apart in different ways, for example into the head and the rest of the organism. This can become the head. Just as Goethe sees the whole in the leaf, we can see the whole in every part of the human being; the whole can emerge from every part.

The moving life in nature wants to be grasped by the visionary power.

Music cannot recall anything that is in external life; everything must be demystified by music. In the other arts, everything that belongs to the senses must be accounted for, but music does not need that.

The whole person must first be demystified. All artistic creation is like a demystification. You have to get life out of the surface, you have to bend once or twice what is otherwise dead in the surface, as in life only demarcates itself, [in the painterly the color], for example the red-yellow. A barbarian says: How does it remind us of what is, when the blue-violet merges into the line? But that's how you get into the form, through the red-yellow into the movement, also into the movement in the limbs. Red and blue are not just colors, they desire something. All barbaric taste says: What does it represent? But the artist only reveals something that was in the soul. Everything artistic has an expressionistic element in it.

What stands before us as nature we cannot achieve by imitation; it stands before us only as a larva. Critics are like someone standing behind us as we eat and saying how the food tastes.

The “Group” in Dornach is the artistic expression of the theory of metamorphosis. Here, the attempt has been made to depict the representative of humanity asymmetrically, and to show how the rest of the organism wants to become entirely head. This cannot be achieved by merely caricaturing a head, but only by doing so from the inside out.

Another approach has been tried, in which the head seeks to become the rest of the organism, in which the head pours itself out over the whole organism, a dissolution, a harmonization. Such things evoke a slight horror today, as the Copernican worldview did until 1827 among an influential authority. But that cannot stop the course of development.

A change has taken place with regard to art, for example, in relation to the position of the works of art by Raphael and Michelangelo. One no longer tries to resonate with them, one has a kind of awareness that they must be related to a bygone era and a different consciousness. What one does with regard to today's artists is more closely related to the soul. One would like to accompany Raphael and Michelangelo back to other times, where they were different as artists; one would like to accompany today's artists directly. Such artists have a feeling, as Goethe had, that if one seeks truth, one must seek it in art. If you want to paint a lady today as she is, she will look like a lady in a state of trismus, which is what every photograph looks like. You have to kill and then recreate with what you might call humor, an inner drama; you not only have to kill a pretty woman, you have to abuse her. Perhaps it is part of the artistic essence that the pedant is appalled, that the philistine condemns it as unnecessary. It already sounds so terrible when one says, as if in a civil servant's office, that art should be put in the service of life.

Art is so integrated into the education of life that art is not a servant of life, but is meant to beautify it, and since it is the path to the spiritual, it also imbues life with reality.

One is only able to intervene correctly in social life if one approaches it as the artist approaches his material. New forces constantly want to be incorporated into life; an artistic element should live in everything. When deficiencies arise somewhere, it is because the artistic element in man has been lost. People believe they have found program points and consider them to be the most divine ideals. But all this social talk is of no use, has no foundation, cannot fertilize. Nowadays, people found associations, give them statutes, take up excellent program points, and believe that they can master life with them. But it is all abstract. It is much more important to put the right person in the right place, only then one must not always think that the nephew is the right person.

What wants to gain strength in life is what is in the underground, that wants to be demystified. You can't do that in the abstract. Art can only fertilize life if you strive to find life in art.

A sensual-supernatural lies in art. A person who does not dream does not know about the connection. A life without art resembles pedantry and philistinism. Art must not correspond to necessity, but to human freedom. People do not take into account that the human being has a say in this, that there is a freedom. Man must say: Nothing external can push me towards art, but I myself declare that it is necessary.

Dear attendees! At the kind instigation of Baron Rosenkrantz, a number of questions have been put by our friends, which are now to be answered within the framework of this event.

Before that, however, since the request has been expressed so frequently and I have also asked some friends personally, I would like to ask those artists present here and a few others who have never seen the wooden group, which is still in progress, to come to the studio tomorrow at 9 a.m. This group will then be shown. But I ask you to take this matter very seriously and I really ask only those to come who have never seen the group before.

Now a number of questions have been handed to me.

Question: If the content of a work of art is the most important thing, why can't we express it in accordance with the Greek ideal?

Dr. Steiner: The question is not quite clear. I would like to think that it alludes to what I have often said about Goethe's view of art, which was expressed when Goethe, upon arriving in Italy, wrote to his friends in Weimar: When I look at these Greek works of art, I believe that the Greeks, in creating their works of art, proceeded according to the same laws by which nature itself proceeds, and which I am trying to grasp. I would just like to note that if it is possible for a person to truly find a way to experience and relive the creative forces of nature, as I have indicated on various occasions when discussing this building, then we do not actually become imitators of nature, but we do create with our materials in the same way that nature creates. We need only remember that, in the full perception of man, the aim should not be to imitate nature, because whatever we encounter in nature, whether in the form of landscape or anything else, is always done more perfectly by nature than even the most accomplished artist can achieve. Art is only justified if, in the Goethean sense, it does not imitate nature, but continues nature's work from the same forces that nature uses to create. And then, if we create in this way, we can recreate nature just as the Greeks did. We must only be clear about the fact that humanity does not go through various stages of development in vain, just as the individual human being does not either, but that our present humanity has different developmental impulses from those of the people of the Greek age. What the Greeks had in common with nature in their art is there for us in a different form, and if we accept and understand this metamorphosis of the whole coexistence of man with nature, then we can definitely say that what we create is just as “recreated according to the laws of nature” as the Greek works of art are.

Question: If we take beautiful colors from nature, why shouldn't we be able to take beautiful forms from nature?

Dr. Steiner: I would not be able to see that either. But I ask you to consider again how I repeatedly spoke about colors in connection with this building and how I spoke about forms in my lecture on art. It is not a matter of imitating the inartistic, which is characteristic of an inartistic present time, but of not imitating nature's colors, but of experiencing them. We do, after all, inwardly experience color and then create from the world of color. Likewise, we can, of course, also experience form from within, and then we will create forms for ourselves as they also appear in nature. But we must bear in mind that when we draw, we are actually demanding not to imitate nature's forms, but to counterfeit them. We have to draw the surfaces.

It is indeed the case in nature itself that the horizontal line, when we draw it, is a fake – I said a lie a few days ago. What can be seen is the blue sky, the green sea, and the form is the result of the color. This is already in nature, and when we work artistically out of color, the form arises just as the form arises in nature itself.

Question: Should color be used in painting from a moral point of view?

Dr. Steiner: If I understand the question correctly, it is asked whether one should try to translate a moral intention into colour or even into colour harmony if one has a moral intention.

I believe that anyone who tries to embody human and moral thoughts in colour in this way actually creates in an unartistic way. Only that which can be experienced as spiritual in the world of color can be embodied in color. To the same extent that one has the moral intention of artistically forming what has been morally conceived, one falls back on symbolizing, and allegorizing is always inartistic.

To illustrate what I actually mean, I will say the following: I was once obliged to reconstruct the forms of the Kabirs, the Samothracean gods, the Samothracean mysteries, for the purpose of a Faust performance here. They had to be shown while the Goethean text was being spoken. I believe that I was able to construct these Kabirs out of spiritual contemplation. Then – and I say this not out of immodesty but because it is a fact that should be communicated – then it occurred to one of our members to have these Kabirs, who fell, as well and they should be photographed. Now, the thought of photographing a three-dimensional work is so repulsive to me that I actually want to run away from every photograph of a sculpture, because what is really artistically created is created out of the spiritually experienced feeling for material, and because it is impossible to directly experience what is conceived in spatial forms in the form of a surface. Therefore, at the time, I preferred to do it again in black and white, because I wanted to take this wish into account, and then you could photograph it.

Anyone who thinks that moral intentions can be realized in painting is thinking that you can take any content, I mean a novella, and then pour it into any material. That is not true. It is artistically untrue. In a material, any artistic thing can only be formed in one way.

Question: Does this mean that in the future sculpture should express inner feeling and painting inner wisdom?

Dr. Steiner: I will allow myself to answer this question now because it belongs together with another question, in connection with the other question.

Question: Would art under the influence of anthroposophical teachings not tend to become monotonous, which would not be interesting? Is there not a danger that art would bear an anthroposophical stamp, as if from a particular school of painting? Dr. Steiner: If one grasps what can really arise out of anthroposophical thinking as art, grasps it correctly, then I think the question will not arise at all, and one will not be led to believe that anthroposophy could ever aspire to influence art through anthroposophical teachings. To think in any other way than that the artistic can arise out of the experience of the spirit flowing in the material, out of living together with the material, cannot actually be assumed from an anthroposophical attitude.

In a somewhat primitive way, many anthroposophists understand this to mean, for example, that they somehow paint what they have been given in the teaching of the Rosicrucians on a blackboard, and then one encounters these images in all the individual branches. There is inner feeling, inwardly intended, outwardly recorded. I usually help myself with regard to such “artistic attempts” by not looking at them in the respective branches, because these are admittedly primitive and not very far-reaching, but they are precisely wrong attempts to transfer what can be represented in the spirit, which now becomes word, which becomes teaching, into some artistic aspect. That is nonsense. You cannot carry what is teaching into the work of art.

But what real anthroposophy is, whether you approach it through the teachings or through art, leads to the inner experience of something far more original than anthroposophical teaching and anthroposophical art is, of something that lies further back in human life. If, on the one hand, artistic forms are created that have nothing at all to do with the anthroposophical teachings, and if, on the other hand, one focuses on the word, on the thought, then, from the same foundations, one creates contexts of ideas. Both are branches that come from the same root. But you cannot take one branch and stick it into the other.

In any case, I cannot understand how a life that has developed out of such art could possibly become monotonous, because – and I am speaking only illustratively now – I can assure you that if I had to build another one after this one is finished, it would be completely different, it would look completely different. I would never be able to build this structure again in a monotonous way; and I would build a third one differently again – it will certainly not come to that in this incarnation. But I feel, especially in what underlies the anthroposophical as the living, that in art, beyond everything monotonous, it comes to life. I can tell you, one always only wishes to comply with what one can do, with what presents itself to the soul, and not at all in a monotonous way, but to show in great variety what one would like to show.

The questions that were asked in English have now been answered, and since Mrs. Mackenzie has promised to tell us about some of her intentions, I believe that we may use the time we still have left to listen to Mrs. Mackenzie about her intentions.

Mrs. Mackenzie: (remarks in English not written down)

Dr. Steiner: I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Mrs. Mackenzie and ask Baron Walleen to translate her words into German.

Baron Walleen: (translation:) Dr. Steiner has given his consent to hold a seminar for teachers here around Christmas time. Mrs. Mackenzie has taken on the responsibility of finding suitable individuals in England and America who could be accepted as students in these seminars, and Mrs. Mackenzie hopes that if such a beginning is made, it will be possible to gradually develop a teacher training seminar for the whole world here. The matter is being handled quite informally in order to gain time, so that when she returns to England, Mrs. Mackenzie will immediately try to make contact with such personalities as she finds suitable to attend this course. It would be important to know early on, in October, which personalities and how many can and will come here. Of course, Dr. Steiner himself will lead the course.

Dr. Steiner: I would just like to say this very briefly in response to Mrs. Mackenzie's words: if this extraordinarily satisfying plan can be realized, everything should be done here to bring satisfaction to those who are making such efforts to expand the effectiveness of the Goetheanum in this important area. Thank you very much on behalf of our cause and the promise that all efforts will be made here to implement your intentions in a dignified manner!

This occult lecture was inspired by the question: Do the souls of stillborn or deceased young children also reincarnate after 1500 to 1800 years? And does such a re-embodiment serve a purpose?

1500 to 1800 years is an average period. There are souls that only reincarnate after 4000 to 2000 years. However, the question asked is connected with much deeper questions. There are seven great mysteries of existence in the becoming of our earth. Of these seven great mysteries of existence, one of these secrets is handed over to people from time to time in the succession of human races. Our present race will receive the fourth. Our theosophical current is nothing more than the preparation for the communication of the fourth of the so-called unspeakable secrets. Only a small part of what the great masters learn from the fourth secret may we communicate in lectures. There are things that it is sinful to utter with words, says the Apostle Paul.

One of these things is the fourth secret. It is the secret of life and death. The theosophical current has the task of enabling us to learn about birth and death and how they are related in a lawful way. It is not yet time for the whole of the fourth secret to be revealed to us, but parts of it are being revealed little by little. We have spirits who have already anticipated the stages of development of future stages. Plato, for example, is a “fifth rounder”. Gautama Buddha anticipated what humanity will only achieve in the sixth round.

I will now try to say something about what reincarnation depends on. When a person dies, he does not discard a worthless garment. This physical incarnation really has a purpose. We bear the fruits of it into the other incarnation. Learning the art of writing may serve as an example here. You learn the steps, form letters and learn to put them together in a context. Just as you take one thing from the various individual activities, namely the ability to write, and you no longer remember your individual tasks at a later time, it is the same with rebirth. The ability to write has remained, the individual stages of learning have been forgotten.

It is the same with rebirth. The individual experiences have been forgotten, the abilities gained from them have remained. The voice of conscience, the ability to distinguish between good and evil, we have learned all this in previous incarnations. The savage who originally eats his fellow human beings gradually learns that he is not allowed to do so because it causes him to incur the hostility of his fellow human beings, because it causes enmity.

Our organs are the means of acquiring experience and skills. It is the organs that we receive in the new incarnation. If we are incarnated today and incarnate again in fifty years' time, or even immediately after our death, could we really learn something new that we could add to what we have already learned in the broader sense?

No, things on Earth don't change that quickly. What we learn up to the age of seventy is one lesson, and the following seventy years would not differ much from the previous ones. So we only incarnate again when the Earth has changed enough for us to learn something substantial again. This is related to the law that a person is reincarnated after an average of two thousand years. [...] Within two thousand four hundred or two thousand six hundred years, cosmic conditions change. So there is something new to learn again. Man must therefore wait until new constellations occur between the sun and the earth that can influence our being in a completely new way. But there are also deviations because what man has to do within the rounds is not the only thing.

At a certain stage of development, the human being will leave the earth. He will then continue to live on a new planet. However, he can only enter the scene of the new earth, or rather the new planet, when he has reached a certain level of development. The human being has to develop his ego to such an extent that he will be able to enter this new scene.

The thought that lives in you is not just what lives in your head. Every thought is a living force. Just as any air wave propagates and can still be perceived far away from its original location, so does my thought propagate. It continues to have an effect in the mental world. We have to see it as such a force. A thought is a force as strong as if you were splitting wood with an axe. You can cut and work with thoughts – and also with your drives – deep into the astral world. The changes you bring about there are much more significant than any physical events.

We have to become clear about these forces and we have to learn what changes we are causing. This is the first consecration, the experience and clarification of the inner drives, the terrible beings. We cannot think without affecting a whole host of beings. The adept is fundamentally different from other people because the adept does what others do unconsciously, consciously.

We affect the entire world around us. If it were only a matter of human development, we would regularly be reincarnated. However, a higher individuality may be needed for human development, in which case it must incarnate more quickly. The laws that cause an individual to reincarnate do not only apply to that person's development; the demands and laws for the entire environment also apply.

When such conditions arise, then such a personality may have died immediately beforehand or a few years before, and they incarnate again immediately. In the Theosophical Society, we have such personalities who were re-embodied almost immediately after death.

It depends on a great many circumstances after how many years an individuality has to reincarnate. A personality that has taken in a lot can take a long time to process the substances it has taken in. We know from a great personality in the development of German thought, Goethe, that he was previously incarnated in Greece at the time of Plato. And we know that he was reborn as Goethe in the eighteenth century. It was one of the most harmonious incarnations he experienced in Greece. He was a student of sculpture. The student of sculpture had absorbed so much that it took him so long to process it all. “Iphigenia in Tauris” could only be written with a great knowledge of Greek sculpture. Plato's lofty idealism flows towards us again in the profound passages of Goethe's “Faust”. The “fairytale” of the green snake and the beautiful lily contains the revelation of Goethe's harmonious development at the time of his Greek incarnation.

Bismarck could not work like Goethe.

Not all abilities need to be expressed in the embodiment. If someone who is in the devachan is able to carry out a necessary task on earth at a certain time, he will be re-embodied. He must then sacrifice himself for the sake of all humanity.

“Creare” is usually translated as “creating”. It has the same root as the Sanskrit word “kri”, which is the same as what we recognize in “karma”. It means “to will”. The body is willed by certain forces, by so-called “destiny directors”. The body is then brought into a suitable connection and mixture. Aristotle still used the word for human labor, but at that time it still meant “choosing,” “wanting.”

The physical body is an instrument for the soul, just as the piano is for a person who wants to make music. When we use the instrument, we take the fruits of our development with us. However, even the most highly developed individuals can still make mistakes when choosing a body. It may be that a person who would be capable of great achievements cannot find the body in which he can bring the forces within him to fruition. These are possibilities that must always be taken into account when doing research in this area. A student of Plato will be able to take quite different things with them into the next life.

But those who only have monotonous experiences in one incarnation will have few germinal forces to carry through. And therefore they will be able to reincarnate quickly. Savages who have little experience only spend a short time in Devachan. Chelas, on the other hand, those who have already acquired the right to the championship, can do without Devachan. They do not undergo Devachan. Therefore, they can re-incarnate immediately after death to continue serving humanity.

In childhood, the soul of the child has weak, soft powers that still need to be developed and refined. If you were unable to develop the astral body in one incarnation, it is possible that you will be reborn as a child for the sole purpose of developing the emotional body. A scholar who has a highly developed mind but no feelings will then only need a short period of tutoring as a child and will soon leave the body again.

An attempt to be born can also fail. Then a new attempt is made if the previous body was unable to express the forces. There are even examples in the Bible where re-embodiment occurs immediately after death. It is important to know that re-embodiment not only has a purpose, but that it is a necessity. (Here the example of the clock was given.) The [clock] is a product of development. It could only come into being when different sciences had reached the same level of development at the same time. It took the ability to work with metal and people who had mastered the laws of scientific mechanics. All these people combine at a certain level, and then you have the ability to make a clock in that age.

Those who look only in one direction make a mistake. Those who have developed in only one direction, like a Darwinist, for example, also make a mistake. Monism is not a unity because it has emerged from a unity, but the other way around: body and soul are one because they have connected at a certain level and thus form a unity. The wheel in the clock broke, and with it the unity. The clock is unusable. It is the same when an organism has a “bad wheel”.

The next question was whether the facts in the world are based on a plan or whether chance rules them. (The answer was:)

Development depends on temperature, on mountain air or sea air, on city or country. Let us assume that a brick fell on a person's head. Is that a coincidence or is it part of a plan? A person falls into the water, another jumps in after him, helps him, but he catches a cold and dies. Now let us take a counterpart to this: a person sees his enemy, pushes him into the water. But he also falls in and subsequently dies. These are two very different internal cases. But outwardly it seems as if they are the same cases. Both die as a result of falling into the water. The question of whether the world is governed by a plan full of wisdom or just by coincidence is something we will deal with in more detail in the near future.

When a person has developed their spiritual faculties through meditation and concentration and consciously enters the astral plane, they see a completely different world. They see a world of images, a world of symbols around them. Usually, the astral world is viewed too sensually, that is, it is felt and described by the clairvoyant, who is still new to this, much like a material, sensually perceptible world. In addition, he often mistakes mirror images of the etheric realm for astral images; some descriptions of the astral world are not much different from mirror images of this etheric realm. In the astral realm, everything is seen in colors: if a hostile being approaches us, the clairvoyant sees an orange-yellow color image; if it is a being that is sympathetic to us, the color image is indigo blue. Everything is seen the other way around, as in a mirror image, and this also applies to time. For example, you first see the chicken and then the egg from which it hatched; or you first see the flower and then the root of the plant. The same happens with our soul life: The passions and desires that emanate from a person come towards him on the astral plane as animal-like beings from space, as snakes, wolves and so on, depending on the nature of the feelings and desires. Every noble desire and feeling that is held back by circumstances on earth comes towards him there in magnificent color images. Man, immersed in materialism, and in many cases highly gifted personalities whose thoughts, however, go no further than the world of sensory perception, see here the emptiness of their ideals. The artist, the scholar who loves his art and science for the pleasure they give him, and does not place them in the service of the development of humanity towards the spiritual ideal, sees here the vanity and futility of his aspirations. The knowledge of the higher realms that Theosophy gives us must provide us with the means to advance the spiritual development of humanity.

We will now move on to the experiences on the astral plane after death. Death differs from sleep only in that not only the astral body but also the etheric body with the higher bodies leaves the material body.

Otherwise, the physical body is never left by the etheric body between a person's birth and death if they do not undergo certain states of initiation. The most important moment for a person after death is the moment immediately after dying. This moment can last for hours, sometimes days. In this state, the life of the last incarnation passes by as a memory. The peculiar thing about this memory panorama is that when looking at these life memories from the cradle to the grave, all subjective feelings of joy and pain have disappeared. It is as if one is looking at the life story of someone else, so impersonal is one's relationship to it. The same phenomenon is experienced when, due to a sudden shock – for example, falling into an abyss or being in danger of drowning – an instantaneous separation of the physical and etheric bodies occurs. The etheric body, not the astral body, is the carrier of our memory. As long as the etheric body remains attached to the astral body, the memory image of our last incarnation remains with us. This depends on the duration of our ability to stay awake during our life in the material body. If we can stay awake for three days, then the etheric body will remain connected to the astral body for three days. As soon as the etheric body lets go of the astral body, the panorama of memories disappears. But as a fruit, as a seed for a future incarnation, an essence of these life experiences remains, which is stored in the causal body.

From each life, one brings one's experiences as the essence of life in the causal body; each life increases the power of the content of that life essence. This is the cause of the diversity of innate abilities that each person brings into their new life as a result of their previous lives, whereby their life will be rich or poor according to their abilities and predispositions. To understand the life of the astral body after it has separated from the etheric body, we must first take a look at the astral world and its conditions. The astral body is the body of desires. The seat of our desires and passions lies in the astral body. The material body is only the tool of the astral body to live out its desires and passions in the material realm. At death, the material body, the tool of desires, falls away, but the desires remain. This is where the burning fire of lust and desires in the Kamaloka period arises.

