The Rudolf Steiner Archive

after the eurythmic-dramatic presentation of the “Easter Vigil”

Among the Easter performances that have just passed before our minds were also those that depict how a soul that is about to pass through the gate of death through its own decision is brought back into the world of earthly life through the Easter message. I believe that, of the many impressions that the Faust story can have on us, this scene must be one of the most profound. Now, after the transformation, I would like to say, after the transformation, ¹ the scene that signifies the world with its evolution, bring that you have absorbed as a prospect within the Faustian poetry into your soul, in connection with what was said here yesterday, so to speak, before the transformation, about that meaningful real vision that can arise in the human soul when it steps before the symbol of Jesus Christ resting in the tomb. Let us bear in mind that yesterday we were able to say that the sight of what is connected with human life through its development on earth in relation to the world of Lucifer and Ahriman is evoked through a corresponding spiritual contemplation or spiritual perception. Let us bear in mind that in the Faust epic we have a soul which announces itself to us immediately at the beginning of the poem as having absorbed Ahrimanic knowledge and insights. And then let us look into this soul as it struggles out of its connection with the Ahrimanic wisdom towards the — we may say from our point of view — Christ-imbued source of life: a momentous moment that is presented to us for a human soul. Let us visualize this human soul! There she stands before us with all the knowledge she has absorbed through observing the external material world and its interrelations, with the insight she has been able to gain through the instruments by which the external naturalist attempts to penetrate the interrelations of nature... And what has this soul come to with all the research that is linked to the various instruments and also to the phial containing the juices that “quickly make one drunk” for earthly life? We feel how an Ahrimanic nature already rules at the side of the Faust soul, and how this Ahrimanic nature is linked to what is earthly death. Do we not see how this human soul, filled with Ahrimanic nature, draws the result of its Ahrimanic insights? And this result of knowledge that Ahriman can give to man on earth is what is summarized in the words:

I greet you, you only vial!
Which I now bring down with devotion,
In you I honor human wit and art.
You epitome of the sweet slumber potions,
You distillation of all deadly subtle powers,
Do show your favor to your master!
I see you, pain is alleviated,
I grasp you, the striving is diminished,
The spirit's flood tide ebbs away little by little.
I am expelled into the high sea,
The mirror tide glistens at my feet,
A new day beckons to new shores.

And already this soul has the vision of coming to the other shore, where it may be able to find that which it must believe it cannot find on this earth because of its ahrimanic entanglement. Already it has the vision of crossing over to the other shore:

A chariot of fire floats, on light wings,
Towards me! I feel ready,
On a new path to penetrate the ether,
To new spheres of pure activity.
This lofty life, this divine bliss!
You, still a worm, and do you deserve them?
Yes, just turn your back resolutely
to the lovely sun of the earth!
Dare to tear open the gates,
before which everyone likes to sneak by.
Here it is time to prove by action
That manly dignity does not give way to the height of the gods,
Not to tremble before that dark cave,
In which the imagination condemns itself to its own torment,
To strive towards that passageway,
Around whose narrow mouth the whole of hell is aflame;
To take this step serenely,
And, even if it means flowing into nothingness,

And now that he has also taken up the other Ahrimanic instrument, he is ready to take the path over to those realms that he learned in Ahriman's school are numberless to the soul as long as it is enclosed in the earthly body. And this soul is torn out of this mood by the sound of the Easter bells and the choir of the Easter song. And so the Faust soul has lived an earthly life to now seek within the earthly body what this human soul, as a result of its seeking in the earthly body, is to carry through the gate of death, so that it can carry it up into the spiritual realm where it needs it for its further development.

What you have heard today from the first part of Goethe's “Faust”, and much of what belongs to this part, to this scene of Goethe's “Faust”, first appeared as the completed first part of the poem in 1808. But before that, in 1790, Goethe had already published “Faust, a fragment”, this fragment, which did not yet have the last Gretchen scene. But this fragment did not even have the scene that has brought the events of such significance for Faust's soul to our own soul today. In 1790, Goethe published his fragment without this Easter scene and without the monologue that leads to the deepest depths of human and spiritual experience. And at the end of the 19th century, what Goethe had finished in the 1780s, even as early as the 1770s, was discovered in the 1790s. It was then published under the tasteless title “Urfaust”. In this Urfaust, we do not find, one might say, of course, this Easter scene. Why is it not there? Yes, Goethe, who was a child of his time, had to mature in order to be able to depict the effect of the Christ impulse on Faust's soul in his own way, in accordance with his soul; he first had to mature for this. And Goethe was not ripe for it until 1790. The nineties saw the deepening of Goethe's soul, which found its reflection in the well-known “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”. It falls into the time between the moment when “Faust” was published without the Easter scene and the moment when it was published with the Easter scene. Goethe's soul experienced a profound deepening through what it developed in the “Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”. And it was only through this experience that Goethe realized how he could allow the Easter experience scene to affect Faust's soul.

Now, let us look into this soul of Faust itself, and try to put ourselves in the place of the beginning of Goethe's “Faust,” which is more or less the same in the various successive publications. We know that it reads:

I now, alas! have philosophy,
Jurisprudence and medicine,
And unfortunately also theology!
Thoroughly studied, with hot endeavor.
There I stand now, I poor fool!
And am as wise as before;
I am called Magister, even Doktor,
And for ten years now,
Up and down and hither and thither,
I have led my students by the nose –
And I see that we cannot know anything!

So he has been a lecturer for ten years. Let us assume that he entered the teaching career regularly, then we might think that he became a lecturer around the age of thirty. In fact, he has been leading his students by the nose since the age of thirty! Let us recall what I said yesterday. In the thirties, the human being will stand before the image of the Jupiter existence when he visualizes the seduction I spoke of yesterday. And a vision, a prophetic vision of this seduction, is what one has before one when one stands before Christ Jesus lying in the tomb. Do we not have this vision dramatically developed in Faust? Does he not stand before us before the Easter Mystery, and does he not stand before us, one might say, at the end of the 1830s, before the Easter Mystery? May we not assume that in his feelings, what man must feel from the Easter Mystery, rumbles like a premonition of the Jupiter experience with Lucifer and Ahriman? In Goethe's time one could not present it as one can present it now, but Goethe could present the rumbling sensation in the heart towards the Easter Mystery, and it rumbled in Faust's soul. And is it not as if Faust felt, when Mephisto-Ahriman approaches him, how his soul has fallen prey to the Ahrimanic powers? How he has to save himself from something? Yes, but from what? From what must he save himself? Can we not say that Goethe sensed something of this when, as a mature man, as a mature soul, he allowed the spirit of his own Faust to take effect on him again, as he was able to sense it in his time, of the Easter mood that we have been picturing in our minds these days, and that this gave rise to the need to insert the Easter scene into “Faust”, which did not have this Easter scene before? The “Faust” was re-written into Christian verse with the insertion of the Easter scene between the years 1790 and 1800.

So what years did Faust have to live through? Before which years of life did he shudder so much that he wanted to reach for the vial himself? Well, before the second, descending part of life, that part of life of which we have said how man, when he stands before the vision of the Jupiter existence, knows that later on he must carry to Jupiter that which the Christ can give him as provisions for the journey, because otherwise he would have to go without nourishment in the second half of life. What is Faust seeking? He seeks nourishment for the soul for the second half of life. We have all been seeking it since the time when the Mystery of Golgotha has passed over the evolution of our Earth. We are all seeking it. For that which will take physical and psychic form on Jupiter is already living in the depths of our souls, and we must all feel something of this Faustian mood. We need a power that we cannot have through that which, as human beings, only gives us freedom and thus leads us to Ahriman and Lucifer; we need a power for those impulses in us that are connected with the descending half of life. It is the power of Christ, the power of Christ, which the Christ has after he has passed through the gate of death and has not lived through in an earthly body the second half of man's life. Why did he not live through it? Because this power, which must be bestowed upon people in the second half of life, had to flow into the earth aura so that all people can find themselves through the evolution of the earth. Through the Easter mystery, that which we need to enable us to journey through our entire life on earth with our soul is resurrected. And now imagine this profound connection in Goethe's “Faust”. Faust has absorbed within himself — Goethe knew how to absorb this, because he presented it without the Easter mystery when he published his fragment without the Easter mystery — Faust has absorbed within himself what man can absorb through the connection with Lucifer and Ahriman, what gives us the possibility of a free soul. But Faust, who measures the depths of the soul, is aware that he cannot continue to live with him; he needs something else in order to live. And Goethe was ripe to show what Faust needs, what is the impulse of the Easter Mystery. Does not the Easter Mystery stand profoundly before us in what Goethe made of his “Faust” only as a fully mature man, what he could not yet have included in 1790 because he did not yet understand it?

How did the poetic idea for this poem, which takes us to such depths, come about in the young Goethe? We know that the young Goethe was deeply impressed both by the puppet show of Faust, which he saw, where the fate of Faust was simply presented through puppets, and by the folk play of “Doctor Faust”. This thoroughly popular element came before Goethe's soul. What then is this Faust? And Goethe's soul immediately realized: this Faust must be the striving human being in general, who, through his striving, can dive down into all the depths of the human soul and must find the way up to the bright heights of the spirit. That an inner path must be traversed by a human soul, the young Goethe knew that. For what is it, after all, if not a meditation that Faust experiences in his soul as he gazes at the various signs? It is a meditation that ultimately leads him to the vision of the Earth Spirit that flows through and permeates the Earth. The meditation receives the words in response:

In the flood of life, in the storm of action,
I surge up and down,
Weaving back and forth!
Birth and death,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life,
So I work at the whirring loom of time
And weave the living garment of divinity.

Meditation and counter-meditation! It leads Faust into the depths of life, but how to get out? How to ascend to spiritual heights?

Now that we have placed ourselves before the soul, what a grandiose idea of the striving Faust in Goethe's soul arose from the puppet show and the folk play, and what form this grandiose idea took through the penetration of the Goethean soul into the mystery of the soul, we now ask ourselves: What did Goethe make of Faust throughout his life? After we have realized the magnitude of what Goethe's soul was capable of through the impact of the Faust impulse, we may well ask ourselves: What did these impressions become in artistic and poetic terms? Well, one thing I just said can help us in our quest to understand this 'Faust' in aesthetic and artistic terms as well. Goethe published a fragment that roughly concludes with the cathedral scene in 1790. What makes the “Faust” seem so grandiose to us today is not in it. He added it later, when he was in Rome. In 1787, he added what we now know as the “Witches' Kitchen”. He inserted other scenes into the manuscript at other times. The original manuscript was written and copied by someone else, and at the time the later scenes were added, Schiller himself described it as a “yellowed manuscript”. And when Schiller called upon Goethe at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century to do something to round off Faust, Goethe said that it would be difficult for him to take on the old monster Faust again and to appropriately complete what had been left unfinished for so long. Goethe was afraid of incorporating into this his “Faust” that with which he had later matured, into all that he was and had appeared by the year 1790.

And now let us look at the first part of this “Faust”. Is it not a work that we can clearly see has been patched together from what was created at different times? If people were not attached to traditional judgments, they would see in “Faust” the most magnificent poetic idea that has ever come into the world with regard to the individual human being. At the same time, they would have to admit to themselves that in terms of art and poetry, this “Faust” is the most inconsistent, that it is a thoroughly disharmonious work, into which one could still put many things that are not in it, that has cracks and fissures everywhere, that is artistically far from perfect. Goethe's great genius could only ever complete fragments of what was before his soul. And however much we may admire the magnificent beauty of individual scenes, if we are not merely attached to the traditional judgment that literary historians have passed, but if we are unbiased, we cannot deny that “Faust” as it is is not a harmonious work of art, that it is glued in many places, but shows cracks and fissures everywhere. Why is this so? At a very advanced age, Goethe once again undertook to complete the second part of his Faust, for which he already had individual scenes, to which he added what he could add in his very old age. For example: the beginning of the classical-romantic phantasmagoria, the Helena interlude, was already completed around the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, and some parts were completed earlier. And again, we have every reason not to say, as some literary historians say, that one cannot understand the second part of “Faust,” or, as a very clever man, who is by no means stupid, said, that “Faust” is “a cobbled-together, patched-up concoction of old age.” It is not! On the other hand, it is a work whose task was so great that even Goethe's rich life experience was not enough in his time to shape it. One may well have one's own opinion even about the greatest things in the world. But why is that so? Well, I have already indicated on one occasion, in a lecture series held in The Hague, that this Faust is by no means, I would say, so extraordinarily young in world history. Faust, as he lived in the folk play that Goethe saw and as he lived in the puppet show, represents the human being descending into the depths of spiritual life and the human being wanting to rise to the light of the heights; he represents him in such a way that the greatest poet of modern times needed the Easter mystery for the liberation of his soul. As he appears in the folk play, he is a combination of the external physical reality, of the Dr. Georg Faust, who lived in the second half of the Middle Ages and wandered around like a tramp; of whom Trithem of Sponheim as well as other important men who met him report, and who even had a certain respect for him, the respect that one has for a remarkable personality who, through the way he expresses himself emotionally, knows many things and is capable of many things. And it was not for nothing that this real Doctor Faust was called by the name, as I have once stated here:

Magister Georgius Sabellicus Faustus Junior, fons necromanticorum, Magus Secundus, Chiromanticus Aeromanticus, Pyromanticus, in hydra arte secundus.

That was the name he gave himself. Now, it was common in those days to have many titles, and a long list of similar-sounding titles could be said of Giordano Bruno and many other important minds of the Middle Ages. If today's sophisticated people may find it strange that Trithem von Sponheim and others who knew about the existence of this real Faust thought that he was in contact with demonic powers of the world and the earth and through them was able to accomplish many things, then we must remember that in Luther's time, for example, there was nothing special about telling such a story. We know how Luther himself wrestled with the devil. We know that all this was common practice, the views and stories of that time. But a feeling lived in all this, which helped to shape Faust in the popular consciousness. The feeling lived — I say the feeling and not the concept, not the idea — natural science is coming up, natural science, which brings the Ahrimanic part of real reality before the human soul. And from this arose the feeling that Faust is a personality, and always has been, who has something to do with these Ahrimanic powers. People saw, as it were, the secret spiritual connecting threads that went from the soul of Faust to the Ahrimanic powers. And they found that Faust's destiny was tied to this inclination towards the Ahrimanic powers. That the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic has to do with the entire evolution of the human soul was still sensed and felt from the remnants of ancient clairvoyance and clear-sighted knowledge. And so the Faust figure was linked to this feeling of man's connection with the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers. But at the same time, this intuitive knowledge was already descending into twilight, becoming unclear. And so, one might say, the feeling arose that one could depict the striving human being with all his temptations and dangers for his soul in the figure of Faust. But how this striving of the human being is connected with Lucifer and Ahriman was no longer known exactly. It had become blurred, and that is where the tremendous vagueness came from, which one gets a sense of when one picks up the medieval Faust book, in which all that the folk character is said to have experienced is where everything is thrown together in a grotesque ragout of all kinds of adventures that the human soul experiences in its quest to master all possible demonic and elementary spirits, Ahriman and Lucifer. After they were no longer seen in their full form, after they were shattered and ground into a ragout with all possible elemental spirits of nature, the figure of Doctor Faust was now placed in this ragout in this folk book. It was only Goethe's inspired insight that was able to discern in this gruesome ragout the mighty fundamental idea and to develop it to the point of the Easter Mystery. But it is really quite interesting to observe how, I might say, Lucifer and Ahriman were gradually dismembered into such ragout pieces.

If we go back and search for the figure of Faust in ancient times, we can look in books that were written as popular books at the time and that were in the hands of all those who were dealing with matters related to such things at the time. Augustine's works were very widespread when this book was written, cobbled together, glued together. One has the feeling of a bookseller who wanted to make a book that was as thick as possible, and not as if it were from a writer or even a literary man. But he must have known his Augustine, especially the biography of Augustine. And Augustine presents himself to us in all his development in such a remarkable way. How he at first cannot understand what Christianity is in its essence, how he gradually overcomes the inner resistance that he must bring to bear on Christianity in the development of his soul, first to what can now become known to him from the Manichaean doctrine. And from a great and important man within the Manichaean sect, Augustine receives knowledge from the Manichaean bishop Faustus. And we almost sense who this Faustus senior is, in comparison to whom the Faustus I mentioned earlier calls himself Faustus junior. He is the one whom Augustine once encountered in ancient times, the one who represented something of the Manichaean doctrine as Faustus, as bishop of the Manichaeans.

But what did he represent of the Manichaean doctrine? That which is corroded by Ahriman, that which no longer allows one to see how man, with his soul, is connected to the whole cosmos, to all cosmic, all stellar impulses. One can say: Even in the Manichean Bishop Faustus, the bond of knowledge that leads up to the cosmic insights that show how the human soul is born out of the cosmos, and which one must know if one wants to understand the Easter mystery in truth, is already torn. So it could be that in the person who wrote the folk book about Doctor Faust, precisely through the figure that Augustine describes as the Manichean bishop Faustus, it could emerge in this writer and compiler through the figure of Faustus, who had fallen prey to Ahriman. But since everything had become blurred, he did not understand that it was going against Ahriman. We see the scraps of the Ahrimanic danger shimmering through the stories of the folk play, but we see nothing clear. Yet we can get a clear feeling that Faustus is to be presented as the representative of the striving human being, so that danger threatens him from the Ahrimanic side. And much of what has been added to the Faust figure as it developed up to Goethe has been added by that Manichean Bishop Faustus, Faust senior. Many chapters of the folk tale seem as if they had been copied, but badly copied, only from the book in which Augustine describes his own development and his encounter with Bishop Faustus. We can prove that the Ahrimanic trait in the Faust figure points in this direction, and that when the folk book was written only the last dark urge remained to depict the Ahrimanic elements of human nature in the Faust figure.

And now, what about the Luciferic element? How were the Luciferic elements chopped up into those ragout pieces, which were then cooked into the ragout of elemental spirits and pieces of Lucifer and Ahriman, as I just said? Yes, we have to search if we want to find the connection between Faust and Lucifer. We can also search for it historically, we don't even have to go terribly far, we just have to go to Basel, and we can find clues in Basel as to how Lucifer was chopped up into a ragout. We are told that Erasmus of Rotterdam met with Faust in Basel, where they wanted to have a meal in the college, but could not find the right food. And since Erasmus lacked something that should now taste good to him, he told Faust, who was sitting with him and wanted to eat with him, but they had nothing right. So the Faust saga tells us that Faustus was now able to suddenly bring to the table, cooked and roasted, from somewhere - we don't know where - very strange birds that were not otherwise available in Basel. So we see a scene between Erasmus of Rotterdam and Faust, in which Faust is able to present such birds, which could not be bought in Basel at the time, nor far and wide in the surrounding area, to Erasmus. What is it actually? As such, it is not at all comprehensible in the legend, one can say, completely incomprehensible, but it becomes more understandable to us if we go back and bring together what we can gain from the writings of Erasmus of Rotterdam, who himself tells us that he made the acquaintance of a certain Faustus Andrelinus in Paris. This Faustus Andrelinus was an extremely learned man, but also an extremely sensual man. At first, Erasmus became so familiar with this Faustus that he had no real taste for the sensual sides of this Faustus. But again, we hear about a meal that the two are said to have eaten together. Now, however, two learned gentlemen of the time, such as Erasmus of Rotterdam and Faustus Andrelinus – we cannot expect them to serve each other such birds and in such a way, as Faustus of Basel is said to have served them to Erasmus. So it is likely that what has been handed down to us is just a kind of, I would say, joking speech that the two exchanged at the meal. But we do get a little behind this jocular talk when we also hear within this talk that Faust – this time it is probably Faust – was not satisfied with what was served to him, and demanded something else. Faust would now like to eat, in order to particularly torment himself, strange birds and rabbits; yes, strange birds and rabbits. Erasmus initially has the idea that this must mean something. So he behaves exactly like some theosophists who reflect on what things mean. Well, then the other one says, okay, he wants to do without the rabbits. Erasmus said: Could it not mean flies and ants? He wants to do without the rabbits. But the birds really are flies, and he wants to kill himself with flies for a change. Now we are very far. Now the birds have transformed into flies through astral transformation. And in Goethe we have the god of the flies in the figure of Mephisto. All that is needed is the spirit that commands these beings, and it could conjure up these beings. And so we have built the connecting bridge from the incomprehensible Basel legend and the strange birds to the flies that simply come from the devil. And we need not be surprised that the devil presents flies to him whom he invites to the table. But what kind of soul Faustus Andrelinus has, what kind of soul he has, that much becomes clear to us when we follow Erasmus a little further on his journey in Paris. In Paris, Erasmus was not yet quite inclined to engage with this Faustus Andrelinus character. But then he has to make a trip to London. There he writes that he has now learned – truly, Erasmus, think! , that he had manners like a coarse peasant, — that he has now learned to bow and even knows how to move around on the court parquet! And, yes, Erasmus writes it, that he lives in an atmosphere where, as you come and go, you always kiss each other by mistake. One recognizes from this that he wants to meet the tastes of his Parisian friend. He writes: “Come over here.” And if the gout prevents you too much, come over through the air in the spirit chariot. That is an element for you! — One sees that Faustus has a connection with the Luciferic kind of soul tendency.

