The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We have been busy getting acquainted with the way man's life processes and the sense-zones locate him in the cosmos, and we have tried to look at some of the consequences that follow from the facts on which this knowledge is based. Above all, we have to some extent cured ourselves of the trivial notion, held by many who want to befriend the spirit, that everything that can be referred to as ‘material’ or ‘perceptible to the senses’ is to be despised. For we have seen that here in the physical world it is precisely the lower organs and functions that reflect higher activities and relationships in the human being. In their present state, we can only view the senses of touch and life as being very dependent on the physical world—equally so the ego sense, the sense of thought and the sense of speech. But we must accustom ourselves to seeing those senses that in the Earth sphere only serve the inner being of the organism as the shadowy reflections of something that is immense and significant for the spiritual world once we have passed through death: the sense of movement, the sense of balance, the sense of smell, the sense of taste and, to a certain degree, the sense of sight. We have emphasised the fact that in the spiritual world the sense of movement enables us to move among the beings of the various hierarchies in accordance with the way they attract or repel us. After death we experience our connection with the hierarchies as spiritual sympathy or antipathy. Physical balance, as we know it here in our physical bodies, is not the only thing the sense of balance provides for us; it also holds us in balance between the beings and influences of the spiritual world. It is similar with the other senses: taste, smell, sight. And, in so far as a hidden spirituality plays into the physical world, it is of no use to turn to the higher senses for clarification. Rather we must enter the realms of the so-called lower senses. Mind you, these days it is not possible to speak about many of the highly significant things that lie in this direction. For today there are such strong prejudices that all one has to do to be misunderstood and accused of all kinds of things is to speak out about precisely those things that are interesting and significant in a higher spiritual sense. So, for the time being, I must forgo speaking about some of the interesting things that go on in the realm of the senses.

In this respect, the situation was much more favourable in earlier times. In those times, however, there were not the same possibilities of disseminating information, either. Aristotle could discuss certain truths much more unguardedly than they can be discussed today, when such things are immediately taken personally and awaken personal sympathies and antipathies. In Aristotle's works, for example, you can find profound truths about the human being which one simply could not explain to a large audience of today. I was referring to some of these in the last lecture when I said that the Greeks did not fall prey to materialism even though they knew more than we do of how our soul-spiritual nature is related to our physical, bodily nature. In Aristotle's writings, for example, you can find wonderful descriptions of the external appearance of a brave person, or a coward, or an indignant person, or of someone who is addicted to sleep. There, in a manner that from a certain point of view is correct, you find described what kind of hair and complexion and wrinkles cowardly people have, what sort of bodies drowsy people have, and so on. To say even this much would create problems these days; other things would be even more problematic. People of today take these things much more personally. In many respects they positively want to use the personal to keep themselves in the fog about the truth. That is why some circumstances today compel one to speak in more general terms if one wants to speak truthfully.

Specific insights about every kind of human being and every human activity await those who, in the right spirit, turn to our preceding considerations with the necessary questions. We have said, for example, that the human senses are presently located in more or less separate, static regions. They are just like the constellations, each of which remains motionless in its own region of the cosmos—in contrast to the planets, which appear, circling, wandering, changing their location in a relatively short time. Moreover, the boundaries of each sense region are fixed, whereas the life processes pulse through the whole organism and circulate through the individual sense-zones, permeating them with their influence.

Now we also have said that our sense organs were more like vital organs during Old Moon. There they functioned more as vital organs, whereas the organs that are now vital organs were essentially more related to the soul. Consider, then, something that has been emphasised more than once: that sometimes people will regress to, or return to, an atavistic state that was a natural and usual state in an earlier time—in this case, during the Old Moon period. We have noted that there is a form of regression that revives the dreamlike imaginative vision of Old Moon. Today, such an atavistic regression into the visionary state of Old Moon is a form of illness.

Now I ask you please not to lose sight of something: namely, that the visions themselves are not pathological. If that were so, we would have to say that everything mankind experienced on Old Moon was the product of illness, for there one lived entirely in such visions. And we would have to say that Old Moon was an illness that humanity had to go through—an illness of soul, at that—so that the humanity of Old Moon was necessarily insane. Naturally, one cannot say this; it is utter nonsense. The pathological aspect does not lie in the visions themselves, but rather in the fact that they cannot be sustained by the human organisation in its present, earthly form. The earthly, human organisation adapts to such visions in a way that is not appropriate to them. Just consider: when someone has the kind of vision one had on Old Moon, this vision is only adapted for engendering the kind of feelings, activities and acts that were appropriate to Old Moon. The illness consists in someone having such a vision here on Earth and responding to it in ways that only an earthly organisation can respond. This only happens because the earthly organisation cannot tolerate this vision with which it is more or less impregnated.

Take the most obvious, concrete kind of case: circumstances arise in which someone has a vision. Then, instead of remaining in quiet contemplation of the vision and relating it to the spiritual world, which is the only world to which it can rightly be related, the person applies it to the physical world and behaves accordingly. In other words, he starts to go berserk because the vision is doing what it should not do—permeating his body and bringing it into action. This is the most obvious kind of case. Today, when an atavistic vision arises that the body cannot tolerate, it does not remain in the domain which has brought it to life, which is where it should remain. A person becomes powerless if, his physical body is too weak to stand up against the vision. If the physical body is strong enough to stand up against it, the vision is weakened. Then the objects and events in it cease to appear—falsely—as if they really belonged to the world of the senses, for that is how they seem to someone who is made ill by them. Thus, if the physical body is strong enough to counter the falsifying tendencies of an atavistic vision, the following occurs: in such cases, a person relates to the world in a fashion that is similar to that of Old Moon, and yet he is strong enough to reconcile this Moon mode of experience with the earthly organism in its present state.

What does this imply? It implies that this person has somewhat altered his inner zodiac with its twelve sense-zones. It is changed in such a way that what happens in this zodiac of the twelve senses is more like a life process than a sense process. Or, better expressed, one could say that events in the regions of the senses, events which actually do impinge on the sense processes, are transformed into life processes—so that the sense processes are lifted out of their present, dead state and transformed into something living: you still see, but something lives in that seeing; you hear, but simultaneously there is something living in that hearing. Something lives in the eyes or in the ears which otherwise only lives in your stomach or on your tongue. The sense processes are truly brought into movement. And it is quite in order for that to happen. For then our modern sense organs acquire qualities that could otherwise only be possessed in the same degree by our vital organs. The forces of sympathy and antipathy flow strongly through our vital organs. Now just consider how much of our whole life depends on sympathy and antipathy—on which things we accept and take up and which we reject! And now those very powers of sympathy and antipathy, powers that are otherwise developed in the life organs, once more begin to pour into the sense organs. The eye not only sees red, it experiences sympathy or antipathy along with the colour. The sense organs regain the capacity to receive and be permeated by the life forces. So we can say: in this way the sense organs are brought once more into the sphere of life.

For this to happen, there must be changes in the life processes. Through these changes, the life processes become more ensouled than they otherwise would be in earthly life. The ensouling takes place in such a way that the three life processes—breathing, warming and nourishing—are more or less united. Then they begin to manifest themselves more in the sphere of the soul. With normal breathing, one breathes the prosaic, earthly air; the normal process of warming involves earthly warmth; and so on. But when they are ensouled, the life processes are united by a kind of symbiosis. They cease to be separated in the way they are usually separated in the present-day human organism; they establish connections with each other. Breathing, warming and nourishing unite to form an inner association with one another. And this is not nourishing in the coarse, material sense, but is rather the process of nourishing. The process occurs without it being necessary for anything to be eaten, and it does not occur on its own, as when we eat, but in conjunction with the other processes.

The four remaining life processes are united in a similar fashion. Secretion, growth, maintenance and reproduction are united to form a single, more ensouled process, a life process that has more to do with the soul. And then these two parts can unite yet again-not just gathering all the life processes together so that they function as one, but by combining three of the processes in one group and the other four processes in another so that these two groups, in turn, can function in concert.

In this way three new soul faculties arise. In character they resemble—but are not identical with—the earthly faculties of thinking, feeling and willing: here is another triad of soul faculties. The new faculties differ from thinking, feeling and willing as they normally present themselves on Earth. They are more like life processes, but not so differentiated as the life processes otherwise are on Earth. When someone is able to sustain this sinking-back into Moon without lapsing into visions, a very intimate, subtle process takes place. The sense-zones are transformed into regions of life, the life processes are ensouled, and there arises a kind of understanding that is faintly suggestive of the Old Moon visions. Nor can a person remain constantly in this state, for then one would cease to be fit for life on Earth. To be fit for Earth one needs the kind of senses and vital organs we have described previously. But in special circumstances a person can enter into this other state. Then, if the state tends more towards the will, it leads to aesthetic creation; if the state tends more towards perception, it leads to aesthetic enjoyment. Truly aesthetic human behaviour consists in the enlivening of the sense organs and the ensouling of the life processes. This is an extremely important truth about humanity; it explains much. This enlivening of the sense organs and this new life in the regions of the senses is to be found in the arts and the enjoyment of art. Something similar occurs with the vital processes, which are more ensouled in the enjoyment of art than they are in normal life. These days, it is impossible to understand the full significance of the changes a person undergoes when he enters the artistic sphere, because a materialistic approach is incapable of grasping the facts in their full reality. Today a human being is seen as concrete and fixed. But, within certain limits, people actually are variable. This is demonstrated by the sort of variability we have just been observing.

Elucidations such as those that have just been presented contain far, far-reaching truths. To mention only one such truth: there is the fact that precisely those senses that are most adapted to the physical plane of existence are the senses that must undergo the most radical changes when they are led halfway back into a quasi-Moon existence. In order to serve someone who follows this road halfway back into the time of Old Moon, the sense of the I, the sense of thought and the sense of physical touch must be wholly transformed, for these senses are robustly adapted to Earth existence.

It is of no use to art, for example, to confront the I or the world of thoughts the way we normally do. At the very most, you might find the usual relationship to the I and to thought in some minor arts. No art describes or portrays a person's I directly, in the way the person actually lives, standing within the real world. The artist must go through a process whereby the I is lifted out of the specialisation it has acquired on earth; it must give him a generalised sense of meaning, a sense for the typical. An artist does this as a matter of course. Similarly, an artist cannot directly express the world of thoughts in the way in which it is usually expressed here on earth. Otherwise he would not be able to produce any poetry or works of art at all, but at the very most only didactic things, things that contain some lesson and are not artistic in the true sense of the word. The changes that the artist makes in the world that confronts him enliven the senses by leading them back to a previous condition in the way I have been explaining.

But, regarding this change in the senses, there is something else that must still be considered. I said that the life processes intermingle. Just as the planets come into conjunction, and just as their mutual relations are significant—in contrast to the immobile stars—the sense-zones can also come into motion; once they have been transposed to the planetary dimension of human life, they can come to life and attain to relationships with one another. This is the reason why artistic perception is never as restricted to specific sense-zones in the way in which our usual perception is. The particular senses also develop certain relationships with one another. Let us consider an example—say, painting.

A consideration that is based on true spiritual science would discover the following things. Sight, the sense of warmth, the sense of taste, the sense of smell—these have their discrete zones as far as normal sense observation goes. Their respective areas are separate. In painting, however, these sense regions merge in a remarkable fashion, not only in the concrete organs, but also in their spheres of influence as I have described them in preceding lectures.

A painter, or someone who is enjoying a painting, does not merely see the content as colours: the red or the blue or the violet. Instead, he actually tastes the colours, although of course not with the actual organ, or else he would have to lick the painting with his tongue, which he does not do. But a subtle process that is similar to the process of tasting nevertheless takes place in all those areas allied to the sphere of the tongue. When you use the processes of sensory perception to see a green parrot, your eyes see the green colour. But when you enjoy a painting, other subtle, imaginative processes also participate in the act of seeing. These processes are associated with your tongue and belong to your tongue's sense of taste. They are similar to the subtle processes that occur when you taste something, when you eat your food. Now, the act of seeing simultaneously involves other processes—not the processes that actually happen on the tongue, but rather fine, physiological processes associated with these—so that in the deeper sense of the word the painter really does taste the colours.

And he smells the nuances of the colours—not with his nose but rather with the more soul-allied things that accompany the act of smelling from deeper in the organism. Therefore, the individual sense-zones begin to merge as they become areas more given over to the life process.

When we read a description intended for instructing us as to how something looks or how something happened, we employ the sense of speech, or the sense of word. Through it, we obtain information about one thing and another. But if we listen to a poem in the same way as we listen to straightforward information, we will not be able to understand it. The poem does manifest itself to the sense of speech, of course, but it cannot be understood solely through the sense of speech. In addition to the sense of speech, the ensouled senses of balance and movement must also be focused on the poem—not just the usual senses of balance and movement, but the ensouled senses. So we again see that the senses merge. The regions of the senses have become life regions and the sense organs function in combination. Furthermore, this whole process must be accompanied by life processes that relate to the soul instead of functioning like the usual life processes in the physical world.

Someone who engages the fourth life process so intensely that he sweats when he listens to a piece of music has gone too far; that is no longer appropriate to the aesthetic realm, for secretion has been taken as far as physical secretion. The first point is that the process should remain on the soul level and not lead to physical secretion, even though physical secretion is based on exactly the same process. The second point to note is that secretion should not emerge as a discrete process, but rather in an association of four processes—all of them on a soul level: secretion, growth, maintenance and reproduction.

On the one hand, spiritual science has the task of linking the development of Earth to the spiritual worlds. From many points of view we have seen that mankind is headed for disaster unless this link is established. On the other hand, however, spiritual science must also revive the capacity for grasping and understanding the physical world in terms of the spiritual. Not only has materialism led to an inability to rise to the spirit, it also has led to an inability to understand the physical. The spirit is alive in everything physical. If it is lost sight of, it becomes impossible to understand the physical. Just ask yourselves, what could someone who knows nothing of spiritual realities know about the way an entire sense-zone can become a life-zone, and about the way vital processes can manifest as soul processes? What do contemporary physiologists know about these subtle processes that occur in us? Materialism has gradually brought us to such a pass that we have lost all contact with concrete reality. We live only in abstractions, and now we are abandoning the abstractions, too. At the beginning of the nineteenth century people still spoke of vital energy, or of life energy. Naturally, one cannot do anything with such an abstraction, for matters can only be grasped when one enters into the concrete. Once you have a full grasp of the seven life processes you are involved with the realities, and what matters is to re-establish a connection with reality. People try to put new life into all sorts of greyish abstractions, abstractions like elan vital. Even though they may intend exactly the opposite, they are only leading mankind deeper into the crudest materialism, materialism that stoops to mysticism. These abstractions say nothing; they simply testify to an inability to understand. The development of humanity in the immediate future depends on a knowledge of things that can only be discovered in the spiritual worlds. We must make real progress in our spiritual understanding of the world.

In this regard, we ought to go back to the good Aristotle, who was closer to the ancient vision than people are today. I only want to remind you of one characteristic thing about old Aristotle. A whole library has been written about the notion of catharsis, by which he attempted to show what is at the root of tragedy. He said: Tragedy is a unified presentation of events from human life, events which arouse fear and pity as they unfold; furthermore, the soul is purified because of the way this fear and pity unfold, and so the effects of the fear and pity are also purified. The age of materialism has written so much about this passage because it does not possess the organ for apprehending Aristotle. The only ones on the right track were those who saw that Aristotle's expression ‘catharsis’ is medical, or quasi-medical, and not so in the sense of today's materialistic medicine. The aesthetic experience of tragedy really does engender processes that reach right into the physical body and are the organic events that normally accompany fear and pity. It does this because vital processes are changed to processes of soul. A tragedy purifies these vital effects because they are simultaneously elevated to processes of soul. And if you read further in Aristotle's Poetics you will find a hint of this deep understanding of the aesthetic man—not understanding in the modern style, but out of the ancient traditions of the Mysteries. You will find yourself much more in the grips of immediate life reading Aristotle's Poetics than you ever will by reading the tract of some modern aesthetician who can only sniff around and dialecticize, but is unable to get hold of realities.

Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man marks another high point in the understanding of aesthetic man. He lived in a more abstract time, however. Today we need to add the spiritual—the spiritually concrete—to the idealism of that time. But when we look at the more materialistic time of Goethe and Schiller, we see that the abstractions of Schiller's letters on aesthetics nevertheless contain something of what we have been talking about. It is only that the process has descended nearer to the physical plane—but only so that the material may be all the more thoroughly penetrated by an intensively grasped spirituality. What does Schiller say? He says: Humanity, as it lives on earth has two basic drives: it has rational impulses and natural impulses. The logic of the impulse to reason functions as a natural necessity. One is forced to think in a certain way; thinking is not at all free. What avails it to speak of freedom as regards this sphere of natural necessity where one is forced to think that three times three is nine, and not ten? Logic implies a strict rational necessity. For this reason, Schiller says that the person who conforms to the necessities of pure reason is subject to spiritual compulsion.

Schiller contrasts the necessity of reason with the necessities of the world of the senses—of everything that lives in the drives and emotions. There, also, a person must follow a natural necessity rather than his own free impulses. Then Schiller looks for a middle condition between the necessities of reason and the necessities of nature. He finds it in what occurs when a person forms something aesthetically—when rational necessity inclines towards what the person loves or does not love, and when his thinking follows or avoids inner impulses and pictures instead of being bound by rigid, logical necessity. But this state also suspends natural necessity. For one ceases to follow, as through compulsion, the necessities of the natural senses. These necessities are ensouled and spiritualised. A person ceases simply to want what the body wants; instead, sensual pleasures are spiritualised. In this way, the necessity of reason and the necessity of nature approach one another.

Naturally, you must read Schiller's letters on aesthetics for yourselves; they are among the most significant philosophical productions of world history. There, living in Schiller's analyses, you will discover the very things you have just been hearing, only there they are described in metaphysical abstractions. The way vital forces are returned to the sense-zones is contained in what Schiller calls the freeing of natural necessity from rigidity. And what Schiller calls the spiritualisation of natural necessity—he might more aptly have called it ‘ensouling’—contains what we referred to as the functioning of the life processes as soul processes. The life processes become more ensouled, the sense processes come more to life—that is the true process that you will find described in Schiller's letters on aesthetics. There it is put more in abstract, rather ghostly concepts, because that was how it had to be in that era. At that time thinking was not yet spiritually strong enough, not strong enough to descend with the spirit into the regions sought by the seer. In those regions there is no opposition between matter and spirit; rather there is an experience of how the spirit everywhere saturates matter so that there is no possibility of ever bumping into spiritless matter. Contemplation that is merely mental is merely mental only because the person is not able to make his thoughts as strong and as spiritual—as concretely spiritual—that the thoughts can cope with matter. In other words, he is not able to penetrate to what is truly material. Schiller is not yet able to see that the vital processes can function as soul processes. He is not yet able to go as far as to be able to see how the processes that work physically as nourishing, warming and breathing can be formed into something that ceases to be material and instead lives and bubbles in the soul. When this happens, the material particles are scattered by the force of the concepts with which one grasps the physical process. And Schiller is equally unable to look up to the realm of the logical in such a way that he ceases to experience it as merely conceptual. He is not able to come to that stage of development, which can be reached through initiation, whereby the spiritual processes are experienced in their own right and whereby a living spirituality enters into what would otherwise be mere knowing. Thus the attitude that lives in Schiller's aesthetic letters is that ‘I do not quite trust myself to directly approach concrete experience.’ Nevertheless, that which one grasps more exactly when one tries to approach the realm of life through the spirit, and the realm of material through the living, is already stirring in these letters.

Thus we can see all areas of life struggling to move towards the goals of spiritual science. At the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century there arose a philosophy which expressed a longing for greater concreteness. This philosophy had a more or less conceptual form, however, and the longing could not be satisfied. And, because its initial vitality ebbed, this longing for greater concreteness gradually degenerated into the coarse materialism that has lasted from the second half of the nineteenth century into our own time. But something else must also be understood: For spiritualism to establish links only with the spirit is not enough; the material world must be conquered—we must learn to recognise the spirit in matter. That happens through such knowledge as we have been discussing. It leads one to discover new connections, such as the unique place of aesthetic man in Earth evolution. To a certain extent, aesthetic man lifts himself above the stream of development and enters a different world. And that is important. The aesthetically inclined person and the person who works in an aesthetic field do not act in a way that is entirely appropriate to someone on earth, but rather their sphere of activity is in a certain way lifted out of the Earth sphere. With this discovery, aesthetics leads us to some profound secrets of human existence.

On the one hand, anyone who expresses such things as these is touching on the highest truths; on the other hand, what he says can sound virtually nonsensical—mad and distorted. But we will never understand life as long as we timidly hold ourselves back from the real truths. Take any work of art that you wish—the Sistine Madonna or the Venus of Milo: if it really is a work of art, it is not entirely of this earth. It has been lifted out of the stream of earthly events. That is self-evident. And what lives in a Sistine Madonna or a Venus of Milo? That which lives in them also lives in the human being. It is a power that is not entirely adapted to Earth. If everything in humanity were adapted to the earth, mankind would not be able to live on any other level. But not everything in the human being is adapted to the earth and, for occult vision, not everything in humanity is attuned to being earthly man. There are mysterious forces that some day will provide mankind with the impetus to lift itself out of the sphere of earth existence. Nor will we ever understand art as such until we see that its task is to point beyond the merely earthly and beyond what is solely adapted to the earth—to point to the sphere where that which lives in the Venus de Milo truly does exist.

The more you cast your gaze towards the humanity of the future and towards the spiritual challenges of the future, the more you must take certain facts into account, certain facts that are necessary to any truthful picture of the world. Today we still are living with many versions of the assumption that anyone who states something logical and who logically substantiates what he says is necessarily saying something significant about life. But being logical—logicism—is not enough on its own. And because people are always so satisfied when they can produce something logical, they maintain the truth of all imaginable kinds of world view and philosophical system. And of course, all of these can be supported logically: no one who is acquainted with logic would question that they are supportable by logic. But mere logical demonstration does nothing for life. What is thought, what is held in the light of consciousness, needs to be more than just logical, it needs to measure up to reality. What is merely logical is not necessarily valid; only what measures up to reality is valid. I will use just one example to show you what I mean. Suppose you are describing a tree trunk that is lying here before you. You can describe it quite systematically and demonstrate to someone that something really is there because you are describing it just as it is. All the same, your description is a lie. For what you describe does not exist in its own right and cannot possible be a tree trunk in the state in which it is now lying there, cut off from it roots and branches and twigs. It is only a part of existence when seen along with its branches, blossoms and roots, and it is nonsense to think of the trunk as existing in its own right. It is not a reality when it is only seen as it is, lying there. It must be seen with all its shoots and with everything in it that enables it to come into being. One must become convinced that the trunk lying before one is a lie because the truth is before one only when the whole tree is there. Logic does not require us to see a tree trunk as a lie, but it accords with reality that we see it so and that we only accept the whole tree as the reality. A crystal is a truth. In a certain respect it exists in its own right, although only in a certain respect, mind you, for all is relative here, too. A crystal is a reality, but a rosebud is a lie if it is seen only as a rosebud.

So you see how all manner of things occur today because the concept of being in accordance with reality is lacking. Crystallography and, at a pinch, mineralogy are still sciences that accord with reality. But when you get to geology, it no longer accords with reality, for it is an abstraction in the way the tree trunk is an abstraction. It is an abstraction, not a reality, even though it is lying there before you. Things contained in the earth's crust came into being along with what grows out of the earth's crust and thus cannot be conceived without it. We need philosophers who are not satisfied to limit themselves to their powers of abstraction, thinking up new abstractions. More, and increasingly more, there must arise a thinking that accords with reality and is not merely logical. Thinking alters the whole course of world evolution. For what is a Venus de Milo or a Sistine Madonna from the standpoint of thinking that accords with reality? If you take them just as they are before you, you are not in contact with reality. You must be enraptured. To see a work of art truly, you must be lifted out of the earth's sphere and removed from it. To really encounter the Venus de Milo, your soul must be different from the soul that responds to earthly things; precisely the things that do not exist on this earthly plane are what transport the soul to the plane where they really do exist—to the realm of the elemental world, which is where what is in the Venus de Milo really exists. One is able to stand before the Venus de Milo in a way that accords with reality precisely because she possesses the power to tear us away from mere sense-bound vision.

I have not the slightest desire to promote teleology in the negative sense of the word. Nor shall I say anything about the uses of art, for that would be adding pedantry and philistinism to teleology. I shall say nothing about the uses of art. But we can well speak of the sources of art and how art comes to be a part of our lives. We do not have time to cover the whole subject today, so I will just make a start with a few preparatory words. A counter-question leads us to part of the answer: What would happen if there were no art in the world? If that were so, all the forces that are now devoted to art and the enjoyment of art would be used to produce a life that runs counter to reality. If you were to remove art from the development of humanity, then human development would contain just as many lies as it now contains works of art! Here art displays that unique and dangerous relationship that arises when one nears the threshold of the spiritual world. Just listen yonder, where things always have two sides! If a person has a sense for being in accord with reality, then an aesthetic attitude gives him access to higher realities. An aesthetic attitude leads someone who lacks the sense for being in accord with reality directly into a world of lies. There is always a dividing of the ways and it is very important to be aware of this fork in the road. This does not just apply to occultism; it already applies when you come to the realm of art. To bring about a way of seeing the world that accords with its reality is an aim of spiritual science. Materialism has given us a way of seeing things that goes directly against reality.

As contradictory as this all seems, it is only contradictory for those who judge the world according to their preconceptions, rather than in accordance with what is really there. We really do live in a phase of development in which the direct influence of materialism is putting more and more distance between us and the ability to comprehend what even a normal object of the senses is—an ordinary thing of the physical world. There have been some very interesting experiments that shed light on this problem.¹³ They conform exactly to a materialistic way of thinking but, like so many things produced by materialistic thought, they support the development of precisely those abilities that mankind needs for developing a spiritual world-view. The following experiment has been carried out—I am taking just one example from among the many such experiments. A whole event was planned ahead of time: A person is to give a lecture in the course of which he says something injurious and upsetting about someone present in the audience. All of it is planned. The lecture is given word for word as planned beforehand. The person against whom the insult is directed is supposed to jump up and a real scuffle is to develop—this is how events are supposed to develop. During the course of the argument, the man who has jumped up is to reach into his pocket and draw out a revolver. Other details of the incident are planned out exactly. In other words, you must imagine the unfolding of a fully programmed, detailed scene. Thirty people were in the invited audience—not just any people, but advanced students of law, and lawyers who had already completed their studies. After the scuffle is over, each of the thirty was asked to describe what happened. Others who were privy to what was going on were there to ensure that protocol was followed and that the whole event went exactly according to plan. So each of the thirty is questioned. Each has seen the event. None of them is thick-headed. They are all educated people, the very ones who later will go out into life and investigate what really has occurred in the case of such a fracas or of other incidents. Yet of these thirty, twenty-six falsely described what they saw and only four could produce an acceptably accurate account—only four tolerably accurate accounts! Such experiments have been going on for years in order to demonstrate how the truthfulness of witnesses should be weighed in a court of law. Every one of the twenty-six sat there and could say, ‘I saw it with my own two eyes.’—One forgets to consider what is required in order to be able to correctly describe something that has occurred before one's very eyes!

We need to consider the art of maintaining a true perspective on what happens before our very eyes. Someone who is not conscientious towards events in the world of the senses will never be able to develop the feeling of responsibility and the conscientiousness necessary for viewing spiritual facts. Just look at this world of ours that is presently so under the influence of materialism and ask yourselves how many are aware that it is possible for twenty-six people out of the thirty who have witnessed an event to be unable to describe it without committing falsehoods, with only four who are able to give even tolerably accurate accounts. In view of something like this, you can begin to feel what immeasurable significance the results of a spiritual world-view have for ordinary life.

Now you might ask yourself whether things were different in earlier times. Our current mode of thought has not always been current. The Greeks did not yet possess the abstract manner of thinking that we have, and need to have, in order to get about the world in a way appropriate for today. But the manner of thinking is not the important thing; the truth is what matters. In his own way, Aristotle tried to use more concrete concepts to describe the inner aesthetic mood and the aesthetic attitude. But the aesthetic constitution was understood in an even more concrete, imaginatively clairvoyant fashion by the early Greeks, who were still connected with the Mysteries and who experienced pictures instead of concepts. In those times, one looked back to the age of Uranus, who embodied everything that we can take in through our heads and through the powers that now are manifest in the outer world through the sense-zones. Uranus—the twelve senses—is wounded. Drops of his blood fall, foaming, into the ocean called Maya. Here you see the senses beginning to come to life and sending something down into the ocean of the life processes, and there below you see how the blood of the senses pulses through the life processes which begin to foam up and become processes of soul. And the ancient Greeks' understanding of this led them to see how Aphrodite¹⁴—Aphrogenea, the goddess of beauty—is created out of the foam that arises when the blood of the wounded Uranus drips into the ocean of Maya. This, the more ancient of the myths about the creation of Aphrodite, expresses the condition of the aesthetic man and is one of the most significant imaginations and one of the most significant thoughts in the whole of mankind's spiritual evolution. But still another thought needs to be placed beside the thought of this ancient myth which shows Aphrodite being born from the drops of blood of the wounded Uranus that fall into the sea—rather than as the child of Zeus and Dione. We need a further imagination—one that penetrates even more deeply into reality and goes beyond the realities of the elemental world into the physical realities. We need an imagination from a later age—one that approaches the physical-sensory world. Alongside the myth that shows how Aphrodite, beauty, was born into the world of mankind, we need to place the great truth about how original goodness entered into humanity. We need to show how the spirit descended into Maya-Maria, just as the drops of Uranus' blood trickled into the ocean whose name also was Maya—and how, out of the beautiful foam that arises [*The German for foam—Schaum—has many suggestive echoes. For example, there is the word schauen, ‘show’ or ‘spectacle’, and also ‘Schema’, which means ‘perceptible manifestation, semblance, or appearance’, and which refers to a concept that is central to Schiller's account of aesthetic man. (Tr. note.)], the herald who announces the approaching dawn of a new age is born. The sunrise that announces the eternal regency of the Good ... of understanding of the Good, The True-and-the-Good, the spirit. This is the truth Schiller intended when he wrote the words:

Only through beauty's dawn-lit gate
Can you pass into the realms of knowledge.¹⁵

The knowledge he refers to is primarily moral knowledge.

You can see how the tasks of spiritual science are growing—not mere theoretical ones, but real life tasks. In our day it is no wonder that the misunderstandings about spiritual science multiply among those who are not devoted to the truth. We have to accept that as an inevitable side-effect.

Many people have been caught in the grip of a most peculiar attitude towards the truth, especially in our materialistic age. And if I had to tell you about the letters I receive, then today I would have to make yet another addition to that part of our collection where the enemies of the truth are exhibited. I do not even like to mention the latest incredible nonsense, which came in a letter I received yesterday. Yes, my dear friends, this is something we must feel; just reflecting a little on it is not enough. For although our time demands it, bringing spiritual science to mankind in a form that is appropriate to our time is not such a simple task. One must speak out in spite of thereby being exposed to the dangers involved in telling numbers of people—and it truly is more than a few—about truths that not only touch upon what is highest and most holy, but that also go most deeply, affecting heart and soul. Think of the times when there were not a few sitting in the auditorium who later became thorough-going enemies and falsified what was being said! Those who, at any rate, still take the Society seriously, must go through this experience of speaking to many people who, like yourselves, are supposedly friends, while knowing that in the past there have been some who turned out to be enemies—people who later falsified the truths they heard and used what they received here to attack the truth. One must always reckon—sometimes while watching it happen—on the possibility that the person who is listening to what is being said may turn against us in the way others have turned in the past. Today this must colour our work in the realm of spiritual science: knowledge of the human soul takes on special significance.

Such things are not to be taken too lightly. Let us try to refresh our memory for a moment, our memory of truth's path as it has appeared in cosmic development, in the evolution of humanity, and remind ourselves of how much was involved in the progress of truth! I will not say any more about it today. But we have touched on an area that is closely related to the direct connections between this life and the spiritual world. Only by understanding it can we shed lights on such things. One must take such opportunities as this to touch on what today's representatives of the truth must undergo. And I hope that there are at least a few of you who know why every now and then I have something bitter to say about the way people relate to the truth, and that there are some who know that it is not quite truthful to say that I am the guilty one. Perhaps I might characterise our contemporaries' much-loved illogicality with an anecdote that would seem silly in other circumstances. But this false logic is used, not in the service of the truth, but in the service of lies.

Once there was a man who took another man's estate away from him. After he had taken it, the former owner did not possess it as before, but instead had to begin all over again to work for what he already had earned once. A trial was conducted. The former possessor of the estate was there and also the man who had taken it away. Each had his own advocate. Now, advocates are not always there to present the unconditional, absolute truth, but rather to say what is useful to the person they represent. In this case, the advocate who was lodging the complaint was the first to speak, the one representing the man from whom something had been taken. And, indeed, to begin with he seemed on the way to convincing the court. But then the advocate of the man who had taken the estate away took the floor and said to the judge, ‘Your Honour, you have heard that my client confesses to having done everything that he has done. You have asked my client, “Do you plead guilty, or not guilty?” To that my client answered, “I took all those things, but I do not feel that I am guilty.” And my client is entirely correct in saying this. He will concede that he took all those things; but he need not feel guilty about it. Nor can Your Honour find him guilty, for in order to establish the guilt one must go back to the original cause of the matter. Just consider, Your Honour, this man has become a thief. But he never would have become a thief if the other man had not possessed these things he took away from him! The original owner is the one who has trespassed! If he had never had the possessions, my client could never have become a thief! So he is truly the guilty one! It was only when my client saw that this man had these possessions that he was tempted to become a thief.’ And this advocate spoke so eloquently that the court finally declared, ‘Yes, until today we have always believed that the thief is the guilty one. But all those who have believed that the person who takes something is guilty have been mistaken, for when one examines the real, original cause, one sees that the person from whom the things were taken, the original possessor, is the guilty one.’

Everyone will see that what I am telling you is utter nonsense. But this is exactly the sort of logic that is used today against spiritual science. Spiritual science makes its way into the world and accomplishes certain things. Then these things are distorted by people who say they only do so because they see the truth in spiritual science. They are using the same logic as someone who says that the person from whom something is taken is the guilty one because he has tempted the other to take it from him. Such is the logic abroad today and, if you will only take care to observe the life around you, you will see instances of this kind of logic.

Yesterday I was blamed—among other things—for everything that happens in the world when someone or other lies about spiritual science and commits certain acts. This is the same logic as that followed by one who says: ‘The real guilt does not lie with the person who takes, but with the person from whom something is taken, for he is the one who created the original cause of the theft.’

• 13. The experiment referred to was carried out by Franz von List, a professor of criminal law.
• 14. The birth of Aphrodite: Compare lines 188 ff. of Hesiod's Theogony:
  
  But the members themselves, when Kronos
  had lopped them with the flint,
  he threw from the mainland
  into the great wash of the sea water
  and they drifted a great while
  on the open sea, and there spread
  a circle of white foam
  from the immortal flesh, and in it
  grew a girl, whose course first took her
  to holy Kythera
  and from there she afterward made her way
  to sea-washed Cyprus
  and stepped ashore, a modest lovely goddess,
  and about her
  light and slender feet the grass grew,
  and the gods call her
  Aphrodite, and men do too,
  and the Aphro-foam-born
  goddess, and garlanded Kythereia,
  because from the seafoam
  she grew, and Kythereia, because she came forth
  from wave-washed Cyprus,
  and Philommedea, because she appeared
  from medea, members ...
  
  (Hesiod, translated by Richmond Lattimore. The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1959.)
• 15. Schiller, when he wrote the words: The words in question are to be found in the poem, Die Kunstler (The Artist).

Yesterday, when we were discussing the threefold order of the social organism from morning till night, the latest issue of the journal Das Reich arrived, in the middle of our deliberations. Under the general title of “Knowledge and Opinion” it contains material that I have never read before and that I have never seen before. These statements, however, stimulated a whole series of thoughts in me, thoughts, however, that are often stimulated in me anyway.

It is in Lower Austria, in a place from which, if you look south, you have a particularly beautiful view of the mountains in the evening glow, the Lower Austrian Schneeberg, the Wechsel, those mountains that form the northern edge of Styria, a small, very inconspicuous house. Above the entrance door was written: “In God's blessing all is included”. I myself was in this cottage only once during my youth. But there lived a man who was outwardly very inconspicuous. When you came into his cottage, it was full of medicinal herbs everywhere. He was a herbalist. And these herbs he packed in a knapsack on a certain day of the week, and with this knapsack on his back he then traveled the same route to Vienna that I also had to take to school back then, and we always traveled together, then walked a bit together through the road that leads from the South Station to the city center, “auf der Wieden” in Vienna. This man was, so to speak, the embodiment of the spirit that prevailed in the area, in everything he said, but how he, as that spirit, had survived from the first half of the nineteenth century, which was not that long ago at the time. This man actually spoke a language that sounded quite different from the language of other people. When he spoke of the tree leaves, when he spoke of the trees themselves, but especially when he spoke of the wonderful essence of his medicinal herbs, one realized how this man's soul was connected with all that made up the spirit of nature in that particular area, but also what formed the spirit of nature in the wider area. This man was a sage in his own way, through his own inner being, and from this inner being spoke much more than the inner being of a human being often reveals. This man, Felix was his first name, had a spiritual bond between his soul and nature, he also spoke a lot from all kinds of reading. For in addition to the medicinal herbs that, so to speak, stuffed his little house, he had a whole library of all kinds of meaningful works, but which were basically all related in their basic nature, in their basic character to that which was the basic character, the basic trait of his own soul. The man was a poor fellow. For one earned very little, extremely little, from the trade in medicinal herbs, which one laboriously gathered in the mountains. But this man had an extraordinarily contented face and was extraordinarily wise inside. He often spoke of the German mystic Ennemoser, who was his favorite reading, and who indeed contains much in his writings of what had passed through the German mind, but precisely through the German mind in the great times when the thought impulses of Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe and those who stood in the background were still alive. For behind these minds there stood the spiritual world, which they allowed to flow over into what they revealed to the world in their writings. But what was printed in the issue of “Reich” that came to me yesterday from the estate of Ennemoser was completely unknown to me until yesterday. It contains the final section of Joseph Ennemoser's “Horoscope of World History” - I note in addition: Ennemoser died in 1854 and this is the first of his works to be published from his estate. I would like to read a little from this work by Ennemoser to introduce today's discussion:

”...The winter that covers the German regions with snow and ice may last a long time before the real spring comes, but it will come, the seed of freedom has been sown and it will grow, the law of nature will not be repealed by either cunning or military power. Just as the idea of Christianity was implanted in the rough trunk of the Germanic nation and absorbed into its life, so will this vigorous trunk unfold green branches into fresh flowers; just as the body of the church in the German architectural style is already complete in its outlines, wherein the finished dogma of faith , the towers that are still missing almost everywhere will also rise to the sky with the incense of true devotion, and the ever-spiritual life and the organization of personal relationships with the divine will only mature into self-aware understanding, the symbolic framework must first be absorbed into the living movement of purpose , the heaviness of the church must be lightened, the stability of the dogma of separateness must be guided into the current of the universally human; just as freedom should move within the laws of justice, so religion must become an enlightened truth with the light of science, and art a cultivator of spiritual beauty in natural material!

Is it not a utopian dream and will Germany be even remotely able to fulfill such a requirement? Germany will fulfill its calling, or perish most ignominiously and with it European culture. The decision is approaching, time is pressing, the wind is blowing from the east and west, a storm can break out! The trunk of old politics stands on rotten roots, the calculations of diplomats would like to be destroyed, their art has become a distorted art that no one understands. Can you pick figs from thistles, grapes from thorns? True life of freedom sprouts only on the green branches of justice and from the warm spring of charity! Or can this unnatural state persist and the disharmony that has spread to all limbs return to the old order of withered bodies?

Evening will come, the first time has passed, but Germany's end has not yet come; so far it has had childish attempts, there will come a second time when it will discard the 'childish' and have 'manly' attempts. The time of a nation is only at an end when it no longer has questions and does not care about life's higher goods, or when it is incapable of engaging in the solution of the issues of the time! The German has lost nothing but his resilience, his mind is clear, his courage firm, and who doubts the strength of his arm? Everywhere, living spirits are at work, not as imitators, but as originals. The true hunger of the Germans is the yearning for a higher freedom of the mind; the thirst and desire for the light of truth and justice are the main driving forces to set the vigorous hands to work, all of which are still unfinished, to strive for a goal that is still far from humanity. Or should the stream flow back to the sources of its origin? Are nations to become the family fiefdoms of princes again, or is it a matter of state and national rights? There is a higher law in nature and history that no nation can escape, none can go beyond its goal, but neither can any disturb the order of the whole and fall short of it, as its abilities and the spirit of language drive it to! And will not reaction guide the wheel back onto the old track? Fools, who delight only in the dreams of their youth! You can extinguish the fire that erupts in many directions, but you cannot extinguish the inner embers once they have been ignited; reaction itself becomes the means to freedom, pressure brings accelerated movement, the hatred of the parties has a stronger effect than love on the events of the future; perhaps only some kind of spark is needed, and the suppressed intellectual power of the whole nation breaks out in bright flames of enthusiasm. “Nescit vox missa reverti,“ the spirits of life slumber under a thin cover; no free action can be taken back by the spirit; foreign spirits, moods and earthly powers act alone or together on the human will, driving it with irresistible power to acts that, according to divine order, lead to the unification of opposites, to the reconciliation of parties and to the final fulfillment of the calling!”

These are the sentences of a man who died in 1854. I also had to think when I visited dear Felix in his little house one time, that I also visited the home of the schoolmaster's widow, the widow of the schoolmaster who had died several years ago, but I visited her for reasons that the Lower Austrian schoolmaster was also a highly interesting personality. The widow still had a wealth of literature that he had collected in his library. Everything that German scholarship had collected and written down about the German language, myths and legends, in order to sink it into the forces of the German people, could be found there. The lonely schoolmaster had never had the opportunity to go public until after his death; only after his death did someone dig up some of his estate. But I still have not seen those long diaries that that lonely schoolmaster kept, in which pearls of wisdom were written. I don't know what happened to those diaries. On the one hand, this lonely schoolmaster worked among his children; but on the other hand, when he left the schoolroom, he immersed himself—like many such people from the old days of German development—in what lived on in this way as the substance of the German essence. When one then went away from them and traveled to Vienna, one could see how the ancient and the most recent times merge. We live in these most recent times, and it is up to us to understand them a little, to understand them in order to find in them the possibility, as far as it is up to us, to participate in the great tasks that this time poses for humanity.

It is truly not an external matter that all these thoughts, in connection with the experiences of which I have given you a hint, passed through my soul yesterday, just after our meeting, because yesterday, too, was basically a piece of what is falling into our time, right out of the great questions that we must have. For the man said: “The time of a people is only at an end when it no longer has any questions and is no longer concerned about the higher goods of life, or when it is incapable of engaging in the solution of the questions of the time.” Yesterday, many things passed us by that could inspire the thought: How many are there still who have real questions about the time, who still care about the higher goods of life? Did we not experience it yesterday that when our Mr. Ranzenberger appeared in a good-natured way with something that could have touched the heart, he had to disappear? As in the Symbolum, one could encounter the treatment that what is anthroposophically intended experiences in the present. He was not allowed to finish speaking. Nor was the next speaker allowed to finish, who had no questions, who really had no questions, who is living out that senile youth that has no questions and which makes one fear for the future when one knows that only that which that has the strength and substance of the spirit behind it, that can only flourish in the present time if it still has questions and is concerned about the higher goods of humanity, that does not reel off abstract phrases about content-free ideals of youth and thinks itself great with them.

These things are worthy of attention. They are just as worthy of attention as when revolutionary phrases and philistinism are combined. For revolutionary phrases and radicalism are a mask for philistinism, for pedantry, for banality, which we have also encountered enough of, especially in recent times. It is necessary in our time not to speak, not even to speak in short sentences, of those things that mean compromise, but to speak in a clearly conceivable way – for one distinction should be written in the hearts of people of the present: the distinction between content and lack of content – that that which can be developed from here is the strongest opponent of lack of content. For, through the impulse of the threefold social organism, together with friends who have devoted themselves to this idea and sensed its substantiality, we have tried to bring into the world that which is backed by spiritual insight. But on the other hand, it must also be emphasized that the spiritual reality must not be confused with the phrase of the time, no matter how beautiful that phrase may be. The same sentences can be said today: one time they are empty phrases, the other time they are spiritual content. The latter must be present as reality; it is not yet present just because the words sound the same. But everything that is mere phrase, even if it ultimately seems to succeed, has no substance of reality. And it is the task of those united in the anthroposophical movement to recognize this difference between spiritual reality and insubstantial, meaningless phrase. It is not enough that people today say that humanity must show courage again, must straighten up again, must glow with new spiritual forces, and that spiritual life must break away from economic and state life and establish an autonomy of the spirit. We must distinguish whether there is any substance behind such things or whether they are mere empty phrases, born of the spirit of empty phrases of our time. No matter how beautiful they may sound, what matters is whether there is any spiritual reality behind them or whether they are just empty phrases.