The Kamaloka period, the time you spend in the lower part of the astral plane, will be shorter or longer depending on whether we have desired more strongly and coarsely during our life on the material plane. On average, the Kamaloka period lasts one-third of our lifetime on the material plane. The peculiar thing about the Kamaloka period is that one relives one's life again, but now from back to front: one begins with the last life experience and goes back at triple speed to the time of childhood. While the memory of one's life in the etheric body [immediately after death] was without joy or pain, one now relives all the joys and pains of one's past life again, but in reverse, which means that one experiences everything one has done to others, the suffering and the joy, oneself. These memories remain as impressions in the astral body, to fulfill our karma in future incarnations, in which we are born with the same personalities to whom we have done good or evil in previous incarnations. Now [after the Kamaloka period] the astral body is released. When the person has left his material, etheric and astral bodies, he reaches the state that is mystically expressed in the Bible with the words: Unless you become like little children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.

We must now study the devachanic world. It is just as varied as our material world. There, as here, we can speak comparatively of a continental area, an ocean area and an air area (atmosphere or aura), which permeate each other. The continental area contains the archetypes of the material world, insofar as they are not animated with life, that is, the material forms of minerals, plants, animals and humans.

Imagine a limited space filled with material bodies. Seen with a devachanic gaze, the material forms disappear, but a radiance around the bodies begins, while the space occupied by the material bodies forms an empty space, a negative or shadow image. Animals and humans, seen in this way, appear as negative images: Blood appears green, which is the complementary color of red. The entire material world is present in this way as an archetypal image in the devachanic realm.

The second realm, the oceanic realm, consists not of water but of flowing life that permeates the entire devachanic realm, just as the bloodstream permeates everything in the human body. The unique substance, the “Pran”, which flows here [on earth] in separate animal and human bodies, forms an eternally flowing stream of life in the devachan, the color of peach blossoms. This element is the creative force of everything that appears on earth as a living being. In Devachan we see that the life that animates us all is indeed a unity.

The third realm can best be characterized by saying that everything that takes place here [on earth] in the soul in terms of inner feelings of joy or pain, passion or anger, is revealed there as an atmospheric phenomenon. The silent longing of a human soul can be perceived there like a gently whispering wind; an outburst of passions like a storm wind; a battlefield caused by the outbursts of hatred, anger and lust for murder causes a heavy thunderstorm with rolling thunder and bright lightning strikes. Just as the earth is surrounded by its aura, so the devachan has around it, scattered about, all the feelings that are nurtured or expressed here on earth.

The fourth region of devachan has no direct connection with the lower worlds. The archetypes found there are beings that rule over the archetypes of the lower devachanic realms and bring them together. They are therefore more concerned with organizing and grouping the archetypes that are subordinate to them. A greater power emanates from this realm than from the lower three.

In the fifth, sixth and seventh regions of Devachan, we find the creative forces of the archetypes. Those who can ascend this far learn about the underlying objectives of our world. The archetypes are still present here as soul-inspired germ cells, ready to take on the most diverse forms when they enter the lower realms. The ideas through which the human spirit appears in the material world are a reflection, a shadow image of these germs of the higher spiritual world. The harmony of the spheres of the devachanic realm is here translated into spiritual language. Here one begins to hear the spiritual word, whereby things express their inner being not only in tones and sounds, but also in words. They say their “eternal names” to [the human spirit.

We will only understand the value of the stay in Devachan when we follow the soul's pilgrimage through the three worlds in brief. As long as a person lives in his body, he works and creates in the material realm, but he works there as a spiritual being. What his spirit creates is expressed in material forms; as an emissary of the spiritual world, he must inspire the material with his spirit. However, as long as he is bound to the material body, his spiritual life cannot fully develop. He must repeatedly return to the devachanic realm to gain new spiritual strength and new insights into the goal and striving of the soul and the world. Thus the material world is at the same time the place for creating and for learning, that is to say: [the human being] must learn about the properties of matter in the material world and know how to make them subservient to revealing the spirit. In Devachan, what has been learned and the experiences of the material realm are transformed into spiritual qualities. The person works on themselves in order to better fulfill their life's work with each re-embodiment. Thus, their gaze is always directed towards the earth, their current place of work, in order to bring it ever closer to perfection.

What he has thought on earth, he experiences in Devachan. There, the human being lives between thought images that are reality there. One sees the world of thought in action, creating and forming thoughts and sending them to earth. Among the thought images that one sees there is also the thought image of one's own body. One no longer feels related to one's body at all, but completely identifies with the spirit and asks oneself: Who are you? One learns to see one's body as part of a greater whole; one learns to understand the unity of everything that surrounds us. Thus, from the devachanic realm, one views one's entire life as if from a higher vantage point from the outside. The fruits of life experiences are collected here in the causal body so that they can be transferred to the following incarnations. One looks back on many past incarnations and strives to incorporate one's life experiences into the life plan for future incarnations. The past and the future are illuminated for a moment in a bright light before the person descends again to a new incarnation.

The more we study the Mystery of Golgotha in the light of Spiritual Science, the more we realize that future generations will have to penetrate ever more deeply into this Mystery. In fact, what we have known of this Mystery hitherto and what we know of it today is but a preparation for a future understanding and especially for what will be experienced by mankind through this Mystery. A time will come when it will be possible to reveal to mankind in a few simple words what Spiritual Science, by exploring the widest fields of knowledge, is obliged to expound in a somewhat involved way, a way that some would perhaps say is “difficult to comprehend”. We can safely anticipate that this possibility will be realized. But the nature of spiritual development is such that the understanding of the greatest and simplest truths must be earned by patient effort, that the most profound truths cannot be reduced to simplest terms in every epoch. And therefore we must accept it as the karma of our epoch that we have much to learn before we can grasp the full import and the full gravity of the Mystery of Golgotha.

I should like to open our lecture today by emphasizing that we must attach great importance to the idea of faith, or trust, as an active and positive force.

We have to realize that both academic and popular thinking are at pains to exclude morality from their view of world evolution. Today scientists are interested only in the physical and chemical laws which determined the emergence of the Earth out of an original nebula and their aim is to discover how the end of the world will be determined by these same laws. To a certain extent we acquire our moral ideas in conjunction with these physical conceptions and I have already pointed out that they are not powerful enough to act as a positive force. Such is the position today. And in the future our moral ideas will become increasingly impotent. The idea that a deed or an occurrence, such as the “Fall”, which stands at the beginning of terrestrial existence, must be judged by moral laws is regarded by the scientific mind as sheer superstition. Our present understanding is not sufficient of itself to conceive of a moral evolution at the end of terrestrial existence whereby the physical and chemical processes of the Earth would be raised by a moral impulse to the Jupiter condition. Conceptions about what is physical and what is moral co-exist, but cannot, so to speak, “tolerate” each other; the two spheres are strictly delimited. Whilst natural science excludes morality entirely from its ideology, morality is resigned to the fact that it is without effective life, that it has no place in the physical world. Indeed certain religious confessions seek to accentuate this cleavage between the physical and the moral, which permits them to reach a kind of compromise with natural science in that the scientist emphasizes that a clear line of demarcation must be drawn between the sphere of morality and what belongs to the sphere of chemistry, physics and geology, etc.

I propose to begin my lecture today with something that is seemingly wholly unrelated to our subject but which leads directly into it. First, let me say that not all who have devoted themselves to cosmology excluded moral judgements from their study of external nature and natural phenomena. It would never occur to the modern botanist to apply moral ideas to the laws of plant growth. He would consider it childish to apply moral standards to the plant kingdom or to enquire into plant morality. Imagine the reception that would be accorded to anyone who took such an idea seriously. But people did not always share this attitude. I should like to quote the example of Goethe whom many did not regard as a Christian, but whose “Weltanschauung” was more Christian than that of many others. If you refer to critical studies on Goethe, especially those by Catholic authors, you will find that they are of the opinion that Goethe—as a man of stature he was sometimes treated indulgently—did not take Christianity seriously. Goethe, however, was by temperament and disposition inherently Christian, more profoundly Christian than those who forever have “Lord, Lord” upon their lips. Goethe certainly did not wear Christianity on his sleeve, but his view of the world was profoundly Christian in character. And here I would like to draw your attention to an aspect of Goethe's thought which is often neglected.

In his theory of metamorphosis Goethe attempted, as we know, to gain insight into plant growth. I have often had occasion to refer to a conversation between Goethe and Schiller on this subject after they had attended a lecture by Professor Batsch in Jena. Schiller did not approve of the way in which Batsch classified plants. He said that the method of dividing and classifying was unnecessary and that a totally different approach was possible. Thereupon Goethe illustrated with a simple sketch his idea of the metamorphosis of plants, in order to show how the spiritual link common to the individual plant forms could be envisaged. Schiller shook his head and replied: “That is not an experience; that is an idea.” Goethe did not really understand this objection and said: “I am glad to hear that I have ideas without knowing it and that I can even perceive them with my own eyes.”—Goethe could not understand how that which was derived from reality, like a tune or a colour, could be described as an idea. He maintained that he actually saw his ideas. Goethe, therefore, strove to discover the spiritual behind phenomena, to find the spiritual element underlying plant growth.

Now Goethe realized that he could not fully communicate his ideas to his contemporaries, for the time was not yet ripe to receive them. Meanwhile other naturalists, amongst them the botanists Schelver and Henschel, had been stimulated by Goethe's theory of metamorphosis. They wrote the most remarkable things about plant growth which met with Goethe's approbation. But the modern botanist regards this whole subject as dealt with by Goethe, Schelver and Henschel as midsummer madness. In cases such as this we must adapt the words of Paul and say: “What is foolishness to man may be wisdom in the sight of God.” And Goethe then jotted down his impressions of Schelver's method of presentation.

I will now outline briefly what Schelver wished to establish. The existing approach to botanical studies was anathema to him. At this time the generally accepted view was that plants are divided into plants with female flowers and plants with male flowers, that the ovule is fertilized by the pollen from the stamens and so a new individual arises. Schelver firmly rejected this view since it did not accord with the nature of the plant kingdom. The fact is, he said, that every plant, by virtue of its nature, can reproduce its kind. He looked upon fertilization as a more or less secondary phenomenon, as a mistake, an aberration of nature. If nature followed the right course, Schelver believed, then each plant would reproduce its kind without fertilization; there would be no need for pollination in order to ensure the continuity of the plant species (note 1).

Goethe who had made a close study of such phenomena as the metamorphosis of the leaf into the flower, regarded it as self-evident that the whole plant would reproduce its kind through metamorphosis. He was attracted by Schelver's idea and in all seriousness he recorded his reflections on the subject in a series of aphorisms which are extremely interesting, but which modern botanists regard as pure nonsense. In his article on Schelver he wrote amongst other things:

“This new theory of pollination would doubtless be most welcome and most seemly when lecturing to young people and ladies, for, with the existing theories the teacher finds himself in considerable embarrassment. Moreover whenever innocent young minds, desirous of perfecting their knowledge, consulted botanical textbooks, they could not conceal the fact that their moral feelings were outraged. These perpetual “nuptials” which reduce monogamy, on which morals, law and religion are founded, into a vague and undefined lasciviousness are wholly intolerable to the pure in heart.”

Thus Goethe, surveying the plant kingdom, finds it intolerable that there is no escape from these perpetual “nuptials”. He finds it—as he so delicately puts it—more seemly not to have to mention them; it is far better (in his view) to teach the a-sexual reproduction of plants. He then elaborated further on this and wrote:

“People have often reproached scholars—and not without justification—for having shown undue interest in the slightly improper and frivolous passages of ancient authors in order to compensate to some extent for the tedium and aridity of their own writings. In the same way certain naturalists, seeing Mother Nature partly in the buff, went so far as to crack ribald jokes at her expense, as they never failed to do about old Baubo (note 2). We recall having seen arabesques which depicted most realistically, in the style of antique art, the sexual relationships within the calix.”

Goethe therefore thought it highly desirable that the study of sexual behaviour in the plant kingdom should be abolished. But, of course, this was considered to be an absurd idea even in Goethe's time. And today in the age of psychoanalysis which seeks a sexual explanation for everything, it would seem more foolish still to say that it would he a good thing if we could dispense with this immoral notion of sexuality in our study of nature. Goethe expressly says: “Just as we find everywhere today ultras (note 3)—liberal as well as royalist—so Schelver was an ultra on the question of metamorphosis. He broke through the narrow limitations of the earlier theory.” Goethe does not say that he found an ultra such as Schelver in any way antipathetic; on the contrary he warmly welcomed his appearance.

We shall the better understand what lies behind all this if we enter more deeply into the soul of Goethe, I mean, into his Christian soul. Those who study nature as it is from the standpoint of modern science can of course make nothing of such ideas, for certain assumptions are necessary before these ideas can be understood. It must first be assumed that the plants, as they are at present, belie their original design. Those who make a detailed study of the plant kingdom are compelled to acknowledge that, when they reflect upon the original design of plant growth, they find that fertilization by wind-blown pollen does not accord with the original intention of nature. Fertilization should take a different form. The only course open to us therefore is to recognize that the whole flora around us shows a deterioration from its original form and that a view of nature such as that of Goethe still discovered in the form of plants as they are today an intimation of what they had been before the Fall. Indeed we cannot understand Goethe's theory of metamorphosis unless we appreciate its child-like innocence, unless we realize that Goethe wished to indicate by this theory that the present mode of reproduction in the plant kingdom is not what was originally intended; it arose only after the Earth had fallen from a higher sphere to its present level.

It follows from this—I cannot enter into precise details at the moment, but we shall have an opportunity to discuss these matters later—that the same applies to the mineral kingdom; that it too is not as originally constituted. And those who make a careful scientific study of these problems will also realize that what I have said is applicable to the animal kingdom, to the so-called cold-blooded animals, but not to the warm-blooded animals. The mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom and the kingdom of the cold-blooded animals, whose blood temperature is permanently below that of the environment in which they live, these three kingdoms are not such as they were originally intended to be. They have fallen from a higher sphere, with the result that they are of necessity subject to the sexual principle which governs them today. These three kingdoms are unable to develop their potentialities to the full; they must be given assistance in order to fulfil their development. Originally, plants possessed a natural capacity, peculiar to themselves, not only to metamorphose leaf into blossom, but also to bring forth an entirely new plant. But they now lack the vital energies to do this; they require a new stimulus from without, because they have forsaken the realm to which they originally belonged. And the mineral kingdom and the kingdom of the cold-blooded animals too were intended to be different from what they are now; they have stopped short midway in their evolution.

Let us now turn to the other realms of nature: to the kingdom of the warm-blooded animals, to the human kingdom and to the kingdom of the ligneous plants, i.e. trees (note 4). The plants I have already mentioned which follow normal metamorphosis are those which develop green leaves and stems, the herbaceous plants. I pointed out in my previous lecture that physical man, as at present constituted, does not answer to his inherent potentialities; his physical body was originally destined for immortality. This idea has further implications. Not only has physical man who was destined for immortality forfeited his claim to immortality, but also the other living beings, the ligneous plants and the warm-blooded animals bear the seeds of death in them. They are not as originally created; not that they were created immortal, but they have deteriorated. In consequence a new situation has arisen for them. I stated that the kingdom of the herbaceous plants, and the kingdom of the cold-blooded animals are unable to fulfil their potentialities; they are in need of an external stimulus. The warm-blooded animals, the ligneous plants and man do not betray their origin in their present form. Thus the first group do not develop to the full their potentialities and need some external influence to further their development. The second group, the ligneous plants, the warm-blooded animals, and man as at present constituted, do not betray their origin. The former fail to fulfil their development; the latter do not immediately disclose their origin in their present form.

If we accept this point of view we can predict to a certain extent the direction which the study of nature must take in the future. We must make a clear distinction between what the beings were destined to become and what they are at the present moment.

The question then is: how are we to account for this deterioration? Virtually the whole of nature around us, even when investigated scientifically, is not such as it was intended to be. Who is responsible for this? The blame lies with man because he succumbed to the Luciferic temptation, to what is called in the opening chapter of Genesis, the “Fall”, or original sin. To Spiritual Science this is a real and genuine drama in which man was not only involved, but which was first played out in the soul of man. At that time man was still so powerful that he involved the whole of nature in his fall. He involved in his fall the plants. Consequently they were unable to complete their development and required a stimulus from without. It was his responsibility that, alongside the cold-blooded animals, there are also warm-blooded animals, that is, animals capable of suffering pain, as he does. Man therefore has dragged the animals down with him because he succumbed to the Luciferic temptation.

People often imagine that man's relation to the universe has always been the same as it is today, that he is powerless in the face of nature, that he has no apparent influence upon the creation of the animals and plants around him. But this has not always been the case. Before the present order of nature arose man was a powerful being who not only succumbed to the Luciferic temptation, but involved the rest of creation in his fall, with the result that the moral order was completely divorced from the natural order.

Whoever expresses the view I have expressed today will not meet with the slightest understanding from those who think along the lines of natural science. None the less it is imperative that such views should be understood in the future. Despite all the services it has rendered to mankind, despite its great achievements, modern science is but an interlude. It will be replaced by another science which will recognize once more that there is a higher vision of the world in which the natural law and the moral law are two aspects of a single whole. But this higher vision will not be reached through a vague pantheism, but from a concrete insight into reality. We must recognize, as external nature unmistakably shows, that it was originally designed for something other than is disclosed in the existing order of nature today. We must have the courage to measure external nature also by the yardstick of morality. The materialistic monism of today which prides itself on excluding moral principles does so from intellectural cowardice, because it has not the courage to probe deeply enough to a point where, as was the case with Goethe, it becomes imperative to apply moral standards, just as it is necessary to apply scientific standards to the study of external nature.

Mankind would have found it impossible to think of the world as once again imbued with morality if the Mystery of Golgotha had not supervened at the beginning of our present era. We have seen that everything pertaining to the natural order has, in a certain sense, been corrupted, has fallen from a higher sphere and must recover once again its former high estate. And our “Weltanschauung” likewise must rise above its present level. Our thinking also is an integral part of this natural order. And when Du-Bois Reymond and other scholars maintain that our thinking cannot attain to reality, when they assert that we can never know the ultimates (ignorabimus) this is to some extent true. And why? Because our thinking has forsaken the realm for which it was originally predestined and must find its way back once again. Thinking has declined everywhere and those who maintain that thinking cannot attain to reality are right to some extent. This thinking, together with the rest of creation, has been corrupted and must lift itself to a higher level. The necessary impulse through which this thinking can be raised to a higher level is found in the Mystery of Golgotha, that is, in the new stimulus which the Mystery of Golgotha brought to mankind. Even our thinking is subject to some extent to original sin and must be redeemed before it can again participate in reality. And our present natural science with its necessarily a-moral outlook is simply the outcome of this deterioration of thought. If we have not the courage to admit this, we have completely lost touch with reality.

The new spiritual impulse that was brought by the Mystery of Golgotha and whose purpose was to raise up the fallen kingdom of nature becomes abundantly clear to us if we bear in mind certain concrete facts, if we ask ourselves the question: What then would have been the fate of Earth evolution after its involvement in the Fall through the action of men—I say this not as an expression of opinion but as the result of spiritual investigation, just as the findings of natural science are the result of scientific investigation—what, I repeat, would have been the fate of Earth evolution if the Mystery of Golgotha had not brought a new spiritual impulse? Just as the plant cannot fulfil its development if the ovary is removed, so the Earth could not have fulfilled its evolution if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place.

Today we have just entered the Fifth post-Atlantean epoch. The Mystery of Golgotha took place during the first third of the Fourth epoch. Everywhere we find evidence of a progressive decline; this is patent to all. Thinking that is capable of penetrating into the essential nature of things has suffered a catastrophic decline. The Copernican theory and allied theories are valuable contributions to knowledge at a superficial level, but they do not probe deeply enough. They are the outcome of man's failure over the years to go to the heart of things, a failure that will become progressively more pronounced. Today, we can cite instances, fantastic as they may seem, of the situation that must arise if this trend of thought, which is already to some extent endemic, were to continue unimpeded. This trend of thought will have to be abandoned because the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha will gather increasing strength.

I ask you to look with me for a moment through a window into the possibilities of future evolution and not to discuss what I have said in public lest you lay yourselves open to ridicule for stating a plain truth, for today such ideas will only meet with derision. If the present outlook of academic science persists, if it should spread further afield and become increasingly pervasive—we are now living at the beginning of the Fifth postAtlantean epoch which will be followed by a Sixth and a Seventh epoch—then, unless the Mystery of Golgotha is understood at a deeper level, the situation can only grow worse. Today, if one were to speak, as I have done, of a new conception of the “Fall”, outside an esoteric circle, a circle that for years has been accustomed to ideas which provide evidence that this new conception can be scientifically demonstrated, he would of course be laughed to scorn. The materialistic, non-Christian world would have precious little confidence in him, if he were known to hold such views. But in the Sixth post-Atlantean epoch things will be totally different and there will be a different attitude amongst a certain section of mankind. There will be a bitter struggle before the Christ Impulse can be realized.

People imagine that those who strive to arrive at the truth by means of Spiritual Science can be met with the weapons of scorn and ridicule that often pass for criticism. In the Sixth epoch they will be treated medically! By that time medicaments will have been discovered which will be administered compulsorily to those who believe in a recognized canon of good and evil independent of social sanctions. A time will come when people will say: “What is all this talk about good and evil? Good and evil are determined by the State. What the State declares to be good is good; what it declares to be evil is evil. When you speak of good and evil as moral values, you are obviously ill.” And medicaments will be administered to such people in order to cure them. It is no exaggeration to say that this is the direction in which our epoch is moving; it is a pointer to the future. For the moment I will not disclose what will follow in the Seventh epoch. A time will come—for human nature cannot be changed—when people will be adjudged ill according to the concepts of natural science and the necessary steps will be taken to cure them. This is no flight of fancy. Even the most sober observation of the world around confirms what I have said. And those who have eyes to see and ears to hear see on every side the first steps in this direction.

Now the etheric body is not such as it was originally designed to be and this is the determining factor in all development subsequent to the “Fall”. It is of paramount importance to be alive to this fact and gradually to turn it to account in our life. Amongst the various etheric formative forces which our etheric body originally possessed—and originally it possessed all etheric formative forces in their full and vigorous vitality—is the warmth ether that is still active within it. This explains why man and the animals which he dragged down with him in his Fall both have warm blood. It was therefore possible for man to transform the warmth ether in a special way. This he could not do with the light ether. Admittedly he assimilates light ether, but he simply radiates it again so that a lower form of clairvoyance is enabled to perceive the etheric colours in the human aura. They are actually present there. But in addition, man was also designed for a particular tone; he was endowed with his own specific tone in the whole Harmony of the Spheres, and also with an original vitality, so that it would always have been possible for the etheric body, if it had retained its original vitality, to have preserved the immortality of the physical body. And man would have been spared the consequences. For had the etheric body preserved its original form man would have continued to dwell in those higher realms from which he has fallen. He would not have succumbed to the Luciferic temptation, for in those higher realms totally different conditions would have prevailed. And in former times those conditions really did exist. Great souls like Saint-Martin were to some extent still aware that such conditions had once existed and therefore they spoke of these conditions as a former reality.

