The Rudolf Steiner Archive

A truth, intimately united with human aspiration and for centuries closely associated in the human heart with the festival whose modern symbol is the Christmas tree, is expressed in the words that have resounded ever since the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and that must be impressed still more deeply into the evolution of the earth. This truth, which has shone down through the ages, is associated with the words, et incarnatus est de spiritu sancto ex Maria virgine (and is born of the Holy Spirit from the Virgin Mary).

Most of the people of today seem to attach just as little significance to these words as they do to the Easter mystery of the Resurrection. We might even say that the central mystery of Christianity, the resurrection from the dead, appears to modern thought, which is no longer directed to the truths of the spiritual world, just as incredible as the Christmas mystery, the mystery of the Word becoming flesh, the mystery of the virgin birth. The greater part of modern humanity is much more in sympathy with the scientist who described the virgin birth as “an impertinent mockery of human reason” than with those who desire to take this mystery in a spiritual sense.

Nevertheless, my dear friends, the mystery of the incarnation by the Holy Spirit through the Virgin begins to exert its influence from the time of the Mystery of Golgotha; in another sense it had made itself felt before this event.

Those who brought the symbolic gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the babe lying in the manger knew of the Christmas mystery of the virgin birth through the ancient science of the stars. The magi who brought the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh were, in the sense of the ancient wisdom, astrologers, they had knowledge of those spiritual processes that work in the cosmos when certain signs appear in the starry heavens. One such sign they recognized when, in the night between December 24 and 25, in the year that we today regard as that of the birth of Jesus, the sun, the cosmic symbol of the Redeemer, shone toward the earth from the constellation of Virgo. They said, “When the constellation of the heavens is such that the sun stands in Virgo in the night between December 24 and 25, then an important change will take place in the earth. Then the time will have come for us to bring gold, the symbol of our knowledge of divine guidance, which hitherto we have sought only in the stars, to that impulse which now becomes part of the earthly evolution of mankind. Then the time will have come for us to offer frankincense, the emblem of sacrifice, the symbol of the highest human virtue. This virtue must be offered in such a way that it is united with the power proceeding from the Christ Who is to be incarnated in that human being to whom we bring the frankincense.

“And the third gift, the myrrh, is the symbol of the eternal in man, which we have felt for thousands of years to be connected with the powers that speak to us from starry constellations; we seek it further by bringing it as a gift to him who is to be a new impulse for humanity; through this we seek our own immortality, in that we unite our own souls with the impulse of the Christ. When the cosmic symbol of world power, the sun, shines in the constellation of Virgo, then a new time begins for the earth.”

This was the belief held for thousands of years, and as the magi felt compelled to lay at the feet of the Holy Child the wisdom of the gods, the virtues of man, and the realization of human immortality, symbolically expressed in the gold, frankincense, and myrrh, something was repeated as a historical event that had been expressed symbolically in innumerable mysteries and in countless sacrificial rituals for thousands of years. There had been presented in these mysteries and rituals a prophetic indication of the event that would take place when the sun stood at midnight between December 24 and 25 in the sign of the Virgin, for gold, frankincense, and myrrh were also offered on this holy night, to the symbol of the divine child preserved in ancient temples as the representation of the sun.

Thus, my dear friends, for nearly two thousand years the Christian words, “incarnatus de spiritu sancto ex Maria virgine” have resounded in the world, and so it has been ever since human thought has existed on the earth. In our times we can now present the question, “Do human beings really know to what they should aspire when they celebrate Christmas?” Does there exist today a real consciousness of the fact that, out of cosmic heights, under a cosmic sign, a cosmic power appeared through a virgin birth—spiritually understood—and that the blazing candles on the Christmas tree should light up in our hearts an understanding of the fact that the human soul is most intimately and inwardly united with an event that is not merely an earthly but a cosmic earthly event? The times are grave, and it is necessary in such serious times to give serious answers to solemn questions, such as the one raised here. With this in mind we will take a glance at the thoughts of the leading people of the nineteenth century to see whether the idea of Christ Jesus has lived in modern humanity in such a way as to give rise to the thought: the Christmas mystery has its significance in the fact that man wills to celebrate something eternal in the light of the Christmas candles.

Firstly we will take the words of a writer, Ernst Renan, who has given much study to the personality of Jesus and who has tried to give a picture of Christ Jesus out of the consciousness of the nineteenth century. We will listen to some of the voices of leading thinkers of the nineteenth century. Ernst Renan regarded the cities of Palestine with his physical eyes in true materialistic fashion. He desired to awaken in his own soul, from a materialistic standpoint, a picture of the personality known through the centuries as the Redeemer of the world. This is what he says:

“A beautiful outer nature tended to produce a much less austere spirit—a spirit less sharply monotheistic, if I may use the expression—which imprinted a charming and idyllic character on all the dreams of Galilee. The saddest country in the world is perhaps the region round about Jerusalem. Galilee, on the other hand, was a green, shady, smiling district, the true home of the Song of Songs, and the songs of the well-beloved. During the months of March and April the country forms a carpet of flowers of an incomparable variety of colors. The animals are small and exceedingly gentle—delicate and lively turtle doves, blue birds so light that they rest on a blade of grass without bending it, crested larks that venture almost under the feet of the traveler, little river tortoises with mild, lively eyes, storks with grave and modest mien, which, laying aside all timidity, allow man to come near them, seem almost to invite his approach.”

Ernst Renan never tires of describing this idyll of Galilee, so remote from the world's historic events, so as to make it seem natural that in this idyll, in this unpretentious landscape, with its turtle doves and storks, those things could happen that humanity for centuries has associated with the life of the Savior of the world.

So, my dear friends, that truth from which the earth received its meaning, the truth toward which humanity has looked for centuries, is attractive to a thinker of the nineteenth century only as an idyll with turtle doves and storks.

Ernst Renan proceeds, “The whole history of infant Christianity has become in this manner a delightful pastorale. A Messiah at the marriage festival, the courtesan and the good Zaccheus called to his feasts, the founders of the Kingdom of Heaven like a bridal procession—that is what Galilee has boldly offered and what the world has accepted.”

This, my dear friends, is one of the voices of the nineteenth century. Let us listen now to another, the voice of John Stuart Mill, who also desires to find his way from the consciousness of the nineteenth century to the being whom humanity for hundreds of years, and to the prophetic mind of man for thousands of years, has recognized as the Savior of the world.

John Stuart Mill says, “Whatever the rationalist may destroy of Christianity, Christ remains, a unique figure as different from his predecessors as from his successors, and even from those who enjoyed the privilege of his personal instruction. This estimate is not diminished if we say the Christ of the Gospels is not historical, for we are not in a position to know how much of what is worthy in Him has been added by His followers, for who among His disciples, or their followers, has been able to think out the speeches ascribed to Jesus, or to imagine a life and personality such as is portrayed in the Gospels? Certainly not the fisher-folk from Galilee, nor even St. Paul, whose whole character and inclination are of quite another kind, nor the early Christian writers. The kind of words that could be added and inserted by a scholar can be seen in the mystical part of the Gospel of St. John, who borrowed words from Philo and the Platonists of Alexandria and put them into the mouth of the Savior, who said many things about Himself of which not the slightest trace appears in the other Gospels. The East was full of people who could have stolen any number of such sayings, even as the many sects of the Gnostics did in later times. The life and teachings of Jesus, however, bear the stamp and impression of such profundity and personal originality that, if we deny ourselves the expectation of finding scientific exactitude, the prophet of Nazareth is placed in the foremost rank of venerated people of whom the human race may boast, even in the estimation of those who do not believe his divine inspiration. As this extraordinary spirit was equipped with the qualities of the greatest reformers and martyrs who have ever lived on earth, we cannot say that religion has made a bad choice” (Made a choice! We even choose in the nineteenth century!) “that religion has made a bad choice in setting up this man as an ideal representative and leader of humanity; also it would not be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a better way of giving concrete expression to the abstract laws of virtue than to accept Christ as the model for our way of living. If, finally, we admit that even for the skeptic there remains the possibility that Christ was actually the person He said He was—not God; He never made the slightest claim to that; He would have seen in such a claim as great a blasphemy as would the people who judged Him—but the man expressly entrusted by God with the unique mission of leading humanity to truth and virtue, we may surely conclude that the influences of religion upon character, which would remain after the rationalistic critic had done his utmost against religion, are worthy of retention and, though they may lack direct proof as compared with other beliefs for which better evidence exists, the greater truth and correctness of their morality more than compensate for this lack.”

There we have the picture that the rationalists of the nineteenth century, by denying their own spirit, have given to that being whom humanity for centuries has recognized as the Savior of the world. Let us hear another voice, the voice of the international spirit, Heinrich Heine, and what he has to say:

“Christ is the God whom I love most, not because He is a God by inheritance, whose Father was God who had ruled the universe from time immemorial, but because He had no love for courtly, ceremonial display, although He was born the prince of heaven; I love Him because He was no aristocratic God, no panoplied knight, but a humble God of the people, a God of the town, a good citizen. Verily if Christ were not a God, I would choose Him for one and would much rather listen to Him, the God of my choice, than to a self-decreed, absolute God.”

“Only so long as religions have to struggle with each other in rivalry, and are more persecuted than followed, are they beautiful and worthy of veneration, only then do we see enthusiasm, sacrifice, martyrs, and palms. How beautiful, holy, and loveable, how heavenly sweet was the Christianity of the first centuries, as it sought to equal its divine founder in the heroism of His suffering—there still remained the beautiful legend of a heavenly God who in mild and youthful form wandered under the palms of Palestine preaching human love and revealing the teaching of freedom and equality—the sense of which was recognized by some of the greatest thinkers, and which has had its influence in our times through the French Gospel” (of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity).

Here we have this Heine Creed which regarded Him, whom humanity for centuries has recognized as the Redeemer of the world, as worthy of praise because we ourselves would have chosen Him, in our democratic fashion, even if He had not already held that exalted position, and because He preached the same Gospel as was preached later, at the end of the eighteenth century. He was therefore good enough to be as great as those who understood this Gospel.

Let us take another thinker of the nineteenth century. You know that I think very highly of Edward von Hartmann. I mention only those whom I do admire in order to show the manner in which the thought of the nineteenth century about Christ Jesus expressed itself.

“We see,” says Edward von Hartmann, the philosopher, “that the spiritual faculties of Jesus could not have achieved such good results without the magic of an impressive and loveable personality. This personality was endowed with unusual oratorical power, but His quiet majesty and personal tenderness must have been extraordinarily charming to his followers, not only to the men but to the women who made up so large a part of his following, in which prostitutes (Luke 7:37), married women of high rank (Luke 8:3), and young maidens of all classes mingled without discrimination. They were mostly eccentric persons, the epileptic, hysterical, or crazy, who believed themselves to be healed by Him. It is a well-known fact that such women are very prone to project or individualize their religious emotions and enthusiasms onto the person of an attractive male whom they proceed to make the center of a cult. Nothing is more obvious than that these women were of such a kind, and that even if they did not awaken in Jesus the idea of His Messiah-ship, yet it was so nourished by their adoring homage that it struck deep roots. According to modern psychological and psychiatrical opinion it is not possible for healthy religious feeling to flourish in such unhealthy soil, and today we would advise any religious reformer or prophet to shake off such elements in his following as much as possible, for they would merely end in compromising both him and his mission.”

Yet another voice I wish to quote, the voice of one of the principal characters in a romance that exercised a wide and powerful influence during the latter third of the nineteenth century over the judgment of the so-called “educated” humanity. In Paul Heyse's book, Die Kinder der Welt, the diary of Lea, one of the characters in the book, is reproduced. It contains a criticism of Christ Jesus, and those who know the world well will recognize in this judgment of Lea's one which was common to large numbers of human beings in the nineteenth century. Paul Heyse has Lea write, “The day before yesterday I stopped writing because an impulse drove me to read the New Testament once again. I had not opened the New Testament for a long time; it had been a long time since its many threatening, damning, and incomprehensible speeches had estranged and repelled my heart. Now that I have lost that childish fear, and the voice of an infallible and all-knowing spirit can be heard, since I have seen therein the history of one of the noblest and most wonderful of human beings, I have found much that greatly refreshed and comforted me.

“But its somber mood again made me depressed. What is more liberating, gracious, and comforting than joy in the beauty, goodness, and serenity of the world, yet while we are reading this book (the New Testament) we hover in a twilight of expectation and hope, the eternal is never fulfilled, it will only dawn when we have struggled through time; the full glory of joy never shines, there is no pleasantry, no laughter—the joy of this world is vanity—we are directed to a future that makes the present worthless, and the highest earthly joy of sinking ourselves deep in pure and loving thoughts is also open to suspicion, for only those can enter heaven who are poor in spirit. I am such a one, but it makes me unhappy to feel so, yet at the same time if I could break through this limitation I should no longer be what I am, thus my salvation and blessedness are not certain, for what transcends me is no longer. And then this mild, God-conscious man, in order to belong to the whole human race, departed from his own people with such strange hardness that he became a homeless one—it had to be so, but it chilled my feeling. Everything great that I had formerly loved, even when shrouded in majesty, was yet happily and comfortably linked with my being by ties of human need.”

Here you see the New Testament represented as it had to be if it was to provide satisfaction to such a typical person of the nineteenth century. Thus she says that everything great that she had formerly loved, even when shrouded in majesty, was yet happily and comfortably linked with her being by ties of human need. Because the New Testament contains a power that cannot be described in these terms, therefore, the Gospel failed to meet the needs of a person of the nineteenth century.

“When I read the letters of Goethe, of the narrow home life of Schiller, of Luther and his followers, of all the ancients back to Socrates and his scolding wife—I sense a breath of Mother Earth, from which the seed of their spirit grew, which also nourishes and uplifts mine own which is so much smaller.” Lea thus finds herself more drawn even to characters like Xanthippe than to the people of the New Testament, and this was the opinion of thousands and thousands of people in the nineteenth century.

“But this picture of a world forlorn alarms and estranges me, and I am unable to justify it by any belief that everything is guided and ordered by God.”

It is fitting, my dear friends, to ask in these grave times what is really the attitude of soul of people today with regard to the candles they burn at Christmas? For this attitude of soul is a complex of such voices as we have just examined and that could be multiplied a hundred or thousand fold. But it is not fitting in serious times to ignore and disregard the things that have been said about the greatest mystery of earthly evolution. It is much more fitting today to ask what the official representatives of the many Christian sects are able to do to check a development that has led human beings right away from an inwardly true and genuine belief in that which stands behind the lights of Christmas time. For can humanity make of such a festival anything but a lie, when the opinions just quoted from its best representatives are imposed upon that which should be perceived through the Christmas mystery as an impulse coming from the cosmos to unite itself with earthly evolution? What did the magi from the East desire when they brought divine gifts of wisdom, virtue, and immortality to the manger, after the event whose sign had appeared to them in the skies during the night between December 24 and 25 in the first year of our era? What was it these wise men from the East wished to do? They wanted, by this act, to furnish direct historical proof that they had grasped the fact that, from this time onward, those powers who had hitherto radiated their forces down to earth from the cosmos were no longer accessible to man in the old way—that is, by gazing into the skies, by study of the starry constellations. They wished to show that man must now begin to give attention to the events of historical evolution, to social development, to the manners and customs of humanity itself. They wished to show that Christ had descended from heavenly regions where the sun shines in the constellation of Virgo, a region from which all the varied powers of the starry constellations proceed that enable the microcosm to appear as a copy of the macrocosm. They wished to show that this spirit now enters directly into earthly evolution, that earthly evolution can henceforth be understood only by inner wisdom, in the same way as the starry constellations were formerly understood. This was what the magi wished to show, and of this fact the humanity of today must ever be aware.

People of today tend to regard history as though the earlier were invariably the cause of the latter, as though in order to understand the events of the years 1914 to 1917 we need simply go back to 1913, 1912, 1911, and so on; historical development is regarded in the same way as evolution in nature, in which we can proceed from effect to impulse and in the impulse find the cause. From this method of thinking, that fable convenue which we call history has arisen, with which the youth of today are being inoculated to their detriment.

True Christianity, especially a reverent and sincere insight into the mysteries of Christmas and Easter, provides a sharp protest against this natural scientific caricature of world history. Christianity has brought cosmic mysteries into association with the course of the year; on December 24 and 25 it celebrates a memory of the original constellation of the year 1, the appearance of the sun in the constellation of Virgo; this date in every year is celebrated as the Christmas festival. This is the point in time that the Christian concept has fixed for the Christmas festival. The Easter festival is also established each year by taking a certain celestial arrangement, for we know that the Sunday that follows the first full moon after the vernal equinox is the chosen day, though the materialistic outlook of the present time is responsible for recent objections to this arrangement.

To those who wish, reverently and sincerely, to tune their thoughts in harmony with the Mystery of Golgotha, the period between Christmas and Easter is seen as a picture of the thirty-three years of Christ's life on earth. Previous to the Mystery of Golgotha, with which I include the mystery of Christmas, the magi studied the heavens when they wished to investigate the secrets of human evolution or any other mysterious event. They studied the constellations, and the relative positions of the heavenly bodies revealed to them the nature of events taking place upon earth. But at that moment in which they became aware of the important event that was happening on earth, by the sign given to them through the position of the sun in Virgo on December 24 and 25, they said, “From this time onward the heavenly constellations themselves will be directly revealed in human affairs on the earth.”

Can the starry constellations be perceived in human affairs? My dear friends, this perception is now demanded of us, the ability to read what is revealed through the wonderful key that is given us in the mysteries of the Christian year, which are the epitome of all the mysteries of the year of other peoples and times. The time interval between Christmas and Easter is to be understood as consisting of thirty-three years. This is the key. What does this mean? That the Christmas festival celebrated this year belongs to the Easter festival that follows thirty-three years later, while the Easter festival we celebrate this year belongs to the Christmas of 1884. In 1884 humanity celebrated a Christmas festival that really belongs to the Easter of this year (1917), and the Christmas festival we celebrate this year belongs, not to the Easter of next spring but to the one thirty-three years hence (1950). According to our reckoning, this period—thirty-three years—is the period of a human generation, thus a complete generation of humanity must elapse between Christmas festivals and the Easter festivals that are connected with them. This is the key, my dear friends, for reading the new astrology, in which attention is directed to the stars that shine within the historical evolution of humanity itself.

How can this be fulfilled? It can be fulfilled by human beings using the Christmas festival in order to realize that events happening at approximately the present time (we can only say approximately in such matters) refer back in their historical connections in such a way that we are able to perceive their birthdays or beginnings in the events of thirty-three years ago, and that events of today also provide a birthday or beginning for events that will ripen to fruition in the course of the next thirty-three years. Personal karma rules in our individual lives. In this field each one is responsible for himself; here he must endure whatever lies in his karma and must expect a direct karmic connection between past events and their subsequent consequences.

How do things stand, however, with regard to historical associations? Historical connections at the present time are of such a nature that we can neither perceive nor understand the real significance of any event that is taking place today unless we refer back to the time of its corresponding Christmas year, that is 1884 in this case. For the year 1914 we must therefore look back to 1881. All the actions of earlier generations, all the impulses with their combined activity, poured into the stream of historic evolution, have a life cycle of thirty-three years. Then comes its Easter time, the time of resurrection. When was the seed planted whose Easter time was experienced by man in 1914 and after? It was planted thirty-three years before.

Connections that reach over intervals of thirty-three years are essential for an understanding of the time rhythms of historic evolution, and a time must come when people in the holy time that begins with Christmas Eve will say to themselves, “What I do now will continue to work on, but will arise as outer fact or deed (not in a personal but in a historic sense) only after thirty-three years. Furthermore, I can understand what is happening now in the events of the outer world only by looking back across the thirty-three years of time needed for its fulfillment.”

When, at the beginning of the 1880's, the insurrection of the Mohammedan prophet, the Mahdi, resulted in the extension of English rule in Egypt, when at about the same time a war arose through French influence between greater India and China over European spheres of control, when the Congo Conference was being held, and other events of a like nature were taking place—study everything, my dear friends, that has now reached its thirty-three years fulfillment. It was then that the seeds were sown that have ripened into the events of today. At that time the question should have been asked: what do the Christmas events of this year promise for the Easter fulfillment thirty-three years hence? For, my dear friends, all things in historic evolution arise transfigured after thirty-three years, as from a grave, by virtue of a power connected with the holiest of all redemptions: the Mystery of Golgotha.

It does not suffice, however, to sentimentalize about the Mystery of Golgotha. An understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha demands the highest powers of wisdom of which the human being is capable. It must be experienced by the deepest forces that can stir the soul of man. When he searches its depths for the light kindled by wisdom, when he does not merely speak of love but is enflamed by it through the union of his soul with the cosmic soul that streams and pulses through this turning point of time, only then does he acquire insight and understanding into the mysteries of existence. In days of old the wise men who sought for guidance in the conduct of affairs of human beings asked knowledge of the stars, and the stars gave an answer; so, today, those who wish to act wisely in guiding the social life of humanity must give heed to the stars that rise and set in the course of historic evolution. Just as we calculate the cyclic rotations of celestial bodies, so must we learn to calculate the cyclic rotations of historic events by means of a true science of history. The time-cycles of history can be measured by the interval that extends from Christmas to the Easter thirty-three years ahead, and the spirits of these time-cycles regulate that element in which the human soul lives and weaves in so far as it is not a mere personal being but is part of the warp and woof of historic evolution.

When we meditate on the mystery of Christmas, we do so most effectively if we acquire a knowledge of those secrets of life that ought to be revealed in this age in order to enrich the stream of Christian tradition concerning the Mystery of Golgotha and the inner meaning of the Christmas mystery. Christ spoke to humanity in these words, “Lo! I am with you always even to the end of the world.” Those, however, who today call themselves His disciples often say that; though the revelations from spiritual worlds were certainly there when Jesus Christ was living on earth, they have now ceased, and they regard as blasphemous anyone who declares that wonderful revelations can still come to us from the spiritual world. Thus official Christianity has become, in many respects, an actual hindrance to the further development of Christianity.

What has remained, however? The holy symbols, one of the holiest of which is portrayed in the Christmas mystery—these constitute in themselves a living protest against that suppression of true Christianity that is too often practiced by the official churches.

The spiritual science we seek to express through anthroposophy desires, among other things, to proclaim the great significance of the Mystery of Golgotha and the mystery of Christmas. It is also its task to bear witness to that which gives to earth its meaning, and to human life its significance. Since the Christmas tree, which is but a few centuries old, has now become the symbol of the Christmas festival, then, my dear friends, those who stand under the Christmas tree should ask themselves this question, “Is the saying true for us that is written by the testimony of history above the Christmas tree: Et incarnatus est de spiritu sancto ex Maria virgine? Is this saying true for us?” To realize its truth requires spiritual knowledge. No physical scientist can give answer to the questions of the virgin birth and the resurrection; on the contrary, every scientist must needs deny both events. Such events can only be understood when viewed from a plane of existence in which neither birth nor death plays the important part they do in the physical world. Just as Christ Jesus passed through death in such a way as to make death an illusion and resurrection the reality—this is the content of the Easter mystery—so did Christ Jesus pass through birth in such a way as to render birth an illusion and “transformation of being” within the spiritual world the reality, for in the spiritual world there is neither birth nor death, only changes of condition, only metamorphoses. Not until humanity is prepared to look up to that world in which birth and death both lose their physical meaning will the Christmas and Easter festivals regain their true import and sanctity.

Then, and only then, my dear friends, will our hearts and souls be filled with inner warmth of tone, fortified by which we shall be able again to speak to our little ones, to speak to them even in earliest childhood, of that Child who was laid in the manger, and of the three wise men who brought to him their gifts of wisdom, virtue, and immortality. We must be able to speak of these things to children, for what we say to the child about the Christmas mystery will be celebrated by him as an Easter festival, it will reappear in his life when he has lived through thirty-three years. For in historical evolution the responsibilities of humanity are such that one generation can only express as Christmas impulse those forces that the next generation will experience as Easter impulse. If we could realize this with consciousness, my dear friends, one generation would think of its successor in the following way: in the Christmas star I teach you to receive into your soul as truth that which will arise as the Easter star after thirty-three years. If we were conscious of this connection of the present generation and its successor, each one of us could say, “I have received an impulse for work that extends far beyond the limits of the day, for the period between Christmas and Easter is not merely the weeks that lie between these festivals but is really a period of thirty-three years; this is the true cycle of an impulse that I have implanted in the soul of a child as a Christmas impulse, and that after thirty-three years will arise again as an Easter impulse.”

Such things, my dear friends, should not encourage pride in mere theoretical knowledge; they achieve value only when they are expressed in practical deeds, when our souls become so filled with conviction concerning them that we can do nothing but to act according to their light. Only then is the soul filled with love for the great being for whom the deeds, in this light, are done; then this love becomes a concrete thing, filled with cosmic warmth, and quite distinct from that sentimental affectation that we find today on all lips but that has led, in these catastrophic times, to some of the greatest impulses of hatred among humanity. Those who for so long have talked about love have no further right to speak of it when it has turned to hate; to such persons falls rather the duty of asking themselves, “What have we neglected in our talk of love, of Christmas love, that out of it deeds of hatred have developed?” Humanity, however, must also ask, “What must we seek in the spiritual world in order to find that which is lost, that love that rules and lives warmingly in all beings but is only real love when it wells up from a vital understanding of life.”

To love another is to understand him; love does not mean filling one's heart with egotistical warmth that overflows in sentimental speeches; to love means to comprehend the being for whom we should do things, to understand not merely with the intellect but through our innermost being, to understand with the full nature and essence of our human being.

That such a love, springing from deepest spiritual understanding, may be able to find its place in human life, that desire and will should exist to cherish such love, may still be possible in these difficult times for him who is willing to tread again the path of the magi to the manger. He may say to himself, “Just as the wise men from the East sought understanding to find the way, the way of love, to the manger, so will I seek the way that will open my eyes to the light in which the true deeds of human love are performed. Just as the magi surrendered their faith in the authority of the starry heavens, added to their knowledge of the stars their sacrifice of this knowledge, and brought the union of immortality with this stellar wisdom to the Christ Child on that Christmas night, so must humanity in these later times bring its deepest impulses of soul as sacrifice to that being for whom the Christmas festival stands as the yearly symbol. Inspired by such a consciousness, the Christmas festival will again be celebrated by humanity sincerely and truly. Its celebration then will express not a denial but a knowledge of that being for whom the Christmas candles are lit.”

You will have seen from several earlier contemplations, that I do not like the phrase: “We live in a time of transition”, because every age is a time of transition—a transition from the earlier time to the later one. It is only a question of in how far a time is the time of transition—and just what is changing?

For the person who can see into the spiritual world, ours is indeed the time of an important transition.The wisdom of oldest time has always pointed to this important transition. During the epochs in which a spiritual world was still spoken of truthfully—if only out of dreamlike knowing—it was always said: after a certain time had passed, the so-called Dark Age will come to an end and a light-filled age would begin. If one now examines the words of the old wise men and takes them seriously, one indeed comes to realize that they meant that the transition from the Dark to the Light Age would occur around the turn of the 19th and 20th century—the time in which we now live. But we do not have to go through Anthroposophy to a renewal of the old dreamlike wisdom. I often have said that this is not the case, that with Anthroposophy it is the question of what one can acquire as knowledge in our time through spiritual research. Anthroposophy shall therefore not be the renewal of any kind of old wisdom, but a present-day mode of cognition. But as regards the transition from the Dark Age into the Light Age, present cognition has to completely concur with the old wisdom.

Although one can hardly say that we as mankind, especially as civilized European mankind, enter from worse conditions into better ones, what the old wisdom had in mind regarding the passing over into the light age, and what we also must think today, is nevertheless true. Only we must understand matters in the right way. I would like to make clear, with the help of an example, what the difference is between a Light Age—meant in this way—and a Dark Age.

Those people who once—in about the 5th pre-Christian millennium—spoke about such Dark and Light Ages, looked at this dark age as at the continuation of an earlier Light Age, and they expressed the opinion that, after the Dark Age had lasted for some time, a Light Age would come again. It would be instructive to look back and see how—mainly in human affairs—the Light Age, which once existed (approximately in the 7th or 8th millennium) was different from the later Dark Age, out of which we as mankind shall now emerge.

I would like to make that clear by an example—as I said—through the example of healing. The example of healing is very suitable in this respect, because one can see much by it. Namely, during that Light, or illuminated age, we did not look to the physical human body. One did not think of that at all. Altogether, one did not speak during that old Light Age of illness in the manner that one still speaks today of illness, but will speak no longer in the future. Of course one had in those olden times also the phenomenon that a person experienced the decay of his organs in this or that direction, that he simple was not healthy. However, one did not speak of illness, but said right out: Death exists and He takes hold of man. One saw something like a struggle between life and death in the situation where we would say today: this person is ill. So in those olden times one did not speak of illness and health when a person had become ill in the sense we understand, but one spoke about it in this way: in him death is fighting. And making well one regarded as combating, as driving out death in this way. Illness was only a special case of death, one might say, "a little dying", and health was life.

Why did one speak that way? One spoke that way because healing was then done entirely from the etheric body of man. One did not pay attention to the physical body; instead one was healing altogether in relation to the etheric body.

How was this done? Let us assume now, that a human being had become ill of something we would call pneumonia today. The form of illness in case of pneumonia was of a somewhat different type at that time, but one can nevertheless speak of this type of illness. One then said to oneself: this person has become too dependent on the region of the earth where he lives. This took place in times when migrations of people, when the moving away from places, was more unusual than today. People—at least the majority of people--mostly spent all their life at the same place. Nevertheless in such a case one said: this person has become too dependent upon the earthly spot where he was born. In those olden times one knew very specifically: man has already had a pre-earthly existence; through the survey, so to speak,through his destiny, he had decided about the place on earth himself. Therefore one said to oneself if a person has been taken ill before his 40th year or earlier by pneumonia, then he simply has not chosen his place on earth in quite the right way. He does not quite fit on this place on earth. In short, one derived the illness from the relation his human organization had to the spot on earth on which he was.