I have often said here that it is not without reason that what we call anthroposophy has emerged in our time, what we call anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. For decades we have tried to cultivate it in preparation for this serious 'time. But we must also understand it as such: as a preparation for this serious time. This time has very special characteristics. Outwardly, this time bears the mark of materialism, and the sister of materialism is empty talk. The more humanity clings to outward material things, the more that which it says about the outer world becomes empty talk. Empty talk and materialism belong together. Today we can only rise above empty talk by deepening our spiritual life. We can only rise above materialism by deepening our spiritual life. For, however strange it may sound, this age of materialism and empty phrases is the time when the spirit, with its content from the spiritual world, most strongly wants to communicate with humanity. The world lives in contradictions. Never before has man been as close to the spiritual world as he is today, although outwardly he is mired in materialism. Never before have people been so close to the spiritual world, but they do not realize it, they misunderstand it. And it is particularly strange when one is repeatedly told that one can only believe what anthroposophy brings, or that one must accept it on authority. However, there is nothing for which authority is less necessary, nothing for which it is less appropriate than for anthroposophy. For it speaks of that which today wants to enter into every human being, which wants to enter through the senses but is not allowed in by the materialistic attitude of the time. And this anthroposophy speaks of that which today wants to arise from within every human nature, but which people do not let up from the lower body through the heart to the head, and of which they naturally do not notice anything.

Not only do people today want to be approached by sensual external impressions, but these sensual external impressions want to flow in through the human senses in such a way that they become imaginations in the human being. Today, people are inwardly predisposed to develop imaginations, pictorial representations of the world. But he hates it, does not want it; he says: That is poetry, fantasy. He does not realize that science can give him many good things, but never the truth about man, and that he would experience the truth if he could come to his imaginations. And what lives in man's inner being reveals itself continually, only that man does not notice it as inspiration. Never before have people been so tormented by inspirations as they are today. For they notice that something from within them wants to rise to their hearts and minds; but they perceive it only as nervousness because they do not want to let it rise, or they anesthetize themselves with something else against these revelations of the spirit.

We have often spoken here of the fact that, in addition to his physical body, which can be seen with eyes and grasped with hands, man also has his etheric body. They also know that the etheric body can only be recognized by those who devote themselves to real imaginations. But today there is a way to truly grasp the human etheric body. This way consists in taking art in the Goethean sense seriously. Throughout his life, Goethe was convinced that truth comes to life in the artistic perception of reality, that art is a “manifestation of secret natural laws that could never be expressed without it.” But our school system is dripping a poison dew on everything that science should imbue with a productive artistic spirit. Our scientific humanity believes that it is getting closer to the truth by eradicating everything from its content that is imbued with the artistic spirit. In doing so, it is getting further and further from the real truth, not closer to it, and besides, the real truth is gradually being squeezed out of all the individual sciences that we have to hand down to young people. The only truth is what Richard Wahle says – in the sense in which I have expounded it – that in what is called science today, only ideas of a ghostly world live. Take everything that can be known through natural science: it gives man no conception of reality. Nature itself, with its true essential being, does not live in the conceptions of today's natural science, and the other sciences have formed themselves after natural science. What lives in these conceptions is not nature, it is a ghost of nature. The world spirit has taken its revenge on present-day people who no longer want to believe in a spiritual world, so that present-day humanity has fallen into the terrible superstition of taking the spectre of science as real science. Today, those who believe in ghosts are precisely those who call themselves monists, scientifically educated. And how could these ghosts of the world become reality?

This could happen if one seriously develops the artistic sense in oneself, as Goethe wanted to educate it in his nation, if one could absorb what comes to life in a productive capacity for contemplation – Goethe called it “contemplative judgment” – if one could dissolve the specter of contemplating nature into the productive, creative power of the spirit. In the middle of the last century, this creative power of the mind was treated in German intellectual life as the fantasy of the wild man who comes to this fantasy in my fairy tale in the one mystery drama. Thus we live with our ideas today as people in a ghostly world, we are superstitious without knowing it, we mock the superstition of others and are three times more entangled in this superstition than those we mock as superstitious people.

The etheric body of the human being is not built according to what we know as natural laws, but according to artistic laws. No one can grasp it, either in themselves or in others, unless they have an artistic spirit within them. And it is the lack of artistic spirit in the present that is so devastating, so destructive, so devastatingly interfering with the worldviews of the present. And in addition to his etheric body, we know that the human being also carries the astral body within him. This astral body is of particular importance in the present.

My dear friends, I know of no more poignant event for world development than the fact that the most important decisions regarding this world catastrophe were taken on a Saturday, on August 1, 1914 in Berlin, in the late afternoon, even into the night. For those who understand the basic laws of human life from the point of view of anthroposophy, many things are obvious, but for these others stand and mock at the superstition of others, but they are three times as superstitious as those they mock. For these people do not want to know anything about the deeper laws that prevail in the life of the world. They believe that gravity rules, that atomic forces rule. But they do not know that world history is ruled by deep-seated laws, of which the outer phenomena are only symptomatic expressions, that from epoch to epoch people have to enter ever different spheres and live in ever different ways. And so we have arrived in the present time because we, of all times in the development of mankind, are closest to the spiritual world, we just do not realize it yet. We have arrived at the point where we have to take into account man's relationship to the spiritual world. Oh, earlier people did not need to take this into account; their poor brains were still agile enough to receive the spiritual revelations they needed. But in the course of time these revelations have become empty shadows and phrases. And what is called Christianity today is often nothing more than a collection of empty shadows and meaningless phrases, not filled with the spirit. But mankind hates the real spirit; it repeatedly succumbs to its tendency towards complacency, in that which has been called Christianity for centuries and millennia, and which Christ repeatedly and repeatedly repels. It is always said: If you go among today's workers and talk to them about Christianity, they don't want to hear it. I can only say: I believe that. For just as you speak today, so you have spoken and thought for centuries and millennia, and now you want to heal the people to whom you have spoken in this way with the same thing that has brought about the misery of the time and of which you have proven that it has no hope.

Today, man is compelled to take his relationship with the spiritual world seriously, to feel that he really does not only live in the physical world, but also in a spiritual world. And until we take this attitude seriously, rivers of blood will still have to flow over poor Europe. For men hate the truth, and the hatred very often changes into fear; therefore, the people of the present are afraid of the truth. Today it is so that we cannot come to the truth at all when we make our decisions. I am going to tell you something extremely paradoxical, but I am only saying it because it is necessary that these things be said in our very serious times, because today man needs real self-knowledge, not empty self-knowledge. Man today is close to the spiritual world. When he is in his physical body, he is separated from the spiritual world; there he sees through his physical eyes, hears through his physical ears, and feels with his physical sense of touch. From falling asleep to waking up, however, he is in the spiritual world, where he lives the life that remains largely unconscious to him today, and that plays into his daily life with its impulses. But for the modern man it is so that he cannot come to fruitful decisions if he wants to make these decisions in the time from morning to evening, but he must have lived them prophetically the night before. It was not like that in the past, when people, through the different nature of their brains, still had spiritual revelations. Today, the human brain has dried up, even in youth it speaks in a senile way. For man must know: when he wakes in the morning, he has already prepared as an inner prophet what he must decide upon during the day. Only that is of real fruitfulness, what he has ready when he wakes in the morning. Everything else will lead more and more to need and misery for those who live in the superstition that one must come to one's decisions during the day, when one is in the physical body. Man should take this into account. For we live today in a time when he should make his relationship with the spiritual world real. That is why it is so distressing that the decisions leading up to the events that marked the beginning of the world catastrophe for Germany were not prepared by the corresponding personalities through what they could have experienced in the preceding night, but were made under the immediate impressions of Saturday, out of the mind of the day, until late into the evening.

I often said to friends when this war broke out: we will not be able to talk about this war in the same way as about the other wars that have taken place in history. We can talk about these other wars by collecting documents from the archives and then judging the facts. On the other hand, we will not be able to talk about this war and its origins in the same way. For at the time when this tempest broke out, all hell was let loose and the gates were sought by the confused human beings. And it will be possible to prove that of the forty to fifty people who were involved in the events that led to the war in July 1914, a large number did not have full use of their consciousness when they made those fateful decisions during the day. But that is the time when consciousness is silent during the day, and when people are not asleep, that is when the demons hostile to humanity intrude into human consciousness. We are therefore dealing with the playing into the world catastrophe of spiritual causes, and anyone who sees through the laws of the world can recognize how, through the fact that the most important decisions are only made on the basis of the events of the day, disaster occurs. Thus one will find less and less the possibility of getting out of the distress and misery if people do not strive to make their relationship with the spiritual world real, that is, to take their relationship with the spiritual world seriously in the facts that take place within. What use is it if you are a mystic, no matter how good, if you sit down half the day or sometimes the whole day and immerse yourself inwardly, trying all kinds of things to evoke an inner sense of comfort and pleasure What use is it if the spirit does not come to life in you, whereby you create living relationships between yourself and the real spiritual world and its laws, which are then expressed in the destinies in which we humans are involved?

All that is expressed in these words was one of the reasons why reading Ennemoser's words had inspired particular thoughts in me. For it was in the middle of German intellectual life between East and West. Ennemoser himself uses these words: “The wind blows from the east and the west.” He thus points first to a special relationship to the Orient and Occident, which I recently pointed out in a public lecture. He points this out as a man of the old Germanic times and shows that in the old days the German spirit was still connected to the world spirit, and that the German spirit was actually called upon to understand the great world connections a little. Oh yes, it goes to the heart when you read such a sentence in our time, written more than half a century ago: “Germany will fulfill its destiny or perish most ignominiously, and with it European culture.” “ One feels that others in the past have thought the same thoughts that have been expressed here and in other places to you and other people. Because basically much of it was a paraphrase of the words: Germany will either fulfill its destiny or perish, and with it European culture. — This Germany must have questions again, it must regain a connection with the higher goods of life. For this question hangs over us: can we still have questions of deeper significance? Can we still concern ourselves with life's higher goods? The question is one of being or not being. If we concern ourselves with higher goods and can still pose questions to the spiritual world, then we will find a way, starting from Central Europe, to prevent the downfall of world culture. If, on the other hand, we continue along the path of a senile youth and a philistine phrase that masquerades as revolutionary, then we will descend into barbarism. If people in Germany know how to spiritualize, then they are a blessing for the world; if they do not know how, then they are a curse for the world. Today the situation is such that the way that will lead to the salvation of mankind in the future runs between right and left like the sharp edge of a razor, and that anyone who wants to recognize things in their reality cannot love comfort and choose comfortable paths.

Remember that I have been telling our friends for a long time that he certainly counted, clearly counted, on generous historical impulses, but in a sense that was only beneficial in those places where he lived out the nationalistic impulses in such a way that their bearers saw them as universal human impulses. The Anglo-American world has its initiates, its people who appreciate intellectual power. Here you could preach and preach about intellectual power, and those three times superstitious people thought you were superstitious yourself. That is why the three times superstitious people have become the victims of the Anglo-American West, which saw through things. In the 1880s, or perhaps even earlier – I am only familiar with the period up to that time – this Anglo-American West spoke to the public about what it considered appropriate for the intellectual and spiritual state of that public. But he spoke from the lodges of his initiation in such a way that he said: The world war will come - that was a spiritual-scientific dogma among the English-speaking population - and its only goal can be that socialist experiments are being carried out in the east of Europe that we do not want and cannot want in the west. I am not telling you a fairy tale, but what was said in the 1880s by English-speaking people who were connected to those who knew about these things. But here these things were not taken for what they are, namely as explorations of a real reality. And so one was overtaken by what the others knew, who therefore could never draw the short straw, precisely for the reason that they knew. And in these mysterious lodges themselves, what kind of people were there? There were people who had their ramifications into all those areas that were important to work on. One has only to study what has been going on at various points, for example, on the Balkan peninsula, for decades, and try to see the connection. In the lectures I gave in various places during the war, I pointed out many symptoms in this regard. Everything was geared to the socialist experiments in the East coming through the world war and flooding Central Europe. In the lodges of the initiates, these people said: We in the West are preparing everything so that in the future, using all the means that can be gained from the spiritual world – but can be gained in an unlawful way – we will get such people for the exaltation of national honor, who can become their rulers, individual people on a plutocratic basis.

This was prepared by the West. The Ahrimanic spirits were involved in this, and it is in this world that those personalities are to be sought who can wait, who prepare their actions not by years but by decades, if these are the actions of great politics. In these English-speaking areas, there is not the militaristic discipline that is known in Central Europe, but rather a spiritual discipline, but to the highest degree. It is so strong that it can turn men like Asguith and Grey, who are basically innocent hares, into its puppets, into its marionettes. Grey is truly not a guilty person, but what a fellow minister said about him a long time ago is true: he is a person who always makes a concentrated impression because he has never had any thoughts of his own. But such people are chosen if you want the right puppets for the world theater. Things were well initiated and well prepared.

But today it is the case that man must not only take into account that which connects him to the spiritual world, which is so close to him, but he must also know that great cosmic laws are at work in the evolution of the world, in which humanity is enmeshed with its destiny, and that these can also be experienced through a spiritual science. One must only be able to finally break away from that stupidity which today is called history; for this history of today is stupidity. It believes that what follows is always determined by what has gone before.

But such a view is just as if you had a sea in front of you and said of it: Waves are washed up on the shore; each one is caused by the one before; the fifth comes from the fourth, the fourth from the third, the third from the second, the second from the first. But the truth is that forces are at work beneath the surface of the water, causing the individual waves to arise. In the same way that someone today looks at the sea, people today also look at history, and they are still proud to write pragmatic or causal history and to present these spectres to people, who in turn react to them superstitiously and take this stupidity of causal history as reality. But anyone who knows how things really are, how forces work from below, how every single event is driven to the surface, must say to himself: Unless this stupidity, which we call history today, is removed from people's minds and views, no salvation can come into human development and evolution. These are the serious thoughts that should fill the mind of anyone today who is really serious about what is happening today as a result of the fire signs.

Oh, it could be painfully soul-stirring when one tried to bring humanity to its senses on specific issues. In the 1880s, for example, I had to think: Oh, we have a physics that exerts its devastating effects on the whole world view with its absurd atomic theory, and that believes in the spectre of the external world of which I spoke earlier. How can one, I thought, teach this world again that it is a spectre? And I said to myself: If you make the world aware that what reaches us as color and light is not only quantity, as physics today with its atomistic stupidity believes, but also quality in the Goethean sense, then you could bring people from one corner to self-awareness in this regard. And I wanted to make people understand that Goethe's Theory of Colors is not dilettantism, but reality in the face of today's atomistic physical foolishness. But the time for that had not yet come. The German mind was still bowing to the English Newtonian theory of colors, which is just as suited to the Anglo-American mind as Goethe's theory of colors is to the German mind. If we had found the opportunity to take up what we needed, who knows what might have come of it! But we should not have tried to find it by taking the easy way out; instead, we should have taken the path of taking the spirit seriously. And then: Goethe's theory of metamorphosis was already a theory of the connection between humans and the rest of the living world. This theory of metamorphosis should have been developed further. But what happened? People did talk about it, but those who spoke had no idea of the real circumstances: what was said was mere empty phrases. People did not distinguish the phrases from what had substance, and so they adopted Anglo-American Darwinism instead of Goethe's metamorphosis theory.

These are the individual facts in a specific area, by which one can see what we have sinned against the individual facts, and what should be done, for example, with such individual facts. Today is a serious time, and it is necessary that we reflect on the great impulses of the Central European spirit, which gave the signature to the period from the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. If we can summon up the forces that were at work in that time, then there may be hope that we will again see questions arise and that we will again find goals and access to the spiritual forces of the world. For what Ennemoser wrote more than half a century ago is as true for our time as it is for his: “The decision is approaching, time is pressing, the wind is blowing from the east and the west, a storm can break out!” Today you can feel it. “The trunk of the old policy stands on rotten roots, the calculations of the diplomats would like to be destroyed, their art has become a distorted art that no one understands. Can you get figs from thistles, grapes from thorns?” And I ask: Can you make revolutions with philistines who act radically? Can the spirit be emancipated and left to its own devices with senile youth? We need true spiritual substance, not that which merely behaves in a radically phrase-filled manner. We need truly enthusiastic youth for everything that young people can be enthusiastic about, but not a youth that spouts senile phrases and has programs for everything and confuses these phrases and programs with spiritual content. One would like to see a ray of spiritual power penetrating into their hearts, so that it might prepare people to distinguish between thoughtless phrase and substantial content. But when substantial content comes to people, they say they do not understand it, it is not quite clear to them. And when the attitude lives in something: you have to form your sentences in a way that befits the truth - and it is not always convenient for it to fit into every cheap phrase - then people say: you write convoluted sentences. How often have I said: Those who take the truth seriously must write some sentences in such a way that they deal with the next sentence while formulating one, and that they place what is said in one sentence in its proper light with the next. If we take this seriously, we will develop the kind of attitude that enables us to understand anthroposophy in its deepest inner sense. Above all, we will develop the ability to distinguish, to really distinguish. Are people today really able to distinguish between things that are, for example, dawning and things that are setting? They are not. And it is here, in this power of discernment, that the big questions we have to ask ourselves must arise. We must ask ourselves what Goethe wanted for natural science. Was Goethe's theory of colours a morning light to recognize the essence of colour more deeply than physics can, or do we want to turn it into an evening glow that testifies that the sun of Goethean culture has already set? Was Goethe's theory of metamorphosis a morning light, or do we want to turn it into a Darwinian law that makes the sun of Goethean culture set? These things must be thought through and felt through today. Without this, it cannot continue.

Take the experiences of the last few weeks: you can become hopeful and hopeless at the same time. We have begun to work here in the spirit of the threefold social order. We began in such a way that we took no account of a certain stratum of humanity. We spoke to the humanity that makes up the broad masses, and we had found that no one can deny our understanding of the souls of the broad masses. During the war I once spoke a word of warning: We were condemned during the war to have healthy roots of the people, and that out of these roots of the people individualities developed, which were the German greats; but what the middle class was, that was what could fill one with doubt, that was what so easily wanted to take the easy way out in relation to truth and education. And so it came about that in our movement for threefolding, what had emerged from the roots of the people was brought into a rather alarming view: the party leaders. And the party leaders, who no longer belong to the people, are now presenting the people with a choice: either to remain reasonable and listen to what is truly based on spiritual foundations, but what can be understood in a reasonable way by human understanding, like everything that is based on spiritual foundations, can be understood by the mind, if one only wants to, or to follow the leaders and to lead Europe little by little to the fate of the ten to twelve million people who were killed during the war catastrophe, and the so-and-so many millions who were crippled, and to bring ten to twelve more millions to death or to starve them. This choice has been made today. And anyone who cannot grasp this idea cannot raise their thoughts to the level of strength necessary for the seriousness of the times.

A few weeks ago, we tackled what - it may not be aptly described as the cultural council. For three weeks we have been fiddling with the matter, and it has not been resolved. The matter had to be presented in the way it was presented, because it was also necessary to appeal to what remained of healthy instincts in the general wilderness. What was said from this point of view need not be national-chauvinistic, nor need it have the hostile point against another people. The English themselves know very well that as individual Englishmen they are something different than as a people. The man, who I have often quoted, who is one of the finest art critics, once said a beautiful word, in which he said something like the following: Oh, that's where we make history. There you examine how events actually developed and resulted and how peoples get into wars. But all that has been written is only there to praise the one that we need, according to our subjective point of view, and to condemn or defame the other. And it is true that when nations wage war, they wage war everywhere like savages and do not ask why. lerman Grimm says that the moment people wage war, they become savages. When people become a state, a nation, they do not become higher, but lower. This is the great misfortune of our time, that the state or the sense of belonging to a nation is valued higher than the individual human being. But people today are so enmeshed in the esteem of communities rather than of the individual that they feel quite comfortable being dehumanized, being a state template. It is naturally difficult to create something that can truly emancipate intellectual life. But in our time, humanity is closer to the spirit than one might think, despite its materialism. Inspiration and imagination rule in us. But because of our lack of productive imagination, we transform our imagination into all kinds of ghostly images about the world's interrelations, with which we defame the real world's interrelations. If you tell someone: Europe hangs together in such and such a way – as I did a few years before the outbreak of this war in the lecture cycle in Kristiania; if you look at the world in such a way that you judge it with inner psychology, with inner vision, then the dreamers regard it as a superstition, and if you set about putting it into practice, then these same people consider it utopian or ideological. But what matters is that we see clearly in these matters today. In their sense, the members of the Anglo-American world have seen clearly, and we have seen dimly. —- And inspirations also change, turning into wild animalistic emotions that want to live it up in blood. Look at the blood that is flowing today, look when people are lined up against the wall and shot: these are the inspirations that want to come to people with the good will of the spiritual world, which is hated by people and which therefore transforms into wild animal instincts. Because if a person does not want to allow what wants to come to him from the spiritual world as inspiration, then it transforms into wild emotions, into animalistic drives.

This should be borne in mind by those who have been involved with anthroposophically oriented spiritual science for decades. They should bear in mind that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is not just about collecting knowledge. Whether you ultimately know something about the astral body and etheric body and I, purely conceptually, or whether you copy out a cookbook and just juxtapose what is in the cookbook in your mind, it makes no difference; one is no more valuable than the other. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must pass over into the human soul as knowledge, but one must not confuse this knowledge with the dull, muffled mystical feeling. Ennemoser has already said this very rightly in this essay, for he says: “Just as freedom should move within the laws of justice, so religion must become an enlightened truth with the light of science.” But people today do not want to illuminate religious feeling with anthroposophical science; they want to have an abstract divinity in the mystical feeling. And above all, they do not want art to become a cultivator of spiritual beauty in natural material.

But this is what anthroposophy must aim to achieve: it must not only impart knowledge; admittedly, knowledge, but knowledge that can become inner enlightenment, that spurs on our power of discrimination. If it can do that, then much will be served in Central Europe. For we must be able to look to the west and to the east with a gaze that sees and recognizes the world. We in the west must be able to distinguish between what rises hostile to us and what is hostile only in the declining. Here too I recall from my boyhood, when I was in the area where the Styrian mountains are, how every week, twice, I had before me in the train that Count Chambord, who lived in Frohsdorf Castle, on whose face lay the most ancient catholicity, the most ancient ultramontane Jesuit education and at the same time that which was the reflection of the French “L'Etat c'est moi”. That was still truth. Everything else is no longer truth. No matter how much France may develop her power today, she is in decline, just as the Anglo-American element is in the ascendant. But these things must be properly assessed. We must see through them so that we can fertilize ourselves with the laws of spiritual life, so that we can transform thoughts into will and find the courage to really place ourselves in the present, which demands so much seriousness and so much significance from us. We must always renew the attempts and make these attempts again and again to knock on the door of our contemporaries: Do you want a free spiritual life, do you want a soil in which a free spiritual life can develop? For these attempts must always be made. If we want to let some truth and wisdom flow into humanity, then we must put it to the test, whether people want to accept it or not; it can very well impair the matter that people do not want to accept it. Therefore, I ask you not to lie down on a lazy bed by saying to yourself, according to Ennemoser's sentence: “Germany will fulfill its destiny or perish in the most disgraceful way, and with it European culture. “ These words are not to be understood in this way; rather, you must say to yourselves that Germany will fulfill her calling if there are people who have enough strength to revive the German spirit in themselves, unchauvinistically, unnationally, as a part of the world spirit, in whose sense we have to work between East and West. And if the world rejects what can come from Central Europe, then the time should have come for us, those who for decades have committed themselves to anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, not only with our heads but also with our hearts and with all our willingness to make sacrifices, to remember and say: We are here! And that we are here to cultivate the spirit should not be a lie of the soul, but should unfold as a truth of the soul! And when others are ready to accept the call for truth, as it can come from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, then, when this understanding occurs, what was intended as the Anthroposophical Society could become what it was intended for. Today, the call for the emancipation of spiritual life goes out to all people of good will. But those people who have laid claim to it from the standpoint of the spirit should be honest about it and say: If the others leave the path of the spirit, if they do not have the courage to do so, then we will take it upon ourselves. We have the courage to do so. We do not want the spirit to be an empty phrase for us; we want it to pulsate as reality in our blood; we want to say what has to be done for the spirit.

In these, days I must bring before you some facts which can shed light upon the great events of our time. Next Sunday too I shall have to direct your attention and your feelings to certain aspects which can throw some light upon the events which so deeply move our hearts and souls in the present time. To-day I wish to give, as it were, a kind of basis, a kind of preparation, by guiding your souls towards certain powers and forces which are active in man's historical existence. They can only be recognised through the insight given by spiritual science and are not immediately perceptible to the ordinary consciousness. Let me point out to-day certain facts of human development, certain more or less sub-conscious facts. But let us set out from the truth that what takes place, as it were, in the hidden depths of every human being, can be recognised in the successive supersensible stages of knowledge, as described in my book A Path of Initiation (Knowledge of the Higher Worlds): it can be recognised through the so-called, imaginative knowledge, inspirative knowledge and intuitive knowledge. Yesterday, in my public lecture, I emphasized that this must always be borne in mind: namely that the spiritual scientist who reveals something concerning the spiritual worlds, as a result of knowledge gained by imaginative, inspirative and intuitive perceptions, should not add anything which does not already exist, even without his knowledge in those spiritual regions in which every human soul is at home. The spiritual scientist merely draws, attention to something which always weaves and lives in the world, and he, shows how the individual human soul lives in it. Such knowledge is therefore of importance not only for those who intend to penetrate into the stream of occult experiences, but it is of importance also for every human soul, for under every circumstance it constitutes an inner reality for all, tut an inner reality which cannot be recognised by the ordinary perception in life.

Let me therefore set out from certain facts concerning human nature in general which are accessible to the imaginative perception. Every day we may observe an enigmatic process—at least it is an enigma to ordinary science—which alternates rhythmically in our life: WAKING and SLEEPING.

We already know that during, our waking state we belong to the physical world of the earth with our four parts or members, with the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the Ego. We know that during our sleeping state, that is to say, from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, we exist in the physical world only with our physical body and with our etheric body and that we withdraw, as it were, into a purely spiritual world with our astral body and with our Ego. What presents itself to the spiritual perception of the spiritual investigator, may be characterised by saying: The spiritual investigator simply perceives something which, always takes place in man, for example when he abandons his physical and etheric body on falling asleep, and ascends with his astral body and Ego into regions pertaining to a higher world. The spiritual-scientific investigator simply watches a process which takes place in man, in every man, whenever he falls asleep.

We may therefore say: The spiritual investigator only observes something which would present itself to every human soul if in the state of sleep, not in the: dreaming state, it could look down upon the world so as to discover among the objects in this world its physical and etheric body, but as something which exists outside the sleeping soul. But we should not think that from, the standpoint of sleep we would see our physical body and our etheric body which we left, behind in the same way in which we perceive with physical eyes the. objects which surround, us in the physical world. In order to see the world in the way in which we perceive it from the moment of waking up to the moment of falling: asleep, we must use our physical eyes, our physical sense-organs. We do not use our senses when we arc outside our physical, body and our etheric body. If we were suddenly to become clairvoyant during our sleep, we would not perceive anything of all that we see during our waking condition, nor in the way in which we perceive it then. And then we do not perceive our physical body and our etheric body in the same way in which we see our physical form when we look into a mirror. It is quite wrong to think that we behold our physical and etheric body as if we were bending over it with our astral body and our Ego, that we view them from this standpoint and, see them as if in a mirror. This is not the case. What presents itself to the imaginative-knowledge is that everything which we are accustomed to see in our waking state of consciousness during our ordinary life disappears in the end, it really vanishes from our sight. In reality, our physical body and our etheric body then appear to us as if they were extended into a world, enlarged into a world; they appear to us as if they were connected with the whole world of the earth. We behold them ... and we are conscious of the fact that we are looking upon our physical body and our etheric body, but we behold them in such a way that to begin with they constitute for us as it were the only existing world.

Even as in our waking state we are surrounded by mountains, rivers and clouds, by the sun and the stars, etc., and look upon these as our environment, so when we are outside our physical and etheric body and look upon our environment, we behold our physical and etheric body as if enlarged into a world. We really behold this. We do not look upon anything else. And we envisage it in the same way in which we ordinarily view the different objects on the earth.

We look upon our own bodily structure as if it were a whole world. And a strange thing appears: This world which we behold, appears to us in such—away that in failing asleep we experience it in the same way in which we experience the earth in the spring: it has shed off its snow covering and brings forth green shoots, and once more prepares itself for the growth and vegetation of everything that is produced upon it; everything begins to grow and to green. When we fall asleep and behold the physical body and the etheric body enlarged into a world, we behold them in such a way that we experience them as it were like a planet that is awakening in the spring. And this continues throughout the condition of sleeping. What we see in it, the mighty pictures which really appear to us in their extension as a planet, prepare to pass over into summer, just like the earth faces Sommer, when its spring is coming to an end. This is how we pass through sleep, if we live through it in the right way.

We go as it were through the sleeping state as far as a point in which we feel: our physical body and our etheric body carry a growing, greening life to the flowering stage, indeed to the stage of the development of fruits—everywhere we behold that everything is growing and flourishing.

If I may express myself in detail I must say: To the imaginative vision the sight which thus appears, presents to be sure a paradoxical aspect. When we survey the surface of the earth with our physical eyes, we are conscious of the fact that the plants grow upwards from below; but when we observe from outside what takes place in our body, and take the vegetable world as a comparison, it is as if its roots were to penetrate into our body from above, and its flowers would grow into the body. Bo that we then experience a world that is completely upside down, and its fruits grow into us.

We then discover that these fruits which penetrate into, us really bring to expression the strengthening which is brought by sleep, this strengthening of which we are conscious. And this enables us to know (because everything which we thus perceive in the imagination are forces) that by passing over into the condition of sleep, our physical body and our etheric body which remain lying on the bed, receive forces from the whole cosmos. We behold how the forces which express themselves in pictures of plants growing out of the world, come to us from the cosmos. We behold how the cosmos sends a whole vegetation into our bodily structure. And this gives us the sure knowledge that on falling asleep we abandon our body because from the moment of waking up to the moment of falling asleep our astral body and our Ego keep the physical body and the etheric body away from the influences of the cosmic forces. By going out ourselves, we make our physical and etheric body free for the influences of the whole cosmos, which sends in these forces—elemental, not physical forces—expressed in the above-mentioned imaginations.

Whenever we fall asleep, a connection is established between our physical and etheric body and the whole cosmos. In the waking condition, we live in the physical world, but when we are asleep our physical and etheric body live in the sphere which may be designated as the elemental world, the world of pure forces, which presents itself to us in the form of the above mentioned imaginations.

And where are we ourselves, with our astral body and our Ego? This has frequently been described and it is also contained in many books: With our Ego and our astral body we live in the world which has been described as the world of the Higher Hierarchies, among the Beings whom we designate as Angeles, Archangels, Archai, and so forth. Into these Beings and into this world penetrate the astral body and the Ego. Even as during our waking state we know of the existence of the creatures pertaining to the animal world, to the vegetable world, and to the mineral world, and stand above them, as it were, as human beings, by taking them into our thoughts, so we ourselves are now taken in by the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies. I might say, we are absorbed by them like thoughts.

The significant thing is that we can say: Whereas there below our physical body and our etheric body enter in connection with the forces of the whole cosmos, we ourselves become thoughts from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, as if we were real Beings woven out of the essence of thought and will. We become the thoughts of Beings of the Higher Hierarchies. Even as WE think Nature, so do the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies think US.

If we wish to speak exactly, it is therefore not correct to say: When we abandon the physical body, we think the world. It is instead correct to say: We experience that we are the thoughts of the world of the higher Hierarchies. If thoughts had consciousness and could experience themselves during our waking state, this is how we should experience ourselves outside the physical body, as thoughts of the higher Beings.

And how do we experience through imaginative knowledge the moment of waking-up again? When we gradually approach the moment of waking up, we really experience it in the same way (we may again compare this Imagination with external Nature) in which we experience the approach of winter, with its destructive and paralyzing effect on the greening growing life of summer. We dive down into the physical and etheric body when we wake up, and even as the winter brings cold and frost which destroy the glory of summer, so we dive into the physical and etheric body in the same way in which the winter dives down into the earth. We destroy the forces which entered from the elemental sphere of the cosmos into our physical and etheric body like a vegetation or an animal world, we destroy them in the same way in which the winter destroys the glory of summer.

When we are awake, our presence within the physical and etheric body brings about a condition comparable to the one in which the cosmos places the earth in winter: We spread winter over our own physical and etheric being, by penetrating into it.

This shows you at the same time that comparisons often used from physical points of view are not correct from the spiritual aspect. Of course, we feel that we are connected with the whole cosmos and that our experiences are a microcosmic image of the macrocosmos. But when people wish to compare their microcosmic life with the life of the macrocosm, they like to say: When we wake up, this is like the approach of spring in our life, aid our waking life is like summer,—the autumn is like the fatigue which we feel in the evening and our sleeping life is like winter. But the very opposite is true. Summer, life is the sleeping life, and winter life is the waking life! This is the truth.

When the spiritual investigator really investigates these conditions, he discovers that by rising up with his Ego and astral body into the spheres of the higher Hierarchies, where he is thought, as it were, by the higher Beings, not only the forces of the elemental world influence his physical body and his etheric body, but that certain Beings of the higher Hierarchies also influence our physical body and our etheric body. Not only the elemental world, consisting of FORCES, but real BEINGS, the Beings of the Hierarchies, of the Higher hierarchies, are active within our physical body and our etheric body.

Here a strange thing presents itself: Namely, we can perceive that when we fall asleep we penetrate into conditions which are quite different from those of our waking state. As stated, everything which can thus be said, is based upon the fact that spiritual research allows us to watch how the process of falling asleep and of waking up takes place. And spiritual investigation discovers that from the moment of waking up to the moment of falling asleep, our physical body and our etheric body are, for example, also subjected to the influence of that Being of the Higher Hierarchies whom we must experience as FOLK-SPIRIT, as FOLK-SOUL, as the Folk-Soul to whom we belong.

When we wake up, we do not only dive down into our physical body and into our etheric body, but also into the processes which take place in them as the result of the activity of the Folk-Soul. And a peculiar thing appears—please note this carefully, for we who wish to penetrate into spiritual science must observe the connections in the world more deeply than through the ordinary external perception—the following strange thing appears: When we fall asleep, we do not only dive down into those Beings of the Higher Hierarchies that correspond to our individual development, but also into the spiritual Beings whom we must look upon as Folk-Souls from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, we penetrate into the connection of all the other Folk-Souls, except into the Folk-Soul to which we ourselves belong. Let us note this carefully: During cur waking state we live immersed in the spiritual facts produced in our physical body and etheric body by OUR OWN Folk-Soul; from the moment of waking up to the moment of falling asleep, we live as it were together with our own Folk-Soul.

But in addition to our own Folk-Soul, there exist in the world all the other Folk-Souls of the other nations. When we fall asleep, we penetrate into the connection of these OTHER Folk-Souls; we do not dive down into one of these other Folk-Souls (let us bear this in mind clearly), but into their joint activity, into what they do together, as a community. Only our own Folk-Soul is excluded from this connection during the night.

We cannot escape entering into connection also with all the Folk-Souls that pertain to the other nations in which we are not incarnated during one particular incarnation. Whereas during the day, in our waking state, we belong to our own Folk-Soul, we belong during our sleeping state to the other Folk-Souls—but only in so far as they work together. When we are awake, we follow the intentions of the individual Folk Soul, into whose sphere we were born in a definite incarnation.

But it is possible to penetrate, even during the sleeping state, into the Being of an individual Folk-Spirit that is not our own. Whereas in our normal condition we live, when awake, within our own Folk-Soul, i.e. within his activity, and during sleep in the joint activity of the other Folk-Souls, we can dive down into an individual Folk-Soul, when we are asleep, if during our fife we are filled with glowing hatred for the activities of this other Folk-Soul. Though it may sound absurd, it is nevertheless true—and in our movement, we must learn to bear such truths calmly—it is nevertheless true that when a person is filled with glowing hatred for another nation, he condemns himself thereby to sleep with the Folk-Soul of that nation during the night, to live together with him.

Here we touch upon truths which show us that behind that veil which conceals the spiritual worlds to the ordinary observation, life begins to acquire a deeply earnest character and that it is uncomfortable, in a certain way, to be an adherent of spiritual, science. For from certain aspects spiritual science begins to treat certain matters earnestly which in ordinary life are looked upon as uncomfortable and which are mercifully withdrawn from us through the fact that in ordinary life the truth is not revealed to us. Although as followers of spiritual science we must stand with both, feet upon the ground which external life provides, we must nevertheless deal quite earnestly with such a fundamental principle, when we rise up to realms where other characteristics of life begin to reveal themselves.

You see, my book A WAY OF INITIATION speaks of that moment when we rise up to the spiritual world (indeed, every human being is in the spiritual world, it is simply a question of his being able to recognise a world which always exists round about him),—when that easy union, that unity of our being in which We live here in the physical world, ceases to exist. Divisions arise; but in addition to the division mentioned in that book, the one which may be observed after the encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold, there are other divisions, one for example, which is of deepest significance for our whole life of feeling. We should recognise that although we must do our duty fully towards the nation to which we belong in one particular incarnation and give it our love unstintingly, this nation stands within the whole process of evolution of the earth. We should realise that in view of the fact that through our Ego and our astral body we are also SPIRITUAL beings, we belong to the whole, of humanity and should therefore have impulses which we share with the whole of mankind. Spiritual science does net admit that we should, live in the world in a one-sided manner; these two sides of our being must be harmonised. We should realise that in our present incarnation we can love the nation to which we belong even though we are spiritual scientists, we can love it as deeply as any patriot, but the same time wo must bring this love in harmony with the feelings which unite us with the WHOLE of mankind.

Spiritual science above all unites us with the whole of mankind because it reveals to us that through our Ego and our astral body we are connected with humanity as a whole. To establish harmony between contrasts—this is what spiritual science more and more demands from those who dedicate themselves to it with earnestness and with worthy feelings. And it is harmful to mistake spiritual science for that unclear mysticism which always seeks to mix up the demands of external physical life with the truths to which we should ascend when we penetrate into the spiritual world. For that unclear mysticism which seeks to bring into ordinary life the things which spiritual science reveals in a true light, that unclear mysticism will, for example, never be able to harmonise the love for one's own nation with the love for the whole of mankind and it will lead instead to a vague mystical cosmopolitanism.

This, may be compared, as I have, done, with that equality wh.is always advanced by vague theosophists, the equality of all religions on earth. In an abstract way, it is possible to say that the truth is of course, contained in every religion. But this is the same as saying: On the table there are pepper, salt, cayenne and many other spices; they are all the same, for they are condiments. So, I may put cayenne into my coffee or sugar into my soup, this does not matter, for all condiments are the same Exactly the same, logic is applied by people who vaguely talk in a mystical way of the equal essence in all religions, instead of penetrating into the true essence of everything that appears in the evolution of the earth. The essential thing is to avoid emphasizing again and, again that all nations are, as it were, expressions of the universally human; it is instead essential to recognise the. specific task of each nation, as given, by the folk-soul. Fundamental points for this may be found in the lectures published long ago, which, were given several years before the war, so that they were not influenced by the present events and consequently it cannot be said that they are the result of war influences! I mean the lectures comprised in the cycle “THE MISSION OF THE SINGLE FOLK-SOULS IN CONNECTION WITH THE NORTHERN GERMANIC MYTHOLOGY.

In the present time above all it is important to reflect over such earnest things, so that the harmony between universal love and. the love for one's nation may be found. We need not recoil from describing the characteristics of each single nation, in so far as it is a nation, for the individual human being always, rises above his nation, but you will see from the remarks which I made that.it is necessary.to give such a description without any hatred. Even as we cannot recognise the true nature of a plant if we hate that plant,—for in that case we would describe our hatred—so it is not possible.to recognise the characteristics of a nation if we describe the qualities which we dislike in that nation, or if our description includes things inspired by our feelings of antipathy.

Those who are able, to rise to the standpoints of spiritual science should ceaselessly endeavour to gain insight not only into the uniform essence of the world, but into the harmony of its manifold characteristics. We should be able to feel warmest love for the nation to which we belong, in this warmth of feeling we need not be behind any other person, yet at the same time we should, be able to unite this with everything which unites us with humanity as a whole, with our feelings for the whole of mankind, as a great all-encompassing being

As stated, we shall deal more fully with these things the day after tomorrow how let me explain that when we pass over from the waking to the sleeping condition, when we are taken in and received by the Beings of the higher Hierarchies, we really cast off the physical body and the etheric body which connect us with one particular incarnation. We therefore cast off our national character when we are asleep. When we are asleep, we are simply “human beings,” endowed with all the qualities which we must have through all the experiences gained as human, beings. But at the same time, when we observe from the spiritual-scientific standpoint what takes place with man both in his waking and sleeping conditions, we perceive that when he is asleep, when he lives in the spiritual world with his Ego and his astral body and also his physical body and his etheric body belong to the great cosmos, that then the single life which takes its course, as it were., within the compass of the skin, ceases, for our narrow individual self becomes extended to the great Self.

Consider now that, as a rule, in the course of twenty-four hours we always pass through a summer and a winter condition. Also, the earth passes through these conditions of summer and winter, but in the course of one year. Why does the. Earth pass through these states during the course of one year? Because the earth is, like man, a living Being? but upon another stage of the world of the Hierarchies. If we observe the whole earth physically, such as it exists, round about us, it is only the body of the earth, and even as man bears within him soul and spirit, so the earth also has its soul and its spirit. Our sleeping and waking conditions alternate in the course of twenty-four hours, whereas the earth sleeps and wakes during the course of one year. The earth is awake from autumn to spring, and it is asleep in the summer. We may therefore say that in the summer we are embedded in a sleeping earth. It is not true that the earth Is awake in the summer and asleep in the winter; this trivial comparison taken from ordinary life is hot correct. It is instead correct to say that with the approach of autumn the earth begins to wake up as a soul-spiritual being, and that it is most wide awake in the middle, of winter. The Spirit of the Earth is most deeply engrossed in thought in the middle of the winter, and with. the approach of spring, his thoughts gradually begin to ebb away, and in the summer the Spirit of the Earth is sound asleep; when life outside is budding and growing it is sound asleep.

As human beings, we are not only connected through our physical body with the body of the. Earth, but we are also connected with the Spirit of the Earth. Many lectures have shown you that through the Mystery of Golgotha the Spirit Whom we designate as the Christian Spirit, as the Spirit of Christ, united Himself with the Spirit of the Earth. Ever since the Mystery of Golgotha, the Spirit of Christ lives in the Spirit of the Earth. Consequently, if people wish to celebrate a festival expressing the fact that the Spirit of Christ lives in the Spirit of the Earth, what should be the right season for it?—Not summer, but winter would be the right season for such a festival, the very heart of winter. This festival is the Christmas Festival.

For this reason, the Christmas Festival and everything that develops from it is celebrated in the middle of winter. This proceeded from the real knowledge of the people who in the past fixed the Christian festivals of the year. The Christmas festival was fixed in accordance with occult truths, not with historical facts, because in regard to what now constitutes humanity, man is in the winter time united with that condition of earthly existence which is most wide awake, because his own soul-spiritual part is embedded in the soul-spiritual part of the earth. In the winter, he lives together with the waking earth.

And what do we find in the case of past races of whom we know that they built up their service to the world and their knowledge of the world upon a kind of dreamlike clairvoyance? They must above all have based themselves upon that which lives in the SLEEPING Spirit of the Earth. In contrast to the men of more modern times, these ancient peoples must have risen to the truths received in unconscious inspirations in the form most suited to them, when the Spirit of the Earth was immersed in deepest sleep, when it withdrew almost completely in sleep. We therefore find among these peoples whose cults and knowledge were drawn out of a more sleeping, dreaming state, the MIDSUMMER FESTIVAL, in contrast to the Christmas Festival which is suited to a more modern human race.

What was continued in an external way and what our materialistic, age did not understand at all, has its truly deep foundation in a spiritual, reality. Now we live in an age in which people should again begin to think and to feel in a different way from that of past epochs. The task of the past epoch was to make us familiar with the sphere of materialistic thinking and feeling. And the past centuries had to bring human souls in contact with materialistic thought and feeling. Indeed, the development of the earth had to pass through this materialistic epoch. And it is wrong if we only criticize materialism, for materialism had to enter the., evolution of the earth. But now we live in an epoch in which materialism must be overcome, an epoch in which a SPIRITUAL conception must enter the human souls. This is the more or less distinct or unclear feeling of all those who feel attracted, by our spiritual-scientific goals, by our spiritual-scientific world conception. These souls feel that the time has approached in which the spiritual world should be grasped consciously, whereas in the past it had to be perceived in a dreamlike way. Spiritual science exists for the purpose of understanding the world in a conscious way.

The past epoch was therefore the epoch of materialism. You see, because humanity had to dive down, as it were, into materialism, the strong impulse which leads it up again, had to be active above all during the age of materialism. This is the Christ Impulse. The preparation began when the Christ Impulse entered the development of the earth. During the 14th/15th century it was in its most active stage, but when the Christ Impulse approached humanity was already preparing itself for its dive into materialism. The Christ Impulse existed in the evolution of the world as an objective fact, yet the people, who lived in the time when it appeared, were least of all able and ready to grasp it. Now we live in an epoch in which we must begin to understand what took place.

What do we see? We may study the strange course followed by the Christ Impulse in the historical development up to the present time. We see that when the Christ Impulse entered the evolution of humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha it was not grasped at all by those who lived at that time. Let us try to form a picture of what people did in their cleverness! We find that all hinds of theological systems arose during the first Christian centuries which immediately followed the Christ Impulse. People began to dispute as to the way in which they were to think of the Trinity, and so forth. Throughout these, centuries there were endless theological disputes, and It would be the worst possible mistake to study the influence of the Christ impulse by studying these theological disputes which lasted for so many centuries. The people who were disputing over the Christ Impulse did not understand anything of the way in which the Christ Impulse stands at the very centre of evolution.