With Goethe, we then encounter how Faust carries out his seductions by seducing Gretchen and so on. Lucifer has really fallen so far from the surroundings of the Faust figure that one must already do such literary investigations if we want to state the connection of Faust with Lucifer in the Parisian Faust. But we literally see Faust standing there, Lucifer and Ahriman at his side, albeit indistinctly through the confused time, boiled down into a ragout in the folk play. Should we be surprised to find in the folk play and folk drama, and even in Marlowe's Faust, something that is a remnant of ancient beliefs, still rooted in those times when man's connection with Ahriman and Lucifer was recognized through atavistic clairvoyance? But all this has become blurred, and in the literary product of which we have spoken, it is presented in a thoroughly blurred way. Goethe sensed the deep connection. But what could Goethe not do? He could not separate Lucifer and Ahriman from each other. They merged for him into the hybrid figure of Mephisto, in whom one does not really know whether it is the devil, Ahriman, or the real Mephisto. For he has also taken upon himself what Lucifer has. Goethe receives the ragout, as it were; he senses that Ahriman and Lucifer are at work, but he cannot yet sort it out; he devours them in the occult impossibility of the figure of Mephisto, who is a hybrid of Ahriman and Lucifer. One would like to be able to name the time that Goethe looked into by getting to know the Faust book: the last darkening of an old knowledge of this matter, the dying evening twilight of the old knowledge of Ahriman and Lucifer. And Goethe's Faust is the first dawn of the as yet unascended knowledge of Ahriman and Lucifer, dark and confused in the figure of Mephisto, Ahriman and Lucifer still mixed up. But already with the need to depict what the human soul can have by allowing itself to be affected by what has flowed into the earth's aura through the Christ being having passed through the mystery of Golgotha!

The Easter Mystery appears to us as the dawn of a new era of spiritual life for humanity in Goethe's “Faust”, which, despite its grandiose nature, still has something confused about it, something of a dark, foggy dawn. It appears to us as something within this dark dawn that we can see when we climb a mountain and see the sun rise earlier than we could see it before we stood on the mountain. We feel how one of the greatest of men, in his striving for the renewal of ancient knowledge, turns his soul towards the Paschal Mystery, when we allow Goethe's Faust to take effect on us. And if we allow it to take effect on us in the right way, then we feel what can take place in the heart of one of the greatest of men when this human heart has been touched by the Paschal Mystery, as Goethe himself felt at the same time. There is also something in this intuitive presentiment of Goethe to the Easter Mystery in Goethe's anticipation of it, is something like a hint: Yes, after the dawn, into which the first dark-light rays of the Easter Mystery shine, will come the sun of a new spiritual knowledge. The human soul will rise from the grave of darkened knowledge into which it too must descend. In the course of its development, the human soul will experience the Easter Mystery, the resurrection of that which is the Christ impulse in its deep, grave-like depths, when it unites with the power that emanates from the contemplation of the Christ Easter Mystery.

So, one would like to say, we feel Goethe's call and, after letting the tragedy of the Easter mystery take effect on us, would like to transform it into the call: May spiritual knowledge appropriate to the future rise in human hearts, in human souls! May human hearts and human souls, after sensing the deepest tragedy of the Easter mystery, feel and experience its depth in their innermost being, and may they experience resurrection in themselves through Christ!

May you, today, through the words that I have taken the liberty of speaking to you, absorb something of the feeling in your soul, so that you are united here, in our building dedicated to spiritual research, so that you, through the power of your souls into the future, something of that resurrection impulse which is so powerfully illustrated in the Easter mystery, and from which we could see how the greatest spirits of that time, which has now passed away, longed for it.

Feel in “Faust” something of what the magical sound of the Easter bells can resonate in the spirit of your souls.

• 1. At the words “Christ is Risen,” the black color of the scene transformed into a red one.

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]

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.

My dear friends,

I would have liked to carry out for you today some experiments to round out the series of facts that lead us to our goal. It is not possible to do so, however, and I must accordingly arrange my lecture somewhat differently from the way I intended. The reason for this is partly that the apparatus is not in working order and partly because we lack alcohol today, just as we lacked ice yesterday.

We will therefore take up in more detail the things that were begun yesterday. I will ask you to consider all these facts that were placed before you for the purpose of obtaining a survey of the relationships of various bodies to the being of heat. You will realize that certain typical phenomena meet us. We can say: These phenomena carry the impress of certain relations involving the being of heat, at first unknown to us. Heat and pressure exerted on a body or the state of aggregation that a body assumes according to its temperature, also the extent of space occupied, the volume, are examples. We are able on the one side, to see how a solid body melts, and can establish the fact that during the melting of the solid, no rise in temperature is measurable by the thermometer or any other temperature-measuring instrument. The temperature increase stands still, as it were, during the melting. On the other hand, we can see the change from a liquid to a gas, and there again we find the disappearance of the temperature increase and its reappearance when the whole body has passed into the gaseous condition. These facts make up a series that you can demonstrate for yourselves, and that you can follow with your eyes, your senses and with instruments. Yesterday, also, we called attention to certain inner experiences of the human being himself which he has under the influence of warmth and also under the influence of other sense qualities such as light and tone. But we saw that magnetism and electricity were not really sense impressions, at least not immediate sense impressions, because as ordinary physics says, there is no sense organ for these entities. We say, indeed, that so far as electrical and magnetic properties are concerned we come to know them through determining their effects, the attraction of bodies for instance, and the many other effects of electrical processes. But we have no immediate sense perception of electricity and magnetism as we have for tone and light.

We then noted particularly, and this must be emphasized, that our own passive concepts, by which we represent the world, are really a kind of distillation of the higher sense impressions. Wherever you make an examination you will find these higher concepts and will be able to convince yourselves that they are the distilled essence of the sense impressions. I illustrated this yesterday in the case of the concept of being. You can get echoes of tone in the picture of the conceptual realm, and you can everywhere see showing through how these concepts have borrowed from light . But there is one kind of concept where you cannot do this, as you will soon see. You cannot do it in the realm of the mathematical concepts. In so far as they are purely mathematical, there is no trace of the tonal or the visible. Now we must deceive ourselves here. Man is thinking of tone when he speaks of the wave number of sound vibrations. Naturally I do not refer to this sort of thing. I mean all that is obtained from pure mathematics. Such things, for instance, as the content of the proposition of Pythagoras, that the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180°, or that the whole is greater than the part, etc. The basis of our mathematical concepts does not relate itself to the seen or the heard, but it relates itself in the last analysis to our will impulse. Strange as it may seem to you at first, you will always find this fact when you look at these things from the psychological point of view, as it were. The human being who draws a triangle (the drawn triangle is only an externalization) is attaining in concept to an unfolding of the will around the three angles. There is an unfolding of action around three angles as shown by the motion of the hand or by walking, by turning of the body. The thing that you have within you as a will-concept, that in reality you carry into the pure mathematical concept. That is the essential distinction between mathematical concepts and other concepts. This is the distinction about which Kant and other philosophers waged such controversy. You can distinguish the inner determination of mathematical concepts. This distinction arises from the fact that mathematical concepts are so rigidly bound up with our own selves, that we carry our will nature into them. Only what subsists in the sphere of the will is brought into mathematical operations. This is what makes them seem so certain to us. What is not felt to be so intimately bound up with us, but is simply felt through an organ placed in a certain part of our make-up, that appears uncertain and empirical. This is the real distinction. Now, I wish to call your attention to a certain fact. When we dip down into the sphere of will, whence came, in a vague and glimmering way, the abstractions which make up the sum of our pure arithmetical and geometrical concepts, we enter the unknown region where the will rules, a region as completely unknown to us in the inner sense, as electricity and magnetism are in the outer sense. Yesterday I endeavored to illustrate this by asking you to imagine yourselves living, thinking rainbows with your consciousness in the green, in consequence of which you did not perceive the green but perceived the colors on each side of it, fading into the unknown. I compared the red to the dipping down inwardly into the unknown sphere of the will and the blue-violet to the outward extension into the spheres of electricity and magnetism and the like.

Now I am inserting at this point in our course this psychological-physiological point of view, as it might be called, because it is very essential for the future that people should be led back again to the relation of the human being to physical observations. Unless this relationship is established, the confusion that reigns at present cannot be eliminated. We will see this as we follow further the phenomena of heat. But it is not so easy to establish this relationship in the thinking of today. The reason is just this, that modern man cannot easily bridge the gap between what he perceives as outer space phenomena in the world, or better, as outer sense phenomena and what he experiences within. In these modern times there is such a pronounced dualism between all which we experience as knowledge of the outer world and what we experience inwardly, that it is extraordinarily difficult to bridge this gap, But the gap must be bridged if physics is to advance. To this end we must use the intuitive faculties rather than the rational when we relate something external to what goes on within man himself. Thus we can begin to grasp how we must orient ourselves, in observing phenomena so difficult as those arising from heat. Let me call your attention to the following:

Suppose you learn a poem by heart. You will, as you learn it, first find it necessary to become acquainted with the ideas that underlie the poem. At first you will always have the tendency, when you recite the poem, to let those ideas unroll in your mind. But you know that the more frequently you recite the poem, especially when there is a lapse of time between the recitations, the less intensely you are obliged to think of the ideas. There may come a time when it is not necessary to think at all, but simply to reel off the recitation mechanically. We never actually reach this point; do not wish to, in fact, but we approach the condition asymptotically as it were. Our feelings as human beings prevent us from reaching this stage of purely mechanical repetition, but it is thinkable that we would get to the point where we needed to think not at all, but when we spoke the first line the rest of the poem would follow without any thinking about it. You recognize the similarity between such a condition and the approach of the hyperbola to its asymptotes. But this leads us to the conception that when we speak a poem we are dealing with two different activities working simultaneously in our organism. We are dealing with a mechanical reeling-off of certain processes, and along with this go the processes included in our soul concepts. On the one hand, we have what we can properly speak of as playing itself out mechanically in space, and on the other hand, we have a soul process which is entirely non-spatial in nature.

When now, you fasten your attention simply on that which reels itself off mechanically, and you do this in thought, for instance, if you imagine you recited a poem in an unknown language, then you have simply the mechanical process. The instant you accompany this mechanical process with thinking, then you have an inner soul activity that cannot be brought out into space. You cannot express in space the thinking with which a man accompanies the recitation, as you can the mechanical processes of actual speaking, of the pronouncing of words.

Let me give you an analogy. When we follow the heating of a solid body up to the time it arrives at its melting point, the temperature becomes higher. We can see this on the thermometer. When the body begins to melt, the thermometer stands still until the melting is complete. There is an analogy between what we can follow with the thermometer, the outer physical process, and what we can follow physically in the spoken word. And there is an analogy also between what escapes us, and lies in the concepts of the reciter and what happens to the heat while the melting goes on. Here you see, we have an example where we can, by analogy, at least bridge the gap between an outer observation and something in the human being. In other realms than that of speech we do not have such ready examples to bridge the gap. This is because in speech there is, on the one hand, the possibility imaginable, at least, that a person could mechanically speak out something learned by heart. Or on the other hand, that the person would not speak at all but simply think about it and thus remove it entirely from the realm of space. In other spheres we do not have the opportunity to make this cleavage and see precisely how one activity passes over into another. Especially is this difficult when we wish to follow the nature of heat. In this case we have to set out to investigate physiologically and psychologically how heat behaves when we have taken it up into ourselves.

Yesterday, by way of illustration, I said to you: “I go into a room that is comfortably warmed, I sit down and write.” I cannot so directly find the inter-relationships between what I experience or feel when I go into the warm room. What goes on within me parallels the outer warmth, when I write my thoughts down. But I cannot determine the relationship so readily as I can between speaking something and thinking about it. Thus it is difficult to find the something within that corresponds to the outer sensation of warmth. It is a question of gradually approaching the concepts that will lead us further in this direction and in this connection I want to call your attention to something you know from your anthroposophy.

You know, when we make the attempt to extend our thinking by meditation, to increase its inner intensity, and so to work with our thoughts that we come again and again into the condition where we know we are using soul-forces without the help of the body, we notice a certain thing. We notice that in order to do this, our entire inner soul life has to change. With ordinary abstract thoughts man cannot enter the higher region of human soul life. There thoughts become picture-like and they have to be translated out of the imaginative element in order to get them into abstract form, if they are to be brought into the outer world which is not grasped by the imaginative element. But you need to understand a method of looking at these things, such as is presented, for instance, in my Occult Science. In this book the endeavor is to be as true to the facts as possible, and it is this which has so disturbed the people who are only able to think abstractly. For the attempt must be made to get things over into picture form, as I have done to some extent in the description of the Saturn and Sun states. There you will find purely picture concepts mixed in with the others. It is very hard for people to go over into the pictures, because these things cannot be put into the abstract form. The reason for this is that when we think abstractly, when we move within the narrow confines of concepts, in which people today are so much at home, and especially so in the realm of natural science, when we do this we are using ideas completely dependent on our bodies. We cannot, for instance, do without our bodies when we set out to think through the things set forth as laws in the physics books. There we must think in such a way that we use our bodies as instruments. When we rise to the sphere of the imagination, then the abstract ideas must be completely altered, because our inner soul life no longer uses the physical body.

Now you can take what I might call a comprehensive view of the realm of imaginative thought. This realm of imaginative thought has in us nothing to do with what is tied up in our outer corporeality. We rise to a region where we live as beings of soul and spirit without dependence on our corporeality. In other words, the instant we enter the realm of the imaginative, we leave space. We are then no longer in space.

Note now, this has an extremely important bearing. I have in the previous course, made a very definite differentiation between mere kinematics and what enters into our consideration as mechanical, such as mass, for instance. As long as I consider only kinematics, I need only think of things. I can write them down on a blackboard or a sheet of paper and complete the survey of motion and space so far as my thinking takes me. But in that case I must remain within what can be surveyed in terms of time and space. Why is this? This is so for a very definite reason. You must make the following clear to yourselves: All human beings, as they exist on earth, are as you yourselves, within time and space. They are bounded by a definite space and are related as space objects to other space objects. Therefore, when you speak of space, you are not able, considering the matter in an unprejudiced way, to take seriously the Kantian ideas. For if space were inside of us, then we could not ourselves be within space. We only think space is inside of us. We can free ourselves of this fancy, of this notion, if we consider the fact that this being-within space has a very real meaning for us. If space were inside of us, it would have no meaning for a person whether he were born in Moscow or Vienna. But where we are born has a very real significance. As a terrestrial-empirical person, I am quite completely a product of space facts. That is, as a human being, I belong to relations that form themselves in space. Likewise, with time, you would all be different persons if you had been born 20 years earlier. That is to say, your life does not have time inside of it, but time has your life within it. Thus as experiencing persons, you stand within time and space. And when we talk of time and space, or when we make a picture of will impulses, as I have explained we do in geometry, this is because we ourselves live inside of spatial and temporal relations, and are therefore quite definitely conditioned by them, and so are able, a priori, to speak of them as we do in mathematics. When you go over to the concept of mass, this is not so. The matter must then be put otherwise. In respect to mass, you are dealing with something quite special. You cannot say that you cut out a portion of time or space, but rather that you live in the general space mass and make it into your own mass. This mass then, is within you. It cannot be gainsaid that this mass with all its activities, all of its potentialities, is active inside of you; at this moment it falls into a different category from time and space so far as its relations to you are concerned. It is precisely because you yourself take part, as it were, with your inner being in the properties of the mass, because you take it up into your being, that it does not allow itself to be brought into consciousness like time and space. In the realm where the world gives us our own substance, we thus enter an unknown region. This is related to the fact that our will is, for instance, closely connected with the phenomena of mass inside us. But we are unconscious of these phenomena; we are asleep to them. And we are related to the will activity and accompany mass phenomena within us in no other way than we are to the world in general between going to sleep and waking up. We are not conscious of either one. Both these things are hidden from human consciousness, and in this respect, there is no immediate distinction between them.

Thus we gradually bring these things nearer to the human being. It is this that the physicists shy away from, the bringing of such things near to man. But in no other way can we obtain real concepts except by developing relationship between the human being and the world, a relationship that does not exist at the start, as in the case of time and space. We speak of time and space, let us say, out of our rational faculties, whence comes the remoteness of the mathematical and kinematical sciences. Of the things experienced merely through the senses, in an external fashion, things related to mass, we can at first speak only in an empirical fashion. But we can analyze the relation between the activity of a portion of mass within us and outer mass activity. As soon as we do this we can begin to deal with mass in the same way that we deal with the obvious relation between ourselves and time or ourselves and space. That is, we must grow inwardly into such relation with the world in our physical concepts, as we have for the mathematical or kinematical concepts.

It is a peculiar thing that, as we loosen ourselves from our own bodies in which all those things take place to which we are asleep, as we raise ourselves to imaginative concepts, we really take a step nearer the world. We approach always nearer to that which otherwise reigns in us unconsciously. There is no other way to enter into the objectivity of the facts than to push forward with our own developed inner soul forces. At the same time that we detach ourselves from our own materiality, we approach more and more closely to what is going on in the outside world.

However, it is not so easy to obtain even the most elementary experiences in this region, since a person must so transform himself that he pays attention to things that are not noticed at all under ordinary circumstances. But now, I will tell you something that will probably greatly astonish you. Let us suppose you have advanced further on the path of imaginative thinking. Suppose you have really begun to think imaginatively. You will then experience something that will astonish you. It will be much easier than it formerly was for you to recite in a merely mechanical way a poem that you have learned by heart. It will not be more difficult for you, but less so. If you examine your soul organism without prejudice and with care, you will at once find that you are more prone to recite a poem mechanically without thinking about it, if you have undergone an occult training than if you have not undergone such a training. You do not dislike this going over into the mechanical so strongly as you did before the occult development. It is such things as this that are not usually stated but are meant when it is said over and over again: The experiences you have in occult training are really opposed to the concepts that are ordinarily had before you enter occult training and thus it is, when the more advanced stage is reached, that one comes to look more lightly on the ideas of ordinary life. And therefore, anyone who advances in occultism is exposed to the danger of afterwards becoming a greater mechanist than before. An orderly occult training guards against this, but the tendency to become materialistic is quite marked in the very people who have undergone occult development. I will, by example, tell you why.

You see, in ordinary life, it is really, as the theorists say it is, the brain thinks. But ordinarily, a man does not actually experience this fact. It is quite possible in this ordinary life to carry out such a dialogue as I did in my childhood with a youthful friend who as a crass materialist and became more and more so. He would say, “When I think my brain does the thinking.” I would say to that: “ Yes, but when you are with me you always say, I will do this, I think. Why do you not say, my brain will do this, my brain thinks? You are always speaking an untruth.” The reason is that for the theoretical materialist, quite naturally, there does not exist the possibility of observing the processes in the brain. He cannot observe these physical processes. Therefore, materialism remains for him merely a theory.

The moment a person advances somewhat from imaginative to inspirational ideas, he becomes able really to observe the parallel processes in the brain. Then what goes on in the material part of the brain becomes really visible. Aside from the fact that it is extremely seductive, the things a person can observe in his own activity appear to him more and more wonderful to a high degree. For this activity of the brain is observable as something more wonderful than all that the theoretical materialists can describe about it. Therefore, the temperature comes to grow materialistic for the very reason that the activity of the human brain has become observable. Only one is, as has been said, protected from this.

But as I have explained to you these steps in occult development, I have at the same time showed you how this development creates the possibility of a deeper penetration into material processes. This is the extraordinary thing. He who functions in the spirit simply as an abstract thing, will be relatively powerless in the face of nature. He grows into contact with other natural phenomena as he has already grown into contact with time and space.