Diagram 1 Click image for large view

If I would sketch this, it would be this way: (diagram 1). If one imagined the earth this way, one said to oneself: if the person lives there, then he is too strongly dependent upon this particular spot on earth. One has to heal him by freeing him inwardly from the outer dependence on this earthly spot. One can do this by bringing him into connection with the surrounding cosmos to the outer heavenly cosmos. Heaven is that which had been man's home before he came down to earth. He does not quite fit into the earthly surroundings. One has to heal him in bringing him into the right relationship to the cosmos. One did this in such a way that one said: since this person has too many effects of the earth in himself—because there is too much gravity, and what is connected with gravity, in him, one has to give him relief—one has to bring super-earthly forces into him. One said to oneself: In these or other plant-blossoms, super-earthly forces are working. Therefore one prepared these or other plants by extracting their juice. One said to oneself: this plant is blossoming at a certain season, it is blossoming at this season through the influence of the cosmos. One investigated now, how far this person is influenced by this season in particular. In olden times the dependence of a person upon the cosmic forces was investigated through a kind of horoscope. One gave then as medication something that brought his ether-body into a general vibration. One expressed it to oneself in the following way: If this is a man (diagram 2, red), then this will be his ether body. He became ill of pneumonia because his ether body in the region of the lung is too much inclined towards the earth (blue) and because the forces of the earth have too great an influence on him. Mow one simply imparts to him juices from plant blossoms, which will work in him and help him to overcome these forces (Yellow). In this way one imparted forces to him which brought him into connection with the cosmos. One was striving through this treatment to place the whole ether body into the right vibration to balance the different single incorrect vibrations. So one always was asking: what does one have to do regarding the ether body?

Diagram 2 Click image for large view

Altogether, how could one proceed in such a way? One could do that, because one had a distinct picture of the human ether body. One did not only see the physical human body in those old times, but one saw the physical human body luminous, one saw the ether body. Man was a being of light, and as one judges today by a person's complexion, e.g., if someone is pale, that he is ill—in the same way one formed an opinion about his state of health by his ether body, by the color, if it became red, or blue or green. On what did one base one's knowledge of the human being in those times? On the light, on that which was Light in man. One has to take it quite literally: it was the Light Age, it was the age in which one really saw what was living in man as Light.

If you look at man from today's point of view in regard to health and illness, you will find that today, also, it must be said: light has a tremendous strong influence on human health. People have to take care that they receive the right quantity of light into their organism. We know that children who at a delicate age suffer from lack of light, will contract rickets or other illnesses ,which are throughout related to a lack of light. Of course these are related to other factors, too—an illness can never be derived from only one cause—but such cases as rickets, can connected throughout with lack of light. One can relate with certainty how frequently rickets occurs among children who live in city apartments, where little light enters, and how little children are inclined to rickets—approximately, of course—who can be exposed to light in the proper way. So we can rightly say today as well that the human being takes light into himself.

But the light that man receives today is—if I may express myself that way—mineral light. Man takes up that light which is radiated onto the earth, onto the minerals, and is radiated back to him, or else the light which he receives directly from the sun. It is mineral light. The light that falls on the meadows and on the trees is also conveyed to us in a mineral way. It is dead light that we absorb through our skin, throughout our whole human being. During that old light-filled age, which preceded our dark age, men were conscious that this dead light was of no meaning to them.

The research historian of today, as well as the cultural historian know absolutely nothing about such things. The light that we appreciate so much today was not considered worthy of appreciation by men of olden times. They differentiated between the light they appreciated and the light that is so much esteemed today. For example—we sit down at the table and have plates and forks and knives, and on the plate some kind of cake or something else that is edible. We then eat the cake; naturally, we also appreciate knives and forks, but we don't eat them, they are just there. What we value as light stood in relation to what the ancients valued as light much as the utensils stand in relation to the cake. But what they regarded as light comes from the plant kingdom. This we do not take up at all any more, as it was taken up in the old light ages. We enjoy ourselves today when we can walk in the sun. The man of old enjoyed himself when he walked over a meadow, or through the woods, because he absorbed into himself—through his skin—the light that the woods had first absorbed, which had been enlivened in the woods, enlivened on the meadow. The other, the dead light—that was an addition, “trimmings,” as it were. For us, the trimmings have become the main thing. The man of old lived in the light, which the flowers, the trees of the woods gave to him. For him that was a source of being quickened inwardly with light, with inner living light and not with dead light. With our abstract joy of the woods, with our abstract joy about flowers, with all that, we have, basically, what I might call philistinism, in the cosmic sense. It may still be very beautiful, but it is philistine in contrast to what was existing in the old people as inner jubilation of the soul in face of the wood, of the meadow, in face of all that was living outside. The man of old felt himself related with his trees, with all that was for him precisely the suitable plant. He felt sympathy and antipathy in the most animated way with this or that plant. We, for example, walk across such meadows as those around the Goetheanum in autumn. We judge in a philistine way: the meadow saffron, the colchium autumnale might perhaps be beautiful. The man of old passed by these plants and became sad, so that even his skin seemed to become somewhat dry. He even sensed something like his hair becoming limp. While, when he passed—let us say, by red blooming plants, they might be such plants as the poppy is today, his hair became downy, soft. Thus he experienced the light of the plants in an absolute way. It was the light-filled age, and his whole cultural life was directed accordingly. Accordingly it was also directed that he could heal—that is, could combat death—through observation and treatment of the ether body.

This remained effective for a long time and we still see, when we go back to the older Greek medicine, to Hippocrates, how one spoke then of the “humors” of man, of a black or light bile, of blood and of phlegm. This was really thought about as remembrances of the old light age. Phlegm was essentially taken to mean the ether body and blood, those vibrations which the astral body effects in the ether body, and so on, So these after-effects were still there, and basically only at the time of Galen did one start to rely on the mere physical world, including the remaining human cultural life. The conception of man, in as far as it should be the foundation for processes of healing, received a physical character. One looked at the physical body.

But it was in fact only at the great turn in the first half of the 15th century that one did not know anything at all any more of the human ether body, not even how it expresses itself in the temperaments; that one began to look more and more only at the physical body of man. The older physical medicine was still something else than it was to become later, mainly in the 18 and 19th centuries. The old physical medicine always had traditions, at least, of the earlier healing through the ether body. One really has the impression that in this older European medicine, one had retained old principles and had only carried them over into the physical. In a certain way the physical human organism still continued to be seen as under the influence of the etheric organism. Only in more recent times—in the time of Copernicus and Galileo—did one begin to observe more and more merely the physical human body and cease to know something the earlier times had known in an exact way. Today one thinks: if man eats this or that substance, which one finds out there in nature, it will stay basically the same inside the human organism. But that is not true. Only the salts remain approximately the same. But all that is there in the animal and plant kingdom becomes something entirely different in the human organism. The human organism changes it completely. One knew that the human physical organism “is not from this world” in its inner consistency and one knew fundamentally that becoming ill is nothing else than a continuation of what happens through eating. In fact there was a time, especially among the Arabian physicians, when one regarded every digestion as a partial process of illness, where one looked at digestion in a way that.was not really wrong; when man has eaten, he has brought something foreign into himself and that he really is “sick”. He must first, through his inner organism, through inner organic functions, overcome the illness. So that one continuously lives in a state of being “a little bit sick,” and “a little bit overcoming the illness.” One eats oneself sick and one digests oneself well again. This was in fact for some time, especially among Arabian physicians, a point of view which is altogether—if I may express myself that way—something quite healthy, because there exists no real borderline between what one calls today “eating oneself well” and “eating oneself ill.” Just think how easy it is to get one's stomach in disorder, something that—as one says—could normally still be overcome, quickly goes over into something one cannot overcome any more. Then one is simply sick. But the borderline is really not to be drawn at all.

It is just as difficult to draw a borderline regarding confusions between something that still can be evened out in a completely natural way and something where one has to come and give help through a process of healing. So once one correctly saw illness as a continuation of eating—eating that was not done correctly. One studied the daily process of digestion, that is: digesting oneself into health; this one studied.

In this respect it is quite a good practice if one person or another who cannot tolerate this or that food unsalted, adds more salt for himself. Somebody else even has to add pepper, others add paprika—isn't that so? Because he cannot digest the things just as they are, he adjusts them to his needs. There again is no borderline, if somebody needs pepper or paprika as a healing factor; there again is no borderline, if one gives more pepper or paprika, so one can digest oneself well, or if, when things get worse, one takes something out of the mineral kingdom. It does not matter if one then gives that as addition to the food, or as medicine. There again things flow into each other, there is again no borderline.

What was therefore known in a precise way was that if man takes something completely from the outer world, this will injure his inner organism and he must by all means overcome it. If finally I push a rusty nail into myself and my organism has to fester it out, or if I bring something into my stomach, which must not be allowed to stay that way, and my organism has to go through all these processes so it can assimilate this—these are only gradations of difference. But the knowledge that the human organism is not of this earth, and that it can sustain itself on this earth only if it is continuously stimulated to overcome the forces of this earth—this knowledge did exist. Namely, we do not eat to get this or that food into oneself, but we eat so that we can develop the forces inwardly which can overcome this food. We eat to bring forth resistance to this earth, and we live on this earth in order to bring forth resistance.

But this was gradually forgotten. One just took the whole matter in a materialistic way and finally one only still tried to see if this or that substance in these or other plants might give help. Yes, you see that is what was once meant, and what we again must have in mind regarding the dark age. Everything has simply become dark. In earlier times one looked at the light ether-body, and regarded this as man. Now one does not see anything of this light any more. One perceives only where there is matter, and one holds on to the dead light. But this dead light gives man only abstract conceptions, it has brought forth only intellectualism. But today we stand in a transition to the necessity to recognize the light again in a new way. Before, man knew within himself: he had this light ether body. Now we must increasingly develop such knowledge, and recognize the etheric in the outer world, especially in the plant kingdom.

Goethe made a beginning with this in his theory of metamorphosis, although he still put the whole into abstract conceptions. This must develop more and more into Imaginations. And we must be clear that we simply must reach the point of perceiving the being of the plant in luminous pictures. While man himself was luminous in the earlier light age, in the future nature around us, as far as it is plant-world, has to become aglow in the most manifold Imaginations of plant forms. And just with the help of these plant forms, luminously shining forth, will we be able to find new remedies in the plants. This necessity confronts us. While man in the earlier light age saw an inner light, people of the present age have the obligation of “seeing” in the outer world, to behold again a light, this light in the outer world.

This light can be kindled, if one deepens more and more the study of spiritual science. You may say: spiritual science, Anthroposophy—there also I read only concepts, and finally, if I read Occult Science, I also find only concepts there; that does not give me an occasion to really “perceive.” Yet, my dear friends, this Occult Science does have a twofold goal. The first is that one learns to know what is related there; but that is not the whole. If you have read my Occult Science like another book, then you will know only the match. But if you want to have fire, you must not say: this match is no fire! It is nonsense to say, if he gives me a match, that he gives me fire, it does not look like fire! Occult Science does not look like clairvoyance; that is like saying the match does not look like fire. Yet it will look like fire if you will but strike the match. And if it does not work the first time, you will strike another time, and so on. That is how it is with Occult Science. If you have read it like another book, then it is simply only “the match,” but if you have rubbed it in the right way in your whole human being, then you will see, it kindles! It has kindled only a little! But it does kindle, my dear friends. And the person who says: this remains far away from what one is striving for, namely clairvoyance, he will only look at the match and not strike it. But the fact is, one must first know the match, otherwise one will give oneself up to the illusion that one could kindle it with a pin. Of course, you cannot kindle it with a pin—that is, with modern science—you can do it only with a real match.

The human race is confronted precisely by this necessity and it may be especially shown in something such as medical knowledge and medical ability. If one will find the transition from a mere looking at the darkness in substances—in the way that one somehow looks at a plant blossom, as it is done today—to an imaginative way of looking, by “striking the match”—then one acquires the knowledge of how this or the other substance will affect the human being. And if one now thinks over the matter a little, one has to say to oneself: today's mankind is confronted with that: out of the darkness it should enter again into the light, it should learn to judge in a light-filled way.

Diagram 3 Click image for large view

I want to make this clear once more by an example. Let us assume that a physician of today is making a diagnosis of, let us say, an enlargement of the heart. He does it the way it is done today. One cannot do much with such a diagnosis. Perhaps one has tried if this or that can help here. But the fact is that one does not have any comprehensive connections. One does not have anything comprehensive because one does not look through the whole matter. A real penetration of the whole would result in the following: Assume once that the human being, as I have, presented him quite often, renews his organism after seven years. But I also mentioned last time how this renewal comes about. There are always unfinished substances in a way sent upwards or also forwards or downwards by the kidneys' system. From the head the rounding off is done (diagram 3) so that continuously such waves (blue) are coming from the head-system, which give form, and that through the kidney-system such effects take place—four times faster—which are broken off and formed by the waves (red) as I described.

Take an organ such as the heart (orange). There too such an exchange takes place in every human after 7 or 8 years. The heart is being renewed. It is made anew. What you see at the fingernails, that they grow outwards and always grow again after one cuts them off, that is also the case with the whole human being: he renews the material substance from the center. Now assume once that the rhythmic man might not be in order, that it might be so for his organization, that the rays from the kidney system burst forth much too rapidly, so that the right relation of 4 to 2 is not there. That varies for the individual—every person is an individuality in this respect—but it is the case in regard to his whole construction as a human being. Assume then, that this is not in order, that the radiation from the kidney-system is pushing too fast. What will happen thereby?

Diagram 4 Click image for large view

The following can happen. The process of renewal is indeed happening continuously; let us then imagine that the new heart moved in (red) before the old heart is completely ejected (diagram 4, light). Then it goes too fast. If the renewal goes on too fast, such phenomena as an enlargement of the heart occurs. First and foremost you can detect in the beginning of an enlargement of the heart that something is not in order in the activity of the kidney. Just where you take this matter of a renewal of the human being in 7-8 years seriously you will see: if that which will come as renewed substance is already there after 6 years, that which is there as the old heart has not yet been removed sufficiently and the organ expands, or tries at least to expand itself. That is how one must learn to look at things; one must learn to see things in living movement. That is what confronts us. One must see most of all what one always has seen in fixed limits. How does the physician today make a diagnosis?

The physician of today comes to a diagnosis in such a way that he likes best to trace down the contours of the heart to what it is as a finished organ. It is not so much the question of looking at what the finished organ is, since it simply is an organ that is always floating away and getting pushed back again. In this going away and pushing back there is something inwardly mobile. If I lay hold of it, it is essentially as if I were to lay hold of lightning—it is constantly in movement, Therefore if I want to comprehend man, I have to grasp him in his liveliness. This liveliness I understand and find today only if I understand the whole world, and man out of the world and cosmos. This is what we are confronted with: every thing has to pass over into knowledge that is flexible. It is something dreadful if we keep the children in school immobile. For example, it is always quite grievous for me to see the children use any kind of finished triangle, with which they make all sorts of things. This fixed object is really nothing. One should really have a kind in which the triangle can be shifted. This is the point: that the children get the conception in the right way that everything should be grasped in movement. (diagram 5).

Diagram 5 Click image for large view

It is, of course, dreadfully difficult to get an understanding in regard to these things with such people who want their peace and quiet, who are already angry, when children are making a row—and now the tools for instruction are making a row! It is, of course, something dreadful: but it is so, we have to change over to liveliness. All this taken together results in the challenge to move upward into the light, luminous
age. Out of the dark age we must enter into the light luminous age.

And because people can not do it—that is, they imagine that they cannot do it—because people do not want it, because people cling to the old, and don't want to step into the new, and because the old does not fit any more—it is because of this that we experience the terrible catastrophes in our present time. And we will experience them still more if people don't want to take the trouble to enter into the new.

What occurs as catastrophe is the reaction of the dark age, which does not belong in our time. But it is, of course, terribly difficult to come to an understanding. At best something like an inkling appears in the contrasting attitude between the old people and youth today, like an inkling of the new light: filled age. Young people say as a rule: oh, the old people are philistines. This also has its forerunners. The great German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte had something of an inkling beforehand of this in making the classical declaration, that one really should kill all people at the age of thirty because man is only a decent human being up to his 30th year. This is a famous sentence of Fichte and since Goethe at the time that Fichte made this sentence was already considerably older, he was terribly annoyed and has ridiculed this whole theory in the second part of his Faust. It was really provoking for Goethe, of course! So one finds that youth agrees that the old people are philistines, but up to now no serious results have come about in this matter, because young people declare this up to a certain age and then become even greater philistines than the old ones have been. Even this side must be looked upon from an inner vantage point.

What I mean is the question that we already know: either Spenglerism—that is, the decline of the West—or taking the trouble to adjust ourselves to the new appearance of the light age in contrast to darkness, during which men were “earthworms” in regard to the cosmos. It cannot be different. But for a while in the course of history man had to he an earthworm because otherwise he would have been taken up completely by the light. He could strive to gain his freedom only during the dark age, and most of all during the termination of the dark age, in the more recent times. He could acquire his freedom only because the light left him unmolested so that he could lead an earthworm existence.

But now I tell you: men of the light ages preferred to receive the light of the plant world. The plants were, so to speak, drinking the cosmos light and man in turn drank the light out of the cup the plants presented to him.

Today we have only the dead light. But on the rays of the dead light Christ has come and has achieved the Mystery of Golgotha. That is the great cosmic Mystery of the newer time. Though we have the dead light—the dead light that cannot make us blessed—yet on this dead light's rays has Christ entered the earth and achieved the Mystery of Golgotha. And though outwardly we have around us the dead light we can bring the Christ in us to life. And with Christ in us in the right way we will enliven all of the light on earth around us—we will carry life into the dead light, we ourselves will have a reviving effect on the light. This means we must enter the new age with the right Christ impulse. The denial of the Christ-impulse is the basis of all that keeps men away from seeing rightfully how a dark age transits into the light age.

Diagram 6 Click image for large view

It is really so. Where the plant grows out of the earth (diagram 6) it develops the seed bud—as I have shown you already—still through the forces of the previous year; only the petals grow out of this year's light. What pulls the plant out of the earth really comes from the previous year. So it was actually conserved light which the plants once gave to man during the old light age. We have to find the possibility to comprehend the dead light with the mind and heart that is engendered in us if we receive the strength of Christ in the living perception of the Mystery of Golgotha. Then we will revive the light as I have indicated. But we can do that only if we learn to try to look at all things in the way I have tried to describe to you in these lectures.

My dear friends! First, we will speak the verse that comes to us as an adjuration out of the world-all itself, summoning us to self-awareness.

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.

You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?

Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?

Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?

Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

It is most certainly insight into oneself, my dear brothers and sisters, that can lead us in a spiritual sense to insight into the world. And it has often been said, how appreciation must be there for the streaming forth of a true spiritual knowledge out of the spiritual world itself, how a person must have an appreciation of this, that of those who can impart such knowledge of the spiritual world, that they will certainly have approached the Threshold, at the Threshold where the Guardian of the Threshold stands, the Guardian that there protects a person in ordinary consciousness from entering the spiritual world unprepared.

But as soon as one gets to know this Guardian, initially through a healthy human mental appreciation, and later by really getting to know, after one’s healthy human mental appreciation leads the way to an appreciation of the true constitution, the reality in being of the Guardian, then this Guardian places there what we confront as an admonition, when we first seek to enter the spiritual world in the proper manner, and then in the proper manner when we seek to remain within the experience of the spiritual world.

Now as it has also often been said, remaining in the spiritual world for the most part proceeds improperly, due to one’s wanting something else to take place instead of the reality of being in the spiritual world. Such a person wants it to be similar to the sensory world. But this is not being in the spiritual world. It is suddenly supersensory, and it cannot simply lead to the sort of gazing about that is like gazing about with the senses. This sort of imagination of supersensory gazing is only a picture. It must lead to real experiencing of the spiritual world. And quite a few of you have this experience of the spiritual world, my dear brothers and sisters, many more than you might think. They just don’t quite notice it, they pay it no attention, how it actually maintains dominion within their soul experiencing. It actually rules, and part of its action there is to bring into intimate presence of mind the true realization of this ruling actuality.

Toward this end knowledge should flow ever and again, immediately out of the spiritual world into these Class lessons knowledge should be flowing to you, my brothers and sisters, and it should become ever more and more your actual point of departure in making tangible your human soul in the spiritual world. And the following can be such a declamation of wisdom.

Take any one of the mantras, or any other meditative verse, and recite all that lies within such a mantra. It certainly does not come down to which one it is, but rather to one specific mantra, one specific mantra, however, that is quite well known by you. For your meditation take the mantra and say it to yourself in the most beautiful manner in which you can say it, bringing it forth for yourself, into your presence. Make it, say it to yourself, not right away in a loud tone, but rather in a soft peaceful tone, and so bring forth the specific mantra.

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.
You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

And then, when you yourself have brought forth such a mantra, try to sense how it works in you, how it is. In this manner try to reach it, so that you sense the speech, you sense what sort of difference there is in your body between the condition of your being at peace, and the condition of your speaking. And so try to sense the speech in your organs, in its coursing. You ought to feel it in its forceful coursing and reverberating entrainment even in the organ of speech.

And when you have caught the aroma of its sense and feeling, then each of you must ask the following of yourself. “If I am thinking about something so as to bring my attention to bear on it, perhaps something someone said to me and I am thinking about, an otherwise external experience that has made an impression on me, in order to make it clear, when I think about something in this way, as it were, can I also sense its aroma, its feeling?

Well, when you have learned to sense speech, then it will be easy for you in addition to become able to sense thinking, made immediate when presented in this way. So in this way you can also sense thinking. It is lighter and quieter in sensing than is speech, but it may be sensed. By sensing speech, you can learn to sense the aroma of thinking, to perceive thinking.

It is good to undertake such an exercise, for such an exercise generally eases the way to intimate self-observation.

And then you proceed, my dear brothers and sisters, so that you now make a thought active in yourself, a memory-thought, perhaps something that you thought about a few days ago, or weeks, or months, some thought, however, that you can make really active within yourself. Then try to sense this memory-thought, try to perceive it, and you will have the feeling that in perceiving it you localize it underneath speech, you perceive it therefore below, below the localization of speech [yellow]. And you will say to yourself something like, “When I speak, I experience it in the region of my organ of speech, when I think, I experience it over this in my head, but when I remember, I experience it underneath the thinking.”

For this to be intimate experiential knowledge for you, if you really feel it to be so, then you will have already engaged in the spirit to some extent, which can generally be the beginning of a further progressive spiritual engagement. A great disconnectedness from the other experiences of the day is necessary, however, in order to sense it inwardly in this way. And it is not good to say to yourself, “Well of course, to attain such disconnectedness, I must take a couple of weeks off sometime to go where there are no other people, where nothing will disturb me, where I will have absolute peace and quiet, away all by myself, possibly to a cottage on Mont Blanc, in order to bring it about.” It is not good to think like this, for what is best is rather to remain in the middle of all the strife of life, to be exposed to all that life brings from morning until evening, and through all this, through one’s own power of soul, to find a certain time, be it ever so brief, to be totally outside the strife of the world, remaining within yet totally outside, purely through the power of one’s inner nature totally outside. That is best. In the solitude of going away by oneself, in order to find peace and quiet, that is certainly not the thing that is most effective, but rather through one’s own power to engender the solitude, that is the very thing that absolutely and certainly can lead to the goal. And in this manner a good foundation will be established, concerning specifically the ability to practice meditating, which most certainly is needed.

You have become acquainted with mantras, my dear brothers and sisters, to be effectively spoken out of stillness of soul. The first mantras in the Class lessons have certainly been of this sort. But we have forged ahead by means of such mantras, which in part ring forth from the soul, and which also in part must be envisioned as intonations coming to us from the breadth of the world, so that in meditating we not only speak them inwardly, but also in meditating we hear them inwardly, so that we shift our position in thinking, and so hear them coming to us, being spoken to us, out of the depths of space, out of spirit-being. And directly out of this reorientation of ourselves into other entities speaking to us, directly out of this reorientation of ourselves in such a way, we may become able to really consummate this soul-reorientation inwardly, thereby feeling ourselves within the spiritual world.

Please note that today’s mantra ought to be given over to this goal. The human soul must now imagine itself to be entirely silent, utterly silent. But it should imagine that it is already on the other side of the Threshold, already in the spiritual world before which the Guardian stands, and there the soul hears three different intonations. While it remains entirely silent itself, it hears three different intonations. The first intonation resounds out of the breadth of the world-all. The second comes from the Guardian. And the third comes from the various beings that become identified by the mantra. So should it be thought, that which comes forth to your souls today as the mantra. So, out of the breadth of the world sounding forth and arriving from all sides,

Examine¹ the field of thinking.

Just so we take up, we focus our attention on becoming clear about the true nature of thinking by means of a spiritual, soulful experience of the world.

Then the Guardian speaks. And as the sounding forth unto us out of the breadth of the world fades away, the spirit of which we must dwell within, then the Guardian speaks.

He speaks, who you the ways
From earthly life to earthly life
Will show in spirit light:

That is the Guardian’s speech.

Then the Angelic being speaks, who accompanies us from earth-existence to earth-existence.

Look to your senses’ radiant nature.

That is also the being, that as an Angelic being, as an Angel, conducts us from incarnation to incarnation. So is this line spoken. We hear it living, inwardly in contemplation.

The Guardian speaks again.

He speaks, who on to souls
In realms of being material free,
Will carry you on wings of soul.

Then the next line sounds, spoken by a caring being watching over us from the hierarchy of the Archangels.

Look to your thinking’s forceful impact.²

That comes down from where the Archangels are.

First it was “Look to your senses’ radiant nature.” In reality, it really is this way, similar to the sun’s glowing in sensory life. In sensory life, our senses do not seem to glow, but in actuality, they also really glow. Nevertheless, even though our senses are actually glowing, we do not take note of it. So the being admonishes us, the being belonging to us from the ranks of the Angels, “Look to your senses’ radiant nature.”

As we go about thinking in customary awareness, we generally don’t really examine the thinking, we don’t really sense it as such. We don’t actually perceive it. The being that belongs to us from the realm of the Archangels admonishes, “Look to your thinking’s forceful impact.”

Now it progresses to where the Archai are. The Guardian admonishes in three lines, and we ought to hear this being’s admonition as coming from the ranks of the Archai. The next three lines are the lines of the Guardian.

He speaks, who among spirits
In creator fields far from earth
Will give you the grounds of existence-awareness.³

I could also say “the throne of existence-awareness,” but “the grounds of existence-awareness” is better, for it will give you a sort of spiritual floor, much as here in the sensory world you have a physical floor.

After the Guardian of the Threshold has spoken this, then the being from the ranks of the Archai speaks.

Look to memory’s picture-forming.

That is the third. First, we are to look to the radiant nature of our senses, then to thinking’s forceful affect working in us, then to that which lies deep underneath, to what lies underneath speech, to what lies in the constituting of memory, “Look to memory’s picture-forming.”

And so we ourselves have managed in this disparate fashion to bring the three-part speech to our ears, first the speech from the cosmos in the very first line, “Examine the field of thinking,” then the Guardian’s respective three lines lying between directives from the cosmos and the specific hierarchies, and finally the lines of the being belonging to us out of the actual realms of the hierarchies, always speaking the specific paradigm-line, in certainty to the most profound part of our being. It is all brought together in the following manner, which I will then write down.

Examine the field of thinking:

He speaks, who you the ways

From earthly life to earthly life

Will show in spirit light:

Look to your senses’ radiant nature.

He speaks, who on to souls

In realms of being material free,

Will carry you on wings of soul:

Look to your thinking’s forceful impact.

He speaks, who among spirits

In creator fields far from earth

Will give you the grounds of existence-awareness.

Look to memory’s picture-forming.

[The mantra was now written on the board and at the same time in the first line “thinking was underlined, and in each case the last lines of parts 1,2, and 3 were underlined.]

1. Examine the field of thinking

1. He speaks, who you the ways

   From earthly life to earthly life

   Will show in spirit light:

   Look to your senses’ radiant nature.

2. He speaks, who on to souls

   In realms of being material free,

   Will carry you on wings of soul:

   Look to your thinking’s forceful impact.

3. He speaks, who among spirits

   In creator fields far from earth

   Will give you the grounds of existence-awareness.

   Look to memory’s picture-forming.

With this we have it, which as an admonition for our self-awareness sounds forth out of the three lower hierarchies, experienced inwardly in soul: the first from the hierarchy of the angels, the second from the hierarchy of the archangels, the third from the hierarchy of the Archai. [“Angels” was written next to the first part, “Archangels” next to the second part, and “Archai” next to the third part.]

Before the exercise is utilized, soul-concentration can be engendered by means of a person’s bringing up before the soul a certain well-defined picture: picture an eye gazing overhead [an eye was drawn] beholding the sphere of the higher hierarchies [a curving arc] which the forces of the world allow to stream down upon the eye [upper rays], and that then beholds the sphere of the lower hierarchies [a wavy line] that intertwines itself with the higher hierarchies and sends the rays further on to human beings [lower rays].

This picture may be called up before the soul and held there in mind, the outward-looking eye, the two lines, one curved and one wavy, and the rays that come down. And you imagine yourself actually there while practicing the exercise, but without thinking further about the picture, so that while practicing the exercise, the picture remains before the soul, the picture of this outward-looking eye.

Then a person again takes up, attends to, hearkens to the sounding forth from all sides of the cosmos:

Examine the field of feeling.

Spoken then by the Guardian, the next three lines are:

He speaks, who as thought
Out of spirit sun-rays
Calls you to world existence-awareness:

It is already a higher speech, a speech that rings forth from higher hierarchies. Here [in the first mantra], we are always merely made to take note of what is already in us, whereas we are spoken to here in this mantra, by the Guardian, so that we are not merely called to observe our senses, our thinking, and our remembering, but rather so that we are called to taking note of how we ourselves are called out into the world, into world existence-awareness. That sounds forth from the hierarchy of the Exusiai.⁴

Spoken forth then by the being who belongs to us from the hierarchy of the Exusiai:

Feel in your breath life stirring.

Spoken again by the Guardian, the next three lines are:

He speaks, who world existence-awareness
Out of star-life-forces
Would bestow on you in spirit realms.

Then the being speaks from the hierarchy of the Dynamis:⁵

Feel in your blood’s welling-weaving.

Here we must think steadfastly on the interwoven fabric of the world, feeling it actually, within the vibrant activity of our blood.

And the Guardian speaks again, now admonishing us, that we should hearken unto what is spoken by the being from the ranks of the Kyriotetes:⁶

He speaks, who spirit-sense
In light-filled gods-high-realms
Will fashion for you out of will of earth.

Then the being from the ranks of the Kyriotetes speaks:

Feel earth’s mighty counter striving.

Only when a person feels this mighty counter striving of earth-forces can a person properly remain within the purely spiritual world.

So now experience this mantra sounding as a unity:

Examine the field of feeling:

He speaks, who as thought

Out of spirit sun-rays

Calls you to world existence-awareness.

Feel in your breath life stirring.

He speaks, who world existence-awareness

Out of star-life-forces

Would bestow on you in spirit realms.

Feel in your blood’s welling-weaving.

He speaks, who spirit-sense

In light-filled gods-high-realms

Will fashion for you out of will of earth.

Feel earth’s mighty counter striving.

In ascending into the ranks of the second hierarchy, self-awareness will be quickened in us, as an entity belonging to us from the ranks of the Exusiai admonishes us. At first the Guardian will direct us, then such a being will speak to us.