Let us try to understand how the Christ Impulse really worked. Let me indicate a few facts as an illustration. Let us take an event which took place in the 4th century, in the year 312 A.D. on the 26th of October, an event which changed, as it were, the future map of Europe completely. It took place when Constantine called the Great, the son of Constantius Chlorus, moved against Maxentius, the ruler of Rome and gained a victory over him, whereby Christianity also became victorious in an external way in the Occident. For Constantine raised Christianity to the rank of official religion of the State. But was it his own cleverness which inspired all these deeds? Were the events which then took place the outcome of his cleverness? We cannot say that this was the case. For what occurred? Maxentius, the emperor of Rome, on hearing that Constantine was approaching, first consulted the Sibylline Books, so that he tried to grasp the world's events in a dreamlike way. What these Books revealed to him, was interpreted as follows: The right “deed would be done” by the one who being the ruler of Rome would leave the city and wage battle outside the walls of Rome. This was the most unusual advice which could be imagined. For Constantine had a far, far stronger army than Maxentius; nevertheless, he could not have won had Maxentius remained within the walls of Rome, But Maxentius followed the advice of the Sybil line Books and moved out of Rome. Also, in Constantine's army, the victory was not gained by the generals, but Constantine had a dream in which he saw the symbol of Christ, and in obedience to this dream he ordered that the Cross, the symbol of Christ, should be carried in front of his armies. He made his subsequent deeds depend on the revelations of that dream.

This battle, which gave a decisive aspect to the whole map of Europe of that time, was not waged by generals, nor determined by human cleverness, but by dreams and prophecies. If the events had followed the course dictated by human consciousness, and not influences coming from sub-conscious depths, everything in Europe would have taken on a different aspect.

Theologians were quarrelling over the true essence of Christ—whether He was born in Eternity together with the Father or whether he was born in Time, whether He was of equal rank with the Father, and so forth. But their thoughts did not contain anything of the Christ Impulse! The Christ Impulse worked in the sub-consciousness of human beings. It did not work through the Ego, but through the astral body. The Christ Impulse was a reality, and it worked in such a way that people did not need to understand it. This is the important and essential fact. The way in which the Christ Impulse worked, is as independent of the way in which people grasped it, as a thunderstorm is independent of what people learn in a laboratory concerning the electrical machine, and so forth.

This time has now come in which we must immerse ourselves CONSCIOUSLY into the influence of the Christ Impulse. In the historical events, however, the Christ Impulse is active as a force.

Let us pass over from this example to one which belongs to a later epoch. Here we must consider something which I already explained to you. It is important to know, in connection with the materialistic epoch, that when people wished to immerse themselves in the spiritual world, they could do this best of all in the winter. In that epoch, we therefore come across the conception that during the Thirteen Nights in the middle of winter specially gifted natures could obtain the gift of inspirations from the spiritual world. Every nation has legends which tell us how specially gifted people, who do not pass through an Initiation, but obtain inspirations through their own nature, through elemental forces which work in them, become inspired during the nights from Christmas Eve to the Three Kings' Day (Epiphany), during the Thirteen Holy Nights. Recently, a Very beautiful legend was discovered in Norway, the legend of OLAF ASTESON, who went to a church on Christmas Eve and began to sleep. He slept until the 6th of January, and when he woke up, he was able to relate in pictures the events which took place in the soul-realm—the Spirit-realm as we call it. He expressed them in pictures, but he had experienced all this during the Thirteen Nights. Such legends may be found everywhere. They are not simply legends, for in fact there always existed specially gifted people who passed through a kind of Nature-Initiation. Elemental forces were, active within them in this natural initiation, which we can only attain through the will, by faithfully following the indications given for the path leading to initiation.

We may therefore say: During the materialistic epoch, we can always come across people who were able to unite themselves with the Spirit of the Earth in the middle of winter, when the Spirit of the Earth is most wide awake, and they were thus able to receive inspirations. This was the epoch in which the Christ Impulse that had united itself with the earth, could not work through human consciousness. We must think of specially receptive souls, who could receive inspirations from the spiritual world. And we find that such souls receive the impulses which inspire their deeds, they receive their inspirations from the spiritual world, in the Thirteen Holy Nights, until the 6th of January. This was necessary, and it appeared again and again in small and great events that in the course of history there were people with such a spiritual disposition that when the right moment arrived for them, when they could live through these Thirteen Winter Nights, a spiritual impulse entered into them, and in that epoch this was above all the Christ Impulse. During the materialistic epoch, natural initiations which did not depend on conscious human activity, took place most easily of all in these Thirteen Holy Nights. And whenever such initiations appear, we find that they took place during these Thirteen Nights.

There is one event which induces even those who are least inclined to recognise the spiritual world (and to-day very few people are inclined to do so), to admit that in the 15th century Spiritual Powers really entered the course of history through the medium of a young girl, the Maid of Orleans, Joan of Arc. It can be proved historically that also in this case the whole map of Europe took on a different aspect because tie Maid of Orleans aided the French in the war against the English people who reflect over such things will discover that in accordance with human plans, everything would have followed a different course if the shepherd maiden had hot interfered—and through her, the forces of the spiritual world. The Maid of Orleans was only an instrument for the forces which were then at work. The influence which worked through her was the Christ Impulse.

But a natural initiation was required for this, and such an initiation could only have taken place, as it were, during the Thirteen Nights until the 6th of January. The Maid of Orleans must therefore have been in a kind of sleeping condition from the 24th of December to the 6th of January, and been specially open to the spiritual influences which are active just in that period. We must therefore assume that the Maid of Orleans must have lived through the period from the 24th of December to the 6th of January in a not fully conscious state and received the Christ Impulse. And the Maid of Orleans indeed passed through such a condition in a very marked way! It cannot be experienced more markedly than during the sleeping condition which precedes birth, during the last days in which a child lives in the mother's body, just before birth. External human consciousness is then not able to take in anything, for it lives in a sleeping state, and when the child within the mother's body reaches the end of its time and approaches birth, this is the best condition of sleep this last period in the mother's body. The Maid of Orleans was actually born on the 6th of January, and this is the great mystery connected with her: that she passed through a Nature-Initiation during the thirteen days which preceded her birth. Specially sensitive people assembled in the village on the 6th of January on which the Maid of Orleans was born, said that something special must have happened; they felt that something special had occurred in their village: The Maid of Orleans was born, she passed through a natural initiation during that sleep In her mother's body, that sleep which was so significant to her, the sleeping condition just before her birth.

This shows us that spiritual Beings are really at work below the threshold of consciousness, behind the events which are accessible to human consciousness. It shows us the meaning of a history that only reckons with information gained by documents and external reports! But the Gods work along different paths and use other means: They place a Maid of Orleans into the world, through her special Karma in that particular incarnation she is able to take in the Christ Impulse and work through it. At the right moment, the Gods allow the Christ Impulse to flow into the development of humanity. Of course, both factors had to be there: for we must consider the special individual Karma of the Maid of Orleans. This must be added. Not every child born on the 6th of January could fulfil the same deeds.

We can therefore really say: The Christ Impulse worked through forces in man which did not rise up into human consciousness. Only now we again live in an age in which we should take in consciously the impulses which sought to enter the historical development by other ways than the conscious one.

I wished to call up in you a feeling of how the sub-conscious powers really work, and that external history, studied upon the foundation of documents and external records, is really quite superficial. In the present time, it is good to study history. For now, above all we can see that great, mighty and heroic events are taking place, joined to deeds of Sacrifice. But at the same time, we can see that the events of our time are accompanied, as it were, by the effects of the crassest materialism, by that consistent form of materialism which seeks to explain everything which is now taking place.as the result of merely external conditions. This is evident through the fact that one nation makes the other responsible for the present events. People wish to judge everything from outside, and they seek in others the guilt for what is taking place. But also in the present time the true cause and reasons for what is taking place should be sought in the depths of subconscious events. But we shall speak of this the day after tomorrow.

The present epoch can more than any other admonish people to follow spiritual impulses of knowledge, also in view of the blood which is shed on the battlefields. When peace will spread out its wings over the countries now at war, people will make a discovery; They will discover that such tremendous conflagrations in the history of the world cannot be explained by drawing in external causes! They will discover that it is not possible to explain them. To-day people still say—particularly the cleverest people: “It is not right to speak of the things which gave rise to this war let history speak of this.” And they think that they are particularly clever when they say: “In 50 or in 100 years' time, history will reveal the true causes of this war.”

But what we now designate as history will never be able to explain the causes of the present events: People will see that a historical survey cannot grasp the true cause. Other aids will have to be drawn in: This is particularly evident through an occult observation of the present time.

What is one of the most evident facts in the present time which is so fraught with destiny? Oh, one of its most obvious facts is undoubtedly the one that so many young people are passing through the portal of death! We know what takes place with them when they pass through the portal of death. We know that a human being first goes out of his physical body with his etheric body, his astral body and his Ego, and that after, e.g. relatively short time he sheds his etheric body and continues his pilgrimage with an extract of the etheric body. But can you not imagine that there must be a difference between an etheric body shed between the 20th and 30th year of life, an etheric body which might still have continued its functions in life for many decades, and an etheric body cast off at a later age? Yes, there is a great difference! When a person dies as a result of illness or old age, the etheric body has fulfilled its task. But, in the case of a young person—and countless young people are^-now passing through the portal of death—the etheric body has not yet been able to fulfil all that it might have fulfilled.

Let me now give you a concrete example of what takes place with an etheric body torn away violently, as it were, from its physical body. Of course, many examples can be given. But let me give you an example which we actually experienced here at Dornach last autumn. We experienced it at the site where the Goetheanum stands. A family that lives near the Goetheanum had a little son aged seven, really a wonderful little boy. He was so good that when his father had to leave for the front, little seven year old Theo told his mother: “Now I must work specially hard, for I must help you in things, where father used to help you.” One, evening after a lecture a person belonging to our circle came and told us that little Theo was missing since that evening.—One could only suppose that, there must have been an accident. On that evening, through circumstances which in ordinary life, are designated as a “coincidence,” a furniture van had passed through a lane, through which no van had passed for years, and through which no van ever passed since. At a certain spot, it overturned. Little Theo was in the small house called the Canteen, where the friends who work on the Building get their meals. He would have left sooner, but by a strange coincidence he was held up by someone and instead of going out by the usual door which would have led him down a certain path, he went out through another door and passed by the furniture van at the very moment when it fell over. The van fell on top of him. This is an example, which clearly shows how Karma works.

I have often used a simple comparison in order to show how frequently people mix up cause and effect! A man is seen walking along the banks of a river. Suddenly he falls into the water. A stone is found at the place_; where the man fell into the river. The man is drawn out of the water but he is already dead. On investigating matters, people will give the following account of the accident in the full belief that they are telling the truth: The man stumbled over the stone, fell into the river and was drowned. Yet it would have sufficed to examine things more carefully and one would have discovered that death was not due to the fact that the man fell into the water, but he fell into the river because he was dead, for he had had a stroke. Consequently, the case was quite different from what people imagined it to be. Thus, we see how easy it is to mistake cause and effect, and particularly in ordinary science cause and effect are always mixed up.

In Theo's case, Theo himself was the cause of the accident; it was he who caused the van to pass by at a certain moment and he attracted the van so that it fell on top of him. This should he borne in mind as the secret of the whole case.

But let us now consider the continuation; A human being who dies accidentally in the very prime of life! If one's heart is intimately united with the whole work on the Building at Dornach and if at the same time one has the possibility to observe the influences which work in this Building, it is possible to say: The etheric body so violently torn away from little Theo, now lives in atmosphere of the Goetheanum Building, and the most beautiful forces of inspiration for the work connected with it, can be gained by uniting one's soul with the enlarged etheric body, extended as it were, to a small world, which lives in the atmosphere of the Goetheanum. I shall never hesitate to admit unreservedly that many things which I was able to discover at that time in connection with our Building, I owe to the fact that I turned my own soul to the etheric body of little Theo that was active in the atmosphere of the Building. Of such kind are the connections in the world. The real individuality of the human being passes on, but the etheric body that might still have sustained life for many decades, remains behind.

Consider now how many etheric bodies soar above us in the spiritual atmosphere and will also soar above those who come after us! They are the etheric bodies that remained behind, the etheric bodies of those who passed early in life through the portal of death in the present epoch so heavily laden with destiny. We do not speak here of the paths trodden by the INDIVIDUALITIES, but of a special spiritual atmosphere created by the etheric bodies that remained behind. The human beings here on earth will live in this atmosphere. They will be submerged in an atmosphere which is filled by these etheric bodies whose life-forces were sacrificed, in order that humanity may progress through the tragic events which are taking place particularly in the present time.

It will be necessary however to feel what these etheric bodies desire, for these etheric bodies will be the best inspirers of mankind in the future. A beautiful age of spirituality might dawn, if true understanding, an inner understanding of the heart, is brought towards these etheric bodies, if people listen to what they wish to say. All these etheric bodies can in the future aid humanity to rise up to spiritual heights. For this reason, it is so important that there should be souls on earth who are able to feel what is penetrating into the atmosphere of the future, through the medium of these etheric bodies. You learn something, concerning the nature of these etheric bodies not only by recounting that man consists of a physical body, of an etheric body, of an astral body and of an Ego, but also by learning to know the secret of the influence exercised, by these etheric bodies and of how this influence will work in the future.

Those who are already now followers of spiritual science prepare the souls so that they become receptive for the messages of these etheric bodies. Let us therefore turn our souls to the spiritual world, for in so doing, we prepare ourselves and those who come after us to feel the heritage of the dead, to feel what the dead demand from mankind in the future. If spiritual science can stimulate human souls in such a way that they can turn their spiritual sense towards the spiritual worlds, the effect which grows out of the blood/courage/suffering and sacrifice will be great and powerful indeed. Let me therefore recapitulate at the end of this lecture the feelings which can animate us, when our souls, which follow spiritual science, are directed towards the great events of our time:

Aus dem Mut der Kampfer,
Aus dem Blut der Schlachten,
Aus dem Leid Verlassenem,
Aus des Volkes Opfertaten
Wird er wachsen Geistesfrucht,
Lenken Seelen geistbewusst
Ihren Sinn ins Geisterreich

Translation

From the courage of the fighters
From the blood of the battles,
From the sorrow of the abandoned,
From the nation's deeds of sacrifice,
Shall spring forth a spiritual fruit,
If souls, spiritually conscious, direct
Their understanding towards the Spirit-realm.

This evening we want to use to reflect on the interaction between the spiritual and physical worlds. This has already been the subject of other reflections in recent days. It will be the main point on which we will depend to further develop the topic that we have raised. But I would like to start from a more general consideration, which will show us how, in the more abstract, in the more general, the interaction of the spiritual and the physical, the unearthly and the earthly, can be thought of, can be encompassed by a simple thought. And from this more general consideration, we will then move on to what is important: the relationship of the disembodied human being, who has passed through the gate of death, to those people who are embodied in this earthly life.

Let us look at our Earth as the scene of what is expressed to our senses first. I will begin quite hypothetically, will propose thoughts and ideas that are initially just thoughts, or at least appear to be just thoughts. Let us assume that all the forces of our Earth, from a certain point of view, are concentrated and compressed into a small image of the Earth, in some way shaped. So let us assume that we have a small Earth, a small, tiny body, but one that contains in miniature the same forces as the Earth in the large. Let us visualize this schematically. Let us imagine that we have a small Earth, that is, a small, tiny body that contains within itself the same power relationships that are otherwise distributed throughout the large volume of the Earth's body. Let us imagine that this small Earth body is somehow connected to the Earth.

Now, if we imagine the earth correctly, we do not have to think of it as just any inanimate being, as it presents itself to the geologist, the mineralogist, who only imagines this earth as an inanimate being. Because if the earth were only mineral, as the geologist imagines it, it would never be able to harbor plants, animals, human beings on it. Of course the geologist is right to isolate what is dead, but he should be aware that this is only one aspect of the earth's existence. If, however, we imagine the earth as a living being, then we must also imagine that its life undergoes changes over time. So that this earth in winter — we have discussed this often — is in a very different state than in summer, just as a person is in a different state when asleep than when awake. We must not imagine that winter and summer simply brush over the earth, but that they are something that takes hold of the state of the earth, that is, the living being, just as the states of waking and sleeping take hold of us. This temporal sequence is therefore part of our earthly existence if we regard this earthly existence as a living one. But with this we also say that every being that is connected with this earth – and that includes this small earth we are talking about here – is in this changing state with the whole earth, that it shares in it.

What does this change of conditions mean for our earth? Let us say, for example, that spring is coming. When spring comes, it means that the sun's effect on the earth is quite different from that during the winter. We could also say: When spring arrives, the earth is seized by the effects of the sun. During the winter, when our little earth with the great earth was, so to speak, dependent on itself, when the sun did not care about our little earth, now our little earth is also seized by the effects of the sun, by what is outside of our earth. The sum of forces in the little earth is snatched from the earth. Our little earth is, so to speak, no longer dependent on the earth alone; it is claimed by the sun, it is snatched from the earth. Yes, when our little earth is snatched from the earth in this way, then other forces than mere earthly forces play into our little earth, then the external forces communicate with our little earth.

Now we have to imagine this small earth lined with substances. What a substance is is not considered here. From autumn to spring, this small earth is alone with itself, and so it can develop its forces within itself. But then comes the sun, which draws out the forces, so that under the influence of the sun's effect, what was first enclosed in our little earth now comes into extra-terrestrial spheres of activity. It is torn out and comes into extra-terrestrial spheres of activity. That which was compressed can expand and also acquires a relationship to the surrounding cosmic space under the influence of the sun.

Now, after a certain time, towards autumn, the effects of the sun cease again. Then this development cannot take place, and the forces of the sun's effect withdraw from the forces of the earth's effect, that is to say, this combination of forces is restored. It gathers the substance together: the earth takes back, as it were, what it had to leave to the sun for a certain period of time. The effects of the sun now cease for a while, winter comes. If this were left to the earth, the sun would completely take possession of the small earth within the great earth. During the whole of the winter the system of earth forces must be active within. Otherwise the sun would take possession of this small earth entirely for itself. It must be ensured that when the sun reappears it can take hold of this small earth; otherwise it will simply become a tiny ball that is consumed by the great earth. A force must assert itself so that the sun, when it comes, can reach this small earth again. But precautions must be taken for this.

If the earth has its own power only in this one inside it (it is drawn), then that is just a small earth. The sun has retreated, now this small earth is alone with the large earth. When the sun comes again, what should it do now with what has become mere earth? In reality, the sun must be able to reach in again – there is no difference here, whether the sun goes around the earth or the earth around the sun – the sun, when it is in a new relationship to the earth, must be able to reach in. You can imagine it in the following way: Imagine a person standing firmly in one place and using all his strength to remain standing. You approach from the side and try to push him over. If he has enough strength within him to stand, you will not be able to move him. But when it begins to move, you will be able to intervene in its direction of movement. Suppose there were a force inside it that would cause the orbiting movement of the sun, or of the earth itself, like an inner momentum; let us assume that the sun would communicate this momentum to the small earth: then the sun could in turn intervene in this movement that it has imparted. In this way, it could snatch this small Earth from the Earth, and the process could take place as described. In other words, towards spring we would have a small Earth in which the Sun intervenes through impulses of motion that it had already imparted the previous fall. The Sun intervenes, snatches the small Earth from the mere forces of the Earth, and, in accordance with the effect of the Sun, unfolds on a larger scale that which is limited only to the small Earth. The forces must contract, and the small globe of the earth must be given the momentum of the sun. You already suspect what it is: I have described in sketchy terms what happens during the growth of plants, the unfolding of plants into leaves, flowers and fruits. I have described to you here the participation of the sun's momentum: that is fertilization; the seed is fertilized and remains so until the following year, when it is again seized by the sun. The little grain that carries out the fertilization in the plant is the being in which, through the sun's maturation, the possibility is laid to convey this momentum to the earthly part.

You see, we have here a living interaction between the earthly and the extra-terrestrial. We cannot imagine that the plant's growth continues to flourish without the sun leaving it a replica of its momentum, in which it can engage again the following year. In other words, when we look at the plant, we are really not just looking at something that is connected with the workings of the earth; rather, we see in the whole cycle of the plant process an interaction between the sun and the earth. There are other planetary conditions to be considered, but we will disregard these for now in order to grasp the meaning of the whole process. We want to visualize how what we see on earth is not just an earthly product, but also a product of the sun. The fact that human knowledge is usually limited to what goes on inside and outside on earth prevents us from gaining a real insight, from truly understanding things. For with mere earthly forces, only our minerals are formed. The moment we go beyond the merely mineral into the vegetable, we must say that in the earthly itself there are no longer any forces that shape things.

The materialists always hope that one day they will be able to produce a plant seed in the laboratory, just like any other chemical composition. The point of the opposition to materialism is not this production, but rather that, by advancing from the mineral to the plant, from the chemical product to the living, the production can only take place through a supernatural process. And before they will succeed in realizing this ideal of materialism, in producing plant seeds just as they do mineral products, chemical substances, the materialists will have to learn – if I may express myself grotesquely – to believe in astrology, to believe that they must place a process that they want to bring about under the influence of the stars. Laboratories will have to be set up that work with the changing seasons and that take into account the constellation of the stars in the same way that the constellation of the stars is taken into account in nature. One must rise from the earth when one rises from the dead to the living. For the etheric-physical must also be involved in the creation of the living. This, however, is never dependent on the merely earthly, but on that which is spread throughout the whole world. When we survey our earthly surroundings, we survey what is merely physical; from the earthly point of view, we survey the physical by surveying the earthly. That which is ethereal to our earth is still exposed to the entire universe.

If we now go further to the astral, we come to an element that is no longer exposed to the visible at all. And if I were to develop this for the animal kingdom in the way I developed it for the plant kingdom, it would turn out to be more complicated; but you would see that not only the extra-terrestrial and the still visible in the starry world come into consideration, but that the supersensible comes into consideration at all, which is not even concluded in the starry world. One must go out of the realm of the visible.

I wanted to make such a consideration before you, so that you gain insight into the really deep inner mystery of what is going on in the everyday, in the daily growth of plants, so that you gain insight into how it is in the fertilizing grains of the plant , which are distributed in a circle or in some other pattern around the ovary, it is essential that they contain extraterrestrial effects, and that the seed itself is essentially a reflection of the whole earth effect, that it is a small earth. The interaction that takes place in the plant blossom through fertilization is a reflection of the process that takes place between the earth and the entire starry world of the surrounding cosmic space.

We are fundamentally surrounded by secrets everywhere, and knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge always inspire the deepest humility. Just imagine how far it is from the general view of such a thing to the concrete view of the details of all that covers the

4419 earth. The field of knowledge thus truly opens up as an infinite one. We are confronted with infinity at every point of our existence, so to speak. And it is part of the right attitude that a person should develop towards the world to have a sense that one is actually looking into an infinite existence everywhere. But through this one also feels a certain bond between the individual finite human existence and the infinite, the whole world. And this mood should actually be poured out over everything that spiritual science can bring us, because without this reverent mood towards the infinite, nothing can actually be grasped with the right feeling in spiritual science. From time to time, one must renew such a mood within oneself, so that one ceases to regard knowledge as something that is sought after on the side, as it were, in the course of life, while in fact it must belong to the most sacred spiritual that intervenes in our lives.

If we give ourselves up to such moods, then we will also receive with the right attitude that which will increasingly have to be proclaimed in our time from the sources of spiritual science for the progress that must necessarily come into the world from our present time into the future. And when we have developed such an attitude, then this attitude is something effective in our soul. It is really not just something abstract, but it takes hold of our soul, it warms and illuminates our soul. And only when this happens can the right thing emerge from spiritual science, when our soul becomes, as it were, a different one, when what can be explored through spiritual science is felt through. When we bring such an attitude into our soul, then we can approach the riddles of life in the right way, which otherwise flow past us in life without us being able to relate to them in the right way.

There is really an inner connection between the soul and these general considerations, which I have now made, and what I now want to say with regard to human life. If you look at the plant, if you see it sprouting from the earth, you can tune your soul so that you feel: What is sprouting as greenery comes from such a complicated little creature, the seed, that this little being – from certain points of view – is a reflection of the whole earth, that in what I see sprouting from leaf to flower, from flower to fruit, the whole universe is involved. When I look at a green plant leaf on its stem, I realize that in this leaf, the way it is positioned, the way it greens, what was first enclosed in the small earth is enveloped by the effects of the sun, what has been wrested from the earth until the effects of the sun have taken hold of it. Then the effects of the sun, however, leave behind their vibrational impulses, after they have made it impossible for that which was in the small earth to spread when it must contract again. We see, as it were, in the sprouting, unfolding plant an image of certain effects of the whole great cosmos. We must regard what presents itself to our senses in this way as something that reveals to us in every point secrets that permeate and interweave the whole cosmos.

In this way, human life itself is also connected with the whole cosmos and now also with what is there in relation to us of the extraterrestrially visible bodies and processes. But what appears in earthly processes is particularly significant to us when we consider, I would say, the deviations from what we see as normal earthly life, normal human life. It is true that we constantly see many more deviations than what is actually normal in life, but ordinary cognition, which is limited to the sense world, does not engage with these deviations; one might say that it does not engage with the meaning of these deviations. We live in a time in which, crowded together, many deviations present themselves to us, which at the same time are real riddle questions. Do we not see in this time of severe trial for humanity numerous of our human brothers going prematurely through the gate of death? We see them going through the gate of death not through some kind of illness, something that is in their own organism, but we see them forcibly going

go through this gate of death. Because it is something else whether a human soul goes through the gate of death so that she dies of an illness in her youth or because her organism is hit by a bullet or is forcibly taken away from the soul-spiritual in any other way. But I already spoke about it yesterday: What takes place here between birth and death is all significant in the context of life as a whole; we have to accept it as karmic connections, we have to fit into the karma as it is given. But what happens is significant.

Now let us consider the case of the physical organism being taken away from the soul-spiritual by a bullet at a relatively young age. Compared to what we have become accustomed to — that the human being consumes his own organism — this is an abnormality. It is therefore a twofold mystery. If death alone is a mystery for direct contemplation, which is revealed through spiritual science, a twofold mystery arises when the course of life is not such that the organism is taken away from the spiritual soul through inner organic processes, but when this happens through a bullet.

Facing the universe, the cosmos, an inner mood arises in the soul that is created by such simple considerations, but which, grasped in all its depth, seizes us with an inner mood in relation to the secrets of the universe. And then, when the soul is so moved, we also approach the event that I have just hinted at with the necessary reverent mood and dignity and with the necessary seriousness: that the physical-bodily is forcibly taken away from the human spiritual-soul. And then this question arises before our soul like a riddle. Because how such a question arises determines whether or not one can contribute something to its solution. If a person has just had a banquet and then rested and now sits down to his spiritual work, then he will not solve the deep riddle, then he will not find the mood that matters. But when he faces the riddle and his soul is imbued with the right attitude towards the universe, then the riddles can be solved.

When the spiritual researcher, with such a mood of the soul, faces the riddle of death, which approaches us in such a way that the physical body is violently snatched from the soul-spiritual, then all kinds of things arise in the soul that can contribute to solving the riddle. Then the right impressions come, which are needed to clarify such a matter. These impressions cannot arise from every frame of mind, but only from the right one. In order to make this vividly clear to you, I have chosen this particular path today, by showing you, as it were, how such a task presents itself to the spiritual researcher. When the spiritual researcher is in the right frame of mind, the enigmatic question arises before him. But then something quite different arises: just as thoughts usually follow each other in a lawless manner, so now an impression arises before the soul in a law-governed manner, alongside the question. And then, if one has sensed this riddle, the riddle of death, one can sense the other question as something that belongs to it: Yes, how do people actually – depending on their particular nature – accept life? And all kinds of thoughts arise, thoughts that I now want to spread out before your soul itself.

Especially in our present time cycle, people only really accept something as reality if it is not a “mere thought”. For them, thought is not really something real. And they may be right from their point of view, but it is just a certain mood of the soul. That which is real must approach man much more strongly than a mere thought. A mere thought is just that — a mere thought! But for modern man, that which is designated as being must on no account be a mere thought. What presents itself as a mere thought, that is what man today calls non-existent. That which exists must place itself firmly in the world, must not speak merely to the thought. Out of this mood, people only believe that they are standing in reality when they can speak of this reality as an existing being, when they are forced to recognize this reality through being.

Now, when we ascend from this world in which we live to the spiritual world that man inhabits when he has passed through the gate of death, the most uncomfortable thought is, one might say, the thought of the being that formed here in the physical world. A being that is like the being in the physical world disturbs the disembodied person in the spiritual world. Precisely what is here in reality called the unreal in contrast to the existing is the real in the spiritual world. If something were to approach you there as it does here in the material world, you would reject it. It would startle you and be something that does not belong in the spiritual world. This is an extremely significant thought. If one were to talk as trivially in the spiritual world as one does here, a spirit might say, when something approaches it as it does here: What am I supposed to do with it? That's not it at all! — Because in the spiritual world I must have the opportunity to experience everything that comes to me as an imagination — it is at the lowest level of knowledge in the spiritual world — that is, to be able to translate it into intuition through my own activity. While in our time people only recognize as reality what they have done nothing for, one cannot

'recognize this in the spiritual world. Rather, in the spiritual world, one must do something to help bring about what is to appear there as reality. One must always work together.

It is the case that a disembodied person in the spiritual world sees the spiritual world around them to the extent that they are active in it. And what they see when they are not active is the world beyond, the world that is our world here. When the disembodied person looks at the earth, they see what is there without them being involved. Just as we on earth call our visible world, our real world, our existing world the here and now and what cannot be seen the hereafter, it is exactly the other way round from the point of view of the spiritual world. In the spiritual world there is absolutely nothing except what we create out of nothing into the present by participating: That is then the here and now. Otherwise, this world in the spiritual world is dark and silent and desolate if we do not act spiritually and mentally in it. But the hereafter is there without us working. While we look up here to the unknown, we look from the spiritual world at what is familiar to us here, but that is precisely the hereafter, which has no reality because it is, without one doing anything to it. — One must familiarize oneself with such ideas.

Now there is something within our physical world, our physical reality, that not everyone, but certain people, accept as something meaningful, despite the fact that it is not real. It is something that individual people bring into this reality, and in contrast to this, those who have an understanding of it behave in such a way that they accept it, despite the fact that it has no real existence: These are the ideals that people have. Idealists bring something valuable into our sensual reality: the ideals by which people live, which have no material reality, and which only the coarse materialist does not accept. But at the same time, these ideals are something of immense value in this life. They are the ideals that give us the impetus for our lives, they are what we desire so that we can hold to them. In a certain respect, these ideals make life valuable in that man lives up to them. Something unreal in the materialistic sense must be carried into our sensual reality with the ideals, so that what we must characterize in the sense does not arise: mere existence would be bleak if ideals were not there, if man did not find them in them. Among those who have no ideals, there must be idealists who, as it were, develop something in our reality that is an image of the reality beyond, that is not an existing thing, that does not claim the existing and yet is a valuable thing, indeed, has an absolute value.

After the spiritual researcher has developed this impression, which is natural to him, his research leads him back to the riddle of the human being hit by a bullet in his youth. And he must now ask: Is there something for the world beyond, in which the disembodied human beings and spiritual beings live, that corresponds to idealism here on earth? Is there something similar for the beings in the hereafter as the ideals here on earth? And lo and behold, the following emerges. Take a person who was shot at a young age: his etheric body separates from the physical body, the physical body has gone in a violent way. Of course, the violence must come from outside. What I have said can never apply when it is a matter of one's own decision. The process must come from outside. The etheric body, as I have already emphasized, has forces within it that could have continued to supply life for decades, perhaps even for decades, here on earth. These forces do not disappear, they remain. The person who now discards his etheric body in this way hands over the forces of his etheric body to the general world. But he has entered the spiritual world in the manner indicated, or rather, his body has been taken from him. So he now ascends into the spiritual world as a disembodied soul. Something of him remains in the physical world that he could have used up himself but did not use up. Consider what is at hand here! The human being in question ascends into the spiritual world without having used up anything that he could have used up.

We now turn our attention to the individuality of the human being itself. The human being ascends into the spiritual world without having consumed something that he could have consumed. Thus he ascends into the spiritual world with something that could have been real down here in the physical world, but did not become real in the external sense. Those people who entered the physical world with the potential for prolonged use of the etheric body here, but did not experience this use, come up to the spiritual world differently than those who have used up this etheric body by the end of their existence. They come up having incorporated into this earth something that could have been, but did not become. But this causes a mood in them, through which they become something similar for the spiritual world as the idealists here are for the physical world. So the one who passes through the gate of death in this way enters the spiritual world by bringing in something that is idealism there for the spiritual world, which is similar to the ideals that are brought into the physical world here by the idealists. A meaningful context of life!

So in such martyrdom times as the present one, souls enter the spiritual world that have passed through a shorter existence. They have lived here on earth in such a way that something that could have come into existence did not come into being for them, and they enter the spiritual world in such a way that they represent the connection with the earthly world there in the same way that idealists here represent the connection between the earthly world and the spiritual world in their ideals. In other words, these human beings who have passed through the gate of death in this way have the task of proclaiming in the spiritual world that not everything on earth is as coarse as that which is called reality here under ordinary circumstances, that the earth also harbors something that is indeed predisposed to being, but does not live out this being in a coarse way. The fact that such an inner attitude of the soul is also carried up into the spiritual world gives rise, in the time between death and a new birth, to something similar to the idealism that exists here on earth. And if we look at such an age as ours from the standpoint of the wisdom of the world, then we look into the world in such a way that we say to ourselves: Within the whole, wisdom-filled course of the world, we also accept this in such a way that we work our way up to its understanding with reverence. We then recognize that in such ages of martyrdom the spiritual worlds are given in a great, all-embracing sense that which must live with them, just as our idealism must live on earth, so that those who, as such, go up into the spiritual world at all and live through the life between death and a new birth may find something similar in this world to what we find here in idealism. Therefore, these ages must come into being. Whether they must always arise in the future is not a matter for discussion today, because that depends on the way in which the life of knowledge of mankind on earth is spiritualized, not only whether but in what way. No one should draw from what has been said that such ages should necessarily be defended forever; but if one examines their meaning, it becomes clear what has been said for the present time of mankind.

Then we look into the wisdom-filled context of the world and say to ourselves: How does fear and terror, suffering and pain, and what those who pass through the gate of death must necessarily find in the spiritual world fit together? — We see how suffering, pain, blood and martyrdom, which present themselves to us here from one side, look from the other side. One can well imagine that there are people who want to be wiser than the gods and who therefore raise the question: Would the gods not have brought about something in the spiritual world that corresponds to idealism on earth, without having imposed on earth what is imposed on earth in such a martyr age? — Such questions are raised only by those who want to be wiser than the gods. Those who look into the human age in the right way want to understand the world because they are convinced that it must be as it is, and that anything man dreams up about something that would be better for this world could only be worse for it.

We look at the idealists, perhaps at a truly idealistic person in this world; we are perhaps tempted, if we have a sense for ideals, to say: See this man, he brings heaven into the earth, because what is not in the material sense, he brings as something valuable for the existing, as a guiding principle to people! The souls that have normally passed through the gate of death and are going through the life between death and a new birth also see in this life souls that have in some way undergone a sacrificial death, from whom the physical body has been taken from the outside by earthly necessity. They look to these souls as to those who have to proclaim to them that down there on earth there is not only coarse existence, but that, connected with the earth, there are also human tendencies that could be existence and yet do not come to full existence, but instead of consuming this full existence, pass over at an earlier point in their lives between birth and death into the spiritual world.

A significant question arises here, namely, what is the difference between such a violent death and a death caused by an early illness? For what I have said now is nothing but a statement of facts. Precisely those who have ended their physical lives in this way, as described, are, as it were, the idealists of the spiritual world, and they are idealists for the reason that, as can be seen from further observation, the physical body has been taken from them by earthly events, by events that merely belong to earthly life.

When a person undergoes an illness, the body is taken from him by forces other than earthly ones. For consider, even in the growth of plants, not only earthly forces are at work, but extraterrestrial forces also collaborate. This is of course also the case with animals and even more so with human beings. Our illnesses do not come from the earth alone. Death comes to us only from the earth in no other way than when we die a violent death. However death may come, it is never a mere earthly event, unless it be a violent death in the sense indicated. Whether death comes to us through an illness – and suicide is not an earthly event either, since it comes about through a decision of the soul – there is no death that is merely brought about by earthly forces, except that which, through sacrificial deaths, through forces that play on earth, frees the body from the soul-spiritual. So that here earthly forces and relationships enter into reciprocal relationships with that which is spiritual. Otherwise, death is always something that completely transcends the earth; it is never a mere interaction between the earth and what is in the spiritual world. The etheric body, which was early deprived of its activity, is given over to purely earthly conditions, to something that is merely earthly, that is merely earthly events. For death is such — hold what I am about to say together with some of my thoughts these days — that when viewed from the physical side, it appears quite different than when viewed from the spiritual side. I have hinted at this in various ways. But always, when death does not occur in the way I have now indicated, it is something that can be understood from the other side. If one enters the other world through a death from illness, from old age, or through suicide, then one has what is needed to understand death there. If death is caused by a bullet on the battlefield, then one must look at purely earthly conditions to understand it. It is the same with accidents. One must look down from the spiritual world to have been earthly; death is to be explained from earthly conditions. And that makes that one must look down from the here and now of the spiritual world into the hereafter of the physical world in order to understand such a death.

Just as our ideals connect us to heaven, so the heavenly ideals connect these dead to the earth. Therefore, the one who thus passes through the gate of death, in the life between death and new birth, is one who weaves into all that takes place between the human souls that come to be embodied again, that which then results in our earth in spiritual things, which results in our earth in the earth itself also consisting of our thoughts, feelings and not merely of earthly things.

It must be admitted that the characteristics of these things, which I have discussed, are difficult. But it is understandable that this must be difficult, because one speaks with words that are coined for physical conditions about that which extends far, far beyond physical conditions. In any case, it is one thing to look, I would say, dull-witted and uncomprehendingly, at the mysterious nature of such events that emerge from the bosom of history into human life, such as our present difficult time of trial for humanity, and quite another to look at them and say to oneself: What gives meaning to such an event is not only significant for our Earth, but for all life! And in this feeling one is led into the deep meaning and the wisdom of the whole. One gradually learns to sense what must all be involved in order for the human being to be placed in this world in the course of his entire life.

This is what I wanted to suggest in the second mystery drama, from the mouth of Capesius, who speaks of the fact that the thinking of many gods and the cooperation of many gods is necessary to make man appear to all the worlds as their goal. That which in this drama emerges as a world-sentiment from the soul of Capesius, can perhaps become objective if one tries to appropriate such ideas, as we have tried to put them into our souls today. In such personalities as Capesius, such moods arise tragically because they can also arise without one immediately finding the full solution to the riddle. That is one thing to be noted in this connection; the other is that we must always bear in mind how much such study calls upon us to be modest and humble, not proud, not to have human delusions of grandeur.

To appropriate human self-awareness in the right sense means to consciously visualize it inwardly. And when we begin to sense what we can extend our consciousness to, how wide the horizon of the riddles of the world is, we will take care not to fall for the proud thought: O man, how you are actually a summary of the whole cosmos! — I believe that precisely such a thought must be very far from us. On the other hand, the other thought will be close to us: How little we know in our consciousness of what is knowable! — Infinity is necessary to put together the human being; but we have never gone further than knowing a very small piece of it. Modesty and humility are what descends into our soul precisely from knowledge as it expands. One can never learn more about the spiritual world than one already knows without also learning that what can be known is infinite. And the more one knows, the more vividly one senses this infinity. And one learns to understand how a part of life consists in allowing oneself to be seized by the great, mighty riddles and secrets that pulsate through existence.

Much of what humanity must now regain was known by people in ancient times within an ancient wisdom like a heritage. What people possess today has only been gained by this inheritance disappearing from the souls. In order for human souls to acquire this wisdom again, it first had to disappear. It had to disappear so that it could become acquired wisdom. We must work our way up again in order to gain in further earthly lives, in the further existence of the earth, what has disappeared from the souls as inherited wisdom. Thus, we must look into the perspective of the human future; then we will understand the necessity of spiritual science entering the world. It is precisely this living relationship with the infinite, as it has been characterized, that enables us to truly grasp esoteric science as something that is inwardly alive, that is also active and effective in us, and that can make us true co-workers in the shaping of the earth, which we must become if the earth is to develop further.

To reinforce this, I would like to mention one more thing. There are people we should certainly listen to, because they are saying the right thing from the point of view of the present. They say: In earlier times, people did not know what a criminal is, why a person develops as a criminal in the world. Today, however, we know. If you dissect the head of a criminal, you will find that it has a certain characteristic: the occipital lobe does not completely cover the cerebellum, as it does in normal people. It was a great and significant discovery made by Moritz Benedikt, the famous criminal anthropologist, which shows how a certain simple physiology of the occiput determines whether someone is a criminal. So consider: You are a criminal because the posterior lobe does not cover parts of the brain that should be covered! There is nothing to be said against this truth. It is there, and it would be quite foolish to rebel against it, because it is a truth. But think: If you are a materialist, what do you have to say? Well, some people are born with brain lobes that are too small; they are then predestined to become criminals. Consider – I need not elaborate further – the infinite bleakness of such a view of the world! Consider how all human feeling must be changed when one knows nothing but this, and when one must say to oneself: Why do people become criminals? Because that is how nature has placed them in life, so that they cannot help but become criminals. But if one begins to know that the human being has an etheric body, then one knows something else to say about the matter, one knows something else about it. One knows that this ether body encompasses all parts, and that in the case of a person who has a occipital lobe that is too short in the physical sense, the corresponding ether parts can still attain their full development. Whatever the physical condition may be, the correction can also be achieved with the ether body. If we succeed in having a form of education that draws on spiritual science as well as physical science, we can develop an insight into a child's behaviour that enables us to recognise what is needed for its education and what we need to provide so that the ether body develops in such a way that it counteracts the effect of the underdeveloped occipital lobes. Then a person can, even if their hindbrain is not normally formed in the etheric body, still become a good person, even if they are physically predestined to be a criminal. Here you can see how spiritual science can and must practically intervene in life. Because purely physical science must let the criminal brain be a criminal brain, because it is only a science of the physical. But if you take spiritual science into consideration, you paralyze the physical defects. From this you can see what must develop in the future.

And now imagine: this spiritual science did not exist! Then there would never be the possibility of developing the etheric body in the way I have described. That means that anyone born in the future with an atrophied brain will live out their life in a way that corresponds to this brain. There will be no possibility of pedagogically improving this. The consequence of this will be that people will become what their physical organization is capable of. And this will continue forever. And people will reach the state of Jupiter, and the materialists' current dreams will become true. If spiritual science does not overcome what follows from the merely material organization, then people will gradually develop in such a way that this material organization will be decisive; people would then merely be a result of their material development. Because spiritual science intervenes in life, this will not be the case on Jupiter; the etheric body will again transform the physical body. For if in a life in which the physical brain has atrophied due to the karma of earlier lives, the etheric body is properly developed, then in the next incarnation the physical brain will develop properly. These things are all connected. So that spiritual science really becomes a reality, that it transforms humanity again.

” If you summarize these thoughts, you will be able to say to yourself: What the materialists think of man today is not yet reality, because today man is still so predisposed that the spiritual can intervene. But it could become as the materialists think, if it were up to the materialists, if spiritual science could be eradicated by the materialists. If the materialists had their way, people on Jupiter would live as a result of their material organization alone. What are materialists, then? They have a world view that does not correspond to reality today, but which could correspond to reality for people one day. These materialists are prophets, only false prophets! They dream of a world that, if it were up to them, could be created in their image. The materialists are dreamers, but mari must work against their dreams. When people realize that the materialists are dreamers, that they should be told: You go through the world and do not see reality, you dream of an existence that could at best be brought about by your lack of insight into the world, you are false prophets, you make all kinds of fantasies! At that moment materialism will be correctly assessed. So the opposite judgment of what the materialists, well, let's say, dream of themselves, that's what you'll have to have. Then the time will have come when one can really understand spiritual science. In a certain sense, spiritual science will already transform the world from this point of view.

In the last few days, I have tried to give you a few hints about this or that in the context of the physical and spiritual worlds. I have said it out of impulses that arise from the momentous events of our time. At a time when death is so present before the soul, one might say a thousand times a day, such reflections, when offered as a possibility, are indeed close to the human soul. For how could one refrain from searching for the meaning and purpose of existence in such difficult times of trial as these? The fact that we are able to talk about such questions here gives me great satisfaction and allows me to be among you again even in these difficult times. I would just like to add the comment that in the present situation, some things have to be viewed in the context of this present situation. It is not as easy as in peacetime to travel everywhere. Therefore, our members must be aware, as indeed everyone must be aware, that war times are different from normal times, and that we cannot demand everything as we would in normal times. I say this especially with regard to the fact that this is often overlooked, especially by our members, while our members should have a great deal of understanding for our present situation, and should be aware of its context. It has often been shown that our members cannot understand that one must bear in mind the difficult times in which we live and that not everything can happen with the same regularity as usual. But we must hold on to that, so that we are also loyal to our cause. What each of us can do in this time, through the individual branches of our Society working very hard and very thoroughly on our cause, is really done not only for the good of our cause, but for the good of much more.