We must now set up on the one side, all the things we have just tried to place before our minds, and on the other side, those things that have met us from the realm of heat.

What has come to us from the realm of heat? Well, we followed the rise of temperature as we warmed a solid body to melting point. We showed how the temperature rise disappeared for a time, and then re-appeared until the body began to boil, to evaporate. When we extended our observations, another thing appeared. We could see that the gas produced passed over in all directions on its surroundings. (Fig. 1a), seeking to distribute itself in all directions, and could only be made to take on form if its own pressure were opposed by an equal and opposite pressure brought to bear from the outside. These things have been brought out by experiment and will be further cleared up by other experiments. The moment the temperature is lowered to the point where the body can solidify, it can give itself a form (Fig. 1b). When we experience temperature rise and fall, we experience what corresponds externally to form. We are experiencing the dissolution of form and the re-establishment of it. The gas shows us the dissolution, the solid pictures for us the establishment of form. We experience the transition between these two, also, and we experience it in an extremely interesting fashion. For, imagine to yourselves the solid and the gas and the liquid, the fluid body standing between. This liquid need not be enclosed by a vessel surrounding it completely, but only on the bottom and sides. On the upper side, the liquid forms its own surface perpendicular to the line between itself and the center of the earth. Thus we can say that we have here a transition form between the gas and the solid (Fig. 1c). In a gas we never have such a surface. In a liquid such as water, we have one surface formed. In the case of a solid, we have that all around the body which occurs in the liquid only on the upper surfaces.

Now this is an extremely interesting and significant relation. For it directs our attention to the fact that a solid body has over its entire surface something corresponding to the upper surface of a liquid, but that it determines the establishment of the surface on a body of water. It is at right angles to the line joining it to the center of the earth. The whole earth conditions the establishment of the surface. We can therefore say: In the case of water, each point within it has the same relation to the entire earth that the points in a solid have to something within the solid. The solid therefore includes something which in the case of water resides in the relation of the latter to the earth. The gas diffuses. The relation to the earth does not take part at all. It is out of the picture. Gases have no surface at all.

You will see from this that we are obliged to go back to an old conception. I called your attention in a previous lecture to the fact that the old Greek physicists called solid bodies Earth. They did this, not account of some superficial reason such as has been ascribed to them by people today, but they did it because they were conscious of the fact that the solid, of itself, takes care of that which is the case of water is taken care of by the earth as a whole. The solid takes into itself the role of the earthly. It is entirely justified to put the matter in this way: The earthly resides within a solid. In water it does not reside within, but the whole earth takes up the role of forming a surface on the liquid.

Thus you see, when we proceed from solid bodies to water, we are obliged to extend our considerations not only to what actually lies before us but in order to get an intelligent idea of the nature of water, we must extend them to include the water of the whole earth and to think of this as a unity in relation with the central point of the earth. To observe a “fragment” of water as a physical entity is absurd, just as much so as to consider a cut-off garment of my little finger as an organism. It would die at once. It only has meaning as an organism if it is considered in its relation to the whole organism. The meaning that the solid has in itself, can only be attached to water if we consider it in relation to the whole earth. And so it is with all liquids on earth.

And again, when we pass on from the fluid to the gaseous, we come to understand that the gaseous removes itself from the influence of the earth. It does not form surfaces. It partakes of everything which is not terrestrial. In other words, we must not merely look on the earth for the activities of a gas, we must bring in the environment of the earth to help us out, we must go out into space and seek there the forces involved. When we wish to learn the laws of the gaseous state, we become involved in nothing less than astronomical considerations.

Thus you see how these things are related to the whole terrestrial scheme when we examine the phenomena that we have up to this time simply gathered together. And when we come to such a point as the melting or boiling point, then there enter in things that must now appear to us as very significant. For, if we consider the melting point we pass from the terrestrial condition of the solid body where it determines its own form and relations, to something which includes the whole earth. The earth takes the sold captive when the latter goes over into the fluid state. From its own kingdom, the solid body enters the terrestrial kingdom as a whole when we reach the melting point. It ceases to have individuality. And when we carry the fluid body over into the gaseous condition, then we come to the point where the connection with the earth as shown by the formation of a liquid surface is loosened. The instant we go from a liquid to a gas, the body loosens itself from the earth, as it were, and enters the realm of the extra-terrestrial. When we consider a gas, the forces active in it are to be thought of as having escaped from the earth. Therefore, when we study these phenomena we cannot avoid passing from the ordinary physical-terrestrial into the cosmic. For we no longer are in contact with reality if our attention is not turned to what is actually working in the things themselves.

But now another phenomena meets us. Consider such a thing as the one you know very well and to which I have called your attention, namely that water behaves so remarkably, in that ice floats on water, or, stated otherwise, is less dense than water. When it goes over into the fluid condition its temperature rises, and it contracts and becomes denser. Only by virtue of this fact can ice float on the surface of the water. Here we have between zero and four degrees, water showing an exception to the general rule that we find when temperature increases, namely that bodies become less and less dense as they are warmed up. This range of four degrees, where water expands as the temperature is lowered, is very instructive. What do we learn from this range? We learn that the water sets up an opposition. As ice it is a solid body with a kind of individuality, but opposes the transition to an entirely different sphere. It is very necessary to consider such things. For then we begin to get an understanding as to why, under certain conditions, the temperature as determined by a thermometer disappears, say at the melting or boiling points. It disappears just as our bodily reality disappears when we rise to the realm of imagination. We will go into the matter a little more deeply, and it will not appear so paradoxical when we try to clear up further the following: What happens then, when a heat condition obliges us to raise the temperature to the third power, or in this case to go into the fourth dimension, thus passing out of space altogether? Let us at this time, put this proposition before our souls and tomorrow we ill speak further about it. Just as it is possible for our bodily activity to pass over into the spiritual when we enter the imaginative realm, so we can find a path leading from the external and visible in the realm of heat tot he phenomena that are pointed to by our thermometer when the temperature rise we are measuring with it disappears before our eyes. What process goes on behind this disappearance? That is the question which we are asking ourselves today. Tomorrow we will speak of it further.

at the first Anthroposophical College Course at the Goetheanum

Question: How can we recognize the different temperaments in children and in ourselves?

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to say a few words about temperament, more to point out how, under the influence of the pedagogy that we want to cultivate in Waldorf schools, intellectualism and the other soul qualities gradually become an art of education. What is important is that it should not be a matter of mere skill or of pure science in education, but that it should be an art. This presupposes that one is able to observe the human being from all sides, that one has made a great effort to grasp the nuances of the soul life as revealed in the different temperaments. First more theoretically, then, as soon as one has grasped what you find in our anthroposophical literature in various descriptions of the temperaments, by applying it to life. In many cases, this is a method of convincing oneself of the truth that anthroposophy can help when it is seen in the spirit; it is a method of having life confirm it. Life's experiences will present themselves to us at every turn, showing how what is seen in the spirit - or even just appropriated by learning what the seer has seen - must then be transferred into life.

So it should be a more or less long path of one's own study of the human being, and I would like to say about the whole human being. When this has been passed on to the teacher, then what comes out at the end is something like a rounded handling of life. Let us assume that a teacher has been trained in the way I have only been able to sketch it out, in that he has looked into the being of the developing human being with certain glances, and he comes to teach after such preparation. Then the following can happen: he speaks with a child in class. This child, to whom he asks a question, will prepare to answer with a certain ease and indifference. The teacher has a certain idea of how the answer should be. The child easily decides to give the answer, gives an answer without showing that the decision is difficult for him. In the end, one has the feeling that —- one acquires a certain certainty in this feeling only by allowing what I have described to happen: Yes, that is an answer, it is approximately correct, but this answer came about because this child has forgotten much of what I have already taught. The answer is such that much more could be added to it. And I may be led to add much more. The child accepts this and sits down again. I am dealing with a sanguine child.

I ask a question of a second child. The child shows me as I get up that it takes a certain resolve to approach the question. So it allows the question to approach it, not moving its face back and forth, but looking at me quite rigidly. It allows the question to approach it. Now, after it has heard the question, it is silent for a while. It will take a special art to observe and evaluate such reactions in the right way when teaching in a game of questions and answers. Only after a certain pause, which is, so to speak, completely neutral, can you see an effort in the child to come to a decision, to formulate the answer. One will find that the answer is difficult for him, that the child has to struggle to formulate the answer. For such things one must be able to acquire the necessary sense of tact. And one will generally find that this child brings everything he can muster to give the answer. And one will notice from the child's whole bearing – especially from the fact that he probably lowers his face a little – that he is not entirely satisfied with his answer. One will therefore be able to notice anticipation and retrospective feeling, anticipation and empathy before and after the answer: one is dealing with a melancholy child.

You ask a third child a question. You may need to ask the question a second time, because you realize that the child has not fully understood it. The child barely takes in the question completely, you may have to make an effort to formulate the question again forcefully, and so on. Then the child does not make the gesture with his hand, but in his soul [Rudolf Steiner demonstrates the gesture]. It says something to you; there is then something in the words - you have to have a feeling for this - sometimes something that does not correspond to the question: you are dealing with a phlegmatic child.

Then a fourth child. It has long been noticed that this child is eager to answer and wants to be asked questions. You ask it a question and you can hear how the answer bubbles up. How it says something in some way beyond the answer that one expected. This has nothing to do with the method, or that the answer may not be given correctly, but it is a matter of the habitus, how the child behaves, namely that it pushes itself to do so. One must develop a feeling for what is going on in the sphere of temperament – because it is not at all the case that the child who pushes to answer and wants to be asked is much more knowledgeable than the other. Perhaps it does not even know as much as the phlegmatic child. It is not a matter of the method or something learned, but of the feeling habitus, the sentience habitus. There may be a very poor answer. Nevertheless, you can recognize the choleric child by the way he behaves. And so, if you observe the essence of the human being in the right, lively way – if you stand in front of the children in the first lesson, you can tell from their corresponding expression – if you are only able to assess them correctly – what temperament you are dealing with.

Of course, this is just one example. It can also be observed in other ways. What matters is that the educational theory gained from anthroposophy becomes an art of education, so that, just as the artist nuances in color, sees something in color that the other person cannot see, so one sees something in the child that the other person does not see and perceive, and so one must first become acquainted with the nature of the child.

Question: How can we influence the temperaments through colors?

Rudolf Steiner: I refer you to the booklet “The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy”, which was published many years ago. I will try to explain some of it to you.

Let us assume, then, that a child faces you at an early age as a choleric child. It will not take a game of questions and answers to figure it out, but it may show itself by kicking terribly at every opportunity, by throwing itself on the floor and beating itself. All these expressions are the corresponding ones in the choleric child.

Now, if you are a layperson, you will probably believe that you can tame such a child by placing it in a calming, colorful environment if possible. But that is not true. If you surround the choleric child with blue or dress him in blue clothes, then precisely because he has the disposition for it, when he is surrounded by this calming blue color, which he does not reject, he will act out his choleric temperament. He will become even more “z'widerer,” more rumbling. On the other hand, if the child is surrounded by red, the exciting red color, you know from other lectures that the complementary color is green, the green-bluish complementary color is evoked. The child, when constantly surrounded by red, has to make an effort internally to experience the complementary color internally and is not externally excited. So the same thing, that is what has a calming effect on an excited child.

On the other hand, you will have a good effect on a melancholy child if you get him to come out of himself by bringing him into a blue, greenish-blue environment; so don't be afraid that if you give him a calming, adoring environment, you will make him even more melancholy.

The point here is to really understand how it follows from the essence of man that you fight fire with fire. You see, it is always a matter of starting from the essence of man and using the knowledge you gain to approach life. But I would like to make it quite clear that a mechanistic view must be avoided when considering education as an art. And when we ask how we can influence temperaments by means of colors and such things, we must not fall into the trap of intellectual systematization. If education becomes an art, then one does not arrive at such intellectual schematizing. When dealing with color, one does not look at the temperaments, but in general one is more concerned with whether the child is an excited or an unexcited child. It may also happen, for example, that a phlegmatic child may have to be treated in the same way with colors as a melancholic child, and so on. In short, the aim is to develop a living art of education from a living science of education.

Question: Is it beneficial for children to look back as early as five or six years of age?

Rudolf Steiner: I do not know what prompted the question about children looking back. I also do not know if the question arises from experience. It seems so, because it is written here. I am actually surprised that this question has been asked, because I would have thought that such nonsense, having five- to six-year-old children look back, would not actually occur. As you know from my writings, looking back is practiced, in particular, from “How to Know Higher Worlds” in order to advance spiritually and to gradually arrive at a real spiritual view. And you can easily imagine what a profound effect it has on a person when such a review is practiced, when you consider that the other thinking, the one that runs along in the course of natural phenomena, is the thinking of ordinary consciousness. When we now, through a certain inner effort, try to formulate a review in such a way that we, as it were, go through the events of the day backwards from evening to morning, we snatch ourselves away from precisely this ordinary thinking and imagining and experiencing of things. We break free. And by doing this radically, in such a contrary way, we gradually achieve an inner emancipation of the soul and spirit element in the human being. Such practice provides a support for spiritual progress.

Now it could be meant – it is not clearly expressed in the question – that a review would be adapted for children to such an exercise, which is appropriate for spiritual progress in later life. That would simply be nonsense for the reason that one would introduce an absolute disorder into the relationship between the spiritual-mental and the bodily-etheric of the child. It would be plain to see that one was causing terrible damage. To allow such practices with children would mean that one would tear apart at a very early stage that which corresponds to the imagination, to feeling, to the will; that one would bring such disorder into the whole soul-spiritual-physical organization of the child that one would virtually develop the child, deliberately develop it into childish mental deficiency, into a kind of dementia praecox. If one hears about such things at all, if one becomes familiar with such things, it is important to know that they should not be used in a novelistic way, and especially that they are not only not intended for children aged five to six, but that it is nonsense to use them at all in people before sexual maturity. If the intention is to look back in such a way that the child is allowed to remember the events of the day, then such a thing must at least not be taken to any extreme. It may sometimes be necessary for the child to remember some kind of misbehavior or for them to remember a joy they have experienced for this or that reason, but to is something that is basically also a kind of mischief, albeit a small mischief, compared to when, for example, it is meant to suggest that the child should be doing spiritual exercises.

A question about a 23-year-old person with an intellectual disability: Is the disability connected to a past life and how should the person in question be educated?

Rudolf Steiner: In such matters, each case is truly an individual one and nothing can be said from the few details given on this note, least of all how the mental deficiency in question is connected with any previous life on earth. As for how to treat him educationally, that really depends entirely on what the person was like before. Above all, the person should be followed up in terms of education: What was done with the person before? Was no attention paid to the fact that there were abnormalities in the past? The real issue is that it is not possible for a young person of twenty-three to become feeble-minded unless it is due to an external necessity. Rather, the issue is that the things that preceded it should have been dealt with in the appropriate way. But to answer the question of what to do after he turns twenty-three, you would have to know the person very well.

Perhaps I may take this opportunity to come back to a few other things that have caught my eye during the course of the evening. First of all, the matter of the age of nine. It is indeed the case that the main epoch of the developing human being's life is from birth to the change of teeth, then again from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, but that between the ages of nine and ten there is something that intervenes in the child's life in an extraordinarily significant way. You know that the sense of self first arises in the form of a sense of self. This sense of self only emerges in the second, third, sometimes even the fourth year of life. It is not yet an actual sense of self, and this sense of self is not actually present in a transparently clear way even at the change of teeth. So you don't give the child something that is in line with his development when you introduce things that sharply challenge the child to separate himself from his surroundings, to have a strong sense of self. Everything that is perceived when one strongly separates oneself from one's surroundings, when one perceives another being as another, one should bring up as little as possible to the child up to the age of nine, but should guide the child in such a way that it perceives the outside world only as a continuation of its own being, so to speak. One should cultivate precisely this feeling, which does not separate from the outside world. One should educate the child in such a way that it can feel and sense what is outside, as if it were continuing into its own organization and vice versa. And only around the age of nine does a clear and distinct sense of self actually awaken. It is this sense of self that Jean Paul says is actually in the innermost sanctum of the human being and that only this sense of self actually allows one to feel the human being as such, the human existence inwardly. This sense of self awakens in the ninth year. And in this year, between the ninth and tenth year – these things are, of course, only approximations – the world also enters, the outer world; the child differentiates itself from the outer world, is allowed to differentiate itself of its own accord. It is then possible to approach the child with the simplest ideas and observations from the plant and animal kingdoms, no longer to bring things to the child merely in the form of fairy tales, legends or stories, but to really bring them in such a way that the child acquires possible ideas - I do not mean systematically as in science. That is what needs to be observed.

What cannot be emphasized strongly enough for the art of education is that one must not follow the mischief of introducing scientific categories into school life. Unfortunately, even the schoolbooks for the lower grades are often put together in such a way that their content is taken out of scientific books in its structure and direction. But botany, zoology and so on should not be taught to the child as if one wanted to believe that he should become a botanist or zoologist; rather, precisely because one assumes that he should certainly not become a botanist or zoologist, not in such a way that one presents him with all the raisins, but in such a way that one uses the aptitudes that the child has at that particular moment, and then helps them to break through. This is the result of a natural art of education, as applied in Waldorf schools: people are not trained according to a certain specialization, but they are made human beings. And if they then develop in one direction or another, it is because their original abilities have not been suppressed and can now develop in a certain sense. That is what makes a human being human.

Regarding the lecture by Rudolf Meyer, Berlin:

It would certainly be interesting to pursue the considerations that Mr. Meyer so beautifully presented in his lecture on the relationship between Fichte, Pestalozzi and Herbart from a psychological point of view. But let me just express a few thoughts about it.

It is extremely interesting that from the consideration of Pestalozzi one gets the idea that the successes that he had with his art of education are essentially based on the fact that he was, as it seems, an infinitely amiable personality, especially towards children, and that out of a certain childlike love he instinctively applied a highly perfect art of education.

It is a different matter when we look at what was happening around Pestalozzi. Here we do not get the impression that Pestalozzi would have been able to transfer to others the educational skills that he possessed through the inherent kindness of his personality. And if you look at the actual pedagogical principles, the more fundamental aspects, and not just at the extraordinarily charming descriptions that Pestalozzi gave of life with children – which can be extremely inspiring, especially for educators – but if you ask other people about the instructions he gave, you can see that he was not in a position to become aware of what instinctively worked in him as an educational art in a lovable way, so that he could have transferred it to others. Therefore, the love that Pestalozzi is shown is actually based more on the fact that this amiable personality speaks from all his writings, and what one feels when reading these writings triggers many educational impulses from within the human being. While - I only need to recall the instructions that Pestalozzi gives, one must teach very young children the parts of the human body in a way that is not at all natural. If you look at Pestalozzi's formulations in his art of education, you have to say: that is not suitable for inspiring other educators.

But something else is becoming blatantly obvious. It may well be that Pestalozzi also proceeded with young children as he describes it, and had great success; while another - even a direct student of Pestalozzi, we can prove that it was so - who followed the same instructions, now achieved absolutely nothing. The fact is that the important personality of Pestalozzi was not behind it. In the final analysis, it is not the content that is important in a pedagogical system that aspires to become an art of education. The pedagogy cultivated in Waldorf school lessons is actually about the fact that, under certain circumstances, even if the content of what is taught is based on false premises – it does not have to be so, but it can be so – it can nevertheless have an effect on the child in an appropriate way through the way the art of education is applied. One might say that in Waldorf education it is not so much the content of the teaching that is important as the way it is handled. This is because spiritual science is fundamentally not something that merely — that is not even the most important thing, in fact — but spiritual science essentially consists in the fact that it gives a living world view, that it allows what it gives as a world view to be truly experienced. That is why spiritual science is so poorly understood. Because, you see, in the sense of our spiritual science here – and I am saying this precisely with regard to spiritual science as the basis of a pedagogical art – it is certainly a mistake for someone to be a pure materialist, for someone to have materialistic theories; but one can also formulate materialistic theories very wittily. One can have spirit and be a materialist. And conversely, one can also be a spiritualist, a theosophist, an anthroposophist, who can reel off theories from spiritualism, theosophy or anthroposophy and be terribly spiritless in the process. Then it is a matter of the spirit of materialism, which, however, prevails, having to be valued more highly in the sense of a real anthroposophy than the spiritlessness of the anthroposophist, who schematically recounts everything that is theory or inanimate outlook on life. So that one can say: anthroposophy is directed towards the real life of the spirit. And this real life of the spirit really does enter the whole human being. In a sense, the spirit should be banished into what the human being does. And that is what makes the teacher, from the most profound level of his spiritual science, skilled in the art of education, which enables him to truly transform education.