Now, my dear brothers and sisters, we think in life on earth, but our thoughts are quite in vain. When, however, a being from the ranks of the Exusiai thinks, it thinks us as such. Our ego is being thought. And it is brought into being as the thought of a being from the ranks of the Exusiai. If on the earth we say “I” to ourselves, just what are we gazing upon? Yes, this ego, when we say “I” [it was drawn, a circle with the word “I” in gold], we look back on this ego [red arrows], in articulating the word “I”. But for a being from the ranks of the Exusiai [green line], for such a being this ego is a thought, but a thought with more reality, with more actuality. We exist in that we are thought by a being from the ranks of the Exusiai. And when we say “I” to ourselves, we are certainly stating in this way, that we have been thought into being by a heavenly being. And in this thought-becoming by a heavenly entity is contained our higher being.

Then, an entity from the ranks of the Dynamis admonishes us, that we are endowed by him with spirit-presence-in-being, which he abstracts out of life-forces from the stars and bestows on us.

And a being out of the ranks of the Kyriotetes admonishes us, that what lives in us specifically as will upon the earth, will be drawn out into the heights of heaven, and in the transmutation that takes place there, our will of earth again will be given to us, so that we can then utilize it in spirit-willing. Earth-willing is merely a transmutation of spirit-willing. Earth-willing of course will be trundled out down below and also above. On high it is heavenly-willing; below it is earth-willing. Of this we are admonished in closing, first by the Guardian, then by the being from the ranks of the Kyriotetes, who says, “Feel earth’s mighty counter striving.” [Mantra II was now written on the board and at the same time in the first line “feeling” and correspondingly the last lines of parts 1,2, and 3 were underlined.]

2. Examine the field of feeling

1. He speaks, who as thought

   Out of spirit sun-rays

   Calls you to world existence-awareness.

   Feel in your breath life stirring.

2. He speaks, who world existence-awareness

   Out of star-life-forces

   Would bestow on you in spirit realms.

   Feel in your blood’s welling-weaving.

3. He speaks, who spirit-sense

   In light-filled gods-high-realms

   Will fashion for you out of will of earth.

   Feel earth’s mighty counter striving.

And so therefore the second mantra runs as follows:

Examine the field of feeling:

He speaks, who as thought

Out of spirit sun-rays

Calls you to world existence-awareness.

Feel in your breath life stirring.

He speaks, who world existence-awareness

Out of star-life-forces

Would bestow on you in spirit realms.

Feel in your blood’s welling-weaving.

He speaks, who spirit-sense

In light-filled gods-high-realms

Will fashion for you out of will of earth.

Feel earth’s mighty counter striving.

The first is intoned from the ranks of the Exusiai,
the second from the ranks of the Dynamis,
the third from the ranks of the Kyriotetes.

[Exusiai was written next to part 1, and correspondingly Dynamis and Kyriotetes next to parts 2 and 3.]

Once again in ending, so that we may remember what we have fashioned before ourselves as a picture, after all of it has run through us, so that we may have a clear experience of it all, let us place before ourselves once again the picture, which we were to have envisioned as ever standing before our souls during the entire exercise, let us pointedly place it once again before our souls. [This picture, already drawn on the board before the writing of the mantra “Examine the field of thinking”, was now again drawn on the board, the eye, the curving arc, the upper rays, the curvy line, and the lower rays.]

The further ascent into the ranks of the Seraphim, the Cherubim, and the Thrones will properly become appended to all this in the next Class lesson. However just now it may be possible to make somewhat more comprehensible and intelligible what the sense of the whole is.

My dear brothers and sisters, coming to us at the beginning of today’s Class lesson was the formulation, coming out of universal existence-awareness, coming forth out of the essential true nature of the world, admonishing us to self-awareness. Self-experience, it was alleged, leads to true knowledge of the world, although only if and when we can place the self in unity with the world.

But the self does not stand in fanciful relationship to any external entity or process of nature, but rather solely to what is in the spiritual world. That is where the beings of the hierarchies are. If we really wish to penetrate into our self, into the part of our being from which we can say “I”, then we must not coexist with external nature, but rather we must coexist with the beings of the hierarchies. For whatever emerges from external nature that can be spoken of as our inner nature, all that is certainly merely the empty external reflection of our true inner nature. What we truly refer to when we say “I” stands in the same realm within which also stand the higher hierarchies. As soon as a person enters into true self-awareness, he must enter into the ranks of the higher hierarchies. He must then take into account the language of the higher hierarchies.

So that one might do this with full force, not merely making it into a theory drained of blood, but rather doing it with full force, for this reason the admonitions of the Guardian of the Threshold are forever emplaced right there. So that the whole meditation approaches us with due greatness and majesty, for this reason placed there are the two powerful admonitions from the cosmos, “Examine the field of thinking,” and “Examine the field of feeling,” and subsequently the third, which we will hear next time.

If and only if we hold this three-part declamation within our hearts and minds full of life and force, if and when we experience ourselves in this mantric manner in the spiritual world, then we can really bring things forward. For only then have we grasped things in the appropriately correct spirited mood. We must seek this spirited mood in all things. For the actual inner sanctity which must be present, and meditation ought to be conducive, ought to lead to sanctity, this actual inner sanctity comes to one most certainly only through a spirited demeanor, through a specific spirited mood, one in which we are enraptured by the external world for a while, but one in which alone and solely within oneself the content and matter of the meditation is lived. When we entirely full of life attune our inner demeanor in this manner, then self-awareness is not just a sort of brooding within our inner nature, but it is rather a seed-awakening conversation with the world in the widest sense, with the Guardian, and with the Hierarchies. And then we find ourselves in the depths of true self-awareness.

This ought to be taken up by us quite broadly, so that we take it as a ground-rule, to avoid thinking on such things, unless at the same time we can bring this spirited mood to bear on it. And so we should henceforth only think about such things, such as were brought forward today, if and when we can really bring forth within the soul this demeanor, this fundamental accompaniment to our perception, as the majesty of world-wide cosmic distances presses in upon us with a universal thunderclap, as within this in a soft, admonishing voice is intoned all that comes from the Guardian of the Threshold, and as then in compelling fashion a certain being of the Hierarchies itself speaks to our souls.

And only then, when we keep this in memory, and when we bring up the feeling accompanying this memory, specifically only then should we think on this mantra, only then setting ourselves inwardly in relationship with this mantra, so that in this way we should not inwardly desecrate it, thereby desecrating its power, that we may well do by thinking about it with the type of customary, dry, philistine thinking with which we usually think, rather than placing ourselves first in the appropriate mood and demeanor of soul.

And in this regard, we should also make sure that we obtain this mood of soul in order to feel that human self-awareness is something special, serious, and holy, and that in fact, these things should only be spoken inwardly by the soul, silently then externally, so that they come into perception as serious, special, and sacred.

A great hindrance in progressing along an esoteric path is just this, that these things are spoken about so frequently in cliques, in which this serious, special, sacred, spirited nature is not developed at the same time, but rather, even in flights of fancy, these things are gossiped about. In doing this one forgets that in esoteric life all depends on the dominion of truth, proper full truth. Progress cannot be made in esoteric life by one who does not have this knowledge, that in esoteric life truth, full truth, must have dominion, that a person therefore cannot simply speak about the truth and then nevertheless approach such things merely in the way external profane things are approached, in the manner of making these things the subject matter of customary chitter-chatter.

And this, which happens so frequently, this customary chitter-chatter, this is what so very often places hindrances and constraints along the esoteric path. And so we must absolutely bring a serious, special, sacred, spirited tenor of soul along in focusing on all that belongs to self-awareness. Then we will also be able to allow the word to work on our soul in the proper manner, the word which in conclusion shall now be spoken again, just as it was spoken at the beginning of today’s Class lesson:

O Man, know yourself!

Yes indeed, that is a directive to self-awareness.

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.

You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?

Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?

Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?

Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

Fundamentally, it is a question. The answer is given in such as this. [The mantras on the board were indicated.]

• 1. Vernimm is the modified second person singular command form of nehmen, and means “to take up and use.” In English it is much the same as an instructor saying, “Let us take up and examine …” Perceive, which means to understand, is not quite the correct translation, but is close. Examine is also a good translation in that it has a syntactical prefix modifying the base word appropriately. The base word is Amen, a very ancient word in semitic languages as well as in Greek, Latin, and in English meaning take this in, have faith in it, for it is the truth. The prefix ex- modifies it with the understanding that it is external to us, and we must use our powers of thinking, of feeling, and of willing in order to take it into us, to partake of it.
• 2. Kräftewirken: Wirken is something that really works, that has a real effect, a real impact. Kräftewirken then is forceful impact.
• 3. Daseinsgrund: It is not just Sein, which is existence, but Dasein, an existence which is conscious of itself.
• 4. Exusiai means to enthuse a thought with reality, to be the author of something that comes into being, and so the very name should fill us with enthusiasm and these beings are called authors, or authorities in English.
• 5. Dynamis means dynamic magical power, so these beings are called powers.
• 6. Kyrie, Eleison: Repetitive chanting of supplications did not last in the Roman rite, but the response Domine, miserere nobis (Lord, have mercy) persisted. After becoming Pope in 590 AD Gregory the Great changed it to the Greek Kyrie, eleison. It means Lord (in his aspect from the ranks of the Kyriotetes), grace us (undeservedly) with your glory and presence, but have mercy, do it gently, withhold your full glory and presence, as it would destroy us.

My dear friends! We have been studying the position of the human being in relation to the Guardian of the Threshold, and have led the soul in progressive steps into an understanding of the relationship a person has with the Guardian of the Threshold along the path of knowledge. Today we will initially focus our attention on the situation before Guardian of the Threshold, bringing it once again fully alive before our souls, in order to progress a bit forward by means of this esoteric consideration.

A person must forsake, and here I repeat what is appropriate for today and has been covered in prior lessons, a person must forsake the physical world, in which his customary awareness is in force. He comes to know that the sensory-physical world can be grand and joyful, but also full of sorrow and pain, that it can in fact be majestic, and that he has every reason in the world to remain within it, in his awareness. But he also comes to know that he cannot ever get to know himself if he only directs his contemplative eye and sensitive soul out upon this physical world. And he must say to himself, that it is quite grand, arrayed color upon color and arranged form on form, but that just what he himself springs from and is patterned after cannot be found in the encircling wide reaches around.

Yet even at this moment there rings forth from all sides unto a person, as the most noteworthy challenge in one’s life, the word of self-awareness: O man, know yourself!

And in this way, a person will become clearly aware that in customary life he is certainly safeguarded from entering unprepared into what in certainty is the world of his own essential being. Moreover, the Guardian of the Threshold is the same high being who shelters a person as he enters the spiritual world every night in sleep, who shelters the person from consciously experiencing what in sleep is all around him, for otherwise he would be terribly upset in experiencing all this in sleep, if he experienced it unprepared, so much so that he would not be able to continue on in waking life as a human being with strength intact. But at the same time, the Guardian of the Threshold makes it clear to a person that he, the Guardian himself, is the only portal to true, to authentic knowledge.

At this point, a person notices that he comes to an abyss, before entering the realm of knowledge, an abyss displayed as a bottomless chasm. The supporting pillars, that one stands on in the physical world, are gone. One cannot simply march over it. One can only carry himself across when freed of the physical, expressed symbolically, when one “grows wings”, so that one journeys over the abyss as a being of spirit and soul.

But first the Guardian of the Threshold calls out for you to be mindful in regard to the abyss, particularly in regard to the beasts that emerge as spirit-formations from the abyss, for these beasts are the external reflections of impure willing, feeling, and thinking, and these beasts must first be overcome. And in vivid pictures displayed before one’s eyes, willing, feeling, and thinking are revealed in the three beasts, one shown as spectral, one ghoulish, and so forth.

Then the Guardian of the Threshold shows us in greater depth how, in and of themselves, thinking, feeling, and willing can be strengthened, according to whether one has resolved in full awareness to overcome the beasts. And then, before someone actually enters the spiritual world, it is necessary to engage in situational meditations in perceiving the spiritual world, within which to discover how the cosmos speaks to a person, how the hierarchies speak to him, how at first all the things are proclaimed that await him there in the spiritual world.

And we will become progressively more aware, through what is played out before our souls in the mantras, that a person must become something else, if he would stride over the abyss, if he would live within what is on the other side of the abyss. Ever more and more, we will become aware that here on the earth, we are in the company of the beings of the three realms of nature and in the company of people, but over there we are in the company of disembodied souls and in the company of the spirits of the higher hierarchies. A different sort of acquaintanceship is present there. Quite a different constitution of soul is required there for this quite different acquaintanceship.

Once again, it is the business of the Guardian of the Threshold there to forcefully advise a person about how to comport himself, specifically about how to comport himself when striding across the Threshold and actually confronting the things of the spiritual world in their reality, about how in arriving there he must come to possess a wholly different soul-constitution.

There, a person will be aware that within himself two conditions of soul can become a reality, the soul-condition of customary awareness on this side of the abyss, and the soul-condition outside of the physical and etheric bodies on the other side of the abyss, which is the soul-condition of the purely spiritual world.

There, where the difference in these soul-conditions appear, great dangers await a person, dangers however, that initially present themselves in such a way that we have to characterize them as minor departures from normal conditions of soul, but that remain always within the soul when we characterize them properly, for they involve an extreme sickly soul-deformation. It must of course always be said, that when one’s path in the higher worlds is undertaken in the way so painstakingly delineated in the book How to Know Higher Worlds, in many smaller published anthroposophical works, and in the second part of my Outline of Occult Science, then straying from a normal soul-constitution should not happen, at least not easily. A person passing over into the spiritual world through healthy human understanding should be as fully aware of knowledge, initially, as one is through initiation. But a person must know that he may emerge in two different ways from the daily condition of soul-life that he is immersed in, if he does not pay attention to the proper sign-posts along the spiritual world’s pathway.

Here on this side of the Threshold we stand upon the earth, upon the fixed elements of earth. The ground is under our feet. The ground supports us. The watery element is around us, that also takes part in the formation of our own body. This watery element cannot support us in normal life, but infuses throughout us, attaching itself to our blood. It is contained within our forces of growth, within our forces of nourishment. The air is what we breathe. The aeriform, the gaseous element is all around us. Warmth is also all around us, the warmth-ether, the fourth element.

They are disconnected from one another in normal life. Where there is solid earth, there is no water. Where there is water, there is no air. Where there is air, there is no water. Only the fiery warmth presses into and throughout it all, for it is the only one that begins to press itself into everything.

But the moment we take leave, even the first time, my dear friends, the moment we take leave of our physical body, these differentiations cease. The different elements cease to have individual borders. We ourselves enlarge, we extend ourselves out, and we are simultaneously in earth, water, fire, and air. We can no longer differentiate one from another. The attributes held individually by the four elements cease. The earth no longer supports us, for its fixed solidity ceases. Water no longer forms us, for its formative forces cease. In other words, when we plunge into water, it is not as in swimming, where we are separated from the water, but rather it is as if we dissolve into it, as ice dissolves into warm water, as if in becoming one with the water, then we no longer carry, when we pass over into the spiritual world, we no longer carry our blood as a separate element in our vascular circulation, but rather our blood becomes one with the ever-moving watery element of the universe. And just so, air ceases to be a formative breathing-force in us. And warmth ceases to engender our ego-force, ceases to inflame us in warmth to the feeling of individuality. It all ceases. This must be confronted, it must be confronted in the proper manner, this cessation of the differentiation of earth, water, air, and fire.

To do this we may engage, in thought, in having already flown over the abyss. We have arrived on the other side, my dear brothers and sisters. There the Guardian of the Threshold calls out to us, that we should turn, lift our gaze, and face him.

Now think, my dear brothers and sisters, have a lively imagination, imagine a person’s arrival there on the other side, where in certainty the knowledge of the spiritual world is revealed to him. He is there. The Guardian of the Threshold prompts him to look about, to take up the admonitions that he now needs, that in a certain fashion he has now become accustomed to, in the soul-condition that is present there, on the other side of the Threshold, within the spiritual world, there where he lives pressed into the four elements themselves, into earth, water, air, and fire.

Just there a great danger appears, and please forgive the seeming triviality of the expression, my dear brothers and sisters, but if the person has possibly fallen in love with the illusion of disconnectedness of the solid earth, from the formative forces of water, from the creative forces of air, from the ego-awakening forces of warmth, then he may feel delighted merely in spiritual bliss, in giving himself over to the wonder of the spirit, and so he might remain within this spirit-bliss.

A person may be overwhelmed, as the alluring power of Lucifer musters up against him. It depends on his karma, whether a person is more or less susceptible to the alluring power of Lucifer. If he is susceptible, so that he simply totally and completely falls in love with dissolving into earth, water, air, and fire, then the Luciferic attaches itself to him, and he will no longer be able to emerge from this demeanor of soul. He runs the risk, when he once again returns to daily life, of remaining within this soul-demeanor. And so the Guardian of the Threshold must and does call out to him, “You may not do it. You may not fall under the sway of Lucifer. In the dissolution in earth, water, fire, and air you may not simply feel the solitary wonder of bliss. You must take yourself firmly in hand, or else, when you again return to the physical world, as a person in the physical world, when you take up the soul-condition of customary awareness of the physical world, then from then on you will be a person quite confused.”

That is the Luciferic danger, that on the return from the spiritual world, from the other side of the Threshold, a person may be bewildered and no longer have his senses about him, but would be an enthusiastic dreamer, an enthusiastic adherent of idealism, disdainful of customary awareness. That one may not do. And the Guardian of the Threshold admonishes, insistently, that one should be resolutely determined to live in the way corresponding to whatever world one is in, be it earthly or transcendental.

But the Guardian of the Threshold sets down a second admonition. The second admonition is this, that one should take care, when one has arrived on the other side with his thinking, feeling, and willing split apart, one should take care of how much of his thinking, feeling, and willing at hand is still connected to the earthly, is still inclined to the earthly.

There a person can once again be predisposed to remain in what has given him the experiences on this side in the fixed support of earth, to hold on tightly and cross over to the other side of the Threshold with a materialistic soul-constitution, to cross over with the formative forces of water frozen, solidified. Then he can become afflicted with an overweening earthly pride, and can say to himself, “In life on earth I have breathed in, have drawn into myself the very breath, out of which in times past the Father-God has formed human souls, human lives, which I can do also, when freed from earthly life’s confines.”

But if a person carries over into the spiritual world what he perceives in his breath as the creative force of God, then he falls under the sway of the Ahrimanic alluring power. In this condition he cannot return, because before he would return, there in the spiritual world he is enfolded in powerlessness. He would be non-sentient, more or less. His awareness would be disabled, crippled. In this manner, his awareness having been stunted, he would more or less be a sort of tool or implement of the Ahrimanic powers there in the spiritual world.

It is certainly so today since the beginning of the age of Michael, that the spiritual life of human beings, which today is crass and crude, frozen in materialism, is for the most part carried over as such into the spiritual world. And what this means, what it entails, is that the Ahrimanic powers enfold the human being in their grasp whenever his awareness has been stunted into something other than the condition of full wakefulness, and yes, my friends, this has been in evidence everywhere energetically ever since the outbreak of the great World War.

As I have most certainly said many times since the outbreak of the World War, the history of this war cannot be written about from the physical plane’s standpoint alone. Documents by themselves do not reveal the truth, that of the thirty or forty people who were most certainly engaged in the production of the war, a great number at various times were in a state of clouded awareness, and were therefore implements of the Ahrimanic powers. In this way much of what transpired in the World War was a legacy of Ahrimanic powers. This World War can only be written about in an occult manner. Whatever one has seen after a fashion, in his wanderings on this side of the Threshold, of various leading personalities immediately before the outbreak of the World War, all that can be taken truly to be indicative of the habits of soul that are carried over to the other side of the Threshold, and over there then become stunted, become stunted in awareness, and become, therefore, a working force of the Ahrimanic powers.

A person must be clear and fully self-possessed about this, that he may not carry back to this side, the soul-constitution of the other side of the Threshold. He may not carry the soul-constitution of this side of the Threshold to the other side, but rather, for every domain, this side and the other side of the abyss, a strongly stark human inner awareness must be developed.

It arises in this manner for all four elements in the admonition of the Guardian of the Threshold. And again, we should delve into this admonition meditatively.

Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, imagine that you are standing there on the other side of the Threshold. The Guardian has beckoned. You look straight at him. First, he calls out to you, admonishing.

Where is earth’s firmness, that supported you?

One no longer has it. But your heart moves, deep within, and would give an answer. But the heart can be moved inwardly in a three-fold manner, an answer emerging by means of and from the cosmos. It can be moved, this heart, by Christ and his force. Then it answers:

I leave its solid ground,

meaning, the earth’s firmness,

as long¹ as the spirit carries me.

That is the right demeanor of soul. I relinquish the pillars of earth, as long as the spirit carries me within the spirit-domain, as long as I am outside of the body. But the heart can also be moved by Lucifer. Then it answers:

I feel delight, that I no longer need the support.

So speaks the person in his lofty pride, in his self-satisfaction, as if he also would not need the support, when he traverses back into the physical world. Or the heart can be moved by Ahriman. Then it answers:

I will hammer it still harder by the spirit’s might.

The support is referred to here, and carrying the hammered support out and over.

No one should shrink back in fear from meditative soul-consideration of all three answers again and again, in order in this way to be able to choose and align with the first answer in freedom. For one must feel the inherent inward vacillation, the alignment with Lucifer, then with Ahriman. One must place this in meditation firmly within one’s vision. The meditation in this manner must embody the earthen element. [The first part of the mantra was now written on the board.] First the Guardian speaks:

I) Guardian: Where is earth’s firmness, that supported you?

The human heart must give answer. When moved by Christ, it answers:

Christ: I leave its solid ground, as long as the spirit carries me.

If the soul has been moved by Lucifer, it answers in this way:

Lucifer: I feel delight, that I no longer need the support.

The phrase “as long as” [The words “as long as” were underlined.] emerges from the heart, draws the eternal into temporality, and so transforms the sentence. If the heart has been moved by Ahriman, it answers in this way:

Ahriman: I will hammer it still harder by the spirit’s might.

And then, progressing further, so that the soul can fully devote itself to what stands there before it, the second admonition of the Guardian of the Threshold appears, pointing to the formative force of water. This formative force of water is what builds the fixed organs in us, drawing them out of the fluid elements. All that we take in as nourishment must first become fluid, and then the organs are formed out of it. All of a person’s sharply contoured organs have been cast out of fluid elements. This formative force ceases as soon as a person enters the domain on the other side of the Threshold. The Guardian warns, that this is the case. He calls out to us, when we stand there on the other side of the Threshold, our gaze directed onto his stern face. [The second part of the mantra was now written on the board.]

II) Guardian: Where is water’s forming force, that permeated you?

The person answers, if he has been moved in his heart by Christ, “My life extinguishes it, quenches it, as long as the spirit forms me.” The spirit begins to work on you over there, half out of your body.

Christ: My life extinguishes it,

in the sense of quenching it, putting it out, and by “it” is meant the forming force,

as long as the spirit forms me.

Again appears “as long as”, again unobtrusively. [The words “as long as” were underlined.] If the soul has been moved by Lucifer, however, then the phrase “as long as” is left out, and the sentence emerges with haughty arrogance:

Lucifer: My life expunges it, in the sense of melting it away,

Well, what has been extinguished can be rekindled, but what has been melted away, expunged, remains expunged. “My life expunges it”

that I may be released from it.

If the soul has been moved by Ahriman, then it answers:

Ahriman: My life affixes it, in the sense of holding it fast, that I may carry it to spirit realms.

Please take note, my dear brothers and sisters, how everything in mantric verse is fashioned inwardly, meaningfully, and with confident certainty. Here [The first verse was indicated.] we see, “I leave”, “I feel”, “I will.” The ego speaks in the answer. In the second verse the ego speaks, but not so egocentrically, but rather says, “My life”, as in “My life extinguishes it”, “My life expunges it”, “My life affixes it.” Any entry into all reality is only spoken about properly, if it is spoken about accurately in every aspect. Lassitude in the formation of sentences, which is appropriate for people in the physical domain, may not be carried forward into the spirit-domain. In the spirit-domain speaking must be exact and accurate.

You should also most certainly keep in mind, my dear friends, that it all corresponds to a reality, that this esoteric school has not been constituted out of human intentions, but rather out of those of the spiritual world, as was said at the outset, that all that comes to the fore here in the esoteric school of the Goetheanum, even though it is said through my mouth, is nevertheless a dictum of the spiritual world. This must be so in every rightfully constituted esoteric school, certainly in the present and in times to come, just as it was in the ancient holy mysteries. And this esoteric school is the true Michael School, the institution of those high spiritual beings partaking immediately of the inspiration of the cosmic will of Michael.

Concerning the domain of air, the Guardian of the Threshold once again speaks in admonition,

Where is air’s stimulation,² that waked³ you?

waking you into existence. As Jehovah, by means of his infusion of the breath of life into humans, transformed simple living beings, by means of the stimulus inherent in his breath, into beings that can perceive, so a person, through sensing, through the stimulus that the external world brings to bear on the senses, becomes a being who perceives. But what exactly are the senses?

My dear brothers and sisters, the senses are most certainly just refined organs of breathing. The breath broadens itself out into all the senses. As it lives in the lungs, so it lives in the eyes. Only that in the lungs it is bound up with carbon, but in the eyes with the more refined silica. In one’s organism carbonic acid is produced. [It was drawn in red and the word carbonic acid⁴ was written down.] In the senses silicic acid is produced in a much more refined state. [Drawn in yellow, silicic acid⁵ was written down.] A person lives in his lower pole where oxygen combines with carbonic acid, and in his upper pole, in the domain of his nerve-sense system, where oxygen combines with silicon, with silica, and forms refined silicic acid [green]. A human being lives in such a way, that when the breath forms up in the blood, he produces carbonic acid, and when the breath forms up in the senses, he produces silicic acid [yellow arrows], below and outwardly through the breath carbonic acid, in the senses and returning from the senses within the breathing-process silicic acid in a totally more refined dose.

The Guardian of the Threshold calls out to us concerning what is in the air:

Where is air’s stimulation, that waked you?

He who is moved by Christ in his heart answers:

My soul breathes heaven’s air,

no longer earth’s air, but heaven’s air,

as long as the spirit is about me.

The heart moved by Lucifer answers:

My soul cares not for it in spirit blissfulness.

The heart moved by Ahriman answers:

My soul absorbs it, that I may learn godlike to create.

As Jehovah once created with his breath, so those swayed by Ahriman absorb the air, in order to carry it along while crossing over into the spiritual world.

III) Guardian: Where is air’s stimulation, that waked you?

The heart moved by Christ speaks:

Christ: My soul breathes heaven’s air, as long as the spirit is about me

The heart moved by Lucifer speaks:

Lucifer: My soul cares not for it in spirit blissfulness.

The air’s power to stimulate is not noticed at all.

The heart moved by Ahriman speaks:

Ahriman: My soul absorbs it, that I may learn godlike to create.

Concerning the fiery or warmth elements, the Guardian now speaks his last elementary word, admonishing that a person should not lose himself in the element of warmth, but also not carry over into the spiritual world the warmth-element as it is in physical existence, as displayed on earth.

Just before I do this, however, my dear brothers and sisters, I would like to call your attention to this progression along the ascent:

“I” is spoken by the person first.
“My life” is spoken next by the person.
“My soul” is then spoken by the person.

Now the Guardian speaks in warning concerning the fiery elements: [The fourth part of the mantra was written on the board, and at the same time in the Christ-line “as long as” was underlined.]

IV) Guardian: Where is fire’s cleansing,

or cleansing catharsis

that inflamed in you the I?

Our ego lives in warmth, in what presses into and throughout us as warmth. I have often, my dear brothers and sisters, remarked on this in the esoteric school, that the fixed elements remain unconscious within, and also the fluid elements, even though in one’s feeling of satisfaction, one already feels the perfusion of the fluid elements. In satiety or in hunger one experiences the essential nature of the fluid element. The aeriform element is experienced soulfully. A person becomes breathless when not connecting properly with air, and fear comes with breathlessness. This already enters the realm of soul. Warmth is something in which one feels wholly at home. He participates in his condition of warmth or of cold with the whole of his ego. Fire inflames his ego.

The heart moved by Christ answers:

Christ: My “I” blazes in God-Fire, as long as the spirit kindles me.

A person does not need the material warmth of earth when the spirit supplies the spark and ignites his ego. For the ego blazes there not in earthly warmth, not in earthly fire, but within the fire of God.

But the heart moved by Lucifer answers:

Lucifer: My “I” has flaming power through spirit sun-craft.

The heart moved by Ahriman answers, as if the fire begun upon the earth is taken as his own and carried over into the spiritual world, to master the spiritual world with the ego-fire of the physical world.

Ahriman: My “I” has its own fire, that flames purely through self-unfolding.

The ego will not blaze up except by deploying its own fire.

Once again, the progression arising in the formulation first appears in the person speaking “I”.

I leave
I feel
I will

It then becomes more objective, in that the person addresses the things pertaining to himself as “Mine”.

My life extinguishes it
My life expunges it
My life affixes it

It then goes more inwardly, so inner nature becomes objective.

My soul breathes
My soul cares not
My soul absorbs

Now he climbs somewhat further into himself. And take note of the difference, my dear brothers and sisters. Early on is said merely “I”. Then “I” becomes objective, “my I”, as if it were another’s, as one would speak of another’s property. One is externalized even more, one is externalized out of the physical body, even to the extent initially of allowing one to speak fully egoistically of the ego, and one says:

My “I”

as if it were an object. That is the proper way to render it here.

One becomes acquainted with this rendering, my dear brothers and sisters, in all its depth and intensity, when one speaks with souls who have gone through the portal of death and have been in the spiritual world awhile. They do not say “I”, but rather they always say “my I”. I have not yet heard of one departed after death who has said “I”, except at most for a very brief time after death. So some time after death, the dead one says “my I”, because he gazes upon the ego with the eyes of the gods. It becomes objective for him, characteristically objective. Therefore, an account, from someone who has been dead for a somewhat longer time, cannot be accurate if the departed says “I”, if he does not say “my I”. So here in the fourth progressive section, before the Guardian of the Threshold, the soul says “my I”.

And that, my dear friends, is the wonderful spoken exchange at the Threshold, between the Guardian of the Threshold and the human personality, that actually takes place when one stands there before the Guardian of the Threshold, as illustrated here, which must be attended to, in order to catch the feeling in its essential actuality when deploying and immersing oneself in this dialogue properly in meditation. So you form the words up in meditation properly, my dear brothers and sisters, the mantric words coming to you here today, when in a certain sense you hear the words that you yourself are speaking, but only in the course of the Guardian having been heard to be speaking before us first in a manner of soul. Therefore this is how one meditates, as if hearing four times over the Guardian of the Threshold at the start of each section, concerning earth, water, air, and fire, and then allowing one’s own true soul to answer, but in such a manner that one immediately hears the first answer as if inwardly ensouled by Christ, the second answer in the voice of the tempter, and the third answer in the voice of the pompous materialistic Ahriman-Spirit, who approaches a person with the desire to carry over into the spirit the manner of being of the mineralized human.