Let us recall for a moment one of these conditions. Man could not have spoken at that time as he does today, for speech had not yet been differentiated into separate languages (note 5). This differentiation was due to the fact that speech became static. It was never intended originally that language should remain static. You must have a clear picture of what was originally intended for man. If ever a fraction of Goethe's world-conception is realized in the life of man—I do not mean theoretically, but in actual practice—then people will realize what are the implications of this statement. Suppose for a moment that man still had the potentialities with which he was originally endowed. He would have looked out upon a world from which he received external impressions; he would be aware not only of colours and tones, not only of external impressions, but also of spirit emanating from things on every hand—from the colour red the spirit of red, from the colour green the spirit of green, and so on. At all times he would have been aware of the spirit. This was anticipated by Goethe when he said: if the Urpflanze, the archetypal plant, is nothing more than an idea, then I can see my ideas with my own eyes and they are realities in the external world like colours. This is prescient of the future. I beg you to accept as a solid, concrete fact that the spirit is an active force that streams into us. If, however, the external impressions were to stream into us with the same vital energy as the spirit, we would respond to each of these impressions in our breathing process—for our breathing always responds to the impressions we receive through our brain and our senses. For example, an impression of red invades us from without; from within, our breathing responds to this impression with tone. Tone issues from man with every impression he receives from without. There was no such thing as a static language; each object each impression was immediately answered by tone from within. There was complete correspondence between the word and the external impression. Speech in its later development is simply the external projection, the residuum of that original, living and flexible language which was once common to all. And the expression “the lost word” which is so little understood today is a reminder of this original language. The opening words of the Gospel of St. John, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God” recall living “at-one-ment” with the spirit—this primal spirit, when man not only had eyes to see the external world, but also to perceive the spirit, when, through the breathing process he responded to visual impressions with a tone. It is to this communion with the divine that the opening words of St. John's Gospel refer.

So much for the one aspect. On the other hand, in respiration (in so far as it extends to the head), as we inhale or exhale there is not only an interaction with the external world, but a pulsation is set up within our whole organism. The respiration that extends to the head responds to the impressions we receive from without. But in the lower organism our respiration responds to the metabolic process. If man still possessed the original vitality of his etheric body, then something totally different would be associated with his respiration than is associated with it today. For the metabolic process is not wholly independent of respiration; its dependence is simply concealed, it lies beneath the threshold of consciousness. But man would be conscious of it if he had preserved the original vitality of his etheric body, if in the course of his life he had not lost this vitality to some extent, for it is this loss of vitality, not only through the physical body, but from within, that is the cause of death. If man had retained his original potentialities, it would have been possible for him, via his metabolism, not only to secrete waste products, but to produce something of a material nature. So much for the one possibility. On the other hand, the exhalations of man would have contained formative forces and the formative forces of his exhalations would have laid hold of the material substance and thus he would have created in his environment the animal kingdom as it was originally intended to be. For the animal kingdom is a secretion of man and was intended to be so, in order that man could extend his dominion over the kingdom of nature. It is in this way that we should think of the animal kingdom. All this is the conclusion drawn from the investigations I have laid down before you.

Today natural science is inclined to think that originally the animals were much more closely related to man. The truth is not that man has ascended the ladder of evolution as the crude theory of Darwin imagines but that today we can no longer grasp the real relationship of man to the animal kingdom. The vegetable kingdom does not fulfil its development on the terrestrial plane, and the animal kingdom likewise does not develop its origin on this plane. Naturalists speculate on how animals which co-exist with man have evolved. The reason for their co-existence must be sought in the sphere from which man has descended. It cannot be found where Darwin and his materialistic commentators expected to find it; it will be found in the mighty events of prehistoric times.

And bear in mind also what I mentioned recently: that spiritual investigation shows that in the sixth and seventh millennium there will be a decline in fertility. Women will become increasingly sterile. The present method of reproduction will no longer be possible; it must be transposed to a higher plane. In order that the world may not fall into a state of decadence, when opinions as to what is good and evil will be treated medically, in order that good and evil, all personal determination of what is good and evil, should not be recorded merely as a matter to be decided by State regulation or human conventions in order that this should not arise at a time when the natural order that at present prevails in the human species will of necessity have ceased to maintain the race—for just as in women fertility ceases at a certain age, so too the present method of reproduction in the human species will cease at a certain stage of Earth evolution—in order to forestall this, the Christ Impulse was bestowed upon mankind.

Thus the Christ Impulse was implanted in the whole of Earth evolution. I doubt if there is a single person who imagines that the Christ Impulse loses anything of its majesty or sublimity when it is incorporated in this way in the whole world order; when, in other words, it is restored to its cosmic rank, and when men really acknowledge that at the beginning of Earth evolution there existed, and at the end of Earth evolution there will exist, an order different from the present natural order, and a moral order that transcends the physical. The Christ Impulse was necessary in order that the end of Earth evolution should be worthy of the beginning. It was for this purpose that the Christ Impulse entered our Earth evolution and it is in this sense that we must understand it. And those who accept the words of the Gospels, not in an external sense, but with the true faith demanded by Christ, can find in them the necessary attributes whereby an increasing understanding of the Christ Impulse can gradually be developed, an understanding that can meet the demands of external investigation and once again relate the Christ Impulse to the cosmic world order.

There are certain passages in the Bible that can only be understood with the help of Spiritual Science. It is written in the Bible: “One jot or tittle shall in no wise pass from the law.” Many expositors interpret these words as implying that Christ wished to preserve the Mosaic law intact and simply added to it His own contribution. They claimed that this was the real meaning of the passage. Now the passage has no such meaning. A passage should not be torn from its context, for everything in the Gospels is closely interrelated. When we study this interrelation—at the moment I cannot enter into the details which would provide convincing proof of what I am about to say—we find the following.—On the occasion when He spoke of the “jot or tittle”, Christ implied that, in olden times, when the law was first framed, man still possessed his ancient inheritance of wisdom. He had not declined to the extent he has at the present day, when the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, when he must change his mental attitude. In olden times there were still prophets, or seers who were able to discover the law through the power of the spirit within them. “You who are now living in the kingdom of this world are no longer capable of adding to the law or of changing the law. If the law is to remain just, not a jot or tittle must be changed. The time is now past when the law can be changed after the ancient fashion; it must remain as it is. (But at the same time we must endeavour to rediscover its original meaning with the new powers that the Christ Impulse has brought.) You, the Scribes, are incapable of understanding the Scriptures. You must recover the spirit in which they were originally written. You are without, in the kingdom of the world; no new laws can originate there. But to those who are within the kingdom is granted the impulse of that living Force”—which, as I said recently, had to be transmitted orally, for it was not recorded in writing by Christ. “It cannot be codified, cannot be written into the law. It is something that is totally different from the Mosaic law, something that must be grasped spiritually. You, the Scribes, must approach the world in a new light, as something more than a purely phenomenal world.”

Thus the first powerful influence was given to mankind to see the world as something more than a world perceptible to the senses alone. It is only slowly and gradually that we can accommodate ourselves to this new outlook. Occasionally one feels impelled to speak from a Christian standpoint and then one becomes the butt of ridicule. So too Schelling and Hegel, although not regarded as orthodox Christians especially by the Catholics, sometimes allowed themselves to express genuine Christian sentiments. And they have been sharply criticized for it. The objection levelled against them was: “Nature is not as you describe it.” To which they were so misguided as to reply: “So much the worse for Nature!” This reply, it is true, is not “scientific” as we understand the word today, but it is Christian in spirit, the spirit in which Christ Himself spoke when He said: However much the Scribes may speak of laws, they do not speak of the real Law. Not only has a jot or tittle passed from the Mosaic law, but the law itself has changed in many respects. The Scribes speak from the kingdom of this world and not from the Kingdom of Heaven. He who speaks from the Kingdom of Heaven speaks of a cosmic order of which the natural order is only a subordinate part. To this one must reply: So much the worse for nature! To those who objected to Goethe's claim—that plant propagation was not determined by sexual reproduction—on the grounds that scientific observation shows that the ovaries are fertilized by windblown pollen—he too would have replied, if he had given his honest opinion: So much the worse for the plant kingdom if it is so deeply committed to the natural order.

On the other hand, minds such as Goethe's will always insist that man's understanding must be enlarged, that man must become sensitively aware so that he will be able to think, feel and experience that up to the sixth and seventh millennium the spoken word will once again become a reality and will have the same creative power in the external world as the power of fecundation in the seeds of the plant kingdom today. The word which has become abstract today must regain the original creative power it once possessed “in the beginning”. Those who, in the light of Spiritual Science are reluctant to amplify the opening words of the Gospel of St. John, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was a God”, by adding “and the Word one day will live again”, have not fully grasped the Christian message. For Christ Jesus has set forth His teaching in a form that conflicts with the external world. It is to Him that we owe the impulse to regeneration. The world meanwhile has declined rapidly and the Christ Impulse must be increasingly reinforced before this decline can be arrested. To a certain extent we have gone some way towards reversing this doctrine since the Mystery of Golgotha, but for the most part without being consciously aware of it. Man must learn once again to participate consciously in cosmic events. He must begin to realize not merely: “when I think, something takes place in my brain”, but “when I think, something takes place in the Cosmos”! And he must learn to think in such a way that just as he can entrust his thinking to the Cosmos, so too he can once again unite his being with the Cosmos.

The necessary changes that will have to be effected in our external life in order that our social life may be invested with the Christ Impulse are ignored by those who are already aware of this need. There are reasons for their reticence. One can only speak of them when certain prior conditions have been met; only brief indications can be given here. You will recall that earlier in this lecture I opened a window on to the future when I pointed out that those who recognize other laws than those decreed by the State will be treated medically. Before this time arrives, however, a reaction will have set in. One section of mankind will adopt the measures referred to above, but another section will be the bearer of the future Christ Impulse. A battle will ensue between the two groups between the past and the future. And the Christ Impulse will win the day. When the etheric Christ appears in the present century the Impulse that streams from Him will be able to awaken such a response in the souls of men that governments based on ambition, vanity, prejudice or error, will gradually become an impossibility. It will be possible to discover principles of government free from these human frailties but only if they are founded on a true and concrete acceptance of the Christ Impulse. Christian impulses will not be determined by parliamentary decrees; they will enter the world in a different way.

This tendency exists already. Alongside the incorporation of the Christ Impulse into world evolution there is a longing to incorporate the Christ Impulse into social evolution. In order to achieve this goal a considerable reorientation of thinking is called for. And great strength of mind will be necessary before people can accept seriously what I have said about the Christ. When Jesus had delivered His message to the multitude they were filled with wrath and sought to cast Him from the mountain top. The course of world evolution is not so simple as one imagines. We must realize that those who have some truth to impart may already have encountered an attitude of mind such as Christ encountered in those who sought to cast Him from the mountain.

In an age whose motto is—moderation at all costs, never give offence, avoid a reputation for iconoclasm—in such an age the ground is being prepared for the entry of Christ into the social evolution of mankind and perhaps with good reason in this particular age. It is being prepared in the subconscious; little evidence of it is to be seen on the surface where the unchristian principle of opportunism prevails, that unchristian principle that dare not openly declare like Christ: “The Kingdom of Heaven is not for you, ye Scribes and Pharisees.”—I ask you to pause and consider what has replaced the Scribes and Pharisees today. Gospel commentators are wont to excuse or explain away many of Christ's statements. And recently a priest, certainly not of the orthodox persuasion, who has uttered many fine statements about Christ Jesus, went so far as to say that Christ was obviously not a practical person for He advised people to live like the fowls of the air, “for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns”. Such advice would not take us very far today. This preacher did not make very serious efforts to grasp the impulse which permeates the Gospels. People find it difficult to cope with precepts such as “whoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also; if any man take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. Give to him that asketh of thee and from him that would borrow of thee, turn not thou away.” (Matt. V, 39-42.) [The book says this passage is in Matt. II, 40-42 – e.Ed.] When we read all that has been said in extenuation of this rather unpopular passage we have to admit that mankind today has gone half way towards excusing Christ for the strange sentiments He sometimes expressed. They are prepared to excuse much if they can only retain the Gospels—after their own fashion. But in matters such as this it is far more important to understand what is implied. And this is difficult because these things are closely interrelated. But at least we can have an intimation of this interrelationship if we read on from the passage: “and of him that taketh away thy goods ask thou not again” (which occurs in the Gospel of St. Luke) to the more explicit statement in the Gospel of St. Matthew (VII, 12): “Whatever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even to them.” These words, of course, refer to what has gone before. Christ is here appealing to faith and trust.

If Christ had shared only the current superficial ideas He could never have said: “If any man take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.” He is speaking here of laws that govern social life and conduct—such are for the Scribes and High Priests—He is speaking of the Kingdom of Heaven. In this passage He wishes to emphasize that in the Kingdom of Heaven other laws prevail than those of the external world. And if you compare the passage in the Gospel of St. Luke with that of St. Matthew—and much depends upon the correct translation—you will realize that He wished to say that a faith must be awakened in man which would dispense with the laws and statutes concerning the stealing of another's coat and cloak. Christ wished to show that it was pointless simply to teach, “Thou shalt not steal”. You will recall that He said: “a jot shall in no wise pass from the law”. But as they were originally understood those words no longer provide any impulse for the present epoch. We must really develop within ourselves the power, under the present circumstances, to offer our cloak to whomsoever has taken our coat. If we follow the precept that “whatever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them”, and especially if this principle can be adopted by all, it would be impossible for anyone to steal another's cloak. No one will steal another's cloak if the victim has the strength of mind to say: whoever takes my coat, to him I will give my cloak also.

In a social order where this attitude of mind prevails there will be an end to stealing. This was the implication of Christ's words. The Kingdom of Heaven is contrasted with the kingdom of the world. We must develop the power of faith. Morality must be founded upon this inner power. Every moral act must be a miracle, not merely a fact of nature. Man must be capable of performing miracles. Since the original world order has descended from its former high estate, the purely natural order must be replaced by a supernatural moral order which transcends the natural order. It is not sufficient merely to keep to the old commandments which had been given to the world under totally different conditions, nor is it sufficient to change them; man must adapt himself to a supernatural moral order, so that if someone steals my coat I shall be prepared to give him my cloak also, and not proceed against him. The Gospel of St. Matthew clearly states that Christ wished to debar judicial proceedings. In that event there would have been no point in adding to the passage about the coat and cloak the injunction: “Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them” unless Christ had intended to refer to another kingdom, to a kingdom in which miracles take place. For Christ performed signs and wonders through His sovereign, supernal power of faith. No one can do what Christ has done as part of the natural order, if he cannot bring himself to see in man something more than a nature being. Now what Christ demands of us is that, in the moral sphere at least, our ideas should transcend the limitations of external reality. In external life we act on the principle: if someone takes your coat, then get it back again! But on this basis it is impossible to establish a social order that complies with the Christ Impulse. In Christ's kingdom there must be something more in our moral concepts than a mere concern with, or the satisfaction of material interests. Otherwise the following passages would be strange bedfellows. First, “whoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. If any man take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. Give to every man that asketh of thee and of him that taketh away thy goods ask not again. Whatever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.” And then contrast with these precepts the words: “If you smite someone on the right cheek, then see to it that he offers the other also, so that you can experience the satisfaction a second time. If you steal a man's coat, do not hesitate to take his cloak also. If you want anything from anyone, see that he gives it you, etc.” This negates the principle: Whatever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.

From the point of view of the practical world these injunctions of Christ are meaningless, a mere sequence of empty phrases. They first take on meaning if we presuppose that those who would take an active part in the salvation of the world which shall be initiated by the Christ Impulse through which the world will be raised once again to higher realms, must start from principles which do not apply to the external world only. It will then be possible to give practical effect to moral ideas and conceptions once again.

To understand the Gospels in the light of the Mystery of Golgotha demands spiritual courage, a courage which mankind sorely needs today. And this implies that we must take seriously all that Christ said about the opposition between the kingdom of this world, the consequence of the progressive decline of mankind, and the Kingdom of Heaven. Those who in times such as the present (1917) are celebrating the Easter Festival, may already feel a growing desire to find the courage to understand once again the Mystery of Golgotha and to be united with the Impulse of Golgotha. Everywhere the Gospels speak of courage; they insistently call for courage to follow that Impulse which Christ Jesus has implanted in the evolution of the Earth.

In this lecture I have endeavoured to give you a clearer insight into the Mystery of Golgotha in order to impress upon you that aspect which shows how this Mystery must again be incorporated in the whole Cosmic order and can be understood only when we recognize that the Gospels speak with the tongues of Angels and not with the tongues of men. In the course of its development the academic theology of the nineteenth century has tried to reduce the Gospels to the level of human speech. Our immediate task is to learn to read the Gospels once more as the Word of God. In this connection Spiritual Science will contribute to a better understanding of the Gospels.

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NOTES BY TRANSLATOR

Note 1. In sexual reproduction of plants fertilization takes place by means of pollination (windblown pollen, transference of pollen by insects, etc.). Asexual reproduction is of a vegetative nature by means of bulbs, bulbules, tubers and runners. The fern shows alternate sexual and asexual reproduction. The spores fall to the ground where a new plant is formed. The plant which develops from a spore is attached to the ground by the prothallus (root-like hairs) which bears a number of male and female organs.

Note 2. Baubo tried to divert the sorrowing Demeter by cynical jests or obscene antics. Goethe applies the name elsewhere to an immodest merry-maker in the Roman carnival, in Faust. She appears in the Walpurgis Night scene.

Note 3. Ultra—one holding extreme views of the ultra royalist party in France, 1827. (The party of ultras split into parties of the “right” and the “left”.)

Note 4. Ligneous plants are wood-forming plants, e.g. trees, shrubs, etc. Non-ligneous plants are herbaceous plants, e.g. annuals, herbs, etc.

Note 5. On this subject see: Dr. Arnold Wadler, Der Turm von Babel. Urgemeingeschaft der Sprachen. Rudolf Geering Verlag, Stuttgart, 1935. Translated as One Language: American Press for Art and Science, 1948.

Around the same time that the idea that was to become the most important for his scientific thinking took shape in Goethe's mind, he also found the words that sharply characterize his relationship to science. On May 17, 1787, he writes to Herder that he is very close to the secret of plant development; and on Aug. 18, he writes to Knabel:

After what I have seen in Sicily and near Naples of plants and fish, if I were ten years younger, I would be very tempted to make a trip to India, not to discover anything new, but to look at what had been discovered in my own way.

He made it clear that he was not interested in discovering individual facts, but in achieving a conception of nature that was in keeping with his way of thinking. When, after his arrival in Weimar, he began to occupy himself with natural things, driven by inner compulsion and external circumstances, he found the science of these things among his contemporaries in a state that was completely at odds with his way of thinking. This circumstance shaped his entire preoccupation in this direction. He sought enlightenment in the works of naturalists. He always found himself compelled to look at things from points of view that were foreign to the researchers he turned to.

This is most evident in his botanical studies. In this field, Linné was the leading authority at the time. Goethe immersed himself in his writings, but was soon forced into opposition to his way of thinking. Linné sought out the characteristics of the individual plant forms. According to the degree of their relationship, he placed these forms in a systematic series. He does not ask whether there is a natural relationship between the different forms. This is because his conception of nature is dominated by the theological idea of a plan of creation: “We count as many species as different forms have been created in principle.” Anyone who starts from this basic view cannot see what the forms have in common. Rather, he will emphasize the distinguishing features in order to get to know the diversity that lies in the plan of creation. Goethe's way of looking at things was the opposite: “That which he - Linnaeus - sought to keep apart by force, had, according to the innermost need of my being, to strive for union.”

The difference between Goethe's and Linnaeus's approach lies in the fact that Goethe seeks the creative forces within nature itself, which bring the manifold forms of life into existence, while Linnaeus assumes that the creative power exists outside of nature. Therefore, Goethe must seek to immerse himself so deeply in nature until this creative essence becomes visible to him, whereas Linné is content to study the created in its diversity and surrender to the belief that this diversity is based on a wise cosmic plan. It was against Goethe's nature to surrender to such a belief. This nature is characterized by a statement he made to Jacobi:

God has punished you with metaphysics and given you a thorn in the flesh, but blessed me with physics. I follow the atheist's (Spinoza) Verbum Deo caro factum (The Word of God made flesh) and leave to you everything you call and may call religion. You believe in God; I see.

Just as one sees external sensual facts with the eyes of the body, so Goethe wanted to see the deeper-lying facts with the eyes of the spirit, which contain the reasons for those external facts. He searches for an essence that is contained in all plants, because - as he writes down in Palermo on April 17:

There must be such a thing! Otherwise how would I recognize that this or that structure is a plant if they were not all formed according to one pattern.

For Linnaeus and his like-minded colleagues, this question is superfluous, because the common pattern of all plants, in his opinion, does not lie within, but outside of nature in the idea of creation. What is outside of nature cannot be the subject of research.

One can see what is important to Goethe. He includes an element in research that excludes the opposing world view from it. Goethe had the courage to scientifically recognize what others believed should remain a matter of faith: therein lies the essence of his view. Kant found such striving contrary to the human spirit. He believed that our intellect is only called upon to bring the sensual diversity of beings into a conceptual unity. What this unity, which exists only in our minds, corresponds to in reality, we cannot know, he said. Goethe opposed this view. He was convinced that it is possible for the human mind to penetrate to that real unity of things (see the essay “Anschauende Urteilskraft”).

What Goethe calls the primal plant, the primal animal or the type of animal are components of this real unity of nature. These primal plants and animals cannot be perceived by the external senses. They cannot be given to us as sensual, but only as spiritual intuitions. No single actual plant is a primal plant. In this respect, Goethe's view differs from that of contemporary natural science. The latter believes that it has found the original essence when it can point to a single, sensually perceptible organism that has the simplest possible structure and from which more complex living beings have gradually developed. Goethe, on the other hand, says:

But once you have grasped the idea of this type, you will [only] realize how impossible it is to establish a single species as a canon. The individual cannot be a model for the whole, and so we must not look for the model for all in the individual. The classes, genera, species and individuals are related to the law as individual cases are to a law; they are contained in it, but they do not contain and give it.