This is what Rudolf Meyer presented so beautifully in his lecture and by which he measured the intellectualism of Herbart, who played such a great role in the education that we will hopefully soon have behind us and that we will very soon replace with a different one.

Today, you have also been presented with a very nice illustration of how Herbart's views were shaped by his inheritance. But there is something else that matters in the assessment of Herbart, namely how the selection has worked. For the culturally and historically important phenomenon is that one looks at this Herbart, who was purely intellectualistic, but who founded a comprehensive pedagogical school that then had an enormous influence on pedagogical work. It must be said that the fact that, of all the philosophers and other world-view thinkers, it was this intellectualist Herbart who was chosen by the fate of Central Europe to be the educational source of inspiration can be traced back to the entirely intellectualist tendency that the intellectual life of the 19th century took.

This can be made particularly clear with regard to Herbart by the following: one could point out, for example, as Rudolf Meyer has done very nicely, and one can also do so with other personalities, that Schiller's “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man” are also a kind of pedagogical impulse. Schiller, who so magnificently portrays how, on the one hand, man tends towards intellectualism and, on the other, towards mere sensual-physical instincts, points out how man follows the necessity of reason in logic, in the intellectual, and how he follows the necessity of the senses in ordinary life. And then Schiller presents beauty, which is the balance between the two, which one achieves by being able to follow the spiritual not only logically in the intellect, but to already have it in sensual perception, so that one may also feel the pleasant as thoroughly beautiful. On the other hand, he demands that what one experiences sensually should already be spiritualized, so that it is elevated, that one experiences it as spiritual. Schiller therefore actually wants to create a balance in beauty between the intellectual and the sensual-illustrative or instinctive will. And basically he wants to permeate all of life with what emerges from people when they are educated for such a balance. In Schiller, we see how he wants to bring people to action through the spirit, how he works towards this balance between intellectualism and between the instinctive, that is, the dull-willed element, but one that is to be spiritualized, how he points out that the whole human being is to be placed in the world.

This is then contrasted with Herbartianism – yes, one can tell a whole story about it if one has experienced Herbartianism as strongly as it was experienced by people who spent their youth in Austria in the second half of the 19th century, where Herbartianism was proclaimed as philosophy from all the lecterns. It was only Brentano who introduced a change in this respect, but he was an isolated case. Herbartianism continued to be preached until the turn of the century, or at least until the 1890s, and everything that was achieved in the field of education, as you can see, is based on Herbart.

One of these 'Herbartians' was Robert Zimmermann, a very brilliant man, an important man and also a morally superior personality; but he was a Herbartian through and through. And he wrote a 'Philosophical Propaedeutic' for grammar school students. This “Philosophical Propaedeutic” also contained a psychology. In this psychology, there is the following sentence: Man experiences hunger or satiation through food not through something else, but through the ideas he has about it. So it is quite broadly argued that it does not depend on the real process behind the phenomenon of how hunger is transformed into satiation, but it depends - and now I quote almost word for word: if you have the idea of hunger at a certain moment of the day, this idea of hunger would be pushed below the threshold of consciousness by the opposite idea of satiation.

This replacement of nutrition with a purely intellectual process is something that has actually been included in high school psychology textbooks, and one can imagine how the minds of those who absorbed such psychology without knowing it had to be colored.

But I would like to draw attention to something else. Very briefly, I will touch on how Herbartian aesthetics stands in contrast to basically all other aesthetic worldviews that have emerged in Central Europe. When one speaks of aesthetics, then it depends on whether one speaks – I will say it now in general – of what speaks to you as beauty or what repels you as ugliness, that you essentially remain in the realm of taste judgment. Then one differentiates from this aesthetics – and this is what otherwise distinguishes aesthetics from the ethics found within Central Europe – that which, as will, impulsates the moral act or that which is sick in the will in the immoral act. What other people in Central Europe developed as aesthetics, what they selected from the direct impulse of the will, does not exist for Herbart's philosophical considerations. For ethics is only a special chapter of aesthetics. And just as in art, when two forms have something in common, for example, this is the summarizing, the harmonious element, so it is for Herbart in relation to moral judgment. He speaks of five forms: the relationship of action to action or action to thought, and the like, and he says: a strong action pleases next to a weak one. He looks at the aesthetic impression, not at the volitional impulse, and gives his judgment of favor the term “perfection.” So that in the case of perfection, it is not the volitional element that is effectively present in the human being as a volitional impulse, but rather he says: If I will more strongly one time and more weakly the other, I gain the aesthetic impression that the strong is more pleasing than the weak. Therefore it is predominant.

You see, what should be a powerful driving force is reduced to a judgment of liking or disliking. You then have the idea of wanting, of moral freedom, of right and of retribution. These five ethical ideas are therefore considered by Herbart, not by taking them out of the nature of the will, of ethos, but by observing, as it were, how man's action pleases or displeases when it is looked at. So you have here the task of at least guiding ethics, which should essentially arise from the will, on the way to the intellectual. I said that one must look at the selection process to see why Herbart was chosen by the fate of Central Europe. This is based on the fact that the age as such had to go through intellectualism, that the age as such demanded intellectualism.

Now, we have indeed gained a great deal through intellectualism. In Herbart's work, some dark sides and some light sides of this intellectualism can be seen. As Mr. Rudolf Meyer just mentioned, Herbart's ideas only found their way into elementary school pedagogy indirectly, not exactly directly, but all the more so into grammar school pedagogy. The only problem is that in the latter case, it remained an intellectual exercise and did not lead to a true art of education or to the proper practice of pedagogy. For what was this grammar school education? As you know, as a rule the philosopher in the philosophy faculty had to teach it as a subsidiary subject, not out of any great sympathy for it. And as for how it was practised – well, we would rather not talk about how education was practised at grammar schools. It was simply not possible to bring into the art of education that which draws from mere intellectual sources. On the other hand, we must not forget or overlook the fact that Herbart, who had such a broad impact and was so widely disseminated, had an enormously disciplining effect on thinking, that the inner weaving of thoughts does not follow pure arbitrariness but certain underlying laws, which is of course also true. And in this respect it did not really improve until Herbartianism gradually declined more or less only towards the end of the nineteenth century; on the contrary, it must be said that there was something disciplining in Herbart's philosophy , something that, even if it easily led thoughts into an even greater pedantry, nevertheless made this pedantry less unbearable than when the pedantry runs without an inner conformity to the laws of thinking. On the whole, it must be said that, in the 19th century, humanity's urge to discipline thinking inwardly came about, which then also had an effect on natural science until very recently and which has a certain significance. It must be said that in this respect Herbart certainly had a disciplining effect. But today we are faced with a challenge of the world, in the face of which we have to say: We will not get anywhere with such intellectualism. We can no longer, so to speak, substitute the idea of hunger and satiation – apparently it can only be one or the other – for the real process and thereby entrench ourselves entirely in our heads as in a fortress. We have to engage the whole person through what we do. In the course of this discussion about Herbart's intellectualism, I was constantly reminded of how the entire 19th century, especially in Central Europe, was dominated by intellectualism. This became very vividly clear to me many years ago in a conversation I had with the long-deceased Austrian poet Hermann Rollett. He was a remarkable personality. He was completely immersed in intellectualism. He could not imagine the world differently. He said that everything else was simply not proper, had no discipline of thought, one had to think intellectually, think atomistically, and so on. But he was terribly pessimistic, and he once said to me: “For our development as a civilization, as civilized people of the world, we have the prospect of ultimately wasting away in all our limbs and being only heads, being only a ball!” This was Rollett's world, and it was what led him to despair of the progress of humanity, because he believed that the limbs would atrophy more and more, that man would only roll along as a head ball, and that there would be such small bits of arms and feet sticking out. He painted this vividly as a picture.

But it is necessary, at least in a spiritual and psychological sense, to do everything from now on to prevent man from developing into a mere head person in the future. It must be understood that the spirit is not only talked about to him, but that it is banished from human life. But when the spirit takes hold of the whole human being in such a way that this whole human being also radiates the spirit into the social existence, then this is what the time demands of us with all our energy and what we must fulfill: the education of the human being not only as a head human being and towards some one-sidedness, but the education of the whole human being through spiritual science.

By Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, M.D. (HON.)^*

In 1922/23 Ernst Stegemann and a group of other farmers went to ask Rudolf Steiner's advice about the increasing degeneration they had noticed in seed-strains and in many cultivated plants. What can be done to check this decline and to improve the quality of seed and nutrition? That was their question.

They brought to his attention such salient facts as the following: Crops of lucerne used commonly to be grown in the same field for as many as thirty years on end. The thirty years dwindled to nine, then to seven. Then the day came when it was considered quite an achievement to keep this crop growing in the same spot for even four or five years. Farmers used to be able to seed new crops year after year from their own rye, wheat, oats and barley. Now they were finding that they had to resort to new strains of seed every few years. New strains were being produced in bewildering profusion, only to disappear from the scene again in short order.

A second group went to Dr. Steiner in concern at the increase in animal diseases, with problems of sterility and the widespread foot-and-mouth disease high on the list. Among those in this group were the veterinarian Dr. Joseph Werr, the physician Dr. Eugen Kolisko, and members of the staff of the newly established Weleda, the pharmaceutical manufacturing enterprise.

Count Carl von Keyserlingk brought problems from still another quarter. Then Dr. Wachsmuth and the present writer went to Dr. Steiner with questions dealing particularly with the etheric nature of plants, and with formative forces in general. In reply to a question about plant diseases, Dr. Steiner told the writer that plants themselves could never be diseased in a primary sense, “since they are the products of a healthy etheric world.” They suffer rather from diseased conditions in their environment, especially in the soil; the causes of so-called plant diseases should be sought there. Ernst Stegemann was given special indications as to the point of view from which a farmer could approach his task, and was shown some first steps in the breeding of new plant types as a first impetus towards the subsequent establishment of the biological-dynamic movement.

In 1923 Rudolf Steiner described for the first time how to make the bio-dynamic compost preparations, simply giving the recipe without any sort of explanation—just “do this and then that.” Dr. Wachsmuth and I then proceeded to make the first batch of preparation 500. This was then buried in the garden of the “Sonnenhof” in Arlesheim, Switzerland. The momentous day came in the early summer of 1924 when this first lot of 500 was dug up again in the presence of Dr. Steiner, Dr. Wegman, Dr. Wachsmuth, a few other co-workers and myself. It was a sunny afternoon. We began digging at the spot where memory, aided by a few landmarks, prompted us to search. We dug on and on. The realer will understand that a good deal more sweating was done over the waste of Dr. Steiner's time than over the strenuousness of the labour. Finally he became impatient and turned to leave for a five o'clock appointment at his studio. The spade grated on the first cowhorn in the very nick of time.

Dr. Steiner turned back, called for a pail of water, and proceeded to show us how to apportion the horn's contents to the water, and the correct way of stirring it. As the author's walking-stick was the only stirring implement at hand, it was pressed into service. Rudolf Steiner was particularly concerned with demonstrating the energetic stirring, the forming of a funnel or crater, and the rapid changing of direction to make a whirlpool. Nothing was said about the possibility of stirring with the hand or with a birch-whisk. Brief directions followed as to how the preparation was to be sprayed when the stirring was finished. Dr. Steiner then indicated with a motion of his hand over the garden how large an area the available spray would cover. Such was the momentous occasion marking the birth-hour of a world-wide agricultural movement.

What impressed me at the time, and still gives one much to think about, was how these step-by-step developments illustrate Dr. Steiner's practical way of working. He never proceeded from preconceived abstract dogma, but always dealt with the concrete given facts of the situation. There was such germinal potency in his indications that a few sentences or a short paragraph often sufficed to create the foundation for a farmer's or scientist's whole life-work; the agricultural course is full of such instances. A study of his indications can therefore scarcely be thorough enough. One does not have to try to puzzle them out, but can simply follow them to the letter.

Dr. Steiner once said, with an understanding smile, in another, very grave situation, that there were two types of people engaged in anthroposophical work: the older ones, who understood everything, but did nothing with it, and the younger ones, who understood only partially or not at all, but immediately put suggestions into practice. We obviously trod the younger path in the agricultural movement, which did all its learning in the hard school of experience. Only now does the total picture of the new impulse given by Rudolf Steiner to agriculture stand clearly before us, even though we still have far to go to exhaust all its possibilities. Accomplishments to date are merely the first step. Every day brings new experience and opens new perspectives.

Shortly before 1924, Count Keyserlingk set to work in deal earnest to persuade Dr. Steiner to give an agricultural course. As Dr. Steiner was already overwhelmed with work, tours and lectures, he put off his decision from week to week. The undaunted Count then dispatched his nephew to Dornach, with orders to camp on Dr. Steiner's doorstep and refuse to leave without a definite commitment for the course. This was finally given.

The agricultural course was held from June 7 to 16, 1924, in the hospitable home of Count and Countess Keyserlingk at Koberwitz, near Breslau. It was followed by further consultations and lectures in Breslau, among them the famous “Address to Youth.” I myself had to forgo attendance at the course, as Dr. Steiner had asked me to stay at home to help take care of someone who was seriously ill. “I'll write and tell you what goes on at the course,” Dr. Steiner said by way of solace. He never did get round to writing, no doubt because of the heavy demands on him; this was understood and regretfully accepted. On his return to Dornach, however, there was an opportunity for discussing the general situation. When I asked him whether the new methods should be started on an experimental basis, he replied: “The most important thing is to make the benefits of our agricultural preparations available to the largest possible areas over the entire earth, so that the earth may be healed and the nutritive quality of its produce improved in every respect. That should be our first objective. The experiments can come later.” He obviously thought that the proposed methods should be applied at once.

This can be understood against the background of a conversation I had with Dr. Steiner en route from Stuttgart to Dornach shortly before the agricultural course was given. He had been speaking of the need for a deepening of esoteric life, and in this connection mentioned certain faults typically found in spiritual movements. I then asked, “How can it happen that the spiritual impulse, and especially the inner schooling, for which you are constantly providing stimulus and guidance bear so little fruit? Why do the people concerned give so little evidence of spiritual experience, in spite of all their efforts? Why, worst of all, is the will for action, for the carrying out of these spiritual impulses, so weak?” I was particularly anxious to get an answer to the question as to how one could build a bridge to active participation and the carrying out of spiritual intentions without being pulled off the right path by personal ambition, illusions and petty jealousies; for, these were the negative qualities Rudolf Steiner had named as the main inner hindrances. Then came the thought-provoking and surprising answer: “This is a problem of nutrition. Nutrition as it is to-day does not supply the strength necessary for manifesting the spirit in physical life. A bridge can no longer be built from thinking to will and action. Food plants no longer contain the forces people need for this.”

A nutritional problem which, if solved, would enable the spirit to become manifest and realise itself in human beings! With this as a background, one can understand why Dr. Steiner said that “the benefits of the bio-dynamic compost preparations should be made available as quickly as possible to the largest possible areas of the entire earth, for the earth's healing.”

This puts the Koberwitz agricultural course in proper perspective as an introduction to understanding spiritual, cosmic forces and making them effective again in the plant world.

In discussing ways and means of propagating the methods, Dr. Steiner said also that the good effects of the preparations and of the whole method itself were “for everybody, for all farmers”—in other words, not intended to be the special privilege of a small, select group. This needs to be the more emphasised in view of the fact that admission to the course was limited to farmers, gardeners and scientists who had both practical experience and a spiritual-scientific, anthroposophical background. The latter is essential to understanding and evaluating what Rudolf Steiner set forth, but the bio-dynamic method can be applied by any farmer. It is important to point this out, for later on many people came to believe that only anthroposophists can practise the bio-dynamic method. On the other hand, it is certainly true that a grasp of bio-dynamic practices gradually opens up a wholly new perspective on the world, and that the practitioner acquires and applies a kind of judgment in dealing with biological—i.e. living—processes and facts which is different from that of a more materialistic chemical farmer; he follows nature's dynamic play of forces with a greater degree of interest and awareness. But it is also true that there is a considerable difference between mere application of the method and creative participation in the work. From the first, actual practice has been closely bound up with the work of the spiritual centre of the movement, the Natural Science Section of the Goetheanum at Dornach. This was to be the source, the creative, fructifying spiritual element; while the practical workers brought back their results and their questions.

The name, “Bio-Dynamic Agricultural Method,” did not originate with Dr. Steiner, but with the experimental circle concerned with the practical application of the new direction of thought.

In the Agricultural Course, which was attended by some sixty persons, Rudolf Steiner set forth the basic new way of thinking about the relationship of earth and soil to the formative forces of the etheric, astral and ego activity of nature. He pointed out particularly how the health of soil, plants and animals depends upon bringing nature into connection again with the cosmic creative, shaping forces. The practical method he gave for treating soil, manure and compost, and especially for making the bio-dynamic compost preparations, was intended above all to serve the purpose of reanimating the natural forces which in nature and in modern agriculture were on the wane. “This must be achieved in actual practice,” Rudolf Steiner told me. He showed how much it meant to him to have the School of Spiritual Science going hand in hand with real-life practicality when he spoke on another occasion of wanting to have teachers at the School alternate a few years of teaching (three years was the period mentioned) with a subsequent period of three years spent in work outside, so that by this alternation they would never get out of touch with the conditions and challenges of real life.

The circle of those who had been inspired by the agricultural course and were now working both practically and scientifically at this task kept on growing; one thinks at once of Guenther Wachsmuth, Count Keyserlingk, Ernst Stegemann, Erhard Bartsch, Franz Dreidax, Immanuel Vögele, M. K. Schwarz, Nikolaus Remer, Franz Rulni, Ernst Jakobi, Otto Eckstein, Hans Heinze, and of many others who came into the movement with the passing of time, including Dr. Werr, the first veterinarian. The bio-dynamic movement developed out of the co-operation of practical workers with the Natural Science Section of the Goetheanum. Before long it had spread to Austria, Switzerland, Italy, England, France, the north-European countries and the United States. To-day no part of the world is without active collaborators in this enterprise.

The bio-dynamic school of thought and a chemically-minded agricultural thinking confronted one another from opposite points of the compass at the time the agricultural course was held. The latter school is based essentially on the views of Justus von Liebig. It attributes the fact that plants take up substances from the soil solely to the so-called “nutrient-need” of the plant. The one-sided chemical fertiliser theory that thinks of plant needs in terms of nitrogen-phosphates-potassium-calcium, originated in this view, and the theory still dominates orthodox scientific agricultural thinking to-day. But it does Liebig an injustice. He himself expressed doubt as to whether the “N-P-K” theory should be applied to all soils. Deficiency symptoms were more apparent in soils poor in humus than in those amply supplied with it. The following quotation makes one suspect that Liebig was by no means the hardened materialist that his followers make him out to be. He wrote: “Inorganic forces breed only inorganic substances. Through a higher force at work in living bodies, of which inorganic forces are merely the servants, substances come into being which are endowed with vital qualities and totally different from the crystal.” And further: “The cosmic conditions necessary for the existence of plants are the warmth and light of the sun.” Rudolf Steiner gave the key to these “higher forces at work in living bodies and to these cosmic conditions.” He solved Liebig's problem by refusing to stop short at the purely material aspects of plant-life. He went on, with characteristic spiritual courage and a complete lack of bias, to take the next step.

And now an interesting situation developed. Devotees of the purely materialistic school of thought, who once felt impelled to reject the progressive thinking advanced by Rudolf Steiner, have been forced by facts brought to light during research into soil biology to go at least one step further. Facts recognised as early as 1924-34 in bio-dynamic circles—the significance of soil-life, the earth as a living organism, the role played by humus, the necessity of maintaining humus under all circumstances, and of building it up where it is lacking—all this has become common knowledge. Recognition of biological, organic laws has now been added to the earlier realisation of the undeniable dependence of plants upon soil nutrient-substances. It is not too much to say that the biological aspect of the bio-dynamic method is now generally accepted; the goal has perhaps even been overshot. But, important as are the biological factors governing plant inter-relationships, soil structure, biological pest-control, and the progress made in understanding the importance of humus, the whole question of energy sources and Formative forces—in other words, cosmic aspects of plant-life—remains unanswered. The biological way of thinking has been adopted, but with a materialistic bias, whereas an understanding of the dynamic side, made possible by Rudolf Steiner's pioneering indications, is still largely absent.