Now, in closing today’s esoteric lesson, we will allow the characteristic way this is to be meditated to sound forth with firm effect.

Where is earth’s firmness, that supported you?
I leave its solid ground, as long as the spirit carries me.
I feel delight, that I no longer need the support.
I will hammer it still harder by the spirit’s might.

Where is water’s forming force, that permeated you?
My life extinguishes it, as long as the spirit forms me.
My life expunges it, that I may be released from it.
My life affixes it, that I may carry it to spirit realms.

Where is air’s stimulation, that waked you?
My soul breathes heaven’s air, as long as the spirit is about me.
My soul cares not for it in spirit blissfulness.
My soul absorbs it, that I may learn godlike to create.

Where is fire’s cleansing, that inflamed in you the I?
My “I” blazes in God-Fire, as long as the spirit kindles me.
My “I” has flaming power through spirit sun-craft.
My “I” has its own fire, that flames purely through self-unfolding.

• 1. so lang: Translating so lang as "so long as" carries a hint of inevitability that this condition is bound to end sooner or later, whereas translating it more correctly as "as long as" still has the same sense of contingency, but additionally carries the sense that in choosing this condition it can carry on forever.
• 2. Reizgewalt means alluring, stimulating power
• 3. erwechte: The verb in this line is not erwachte, which translates as the intransitive awakened, but rather the transitive erweckte, which translates as waked (inspired, excited, aroused).
• 4. Kohlensäure
• 5. Kieselsäure

From the things I have already said it may perhaps be clear to you what all education and teaching in the Waldorf School is designed to bring about. It aims at bringing up children to be human beings strong and sound in body, free in soul and lucid in spirit. Physical health and strength, freedom of soul and clarity of spirit are things mankind will require in the future more than anything else, particularly in social life. But in order to educate and teach in this way it is necessary for the teacher to get a thorough mastery of those things I have attempted to describe.

The teacher must have a complete vision of the child organism; and it must be a vision of the organism enabling him to judge physical health. For only one who is truly a judge of physical health and can bring it into harmony with the soul can say to himself: with this child this must be done, and with that child the other.

It is an accepted opinion to-day that a doctor should have access to schools. The system of school doctors is developing widely. But, just as it not good when the different branches of instruction, the different subjects, are given to different teachers who make no contact with one another, neither is it good to place the charge of physical health in the hands of a person who is not a member of the staff, not a member of the college of teachers. The situation presents a certain difficulty, of which the following incident will give you an example.

On an occasion when we were showing visitors over the Waldorf School there was a gentleman who, in his official capacity, was an inspector of schools. I was speaking of the physical health and the physical organism of the children and what one could observe in it, and I told him about one child who has a certain disorder of the heart, and another with some other disability etc. and then the man exclaimed in astonishment: Yes, but your teachers would have to have medical knowledge for this to be of any use in the school.

Well, yes, if it is truly a necessity for healthy education that teachers should have a certain degree of medical know-ledge, why then they must have it, they must attain it. Life cannot be twisted to suit the idiosyncrasies of men, we must frame our arrangements in accordance with the demands of life. Just as we must learn something before we can do something in other spheres, so must we learn something before we can do something in education.

Thus, for instance, it is necessary for a teacher to see precisely all that is happening when a child plays, a little child. Play involves a whole complex of activities of soul: joy, sometimes also pain, sympathy, antipathy; and particularly curiosity and the desire for knowledge. A child wants to investigate the objects he plays with and see what they are made of. And when observing this free activity of the child's soul—an activity unconstrained as yet into any form of work—when observing this entirely spontaneous expression, we must look to the shades of feeling and notice whether it satisfies or does not satisfy. For if we guide the child's play so as to content him we improve his health, for we are promoting an activity which is in direct touch with his digestive system. And whether or not a man will be subject in old age to obstruction in his blood circulation and digestive system depends upon how his play is guided in childhood. There is a fine, a delicate connection between the way a child plays and the growth and development of its physical organism.

One should not say: the physical organism is a thing of little account; I am an idealist and cannot concern myself with such a low thing as the physical organism. This physical organism has been put into the world by the divine spiritual powers of the world, it is a divine creation, and we must realise that we, as educators, are called upon to co-operate in this spiritual creation. I would rather express my meaning by a concrete example than in abstract sentences.

Suppose children show an extreme form, a pathological form of what we call the melancholic disposition; or suppose you get an extreme form, a pathological form of the sanguine temperament. The teacher must know, then, where the border-line comes between what is simply physical and what is pathological. If he observes that a melancholic child is tending to become pathological,—and this is far more often the case than one would think,—he must get into touch with the child's parents and learn from them what diet the child as been having. He will then discover a connection between this diet and the child's pathological melancholy. He will probably find,—to give a concrete instance, though there might be other causes,—he will probably find that the child has been getting too little sugar in the food he is given at home. Owing to lack of sugar in the food he gets, the working of his liver is not regulated properly. For the peculiarity of the melancholic child is that a certain substance i.e. starch, (German: Starke) is formed in the liver indeed, but not formed in the right measure. This substance is also to be found in plants. All human beings form starch in the liver but it is different from plant starch—it is an animal starch which in the liver immediately becomes transformed into sugar. This transformation of animal starch into sugar is a very important part of the activity of the liver. Now, m the melancholic child this is out of order, and one must advise the mother to put more sugar into the child's food; in this way one can regulate the glycogenic activity of the liver,—as it is called. And you will see what an extraordinary effect this purely hygienic measure will have.

Now, in the sanguine child you will find precisely the opposite: most likely he is being gorged with sugar; he is given too many sweets, he is given too much sugar in his food. If he has been made voracious of sugar precisely the opposite activity will come about. The liver is an infinitely important organ, and it is an organ which resembles a sense-organ much more closely than one would imagine. For, the purpose of the liver is to perceive the whole human being from within, to comprehend him. The liver is vital to the whole human being. Hence its organisation differs from that of other organs. In other organs a certain quantum of arterial blood comes in and a certain quantum of venous blood goes out. The liver has an extra arrangement. A special vein enters the liver and supplies the liver with extra venous blood. This has the effect of making the liver into a kind of world of its own, a world apart in the human being. [Literally “Aussenwelt,”—outer world.] And it is this that enables man to perceive himself by means of the liver, to perceive, that is, what affects his organism. The liver is an extraordinarily fine barometer for sensing the kind of relation the human being has to the outer world. You will effect an extraordinary improvement in the case of a pathologically sanguine child—a flighty child, one who flits nervously from thing to thing—you will get a remarkable improvement if you advise his mother to diminish somewhat the amount of sugar she gives him.

Thus, if you are a real teacher, through what you do, not in school, but at other times, you can give the child such guidance as shall make him truly healthy, strong and active in all his physical functions. And you will notice what enormous importance this has for the development of the whole human being.

Some of the most impressive experiences we have had with the children of the Waldorf School have been with those of fifteen or sixteen years old. We began the Waldorf School with eight classes, the elementary classes, but we have added on, class by class, a ninth, tenth and now an eleventh class. These upper classes,—which are of course advanced classes, not elementary classes,—contain the children of 15 and 16 years old. And we have with these very special difficulties. Some of these difficulties are of a psychical and moral nature. I will speak of these later. But even in the physical respect one finds that man's nature tends continuously to become pathological and has to be shielded from this condition.

Among girls, in certain circumstances, you will find a slight tendency to chlorosis, to anaemia, in the whole developing organism. The blood in the girl's organism becomes poor; she becomes pale, anaemic. This is due to the fact that during these 14th, 15th and 16th years the spiritual nature is separated out from the total organism; and this spiritual nature, which formerly worked within the whole being, regulated the blood. Now the blood is left to itself. Therefore it must be rightly prepared so that its own power may accomplish this larger task. Girls are apt, then, to become pale, anaemic: and one must know that this anaemia comes about when one has failed to arouse a girl's interest in the things one has been teaching or telling her. Where attention and interest are kept alive the whole physical organism participates in the activity which is engaging the inmost self of the human being, and then anaemia does not arise in the same way.

With boys the case is opposite. The boys get a kind of neuritis, a condition in which there is too much blood in the brain. Hence during these years the brain behaves as though it were congested with blood. (Blutuberfullt.) In girls we find a lack of blood in the body: in boys a superabundance, particularly in the head,—a superabundance of white blood, which is a wrong form of venous and arterial blood. This is because the boys have been given too many sensations, they have been overstimulated, and have had to hurry from sensation to sensation without pause or proper rest. And you will see that even the troublesome behaviour and difficulties among 14, 15 and 16 year old children are characteristic of this state and are connected with the whole physical development.

When one can view the nature of man in this way, not despising what is physical and bodily, one can do a great deal for the children's health as a teacher or educator. It must be a fundamental principle that spirituality is false the moment it leads away from the material to some castle in the clouds. If one has come to despising the body, and to saying: O the body is a low thing, it must be suppressed, flouted: one will most certainly not acquire the power to educate men soundly. For, you see, you may leave the physical body out of account, and perhaps you may attain to a high state of abstraction in your spiritual nature, but it will be like a balloon in the air, flying off. A spirituality not bound to what is physical in life can give nothing to social evolution on the earth: and before one can wing one's way into the Heavens one must be prepared for the Heavens. This preparation has to take place on earth.

When men seek entry into Heaven and must pass the examination of death, it is seldom, in these materialistic days, that we find they have given a spiritual nurture to this human physical organism,—this highest creation of divine, spiritual beings upon earth.

I will speak of the psychic moral aspect in the next section, and on Eurhythmy in the section following.

If there is a great deal to do in the physical sphere apart from the educational measures taken in the school itself, the same is true for the domain of the soul, the psychic domain, and for that of the spirit. The important thing is to get the human being even while at school to be finding a right entry into life. Once more I will illustrate the aim of the Waldorf School by concrete examples rather than abstract statements.

It is found necessary at the end of a school year to take stock of the work done by a child during the year. This is generally called: a report on the child's progress and attainment in the different subjects in respect of the work set. In many countries the parents or guardians are informed whether the child has come up to standard and how—by means of figures: 1, 2, 3, 4; each number means that a child has reached a certain proficiency in a given subject. Some-times, when you are not quite sure whether 3 or 4 expresses the correct degree of attainment, you write 3 ½, and some teachers, making a fine art of calculation, have even put down 3 ¼. And I must own that I have never been able to acquire this art of expressing human faculties by such numbers.

The reports in the Waldorf School are produced in another manner. Where the body of teachers, the college of teachers, is such a unity that every child in the school is known to some extent by every teacher, it becomes possible to give an account of the child which relates to his whole nature. Thus the report we make on a child at the end of the school year resembles a little biography, it is like an apercus of the experiences one has had with the child during the year, both in school and out.

In this way the child and his parents, or guardians, have a mirror image of what the child is like at this age. And we have found at the Waldorf School that one can put quite severe censure into this mirror-like report and children accept it contentedly. Now we also write something else in the report. We combine the past with the future. We know the child, and know whether he is deficient in will, in feeling or in thought, we know whether this emotion or the other predominates in him. And in the light of this knowledge, for every single child in the Waldorf School we make a little verse, or saying. This we inscribe in his report. It is meant as a guiding line for the whole of the next year at school. The child learns this verse by heart and bears it in mind. And the verse works upon the child's will, or upon his emotions or mental peculiarities, modifying and balancing them.

Thus the report is not merely an intellectual expression of what the child has done, but it is a power in itself and continues to work until the child receives a new report. And one must indeed come to know the individuality of a child very accurately—as you will realise—if one is to give him a report of such a potent nature year by year.

You can also see from this that our task in the Waldorf School is not the founding of a school which requires exceptional external arrangements. What we hold to be of value is the pedagogy and teaching which can be introduced into any school. (We appreciate the influence of external conditions upon the education in any school). We are not revolutionaries who simply say: town schools are no use, all schools must be in the country, and such-like; we say, rather: the conditions of life produce this or that situation; we take the conditions as they are, and in every kind of school we work for the welfare of man through a pedagogy and didactics which take the given surroundings into account. Thus, working along these lines, we find we are largely able to dispense with the system of “staying put,”—the custom of keeping back a child a second year in the same class so as to make him brighter.

We have been blamed at the Waldorf School for having children in the upper classes whom the authorities think should have been kept back. We find it exceedingly difficult, if only on humane grounds, to leave children behind because our teachers are so attached to their children that many tears would be shed if this had to be done. The truth is that an inner relationship arises between children and teacher, and this is the actual cause of our being able to avoid this unhappy custom, this “staying put.” But apart from this there is no sense in this keeping of children back. For, suppose we keep back a boy or girl in a previous class: the boy or girl may be so constituted that his mind unfolds in his 11th year, we shall then be putting the child in the class for 11 year-old children one year too late. This is much more harmful than that the teacher should at some time have extra trouble with this child because it has less grasp of the subjects and must yet be taken on with the others into the next class.

The special class (Hilfsklasse) is only for the most backward children of all. We have only one special class into which we have to take the weak, or backward children of all the other classes. We have not had enough money for a number of “helping” classes; but this one class has an exceptionally gifted teacher, Dr. Schubert. As for him, well, when the question of founding a special class arose, one could say with axiomatic certainty: You are the one to take this special class. He has a special gift for it. He is able to make something of the pathological conditions of the children. He handles each child quite individually, so much so that he is happiest when he has the children sitting around a table with him, instead of in separate benches. The backward children, those who have a feebleness of mind, or some other deficiency, receive a treatment here which enables them after a while to rejoin their classes.

Naturally this is a matter of time; but we only transfer children to this class on rare occasions; and whenever I attempt to transfer a child from a class into this supplementary class, finding it necessary, I have first of all to fight the matter out with the teacher of the class who does not want to give the child up. And often it is a wonderful thing to see the deep relationship which has grown up between individual teachers and individual children. This means that the education and teaching truly reach the children's inner life.

You see it is all a question of developing a method, for we are realistic, we are not nebulous mystics; so that, although we have had to make compromises with ordinary life, our method yet makes it possible really to bring out a child's individual disposition;—at least we have had many good results in these first few years.

Since, under present conditions, we have had to make compromises, it has not been possible to give religious instruction to many of the children. But we can give the children a moral training. We start, in the teaching of morality, from the feeling of gratitude. Gratitude is a definite moral experience in relation to our fellow men. Sentiments and notions which do not spring from gratitude will lead at most to abstract precepts as regards morality. But everything can come from gratitude. Thus, from gratitude we develop the capacity for love and the feeling for duty. And in this way morality leads on to religion. But outer circumstances have prevented our figuring among those who would take the kingdom of heaven by storm,—thus we have given over the instruction in Catholicism into the hands of the Catholic community. And they send to us in the school a priest of their own faith. Thus the Catholic children are taught by the Catholic priest and the Evangelical (protestant) children by the evangelical pastor. The Waldorf School is not a school for a philosophy of life, but a method of education. It was found, however, that a certain number of children were non-conformist and would get no religious instruction under this arrangement. But, as a result of the spirit which came into the Waldorf School, certain parents who would otherwise not have sent their children to any religion lesson requested us to carry the teaching of morality on into the sphere of religion. It thus became necessary for us to give a special religious instruction from the standpoint of Anthroposophy. We do not even in these Anthroposophical religion lessons teach Anthroposophy, rather we endeavour to find those symbols and parables in nature which lead towards religion. And we endeavour to bring the Gospel to the children in the manner in which it must be comprehended by a spiritual understanding of religion, etc. If anyone thinks the Waldorf School is a school for Anthroposophy it shows he has no understanding either of Waldorf School pedagogy or of Anthroposophy.

As regards Anthroposophy, how is it commonly under-stood? When people talk of Anthroposophy they think it means something sectarian, because at most they have looked up the meaning of the word in the dictionary. To proceed in this way with regard to Anthroposophy is as if on hearing the words: ‘Max Muller of Oxford,’ a man were to say to himself: ‘What sort of a man can he have been? A miller who bought corn and carted the corn to his mill and ground it into flour and delivered it to the baker.’ A person giving such an account of what the name of Miller conveyed to him would not say much to the point about Max Muller, would he? But the way people talk of Anthroposophy is just like this, it is just like this way of talking about Max Muller, for they spin their opinion of Anthroposophy out of the literal meaning of the word. And they take it to be some kind of backwoods' sect; whereas it is merely that everything must have some name.

Anthroposophy grows truly out of all the sciences, and out of life and it was in no need of a name. But since in this terrestrial world men must have names for things, since a thing must have some name, it is called Anthroposophy. But just as you cannot deduce the scholar from the name Max Muller, neither can you conclude that because we give Anthroposophical religious instruction in the school, Anthroposophy is introduced in the way the other religious instruction is introduced from outside,—as though it were a competing sect.

No, indeed, I mean no offence in saying this, but others have taken us to task about it. The Anthroposophical instruction in religion is increasing: more and snore children come to it. And some children, even, have run away from the other religious instruction and come over to the Anthroposophical religion lessons. Thus it is quite understandable that people should say: What bad people these Anthroposophists are! They lead the children astray so that they abandon the catholic and evangelical (protestant) religion lessons and want to have their religious instruction there. We do all we can to restrain the children from coming, because it is extraordinarily difficult for us to find religion teachers in our own sphere. But, in spite of the fact that we have never arranged for this instruction except in response to requests from parents and the unconscious requests of the children themselves,—to my great distress, I might almost say:—the demand for this Anthroposophical religious instruction increases more and more. And now thanks to this Anthroposophical religious instruction the school has a wholly Christian character.

You can feel from the whole mood and being of the Waldorf School how a Christian character pervades all the teaching, how religion is alive there;—and this in spite of the fact that we never set out to proselytise in the Waldorf School or to connect it with any church movement or congregational sect. I have again and again to repeat: the Waldorf School principle is not a principle which founds a school to promote a particular philosophy of life,—it founds a school to embody certain educational methods. Its aims are to be achieved by methodical means, by a method based on knowledge of man. And its aim is to make of children human beings sound in body, free in soul, clear in spirit.

Let me now say a few words on the significance of Eurhythmy teaching and the educational value of eurhythmy for the child. In illustration of what I have to say I should like to use these figures made in the Dornach studio. They are artistic representations of the real content of eurhythmy. The immediate object of these figures is to help in the appreciation of artistic eurhythmy. But I shall be able to make use of them to explain some things in educational eurhythmy. Now, eurhythmy is essentially a visible speech, it is not miming, not pantomime, neither is it an art of dance. When a person sings or speaks he produces activity and movement in certain organs; this same movement which is inherent m the larynx and other speech organs is capable of being continued and manifested throughout the human being. In the speech organs the movements are arrested and repressed. For instance, an activity of the larynx which would issue in this movement (A)—where the wings of the larynx open outward—is submerged in status nascendi and transformed into a movement into which the meaning of speech can be put,—and into a movement which can pass out into the air and be heard. Here you have the original movement of A (ah), the inner, and essentially human movement—as we might call it—

This is the movement which comes from the whole man when he breaks forth in A (ah). Thus there goes to every utterance in speech and song a movement which is arrested in status nascendi. But it seeks issue in forms of movement made by the whole human being. These are the forms of utterance in movements, and they can be discovered.

Just as there are different forms of the larynx and other organs for A (ah), I (ee), L, M, so are there also corresponding movements and forms of movement. These forms of movement are therefore those expressions of will which otherwise are provided in the expressions of thought and will of speech and song. The thought element, the abstract part of thought in speech is here removed and all that is to be expressed is transposed into the movement. Hence eurhythmy is an art of movement, in every sense of the word. Just as you can hear the A so can you see it, just as you can hear the I so can you see it.

In these figures the form of the wood is intended to express the movement. The figures are made on a three colour principle. The fundamental colour here is the one which expresses the form of the movement. But just as feeling pervades the tones of speech, so feeling enters into the movement. We do not merely speak a sound, we colour it by feeling. We can also do this in eurhythmy. In this way a strong unconscious momentum plays into the eurhythmy. If the performer, the eurhythmist, can bring this feeling into his movements in an artistic way the onlookers will be affected by it as they watch the movements.

It should be borne in mind, moreover, that the veil which is worn serves to enhance the expression of feeling, it accompanies and moves to the feeling. This was brought out in the performance over there (Tr: e.g. at Keble College). And you see here (Tr: i.e. in the figures) the second colour—which comes mainly on the veils—represents the feeling nuance in the movement. Thus you have a first, fundamental colour expressing the movement itself, a second colour over it mainly falling on the veil, which expresses the nuance of feeling. But the eurhythmy performer must have the inner power to impart the feeling to his movement: just as it makes a difference whether I say to a person: Come to me (commandingly), or: Come to me (in friendly request). This is the nuance of feeling, gradation of feeling. What I say is different if I say: Come to me! (1) or: Come to me (2). In the same way this second colour, here expressed as blue on a foundation of green, which then continues over into the veil (Tr.: where it can show as pure blue),—this represents the feeling nuance in the language of eurhythmy.

And the third thing that is brought out is character, a strong element of will. This can only be introduced into eurhythmy when the performer is able to experience his own movements as he makes them and express them strongly in himself. The way a performer holds his head as he does eurhythmy makes a great difference to his appearance. Whether, for instance, he keeps the muscles on the left of the head taut, and those on the right slack—as is expressed here by means of the third colour. (Showing figure) You see here the muscles on the left of the head are somewhat tense, those on the right relaxed. You will observe how the third colour always indicates this here. Here you see the left side is contracted, and down over the mouth here; here (in another figure) the forehead is contracted, the muscles of the forehead are contracted. This, you see, sets the tone of the whole inner character,—this that rays out from this slight contracting: for this slight contraction sends rays throughout the organism. Thus the art of eurhythmy is really composed of the movement, expressed in the fundamental colour; of the feeling nuance, expressed by the second colour, and of this element of will;—indeed the element of the whole art is will, but will is here emphasised in a special way.

Where the object is to exhibit the features of eurhythmy those parts only of the human being are selected which are characteristic of eurhythmy. If we had figures here with beautifully painted noses and eyes and beautiful mouths, they might be charming paintings; but for eurhythmy that is not the point; what you see painted, modelled or carved here is solely what belongs to the art of eurhythmy in the human being doing eurhythmy.

A human being performing eurhythmy has no need to make a special face. That does not matter. Naturally, it goes without saying, a normal and sound eurhythmist would not make a disagreeable face when making a kindly movement, but this would be the same in speaking. No art of facial expression independent of eurhythmic expression is aimed at: For instance, a performer can make the A movement by turning the axels of his eyes outwards. That is allowable, that is eurhythmic. But it would not do if someone were to make special oeilades (“Kinkerlitchen,” we call them) as is done in miming; these oeilades, which are often in special demand in miming, would here be a grimace. In eurhythmy everything must be eurhythmic.

Thus we have here a form of art which shows only that part of man which is eurhythmy, all else is left out; and thus we get an artistic impression. For each art can only express what it has to express through its own particular medium. A statue cannot be made to speak; thus you must bring out the expression of soul you want through the shaping of the mouth and the whole face. Thus it would have been no good in this case, either, to have painted human beings naturalistically; what had to be painted was an expression of the immediately eurhythmic.

Naturally, when I speak of veils this does not mean that one can change the veil with every letter; but one comes to find, by trying out different feeling nuances for a poem, and entering into the mood of the poem,—that a whole poem has an A mood, or a B mood. Then one can carry out the whole poem rightly in one veil. The same holds good of the colour. Here for every letter I have put the veil form, colour, etc. which go together. There must be a certain fundamental key in a poem. This tone is given by the colour of the veil, and in general by the whole colour combination; and this has to be retained throughout the poem,—otherwise the ladies would have to be continually changing veils, constantly throwing off the veils, putting on other dresses,—and things would be even more complicated than they are already and people would say they understood even less But actually if one once has the fundamental key one can maintain it throughout the whole poem, making the changes from one letter to another, from one syllable to another from one mood to another by means of the movements.

Now since my aim to-day is a pedagogic one, I have here set out these figures in the order in which children learn the sounds. And the first sound the children learn, when they are quite young, is the sound A. And they continue in this order, approximately,—for naturally where children are concerned many digressions occur,—but on the whole the children get to know the vowels in this order: A, E, I, 0, U, the normal order. And then, when the children have to practice the visible speech of eurhythmy, when they come to do it in this same order, it is for them like a resurrection of what they felt when they first learned the sounds of speech as little children,—a resurrection, a rebirth at another stage. In this language of eurhythmy the child experiences what he had experienced earlier. It affirms the power of the word in the child through the medium of the whole being.

Then the children learn the consonants in this order: M.B.P.D.T.L.N;—there should also be an NG here, as in sing, it has not yet been made—; then F.H.G.S.R. R, that mysterious letter, which properly has three forms in human speech, is the last one for children to do perfectly. There is a lip R, a palatal R, and an R spoken right at the back (Tr: a gutteral R).

Thus, what the child learns in speech in a part of his organism, in his speaking or singing organism, can be carried over into the whole being and developed into a visible speech.

If there should be a sufficient interest for this expressive art we could make more figures; for instance Joy, Sorrow, Antipathy, Sympathy and other things which are all part of eurhythmy, not the grammar only, but rhetoric, too, comes into its own in eurhythmy. We could make figures for all these. Then people would see how this spiritual-psychic activity, which not only influences the functions of man's physical body but develops both his spiritual-psychic and his organic bodily nature, has a very definite value both in education and as an art.

As to these eurhythmy figures, they also serve in the study of eurhythmy as a help to the student's memory—for do not suppose that eurhythmy is so easy that it can be learned in a few hours,—eurhythmy must be thoroughly studied; these figures then are useful to students for practising eurhythmy and for going more deeply into their art. You can see there is a very great deal in the forms themselves, though they are quite simply carved and painted.

I wished to-day to speak of the art of eurhythmy in so far as it forms part of the educational principle of the Waldorf School.

As we begin more and more to view the human organism in the way which I have unfortunately been able to indicate only very briefly, many things not otherwise appreciated in their full significance assume great importance. Very little heed is paid nowadays to what I have called in the appendix to my book, Riddles of the Soul, the threefold organisation of the physical being of man. Yet a right understanding of this threefold organisation is of the greatest significance for pathology and therapy. According to this threefold organisation of physical man, the system of nerves and senses is to be conceived of as being localised mainly in the head, only of course in this sense the head-organisation really extends over the whole being. The nervous and sensory functions of the skin, and also those within the organism, must be included. We cannot, however, arrive at a well-founded conception of the modes of activity in the organism unless—theoretically in the first place—we differentiate the system of nerves and senses from the rest of the organism as a whole.

The second, or rhythmic, system includes, in the functional sense, all that is subject to rhythm—primarily, therefore, the breathing system and its connection with the blood circulation. In the wider sense, too, there is the rhythm that is essentially present in the life of man, although he can break through it in many ways—I mean the rhythm of day and night, of sleeping and waking. Then there are other rhythms, the rhythmic assimilation of foodstuffs and the like. These latter rhythms are constantly broken by man, but the consequences have to be brought into equilibrium by certain regulative factors which are present in the organism. As a second member of the human organisation, then, we have the rhythmic system; and, as a third member, the metabolic organism, in which I include the limb-formations because the functional processes that arise as a result of the movements of the limbs are inwardly connected with the metabolism in general.

When we consider this threefold nature of man, we find that the organisation described in the last lecture as being mainly connected with the Ego has a definite relation to the metabolism in so far as the metabolic system extends over the whole being. Again, the rhythmic system has a definite connection with the system of heart and lungs. The functions of the kidneys, the forces that go out from the kidney system, are related to the astral organisation of the human being. In short, in his threefold physical nature man is related to the different members of his super-sensible being and also to the several organic systems—as I showed yesterday. But these relationships must be studied in more precise detail if they are to prove of practical value for an understanding of man in health and disease. And here we shall do best to start from a consideration of the rhythmic being of man.

This rhythmic organisation is very frequently misunderstood in respect of a very definite characteristic, namely the relation that is set up between the rhythm of the blood circulation and the rhythm of the breath. In the grown-up person, this relationship is approximately in the ratio of four to one. This, of course, is only the average, approximate ratio, and its variations in individuals are an expression of the measure of health and disease in the organism. Now, that which reveals itself in the rhythmic man as a ratio of four to one, continues in the organism as a whole. We have again a ratio of four to one in the relationship of the processes of the metabolic system (including the limbs) to the system of nerves and senses. This again can be verified by empirical data as in the case of other things mentioned in these lectures. Indeed, so far-reaching is this relationship that we may say: All the processes connected with metabolism in man take their course four times more quickly than the work done by the nervous and sensory activities for the growth of the human being.

The second teeth which appear in the child are an expression of what is proceeding in the metabolic system as a result of its coming continually into contact with the system of nerves and senses. All that flows from the metabolic system towards the middle, rhythmic system, set against that which flows from the nerves and senses system into the rhythmic system, is in the ratio of four to one. To speak precisely, we may take the breathing system to be the rhythmic continuation of the system of nerves and senses, and the circulatory system to be the rhythmic continuation of the metabolic system. The metabolic system sends its workings, as it were, up into the rhythmic man. In other words, the third member works into the second, and this expresses itself through the rhythm of blood circulation in daily life. The system of nerves and senses, again, sends its workings into the breathing system and this is expressed through the rhythm of the breath. In the rhythmic being of man we can perceive the ratio of four to one—for there are some seventy pulse-beats or so to eighteen breaths. In the relationships of the rhythms, the rhythmic being of man represents the contact between the system of nerves and senses and the metabolic system; and this can again be observed in any given life-period of man by studying the relation of all that proceeds from the metabolism in the general organic processes to all that goes out from the head system—the system of nerves and senses. This is a relationship of great significance.

In the child's second teeth there is an upward thrust of the metabolic system into the head, but the point about this meeting between the metabolic system and the system of nerves and senses is that the latter, to begin with, gets the upper hand. The following will make this clear to you. The second dentition at about the age of seven represents a contact between the metabolic system and the system of nerves and senses, but the nervous and sensory action dominates. The outcome of this contact of forces—which proceed from the nerves and senses on the one hand and the metabolic system on the other—is the development of the second teeth.

Again, in the period when the human being reaches puberty, a new contact occurs between the metabolic system and the system of nerves and senses, but this time the metabolic system dominates. This is expressed in the male sex by the change in the voice itself, which up to this period of life has been, essentially, a form of expression of the system of nerves and senses. The metabolic system pulses upwards and makes the voice deeper.