It is natural that the community must now be looser; the work in our branches must be all the more intensive, especially with regard to deepening our souls. This is what I would like to place especially in your soul and heart at this time and today. Let us each try to remain holy and true to our ideals, especially in this time, to remain holy and true to what has been able to develop as an attitude through spiritual science in the course of time. Spiritual science must prove itself not only in easy but also in difficult times. What can be stated as a truism, but is nevertheless the keynote of all our striving, must now connect itself particularly deeply with our soul: the attempt at a comprehensive grasp of life. In contrast to so much that is now given in the outer world, in the outer world tending towards materialism – often with such one-sidedness – we want to strive for the versatility of life. We want to know that we must guard against every comfortable one-sidedness in every moment, because we face an infinity in every moment.

Some of you may have heard that in a place where our spiritual science is cultivated, it is necessary to talk about all kinds of shortcomings that have arisen here or there. If certain words have been used to offend certain people, we must not fall into the opposite extreme of one-sidedness. I am not saying this now in order to go into these things in more detail, but only as an example. If, for example, people who spoke of all kinds of occult events and experiences did not speak about these experiences in the right way, it must not be concluded from this that in our Society, for example, occult experiences are not the main thing. Of course they are, for we are striving from the external into the internal. Nor was there any need to object to occult experiences as such. But it is important to realize that within our movement, what counts is the level at which these experiences occur. For it is one thing to speak in a certain light-hearted way about occult experiences, and it is quite another to say that one does not want to hear about them at all. We have been talking about the most intimate occult experiences for three days. What is being created in our circle cannot be a mere science of thought. That is not what our society is for. We must not go from one one-sidedness to another.

I would like to draw particular attention to the intimate, to the way our spiritual science is so closely connected to the innermost part of our soul. What matters is that we do not turn our soul into something other than what it was before when we go through spiritual science. And that must also prove itself in difficult times. That is why I wanted to make such observations, which may be suitable for putting us in that reverent mood towards the spiritual life that is appropriate for the true spiritual scientist. Because basically the greatest and the smallest event in life, everything in life, is something that fills us with deep reverence if we are only able to go deeply enough into the spiritual background of this particular event. And even the painful events of life, the smallest and the greatest, can be placed in such a light through spiritual science that their contemplation helps to bring our soul into the right relationship with the wisdom that flows and weaves through the world.

From the point of view of world wisdom, we wanted to look at events in life that are connected with what is happening today in our environment, which is so great, but also so full of trials. If we feel this way about our time, then we feel right about what we wanted to suggest with the words:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the suffering of the abandoned,
From the people's sacrificial deeds
Will grow spiritual fruit —
Guiding souls, spiritually aware
Their minds into the spiritual realm.

First Question:

It is certainly possible to believe that spreading a main lesson subject over a longer period of time could have drawbacks. Neither can one deny that it is difficult to engage the attention of children on the same subject for a longer time. Other opinions, representing official contemporary educational theory, also seem to speak against such an extension of a subject into block periods. Nevertheless, it was decided to introduce this method in the Waldorf school. The point is that the results of recent psychological experiments (the main reason for disapproval of our methods) do not represent the true nature of the human being. These methods do not penetrate the deeper layers of the human being.

Why are psychological experiments done at all? I do not object to them, inasmuch as they are justified within the proper sphere. Within certain limits, I am quite willing to recognize their justification. Nevertheless the question remains: Why perform experiments on the human psyche today?

We experiment with the human soul because, during the course of human evolution, we have reached a point where we are no longer able to build a bridge, spontaneously and naturally, from one soul to another. We no longer have a natural feeling for the various needs of children, of how or when they feel fatigued and so on. This is why we try to acquire externally the kind of knowledge that human beings once possessed in full presence of mind, one soul linked to the other. We ask, How do children feel fatigued after being occupied with one or another subject for a certain length of time? We compile statistics and so on. As I said, in a way we have invented these procedures just to discover in a roundabout way what we can no longer recognize directly in a human being.

But for those who wish to establish a close rapport between the soul of a teacher and that of a child, there is something far more important than asking whether we claim too much of our students’ powers of concentration by teaching the same subject for a longer period of time. If I understand the question correctly, it implies that, if we were to introduce more variety into the lesson by changing the subject more frequently, we would gain something of value. Well, something would be gained, all right; one cannot deny that. But these things affect students’ whole lives, and they should not be calculated mathematically. One ought to be able to decide intuitively. Do we gain something valuable when seen against the whole life development of an individual? Or is something lost in the long run?

It is an entirely different matter whether we teach the same subject for two hours (as in a main lesson) or teach one subject for an hour and then another for the second hour—or even change subjects after shorter periods of time. Although students will tire to a certain extent (for which teachers must make allowances), it is better for their overall development to proceed in this concentrated way than to artificially limit the lesson time just to fill the students’ souls with new and different material in another lesson.

What we consider most important in the Waldorf school is that teachers use their available lesson time in the most economical way—that they apply soul economy in relation to their students’ potential. If we build lessons along major lines of content that students can follow without becoming tired, or at least without feeling overcome by tiredness, and if we can work against any oncoming tiredness by introducing variations of the main theme, we can accomplish more than if we followed other methods for the sake of advantages they may bring.

In theory it is always possible to argue for or against such things, but it is not a question of preference. The only thing that matters is finding what is best for the overall development of children, as seen from a long-term viewpoint.

There is one further point to be considered. It is quite correct to say that children will tire if made to listen to the same subject too long. But nowadays there is so little insight into what is healthy or unhealthy for children that people see fatigue as negative and something to be corrected. In itself, becoming tired is just as healthy as feeling refreshed. Life has its rhythms. It is not a question of holding the students’ attention for half an hour and then giving them a five-minute break to recover from the strain (which would not balance their fatigue in any case) before cramming something else into their heads. It is an illusion to think that this would solve the problem. In fact, one has not tackled it at all, but simply poured something different into their souls instead of allowing the consequences of the organic causes of fatigue to fade. In other words, we have to probe into the deeper layers of the human soul to realize that it has great value for the overall development of children when they concentrate for a longer period on the same subject.

As I said, one can easily reach the opinion that more frequent changes of subjects offer an advantage, but one must also realize that a perfect solution will never be found in life as it is. The real issue is, relatively speaking, finding the best solution to a problem. Then one finds that short lessons of different subjects do not offer the possibility of giving children content which will unite deeply enough with their spiritual, soul, and physical organizations.

Perhaps I should add this; if a school, based on the principles I have been describing, were ever condemned to put up with boring teachers, we would be forced to cut the length of the lesson time. I have to admit that, if teachers were to give boring and monotonous lessons, it would be better to reduce the length of each lesson. But if teachers are able to stimulate their students’ interest, a longer main lesson is definitely better. For me, it is essential not to become fixed or fanatical in any way but always consider the circumstances. Certainly, if we expect interesting lessons at school, we must not engage boring teachers on the staff.

Second Question:

There may be good reasons for seeing eurythmy as a derivation of another art form rather than as a new form of art. But whenever one deals with an artistic medium or with the artistic side of life, it is not the what that matters, but the how. To me, there is no real meaning in the statement that sculpture, music, speech, rhythm, and so on are merely a means of expression, whereas the underlying ideas are the real substance. There seems to be little point in making such abstract distinctions in life. Naturally, if one is interested in finding unifying ideas in the abstract, one can also find different media through which they are expressed. But in real life, these media do represent something new and different. For example, according to Goethe’s theory of plant metamorphosis, a colored flower petal is, in the abstract, essentially the same as a green plant leaf. Goethe sees a metamorphosed green leaf in a flower petal. And yet, from a practical point of view, a petal is altogether different from a leaf.

Whether eurythmy is a new form of expression or a new version of another art form is not the point at all. What matters is that, during the course of human evolution, speech and singing (though singing is less noticeable) have increasingly become a means of expressing what comes through the human head. Again, this is putting it rather radically, but from a certain point of view it represents the facts. Today, human language and speech no longer express the whole human being. Speech has become thought directed. In modern cultures, it has become closely connected with thinking, and through this development, speech reveals what springs from egoism.

Eurythmy, however, goes back again to human will, so it engages the whole human being. Through eurythmy, human beings are shown within the entire macrocosm. For example, during certain primeval times, gesture and mime always accompanied speech, especially during artistic activities, so that word and gesture formed a single expression and became inseparable. But today, word and gesture have drifted far apart. So one senses the need to engage the whole human being again by including more of the volition and, thus, reconnecting humankind to the macrocosm.

There seems to be way too much theorizing these days, whereas it is so important to consider the practical aspects of life—especially now. Those who observe life from this point of view, without preconceived ideas, know that for every “yes” there is a “no” and that anything can be proved both right and wrong. Yet the real value does not lie in proving something right or wrong or in finding definitions and making distinctions; it is a matter of discovering ways to new impulses and new life in the world. You may have your own thoughts about all this, but spiritual scientific insight reveals the development of humankind, and today it is leaning toward overcoming the intellectuality of mere definitions, being drawn instead toward the human soul realm and creative activity.

And so, it does not really matter whether we see eurythmy as a version of another art form or as a new art. A little anecdote may illustrate this. When I studied at Vienna University, some of the professors there had been given a much coveted title of distinction; they were called “Privy Councillors” (Hofrat). In Germany I found that such professors received the title of “Confidential Councillors” (Geheimrat). In certain quarters, the distinction between these two titles seemed important. But to me, it was the person behind the title that mattered, not the title itself. This seems similar to the situation in which people engage in philosophical arguments (forgive me, for I really don’t wish to offend anyone) to determine the difference between an art form that has been transferred to a different medium or, for want of a better word, one referred to as a new dimension in the world of art.

Third Question:

I am not quite clear what this question means, but it seems to express a somewhat evangelical attitude. At best, discipline, as I have already said, can become a natural byproduct of ordinary classroom life. I have also told you how, during the last two years of the Waldorf school, discipline has improved remarkably, and I have given examples to substantiate this. With regard to this “sense of sin,” it seems that one’s moral attitude led to a belief in awakening this feeling in children for their own benefit. But let’s please look at this point without any religious bias. An awakening of an awareness of sin would pour something into the soul of children that would remain there in the form of a kind of insecurity throughout life. Putting this in psychoanalytical terminology, one could say that such a method could create a kind of vacuum, an inner emptiness, within the souls of children, which, in later life, could degenerate into a weakness rather than a more active and energetic response to life in general. If I have understood the question rightly, this is all I can say in answer to it.

Fourth Question:

In my opinion this question has already been answered by what I said during the first part of my lecture this morning. In general, we cannot say that at this particular age boys have to go through yet another crisis, apart from the one described this morning. There would be too many different grades of development if we were to speak of an emerging turbulence that affects all boys at this age. Perhaps some people are under delusions about this. If the inner change I spoke of this morning is not guided correctly by the teachers and educators, children (and not just boys) can become very turbulent. They become restless and inwardly uncooperative, so that it becomes very difficult to cope with them.

Events at this age can vary a great deal according to the temperament of the adolescent, a factor that needs to be taken into account. If this were done, one would not make generalizations of the sort that appears here in the first sentence. It would be more accurate to say that, unless children are guided in their development—unless teachers know how to handle this noticeable change around the ninth and tenth years—they become uncooperative, unstable, and so on. Only then does the situation arise that was mentioned in the question. It is essential for teachers and educators to fully consider this turning point in the children’s development.

Fifth Question:

What has been written here is perfectly correct and I believe that one needs to simply say “yes.” Of course, we need a certain amount of tact when talking about the human being with students between ten and twelve. If teachers are aware of how much they can tell students about the nature of the human being, then I certainly agree that we have to enter the individual life of the person concerned.

Sixth Question:

With regard to this question I would like to say that we must count on the possibility of a continually increasing interest in new methods for understanding the secrets of human nature, because spiritual research into the human being is more penetrating than the efforts of natural science. Of course, the possibilities of this study will not be available in every field, but where they do exist, they should be used. It is beneficial not only for teachers and educators, but also for, say, doctors, to learn to observe the human being beyond what outer appearances tell us. I think that, without causing any misunderstandings, we can safely say that only prejudice stands in the way of such methods, and that their development is to be desired. It really is true that much more could be achieved in this way if old, intellectual preconceptions did not bar the way to higher knowledge. My book How to Know Higher Worlds describes just the initial stages of such paths.

Seventh Question:

In the Waldorf school, mathematics definitely belongs to the main lesson subjects, and as such it plays its role according to the students’ various ages and stages. In no way is this subject relegated to classes outside the main lesson. This question is based on a misunderstanding.

Rudolf Steiner:

Because of the impending departure of various conference members, there is a wish that the practical application of Waldorf principles be discussed first. Thus, it is surely appropriate for me to speak of the Waldorf school. Nevertheless, I want to broaden this subject, because I believe we need a great deal of strength and genuine enthusiasm in the face of present world conditions before our educational goals can be put into practice. It seems to me that, until we recognize the need to move toward the educational impulses described here, it will be impossible to achieve any sort of breakthrough in education. I am convinced that if you are willing to observe the recent development of humankind with an open mind, you must realize that we are living in the middle of a cultural decline and that any objection to such an assessment is based on illusions. Of course it’s very unpleasant and seems pessimistic, though in fact it is meant to be optimistic to speak as I do now. But there are many indications of a declining culture in evidence today, and the situation is really very clear. And the whole question of education arises properly in hearts and souls only when this is fully recognized. In view of this, I see the establishment of the Waldorf school as only the first example of a practical application of the education we have been talking about.

How did the Waldorf school come about? It owes its existence—this much can surely be said—to the realization of educational principles based on true knowledge of the human being. But what made it happen? The Waldorf school is an indirect result of the total collapse of society all over Central Europe in 1919. This general collapse embraced every area of society—the economic, sociopolitical, and spiritual life of all people. Perhaps we could also call it a collapse of economic and political life and a complete bankruptcy of spiritual life. In 1919 the stark realities of the situation made the entire public very much aware of this. Roughly halfway through 1919, there was a general and complete awareness of it.

Today there is much talk, even in Central Europe, about how humankind will recover, how it will eventually pull itself out of the trough again, and so on. But such talk is a figment of an all too comfortable way of thinking, and in reality such thoughts are only empty phrases. The fact is that this decline will certainly accelerate. Today, the situation in Central Europe is not unlike those who have known better days, when they bought plenty of good clothes. They still have those clothes and wear them down to their last threads. The fact that they cannot buy new clothes is certainly clear. And, although they realize they cannot replenish their stock, they nevertheless live under the illusion that all is well and that they will be adequately provided for. Similarly, the world at large fails to realize that it is no longer possible to obtain “new clothes” from its cultural past.

During the first half of 1919, the people of Germany were ready for a serious reassessment of the general situation. At that time, however, a Waldorf school had not yet begun, but it was the time when I gave lectures on social and educational issues, which addressed what I have been describing during this conference (though only in rough outline). Some people saw sense in what was said, and this led to founding the Waldorf school.

I emphasize this point, because the prerequisite for a renewal of education is an inner readiness and openness to assess the real situation, which will itself clearly indicate what needs to be done. At the founding of the Waldorf school, I remarked how good it is that this school will serve as a model, but this in itself it is not enough. As the only school of its kind, it cannot solve today’s educational problems. At least a dozen Waldorf schools must be started during the next three months if we are to take the first steps toward a solution in education. However, since this has not happened, we can hardly see our achievement in Stuttgart as success. We have only a model, and even this does not yet represent what we wish to see. For example, apart from our eurythmy room, which we finally managed to obtain, we badly need a gymnasium. We still do not have one, and thus anyone who visits the Waldorf school must not see its current state as the realization of our goals. Beyond all the other problems, the school has always been short of money. Financially it stands on extremely weak and shaky legs.

You see, hiding one’s head in the sand goes nowhere in such serious matters. Therefore, I must ask you to permit me to speak freely and frankly. Often, when I speak of these things, as well as my views on money, I am told, “In England we would have to go about this in a very different way; otherwise, we would merely put people off.” Now, in my opinion, two things must be done. First, the principles of this education—based as they are on a true picture of the human being—should be made widely known, and the underlying ideas need to be thoroughly taken in and understood. Everything possible should be done in this direction.

If we were to leave it at that, however, there would be little progress. Unless we make up our minds to overcome certain objections, we will never move forward at all. For instance, people say, “In England, people must see practical results.” This is precisely what the civilized world has been saying for the past five or six hundred years. Only what people see with their own eyes has been considered truly valuable, and this drags us down. And if we insist on this stance, we will never pull ourselves out of this chaos.

We are not talking about small, insignificant matters. It is absolutely necessary that we grasp our courage and give a new impulse. Well-meaning people often think that I cannot appreciate what they are saying when they state, “In England, we would have to do things very differently.” I understand this only too well, but this does not get to the root of the issue at all. If the catastrophic conditions of 1919 had not hit the people of Central Europe so hard—though this ill fortune was really a stroke of good luck in terms of beginning the Waldorf school—if that terrible situation had not opened people’s eyes, there would be no Waldorf school in Central Europe, even today. In Central Europe, and especially in Germany, there is every need for a new impulse, because there is an innate lack of any ability to organize and so little sense of structured social organization. When people outside Central Europe speak so highly of German organization, it does not reflect the facts. There is no assertive talent for organization in Germany. Above all, there is no articulated social organization; rather, real culture is carried by individuals, not by the general public. Look, for example, at German universities. They do not represent the real character of the German people at all. They are very abstract structures, and do not at all express what is truly German. The real German spirit lives only in individuals. Of course, this is only a hint, but it shows what would probably happen if we appealed to the national mood in Germany; one meets a void and a lack of understanding for what we have been speaking of here. In other words, the Waldorf school owes its existence to an “unlucky stroke of luck.”

Now, with regard to the second point, the most important thing, besides the need to build further on what was spoken of here, is that something like a Waldorf school should be established also in countries where the populations have not been jolted into action by abysmal, cataclysmic conditions, such as Germany experienced in 1919. If, for instance, some sort of Waldorf school could be opened in England, this would mark a significant step forward. Naturally, such a school would have to be adapted to the conditions and culture of that country.

I realized that the Waldorf educational movement was not going to spread its wings, because the original Waldorf school was, in fact, still the only one. So I tried to initiate a worldwide Waldorf school movement. I did this because, during the preceding years, there had been a tremendous expansion of the anthroposophic movement, at least in Central Europe. Today this movement is a fact to be reckoned with in Central Europe. As a spiritual movement, it has made its mark. But there is no organization to direct and guide this movement. It needs to said, and generally understood, that the Anthroposophical Society is not in a position to carry the anthroposophic movement. The Anthroposophical Society is riddled with a tendency toward sectarianism, and consequently it is not capable of carrying the anthroposophic movement as it has developed and exists today.

All the same, I had wanted to make a final appeal to the stronger elements within the Anthroposophical Society, because I was hoping that some individuals might respond by making a final effort to bring about a Waldorf movement. Well, this did not happen. The world school movement is dead and buried, because it is not enough simply to talk about such things; it must be accomplished in a down-to-earth and practical way. To implement such a plan, a larger body of people is needed.

The Waldorf school in Stuttgart is one of the results of the German revolution. It is not itself a revolutionary school, but the revolution was its matrix, so to speak. It would mean a big step forward if something like a Waldorf school were started in another country also (say, in England) because the general world situation was clearly recognized. Perhaps later, when time has been given to the discussion, a little more could be said about this.

Millicent MacKenzie (Professor at University College, Cardiff: At this point, I would like to add that, among the members of this conference, there are several people from England who recognize the needs of humankind and would be in a position to work in this direction. They are in a position to exert considerable influence in an effort to realize this educational impulse. As a first step, they would like to invite Dr. Steiner to come to England some time later this year, and they are eager to create the right attitude and context for such a visit, during which they hope a number of prominent individuals and educators would also be present to welcome Dr. Steiner.

Rudolf Steiner: I wish to add that such a step must be taken only in a practical sense, and that it would be harmful if we talk too much about it. Those of you who are in a position to take a step forward in this direction would have to prepare the ground, so that when the right time has come, the appropriate action may be taken.

I am sure that Mrs. MacKenzie and her friends will agree if there are conference members from other countries who might have ideas on this subject and wish to come forward to add their suggestions.

Mrs. K. Haag: Today we have heard a great deal about England. We are pleased about this and have found it useful. But there are various other matters that we, who come from our little Holland, have on our heart. In fact, we have come with a very guilty conscience because the idea of a World school movement was just discussed for the first time in Holland. Somehow we did not do what we might have done about it, partly because of misunderstandings and partly because of a lack of strength. But we have not been quite as inactive as people might think, and I can assure you that we are more than ready to make good on our failure, as far as possible. Despite our shortcoming, I would like to ask Dr. Steiner whether the plan he outlined for England could also be implemented in Holland. And since Dr. Steiner has promised to visit us in April, I would like to ask him if he might be willing to discuss this with a larger group of people who have a particular interest in education.

Rudolf Steiner: There is already a plan for Holland, which, as far as I know, is being worked out. From the fifth to the twelfth of April this year, an academic course will be held there that are similar to courses given elsewhere. It has the task, first and foremost, of introducing anthroposophy in depth.

After the need to work for anthroposophy in Holland was repeatedly pointed out, and after the lectures and performances there during February and the beginning of March last year, it has been somewhat discouraging to see a notable decline, not in an understanding of spiritual science, but certainly in terms of the inner life of the Anthroposophical Society in Holland. Therefore it seems to me very necessary, especially in Holland, that the anthroposophic movement make a new and vigorous beginning. From which angle this should be approached will depend on the prevailing conditions, but an educational movement could certainly be the prime mover.

Another question has been handed to me, which has a direct bearing on this point.

Question: According to Dutch law, it is possible to set up a free school if the government is satisfied that the intentions behind it are serious and genuine. If we in Holland were unable to raise enough money to begin a Waldorf school, would it be right for us to accept state subsidies, as long as we were allowed to arrange our curriculum and our lessons according to Waldorf principles?

Rudolf Steiner: There is one part of the question I do not understand, and another fills me with doubts. What I cannot understand is that it should be that difficult to collect enough money for a free school in Holland. Forgive me if I am naive, but I do not understand this. I believe that, if the enthusiasm is there, it should at least be possible to begin. After all, it doesn’t take so much money to start a school.

The other point, which seems dubious to me, is that it would be possible to run a school with the aid of state subsidies. For I seriously doubt that the government, if it pays out money for a school, would forego the right to inspect it. Therefore I cannot believe that a free school could be established with state subsidies, which imply supervision by inspectors of the educational authorities. It was yet another stroke of good luck for the Waldorf school in Stuttgart that it was begun just before the new Republican National Assembly passed a law forbidding the opening of independent schools. Isn’t it true to say that, as liberalization increases, we increasingly lose our freedom? Consequently, in Germany we are living in a time of progress, whereas it is quite unlikely that we could begin a Waldorf school in Stuttgart today. It was established just in time.

Now the eyes of the world are on the Waldorf school. It will be allowed to exist until the groups that were instrumental in instituting the so-called elementary schools have become so powerful that, out of mistaken fanaticism, they will do away with the first four classes of the Waldorf school. I hope this can be prevented, but in any case we are facing menacing times. This is why I continue to emphasize the importance of putting into action, as quickly as possible, all that needs to be done. A wave is spreading all over the world, and it is moving quickly toward state dictatorship. It is a fact that Western civilization is exposing itself to the danger of one day being inundated by an Asiatic sort of culture, one that will have a spirituality all its own. People are closing their eyes to this, but it will happen nevertheless.

To return to our point: I think it only delays the issue to think it is necessary to claim state help before starting a school. Somehow this does not look promising to me at all. But perhaps others have different views on this subject. I ask everyone present to voice an opinion freely.

Question: He states that, at the present time, it is impossible to establish a school in Holland without interference by the state, which would demand, for instance, that a certain set curriculum be formulated and so on.

Rudolf Steiner: If things had been any different, I would not have decided at the time to form a world school movement, because, as an idea, it borders on the theoretical. But because the situation stands as you have described it, I thought that such a movement would have practical uses. The matter is like this: Take the example of the little school we used to have here in Dornach. For the reason already mentioned several times, we managed to have only a very small school because of our continual “overabundant lack of funds.” Children around the age of ten came together in this school. Now, in the local canton of Solothurn, there is a strict law in education that is really not much different from similar laws all over Switzerland. This law is so fixed that, when the local education authorities found out that we were teaching children under the age of fourteen, they declared it completely unacceptable; it was simply unheard of. Whatever we might have done to arrive at some agreement, we would never have received permission to apply Waldorf methods in teaching children under fourteen.

Hindrances of this kind will, of course, be placed in our way all over the continent. I dare not say how this would work in England at the moment. But if turns out to be possible to begin a totally free school there, it would really mean a marvelous step forward. But because we meet resistance almost everywhere when we try to put Waldorf education into practice, I thought that a worldwide movement for the renewal of education might have some practical value. I had hoped that it might make an impression on people interested in education, thus creating possibilities for establishing new Waldorf schools. I consider it extremely important to bring about a movement counter to modern currents, which culminated in Russian Bolshevism. These currents find their fulfillment in absolute state dictatorship in education. We see it looming everywhere, but people won’t realize that Lunatscharski is merely the final result of what lies dormant all over Europe. As long as it does not interfere with people’s private lives, the existence of such thinking is conveniently ignored. Well, in my opinion, we should react by generating a movement against Lunatscharski’s principle that the state should become a giant machine, and that each citizen should be a cog in the machine. The goal of this countermovement should be to educate each person. It is this that is needed. In this sense, one can make most painful experiences even in the anthroposophic movement.

Today it would also be possible to give birth to a real medical movement on the basis of the anthroposophic movement. All the antecedents are there. But it would require a movement capable of placing this impulse before the eyes of the world. Yet everywhere we find a tendency to call those who are able to represent a truly human medicine “quacks,” thus putting them outside the law. As an example, and entirely unconnected with the anthroposophic medical movement, I would like to tell you what happened in the case of a minister in the German government who rigorously upheld a strict law against the freedom of the healing profession, a law that still operates today. However, when members of his own family fell ill, he surreptitiously called for the help of unqualified healers, showing that, for his own family, he did not believe in official medical science, but only in what the law condemned as “quackery.”

This is symptomatic of the root causes of sectarianism. A movement can free itself of such causes when it stands up to the world, while remaining fully within the laws of the land, so that there can be no confusion in terms of the legal aspects. And this is what I had in mind with regard to a world school movement. I wanted to create the right setting for introducing laws that allow schools based entirely on the need for educational renewal. Schools will never be established correctly by majority decisions, which is also why such schools cannot be run by the state.

That’s all I have to say about the planned world school movement, an idea that, in itself, does not appeal to me at all. I do not sympathize with it, because it would have led to an international association, a “world club,” and to the creation of a platform for the purpose of making propaganda. My way is to work directly where the needs of the times present themselves. All propaganda and agitation is alien to me. I abhor these things. But if our hands are tied and if there is no possibility to establish free schools, we must first create the right climate for ideas that might eventually lead to free education. Compromises may well be justified in various instances, but we live in a time when each compromise is likely to pull us still further into difficulties.

Question: How can we best work in the realm of politics?

Rudolf Steiner: I think that we should digress too much from our main theme if we were to look at these deep and significant questions from a political perspective. Unless today’s politics experience a regeneration—at least in those countries known to me on the physical plane—they hold little promise. It is my opinion that it is exactly in this area that such definite symptoms of decadence are most obvious, and one would expect society to recognize the need for renewal—the threefold social order. Such a movement would then run parallel to the anthroposophic movement.

Where has the old social order placed us? I will indicate this only very briefly and, thus, possibly cause misunderstandings. Where did the old social order, which did not recognize its own threefold nature, land us? It has led to a situation in which the destinies of whole populations are determined by political parties whose ideological backgrounds consist of nothing but phrases. No one today can maintain that the phrases used by the various political parties contain anything of real substance.

A few days ago I spoke of Bismarck, who in later life became a rigid monarchist, although in his younger years he had been something of a bashful, closet republican. This is how he described himself. This same Bismarck expressed opinions similar to those expressed by Robespierre. People can make all sorts of statements. What matters in the end is what comes to light when the real ideology of a party is revealed.

For some years, I taught at the Berlin Center for the Education of the Working Classes, a purely social-democratic institution. I took every opportunity to spread the truth wherever people were willing to listen, no matter what the political persuasion or program of the organizers of those institutions. And so, among people who were, politically, rigid Marxists, I taught a purely anthroposophic approach to life, both in courses on natural science and on history. Even when giving speech exercises to the workers, I was able to express my deepest inner convictions. The number of students grew larger and larger, and soon the social-democratic party leaders began to take notice. It led to a decisive meeting, attended not only by party leaders but also by all my adult students, who were unanimous in their wish to continue their courses. But three to four party leaders stolidly declared that this kind of teaching had no place in their establishment, because it was undermining the character of the social-democratic party. I replied that surely the party wanted to build for a future and that, since humankind was moving inevitably toward greater freedom, any future school or educational institution would have to respect human freedom. Then a typical party member rose and said, “We don’t know anything about freedom in education, but we do know a reasonable form of compulsion.” This was the decisive turning point that finally led to closing my courses.

It may seem rather silly and egotistic to say this, but I am convinced that, had this quickly growing movement among my students at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century been allowed to live and expand unhindered, conditions in Central Europe would have been different during the 1920s.

So you can see that I do not have much trust in working with political parties. And you will have the least success in bringing freedom into education when dealing with socialist parties. They, above all, will strive in most incredible ways for the abolition of freedom in education. As for the Christian parties, they are bound to clamor for independent schools, simply because of the constitution of the present German government. But if they were placed at the helm, they would immediately claim this freedom in education only to suit themselves. It is a simple fact that we will be unable to make progress in public life unless we first create the necessary foundations for a threefold social order, in which the democratic element prevails exclusively in the middle sphere of rights. This in itself would guarantee the possibility of freedom in education. We will never achieve it through electioneering.

Question: If children of the present generation were educated according to the principles of anthroposophic knowledge, would this in itself be enough to stem the tide of decadence and decay, or would it be necessary to send them out into the world with the stated intent of changing society to bring about a new social organism?

Rudolf Steiner: The ideas I tried to express in Towards Social Renewal are not fully understood. The reasons for writing this book are decades old. Humanity has reached a stage when, although someone might show up with the most promising ideas for improving society and people’s social attitudes, one could not implement them simply because there is a lack of practical possibilities for such purposes. The first step would be to create the right conditions for the possibility of implementing such ideas and insights into social life.

Consequently, I do not believe it is helpful to ask, If a generation were educated in the way we have described, would the desired social conditions automatically follow? Or, Would a change of the social order one way or another still be necessary? I would say, we must understand that the best we can do in practical life is to help as many people as possible of one generation to make progress through education based on knowledge of the human being. This in itself would obviate the second question, because the thoughts and ideas needed to change society would be exactly those developed by that generation. Since their human conditions would be different from those of the general public today, they would have very different possibilities for implementing their aims.

The point is, if we want to be practical, we have to think in practical terms rather than theories. To think practically means to do what is possible, not attempt to realize an ideal. Our most promising aim would be to educate as many as possible of one generation, working from knowledge of the human being, and then trust that, in their adult lives, they would be able to bring about a desirable society. The second question can be answered only through the actions of those who, through their education, have been prepared for the task you outlined. It cannot be answered theoretically.

Question: How can one make use of what we have heard in this course of lectures to educate profoundly mentally retarded children?

Rudolf Steiner: In answer to this question I should like to give you a real and practical example. When I was twenty-three or twenty-four, I was called to work as a tutor in a family of four boys. Three of the boys presented no educational difficulties, but one, who was eleven at that time, had a particular history. At the age of seven, a private tutor had tried in vain to teach him according to the accepted methods of an elementary school. Bear in mind that this happened in Austria, where anyone was free to teach children, because the only thing that mattered was that they could pass an examination at the end of each year, and students were allowed to take these exams at any state school. No one cared whether they had been taught by angels or by devils, as long as they passed their exam, which was seen as proof of a good education.

Among those four boys, one had four to nearly five years of private tutoring behind him. He was around eleven years old when his latest drawing book was presented to me, which he had brought home from his most recent annual exam. In all other subjects he had remained either completely silent or had talked complete nonsense, but he had not put anything down on paper. His drawing book was the only document he had handed in during his exam, and all it contained was a big hole in the first page. All he had done was scribble something and then immediately erase it, until only a big hole was left as evidence of his efforts and the only tangible result of his exam. In other respects, it proved impossible—sometimes for several weeks—to get him to say even a single word to anyone. For awhile, he also refused to eat at table. Instead, he went into the kitchen, where he ate from the garbage can. He would rather eat garbage than proper food.

I am describing these symptoms in detail so you can see that we are dealing with a child who certainly belonged to the category of “seriously developmentally disabled.” I was told that not much could be done, since everything has been tried already. Even the family doctor (who incidentally was a leading medical practitioner in Vienna and a greatly respected authority) had given up on the boy, and the whole family was very discouraged. One simply did not know how to approach that boy.

I asked that this child’s education, as well as that of his three brothers, be left entirely in my hands, and that I be given complete freedom in dealing with the boy. The whole family refused to grant me such freedom, except for the boy’s mother. From their unconscious depths, mothers sometimes have the right feeling for these things, and the boy was given into my care. Above all else, when preparing my lessons I followed the principle of approaching such a child—generally called “feebleminded”—entirely in terms of physical development. This means that I had to base everything on the same principles I have elaborated to you for healthy children. What matters in such a case is that one gains the possibility of looking into the inner being of such a child. He was noticeably hydrocephalic, so it was very difficult to treat this boy. And so my first principle was that education means healing and must be accomplished on a medical basis.

After two and a half years, the boy had progressed enough to work at the curriculum of a grammar school, for I had succeeded in teaching him with the strictest economy. Sometimes I limited his academic work to only a quarter or, at most, a half hour each day. In order to concentrate the right material into such a short time, I sometimes needed as much as four hours of preparation for a lesson of half an hour. To me, it was most important not to place him under any strain whatsoever. I did exactly as I thought right, since I had reserved the right to do so. We spent much time on music lessons, which seemed to help the boy. From week to week, the musical activity was increased, and I could observe his physical condition gradually changing. Admittedly, I forbid any interference from anyone. The rest of the family, with the exception of the boy’s mother, registered objections when, time and again, they noticed that the boy looked pale. I insisted on my rights and told them that it was now up to me whether I made him look pale, and even more pale. I told them that he would look ruddy again when the time came.

My guiding line was to base the entire education of this child on insight into his physical condition and to arrange all soul and spiritual measures accordingly. I believe that the details will always vary in each case. One has to know the human being thoroughly and intimately, and therefore I must repeatedly point out that everything depends on a real knowledge of the human being. When I asked myself, What is the boy’s real age and how do I have to treat him? I realized that he had remained a young child of two years and three months, and that I would have to treat him as such, despite the fact that he had completed his eleventh year, according to his birth certificate. I had to teach him according to his mental age. Always keeping an eye on the boy’s health and applying strictest soul economy, I initially based my teaching entirely on the principle of imitation, which meant that everything had to be systematically built on his forces of imitation. I then went on to what, today, I called “further structuring” of lessons. Within two and a half years, the boy had progressed enough that he was able to study grammar school curriculum. I continued to help when he was a student in grammar school. Eventually, he was weaned of any extra help. In fact, he was able to go through the last two classes of his school entirely on his own. Afterward, he became a medical doctor with a practice for many years. He died around the age of forty from an infection he had contracted in Poland during the World War.

This is just one example, and I could cite many others. It shows that, especially in the case of developmentally disabled children, we need to apply the same principles I elaborated here for healthy children. In the Waldorf school there are quite a number of slightly and profoundly “mentally-retarded children” (to use the phrase of the question). Naturally, more serious cases would disturb their classmates, so we have opened a special remedial class for such children of various ages, whose members are drawn from all our classes. This group is under the guidance of Dr. Schubert.

Whenever we have to decide whether to send a child into this remedial class, I have the joy (if I may say it this way) of having to fight with the child’s class teacher. Our class teachers never want to let a class member go. All of them fight to keep such children, doing their best to support them within the class, and often successfully. Although our classes are certainly not small, by giving individual attention, it is possible to keep such children in the class. The more serious cases, however, must be placed in our remedial group, where it is absolutely essential to give them individual treatment. Dr. Schubert, who is freed from having to follow any set curriculum, allows himself be guided entirely by the individual needs of each child. Consequently, he may be doing things with his children that are completely different from what is usually done in a classroom. The main thing is to find specific treatments that will benefit each child.

For instance, there may be some very dull-witted children in such a group, and once we develop the necessary sense for these things, we realize that their faculty of making mental pictures is so slow that they lose the images while making them. They lose mental images because they never fully make them. This is only one type of mental handicap. We can help these children by calling out unexpected commands, if they are capable of grasping their meaning. We have also children who are unable to follow such instructions, so one has to think of something else. For instance, one may suddenly call out, “Quickly hold your left earlobe between your right thumb and second finger. Quickly grip your right arm with your left hand!” In this way, if we let them orient themselves first through their own body geography and then through objects of the world outside, we may be able to make real progress with them. Another method might get them to quickly recognize what one has drawn on the blackboard (Steiner drew an ear on the board). It is not easy at all to get such a child to respond by saying “ear.” But what matters is this flash of recognition. One has to invent the most varied things to wake up such children. It is this awakening and becoming active that can lead to progress, though, of course, not in the case of those who display uncontrollable tempers. They have to be dealt with differently. But these examples may at least indicate the direction in which one has to move. What matters is the individual treatment, and this must spring from a real knowledge of the human being.

You will have gathered from the remarks I have made during the last two days that there is a fundamental change in the inner constitution of the human being at every single stage of his life. Today, certainly, modern psychologists and physiologists also take this into account. They too reckon with these changes which take place in the course of life, firstly up to the change of teeth, then up to puberty, and again from puberty into the twenties. But these differences are more profound than can be discovered by means of the methods of observation customary today, which do not reach far enough, however excellent they may be. We must take a further step and examine these differences from aspects demanded by spiritual science. You will hear many things that are already familiar to you, but you must now enter more deeply into them. Even when the child enters this world from the embryo condition, that is, to take an external characteristic, when he adapts himself to the outer process of breathing, even then, physiologically speaking, he is not yet received directly by the outer world, for he takes the natural nourishment of the mother's milk. He is not nourished as yet by what comes from the outer world, but by what comes from the same source as the child himself. Now today people study the substances they meet with in the world more or less according to their external, chemical, physical properties only and do not consider the finer attributes which they possess through their spiritual content. Nowadays everything is considered in this way. Such methods are not to be condemned; on the contrary they should be recognised as justified. Nevertheless because the time came when man was concerned only with the outer aspects of things, aspects which could not be so regarded in earlier civilisations, he has now reached a point of extreme externalisation. If I may make a comparison, things are observed today in some such way as this. We say: I look upon death, upon dying; plants die, animals die, human beings die. But surely the question arises as to whether dying, the passing away of the various forms of life with which we come in contact, is in all three kinds of living beings the same process, or whether this only appears outwardly to be so. We can make use of the following comparisons: If I have a knife there is a real difference whether I cut my food with it, or whether I use it for shaving. In each case it is a knife, but the properties of “knife” must be further differentiated. Such differentiation is in many cases not made today. No differentiation is made between the dying of a plant, an animal or a man.

We meet the same thing in other domains too. There are people who in a certain way want to be philosophers of nature, and because they aim at being idealistic, even spiritual, they assert that plants may well have a soul; and they try to discover in an external way those characteristics of plants which seem to indicate that they have certain soul qualities. They make a study of those plants which, when they are approached by insects, tend to open their petals. The insect is caught, for it is attracted by the scent of what is in the plant. Such a plant is the Venus Flytrap. It closes its petals with a snap and the insect is trapped. This is considered to be a sort of soul quality in the plant. Well, but I know something else which works in the same way. It is to be found in all sorts of places. The mouse, when it comes near, feels attracted by the smell of a dainty morsel; it begins to nibble, and—hey presto! snap goes the mousetrap. If one were to make use of the same thought process as in the case of a plant, one might say: the mousetrap has a soul.

This kind of thinking, however, although quite legitimate under certain conditions never leads to conclusions of any depth, but remains more or less on the surface. If we wish to gain a true knowledge of man we must penetrate into the very depths of human nature. It must be possible for us to look in a completely unprejudiced way at things which appear paradoxical vis-à-vis external methods of observation. Moreover it is very necessary to take into consideration everything which, taken together, makes up the entire human organisation.

In man we have, to begin with, the actual physical organism which he has in common with all earthly beings and particularly with the mineral kingdom. In man, however, we have clearly to distinguish between his physical organism and his etheric organism. The latter he has in common only with the plant world, not with the minerals. But a being endowed only with an etheric organism could never experience feeling, never attain to an inner consciousness. For this again man has his astral organism, which he has in common with the animal world. It might appear that this is an external organisation, but in the course of these lectures we shall see how inward it can be. In addition to this man still has his ego-organisation, which is not to be found in the animal world and which he alone possesses among earthly beings. What we are here considering is in no sense merely an external, intellectual pattern; moreover, in speaking, for instance, of an etheric or life-body, this has no connection whatever with what an outmoded natural science once called “life-force,” “vital-force” and so on. On the contrary, it is the result of observation. If, for instance, we study the child up to the age of the change of teeth, we see that his development is primarily dependent on his physical organism. The physical organism must gradually adapt itself to the outer world, but this cannot take place all at once, not even if considered in the crudest physical sense. This physical body, just because it contains what the human being has brought with him out of the spiritual world in which he lived in pre-earthly existence, cannot forthwith assimilate the substances of the outer world, but must receive them specially prepared in the mother's milk. The child must, so to say, remain closely connected with what is of like nature with himself. He must only gradually grow into the outer world. And the conclusion of this process of the physical organism growing into the outer world is indicated by the appearance of the second teeth at about the seventh year. At approximately this age the child's physical organism completes the process of growing into the world.

During this time, however, in which the organisation is chiefly concerned with the shaping and fashioning of the bony system, the child is only interested in certain things in the outer world, not in everything. He is only interested in what we might call gesture, everything that is related to movement. Now you must take into account that at first the child's consciousness is dream-like, shadowy; to begin with his perceptions are quite undefined, and only gradually do they light up and gain clarity. But fundamentally speaking the fact remains that during the time between birth and the change of teeth the child's perception adheres to everything in the nature of gesture and movement and does so to such an extent, that in the very moment when he perceives a movement he feels an inner urge to imitate it. There exists a quite definite law of development in the nature of the human being which I should like to characterise in the following way.

While the human being is growing into the physical, earthly world, his inner nature is developing in such a way that this development proceeds in the first place out of gesture, out of differentiation of movement. In the inner nature of the organism speech develops out of movement in all its aspects, and thought develops out of speech. This deeply significant law underlies all human development. Everything which makes its appearance in sound, in speech, is the result of gesture, mediated through the inner nature of the human organism.

If you turn your attention to the way in which a child not only learns to speak, but also learns to walk, to place one foot after the other, you can observe how one child treads more strongly on the back part of the foot, on the heel, and another walks more on the toes. You can observe children who in learning to walk tend to bring their legs well forward; with others you will see that they are more inclined to hold back, as it were, between two steps. It is extraordinarily interesting to watch a child learning to walk. You must learn to observe this. But it is more interesting still, although much less attention is paid to it, to see how a child learns to grasp something, how he learns to move his hands. There are children who, when they want something, move their hands in such a way that even the fingers are brought into movement. Others keep their fingers still, and stretch out their hands to take hold without moving the fingers. There are children who stretch out their hand and arm, while keeping the upper part of the body motionless; there are others who immediately let the upper part of the body follow the movement of arm and hand. I once knew a child who, when he was very small and his high-chair was placed at a little distance from the table on which stood some dish he wished to get at, proceeded to “row” himself towards it; his whole body was then in movement. He could make no movements at all without moving his whole body.

This is the first thing to look out for in a child; for how a child moves reveals the most inward urge of life, the primal life impulse. At the same time there appears in the child's movement the tendency to adapt himself to others, to carry out some movement in the same way as his father, mother or other member of the family. The principle of imitation comes to light in gesture, in movement. For gesture is what appears first of all in human evolution, and in the special constitution of the physical, soul and spiritual organism of man gesture is inwardly transformed; it is transformed into speech. Those who are able to observe this know without any doubt that a child who speaks as though the sentences were hacked out of him is one who sets his heels down first; while a child who speaks in such a way that the sentences run one into the other tends to trip on his toes. A child who takes hold of things more lightly with his fingers has the tendency to emphasise the vowel element, while a child who is inclined to stress the consonants will bring his whole arm to his aid when grasping something. We receive a very definite impression of a child's potentialities from his manner of speaking. And to understand the world, to understand the world through the medium of the senses, through the medium of thought, this too is developed out of speech. Thought does not produce speech, but speech thought. So it is in the cultural development of humanity as a whole; human beings have first spoken, then thought. So it is also with the child; first out of movement he learns to speak, to articulate only then does thinking come forth from speech. We must therefore look upon this sequence as being something of importance: gesture, speech, thought, or the process of thinking.