Since 1924 numerous scientific publications that might be regarded as a first groping in this direction have appeared. We refer to studies of growth-regulating factors, the so-called growth-inducers, enzymes, hormones, vitamins, trace elements and bio-catalysts. But this groping remains in the material realm. Science has progressed to the point where material effects produced by dilutions as high as 1:1 million, or even 1:100 million, no longer belong to the realm of the fantastic and incredible. They do not meet with the unbelieving smile that greeted rules for applying the bio-dynamic compost preparations, for these—with dilutions ranging from 1:10 to 1:100 million—are quite conceivable at the present stage of scientific thinking. Exploration of the process of photo-synthesis—i.e. of the building of substance in the cells of living plants—has opened up problems of the influence of energy (of the sun, of light, of warmth and of the moon); in other words, problems of the transformation of cosmic sources of energy into chemical-material conditions and energies.

In this connection we quote from the book Principles of Agriculture,¹ written in 1952 by W. R. Williams, Member of the Academy of Sciences, U.S.S.R.: “The task of agriculture is to transform kinetic solar energy, the energy of light, into the potential energy stored in human food. The light of the sun is the basic raw material of agricultural industry.” And further: “Light and warmth are the essential conditions for plant life, and consequently also for agriculture. Light is the raw material from which agricultural products are made, and warmth is the force which drives the machinery—the green plant. The provision of both raw material and energy must be maintained. The dynamic energy of the sun's rays is transformed by green plants into potential energy in the material form of organic matter. Thus our first concrete task is the continuous creation of organic matter, storing up the potential energy of human life.” And still further: “We can divide the four fundamental factors into two groups, according to their source: light and heat are cosmic factors, water and plant food terrestrial factors. The former group originates in interplanetary space...”

Or again: “The cosmic factors—light and heat—act directly on the plant, whereas the terrestrial factors act only through an intermediary (substance).”

We see that the author of this work rates knowledge of the interworking of cosmic and terrestrial factors as the first objective of agricultural science, while ranking organic substance (humus) second on the list of objectives of agricultural production. This is what was published in 1952. In 1924 Rudolf Steiner pointed out the necessity of consciously restoring cosmic forces to growth processes by both direct and indirect means, thereby freeing the present conception of plant nature from a material, purely terrestrial isolation; only through such restoration would it be possible to re-energise those healthful and constructive forces capable of halting degeneration. He said to me, “Spiritual scientific knowledge must have found its way into practical life by the middle of the century if untold damage to the health of man and nature is to be avoided.”

Our research work began with the attempt to find reagents to the etheric forces and to discover ways of demonstrating their existence. Suggestions were given which could only later be brought to realisation in the writer's crystallisation method. Then it was our intention to proceed to expose the weak points in the materialistic conception and to refute its findings by means of its own experimental methods. This meant applying exact analytical methods in experimentation with physical substances, and even developing them to a finer point. We proposed to work quantitatively as well as qualitatively. During my own years at the university, for example, it was my regular practice to lay my proposed course of studies for the new term before Rudolf Steiner for guidance in the choice of subjects. On one occasion he urged me to take simultaneously two—no, three—main subjects, chemistry, physics and botany, each requiring six hours a day. To the objection that there were not hours enough in the day for this, he replied simply, “Oh, you'll manage it somehow.”

Again and again, he steered things in the direction of practical activity and laboratory work, away from the merely theoretical.

Suggestions of this kind were constantly in my mind during the decades of work which arose from them. They led me not only to work in laboratories, but also to apply the fundamentals of this new outlook to the management of agricultural projects, both in a bio-dynamic and in an economic sense. Dr. Steiner had insisted on my taking courses and attending lectures in political economy as well as in science, saying, “One must work in a businesslike, profit-making way, or it won't come off.” Economics, commercial history, industrial science, even mass-psychology and other such subjects were proposed for study, and when the courses were completed, Dr. Steiner always wanted a report on them. On these occasions he not only showed astounding proficiency in the various special fields, but—what was more surprising—he seemed quite familiar with the methods and characteristics of the various professors. He would say, for example, “Professor X is an extremely brilliant man, with wide-ranging ideas, but he is weak in detailed knowledge. Professor Z is a silver-tongued orator of real elegance. You needn't believe everything he says, but you must get a thorough grasp of his method of presentation.”

From these and many other suggestions it was clear what had to be done to promote the bio-dynamic method. There was the big group of practising farmers, whose task it was to carry out the method in their farming enterprises, to discover the most favourable use of the preparations, to determine what crop rotations build up rather than deplete humus, to develop the best methods of plant and animal breeding. It took years to translate the basic ideas into actual practice. All this had to be tried out in the hard school of experience, until the complete picture of a teachable and learnable method, which any farmer could profitably use, was finally evolved. Problems of soil treatment, crop rotation, manure and compost handling, time-considerations in the proper care and breeding of cattle, fruit-tree management and many other matters could be worked out only in practice through the years.

Then there was the problem of coming to grips with agricultural science. Laboratories and field experiments had to provide facts and observational material. I was now able to profit from the technical and quantitative-chemical education urged upon me by Dr. Steiner. This was the sphere in which the shortcomings and weaknesses of the chemical soil-and-nutrient theory showed up most clearly, and where to-day—after more than thirty years—one can see possibilities of building a bridge between recognition of the existence of cosmic forces and exact science.

The first possibility of breaking through the hardened layer of current orthodox opinion came through discoveries that cluster around the concept of the so-called trace elements. Dr. Steiner had pointed out as early as 1924 the existence of these finely dispersed material elements in the atmosphere and elsewhere, and had stressed the importance of their contribution to healthy plant development. But it still remained an open question whether they were absorbed from the soil by roots or from the atmosphere by leaves and other plant organs. In the early thirties, spectrum analysis showed that almost all the trace elements are present in the atmosphere in a proportion of 10-6 to 10-9. The fact that trace-elements can be absorbed from the air was established in experiments with Tillandsia usneodis. It is now common practice in California and Florida to supply zinc and other trace elements, not via the roots, but by spraying the foliage, since leaves absorb these trace elements even more efficiently.

It was found that one-sided mineral fertilising lowers the trace-element content of soil and plants, and—most significantly—that to supply trace-elements by no means assures their absorption by plants. The presence (or absence) of zinc in a dilution of 1:100 million decides absolutely whether an orange tree will bear healthy fruit. But in the period from 1924-1930 the bio-dynamic preparations were ridiculed “because plants cannot possibly be influenced by high dilutions.”

Zinc is singled out for mention here not only because treatment with very high dilutions of this trace element is especially essential for both the health and the yield of many plants, but also because it is an element particularly abundant in mushrooms. A comment by Rudolf Steiner indicates an interesting connection which can be fully understood only in the light of the most recent research. We read in the Agricultural Course: “... Harmful parasites always consort with growths of the mushroom type, ... causing certain plant diseases and doing other still worse forms of damage. ... One should see to it that meadows are infested with fungi. Then one can have the interesting experience of finding that where there is even a small mushroom-infested meadow near a farm, the fungi, owing to their kinship with the bacteria and other parasites, keep them away from the farm. It is often possible, by infesting meadows in this way, to keep off all sorts of pests.”

Organisms of the fungus type include the so-called fungi imperfecti and a botanical transition-form, the family of actinomycetes and streptomycetes, from which certain antibiotic drugs are derived. I have found that these organisms play a very special rôle in humus formation and decay, and that they are abundantly present in the bio-dynamic manure and compost preparations. The preparations also contain an abundance of many of the most important trace elements, such as molybdenum, cobalt, zinc, and others whose importance has been experimentally demonstrated.

Now a peculiar situation was found to exist in regard to soils. Analyses of available plant nutrients showed that the same soil tested quite differently at different seasons. Indeed, tests showed not only seasonal but even daily variations. The same soil sample often disclosed periodic variations greater than those found in tests of soils from adjoining fields, one of which was good, the other poor. Seasonal and daily variations are influenced, however, by the earth's relative position in the planetary system; they are, in other words, of cosmic origin. It has actually been found that the time of day or the season of the year influences the solubility and availability of nutrient substances. Numerous phenomena to be observed in the physiology of plants and animals (e.g. glandular secretions, hormones) are subject to such influences. The concentration of oxalic acid in bryophyllum leaves rises and falls with the time of day with almost clock-like regularity. Although in this and many other test cases the nutrients on which the plants were fed were identical, the increase or decrease in the plant's substantial content varied very markedly in response to varying light-rhythms and cycles. Joachim Schultz, a research worker at the Goetheanum whose life was most unfortunately cut short, had begun to test Dr. Steiner's important indication that light activity acts with growth-stimulating effect in the morning and late afternoon hours, while at noon and midnight its influence is growth-inhibiting.

When I inspected Schultz's experiments, I was struck by the fact that plants grown on the same nutrient solution had a wholly different substantial composition according to the light-rhythms operative. This was true of nitrogen, for example. Plants exposed to light during the morning and evening hours grew strongly under the favourable influence of nitrogen activity, whereas if exposed during the noon hours, they declined and showed deficiency symptoms. The way was thus opened for experimental demonstration of the fact that the so-called “cosmic” activity of light, of warmth, of sun forces especially, but of other light-sources also, prevails over the material processes. These cosmic forces regulate the course of material change. When and in what direction this takes place, and the extent to which the total growth and the form of the plant are influenced, all depend upon the cosmic constellation and the origin of the forces concerned. Recent research in the field of photosynthesis has produced findings which can hardly fall to open the eyes even of materialistic observers to such processes. Here, too, Rudolf Steiner is shown to have been a pioneer who paved the way for a new direction of research. It is impossible in an article of this length to report on all the phenomena that have already been noted, for they would more than fill a book. But it is no longer possible to dismiss the influence of cosmic forces as “mere superstition” when the physiological and biochemical inter-relationships of metabolic functions in soil-life, the rise and fall of sap in the plant, and especially processes in the root-sphere are taken into consideration.

In an earlier view of nature, based partly on old mystery-tradition and partly on instinctive clairvoyance—a view originating in the times of Aristotle and his pupil Theophrastus, and continuing on to the days of Albertus Magnus and the late mediaeval “doctrine of signatures”—it was recognised that relationships exist between certain cosmic constellations and the various plant species. These constellations are creative moments under whose influence species became differentiated and the various plant forms came into being. When one realises that cosmic rhythms have such a significant influence on the physiology of metabolism, of glandular functions, of the rise and fall of sap and of sap pressure (turgor), only a small step remains to be taken by conscious future research to the next realisation, which will achieve an experimental grasp of these creative constellations. Many of Rudolf Steiner's collaborators have already demonstrated the decisive effects of formative forces in such experiments as, the capillary tests on filter paper of L. Kolisko and the plant and crystallisation tests of Pfeiffer, Krüger, Bessenich, Selawry and others.

Rudolf Steiner's suggestions for plant breeding presented a special task. Research in this field was carried out by the author and other fellow-workers (Immanuel Vögele, Erika Riese, Martha Kuenzel and Martin Schmidt), either in collaboration or in independent work. Proceeding from the basic concept of creative cosmic constellations, one can assume that the original creative impetus in every species of sub-type slowly exhausts itself and ebbs away. The formative forces of this original impulse is passed on from plant to plant in hereditary descent by means of certain organs such as chromosomes. One-sided quantity-manuring gradually inhibits the activity of the primary forces, and results in a weakening of the plant. Seed quality degenerates. This was the initial problem laid before Rudolf Steiner, and the bio-dynamic movement came into being as an answer to it.

The task was to reunite the plant, viewed as a system of forces under the influence of cosmic activities, with nature as a whole. Rudolf Steiner pointed out that many plants which had been “violated,” in the sense of having been estranged from their cosmic origin, were already so far gone in degeneration that by the end of the century their propagation would be unreliable. Wheat and potatoes were among the plant types mentioned, but other such grains as oats, barley and lucerne belong to the same picture. Ways were sketched whereby new strains with strong seed-forces could be bred from “unexhausted” relatives of the cultivated plants. This work has begun to have success; the species of wheat have already been developed. Martin Schmidt carried on significant researches, not yet published, to determine the rhythm of seed placement in the ear, and to show in particular the difference between food plants and plants grown for seed. According to Rudolf Steiner, there is a basic difference between the two types, one of which is sown in autumn, nearer to the winter, and the other nearer to the summer. Biochemists will eventually be able to confirm these differences materially in the structure of protein substances, amino-acids, phosphorlipoids, enzyme-systems and so on by means of modern chromatographic methods.

The degeneration of wheat is already an established fact. Even where the soil is good, the protein content has declined; in the case of soft red wheat, protein content has sunk from 13% to 8% in some parts of the United States. Potato growers know how hard it is to produce healthy potatoes free from viruses and insects, not to mention the matter of flavour. Bio-dynamically grown wheat maintains its high protein level. Promising work in potato breeding was unfortunately interrupted by the last war and other disturbances.

Pests are one of the most interesting and instructive problems, looked at from the bio-dynamic viewpoint. When the biological balance is upset, degeneration follows; pests and diseases make their appearance. Nature herself liquidates weaklings. Pests are therefore to be regarded as nature's warning that the primary forces have been dissipated and the balance sinned against. According to official estimates, American agriculture pays a yearly bill of five thousand million dollars in crop losses for disregarding this warning, and another seven hundred and fifty million dollars on keeping down insect pests. People are beginning to realise that insect poisons fall short of solving the problem, especially since the destruction of some of the insects succeeds only in producing new, more resistant kinds. It has been established by the most advanced research (Albrecht of Missouri) that one-sided fertilising disturbs the protein-carbohydrates balance in plant cells, to the detriment of proteins and the layer of wax that coats plant leaves, and makes the plants “tastier” to insect depredators. It has been a bitter realisation that insect poisons merely “preserve” a part of moribund nature, but do not halt the general trend towards death. Experienced entomologists, who have witnessed the failure of chemical pest-control and the threats to health associated with it, are beginning to speak out and demand biological controls. But according to the findings of one of the American experimental stations, biological controls are feasible only when no poisons are used and an attempt is made to restore natural balance. In indications given in the Agriculture Course, Rudolf Steiner showed that health and resistance are functions of biological balance, coupled with cosmic factors. This is further evidence of how far in advance of its time was this spiritual-scientific, Goethean way of thought.

The author is thoroughly conscious of the fact that this exposition touches upon only a small part of the whole range of questions opened up by Rudolf Steiner's new agricultural method. He is also aware that other collaborators would have written quite differently, and about different aspects of the work. These pages should therefore be read in accordance with their intention: as the view from a single window in a house containing many rooms.

• *. Contributed by Dr. Pfeiffer to the German symposium, Wir erlebten Rudolf Steiner, of which a complete English translation, “Rudolf Steiner, by his pupils,” was published as a special number of The Golden Blade, 1958. This translation is used by permission of The Golden Blade and the Verlag Freies Geistesleben G.m.b.H., Stuttgart, publishers of the book, Wir erlebten Rudolf Steiner.
• 1. Translated from the Russian by G. V. Jacks, Director of the Commonwealth Bureau of Soil Science (London, 1952).

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.

My dear Theosophical friends! It is my honest conviction that it is basically a terrible imposition to present what I now have to present to such an assembly. You can be absolutely certain that I, feeling this, only resort to this description because things have recently come to light that make it our duty to refute suspicions and distortions with regard to our cause.

I will endeavor to present what needs to be presented as objectively as possible, and I will endeavor – since I obviously cannot present everything – to influence what I present subjectively only to the extent that the selection of what is to be presented comes into consideration. In doing so, I will be guided by the principle of mentioning what can be thought to somehow influence my entire school of thought. Do not consider the way in which I will try to present it as a form of coquetry, but rather as something that must appear to me in many respects as the natural form.

If someone had wanted to prepare themselves for a completely modern life, for a life in the most modern achievements of the present time, and had wanted to choose the appropriate conditions of existence for their present incarnation, then, it seems to me, they would have had to make the same choice in relation to their present incarnation as Rudolf Steiner made. For he was surrounded from the very beginning by the very latest cultural achievements, was surrounded from the first hour of his physical existence by the railroad and telegraph system.

He was born on February 27, 1861 in Kraljevec, which now belongs to Hungary. He spent only the first year and a half in this place, which is located on the so-called Mur Island, then half a year in a place near Vienna and then a whole number of boyhood years in a place on the border of Lower Austria and Styria, in the middle of those Austro-Styrian conditions of a mountainous region, which can make a certain deeper impression on the mind of a child receptive to such things.

His father was a minor official of the Austrian Southern Railway. The family was, after all, involved in circumstances that, given the state of affairs at the time, cannot be characterized as anything other than a “struggle against the poor pay of such low-level railway officials”. The parents – it must be emphasized, so as not to give rise to any misunderstanding – always showed a willingness to spend their last kreuzer on what was best for their children; but there were not many such last kreuzer available.

What the boy saw, one might say, every hour, were the Styrian-Austrian mountains on one side, often looking in, often shining in such beautiful sunshine, often covered by the most magnificent snowfields. On the other side, to the delight of the mind, there were the vegetation and other natural conditions of such an area, which, situated there at the foot of the Austrian Schneeberg and the Sonnwendstein, are perhaps among the most beautiful spots in Austria. On the one hand, that was what shaped the impressions that came to the boy. The other was that the view could be directed hourly to the most modern cultural conditions and achievements: to the railroad, with the operation of which his father was involved, and to what telegraphy was already able to achieve in modern traffic at that time. One might say that what the boy was confronted with was not at all modern urban conditions. The place where the station was part of, where he grew up, was a very small place and offered only modern impressions insofar as a spinning mill belonged to the place, so that one constantly had a very modern industry in front of one's eyes.

These circumstances must all be mentioned because they actually had a formative and challenging effect on the forces of the boy's soul. They were really not city conditions at all; but the shadow of city conditions came into this remote place. For it was not only – with all the effects that such a thing has – one of the most artistically designed mountain railways in the immediate vicinity, the Semmering Railway, but also close by were the springs from which the water of the Vienna mountain spring water supply was taken at that time. In addition, the entire surrounding area was frequented by people who wanted to spend their summer vacation in this mountainous area, coming from Vienna and other Austrian towns. But one must bear in mind that in the 1860s, such places were not yet as overrun with summer visitors as they were in later times, and that even as a child one entered into certain personal relationships with the people who sought out such summer retreats, so that one gained a kind of intimate relationship with what was going on in the city. Like the shadow of the city, what was revealed there extended into this small town.

What also came into consideration – anyone who has acquired a little psychological insight will see that something like this can come into consideration – were certain impressions, about which one can say nothing other than that they showed the dissolution of long-standing religious relationships in the closest circle of a small town. There was a pastor in the town where the boy grew up. I would just like to mention that I naturally omit all names and the like whose mention could cause any offense or even just hurt, since in such a presentation one often has to deal with people who are still alive or whose descendants are still alive; so that should be avoided, despite the desire to present in the most accurate way. In this place, we are dealing with a pastor who had no influence on our family other than baptizing my siblings; he didn't need to baptize me, since I had already been baptized in Kraljevec. Incidentally, he was considered a rather strange character at the train station where the boy I am talking about grew up, by the residents of the train station and by all those who were present at almost every train from the nearby spinning mill, since the arrival of a train was a big event. And the boy heard the parish priest in question referred to as nothing other than “our Father Nazl”, in a not particularly respectful way.

In contrast, there was a different parish priest in the neighboring village; he often came to our house. This other parish priest was, however, thoroughly fallen out, firstly with Father Nazl and secondly with all the professional relationships in which he found himself. And if someone, even in the very earliest childhood that Rudolf Steiner had to live through, used the loosest words in front of the boy's ear about everything that was already called “secular” at the time – if someone used the loosest words in the presence of the four- to five-year-old boy about church affairs, it was that pastor, who felt he was a staunch liberal and who was loved in our house because of his self-evident free spirit. At the time, the boy found it extraordinarily funny what he once heard the pastor say. He had been informed of the bishop's visit. In such cases, even in such a small town, great preparations are usually made. But our free-thinking pastor had to be dragged out of bed and was told to get up quickly because the bishop was already in the church. In short, it was a situation that made it impossible for anything to develop other than what perhaps only Austrians know: a certain matter-of-factness about the circumstances of religious tradition, a matter-of-fact indifference. No one cared about it, so to speak, and took a cultural-historical interest in such an original personality as the aforementioned pastor, who was late for the bishop because he actually presented a strange sight. No one knew why he was actually a pastor. Because of everything else that interests a pastor, he never spoke; on the other hand, he often talked about which dumplings he particularly liked and what else he experienced. He sometimes went out about his authorities and told what he had to endure there. But this “pastor” certainly could not have given any guidance to zealotry.