We can understand these workings by observing the extent to which they embrace the radiations in the human organism which originate in the kidney system and the liver-gall system on the one hand, and in the head and skin organisations on the other. This is an exceedingly interesting connection, and one which leads us into the deepest depths of the organisation of man. We can envisage the building and moulding of the organism thus: Radiations go out from the system of kidneys and liver, and they are met by the plastic, formative forces proceeding from the head. The forces from the system of kidneys and liver (naturally they do not only stream upwards but to all sides) have the tendency to work in a semi-radial direction, but they are everywhere thwarted by the plastic, formative forces which proceed from the head. We can thus understand the form of the lungs by thinking of it as being organised by the forces of the liver and kidneys, which are then met by the rounding-off forces proceeding from the head. The whole structure of man comes into being in this way: radiation from the systems of kidneys and liver, and then the rounding off of what has been radiated out by the forces proceeding from the head.

In this way we arrive at a fact of the greatest importance and one which can be confirmed empirically in every detail. In the process of man's development, in his growth, two sets of forces are at work: (1) forces that proceed from the systems of liver and kidneys, and (2) forces that proceed from the system of nerves and senses, which round off the forms and give them their surfaces. Both components play into each other, but not with the same rhythm. All that takes its start from the systems of liver and gall has the rhythm of metabolic man. All that proceeds from the head system has the rhythm of the man of nerves and senses. So that when the organism is ready for the coming of the second teeth, at about the seventh year of life, the metabolic system, with all that proceeds from the liver and kidneys (which is met by the rhythm of the heart), is subject to a rhythm that is related to the other rhythm, proceeding from the head, in the ratio of four to one. Thus not until the twenty-eighth year of life is the head organisation of man developed to the point reached by the metabolic organisation at the age of seven. The plastic principle in man, therefore, develops more slowly than the radiating, principle—in effect, four times as slowly. Connected with this is the fact that at the end of the seventh year of life, in respect of what proceeds from the metabolic activities, we have developed to the point reached by growth in general (in so far as this is subject to the system of nerves and senses) only at the twenty-eighth year.

Man is thus a complicated being. Two streams of movement subject to a different rhythm are at work in him. And so we can say: The coming of the second teeth is due in the first place to the fact that everything connected with the metabolism comes into contact with the slower, but more intense plastic principle, and in the teeth the plastic element dominates. At the time of puberty, the metabolic element preponderates the plastic influences withdraw more into the background, and the whole process is expressed in the male sex by the familiar phenomenon of the deepened voice.

Many other things in the being of man are connected with this: for instance the fact that the greatest possibility of illness occurs, fundamentally speaking, during the period of life before the coming of the second teeth—the first seven years of life. When the second teeth appear, the inner tendency of the human being to disease ceases to a very great extent. The system of education which it was our task to build up compelled me to make a detailed study of this matter, for it is impossible to found a rational system of education without these principles which concern the human being in health and disease. In his inner being, man is in the healthiest state during the second period of life, from the change of teeth to puberty. After puberty, an epoch begins again when it is easy for him to fall a prey to illness. Now the tendency to illness in the first period of life is of quite a different nature from the tendency to illness after puberty. These two possibilities of illness are as different, shall I say, as the phenomena of the second dentition and the change in the male voice.

During the first period of life, up to the change of teeth, everything goes out from the child's organisation of nerves and senses to the outermost periphery of the organism. The system of nerves and senses still has the upper hand at the change of teeth. You will be able to form a general conception of pathological phenomena during the first seven years of life if you say to yourselves: It is quite evident here that the radiations from the system of liver and kidneys are rounded off, stultified in a sense, by the plastic principle working from the system of nerves and senses. This plastic element is the main field of action of everything which I have described in these lectures as being connected with the Ego-organisation and astral organisation of man.

Now it may seem strange that I previously spoke of the Ego-organisation as going out from the system of liver and gall and the astral organisation from the kidney system, and that I now say: everything connected with the Ego and astral organisations emanates from the head. But we shall never understand the human organism with all its complexities if we say baldly that the Ego-organisation proceeds from the system of liver and gall and the astral organisation from the system of kidneys. We must realise that in the first life-period, up to the change of teeth, these radiations from the system of liver and kidneys are worn down by the action of nerves and senses. This rounding-off process is the essential thing. Strange to say, the forces supplied to the Ego and astral organisations by the systems of liver, gall and kidneys reveal themselves as a counter-radiation, not in their direct course from below upwards, but from above downwards. Thus we have to conceive of the child's organisation as follows: The astral nature radiates from the kidney system, and the Ego-organisation from the liver system, but these radiations have no direct significance. Both the liver system and the kidney system are, as it were, reflected back from the head system and the reflection in the organism is alone the active principle.

How, then, are we to think of the astral organisation of the child? We must think of the workings of the kidneys as being radiated back from the head system. What of the Ego-organisation in the child? The workings of the system of liver and gall also are radiated back from the head system. The physical system proper and the etheric system work from below upwards, the physical organisation having its point of departure in the digestive system and the etheric organisation in the system of heart and lungs. These organisations work from below upwards and the others from above downwards during the first epoch of life. And in the radiation from below upwards works the rhythm which is related as four to one to the radiation working from above downwards.

It is a pity that the indications here have to be so brief, but they really are the key to the processes of childhood. If you want to study the most typical diseases of children, you may divide them into two classes. On the one side you will find that the forces streaming from below upwards meet the forces streaming from above downwards with a rhythm of four to one, but that there is no co-ordination. If it is the upward-streaming forces with their rhythm of four that refuse to incorporate themselves into the individuality, while the inherited rhythm of the head system (representing the one) is in order, then we find all those organic diseases of childhood which are diseases of the metabolism, arising from a kind of congestion between the system of nerves and senses and the metabolic system. I mean that the metabolism is not quite able to adapt itself to that which radiates out from the system of nerves and senses. Then we get, for example, that strange disease in children which leads to the formation of a kind of purulent blood. All other children's diseases which may be described as diseases of the metabolism arise in this way.

On the other hand, suppose the metabolic organism is able to adapt itself to the individuality of the child, and the hygienic conditions are such that the child lives healthily in its environment—if, for example, we give the proper kind of food. But if, as a result of some inherited tendency, the system of nerves and senses working from above downwards does not rightly harmonise with the radiations from liver, gall and kidneys, diseases accompanied by fits or cramp-like conditions arise, the cause of them being that the Ego and astral organisations are not coming down properly into the physical and etheric organisation.

Diseases of children, therefore, arise from two opposite sides. But it is always true that we can understand these diseases of the child's organism only by directing our attention to the head and the system of nerves and senses. The metabolic processes in the child must not only be brought into harmony with outer conditions but also with the system of nerves and senses. In the first period of life, up to the change of teeth, a practical and fundamental knowledge of the system of nerves and senses is necessary, and we must observe that while in the child everything radiates from the head organisation, it is none the less possible for the metabolism to press too far forward, if it so be that the metabolism is normal, while the head organisation through hereditary circumstances is too feeble.

Now when the second life-period, from the change of teeth to puberty, sets in, it is the rhythmic organism which is the centre of activity. The astral and etheric organisations are essentially active here. Into the astral and etheric organisations between the change of teeth and puberty, streams everything that arises from the functions of the breathing and circulatory systems. The reason why the organism itself can afford the human being the greatest possibility of health during this period of life is that these systems of breathing and circulation can be regulated from outside. The health of school-children of this age is very dependent on hygienic and sanitary conditions, whereas during the first period of life external conditions cannot affect it to the same extent.

The tremendous responsibility resting upon us in regard to the medical aspect of education is that a true knowledge of man tells us that we may have dealt wrongly with the tendencies to disease which make their appearance between the seventh and fourteenth years of life. During this period the human being is not really dependent on himself; he is adjusting himself to his environment by breathing in the air and by means of all that arises in his blood circulation as a result of the metabolic processes. Metabolism is bound up with the limb-organisation. If children are given the wrong kind of drilling or are allowed to move wrongly, outer causes of disease are set up. Education during the Elementary School age should be based upon these principles. They should be taken into strictest account through all the teaching.

This is never done in our days. Experimental psychology—as it is called—has a certain significance which I well appreciate, but among other errors it makes the mistake of speaking like this: Such and such a lesson causes certain symptoms of fatigue in the child; such and such a lesson gives rise to different symptoms of fatigue, and so forth. And according to the conditions of fatigue thus ascertained, conclusions are drawn as to the right kind of curriculum. Yes—but, you see, the question is wrongly put. From the seventh to the fourteenth years, all that really concerns us is the rhythmic system, which does not tire. If it were to tire, the heart, for instance, could not continue to act during sleep through the whole of earthly life. Neither does the action of breathing cause fatigue. So when it is said: heed must be paid to the degree of fatigue arising from an experiment—the conclusion should be that if there is fatigue at all, something is amiss. Between the seventh and fourteenth years our ideal must be to work upon the rhythmic system of the child and not, primarily, upon the head system. In effect, education must be imbued with the quality of art. Then we shall be working upon the rhythmic system, and it will be quite possible to correct all the conditions of fatigue arising from false methods of teaching. Excessive strain on the memory, for example, will always affect the breathing action, even though it be in a mild way, and the results will appear only in later life.

At puberty and afterwards, the opposite holds good. Causes of disease may then again arise in the organism itself, in the metabolic-limb-system. This is because the food substances assert their own inherent laws, and then we are faced with an excessively strong working of the physical and etheric organisms.

In the organism of the very young child, therefore, we are essentially concerned with the Ego-organisation and the astral organisation working by way of the system of nerves and senses; in the period between the change of teeth and puberty we are concerned mainly with the activity of the astral and etheric organisations arising from the rhythmic system; after puberty we have to do with the predominance of the physical and etheric organisations arising from the metabolic system. Pathology confirms this, and I need only call your attention to certain typical diseases of women; metabolic diseases proper arise from out of the inner being after puberty—metabolism has the upper hand. The products of metabolism get the better of the system of nerves and senses instead of duly harmonising with its activities. In diseases of children before the change of teeth there is a wrongful predominance on the part of the system of nerves and senses. The healthy period lies between the change of teeth and puberty; and after puberty the metabolic organism, with its quicker rhythm, begins to dominate. This quicker rhythm then expresses itself in all that is connected with metabolic deposits which form because the plastic forces from the head do not make a right contact with them. The result of this is that the metabolism invariably gets the upper hand.

I am very sorry that I can speak of these things only in a cursory, aphoristic way, but my aim is to indicate at least the final conclusion, which is that the functional activities in the human being are the primary factors, and that formations and deformations must be regarded as proceeding from these functional activities. In the outer sense this means that up to the seventh year of the child's life the plastic, rounding-off forces work with particular strength. The plastic structure of the organs is brought to such a point by the forces arising from the system of nerves and senses that the plastic moulding of the teeth, for example, up to the time of the second dentition, is an activity that never occurs again. As against this, the permeation of the organism with forces coming from the metabolism enters upon an entirely new phase when—as happens at puberty—some of the metabolic activities are given over to the sex organs. This leads to an essential change in the metabolic processes.

It is all-important to make a methodical and detailed study of the matters I have indicated to you. The results thus obtained can then be co-ordinated in the truly scientific sense if they are brought into line with what I told you at the end of the last lecture, and related to the working of the Cosmos outside man.

How then can we approach therapeutically all that radiates out so complicatedly from the kidney system, from the liver system? We have simply to call forth changes by working on it from outside. We can approach it if we hold fast to what is observable in the plant—I mean, the contrast between the principle of growth which is derived rather from the preceding year or years, and, on the other hand, those principles of growth which come from the immediate present. Let us return once more to the plant. In the root and up to the ovary and seed-forming process we have that which is old in the plant, belonging essentially to the previous year. In all that develops around the corona we have that which belongs to the present. And in the formation of the green leaves there is a working together of the present and the past. Past and present, as two component factors, have united to produce the leaves.

Now everything in Nature is interrelated, just as everything is interrelated in the human organism, in the intricate way I have described. The point is to understand the relationships. Everything in Nature is interrelated, and by a simpler classification of what is revealed in the plant we come to the following.

In the terminology of an older, more instinctive conception of medicine we find constant mention of the sulphurous or the phosphoric. These sulphurous or phosphoric elements exist in those parts of the plant which represent in the blossom—not in the ovary and stigma—the forces of the present year. When, therefore, you make a decoction from these particular organs of the plant (thereby extracting also what is minerally active in them) you obtain the phosphoric or sulphurous principle. It is quite incorrect to imagine that the doctors of olden times thought of phosphorus and sulphur in the sense of modern chemistry. They conceived of them in the way I have indicated. According to older medicine, a decoction prepared from the petals of the red poppy, for instance, would have been “phosphoric” or “sulphurous.”

On the other hand, in a preparation derived from a treatment of the leaves of a plant, we get the mercurial principle, as it was called in ancient terminology. This, of course, means the mercurial nature, not the substance of quicksilver in our sense. (To use pine-needles, for example, is quite a different thing from using, say, the leaves of cabbages).

Everything connected with root, stem or seed was called the salt-like in older medical terminology. I am saying these things only for the sake of clarity, for with our modern scientific knowledge we cannot go back to older conceptions. A series of investigations should be made to show, let us say, the effects of an extract prepared from the roots of some plant on the head organisation, and hence on certain diseases common to childhood.

A highly significant principle will come to light if we investigate the effects of substances drawn from the roots and seeds of plants on the organisation of the child before the change of teeth. Again, for illnesses of the kind that come from outside—and, fundamentally speaking, all illnesses between the change of teeth and puberty are of this kind—we obtain remedies, or at least preparations which have an effect upon such illnesses, from leaves and everything akin to the nature of leaves in the plant. I am speaking in the old sense here of the mercurial principle, which we meet in a stronger form in quicksilver itself. The fact that mercury is a specific remedy for certain sexual diseases, externally acquired, is connected with this. Sexual diseases are really nothing but the intensification of illnesses that may arise in an extremely mild form in the second period of life, from the seventh to the fourteenth years. They do not then develop into sexual diseases proper because the human being is not yet sexually mature. If it were otherwise, a great many diseases would attack the sexual organs. Those who can really perceive this transition from the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth years, on into the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth years, will realise that at this age symptoms that arise in earlier life in quite another form express themselves as abnormalities of the sexual life.

Further, there are diseases which have their origin in the metabolism. In so far as the metabolism is bound up with the physical and etheric systems of man, we find diseases which must be considered in connection with the workings of the petal nature of plants.

The cursory way of dealing with these matters which is necessary here may make a great deal appear fantastic. Everything can, nevertheless, be verified in detail. The obstacles that make it so difficult to approach orthodox medicine are really due to the fact that, to begin with, it all seems beyond the range of verification. We have to reckon with such intricate phenomena in the human organism as the particularly striking example of which I spoke at the beginning of this lecture, describing it in such a way that it was apparently irreconcilable with what I said yesterday. It clears up, however, when we realise that what goes out from the system of liver and kidneys emerges first in the reactions it calls forth, and in this sense it represents something quite essential for the Ego-organisation and astral organisation of man. In this case it is especially evident. But there is a similar principle of immediate co-operation and counter-action between the rhythms of the blood and of the breathing. Here, too, many an influence that proceeds from the rhythm of the blood must first be looked for in the counter-beat of the breathing rhythm, and vice versa.

And now connect this with the fact that the Ego-organisation really lives in the inner warmth of man, and that this warmth permeates the airy, gaseous being. In the forces proceeding from the Ego and astral organisms, we have, from a physical point of view, something that is working primarily from the warmth organisation and the airy, gaseous organisation. This is what we have to observe in the organism of the very young child. We must seek the cause of children's diseases by studying the warmth and airy organisations in the human being. The effects that appear when we work upon the warmth and airy organisations with preparations derived from roots or seeds, are caused by the fact that two polaric forces come into contact, the one stimulating the other. Substances taken from seeds or roots and introduced into the organism stimulate all that goes out from the warmth organisation and the airy organisation of the human being.

Now in the influences working, so to speak, from above downwards, we can discern in the human being, from the very outset, a warmth and air vibration which is strongest of all in childhood, although in reality it is not a vibration but a time-structure of a living kind—an organic structure in the flow of time. And on the other hand we have that in the physical-etheric organism which goes from below upwards—that is to say, the solid and fluid organisation of man. Moreover these two are in mutual interaction, inasmuch as the fluid and gaseous organisations permeate one another in the middle, bringing forth an intermediate phase by their mutual penetration, just as there exists in the human organism the well-known intermediate stage between the solid and the fluid. So likewise in the living and sentient organism we must look for an intermediate phase between the fluid and the gaseous, and again a phase between the gaseous and the element of warmth.

Please note that everything I am saying here in a physiological sense is of importance for pathology and therapy. When we observe this intricate organism of man we find, of course, that one system of organs is perpetually pouring out its influences into another system of organs. If we now observe the whole organic action expressed in one of the sense-organs, in the ear, for example, we find the following: Ego-organisation astral organisation, etheric and physical organisations are all working together in a definite way. The metabolism permeates the nerves and senses; rhythm is brought into this by the processes of breathing in so far as they work into the ear, and by the blood circulation. All that I have thus tried to make plain to you in diverse ways, threefold and fourfold (in the three members of the human being and in the fourfold organisations which I explained)—all this finds expression in definite relationships in every single organ. And in the long run, all things in man are in constant metamorphosis.

For instance—that which occurs normally in the region of the ear, why do we call it normal? Because it appears precisely as it does in order that the human being as a whole, even as he lives and moves on earth, may come into existence. We have no other reason to call it normal. But consider now the special circumstances, the special formative forces that work here in the ear by virtue of the ear's position, notably by virtue of the fact that the ear is at the periphery of the organism. Suppose that these circumstances are working in such a way that a similar relationship arises by metamorphosis at some other place in the interior of the body. Instead of the relationship which is proper to that place in the body, there arises a relationship among the various members similar to what is normal in the region of the ear. Then there will grow at this place in the body something that really tends to become an ear—forgive this very sketchy way of hinting at the facts. I cannot express what I want to say in any other way, as I am obliged to say it in the briefest outline. For instance, this something may grow in the region of the pylorus, in place of what should arise there. In a pathological metamorphosis of this kind we have to see the origin of tumours and similar formations. All tumour formations, up to carcinoma, are really misplaced attempts at the formation of sense-organs.

If, then, you bear in mind that the origin of a morbid growth is a misplaced attempt at the formation of a sense-organ, you will find what part is played in the child's constitution—even in embryonic existence—by the organisms of warmth and air in order that these sense-organs may come into being. These organs can indeed be brought into being only through the organisms of warmth and air by virtue of the resistance of the solid and fluid organisms, which results in a formation composed of both factors. This means that we must observe the relationship existing between the physical organism (in so far as this expresses itself in the metabolism, for example) and the formative, plastic organism (in so far as this expresses itself in the system of nerves and senses). We must, so to speak, perceive how the metabolic system radiates out the forces which bear the substance along with them, and how the substance is plastically moulded in the organs by the forces brought to meet it by the system of nerves and senses.

Bearing this in mind, we shall learn to understand what a tumour-formation really is. On the one side there is a false relationship between the physical-etheric organism in so far as it expresses itself in the radiating metabolic processes on the one side, and between the Ego-organisation and astral organism on the other (in so far as the Ego and astral organisations express themselves in the warmth and airy organisations respectively). Ultimately, therefore, we have above all to deal with the relation between the metabolism and the warmth organisation in man, and in the case of an internal tumour—although it is also possible with an external tumour—the best treatment is to envelop it in warmth. (I shall speak of these things tomorrow when we come to consider therapy). The point is to succeed in enveloping the tumour with warmth. This brings about a radical change in the whole organisation. If we succeed in surrounding the tumour with warmth, then—speaking crudely—we shall also succeed in dissolving it. This can actually be achieved by the proper use of certain remedies which are injected into the organism. We may be sure that in every case a preparation of viscum, applied in the way we advise around the abnormal organ—for instance around the carcinomatous growth—will generate a mantle of warmth, only we must first have ascertained its specific effect upon this or that system of organs. We cannot, of course, apply exactly the same preparation to carcinoma of the breast as to carcinoma of the uterus or of the pylorus. Further, we can be sure that no result will be achieved if we do not succeed in producing the right reaction—namely, a state of feverishness. The injection must be followed by a certain rise in the patient's temperature. You can at once expect failure if no condition of feverishness is produced.

I wanted to tell you this as a principle in order to make you understand that these things depend upon a ratio; but the ratio is merely a regulating principle. You will find that the statements based on this principle can be verified, as all such facts are verified by the methods of modern medicine. There is no question of asking you to accept these things before they have been tested, but it is really true that anyone who enters into them can make remarkable discoveries.

Although this brief exposition may be first be somewhat confusing, everything will clear up if you will go into the subject deeply.

To-morrow I propose to speak of certain matters in the realm of therapy, and then a great deal which seems to have been left rather in the air will be further explained.

As we begin to view the human organism increasingly in the way that I unfortunately have been able to indicate only very briefly, many things become terribly important concerning judgment of the human being in health and disease, things not otherwise appreciated in their full significance. Very little attention is paid nowadays to what I have called in my book, Riddles of the Soul, the threefold nature of the physical being of man. Yet a proper assessment of this threefold nature of the physical human being is of the greatest significance for pathology and therapy.

In accordance with this threefold nature of the physical human being, the nerve-sense system is to be pictured as localized mainly in the head, though of course this head organization really extends over the entire human being. The nervous and sensory functions of the skin, and also those within the human organization, must be included. However, we cannot arrive at a well-founded conception of the modes of activity in the human organism unless we differentiate, theoretically to begin with, the nerve-sense system from the rest of the organization as a whole.

The second system in the human being, the rhythmic system, includes in the functional sense everything that is subject to rhythm—primarily, therefore, the breathing system and its connection with the system of blood circulation. In the wider sense, too, there are rhythms that are of essential significance to the human being, although these can be disrupted in many ways; I am referring to the rhythms of day and night, of sleeping and waking, as well as everything else rhythmical, the rhythmic assimilation of food and so on. These latter rhythms are constantly disrupted by the human being, but the consequences of such disturbances have to be brought into equilibrium by certain regulative factors found in the organism. As a second member of the human organization, then, we have the rhythmic human being, and, as a third member, the metabolic organism, in which I include the limb organism, because the functional processes that arise as a result of the movements of the limbs are inwardly connected with the metabolism in general.

When we consider this threefold nature of the human being, we find that the organization described in the last lecture as being mainly connected with the ego has a definite relationship to the metabolic human being in so far as the metabolic human being extends over the whole being of man. The rhythmic human being has a definite relationship to what I designated this morning as the system of heart and lungs. The functions of the kidneys, the forces that proceed from what I called the kidney system, are related to the astral organization of the human being. In short, in his threefold physical nature the human being is related to the individual members of his super-sensible being and thereby also to the individual organ systems, as I showed this morning. These relationships, however, must be studied in more precise detail if they are to prove of practical value for understanding the human being in health and disease. Here we will do best to begin with a consideration of the rhythmic human being, the rhythmic organization of man.

This rhythmic organization of the human being is very frequently misunderstood in relation to one of its definite characteristics, namely the ratio that is established between the rhythm of the blood circulation and the rhythm of the breath. In the adult human being, this ratio is approximately four to one. This, of course, is only the average, approximate ratio, and its variations in individuals are an expression of the measure of health and disease in the human organism. What is revealed in this rhythmic human being as a ratio of four to one continues in the entire human being. We again have a ratio of four to one in the relationship of the development of the metabolic human being (including the limbs—for simplicity's sake I say “metabolic”) to the nerve-sense human being. This can be verified by empirical data, as is the case with other things mentioned in these lectures. Indeed, so far-reaching is this ratio that we may say that all the processes connected with human metabolism take their course four times faster than the work done by the nerve-sense organization for the growth of the human being.

The second teeth that appear in the child are an expression of what is taking place in the human metabolic system as a result of its coming continually into contact with the nerve-sense system. Everything that flows from the metabolic system toward the middle, rhythmic system, set against that which flows from the nerve-sense system into the rhythmic system, takes place in a tempo of four to one. To speak precisely, we may take the breathing system to be the rhythmic continuation of the nerve-sense system and the circulatory system to be the rhythmic continuation of the metabolic system. We can say that the metabolic system sends its effects, as it were, up into the rhythmic human being. In other words, the third member of the human organization works into the second, and this expresses itself in daily life through the rhythm of the blood circulation. The nerve-sense system sends its effects into the breathing system and this is expressed through the rhythm of the breath. Thus in observing the ratio of four to one in the rhythmic human being—for there are some seventy pulse beats to every eighteen breaths—we see the encounter between the nerve-sense system and the metabolic system. This can be observed in any given life period of the human being by studying the ratio of everything that proceeds from the human processes of metabolism in their impact on everything that proceeds from the head system, the nerve-sense system. This is a ratio of exceptional significance.

We may therefore say that in the child's second teeth there is an upward thrust of the metabolic system into the head, but in such a way that in this meeting of the metabolic system with the nerve-sense system the latter gets the upper hand to begin with. The considerations that follow will make this clear to you. The second dentition at about the age of seven represents a contact between the metabolic system and the nerve-sense system, but the effect of the nerve-sense system predominates. The outcome of this collision between what proceeds from the nerve sense system and the metabolic system is the development of the second teeth.

Again, in the period when the human being reaches puberty, a new collision occurs between the metabolic system and the nerve-sense system, but this time the metabolic system predominates. This is expressed in the male sex, for example, by the change in the voice itself, which up to this period of life has essentially been a form of expression for the nerve-sense system. The metabolic system pulses upward and makes the voice deeper.

We can understand these effects by observing the extent to which they encompass the radiations in the human organism that originate in the kidney system and liver-gall system on the one hand, and in the head and skin organizations on the other (everything that therefore forms the nerve-sense system). This is an extremely interesting ratio, one that leads us into the deepest depths of the human organization. We can picture the building and molding of the organism in this way: radiations proceed from the side of the kidney-liver systems, and they are met by the plastic, formative forces proceeding from the head system. If we were to try to draw what takes place schematically, we would have to do it in this way (sketching). The radiations from the kidney-liver system (naturally they do not stream only upward but to all sides) have the tendency to work in a semi-radial direction, but they are thwarted everywhere by the plastic, formative forces that proceed from the head system. We can thus understand the form of the lungs by thinking of them as shaped sculpturally by the liver-kidney systems which are met by the rounding-off forces proceeding from the head system. The entire structure comes into being in this way: radial formation from the kidney-liver systems, and then the rounding off of the radial formation by the forces proceeding from the head system.

In this way we arrive at a fact of the greatest importance and one that can be confirmed empirically in every detail. In the process of man's development, in human growth, two force components are at work: (1) the force components that proceed from the liver-kidney systems and (2) the force components that proceed from the nerve-sense system, rounding off the forms and shaping their surfaces. These two components collide with each other, but not with the same rhythm. They collide with each other in varying rhythms. Everything that proceeds from the liver-kidney systems has the rhythm of the metabolic human being. Everything that proceeds from the head system has the rhythm of the nerve-sense human being. This means that when the human organization is ready for the emergence of the second teeth, at about the seventh year of life, the metabolic organization, with all that proceeds from the kidney-liver systems (which is met by the rhythm of the heart), is subject to a rhythm that is related to the other rhythm, proceeding from the head, in the ratio of four to one. Thus not until the twenty-eighth year of life is man's head organization developed to the point reached by the metabolic organization at the age of seven. This means that the plastic principle in the human being develops more slowly than the radiating principle, the non-plastic principle. In effect it develops four times as slowly. This is connected with the fact that at the end of the seventh year of life, regarding what proceeds from our metabolism, we have developed to the point reached by growth in general (in so far as this is subject to the nerve-sense system) only at the twenty-eighth year.

Man is a thus a very complicated being. Two streams of movement subject to totally different rhythms are at work in him. And so we can say that the emergence of the second teeth, for example, is due in the first place to the fact that everything connected with the metabolism comes into contact with the slower but more intensive plastic principle, so that in the teeth the plastic element predominates. At the time of puberty, there is a predominance of the metabolic element; the plastic element withdraws more into the background, which is expressed in the male sex by the familiar phenomenon of the deepened voice.

Many other things in the human organization are connected with this: for instance the fact that the greatest possibility of illness fundamentally occurs during the period of life before the arrival of the second teeth—the first seven years of life. When the second teeth appear, the inner tendency of the human being to disease ceases to a great extent. The system of education that it has been our task to build up* has compelled me to make a detailed study of this matter, for it is impossible to found a rational system of education without these principles concerning the human being in health and disease. In his inner being, the human being is in the healthiest state during the second period of life, from the change of teeth to puberty. After puberty, a period begins when it is again easy for him to fall prey to illness.

• Referring to the Waldorf education movement, founded in Stuttgart, Germany in 1919, and now a worldwide independent educational movement.

The tendency to illness in the first period of life until the change of teeth is quite different from the tendency to illness after puberty. These two possibilities of falling ill are as different, you could say, as the second dentition is from the change in the male voice. During the first period of life, up to the change of teeth, everything proceeds from, the child's nerve-sense organization to the outermost periphery of the human organism. Everything proceeds from the nerve-sense organization. The nerve-sense organization, which predominates until the change of teeth, is the origin for pathological phenomena in the first period of human life. You will be able to form a general conception of these pathological phenomena if you say to yourselves: it is quite evident here that the radiations from the kidney-liver systems are rounded off, sculpturally rounded off by the plastic principle working from the nerve-sense human being. This plastic element is the main field of action of everything that I have described as being connected with the ego organization and the astral organization of the human being.

Now it may seem strange that I previously spoke of the ego organization as proceeding from the liver-gall system and the astral organization as proceeding from the kidney system, and that I now say: everything connected with the ego and astral organizations emanates from the head organization. We shall never understand the human organization with all its tremendous complexities if we say baldly that the ego organization proceeds from the liver-gall system and the astral organization from the liver-kidney systems. We must realize that in the first period of life, up to the change of teeth, these radiations from the liver system and the kidney system are rounded off by the nerve-sense system. This rounding-off process is the essential thing. Strange to say, the forces supplied to the ego and astral organizations by the liver-gall system and the kidney system reveal themselves as a counterradiation, not in their direct course from below upward but from above downward. Thus we have to conceive of the child's organization as follows: the astral nature radiates from the kidney system and the ego organization from the liver system, but these radiations have no direct significance. Both the liver system and the kidney system are, as it were, reflected back from the head system, and only this reflection into the organism is the active principle.

How, then, are we to think of the astral organization in the child? We must think of the workings of the kidneys as being radiated back from the head system. What of the the ego-organization in the child? The workings of the liver-gall system are also radiated back from the head system. The physical system proper and the etheric system work from below upward, the physical organization having its point of departure in the digestive system and the etheric organization in the heart-lung system. These organizations work from below upward and the others from above downward during the first epoch of human life, and the radiation from below upward works into the radiation working from above downward in a rhythm whose ratio is four to one.