All this is especially characteristic in the first epoch of the child's life, up to the change of teeth. When little by little the child grows into the world during the first, second, third and fourth years of life, he does so through gesture; everything is dependent on gesture. Indeed, I would say that speaking and thinking take place for the most part unconsciously; both develop naturally out of gesture, even the first gesture. Therefore speaking approximately we can say: From the first to the seventh year gesture predominates in the life of the child, but gesture in the widest sense of the word, gesture which in the child lives in imitation. As educators we must keep this firmly in mind for actually up to the change of teeth the child only takes in what comes to him as gesture, he shuts himself off from everything else. If we say to the child: Do it like this, do it like that, he really does not hear, he does not take any notice. It is only when we stand in front of him and show him how to do it that he is able to copy us. For the child works according to the way I myself am moving my fingers, or he looks at something just as I am looking at it, not according to what I tell him. He imitates everything. This is the secret of the development of the child up to the change of teeth. He lives entirely in imitation, entirely in the imitation of what in the widest possible sense comes to meet him from outside as gesture. This accounts for the surprises we get when faced with the education of very young children. A father came to me once and said, “What shall I do? Something really dreadful has happened. My boy has been stealing.” I said, “Let us first find out whether he really steals. What has he done?” The father told me that the boy had taken money out of the cupboard, had bought sweets with it and shared them with the other boys. I said “Presumably that is the cupboard out of which the boy has often seen his mother taking money, before going shopping; he is quite naturally imitating her.” And this proved to be the case. So I said further, “But that is not stealing; that lies as a natural principle of development in the boy up to the change of teeth. He imitates what he sees; he must do so.” In the presence of a child therefore we should avoid doing anything which he should not imitate. This is how we educate him. If we say: You should not do this or that, it does not influence the child in the slightest degree up to the change of teeth. It could at most have some effect if one were to clothe the words in a gesture, by saying: Now look, you have just done something that I would never do!—for this is in a way a disguised gesture.

It comes to this: with our whole manhood we should fully understand how up to the change of teeth the child is an imitating being. During this time there is actually an inner connection between the child and his environment, between all that is going on around him. Later on this is lost. For however strange and paradoxical it may sound to people today, who are quite unable to think correctly about the spirit, but think always in abstractions, it is nevertheless true that the whole relationship of the child to gesture and movement in his surroundings has an innate religious character. Through his physical body the child is given over to everything in the nature of gesture; he cannot do otherwise than yield himself up to it. What we do later with our soul, and still later with our spirit, in that we yield ourselves up to the divine, even to the external world, as again spiritualised, this the child does with his physical body when he brings it into movement. He is completely immersed in religion, both with his good and his bad qualities. What remains with us as soul and spirit in later life, this the child has also in his physical organism. If therefore the child lives in close proximity with a surly, “bearish” father, liable to fall into rages, someone who is often irritable and angry, expressing uncontrolled emotions in the presence of the child, while the inner causes of such emotions are not as yet understood by the child, nevertheless what he sees, he experiences as something not moral. The child perceives simultaneously, albeit unconsciously, the moral aspects of these outbreaks, so that he has not only the outer picture of the gesture, but also absorbs its moral significance. If I make an angry gesture, this passes over into the blood organisation of the child, and if these gestures recur frequently they find expression in his blood circulation. The child's physical body is organised according to the way in which I behave in his presence, according to the kind of gestures I make. Moreover if I fail in loving understanding when the child is present, if, without considering him I do something which is only suitable at a later age, and am not constantly on the watch when he is near me, then it can happen that the child enters lovingly into something which is unfitted for his tender years, but belongs to another age, and his physical body will in that case be organised accordingly. Whoever studies the whole course of a man's life from birth to death, bearing in mind the requirements of which I have spoken, will see that a child who has been exposed to things suitable only to grown-up people and who imitates these things will in his later years, from the age of about 50, suffer from sclerosis. One must be able to examine such phenomena in all their ramifications. Illnesses that appear in later life are often only the result of educational errors made in the very earliest years of childhood.

This is why an education which is really based on a knowledge of man must study the human being as a whole from birth until death. To be able to look at man as a whole is the very essence of anthroposophical knowledge. Then too one discovers how very strong the connection is between the child and his environment. I would go as far as to say that the soul of the child goes right out into his surroundings, experiences these surroundings intimately, and indeed has a much stronger relationship to them than at a later period of life. In this respect the child is still very close to the animal, only he experiences things in a more spiritual way, in a way more permeated with soul. The animal's experiences are coarser and cruder, but the animal too is related to its environment. The reason why many phenomena of recent times remain unexplained is because people are not able to enter into all the details involved. There is, for instance, the case of the “calculating horses” which has made such a stir recently, where horses have carried out simple arithmetical operations through stamping with their hooves. I have not seen the famous Elberfelder horses, but I have seen the horse belonging to Herr von Osten. This horse did quite nice little sums. For instance Herr von Osten asked: How much is 5 + 7? And he began to count, beginning with 1, and when he got to 12 the horse stamped with its foot. It could add up, subtract and so on. Now there was a young professor who studied this problem and wrote a book about it which is extremely interesting. In this book he expounds the view that the horse sees certain little gestures made by Herr von Osten, who always stands close to the horse. His opinion is that when Herr von Osten counts 7 + 5 up to 12 and the horse stamps when the number 12 is reached, this is because Herr von Osten makes a very slight gesture when he comes to 12 and the horse, noticing this, duly stamps his foot. He believes that it can all be traced back to something visible. But now he puts a question to himself: “Why,” he says, “can you not see this gesture which Herr von Osten makes so skilfully that the horse sees it and stamps at the number 12?” The young professor goes on to say that these gestures are so slight that he as a human being cannot see them. From this the conclusion might be drawn that a horse sees more than a professor! But this did not convince me at all, for I saw this wonder of an intelligent horse, the clever Hans, standing by Herr von Osten in his long coat. And I saw too that in his right-hand pocket he had lumps of sugar, and while he was carrying out his experiments with the horse he always handed it one lump after another, so that feeling was aroused in the horse associating sweet things with Herr von Osten. In this way a sort of love was established between Herr von Osten and the horse. And only when this is present, only when the inner being of the horse is, as it were, merged into the inner being of Herr von Osten through the stream of sweetness that flows between them, only then can the horse “calculate,” for it really receives something—not through gesture, but through what Herr von Osten is thinking. He thinks: 5 + 7 = 12, and by means of suggestion the horse takes up this thought and even has a distinct impression of it. One can actually see this. The horse and his master are in a certain way merged in feeling one into the other: they impart something to one another reciprocally when they are united through the medium of sweetness. So the animal still has this finer relationship to its environment, and this can be stimulated from outside, as, in this case, by means of sugar.

In a delicate way a similar relationship to the outer world is still present in children also. It lives in the child and should be reckoned with. Education in the kindergarten should therefore never depend on anything other than the principle of imitation. The teacher must sit down with the children and just do what she wishes them to do, so that the child has only to copy. All education and instruction before the change of teeth must be based on this principle.

After the change of teeth all this becomes quite different. The soul life of the child is now completely changed. No longer does he perceive merely the single gestures, but now he sees the way in which these gestures accord with one another. For instance, whereas previously he only had a feeling for a definite line, now he has a feeling for co-ordination, for symmetry. The feeling is awakened for what is co-ordinated or uncoordinated, and in his soul the child acquires the possibility of perceiving what is formative. As soon as this perception is awakened there appears simultaneously an interest in speech. During the first seven years of life there is an interest in gesture, in everything connected with movement; in the years between seven and fourteen there is an interest in everything connected with the pictorial form, and speech is pre-eminently pictorial and formative. After the change of teeth the child's interest passes over from gesture to speech, and in the lower school years from seven to fourteen we can work most advantageously through everything that lies in speech, above all through the moral element underlying speech. For just as the child before this age has a religious attitude towards the gesture which meets him in the surrounding world, so now he relates himself in a moral sense—his religious feeling being gradually refined into a soul experience—to everything which approaches him through speech.

So now, in this period of his life, one must work upon the child through speech. But whatever is to work upon him in this way must do so by means of an unquestioned authority. When I want to convey to the child some picture expressed through speech, I must do so with the assurance of authority. I must be the unquestioned authority for the child when through speech I want to conjure up before him some picture. Just as we must actually show the little child what we want him to do, so we must be the human pattern for the child between the change of teeth and puberty. In other words, there is no point whatever in giving reasons to a child of this age, in trying to make him see why we should do something or not do it, just because there are well-founded reasons for or against it. This passes over the child's head. It is important to understand this. In exactly the same way as in the earliest years of life the child only observes the gesture, so between the change of teeth and puberty he only observes what I, as a human being, am in relation to himself. At this age the child must, for instance, learn about what is moral in such a way that he regards as good what the naturally accepted authority of the teacher, by means of speech, designates as good; he must regard as bad what this authority designates as bad. The child must learn: What my teacher, as my authority, does is good, what he does not do is bad. Relatively speaking then, the child feels: When my teacher says something is good, then it is good; and if he says something is bad, then it is bad. You will not attribute to me, seeing that 30 years ago I wrote my Philosophy of Freedom a point of view which upholds the principle of authority as the one and only means of salvation. But through the very fact of knowing the true nature of freedom one also knows that between the change of teeth and puberty the child needs to be faced with an unquestioned authority. This lies in the nature of man. Everything is doomed to failure in education which disregards this relationship of the child to the unquestioned authority of the personality of the teacher and educator. The child must be guided in everything which he should do or not do, think or not think, feel or not feel, by what flows to him, by way of speech, from his teacher and educator. At this age therefore there is no sense in wanting to approach him through the intellect. During this time everything must be directed towards the life of feeling, for feeling is receptive to anything in the nature of pictures and the child of this age is so constituted that he lives in the world of pictures, of images, and has the feeling of welding separate details into a harmonious whole. This is why, for instance, what is moral cannot be brought to the child by way of precept, by saying: You should do this, you should not do that. It simply doesn't work. What does work is when the child, through the way in which one speaks to him, can feel inwardly in his soul a liking for what is good, a dislike of what is bad. Between the change of teeth and puberty the child is an aesthete and we must therefore take care that he experiences pleasure in the good and displeasure in what is bad. This is the best way for him to develop a sense of morality.

We must also be sincere, inwardly sincere in the imagery we use in our work with the child. This entails being permeated to the depths of our being by everything we do. This is not the case if, when standing before the child we immediately experience a slight sense of superiority: I am so clever—the child is so stupid. Such an attitude ruins all education; it also destroys in the child the feeling for authority. Well then, how shall I transform into a pictorial image something that I want to impart to the child? In order to make this clear I have chosen the following example as an illustration.

We cannot speak to the child about the immortality of the soul in the same way as to a grown-up person; but we must nevertheless convey to him some understanding of it. We must however do so in a pictorial way. We must build up the following picture and to do this may well take the whole lesson.

We can explain to the child what a butterfly's chrysalis is, and then speak in some such words as these: “Well, later on the finished butterfly flies out of the chrysalis. It was inside all the time only it was not yet visible, it was not yet ready to fly away, but it was already there inside.” Now we can go further and tell him that in a similar way the human body contains the soul, only it is not visible. At death the soul flies out of the body; the only difference between man and butterfly is that the butterfly is visible and the human soul is invisible. In this way we can speak to the child about the immortality of the soul so that he receives a true picture of immortality and one suited to his age. But in the presence of the child we must on no account have the feeling: I am clever, I am a philosopher and by no means of thought can I convince myself of the truth of immortality; the child is naive, is stupid, and so for him I will build up the picture of the butterfly creeping out of the chrysalis. If one thinks in this way one establishes no contact with the child, and then he gets nothing whatever from what he is told. There is only one possibility. We must ourselves believe in the picture, we must not want to be cleverer than the child; we must stand in the presence of the child as full of belief as he is. How can this be done? An anthroposophist, a student of spiritual science knows that the emergence of the butterfly from the chrysalis is actually a picture of the immortality of the human soul placed into the world by the gods. He can never think otherwise than that the gods inscribed into the world this picture of the emerging butterfly as an image of the immortality of the human soul. In all the lower stages of the process he sees the higher processes which have become abstract. If I do not get the idea that the child is stupid and I am clever, but if I stand before the child conscious that this actually is so in the world and that I am leading him to believe in something which I too believe with all my heart, then there arises an imponderable relationship between us, and the child makes real progress in his education. Then moral imponderabilia continually enters into our educational relationship. And this is the crux of the matter.

When we are quite clear about this we shall, out of the whole nexus of our studies, come to see how we can find the right approach to an instruction which is truly educational, an education which really instructs. Let us take an example. How must the child learn to read and write? There is actually a great deal more misery connected with this than one usually imagines, though human intellectualism is far too crude to perceive it. One recognises that learning to read and write is a necessity, so it follows that the child must at all costs be drilled into learning reading and writing. But just consider what this means for a child! When they are grown-up, people have no inclination to put themselves in the child's place, to imagine what he undergoes when he learns to read and write. In our civilisation today we have letters, a, b, c and so on; they are there before us in certain definite forms. Now the child has the sound a (ah, as in father). When does he use it? This sound is for him the expression of an inner soul experience. He uses this sound when he is faced with something which calls up in him a feeling of wonder, of astonishment. This sound he understands. It is bound up with human nature. Or he has the sound e (eh, as in they). When does he use this? He uses it when he wants to show he has the feeling: “Something has come up against me; I have experienced something which encroaches on my own nature.” If somebody gives me a blow, I say e (eh).¹ It is the same with the consonants. Every sound corresponds to some expression of life; the consonants imitate an outer, external world, the vowels express what is experienced inwardly in the soul. The study of language, philology, is today only approaching the first elements of such things.

Learned scholars, who devote themselves to research into language, have given much thought to what, in the course of human evolution, may have been the origin of speech. There are two theories. The one represents the view that speech may have arisen out of soul experiences in much the same way as this takes place in the animal, albeit in its most primitive form—“moo-moo” being the expression of what the cow feels inwardly, and “bow-wow” what is experienced by the dog. And so, in a more complicated way, what in man becomes articulated speech arises out of this urge to give expression to inner feelings and experiences. In somewhat humorous vein this is called the “bow-wow theory.” The other point of view proceeds from the supposition that in the sounds of speech man imitates what takes place in the outer world. It is possible to imitate the sound of a bell, what is taking place inside the bell: “ding-dong—ding-dong.” Here there is the attempt to imitate what takes place in the outer world. This is the basis for the theory that in speech everything may be traced back to external sounds, external event. It is the “ding-dong theory.” So we have these two theories in opposition to one another. It is not in any way my intention to make fun of this, for as a matter of fact, both are correct: the “bow-wow” theory is right for the vowel element in speech, the “ding-dong” theory for the consonantal element. In transposing gestures into sounds we learn by means of the consonants to imitate inwardly outer processes; and in the vowels we give form to inner experiences of the soul. In speech the inner and the outer unite. Human nature, itself homogeneous, understands how to bring this about.

We receive the child into the primary school. Through his inner organisation he has become a being able to speak. Now, suddenly he is expected to experience—I say experience deliberately weighing my words, not recognise, experience—a connection between astonishment, wonder, (ah) and the demonic sign a. This is something completely foreign to him. He is supposed to learn something which he feels to be utterly remote, and to relate this to the sound “ah.” This is something outside the sphere of a young child's comprehension. He feels it as a veritable torture if at the very outset we confront him with the forms of the letters in use today.

We can, however, remember something else. The letters which we have today were not always there. Let us look back to those ancient peoples who had a picture writing. They used pictures to give tangible form to what was uttered, and these pictures certainly had something to do with what they were intended to express. They did not have letters such as we use, but pictures which were related to their meaning. Up to a certain point the same could be said of cuneiform writing. These were times when people still had a human relationship to things, even when these were fixed into a definite form. Today we no longer have this, but with the child we must go back to it again. We must of course not do so in such a way that we study the cultural history of ancient peoples and fall back on the forms which were once used in picture writing; but we must bring all our educational fantasy into play as teachers in order to create the kind of pictures we need. Fantasy, imagination [The German phantasie is often more equivalent to the English imagination than to fantasy. In this lecture the latter is probably more appropriate.] we must certainly have, for without it we cannot be teachers or educators. And so it is always necessary to refer to the importance of enthusiasm, of inspiration, when dealing with some characteristic feature of anthroposophy. It never gives me any pleasure, for instance, when I go into a class in our Waldorf School and notice that a teacher is tired and is teaching out of a certain mood of weariness. That is something one must never do. One simply cannot be tired, one can only be filled with enthusiasm. When teaching, one must be absolutely on the spot with one's whole being. It is quite wrong to be tired when teaching; tiredness must be kept for some other occasion. The essential thing for a teacher is that he learns to give full play to his fantasy. What does this mean? To begin with I call up in the child's mind something that he has seen at the market, or some other place, a fish for example. I next get him to draw a fish, and for this I even allow him to use colours, so that he paints as he draws and draws as he paints. This being achieved I then let him say the word “Fish,” not speaking the word quickly, but separating the sounds, “f-i-ssh.” Then I lead him on so that he says only the beginning of the word fish (f...) and gradually I transfer the shape of the fish into a sign that is somewhat fish like, while at the same time getting the child to say f ... And there we have it, the letter “f!”

Or I let the child say Wave (W-a-v-e) showing him at the same time what a wave is (see sketch). Once again I let him paint this and get him to say the beginning of the word—w—and then I change the picture of a wave into the letter w.

Continuing to work in the same way I allow the written characters gradually to emerge from the painting-drawing and drawing-painting, as indeed they actually arose in the first place. I do not bring the child into a stage of civilisation with which as yet he has nothing in common, but I guide him in such a way that he is never torn away from his relationship to the outer world. In order to do this there is no necessity to study the history of culture—albeit the writing in use today has arisen out of picture-writing—one must only give free play to one's fantasy, for then one brings the child to the point at which he is able to form writing out of this drawing and painting.

Now we must not think of this only as an ingenious and clever new method. We must value the fact that the child unites himself inwardly with something that is new to him when his soul activity is constantly stimulated. He does not “grow into it” when he is pushed, so that he is always coming into an unfamiliar relationship with his environment. The whole point is that we are working on the inner being of the child.

What is usually done today? It is perhaps already somewhat out-of-date, but not so long ago people gave little girls “beautiful” dolls, with real hair, dolls that could shut their eyes when one laid them down, dolls with pretty faces and so on. Civilisation calls them beautiful, but they are nevertheless hideous, because they are inartistic. What sort of dolls are these? They are the sort which cannot activate the child's fantasy. Now let us do something different. Tie a handkerchief so that you have a figure with arms and legs; then make eyes with blobs of ink and perhaps a mouth with red ink as well; now the child must develop his fantasy if he is to imagine this as having the human shape. Such a thing works with tremendous living force on the child, because it offers him the possibility of using his fantasy. Naturally one must do this first oneself. But the possibility must be provided for the child, and this must be done at the age when everything is play. It is for this reason that all those things which do not stimulate fantasy in the child are so damaging when given as toys. As I said, today these beautiful dolls are somewhat out-dated, for now we give children monkeys or bears. To be sure, neither do these toys give any opportunity for the unfolding of a fantasy having any relationship to the human being. Let us suppose that a child runs up to us and we give him a bear to cuddle. Things like this show clearly how far our civilisation is from being able to penetrate into the depths of human nature. But it is quite remarkable how children in a perfectly natural, artistic way are able to form imaginatively a picture of this inner side of human nature.

In the Waldorf School we have made a transition from the ordinary methods of teaching to what may be termed a teaching through art, and this quite apart from the fact that in no circumstances do we begin by teaching the children to write, but we let them paint as they draw, and draw as they paint. Perhaps we might even say that we let them splash about, which involves the possibly tiresome job of cleaning up the classroom afterwards. I shall also speak tomorrow about how to lead over from writing to reading, but, quite apart from this painting and drawing, we guide the child as far as possible into the realm of the artistic by letting him practise modelling in his own little way, but without suggesting that he should make anything beyond what he himself wants to fashion out of his own inner being. The results are quite remarkable. I will mention one example which shows how something very wonderful takes place in the case of rather older children.

At a comparatively early age, that is to say, for children between ten and eleven years old, we take as a subject in our curriculum the “Study of Man.” At this age the children learn to know how the bones are formed and built up, how they support each other, and so on. They learn this in an artistic way, not intellectually. After a few such lessons the child has acquired some perception of the structure of the human bones, the dynamic of the bones and their interdependence. Then we go over to the craft-room, where the children model plastic forms and we observe what they are making. We see that they have learned something from these lessons about the bones. Not that the child imitates the forms of the bones, but from the way in which he now models his forms we perceive the outer expression of an inner mobility of soul. Before this he has already got so far as to be able to make little receptacles of various kinds; children discover how to make bowls and similar things quite by themselves, but what they make out of the spontaneity of childhood before they have received such lessons is quite different from what they model afterwards, provided they have really experienced what was intended. In order to achieve this result, however, these lessons on the “Knowledge of Man” must be given in such a way that their content enters right into the whole human being. Today this is difficult.

Anyone who has paid as many visits to studios as I have and seen how people paint and model and carve, knows very well that today hardly any sculptor works without a model; he must have a human form in front of him if he wishes to model it.

This would have had no sense for a Greek artist. He had of course learned to know the human form in the public games, but he really experienced it inwardly. He knew out of his own inner feeling—and this feeling he embodied without the aid of a model—he knew the difference between an arm when it is stretched out or when, in addition, the forefinger is also extended, and this feeling he embodied in his sculpture. Today, however, when physiology is taught in the usual way, models or drawings of the bones are placed side by side, the muscles are described one after another and no impression is given of their reciprocal relationship. With us, when the children see a vertebra belonging to the spinal column, they know how similar it is to the skull-bone, and they get a feeling for the metamorphosis of the bones. In this way they enter livingly right into the different human forms and so feel the urge to express it artistically. Such an experience enters right into life; it does not remain external.

My earnest wish, and also my duty as leader of the Waldorf School, is to make sure that wherever possible everything of a fixed nature in the way of science, everything set down in books in a rigid scientific form should be excluded from class teaching. Not that I do not value science; no one could value science more highly. Such studies can be indulged in outside the school, if so desired; but I should be really furious if I were to see a teacher standing in front of a class with a book in his or her hand. In teaching everything must come from within. This must be self-understood. How is botany taught today for instance? We have botany books; these are based on a scientific outlook, but they do not belong to the classroom where there are children between the change of teeth and puberty. The perception of what a teacher needs in the way of literature must be allowed to grow gradually out of the living educational principles I shall be speaking about here.

So we are really concerned with the teacher's attitude of mind, whether in soul, spirit and body he is able to relate himself to the world. If he has this living relationship he can do much with the children between the change of teeth and puberty, for he is then their natural and accepted authority. The main thing is that one should enter into and experience things in a living way and carry over into life all that one has thus experienced. This is the great and fundamental principle which must form the basis of education today. Then the connection with the class will be there of itself, together with the imponderable mood and feeling that must necessarily go with it.

Answers to a Question

Question: There are grown-up people who seem to have remained at the imitative stage of childhood. Why is this?

Dr. Steiner: It is possible at every stage of human development for someone to remain in a stationary condition. If we describe the different stages of development, adding to today's survey the embryonic stage, and continuing to the change of teeth, and on to puberty, we cover those epochs in which a fully developed human life can be formed. Now quite a short time ago the general trend of anthroposophical development brought it about that lectures could be held on curative education, with special reference to definite cases of children who had either remained backward or whose development was in some respect abnormal. We then took the further step of allowing certain cases to be seen which were being treated at Dr. Wegmann's Clinical-Therapeutic Institute. Among these cases there was one of a child of nearly a year old, about the normal size for a child of this age, but who in the formation of his physical body had remained approximately at the stage of seven or eight months embryo. If you were to draw the child in outline with only an indication of the limbs, which are somewhat more developed, but showing exactly the form of the head, as it actually is in the case of this little boy, then, looking cursorily at the drawing, you would not have the faintest idea that it is a boy of nearly a year old. You would think it an embryo, because this boy has in many respects kept after his birth the embryonic structure.

Every stage of life, including the embryonic, can be carried over into a later stage; for the different phases of development as they follow one after the other, are such that each new phase is a metamorphosis of the old, with something new added. If you will only take quite exactly what I have already said in regard to the natural religious devotion of the child to his surroundings up to the change of teeth, you will see that this changes later into the life of soul, and you have, as a second attribute the aesthetic, artistic stage. Now it happens with very many children that the first stage is carried into the second, and the latter then remains poorly developed. But this can go still further: the first stage of physical embodiment can be carried over into each of the others, so that what was present as the original stage appears in all the later stages. And, for a superficial observation of life, it need not be so very obvious that an earlier stage has remained on into a later one, unless such a condition shows itself particularly late in life. Certain it is however that earlier stages are carried over into later ones.

Let us take the same thing in a lower kingdom of nature. The fully grown, fully developed plant usually has root, stalk, with it cotyledon leaves, followed by the later green leaves. These are then concentrated in the calyx, the petals, the stamen, the pistil and so on. There are however plants which do not develop as far as the blossom, but remain behind at the stage of herbs and other plants where the green leaves remain stationary, and the fruit is merely rudimentary. How far, for instance, the fern has remained behind the buttercup! With the plant this does not lead to abnormality. Man however is a species for himself. He is a complete natural order. And it can happen that someone remains his whole life long an imitative being, or one who stands in need of authority. For in life we have not only to do with people who remain at the imitative stage, but also with those who in regard to their essential characteristics remain at the stage that is fully developed between the change of teeth and puberty. As a matter of fact there are very many such people, and with them this stage continues into later life. They cannot progress much farther, and what should be developed in later years can only do so to a limited extent. They remain always at the stage where they look for the support of authority. If there were no such people, neither would there be the tendency, so rife today, to form sects and such things, for sectarian associations are based on the fact that their adherents are not required to think; they leave the thinking to others and follow their leaders. In certain spheres of life, however, most people remain at the stage of authority. For instance, when it is a question of forming a judgment about something of a scientific nature people do not take the trouble to look into it themselves, but they ask: Where is the expert who must know about this, the specialist who is a lecturer at one of the universities? There you have the principle of authority. Again in the case of people who are ill the principle of authority is carried to extremes, even though here it may be justifiable. And in legal matters, for instance, nobody today will think of forming an independent judgment, but will seek the advice of a solicitor because he has the requisite knowledge. Here the standpoint is that of an eight or nine year old child. And it may well be that this solicitor himself is not much older. When a question is put to him he takes down a lawbook or portfolio and there again you have an authority. So it is actually the case that each stage of life can enter into a later one.

The Anthroposophical Society should really only consist of people who are outgrowing authority, who do not recognise any such principle but only true insight. This is so little understood by people outside the Society that they are continually saying: “Anthroposophy is based on authority.” In reality the precise opposite is the case; the principle of authority must be outgrown through the kind of understanding and discernment which is fostered in anthroposophy. The important thing is that one should grasp every scrap of insight one can lay hold of in order to pass through the different stages of life.

• 1. In English we tend to prefix an aspirate to the vowel, saying “Ha” when something astonishes us, or “Heh” when something impinges on us, e.g. “Heh, stop it!”

In this lecture, Rudolf Steiner indicates the magnitude of the questions at stake and suggests that a mechanisation of the spirit, vegetation of the soul, and animalisation of the body will take place unless humanity is able to find a new relationship to the spirit. It is lecture 13 of 14 from the lecture series: Reorganization of the Social Organism.

Every individual has the feeling that part of his being is super-sensible, whatever function it has within his soul. And anthroposophical spiritual science—the name applying to what I have been presenting for many years—has something it wants to say about this feeling becoming an inner scientific certainty in the consciousness of present-day mankind. However, there are still all manner of prejudices against the anthroposophical approach to knowledge of man's super-sensible being and to knowledge of the super-sensible world altogether. But anthroposophy cannot speak about the super-sensible being of man in the kind of way people would still like to hear it spoken of in many circles today. For we should imagine, in fact, we should be certain that speaking about it in that way would not satisfy people's present-day aspirations for knowledge, which are none the less intense although they may still be unconscious. Nowadays when people pass judgment on one or another aspect of anthroposophy you constantly hear the remark that anthroposophy is difficult to understand. They say that anthroposophy obtains its knowledge from regions one does not need to go to in order to reach the super-sensible. They emphasise the difference between anthroposophy's search for knowledge and ‘simple faith’ based on the creed and the Bible, and they keep on stressing that anyone who has found the inner strength of this ‘simple faith’ does not need anthroposophical spiritual science.

If anthroposophy were to speak along the lines that people nowadays call ‘simple faith,’ it would certainly consider it was failing to do justice to the deepest aspirations of the times. It would have to admit, in that case, that although it was presenting a point of view still popular with many people who find it less difficult to understand than anthroposophy, this point of view is nevertheless no longer appropriate for the real soul needs of present-day mankind. I wanted this to be said because it is just from this direction that objections are continually being raised against the views which arise from a valid consideration of man's present-day needs, views which are held by the kind of spiritual science that will be spoken of here. This kind of spiritual science is convinced that certain inter-relationships exist about which many people nowadays have the most detrimental illusions. Today, however, we are living in an age that has a long way to go before confusion and chaos are over. We are entering a difficult period of human evolution. Anyone able to look more deeply into the evolution of mankind and seeing the amount of elemental unrest felt today throughout the whole of the civilised world, of which everything of the nature of inner tensions is only the ripples on the surface, knows that this has a mysterious connection with that obstinate attitude of ‘simple faith’ that wants to rely solely on the creed and the Bible. The parts of man's being that are attracted by this so-called ‘faith’ shut him off from those very forces that could bring order into chaos and confusion at the present stage of human evolution. If those people who speak in the way I have indicated would now deepen their knowledge somewhat, they would have to see all that is bringing mankind into such terrible conflict and chaos. Then they would have to admit that they now lack certain forces that they failed to develop because of their determination not to go beyond their so-called ‘simple faith,’ which they and others find so convenient. They would also have to admit that there is an inner relationship between the unrest of today and this harping on ‘simple faith.’ A causal connection there certainly is, today's elemental restlessness being the result of this obdurate harping.

I am not speaking out of subjective feelings but out of the very kind of knowledge I would like to tell you more about today, namely an inner scientific perception. It is this that has moved anthroposophy to bring knowledge of the super-sensible down from spirit heights. Insofar as the so-called believers in a simple faith point to the super-sensible, their knowledge has also come to them from spirit heights. But they have no wish at all to ascend to these heights.

This had to be said first of all, because today, in particular, what I will have to say concerning the super-sensible being of man will need to be brought into connection with a number of those spiritual scientific facts that people on the one hand find really incomprehensible—though if they were to go into them more thoroughly they would find they absolutely accorded with common sense; and that people on the other hand consider unnecessary, because they do not find they accord with the ‘simple faith’ they think they ought to advocate. I attempted the day before yesterday to characterise the paths by which the kind of spiritual science we mean attains to knowledge. On that occasion I began by saying that on the whole men of present times have very little desire to know about what is taking place unconsciously in the depths of their being. On the one hand people think the body is something external to themselves, and that they can gain knowledge of it either by observing it with sense perception or by considering it according to the outlook laid down by natural science. On the other hand they think that their thinking, sense perception, feeling and willing comprise the whole of their inner being. However, the path of knowledge I indicated the day before yesterday shows that the life of the external body, on the one hand, and the soul experiences of thinking, feeling and willing we have in ordinary consciousness, on the other, do not comprise the whole of man's being. The essential point is that man as spiritual investigator does not stop at the level of ordinary consciousness but takes the development of his soul into his own hands, as it were. In the realm of thought, in particular, he raises thinking consciously onto a higher level than in ordinary life, and in the other direction makes his will nature consciously into an object of self-education. Thus the development of soul forces beyond the level of ordinary life is the only thing that can lead in an anthroposophical sense to knowledge of the super-sensible world.

Now what is this development of thinking? It consists of making human thinking or human visualising stronger than it is in ordinary life, and doing so in a completely systematic way based on the experiences of man's inner soul nature. In ordinary life our thinking or visualising is merely a spectator. And man is conscious of the fact that he actually thinks best in ordinary life when he allows his experiences of life or of external nature to work on him in such a way that he forms his mental pictures as a passive spectator. With the methods described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds you can bring activity into the world of thought. You will bring such activity into the world of thought that you will be conscious that you are not passive whilst you think, but are as active as you are when you use your limbs, even though this is an inner activity. Will must be brought into thinking, the kind of will, however, that does not make the thinking arbitrary, but adapts it to the phenomena of the world. So it is a particularly good preparation for the spiritual investigator if he precedes his spiritual scientific endeavours with a thoroughly disciplined study in the natural scientific method, thus training himself not to think arbitrarily but according to the phenomena of nature itself. But he also has to free himself from this mere looking at nature. His newly acquired capacity of systematic thinking and of observing natural phenomena must now be developed as a thought activity independent of physical phenomena. A spiritual scientific training of thinking is an activating of thinking. This is a fact that many people still disbelieve today—we are only at the beginning of spiritual scientific knowledge—namely the fact that man's thinking and whole activity of mental picturing really takes on quite a different character than it has in everyday life.

If we think back to the dreamlike mental images of early childhood and compare these with the clear thinking of adulthood, we find that man's inner life of soul has undergone a change. A similar change takes place in anyone who develops his thinking in the way we have described and progresses from ordinary thinking to active thinking. He feels as though he has awakened from the normal condition of existence, and, provided we do not use the word in a dubious mystical sense, we can certainly say that this activated thinking ‘awakens’ man.

By learning to use this active thinking man acquires an entirely new way of ‘seeing’ things, a new way of seeing the qualities of the human body, to begin with. Active thinking ascends to the kind of seeing in which the human body appears in quite a new way. Above all, a tremendous difference is to be seen between the form of man's head organisation and the organisation that comes to expression in man's mobile limbs and everything that is connected with these. By means of the kind of seeing that active thinking opens up we come to realise that the human head is of an entirely different character, even in its bodily nature, from the rest of the body, particularly the limb organisation. Inner perception shows us how thinking, especially this activated thinking, is related to the whole nature of the human head. We learn to know in a new way what the human body really is. For as our soul development progresses by means of this active thinking there enters consciously into this active thinking the kind of life experience that is not solely of the type that enters ordinary thinking or visualising.

Life experiences that enter ordinary thinking or visualising have a certain peculiarity. We experience the world within this ordinary visualising. We experience it through our sense perceptions and the thoughts that come to meet them. But we keep a bit of this experience back for ourselves, too. We would not have our whole human nature within ourselves if each external impression did not leave behind it the possibility of our remembering it. It is just this memory that keeps our whole human personality intact, and we only have to think of the devastation wrought in the human personality by any kind of loss of memory to realise what the power of memory means for the cohesion of the human personality in ordinary life. But the force that enables us to keep memories alive, those memories acquired by opening ourselves to the outer world and forming mental images of it via our sense perception, this force remains unconscious. This is something that man carries out unconsciously. But when it comes to the experiences of active, super-sensible thinking, it is different. It would be quite impossible to bring what is acquired in a really super-sensible way, through active thinking, into any sort of connection with the human personality if we were dependent on the activity that works unconsciously within us. Something we have to learn about the acquisition of super-sensible knowledge is that we are not taking something unconsciously into the body by means of which we can later on awake a memory, on the contrary the imprinting of something in the physical body, the taking in of it, that normally takes place as an unconscious activity and works on as memory, has to be carried out consciously by the spiritual investigator. The higher, super-sensible experience gained by activated thinking would never come in place of an absolutely dreamy experience if we could not acquire the capacity to introduce this super-sensible experience to the body consciously.

We can only introduce it, however, to the head organisation. But then this head organisation teaches us something that eludes ordinary science, but which sheds great light on the mystery of man's being. We discover that when we make a conscious imprint of what we experience in active thinking we are constantly bringing about a process in the human head that is not an intensification of life but a breaking down of life, a partial dying. This is a significant and moving experience acquired through spiritual science: In order to remember super-sensible knowledge, we have to imprint it into our head organisation, and it is immediately evident that this imprinting does not bring about an enlivening process but a process of partial dying, a breaking down of the head organisation's life processes. This teaches us how the bodily head organisation actually functions in man. We discover something that is normally not known because it remains unconscious, namely that our whole thinking activity or mental imagery is not something that comes from forces of life, as materialists believe, but something that comes from the damping down of the life of the head. It arises because whilst our soul is active our head is constantly in a state of partial dying. We also discover a fact that strikes a man of today as being absurd: if the thinking activity of the head were to spread into the rest of man's body, he would immediately die.

Thus spiritual science teaches us that the death-bringing principle is constantly at work in part of man's bodily nature. We learn that because our head is organised that way, death is at work in us throughout our life. You see, this approach, that people in many circles today imagine has nothing useful to offer, leads to the kind of conceptions that completely contradict the usual views. We find that this imprinting that I have just described as a conscious process which must be carried out by active thinking, cannot actually directly imprint into man's physical organisation the super-sensible world where the experiences have been undergone. We find out the real fact that eludes external sense observation. We discover that incorporated into the ordinary life of the senses is what I took the liberty, in my books on spiritual science, to call the etheric body or body of formative forces. We discover a delicate body of light between the activity of active thinking and man's physical body, particularly in the head organisation. This finer body is the formative force—a thing that modern natural science makes fun of—underlying the physical body, and it is discovered in this way by super-sensible sight, which at this stage we can call an Imagination. We discover a higher, super-sensible member of man's being. At this point we experience an extraordinarily shattering phenomenon. When we imprint our super-sensible experiences into our etheric body and on into our physical body, we feel as though we were no longer master of our ego. We thought our ego filled our soul being through and through, but now it feels as though it were being sucked into the body.

The way to overcome this phenomenon is to have other soul exercises going parallel with the activating of thinking. These outer exercises are to do with disciplining the will. Although I characterised them the day before yesterday, I want to refer to them again briefly. I described how man changes from one week to the next, from one hour to the next, from one year to the next. We know we are becoming a different person. Our experiences are not the kind of thing we have, but the kind of thing that is perpetually making us into a different person. But nowadays an unconscious activity is also at work here. Present-day man gives himself up to external experiences. If he goes so far as to observe his inner being to any extent, he may notice that on the whole he is becoming a different person from week to week, year to year, and decade to decade; that his soul constitution is changing. But he does not take this development of his soul constitution in hand. This, however, the spiritual investigator has to do. He has to work on himself in such a way that his own will controls the progress he makes from one year to the next and from one decade to the next, and this also has to be systematic. He has to practise self-discipline and self-education systematically and fully consciously, not merely arbitrarily or according to the pattern of ordinary more or less unconscious existence. He has to bring under the control of his own will what otherwise takes place in us involuntarily.

This calls forth another experience of a kind that is very far removed from present-day consciousness; we realise that we have to put aside a scientific prejudice that prevails nowadays in a particular realm of science and has taken general hold of people's minds. This scientific view—which I want to mention because it could be the very thing that might make my present argument intelligible—is that man has two kinds of nerves: the so-called sensory nerves and the motor nerves. The sensory nerves run from our sense organs (so people believe) or from the surface of the skin to the nerve centre and convey perceptions in the same way as telegraph wires. The so-called motor nerves, the will nerves, go out from the nerve centre. A kind of demonic being is imagined as residing in the central nervous system, although of course present-day science will not admit this, and he is supposed to change what comes in through the telegraph wire nerves from the senses to the telegraph exchange into will through the motor nerves, the will nerves. People have thought out such beautiful theories that are really extremely clever, especially those derived from the terrible illness tabes, to explain this theory of the two kinds of nerves. Nevertheless this theory is nothing else than the result of a lack of knowledge of super-sensible man. It would lead too far for me to go into it now—although tabes proves it if we observe it correctly—but there is no difference between the sensory and the motor nerves. The same as with the so-called sensory nerves, the function of which is to convey external perceptions, the only function of the so-called motor nerves is to convey internal perceptions when we walk or move our arms. The motor nerves are sensory nerves too, only their function is to perceive our movements.

The reason why people believe the motor nerves to be the bearer of the will is only because they have no idea what is the real bearer of the will. We only discover what this is when we really practise the kind of self-discipline of the will I was speaking about: become actively engaged in self-education and become at the same time independent of what the body does with us, so to speak. Then we discover that it is not the motor nerves that create will, for they only perceive its movements, but that it is created by a third member of man's being, a super-sensible member that we could actually call the soul. I have called it the astral body in my books, though people do not like the term yet. Again it is by means of direct vision, acquired through this self-disciplining of the will, that we get to know this super-sensible member of man's being; and we discover that it is this ‘soul body,’ if I may call it that, that is the soul and spirit entity underlying all the bodily movements arising out of will. Nerves are there only to convey the perception of movement. If we take this disciplining of the will to further stages, however, we must then ascend from the level of imaginative knowledge, to which I have just referred, to those of Inspiration and Intuition, as I call them in the book just mentioned. We then discover this soul body to be a higher member of man's being than the etheric body or body of formative forces. We find, however, that we cannot experience this soul body in ourselves but only when we are outwardly active and when we become conscious of our will impulses.

When we have reached the point where we discover this actual soul body in ourselves, this second super-sensible part of man's being, the will, grows stronger and stronger, and we recognise it as our sentient body, as the force that works into our limbs and sets our body in motion, as an organisation totally different from our head organisation. In contrast to this head organisation, which I characterised as being constantly in the state of partial dying, we discover that this organisation is constantly in the process of spiritual birth, in which life is increasing and developing all the time. Thus through the head organisation on the one hand, we experience a perpetual dying, and in the will organisation, the second super-sensible member of man's being, we experience a perpetual continuation of the birth process. Out of this continuation of the birth process, out of this increase of life which has to come out of our whole being, there then rays back to us the true, super-sensible nature of our ego, and enters into what we have imprinted into our body. Our ego arises again and again out of the grave of our partially dying head. This perpetual interplay of dying and being born is what we experience within ourselves when we develop our soul life in this way. So we discover that birth and death take place not only at the beginning and end of our lives but that dying and becoming are the expression of forces working in our organisation throughout our lives.

Only when we have thus encountered man's super-sensible forces through Intuition and Inspiration are we in a position to recognise the evolutionary path of mankind; for in developing this kind of vision, the forces we acquire from our head organisation and the organisation of the rest of our body combine to illuminate for us the inner forces at work in the historical development of mankind. How does historical development appear, as a rule, to the ordinary consciousness of present times? If we ignore what men believed in early stages of human evolution out of a primitive conception of mankind and which is now considered childish, namely that there is spirit working in history; if we ignore this, we can say that people nowadays regard history, or rather the evolution of mankind, as a collection of facts gleaned from documents, archives and tradition which, at the most, they link together with the intellect. Not until we perceive the super-sensible being of man, as I have just described it, does the ability to see the progression of higher super-sensible beings through the course of history associate itself with the historical facts which even a spiritual investigator has to take from external history. He gets to know human evolution from the inside, whereas it is usually only looked at from the outside.

So as not just to talk round the subject in the abstract, I will speak of one fact in particular, to show you the evolution of human history from the point of view of symptoms. As man's outlook is restricted solely to the material world, what is presented as history today is just an external picture, and is largely a fable convenue. Anyone who is able to look with inner vision at the connecting link between the facts, discovers that the first thing he sees on looking backwards into our historical evolution is, strange to say, a nodal point in the evolution of modern humanity around the middle of the fifteenth century. We see in a number of spheres something like a forward leap taking place in human development. We know of course that leaps like this take place in nature, too. If we look at the evolving plant, and see first the green leaves developing, then the calyx, and then the transformation into petals, we see a leap from the green leaf to the coloured petal, even though there is a steady development. There is a similar leap in the evolution of humanity in the middle of the fifteenth century, only it passes unnoticed when historical facts are looked at solely from the outside. Something then begins to make itself felt in human evolution that lifts men's souls onto quite a different level of development from the one preceding it. Earlier epochs of human evolution, it is true, also attained considerable heights from time to time, but human souls were quite differently constituted before and after the middle of the fifteenth century. Looking at history from the inside, the middle of the fifteenth century was the end of an epoch of human evolution that actually began in the eighth century B.C., roughly with the founding of the Roman Empire.

Anyone observing history from a spiritual scientific point of view sees a continuous line of development running through the centuries from 800 B.C. until the middle of the fifteenth century A.D. And anyone looking from inside at the Greek or the Roman era will find what is said here thoroughly substantiated. The kind of soul constitution that was developing in man during that epoch was of a kind that nurtured feeling (Gemüt) and intelligence. The surprising thing is that when observing history from the inside, we find that prior to the eighth century B.C. the power of feeling and intelligence was not yet actively at work in the human soul. In those days man was still to a great extent united with nature; he did not step back and reflect on the things he had seen, for his life of feeling was still a part of nature. Not until the eighth century did he free himself from nature and develop forces of intelligence and feeling independently within himself. By and large the whole of historical development from the eighth century B.C. to the fourteenth century A.D. is a gradual unfolding of those particular forces of soul in mankind that produce a flowering of the qualities of feeling and intelligence from out of man's inner being.

This development of the forces of feeling and intelligence, however, still had an instinctive quality about it during this epoch, intelligence and feeling still working in an instinctive way. In the middle of the fifteenth century, however, these forces previously working instinctively in the intelligence and feeling took on a fully conscious quality. Men felt more strongly isolated from outer nature than they had felt before, because in order to think about things consciously and experience their instinctive feelings of sympathy and antipathy consciously, they had to draw back from external nature, so to speak. Everything became conscious. Therefore we can say, from a spiritual scientific point of view, that whilst in earlier epochs the instinctive life of thought and feeling was being developed, from the middle of the fifteenth century onwards what we can call the consciousness soul has been developing, and this stage of development is something that will continue for a very long period of human evolution. Relatively speaking, we human beings are still at the beginning of this evolution of the consciousness soul, which is already responsible for the great progress made in natural scientific thinking. However great Plato and Aristotle were, they did not possess natural scientific thinking, which requires the kind of withdrawal of man's inner being from nature that did not take place until the consciousness soul appeared in human evolution. Thus our development of natural science is part and parcel of one epoch of human evolution. Lessing described this very beautifully, whichever way you interpret his words, by saying that the whole of human evolution is “a kind of Education of Mankind.” Since the middle of the fifteenth century the education of mankind consists of the education of the consciousness soul, and this it is that has actually brought with it the natural scientific outlook. Looked at from inside this is a section of human evolution.