When we survey the individual classes, genera and species, an ideal form arises in our mind that is not realized anywhere in the senses: and this is the original being in the sense of Goethe's conception. The modern naturalist would call such a form a mere idea, a thought. Goethe, however, sees in it a real being. This is characteristic of him. He regards the ideal as a reality, as truly present in nature.

From this basic view, Goethe's relationship to the modern conception of nature and his significance within it can be seen. This conception of nature differs fundamentally from the one prevailing at the time of Goethe. But it also differs from his own. Under the influence of the research of Lamarck, Darwin and others who followed similar paths, a revolution in natural science took place in the nineteenth century. It was recognized that one organic form can change into another over time. The consequence of this idea is the assumption that one form is not similar to another because it was originally created similarly by a higher being, but because it actually gradually emerged from the other. The forms of predators are no longer seen as similar to each other because they are all originally designed similarly, but because one actually emerged from the other. Thus, the view was arrived at that originally there were only a few or only one organic form, which developed over immeasurably long periods of time into today's diversity. What was previously seen as existing side by side is now seen as emerging from one another in a temporal sequence. This is essentially the difference between the modern conception of nature and that of Goethe's contemporaries.

This modern view of nature is, however, initially nothing more than a description of a state of affairs. And it stops at this description. It differs from the usual approach in inorganic science. When two elastic spheres in motion meet, they both change their motion. Inorganic natural science is not satisfied with describing the process of the change of motion, but seeks a law from which this process can be explained. Once this law has been recognized, the process can be understood. One can develop the process of motion after the encounter from the one before it.

The corresponding process in organic natural science is that one living form can be developed logically from another in thought. One then not only describes its temporal emergence from this other, but also comprehends it. The means to this comprehension in the organic realm would have to be something like the natural law in the realm of the inorganic.

Goethe strove to discover in organic nature that which corresponds to the law in inorganic nature. And he recognized it in his Primordial Plant and in his Primordial Animal. Through the inorganic laws of nature, an ideal unity is brought into the abundance of mechanical, chemical and physical phenomena; through them we see what is next to each other in a large, structured context; Goethe also wanted to recognize such a unity in the organic world of forms. The extension of the physical-mechanical way of explaining to the whole field of natural science is the characteristic of his view. It must be admitted, however, that modern natural science is moving in a similar direction. But it does so in a fundamentally different way from Goethe. He sought for the organic world something that would explain the diversity just as the laws of nature explain the inorganic phenomena, but which is of a higher nature than the latter. Today, we look for the same laws in the organic realm as we do in the inorganic realm. We imagine that the laws of organic action are actually physical laws, only in complicated combinations that are not easily understood. In exactly the same way, it is thought, as hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water under certain conditions, so under more complicated conditions, carbonic acid, ammonia, water and protein combine to form living substance, without the need to imagine special organic physical-chemical forces in addition to the physical-chemical ones.

This is not Goethe's view. He does not want to see inorganic laws applied to organic life, but he wants to discover new ones for this field that correspond to them. For anyone with a deeper insight, contemporary natural science virtually demands expansion in the direction that Goethe has taken.

When it comes to actual discoveries, one can fully agree with du Bois-Reymond, who said:

Even without Goethe's participation, science would have progressed as far as it has today. ... Sooner or later, others would have made the advances he achieved.

This applies perfectly to the individual facts that Goethe discovered. But these facts are not the essence of his scientific endeavors. This consists in the indicated basic direction of his scientific thinking.

In this respect, it is remarkable how Goethe came to his individual discoveries.

When he set about studying the animal and human organism, he was guided by the idea that both must be based on a common archetype, which appears in man only at a higher stage of development than in animals. This was demanded by his fundamental view of the unity of ideas in nature. However, the most important natural scientists of his time saw a significant difference between the organization of higher mammals and that of humans in that the former have the so-called premaxillary bone in the upper jaw and the latter does not. Goethe could not do anything with this assertion of the natural scientists. He therefore looked for the premaxillary bone in humans and found it. In the embryonic state it is still separate from the laterally adjacent bones, but in the developed human being it has grown together with them. In individual cases, if the development is not quite normal, the separation can remain. So Goethe did not make the discovery of the intermediate bone for its own sake, but to dispel an opinion that contradicted his basic view. It will become clear in what follows that the same applies to the discovery of the vertebral nature of the skull bones.

Fundamental to Goethe's scientific ideas is his concept of the metamorphosis of plants. In this area, he consciously set out to find an ideal form that underlies all the diverse plant forms as a pattern. He felt as if he were studying botany as if he had a text in front of him that he couldn't read at first, but could only look at the individual letter forms. The individual organs of the plant appeared to him as a diversity that must correspond to a unity, and the abundance of plant forms also seemed to point to something that they all have in common. He relentlessly pursued the goal of being able to move from one structure to another in such a way that this transition becomes a continuous unity, as when moving from spelling to reading. And on [June 15, 1786] he was able to report to Frau von Stein: “[...] my long spelling has helped me, now it works all at once, and my quiet joy is inexpressible.” It was, however, a long way from spelling to actual reading. In his estate, which is in the Goethe Archive in Weimar, there are diary-like pages on which he has recorded the individual stages of this journey. (See Goethe's works in the Weimar edition, 2nd section, volume 7, p. 273ff.) They were written during the Italian journey. The opulent world of forms in the south offers him the opportunity to recognize unity in abundance. He is tireless in his efforts to find plant specimens that are suitable for shedding particular light on the laws of germination, growth and reproduction. If he thinks he is on the trail of some law, he first formulates it hypothetically and then tests it for accuracy in the course of further experiences. One such hypothetical law is: “Everything is a leaf, and through this simplicity the greatest diversity becomes possible.” Finally, on May 17, 1787, he writes to Herder about his completed discovery with the words:

It had become clear to me that the true Proteus lies hidden in that organ of the plant that we usually refer to as the leaf, which can hide and reveal itself in all formations. Back and forth, the plant is always only a leaf, so inseparably united with the future germ that one cannot be thought of without the other.

Goethe means that all the organs of the plant, from the germ to the fruit, no longer appear to him as mere diversity, but he can, in the idea, carry out their emergence from one another just as it develops in reality before his eyes. Just as a sentence is formed out of words into a spiritual unity, so all the organs of the plant are united in the ideal image of the primal plant. Therefore, the term “leaf” should not be taken literally either. It is only intended to convey that the unity of the plant's being lives in the other organs as well as in the leaf, only in a modified form. When he set down his idea in the essay “An Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants” in 1790, he therefore expresses himself more clearly:

It goes without saying that we would need a general word to describe this organ that has been metamorphosed into such different forms and to compare all the appearances of its shape with it; at present, we have to be content with getting used to holding the appearances backwards and forwards against each other. For we can just as well say that a stamen is a contracted petal as we can say of the petal that it is an expanded stamen; that a sepal is a a stem-leaf that is contracted and approaching a certain degree of refinement, than we can say of a stem-leaf that it is a sepal that has been expanded by the intrusion of rougher juices.

When Goethe speaks of the unified organ that underlies all visible organs, he means an idealized structure that enables the observer to see the sequence of forms present in the plant in a living sequence and development. He has described how the text that he reads from the individual letters is formulated in the aforementioned essay and in the poem 'The Metamorphosis of Plants'.

Does the unity that Goethe perceives in the plant from germination to fruitfulness suddenly come to an end? He answers this with a decisive 'No'. In the fruit, the potential for a new plant is present in the form of the seed. This is a whole plant, only contracted into a sensually simple form. During germination, it undergoes further transformation, and the new plant thus presents itself only as a continuation of the parent plant. Goethe expresses this by saying that procreation is only a growth of the organism beyond the individual. However, since the basic ideal organ is changeable in its sensory appearance, the plant forms that descend in continuous succession from a progenitor can also take on different forms over time. And thus the present-day view that the diversity of forms has gradually developed in a temporal sequence from a few or only one original species is justified by Goethe's view. What is today called the theory of descent thus finds a lawful explanation through Goethe's view.

It was in Goethe's nature to extend the ideas that had occurred to him for explaining the plant world to the whole of organic natural science. As early as 1786, he wrote to Frau von Stein: he wanted to extend his thoughts about the way in which nature, as it were, plays with a main form to produce the manifold life, to “all realms of nature, to all of her realm”.

Therefore, after his return from Italy, he also eagerly continued his studies of the animal organism, which he had already begun in the mid-1770s and which led him to the discovery of the interosseous bone. In this field, however, he did not succeed in achieving results as perfect as in the science of plants. He was unable to create an ideal structure in this field, as he had done with the “primordial plant”. The essays he wrote in 1795 and 96 (“First Draft of a General Introduction to Comparative Anatomy, based on Osteology” and “Lectures on the First Three Chapters of the Draft of a General Introduction to comparative anatomy, proceeding from osteology), written in 1795 and 96, as well as the earlier fragment, “On the Form of Animals,” found in his estate and published in the Weimar edition, contain only rudiments and preliminary studies for the general idea of the archetypal animal. Nor is there more to be found in the poem “Metamorphosis of Animals” (AOPOIEMOR). He has only achieved something more important in one detail. He recognized the relationship between the brain and the limbs of the spinal cord, and also that between the bones that enclose the brain and the vertebrae that enclose the spinal cord. Goethe's efforts were obviously aimed at tracing all the organs of the animal body back to an ideal basic form, as he had already done with plant organisms. This is much more difficult for all the organs of the animal form than for plants, because the more perfect a creature of nature is, the more diverse the outward appearance of the organs that are the same in their ideal form. The simplest case is that of the mutual relationship between the spinal cord and the brain and the bones that enclose them. Through his general view of nature, Goethe came to suspect that the bones that enclose the brain are not only spatially adjacent to the vertebral bones of the spinal cord, but are also ideally related to them. Full certainty was brought to him by a chance event that he experienced in 1790 on the dunes of the Lido in Venice. He found a sheep's skull that had so happily disintegrated into its individual bony components that the observer could recognize remodeled vertebrae in the individual pieces. Contemporary science has not entirely confirmed this isolated discovery by Goethe, but it has confirmed it in its essential parts. The anatomist Carl Gegenbaur conducted research on this subject and published his findings. They deal with the head skeleton of the selachians, or ancestral fish. The skull of these animals is clearly the remodeled end part of the backbone and the brain is the remodeled end member of the spinal cord. One must therefore imagine that the bony capsule of the skull of higher animals also consists of remodeled vertebral bodies, which, however, in the course of the development of higher animal forms from lower ones, have gradually shape that is very different from vertebral bodies and that are also fused together in such a way that they have become suitable for enclosing the brain, which also developed from a limb of the spinal cord. Over time, this adhesion has become such a permanent feature of higher animals that a separation into the individual components, as in the case of the interstitial bone, cannot even be observed in the embryonic state in which the organs concerned are still soft. On the contrary, the separation into individual skull bones occurs only at a later stage of development in higher animals today. Initially, they form a continuous cartilaginous capsule.

But this case is characteristic of Goethe. He discovers something that later natural science rediscovers by completely different means, simply because it follows from his general view of nature. Goethe also viewed the relationship between the brain and spinal cord in the same way as the later research mentioned above. In 1790, he made the following entry in his diary:

The brain itself [is] only a large main ganglion. The organization of the brain is repeated in every ganglion, so that each ganglion [is] to be regarded as a small subordinate brain.

Today, when speaking of Goethe's relationship to science, many people feel that the most important question is: Did Goethe believe that over time one species of plant or animal actually transforms into another, or did he not go beyond the observation of the ideal unity? From what has been said so far, it is clear that his approach provides a meaningful explanation for an actual transformation. In contrast to this, it seems completely irrelevant whether he actually spoke about such an actual transformation. One must bear in mind that such an expression was far less necessary in his time than it is today. It would also not have seemed as significant as it did a few decades later. All experiential foundations for how one was to imagine the actual relationships and transformations in detail were lacking. Therefore, the actual science could not do anything with such ideas. It was only when Darwin created scientific foundations for individual thoughts in this direction that one could talk about them. Goethe, according to the state of empirical science at the time, could only form very general concepts. And he spoke about such concepts clearly enough.

But if we consider all forms, especially organic ones, we find that nothing exists, nothing rests, nothing is closed off, but rather everything is in constant motion. (Formation and Transformation of Organic Beings [on morphology). The intention is introduced.

This, then, we have gained, and can claim without fear that all perfect organic natures, including fish, amphibians, birds, mammals, and at the top of the latter man, were all formed according to an archetype, which only tilts more or less back and forth in its [very] constant parts and still daily forms and remodels itself through reproduction.

If Goethe had expressed his view of the transformation of organic nature more clearly than in such phrases, he would have been lumped together with the fantasists who had all kinds of adventurous ideas about the metamorphosis of natural beings. We also have a statement from him about this: “However, the time was darker than one can imagine now,” he writes in retrospect in

For example, it was claimed that it only depends on the person to walk comfortably on all fours, and that bears, if they remained upright for a while, could become people. The audacious Diderot dared to make certain suggestions as to how to produce goat-footed fauns to be placed on carriages in livery, for the special pleasure and distinction of the great and rich.

Just as far as the science of that time was from such ideas, just as close was the un-science to them. He was careful in his indications of an actual tribal or blood relationship of the organic forms, so as not to see his explanations mixed up with the latter.

Goethe wanted to extract everything necessary for the explanation of natural phenomena from nature itself. This has been shown by considering his studies of the organic world. This fundamental view of his mind can be observed just as clearly in his theory of colors. In Goethe's time, this field of natural science was built on assumptions that were not taken from nature. And even today it still bears this character. The eye's perception provides light and dark and the variety of colors. The theory of colors seeks to discover the relationships between these elements of perception. Light is the absolute brightness; its opposite is absolute darkness. Goethe, in accordance with his entire nature, had to stop at the sensory perception of light. Newton, the founder of the more recent color theory, did not do that. He was of the opinion that light is something other than what it directly presents to the eye, namely an extremely fine substance. What presents itself to perception as light should be substance in reality outside of perception. And white light, as it reaches the earth from the sun, for example, is said to be a composite substance. This composite substance is broken down into its individual components, which are the seven primary colors, by the prism. So this theory explains a vivid process, namely the appearance of colors in the illuminated space, by means of a non-vivid, hypothetical process. Present-day natural science takes a similar view. It has only replaced the substance with a wave motion of that substance. Goethe could not work with such a view. Within the world of the eye, there are neither substances nor movements, but only qualities of light and color. He wants to work with them alone, not with hypothetical entities that cannot be found within experience. He observes how the sensory elements of perception of the eye relate to each other. He notices that where light and dark meet, color arises when the spot is viewed through a prism or a glass lens. He records this immediately perceptible fact. He conducts experiments that are suitable for elucidating the phenomenon. If a white disc on a black background is viewed through a convex glass lens, it appears larger than it actually is. Through the edges of the enlarged surface, you can see the black background below. The part of it that is covered by the enlarged white disc appears blue. The situation is different when a black disc on a light background is observed in the same way. The edge that appeared blue there now appears yellow. Goethe does not go beyond these perceptible facts. He says: When a light color is moved over a dark one, the blue color arises; when a dark color is moved over a light one, the yellow color arises. These colors also arise in a similar way through the prism. Through the inclination of the prism surfaces against each other, just as through the lens, a dark color is passed over a light color or vice versa, when a point is observed where the dark and light colors meet. A white disc on a black background appears displaced when viewed through the prism. The upper parts of the disk slide over the adjacent black of the background; while on the opposite side the black background slides over the lower parts of the disk. So through the prism you see the upper part of the disk as if through a veil. The lower part, on the other hand, can be seen through the superimposed darkness. The upper edge therefore appears [blue], the lower edge yellow. The blue increases towards the black, a violet tone, the yellow downwards a red tone. With increasing distance of the prism from the observed disc, the edges broaden. At a sufficiently large distance, the yellow from below spreads over the blue from above; and green is created in the middle. To further educate himself, Goethe looks at a black disc on a white background through the prism. This causes a dark color to be pushed over a light color at the top and a light color over a dark color at the bottom. Yellow appears at the top and blue at the bottom. When the prism is removed from the disc, peach blossoms appear in the middle.

If the light is broken up into so many colors there, [I said to myself,] then here, too, darkness must be seen as broken up into colors.

Goethe calls these experiments subjective because the colors do not appear fixed anywhere in space, but only appear to the eye when it looks at an object through a prism. He wants to supplement these experiments with objective ones. To do this, he uses a water prism. He lets the light shine through this prism and catches it behind it through a screen. Because the sunlight has to shine through openings cut out of cardboard, a limited illuminated space is obtained, surrounded by darkness. The limited body of light is deflected by the prism. If this deflected light falls on a screen, an objective image appears on it, which is colored blue at the upper edge and yellow at the lower edge if the cross-section of the prism becomes narrower from top to bottom. Towards the dark space, the blue turns into violet; towards the light center, it turns into light blue; towards the dark, the yellow takes on a red tone. Goethe explains this phenomenon as follows. At the top, the bright mass of light radiates into the dark space; it illuminates a dark area and makes it appear blue. At the bottom, the dark space radiates into the mass of light; it darkens the brightness, which then appears yellow. If the screen is removed from the prism, the edges broaden; and at a sufficiently large distance, the blue in the middle shines into the yellow; and green is created. Through such experiments, Goethe finds the view that he has gained from subjective experiments confirmed by objective ones. In his opinion, colors are therefore produced by the interaction of light and dark. The purpose of the prism is to superimpose light on dark and dark on light. Yellow is light subdued by darkness; blue is darkness attenuated by light. Where yellow is further dimmed by overlying darkness, red arises; where blue is attenuated by darkness, violet appears. These are the basic laws of Goethe's theory of colors. They are nothing more than the expression of the experience given to the eye. And because they are brought about by the simplest conditions, Goethe calls them the archetypal phenomena of the color world. All other phenomena within this world arise when further conditions are added to the simple ones. One then obtains the derived phenomena, which, however, can be traced back to a sum of simple ones. In this way of thinking, Goethe's theory of color remains strictly within the bounds of empirical observation. Because Newton and the physicists did not proceed in the same way, Goethe became their opponent. He attacked Newton so fiercely because he felt that he lived in a completely different conceptual world from his own. However, he did not become fully aware of this fundamental contradiction. Otherwise he would have simply developed his own point of view and ignored the other, which was based on entirely different premises. Instead, he went through each of Newton's experiments individually, seeking to prove the error in each particular case. This is how the “polemical” part of his theory of colors came about.

Goethe's efforts in the fields of mineralogy, geology and meteorology were less successful, although he also tried to penetrate the phenomena of these fields from the point of view of his world view. Here, too, he succeeded in making individual discoveries. But again, the guiding ideas are more important than these individual discoveries, although he remained stuck in the rudiments everywhere. In mineralogy and geology, too, he seeks to explain phenomena by striving to expand the world of concepts. He believes that he can recognize how large inorganic masses are formed during his journeys into the resin. His view that not only the sensually perceptible but also the spiritually perceptible is real is also evident in this area. He imagines the stone masses to be permeated by an ideational lattice work, and indeed a six-sided one. As a result, cubic, parallelepipedal, rhombic and columnar bodies are cut out of the ground mass. This lattice work should not be just an idea, a thought, but a real system of forces at work in the stone mass. This lattice work of forces represents a transitional stage between the inorganic processes and the archetypes that Goethe sees as underlying organic nature. He sees geology as a realm between physics and organic. Therefore, he also rejects the idea that the composite rocks have arisen from their components by aggregation, but believes that these individual components were originally contained in a uniform groundmass and have been separated from each other by internal formative laws. Unfortunately, Goethe did not succeed in applying these fundamental ideas to a larger number of inorganic formations. But from them we can understand his antipathy to the volcano theory of the Earth's formation as defended by Hutton, Alexander von Humboldt, Leopold von Buch and others. This view explains the development of the Earth's surface in terms of violent revolutions. It is now impossible for a mind like Goethe's, which always adheres to what is empirically given, to assume that at any time in the earth's development forces were present that do not currently fall within the scope of experience. The only natural view is that which derives this development from the forces recognizable by observing the present conditions, from which all earth formations can be explained if one only assumes that these forces were active for a sufficiently long time. To Goethe, nature appeared consistent in all its parts, so that even a deity could not change the laws innate to it and ascertainable through experience. He therefore could not see why these laws should have expressed themselves in the past by “lifting and pushing, hurling and throwing”. The fight against the volcanic theory led him back to individual discoveries, to the one about the origin of the boulders found in some areas, which, based on their composition, must once have belonged to the mass of distant mountains. Volcanism provided the explanation that these “erratic blocks” were hurled to their present location by the tumultuous uprising of the mountains far from their present location. Goethe found an explanation that corresponded to his view in the assumption that [breaks off]

Yesterday, in the description of the development of the various cycles of earthly development, we reached a point which made us realise how the three celestial bodies, the Sun. the Moon and the Earth, gradually separated from one another. We began by considering this separation and stopped at the point where the Moon separated itself from the Earth, but we also tried to reach this same point by setting out from the present time and going back to the Atlantean epoch. Let us now consider the condition of the Earth at the time of Atlantis. Long, long epochs of time must be borne in mind, taking up millions of years, so that the great changes which took place, not only in the universe, but also upon the earth, need no longer surprise us.

Let:us consider once more the Earth, after its separation from the Moon. It was still enveloped by a volume of air, which presented, however, quite a different aspect from the present air. You must not think that this air inwardly resembled a glowing stove—although its temperature was far higher than is the case now. At that time many substances which are now solid existed within the Earth in a liquid state. An air thickly permeated with gases of the most varied substances, enveloped the Earth, an atmosphere which we might designate as fire-air, a repetition of the former Moon-condition,

When the Earth became independent after its separation from the present Moon, it was surrounded by a strange atmosphere which may be designated as fire-air, Through the fact that the Earth freed itself from the atmosphere which went away with the Moon, the beings who lived upon the Earth were able to attain certain higher stages of development. Within the atmosphere of the Earth the most advanced animal-men had reached a higher stage than the one which they had attained upon the Moon, and these were the beings who later developed into men. A great number of these animal-men remained behind upon the Moon-stage. As a result, they not only remained behind, but owing to the entirely new conditions which now arose, they sank half a degree below the level which they had previously attained, (animal-men could, only live upon the Moon) and thus they became animals. Animals did not as yet exist upon the Moon. We therefore have two kingdoms: Human beings—and the kingdom of animal-men, beings who had remained behind and had gradually sunk to the level of animals.

The same applies to the plant-animals. A certain number of these had developed to a higher stage, to that of animals; others had remained behind and changed into plants. A The kingdom of plant-minerals also followed this line of development: some became heavy minerals, while others ascended in their development to the level of plants.