It is a pity that the indications here have to be so brief, but they really are the key to the processes of childhood. If you want to study the most typical childhood diseases, you may divide them into two classes. On the one side you will find that the forces streaming from below upward meet the forces streaming from above downward with a rhythm of four to one, but there is no coordination. If it is the upward streaming forces with their rhythm of four that refuse to incorporate themselves into the human individuality, while the inherited rhythm of the head organization is in order, then we find all those diseases in the child's organism that are diseases of the metabolism, arising from a kind of damming-up against the nerve-sense system in which the metabolism is not quite able to adapt itself to what radiates out from the nerve-sense system. Then we get, for example, that strange disease in children that leads to the formation of a kind of purulent blood. All other children's diseases that may be described as diseases of the metabolism arise in this way.

On the other hand, suppose the metabolic organism is able to adapt itself to the individuality of the child and that the hygienic conditions are such that the child is properly adapted to its environment—if, for example, we feed him in a regular way. If however, as a result of some inherited tendency, the nerve-sense system working from above downward does not harmonize properly with the radiations from the liver-gall system and the kidney system, diseases accompanied by cramp-like conditions arise, the cause of them being that the ego and astral organizations are not descending properly into the physical and etheric organizations.

Childhood diseases, therefore, arise from two opposite sides. Nevertheless, it is always true that we can understand these diseases of the child's organism only by directing our attention to the head and nerve-sense organization. The metabolism in the child must be shaped so that it is brought into harmony not only with outer conditions but also with the nerve-sense organization. In the first period of human life, up to the change of teeth, a practical and fundamental knowledge of the human nerve-sense system is necessary and we must be aware that despite the fact that everything in the child radiates from the head organization, it is nonetheless possible for the metabolism to press too far if the metabolism is normal while the head organization, through hereditary circumstances, is too weak.

Now when the second period of life sets in, from the change of teeth to puberty, it is the rhythmic organism from which everything radiates. The astral and etheric organizations of the human being are essentially active here. Into the astral and etheric organizations between the change of teeth and puberty streams everything that arises from the functions of the breathing and circulatory systems. The reason that the human organization itself can offer the human being the greatest possibility of health during this period of life is that these two systems can be regulated from outside. The health of school children of this age is very dependent on hygienic and sanitary conditions, whereas during the first period of life external conditions cannot affect health in the same way.

Out of a real knowledge of the human being we become aware of the tremendous responsibility resting upon us with regard to the medical aspect of education. We become aware that we may have dealt wrongly with the causes of disease that make their appearance between the seventh and fourteenth years of life. During the elementary school years, the human being is not really dependent upon himself; he is adapting himself to his environment in his breathing, by inhaling the air and by means of all that arises in his circulation through metabolism. Metabolism is connected with the limb organization. If children are given the wrong kind of gymnastics or are allowed to move wrongly, outer causes of disease are cultivated. Education during the elementary school age should be based upon these principles, which should be taken into strictest account in all our teaching.

This is not done in our time, as you can conclude from the following. Experimental psychology—as it is called—has a certain significance which I well appreciate, but among other transgressions it makes the mistake of speaking like this: such and such a lesson causes certain symptoms of fatigue in the child; such and such a lesson gives rise to different symptoms of fatigue, and so forth. And according to the conditions of fatigue thus ascertained, conclusions are drawn as to the right kind of curriculum. Yes—but, you see, the question is put incorrectly, it must be posed in a different way. From the seventh to the fourteenth years, thank God, all that really concerns us is the rhythmic human being, which does not get tired. If it were to tire, the heart, for instance, could not continue to beat during sleep throughout the whole of earthly life. Nor does the action of breathing get tired. So when it is said that we must pay attention to whether more or less fatigue arises in an experiment, the conclusion should be that if there is fatigue at all, something is amiss. Between the seventh and fourteenth years our ideal must be to work not primarily upon the head system but upon the rhythmic system. We do this when we form our education artistically. Then we are working upon the rhythmic system, and we will see that it will be quite possible to correct all the conditions of fatigue arising from false methods of teaching that are being researched today. Excessive strain on the memory, for example, will always exert an influence on the breathing action, even if only in a mild way, and the results will appear only in later life.

At puberty and afterward, the opposite is the case. Causes of disease may then arise again in the human being himself, particularly in his metabolic-limb organism. This is because the food substances assert their own inherent laws, and then we are faced with an overpowering effect of the physical and etheric organisms in relation to the human organization.

In the organism of the very young child, therefore, we are essentially concerned with the ego organization and the astral organization working by way of the nerve-sense system; in the period between the change of teeth and puberty we are concerned mainly with the activity of the astral and etheric organizations, but now arising from the rhythmic system; after puberty we have to do with the predominance of the physical and etheric organizations arising from the metabolic-limb system. We can see how pathology confirms this absolutely. I need only call your attention to certain typical diseases of the female sex; actual metabolic diseases arise from within the human being after puberty, so that we can say that the metabolism predominates. The products of metabolism get the better of the nerve-sense organization instead of duly harmonizing with its activities. In childhood diseases before the change of teeth there is an inappropriate predominance of the nerve-sense system. The healthy period lies between the change of teeth and puberty; and after puberty the metabolic-limb organism, with its quicker rhythm, begins to predominate. This quicker rhythm then expresses itself in everything connected with deposits of metabolism which form because the plastic organization from the side of the head does not meet them properly. The result of this is that the products of metabolism invariably get the upper hand.

I am very sorry that I can speak of these things only in a cursory, aphoristic way, but my aim is to indicate at least the goal of such thoughts, which is to see that the functional aspect in the human being is primary, and that formations and deformations must basically be regarded as proceeding from this functional aspect. This is expressed outwardly in the fact that up to the seventh year of the child's life the plastic, shaping forces work with particular strength. The plastic structure of the organs is developed by the nerve-sense system to such a point that the plastic molding of teeth, for example, up to the time of the second dentition, is an activity that is not repeated. In contrast to this, the permeation of the organism by the metabolism enters an entirely new phase when—as happens at puberty—a portion of the metabolism is given over to the sexual organs. This leads to a thorough change in the metabolism.

It is terribly important to make a methodical and detailed study of the matters I have indicated to you. The results thus obtained can then be coordinated in a truly scientific sense if they are brought into line with what I told you at the end of the last lecture, if they are related to the working of the cosmos outside the human being.

How, then, can we approach therapeutically everything that radiates out in such a complicated way from the kidney system, from the liver system? We simply need to call forth changes by working on it from outside. We can approach it if we hold fast to what can be observed in the plant—I mean, the contrast between the principle of growth that is derived from the preceding year or years, and those principles of growth that stem from the immediate present. Let us return once more to the plant. In the root and up to the ovary and seed-forming process we have what is old in the plant, belonging to the previous year. In everything that develops around the petals we have what belongs to the present. And in the formation of the green leaves the past and the present are working together. Past and present, as two component factors, have united to produce the leaves.

Now everything in nature is interrelated, just as everything is interrelated in the human organism, in the complex way I have described. The point is to understand the relationships. Everything in nature is related reciprocally, and by a simpler classification of these relationships revealed in the plant we come to the following.

In the terminology of an older, more instinctive medicine (which we by no means want to renew; I only mention it so that we can understand one another better), we find constant mention of the sulfurous or the phosphoric. These sulfurous or phosphoric elements exist in those parts of the plant that represent the forces of the present year—in the blossom, not in the ovary and stigma. When you therefore make a tea from these particular organs of the plant (thereby extracting also what is minerally active in them) you obtain the phosphoric or sulfurous aspect. It is totally incorrect to imagine that the doctors of ancient times thought of phosphorus and sulfur in the sense of modern chemistry. They conceived of them in the way I have indicated. According to ancient medicine, a tea prepared from the petals of the red poppy, for instance, would have been “phosphoric” or “sulfurous.” On the other hand, in a preparation derived from a treatment of a plant's leaves (naturally you get totally different results depending on whether you use pine needles, for example, or cabbage leaves for your decoction) we get the mercurial element, as it was called in ancient terminology. This mercurial element is not the same as what is also called quicksilver. And everything that is connected with the root, the stem, and the seed was for ancient medicine connected with the salt-like element.

I am saying these things only for the sake of clarity, for with our modern natural scientific knowledge we cannot go back to older conceptions. A series of investigations should be made to show, let us say, the effects of an extract prepared from the roots of some plant on the head organization, and hence on certain diseases common to childhood.

A highly significant regulating principle will come to light if we investigate the effects of substances drawn from the roots and seeds of plants on the organization of the child before the change of teeth. For illnesses of the kind that are acquired from outside—and, fundamentally speaking, all illnesses between the change of teeth and puberty are of this kind—we obtain remedies, or at least preparations that have an effect upon such illnesses, from leaves and everything akin to the nature of leaves in the plant. I am speaking in the old sense here of the mercurial element, which we meet in a stronger form in mercury, in quicksilver itself, though it is not identical with this substance. The fact that mercury is a specific remedy for externally acquired sexual diseases is connected with this.

What manifests in sexual diseases is really nothing but the intensification of illnesses that may arise in an extremely mild form in the second period of life. The sexual diseases themselves are only a more potent form of what can be acquired externally from age seven to fourteen, until puberty. Before puberty they do not develop into sexual diseases proper, because the human being is not yet sexually mature. If it were otherwise, a great many diseases would attack the sexual organs. Those who can really observe this transition from the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth years, on into the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth years, will see that symptoms that arise in earlier life in quite another way express themselves at this age as abnormalities of the sexual life.

Then there are diseases that have their origin primarily in the metabolism, in so far as the metabolism is bound up with the physical and etheric systems of the human being. These diseases must be considered in connection with the workings of the petal nature of plants.

The cursory way of dealing with these matters that is unfortunately necessary here may make a great deal appear fantastic. Everything can nevertheless be verified in detail. The obstacles that make these things so unapproachable to orthodox medicine are really due to the fact that, to begin with, they all seem beyond the range of verification. This is because we have to reckon with complicated phenomena in the human organism such as the particularly striking example that I spoke about at the beginning of this lecture. I described it in such a way that it appeared irreconcilable with what I said yesterday. This confusion clears up, however, when we see that what proceeds from the liver-kidney organization appears first in its counterreactions, and in this sense it represents something quite essential for the ego organism and astral organism of the human being. In this case it is especially evident, but in a similar way there is a direct cooperation and counterreaction between the rhythms of the blood circulation and of the breathing in man's middle system. Here, too, many an influence that proceeds from the rhythm of the blood must first be looked for in the beat of the breathing rhythm, and vice versa.

Now connect this with the fact that the human organization, for example, really lives in the inner warmth-man, as I said this morning, and that this warmth-man then permeates the airy, the gaseous man. In the forces proceeding from the ego and astral organisms, we then have seen physically something that is working primarily from the warmth organization and the airy, gaseous organization. This is what we have to see in the organism of the very young child. We must see the cause of childhood diseases by studying the warmth and airy organizations in the human being. The effects that appear if we approach the warmth and airy organizations with preparations derived from roots and seeds are caused by the fact that two polar ways of working collide with each other, the one stimulating the other. Substances arising from the seed or root organizations and introduced into the organism stimulate everything that emerges from the warmth organization and the airy organization of the human being.

Through this I merely wished to indicate to you that in the influences working from above downward, so to speak, we can discern in the human being, from the very outset, a warmth-air vibration that is strongest in childhood, although in reality it is not a vibration but an organic structure taking its course in time. What goes from below upward in the physical-etheric organism is the solid and fluid organization of the human being. These two are in mutual interaction, inasmuch as the fluid and gaseous organizations permeate one another in the middle, bringing forth an intermediate phase of the states of aggregation by their mutual penetration, just as there exists in the human organism the well-known intermediate stage between the solid and the fluid. So likewise in the living and sentient organisms we must look for an intermediate phase between the fluid and the gaseous, and again a phase between the gaseous and the element of warmth.

Please note that everything I am expressing here in a physiological sense has a significance for pathology and therapy. When we look into the human being who is organized in such a complex way, we find that one system of organs is continually pouring its influences into another system of organs. If you now study the whole organic action expressed in one of the sense organs, in the ear, for example, you will find the following: ego organization, astral organization, etheric and physical organizations are all working together in a certain way so that the metabolism permeates the nerve-sense being; this is then permeated by rhythm through the processes of breathing, in so for as they work into the organ of hearing; it is permeated by rhythm and organization through the blood rhythm, in so far as this penetrates the organ of hearing. Everything that I have thus tried to make transparent for you in these ways, threefold and fourfold (in the three members of the human being and in the four organizations that I have explained)—all this finds expression in definite relationships in every single organ. And in the long run, everything in the human being is in metamorphosis.

For instance, consider what appears normal in the region of the ear—why do we call it normal? Because it appears precisely as it does in order that the human being can come into existence, can come into existence as he lives and moves on earth. There is no other reason for us to call it normal. But consider now the special relationships that work in shaping the ear by virtue of the ear's position, notably by virtue of the fact that the ear is at the periphery of the organism. Suppose that these relationships were working in such a way that a similar relationship arose by metamorphosis at some other place within the organism, a similar reciprocal relationship to all these members. Instead of the reciprocal relationship that is appropriate to that place within the body, something incorporates itself into this place that wants to become an ear. (Forgive this very sketchy way of hinting at the facts. I cannot express what I want to say in any other way, as I am obliged to say it in the briefest outline. ) For instance, this may incorporate itself in the region of the pylorus, in place of what should arise there. In a pathological metamorphosis of this kind we have to see the origin of tumorous formations. In fact, all tumorous formations up to carcinoma are really displaced attempts at the formation of sense organs. If you penetrate the human organism in the right way regarding such a pathological formation, you will find what part is played in the child's organization—even the embryonic organization—by the organisms of warmth and air in order to bring these sense organs into being. These organs can indeed be brought into being in the right way only through the organisms of warmth and air encountering the solid and fluid organisms, which results in a formation composed of both factors. This means that it is necessary for us to look into this relationship existing between the physical organism (in so far as this expresses itself in the metabolism, for example) and the formative, plastic organism (in so far as this expresses itself in the nerve-sense system). We must see, so to speak, how the metabolic organism radiates out that which carries the substance in a radial way, and how the substance is plastically molded in the organs by what the nerve-sense system carries to meet it.

Bearing this in mind, we shall learn to understand in what way we can really approach a tumor formation. We can only approach a tumor formation by saying that there is a false relationship between the physical-etheric organism on the one side, in so far as it expresses itself in metabolism, and the ego organism and astral organism on the other side, in so far as they express themselves in the warmth and airy organisms respectively. Ultimately, therefore, we have above all to deal with the relationship of the metabolism to the warmth organization in the human being, and in the case of an internal tumor—although it is also possible with an external tumor—The best treatment is to envelop the tumor with a mantle of warmth.(I shall speak of these things tomorrow when we come to consider therapy.) We must succeed in enveloping the tumor with a mantle of warmth. This brings about a radical change in the whole organization. If we succeed in surrounding the tumor with a mantle of warmth, then—speaking primitively—we shall also succeed in dissolving it. This can actually be achieved by the proper use of certain remedies that have probably been suggested to you by our physicians, which are then injected into the human organism. We may be sure that in every case a preparation of viscum (mistletoe), applied in the way we advise around the abnormal organ (for instance around the carcinomatous growth) will generate a mantle of warmth, but we must first have ascertained its specific effect upon this or that system of organs. We cannot, of course, apply exactly the same preparation to carcinoma of the breast as to carcinoma of the uterus or of the pylorus. One must study the path taken by what is produced by the injection, but you will achieve nothing unless you bring about a real reaction. This reaction comes to expression as a state of feverishness. The injection must be followed by a feverish condition. You can at once expect failure if you do not succeed in evoking a condition of feverishness.

I wanted to lead you to this principle so that you could see that these things depend upon a ratio; but the ratio is merely a regulating principle. You will see that these regulating principles can be verified, as all such facts are verified by the methods of modern medicine. There is no question of asking you to accept these things before they have been verified, but anyone who really looks into these things today can make remarkable discoveries.

Although this brief exposition may at first be somewhat confusing, everything will become clear to you if you go into the subject deeply. Everything that I have presented to you today can be verified in a remarkable way if only you take the proper facts that are reported in the literature. These things are reported somewhere, and you need only connect them then with the picture presented today. This is particularly the case if you bring this into connection with something else, with the many comments found in the literature that one can only reach a certain point in these matters and then go no further. Thus you will find confirmation from two sides in existing medicine for what I have suggested sketchily today.

Tomorrow I will allow myself to speak about therapeutic matters, and then things will be clarified further that may not be clear to you today because of the sketchy method of presentation.

Herman Grimm, the cultured Art-Critic of the nineteenth century, has pronounced what one might call a profound utterance about Goethe. He has aid that mankind would not realize the full importance of Goethe till the year 2000. A goodish time, you will agree. And when one looks at our epoch, one is hardly inclined to contradict such a statement. For what does Herman Grimm consider as the most important fact about Goethe? Not that he was a poet, nor that he produced this or that particular work of art, but that he created all he did out of the complete man, that the impulses of his full manhood underlay every detail of his creations. One may say that our epoch is very far from comprehending this full manhood that lived in Goethe. In saying this I do not want in any way to refer to the oft-denounced specialized method of observation of Science. This method is to a certain extent a necessity. There is, however, something much more striking than the specialization of Science, and that is the specialization of our life! For it leads to the situation that the soul which is confined to this or that specialized circle of ideas or sensations can understand less and less the other soul which is specialized in another direction. And to a certain extent all men are now specialists. This aspect of the specialist and soul particularly strikes us when we consider the Art-development of mankind. And precisely for this reason is it necessary—if only in primitive beginnings—that a kind of pulling together of spiritual life will result in artistic form. We need not take a very comprehensive view to prove what I have said. AS we shall probably understand each other best if we proceed from something close at hand, I should like to refer to one of the many instances of those misunderstanding and often ridiculous attacks on our spiritual movement which are at present so conspicuous.

In quarters where they are anxious to blacken us before the world, it is considered cheap and common-place in us to make our rooms as we please. We are reproached for decorating our meeting places with coloured walls and are ridiculed for what is called the freakishness of the (first) Goetheanum at Dornach, which is said to be quite unnecessary for a real Theosophy, as the expression goes. Well, in certain circles, one considers as a “true Theosophy” a physic hotch-potch, interspersed with all sorts of dark feelings, and which revels in the fact that the soul can unfold in itself a higher ego, though all the time having no other than egoistic ideas in view. And from the point of view of this psychic hotch-potch, this cloudy dreaming, it is found unnecessary for a spiritual movement to express itself in an outward form, even if this outward form has to be admittedly a tentative and primitive one. In these circles it is imagined that one could chatter wherever one happened to be about this hotch-potch and this misty dreaming about the divine ego in man. Why is it necessary, therefore, that all sorts and kinds of expression in such peculiar forms should be attempted?

Well, my dear friends, it is of course not to be expected that such people who turn this sort of thing into a reproach are also capable of thinking: such a demand can only be made of a very few. But we must get clear on many points, so that we can answer the questions raised at least in our own souls rightly.

I want to draw your spiritual attention to an artist of the eighteenth century, who was greatly gifted as draughtsman and painter, Carstens. I do not want to discuss the value of his art, to unroll the tale of his activity or give you his life-story, but I want you to note that in Carstens lay a great gift for drawing, if not for painting. If we look into his soul, and at an artistic longing there, we can in a way see what was wrong. He wants to set pencil to paper, he wants to draw ideas and embody them in paint, only he is not in the position in which—let me say—Raphael or Leonardo still were, or to take an example from poetry, in which Dante was. Raphael, Leonardo and Dante lived in a full, rich culture, one which was really alive in men's souls, and surrounded them. When Raphael painted Madonnas, there lived in human hearts and souls the understanding for a Madonna, and—be it said in the noblest sense—out of the people's soul there streamed something towards the creations of these artists. When Dante led the human soul into spiritual realms, he needed only to take his matter and material from something that in a way echoed in every human soul. One might say these artists had some substance in their own souls which was present in the general culture. If one picks up some even obscure work of science of the time, one will find there is everywhere some kind of connection between it and what was alive in all souls, even in the lowest circles. The educated people of those circles of culture from which Raphael created his Madonnas recognized fully the idea of the Madonna, and in such a way that this idea of Madonnas lived in them. Thus the creations of art appear as an expression of the universal and unified spiritual life. This is what arose again in a single man, in Goethe, as he was at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And it is this which is so little understood in our time, namely, that Herman Grimm was inclined to wait for the year 2000 for such an understanding to become possible for the world again.

On the other hand let us look at Carstens. He takes Homer's Iliad and imprints its events he reads into the forms his pencil creates. Just think how different was the attitude of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the Homeric figures from Raphael to the figures of the Madonnas or the other motives of the time! One might say the content of art was inevitable in the great periods because it flowed from things that touched the very inmost hearts of men. In the nineteenth century the time began when the artist had to look for the content of what he purposed to create. It was not long before the artist became a kind of cultural hermit who was really dependent only on himself, of whom one might ask: What is his own relation to his world of forms? One could unroll the history of human art in the nineteenth century to see how Art stands in this respect.

And so it has come about that not only that cool, but cold relationship of mankind to Art began which exists at present. One may imagine a man today going through a picture gallery or exhibition in a modern city. Well, my dear friends, he is not faced with something that moves his soul, something that echoes inwardly, but he is faced with a number of riddles which he can solve only when he has deeply studied the special attitude of this or that artist to Nature or to something else. We are confronted with a lot of individual problems or tasks. And—this is the significant thing—while one thinks one is solving artistic problems, one is solving really for the most part problems that are not artistic ones but psychological. The way in which this or that artist regards Nature today is an exercise in philosophy or something of the sort, which simply does not come into account at all when one steeps oneself in the great Art-periods. On the contrary there enter these real artistic questions, for the onlooker also, because the “How” is something which makes the artist creative, whereas the substance is merely something that surrounds him, in which he is steeped. We may say that our artists are not artists at all any more, they are world observers from a particular point of view, and they put into form what they see and what strikes them. But these are psychological tasks, tasks of historical interpretation and so on; the essential thing about the artistic view of “How” has disappeared almost completely from our time. The heart is often lacking for such artistic considerations as “How.”

A great deal of the blame for all this to which I have briefly drawn your attention must be ascribed to our thoroughly theoretic world-philosophy. Men have become as theoretic in their thought as they have become practical in their industry and technique and commercial relations. To build a bridge between, for example, the pursuits of modern science and the artist's conception of the world is not only difficult, but also few people feel the need to do it. And a saying like Goethe's: “The beautiful is a manifestation of the secret laws of Nature, which, without this revelation, would for ever have remained hid.” Is completely unintelligible to our time, even if here and there somebody believes he understands it. For our time clings to the most superficial, most abstract laws of Nature, to those which approach, one might say, the most abstract Mathematics, and will allow no importance to any research into reality which transcends the abstract-mathematical, or anything that is similar to the abstract-mathematical. And so it is not surprising if our time has lost that living element in the soul which finds that substantiality in world relationships which must spring from them actively if Art is to arise at all.

Art can never be evolved from scientific concepts, or abstract-theosophical concepts, at the most it would be an allegory of straw or a stiff symbolism. The representations that the present time makes of the world is in itself inartistic, and makes an effort to be inartistic. Colours—what have they become in our scientific view? Vibrations of the most abstract kind in the material of the ether, vibrations of the ether-waves so and so much in length, etc. Imagine how far removed the waves of vibrating ether, which are science seeks today, are from the direct and living colour. How is it possible to do anything but forget completely to pay any attention to this living element in colour? We have already pointed out how this element in colour is fundamentally a flowing, living one, in which we with our sols are also living. And a time will come (I have pointed this out)_ in which the living connection of the flowing colour-world with coloured beings and objects will again be realized.

It is difficult for man, my dear friends, because man, on account of having to perfect his ego in the course of earth's evolution, has risen from this flowing sea of colour to a pure Ego perception. Man raises himself from this sea of colour with his ego; the animal-world is still deep in it, and the fact that an animal has feathers or hair of this or that colour, is connected with the animal's soul-relation with this flowing sea of colour. An animal regards objects with its astral body (as we do with the ego) and there flows into this astral body whatever forces there are in the group-souls of animals. It is nonsense to believe that even the higher animals see the world as man sees it. But the truth of this point is quite unintelligible to modern man. He believes that if he is standing beside a horse, it sees him exactly as he sees it. What is more natural? And yet, it is complete nonsense. For just as little as a man sees an angel without clairvoyance, does a horse see a man without clairvoyance, for the man is not a physical being to the horse, but a spiritual being, and only because the horse is endowed with a certain clairvoyance does he perceive man as a kind of angel. What the horse sees in man is quite different from what we see in the horse. As we humans wander about, we are very ghostly beings to the higher animals. If they could talk a real language of their own, man would soon see that it does not occur to animals at all to regard man as a similar being to themselves, but as a higher, ghostly being. If they regard their own body as consisting of flesh and blood, they certainly would not regard man as consisting of flesh and blood. If one expresses this today, it sounds to modern minds the purest rubbish—so far is the present age removed from truth.

The susceptibility for the living, creative element of colour flows into animals because of their peculiar connection between astral body and group-soul. And just as we look at an object which rouses our desire and seize it with a movement of the hand, so in the case of animals, the whole of their organization is such that the directly creative element of colour makes an impression, and it flows into the feathers or wool and colours the animal. I have already expressed my opinion that our time cannot even realize why the polar bear is white; the whiteness is the product of his environment and that the polar bear makes himself white has approximately the same significance, on another plane, as when, through desire, a man stretches out his hand to pick a rose. The living productive element in his environment works on the polar-bear in such a way that it releases in him an impulse and he completely “whitens” himself.

Now this living weaving and existence in colour is suppressed in man, for he would never have been able to perfect his ego if he had stayed in the colour-sea, and he would never, for example, have developed the urge regarding a certain red colour, let us say the red of dawn, to impress it on certain parts of his skin. Such was still the case during the old Moon-Period. Then the effect of contemplating such a drama of nature as the red of dawn was such that it impressed the man of that time and the reflection of the impression was at the same time thrown back into his own colouring, it permeated his being and then expressed itself again outwardly in certain parts of his body. Man had to lose this immersion of his body in this flowing colour-sea during his earth-period, so that he could develop in his ego his own world-outlook. And man had to be come in his form neutral towards the flowing colour-sea. The colour man's skin in the temperate zones is in essentials the expression of the ego, the expression of absolute neutrality towards the colour-waves streaming without, and it denotes the rising above the flowing colour-sea. But, my dear friends, if we take even primitive scientific knowledge, we shall remember that it is man's task to find the way back again. Physical, etheric and astral body were formed during the epochs of Saturn, Sun and Moon respectively, the ego during the earth-period. Man must find the means to spiritualize the astral body again, to permeate it with what the ego gains for itself by working upon it. And in spiritualizing the astral body and thus finding the way back again, man must once more find the flowing and ebbing colour-waves, from which he arose in order to develop the ego, just as when he rises out of the ocean, he sees only what is outside. And we really do live at a time when a beginning must be made—unless man's living in accordance with the universe is to cease altogether—with this diving down into the spiritual waters of Nature's forces, what is, the spiritual forces that lie behind Nature. We must make it again possible not merely to look at colours and to apply them outwardly, but to “live” with the colour, to share its inner power of life. We cannot do it if we study the effect of this or that colour from a painter's point of view, as we stare at it; we can do it only if we experience with our souls the manner in which red, for example, or blue flows; if this flowing of colour becomes directly alive for us. We can only do it, my dear friends, if we are able so to instill life into the colour, that we do not produce mere symbolism in colour—that would of course be the worse way—but that we really discover what actually lies in the colour itself, as the power to laugh lies in a laughing man.

If a man in feeling the sensation of red or blue has no other reaction to it than in feeling—here is red, and here is blue, he can never proceed onwards to a living experience of the real nature of colour. Still less can he do so if he clothes the colour-content with intelligence and finds one symbol behind the red, and another behind the blue; that would lead still less to experiencing the element of colour. The point is we must know how to surrender our whole soul to the message of colour. Then, in approaching red, we shall feel something aggressive towards ourselves, something that attacks us. Red seems to “come for” us. If all ladies went about the streets in red, anyone with a fine feeling for the colour might inwardly believe that they might all fall upon him, on account of their red clothes. Blue, on the contrary, has something in it which goes away from us, which leaves us looking after I with a certain sadness, perhaps even with a kind of longing.

How far the present day is from such a living understanding of colour can be seen from something I have already pointed out: in the case of the excellent artist Hildebrandt it was expressly emphasized that the colour is on the surface, and there is nothing else but surface-colour, thus differing from form, which gives us, for example, distance. But colour gives us more than distance, and that an artist like Hildebrandt does not feel this must be taken as a deep symbol of the whole modern manner. It is impossible to steep oneself in the living nature of colour, if one cannot have a direct transition from immobility to movement, if one is not directly made aware that the red disk is coming nearer and the blue retreating; they move in opposite directions. In steeping oneself in this living element of colour, one gets to a stage of realizing that if we had two coloured balls, for instance, of this kind, one is quite unable to conceive the possibility of their standing still; it is inconceivable. If it were conceived it would mean the death of living feeling, which gives the direct idea that the red and the blue balls are revolving, one towards the spectator, the other away from him. And the red on a figure, in opposition to the blue, results in giving to a figure composition life and movement through colour. And what is portrayed, my dear friends, is made part of the living world, because it shines in colour. If you have

The form before you, it is restful, it remains stationary; but the moment the form receives colour, the inner movement of the colour stands out from the form, and the whirl of the world, the whirl of spirituality, permeates it. If you colour a figure you vivify it directly with soul, with the world-soul, because the colour does not belong only to the form, the colour which you apportion to the single figure places the latter in its full relationships with its environment, yes, in its full relationship with the world. One might say that when one colours a form one must have the feeling: “Now you are going to approach the form so that you endow it with soul.” You breathe soul into the dead form, when you animate it with colour.

You need only get a little closer to this inner weaving of colour to feel as if you are not approaching it directly, but are standing slightly above or below it; one feels how living the colour itself inwardly becomes. For a lover of the abstract, who stares at the colour without that living inner sympathy, a red ball can revolve round a blue one and he has no desire to alter the movement in any way. He may be the greatest mathematician or the greatest metaphysician, but he does not understand how to live with colour, because for him it moves from one place to another like a dead substance. In reality, if one lives with it, colour does not do this. It radiates, it changes in itself, and a colour such as the red colour drives in its advance something before it like an orange or yellow or green aura. And the blue in its movement drives something different before it.