The boy only attended the local school there for a short time. For reasons that need not be described in any detail – it is not necessary to describe anything inaccurately – which simply lay in a personal dispute between the boy's father and the school teacher, the boy was very soon taken out of the village school and then received some lessons from his father in the station office between the times when the trains were running.

Then, when the boy in question was eight or nine years old, his father was transferred to another railway station, which lies on the border between – as they say in Austria – “Cisleithania” and “Transleithania”, between the Austrian and Hungarian lands, but the station was already located in Hungary. But before we can talk about this relocation, something else must be mentioned that was of extraordinary significance and importance for the life of the young Rudolf Steiner.

In a way, the boy was an uncomfortable child for his relatives, if only because he had a certain sense of freedom in his body, and when he noticed that something was being demanded of him that he could not fully agree with, he was keen to evade that demand. For example, he avoided greeting or speaking to people who were among his father's superiors and who were also vacationing in the area. He would then withdraw and pretend not to understand the natural subservience that should be expected. It was only as a peculiarity that he refused to acknowledge this and often retreated to the small waiting room, where he tried to penetrate into strange secrets. These were contained in a picture book that had movable figures, where you pulled strings at the bottom. It told the story of a character who had a certain significance for Austria, and especially for Vienna: the character of the “Staberl.” It had become something similar, albeit with a local flavor, a cross between a Punch and Judy and Eulenspiegel.

But there was something else that presented itself to the boy. There he sat one day in that waiting room all alone on a bench. In one corner was the stove, on a wall away from the stove was a door; in the corner from which one could see the door and the stove, sat the boy. He was still very, very young at the time. And as he sat there, the door opened; he was naturally to find that a personality, a woman's personality, entered the room, whom he had never seen before, but who looked extremely like a member of the family. The woman's personality entered through the door, walked to the middle of the room, made gestures and also spoke words that can be roughly reproduced in the following way: “Try now and later to do as much as you can for me,” she said to the boy. Then she was present for a while, making gestures that cannot be forgotten by the soul that has seen them. She then went to the stove and disappeared into it. The impression made on the boy by this event was very strong. The boy had no one in his family to whom he could have spoken of such a thing, and that was because he would have had to hear the harshest words about his foolish superstition if he had told anyone about the event.

The following now occurred after this event. The father, who was otherwise a very cheerful man, became quite sad after that day, and the boy could see that the father did not want to say something that he knew. After a few days had passed and another family member had been prepared in the appropriate way, it did come out what had happened. At a place quite far from that train station in terms of the way of thinking of the people involved, a very close family member had committed suicide in the same hour in which the figure had appeared to the little boy in the waiting room. The boy had never seen this family member; he had also never heard much about this relative, because he was actually somewhat inaccessible to the stories of the environment – this must also be emphasized – they went in one ear and out the other, and he actually did not hear much about the things that were spoken. So he did not know much about that personality who had committed suicide. The event made a great impression, for there can be no doubt that it was a visit by the spirit of the suicidal personality, who approached the boy to instruct him to do something for her in the period immediately following her death. Furthermore, the connections between this spiritual event and the physical plane, as just related, became equally apparent in the days that followed.

Now, anyone who experiences something like this in their early childhood and, according to their disposition, has to seek to understand it, knows from such an event onwards – if they experience it consciously – how one lives in the spiritual worlds. And since the penetration of the spiritual worlds is to be discussed only at the most immediately necessary points, it should be mentioned here that from that event onwards, a life in the soul began for the boy, to whom those worlds revealed themselves from which not only the outer trees and the outer mountains speak to the soul of man, but also those worlds that are behind them. And from that time on, the boy lived with the spirits of nature, which can be observed particularly well in such a region, with the creative entities behind things, in the same way that he allowed the external world to affect him.

After the aforementioned transfer of his father to the town on the border of Austria and Hungary, but still in Hungary, the boy went to the local farm school. It was a farm school with an old-fashioned set-up, as they existed at the time, where boys and girls were still together as a matter of course. What could be learned in this rural school did not even have a full impact on the boy in question, despite the fact that it was not particularly much, for the simple reason that the excellent teacher at this rural school – excellent in his way within the limits of what is possible – had a particular fondness for drawing. And since the boy showed an aptitude for drawing quite early on, the teacher simply took him out of the classroom while the other students were being taught how to read and write, and took him to his small room , and the boy had to draw all the time. He was taught to draw quite nicely – as some people said – one of Hungary's most important political figures, Count Széchenyi, relatively quickly.

Of course, there was also a pastor in that village. But the boy did not learn much from the pastor, who came to the rural school every week, in terms of religion. One can only say that it was not of particular interest to him. Not much was said about religious matters in the parental home, and there was no particular interest in them. On the other hand, the pastor once came to school with a small drawing he had made; it was the Copernican world system. He explained it to some boys and girls, from whom he assumed a particular understanding of it, so that the boy, who could learn nothing from the pastor in religion, understood the Copernican world system quite well through him.

The place where all this happened was a very peculiar place because, as it were, important political and cultural circumstances were looking in. It was just the time when the Hungarians began to Magyarize and when a lot was happening, especially in such border areas, which resulted in the connection between different nationalities, especially between the Magyar and German nationalities. You still learned an extraordinary amount about significant cultural conditions – without everything being categorized at the time – so that the boy was also familiar with the most modern conditions.

What has now been misunderstood is that the boy, like the other schoolboys in the village, had to serve as altar boys in the village church for a very short time. It was simply said: “So-and-so has to ring the bells today and put on the altar boy clothes and do the altar boy duties.” This was not done for very long, but the boy's father insisted – for very strange reasons – that these altar boy duties should not be extended for too long. The boy was occasionally unable to avoid being late due to certain circumstances, and his father did not want his boy to receive the same blows as the other boys if he was late for ringing the bells. So he managed to have his son removed from this duty.

The circumstances at that time were also quite interesting in other respects. The pastor, who was not particularly devoted to his office, but did not let this be seen, was an extremely enraged Magyar patriot. It seemed wise to him – something that even a boy could see through – to turn against something that was emerging in this place at the time, and which shows how, even as a boy, one could study cultural-historical conditions quite well. A fierce struggle had broken out between the pastor and the Masonic lodge, which was located in the place that was already in Hungary as a border town. Such border towns were popular choices for the lodges. The local Freemasons raised the most incredible accusations against the church, in addition to the justified ones. And if you wanted to become familiar with what could be said against the clerical conditions, even in a justified way, you had plenty of opportunity to do so, even if you had not yet passed a certain youth.

Some things that do not exactly help to instill a special respect for the church in a boy should not actually be printed in a later edition, but they should be mentioned here. It did not exactly help to increase reverence for church traditions that the boy had to see the following. There was a farmer's son in the village who had become a clergyman, something of which the farmers are particularly proud. He had become a Cistercian, which the boy had not witnessed, but he saw what was happening now. At that time, a great celebration had been organized because the whole village was proud that a farmer's son had achieved so much. Five or six years had passed, the clergyman in question had been given a parish and occasionally came to his home town. Then you could see how a cart, pushed by a woman dressed as a farmer and the clergyman, became heavier and heavier. It was a baby carriage, and with each year there was one more child for this pram. From the first visit to this clergyman, one could see a remarkable increase in his family, which seemed more and more peculiar with each new year as an “add-on” to his celibacy. Perhaps it may be noted that in this way no care was taken to ensure that the boy had as much respect as possible for the traditions of the clergy.

It should also be mentioned that at the age of about eight, the boy also found a “Geometry” by Močnik in the library of the aforementioned teacher, which was widely used in the Austrian lands, and now set about studying geometry eagerly and alone, immersing himself in this geometry with great pleasure.

Then circumstances arose that could be characterized as follows: it was taken for granted in the boy's family that he should only receive an education that would enable him to pursue some modern cultural profession – every effort was made to prevent him from becoming anything other than a member of a modern cultural profession – these circumstances led to the boy being sent not to the gymnasium, but to the Realschule. So he did not receive any kind of education that could have prepared him for a spiritual vocation, because he did not attend a gymnasium, but only a Realschule, which at that time in Austria would not have provided him with the qualifications for a spiritual vocation at a later stage. He was quite well prepared for the Realschule by his talent for drawing and his inclination towards geometry.

He only had difficulties with everything related to languages, including German. That boy made the most foolish mistakes in the German language in his schoolwork until he was fourteen or fifteen years old; only the content repeatedly helped him get through the numerous grammatical and spelling mistakes. Because these are symptoms of a certain soul disposition, it may also be mentioned that the boy in question was led to disregard certain grammatical and spelling rules even of his mother tongue by the fact that he lacked a certain connection with what one might call: direct immersion in the very dry physical life. This sometimes came across as grotesque. One example: at the rural school the boy attended before entering secondary school, the children always had to write congratulations on beautiful, colorful paper for New Year and the name days of parents and so on. These were then rolled up and, after the contents had been learned by heart, the teacher put them in a so-called small paper sleeve; these were then handed out to the relatives concerned, reciting the contents, to whom they were addressed. That pastor, who once made an inevitably comical impression on the boy by shouting terribly when the local Masonic lodge was built, and because, to make an effective turn of phrase, the founder of the Masonic lodge was a Jew - it was inextricably funny - was proclaimed from the pulpit that in addition to being bad people, it was also part of being something like a Jew or a Freemason that that pastor had a boy at his parsonage - nothing bad is meant by this -. He also went to our school and wrote his congratulations there. Once, the boy Rudolf Steiner happened to glance at the greeting written by the boy who lived in the parsonage and saw that this boy did not sign his name like the others, but rather: “Your sincerely devoted nephew”. At the time, the boy Rudolf Steiner did not know what a “nephew” was; he did not have much sense of the connection between words and things when the words were rarely pronounced. But he had a remarkable sense of the sound of words, of what can be heard through the sound of words. And so the boy heard from the sound of the word “nephew” that it was something particularly heartfelt when you signed your congratulations to your relatives: “Your sincerely devoted nephew,” and he now also began to sign for his father and mother: “Your sincerely devoted nephew.” It was only through the clarification of the facts that the boy realized what a nephew is. That happened when he was ten years old.

Then the boy went to secondary school in the neighboring town. This secondary school was not so easy to reach. It was out of the question, given the parents' circumstances, that he could have lived in the city. But attending the secondary school was also possible because the city was only an hour's walk from where he lived. If – which was not very often the case – the railroad line was not snowed in during the winter, the boy could take the train to school in the morning. But especially in the times when even the footpath was not particularly pleasant, because it led across fields, the railroad tracks were actually very often snow-covered, and then the boy often had to walk to school in the morning between half past seven and eight o'clock through really knee-deep snow. And in the evening, there was no way to get home other than on foot. When I look back at the boy, who had to make quite an effort to get to and from school, I can't help but say that it is my belief that the good health I enjoy today is perhaps due to those strenuous wades through knee-deep snow and the other efforts associated with attending secondary school. It was thanks to a charitable woman in town who invited the boy to her house during the lunch hour – for the first four years of school – and gave him something to eat, that the boy's need, at least according to the information given, was alleviated. On the other hand, however, it was also an opportunity to see the most modern cultural conditions. For the husband of that woman was employed in the locomotive factory of that town, and one learned there much about the conditions of that industrial town, which were extremely important for the time. So even the most modern industrial conditions cast their shadows over the boy's life.

Now there were several things about school that interested the boy in an extraordinary way. First of all, there was the director of the secondary school, a very remarkable man. He was at the center of the scientific life of the time and devoted all his efforts to establishing a kind of world system based on the concepts and ideas of natural science at the end of the 1860s and beginning of the 1870s. As a boy, he became acquainted with one of the school's programmatic essays, 'The force of attraction considered as an effect of motion', through his director's endeavors. And the matter started right away with very powerful integrals. The boy's strongest endeavor was now to read into what he could not understand, and again and again he read about it as much as he could grasp. He understood one thing: that the forces of the world and even the force of attraction should be explained by movement. The boy now aspired to know as much mathematics as possible as soon as possible in order to be able to understand these ideas. That was not easy, because you first had to learn a lot of geometry to understand such things.

Now something else came along. At that secondary school was an excellent teacher of physics and mathematics who had written a second program essay that the boy got to see. It was an extremely interesting essay about probability theory and life insurance. And the second impetus that the boy got from it was precisely that he wanted to know how people are insured from the rules of probability theory, and that was very clearly presented in that essay.

Then a third teacher must be mentioned, the teacher of geometry. The boy was lucky enough to have this teacher already in the second year of school and to get from him what later led to descriptive geometry and is connected with geometric drawing, so that on the one hand you had arithmetic and on the other hand freehand drawing. The teacher of geometry was different from the headmaster and different from the one who wrote the essay about life insurance. The way this teacher presented geometry and taught how to use compasses and rulers was extremely practical, and it can be said that, as a result of this teacher's instruction, the boy became quite infatuated with geometry and also with geometric drawing with compasses and rulers. The clear and practical way of teaching geometry was further enhanced by the fact that the teacher demanded that the books were actually only kept as a kind of decoration. He dictated what he gave to the students and drew it on the blackboard himself; they copied it, making their own notebooks in this way, and actually needed to know nothing other than what they had worked out in their notebooks. It was a good way to work independently. In other subjects, on the other hand, there was often a very good guide to help you keep track of everything that was going on.

As luck would have it, in his third year at secondary school the boy had the opportunity to be taught by the teacher of mathematics and physics who had written the essay on probability theory and life insurance. He turned out to be an excellent teacher of mathematics and physics. And something flashes in the mind the man who the boy has become thinks of that teacher, something flashes it is that he would always like to lay a spiritual wreath in front of that excellent teacher of mathematics and physics. Now they really began to devote themselves to mathematics and physics, and so it could happen that it had become possible to get hold of Lübsen's excellent textbooks for self-teaching in mathematics readily, which were much more widespread then than they are now. With the help of H. B. Lübsen's books, the boy was able to understand relatively quickly what his principal had written about “attraction considered as an effect of motion” and what his teacher had written about probability theory and life insurance. It was a great joy to have gradually driven this understanding.

Now, the boy's life was complicated by the fact that he had no money to have his school books bound. So he learned bookbinding from one of his father's apprentices and was able to bind his own schoolbooks during the holidays. It seems important to me to emphasize this, because it meant something for the development of that boy to get to know such a practical thing as bookbinding at a relatively early age.

But there were other factors at play as well. It was the time of which we are now talking, precisely the time when the old system of customs, feet, pounds and hundredweight was replaced in Austria by the new metric system of measurement and weight, the meter and kilogram system. And the boy experienced the full enthusiasm that took place in all circumstances when people stopped calculating in the previous way with feet and pounds and hundredweights and began to use meters and kilograms in their place. And the most read book, which he always had in his pocket, was the now forgotten one about the new system of weights and measures. And the boy quickly knew how to tell how many kilograms a number of pounds made up and how many meters a number of feet, because the book contained long tables on this.

One personality who played a role in the boy's life must not go unmentioned: a doctor, a very free-thinking doctor, who – perhaps it will not be held against me – had a certain “far-sighted view of life”. As a result, he also had his idiosyncrasies, but in some respects he was an extraordinarily good doctor. But things happened to him, for example: the doctor was already known to the boy from the first railway station where the occult phenomenon took place. At that time, the following had occurred. The pointsman at the station there had a severe toothache. The doctor in question was also a railway doctor and, although he did not live there, had to treat the pointsman. And lo and behold, the good doctor wanted to get things over with quickly and sent a telegram saying that he would come by a certain train. However, he only wanted to get off the train for as long as it stopped, in order to extract the tooth during this time and then continue his journey immediately. The scene was set, the doctor arrived on the appointed train, extracted the switchman's tooth and continued his journey. But after the doctor had left, the switchman came and said: “Now he has just pulled out a healthy tooth, but the sick one doesn't hurt me anymore!”

Then the pointsman had a stomach ache, and the doctor wanted to get rid of him in a similar way. This time, however, the train he was coming in was an express that didn't stop at the station. So he ordered the pointsman to stand on the platform and stick his tongue out at him when the train passed by, and he would then pass on the message from the next station. And so it was: the pointsman had to stand there, sticking out his tongue, while the train passed by, and the doctor then phoned the prescription back from the next station. These were some aspects of this doctor's “broad view of life”. But he was a subtle, extraordinarily humane personality.

The boy had long since studied the new system of weights and measures and had read up on integral and differential calculus. But he knew nothing of Goethe and Schiller except for what was in the textbooks – a few poems – and nothing else of German literature, of literature in general. But the boy had retained a strange, natural love for the doctor, and he would walk past the doctor's windows in the city, where the secondary school was, with a sense of true admiration. He could see the doctor behind the window with a green screen in front of his eyes, and he could watch unnoticed as he sat absorbed in front of his books and studied. During a visit that the doctor made to the latter village, he invited the boy to visit him. The boy then went to him, and the doctor now became a loving advisor, providing the boy with the more important works of German literature – sometimes in annotated editions – and always dismissing him with a loving word, also receiving him in the same way when he returned the books. Thus the doctor, of whom I first told you the other side, was a personality who became one of the most respected in the boy's life. Much of the literature and related matters that entered the boy's soul came from that doctor.

Now something peculiar turned out for the boy. He felt the greatest devotion for descriptive geometry through that excellent geometry teacher, and as a result something happened that may be mentioned, which had never happened before in that school or in any other school: that the boy in question received a grade in “Descriptive Geometry and Drawing” from the fourth grade on that was otherwise never given. The highest grade, which was difficult to obtain, was “excellent”; he had received “distinguished.” He really understood much more about all these things than about literature and similar subjects.

But there were also many other sides to the school. For example, throughout a number of classes, the history teacher was a rather boring patron, and it was extremely difficult to listen to him; what he presented was the same as what was in the book, and it was easier to find out by reading it in the book afterwards. The boy had devised a remarkable system that was related to his inclinations at the time. He never had much money, but if he set aside the pennies he received here and there for weeks on end, he could eventually save up something. Now, just at that time, Reclam Universal Library had been founded, and among the first works to appear were, for example, the works of Kant. The first thing the boy bought from the Universal Library was Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason". He was between the ages of fourteen and fifteen at the time. His professor's history lectures bored him terribly. He didn't have much free time either, as there were many school assignments that had to be completed in the evenings and nights. The only time that could be usefully applied was the hour in which the history teacher lectured so boringly. Now the boy thought about how he could use this time. He was familiar with bookbinding. So he took the history book apart and glued the pages of Kant's “Critique of Pure Reason” neatly between the pages of the history book. And while the teacher was telling the class what was in the book, the boy was reading Kant's “Critique of Pure Reason” with great attention. And he was attentive because he managed to have thoroughly read Kant's “Critique of Pure Reason” by the age of fifteen, and then he was able to move on to working through the other works of Kant. It can truly be said, without boasting, that by the age of sixteen or seventeen the boy had managed to absorb Kant's works, insofar as they were available in the Reclam Universal Library; for in addition to studying during history lessons, there was also the study during the vacation period. He devoted himself eagerly to Kant, and it was indeed a new world that opened up to the boy from a physical point of view as he studied these Kant works.

The time at secondary school was now coming to an end. The boy had a very modern school curriculum behind him. Two things should be emphasized. In the higher classes there was also a very good chemistry teacher who did not speak much, who usually only said the most necessary things. But on a table several meters long, all kinds of apparatus were spread out, and everything was shown. The most complicated experiments were carried out and only the most necessary words were spoken. And when another interesting lesson like that was over, the students would ask: “Doctor” – he preferred to be addressed as “Doctor” rather than “Professor” – “will there be experiments or exams next time?” The answer was usually: “Experiments”, and everyone was happy again. Examinations usually only took place in the last two hours before the certificates were to be issued. But everyone had always paid attention and worked hard in their lessons, and so it came about – because he was also an excellent man – that the students were always able to do something. It may be noted that it was the brother of that now again in Austria known personality, the brother of the Austrian-Tyrolean poet Hermann von Gilm, an important lyricist. It may well be mentioned here as an exception the name of a no longer among us, since only good can be said of him.