Not everything arose in accordance with one standard of measure, for the animals which we know to-day arose, for instance, partly through the descending development of men-animals and partly through the ascending development of plant-animals. In the vegetable kingdom also we have side by side the plant-minerals in an ascending course of development and the plant-animals in a descending course. The plants now chiefly constituting the pleasant plant-carpet of our earth, arose through the ascending development of the Moon's plant-minerals; this is, for instance, the case with the violet. On the other hand, everything that gives us a decaying impression is in a descending development, whereas our green, leafy, plants will in future attain to higher stages.

Our minerals developed entirely upon the Earth; there were no minerals upon the Moon, such as exist to-day. The mineral kingdom is the former plant-mineral kingdom which sank down to a lower stage and which was embedded into the earth as a firm crust. When the Earth cast off the Moon, the substances which remained behind and which later on became
minerals, solid metals,. etc., were still an altogether liquid mass. The substances which at that time had already reached a solid state, were hurled out into the cosmic spaces, because, had it kept these substances, the Earth could not have developed, further. Then the first metals which reached a solid state were added. Sometimes they had most peculiar forms! What you now encounter in the mountains as granite or gneiss, at that time revealed quite clearly that it had arisen through the descending development of vegetable beings, of plants which had become stones.

You may gather from this that upon the Sun and upon the Moon the mineral kingdom was a vegetable kingdom. The vegetable kingdom has not developed out of the mineral kingdom, but minerals have developed out of the vegetable kingdom! The coal which is now dug out of the earth is nothing but a complex of petrified plant—plants which decayed and became stones, so that now they can be dug out of the earth as petrified plants. If you were to go back still further, you would see that once even the hardest stones were plants; and that they have arisen out of plants through the descending development of plants to the mineral kingdom.

A clairvoyant sees this in the following way: If you investigate gneiss, the mineralogist will tell you that it consists of feldspath, hornblende and mica—but he cannot go further. The clairvoyant says: Feldspath in gneiss appears to spiritual vision quite clearly as the petrified stalk and the green leaves of plants, the petrification of those parts which built them up; whereas the mica foundation is related to that part of the plants which still develops to-day as the plants sepals and corollae. When a modern occultist observes a piece of gneiss he will say: This is a petrified plant, and even as plants now possess leaves and flowers, etc., so the mica foundation of gneiss has developed out of the sepals and petals of ancient epochs.

Thus it can be explained how every mineral developed out of former plants. For the substances which came over from the ancient Moon were plants, which then became densified in the liquid mass of the Earth. Even as one can see the water in a receptacle freezing into solid ice, so it is possible to observe in the early stages of the Earth's development the gradual forming of solid masses. Thus the solid crust of the Earth slowly developed out of the liquid Earth. The further we proceed, the higher and purer become the beings who live upon the Earth, and those that were unable to ascend became petrified. It was the same both with animals and men. Man reached the stage of being able to transform his body in a still higher measure.

The Moon-men floated and swam about in a primordial ocean; they were predisposed to this swimming movement. This may sound strange to modern men, nevertheless it is true; and let it be said without reserve, that I do not wish to mitigate some of these apparently grotesque descriptions;, for generally people laugh at truths when they are revealed for the first time.

The human. being who swam about in this primordial ocean had as yet no eyes and endowed with sight such as we have to-day: man, indeed, received the foundation of sight upon Saturn, but in this primordial ocean he did not need to see; he had to orientate himself in other ways. The ocean contained all the food which he required for his life and also animals, some benevolently disposed towards him; and some not. At that time man still possessed an organ which now exists in the head, it is the size of a cherry and is called the pineal gland (in reality it is not a gland). Once upon a time, this organ was of immense size; it enabled man to orientate himself in the ocean and it protruded from his head like a lantern. Man moved about, by using this lantern-like organ in front; it was a sensitive organ, not an organ of sight. He used it when swimming about. Later on, he no longer needed it and so it shriveled.

At that time it was not possible to speak of an Ego foundation. In regard to everything which man did, he was still under the guidance of higher spiritual powers: We may compare him with the animals of to-day. From a spiritual-scientific aspect, we now look upon animals by saying that man differs from the animal through the fact that he has an individual soul; every man has his own soul, his individual Ego.

This is not the case with animals; for whole groups of animals have one soul in common. For instance, all the animals pertaining to the lion species have one soul, which lives in the astral world. Similarly all the animals of tiger-nature have a soul in common. In the case of animals we therefore speak of group souls. All the horses together have one group soul; these horses belong together. Even as the single fingers belong to the hand, so the animals belong to their group soul. Consequently we cannot speak of individual responsibility in the case of animals. Only of an individual soul can we say that it is either good or evil.

At that time, the human beings possessed a kind of group-soul embedded in the bosom of the Godhead. We must however realise that that which now lives in us as our Ego already existed in those early epochs, but it did not live within the human body.

Man's origin must be sought in two currents: that which came over from the Moon and continued to develop, constituted the animal-man who lived upon the Moon; but that which now lives in us as our individual soul, existed in those times in the higher realm, in the care of the Godhead,—only man's body lived below in the primordial ocean. Later on body and soul united; the soul descended and spititualised the body, so that man became an individual soul.

Imagine a receptacle containing water; in it are many many drops of water, but it is impossible to distinguish them. If you were to take many hundreds of small sponges dipping them into the water, the drops first contained in the volume of water would be individualised. Similarly imagine your spirituality soaring above the primordial ocean and compare your soul reposing in the bosom of the Godhead with the drops of water; the bodies absorb the souls, even as the small sponges absorb the drops of water; the souls thus became independent, in the same way in which the water becomes individualised into drops through the sponges. Below we have the primordial ocean with the floating-swimming bodies, and above there are the souls. We cannot describe this better than by saying: “And the Spirit of God moved (literally: brooded) over the face of the waters,” which means that he elaborated that which was below until it was able to take in the soul-drops.

The bodies themselves had to soar and float, and for this purpose the beings within them needed a special organ. At that time man had no lungs, but a kind of air-bladder; this kept him afloat in the ocean.

The fish which have remained behind upon that stage, have even to-day an air-bladder and no lungs. The lungs developed little by little, as the air freed itself from the moisture and man could raise himself above the water, so that he began to breathe in air. A long process, lasting millions of years, finally enabled man to breathe in the air through his lungs. This gave rise to the physical form capable of absorbing the soul. The more man became a being who breathed through lungs, the more he became capable of taking in the soul. You cannot express this better than with the words: “And God breathed His own breath into man's nostrils and he became an individual soul.”

At the same time this enabled man to develop something which he did not possess before; he became capable of forming red blood. Before that time all human beings had a constitution which gave them the same temperature as their environment; if they were surrounded by a higher temperature, they were adapted to it. Red blood did not exist at that time and the animals above the stage of amphibians are human bodies which have remained behind at a much later stage of development. After the epoch in which man began to develop red blood, the animals also began to develop into warm-blooded beings.

Even as a plant cannot develop out of a stone, but stones developed out of plants, so the animal developed out of man. Every being upon a lower stage developed out of beings who once stood upon higher stages, this is the theory of evolution. Man first had to transform himself into a being with red blood, and then he could leave behind the animals. You may literally see in animals the stages left behind in man's development. In every animal man perceives more or less a piece of himself which he has left behind. Paracelsus expressed this so wonderfully in the words: When we look about in the world, we see, as it were, the letters of an alphabet; in the human being alone these letters unite and form a word. Consequently the meaning of that which lies spread out in man's environment is to be seen in man himself.

You must then bear in mind the following: An apparently insignificant process (but in the light of spiritual science it is an extraordinarily important process) took place at that time: it already began in the early stages of the Earth's separation from the Moon, when the Earth was still connected with the Moon, and it consisted in a certain cooperation between Mars and the Earth. During the whole first half of the Earth's development, the forces of Mars streamed into the Earth, so that this first half is actually designated as the Mars condition of the Earth. Iron is connected with this passage through Mars and iron then began to play an entirely new role in the earthly process of evolution.

Iron plays a far more superficial part in plants, but you can see how things are connected: cosmically, the Earth passed through Mars and Mars gave it iron; iron was then stimulated to exercise the functions which it now possesses and iron appeared in the blood. The aggressive side of human nature, that which turns man into a warrior here on earth, is connected with the iron in the blood. The Greek myth knew this, for it designated Mars as the God of War.

The human body thus became capable of taking in the Ego; for without red, warm blood a body cannot be the bearer of an Ego. This is very important. Pulmonary breathing is the first condition for the formation of warm, red blood. The required processes then arose upon the earth and became embodied with the blood. Little by little, man developed so as to become a red-blooded being breathing through lungs, and then he left behind the other creatures, the lower warm-blooded animals.

In occultism, animals are not only differentiated in the ordinary way, but another differentiation is pointed out. We distinguish the “inwardly sounding animals”, those which can express their own pain and pleasure in sounds from the “non-sounding animals”. If you descend to the lower animals, you may still hear sounds, but these are purely external, produced by rubbing together certain parts of the body,or by climatic influences; these are sounds produced by external causes. Only the animals which branched off when man had developed into a warm-blooded being were able to express pain or pleasure through sounds coming from within.

This was the time when man's larynx was transformed into an organ of sound. The fact that outside the liquid earth substance became crust, produced an inner process in the human being; parallel with the external process of hardening, an osseous and cartilaginous skeleton developed within the human being out of the soft parts of his body. Beings with a skeleton did not exist before that time.

The minerals outside are the counterpart of the bones. The Earth perpetuated this epoch in the masses of rock and man in his skeleton. Man then gradually became an upright walking being, thus changing over from his former horizontal position into a vertical one. He turned round, so that his front extremities became organs of work, and his other extremities were used for walking. There is a connection in all this, for no being without a sound-producing larynx and an upright walk can be an Ego-being.

Animals were predisposed for this, but they degenerated. Consequently they could not transform themselves into beings endowed with speech, for speech is connected with a larynx located in a in a body having an upright position. We may gather this through a primitive fact. Many dogs are undoubtedly cleverer than parrots, yet a parrot learns more, because its larynx is in a more vertical position. Parrots and starlings learn to speak a little, because their larynx is located vertically.

This shows you that the Earth and man advance to ever new stages of development. The atmosphere also changed: a condition developed in which the Earth was surrounded by a misty, foggy air. This took place at the time, when the Lemurians saw their continent crumbling away, so that they wandered out to Atlantis and became Atlanteans.

During this, phase of evolution; in which man acquired the first elements of speech, which were, to be sure, sounds expressing mere feelings, the soul emerged more and more. Essentially speaking, the Atlantean had a dull kind of clairvoyance. As he came out of the sub-earthly ocean, his eyes developed to the extent of enabling him to participate in the light raying out from the sun through the masses of mist. Physically, his power of sight and perception developed more and more, but he gradually lost his old clairvoyance. The most advanced race of the Atlanteans developed in a certain region of the Earth's surface during the last third of the Atlantean era, which was a significant close of phase of evolution.

In view of the existing conditions, the Atlantean who traveled more to the West, became inwardly neutral natures, cold and indifferent, and developed later on into the copper coloured population of America. The others who traveled further South, became the black Negro population, and those who turned to the East became later on the yellow Malayan population. These populations concentrated themselves in the most unfavourable places which prohibited a further development. But the peoples who lived in a region now occupied by Ireland, and further West, in a country now covered by the ocean, reached the highest stage of development. The mixtures of not and cold streams which existed there, permitted the human body to develop in the best and speediest manner. A pronounced Ego-feeling, a first foundation of such a feeling, developed from the still magical will power of those epochs. It was then that man first learned to say “I”. The human beings then also learned the first foundations of counting and of arithmetic, and they developed the first capacity of forming judgments and of combining thoughts.

There were always Beings among them who had progressed further, who were the leaders of humanity and their relationship to man was that of Beings who belonged to a higher realm. These Beings became the teachers and guides of men and it was they who induced them to migrate towards the East. From the site which lay in the neighbourhood of present-day Ireland certain peoples had already migrated to the East, settling as far as Asia. Now the most highly developed masses of peoples began to migrate to the East, and everywhere along their journey they formed colonies, the most powerful of these colonies, with the most highly developed culture, existed in the neighbourhood of the present Gobi desert. Later on, a certain number of peoples travelled from there to many parts of the world: one group went to the present India; where they encountered an indigenous yellow-brown race, with whom they became partly united.

It was after the Atlantean flood, that this colony travelled South and founded the first culture of the post-Atlantean epoch, the first culture of our own age. The most advanced teachers who went with this colony, the first great teachers of ancient India, are called the ancient Indian Rishis. The Hindoos of to-day are the descendants of that ancient population, but if we wish to discover traces of this culture we must go far back into times which are not known to history; the Vedas, for example, already belong to a later epoch, for nothing was recorded in those early days.

The ancient Hindoo nation represents the first cultural group after the Atlantean age and consequently they resembled the Atlanteans most of all. The Atlantean was a kind of dreamer; his consciousness was dull, he did not have any power of judgment and self-consciousness and like a dreamer he wandered about half consciously. The ancient Hindoos were the first to overcome this condition, but they were still partly rooted in it. The ancient Hindoo longed to experience the spirit realm of past times and yearned for the clairvoyance which the Atlanteans still possessed. In ancient India the early Yoga training still consisted of a kind of dulling of human consciousness, which transferred the human being back to the times when he could still perceive in his environment spiritual beings. The Hindoo longed for this clairvoyance of ancient Atlantis and in the Yoga training the Rishis taught him the methods of producing clairvoyance, though these methods followed another line of development.

The Atlantean did not possess any power of judgment, whereas in India the power of judgment had already awakened; but men loved, so to speak, that which they had already overcome and they knew how to conjure it up again, by dulling their consciousness and by recalling that which they had seen in earlier epochs. The culture of ancient India preserved this through its highest representatives. The Hindoo did not seek to enhance his consciousness, but he dimmed it down to a dreamy state, and this explains the passivity of the Hindoo character. It would be a great disadvantage, indeed harmful, if modern culture were to take hold in a greater measure of life in India.

During the first epochs, the human beings did not perceive minerals; and what the Atlantean saw least clearly of all ,was the mineral kingdom. Through his visions, the spirit-world was the one which existed for him, and this world lived in everything. He perceived the human being surrounded by colours—by sympathetic colours if he liked him. This was the world which the Hindoo tried to conjure up again. But human progress requires that man shall enter more and more into a relationship with that which exists upon the earth in the world of matter, The Atlanteans did not need any instruments; they orientated themselves through their clairvoyance and they attributed no importance whatever to physical instruments. The Hindoo followed the Atlantean in this, and consequently he looked upon the physical world as Maya, as a kind of illusion and lie. He had no interest in the world which is accessible to the ordinary senses. He asked the dream-like world of the Spirit to rise up before him.

The progress from this Indian culture to the next cultural epoch, i.e. the Persian one preceding the time of Zarathustra, consisted in the fact of humanity learning to appreciate external reality. A second colony went out from the Gobi desert and founded a kingdom in Asia minor which existed in remote times and which gave birth to the kingdom of Zarathustra. The Persian began to perceive the existence of a world in which he had to be active. The Divine essence appeared to him as something which he had to overcome, against which he had to measure his strength. From the spiritual world he drew the forces which he needed in order to work in this world. The world appeared to him as something dark, which had to be transformed with the aid of the good forces. The Hindoo established a science pertaining exclusively to the spiritual world, which told him nothing about the external reality. But to the Persian this external reality presented another aspect, it was something which had to be constantly transformed through his own work.

The third colony which went out from the Gobi desert went further West into Asia Minor and founded the Chaldean-Babylonian-Egyptian cycle of culture. In addition to the earlier science of the Spirit, these nations also possessed a science of the physical world. An astrology and geometry arose in Egypt which taught the Egyptians how to treat and cultivate the earth. Science extended to spheres which the Hindoo still looked upon as a world of illusion. Now this world of illusion had become a world calling for the keenest thought, for a manner of thinking connected with physical things. When the Hindoo immersed himself in the starry world, this world was to him only the expression of the Godhead. But the Chaldean loved the physical World; to him it was a part of the Godhead into which he penetrated and immersed himself. This activity leading him from the divine into the physical world appears to us in the Babylonian-Assyrian culture.

We have now reached a point leading us to the fourth cultural cycle, which we designate as the Graeco-Latin culture. The human being is now included in the external perception, The Egyptian knew that the world was not a chaos, but that it was fraught with meaning and that it had been constructed throughout immeasurable aeons of time. The sphinx and the pyramid expressed great cosmic thoughts. The ancient Egyptian concealed his knowledge of these truths in images: he created the sphinx, which faces us like a riddle of evolution itself: the development of man's higher essence from earlier animal-like conditions. This was the wisdom which the Egyptian spoke out into the world in his own way. In ancient Egypt you may find calculations and measurements,which were drawn directly from heaven. The cities were built in such a way that the Egyptian expressed in these constructions a sacred order of laws and they sought to express in images the cosmic laws which governed the universe. This did not as yet include the individual human essence, which only begins to unfold in Greek art, and which shows us that man now takes hold of his own being as an immediate reality and seeks to create it as an image in space.

Man became more and more familiar with the world which the Hindoo designated as Maya. He began to face his own self. Within the world which in ancient India was considered as an illusion, the Greek created a world of realities and realised that he had to create it without the help of the Gods; more and more he united himself with the external reality and out of his own strength he permeated the external reality with a divine essence. If you study the Greek “polis” you do not find in it any trace of jurisprudence. Man had to establish this during the Roman epoch as “Roman right” which governed the private social intercourse of men, as Roman citizens.

The human being thus acquired an ever greater knowledge of that which takes place in the world of external reality.

The fifth cycle of culture is the one in which we now live, with our materialistic civilisation. It is the time in which man has descended most profoundly into the external world. Compare, our age with preceding ones: We know, to be sure, how to apply the forces of the spiritual world to our physical environment—we carry the spiritual world into it. But in the light of spiritual science this presents strange aspects. Think of the time when the human being still produced his flour by grinding corn between two stones—he did not apply much spiritual power to do this. In ancient Egypt and Chaldea he still immersed himself in the wisdom of the heaven; he still learned a great deal concerning the spiritual significance of the earth itself and of the starry sky. The Greek still placed into the world of physical reality the idealised human form. What is the aspect of our own time? A great amount of spiritual power is used to produce modern natural science with its technical appliances. How great is the difference between obtaining food by primitive means, and obtaining it from America with the aid of telephone, engines, etc.! Yet these complicated technical means are after all used to satisfy the same needs also felt by animals and which animals are able to satisfy by primitive means! Try to investigate how many of the modern inventions really serve spiritual life, and how much spiritual power is used for the sake of furthering material life! What an enormous amount of spiritual power must human beings develop at the present time for the satisfaction of material requirements! There is no great difference whether an animal satisfies its hunger by grazing, or whether man obtains his food from America or Australia through all kinds of means.

This is hot an adverse criticism, for this had to come. Man had to submerge himself in the physical world. The Hindoo still looked, upon it as an illusion, but modern man considers the physical world as the only reality. We have reached the deepest point in our descent and this rendered possible the greatest progress upon the physical plane: This descent, however, must not be in vain, even from a spiritual aspect!

A new element has now arisen, an element that was implanted into the world during the first third of the post-Atlantean epoch: it is the rise of Christianity, the most significant influence in the whole development of the earth. In the light of occultism, everything which proceeded is only the preparation for Christianity. Buddha, Hermes, and so forth, prophetically pointed towards Christianity, for Christianity must lift man out of his deepest entanglement with matter. And it will raise man out of this entanglement. Man's ascent from matter begins again. The task of spiritual science is to help in this ascent into the spiritual world.

The next epoch of our Post-Atlantean culture will bring still more inventions and discoveries; but man will more and more perceive mere letters in the physical world. A genuine Christianity will speak of the external world as condensed Spirit, and the Spirit will once more arise out of matter. We shall then no longer say that the external world is an illusion, for we shall recognise it fully and lose nothing, and yet rise up to a higher spiritual world.

Christianity will contribute most of all towards this course of development. During the sixth epoch, great masses of men will be deeply moved and seized by truths which are now revealed to few, and this will give mankind an insight into the spiritual world. What now exists as thought will in future be a real force. Many people will have this power of thought during the sixth epoch of culture. The theosophical Christianity of to-day will spread among great masses of men. These thoughts will grow stronger and stronger and they will have a creative influence upon the human form.

Once upon a time the human body had quite a different aspect from that which it has to-day; indeed, if I were to describe to you this human body of ancient times, you would be greatly surprised. Because it was still soft, the Ego could exercise a far greater influence upon it. Modern man has only retained an insignificant rest of the psychic influence of will upon his body, for instance, when you are seized by sudden fright you grow pale, because the inner soul-condition penetrates as far as the blood and your complexion changes. But other bodily conditions can show you how little we are now able to control our body. With the gradual ascent into the spiritual world this will change; man's body will become softer and softer and he will once more be able to influence the thoughts which now still exist so sparsely, will gradually grow stronger; these thoughts will then be able to transform even the body. Man will be able to mould his own body—but this will only be the case in a very distant future.

Sex arose in the human being only during the Lemurian age; before that time he was bi-sexual, both male-and female. With the incorporation of the Ego, the human being was split into two sexes. We shall learn to know this better, when we shall consider more closely the development of the human blood. This will lead us to the problem of the division into sexes and also to the fact that the now existing division of the sexes will again disappear.

Thus we look into a future in which the human being will exercise quite a different influence upon his body.

What is, for example, that which sends the blush of shame into our face? What is it? A last remnant of the influence which man once exercised over his body. Man will more and more be able to work consciously into his body, and then will come the time when he will be able to transform the muscle of his heart into one which obeys' him.

Science describes the heart as a mere physical apparatus: as a pump. But the blood does not only stream through the body because the heart pumps the blood through it; everything which constitutes the blood depends upon the soul; the blood pulses more or less quickly according to our feelings, and it is the blood which produces the movement of the heart. But in future the human being will have a conscious influence upon the heart; therefore the heart is an organ which is now at the beginning of its development. The heart is a muscle with a spiritual development, an organ through which the human being will be able to express himself as he develops towards a higher stage, thus exercising a creative influence upon his whole body.

The heart is only at the beginning of its development, and for this reason it is a cross to materialistic science. Materialistic science tells you: all the muscles through which you move, are formed of transversal strips, but all those muscles which move automatically consist of longitudinal strips. The heart however is a peculiar organ upsetting every calculation! It is an automatic muscle, nevertheless it has, even to-day, transversal fibres.