We only understand fully what belongs to the era from the eighth century B.C. till the middle of the fifteenth century A.D. when we look at it from the inside, from the point of view of man's soul development. For the founding of Christianity falls in the first third of this era, and the spiritual scientist sees this as the greatest event that has ever occurred in earthly evolution. With his ability to look down the centuries from inside at man's soul development, the spiritual scientist recognises better than anyone else that in the first third of the epoch I described as the era of the evolution of intelligence and feeling, something was still present that had existed in the highest degree in the days of early humanity, namely something that made man feel a part of the natural world around him; but in those times this feeling arose out of the subconscious depths of the soul. Then there broke upon human evolution the Event of Golgotha, the nature of which can never be understood if people try to understand it merely out of a material conglomeration of historical facts. There broke in upon human evolution a fructification of man's evolution, in that a super-sensible element united with this evolution from out of cosmic heights, preparing the way for man's being to become conscious and inwardly strong to an ever greater and greater degree.

Initially the Event of Golgotha, the Incarnation of Christ as Man, met with a way of thinking and feeling that was still of an instinctive nature. It took the next two-thirds of this epoch for these forces emanating from the Event of Golgotha to flow into man's more or less unconscious instinctive forces of intelligence and feeling. Then from the middle of the fifteenth century onwards came the conscious soul evolution of man and, with it, the epoch of natural science, when men turned their attention to external processes of natural phenomena. The beginning of this epoch was the time in which the earlier connection with the spirit, with the super-sensible element in the world, tended to withdraw in favour of conscious existence. This spiritual element, which in earlier times man perceived as though by instinct in the very phenomena of the world, now sprang to life in his inner being by virtue of the fact that the Being of Christ had united Himself with human evolution. But this new life within man came at the point in his evolution when, as I said, man was becoming increasingly conscious and therefore increasingly external. Thus it happened that just at the beginning of the age of the consciousness soul, the age of the conscious development of intelligence and feeling, although the Christ Impulse was at work in human souls, men's consciousness was of a kind that made them lose sight of their spiritual and super-sensible being. Therefore it also happened that people had less and less understanding for the Event that had united itself with human evolution in a super-sensible way—the Event of Golgotha. In the nineteenth century there was a climax in this respect. Now the point had been reached when the Event of Golgotha was divested of its super-sensible character even in the eyes of most of the faithful. Even for these the Event of Golgotha was, in the nineteenth century, relegated to the world of external facts, so to speak. Jesus the Christ Bearer became the ‘simple man of Nazareth,’ a person no greater than a somewhat more highly developed human being. And this happened solely because, while they were developing the consciousness soul, men also lost the understanding for the super-sensible element in history. The conception of Jesus as the simple man of Nazareth brought materialism into Christianity. And nowadays there is not only a materialistic science, there is also a widespread materialistic faith.

Now, however, we have come to the time—in this epoch of human evolution that began in the middle of the fifteenth century—when we face the necessity of ascending once more to the spirit. And the path I described to you today and the day before yesterday is the path that coming humanity will have to tread to ascend to the spirit again and to find its way once more to super-sensible knowledge and to the super-sensible phenomena lying behind the sense world and behind external historical facts. It is this which will also lead it to the super-sensible nature of the Event of Golgotha. Then this unique Event will appear as the kind of turning point in the whole evolution of mankind that everybody can understand and accept. With the coming of this new super-sensible knowledge the Event of Golgotha will be divested of all its sectarianism, and, rising above separate denominations, even above the religious differences existing in different parts of the world, an understanding of it will become the general possession of mankind. Then the Mystery of Golgotha will be seen to be the most important super-sensible fact of all human evolution. The narrow view of Christ that prevents people from seeing the true mystery—and which still inhibits a number of denominations, because materialism has even found its way into faith—this narrow point of view will be superseded; people will find a new understanding of this Impulse, which is the greatest and most powerful Impulse in the whole of mankind's evolution.

This should show you that spiritual science does not deprive people of what they believe to be the results of ‘simple faith.’ On the contrary, spiritual science reaches up to the highest level of knowledge in order to show mankind the greatest Event of human evolution. This is something modern man longs for if he is honest enough with himself and admits that he is more and more disenchanted with ‘simple faith.’ It had to be stated here as belonging to spiritual science. And as we are in the age of consciousness, in which mankind is dividing and becoming disharmonious to an ever greater degree—because the individual is thrown back on his own personality and his personal loneliness—it is essential to point to what men, the whole world over, need to re-unite them once again.

What is needed today is a new understanding of the central Event of human evolution. Spiritual science does not take anything away from man. On the contrary it gives him just what his present-day consciousness needs. And if people, out of their healthy human understanding, want to complain of the views and teachings of anthroposophical spiritual science, we shall have to tell them that their thinking is not healthy enough and that they must throw off the illusions with which the purely external, material theories of natural science have befogged them; they should think about their own thinking, and then they will make a remarkable discovery about the particular nature of man's present-day life of soul. They will hear what natural science tells them from reliable, strictly methodical sources about the evolution of the physical body. But, when their minds are healthy, they will not be able to agree that there is no more to life as they know it than natural science tells them. They will find that when they listen to spiritual science in a really healthy way, and draw comparisons with life, the contradictions arising out of the illusions produced by materialism are enough to make them ill, and that they will only rediscover life if they refer, with the help of spiritual science, to the super-sensible nature of man and the super-sensible world in which the evolution of man and mankind are embedded.

If you have acquired the possibility in this way of seeing historical life supersensibly, the present world epoch, or epoch of human evolution, will appear before you—it is not the right occasion today to include a description of the whole of earthly evolution; you can read that up in my Occult Science and you will be far enough advanced to aspire to the kind of perception Lessing spoke of in his Education of the Human Race, which he had attained out of his much admired healthy human understanding within the German spiritual stream of development. Then you will be capable of perceiving that in the course of spiritual evolution human life runs its course in repeated earth lives. For the whole span of man's life consists of an altenation between the kind of lives he spends in a physical body and another form of existence between death and a new birth, spent in the super-sensible worlds which are connected with our world through the spirit that is also at work in historical evolution. We discover then, as Lessing also did, that in coming back for repeated lives on earth, man himself carries evolution forward from one epoch to the next. This knowledge of repeated earth lives cannot become a theory in the accepted sense, for when you are capable of penetrating into the spirit of human evolution in the way I have described, you can find this knowledge for yourself, but you have then acquired it as a fact of man's higher super-sensible nature.

A new perception of spiritual life, a perception which will help us find the spirit again in our materialistic world, is about to enter present civilisation. The materialistic outlook prevailing today is largely responsible for estranging man's inner life from a real perception of the spirit, and depriving him of the courage to plunge into this spiritual perception, making him believe that the only way to the spirit is the way of ‘simple creed’ based on a literal acceptance of the Bible. This ‘simple creed’ and the materialism of our time are closely related, for before such a thing as materialism existed, there was not this perpetual harping on a simple creed. After all, at the time when Christianity arose, the teachings about Christ Jesus came out of highly developed spiritual vision, though of course it was atavistic. This old spiritual vision cannot be the way of modern man. Modern man must work for spiritual vision in the way I have tried to describe. If you become aware of what is living deep down in people's souls nowadays and colouring their whole outlook, although they are not fully conscious of it—this mood that unconsciously flashes into consciousness, sometimes in a pathological way, so that people feel it as inner unrest, as a psychopathic tendency, even though they cannot explain it—this mood is the striving for a new spirituality. I certainly do not wish to be so immodest as to suggest or maintain that the spiritual science or anthroposophy I give lectures on is the only thing that has to happen on the path to the spirit. What I have given here is just a humble attempt. And anyone who makes a humble attempt like this, yet is aware that it comes out of the deepest longings of the present time, is also aware that there will be more and more people coming along and attempting to tread the paths to spiritual vision and to proclaim the possibility of ascending to life on a super-sensible level.

But you can see too, that when I lecture on anthroposophy I cannot spare anybody's feelings, at the first encounter, that these things are rather difficult to understand. You will also see that what leads to these spiritual worlds is neither a damping down of clear thinking nor a damping down of the will that works in practical life, but is an intensification of both thought and will. Many people of the present day cannot muster sufficient inner courage for this as yet. So they look at anthroposophy and say: They mean well, these people, but with their anthroposophy they tell us all kinds of things about mankind's evolution, even about cosmic facts of a spiritual nature. Looking at anthroposophy from a safe distance, people like this call it ‘crazy stuff’, etc., terms used here recently in Stuttgart, to apply to the world of physical facts. Yet, ladies and gentlemen, people will never get beyond a nonsensical, merely hazy presentiment of the spiritual world if clear, mathematical thinking and a light-irradiated, self-disciplined will are not applied to bring down real facts from the super-sensible world to replace mere phrases. Modern man needs these facts.

I have spoken to you about what mankind is longing for. And it was this very longing that caused such a caricature of super-sensible striving to arise in the nineteenth century. People only know how to strive in a materialistic way. But alongside this materialistic striving they acquired a yearning for the spirit. So they investigated the spirit on the pattern of their research in the material world and carried out a caricature of spiritual research, namely spiritualism, which is nothing else but a material search for something that can never be matter, namely spirit. What comes out in a pathological way in spiritualism as a caricature of spiritual striving, is the same thing that is being sought for by anthroposophical spiritual science, but in the latter case it is healthy and is based on a further development in clear consciousness of forces already inherent in man.

Anthroposophical spiritual science therefore appears, in the best sense of the word, as an attempt (we mean this modestly) to bring perceptions of the spiritual world, super-sensible man and his evolution into the age of great and outstanding perceptions of an external, scientific nature. Not until these scientific perceptions have been supplemented by the perceptions of spiritual vision will modern man understand his being in the way he longs to. Therefore spiritual science as we pursue it must shake off all the reproaches it encounters, even those from well-meaning people.

To conclude I should like to draw your attention to the fact that even the kind of people who have no intention of rejecting spiritual science are offended when we speak to large audiences about ‘spiritual secrets’, as they call them, instead of keeping these in intimate sectarian circles. Oh, they know very well that it is a sacred duty of the times to stand up and speak to large audiences. Therefore I must not pay attention to the kind of reproach that was made recently:—That it is just not done to speak about cosmic things to a large city audience, like Dr. Steiner does. What is needed is a master of the art of divine gesture who can inexorably drive everyone from his presence who does not know when to be silent. What we need is an approach that can distinguish in more than mere words between what is profane and what is holy.—In answer to this reproach we have to say that we have also entered the age of democracy in the spiritual sphere, and that it is a sin against mankind to wish to distinguish between what is profane and what is holy. Anyone whose destiny allows him to penetrate into the spiritual worlds has the obligation to speak as widely as possible to people's healthy human understanding, so that this healthy human understanding can find the way to the spiritual worlds again.

Although this is an absolutely general task of the times—an obligation to the whole of mankind—we have a special obligation to the middle European region in which we live. If anyone has been deeply interested for decades, as I have, in the beginning made in German spiritual life in the direction of a new spiritual perception by Lessing (who I have mentioned today), Herder, Goethe, Schiller and the German philosophers, then he knows—through the interest he takes in this spiritual life, if he does so in such a way that he makes those forces his own which motivated Goethe, Schiller and the rest—that this spiritual life leads straight into what I have been speaking about today and the day before yesterday. In order to overcome the terrible materialistic development of recent times, we in middle Europe can begin by bringing to mind again that which had its beginnings in the Great Age of Germany. Then what is called anthroposophical spiritual science will follow on naturally. That is why, just at this time when the German spirit is so little appreciated anywhere, we chose to call the building conceived as a High School for Spiritual Science the ‘Goetheanum.’ ‘Goetheanum’ as a sign that from the spiritual point of view, the Goetheanistic German spirit has the courage to face the world.

I know, too, that we are not sinning against Goethe if, in order to link on to something historical, we use the term Goetheanism for the new way of thought and vision we have spoken of today and the day before yesterday. However much is taken away from us in external ways, and however much power the world has today to make things as difficult as possible for us in external matters, it can never take away from us our connection with the best of German qualities, if we ourselves intend having this connection. If we have this intention, however, then even in these dark and sad times we shall not lose hope—the hope of a re-awakening, in a new form, of the spiritual life of mankind, that we are perhaps destined to have just in this time of greatest need.

If we continue with the kind of thing the materialistic age has brought into human evolution in recent times, we shall get further and further removed from the spirit and more and more attached to matter. But if we turn our minds to our super-sensible nature and develop this in ourselves, we shall add the results of spirit vision to the dazzling achievements of the materialistic natural scientific outlook. This spirit vision will then be like the soul of the world conception of outer nature. These two ways are open to human evolution today: either to keep to a perception of the material world and drag mankind further into chaos and distress, or to give birth to our higher inner being from out of our super-sensible nature and the super-sensible world. One of these directions, the materialistic way, can already be seen in the ripples it sends to the surface.

With its external logic of the intellect and its inability to find its way to the inner logic of facts, external science actually sees things very inexactly. I will give you one example of what I mean: There is a philosophical view prevalent at the present time that is a genuine product of materialistic thought. It was advocated by Avenarius and Mach, and it is to the effect that man's field of experience is limited to what he takes in through ordinary sense perception and ordinary consciousness. These two particular men expressed the materialistic outlook by means of some very clever philosophy, and if we inquire into what they expressed with such dedication we shall acquire great respect for their intellectual achievements. If we remain within the ordinary outlook, we shall accept philosophers like Avenarius and Mach as individual philosophical phenomena. But if we go beyond the ordinary outlook, and recognise the inner impulses behind world conceptions such as these, our eyes will be opened, and we shall see the mysterious way these world conceptions work in life. We shall then hit upon the remarkable connection existing between these world conceptions and the decline that threatens European civilisation today, and comes from the East, from Russia, from bolshevism. We shall realise that the practice of bolshevism is the end result of world conceptions like these. This is further confirmed by the fact that the philosophy of Avenarius and Mach is the state philosophy of bolshevism. This connection is known today only to those who penetrate into the spirit of things and who can rise above the noise of party opinion. Party opinion rides roughshod over everything that has to be said right now for the salvation of mankind. This kind of factual logic I have shown you is more important for the man of today than all the logic of sophistry, which would certainly never lead over from Avenarius and Mach to bolshevism. But the facts do. If you want to understand the origins of the things happening today to destroy civilisation within the civilised world, look at the philosophies of the past few decades, the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, and you will find further confirmation of the fact that two ways are open to us today: One way continues with the materialistic approach, despite the fact that its logic is as subtle as that of Avenarius and Mach; and the other, that has been characterised here, wants to participate in the spirit. If we carry on in the first direction, the effect on European spiritual life will be that man's spirit will become mechanised, man's soul vegetative and man's body animalised. This is the fate that actually threatens us today. If men become addicted to this western mechanisation of the spirit, this state of being will combine with eastern animalisation, which means that social demands will be on a level of animal instinct and blind impulse. Western mechanisation and eastern animalisation are connected one with another. In between these is the vegetative or drowsy nature of soul that does not want to be woken up by a treading of the path to the spirit. This is the one perspective. Mankind will have to choose between becoming mechanised in spirit, vegetative in soul and animalised in body or going the other way. Hardship and distress will no doubt eventually drive us into going the other way. And although it will be the other people who have the power, they will not be able to bar us from going this other way, the way leading to the spirit. We shall have to want to go this way. We shall have to want to keep our spirit free, even if our bodies are in bondage. Out of the feelings and experience which can come to us out of a consciousness of super-sensible man and the super-sensible world, we shall have to resolve to have inner self-reliance. Then the others will not be able to harm us. And I should like to describe in the following words what might then come about after all:

In the course of the nineteenth century we middle Europeans were foolish enough to copy the western nations, even though there were no grounds for this in western civilisation. Through hardship and distress, through the very power these have over us, we shall perhaps find the way to stop imitating all that we were foolish enough to imitate when we chose them for a model.

Now, when they want to use their power to give us the lead in the mechanisation of the spirit, may we find the strength, in this old middle Europe of ours that has such a great heritage, to tread the path to the spirit from out of ourselves. We shall then avoid the materialistic mechanisation of the spirit and attain the freedom I attempted to characterise as early as the beginning of the 1890s in my Philosophy of Freedom. The liberated spirit will bring us to a real vision of the spiritual world. The spirit will also help us find the way to the equality of man. For human equality can never exist in the external economic order only. As soon as man understands the super-sensible nature of his own ensouled spirit being, however, he will be able to find the law that makes him an equal among equals. He will also deepen science; for with spiritual vision, as I have indicated here today, medicine, law, and the art of education will find their real source. Science will then lead neither to the mechanisation of the spirit as it has hitherto, nor to the inequality of man, for complete freedom of the spirit will come to man when the spirit seeks it on spirit paths; human equality will come to human souls when the spirit seeks it on paths of the soul; and finally, when the human being who knows himself to be a super-sensible spirit being approaches another person lovingly, then—because human beings will be associating with one another as conscious spirit beings in a loving way—in addition to having a liberated spirit and a soul that is equal with its neighbours, man will have, both in his human nature and in social life, a true, spiritualised, ensouled, thoroughly human brotherliness!

Dear attendees! Thoughts and spiritual struggles, which relatively recently were the concern of a few people who set themselves apart through their special education, must necessarily become a general concern for the whole of humanity today. I took the liberty of speaking here the day before yesterday about such a general matter, which used to be more or less a matter for the thoughts of a few individuals, about the process of developing a relationship with the peculiarities of the individual peoples living across the earth. Today I would like to speak of another such matter; I would like to speak of what is to become, under the influence of our humanity that necessarily strives for the new, what can be called history, the development history of humanity in the broadest sense of the word.

When, quite recently, the question of how we should actually relate to human history was still more or less a matter for scholars, the excellent art writer, art thinker and art observer Herman Grimm, whom I have often mentioned in these lectures, made a statement that is extremely significant in a certain respect for the evaluation of our current historical view. Herman Grimm says that, in wanting to characterize what is often regarded as history today, namely as history, humanity feels today that it is carrying far too much ballast with it.

Even though we must certainly admire what has been revealed to us in the last few decades through all kinds of excavations and discoveries of external documents of humanity, we must still say that the accumulated material, the material accumulated in notes in history, today lacks the great points of view in the historical view of humanity. And it is these great aspects alone that can give history a value for life. For when has history had any value for human beings? It only has value for us if what can be thought in it, what can be observed in it in terms of the destinies and achievements of past human beings, can yield a result for our own soul, something that warms our own hearts, so that from this warmed heart forces can develop that are suitable for placing us in the right position in life. In this respect, we must say that we are carrying a ballast in our current historical consideration and that the great perspectives that we need today in relation to the most pressing needs of contemporary humanity are missing.

Not as if historical consideration of earlier times did not have such great perspectives in its own way. Not that we cannot appreciate what it meant for young men and women to become acquainted with the great historical figures of antiquity and to emulate them, to fulfill the saying used by the poet: “Each must choose his hero, whom he works his way up to Olympus after.” But the way in which such individual figures are chosen as role models, and the things that have been tried and tested by them are incorporated into one's own will, depends on living in a time in which living admiration could flourish for personalities and for legal or state or ecclesiastical formations that flourished in those times from which we are now gone. To put it somewhat radically, one could say: How can young people today warm to Alexander the Great in the same way as in the past, since they have become more or less indifferent to something that Alexander the Great himself regarded as his ideal? In earlier times, a large mass of humanity had to look to individuals who took care of the affairs of this humanity within extensive empires, which they founded by conquering, so that history in the old form with its broad perspectives could have an effect on this humanity, namely on the will of people.

That is indeed the most significant fact of modern history: that the members of the broad masses of humanity must participate in all public life, that everything that bears the human face wants to come and regard the affairs of humanity as its own affairs. That is what is ultimately flooding our present as a justified democratic spirit. People are taking part in the great public affairs of life, which have become more or less indifferent to what inspired the members of earlier ages. Above all, because the spiritual interests of humanity have spread democratically across all people, the necessity arises to come to a new way of looking at history. And for those who really let the events of the present have an effect on them, especially for those who can truly feel the hardship of the present time, among the many other ideological or ideal questions, among the great spiritual questions of the present, there is the question: How can we, already in the child and then in the young person, bring the contemplation of our ancestors to such an effect, to such an experience, that the will can be steeled, that the orientation in life can be clarified precisely through the influence of a historical contemplation? In this way, what interests us as human beings in the first place – the spirit in the developmental history of our own earthly race – is interwoven with the big questions of education, pedagogy, didactics, and so basically everything is interwoven with the big social question of the present. And the point is that, as was said the day before yesterday and in last week's lectures, we live in the age of intellectualism, the age in which reason plays a major role in the ordering of human affairs. This human intellect, in its soberness and dryness, has not been suitable for writing history in such a way that it can truly become what it must become in the sense of what has just been said, if it is to retain the right value for humanity. It is precisely here that spiritual science believes it can do its part, including in the reformation of historical perspective.

Spiritual science assumes that insights can be gained by intensifying the inner life of the human being. What our knowledge and our other human abilities are in ordinary life, these are to be developed through spiritual science into a higher vision and an elevated soul life stimulated by this vision. These abilities are to be developed in the same way that the abilities of a child develop from a lower level to the abilities of an adult human being; the abilities dormant within the human being are to spring up from within. A strengthened thinking, a will that has been subjected to strict self-discipline, should bring forth, from the depths of the human being, powers of knowledge and insight that can look into those spiritual depths of the world and of human existence, of which they [without these abilities] can at most have an inkling.

That is the peculiar thing about this spiritual knowledge, as it is meant here, that it takes hold of the whole human being. If we can say that, with its striving for clarity, intellectual knowledge, which has become so great in the last three to four centuries, not only dominates our cognitive life but also our practical life, if we can say that it is primarily something that claims the human head, the purely intellectual realm of man, we must say that spiritual science strives no less for full clarity, for inner logic, for concepts full of light, but that these concepts, because they arise from previously practiced thinking and previously practiced will of the human being, draw on the forces of the whole human being. It would be a great mistake to believe that spiritual science, as it is meant here, wants to draw from dark feelings, that this spiritual science wants to have anything in common with all the nebulous, mystical currents with which it is so easily confused. No, its path should be such that it gains clear ideas and insights about the spiritual that are of the kind that are only ever clearly and precisely striven for in natural science. But these ideas should arise out of such a development of the life of the human soul that, in spite of their clarity and exactness, they fill the whole human being with their power and take hold of the whole human being. While we are not usually involved with our feelings when we recognize the laws of the world as formulated by modern science, and while these scientific laws give rise to little impulse for the will, it can be said that that what is recognized in the field of spiritual science about the world's interconnections really does course through the human being's soul and transforms him, that it pours into the will so that the person can orient himself and integrate himself into the practice of life, so that he can do the individual thing in accordance with the great mission of the human being on earth.

If one understands correctly what is at stake here – I have often characterized the details of how man arrives at such knowledge, especially here in these lectures – then one will easily be able to see the following.

When we first consider the individual human body, we actually do so only by observing the present. If we observe the human limbs, in an amateurish or scientific way, as the human body presents itself, we actually consider it as something that is present, even if this human body carries within itself the traces of its own past. We pay little attention to what this body retains from the past, no matter how scientifically we look at a human body. When we move on to the ordinary life of the soul, things are different. We do not just look at what is present in the person, but as human beings we look into our own past, almost to the point of birth. There we summarize everything we have experienced in our memory, which is the main thing. We must know that we would be mentally ill if we could not properly expand our memory of our experiences. We extend our interest from the present moment to our immediate past. Indeed, we extend it in another way by wanting to gain from this past the impulses and the strength of the past for our work in the future. We connect the past and the future with the present. Thus, a certain ascent in our approach can already be seen in ordinary life, when we ascend from the contemplation of the bodily to the experiences of the soul.

If we now progress within this soul and develop in such a way that we master thinking, come from thinking to beholding, from will to inner spiritual experience, then something completely different emerges. If we survey, as it were, our own few decades that we have to cover here as an earthly human being, by looking at our individual earthly development from childhood to adulthood – surveying our existence in our ordinary soul life – a new element of our whole being enters our inner being, our own past enters our memory. If we extend our concept of the human being through spiritual knowledge, if we develop beyond ordinary earthly knowledge to the point where we can see spiritually, then the context of the developmental history of the whole of humanity enters our view. However paradoxical

However paradoxical this may appear to many people today, it must be said: much will depend on our ability to see through how the human being - by simply inwardly taking hold of his entire humanity, his strength and his power of knowledge - becomes one with all humanity. In this way, what we can research through external documents about history is supplemented by what we can recognize inwardly through our knowledge thus acquired: our connection with all humanity, as a member of which we then feel truly included.

And here lies the path, which I can only sketch out today: to ascend spiritually to a comprehensive historical point of view, which can then lead us like a red thread through the developmental history of humanity. In the natural sciences, which in recent times, and with a certain justification, also include the physical body of man, we speak of the so-called biogenetic law. It has become famous in connection with the study of descent in modern times. I need only characterize it here in a few words. It states that, while developing as an embryo in the mother's womb before birth, man repeatedly goes through all the stages of development that can be observed in the individual animal forms. Development begins with man being similar to lower animals, in that he has the form of a fish. He then develops through higher animal forms until he gradually takes on the human form that sees the light of day. It is said that: The development of man is a repetition of the physical forms similar to animals that man has gone through before he has taken on his present human form. The development that a person undergoes from conception to birth is a brief repetition of what the human being has undergone in the course of, as they say, millions of years of development. An attempt has now been made to tie in with this scientific result, which I do not want to discuss here, by means of an external intellectual consideration, for that is what it is. Attempts have also been made to consider the spiritual and soul life, the history of the human being, in a similar way. The aim is to consider that which develops as culture in the present, that which characterizes the human being of the present as a civilized human being, as a human being with a certain education, in connection with the past, just as one considers embryonic development in connection with the past. And it has even come about that people want to investigate how the original cultures, so to speak, in the childhood of man, gain their special repetitive expression, how then, when man grows up, he repeats later cultures and so on, until he - after repeating the earlier epochs from birth through childhood - develops into what he actually is now as a person living in this time.

Spiritual science enables a certain self-knowledge of the human being precisely by the fact that one gains a more intimate knowledge of the human being through his spiritual exercises, through the strengthening of the soul forces, because in this way one can look more closely at the human course of life, as it presents itself to us or to others, than is possible with today's superficiality or than one tries to do in today's spiritual science or the like. And then it turns out that when a person advances to the possibility of true self-knowledge through spiritual science, they actually gain something different through this self-knowledge than is usually assumed today. This self-knowledge through spiritual science actually provides a lot of astonishing information about childhood; even if not exactly [with the methods of natural science], but from this spiritual science there is a lot of extraordinarily important information to be said about the periods of childhood. But this is precisely what is needed to renew pedagogy: a precise and honest application of ordinary human abilities. If we follow spiritual scientific principles here, we will be able to understand the developing child and become a proper teacher and educator of this child, even if we have not acquired direct insight ourselves. One can be a capable teacher in the sense of spiritual science, if one only has the honest will to respond intimately to the development of the human in the child, even without being able to see.

But with regard to the older stages of individual human life, it is not so. What is essential here is only really realized when one strengthens one's cognitive abilities as can be done within spiritual science. Then one notices that from about the 30th year of human life onwards, inner abilities are already present in a person, but hardly hinted at; one notices that they emerge intimately into the soul life from unknown depths , but that they initially express themselves so weakly in ordinary life that one cannot properly handle them - they are so weak that they are drowned out by what is rushing in through the external affairs of the world. One must observe quite intimately in order to see what continually seeks to emerge in the soul-life of man in advanced years and appears not like its original form, but as if it were the echo of something quite different from what it is now. And if you watch more closely, you will discover something quite remarkable through spiritual observation: if you want to look at the natural foundations of the human being in their connection with the prehistoric forms that the human being has gone through, then you have to look at the embryonic development, at the developmental epoch of the human being that precedes childhood; you have to go to the beginning of life. But if one wants to observe the historical development of humanity, then one must look at the final years of individual human development. Then we must look at the intimate abilities that now flit through the soul as if they cannot properly come out. They are just as much rudiments, intimations of something that has gone before and is historically past, as the hinting forms of embryonic development in the womb today are of what has gone before in developmental history. To understand the natural development of the human being, one must go to the beginning of life; for historical development, one must acquire the ability to see the end of human life by sharpening one's powers of perception through spiritual science.

If one seeks to penetrate what, I would like to say, appears like a faint afterglow in today's humanity, when one has passed the thirties, then one learns to recognize in these shadows, which flit across the soul life, what makes one understand the other, which resonates from times long past in the development of humanity. One then looks at what is called prehistoric cultures, yes, one even sharpens one's view for the prehistoric, which has only recorded its last echo in the historical; one lets one's gaze wander back from the Vedanta philosophy of the Indians, from the Vedas, to that from which they have descended, must have descended, for they do not show themselves as original products, but as final results, and one learns to recognize the basis of that remarkable element of power that has permeated ancient Indian culture, this first dawn of an earth culture. One finds a relationship between what lives shadowy in human age and what lived in humanity in youthful freshness at that time and cared for the culture of primeval times. We gradually learn to recognize the spiritual reversal of the basic biogenetic law in nature. We learn to recognize how, in those ancient times, to which one must go back if one wants to understand the developmental history of humanity, the human being retained the physical ability to develop into old age, with which a spiritual-soul ability to develop was connected. Today, we take an important leap in our childhood, also for our soul life, around the seventh year, when the teeth change; an important developmental period of a child's life is completed. The body undergoes a metamorphosis, and the soul and spiritual development accompanies this metamorphosis. And again, when sexual maturity occurs, the body undergoes a metamorphosis, but the soul and spiritual development of the person also accompanies this physical metamorphosis. What the person develops spiritually and soulfully in these stages of life is simply because the body also undergoes this development. Then, for us human beings, the possibility of perceiving such transformations soon disappears, and of even admitting such transformations. Although it is very clear that we are still undergoing a transformation at the beginning of our twenties, it is already more intimate, but still clearly present. But the transformation that occurs at the end of our twenties, and even more so those that occur later, are actually only present in shadowy form. And only the person whose view is sharpened through spiritual science notices how these shadows of transformation arise, those transformations that were, however, present in full clarity in earlier stages of human development. Just as today only children experience the transition through the change of teeth and through sexual maturity both physically and spiritually, and as we, being natural human beings, undergo a spiritual-mental development at the same time and feel united as a whole human being, in our development – while later our soul-spiritual separates and goes its own way – man in earlier developmental epochs of the earth has clearly undergone spiritual-soul metamorphoses that went hand in hand with the physical.

And once we have grasped this, once we have grasped how the human being of the first historical period that we can follow lived entirely in his body on earth, how he experienced what was in his body into the highest age, then we understand that such a completely different language is spoken in the oldest documents that speak of the historical development of humanity. Then we also understand the freshness with which wisdom comes to us in these old documents. Then we understand how something poetic was poured out at that time over that which we today produce only in abstract philosophy; then we understand how a Confucius produces the highest sayings of wisdom when we know that what we only experience in childhood was also experienced in those ages when the hair was already beginning to turn grey. Even then, man still experienced his physical self. He did not just speak from a more abstract soul and spirit, he spoke from the heart about the most abstract matters of humanity. That is what flows towards us not only from the scriptures, but also from what has been handed down and overheard from the public affairs of this primeval humanity.

And when we look back, we feel that we are a link in this whole human development, this development of humanity. We feel what it must have meant that in those times, although man grew old, he remained a child and experienced everything as a child, which today is experienced soberly, in a mature way. One understands how the whole inner life of the soul had a different coloring in those days; one understands that the way people lived together was such that the childlike, the youthful human being looked up to the old human being differently than we can today. For the young person could say to themselves: When I myself grow old, something will well up from within me that one can only experience when one grows old; one can look forward to growing old, because this growing old gives one a joy that one must grow old to experience. And one could also look up to old age in a different way, as if one believed that old age only makes the sober abstract exterior - as one usually thinks about old age today. The whole position of the human being in the world becomes different as a result. And we understand the whole character of ancient times inwardly, not just outwardly dryly, when we empathize with the first times of human development. We then learn to understand how there was an initial period of human development in which man lived in his body in such a way that he felt his physical development period at the same time as a spiritual-soul fact, just as we today only feel when we experience the spiritual-soul as such. But man then also felt himself to be in complete harmony with nature. Man in those ancient times was not yet placed in a position to despise, undervalue or overestimate anything material, because for him everything spiritual was still revealed in the material. He ate and drank, but in what he took in as food and drink, spiritual things were revealed to him. He knew not only the material. He could, by taking the fruit from the tree, in the enjoyment of the fruit, say to himself: Through the blossom, in the whole growth, in the power of the tree, the Godhead is at work; it gives me the fruit; the Godhead is directly related to me in that I enter into a spiritual-bodily relationship with the world.

Thus did the human being of the first epoch on earth feel connected to nature, to other people, and to the spiritual, economically, legally, and spiritually. He felt God to be present on earth, he felt God in everything that revealed itself to him physically – for he did not yet know a spiritual experience separate from materiality. Everything that presented itself to him in an earthly, sensual way, he also experienced spiritually; he based his institutions on what revealed itself to him as divine. The institutions, if one could study them today with an external historical perspective — one can only do so with spiritual science — the institutions that people encountered at that time, one can only describe them as theophanies. They can only be described by saying that through everything that man experienced inwardly, he and his environment were spiritual, and what happened in economic life was only a reflection of the spiritual, like a shadow image of the spiritual. It is quite wrong for this spiritual-scientific consideration to look at a primeval humanity that would have lived on the earth somewhat like animals and would have lived out of animal instincts, like better apes. Spiritual science makes it clear that man did indeed start from the most material experience, but that he felt this most material experience as spiritual-divine, that he also set up everything economic on earth as a mirror image, as a reflection of the spiritual-soul. In the course of his development on earth, man started out from spiritual experience, albeit with matter. He only progressed to something else when he ceased to perceive the inner soul-spiritual metamorphoses in harmony with the aging body at an advanced age, in his forties, even in his early fifties. The human being was limited to completing his sense of unity for the spiritual and soul and the physical at a younger age. In the previous cultural age, the human being still felt the harmony of the physical with the spiritual and soul until well into his thirties, but no longer higher. In the middle of life, the human being still felt what it meant to enter one's thirties in a bodily and spiritual sense. Then it ceased, just as the ordinary experience ceases for us even earlier, as we grow old earlier, without really experiencing growing old inwardly with the body.

The second period of human development - it begins around the 8th century BC - still includes that wonderful folklore that has gained such a great, such a huge influence on the whole civilizing life of modern times; the development of Greek folklore falls within it. Those who today cannot feel how fundamentally different this Greek culture is from our own do not properly feel the history of the development of humanity.

Oh, this Greek culture! One truly enriches one's human life when one can put oneself in the way the Greeks felt. They no longer remained young like primeval man into old age, but they felt like a unified human being until the middle of life, and they still felt a spiritual connection with the physical in their thirties, as we experience it until the time of sexual maturity. What lived and breathed as a unity in Greek nature formed the basis for the harmonious art and intellectual creativity of Greek culture. Experiencing this as a unity, as an inner harmony, even in middle age, in the middle of existence, made it possible for what we know as Greek culture to develop out of the old forms of artistic creation, of drama and of musical feeling. We only get to know this Greek culture in a truly human way if we are able to direct our gaze to the individual Greek. Oh, this Greek, he is to be our representative of this second epoch in the developmental history of humanity. He also saw the nature around him differently than we do. Because the growth forces of his soul-spiritual were still in use into his thirties, these growth forces flowed into his sensory perception. And anyone who can feel what it means for physical forces to work in the human being in such a way that they express themselves spiritually and soulfully well into the thirties will have to say to themselves: Another force is pushing into the senses themselves, and this results in a different perception of sensory reality. In this way, one learns to empathize with the entire development of humanity, to feel one's way into the individual human being of the past. One learns to feel how he looked at his surroundings in such a way that nature, with all its blossoms, with all its other expressions, yes, with stars, sun and moon, with clouds and so on, in all the nuances of impressions, had a different effect on him than it has on us. If we follow with feeling what was different in the Greek, we can say to ourselves in recognition: The Greek vividly felt precisely the light in its natural environment, everything that stood out, that shone and glistened, while he had little sense for what did not shine and glisten. Anyone who believes that the Greeks saw their surroundings in the same way that we see them has no sense of the developmental history of humanity. They are looking at it much like a forty-year-old would, who believes that a child sees the world around them in the same way that he or she does. But the Greeks, who lived in the second epoch of human development, saw the nature around them in great vividness. He saw what shone and glistened, what spoke directly to the human being; he also saw in other people that which is more active from person to person, that which is more luminous from person to person. The Greek saw his fellow human being differently from us, right down to the other person's complexion. This must be said by spiritual science out of its cognitive compassion for the developmental history of humanity.

This is not refuted by external observation, but fully confirmed, however one may dispute about these things. Anyone who looks at Greek literature with an open mind must notice that the Greeks do not actually have a real word to express blue. They have a word, yAauxög (glaukos), which they use to describe the dark hair and also the dark-colored eyebrows of certain people, and they also use the same word to describe the blue stone lapis lazuli. With the same word they designate everything blue and everything black or dark in general. And it is also quite interesting that the Greeks have a word for green, xAwoög (chloros), but with these words they simultaneously designate the yellow resin, the honey and the hair – just as blue-blind people of the present do not distinguish between green and yellow, so that we can say: External history also confirms that the ancient Greeks saw the light colors as the ones that mattered to them; and that they had no strong sense of blue, of dark colors, at all, that they expressed this sense particularly. Here we must look to a quite different bodily and mental constitution of the Greek. And this is given to us by a consideration of history, which inwardly reveals the course of progress over the earth. This leads us into the inner life of man.

And if we continue along this path and have followed such points of view, then we shall also look at other matters in the same way. Then one will understand why the Roman writers tell us that the Greek painters only painted with four colors, black, white, red, and yellow, and say nothing about their also painting in blue. Perhaps they also had what we see as blue and covered the surface with it, but they did not call it that. They only felt everything insofar as it was bright and shining and luminous. That is, they lived with the forces of nature and did not yet know the reflective element. For one learns to recognize that this reflective element in the developmental history of mankind can only arise when the effects of the thirties on man, in the sense that he still perceives the spiritual and soul in harmony with the physical body, when, so to speak, this sense of unity, where one as a human being feels the metamorphoses of the physical body and the spiritual soul at the same time, already ceases in the twenties. That which the body is primarily organized for develops in the old age body, and that which was present in full clarity in earlier ages only scurries up in traces, in shadows. If one follows these things impartially, then one comes to say that in the present age, this dependence of the spiritual-soul on the physical-corporeal normally ceases for the normal human being around the 26th or 27th year human being, if he does not do something about it by taking his inner development into his own hands, and that then only that which is laid in the human inner being through education during childhood comes to the fore. Something most significant occurs when we consider the developmental history of humanity in this way. We look back to earlier times in human development. We can understand that people were more satisfied with an education in which a person grew up with their environment through the natural process of imitation. We see the full, profound human importance of education and teaching only emerge in this third, “reflective” epoch. We learn to recognize our place as human beings in the developmental history of all humanity; we no longer feel our relationship to all humanity as abstract. We feel our mission in this particular age; by belonging to it, we know that, for example, educational tasks in particular are approaching the present age of humanity – the educational tasks of which the social question is one of the most important.

In the first epoch of humanity and in the aftermath of the second epoch, man in his youth could say to himself – he could learn this from the moods and messages of the ancients: as you grow up and grow older, you will experience this and that, which you will simply experience through your physical transformation in old age. In our time, the way in which a person fills their old age must be germinally assessed in their youth through education and teaching. And more and more, the time is approaching – it is already here to a great extent – when we must feel a strong obligation to educate young people in such a way that throughout their later old age, people can remember what they learned during their years of education. Because life no longer gives us the same things in elementary events that it gave to people in earlier epochs of humanity, what is experienced during the years of education must, I would say, be able to have an elastic effect over time, so that it can permeate and illuminate the whole of life

until we turn gray. In this way, history can gain insights, and in this way, history can give us knowledge that also strengthens the will and provides orientation in life.

This is what spiritual science must repeatedly draw attention to, that by trying to penetrate more deeply into life and existence to the point where this life and existence reveal themselves as spiritual, it can also directly serve practical life.

History that merely adheres to the external will not be able to give man such expanses [in the contemplation] of historical development that simultaneously become life forces in him. Nor does it give him ideas that can enlighten him about what has happened in human development.

It is remarkable to hear, for example, that one of the greatest historians of the recent epoch, Ranke, was always in doubt as to how he should place the figure of Christ Jesus in human history. He was convinced that the figure of Christ Jesus could actually only be considered from a religious point of view, that is, it had to be considered on a different level than is usual in the study of history. He was not able to place the life of Christ among the forces that construct history. Herman Grimm attempted to correct this deficiency in some of his allusions, but he did not succeed because in the present-day conditions of the age, one can only succeed by adopting the spiritual-scientific approach.

What has man basically become by becoming a “reflective” human being, by developing since the middle of the 15th century into the reflective, intellectualistic period? What has he become as a result of developing into everything that comes out of intellectualism in the field of technology, in the field of external life and external knowledge, albeit as something great?

In the first epoch, and to a large extent in the second, of which the Greek can be said to be a representative, man felt himself to be a member of the whole world simply because his body is a member of the whole world. He saw lightning; he had an instinctive realization that the power in lightning is akin to the power that lives in his own feeling. He felt part of the whole existence of the world. He was rich in his inner life because, at bottom, he felt himself to be a part of the whole world, because what lived and breathed in him as a human being was the same as what lived and breathed in the whole world. He saw his own destiny in the course of the stars. He could trace not only what was in him by natural law to the farthest heights of heaven, but also what was in him morally, he could trace it to cosmic widths.

We today have different experiences. Since the dawn of modern intellectual life in the third developmental epoch of humanity, in which we have become contemplative people, we have experienced that we can well calculate, with Galilean grandeur, with Bruno-like insight, looking up into the starry worlds. But we carry nothing down from them but mathematical-mechanistic formulas about planets and the course of the sun, and today at most what spectral analysis tells us about them. And here on this earth we have become lonely. We know we are standing on this earth, but we feel nothing more of a kinship with the starry expanse. We can no longer feel that we are a living link in the world if we live honestly within the modern mechanistic world view. We stand alone with our earth in space; and we only calculate about that which is not our earth. Can we, if we are honest, still develop the biblical belief that the Christ descended from the heights of heaven into the world that we have so rationalized, in order to accomplish the most important event, the meaning of all earthly development, in the body of Jesus of Nazareth?

What humanity has acquired through calculation and mechanistic knowledge is what has led it away from the spiritual understanding of the developmental history of humanity itself. Only spiritual science will be able to reconnect meaning to the fact that what lived in Jesus descended from spiritual heights, that the great marriage of the spiritual world with earthly humanity has been concluded for the benefit of human further development. That the Mystery of Golgotha is a spiritual one, that is the truth that can only be presented to the soul in full clarity through spiritual science.

And then, when one experiences the Mystery of Golgotha from a spiritually renewed perspective, one would like to say that spiritual science also brings to light a further, seemingly only incidental fact of human developmental history, but one that has a deeply moving effect on those who can perceive it in all its depth. By applying this reverse biogenetic law, we discover the fact that what human beings experience today in the age epoch of their individual development is a shadowy hint of what was clearly experienced by our human ancestors in body and soul and is today experienced only in the outer human metamorphoses of earlier developmental epochs. Just as the physical nature of the human being at the embryonic stage naturally repeats itself in the intimations of what was experienced by our ancestors over millions of years, so too what occurs in the human being in the adult stage is a shadowy repetition of what was clearly and distinctly present inwardly in prehumanity. We thus connect our present life with the past.

And if you follow these facts with spiritual scientific methods, which have often been characterized here and which you can read about in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds”, “Occult Science”, “The Riddle of Man”, “The Riddle of Souls”, you will be able to say to yourself that it is quite possible through inner vision to understand how, in pre-Christian times, people remained capable of development in this way, that is, they experienced inwardly, including spiritually and soulfully, the bodily-physical up to and including the thirties, up to the last thirties. Then it went down and down until our time, the third epoch in the developmental history of humanity, where the human being experiences the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily together only until the twenties. In between lies something that is an important transition in human life.

By shaping himself in terms of developmental history across the earth, the human being has, so to speak, descended from the youthful-childlike experience of aging into those times when he experiences only his unified human being into his thirties. Then the figure emerged from the depths of the world, who lived out before him, into his thirties, that which he is to live out, so that he can absorb the forces in his youth to carry into old age what he absorbs in his youth. In the time after the Mystery of Golgotha, man can no longer carry the forces he needs in old age into old age through natural development. Therefore, the life of Christ Jesus, which only extended to the middle of earthly life, was presented to him on earth, and which gave man a divine-human example until the age of 33. If he seizes the strong forces of this model so that he can grasp within: “Not I, but the Christ in me,” we organize all education and teaching in such a way that it is permeated by the Christ, that we allow the child in the youth to take up the forces that can then, as I have indicated, stretch like a rubber band into old age. We thus Christianize the whole person - then we work on the progress of humanity in this area, based on the knowledge of human developmental history.

And just as I was able to show in individual areas that the truly inwardly living understanding of human developmental history, in turn, provides insights from spiritual science that show us what we have to do in our present age, we can also show it in certain other areas. We can point out how man, through his physical development, was so constituted that he recognized the divine in material things. What we have received as the inheritance of man's relationship to the divine continues to work in us; we only have to cultivate it independently, for today it wants to be independent. It wants to be cultivated as an independent element of our social life.