The other thing that should be emphasized is that near that place was a castle where a man lived, Count Chambord, who was the pretender to a European throne but was never able to take that throne because of the political situation. He was a great benefactor to the local area, and much was learned of what came from this castle of the crown pretender. Of course, the boy never had the opportunity to meet the count himself; but he was the talk of the town throughout the region. Even though he was a person whose views were shared by few, the shadow of important political events spread throughout the town, which allowed people to learn about them.

Now other things came along. The boy's interest, which had been sparked by Kant, gradually went so far that he also developed an interest in other philosophical things, and he now procured psychological and logical works with his rather limited means. He felt a particular affinity for Lindner's books, which, as far as psychology was concerned, were very good teaching aids, and even before he left secondary school he had become quite familiar with Herbart's philosophy from the threads that were followed. This had caused him some difficulty, however, because his German teacher, who was an excellent man and did a great deal for the school system, did not like the fact that the boy Rudolf Steiner was reading material that tempted him to write such terribly long school essays, sometimes even filling an entire notebook. And after the school-leaving examination, when the students were together with the teachers before graduating, as was the custom, he said to the boy: “Yes, you were my strongest phraseur, I was always afraid when your notebook came.” Once, for example, after using the term “psychological freedom,” he had advised the boy: “You really seem to have a philosophy library at home; I would advise you not to spend much time on it.”

The boy was also particularly interested in a lecture by a professor from the small town about “pessimism.” It should also be mentioned that there were later years in which history was taught excellently at secondary school. And then there was the boy's really thorough immersion in the history of the Thirty Years' War, because he was able to get hold of Rotteck's “World History”, which made a great impression due to the warmth with which the first volumes of this world history are written.

Of what is significant, so to speak, it may be emphasized that the boy only attended religious education out of duty for the first four years. When he was exempt from religious education from the fourth school year onwards due to the school curriculum, he no longer attended. Due to his family's circumstances, he was never taken to confirmation either, so he has not been confirmed to this day. So you are not dealing with a confirmed person. Because in the circles in which the boy grew up, it was a matter of course that you didn't go along with anything like the clerical institutions. On the other hand, it had made a deep impression on him that he was asked a question in physics during his high school graduation exam that was so modern that it was probably asked for the first time in Austrian schools. He had to explain the telephone, which had only just become widespread at the time. There really was a connection with the very latest developments. He had to draw on the board how to make a phone call from one station to another.

Now, after school, a whole range of philosophical longings had been awakened in the boy. The school-leaving examination was over, and his father had himself transferred to a train station near Vienna so that the boy could now attend university. It was during the vacation period that followed the school-leaving examination that a deep longing for the solution of philosophical questions really arose. There was only one way to satisfy this. Over the years, a number of school books had been piled up, and these were now taken to the antiquarian bookseller, where a nice little sum was received for them. This was immediately exchanged for philosophical books. And now the boy read what he had not yet read by Kant, for example his treatise of 1763 on the “Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Sizes into World Wisdom” or Kant's “Dreams of a Spirit Seer, Explained by Dreams of Metaphysics”, where reference is made to Swedenborg. But not only Kant, the whole of literature could be traced through individual representative books by Hegel, Schelling, Fichte and their students, for example Karl Leonhard Reinhold, by Darwin and so on. It came to Traugott Krug, a Kantian, who is no longer particularly esteemed today.

Now the boy was supposed to go to college. Of course, he could only go to a technical college, since he had no prior education for the studies associated with humanistic and ancient intellectual knowledge. He did indeed enroll at the Technical University in Vienna and in the early years he studied chemistry, physics, zoology, botany, biology, mineralogy, geology, mathematics, geometry and pure mechanics. He also attended lectures on German literary history by the lecturer in German literature at the Technical University, Karl Julius Schröer, who was closely connected with the boy's life.

Something very special happened in the first year of his university studies. Through a special chain of circumstances, a remarkable personality entered the boy's life, a personality who had no erudition but who had a comprehensive and profound knowledge and wisdom. Let us call this personality by his real first name, Felix, who lived with his farming family in a remote, lonely mountain village, had a room full of mystical-occult literature, had himself delved deeply into mystical-occult wisdom and who spent most of his time collecting plants. He collected the most diverse plants in the surrounding areas and, as a rare privilege for those who accompanied him on his solitary wanderings, was able to explain the essence of each individual plant and its occult origins. There were immense occult depths to this man. It was significant what could be discussed with him when he traveled to the capital with his bundle on his back, containing a large number of plants that he had collected and dried. There were very important conversations with this man, whom one calls in Austria a Dürrkräutler, one who collects and dries herbs and then carries them to the pharmacies. That was the man's external profession, but his inner one was quite different. It should not go unmentioned that he loved everything in the world and only became bitter – but that is only mentioned from a cultural-historical point of view – when he came to speak of clerical conditions and of what he too had to endure due to clerical conditions; he was not lovingly inclined towards that.

But something else soon followed. My Felix was, as it were, only the forerunner of another personality who used a means to stimulate in the soul of the boy, who was after all in the spiritual world, the regular, systematic things that one must be familiar with in the spiritual world. The personality who was now again as far removed as possible from all clericalism and naturally had nothing whatever to do with it, actually made use of the works of Fichte in order to connect certain considerations with them, from which things arose in which the germs of Occult Science, which the man who had become a youth later wrote, could be sought. And much of what later became “Occult Science” was then discussed in connection with Fichte's sentences. That excellent man was just as unsightly in his outward profession as Felix. He used a book as a point of reference, so to speak, which is little known in the outer world and which was often suppressed in Austria because of its anti-clerical orientation, but through which one can be inspired to follow very special spiritual paths and paths of the spirit. Those peculiar currents that flow through the occult world, which can only be recognized by considering an upward and a downward double current, came to life in the boy's soul at that time. It was at a time when the boy had not yet read the second part of Faust that he was initiated in this way into the occult. There is no need to say more about this point in the occult training of the present youth, for that is how the boy had grown up. For everything that presented itself to him remained in the soul of the youth; he experienced it within himself and continued on his outer path of life.

At first he was inspired by Karl Julius Schröer's lectures on literary history, on “German Literature since Goethe's First Appearance,” and by what Goethe had given, but especially by the “Theory of Colors” and the second part of “Faust,” which he studied as an 18- to 19-year-old youth. At the same time, he studied Herbartian philosophy, especially the “Metaphysics”. The young man, who had already been introduced to a great deal of philosophy, had experienced a strange disappointment, but for certain reasons he appreciated Herbartian philosophy. He had developed a joyful longing to meet one of the most important lecturers on Herbartian philosophy, namely Robert Zimmermann. This was indeed a disappointment, because one's estimation of Herbartian philosophy was greatly diminished when one heard Robert Zimmermann, who was otherwise brilliant but unbearable at the lectern.

On the other hand, there was a stimulus that was very beneficial for the mind, from a man who later also entered into the life of the personality under discussion here, the historian Ottokar Lorenz. The young man had little inclination to attend the lectures at the Technical University with pedantic regularity, although he took part in everything. In the meantime, he had also attended lectures at the university as an auditor by Robert Zimmermann on “Practical Philosophy” and also the lectures on “Psychology” by Franz Brentano, which at the time - but this was less due to the nature of the subject - did not make such a strong impression on the young man as his books did later, and which the man who had become the young man then got to know thoroughly. Ottokar Lorenz made a certain impression with his sense of freedom, because at that time – during the so-called “Austrian liberal era” – he gave very free-thinking lectures. And Ottokar Lorenz was the kind of character who could make an impression on very young people. He really spoke the harshest words in the college, set out as a historian with a lot of evidence about what was to be set out, and was a very honest person who, for example, after he had discussed some “difficult” circumstances, he was able to say: “I had to gloss over a bit; because, gentlemen, if I had said everything that could be said about it, the public prosecutor would be sitting here next time.”

It was the same Ottokar Lorenz, about whom the following anecdote is told – insofar as anecdotes are true: namely, truer than true. A colleague of his who was particularly interested in the ancillary sciences of history had a favorite student whom Lorenz had to examine when he came to do his doctorate. For example, the candidate was able to provide detailed information on the papal documents in which the dot over the i first appeared. And since he knew so much about everything, Ottokar Lorenz could not help but ask: “I would also like to ask the candidate something. Can you tell me when that Pope, in whose documents the dot over the i first appears, was born?” The candidate did not know that. Then he asked him further if he could tell him when that Pope died? He did not know that either. Then he asked what else he knew about this Pope? But the candidate couldn't answer that either. The teacher, whose favorite student the candidate was, said, “But Mr. Candidate, today you are as if a board had been nailed in front of your head!” Lorenz said, “Well, Mr. Colleague, he is your favorite student, who nailed the board in front of his head?” Such things did happen.

Lorenz was the favorite of the student body at the University of Vienna, and he was also rector at the University of Vienna for one year. It was now customary there for someone who had been rector to become pro-rector for the next year. After him, a completely black radical was elected rector who was extremely unpopular. The students liked to play all kinds of cat music for him. Now Lorenz was the most vehement opponent of the cleric, who was a representative of canon law. That rector could no longer enter the university at all, because as soon as he prepared to do so, the noise started immediately. Then the vice rector had to come and restore order. As soon as Lorenz appeared, the students cheered for him. But Ottokar Lorenz stood there and said: “Your applause leaves me cold. If you – however differently we two may think – treat my colleagues as you do and cheer me, then I tell you that I, who am not worthy of scholarship to untie my opponent's shoe laces, care nothing for your applause and reject it!” - “Pereat! pereat!” it started, and that was the end of his popularity. Lorenz then went to Jena, and the speaker of this text met him several more times. He is no longer on the physical plane. He was an excellent personality. I can still vividly recall in every detail how he once gave a lecture on the relationship between the activities of Carl August and the rest of German politics. The next year, at the assembly of the Goethe Society, Ottokar Lorenz sat and we talked about this lecture that he had given, and out of his deep honesty came the words: “Yes, as far as that is concerned - when I spoke about Carl August's relationship to German politics, I made a terrible mistake!” So he was always ready to admit his wrongs.

In addition to a number of other personalities who made an impression on the young man at the time, an excellent man should be mentioned who, however, soon died, at whose lectures on the “History of Physics” the young man attended at the Vienna Technical University. It was Edmund Reitlinger, who also worked on the “Life of Kepler” and was able to present the development of physics through the ages in an excellent way.

Significant suggestions came in many respects from Karl Julius Schröer, who not only had an impact through his lectures, but also by setting up “exercises in oral presentation and written presentation”. There the students had to present, and there they learned the proper structure of a speech. In doing so, one could also catch up on some of the things one had not learned earlier in terms of sentence structure; in short, one was thoroughly instructed in oral presentation and written presentation. And I can vividly remember what the young man, who is being talked about here, presented at the time. The first lecture was on the significance of Lessing, especially on Laocoon; the second on Kant, and in particular on the problem of freedom. Then he gave a lecture on Herbart and especially on Herbart's ethics; the fourth lecture, which was given as a trial at the time, was on pessimism. At that time, a fellow student had initiated a discussion of Schopenhauer in this college through “oral lectures and written presentations,” and the young man in question said at the time in the debate: “I appreciate Schopenhauer enormously, but if what is the conclusion of Schopenhauer's view is correct, then I would rather be the wooden post on which my foot is now standing than a living being.” Such was the tenor of his soul; the young man wanted to defend himself against an ardent Schopenhauerian. That he would no longer fight him off now can probably be seen from the fact that he himself published an edition of Schopenhauer in which he tried to do justice to Schopenhauer's views.

Now at that time there was also a student association at the Vienna Technical University, and the young man in question was given the office of treasurer in this student association. But he only dealt with the cash at certain times; he was more concerned with the library. Firstly, because he was interested in philosophy, but also because he longed to become more familiar with intellectual life. This desire had become very strong, but he lacked the means to buy books, because there was little money. So it happened that after some time he became the self-evident librarian of that student association. And when books were needed, he wrote a so-called “Pumpbrief” on behalf of the student association to the author of some work that they would like to have, informing him that the students would be extremely pleased if the author would send his book. And these urgent letters were usually answered in an extraordinarily kind way by the books coming. In fact, the most important books written in the field of philosophy came into the student association in this way and were read – at least by the person who had written the fundraising letters. This enabled the person concerned not only to familiarize himself with Johannes Volkelt's “Theory of Knowledge” and the works of Richard Falckenberg, but also with the works of Helmholtz and with historical-systematic works. Many sent their books; even Kuno Fischer once donated a volume of his “History of Modern Philosophy.” In this way, the library came to include the complete works of Baron Hellenbach, who sent all his works at once after a collection letter was written to him. This provided ample opportunity to become familiar with philosophical, cultural studies, and literary-historical works. But one could also deepen one's view in other areas to a sufficient extent.

But then, through his personal and increasingly intimate contact with Karl Julius Schröer, who was not only a connoisseur but also a deeply significant commentator on Goethe, the young man began to take an interest in Goethe's ideas and especially in his ideas about the natural sciences. After the most diverse efforts had been made, Schröer succeeded in placing certain essays on the “Theory of Colors” written by the young man in a physics style.

He was then offered the opportunity to collaborate on the great Goethe edition, which was being prepared at the time by Joseph Kürschner as the Kürschner Edition of National Literature. When the first volume of Goethe's Scientific Writings, with Introductions by Rudolf Steiner, appeared, he felt the need to present the foundations of the sources of thought from which the whole view that had been presented here for an understanding of Goethe followed. Therefore, between the publication of the first and second volumes, he wrote The Theory of Knowledge of Goethe's World View.

From before, from the beginning of the 1880s, only a few essays are worth mentioning: one that was published under the title “Auf der Höhe”, one about Hermann Hettner, one about Lessing and one about “Parallels between Shakespeare and Goethe”. Basically, these are all the essays that were written at that time.

Soon Rudolf Steiner became involved in extensive writing by becoming a collaborator on Kürschner's German National Literature and having to take care of the publication of Goethe's scientific writings with the detailed introductions. It should also be emphasized that, just as the student association had been a kind of support for him earlier, the Vienna “Goethe Association” now became one, with Karl Julius Schröer as its second chairman. It was also a further incentive for Rudolf Steiner that Schröer invited him to give a lecture to such an assembly, as the members of the Vienna “Goethe Association” were, after the first Goethe volumes had appeared. And there Rudolf Steiner gave his lecture on “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic”.

At that time, after he had left the School of Spiritual Science, the person whose life circumstances are to be presented here had become an educator. From the age of fourteen, he had to give private lessons, teach other boys, and continue this teaching later in order to make a living. While he was attending the School for Spiritual Science, he had quite a number of pupils. One could say that he was lucky to have quite a number of pupils whom he tutored or educated. This went hand in hand with his joining the Goethe Society.

Then he became a governess in a Viennese house. With regard to this house, it must be said again that something shone in here that radiated from the most modern circumstances. For the master of this house, whose boys were to be educated by Rudolf Steiner, was one of the most respected representatives of the cotton trade between Europe and America, which can lead one most deeply into modern commercial problems. He was a decidedly liberal man. And the two women, two sisters — two families lived together in this house, so to speak — were quite outstanding women who had the deepest understanding, on the one hand, for child education and, on the other hand, for the idealism that was expressed in Rudolf Steiner's “Introduction to Goethe's Scientific Writings” and in “The Theory of Knowledge”. Now it became possible to learn practical psychology, so to speak, by educating a number of boys. Practical psychology also arose from the fact that one was allowed to develop initiative in all matters concerning education, because one could encounter such a deep understanding, especially with the mother of these boys. What Rudolf Steiner undertook was an educational task that he had to carry out over many years. And he spent these years in such a way that, alongside his teaching work, he was also able to devote himself to working on his essay on the introduction to Goethe's scientific works.

Up to this time, Rudolf Steiner had completed a secondary modern school, had spent time at the Vienna University of Technology and was now living as a teacher of boys who had themselves attended secondary modern school, only one of whom had attended grammar school. Because one of them attended grammar school, Rudolf Steiner was now obliged to catch up on grammar school. So it was out of this necessity that, after he had reached the age of twenty, twenty-one, he was able to catch up on the grammar school with the boys, and only that enabled him to gain his doctorate later.

So things turned out in such a way that before the age of twenty Rudolf Steiner had nothing to do with anything other than a secondary modern school, which in Austria never prepares students for the clergy but actually discourages them from entering the ministry. Then he went through a technical college, which also does not qualify for the spiritual profession, because chemistry, physics, zoology, botany, mechanics, what relates to mechanical engineering, geology and so on, was also done, as well as newer geometry, such as the “geometry of the situation”. During my time at university, I also immersed myself in a wide range of philosophical works, and then, as I became more intimate with Schröer, I approached the Goethe editions. And then came what one might call my “professional” life: teaching, which – because I had to develop a psychological eye for the difficult circumstances of the boys, given their abnormalities – could be called “practical psychology”. So this time really did not pass, as other people want to know, at the Jesuit College in Kalksburg – now another place is being mentioned again – but the time passed in the educational work in a Viennese Jewish house, where the person in question certainly had not the slightest instruction to develop a Jesuit activity. For the understanding that the two women developed from the idealism of the time or from the educational maxims for children was not at all suited to come close to Jesuitism.

But there was something that, so to speak, looked in from the world of Jesuitism like a shadow. And that came about like this. Schröer made the acquaintance of the Austrian poet Marie Eugenie delle Grazie, who lived in the house of a Catholic priest, Laurenz Müllner, who later went on to the Faculty of Philosophy. And one need only read the writings of Marie Eugenie delle Grazie to see immediately that Müllner had no intention of bringing her under Jesuit influence. But one also came together with all kinds of university professors. Among them was one who was a scholar in Semitology, the Semitic languages, and who was a profound expert on the Old Testament. He was a very learned gentleman, of whom it was said that he knew “the whole world and three villages about it”. But the conversations I had with him that were significant to me were those that related to Christianity. What this scholar said about Christianity at the time related to the question of the “Conceptio immaculata”, the immaculate conception. I tried to prove to him that there is a complete inconsistency in this dogma, which is not only about the immaculate conception of Mary, but also about that of Mary's mother, Saint Anne; since you would then have to go further and further back. But he was one of those theologians for whom the term “theologian” was not at all onerous, a thoroughly liberal theologian, and he added: “We can't do that now; because then we would gradually arrive at Davidl, and that would be a bad thing.”

In this tone, the conversations in general took place in Professor Müllner's house at the “Jour” of delle Grazie. Müllner was a sarcastic spirit, and the professors were also liberal-minded men. What shone through from the other side actually came only from a man who had something of a Jesuit spirit, who later met a tragic end. He drowned in a shipwreck in the Adriatic. This man was a church historian at the University of Vienna. He spoke little, but what he said was not suitable for favorably representing the other element. Because there was a rumor about him that he no longer went out on the streets at night for fear of the Freemasons. So he could not arouse particular interest in Jesuitism, firstly because he was not a good church historian, and secondly because of such talk. He always disappeared before dusk.

At that time, there was also an opportunity to gain a more thorough insight into Austrian political conditions, and this came about through my being able to edit the “Deutsche Wochenschrift” founded by Heinrich Friedjung. This represented a decidedly liberal point of view with regard to Austrian conditions, which anyone can study by familiarizing themselves with what Friedjung had available. This period also brought Rudolf Steiner into contact with the other political conditions and personalities. Although this editorial work was very brief, it took place at a very important time: after the Battenberger was expelled from Bulgaria and the new Prince of Bulgaria had taken office. This provided the signature for how to get an accurate picture of the cultural-political conditions.

Now a work appeared at that time that is quite significant, even if some may consider it one-sided, namely “Homunculus” by Robert Hamerling. “Homunculus” was particularly significant for the person whose life circumstances are to be described here because Rudolf Steiner had already become acquainted with Hamerling earlier. Although Rudolf Steiner was born in Kraljevec, his family came from Lower Austria, from the so-called “Bandlkramerlandl”, where people can be seen carrying ribbons made there on their backs. That is where the family came from. And as it is, families in such occupational circumstances are scattered everywhere, and the boy never returned to Lower Austria. But in a certain respect he was, after all, from the same “Bandlkramerlandl” (a region in Lower Austria) where Hamerling also came from.

Hamerling was not given much credit. But in his case one could say that he enjoyed, if not a Jesuit, then at least a monastic education. But that is not the case with the person standing here before you. Robert Hamerling was not recognized either, because when he visited his homeland again later and said to the innkeeper there that he was Hamerling, the innkeeper replied: “Well, you... you Hamerling, you mushroom...”