To-morrow I will show you how certain things can be explained in the light of spiritual science.

Spiritual science thus throws light upon that which surrounds us. We shall redeem everything which has become matter from its present rigid condition. This is how the thought of redemption, may be grasped in its deepest essence! Man has developed to an ever higher stage, leaving behind him certain kingdoms in the course of this development. He will become powerful and redeem that which he has left behind; he will help to redeem the earth! But if he is to redeem the earth he must not despise it, but unite himself with it.

Here in Berlin, as well as in other localities where our Society has spread, much has been discussed that concerns the comprehensive realm of theosophy, that emanates, so to speak, from the high regions of clairvoyant consciousness, and it is natural that a desire should have arisen to do something toward a serious and adequate substantiation of our spiritual current.

The present General Assembly, which brings our members together here at the seventh anniversary of our German Section, may be taken as the proper occasion for contributing something toward strengthening the foundations of our cause. This I shall attempt to do at this time in the four lectures on Anthroposophy.

The lectures in Kassel on The Gospel of St. John, those in Düsseldorf on the hierarchies, those in Basel on The Gospel of St. Luke, and those in Munich on the teachings of oriental theosophy, were all occasions for rising to high altitudes of spiritual research and for bringing back spiritual truths difficult of access. What occupied us there was theosophy and, at least in part, its ascent to exalted spiritual peaks of human cognition.

It does not seem unjustifiable, given a gradually acquired feeling in the matter, to see something deeper in what is called the cyclical course of world events. At the time of our first General Assembly, when the German Section was founded, I delivered lectures to an audience composed only in part of theosophists; those lectures may be characterized as the historical chapter of anthroposophy. Now, after a lapse of seven years that constitute a cycle, the time seems ripe for speaking in a more comprehensive sense on the nature of anthroposophy.

First, I should like to make clear through a comparison what should be understood by the term anthroposophy. If we wish to observe a section of country, together with all that is spread out there in the way of fields, meadows, woods, villages, roads, we can do so by going about from village to village, through streets and meadows and woods, and we will always have a small section of the whole region in view. Again, we can climb to a mountain top and from there overlook the whole landscape. The details will be indistinct for the ordinary eye, but we have a comprehensive view of the whole.

That approximately describes the relation between what in ordinary life is called human cognition or human science, and what theosophy stands for.

While the ordinary search for human knowledge goes about from detail to detail in the world of facts, theosophy ascends to a high vantage point. This extends the visible horizon, but without the employment of quite special means the possibility of seeing anything at all would vanish. In my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, is set forth how one can reach this ideal peak without losing the power of clear vision.

But there is a third possibility, lying between the two described. It is to ascend part way, remaining half-way up. At the bottom you cannot survey the whole; you observe only details and see the top from below. At the top, everything is beneath you, and above you have only the divine heavens. In the middle you have something above and something below you, and you can compare the two views.

Any comparison lags and limps, but all that was intended at the moment was to place before you the manner in which in the first instance theosophy differs from anthroposophy. The latter stands in the middle, the former on the summit: it is the point of departure that is different. Thus far the comparison is helpful, but it is inadequate in characterizing what follows.

Devotion to theosophy necessitates rising above human points of view, above the middle, from self to higher self, and it implies the ability to see with the organs of this higher self. The peak attained by theosophy lies above man, ordinary human knowledge, below, and what lies half-way between, that is the human being himself: between nature and the spiritual world. What is above reaches down to him; he is permeated by the spirit. In contemplating the world from a purely human angle, he does not take his point of departure from the summit, but he can see it—see the spirit above. At the same time he sees what is merely nature beneath him; it reaches into him from below. There is a risk connected with theosophy; unless the above-mentioned means are employed to see with the higher self—not with the ordinary self—there is danger of losing contact with the human element, and this results in forfeiting the ability to see anything at all adequate, of recognizing reality below. This danger disappears, however, as soon as those means are employed. Then we can say that theosophy is what comes to light when the God within man says, “Let the God within you speak; what He reveals of the world is theosophy.”

Take your stand between God and Nature and let the human being in you speak. Speak of what is beneath as well as what is above you, and you have anthroposophy. It is the wisdom spoken by man.

This wisdom will prove an important fulcrum, a key to the whole realm of theosophy. After a period of immersion in theosophy, nothing could be more profitable than seriously to seek the firm center of gravity provided by anthroposophy.

All that has been said so far can be historically substantiated in many directions. We have, for example, the science calling itself anthropology. As it is practised, anthropology comprises not only the human being, but everything pertaining to him; all that can be gleaned from nature, everything necessary for understanding man. This science is based on moving about among objects, passing from detail to detail, observing the human being under a microscope. In short, this science, which in the widest circles is regarded as the only one dealing authoritatively with man, takes its view from a point beneath human capacities. It is chained to the ground; it fails to employ all the faculties at the disposal of man, and for this reason it cannot solve the riddles of existence.

Now contrast all this with what you encounter as theosophy. There one searches the most rarefied regions for answers to the burning questions of life. But all those who are unable to keep pace, whose standpoint is anthropology, consider theosophy an air-castle, lacking foundation. They are not able to understand how the soul can ascend step by step to that summit from which all is spread out beneath it. They cannot rise to the planes of imagination, inspiration, and intuition. They cannot ascend to the peak that is the final goal of human evolution.

Thus we find anthropology on the lowest step, theosophy on the summit. What becomes of theosophy when it wants to reach the top but is not in a position to do so with the right means? We can find the answer in the historic example of the German theosophist, Solger, who lived from 1770–1819. Conceptually, his views are theosophical, but what means does he employ to attain the summit? Philosophical concepts, concepts of human cerebration long since sucked dry and emaciated! That is like climbing a mountain for the purpose of observation, and forgetting to take your field-glasses; you can distinguish nothing whatever down below.

In our case the field-glasses are spiritual, and they are called imagination, inspiration, and intuition. Man's ability to reach that peak diminished more and more through the centuries—a fact that was clearly felt and acknowledged as early as the Middle Ages. Today it is felt too, but not acknowledged. In olden times that capacity to ascend existed, as you know, though only to a minor degree. It was based on a clairvoyant twilight condition in man. There really was an ancient theosophy of that sort, but it was written that such revelations from the summit should come to a close, that they should no longer be open to the ordinary means of cognition.

This old theosophy, which considers revelation a thing of the past, became theology, and thus we find theology running parallel with anthropology. Theology's ambition is to climb the heights, but for its means it depends upon something that was once revealed, was then handed down, and is now rigid; something incapable of continually revealing itself anew to the striving soul. Throughout the Middle Ages, anthropology and theology frequently opposed without rejecting each other, but in recent times the contrast is sharp. Nowadays theology is admitted along with anthropology as something scientific, but no bridge is found between the two. If we do not stop with the details but ascend half-way, we can establish anthroposophy by the side of theosophy.

Within modern spiritual life attempts have been made to practise anthroposophy, among other things, but again, as in the case of theosophy, with the wrong, inadequate means of a defunct philosophy. The meaning of philosophy can really no longer be understood by philosophers—only by theosophists. Historical contemplation alone yields this understanding. Philosophy can be comprehended only by contemplating its origin, as can be seen by an illustration. In former times there were the so-called Mysteries, abodes where the higher spiritual life was cultivated, where the neophytes were guided by special methods to spiritual vision. One such Mystery, for example, was in Ephesus, where the neophytes could learn through their training the secrets of Diana of Ephesus; they learned to look into the spiritual worlds. As much of such matters as could be made public was communicated to the profane and received by them, but not all of these realized that higher secrets had been revealed to them. One of those to whom such communications from the Mysteries of Ephesus had penetrated was Heraclitus. He then proclaimed these, by means of his partial initiation, in a way that could be generally understood. In reading the doctrines of Heraclitus, “The Obscure,” we still find immediate experience, the experience of the higher worlds, shining through between the lines. Then came his successors who no longer realized that those doctrines originated in direct experience. They no longer understood them, so they began to improve them, to spin them out in concepts. They began to speculate intellectually, and this method persisted through the generations. Everything we have in the way of philosophy today is but a heritage of ancient doctrines squeezed out and sucked dry of all life, leaving only the skeleton of the concepts. Yet the philosophers take that skeleton for a living reality, for something created by human thinking. There is, as a matter of fact, no such thing as a philosopher who can think creatively without having recourse to the higher worlds.

Just such a skeleton of concepts was all that the philosophers of the nineteenth century had to work with when they took up what may be called anthroposophy. The term actually occurred. Robert Zimmermann wrote a so-called Anthroposophy, but he constructed it of arid, empty concepts. Indeed, everything that has attempted to transcend anthropology without employing the right means has remained a shriveled web of concepts no longer connected with the subject.

Like philosophy, anthroposophy too must be deepened through theosophy; the latter must provide the means for recognizing reality within the spiritual life. Anthroposophy takes the human, the middle standpoint, not the subhuman, as does anthropology. A theosophy, on the other hand, as practised by Solger, though spiritual in its point of view, employs only inflated concepts, and when Solger arrives at the summit he sees nothing. That is spinning at the loom of concepts, not living, spiritual observation. It is something we do not intend to do. We aim in these lectures to confront the reality of human life in its entirety. We shall encounter the old subjects of observation, now illuminated, however, from a different point whence the view is both upward and downward.

The human being is the most important subject of our observation. We need but to contemplate his physical body to realize what a complicated being he is. In order to gain a sentient understanding of anthroposophy's aims, let us first ponder the following. The complicated physical body as we encounter it today is the product of a long evolution. Its first germinal potentiality came into being on old Saturn, and it evolved further on the old Sun, the old Moon, and the Earth. The etheric body was added to it on the Sun, the astral body on the Moon. Now, these members of the human being have changed in the course of evolution, and what we encounter today as the complicated physical human body, with heart, kidneys, eyes, ears and so forth, is the product of a long development. It has all grown out of a simple germinal form that originated on Saturn. Through millions and millions of years it has continually changed and been transformed in order that it might achieve its present perfection. If today we wish to understand a member or an organ of this physical body—say, the heart or the lungs—we can do so only on the basis of this evolution. Nothing of what we encounter today as the heart existed on the old Saturn. Only gradually did these organs assume their present form, one being developed and incorporated earlier, another later. Some organs we can actually designate Sun-organs, as having first appeared during the Sun evolution, others Moon-organs, and so on. If we would understand the present physical body of man we must assemble our concepts from the whole Universe—that is the theosophical method of observation.

How does anthropology set to work? Theosophy ascends to the ultimate heights and from this spiritual summit examines individual phenomena. Anthropology remains on the ground, takes its point of departure from the details, and now even investigates individual cells in their juxtaposition. Everything is mechanically lined up and the cells are studied individually, but this does not reveal their relative age. Yet, far from being immaterial, it is important to know whether a given group of cells developed on the Sun or on the Moon. Much more could be said concerning these complicated conditions. Consider, for example, the human heart. True, as constituted today it evolved late, but as regards its first germinal potentiality it is one of the oldest human organs. During the period of the old Sun, the heart was dependent upon the forces governing there. During the Moon period its development continued; then the Sun withdrew from the Moon, with which it had been united, and henceforth its forces acted upon the heart from without. Here the heart underwent a different development, so that from then on a Sun element and a Moon element can be observed in its tendencies. Then Earth, Sun, and Moon were united again and worked upon the heart. After a pralaya the Earth evolution followed, during which the Sun first withdrew again. This separation resulted in an intensification of the Sun's influence from without. Then the Moon withdrew as well and also acted upon the heart from without. So, being among the oldest human organs, the heart comprises a Sun element, a Moon element, a second Sun element during the Earth evolution, a second Moon element during the Earth evolution, and finally, after the withdrawal of the Earth, an Earth element—all corresponding to cosmic evolution.

If these elements of the heart accord, as in the cosmic harmony, the heart is healthy; if any one element preponderates, it is sick. All human sickness derives from disharmony among the elements within the organ in question while their cosmic counterparts are in harmony. All healing depends upon strengthening the element that lacks its share, or subduing superfluous activity, as the case may be, thereby bringing the elements into harmony again. But talking about this harmony is not enough. In order to effect it one must really penetrate into the wisdom of the universe; one must be able to recognize the different elements in each organ. That will suffice to give an idea of genuine occult physiology and anatomy, which comprehend the whole human being out of the whole cosmos and explain the details out of the spirit.

Occult physiology speaks of Sun and Moon elements of the heart, larynx, brain, and so forth, but since all these elements are at work upon man himself, something in him confronts us today in which all these elements are consolidated. If we look into the human being himself and understand these elements, we also understand the etheric body, the astral body, etc., the sentient soul, the intellectual soul and the consciousness soul, as man is constituted today. That is anthroposophy, and in anthroposophy, too, we must start at the lowest step, gradually ascending to the highest.

Man's lowest member is the physical body that he has in common with the sensory world that is perceived through the senses and the sensory-physical mind. The theosophical point of view, starting from the universe, contemplates man in his cosmic contexts. In the matter of the sensory-physical world, anthroposophy must start from man, in so far as he is a sensory being. Only then can we deal appropriately with the etheric body, then the astral body, the ego, and so forth, and what is to be learned from them.

Observing the human being in this anthroposophical sense, we ask what it is that must first engage our interest. It is his senses, and it is through these that he acquires knowledge of the physical-sensory world. Starting from the physical plane, it is therefore these that anthroposophy must consider first. Let the study of the human senses then constitute our first chapter. Thereafter we will ascend to the study of the individual spiritual regions in man's nature.

Beginning with the study of the human senses, we at once find anthroposophy invading the territory of anthropology, for anthroposophy must invariably start from all that the senses tell us is real. But it must keep in mind that what is spiritual, influences man from above. In this sense it is genuine anthropology. Ordinary anthropology has thrown everything pertaining to the human senses into complete confusion, groping its way from detail to detail and examining only what is on the ground, so to speak. Important matters are disregarded because men have no Ariadne-thread to lead them out of the labyrinth of facts into the light. Anthropology cannot find its way out of this maze and must fall a victim to the Minotaur of illusion, for the saving thread can be spun only by spiritual research.

Even in the matter of the human senses, anthroposophy has a different story to tell than has external observation. At the same time it is interesting to note how external science has lately been forced by material facts to go to work more thoroughly, seriously and carefully. There is nothing more trivial than the enumeration of the five senses: feeling (touch), smell, taste, hearing, and sight. We shall see what confusion reigns in this enumeration. Science, it is true, has now added three more senses to the list, but as yet doesn't seem to know what to do about them. We will now list the human senses according to their real significance, and we will endeavor in the following to start laying the foundations of an anthroposophical doctrine of the senses.

The first sense in question is the one that in spiritual science can be called the sense of life. That is a real sense and must be as fully acknowledged as the sense of sight. What is it? It is something in the human being of which, when it functions normally he is not aware. He feels it only when it is out of order. We feel lassitude, or hunger and thirst, or a sense of strength in the organism; we perceive these as we do a color or a tone. We are aware of them as an inner experience. But as a rule we are conscious of this feeling only when something is out of order, otherwise it remains unobserved. The sense of life furnishes the first human self-perception; it is the sense through which the whole inner man becomes conscious of his corporeality. That is the first sense, and it must figure in the list just as does hearing or smell. Nobody can understand the human being and the senses who knows nothing of this sense that enables him to feel himself an inner entity.

We discover the second sense when we move a limb—say, raise an arm. We would not be human beings if we could not perceive our own movements. A machine is not aware of its own motion; that is possible only for a living being through the medium of a real sense. The sense of perceiving our own movements—anything from blinking to walking or running—we call the sense of our own movements.

We become aware of a third sense by realizing that the human being distinguishes within himself between above and below. It is dangerous for him to lose this perception, for in that case he totters and falls over. The human body contains a delicate organ connected with this sense: the three semicircular canals in the ear. When these are injured we lose our sense of balance. This third sense is the static sense, or sense of balance. (In the animal kingdom there is something analogous: the otoliths, tiny stones that must lie in a certain position if the animal is to maintain its equilibrium.)

These are the three senses through which man perceives something within himself, as it were; by their means he feels something within himself.

Now we emerge from the inner man to the point at which an interaction with the outer world begins. The first of such reciprocal relations arises when man assimilates physical matter and, by doing so, perceives it. Matter can be perceived only when it really unites with the body. This cannot be done by solid or fluid matter, but only by gaseous substances that then penetrate the bodily matter. You can perceive smell only when some body sends out gaseous matter that penetrates the organs of the mucous membrane of the nose. The fourth sense, then, is the sense of smell, and it is the first one through which the human being enters into reciprocal relationship with the outer world.

When we no longer merely perceive matter but take the first step into matter itself, we have the fifth sense. We enter into a deeper relationship with such matter. Here matter must be active, which implies that it must have some effect upon us. This takes place when a liquid or a dissolved solid comes in contact with the tongue and unites with what the tongue itself secretes. The reciprocal relationship between man and nature has become a more intimate one. We become aware not only of what things are, as matter, but of what they can induce. That is the sense of taste, the fifth sense.

Now we come to the sixth sense. Again there is an increase in the intimacy of the interaction. We penetrate still deeper into matter, things reveal more of their essence. This can only occur, however, through special provisions. The sense of smell is the more primitive of these two kinds of senses. In the case of smell, the human body takes matter as it is and makes no effort to penetrate it. Taste, where man and matter unite more intimately, is more complicated; then, matter yields more. The next step offers the possibility of penetrating still more deeply into the outer world. This takes place by reason of an external material substance being either transparent or opaque, or by the manner in which it permits light to pass through it, that is, how it is colored. An object that rays out green light is internally so constituted that it can reflect green light and no other. The outermost surface of things is revealed to us in the sense of smell, something of their inner nature in taste, something of their inner essence in sight. Hence the complicated structure of the eye, which leads us much deeper into the essence of things than does the nose or the tongue. The sixth sense, then, is the sense of sight.

We proceed, penetrating still deeper into matter. For example, when the eye sees a rose as red, the inner nature of the rose is proclaimed by its surface. We see only the surface, but since this is conditioned by the inner nature of the rose we become acquainted, to a certain extent, with this inner nature. If we touch a piece of ice or some hot metal, not only the surface and thereby the inner nature are revealed, but the real consistency as well because what is externally cold or hot is cold or hot through and through. The sense of temperature, the seventh, carries us still more intimately into the fundamental conditions of objects.

Now we ask ourselves if it is possible to penetrate into the nature of objects still more deeply than through this seventh sense. Yes, that can be done when objects show us not only their nature through and through, as in the case of temperature, but their most inner essence; that is what they do when they begin to sound. The temperature is even throughout objects. Tone causes their inner nature to vibrate, and it is through tone that we perceive the inner mobility of objects. When we strike an object its inner nature is revealed to us in tone, and we can distinguish among objects according to their inner nature, according to their inner vibration, when we open our inner ear to their tone. It is the soul of objects that speaks to our own soul in tones. That is the eighth sense, the sense of hearing.

If we would find an answer to the question as to whether there exist still higher senses, we must proceed cautiously. We must beware of confusing what is really a sense with other terms and expressions. For example, in ordinary life—down below, where much confusion exists—we hear of a sense of imitation, a sense of secrecy, and others. That is wrong. A sense becomes effective at the moment when we achieve perception and before mental activity sets in. We speak of a sense as of something that functions before our capacity for reasoning has come into action. To perceive color you need a sense, but for judging between two colors you do not.

This brings us to the ninth sense. We arrive at it by realizing that in truth there is in man a certain power of perception—one that is especially important in substantiating anthroposophy—a power of perception not based on reasoning, yet present in him. It is what men perceive when they understand each other through speech. A real sense underlies the perception of what is transmitted to us through speech. That is the ninth sense, the sense of speech.

The child learns to speak before he learns to reason. A whole people has a language in common, but reasoning is a matter for the individual. What speaks to the senses is not subject to the mental activity of the individual. The perception of the meaning of a sound is not mere hearing because the latter tells us only of the inner oscillations of the object. There must be a special sense for the meaning of what is expressed in speech. That is why the child learns to speak, or at least to understand what is spoken, before he learns to reason. It is, in fact, only through speech that he learns to reason. The sense of speech is an educator during the child's first years, exactly like hearing and sight. We cannot alter what a sense perceives, cannot impair anything connected with it. We perceive a color, but our judgment can neither change nor vitiate it; the same thing is true of the sense of speech when we perceive the inner significance of the speech sound. It is indispensable to designate the sense of speech as such. It is the ninth.

Finally we come to the tenth sense, the highest in the realm of ordinary life. It is the concept sense, which enables us perceptively to comprehend concepts not expressed through speech sounds. In order to reason we must have concepts. If the mind is to become active, it must first be able to perceive the concept in question, and this calls for the concept sense, which is exactly as much a sense by itself as is taste or smell.

Now I have enumerated ten senses and have not mentioned the sense of touch. What about it? Well, a method of observation lacking the spiritual thread confuses everything. Touch is usually tossed in with our seventh sense, temperature. Only in this meaning, however, as the sense of temperature, has it in the first instance any significance. True, the skin can be called the organ of the temperature sense—the same skin that serves also as the organ of the touch sense. But we touch not only when we touch [TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: The verb tasten can mean “to touch.” Indeed, the sense of touch is der Tastsinn, but more often it signifies something like our “groping,” as one gropes in the dark by means of the sense of touch: “feeling around for something.” In this sentence the first “touch” is to be understood in this sense, the second (berühren) as meaning “to come in contact with.”] the surface of an object. We touch when the eye seeks something, when the tongue tastes something, when the nose smells something. Touching is a quality common to the fourth to seventh senses. All of these are senses of touch.

Up to and including the sense of temperature we can speak of touching. Hearing we can no longer describe as touching; at least, the quality is present only to a small degree. In the senses of speech and concepts it is wholly absent. These three senses we therefore designate as the senses of comprehension and understanding. The first three senses inform us concerning the inner man. Reaching the boundary between the inner and the outer world, the fourth sense leads us into this outer world, and by means of the other three we penetrate it ever more deeply. Through the senses of touch we perceive the outer world on the surface, and through those of comprehension we learn to understand things, we reach their soul. Later we will deal with other senses transcending these.

Below the sense of smell, then, there are three senses that bring us messages out of our own human inner being. The sense of smell is the first to lead us into the outer world, into which we then penetrate deeper and deeper by means of the others. But what I have described to you today does not exhaust the list of senses. It was only an excerpt from the whole, and there is something below and something above the ten mentioned. From the concept sense we can continue upward to a first astral sense, arriving at the senses that penetrate the spiritual world. There we find an eleventh, a twelfth and a thirteenth sense. These three astral senses will lead us deeper into the fundamentals of external objects, deep down where concepts cannot penetrate. The concept halts before the external, just as the sense of smell halts before the inner man.