So you have here a kind of colour-game. You experience something, when you enter into the life of colours, which makes the red appear to be attacking and the blue retreating—which makes you feel that you must flee from the red and follow the blue with longing. And when you can feel all this, you would also actually feel yourself in harmony with the living, moving flow of colour. You would feel in your soul also the onslaughts and longings superimposed on each other as in a vortex, the fleeing and the prayer of devotion, which follow each other and pass by. And if you were to transform this into a detail on a figure, of course as an artist would do, you would tear away the figure from its natural repose. The moment you paint, let us say, a figure in repose, you would have a living weaving movement, which belongs not merely to the form, but also to the forces and weaving elements round the figure: this is what you would have. You take away the mere immobility of the figure, its mere form, by means of soul. One would like to say that something of this sort must some day be painted into this world, something depicting the elementary powers of this world; for all that man is able to receive through the power of longing could be expressed in the blue colour. Man would have to represent this plastically in his head, and everything that is expressed in red, man would have to have in such a form that it flows out of his organism up to the brain: outside him the world, the object of his longing, which is ever permeated by that which rises upwards from his own body. By day the blue half flows stronger than the red, or the yellow half. At night it is the reverse in the human organism. An accurate reproduction of this is what we usually call the two-leaved lotus flower, (See Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment by Rudolf Steiner) in which the beholder sees both such movement and such colouring. And no one will ever be able to investigate what lives in the world of form as the productive element, as the upper part of the human head, unless he is in a position to follow this flow of colour which is hidden in man.

Art, my dear friends, must make an effort again to get down to the bottom of elemental life; it has studied Nature long enough, and tried long enough to solve all kinds of enigmas in Nature, and to reproduce in works of art in another form what can be seen by penetration into Nature. But that which lives in the elements, that is still dead for modern Art: air and water and light, as they are painted today are dead; form, as exemplified in modern sculpture, is dead. A new Art will arise when the human soul learns to steep itself in the living elemental world. One can argue against this, one can be of the opinion that one should not do this. But it is only human indolence arguing against it; for either man will come to live with his whole manhood in the elemental world and its forces, will acknowledge the spirit and soul or outer things, or else Art will become more and more the hermit-like work of the individual soul., whereby perhaps extremely interesting things may appear for the psychology of this or that soul, but never will those things be attained with Art alone can attain. One speaks of a very distant future, my dear friends, in speaking thus, but we have to approach this future with an eye strengthened by spiritual science, otherwise we look out only upon what is dead and decaying in the future of mankind.

Therefore it is that an inner connection must be sought between all that in form and colour is created in our domain, and that which stirs our soul in its deepest depths as spiritual knowledge, as something that lives in our spirit, just as the Madonnas lived in Raphael, so that he could thus become the painter of Madonnas, because they lived in him as they did in the scholar, the peasant and the artisan of his time. This is what made him the true painter of Madonnas. Only if we succeed in bringing into form livingly, artistically, without symbolism or allegory, what in our whole world outlook lives in us, not as abstract thoughts, not as lifeless knowledge, nor as science, but as the living substance of the soul, can we get an idea of what is meant by this future to which I have just alluded.

For this there must be a unity, as there was, one might say, with Goethe through a special Karma, between outward creation and what permeates the deepest recesses of the soul. Bridges must be thrown between what or many is still today abstract idea in the content of spiritual science, and the produce of our hand, our chisel, and our paint-brush. The obstacle to building this bridge today is the superficial, abstract culture, which does not allow what is being done to become living. Only so is it comprehensible that the completely unfounded belief has grown up that spiritual knowledge can kill Art. It has certainly killed much in many people; all the dead allegorizing and symbolizing, all the inquiry—what is the meaning of this, or of that? I have already pointed out that one should not always be asking: What does this or that mean? We do not have to ask what the larynx “means,” we know it is the living organ of human speech, and in the same way we must look upon what lives in form and in colour as the living organ of the spiritual world. As long as we have not accustomed ourselves to stop asking about symbols and allegories, as long as we represent myths and sagas allegorically and symbolically, instead of feeling the living breath of the spirit surging through the whole Cosmos, and realizing how the cosmic content enters livingly into the figures of the myths and legends, we shall never attain a true spiritual knowledge.

But a beginning must be made! It will be imperfect. No one must think that we regard the beginning as perfect: but the objection is as silly as many other objections which the present age makes against our spiritual movement, namely that what we have tried to do in our building has nothing to do with this spiritual stream. What these people think they can prove, we know already ourselves. That all the silly nonsense about the “higher Ego,” all the sentimental talking about the “spiritualization of the human soul,” that all this can of course be babbled about in the present-day outward forms, we know ourselves also. And we know of course as well that spiritual science can be pursued in its ideal and conceptual character anywhere. But we feel that a living spiritual science demands an environment which is different from that supplied by a dying culture, if it is to be pursued beyond theory. And there is really no need for that platitude to be announced to us by the outer world, that one can carry on spiritual science in the ideal sense in other rooms than those enlivened by our forms. But the ideal of our spiritual science, my dear friends, must be poured into our souls seriously and ever more seriously. And we still require much in order to instill this seriousness, this inner psychic energy completely into ourselves. It is easy to talk of this spiritual science and its practice in the outer world in such a way as to miss its nature and its nerve. When one often sees nowadays how the strongest attacks against our movement are formed, and how they are only directed at us, one has a remarkable sensation. One reads this or that onslaught, and if one is of sound mind, one must say to oneself: what is really being described here? All sorts of fantastic things are described which have not the remotest connection with us! And then these are attacked. There is so little capacity in the world to accept a new spiritual element, that it sketches a completely unlike caricature, discusses this and marches into battle against it. There are even some who think that we should refute these matters. We might reply, though we cannot refute every sort of thing which a person may imagine for himself and which has no resemblance whatever to that which he wishes to describe. But whatever sense of truth and sincerity lies at the bottom of such matters, this, my dear friends, we must carefully and earnestly consider. For thereby we may become strong in that which ought to arise in us through Spiritual Science—in that which out of spiritual Science, I would say, should with living force come to realization externally in material existence. That the world has not grown more tolerant in understanding is shown precisely in the attitude it takes up towards this spiritual science.

Perhaps we can celebrate the more intimate union of our souls with spiritual science in no greater way than in steeping ourselves in such problems as the problem of colour. For by experiencing the living element in the flow of colour we come, one might say, out of our own form, and share the cosmic life. Colour is the soul of nature and of the whole Cosmos, and by experiencing the life of colour, we participate in this soul.

I wanted to allude to these things today, in order to investigate next time further into the nature of colour and of painting.

My dear friends, I had to introduce into these remarks some allusions to the attacks which are now pouring in upon us from all sides. They originate in a world which cannot have any idea of what is the object of our movement. One can only wish, my dear friends, that through a deepening in all directions those who are in the movement will find the possibility of being clear about a fact which is indeed symptomatic of our time: the intrusion of unreality and untruthfulness in the comprehension of what is trying to find its place in the spiritual world. We shall certainly not be the cause of shutting out our spiritual movement from the world; it can have as much of it as it wishes. But what it will have to accept, if it wishes to understand our direction, is the unifying principle in the whole nature of man, whereby every detail of human accomplishment arises from the whole of man's nature.

What I have been saying is not an attack on the present age, but I have said it with a certain sadness because one sees that the wider our movement spreads, the more spiteful the forces of opposition become—perhaps not consciously, but more or less unconsciously and because the way one should judge such things is not sufficiently known, even in our ranks, for one should earnestly take up the standpoint that something new, that a new beginning is at least intended in our movement. One can only wish, my dear friends, that through a deepening in all directions those who are in the movement will find the possibility of being clear about a fact which is indeed symptomatic of our time: the intrusion of unreality and untruthfulness in the comprehension of what is trying to find its place in the spiritual world. We shall certainly not be the cause of shutting out our spiritual movement from the world; it can have as much of it as it wishes. But what it will have to accept, if it wishes to understand our direction, is the unifying principle in the whole nature of man, whereby every detail of human accomplishment arises from the whole of man's nature.

What I have been saying is not an attack on the present age, but I have said it with a certain sadness because one sees that the wider our movement spreads, the more spiteful the forces of opposition become—perhaps not consciously, but more or less unconsciously and because the way one should judge such things is not sufficiently known, even in our ranks, for one should earnestly take up the standpoint that something new, that a new beginning is at least intended in our movement. What the “intention” will lead to will no doubt appear. And also our “building” is surely only expressive of an “intention.” People will come who can do more than “intend”—if perhaps only at the date Herman Grimm assumes that Goethe will be fully understood. A certain modestly is requisite to understand such a saying and this is rare in the intellectual life of today. Spiritual science is well adapted to bring this modesty, as well as the earnestness of the situation, near to our souls.

These attacks from all sides on our spiritual movement make a saddening impression, since the world is beginning to see something of it; as long as it was only spiritually there, the world could see nothing; now, when it can see something it cannot understand, it begins to blow its cacophonous sounds from all nooks and corners; and this will become ever stronger and stronger. If we are able to see this, we shall at first be filled with a certain sadness; but the strength to stand for what we accept, not merely as a conviction but as life itself, will increase in us. Etheric life will also permeate the human soul, and what will live in it will be more than theoretic conviction, of which the people of today are still so proud. The man who imbues his soul with such earnestness, will find also the assurance that the foundations of our world, the foundations of our human existence can support us if they are sought in the spiritual world—and one needs this assurance, my dear friends, at one time more, at another time less.

And if one can speak of regrets, in considering the relation of our spiritual movement to the echo it finds in the world, if this is regret, then from this mood of melancholy must proceed the feeling of strength which rises from the knowledge that the sources of human life are in the spirit, and that the spirit will lead man out of everything concerning which, like disharmony, he can feel only regret. From this mood of strength one will also receive strength.

One would have to speak today, my dear friends, of spiritual affairs with a still greater regret than is caused by the discrepancy between the intentions in our spiritual movement and the echo which they arouse in the world. The disharmony in the world would disappear in another way if mankind once realized what our spiritual science means by the spiritual light which can illuminate in the human heart. And if we look at the fate of Europe today, the anxiety concerning our movement is but relatively small. Filled and shaken by this anxiety, I have spoken these words to you, but at the same time I am filled with the living conviction that with whatever painful experiences Europe is faced in the near or distant future, we can be reassured by the living knowledge that the spirit will lead man victoriously through all perplexities. Truly in days of anxiety, in hours so fraught with seriousness as these, we not only may, we must speak of the sacred concerns of our spiritual science, for we may believe that however small its sun appears today, it will grow and grow and become brighter and brighter—a sun of peace, a sun of love and harmony over all men.

These are earnest words, my dear friends, but they are such as justify us in thinking of the narrower affairs of spiritual science with all our souls and hearts, just because such terribly serious times are looking in at our windows.

It may well be regarded as a curious symptom of the times that on the occasion of the jubilee of that body of the German Reich which was supposed to be the most learned, a theologian was at the center of the celebration. It will be said that Professor Adolf Harnack was a liberal theologian. But one thing remains true: theology can only be free-minded to the extent that it is permitted by certain basic views, without the recognition of which it would cancel itself out. Indeed, it can only be scientific to the extent that its essential dogmatic ideas allow it to be. The question: "Is theology science in the modern sense?" can only be answered with a clear "no". Science, if it is to be worthy of the name, must come to a world view independently, from human reason. Today we hear this emphasized again and again in all variations. But when a scientific body of the first rank celebrates a great feast, it does not choose a man of science, but a theologian as the main speaker and actor of its history. Theological views played such an important role at this festival that the most ultramontane press organs speak of it with particular pleasure.

For many of our contemporaries, it took the shrill discord of the lex Heinze debates to make them realize how powerfully the most reactionary attitudes intervene in our lives. Even the writers of articles in "free-minded" journals are blind to more subtle signs, such as those that emerged at the Akademiefest.

However, the reasons for the reactionary course of the present lie deep. They are to be found in the fact that the official philosophers of the present are absolutely powerless, even helpless, in the face of the onslaught of unscientific contemporary currents. In order to explain these reasons, we shall have to look at the elements which have brought about the present existence of cathederal philosophy. My view is that this philosophy is indeed unsuited to fight the battle against outmoded ideas alongside liberal natural science. In proving this assertion, I will start from the man who exerts the most profound influence on contemporary philosophical thought, Kant, and I will try to show that this influence is a pernicious one.

I

Kant's acquaintance with Hume's view shook the conviction he had held in earlier years. He soon no longer doubted that all our knowledge is really gained with the help of experience. But certain scientific theorems seemed to him to have such a character of necessity that he did not want to believe in a merely habitual adherence to them. Kant could neither decide to go along with Hume's radicalism nor was he able to remain with the advocates of Leibniz-Wolff's science. The latter seemed to him to destroy all knowledge, in the latter he found no real content. Viewed correctly, Kantian criticism turned out to be a compromise between Leibniz-Wolff on the one hand and Hume on the other. And with this in mind, Kant's fundamental question is: How can we arrive at judgments that are necessarily valid in the sense of Leibniz and Wolff if we admit at the same time that we can only arrive at a real content of our knowledge through experience? The shape of Kant's philosophy can be understood from the tendency inherent in this question. Once Kant had admitted that we gain our knowledge from experience, he had to give the latter such a form that it did not exclude the possibility of generally and necessarily valid judgments. He achieved this by elevating our perceptual and intellectual organism to a power that co-creates experience. On this premise he was able to say: Whatever we receive from experience must conform to the laws according to which our sensuality and our intellect alone can comprehend. Whatever does not conform to these laws can never become an object of perception for us. What appears to us therefore depends on things outside us; how the latter appear to us is determined by the nature of our organism. The laws under which it can imagine something are therefore the most general laws of nature. In these also lies the necessary and universal nature of the course of the world. We see that, in Kant's sense, objects are not arranged spatially because spatiality is a property that belongs to them, but because space is a form under which our sense is able to perceive things; we do not connect two events according to the concept of causality because this has a reason in their essence, but because our understanding is organized in such a way that it must connect two processes perceived in successive moments of time according to this concept. Thus our sensuality and our intellect prescribe the laws of the world of experience. And of these laws, which we ourselves place in the phenomena, we can of course also form necessarily valid concepts.

But it is also clear that these concepts can only receive content from the outside, from experience. In themselves they are empty and meaningless. We do know through them how an object must appear to us if it is given to us at all. But that it is given to us, that it enters our field of vision, depends on experience. How things are in themselves, apart from our experience, we can therefore make nothing out through our concepts.

In this way, Kant has saved an area in which there are concepts of necessary validity, but at the same time he has cut off the possibility of using these concepts to make something out about the actual, absolute essence of things. In order to save the necessity of our concepts, Kant sacrificed their absolute applicability. For the sake of the latter, however, the former was valued in pre-Kantian philosophy. Kant's predecessors wanted to expose a central core from the totality of our knowledge, which by its nature is applicable to everything, including the absolute essences of things, the "interior of nature". The result of Kant's philosophy, however, is that this inner being, this "in itself of objects", can never enter the realm of our cognition, can never become an object of our knowledge. We must content ourselves with the subjective world of appearances that arises within us when the external world acts upon us. Kant thus sets insurmountable limits to our cognitive faculty. We cannot know anything about the "in itself of things". An official contemporary philosopher has given this view the following precise expression: "As long as the feat of looking around the corner, that is, of imagining without imagination, has not been invented, Kant's proud self-modesty will have its end, that of the existing thing its that, but never its what is recognizable." In other words, we know that something is there that causes the subjective appearance of the thing in us, but what is actually behind the latter remains hidden from us.

We have seen that Kant adopted this view in order to save as much as possible of each of the two opposing philosophical doctrines from which he started. This tendency gave rise to a contrived view of our cognition, which we need only compare with what direct and unbiased observation reveals in order to see the entire untenability of Kant's thought structure. Kant imagines our knowledge of experience to have arisen from two factors: from the impressions that things outside us make on our sensibility, and from the forms in which our sensibility and our understanding arrange these impressions. The former are subjective, for I do not perceive the thing, but only the way in which my sensuality is affected by it. My organism undergoes a change when something acts from the outside. This change, i.e. a state of my self, my sensation, is what is given to me. In the act of grasping, our sensuality organizes these sensations spatially and temporally, the mind again organizes the spatial and temporal according to concepts. This organization of sensations, the second factor of our cognition, is thus also entirely subjective. This theory is nothing more than an arbitrary construction of thought that cannot stand up to observation. Let us first ask ourselves the question: Does a single sensation occur anywhere for us, separately and apart from other elements of experience? Let us look at the content of the world given to us. It is a continuous whole. If we direct our attention to any point in our field of experience, we find that there is something else all around. There is nowhere here that exists in isolation. One sensation is connected to another. We can only artificially single it out from our experience; in truth it is connected with the whole of the reality given to us. This is where Kant made a mistake. He had a completely wrong idea of the nature of our experience. The latter does not, as he believed, consist of an infinite number of mosaic pieces from which we make a whole through purely subjective processes, but is given to us as a unity: one perception merges into the other without a definite boundary.

II The reasons for the reaction within modern science

A worldview strives to comprehend the totality of the phenomena given to us. However, we can only ever make details of reality the object of our experiential knowledge. If we want to look at a detail in isolation, we must first artificially lift it out of the context in which it is found. Nowhere, for example, is the individual sensation of red given to us as such; it is surrounded on all sides by other qualities to which it belongs and without which it could not exist. We must disregard everything else and focus our attention on the one perception if we want to consider it in its isolation. This lifting of a thing out of its context is a necessity for us if we want to look at the world at all. We are organized in such a way that we cannot perceive the world as a whole, as a single perception. The right and left, the above and below, the red next to the green in my field of vision are in reality in uninterrupted connection and mutual togetherness. However, we can only look in one direction and only perceive what is connected in nature separately. Our eye can only ever perceive individual colors from a multi-membered color whole, our mind individual conceptual elements from a coherent system of ideas. The separation of an individual sensation from the world context is therefore a mental act, caused by the peculiar arrangement of our mind. We must dissolve the unified world into individual perceptions if we want to observe it.

But we must be clear about the fact that this infinite multiplicity and isolation does not really exist, that it is without any objective meaning for reality itself. We create an image of it that initially deviates from reality because we lack the organs to grasp it in its very own form in one act. But separating is only one part of our cognitive process. We are constantly busy incorporating every individual perception that comes to us into an overall conception that we form of the world.

The question that necessarily follows here is this: According to what laws do we combine what we have first separated? The separation is a consequence of our organization, it has nothing to do with the thing itself. Therefore, the content of an individual perception cannot be changed by the fact that it initially appears to us to be torn from the context in which it belongs. But since this content is conditioned by the context, it initially appears quite incomprehensible in its separation. The fact that the perception of red occurs at a certain point in space is caused by the most varied circumstances. If I now perceive the red without at the same time directing my attention to these circumstances, it remains incomprehensible to me where the red comes from. Only when I draw on other perceptions, namely those things and processes to which the perception of the red is connected, do I understand the matter. Every perception points me beyond itself because it cannot be explained by itself. I therefore combine the details separated by my organization from the whole of the world according to their own nature into a whole. In this second act, what was destroyed in the first is thus restored: the unity of the real regains its rightful place in relation to the multiplicity initially absorbed by my spirit.

The reason why we can only take possession of the objective form of the world in the detour described above lies in the dual nature of man. As a rational being, he is very well able to imagine the cosmos as a unity in which each individual appears as a member of the whole. As a sensory being, however, he is bound to place and time, he can only perceive individual members of the infinite number of members of the cosmos. Experience can therefore only provide a form of reality conditioned by the limitations of our individuality, from which reason must first extract that which gives the individual things and processes within reality their lawful connection. Sensory perception thus distances us from reality; rational contemplation leads us back to it. A being whose sensuality could view the world in one act would not need reason. A single perception would provide it with what we can only achieve with our mental organization by combining an infinite number of individual acts of experience.

The above examination of our cognitive faculty leads us to the view that reason provides us with the actual form of reality when it processes the individual acts of experience in the appropriate way. We must not allow ourselves to be deceived by the fact that reason appears to lie entirely within ourselves. We have seen that in truth its activity is destined precisely to abolish the unreal character which our experience receives through sensory perception. Through this activity, the contents of perception themselves re-establish in our minds the objective context from which our senses have torn them.

We are now at the point where we can see through the fallacy of Kant's view. What is a consequence of our organization: the appearance of reality as an infinite number of separate particulars, Kant conceives as an objective fact; and the connection that is re-established, because it corresponds to objective truth, is for him a consequence of our subjective organization. Precisely the reverse of what Kant asserted is true. Cause and effect, for example, are a coherent whole. I perceive them separately and connect them in the way they themselves strive towards each other. Kant allowed himself to be driven into error by Hume. The latter says: If we perceive two events over and over again in such a way that one follows the other, we become accustomed to this togetherness, expect it in future cases as well, and designate one as the cause and the other as the effect. - This contradicts the facts. We only bring two events into a causal connection if such a connection follows from their content. This connection is no less given than the content of the events themselves.

From this point of view, the most mundane as well as the highest scientific thought finds its explanation. If we could encompass the whole world at a glance, this work would not be necessary. To explain a thing, to make it comprehensible, means nothing other than to put it back into the context from which our organization has torn it. There is no such thing as a thing that is separated from the world as a whole. All separation has merely a subjective validity for us. For us, the world as a whole is divided into above and below, before and after, cause and effect, object and idea, substance and force, object and subject and so on. However, all these opposites are only possible if the whole in which they occur confronts us as reality. Where this is not the case, we cannot speak of opposites. An impossible opposition is that which Kant calls "appearance" and "thing-in-itself". This latter term is completely meaningless. We have not the slightest reason to form it. It would only be justified for a consciousness that knows a second world in addition to the one that is given to us, and which can observe how this world affects our organism and results in what Kant calls an appearance. Such a consciousness could then say: the world of human beings is only a subjective appearance of that second world known to me. But people themselves can only recognize opposites within the world given to them. Bringing the sum of everything given into opposition to something else is pointless. The Kantian "thing in itself" does not follow from the character of the world given to us. It is invented.

As long as we do not break with such arbitrary assumptions as the "thing in itself", we can never arrive at a satisfactory world view. Something is only inexplicable to us as long as we do not know what is necessarily connected to it. But we have to look for this within our world, not outside it.

The mysteriousness of a thing only exists as long as we consider it in its particularity. However, this is created by us and can also be removed by us. A science that understands the nature of the human cognitive process can only proceed in such a way that it seeks everything it needs to explain a phenomenon within the world given to us. Such a science can be described as monism or a unified view of nature. It is opposed by dualism or the two-world theory, which assumes two absolutely different worlds and believes that the explanatory principles for one are contained in the other.

This latter doctrine is based on a false interpretation of the facts of our cognitive process. The Dualist separates the sum of all being into two areas, each of which has its own laws and which are externally opposed to each other. He forgets that every separation, every segregation of the individual realms of being has only subjective validity. What is a consequence of his organization, he considers to be an objective natural fact that lies outside him.

Such a dualism is also Kantianism. For in this worldview, appearance and the "in itself of things" are not opposites within the given world, but one side, the "in itself", lies outside the given. As long as we separate the latter into parts, however small they may be in relation to the universe, we are simply following a law of our personality; but if we regard everything given, all phenomena, as one part and then oppose it with a second, then we are philosophizing into the blue. We are then merely playing with concepts. We construct a contrast, but cannot gain any content for the second element, because such a content can only be drawn from the given. Any kind of being that is assumed to exist outside the latter is to be relegated to the realm of unjustified hypotheses. Kant's "thing-in-itself" belongs in this category, as does the idea that a large proportion of modern physicists have of matter and its atomistic composition. If I am given any sensory perception, for example the perception of color or heat, then I can make qualitative and quantitative distinctions within this perception; I can encompass the spatial structure and the temporal progression that I perceive with mathematical formulas, I can regard the phenomena according to their nature as cause and effect, and so on: but with this process of thinking I must remain within what is given to me. If we practise a careful self-criticism of ourselves, we also find that all our abstract views and concepts are only one-sided images of the given reality and only have sense and meaning as such. We can imagine a space closed on all sides, in which a number of elastic spheres move in all directions, bumping into each other, bouncing against and off the walls; but we must be clear that this is a one-sided image that only gains meaning when we think of the purely mathematical image as being filled with a sensibly real content. But if we believe that we can explain a perceived content causally through an imperceptible process of being which corresponds to the mathematical structure described and which takes place outside our given world, then we lack all self-criticism. Modern mechanical heat theory makes the mistake described above. If we say that the "red" is only a subjective sensation, as modern physiology does, and that a mechanical process, a movement, is to be assumed as the cause of this "red" outside in space, then we are committing an inconsistency. If the "red" were only subjective, then all mechanical processes connected with the "red" would also only be subjective. As soon as we take something from the interrelated world of perception into the mind, we must take everything into it, including the atoms and their movements. We would have to deny the entire external world.

The same can be said of the modern theory of color. It too places something that is only a one-sided image of the sense world behind it as its cause. The whole wave theory of light is only a mathematical picture which represents the spatio-temporal relations of this particular field of appearance in a one-sided way. The undulation theory turns this image into a real reality that can no longer be perceived, but rather is supposed to be the cause of what we perceive.

III The reasons for the reaction within science

It is not at all surprising that the dualistic thinker does not succeed in making the connection between the two worlds he assumes - the subjective one within us and the objective one outside us - comprehensible. The one is given to him experientially, the other is added by him. Consequently, he can only gain everything contained in the one through experience, and everything contained in the other only through thinking. But since all experiential content is only an effect of the added true being, the cause itself can never be found in the world accessible to our observation. Nor is the reverse possible: to deduce the experientially given reality from the imagined cause. This latter is not possible because, according to our previous arguments, all such imagined causes are only one-sided images of the full reality. When we survey such a picture, we can never find in it, by means of a mere thought process, what is connected with it only in the observed reality. For these reasons, he who assumes two worlds that are separated by themselves will never be able to arrive at a satisfactory explanation of their interrelation.

Whoever allows the actual real entities to exist outside the world of experience sets limits to our knowledge. For if his presupposition is correct, we would only perceive the effect that the real beings exert on us. These, as the causes, are a land entirely unknown to us. And here we have arrived at the gate where modern science can let in all the old religious ideas. So far and no further, says this science. Why shouldn't the pastor now start with his faith where Du Bois-Reymond stops with his scientific knowledge?

The follower of the monistic world view knows that the causes of the effects given to him must lie in the realm of his world. No matter how far removed the former may be from the latter in space or time, they must be found in the realm of experience. The fact that of two things which explain each other, only one is given to him at the moment, appears to him only as a consequence of his individuality, not as something founded in the object itself. The adherent of a dualistic view believes that he must assume the explanation of a known thing in an arbitrarily added unknown thing. Since he unjustifiably endows the latter with such properties that it cannot be found in our entire world, he sets a limit to cognition here. Our arguments have provided the proof that all things which our cognitive faculty supposedly cannot reach must first be artificially added to reality. We only fail to recognize that which we have first made unrecognizable. Kant commands our cognition to stop at a creature of his imagination, at the "thing-in-itself", and Du Bois-Reymond states that the imperceptible atoms of matter produce sensation and feeling through their position and movement, only to conclude that we can never arrive at a satisfactory explanation of how matter and movement produce sensation and feeling, for "it is quite and forever incomprehensible that a number of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, etc. atoms should not be indifferent to each other. -atoms should not be indifferent to how they lie and move, how they lay and moved, how they will lie and move. It is in no way comprehensible how consciousness could arise from their interaction". This whole conclusion collapses into nothing if one considers that the atoms moving and lying in a certain way are a creature of the abstracting mind, to which an absolute existence separate from perceptible events cannot be ascribed.

A scientific dissection of our cognitive activity leads, as we have seen, to the conviction that the questions we have to ask of nature are a consequence of the peculiar relationship in which we stand to the world. We are limited individualities and can therefore only perceive the world piecemeal. Each piece considered in and of itself is a puzzle or, in other words, a question for our cognition. However, the more details we get to know, the clearer the world becomes to us. One perception explains another. There are no questions that the world poses to us that cannot be answered with the means it offers us. For monism, therefore, there are no fundamental limits to knowledge. This or that can be unresolved at any given time because we were not yet in a position in terms of time or space to find the things that are involved. But what has not yet been found today may be found tomorrow. The limits caused by this are only accidental ones that disappear with the progress of experience and thought. In such cases, the formation of hypotheses comes into its own. Hypotheses may not be formed about something that is supposed to be inaccessible to our knowledge in principle. The atomistic hypothesis is a completely unfounded one if it is to be conceived not merely as an aid to the abstracting intellect, but as a statement about real beings lying outside the qualities of sensation. A hypothesis can only be an assumption about a fact that is not accessible to us for accidental reasons, but which by its nature belongs to the world given to us. For example, a hypothesis about a certain state of our earth in a long-gone period is justified. Admittedly, this state can never become an object of experience because completely different conditions have arisen in the meantime. However, if a perceiving individual had been there at the assumed time, then he would have perceived the state. In contrast, the hypothesis that all sensory qualities owe their origin only to quantitative processes is unjustified, because qualityless processes cannot be perceived.

Monism or the unified explanation of nature emerges from a critical self-examination of man. This view leads us to reject all explanatory causes outside the world. However, we can also extend this view to man's practical relationship to the world. Human action is, after all, only a special case of general world events. Its explanatory principles can therefore likewise only be sought within the world given to us. Dualism, which seeks the basic forces of the reality available to us in a realm inaccessible to us, also places the commandments and norms of our actions there. Kant is also caught up in this error. He regards the moral law as a commandment imposed on man by a world that is alien to us, as a categorical imperative that he must obey, even when his own nature develops inclinations that oppose such a voice sounding from the hereafter into our here and now. One need only recall Kant's well-known apostrophe to duty to find this reinforced: "Duty! thou great and sublime name, who dost not hold in thyself anything that is pleasing and ingratiating, but dost demand submission", who dost "establish a law... before which all inclinations fall silent, even if they secretly work against it." Monism opposes such an imperative imposed on human nature from the outside with the moral motives born of the human soul itself. It is a delusion to believe that man can act according to other than self-made imperatives. The respective inclinations and cultural needs generate certain maxims that we call our moral principles. Since certain ages or peoples have similar inclinations and aspirations, the people who belong to them will also establish similar principles to satisfy them. In any case, however, such principles, which then act as ethical motives, are by no means implanted from outside, but are born out of needs, i.e. generated within the reality in which we live. The moral code of an age or people is simply the expression of how adaptation and heredity work within the ethical nature of man. Just as the effects of nature arise from causes that lie within the given nature, so our moral actions are the results of motives that lie within our cultural process. Monism thus seeks the reason for our actions within nature in the strictest sense of the word. However, it also makes man his own legislator. Man has no other norm than the necessities arising from the laws of nature. He continues the effects of nature in the area of moral action.

Dualism demands submission to moral commandments taken from somewhere; monism points man to himself and to nature, i.e. to his autonomous being. It makes him the master of himself. Only from the standpoint of monism can we understand man as a truly free being in the ethical sense. Duties are not imposed on him by another being, but his actions are simply guided by the principles that everyone finds lead him to the goals he considers worth striving for. A moral view based on monism is the enemy of all blind faith in authority. The autonomous person does not follow a guideline that he should merely believe will lead him to his goal, but he must realize that it will lead him there, and the goal itself must appear to him individually as a desirable one.