In the second epoch of human development, where the human being finds harmony only between the physical and the soul-spiritual until about the thirties, which lie in the middle of the earthly life, in this second epoch, the instinctive forces of the human soul life, in particular, come fully to life, those instinctive forces of the human soul life that find expression, for example, in the right-shaping and state-shaping factors of public life. Thus, in the second epoch of human development, we see the germinal seeds of what we can well think of as right, but not reflectively, but instinctively. That is why there is always something controversial in all legal concepts, because they were still instinctively created in the second epoch.

The third epoch, which began in the middle of the 15th century - this can be clearly traced historically - this third epoch, in which we are still living, is primarily a reflective one. Man withdraws from the cosmos. Man withdraws from what he thought of as being organically connected with the human being of the first epoch. Man becomes lonely on earth, and this loneliness of spirit on earth reverses everything. In the first human epoch, it was felt that the spiritual-soul permeated the world as a matter of course, and that the economic was only a reflection of the spiritual-soul. In our epoch, where the human being stands with the spiritual-soul separate from the external in the later developmental epochs of individual life, where he only feels in tune with physical development as a whole human being until his twenties, it is economic life that becomes decisive. Economic life extends into the configuration of the state; the economic sphere becomes state economy, becomes empire. What we now see emerging, what then becomes a one-sided method in Marxism, what becomes theory and appears as if economic life were everything and the spiritual life, which once was everything, were only a reflection of economic life, thus the spiritual life were only ideology. Because we have separated ourselves from the external, bodily realm through our natural development, through the developmental history of humanity, because that is the normal development of human nature, man must now seek harmony through his culture, through his civilization, between what has become separated: the spiritual , which he must cultivate in its independence because it no longer shows itself connected with the material, and the economic, which he must cultivate so that he can fight with it in the right way, so that he can bring the spirit into it again, which used to be taken for granted. And in the middle he must cultivate the state-legal as an independent link.

A correct understanding of history, when viewed from within, also gives us a true social insight into the present. It lives in what we want to put into the social organism today. People have gone through [through these epochs] by developing the three limbs of the social organism more or less one-sidedly. Now the time has come when we must develop these three limbs independently, out of human consciousness, so that we become strong, these three limbs, an independent spiritual life, an independent legal or state life, an independent economic life, through our inner humanity.

The ancient Greeks, who in the Middle Ages still had harmony between the spiritual and soul and the physical, these ancient Greeks were still condemned to split people into classes, into teaching, military and nutritional classes. We are striving for a social structure in which people are not divided into such groups, but where life is structured in threefoldness and each individual person lives in each of these threefold aspects, with the three aspects working together in each individual person.

But, my esteemed audience, what really gives cause to consider the trinity in the strongest sense is the historical consideration of humanity, which allows new perspectives to be gained. I would like to say that in the intellectual circles of scholars, Herman Grimm has found that the facts of history, which are so numerous today, are carried along like a ballast, and that the great perspectives are missing. Yes, as the history of recent years teaches, we need such broad perspectives, but what has emerged [so far] from human thinking and feeling could only be experienced by individuals. The numerous people who come from the great masses to participate in public affairs will not be edified by this kind of history, as Herman Grimm presents it.

If we establish a human history from a spiritual scientific point of view, through which one sees how man has felt through the millennia, going once like this, once like that, if one learns in historical development from what every human being experiences in himself, must experience in himself, in order to feel the same as all other human beings, then we will have a history that our age needs, as the coming age will need: a historical perspective that is not merely absorbed in the intellect, a historical perspective that draws on clear and objective concepts, but one that penetrates into human life, so that the insights warm the mind and the mind, warmed by the insights, is will-forming. And when one feels that, after all, everything that is necessary for further social development does not depend on institutions - for these themselves depend on people - but must depend on people, then one longs for the strong will in people to become the disposition for strong action, so that the recognized and necessary institutions can also be taken. But the man we need, the creative, the insightful, the man who orients himself correctly in the public world, will only be the man who can make his will, his deeds glow and shine – not with dead, not with intellectualistic, but with living, spirit-filled knowledge. But this will come to him when he can recognize himself, feeling, as a link in the whole developmental history of humanity, when he can point to the past of humanity and from this a light will arise for him, which will shine for him to work by, to act, to have an effect on the future.

There are several reasons why it would seem a somewhat risky enterprise to speak about fairy tales in the light of spiritual science.

First of all, the subject is indeed difficult, for the source of what one can call the true fairy tale mood lies deep down within the human soul. The methods of spiritual science that I have often described must take their way along extremely convoluted and lengthy paths in order to find this source. We little suspect how deeply hidden lie the springs that have given rise through centuries of human history to all the enchantment of genuine fairy tale poetry.

In the second place, it is just this poetic enchantment that causes one to feel strongly about fairy tales; studying them or trying to explain them with one's own ideas must surely destroy their fresh spontaneity, yes, even the whole effect of the tales. We often hear it said quite rightly that explanations and commentaries of poetry spoil the immediate, lively, artistic impression that a poem should give us; we want it to affect us simply on its own. All the more should this apply to the infinitely subtle and bewitching quality of the poetic tales arising from the deep, almost bottomless springs of the folk soul or from single human hearts. They flow out in such an original way that intruding our own strong judgment would seem like tearing a flower to pieces.

Nevertheless, spiritual research does find it possible to throw some light into those regions of soul that give rise to the poetic mood of the fairy tale. In doing this, the second doubt will be allayed. Simply by searching out the sources and wellsprings from which fairy tales flow, deep down in human soul nature, we can be completely sure that the explanations of spiritual science will touch those depths so gently that they are not harmed. Just the opposite: the wonder of everything lying down there in the human soul is so new, so original, so individual that one has oneself to resort to a kind of fairy tale in speaking about it all; nothing else will do to describe these hidden springs.

Goethe, for one, moving beyond his work as an artist in order to plunge fully into the wellsprings and sources of life, would not take to theoretical discussion nor destroy the fairy tale's living water with his scrutiny when he wanted to reveal one of the most profound insights into the human soul. No, as soon as he had won these insights, it seemed natural to use the fairy tale itself to describe what lives and comes to expression in the soul at its deepest level. In his Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, Goethe tried to express in his own way the extraordinary soul experiences that Schiller brought forward in a more abstract, philosophical style in the Aesthetic Education of Man.

The very nature of fairy tale enchantment leads us to believe that explaining and trying to understand it will probably never destroy the creative mood; to dig down into those wellsprings with the resources of spiritual research is to discover something quite remarkable. If I were to talk about fairy tales as much as I'd like to do, I would have to give many lectures. Today it will be possible to bring only a few hints regarding the results of research.

A person who attempts the spiritual exploration of the fairy tale sources will find that they lie in far more profound depths of the soul than those from which other works of art emerge, even for instance, the most awe-inspiring tragic drama. In a tragedy, the poet shows us how the human soul experiences the gigantic powers of fate that exalt as well as crush their victim. Fate is the cause of the ordeals and shocks of tragedy. We find that the tangled threads woven together and then unraveled in tragic drama belong more or less to what an individual has to suffer from the outside world. However difficult this may be to discern, requiring as it does our finding the way into the uniqueness of a human soul, it is nevertheless quite possible for anyone sensitive to the impact of life itself upon the soul. A tragedy, we feel, shows us how an individual is entangled in this or that fateful life-situation.

However, the source of fairy tale mood and fairy tale poetry lies still deeper than the complexities of tragedy. For one thing, we can feel that tragedy concerns itself—as do other artistic creations—with an individual who in a certain period of life, at a certain age, is exposed to some kind of misfortune. We take it for granted that when tragic drama affects us, it is because a human being is brought through his own unique experiences to what is happening; we realize that it is one single person with his own special destiny that we must come to understand. Here, as in other works of art, we meet a particular, circumscribed sphere of life.

It is altogether different, we feel, when we come knowingly to fairy tale poetry and its mood. The effect of a fairy tale on our soul is spontaneous, elementary, and therefore remains unconscious. When we try to get a feeling for it, however, we can find that what a fairy tale expresses is not about one person in a particular situation in life, is not a limited portion of life, but rather something so integrated in human experience that it has to do with the comprehensive truth of all mankind. It is not about some special individual who finds himself at a certain time of life in a singular dilemma; what the fairy tale describes lies so completely in everyone's soul nature that it represents actual experience to children in their early years to persons of middle age and even to old men and women.

Throughout our whole lifetime the fairy tale happenings picture our most profound experiences of soul, even though the style is light, playful and picturesque. The artistic enjoyment of a fairy tale, in its correspondence to inner soul experiences, can be compared—a rather bold comparison—to the relationship of an enjoyable taste on the tongue to the hidden, complex proceedings in the rest of the body, where the food takes up its task of nourishing the organism. What lies in that further process, after our pleasure in its taste, is not at all evident to our observation or understanding. Both things seem at first to have little to do with each other; no one is able to say, from savoring a food, what its particular use will be in the life processes of the body. And so it is with our joy in the art of the fairy tale. It is far, far removed from what is happening at the same time, all unconsciously, deep in the soul. There the essence of the fairy tale is pouring forth, satisfying the soul's persistent hunger for it. Just as our body has to have nutritive substances circulating through the organism, the soul needs fairy tale substance flowing through its spiritual veins.

Using the methods of research described in my books as a way to approach the higher worlds, you will discover, at a certain level of spiritual knowledge, the spiritual processes working unconsciously in the depths of the soul. In our ordinary life we are aware of these spirit impulses within our soul only when they surface as gentle dreams, caught at rare times by our waking consciousness. Now and then we may have such a special waking up that we realize: You are emerging out of a spiritual world where there is thinking and where there are intentions, and where something was happening down in the unapproachable grounds of your existence that was somehow akin to daily happenings; this something seems an intimate part of your own being but is completely hidden from your waking, everyday life.

It is often the same story with the spiritual researcher, even when he has progressed as far as experiencing a world of spiritual beings and spiritual deeds. However much further he then advances, he nonetheless reaches again and again the same edge of a world out of whose deep unconsciousness there come towards him spiritual impulses, impulses connected with himself. They appear to his spiritual gaze like a Fata Morgana but they do not yield themselves up to him completely.

This very peculiar experience is what awaits one on looking into the unfathomable spiritual relationships belonging to the human soul. It is fairly easy to follow attentively and understand certain intimate soul happenings, for example, the emotional conflicts that also lie there within the soul and that are revealed in art, in tragic drama. But far more difficult are the quite common human conflicts, which in our daily life we simply cannot imagine are there, and yet every one of us undergoes them at every period of our life.

One such soul conflict discovered by spiritual research takes place without the ordinary consciousness being aware of it: our waking up every day, when the soul leaves the world it has been in during sleep and slips down into the physical body. As I said, we have normally not the slightest knowledge of this, yet every morning our soul is engaged in a battle that the spiritual researcher can catch only to a slight degree: it is the battle of the single, lonely human soul meeting the gigantic powers of nature. Thunder and lightning and everything else in the elements that we have to confront out in the world unload their great strengths on us as we stand there more or less helplessly. All that tremendous power, however, even when we meet it head on, is a small thing compared to the unconscious battle at the moment of waking up, when our soul—alive only to itself up to then—has to unite with the pressures and substances of a purely physical body. The soul needs this organism in order to use the bodily senses that are governed by the laws of nature and to use also the bodily limbs in which the powers of nature prevail. There is something like a yearning in the soul to dip down into this sheer natural state, a yearning satisfied each time by waking up, and yet at this very moment there is a shrinking back, a feeling of utter helplessness in the face of the eternal opposition existing between the soul and the nature-related physical body, into which one awakens. It may sound strange that this daily battle takes place in the depths of our soul—but then it takes place in complete unconsciousness. The soul knows nothing of what it has to undergo every single morning, but nevertheless it is burdened by the conflict, which affects its very nature and its individual character.

There is something else happening in these depths, which can be caught on the wing by spiritual research; it occurs at the moment of falling asleep. The human soul withdraws from the sense world and from the bodily limbs and has more or less left behind the physical body in the physical-sense world. Then there comes to the soul what one may describe as an awareness of its inwardness. At that moment it begins to experience unconsciously the inner battles caused by its constraint in a physical body in the waking state, where it has to act in consequence of its entanglement in matter. It is aware of its bent toward the burdensome sense-world, which, however, represses its morality. In falling asleep and during sleep, the soul is alone with itself and pervaded unconsciously by so moral an atmosphere that it can hardly be compared to the morality we know in ordinary life. Besides other impressions, it is this that the soul experiences when it is outside the physical body and living a purely spiritual existence between falling asleep and waking up.

We should not imagine that all these occurrences in our soul are simply absent when we are awake. Spiritual research can show one very interesting effect as an example: we do not dream only when we believe we are dreaming but we actually dream the whole day long. In truth, our soul is full of dreams all the time, even though we don't notice it, for our waking consciousness is more forceful than the dream consciousness. As a somewhat weak light is extinguished altogether in the presence of a stronger one, our day-consciousness extinguishes what is continually running parallel to it, the dream experience in the depths of our soul. We dream all the time, but we are seldom conscious of it. Out of those abundant and unconscious dream experiences—an infinitely greater number than our waking perceptions—a few rise up like single drops of water shaken out of an immense lake; these are the dreams we become conscious of. But the dreaming that stays unconscious is perceived by the soul spiritually. In its depths many things are being experienced. Just as chemical processes that we are unaware of take place in the body, there are spiritual experiences taking place within us in unconscious regions of the soul.

We can throw more light into these hidden depths of soul life by adding something else to the facts we have mentioned. It has often been emphasized, and especially so in my last lecture, [Raphaels Mission im Lichte der Wissenschaft vom Geiste (January 30, 1913); The Mission of Raphael (unpublished MS).] that in the course of evolution on earth, human soul life has undergone a complete change. When we look far, far back into the past of humankind, we find the soul of ancient man having totally different experiences from those today. In earlier lectures we spoke about early mankind's primitive clairvoyance; we will speak further about it in the future. We look out at the world today in the wide-awake condition of soul that is normal, taking in sense impressions from outer stimuli, working on them with our intelligence, reason, emotions, and will forces—but this form of consciousness is merely the one that holds good for the present day. This modern consciousness has developed out of the earlier forms in ancient days that we can call—in the best sense of the word—clairvoyant; people were able in certain intermediate conditions between waking and sleeping quite normally to experience something of the spiritual worlds. At that time a person, even though he could not become really conscious of himself, would not find the experiences we have been describing as taking place in the depths of the soul at all unfamiliar or strange.

In ancient times the human being could more fully perceive his union with the spiritual world outside himself. He saw how everything going on in his soul, the happenings deep in his soul, were related to certain spiritual realities alive in the universe. He saw these realities moving through his soul, felt closely related to the spirit-soul beings and realities of the universe. This was a characteristic of mankind's primeval clairvoyance. In ancient times, not only artists but quite primitive people frequently had a feeling that I am going to describe, which today we arrive at only in quite special moods.

It can really happen that, living gently in the depths of the soul, as gently as anything can be, there is an experience of the spiritual realities mentioned above, one that does not come to consciousness. Nothing of it is perceived in the wide-awake life of the day. But something is there in the soul, just as hunger often is there in the physical organism, and just as we have a need for something to satisfy our hunger, we have also a need for something to satisfy this delicate need in our soul.

It is at this moment that one feels urged either to come to a fairy tale or a legend that one knows, or else, perhaps, if one has an artistic nature, to create something of the kind oneself, even though one senses that all the words one could theoretically use would only reach a kind of stammering about such experiences. This is how the fairy tale images arise. The nourishment that satisfies the hunger we spoke of is just this conscious filling of the soul with fairy tale pictures. In the earlier times of mankind's evolution, the human soul was closer to a clairvoyant perception of its inner spiritual experiences; often, therefore, the simple country folk felt this hunger more distinctly than we do today, and this led them to search for nourishing pictures arising out of their creative soul life; we find these today in the fairy tales coming down to us as folk traditions in various parts of the world. In those earlier times the human soul felt its connection to spiritual existence and felt more or less consciously the inner battles it had to undergo, even without understanding them. The soul formed these into pictures and images which had only a distant resemblance to what was happening in its depths. But still one can feel that there is a connection between the happenings of a fairy tale and the unfathomable, profound experiences of the soul.

It is evident—many can confirm this—that the heart of a child often succeeds in creating for itself a comrade or “friend” who is present only for that child and who stays at its side through all its coming and going. Probably everyone knows children with such invisible spirit-friends. These unseen playmates you have to imagine as being with the child wherever he is, sharing all his joys and sorrows. And then you see someone coming along, a so-called “intelligent” person, who hears about this invisible playmate and tries to talk the child out of it, even believes it's a healthy thing he's doing—but it has a bad effect on the child's feeling-life. A child will grieve for his soul-comrade and if he is susceptible to spiritual-soul moods, the grief will be weighty and can develop into a pining away or sickliness. This is actual experience, related to deep, inward happenings of the human soul.

We can take to heart, without dispelling the fragrance of such a tale, the Grimms' story of the child and the paddock (a small frog). A little girl lets the paddock eat with her out of her bowl of bread and milk; the paddock only drinks the milk. The child talks to the little creature as to another human being, saying one day, “Eat the bread crumbs as well, little thing.” The mother hears this, comes out to the yard, and kills the paddock. And now the child loses her rosy cheeks, wastes away and dies.

In this tale we can feel an echo of certain moods that really and truly are present in the depths of our soul. They are there not only at certain periods of our life, but whether we are children or adults, we recognize such moods because we are human beings.

Every one of us can feel reverberating in us how this something we experience but don't understand, something we don't even bring to consciousness, is connected with the effect of the fairy tale on our soul like the taste of food on our tongue. And then the fairy tale becomes for the soul very much like nutritious food when it is put to use by the whole organism. It is tempting to search in these deep-lying soul experiences for what reverberates in each different tale. Of course it would be a tremendous task over a long time, given the great collections of fairy tales from everywhere in the world, to probe into them just for this. However, what can be looked at in a few tales can be used in a general way for all of them, if the few are genuine fairy tales.

Take one of the stories that the brothers Grimm collected, “Rumpelstiltskin”. When a miller claims that his daughter can spin straw into gold, the king has him bring her to the castle in order to test her art. She comes to the king, is locked in a room with a bundle of straw and “there sat the poor miller's daughter and for the life of her could not tell what to do”. As she begins to weep, there appears a little man who says, “What will you give me if I spin the straw into gold for you?” The girl gives him her necklace and the little man spins the straw into gold. The king next morning is astonished and delighted but wants more; she should spin straw into gold again. She is locked in another room with even more straw, and when the little man appears again and asks, “What will you give me if I spin the straw into gold for you?” she gives him her ring. By morning all the straw is spun into glittering gold. But the king is still not satisfied. The manikin comes again, but now the girl has nothing more to give him. “Then promise me, if you should become queen, to give me your first child,” says the little man, and so she promises. And when, after a year, the child is there and the manikin comes and reminds the queen of her promise, she begs him to wait. “I will give you three days' time,” he replies. “If you know my name by that time, you shall keep your child.” The miller's daughter sends messengers far and wide. She must find every name and also the particular name of the little man. Finally, after several wrong guesses, she succeeds in naming the little man by his right name: Rumpelstiltskin.

No other work of art gives us the feeling of utmost inner joy as the fairy tale with its unsophisticated pictures, yet we can also know the deep soul experience from which such a tale arises. It is a prosaic but accurate comparison to say, we can know a great deal about the chemistry of our food and still take pleasure in something delicious we're eating. And so we can know and understand something about these deep inner soul experiences in us that are felt but not “known”—and that emerge as the pictures of fairy tales.

Indeed our solitary soul, this miller's daughter, is a lonely thing, both in sleep and in waking life, even though she is harbored in our body. The soul feels (but unconsciously) the great antithesis she has to live in; she experiences (but does not understand) her unending task, her own anchorage in divine worlds.

The soul will always be aware of other insignificant abilities in comparison to those of outside nature. Nature is the mighty enchantress, who can transform one thing into another in a trice—something the soul would like to be and do.

In everyday consciousness, one can submit with a good grace to this disparity between the human being and the omnipotent wisdom of the spirit of nature. In the depths of the soul, however, things are not so simple. The soul would certainly come to grief if she did not surmise that within her own conscious being a still deeper being is present, something she can trust, something she might be able to describe like this:

You, Soul, are still at such an imperfect stage—but there is something in you, another entity, who is far more clever than you, who can help you to accomplish the most difficult tasks and give you wings to rise up and look over wide perspectives into an infinite future. Someday you will be able to do what is still impossible, for there is something within you that is far, far greater than the part of you now that “knows”; it will be a loyal helper if you can enter into an alliance with it. But you must truly be able to form a concept of this creature who lives within you and is so much wiser, cleverer, more skilful than you are yourself.

When you try to imagine this conversation of the soul with itself, an unconscious conversation with the more capable part of the soul, you can then try to catch this nuance in the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale: what the miller's daughter had to experience in not being able to spin straw into gold and then finding a loyal helper in the little manikin. It is impossible to blow away the fragrance of those pictures, even when we know their origin, deep down in our soul life. Let us take another tale. Please forgive me if it is connected with things that seem to have a personal coloring; it is not meant to be personal. It makes it somewhat easier to explain if I add this small personal note.

In my book Occult Science [ An Outline of Occult Science, Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1972.] you will find a description of the evolution of the world. I don't intend to speak about it now—possibly on another occasion. During this evolution of the world our earth has passed through certain stages as a planet in the universe, and these stages can be compared to the stages of life in the individual human being. Just as individuals go through one life after another, the earth itself has had various planetary stages or embodiments. In spiritual science, for certain reasons, we speak about the earth—before its “earth” stage began—as having a “moon” stage and before that, a “sun” stage. There was a sun evolutionary period as a planetary pre-stage of our earth in the primordial past; an ancient sun was still united with the earth, from which—at a later stage—it split away. The moon also split away from what originally was the sun. Our sun today is not the original one but only a piece of it; we can speak of an ancient sun-stage of the earth and also of our present sun. Spiritual research can look back to the time in earth evolution when the second sun, our present one, developed as an independent body in the universe. In searching for the existence at that time of beings actually perceptible to the senses, it finds only the lower species up to the level of the fishes.

You can read all this in more detail in Occult Science, and there you will be able to understand it. The actual details, however, can be found only through the scientific methods of spiritual research. At the time they were discovered and I wrote them down (more precisely, they were not discovered just when I wrote them down but they were, one can say, discovered for me and I wrote them down in Occult Science) the following fairy tale was quite unknown to me—and this is the personal note I wanted to add. I can verify the fact that it was unknown then, for I found it much later in Wundt's Elements of Folk Psychology and traced it then back to its source.

Before I give you a short summary of the fairy tale, let me say this: Everything the spiritual researcher finds in the spiritual world—and what was just described had to be found in the spiritual world, for otherwise it would no longer exist—everything in that world is very much connected with the human soul. In the very deepest roots of our soul we are united with that world. It is always at hand; we enter it unconsciously as soon as we fall asleep in a normal way. In our union with that world, our soul holds within itself not only its sleep experiences but also all those experiences related to world evolution as we have described them. It is a paradox but one can say that the soul knows unconsciously that it experienced the stream of evolution from the original sun to its daughter, the sun we see shining in the sky, and to the moon that is also a child of the original sun. Moreover, the soul can recognize that it was living through a soul-spiritual existence at that time, for it was not yet united with earthly substance. It could look down then on earthly happenings, for example, when the highest animal organisms were the fish-prototypes, at the time when the present sun and moon developed by separating from the earth. In the unconscious, the soul is connected with these happenings.

Now look at this short folk tale that can be found among several primitive peoples: There was once a man who was made of resin. He worked only at night. If he had worked in the daytime, the sun would have melted him. One day, however, he did go outside, for he wanted to catch some fish. And lo! the man made of resin melted away. His sons made up their minds to take revenge. They shot off their arrows. They shot so well that the arrows formed figures, towering one above the other. They became a ladder, reaching right up into the sky. The two sons climbed up the ladder, one by day, the other by night. And one son became the sun, the other son became the moon.

It is not my custom to explain such tales with abstract, intellectual ideas. Everyone can realize, however, through spiritual research how the human soul is deeply connected with everything happening in the world, how the soul can be understood only through spiritual means, and how it hungers to enjoy the picture-images of its unconscious experiences—this is truly different. If you feel this, you will also feel, vibrating like an echo of this folk tale, just what human souls experienced at the time of the primordial sun and then at the origin of the sun and moon during the time of fish-development in earth evolution. It was for me a most important event—and this is the personal note—to discover, long after these things were described in Occult Science, this particular tale. Even though I would never wish to explain it in an abstract way, a certain feeling comes over me when I look at the evolution of the world, a feeling that is twin-brother to the one I get from immersing myself in the wonderful picture-images of the folk tale.

We can look at another story, this one from the Melanesian Islands. Before we hear it, let us recall that according to spiritual research the human soul is closely connected to the present-day happenings and facts of the universe. It may be too picturesque, but nevertheless quite correct from the spiritual-scientific standpoint, to describe the life of the soul when it leaves the body in sleep as completely related to and united with the whole universe. One possibility of remembering or understanding this relationship of our ego, for example, to the cosmos, at least to something significant in the cosmos is to look at the plants. They can grow only when they have the light and warmth of the sun. They are rooted in the earth and consist, as spiritual science tells us, of a physical body interwoven by an etheric body. This is not enough, however, to cause the plants to unfold and blossom; they must also have the forces of the sun shining down on them.

Looking at the human body during sleep, we see to some degree its equivalence to a plant. Our sleeping body is like a plant, in that it has the same power to grow. But the human being has freed himself from the cosmic order in which the plant is caught. A plant has to wait for sunlight to come to it, the rising and setting of the sun. It is dependent, as we humans are not, on the external cosmic order. Why are we not? Because of a fact that spiritual research has discovered, that the human ego, which in sleep is outside the plant-like body, unfolds for the body what the sun unfolds for the plant. The sun pours its light over the plant; the human ego shines too, resting spiritually over the sleeping body. And the human ego is related to the life of the sun; it is itself a kind of sun for the plant-like human body, engendering its growth during sleep, repairing its various forces that have been used up during the daytime. In perceiving this, we realize how much like the sun our ego is. As the sun moves across the sky—of course I am speaking of its apparent movement—the effect of the sun's rays changes according to the constellations of the zodiac from which they come to earth. In the same way, spiritual science shows us ever more clearly that the human ego passes through the various phases of its experience; the physical body is influenced according to each aspect. We perceive the sun's effect on earth, with the help of spiritual science, according to whether it is passing through Aries, or Taurus, or any other constellation. Rather than refer to the sun in general terms, it is preferable to describe the effect of the sun from one of the twelve constellations of the zodiac. As we consider the sun's passage through the constellations, we become aware of its relationship to the ever-changing ego.

All this is described much more fully in Occult Science; it can be acquired as spirit-soul knowledge. We can perceive it as something that takes place unconsciously in the depths of the soul and yet takes place as an inward involvement with the spiritual powers of the cosmos alive in the planets and constellations.

Let us compare these secrets of the universe, disclosed by spiritual science, with the following Melanesian tale, which I will sketch very briefly.

In the road is a stone. The stone is the mother of Quatl, and Quatl has eleven brothers. After Quatl and his brothers were created, Quatl began to create the world. But in this world that Quatl created, there was no change of night and day. Quatl heard about an island where there was a difference between the day and the night. He traveled to that island and brought a host of beings back to his own land. And through the power of these beings, those in Quatl's land came into the alternation of sleeping and waking. Sunrise and sunset occurred for them as soul happenings.

It is amazing what vibrates as echo from this story. If you read the whole thing, you will find that every sentence vibrates with the tones of world secrets, just as our soul vibrates in its depths when it hears how spiritual science describes those secrets. It is true: the source of fairy tale mood and fairy tale poetry lies in the depths of the human soul! The tales are simply pictures using external happenings to help characterize the soul experiences we have described; the pictures are nourishment for the hunger arising from these experiences. This must also be true: we are quite distant from the experience but nevertheless we can feel them echoing in the fairy tale picture-images.

When all this has been said, we should not be surprised to find that the most beautiful and characteristic fairy tales have come to us from those very early times when human beings had a certain clairvoyant consciousness. Because of this, they were able to come close to the wellsprings of fairy tale mood and poetry; it is not at all strange that from those parts of the earth where souls are closer to spiritual sources than in the western world, for example in India or the Orient, fairy tales can have an especially distinctive character.

Furthermore, in German we find Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Children's and Household Tales, which they collected by listening to their relatives or other more or less simple, unsophisticated people telling stories that remind us of the ancient European sagas; even the fairy tales contain elements of the great stories of heroes and gods. We should not be surprised to hear that the most significant fairy tales have now been proven older than the sagas. The hero stories, after all, describe someone at a certain time of life in a particular difficulty, while the fairy tales show us what is relevant to every single person at every period of life from his first breath to his last. Then we understand how a fairy tale can press into itself the deep-seated soul experience on awakening from sleep, of feeling completely inadequate in the face of the powers of nature; how, too, one feels equal to it only with the consoling knowledge that something greater than oneself is present in the soul that may even allow one to triumph over the forces of nature.

When you have a feeling like this, you will understand why there are so many giants that have to be dealt with in the tales. Indeed, they make their appearance without fail as an image out of the soul's mood on waking up—of its wanting to enter the body and seeing the “gigantic” forces of nature alive there. The battle the soul has to undergo is exactly what corresponds—though this cannot be understood perhaps with the intellect—to the various descriptions of people having to fight giants. The soul realizes when confronted by battles with giants that it has only one advantage—and that is its cleverness. This is the soul's perception: You can slip into your body but what can you do about those tremendous forces of the universe? Why, there's one thing the giants don't have that you do have ... cleverness! reason! Unconsciously this lives in the soul even when it realizes the small strength it has; we find that the soul, put into this position, can express itself in the following pictures:

A man was going along the road. He came to an inn, went in, and asked for a bowl of milk soup. Flies by the dozen were buzzing around; some fell into the soup, the others he swatted. When he counted a hundred dead flies on the table, he boasted, “A hundred with one blow!” The innkeeper hung a medallion around his neck that said: He killed a hundred with one blow.

The man went further and came to a castle where the king was looking out of his window. When he caught sight of the wayfarer and his medallion, the king thought to himself, “This is a fellow I can make use of!” The king hurried out and took the man into his service to do a certain task. “There is a pack of bears coming ever and again into my kingdom. Look! if you've killed a hundred with one blow, you can put an end to those bears.” The man said, “I'll do it!” But first he demanded his wages and plenty of food before the bears should arrive, for he thought he might as well enjoy his life for a while, in case it should be cut short. Now came the time when the bears were expected; he collected together all the sweet things bears like to eat, and laid them ready.

The bears came, ate up everything they found and were so well stuffed that they had to lie down to sleep off their greed. And now as they lay helpless, the man came and finished them off. When the King arrived, the man told him, “I simply chopped off their heads while they jumped over my stick!” The King was delighted with this brave fellow and gave him a still harder task. “Look! The giants will soon be coming back into my kingdom. You must help me with them.” The man promised and when the time came, he collected a great amount of good things to eat, which he took along with him, besides a young lark and a piece of cheese. Sure enough, he met the giants and began to boast about how strong he was. One of them said, “We'll show you how much stronger we are!” Taking up a stone, he squeezed it into a powder. “Do that likewise, little man, if you're as strong as we are.” The other giant aimed an arrow up into the sky, shot it off, and only after a very long time, it dropped down again. “Do that likewise, little man, if you're as strong as we are.” At that, the man who had killed a hundred with one blow told them, “I can do better than that.” He took up a stone, stuck his piece of cheese on it and said, “Watch me press water out of the stone!” Sure enough, when he squeezed, water squirted out of the cheese. The giants were astonished. Then the man took the lark and let it fly upwards, saying, “Your arrow came back, but mine will go up so high that it never comes back!” Sure enough, the lark did not return. The giants were so astonished that they decided that they would have to overcome him with cunning, for it seemed that they couldn't manage it with strength. However, they failed to get the better of the man with cunning, for he got the better of them. They lay down together to sleep and in the dark the man put over his head a pig's bladder that was blown up and filled with blood. The giants told one another, “We can't overcome him when he's awake, so we'll have to wait until he sleeps.” As soon as he was asleep, they attacked him with great blows on the head and broke the pig's bladder. The blood gushed out; the giants were sure they had finished him off. Therefore they laid themselves to rest and slept so peacefully that it was easy for the man to put an end to them.

Just as it is in dreams, this fairy tale peters out in a somewhat vague, unsatisfactory way; nevertheless we do find in it the conflict of the human soul with the forces of nature, first with the “Bears” and then with the “Giants.” But something more is in the fairy tale. The man who “killed a hundred with one blow” stands out so clearly that we feel something vibrating in the unconscious depths of our soul to the utter trust he had in his cleverness, even in the face of those powerful forces he found so “gigantic.” It is wrong to try to explain in abstract detail the picture-images created with such artistry, and this is not the intention here. Nothing actually can disturb the character of a fairy tale if you feel how it echoes our inward soul processes. And these inner processes—however much one knows about them, however much as spiritual science itself can know about them—you do become ever and again entangled in them; then, experiencing them in a fairy tale, you see them in their most elemental, primary form. Knowledge of these soul-happenings, when it is present, does not destroy the ability to transform them into fairy tale magic.

It is certainly stimulating for the spiritual researcher to discover in fairy tales just what the human soul has need of when confronting its innermost experiences. The fairy tale mood can never be disturbed, for research that is able to arrive at the wellsprings of the tales in subconscious life will find there something that becomes poorer for the ordinary consciousness when it is described abstractly. The fairy tale itself is the most perfect description of these deepest of soul experiences. Now one can understand why Goethe put into the manifold eloquent picture-images of his Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily the rich experiences of life that Schiller expressed in abstract philosophical terms. It was pictures that Goethe wanted to use—even though he was otherwise very much given to thought—in order to express his most profound perception of the subconscious roots of human soul life.

Because fairy tales belong to our innermost feeling and emotional life and to everything connected with it, they are of all forms of literature the most appropriate for children's hearts and minds. It is evident that they are able to combine the richest spiritual wisdom with the simplest manner of expression. One has the feeling that in the magnificent world of art there is no greater art than this one, which traces the path from the unknown, unknowable depths of the soul to the charming and often playful fairy tale pictures.

When what is most difficult to understand is able to be put in the most clearly perceptible form, the result will be great art, intrinsic art, art that belongs at a fundamental level to the human being. Human nature in the child is linked to the life of the whole world in such a primary way that children must have fairy tales as soul-nourishment. The expression of spiritual force can move much more freely when it comes towards a child. It should not be entangled in abstract, theoretical ideas if the child's soul is not to become dry and disturbed, instead of remaining linked to the deep roots of human life.

Therefore there is nothing of greater blessing for a child than to nourish it with everything that brings the roots of human life together with those of cosmic life. A child is still having to work creatively, forming itself, bringing about the growth of its body, unfolding its inner tendencies; it needs the wonderful soul-nourishment it finds in fairy tale pictures, for in them the child's roots are united with the life of the world. Even we adults, given to reason and intelligence, can never be torn away from these roots of existence; we are most connected with them just when we have to be fully involved with the life of the time. Therefore at various parts of our life, if we have a healthy, open-hearted mind, we will happily turn back to fairy tales. Certainly there is not a single age or stage of human life that can take us away from what flows out of a fairy tale, for otherwise we would be giving up the deepest and most important part of our nature; we would be giving up what is incomprehensible for the intellect: a sensing within ourselves, a sense for what is pictured in a simple fairy tale and in the simple, artless, primordial fairy tale mood.

The brothers Grimm, and other collectors like them, devoted long years to bringing the world the somewhat civilized fairy tales they had gathered out of the folk tradition. Although they had no help from spiritual science, they lived wholeheartedly with these tales, convinced that they were giving human beings what belonged intrinsically to human nature itself. When you know this, you will understand that although the age of reason did its best for a hundred years or so to alienate everyone, even children, away from fairy tales, now things are changing. Fairy tale collections like the Grimms' have found their way to every person who is alive to such things; they have become the property and treasure of every child's heart, yes, property of all our hearts. This will grow even stronger when spiritual science is no longer considered just a theory but becomes a mood of soul, one that will lead the soul perceptively towards its spiritual roots. Then spiritual science, moving and spreading outwards, will be able to confirm everything that the genuine fairy tale collectors, fairy tale lovers, fairy tale tellers wanted to do.

To sum up what spiritual science would like to say today in describing the fairy tale, we can take the poetic and charming tribute that a devoted friend of the tales [Ludwig Laistner (1848 – 1896)] liked to use in his lectures, some of which I was able to hear. He was a man who understood how to collect the tales and how to value them.

“The fairy tale is like a good angel, given us at birth to go with us from our home to our earthly path through life, to be our trusted comrade throughout the journey and to give us angelic companionship, so that our life itself can become a truly heart- and soul-enlivened fairy tale!”

Dearly beloved! For many years now I have been privileged to give one or more lectures here every year on the subject of what I dare call the spiritual-scientific world view. The friends of our spiritual-scientific world view were of the opinion that even in our fateful times such a lecture should be given here in this city again.

You will understand, dear ladies and gentlemen, that from the point of view of the spiritual-scientific world view, a consideration of our time must direct our feelings and emotions to what moves us in our immediate present as its most fateful content. We see various nations of the earth fighting with each other. Above all, we see Central Europe, as if locked in a great, mighty fortress, struggling for the most sacred goods. Every human soul must then, even if it wants to turn its thoughts to the most important, perhaps the highest riddle questions of existence, take with it the feelings that come from the events, which undoubtedly carry something tremendously significant in their womb , demand confidence, strength, hope from us, and above all demand of us that we survey the facts with open eyes, that we also allow the forces to come before our soul with open eyes, which come into play in the present.

Now it is truly not my intention to add yet another reflection to the already overwhelming literature and the abundant lectures on our current events. Tonight's discussion will cover a number of other topics that have often been discussed in our present time. It has already been said, and not without good reason, that one should not allow one's clear and certain view of the conflicting interests at stake in the present to become clouded, to become obscured by all kinds of mysticism, all kinds of metaphysical, that one must be clear about the fact that the present struggle owes its existence to political causes, social causes and the interests of the peoples, and that one should certainly not speak of the fact that the spiritual life can somehow be called fruitful among the causes of the present events.

Now, of course, the spiritual scientist in particular has every reason, my dear audience, to be careful not to fall into all sorts of speculation about how the world spirits themselves came into conflict with each other or the like. But one thing must always be emphasized: Even in those ancient times, at the beginning of the Middle Ages, when our ancestors, our Germanic ancestors, the inhabitants of Central Europe, were confronted with the old Roman Empire, which was coming to an end, even then people could say: It is only a question of the spheres of interest , on the one hand the Germanic peoples of Central Europe, on the other the peoples of Southern Europe, and one should not let one's clear view be clouded by all kinds of considerations of intellectual currents or the like when considering the immediate issue.

Of course, for the immediate present, for the view that only looks at the immediate present, it is so, it is fully justified. Nevertheless, the following may perhaps be considered. One will be able to say: Yes, certainly, just as English and German interests, political interests, are correctly viewed as being opposed to each other and have led to war, so in those days Central European and Southern European interests were opposed to each other; but if one considers the whole history that followed those events, one will still have to say: Yes, Europe was shaped back then as it had to be shaped so that the entire cultural development with all its content that has since taken hold could take place. And everything that happened intellectually afterwards was already in the womb of events back then. The way in which Christianity took root in Europe depended on the validity that the Germanic peoples were able to establish for themselves at the time. All subsequent culture, in which we are only beginning to immerse ourselves, was shaped by what happened at that time.

It is incumbent upon people of the present day not to live their lives only instinctively in the same way as people of that time, for example. Times have moved forward, and now it is a matter of allowing what is happening before one's soul, even from a certain higher point of view – I do not want to say that it underlies the events, I would like to emphasize that – but what is expressed in the tremendous struggle that has never been seen before in human development, to be seen with open eyes, that is, with full consciousness, I want to emphasize that.

This is one thing. The other thing, however, my dear audience, is this: that anyone who considers the spiritual events of the present and the past, insofar as the present has developed out of this past, will see that not only at the present time, but basically for a long time already, a struggle, a wrestling of the peoples of the earth, of the people of the earth for spiritual goods is taking place, a wrestling that has often been neglected in its special nature, and perhaps especially in the last few decades. But what is happening today, what has to be fought for today in blood and death, must remind us to take a look at what is going on in souls and how in what souls strive for and want, there is also a field of battle on our earth.

It is not my responsibility to get involved in political matters. But I may touch on the fact that in the future all the declamations and sophistries that are practiced today about the causes of the war, about what one or the other did to bring about the war, that this will crystallize, especially when deeper and deeper into the future, which may not be so very far away, the situation will be understood, that it is a matter of a defense that the peoples of Central Europe, in particular the German people, have to lead against powerful nations that do not want to let it happen. It is also clear to the objective observer and will become ever clearer that the German people have to fight a defensive battle. I call attention to this for the reason that the word defensive struggle must also be applied to the spiritual goods that are to be given from the depths of the German national soul to the world, but which must be defended against attacks that no longer present themselves as attacks but which are nevertheless attacks in a spiritual sense, so to speak, on the stage of world events.

To illustrate what I actually mean, let me give an example that seems rather remote, but is only an example. For more than a century, our German intellectual culture has included a certain area of intellectual property, the tremendous value of which is unfortunately still not fully recognized. For a long time now, when speaking of a thorough-going Weltanschhauung in harmony with the present time, reference has been made to the idea of evolution. It is said that humanity has advanced to the point of realizing that individual forms of life do not stand side by side, but that individual forms develop side by side. With tremendous magnitude – to use this expression – in a spiritually appropriate way, Goethe, at the end of the eighteenth century, out of the depths of German thinking, of German intellectual research, placed this developmental idea into world development, into world culture. And it may be said that the way in which Goethe has placed the idea of development in the spiritual world culture is one of the greatest things that has emerged in the development of humanity, at least in the spiritual realm, even if one compares it with everything that Goethe achieved as a poet.

Now it must be said that not everything that Goethe gave to humanity has directly flowed into the great stream of spiritual progress. Basically, few have yet recognized the full value of Goethe's spiritual achievement. On the other hand, the idea of evolution has entered world culture through Darwinism, I would say in a purely external, more materialistic-utilitarian form, from a non-German ethnic group.

Of course, one cannot say that there is something like struggle and war when looking at things so externally and superficially. But if you look at them internally, it is clear that something greater has simply been pushed back by the intellectual and external power of a less significant, English-influenced Darwinian idea. That is one thing. But countless examples of this could be cited. Countless things could be cited – we need not concern ourselves here with the deeper reasons – that within German culture impulses have been given that are being oppressed as such, even waged against, that are to be replaced by those who have surrounded them. The intellectual encirclement began long ago. And it will be, one may say a world luck - if the word is not misunderstood - it will be a world luck, if that which we are now experiencing in such a hard way makes us aware that we also need spiritual weapons. The future will teach that we need spiritual weapons to protect the deeper against the less deep. For those who look a little deeper, what is happening today out of blood and death is only a beginning; a beginning of a struggle that will also take place on the spiritual scene.

Now many things can help to find the way in the confusion that has arisen in relation to spiritual currents - the word is of course itself challenged today, but it may still be used because it best describes the present situation. And today's reflection is intended to point the way.

Spiritual science is by no means something - as it is meant here - that is already recognized in wider circles today. Rather, spiritual science is something that is even regarded as folly, as fantasy or reverie in wider circles. But the spiritual scientist does not allow himself to be deterred by this. When Copernicus put forward the new natural scientific world view in relation to their first thoughts, when Copernicus and Galileo appeared, what they had to say to humanity was also seen as fantasy in the eyes of those who wanted to hold on to what corresponded to their habitual thinking. He who observes the way in which truth advances through the world knows that spiritual science today is in exactly the same position as natural science was several centuries ago. And he finds it understandable, indeed self-evident, that it is still regarded by the vast majority of people today as fantasy, as reverie or worse.

Now, in earlier lectures, I have had a variety of things to present here from the field of spiritual science, how the view should be directed to something else. Today I can only present, not prove, but only hint at, some basic ideas that may interest us today, the spiritual-scientific views.

Sometimes we speak of the soul of the nation. However, the soul of the nation is a concept that can, it is to be hoped, be placed in a new light by spiritual science. What is the soul of the nation in our more or less materialistically thinking times? Well, if one wants to raise oneself to the concept of the national soul at all, one says: one looks at the qualities that always emerge in a national community, that is, what a group of people, who are called a nation, have in common, and one then comes to an abstract concept and does not think of anything further, of anything real, when one speaks of the national soul.

The spiritual scientist, however, speaks of the soul of a nation as something very real, as something one can call personal reality, as something personally real. The spiritual scientist speaks from his spiritual scientific research that just as we are surrounded in the physical world by the realm of minerals, plants, animals and human beings, we are surrounded by higher realms of the soul and spirit, by beings of a supersensible world. He does not speak of these beings of a supersensible world as if they were abstract concepts, but he speaks of these entities as if they were real realities. Just as someone in ancient times who had no idea about the nature of the atmosphere could believe that there was nothing around where we live, while the modern person knows, of course, that he is surrounded by air, so the person who is familiar with spiritual science knows that, in relation to our soul and spirit, we are surrounded by spiritual beings everywhere. But not in the sense of pantheism, but in the sense of a spiritual world that is populated by spiritual beings everywhere. And we also count the folk soul among such spiritual beings, we count the individual folk souls of the various peoples. We speak of real and individual beings when we speak of the folk souls of the individual peoples. I can only hint at this briefly today because time is limited.