What I have given you is an urgently needed foundation upon which to build cognition of the human being. Through its neglect in the nineteenth century, everything pertaining even to philosophy and the theory of knowledge has been most horribly jumbled. Merely generalizing, people ask what the human being can learn by means of the individual sense, and they cannot even explain the difference between hearing and sight. Scientists talk about light waves in the same way they do about sound waves, without taking into account that sight does not penetrate as deeply as hearing. Through hearing we enter the soul-nature of things, and we shall see that by means of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth senses we penetrate their spirit as well: we enter the spirit of nature. Each sense has a different nature and a different character.

For this reason a great number of expositions given today, especially in physics, concerning the nature of sight and its relation to its surroundings may be regarded unhesitatingly as theories that have never reckoned with the true nature of the senses. Countless errors have arisen from this misconception of the nature of the senses. That must be emphasized, because it is quite impossible for popular representations to do justice to what has here been set forth. You read things written by people who can have no possible inkling of the inner nature of the senses. We must understand that science, from its standpoint, cannot do other than take a different attitude. It is inevitable that science should spread errors, because in the course of evolution the real nature of the senses was forgotten.

This true nature of the senses is the first chapter of anthroposophy.

I should like to-day to add various things to the considerations of Cosmic and human truths, which we have been studying of late, and I shall want to add several things concerning the sort of truths we discussed in the last lecture, truths connected with the development of mankind in our own age.

How, in order to amplify those things from one side, and another, it will be necessary to-day to insert here and there an observation which may strike you as being personal; but you know that I only make personal observations on the rarest occasions, and when I do, it is always, as to-day, to explain something strongly objective.

We are living at present in an epoch which demands something quite definite from human beings. It demands from everyone what must be called a decision arising from the innermost depths of human nature. It must be considered, and clearly seen that we have now really entered for the first time on the age of human freedom, and the upheavals in intellectual, moral or social spheres, are, after all, nothing but the expression of man being brought into the region of freedom through the deeper forces connected with human development. We have merely to consider the life of individual man or the life of Nations, and to look at them in a quite unprejudiced way, to see what occurs; and then we can say to ourselves that there are to-day innumerable factors, through which each single individual, or whole races, communities and Groups of mankind, are deteriorated either from without or within, factors which leave them unfree. This being carried along by the relationships and events around then, is something which fundamentally lay in the real evolution of humanity; but now man has to emerge from this stage. The future of the Earth will consist in man developing more and more what we have just characterised by saying that, to-day, for the first time, man is faced with such significant decisions.

The fact that man is thus placed before such significant decisions, my dear friends, decisions which have to be made from the innermost depths of man's heart and soul, is expressed in the external course of events. As a rule, however, the great changes which have occurred in all the spheres of political, social, Spiritual and scientific life in the course of the second half of the 19th Century, have been too little observed.

One can notice signs of this transition, both in great and in small things everywhere to-day. Let us take one instance which lies very close to us. You know that amongst the many enemies of our Anthroposophical Movement to-day, are also to be found the Clergy of this Country (Switzerland), and they show quite clearly that behind them stands the power of the Jesuits, and that power appears to have a certain validity just in Switzerland. One has merely to keep in mind what reveals itself to-day in various spheres, to see how this Jesuitical power is amalgamated, for many people, with what they call the external religious education and so on. As regards this Country it may be interesting to bring before our souls an extraordinary document which, because it is so interesting, I have had photographed. This document originated in Switzerland and was produced there in 1847. I will read it to you:—

“Dedicated to the contemporary Army and their brave leaders as a permanent monument, in memory of the 24th November 1847, when the Dominion of the Jesuits passed away from Switzerland. The Almighty has given victory to the just cause. Those days, from the 12th to the 30th November 1847 are therefore unforgettable to every Confederate soldier—those days during which in consequence of resolutions passed on the 20th July and 4th November 1847, the seven Catholic separated States—Lucerne, Uri, Schweiz, Zug, Freiburg, and the Valais, were infested with war, but because of our Army under the command of Heinrich Du-four of Geneva, they had one after another to capitulate. To these days belong some of the most note-worthy events which Swiss history offers. With a relatively slight sacrifice of dead and wounded our clever and war-experienced leader, by his strategical arrangements, was successful, after many conflicts, in freeing those people who were slaves to the tyranny and power of a hypocritical Clergy full of fanaticism; and the inhabitants blinded by their Catholicism, who as enemies faced the Confederate army including the Militia over 80,000 strong. After a few days were entirely conquered, which made it possible to dissolve that Sonderbund and to drive the Jesuits out of Switzerland”

The concluding sentence, which is especially interesting in my opinion runs: “May God's Fatherly protection rule over our Army.”

You see under whose protection at that time the expulsion of the Jesuits was undertaken, and how “God's Fatherly protection” was similarly evoked for the future, that it might always continue to rule over the Swiss people as at the time, when General du-four was successful in ridding Switzerland from the Jesuits. That occurred in 1847.

Now, my dear friends, not these things alone, but many others, have undergone radical transformations in the course of the last half Century, transformations of quite a definite character. Their characteristic is that anyone who gives himself over merely to the sequence of external events, such as have transpired during this epoch, must of necessity come into confusion. The very best way to come into confusion, and to be unable to find a way out of certain knots and tangles, is just to let the external events of the last half- or two-thirds of the last Century work upon us. If a person to-day wishes to find his way aright, a certain orientation which comes entirely from within, a certain impulse, is absolutely necessary. In that chaos, which is the basis of all the confusion into which we fall if we rely solely on external things, all the best strivings of recent times have been entangled. It cannot of course be denied, that our newer age has accomplished many things in various spheres of life; especially in the sphere of technique and the science which is connected with technique, great significant progress has been made. Triumphs have been celebrated, and this praise is thoroughly justified. But if you take the best results, the best scientific and technical conquests of our civilisation, although you will find many things of use, many illuminating things, many things which bring man on materially, you will find nothing either in science or in technique or in any other sphere, or even in that sphere which has brought good to man, nothing which can shine from the outer world into man's soul so that he can get a guiding impulse from those things coming from that external world. Therefore, Spiritual Science had to come, just at this very time, because out of Spiritual Science something must come which is drawn from no external world, but simply from the Spiritual world; and which is so taken up that when it flows into the outer world it represents an impulse which has nothing to do with anything drawn from that outer world itself. It is an impulse carried into the outer world from Spiritual worlds,—and that is what is sought to be given through our Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. In this connection, we are radically misunderstood to-day, and my yesterday's remarks were a kind of explanation of this from a certain aspect. I wanted especially to show that it must not be said of our School-Impulse (which of course is born out of Spiritual Science), or of our practical undertakings, that we carry into them anything of a theoretical view of the world. I tried to show yesterday how far such a statement is from reality. But neither may one say the opposite, and this too is connected with a right understanding of our Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. One may not say the reverse, that, as people usually imagine to-day, any external activity is the result of a theory, of a programme; one must not imagine that what we accomplish—whether in the sphere of pedagogy or practical life—proceeds from any programme such as is usually imagined to-day.

A few days ago, for instance, someone said:—“Well, this peculiar idea regarding the Threefold State, would not have arisen if this Threefold idea had not sprung from Anthroposophy,” and I had to correct such an utterance radically. And here I must add a few personal things, which are meant quite objectively, and have a good deal to do with these matters. I had to say:—“It is really the case that what meets you and others to-day as the Threefold Division of the Social Organism, in so far as it was conceived by me, sprang from no abstract thought, nor from meditating on how the social life could be so arranged that something could come into it of that Utopian character one finds in many writings to-day. It did not arise in this way.” That came to me as the perception of a Spiritual stream, which flowed together naturally in life with other streams, especially with the economic stream. The economic perception arose from its own soil, on the basis of its own life.

A few years ago, I had to explain how this perception of the economic life of our recent times, of the economic necessities arose I had to object then, when I was told that the Drei-Gliederung (Three- foldness) proceeded out of Anthroposophy, just as one can take something out of a programme to-day and put it forward as an impulse. I said:—My boyhood was spent as the son of a railway official. That was in the 60's and 70's, when railways had only half evolved from their embryonic life. The great traffic only came gradually and later, but I shared in just those measures which were taken under the very first arrangements made for railways. I was thus absolutely under the impression of this life of commerce which was then arising, and it was the perception which I got from that, which of course, was later united with something else, that led to my presenting the social life as I had to do, in the sense of the three-fold Social Order.

We have to consider that in the 70's of the last Century, the essential, basic element of the newer evolution, was the transformation of traffic. International commerce developed in this epoch. I myself, in the last years of this inter-national commercial evolution, was under the daily and hourly influence of the details that developed in connection with that world-traffic, and then, in the last third of the 19th Century, or rather in the last quarter of it, came that great turnover, the great transformation, which led from world-intercourse, to world-trading, and economics.

My dear friends, those are two quite different things. It was world-commerce which first led to world-economics. World-trade is but the latest phase of the development of National economics. That which is, in its essentials, prepared in single Countries, has been spread abroad through the world-trade and been carried into other Countries. But nevertheless, there exists a certain individuality as regards the productions of each Country. All this, under the influence of the developing traffic, became different,—the world passed over from world trade to world economics. World-economics can only exist when the raw product is purchased in one Country and then sent to another where it is worked over industrially; so that not only through the trading, but through the economics itself, one Country or land became dependent on another, and thereby economics were spread over many different Countries. This spreading of trade, of commerce, this—what I must call a welding of the world into a common world- sphere in economics, came about for the most part in the last decades of the 19th Century;—and this arose perhaps in its most permeating, penetrating form, in the arrangements made in the European Textile Industries in connection with the Indian and American cotton. In the cotton industry, one could especially experience the transformation of ordinary trade into world- economics. Just at the time when it could be seen how these things were going on, I was for eight years tutor in a house dealing in cotton brought from India and America to Europe, and in this house Cotton-Agents—which means also the manufacturers of such goods,—congregated together. Those people too traded in cotton, and so at that time I was in the midst of the interests connected with these things.

I lived entirely in that centre, never having been one of those who regarded external things as trivial, considering that one should withdraw from external things into a mystic twilight, I was deeply interested, especially when despatches came, which had to be deciphered with a Code. Once there came a dispatch which included the word “wire-puller,” and one had to look up this word, which meant, “such and such a firm wants so many bales of cotton at this or that price.” With the word “wire-puller” one could draw forth things which might have a very significant business importance.

You see, during this epoch I was greatly interested in those patterns which came, samples of American and Indian cotton, cotton piled high up in the office, each with its own little specification, labels on which were written quite interesting things. While I was studying these carefully, (pardon these personal observations, but they are connected with the objective side), I also studied Goethe's “Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily,” and those two things were carried on absolutely side by side, and fundamentally it was from that which flowed to me then out of my study of the “Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily,” that twenty one years later, 3x7 years after, there flowed that which led to my first Mystery Play, “The Portal of Initiation.” I just wanted to bring forward this couple of instances—which I could multiply many times; but you see, I had to explain to that man who came to me saying that my ideas of economic life came from an abstract Anthroposophy, that it was not abstract. Anthroposophy is not abstract, although people say think so. I had to tell that man that I had taken part in the life of commerce. I even wrote hills of lading; even if in addition to the signs which I had to write on the bills of lading, I made many blots, nevertheless I wrote them. I grew up in the middle of that cotton industry and trade, and it was in connection with these things which are in connection with the whole feeling of our present time, out of my perceptions of these, then that my economic ideas arose. They are not mere theories, but are in reality drawn from life itself. I feel that one can only draw such things out of life if one has the good-will really to look at life itself. One must also, of course look at life just where many despise it, if one wishes to get at those things which can be made practical in life and prove themselves as such. Just out of what resulted from the practise of life and from being in the very midst of it, and seeing the confused tangle and knots in it, those things arose later; for among the men I met at that time were some whose destiny still caused them to find the aftereffects of the great crisis in 1873. At this time, one could clearly see their remarkable connections between the World-views and the economic life, which must now be overcome by our mode of thought. The Director of that railway on which my father worked, was at that time a man named Pontout, who was regarded as a small demi-god by the neighbourhood in which I then lived,—Frau Pontout, for what reason I do not know, was always called the Baroness; she was considered an extremely pious woman. They were both really, from a certain point of view, extremely religious people. Pontout then resigned the post of General Director of the Southern Railway and entered a great business undertaking, which stretched its tentacles from France to Serbia; and, because of his piety he was able to carry out a gigantic business in the service, not of course of a World-power, but of those powers in whose service he placed himself, whenever he took the Prayer-book in his hand. Then the whole business smashed, and there arose that famous Pontout-crash, from which at the right moment, a certain clerical community withdrew their fingers, leaving Pontout alone in it. But even at that time one could see a certain philosophy or let us say a certain order of ideas, being carried into financial undertakings; and one could very well learn from that what one ought not to do. Of course, many people could not believe that I thus learned the right way, and that this led to my thinking in a very different way of the connection between Anthroposophy and the “Kommenden Tag” and “Futurum,” than did Pontout of the connection between the Catholic Church and the Serbian bank.

These things are all taken from life, my dear friends, and the fact that one can read them from life, that we do not approach life with theoretical dogmas, is just what should come from Anthroposophy, if it be rightly understood. Anthroposophy is distinguished, or should make itself distinct from other World-views, in that it can be selfless; that means that it does not trumpet its dogmas abroad, but simply provides an introduction, by which one can learn to know life itself in all its fullness and breadth. Only in this way can Anthroposophy satisfy the most weighty and important demands and necessities of man's present evolution.

I told you that anyone able to look with open eyes at what happens could see confusion everywhere, that even in what was good there was confusion, and that a person could not help going astray if he simply swam on in what the external world offered. Into that an impulse had to flow from spirit-lands, an impulse which coming from quite a different source, was called upon to give a direction which could not be got from the external world, even though there may be good in it. It is just that which Anthroposophy should bring to expression; just consider what an impulse lies in this age, where in external events everywhere whether in scientific or any other branch of cultural life, or in outer life, these insoluble-knots were being formed. It was just then, that coming out of Spiritual depths, something had to find its way into the world which could give it the right direction.

You must consider how, on the other hand, something else came to humanity. That is the following:—Whenever a person gives himself up to the stream of those insoluble knots, he is tempted not to care to seek for guidance for his own soul, but to give himself over to the confusion of external life, and is then only carried along by the river of confusing external events. I could see to my great sorrow, that human beings under this influence, become less and less independent. On the one hand, they were driven to form an independent judgment of things, but their independent judgment could only form that which then forced itself out of that sphere of chaotic external events, urging them into paths unknown to them. These people wanted to be free, they wanted to be independent, for the demand for freedom lives in the subconscious nature of man. People imagine they are free, but all the time, because freedom means a strong shaking up in one's inner soul, and because they did not want to be shaken up, they gave themselves over to that stream which runs its course in the way I have described. In this way, they come under Ahrimanic influence, which strives for the Spiritual with all kinds of beautiful and well-chosen words which have their roots simply in personal egotism, and a longing to allow this personal egoism to carry them into the social life around them.

It is one of the most important characteristics of the age, that human beings are full of this egotism, so that when they speak of social demands they really mean; how can their egoism best be carried along by social life? They speak of the demands of social life, but all the time they mean egoistic life; they want a social life of such a kind that Egoism can thrive best in it.

Of course, the Three-fold Social-Order could not speak in this way, it cannot speak of a Paradise! It must leave that to the Lenins and Trotzkis etc. The Three-fold-Order can only speak of what is organically possible in the social body, of that which is capable of life, of that which can fulfill itself. To that we must attain; for if we simply picture and strive for illusion we shall certainly not get very far.

We must accustom ourselves, my dear friends, not to consider life from any abstract principle, but to live our life, regarding the details of life with full consciousness, whether they belong apparently to Spiritual or material things. A great transformation has taken place, in that the economic life of the whole world has become a single body, but humanity is not able to understand it, could not bear it. It has been proclaimed, but not inwardly understood. Many things have appeared concerning “World Economics,” but they are all mere phrases, for this perception of the whole economic life as one body has not been inwardly digested. And so it has come about that humanity has been driven into a World-trade, but it has not understood how to adapt life to it, and so has now come to live in such a World where barriers on barriers have been set up to preserve all sorts of impossible national commerces, hemmed in by all kinds of customs, duties, passports and other limitations, by which they hope to preserve in a most terrible way, something for which the time is long past.

All that we experience today is nothing but this result of the misunderstanding of what has arisen because the last third of the 19th and the first two decades of the 20th Century, presented a state of chaos, of the confusing tangles to which one ought not to give oneself up externally, for that is also something which shows itself in the inimical attacks made now on Anthroposophy. These attacks which appear to-day, (both extensively and intensively) are now assuming the most incredible dimensions; and we may say, if we take these things externally, that we can see in the very way these attacks are expressing themselves, the spirit by which they are inspired. For instance, the following has been said of “Steiner's Goetheanum in Dornach”—“We should like anyone who wants to form his own judgment of Dr Steiner's views, to visit that Temple, that image of his spirit, and to see it with their own eyes. For what does this man take himself and others, for whom he chooses to pour the hallucinations, the feverish dream of his brain into concrete, to carve them in wood, and in glass, and to have them painted on the wall?”

Finally, my dear friends, another very extraordinary party has joined the various people, the Chauvinists the extreme Socialists, and especially the leaders of Socialism, and so on. They are not of recent date, one heard of their activities in 1912, 1913, They add quite extraordinary sentences to what I have just read to you:—Somebody writes: “these are only tiny samples of attacks, appearing at present under the Uranus-influence.”

You see that mockery is not lacking, especially shown in the indignation of an opponent filled with hate, from which I will quote. The odd people who now are uniting with those others, are especially Astrologers; and behind these lies a special ruthlessness, (of which many of them are unconscious,) because in this astrology there is something attractive, and one can do much with such things. Some of these are very extraordinary if one brings them into connection. For instance, here is another attack which contains these words:—

“We hold it very necessary to keep an open eye on Rudolf Steiner, that man who supports himself on Judaism, on the most distorted Communistic and idealistic ideas, and who wanted to become the Minister for Culture in Wurttemberg during the revolution.”

Here you see, a man is speaking of my relationship with the Jews and Communists. Let us quote another attack, from the other side. It is good to compare these things, because in the comparison many details come to light. “None of the former religious founders, such as Christ and Buddha, none of the wise men and prophets” (I do not think that I have ever in the remotest degree taken upon myself such a title but the opponents do, as it seems here) “have ever paid such heed to the external; to earthly treasures, palaces, temples. On the contrary, they remained without much property, they instructed human beings without reward, they led them higher Spiritually, and taught them to pray in their own quiet chambers. They perieated and spread their Spiritual ideas and wise teachings without needing the material help of rich financiers.”

Here you see, on the one hand, my relationship with the Catholics and Jesuits; and on the other, with rich financiers. Only one thing is lacking, and that is my relationship with prominent generals. But my dear friends, I know that no one can take it amiss if I emphasise quite especially,—it must be emphasised once, for this must be said—I say it quite expressly, it must be sooner or later investigated whether I have used anybody, whether Communists, financiers or generals, for my own purpose; for I could have dispensed with those people. It must be ascertained whether I came to them or they to me; that is something which must be kept in mind, my dear friends, for a great deal depends on it.

There is another point; when on the one hand we must meet with the statement that “he can only support himself on the basis of the Communists” and so on, and on the other it is asserted that the wise men of old managed to spread their Spiritual teachings without the material help of rich financiers, one can say that rounds very much like the calumnies which appeared in 1909, when it was said that I was an especially dangerous 'Freemason.' That assertion came from the side of the Jesuits; but from the other side the Calumny arose, that I was myself a Jesuit! You see how well these people know me! One ought to reflect whether perhaps, that which it is most necessary of all to keep in mind, whether in the Jew or Communist, or even in the rich financier, “Man” himself has not been overlooked; for to-day it is a question of man and what must be sought in the human in every form; for in the last resort, my dear friends, neither the old party-strata, e.g. Communists “nor the old racial connections such as the Jews, nor even the old ranks of financial advisers signify a great deal to-day, because to-day we must with all our power enter into what is universally human.”

But it would seem, my dear friends, that those who are in Spiritual relation with all kinds of movements except with that which is really able to bring a Spiritual impulse into the present confused state of human evolution, are quite specially filled with Ahrimanic influence, so we may calmly listen to what they say, which runs as follows:

“The starry influence of 1921 will bring on Dr. Rudolf Steiner, as on all other men with similar horoscopes either psychic upheavals, or shatterings! will lead to a deepening of Spiritual effort; or, if the astral influences are not appreciated Spiritually, thy will bring about severe material losses, harm or bodily diseases. And many another person born in February in such critical years may also be even in personal danger, which, of course is clearly visible if one looks into each particular horoscope.”

Now my dear friends, it is not in the least necessary that such things should be said of the Uranus and Saturn-influences;—that it is necessary to master the life of Self, and so on. I have tried to describe to you, for instance, from what depths the Threefold Order of the Social Organism of the “Portal of Initiation” came about, and I myself can remain quite unmoved as regards what comes from the Uranus and Saturn-influences. These are not the things that worry me. The things that worry me are of quite a different nature, and as long as such things as the following play a part, there is good cause for anxiety; although the things connected with it must be seen in quite a different light.

A certain enemy filled with hatred is here quoted as having said the following:—“Spiritual flashes of light, like lightning-flashes are darting towards that wooden mousetrap, such flashes are plentiful; and it will need a certain cleverness and cunning on the part of Steiner, so to work that one day a real flash of light does not strike that Dornach magnificence, and bring it to an untimely end.” Now my dear friends, you see, there is something clearly indicated here, which people want to see occurring on the top of the Dornach Hill, and they could then search for the reason of such threats, in the fact of Uranus being near the Sun. You see, not only are these attacks very numerous, but they are filled with a striking intensity; and above all my dear friends, as far as I am concerned, I must say that where such Uranus influences express themselves, they show that they come from no good side, for in their way of appearing they show whose Spiritual child they really are.

On the other hand, we must be quite clear that if we look beyond the Spiritual flames of fire of which it is said that enough exist already, and turn to the physical flames, then, my dear friends, a waking-anxiety is necessary on the part of those who cling, perhaps with a certain love, to what has come to expression here, and all that is connected with it. It is really necessary to feel anxiety about this, in order to preserve that work which is really carried out here with sacrifice. For, those people who look at this work filled with hate, with a will tending to such a ruthless deed, are to-day sufficiently numerous.