It was taken as an occasion to send Hamerling the 'Epistemology of Goethe's World View'. How Hamerling received it can be seen from the 'Atomism of the Will', where it is used in a most important chapter - the chapter on the nature of mathematical judgments - in a way that seems to me today to be completely original. There was a correspondence, albeit not for very long, with Robert Hamerling, which was important for Rudolf Steiner in a certain respect, because, according to a letter he had written to Hamerling, this fine stylist told him that he wrote an extraordinarily sympathetic, beautiful style and that he had a certain talent for powerfully expressing what he wanted to express. This was extremely important for Rudolf Steiner, because in those years he did not yet have much confidence in himself, but now, with regard to the question of style in presentation, he had more confidence in himself than before thanks to Robert Hamerling. It is necessary to mention that up to the age of thirteen or fourteen the boy could write very little correctly, grammatically and orthographically, and that only the content of his essays helped him to overcome his grammatical and spelling mistakes.

When the Goethe edition was nearing completion and Rudolf Steiner had caught up on humanistic-ancient culture in teaching with his boys, the time came when he could do his doctorate. He had also been able to gain a truly artistic and architectural perspective due to the fact that the great architects of the time were living in Vienna, and he had formed relationships with them through his work at the Vienna University of Applied Arts, where he became personally acquainted with them. It should be mentioned that the Votivkirche, the Rathaus, the Parliament building and others were being built in Vienna at the time. This allowed one to stimulate many connections with art. At that time there were also - and this may also be mentioned - fierce debates with the enraged Wagner fans, because the one who is being talked about here could and only had to struggle through to recognize Richard Wagner, to an acknowledgment that is of course known from other representations.

The acquaintance with a spiritual current, which, although it had begun earlier, was only just emerging in Europe at that time, also continues to play a role in that period. It is the acquaintance with what H. P. Blavatsky spread as the theosophical direction. And the person under discussion here can point out that he was indeed one of the first buyers of A. P. Sinnett's “Esoteric Buddhism” and Mabel Collins' “Light on the Path”. He brought this book, which had just been published, to the bedside of a well-known lady who was very seriously ill at the time, and gave her a great deal of guidance to help her understand the book from her point of view. He also brought it to a man who needed to be prepared by him for the Austrian officer's examination in integral calculus and mathematics. He lived in the family home where the very seriously ill lady was.

At that time, the Viennese representatives of the Theosophical movement also approached me. The person in question developed a very friendly and intimate relationship with everyone who was associated with the recently deceased Franz Hartmann during this time, as well as with other Theosophists. That was in the years 1884 to 1885, when the Theosophical movement was just beginning to become known. At that time it was not possible for the person under discussion here to join this movement, although he knew it very well, because the whole behavior and the whole behavior of the people, the so-called inauthentic - that should used here only as a technical term - was not compatible with what had finally developed in the case of the person described here: a scientific exactitude, accuracy and authenticity anchored in the life of the senses. This is not meant as self-praise, but rather I ascribe it more to what has emerged as a result of the erudition of our time. Whatever else one may object to about this erudition, it cannot be objected that the greatest, sharpest logic could not arise from it.

So it happened that the person in question personally met valuable people within the theosophical circle, such as Rosa Mayreder, who later turned away from the theosophical direction altogether. He also became familiar with the whole movement in an outwardly historical sense, but he could have nothing to do with it and it was only later, when he was led to delve into Goethe's Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, that he was able to apply in a practical way, so to speak, what he had to say in a theosophical sense. In commenting on this fairy tale, he first applied in practice what had always lived in his soul since the first occult manifestation mentioned. That was in 1888, after he had thoroughly become acquainted with the Theosophical movement, but had not been able to join it externally, although he had met valuable people there.

One particularly strong impression should also be mentioned, an impression at an art exhibition in Vienna, where the works of Böcklin were seen for the first time in 1888 by the man whose life is described here, namely “Pietà”, “In the Play of the Waves”, “Spring Mood” and “Source Nymph”. These were works that gave him an opportunity to engage with ideas about painting in a lasting way, because he naturally wanted to get to the bottom of the matter – in a similar way to Richard Wagner, where the starting point was the debates mentioned – and then to become particularly involved in this area of art, which later found its continuation in Weimar.

Once the person to be described was ready, it was decided that the editorial work for the great Weimar Goethe Edition would be distributed among individual scholars. For those who were then commissioned by Grand Duchess Sophie of Weimar to distribute the individual works, the idea arose to initially assign only Goethe's “Theory of Colors” to him. But later, when Rudolf Steiner came to Weimar to work on the 'Theory of Colors', he was also given the task of working on Goethe's scientific works, particularly because he came into a warm and intimate relationship with Bernhard Suphan, who met such a tragic end. Thus began that Weimar period, during which a scientific and philological activity was developed by the person to be portrayed. The person concerned has never been particularly proud of the actual philological work, however. He could point out many mistakes in this regard and does not want to gloss over some of the blunders he has made.

After Rudolf Steiner had moved into the old Goethe-Schiller Archive – it was still housed in the castle – he had other important experiences. Domestic and foreign scholars came again and again, even from America, so that this Goethe-Schiller Archive became a meeting point for the most diverse scholarship. Furthermore, it was possible to see the emergence of a wonderfully ideal institution; for it was the time when the new Goethe-Schiller Archive was being built on the other side of the Ilm. At the same time, there was a unique opportunity to immerse oneself in old memories that were still linked to the Goethe-Schiller period. And it was also an opportunity to grow together with the most diverse artistic interests, because Weimar really was the meeting point for many artistic interests – Richard Strauss also started there.

After the “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily” was interpreted by Rudolf Steiner, intensive work on Goethe came to the fore. But in addition to deepening his knowledge of Goethe, he was also working on the “Philosophy of Freedom” at the time; he had already brought the treatise on “Truth and Science” with him to Weimar. He still went to Vienna a few times, once to give a lecture at the Goethe-Verein on the 'Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily'; a second time to give a lecture at a scientific club on the relationship of monism to a more spiritual, more real direction. That was in 1893. The paper can be read in the 'Monatsblättern des Wissenschaftlichen Clubs in Wien'. In this lecture, Rudolf Steiner discussed in detail the relationship between philosophy and science. The lecture then ended with a clear description of his relationship with Ernst Haeckel and highlighted everything Steiner had to say about Haeckel in the negative.

It is now well into the night, so it is not possible to speak about the following in as much detail as the previous. It is not necessary either. But you could, if you were to research much more about what happened up to the Weimar period and explore the circumstances - apart from the fact that things speak for themselves enough - find the clearest evidence everywhere of what is a great perversion of the truth, if that strange accusation has been raised, which has now been repeated by the president of the Theosophical Society on a special occasion, that I was “educated by the Jesuits”. I have just been handed a copy of the magazine Stimmen aus Maria-Laach, which, as is well known, is published by Jesuits. It contains a discussion of a book about Theosophy, which includes a remarkable sentence. A book has been published that is opposed to Theosophy and written by a Jesuit priest. At the end of the review, it says: “The first part deals with the movement in general, its esotericism and false mysticism. The second part goes into detail, refuting the theosophical musings on Christ. [...] The works to which the critic usually refers are by Rudolf Steiner, the (reportedly) apostate priest and current General Secretary of the German Section of the Theosophical Society, “Christianity as Mystical Fact” and Miss Besant, the President of the Theosophical Society (Headquarters Adyar), “Esoteric Christianity; both books have already been translated into Italian.”

That Rudolf Steiner was an “apostate priest” is even stated in the Jesuit magazine itself, in the “Stimmen aus Maria-Laach”, so that the Jesuits can claim the honor of spreading this claim for themselves. But just as age does not protect against folly, so Jesuitism does not protect anyone from unjustly claiming an objective untruth. And if such a distortion of the facts is even spread by the Jesuits themselves, then one could be of the opinion that this should be all the more reason for Mrs. Besant to be suspicious of it. But Mrs. Besant goes on to explain these things, and they are carried further. I even had to confront these things myself from the podium once when I was in Graz. It is also claimed that I received a Jesuit education in Kalksburg, near Vienna. I never saw Kalksburg Abbey, even though my relatives were only three or four hours away from it. And the other place – Bojkowitz – which is mentioned in the same context, I only learned about by name in the last few days.

All these details, which I consider a kind of imposition to tell you, will probably explain to you how right one is to regret the time wasted in rejecting such foolish accusations. Therefore, no fuss was made about the accusation. But when this accusation is now raised by the President of the Theosophical Society, there is a need to counter that claim with the actual course of my upbringing, to describe how it really happened, namely as a kind of self-education. Everything I have told you about the boy, the youth and the later man Rudolf Steiner can be documented, and the facts will prove in every detail the utter foolishness and nonsense of the assertions that have been made. We need not dwell on their moral evaluation. What has been said and what can be said later are facts that can be verified at any time and can be relied upon. But the question can be raised: by what right and from what sources does Mrs. Besant speak of what she says about my “upbringing”, of which I “was not able to free myself sufficiently”? And by what right and from what sources will her followers perhaps - since they do not care about the objections made here - continue to assert these things? Perhaps some people will even come up with the idea that Mrs. Besant is clairvoyant and has therefore perhaps seen everything that she summarizes in the grandiose words: “He has not been able to free himself sufficiently from his youth education.” It would be better to correct what comes from Mrs. Besant's clairvoyance and to test this clairvoyance precisely on such a factor. There is no other way to counter this “clairvoyance” than to cite the facts. And I had to bore those who want to stand by us at the starting point of our anthroposophical movement with the fact that I presented them with the alternative: either to look at the facts, which can all be proven in detail and which , or to accept the uncharacterizable remarks made by Mrs. Besant at the last Adyar meeting of the Theosophical Society, which were probably inspired by her clairvoyance after the votes of her followers.

What may be most comforting to us Germans in the hard-pressed situation in which we currently find ourselves is the awareness that our nation rests on foundations that can never be damaged by any external power. The German nation is one that is not dependent on physical means of power alone for its development. The "strong roots of our power" rest in the depths of the people's soul, which is not accessible to any opponent. And so we experience the joy that, while the external power and living conditions are decidedly unfavorable to us, German poetry is flourishing among us in a way that we have rarely experienced since classical times. The Germans of Austria have the good fortune to possess a poetic phenomenon whose poetry reaches the highest level of art and at the same time must be regarded as the most wonderful outflow of the German national spirit. The fact that we are dealing with a female poet is of no consequence. Those who do not know from the outset are simply like almost all critics: they consider M. E. delle Grazie - the name of our poetess - to be a pseudonym, and it does not even occur to them to think that the powerful Germanic figures of the epic "Hermann" - which is the most important achievement of the brilliant poetess - that this powerful language did not originate from a poet in her prime. We are dealing here with a powerful phenomenon. Delle Grazie is as original as only a spirit formed from the never-ending source of German essence can be, she is as powerful and deep in her characterization as only the German spirit with its loving immersion in the human heart and mind can be. She depicts the Roman depravity that confronts noble German morality with such bitterness as only the noble-minded German is capable of, who on his moral high ground knows no mercy for the unfair, for the bad, but only contempt. The poet has succeeded in creating characters in "Hermann" that are truly of the flesh and blood of our people. The whole poem is borne by the majesty of German sentiment, by the most beautiful idealism.

The sweet hope of all German sons
United in this heroic song;
I wrote it with the bold vigor of youth
You know the hot all-powerful urge,
My deepest love and my deepest love,
My own feeling rests in this song!

This is how the poet praises her work. She wants to send this deepest longing and feeling of hers to all German lands:

Go forth, O song, and glide boldly determined
Through all the tides that blue in the sea,
Welcome also those German shoots,
Who build their hut far away in the jungle.
Proclaim to them that in the homeland
The last chain breaks weak and powerless -
From the Alpine summit to the northern edge
Awaken the German courage, the German spirit!

It is the collapse of Roman rule through the youthful strength of the German people that the epic describes to us. Treachery and deceit fight against German nobility and German manly virtue. Struggle and victory are described with a poetic power that is unique to genius. The poet finds the right tone for every situation. No less for the scenes of battle than for the wonderful depictions of nature, which, when inserted in the right place, give the poetry its greatest advantage. It thus becomes a reflection of Germanic folk life, which also unfolded in an intimate alliance with nature. The crown of the poem, however, is the last song: Peace. Up to this point, Hermann has been presented to us as the hero with the highest martial virtues. Here, in the last canto, we get to know the other side of the German man. He immediately sheds all the roughness of the hero when selfless love pours into his heart. After the brilliant victory, Hermann's union with Thusnelda takes place.

The priest lifts his piously transfigured eyes
And now blesses the blissful couple...

"In autumn you fought with a bloody shield,
But today you are adorned with Freia's oak wreath!"

Surrounded by his warriors, the hero celebrates his marriage.

In battle he fought like a fierce warrior,
But now love transfigures his face
He gazes at the star-studded sky,
He raises the polished sword and speaks:
"May the Star of Concord never fade,
Its holy glimmer nourish our glow.
Freedom float over these lands
And direct our gaze heavenward,
Let the spirit of the ancestors tie all bonds
And sweeten our blurred ore of arms! Let love spread its golden wings,
Loyalty increase her gods' hoard
And victoriously through the wide fields ring
The German song, the free German word!"

The beautiful song concludes meaningfully with a dream of Hermann's: Germania, "the proud, shining Germania", appears to our hero and reveals the future to him. Here, the poet's brilliant imagination is revealed in the wonderful addition and interpretation she gives to the Balder saga. Our ancestors have created an uplifting divine figure in Balder. Balder is the god of love, of peace, who perished in the battle against evil. Germania announces to Hermann that this Balder will reappear:

"The god of peace will rise from death! He comes with his ether-bright shield,
When all the princes of heaven perish!"

She lets Balder, our dearest god, awaken again before his eyes "in the green legendary grove of the Orient".

Christus, then, is Balder, once overcome by evil, for whose return the German people longed because they already knew him, because they were prepared for him by their own legend of the gods. Is there a more beautiful way of expressing the idea that it was precisely the German people who were most receptive to pure, unadulterated Christianity, that this noblest of all cultural creations could never take root in the depraved world of the south because they were simply not receptive there? Christianity, transfigured by the Germanic essence, then appears to Hermann as the champion of a new culture that unites German love and the German spirit with the "beautiful form of the Greeks". The goddess then prophetically predicts to him:

"As long as the oaks lift their crowns,
The larks sing and the roses bloom
As long as you walk on light paths,
Surrounded by a golden ray of sky,
As long as the freedom of the Teutons lives,
As long as the German ideal triumphs!"

Delle Grazie is the singer of that love which expresses itself most purely in the selfless nature of the German. Her poetic mission is to show how pure human love is the source of all that is great, to show how all that is noble and good can ultimately be traced back to the victorious power of this love. What is so far apart in terms of subject matter, such as "Hermann" and the Old Testament story of "Saul", which she turned into a tragedy, is united by this fundamental trait of her poetry. Many objections have been raised against "Saul". But the most important thing has been little noticed. It is the tragic trait of a very special kind that delle Grazie knew how to put into the figure of Saul. In the midst of a people whose religion knows no freedom of spirit, Saul wants to unfurl the banner of love. He wants to oppose the dark Jehovah, the God of revenge and slavery, who does not love his people but only punishes them and is therefore not loved but only feared by them, with the God of nobler humanity. Saul senses Christianity, he senses the basic trait of it, which later found its symbol in the Redeemer, the "image of love-declared humanity". The hero must perish as a result. "Hermann" and "Saul" complement each other; they show how pure love unfolds in different times. That is what is significant about our poet, what is genuinely artistic, that it is problems that reach deep into the workings of the world that she seeks to solve in these, her two most important poems. The latter are followed by a small volume of "Poems". Of these, "The Nile", "Adam and Eve", "Thirst" and "Hashish" can be regarded as masterful. It is always a sign of a poet's original power when the imagination works in such a powerful way, as is the case with delle Grazie. The mere contemplation of a photograph of the ancient colossal statue "The Nile" in the Vatican allows the whole history of Egypt to pass before the poet's mind in the most marvelous poetic images. "Adam and Eve" is a magnificent myth that depicts the longing of the sexes for each other and the delight of the first meeting of man and woman, culminating in a thought of the most far-reaching significance. The voice of God resounds to the first human beings who find each other and see themselves in the midst of the most glorious creation:

I, I called this wonderful becoming,
I created the beautiful world, the vast sea.
I lifted the dark globe from the depths,
I gave the sun its golden glow,
Without me everything would lie lifeless and sleep,
Without me everything would be desolate and dark,
Everywhere are my blessed impulses,
Everywhere is the trace of my goodness.
I am the pure everlasting love,
I am the noble spirit of nature! But even if my works are beautiful and glorious,
You alone show all my power:
In your breast dwells all my strength,
In you I have kindled the holy spirit.

The view expressed in the poem "Thirst" is just as magnificent. It describes a journey through the desert. Merchants accompanied by slaves move across the vast sandy expanse. They are longing for an oasis. Not a drop of water has touched their tongues for a long time.

Full of sorrow and fear of death
The rich merchants look to the earth.

The whole terrible situation of the people is now described.

"O Allah, Allah, have mercy!"
O they cry out involuntarily, for already
They see in their minds their pale carcasses
Adorning the glowing ground of the desert.
...
"O joy, honor, happiness and wealth,
What are you in the face of death?" ...
"Oh how beautiful, oh how glorious
It is up here in the realm of golden light,
But you must go down
Into the cold, eerie darkness."

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So the rich merchants. But there are beings in the course who do not fear death, who see it as salvation. They are the slaves. They are not attached to earthly life, because: "What is life for them without freedom?" They feel a different "thirst" than their masters, they thirst for freedom.

Welcome to them is pale death,
They do not fear it, oh no,
They rejoice and cheer him! Perhaps that over there in his kingdom
The beautiful freedom blooms for them too.

The last of the poems in the collection, "Hashish", truly contains all the qualities of the highest poetic power. It shows us how the poet receives poetic consecration at the throne of God himself. The whole thing is a dream that leads her through infinite space directly to the seat of the divine. Poetic talent is revealed above all when the poet succeeds in transforming real objects into images of extraordinary beauty. For example, when she addresses the moon, which she reaches on her journey:

We are already near you, friendly moon,
And wonderfully, you seem quite different to me now
Than otherwise seen from a lofty vantage point
And scientifically described in many a book! [...] you are just a small gondola,
Shimmering through infinite space,
And all rapturous, enamored poets
To the beautiful realm of divine dreams!

The reader will have seen from the above where delle Grazie's significance lies: in the grandeur of his vision, in his German idealism and in a rich imagination that moves primarily in the regions of the spiritual. We must now mention a fourth of the poet's works, "The Gypsy Woman", a novella. It does not occur to us to defend the deficiency of form and the improbability of the situations in this little work. The son of a landowner is enchanted by the beauty of a girl from this gang at a party where a band of gypsies is providing music and dancing. This girl, an orphan, is not a real gypsy, even according to her comrades. They don't really know how she got into the gang. A rare phenomenon in a gypsy society: a very noble girl, capable of the most beautiful feelings, who has been passionately in love with the landowner's scion ever since they met. After some time, they meet again. The relationship continues, the girl is seduced and then abandoned. The unfaithful man marries Etelka, the daughter of a magistrate. When the couple is blessed by the priest, the gypsy woman appears, mad to assert the rights of her heart. She is thrown into prison. An old gypsy, whose fatherly advice she usually listens to, but not when the seducer approaches, frees her. The madwoman grabs the old man's dagger, rushes into the unfaithful man's house and murders him. She and her liberator flee, pursued by the lord of the manor's people. The old man is killed by a stone thrown at him, the girl plunges the dagger into her own heart.

In spite of all the shortcomings of this little work, if you want to be unbiased, you will find the heartfelt tones with which the poet knows how to depict human relationships and the conflicts they entail, even when they take place within a despised, neglected class of people.

If we consider that the creator of all this is only at the beginning of her twenties, then no assumption we make about the glorious things she will yet give our people will be too bold. In any case, it is the duty of every German who has a heart and mind for the education of his people to follow the development of this spirit. A nation that produces such blossoms has nothing to fear. Not of the present, not of the future. When we are told from some quarters that the German people have played their part and that it is now the turn of younger peoples, we reply: we have nothing ageing about us as long as such youthful life is developing in our midst.