But what the national soul has as an entity can only be understood by considering the relationship of this national soul to the individual soul within such a nation. And here we immediately come to an area where all of today's psychology is quite inadequate in the face of spiritual research. With this consideration, especially with regard to the contemplation of the soul, one stands at the beginning of a completely new way of looking at things with spiritual science. The person who speaks of the soul in the usual way of soul science today speaks of the soul as if it were a simple thing in which will, feeling and thinking and so on surge up and down. For the spiritual researcher, this is just as if one were to speak of color in general or of light in general. Anyone who has heard a little about physics knows that we can get behind the nature of light by observing the rainbow band of the entire spectrum, by observing how light manifests itself in connection with the phenomena of the world, let us say in a sevenfold or, for the sake of simplicity, in a threefold way. On the one hand, light manifests itself in the spectrum in such a way that we have, so to speak, reddish yellow on the outside, green in the middle, and blue-violet on the other side. And it is precisely through this that we come to understand the way in which light works. This enables us to look at light in terms of the way it works and to know that light really does live in the seven colors of the spectrum.

Just as the physicist today takes this for granted, so too will the science of the soul one day take for granted, but also as a scientific necessity, a threefold mode of action of the soul. And there we call that in the field of spiritual science, which, as it were, expresses itself in the soul as reddish-yellow expresses itself in light; we call that in spiritual science, in relation to the soul, the sentient soul. And we call that which, as it were, constitutes the center of the soul, as green is the center of the band of colors, the mind or feeling soul. And we call that which, as it were, appears on the other side as the manifestation of the soul, as blue-violet appears in the band of colors, the consciousness soul. And spiritual science must stand on the standpoint that one recognizes the soul from this structure just as one recognizes the mode of action of light from the color band. And just as light expresses itself everywhere, in every link, in every nuance of the color band, so the threefold effect of the soul expresses itself through what we call our self, our actual I. Truly, there will come a time when there is a science of the soul, as scientific as today's physics is, when the spectrum of the soul will be characterized as the sentient soul, as the mind or feeling soul, as the consciousness soul.

And if we now look at the individual peoples of Europe, we find: What characterizes them – but now in a real way, not in the abstract way that it is characterized by the previous ethnology – what characterizes these peoples is how the folk soul, the real, real folk soul, relates to the individual soul, the soul of the individual human being who belongs to the community of peoples.

And here we find, first of all, that the whole nature of the Italian people can be understood in a luminous way through this – I cannot go into this in detail now, but if it were described in full, one would see how what was previously ethnology would would step forward in a radiant way. The Italian people are characterized by the fact that the folk soul, insofar as it belongs to their nationality, intervenes in the individual soul of the Italian people, insofar as it belongs to their nationality, in such a way that this intervention occurs primarily in the sentient soul. Everything that has emerged as Italian culture is, comparatively speaking, the expression of a dialogue between the Italian folk soul and the sentient soul of the individual members of the Italian people. And all the one-sidedness, but also all the greatness of the Italian development, is based on the fact that the link of the soul life, the nuance of the soul life, which we call the sentient soul, is inspired and impelled in a one-sided way by the forces of the Italian folk soul.

Now one might think that I am only talking about abstract concepts with all these things. This is absolutely not the case. For spiritual science further shows us that these three members of the life of the soul, which have been enumerated, are really connected with the whole being, the comprehensive being of the human soul. And from the research in spiritual science, we can say that what we call the sentient soul initially forms the expression of all passions, all impulsive aspects of human nature; that it is the expression of the sensations that well up from the center of the human soul. But at the same time, it is also the part of the human soul that, as elementary as it is, as much as it is initially at a childlike stage, so it is connected with that which passes through births and deaths of the human soul, which belongs to the eternal part of the human soul, which passes through the gate of death and enters the spiritual world after death. Much more than the other aspects of the soul's life is that which unfolds in the sentient soul, that which belongs to the eternal in the soul.

But it also belongs to the eternal that the sentient soul contains only that which is linked to the eternal in the temporal, so that the human being directly lives this eternal as elementary life. If I could expand on this further, which would take many hours, it would point out to us how, precisely through this dialogue and these interactions between the Italian folk soul and the individual soul as a sentient soul, great Italian painting came into being, Dante's poetry came into being, who, let us say, gave a picture of the eternal in his “Divine Comedy”. All these bearers of Italian culture have given these things in such a way that one must say: What they have given is the result of the interaction of the national soul with the sentient soul of the individual, through everything that is accessible to the sentient soul of the individual soul. These things will be characterized in more detail when we turn to other nations and compare their characteristics with those of the Italian people.

But now something very peculiar happens. Apart from the general facts that I have just mentioned, we must also bear in mind that each age, each historical epoch, is assigned, as it were, the effect on a particular part of the human soul as a special mission in the course of time. It cannot be said that the wisdom that rules in the development of the world is always the same in all ages, so that the sentient soul, the soul of understanding or mind, the consciousness soul can work in the same way. That which comes from the human soul must meet the demands of world culture. And now, a deeper consideration of the spiritual development of newer peoples and especially of Europe shows that the activity of the sentient soul was essentially concluded by the middle or end of the sixteenth century, and that therefore the greatness of a people that is based on the sentient soul must be concluded by the sixteenth century. This in turn explains why everything that has been formed within Italian culture since that time, up to the present day, gives the impression of being outdated, and this can be said quite objectively. When we refresh our soul – and this is deeply satisfying for everyone – by drawing on the essence of southern Europe, as so many artists, as Goethe and others have done, it is due to the greatness of the Italian national spirit, which in the sixteenth century; the other is all after-effects, and it could easily be shown how it is prepared in the depths of the historical impulses, that what has since been asserted as Italian greatness must sound so hollow and empty. These things can now only be hinted at, as I said.

Some things, because they have to be briefly mentioned, have to be stated somewhat radically; but if you follow the lines of thought that are presented here, you will see how much more easily they can penetrate into the understanding that we must seek in the present, the understanding of the interrelationships between the peoples of Europe.

If we now consider the French national soul, we have to look for the essential peculiarities in the fact that there is an interaction between the very real national soul and the intellectual or emotional soul.

And everything that French culture has ever achieved can be explained by this peculiar interaction between the national soul and the intellectual or emotional soul of the individuals who belong to the French nation. This also explains why the French are particularly predisposed to combining and assembling facts, and to applying even the most profound concepts only in a way that is convenient for this world. This explains why even in the poetry of the French people, even when it rises to the classical heights, there is still an effort to construct as systematically as possible, for example in drama, to proceed as far as possible according to certain rules; this is the peculiarity of the intellectual soul. This intellectual or emotional soul brings to manifestation in the soul that which, so to speak, half points to the eternal of the soul, but which, on the other hand, points to the completely transitory temporal, which the soul experiences only in the physical world, in connection with the physical between birth and death.

Recently, some psychological societies have once again been pondering why the French mind in particular is so materialistic, why, let us say, even the greatest philosopher of the French people, Descartes – or Cartesius – constructed a philosophy entirely according to the model of mathematics. This is for no other reason than that the whole culture of the French mind comes from the interaction between the soul of the people and the soul of the mind or soul. How often are we Germans quite peculiar when we try to establish harmony between meaning and form in poetry, when we try above all to allow the content to flow into the form in such a way that the content creates its form, how are we when we now look at the same thing in the artistic products of the intellectual or emotional soul of the French, where it is especially important to build rhythm and rhyme in a systematic way. The French have a completely different feeling for rhythm and rhyme than we Germans do. We Germans are quite capable – and Goethe showed this throughout many of his dramas – of creating rhyming rhythms without rhyme. The French, who want to be justifiably French poets, find this quite impossible. Everything that makes up the peculiar character of French poetry, that which makes up the peculiarity of French characters, comes from the interaction of the French national soul with the intellectual or emotional soul of the individual.

If we now turn to the English people, we find that the individual Briton who seeks his connection with the national soul in his nationality is subject above all to an interaction between this national soul and the consciousness soul. Now this consciousness soul is that which, in relation to the outer man, in relation to everything that man is in his dealings with the world of the senses, is the most highly developed part of the soul. But at the same time it is the only thing that is limited to the world we pass through between birth and death. We can, so to speak, look up to the loftiest expressions of the British spirit, we will find everywhere that its expressions come from the interaction of the British national soul with the consciousness soul of the individual British, which, so to speak, is directed into the physical world with its best powers.

This peculiarity of the British character will become even more apparent to us if we now immediately mention the peculiarity of the interaction between the German national soul and the soul of the individual German. There we see – and we shall understand this later through individual expressions of the German nature – there we see that just as light manifests itself in all color nuances, just as reddish yellow, green, blue violet are all expressions of light, so the soul as a whole is the expression of the self, of the I. And that which constitutes the substance of the German people is rooted entirely in the ego, in the self. And the interaction between what we call the German national soul and the individual German, insofar as he stands within his nationality, is the interaction between the national soul and the ego. Hence the peculiarity of the German soul, that it is not one-sidedly attuned to the revelations of the sentient soul, the intellectual soul or the mind soul or the consciousness soul, but that it expresses itself sometimes in this way and sometimes in that; that it strives for universality, for the all-embracing, and that at the same time it strives for inner depth, always wanting to experience more deeply all the different nuances of the soul life in a living way. It can be said that just as the I, the self, is the deepest part of the human being, and the sentient soul, the mind or emotional soul, and the consciousness soul are its expressions, so it is with the German, insofar as he belongs to his people , that in relation to the most intimate part of his mind, in relation to the depths of his soul, when he rises to the best that can flow from the German nature, he holds a dialogue with his deepest soul with the spirit of his people. Thus he also has a feeling, sometimes only an instinct, but on the heights of humanity also a clear consciousness of this confrontation with the spiritual powers of the world.

If we now look back again at the peculiarities of the British people, it becomes clear to us – and I would like to give an example that has greatness, because no one will accuse me of citing Shakespeare to denigrate him, and I would of course consider myself to be a madman, like anyone else, would consider myself a fool if I were to doubt Shakespeare's greatness in the slightest; of course I count Shakespeare among the best poets in the world – but it is one thing to recognize the foundations of the world's effectiveness and another to form value judgments.

Let us consider one of Shakespeare's most characteristic works, the work in which Shakespeare's thoughts and feelings can come to us so fully from his soul, let us consider his “Hamlet”. Let us see how real riddles of the world and of humanity are brought to our soul in Hamlet. “To be or not to be, that is the question.” The ghost of Hamlet's father appears; one might say that the dead intrude into the world of the living. But do we recognize Shakespeare's greatness on the one hand precisely in the fact that he is able to present his characters in such a wonderfully sharply outlined way, in a typical and completely individual characterization, showing us precisely that the part of his soul that is called the consciousness soul is directed towards the external-historical. What is solid in the world about the human being on two legs and reveals itself through the human being is characterized by Shakespeare from the consciousness soul with a wonderfully sharp contour. That is the remarkable thing, that he has become one of the greatest, that he was able to characterize a world from the consciousness soul as it stands before us. That is the characteristic.

But let us look at him just at the point where he wants to touch the boundary that leads beyond the sensual world into the supersensible. He wants to touch it. He wants to cross over this boundary. Hamlet's soul shows what happens to a person who wants to cross over this boundary. The question is raised: to be or not to be? He looks towards the other world, but how far does Hamlet get? He only gets to the threshold, he looks into that land from which no traveler has yet returned.

In this we have the entire workings of the consciousness soul in that the poet is great at characterizing what is in the physical world; but uncertainty immediately befalls the soul when it wants to go beyond the physical world. Shakespeare in particular shows us how he also emerged from the interaction of the folk soul with the consciousness soul.

If we now compare this with an episode in the greatest world poem, which is also the greatest German poem and the greatest German intellectual achievement, we conjure up the scene in the second part of Goethe's “Faust” where the question of “to be or not to be” also arises before the human soul, and the spiritual world and the sensual-material world stand before the human soul full of significance. Mephisto is there, he has the key to the spiritual world, but he is the representative of the materialistic view, he is the representative of those beings who only see the material, the transitory, out of the spirit. He has the key, just as science has the key to the higher secrets, but, if it is only filled with materialism, it cannot enter into these secrets. Goethe even depicts Mephisto as having to place himself in relation to the higher mysteries. And Mephisto addresses to Faust a question that touches so closely on the Hamlet question: “You will enter the indefinite, you will come to nothingness.” There is a reference to that which is to assert itself in Faust as spirit. And Faust replies to Mephisto: “In your nothingness I hope to find the All.”

You see, this is the answer that comes from the depths of the I, the I that knows it is connected to the world spirit, the I that is directly strengthened by the fact that it is the German I that experiences the interaction between the national soul and what lives as the self in the soul. Doubt alone enters into the one-sidedness of the consciousness soul, the Hamlet doubt, precisely that which is truly experienced as the deepest. Then certainty enters and says: Because I experience the divine that flows and is through the world in my own inner being, I know that I must find the All in your [Nothingness]. That is the significant thing, that precisely this nature of the German essence has been expressed in the greatest German intellectual achievement. And what I have discussed in this one scene from Faust, it goes, like the spirit of Faust, through the whole of Faust. That is the significant thing, that at this point this influence of the folk soul into the depths of the soul is expressed through all the nuances of the soul.

But that is also what is so difficult for other Europeans to understand. It is this that appears to the other Europeans as an enigma. And enigmas that cannot be solved are best banished from the soul by such means as are now being used in the sophisticated and defamatory declamations that are being directed from all sides out of hatred towards the German national character, because it cannot be understood.

But from this interaction of the national soul with the individual soul of the human being, insofar as this human being is rooted in his nationality, follows what I would like to call the ever-rejuvenating power of the German spirit, of the German national soul. For by cultivating his innermost being, by being able to hold a dialogue with the national soul, the German always draws closer to this national soul. And when any cultural period has expired, when a cultural period has become decrepit and dies, then a new interaction of the German national soul with the national spirit occurs, a rejuvenation of the whole being. But through this direct contact with the national soul, the German essence not only rejuvenates that which lives within the German spirit itself, but also that which, as spiritual culture in the world, must also flow into the German essence.

Let us see how Christianity flowed into the old, worn-out cultures at the end of ancient times. Oh, one can observe how this Christianity adopted old forms, ancient forms of religions in the Greek and Roman folk. How that which was Greek philosophy was superimposed like a religious element, superimposed over that which was carried into human development as a living impulse as the deed of the living Christ.

And then we see how Christianity enters into the self-refreshing and rejuvenating spirit of the German being. This can be observed in individual phenomena. For example, let us see how the “Heliand” was written in the ninth century, a German way of presenting the events in Palestine that are grouped around Christ Jesus. If we allow this remarkable ninth-century poem to take effect on us, it shows us above all the peculiarity that here, out of the German spirit, the events surrounding Christ Jesus are described, who has taken Christ Jesus completely into his own mind, who sees a longing, an ideal in it, to live in his own soul life in such a way that the forces of Christ permeate this own soul life. Everything that is German soul should be permeated with Christianity. This is the source of the feeling that arises when reading the Heliand and letting it take effect in one: All this is related to us, the eternal of Christ is described to us in such a way that it does not appear as renewing, as rejuvenating an old culture, but rather that it appears as if the power of Christ itself is absorbed in its youthfully fresh achievement and is directly present, rejuvenating itself.

And then we see how, for example, such profound poetry, which of course did not originate on German soil in its first form, like Parzifal – and I could name others – how such poetry has been seized by the German essence, how it has been deepened, how the adventurous nature that was formerly associated with Parzifal appears to us in the works of Wolfram von Eschenbach and later in those of other writers, and how we see Parzifal as a representative of the striving human soul in general. We see in it something that lives in such a way that its striving is intimately connected with the forces in the human soul that strive for the highest, for the path to the spiritual. And we see, for example, how medieval religious spiritual life is grasped so profoundly by the power of what I have just explained. We see, for example, in the work of Meister Eckhart, this profound German mystic, how he constantly speaks of the fact that the divine must merge with the soul itself, that the soul can feel how God lives in it. Yes, that everything the soul experiences as thinking, feeling and willing can be experienced as if God Himself were thinking, feeling and willing in it. To let God rule completely within oneself becomes the ideal of German mysticism, the ideal of Meister Eckhart and others.

And if we follow the course of this spiritual current, we find numerous expressions by him that show us the same way of thinking. One of his expressions, I would just like to present it to you now for the reason that it can show this way of thinking so extraordinarily characteristically. It is a saying by Angelus Silesius:

I die and do not live either. God himself dies in me,
And what I am supposed to live, he also lives for and for.

Here we have direct proof of the intimate union of the individual human soul with the all-embracing spirit of the world. And do we not see in this an expression of an infinitely profound idea of immortality, an idea of immortality that can confront us, so to speak, in gigantic grandeur? Here Angelus Silesius says: I die and do not live either, God Himself dies in me. But when God Himself dies in me, it means that the event of death is experienced by the God who lives in me; then death can only be an appearance, because God cannot die in me! One sees that this profound German mystic grasps even the thought of death in connection with the divine, living permeation of the world, and he comes to the certainty of immortality from the experience of the divine world within himself. This stems from the fact that the German cannot remain with an old realization, but, as is so magnificently expressed in Faust, always strives for the sources of life. And even if he has studied everything, like Faust himself, he strives beyond everything, he strives for direct contact with the spirit of the world. For that is the peculiar nature, that is the essence, that the self seeks interaction with the national soul in German intellectual life. Therefore, out of this nature of its essence, the true German mind also feels in harmony with the eternal forces of the world that lie beyond death.

That is why we find such profound words in the works of Jakob Böhme and later in those of Fichte, in different ways in both, but both striving in the same direction. They said: He who grasps the essence of death from the depths of the human soul actually grasps that which is already immortal within mortal human nature. That which we carry with us through death is the self, which we have within us even while we live here on earth between birth and death. Therefore, Jakob Böhme, and later Fichte in the manner of Jakob Böhme, regards it as the highest goal to become aware of that which passes through the gate of death, that which lives in man as the eternal, to become aware of it already in earthly life, so that that which can be recognized as the fully developed eternal can be carried through the gate of death, out of the mortal body. And here Jacob Böhme expresses in a wonderful way the saying that is so characteristic of the peculiarity of the German national character as described. He says:

He who does not die before he dies
Perishes when he dies.

These are profound words! For it should be said: Those who are unable to unite during their life on earth in the body with the immortal, cannot in a proper way achieve the consciousness of their unity with the spirit freed from the body after death.

He who does not die before he dies
Will perish when he dies.

These words are spoken with such depth of feeling, and they are spoken by someone who wants to unfold her best powers by allowing the spirit and soul of her nation to weave into her own depths what it wants to give her.

In this respect, the Russian national spirit is incomprehensible, quite incomprehensible, precisely in terms of what is most deeply characteristic of the German national soul. This Russian national spirit, whose characteristic peculiarity, however strange it may seem to some, may appear strange to some, but since I can only characterize many things very briefly, sometimes radical words must be used -, this Russian national spirit, whose peculiarity in relation to Western European and, above all, Central European intellectual culture is arrogance, pride. When people often speak of the modesty of the Russian national spirit, this is based, in relation to what we see as characteristic, on a complete misunderstanding of the innermost impulses of this Russian national spirit. If one can see in the Italian people how there is an interaction between the national soul and the soul of the individual; if one can see in the French people how there is an interaction between the national soul and the soul of the mind or emotions; in the British people how there is an interaction between the national soul and the consciousness soul of the individual; and in the German being, a direct experience of the national soul in the self of the individual, then one must say: the Russian being, to this day he lives in such a way, despite all the forces he carries within himself, that the Russian national soul has not yet found its way into the individual soul. That is why someone who is completely immersed in Russian national identity, whether as a philosopher or as an artist, does not experience the kind of intimate coexistence that the German seeks through the characteristics just described within his being.

The Russian person does not know this flowing in of the forces of the national soul into one's own soul, into the individual soul. The Russian person sees something in the national soul that hovers over the individual souls like a mist. A Russian person, even a profound philosopher like Soloviev, who is the greatest philosophical mind of the Russian people, does not speak as a German would, for example, saying: I have my trust in the deepest core of my soul, which is within me, and it can connect with the divine that flows and weaves through the world. And so he is certain of true spiritual progress for humanity because he feels the power within him through which God reigns in him, which finds expression in the great creations of the German spirit.

That conversation, which every German, the simplest, most original German instinctively feels, is basically quite unknown even to a philosophical Russian person. And so we see, especially in the case of the most outstanding spirit of the Russian people, of the Russian world-view striving, in Soloviev, who died in 1900, we see in this great philosopher: when we go through his works, then one has to – forgive the expression – get out of one's Western European skin in order to live one's way into what one encounters there. It has greatness – that should not be denied, greatness should be acknowledged wherever it is to be found in the world – but it has greatness in such a way that when Solowjow, for example, speaks of what should happen through Russian culture should come, it will come as if from the heights of the mist, as a kind of nourishment, as something that should be sprinkled down by grace at a certain time into the deeds of the Russian people. He is waiting for a miracle. When God Himself works from the heights of the beyond into people, then people will move forward.

The Russian sees the folk spirit above the individual souls; he does not see it working in the three characterized soul powers, let alone really being able to grasp that intimate experience of the spirit in the individual soul itself, which is precisely the characteristic of the Central European folk striving. Therefore, we also find in the great philosopher the peculiarity that the folk soul does not grasp with its powers either the sentient soul, the intellectual soul, the emotional soul, or the consciousness soul. We find in Solovyov the peculiarity that these individual soul powers are at work in him. We see how they string together one idea and one sensation after another according to rules that we in Central Europe would never be able to perceive as logic or inner necessity. We see, as it were, the spirit of the people, revered by the Russian people, hovering in airy heights. And we see: there the souls can be active with their chaotically whirling soul forces. That this can be made clear precisely in the case of one of the greatest minds of the Russian world is remarkable.

And again and again we must remind ourselves of the momentous words spoken by Lessing in his Testament. Oh, this Testament of Lessing's, which is called 'The Education of the Human Race'! He explains how the whole development of humanity is a great unity. And he expounds an idea which, through spiritual science, will be elevated to the rank of a scientific truth: the idea of the repeated earthly lives of human beings. There are very clever people today who say: Well, Lessing created great things, but then he grew old. One need not attach so much importance to the fact that he came up with the idea that the soul always carries over again into a later epoch that which can be made fruitful in a later epoch by an earlier one. But Lessing truly did not grow old and decrepit, nor did he become weak-minded, as very clever people say, even if they do not say it in relation to this 'Education of the Human Race'. Rather, it was precisely at this point that Lessing grasped in the deepest sense what the human soul experiences when it can experience the rule of the world spirit within itself as the most characteristic of its deepest experiences. From this consciousness Lessing spoke the weighty word as in a testament: “I feel as a human soul through its own content, through its own essence; I too have surged from time to time, from eternity to eternity.” Through what I am, I am immortal. And now he concludes: “Is not all of eternity mine?”

There is a conception of the spirit, a cultural conception, which is the direct consequence of this ever-rejuvenating power of the German national soul.

Let us compare this with the belief of the great Russian philosopher, Solowjow, that what man can achieve can only be achieved by a miracle giving the Russian people their mission themselves. If we compare these two beliefs, we have every reason to understand why what is Russian in nature cannot understand what is Western European, what is Central European, and especially what is German in nature. And therein lies the entire arrogance, the entire arrogance of the Russian intellectuals, these Russian intellectuals who have been talking for a long time about how what the West has achieved in terms of culture is actually rotten, ripe for destruction, and that it must be replaced by something that could emerge from the forces of the Russian character into world culture. This was not given much consideration in times that were not as war-torn as our present fateful times, but it has always been the basic tenor of Russian intellectual life that Western culture is rotten.

We have seen the most diverse minds, Khomyakov, Katkov, Aksakov and so on, appear in Russian intellectual life in the nineteenth century. They all repeatedly say: Western European intellectualism must perish. One of these minds even went so far as to say: In this Western European culture, everything has been led by the impulses of art to that human-selfish, to that egoistic individualism, which leads people apart and founds everything that is to be established on violence, on servitude and hatred.

According to important Russian minds of the nineteenth century, these are the characteristics of Western European culture: “violence, servitude and hatred”. While, according to the same minds, Russian culture is said to be based on “freedom, concord and love”.

Now, Solowjow was an important mind, an important spirit. And precisely because he was so great, the feeling that he had to develop from his intimate connection with the Russian essence was that he says: the national soul still hovers above us. We have not yet connected with it in our individual souls. God must perform a miracle, must radiate down to us that which is to be our mission.

But he was convinced that it is up to the Russian people to redeem the world, because Western European culture has reached its death throes, because it has become decrepit. So he, Soloviev, says further: We do not want to destroy this Western European culture, but we want to heal it.

What has just been said about Russian culture should not be seen as a special impulse within the spirituality of the Russian people. For precisely in Russia, what is to be mentioned can be counted among the symptoms that arise from the instincts of nationality. Therefore, in Solowjow, as in his Slavophile predecessors (although he fought against them), we see a connection between what they, out of their arrogance, characterize as the mission of the Russian people; we see how they deduce the whole course of future politics from it. We see them, out of these impulses, demanding that Russia expand ever further and further against the West, that Constantinople become a Russian city, that the Sea of Marmara become a Russian lake, and so on. Everything that we are experiencing today, everything that underlies the attack that the Russian essence is also politically waging against the Central European, the German essence, everything is completely permeated, in terms of feelings and emotions, especially in the best Russians, by what has just been characterized, by the haughty conviction that Russia alone can save European culture, indeed world culture.

It is precisely the contrast between the German and the Russian nature that makes it possible to understand what the driving forces of our present world culture are and what struggles the German nature will be drawn into in the future, which will most certainly come.

Dear attendees, one can refer back to Goethe's “Faust” when one wants to show what is mentioned here as the rejuvenating forces of the German national soul, what has been characterized as such. Don't we see Faust standing there – Goethe wrote this scene in the 1770s , the words have become almost trivial, having been heard so often and probably already declaimed by everyone themselves – we see Faust standing there, wanting to escape from everything he has absorbed from the forces of the past, because he wants to connect directly in his soul with living knowledge, we hear his words:

Alas, I have now studied philosophy,

law and medicine,

and unfortunately also theology

to the full, with great effort.

There I stand, poor fool that I am,

and am no wiser than before!

Goethe wrote this from his own consciousness, from what he himself felt in the seventies of the eighteenth century.

Then came what can truly be called a 'rejuvenation of the German spirit' through German idealism. Goethe himself, like Faust, strove to absorb the sources of life with his thinking, feeling and willing into his soul. Then the great German idealistic philosophy, which had been pushed back precisely by the invasion of the French and also the Russian worldviews, came to Central Europe itself. Then came what must be seen as an achievement: the fact that these struggles again made it possible for the greatness of this German philosophical idealism to be discussed in wider circles.

And so they came, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, who tried to present law and medicine to the German people in a rejuvenated way. And they were not only philosophers, for Schelling wrote a yearbook for medicine; Fichte wrote a treatise on the state. And they all wanted to be theologians. The German intellectual powers that emerged from the depths of the German soul after Goethe wrote these Faust words were tremendous.

Alas, I have now studied philosophy,
law and medicine,
and unfortunately also theology
to the full, with great endeavor.
There I stand, poor fool that I am,
and am as wise as before!

But let us now assume that Goethe did not write these words of Faust in 1772, but only in 1840, after a new philosophy, a new jurisprudence, a new theology had passed through the German soul. Do you think that Goethe, if he had written the beginning of Faust in 1840, only after emerging from the Faust mood, would have written the words as follows:

Now, thank God,
I have studied with Fichte, Schelling, Hegel;
so there I am, I wise man,
and no longer need to be as stupid as before?

Even in the 1790s, despite all this greatness that had passed through German culture, Goethe would certainly have said:

I have now, alas! studied philosophy,
law and medicine,
and unfortunately theology as well
with great zeal and effort.
There I stand, poor fool that I am,
and am no wiser than before!

And again, just as before, Faust would have longed for the sources of life and sought his refuge in the living spirit that was to appear to him. The German does not crave knowledge that has grown old; he always craves that knowledge that has flowed from the depths of the soul and emerged into the visible world. He craves the rejuvenating power of the German spirit itself, as it lives in the interrelationship between the German national soul and the German soul of the individual.

That is what one must feel, ladies and gentlemen, if one wants to visualize the fundamental character of the German spirit. And one may say: it has actually been felt, felt even by those who now dare to say the most defamatory, hateful and poisonous things about the peculiarity of the German spirit in the most diverse languages.

Let us look, for example, to the West. It is very strange: if we go to the far West, we find an excellent spirit of the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson, as is natural for an English-writing writer, names the English as the first people in the world. Yet in numerous passages of his writings, he shows us that he values the Germans more than the English. And today, we can reflect on some of what this English-writing writer said, because it would be unpleasant for us to give a characteristic of our own nature in our own words. Emerson, who had a sense of the rejuvenating power of the German national soul, said the following about Goethe:

One [quality] in particular, which Goethe shares with his entire nation, makes him stand out in the eyes of both the French and English public:

— spoken in English in the nineteenth century, mind you —

that everything in his work is based solely on inner truth.

Now, I would like to say: What more could you want? In English, you hear that Goethe is the representative of Germanness, that he expresses something that he has in common with the whole nation: “that everything in his work is based solely on inner truth.”

In England and America, people respect talent, but they are only satisfied when it works for or against a party of their conviction. In France, people are delighted when they see brilliant ideas, regardless of where they lead. In all these countries, however, talented men write as far as their gifts reach. If what they present stimulates the discerning reader and contains nothing that offends against good manners, it is considered sufficient. So many columns, so many pleasantly and usefully spent hours. The German mind possesses neither the French vivacity nor the Englishman's understanding, honed for the practical, nor, finally, the American adventurousness. What it does have, however, is a certain probity that never stops at the outward appearance of things, but always comes back to the main question: “Where is this going?” The German public demands of a writer that he stand above things and simply express himself on them. Intellectual agility is present, well and good: what does it advocate? What is the man's opinion? Where does he get his ideas?

The English [...] only see the individual, they do not know how to grasp humanity as a whole according to higher laws.

The Germans think for Europe.

The English do not appreciate the depth of the German genius.

Dear attendees, the entire nature of this presentation shows what I have tried to characterize for you today from the perspective of spiritual science. Emerson senses something of this intimate connection between the self of the individual German and that which passes through the world as the Spirit of Truth, as an ideal that indeed hovers over German development. Emerson also sensed this, as he says in the following words:

For this reason, the distinctive terms used in higher conversation are all of German origin. While the English and the French, who are mentioned with distinction because of their acumen and erudition, approach their studies and their point of view with a certain superficiality and their personal character is not too deeply connected with what they have taken up and with the way they express themselves, is not too deeply connected, Goethe, the head and content of the German nation, speaks, not because he has talent, but the truth concentrates its rays in his soul and shines out from it. He is wise in the highest degree, though his wisdom may often be obscured by his talent. However excellent what he says is, he has something in his eye that is even better. [...] He has that fearsome independence that springs from contact with the truth.

From many of the hateful words we hear today, my dear audience, if you are sensitive to such tones, you can discern what Emerson calls “the fearsome independence that springs from the truth”. That independence that is so unbearable to those who cannot muster sympathy for such things. One truly does not need to be chauvinistic to express these things. They arise not only objectively for the observer who stands in the midst of the spiritual essence, they also arise for those who can rise above the peculiarities of their nation.

But one also has such feelings in other places, and in order to illustrate to some extent what I have discussed from spiritual scientific research, I would also like to add the following: Perhaps you know that one of those who spoke the most brutal, hateful, venomous words against the German 'barbarians' was the Belgian-French poet Maeterlinck, Maeterlinck, who himself found so much recognition within the German character. I would like to draw attention to a peculiar compatriot of Maeterlinck. And I would like to tell you a little about this compatriot in a very brief way. So, he is a fellow countryman of Maeterlinck, and a Franco-Belgian poet. When he talks about the influence that an archetypally German spirit, an archetypally German soul, has had on him, when he talks about the influence that Novalis has had on him, this Franco-Belgian poet says some very strange and significant things. It was some time ago, but it is still characteristic to hear a Belgian who writes in French talk about what the soul of Novalis has become for him. This Belgian says: “Isn't Novalis, out of his German uniqueness, a spirit who created something that cannot even be expressed, that is not limited to the earthly at all!”

And so this Belgian writer comes up with something special to describe the purely spiritual influence and the deep impression that Novalis makes on him. He thinks of saying: When you read Schiller or Shakespeare, you find everything that is poetically depicted in Schiller and Shakespeare, but it is only of interest to what is experienced by people on earth. But if one wants to characterize what the soul of Novalis wrote, one would have to assume that spirits from the spiritual heights, spirits from other planets would be interested in it. What Schiller and Shakespeare said is only of interest to people on earth; what Novalis wrote must also interest angels, it must also interest beings that have never heard of the earth. So significant, so deeply connected is what Novalis wrote with the spiritual forces of the German national soul. He characterizes the nature of the influence that the original German, Novalis, has had on him very peculiarly, and he says:

But if he needed other proof, it would lead him among those whose works almost stir silence. She would open the gate of the realm where some loved her for her own sake, without worrying about the small gestures of their bodies. They would climb together to the lonely plateaus where consciousness rises [by one step] and where all those who are restless about themselves [feel] attentively survey the immense ring that connects the world of appearances with our higher worlds. She would go with him to the boundaries of humanity; for at the point where man seems to end, he probably [only] begins, and his most essential and inexhaustible parts are [only] in the invisible, where he must be on his guard unceasingly. On these heights alone, there are thoughts that the soul can approve of, and ideas [that resemble and are] as commanding as she is. There, humanity has ruled for a moment, and these dimly illuminated peaks are perhaps the only lights that announce the earth in the spiritual realm. Their reflection truly has the color of our soul. We feel that the passions of the mind and body would resemble the tolling of bells in the eyes of a [strange] reason; but [the people I am talking about have come out of the small village of passions in their works and said things that are also of value to those who do not belong to the earthly community [count].

This French-writing Belgian feels impressed by Novalis. He feels the magic breath of the German spirit as it flows from Novalis to him. If one were to believe what Maeterlinck, his fellow countryman, said about German “barbarism” after the outbreak of the war, one would not believe that this Belgian would have said: Oh, these useless screamers, who only resort to phrases, they should remain silent when it comes to matters of the mind!

In truth, it is difficult to question one's soul and to discern its weak childish voice amidst the useless clamor that surrounds it.

Yes well, my dear attendees, the French-writing Belgian whom I have quoted here has already spoken, but I have somewhat mystified you. It is the same person who said what I read about Novalis; it is Maeterlinck himself. He only spoke in this way in the healthy days of his soul. One can only believe when reading that it was said by a completely different personality. This is what has become of those who once felt something of the magic breath of the German soul. Maeterlinck himself wrote about Novalis in this way.

From this we can see what will be necessary to defend the German soul against the misjudgment of its essence, with the weapons that we ourselves must take from it as its members. And this defense will truly become more and more necessary. What good does it do that the German soul, having also become part of external culture, has already been understood! That which separates it from those who have become its enemies will speak ever louder if it is not defended by the German essence itself. And what we hear today, one will have to be convinced, as [what we have heard] is in some respects only a beginning, especially with regard to the deeper currents of human life.

I would like to give another example. Shortly before the outbreak of this war, an Englishwoman wrote a book about Germany. Yes, you see, an Englishwoman who differs from many of her compatriots in that she really got to know the German character. Because she was in Germany for eight years. She got to know universities, clinics, hospitals, educational institutions, all kinds of places. But she also got to know the German character, which, as an emanation of the German soul, must after all be present in every soul, even if it masks and hides itself in ordinary life. The book was written shortly before the war. As I said, not in Berlin, not in Cologne or Leipzig, but in England and in English, the following was said about Germany:

We read a great deal [...] about the new Germany and its new spirit. But there is no new Germany and no new spirit. What exists is the mature work of generations, which has always been. Blinded by the sudden splendor of Germany's prosperity, we are inclined to forget that, except for prosperity, it has rarely occupied a place other than one of the very top among nations. In religion and philosophy, Germany has shone at a time when everything around it was dark; in literature, it has made an epoch-making impact; in music, it has always dominated. [...]

German literature, German religion, German philosophy are books with seven seals for us. What we do know is how many dreadnaughts Germany has and how much its trade has increased. What is really important is not the dreadnaught, but the brain of its builder, the courage and talent of its commander. What is really important is not the increase in sales, but the human qualities that prompted it.

Forty years ago, Germany was fighting for its existence, and it is still fighting for it today. It is completely wrong to believe that Germany is already at its peak. It is fighting a quiet but determined battle against powerful rivals whose power and experience was gained generations ago.

At every border and across the water, the opponents sit, commercially and politically, eagerly awaiting the moment when Germany slackens just a little, so that they can pounce on her and overwhelm her. Germany knows this very well.

It would be good if those who are now reflecting on the cause of the war were also listened to, if those who say what the mood within Germany should be towards those who lurked in the period leading up to this war were also listened to.

And if we ask, my dear attendees: How do you understand German culture when you would like to destroy this German culture with more or less pride or from other points of view? A few more characteristics on this point at the end. There is, for example, a true Russian intellectual of the present day. If one picks up his latest book, one can get the impression, from the last words he says about Goethe, that he counts Goethe among the greatest in the development of humanity. We know how Goethe is connected with what must be called the rejuvenating forces of the German national soul. We know that his Faust, if not in an artistic sense, then at least in terms of the power of its characterization of humanity, rises above all other works of world literature. We know how nonsensical it would be to characterize Goethe without first seeing the great spirit of modern times that reigns in Goethe and from which his Faust could emerge. Mereschkowski, the Russian intellectual who certainly knows Faust and German culture as well as he can know it, judges Goethe from what I have just called the characteristic arrogance of the Russian intellectual. He judges the same Goethe about whom Emerson speaks as I read earlier, daring to say the following words:

When Goethe speaks of the French Revolution, he suddenly bends to the earth, as a giant might be crushed by an evil spell and shrink to the size of a dwarf; from a Hellenic demigod he becomes a German bourgeois and – may the shadow of the Olympian have mercy on me – a German philistine, a “Herr von Goethe”, a privy councillor of the Duke of Weimar and a decent son of the decent Frankfurt shopkeeper.

With certain people, it does not matter that such words may be correct, if one is a pedant, but it does matter whether the person who finds it appropriate to speak such words about Goethe understands the greatness of Goethe at all. Sometimes it does not matter what one says, but whether one is at all capable of saying something specific about a particular object or a particular person.

I said: One must seek the Russian national spirit as if floating above the Russian individual soul. But this means that this individual Russian soul, let us say, can easily live as if “down there” without being touched by its national spirit, without also having that confidence and security that arises from the way of dealing with the national spirit, as we were able to characterize it with the German national soul. Therefore, permeated by poetic values, but nevertheless like a worldview, what Mereschkowski calls the “barfoot worldview” as a newest kind of Russian worldview could arise. Now, we know how this barefoot worldview basically arises from the mood that must come when one feels so completely grounded and cannot find the connection with the folk soul, to see within the spirit, so to speak, to that which man is outside of the spiritual. Materialism has not yet taken this completely seriously, but it is characteristic that this Russian individual spirit has taken it seriously in his world view. And so he denies everything spiritual and comes to what an important Russian poet addresses as a characteristic of man. I would truly not mention this if it only occurred here and there. But it is something that the spirit of the East comes to, which characterizes the impulses that live there.

Yes, what is he to you, this human being? Do you understand? He takes you by the collar and crushes you under the nail like a flea! Then you may feel sorry for him! ... Yes! Then you may reveal all your foolishness to him. He will put you on seven different forms of torture for your pity. He will wrap your intestines around his hand and pull all the veins out of your body, one inch per hour. ... Oh you... Pity! Pray to God that you will be beaten without any mercy, and that's it! ... Pity! ... Ugh!

And Maxim Gorky says that these words are spoken entirely from his soul, because this is how he perceives what a person can find as his value when he looks at himself for what he actually is.

One must put such things together with the many things that have come from the East, the arrogance and the arrogance of Russian intellectualism in the course of the last few years, the outgrowth of which is the mood that speaks today of blood and death.

Among the Russian intellectuals I mentioned earlier, we must also mention Yushakov, who has written books that have not found a large audience but which nevertheless show what has been in the minds of many intellectuals in Russia. Yushakov has the following ideas about the course of world culture. I would like to briefly present these ideas to you. He says: This West, everything that this West of Europe has achieved in culture, is over. If you look over to the East, you find that there is actually still something in it of rejuvenation, of germs from which something can develop. But the West cannot develop this. This West has always shown [...] a gap in the text].

[In contrast, at the end of the nineteenth century, Yushakov writes about the Russian-English question in Asia: As far as Russia's mission in Asia is concerned, what the English are doing there is rotten through and through. What Russia is doing there is infinitely more spiritual.

The English – Yushakov says – have behaved towards Asia as if they believed that the Asian peoples existed only to “clothe themselves in English fabrics, fight each other with English weapons, work with English tools, eat from English vessels and play with English baubles”.

Russia alone, Yushakov believes, is capable of feeling an affinity with this Asia, which is now lying prostrate, groaning under the rape of Europe, because it cannot yet grasp the inner human being, which has been made sick and aged by the ego, like the European West.

It is an interesting book, published in 1885, about the relations between England and Russia. It highlights the superiority and arrogance of Russian over Englishness. In 1885, Yushakov has the following idea:

This West, it is over for him. If you look to the East, there is still something that can be developed, the West, especially England, have caused the darkening of India, Persia.

What have the English done in Asia? They have arrogated to themselves everything that was once established in Asia by the power of Ahriman. They have crept in where Ormuzd was at work. They have sat down everywhere where there was light to enjoy the fruits of that light. But what have the Russians done? The Russians have gone everywhere where Asia has been impoverished, where Asia was threatened and impoverished, where people had come down, where people were oppressed and oppressed, where people were plunged into poverty and darkness. Russia has taken care of these people. That is why Russia has its mission in Asia. Therefore, the world struggle between Russia and England must break out in Asia. Russia must be reinstated in the rights of Ormuzd against Ahriman, after it has behaved in this way, while the English have only interfered in what has been established in Asia in terms of fertility, greatness and beauty, and have exploited it.

This is how this Russian speaks about England. And he says: England exploits millions of Hindus. Its greatness and power depend on the people there. I do not wish anything similar for my fatherland. I can only rejoice that it is sufficiently far removed from this sad state of affairs.

Could one not actually wish that the Russians of today, who admire the English, would take a little time to study this book by Yushakov, which was only published in 1885 and deals with relations between Russia and England? It could be interesting at all sometimes if people would get to know something of the driving forces that have worked and will continue to work on the forces that have led to what is now around us, that reaches our souls.

I believe, my dear audience, that what I have said, based on the spiritual-scientific foundations of the nature of the German being, can be substantiated, even if it is illustrated by this or that. And I could cite similar evidence to support what I have said for a long, long time. One could cite such things for so long that no one in the room would be listening.

All of this, however, would illuminate the one truth that is so important now, when we first have to forge the weapons to defend what is also being attacked spiritually and what will be increasingly surrounded, all of this would lead us to the one great truth with which one must come to terms, the truth that the German, by virtue of his immediate national character, could see the direct relationship, the experienced relationship of the individual soul with the national spirit.

And when we see how this German idealism always worked in the whole mood of the German people and its great representatives, especially in the time that we can call the great epoch of the German spirit, how there are seeds, and when we see what is all that is contained in these germs, then we may say to ourselves: We can also trust in the inner strength of the German character, just as we trust in the germs that must unfold into blossoms and fruits in nature; we may have confidence in the German spiritual life. And we know that in many respects it still contains the germs, and that it contains the power of perpetual rejuvenation, that this power is its own. And we know from this what those who, at great sacrifice in the east and in the west, have to defend that which is enclosed as in a large fortress in Central Europe.

But there is also a way to direct the soul's eye to the inner forces of the spiritual world. Then one does not look at this German people as it may be looked at today by the enemies of the German spirit, but rather in such a way that one says to oneself: the German spirit has not yet been fully realized. It has powers within it that are only germinal powers, that must first fully develop in the future. Therefore, from such considerations, however imperfectly they may be presented, as they could only be presented in a lecture in such a short time, nevertheless that which can be summarized in certain feelings emerges, feelings that give the German soul confidence and courage and hope, precisely from the depths of this being.

On the one hand, we are completely convinced today that we have no need to give courage and confidence to those who have to suffer and bleed for the great events of the time based on certain, genuine knowledge and insight – the whole course of events within the realm of the German being, the Central European being, shows that this is not necessary. European being, shows how the Germans went to war, how they knew how to wage this war. No, not to talk about it, but to talk about what reigns and works in the innermost being of the German soul, so that it gives us [and those in the field] certainty about the future and fills us with hope. It is to point this out that today's reflections were made. And that is why I would like to summarize, because the feelings are the most important thing, the feelings that underlie the individual words of this evening. I would like to summarize some of the feelings that, as I believe, can arise for German feeling and sentiment precisely from the contemplation of the German essence and its connection with the German national spirit:

The German spirit has not yet been fulfilled,
What it should bring to the world.
It lives hopefully in future concerns,
It hopes for future deeds full of life; —
In the depths of its being, it feels powerful
Hidden things that must still mature.
How can a wish for his end, without understanding,