You might say I ought not to read out such things to you; but, my dear friends there can be no question as to that, for these things are well-known amongst other peoples in the world, they take care of that. But that such things should be known to you who feel perhaps differently, at least most of you, the fact that you must be told about such things, I take on myself. For, through that custom which has been widely prevalent in this room, these things might be concealed from you. Unfortunately, many things have thus been concealed. And so a certain wakefulness must flash in on our friends, as to those who are filled with hatred for our Anthroposophical Spiritual Science.

It was not simply by way of a joke yesterday that I said:—“Our enemies are in many respects very different people”;—they will yet show themselves quite different people unless we make an effort to be awake, and guardians of that which has been accomplished, with so much sacrifice and such hard work; because if, as is the case at present, where evil is, there ever so many are awake, it should also be possible that where what we regard as good exists, there also we should be awake. You see, my dear friends it will be ever more important to be true Watchers of that Spiritual treasure of which we must say again to-day in a certain connection, that it is not brought into the world through any subjective idea, but from the observation of life itself; out of the perception of those demands which are taken from the most important human things of our age, and which will become more and more important as we advance into the near future. I want you to pay attention to those people whose Will it is, to destroy what is necessary for man-kind. That Will for destruction is very, very strong in many to-day. May you yourselves then be strong, for that which lies in this Spiritual Movement, and which has brought this Goetheanum into expression has not arisen out of the chaos around us. It is an impulse which has been brought into the chaos. That Bau, whenever one comes near it, will make us feel that it gives strength, and life. Be you therefore true Watchers of what you have apparently chosen as your very own, when you joined this Anthroposophical Spiritual Movement.

Having considered the way human beings relate to the cosmos in the form of the human organization, in levels of life and with regard to the contents of their inner life, let us today consider the life of the mind and spirit This will be in preparation for our subject for the next two days.

Remember how we considered the form of the human organism, relating the human organization to the fixed stars out in the cosmos. To consider the levels of human life, we had to look at our own planetary system. For the phenomena of the inner life we had to change our line of approach and relate the inner nature of human beings to their physical organization, which they owe to the fixed stars and the planetary system. Looking at form and life, we perceived the differences between head organization, chest organization, and metabolism and limbs as a third organization. We found that the inner life of sensory perception and of ideas comes into its own through the head organization, through nerves and senses. We found that the life of feeling comes to expression through the breathing and circulatory organization, and the life of will through the system of metabolism and limbs. For our study of the inner life, account had to be taken of the way the I, astral body, ether body and physical body act together in the human being. We gained a general idea of the way soul and body interact, even at the level of glandular function, and of muscle function being made to serve the will, and found that account had to be taken of the way the soul principle comes to expression in the living body.

To study the life of mind and spirit, we have to consider the alternation between waking and sleeping. As you know, this consists in the first place in life swinging to and fro between day-time waking state and night-time sleep within the 24-hour day. We also know that human beings are awake and asleep in another way, for we are really only fully awake when we form ideas and perceive with the senses. The life of the will and of physical actions is really a life of sleep even when we are awake.

The life of feelings, we know, is a dream life even when we are awake. This, then, is another way in which human beings let life swing to and fro between waking and sleeping. Waking sleep, as we may call it, influences the life of ideas when we bring an act of will to expression and are awake in our doing by being able to form an idea of the action. We do, however remain unconscious of what actually happens when we perform the action, as unconscious as when we are asleep.

The fact that we feel ourselves to be individual beings we really owe to sleep. If we were always awake and given up to the life of ideas, our experience of the world would be limited to a sequence of images. We would have the feeling that we are at rest, as it were, in a fixed location in the universe, and the universe itself would be present in form of images. The I, too, would be no more than a kind of mirrored reflection. We are brought back to ourselves in our wide-awake life of ideas in two ways. Firstly, we pour into this life the continual memory of being in a condition of sleep between going to sleep and waking, a condition in which we do not experience anything. Secondly, we have indefinite recollections of our will intent, that is, of something that is sleep-like by nature, playing into conscious life. This gives us a feeling for the I and the I impulse. In ordinary life we do not have conscious awareness of the I impulse but experience it as a nudge coming from our organization. On the other hand we are aware of it because between going to sleep and waking up we go out into the cosmos with the I, which otherwise does not enter into ordinary consciousness, and astral body, which equally does not come to awareness. It is the dimming-down of consciousness between going to sleep and waking up that comes to conscious awareness.

What is it that puts us to sleep over and over again, pushing our will intent and much of our feeling life into the night-time darkness of the conscious mind? It is the need to develop organic activity in the exercise of the will. In the last lecture we noted that when human beings exercise the will they let their soul principle influence even the life of the muscles. The soul immerses itself in the life of the muscles, as it were, and we become unconscious of it, just as we become unconscious of the soul when it leaves the body and enters into a different state during going to sleep and waking up. We are therefore able to say that it is due to the needs and conditions of the living body that we are consciously aware of our I in ordinary life. It is due to the fact that we have a body which lays claim to the soul when will is to be exercised, and chases the soul down into the unconsciousness of sleep because it wants to balance the energies it develops in will activity. This enables it to mediate full awareness of the I at all times, even though the I exists at an unconscious level.

We are thus able to say that we enter into the living physical body by pouring our spirit, and that means in the first place the soul principle, into it. We shall see in a minute that with the soul principle we actually pour the spirit into the physical body. We feel physically strong when the soul has been poured into the body. We do not feel physically strong, but wide awake, when we have ideas and sensory perceptions.

To have ideas and sensory perceptions means not to live in the body. It is quite wrong to think that we must have imaginative, inspired and intuitive perception to enter into the world of the spirit. People are actually in the world of the spirit when they make sensory perceptions and have ideas. We have seen in these lectures that sensory perceptions depend on dead matter, purely physical apparatus, being embedded in the organism, with only the ether body present in them. In sensory perception we have experiences in the physical apparatus, which does not in itself come to experience . It is the spiritual process in the apparatus that we experience. The content of sensory perception is definitely spiritual by nature. It is merely that when we form ideas we extend the sensory activity to the nerve organization. Nerve activity actually is a process of dying. Organic activity has to be excluded when we want to form ideas. This is why we are definitely in the sphere of the spirit when we have sensory perceptions and ideas.

As we are human, and live between birth and death, our life in this sphere of the spirit is such, however, that we have only images of it. Characteristically, therefore, the things of the spirit first come to conscious awareness in sensory perceptions and ideas, but only in images. We are thus able to say: Sensory perceptions and ideas are experiences of life in the spirit, but only in images (written on the board, see table). When it comes to ideas we are in fact aware that they are abstract by nature and that the images they give are not rich and full. Things turn grey, we might say, when we move back from sensory perception to the life of ideas. That greyness exists only for our conscious life, however, for in reality all ideas developed by human beings contain Imaginations.

I am therefore able to say that ideas contain Imaginations, but these do not come to conscious awareness. The ideas we have in everyday life are a kind of extract of those Imaginations. The imaging process extends back into the body, and a pale reflection of our ideas comes to conscious awareness. Every single time you have an idea you also have an Imagination, but whilst the idea remains in the conscious mind, the Imagination slips down and lives in the general vitality, or vital activity, of your organism.

To draw it (Fig. 21), I would have to put the head here, with the process of sensory perception (red), then comes the activity of forming an idea (blue, green) based on sensory perceptions, and this really shows a Janus²⁴ face. In front it is the pale idea which comes to conscious awareness; at the back it is the Imagination which does not become conscious. The Imagination goes down into the organism, where it becomes part of general vital activity. It enters into every organ—it lives in the brain, in the heart, in the lungs, in the kidneys, everywhere. It unites with our general vitality.

Remarkably, the result is this: here, where I have drawn in red and blue, we have the spirit in our picture. None of that which extends down into the physical body comes to conscious awareness, but we experience it as our inner life. The spirit, then, is spirit in the forward direction; it is soul at the back, where it faces the organism (green). In the sphere of the soul, however, it immediately begins to go down into half conscious and unconscious spheres, uniting with the living body.

Below this here (pointing to the drawing) lies unconscious soul activity, and the Imagination vanishes into it. Coming from the other side we have the living physical body, but this is immersed in the night of our consciousness, in sleep, and only comes to expression when it sends the will upwards into conscious awareness. The will is the counter thrust; it makes us physically strong and gives us experience of reality. That experience, however, will at most come up as a feeling. We dream of this reality but essentially do not have it in waking consciousness.

As human beings between birth and death the price we pay for existing in the sphere of the spirit is to experience the spirit in the images of our sensory perceptions and of our ideas. We have living experience of reality, but it enters our conscious mind unconsciously, just as the reality of the outside world comes in unconsciously.

We enter into outside reality, but essentially it enters into us at an unconscious level because we know nothing of the states of sleep when we are out there in the outside reality, which spins a web around us, as it were and enters into us all unconscious. There (pointing to the drawing) we live in the reality, but we live in a physical body, or in an outer, physical element. In so far as we live in the element of the spirit we know it only as image. The physical body is however created out of the spirit, and if we develop our faculty of Imagination, we can gain living insight into the imaginative life that lies at the back of it.

Going further back in the sphere of the soul, we can also gain experience of what in ordinary consciousness are our feelings. First of all, conscious experience of feeling is gained. But behind our feeling lies Inspiration. Every single time you have a feeling you also have an Inspiration. But just as your Imaginations slide down into general vitality when you have ideas, so the Inspiration slides down into the physical body when you feel. You need it down there for your breathing activity and rhythmical function. The Inspiration unites with general rhythmical activity.

I can now put it like this: Further back in us we experience our feelings, and by entering more deeply into these we have inner experience, which is at a dream level. In this, however, Inspiration lies hidden (see Fig. 21).

A hidden Inspiration slips into rhythmical movement and activity, into our breathing and the circulation of the blood. If we were to have a look at someone who was thinking and feeling we might say: You have ideas and you think; this is something you know. But from this activity Imaginations are continuously instilled into every part of your body to maintain your vitality. You feel—and Inspirations are continually going down into your breathing and circulation.

Below this lies will activity. Among the activities of life between birth and death, will activity in the first place belongs purely to the living physical body, and it is experienced as such, for muscle activity lays claim to the spirit. So we have experience of it in the body, but at the sleep level, for only the spirit can be experienced in full consciousness. Here, it sleeps. But there is Intuition in there. It is genuine Intuition when human beings do what I spoke of the last time and send their inner activity and therefore also the spiritual experience they have into their muscle activity in form of images and thus become doers, people with will intent. They are then truly intuiting. They go outside their I life, letting the I enter into something entirely different, which is the movement of muscles and bones. Thus we can say: Intuition slips into metabolic and movement activity. The spirit therefore has its life in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition.

You see, we now have the spirit wholly inside the body. We have Intuition in metabolism and in the movement of the limbs, Inspiration in rhythmical activity, and Imagination in general vitality. Only the perception of objects exists at the level of images, activity of the spirit in images. Being mere images they are also able to combine with the images of the outside world.

The last time we tried to see soul and body together in our thoughts. We have seen that the soul principle is active in the head and in the nerves and senses, where a continual dying process occurs, which allows the soul principle to come into its own as the organic principle is destroyed.

We have seen that in glandular activity the soul principle lays claim to the physical, but only to a limited extent, so that the gland then secretes matter. When muscles and bones are actively used, the soul principle is completely laid hold of by the physical. I made it very clear that we do not waffle on about an abstract interrelationship between the living physical body, the soul and the spirit, nor of the physical relating in some way to a “psychoid” element. No, we consider the soul in real terms and perceive the way the physical body takes the soul principle into itself and everywhere makes it part of itself. Now we have also seen that the spiritual principle, which initially exists only in images in us, nevertheless also lives in the living physical body.

Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition are not something we grasp the way we do the wind and the clouds. They are something that is very much present in the activity of the living body, slipping across into it, whilst we are only able to hold on to images of the things of the spirit. We are thus also able to penetrate to the spiritual principle in the human being. We can consider the human being in terms of form, of levels of life, of soul content, and of the spirit coming to revelation.

The human form is of course dependent on the fixed stars, but it presents itself to us in visible form. The levels of life are dependent on the planetary sphere. In our ordinary consciousness we cannot see them in physical form. We perceive them in so far as they come to expression in aspects of form. Deep down in us rests the soul principle. We gain access to it by considering the mysterious relationships between the activity of nerves and senses and the soul principle, turning our attention to glandular activity in relation to the life of feeling and everything connected with rhythmical activity. We also saw how the soul principle is connected with the metabolism and limbs. At one extreme of life, however, the spiritual enters into the soul principle; it is only able to take hold of images and pushes Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition down into the physical body. And when the spirit thus pours into the soul, it lives in the soul as the most inward element that human beings possess.

The other extreme does not draw human beings into the particular way in which they have sensory activity from within, ideas and feelings, where human beings go down into the physical, into reality, with their spirit, and where the physical, with the spirit, is tinged with the Inspirations which in turn take in Imaginations that come down. This is something that comes to expression when we contemplate in an inward way a human being who is before us and who is fully at rest. When we study the physiognomy, which shines out when the spirit enters into the living body, sending Inspiration into it, the spirit comes to the surface again, coming out through the impulses given by life and giving the human being first of all the flesh colour of the skin, and whatever else there is by way of physiognomy, showing itself in the noble brow, in the shape of the mouth and chin, the form of the nose, and so on. This spirit, entering into the body as Inspiration, becomes active through the levels of life and thus shows itself in the human being who is at rest.

As soon as people start to walk, to be active, and even if they just blink an eye, we see the Intuition aspect of the spirit which is sent down into the living body. When we look at the way someone walks, and at their gestures, we see the working of that person’s spirit, which, however, enters into the body as Intuition, being present not as spirit but as processes that generate heat, processes of chemical decomposition that occur in the body when a person is active in the world.

When we looked at the form, we had something which the world gives to the human being. Now that we have seen the spirit enter completely into the living body, we find that in activity the human being is in turn giving things to the world. But the price we have to pay for having part in the spirit between birth and death is that we have the spirit not in its reality but in the form of images. We do have the spirit in us as something real when we are between birth and death, but the price we have to pay is that we know this reality only when asleep, albeit in waking sleep. We really should say that life between birth and death means that human beings experience the spirit in the reflected glory of images but have no conscious experience of its reality, which only presents itself through the medium of the living body.

Between birth and death we see the spirit in the living body it has created. It is not really matter which we see, for matter is the outer reflection and not the inner reality of the spirit. We may therefore say that when we see any kind of matter in the world around us or in human beings it always means the the reality is hidden from us and only the surface present itself. There the spirit reveals itself out of the reality of the body and of matter. Fig. 22.

It is different when human beings partake of the spirit. Then the physical aspects, for instance the inner parts of the head—and the outer part, too, if they are not just looking in a mirror, though even then all they have is an image—remain in the background, whilst the spirit is really experienced, though only in its image. In the conscious mind we inwardly see the spirit, but as an image. Sleeping, and also in waking sleep, we perceive the spirit in its activity, but the essential reality of the perception does not come to conscious awareness; it remains outside.

Everything is always completely the other way round.

You see, to consider the human form we have to go a long way, to the great world of the fixed stars. Out in that world lie the impulses responsible for giving the human head, chest and limbs their specific form. Coming closer to the human being we encounter the planetary system, the sphere of the planets, and we find that this creates the levels of life in human beings. Then we have to go right inside the human being to find the soul principle. And when we actually enter into this we find the alternation between waking and sleeping, image and reality. Coming to the human being of mind and spirit we discover the spiritual principle in man.

I am now going to present something to you that many of you may well find to be extraordinarily abstract and indeed most strange. Please take it and think of it as some nuts that you have to crack, for what I intend to develop during these last fifteen minutes may prove important for you when you come to consider the nature of the world one day.

If we really visualize the road we have to travel from the whole universe, the fixed stars, through the planetary system and all the way to inside the human being, something quite specific comes to mind for those who are in a position to have this happen. You see, mathematicians establish the location of a body, or of a point—this is very important for those who work with the theory of relativity today—by thinking of three lines at right angles to one another that intersect in one point.

If they then want to give the location of point A, let us say (Fig. 23), they measure the distance from the three planes defined by the three lines. So if you have those three lines, you can give the location of any point. All it needs is to assume these three axes at right angles to one another, which are called “co-ordinates”. They enable us to define the location of any other point, or line, which after all can only be defined by the points it contains, and so on. (Fig. 23)

Mathematicians are inordinately proud of being able to define any location in this way. They speak of the three coordinates as the x, y and z co-ordinates. Yet for someone who is not just a mathematician but is someone connected with reality, as well as having studied mathematics, a question arises at this point.

Such a person would say: During life between birth and death—our mathematicians today do not work with life between death and rebirth, and everything they work with lies between birth and death—we, as human beings, are really always also in the outer reality, and as human beings we see, or perceive with some other sense, what is in the world outside us. I think you’ll agree that the world looks quite different if I stand in one place or another. When I stand over there—well, there would be a considerable difference due to the fact that when I stand here I look you straight in the eye, and if I were over there I would see you all from the other side. Speaking in terms of reality, then, we can always assess reality only from one particular point of view, for human beings can never completely remove themselves from reality.

In a way modern thinkers are always longing, however, to remove themselves from reality. Physicists want to exclude anything that is subjective. A modern physicist recently asked the question: What exists, really? What has being?—Even in our (German) language, the verb for “to be” (sein) derives from the verb “to see” (sehen), so that if we do not exclude the human being we would have to say, in popular terms: Anything you see, exists.—However, physicists are unable to accept this, and a modern physicist therefore gave the following definition: “Anything that can be measured, exists”. This means the object is not seen in relation to the human being but to an objective measuring rod; the human being is excluded.

Another example of excluding the human being is one I have mentioned on a number of occasions. It is the explanation given for the nebular hypothesis of Laplace. You take a droplet of oil, a playing card on a pin—a sewing pin will also serve—and rotate it, and droplets separate out. But nothing would separate out, and the whole small planetary system would not arise if it were not for the schoolmaster who turned the pin! Yet when people want to explain the universe they leave out the schoolmaster. Otherwise the teacher would have to say: Look, children, there a planetary system is evolving, but I am the one who turns the pin; and out there the great planetary system is evolving, and there is the great God who turns the great pin. The world could not evolve if there were not a god out there, who relatively speaking would be much bigger, as I am the little god to you here.—You see, that is what the teacher should really be saying.

He does not, of course. In modern thinking we have got into the habit of declaring that the point of view does not exist, as it were. It is declared non-existent even in analytical geometry, as I have shown. But then it is difficult to answer the question: Who is it who is looking? Who is really seeing this object here without seeing the x, y and z co-ordinates in perspective? Where is the individual who sees it like this? (Fig. 23) Well, you know, he can’t be in that place, nor in that place, he can’t be in any of those place, for if he were, he’d always see in perspective. But if he were far enough away, over yonder in infinity, he would see the vertical z line in the right way. He’d have to be a devil of a fellow to see this axis of co-ordinates, as it is called, which is shown meeting in a point in Figure 23; for he’d have to be out there in infinity—in that place, that place, and that one, everywhere within infinity. That is the point of view, which has to be everywhere at once, from which to consider all three dimensions as they are at right angles to each other. When we speak of space, and indeed of analytical geometry, the point of view has to be from all points in infinity.

And now let us take the opposite. Let us consider how human beings truly experience themselves inwardly. They feel themselves to be a point at the centre of the universe, and they are really always taking sights. Before them, or rather around them, they have their horizon. Anything at, above or below the horizon is experienced in a way I might describe as follows: They experience along their line of vision—it could also be the line of touch—or somewhere above or below, it might also be over here; in short they increase or decrease the angle, or open it in an upward or downward direction.

Mathematicians do the same thing, but they do so from a specific point of view. In this case they are actually taking the human being into account, though they won’t admit it since it would be disgraceful for a modern thinker to include the human being in one’s approach. So they speak of a point and define a second point somewhere else by determining the deviation from the line of vision. Thus they say: this point here is so far away that there is a possibility—well, I won’t go as far as to introduce you to the cosine, as it is called—of defining it. The point will always be different, however, and so will be its cosine, if the sight is taken from higher up or lower down. And if you really think about it, this is where we find ourselves entirely in the real world. The mathematicians have it; they call it a polar co-ordinate system.

We now arrive at a rather peculiar statement. We are able to say: That’s not a devil of a fellow, for it is always I myself. Wherever I may be, the point at the centre of the co-ordinate system is my point of view. If we are looking at space, which is what we are in fact doing, we are everywhere out there in infinity. We ourselves are that devil of a fellow. But if you consider the centre we have here from everywhere out there in infinity, what lies in between? Between point and infinity lies the circle.

If you go out to infinity, passing through space, you will find something in there. But if you visualize the point of view that is everywhere in infinity, you are in the region where things are seen from the point of view of the fixed stars. If you move inwards to the centre, you are in the region of the human point of view. Between the two lies the circle, or at least an approximate circle: the movements of the planets. It cannot be any other way. When the human being is mediated to the world through the soul, this has to happen through a circular movement, through spheres. This is simply due to the inner constitution of the universe. We therefore have to find the stars that move in orbits between ourselves and infinity.

You see, in very early times, instinctive clairvoyance established mathematics on the basis of this very real situation: cosmic space with its three dimensions and a point of view everywhere at infinity; the sphere and the centre which is oneself. This was the starting point for the mathematics of old. Today the science has become abstract and deals only in formulae, not reality. But if we consider it in an inner way, as we have been doing, we can still get a feeling for the way in which the science which modern mathematicians are forced to put before their mind’s eye as a system of co-ordinates, or polar co-ordinates, originates in the inner structure of the universe.

You see, if Einstein, or one of his followers, began to talk today, you would almost always find that they base themselves on some form of co-ordinate system and then move on to the theory of relativity. It is not surprising that all things become relative in this case. For as soon as you start to consider reality you have to change, or ought to change, into the devil of a fellow who is everywhere at infinity. And it makes no difference if the distance is a mile, or more, or less, or the diameter of the earth or even the sun—for all things become relative. We have the theory of relativity because the point of view is at infinity and it makes no difference how far things are apart. If you consider all the arbitrary reasons that are given, you find everything becomes relative. That is the true, psychological reason. All you have to do is look into these things.

Tomorrow we shall build on the basis we have gained today.

• 24. Janus was an ancient Italian deity said to be the protector of doors and gates. He was shown with a face on the front and another on the back of his head. The month January is named after him.