The autonomous human being wants to be governed according to laws that he has given himself. He has only one role model - nature. He continues where the organic nature below him has stopped. Our ethical principles are pre-formed at a more primitive level in the instincts of animals. No categorical imperative is anything other than a developed instinct.

IV

The assumption of the limits of human cognition brought about by the "regression to Kant" has had a truly paralyzing effect on the development of an all-embracing way of thinking. An unprejudiced worldview can only thrive if thinking has the courage to penetrate into the last nooks and crannies of being, to the heights of entities. Reactionary worldviews will always find their reckoning when thinking clips its own wings. A theory of knowledge that speaks of an unknowable "thing in itself" can be the best ally of the most regressive theology. It would be interesting to pursue the psychological problem of the unconscious, secret longing of the theorists of the limits of knowledge to leave a loophole open for theology. Nothing is more characteristic of human nature than what can otherwise be noted as a great joy by excellent thinkers. It comes over them when they seem to succeed in proving that there is something where no knowledge can penetrate - where therefore a good faith may set in. With true delight one hears meritorious researchers say: see, no experience, no reason can get there; one may follow the pastor there.

Try to imagine where we would be today if we had not had the doctrine of all possible limits to knowledge in our higher educational institutions in recent decades, but rather the Goethean spirit of research, to penetrate as far as experience allows at every moment with our thinking, and not to present everything else as a problem as unknowable, but to leave it calmly to the future. With such a maxim, philosophy could have brought the dispute against theological belief, which began somewhat clumsily but not incorrectly in the 1950s, to a good conclusion today. Perhaps we would be ready today to regard the theological faculties with a smile as living anachronisms. Theologizing philosophers, such as Lotze, have caused unheard-of misfortune. The clumsiness of Carl Vogt, who was on the right track, made the game easy for them. Oh, that Vogt! If only he had chosen a better comparison instead of the unfortunate one: thoughts relate to the brain like urine to the kidneys. It could easily be argued that the kidneys secrete matter; can thought be compared to matter? And if so, must not what is secreted already be present in a certain form before it is secreted? No, Vogt the Fat should have said, thoughts relate to brain processes like the heat developed during a friction process relates to this friction process. They are a function of the brain, not a substance separated from it. Lotze, the bland philosophical Struwwelpeter, could not have objected to this. For such a comparison stands up to all the facts that can be established about the connection between the brain and thinking according to scientific method. The materialists of the 1950s waged a clumsy outpost battle. Then came the "regressives to Kant" with their limits of knowledge and stabbed the scientific progressives in the back.

The reaction in all areas of life is spreading again today. And knowledge, which can be the only real fighter against it, has tied its own hands. What use is it for the natural scientist to open the eyes of his students to the laws of nature in his laboratory and at his teaching pulpit if his colleague, the philosopher, says: everything you hear from the natural scientist is only external work, is appearance, our knowledge cannot penetrate beyond a certain limit. I must confess that under such circumstances it is no wonder to me that the most blind charcoal-burner's faith boldly raises its head next to the most advanced science. Because science is discouraged, life is reactionary. You should be fighters, you philosophers, you should advance further and further into the unlimited. But you should not be watchdogs, so that the modern worldview does not overstep the boundaries beyond which outdated theology goes at every moment. It is truly strange that pastors are allowed every day to reveal the secrets of that world about which the unprejudiced thinker should impose careful silence. The more cowardly philosophy is, the bolder theology is. And even the views that prevail about the nature of our schools. They may try to keep everything out of the classroom that natural science links to its established facts as a consequence of worldview, because unproven hypotheses - as they say - do not belong in school, only absolutely certain facts. But in religious education! Yes, Bauer, that's different. There, the "unproven" articles of faith can continue to be cultivated. The religion teacher who knows what the geologist "can't know anything about". The reasons lie deep. Just imagine that modern natural science had confirmed everything that the Bible taught; imagine that Darwin, instead of his evil theory of man's descent from the animals, had delivered a confirmation of the faith in revelation based on natural science: Oh, then we would hear the good Darwin's fame proclaimed from all pulpits today, then the religion teachers would be allowed to talk about it. Children would probably be taught that the seven books of Moses are fully justified by an English naturalist. But perhaps we would then have no theories about the limits of knowledge. It would probably be permissible to transgress the boundaries that lead to theology. However, it is a different matter if this crossing of boundaries leads to purely natural causes of world phenomena.

American readers have known the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche in English for somewhat less than fifty years. The first translations of Nietzsche's works began appearing in this country shortly after the turn of the century. Since then, almost without interruption American publishers' lists have included collections of his writings, selections from his letters, extracts from his journals, commentaries on his works, and, above all, numerous descriptions of his tragic life story; and American interest in Nietzsche continues today.

In view of this it seems particularly fitting that the present book, with its profound insight into Nietzsche's creative activity, brilliant analysis of his character, and clear evaluation of his significance should be published for the first time in English translation as the second volume of the Centennial Edition of the Major Writings of Rudolf Steiner.

In Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom, Rudolf Steiner presents an unforgettable portrait of the man whose writings continue to exercise an important influence in shaping the world in which we live today, and which our children will inherit tomorrow.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born in the little village of Röcken near Leipzig on October 15, 1844. As he wrote later, “I was born on the battlefield of Lützen, and the first name I heard was that of Gustavus Adolphus.” The Protestant element was in his very blood, for Lutheran clergymen were among his forebearers on both his paternal and maternal sides, while his father was the pastor of Röcken. A tradition that his ancestors were Polish noblemen of the Niëzky family was recorded by Nietzsche himself, as was the statement that his grandmother belonged to the Goethe-Schiller circle of Weimar.

The parsonage life during Nietzsche's early childhood was typical of most of the country clergy-houses of the time. The atmosphere was that of “plain living and high thinking,” and the family combined honor and piety with a social life of happiness and cheer, in which a love of music, books and friendships played a role. When the boy was nearly five, in the summer of 1849, Pastor Nietzsche sustained a severe fall, in consequence of which he died. The widow took her children to Naumberg some months later, and they made their home with the paternal grandparents.

At first Friedrich was enrolled in the municipal school in Naumberg, but shortly afterward he was transferred to a private school in the same town. In October 1858, in response to the offer of a scholarship, the boy was enrolled in the Landes-Schule at Pforta. This famous institution had been founded as a Cistercian Abbey in the middle of the twelfth century; at the time of the Reformation it became a secular school. Klopstock, Fichte, Schlegel and Ranke are among the names of those who studied there. In the nineteenth century the Landes-Schule at Pforta was frequently referred to as “the German Eton” because of its excellence in classical studies and as a preparatory school.

Friedrich Nietzsche found a second home in the Landes-Schule; he thoroughly enjoyed his studies—languages, literature and history in particular. In the summer of 1860 he conceived the idea of organizing a literary-artistic club among the students, and this met with a ready response from his schoolmates. Soon the Germania Club, as it came to be called, was organized, and Nietzsche contributed a number of essays on literary and historical themes to the club paper. Many happy hours were spent with his friends at the Germania Club in active discussions about Greek and Latin classics, the works of current German and English authors, and similar subjects. Nietzsche's favorite writers at this time included Emerson, Shakespeare, Tacitus, Aristophanes, Plato and Aeschylus. About Tristram Shandy he wrote his sister Elizabeth, “I read it over and over again.”

While Friedrich Nietzsche was a student at the Landes-Schule, Rudolf Steiner was born on February 27, 1861 in the little town of Kraljevec on the frontier between Hungary and Croatia. His father was a station master in the service of the South Austrian Railway, and the boy's earliest recollections were connected with the activities of the railroad. From his second through his eighth year his impressions were those of the quiet country village of Pottsach, situated in a beautiful green valley at the foot of the magnificent Styrian Alps. The infrequent arrival and departure of the train, the daily activities of the village people, the services at the little church, the colorful peasants and foresters, the life at the local mill, and always and ever the mysterious wonder and beauty of the surrounding nature: all this was a part of the child's world. He attended school in the village for a time; afterward his father undertook to teach him the rudiments of elementary education.

But side by side with this world, the child knew another world, a spiritual world, which was just as real and tangible to him as were the forests, fields and mountains surrounding him. This spiritual world was filled with objects and beings, just as the world about him contained stones and plants and animals and people. Even before he was eight, the child could distinguish between these two worlds, and the one was as clear and immediate to him as the other.

Many children have experiences similar to this of Rudolf Steiner. However, generally speaking, with the passing of the years of childhood, these experiences also vanish little by little, until in the retrospect of later years they seem like “the gentle fabric of a dream.” But in the instance of Rudolf Steiner, the reality and immediacy of the spiritual world did not fade away; it broadened and deepened into a clear, conscious perception of beings and events of that world.

In the wondering eyes of this quiet boy there were many questions. He knew, however, that these were questions he could ask of no one around him. More than this, he could speak with no one about the “other” world which was as close and as real to him as were the houses and fields of Pottsach. So he remained silent, and the questions remained alive within him. And, although he shared the daily activities of the children around him, and entered fully into the life of his family, he was unhappy. More than this, he was lonely ...

In September 1864, Nietzsche left the Landes-Schule with excellent marks, particularly in languages and literature. He entered the University of Bonn a short time later, enrolled as a student of theology and philology. However, he had not been long in the university when his friendship with his professor of philology, Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschel, caused him to drop his theological studies in favor of philology. This action caused great grief to his mother and the other members of his family, who had looked to him to continue the clerical tradition of his father.

A year after he had entered the University of Bonn, Nietzsche withdrew in order to accompany Ritschel, who had been transferred to the faculty of the University of Leipzig. Here he continued his philological studies, and here also two very important events of his life took place. He met Richard Wagner in the home of Professor Brockhaus at Leipzig for the first time; his other meeting happened in a somewhat unusual way.

One day while he was browsing in Rohm's second-hand bookstore in Leipzig, “as if by accident” Nietzsche picked up a copy of Schopenhauer's Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, The World as Will and Idea. Without stopping to so much as open the book, he paid for it, and rushed to his lodgings. There he threw himself down on his bed and began to read avidly. As he relates in his journal, “I don't know what daemon told me to take the book home with me. ... From every line I read I heard a cry of renunciation, denial, resignation. In the book I saw a mirror of the world; life and my own soul were reflected with dreadful faithfulness. The dull, disinterested eye of art looked at me. I saw illness and healing, banishment and restoration, hell and heaven.”

Thus, at the age of twenty-one, his reading of Schopenhauer's book—the first part of which had been sold as waste paper shortly after publication because there was no sale for it—changed Nietzsche's outlook upon life. In Shopenhauer he felt he had found his teacher in the fullest, most ideal sense.

After a brief interval spent in military service, during which he sustained a serious chest injury as the result of a fall from a horse, Nietzsche returned to Leipzig to continue his studies in the autumn of 1868. Meanwhile, a series of articles he had contributed to the periodical, the Rheinisches Museum, had been read by the authorities of the University of Basel, where a position as professor of classical philology was vacant. A letter was addressed to Ritschel, asking details about Nietzsche, and indicating that the chair at the university might be offered to the young student. Ritschel's reply was unequivocal: “Nietzsche is a genius, and can do whatever he puts his mind to.”

This sweeping endorsement must have impressed the authorities at Basel, for they appointed Nietzsche to the post, despite the fact that he had not yet obtained his doctor's degree. One member of the board, however, was slightly dubious of the appointment, for he said, “If the candidate proposed is actually such a genius, perhaps we had better not appoint him, for he would be certain to remain only a short while at such a little university as ours!”

When word of the appointment reached Leipzig, the authorities of the university at once conferred a doctorate upon Nietzsche, without requiring him to undergo further examination. Accordingly, on May 28, 1869, Nietzsche delivered his Inaugural Address at the University of Basel on Homer and Classical Philology. He remained in the position for the next ten years, his final retirement being due solely to reasons of health. The foreboding of the official who felt he might “remain only a short while” proved to be ill-founded.

His residence at Basel gave Nietzsche opportunity to follow up his friendship with Richard and Cosima Wagner, and he was often a guest at their Triebschen estate on the Lake of Lucerne, under the shadow of Mount Pilatus. At the same time, he made friends with Jacob Burckhardt, “the hermit-like, secluded thinker,” as Nietzsche described him. Burckhardt had recently completed his well-known Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien, History of the Renaissance in Italy, 1867, and was famous as the author of a series of critical historical writings on Italian painting, sculpture, and architecture. In addition he occupied the chair of professor of history at the University of Basel.

1869 was a year of importance in the life of Rudolf Steiner, now a boy of eight years. Surrounded by the beauties and wonders of nature, puzzling over the intricacies of such mechanical contrivances as the telegraph equipment in the railway station and the machinery in the local mill, the boy's questions moved to a still broader plane. How could he reconcile his direct experience of the spiritual world with the world of sense which surrounded him? Was there a connection between the two? How could one find a bridge between the experiences of the outer and the inner?

The answer came in a most unexpected way.

Among the books of his school teacher in the little Hungarian village of Neudörfl where he now lived with his family, the boy found a textbook on geometry. This volume opened a new world for Rudolf Steiner. In the study of geometry he found answers to his questions. Perhaps even more important, he says, “I learned to know happiness for the first time.” His satisfaction was complete, for he had discovered that “one can live within the mind in the shaping of forms perceived only within oneself.” He had found that an inner joy came to him as he learned through his study of geometry to “lay hold upon something in the spirit alone ... ”

In the vicinity of his home in Neudörfl was a monastery of the Order of the Most Holy Redeemer. As the boy often met the silent monks on his walks, they aroused solemn feelings in him and he very much wished that they would speak with him. But they never did.

In October 1870, Rudolf Steiner, now eleven, entered the Realschule at Wiener-Neustadt in Austria, traveling backward and forward daily from his home in Neudörfl, which was over the border in Hungary. Along with his intimate contacts with nature which were still an important part of his daily life, the boy now began to find interest in such scientific matters as space and time, attraction and repulsion, atoms and their relation to natural phenomena, and many other subjects. With intense interest his mind turned to science and mathematics, and his teachers in the Realschule were of great help to him in these studies.

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 found Nietzsche active as an ambulance attendant in the medical corps, because his health would not permit him to take part in more active combat. However, even these duties proved too much for his strength, and he contracted diphtheria as a result. He returned to his work at the University of Basel, and in 1872, when he was twenty-eight, Nietzsche published his first major work, the result of his friendship with Wagner and Burkhardt, and the feelings they had evoked in him. This was his Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. The aesthetic passages attracted musicians to the book, but Nietzsche's colleagues in the philological field greeted it with a bitter attack which was led by Wilamowitz-Moellendorf. The result was that despite efforts on the part of Ritschel and Burckhardt to defend him, Nietzsche had no pupils at all in his philology classes in the winter term of 1872–3.

The aftermath of the German victory in the War of 1870 was the eruption of a nationalistic spirit which had been gathering since the previous successes of 1864 and 1866. Nietzsche felt that this was the time to issue a fiery call to the intellectuals of Germany to abandon what he considered a highly dangerous and unworthy chauvinistic spirit, and to return to their work in the service of true German culture. Richard Wagner joined him in this effort to arouse the German youth to a recognition of the responsibilities their victorious destiny had placed upon them.

Nietzsche devoted parts of his lectures in the university to this subject, and finally, in 1873 he issued the first of a series of pamphlets under the general title, Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, Thoughts Out of Season, which he called David Strauss, dealing with the Philistinism of the period. The second, which was published in the following year, was Von Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben, The Use and Abuse of History in Life, a sharp attack on the exaggerations of the current “popular historians” of Germany. The third pamphlet was titled, Schopenhauer als Erzieher, Schopenhauer as Educator, and appeared in the same year as the second. The last in the series was Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, and was published in 1876 when Nietzsche was thirty-two years of age.

Late in August, the first complete performance of Richard Wagner's opera cycle, Der Ring des Niebelungen took place in the newly constructed Bayreuth Festival Theatre under the direction of Hans Richter. People flocked to Bayreuth from many countries to attend this cultural event of the first magnitude. Among the spectators was Friedrich Nietzsche who, however, did not share the general enthusiasm for what he saw depicted on the stage.

The well-known French author and critic, Edouard Schuré was also present at the Bayreuth Festival and wrote an account of his meeting with Nietzsche, including a keen appraisal of the latter's character. Schuré's article appeared some years later in the Paris Revue des Deux Mondes (1895):

“I met Nietzsche in 1876 when the Ring of the Niebelungs had its premiere in Bayreuth. As I spoke with him I was impressed by the high caliber of his mind and by his strange countenance. His forehead was large, his short hair combed well back, and his prominent cheekbones were those of a Slav. His thick mustache and courageous bearing gave him the look of a cavalry officer, at first glance. However, this was tempered by a certain mixture of arrogance and nervousness difficult to describe.

“The music of his voice and the slowness of his speech expressed his artistic feelings. His circumspect, thoughtful bearing pointed to the philosopher in him. But nothing could have been more misleading than the seeming tranquility of his expression. The fixed gaze revealed the unhappy task of the thinker; his look combined sharp perception with fanaticism. This double quality made his eye appear uneasy, particularly since it always seemed to be fastened upon a single point. When he spoke for any period of time his face took on the appearance of poetic gentleness, but it was not long before it resumed its antagonistic character.

“When we left (the theatre) together, he spoke no word of censure or disapproval; his face expressed only the sorrowful resignation of a defeated man. ...”

The year ended badly for Nietzsche. As the months progressed, his health began to fail steadily, and toward the end of the year his symptoms of eye disease were augmented by those of a still graver sort. He withdrew from his university teaching, and was given sick leave.

He passed the winter in Sorrento in company with his friends, Baroness Meysenberg and Dr. Paul Rée, with whom he was to travel considerably in the next years. Despite his illness, he somehow found strength to begin another of his important writings, which would occupy him periodically over the next four years. This was his Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, Human, All Too Human.

The three years that followed were a time of increasing illness and loneliness. Finally, Nietzsche resigned his position at the University of Basel in 1879 and was given a retirement pension on which he lived for the rest of his life.

The physical and mental suffering he experienced in the year 1879 alone, is described by him: “I have had two hundred days of anguish in this year. ... My pulse is as slow as that of Napoleon I. ...”

The years between 1873 and 1879 were most important in the development of Rudolf Steiner. He then passed his twelfth through eighteenth years. As Nietzsche had discovered Schopenhauer's book in Leipzig, Steiner now saw Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Critique of Pure Reason, in a bookstore window, and eventually came into possession of the volume. From the eager study of this book, to which he devoted every spare moment he could find, often reading single pages “more than twenty times in succession,” he hoped to find that which would enable him to understand his own thinking. Yet what he read in Kant was sharply opposed to his own inner conclusion, which he was to describe with the words, “Thinking can be developed to a faculty which really grasps the objects and events of the world.”

In this period Steiner deepened his knowledge of mathematics and German literature, in addition to the prescribed courses of study in the Realschule. From his fifteenth year onward he spent considerable time tutoring other pupils, thus inaugurating an educational activity that was to accompany him through the coming years. He found that a knowledge of practical psychology was indispensable for this task, and from his experience as a tutor he learned many valuable things about the problems involved in the training of the human mind.

Early in the summer of 1879 Steiner completed his studies at the Realschule, and was entered as a student at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna for the term to begin in the fall. He spent the summer entirely in the study of philosophy, working his way with utmost care and diligence through the writings of Kant and the principal works of Fichte. He was enrolled for the study of mathematics, natural history, and chemistry.

The years from 1879 to 1889 are generally regarded as Nietzsche's time of mature productivity. When one takes into account the suffering he experienced, the restless traveling, his constant loneliness, one is astonished at the amount of creative work he was able to produce during this period. In Italy, the French Riviera, the Swiss Engadine, the urge to write drove him relentlessly.

In July 1881, his Morgenröte, Dawn, was published. Although it received a cold reception, it is of importance, for it marks a turning point in Nietzesche's creative development. His previous writings had been largely negative and critical in tone. This book marks the appearance of a positive, constructive tendency, which increased in the works which followed.

Although his letters and journals give the impression that the autumn of this year was one of the happiest times of his life, he described the winter as a time “of unbelievable suffering.”

The next summer while Nietzsche was at Tautenberg in Thuringia, Dr. Rée and Baroness Meysenberg introduced him to Miss Andreas Salomé. Out of this and subsequent meetings with Nietzsche, Miss Andreas Salomé later wrote what has been described as “the most unreliable book about Nietzsche which has ever appeared in print.”

In July the first performances of Richard Wagner's music drama, Parsifal, were given at Bayreuth under the composer's direction. Nietzsche chose this occasion to send Wagner a presentation copy of his Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, Human, All Too Human. Curiously enough, at exactly the same time, Wagner sent Nietzsche an inscribed copy of his Parsifal. The two packages crossed in the mail. No word of acknowledgment from either recipient was ever forthcoming; the break between Nietzsche and Wagner was complete, although the public was not to become aware of it until six more years had passed. In the meanwhile, Wagner had died suddenly in Venice early in 1883.

The high point in Nietzsche's creative life came in May 1883 with the birth of his Also Sprach Zarathustra, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the work which he and many others considered to be his masterpiece. The first part in twenty-three chapters took just ten days to write, as did each of the other parts with the exception of the fourth and last which was completed in 1885. In a letter he said of the writing of his Zarathustra, “All of it was conceived in the course of rapid walks ... absolute certainty, as though each sentence were shouted at one. While writing this book, the greatest physical elasticity and sense of power ...”

In addition to his studies at the Technische Hochschule, Rudolf Steiner attended lectures at the University of Vienna. He particularly appreciated the courses given by the celebrated Karl Julius Schröer on German literature, especially on Schiller and Goethe. As a result, Steiner read Goethe's Faust for the first time at the age of nineteen. Later, he enjoyed a personal friendship with Schröer, under whose guidance he came to a deep awareness of the importance of Goethe's contribution to natural science as well as to literature.

Out of his interest in philosophical studies, Steiner attended lectures by the philosophers Robert Zimmerman and Franz Brentano. He studied writings by Ernst Haeckel on morphology, and by Friedrich Theodor Vischer on aesthetics. The writings of Eduard von Hartmann, “the philosopher of the unconscious,” interested him deeply, and the day was to come when he would meet this man face to face in Berlin; eventually Steiner would dedicate his book, Wahrheit und Wissenschaft, Truth and Science, to him “in warm admiration.”

Among the lectures in his scientific courses, those of Edmund Reitlinger on the mechanical theory of heat and on the history of physics made a deep impression on Rudolf Steiner.

At this time Steiner was engaged as tutor in a family where there were four boys, the youngest of whom was a retarded child. The three older boys were no particular problem for him, and their studies went forward without difficulty under his direction. However, the retarded child was a great challenge. That Steiner met this challenge is clear from the fact that in two years the child was able to complete his work in the elementary school and enter the Gymnasium. Eventually he entered the School of Medicine and finally graduated as a physician. The experience with this child was reflected in methods for the treatment and care of retarded children which Rudolf Steiner gave some forty years later, thus laying the foundation for a system of Curative Education which is successfully practiced in both Europe and America today.

In 1884 Professor Schröer recommended Steiner to the position of editor and commentator on Goethe's natural scientific writings which the publisher, Joseph Kürschner, wished to include in his series of volumes on German literature. In recalling the nature of this task years later, Steiner wrote, “I saw in Goethe a personality who, because of the particular spiritual relation in which he placed man in regard to the world, could also fit the science of nature into the entire realm of human creative activity in the right manner ... To me, Goethe was the founder of a science of organics ... applicable to what is alive.”

From this time onward, Steiner was occupied with Goethe's investigations in such areas of natural science as metamorphosis, the archetypal plant, the world of animals and minerals, and so on. And out of this study in the light of Goethe's investigations and comments, Steiner came to recognize that if one wishes to understand Goethe as a natural scientist this can be done only on the basis of learning how one must perceive in order to enter into the phenomena of life.

Finally he realized that no theory of knowledge then extant explained Goethe's particular form of knowledge. Therefore, as a part of his preparatory work before setting about to edit and write commentry on Goethe's natural scientific writings for Kürschner, Steiner drafted a short study of Goethe's theory of knowledge. This was completed in 1886, when Steiner was twenty-five, and is clear proof of his comprehensive grasp of Goethe's way of thinking. The book is titled, >Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung, Theory of Knowledge in Goethe's Conception of the World, and is one of the most basic of Rudolf Steiner's major writings.

In 1886 Nietzsche, now in his forty-second year, wrote his Jenseits van Gut und Böse, Beyond Good and Evil, a large part of which was composed during his residence in Italy. This was his first attempt to deal with the subject of the origin of morals. The reaction to the book was generally unfavorable, although Jacob Burckhardt in Basel and Hyppolyte Taine in Paris wrote appreciatively of it.

On July 8th Nietzsche wrote his sister, “My health is actually quite normal, but my soul is very sensitive and is filled with longing for good friends of my own kind. Get me a small circle of men who will listen to me and understand me, and I shall be cured. ...” No words could better express the poignancy of the pathetic struggle for health and the longing for human beings who “understand.”

In 1887 came his Zur Genealogie der Moral, The Genealogy of Morals, a further development of the subject which had occupied his mind for some time.

Finally, in 1888 came the publicizing of his break with Richard Wagner upon the appearance of Neitzsche's book, Der Fall Wagner, The Case of Wagner. The volume produced a sensation. It was the first of Nietzsche's works to be reviewed by the public press, and for the first time Nietzsche attracted widespread attention as an author.

Not long before this, Nietzsche had written, “I am the author of fifteen books, and never yet have I seen an honest German review of any of them.” Even though this may have been the case, nevertheless Nietzsche had had devoted and entirely capable readers during all his productive years. Among these were Jacob Burckhardt, the Swiss historian, and Hyppolite Taine, the French critic, as we have seen, and also August Strindberg, the Swedish dramatist, and Georg Brandes, the Danish literary historian. It was Brandes who wrote his famous essay about Nietzsche in 1888, thus making his name known in leading intellectual circles throughout Europe. Nietzsche's books began to sell widely. Fame had come at last. ...

But Nietzsche was fast wearing out; day by day he was fighting against fearful odds. In a pitiful letter to Brandes late in the year, he said, “I have resigned my professorship at the University; I am three parts blind. ...”

Somehow he managed to complete his Götzendämmerung, Twilight of Idols, before the year came to a close.

With the dawn of New Year's Day, 1889, the battle Nietzsche had waged so long was nearly over. For four days he struggled against the gathering shadows, but finally the light of his consciousness flickered out.

On the fourth of January Nietzsche wrote his last letter in pencil on a scrap of paper torn from a child's notebook. It was addressed to Georg Brandes from Turin: “To the friend Georg: When once you had discovered me, it was easy enough to find me; the difficulty now is to get rid of me.” The letter was signed, “The Crucified One.”

Nietzsche was forty-five years of age; the long night of spiritual darkness began. ...

While at work on Goethe's natural scientific writings, Steiner was active in the literary and artistic circles of Vienna in the last two years of the eighties. He had many friends among writers, poets, musicians, architects, journalists, scientists and the clergy. Before the Goethe Society of Vienna in 1888 he gave a lecture which reflected his keen interest in the question of artistic beauty. This lecture was subsequently published under the title, Goethe als Vater einer neuen Ästhetik, Goethe as Father of a New Aesthetics.

This year was marked by Steiner's first journey into Germany. This was in response to a letter from the administration of the Goethe-Schiller Archives at Weimar inviting him to act as a collaborator on the famous Weimar Edition of Goethe's works then in preparation under commission from the Archduchess Sophie of Saxony. Steiner was well received at Weimar, and from there went to Berlin where he made the acquaintance of Eduard von Hartmann, as we have already seen.

The reading of Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Beyond Good and Evil, in 1889 was Steiner's first acquaintance with Nietzsche's writings. He said, “I was fascinated ... yet repelled at the same time. I found it difficult to discover a right attitude toward Nietzsche. I loved his style, I loved his daring, but I did not love the way he spoke of most significant matters without entering into them in ... full consciousness. But then I saw that he said many things to which I was very closely related by my own spiritual experience. I felt myself near to his struggle. To me Nietzsche seemed to be one of the most tragic figures of the time.”

“I felt that Nietzsche photographed the world from the point to which a deeply significant personality was forced if he had to subsist on the spiritual substance of that time alone, that is, if the vision of the spiritual world did not penetrate into his consciousness ...

“This was the picture of Nietzsche that appeared in my thought. It revealed to me the personality who did not see the spirit, but in whom unconsciously the spirit fought against the unspiritual views of the age ...”

Steiner's move from Vienna to Weimar was the beginning of a new phase of his life. As a free collaborator in the Goethe-Schiller Archives he could observe events from the vantage point of one of the centers of the cultural life of his time. He came to know many of the leading personalities of the day. He had conversation with men like Hermann Grimm, the art historian and Goethe scholar, Ernst Haeckel, the scientist and German interpreter of Darwin, Ludwig Laistner, author and literary advisor to the internationally-known Cotta publishing firm, and many others. Laistner invited Steiner to edit editions of Schopenhauer and Jean Paul Richter, which were published by Cotta in their Library of World Literature. Steiner fulfilled this task, including writing introductions to the writings of both authors.

In 1891 Steiner received his Ph.D. at the University of Rostock. His thesis dealt with the scientific teaching of Fichte. In somewhat enlarged form this thesis appeared under the title, Wahrheit und Wissenchaft, Truth and Science, as the preface to Steiner's chief philosophical work, Die Philosophie der Freiheit, The Philosophy of Freedom, 1894.

And now events occurred which finally brought Rudolf Steiner into the company of those around Nietzsche, who was being cared for at the home of his mother in Naumberg.

In his autobiography Steiner describes a significant meeting: “One day Nietzsche's sister, Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche, visited the Goethe-Schiller Archives. She was about to take the first step toward forming the Nietzsche Archives, and wanted to know how the Goethe-Schiller Archives were managed. A short time afterward the publisher of Nietzsche's works, Fritz Koegel, also appeared in Weimar, and I came to know him. ...

“I am thankful to Frau Foerster-Nietzsche that during the first of my many visits (to Nietzsche's home), she led me into the room of Friedrich Nietzsche. There on a couch he lay in spirit-night, with his marvelously beautiful brow, that of artist and thinker in one. It was early in the afternoon. Those eyes, which even in thir dimness gave the effect of soul penetration, still took in a picture of the surrounding, but this had no entrance into the soul. One stood there and Nietzsche was unaware of it. And yet one could have believed that this spiritually illuminated countenance expressed a soul which had formed thoughts within itself all morning, and now wished to rest for a while. A deep inner shudder which siezed my soul ... transformed itself into an understanding for the genius whose look was directed toward me, but which did not meet mine ...

“And before my soul stood the soul of Nietzsche, as if floating above his head, already boundless in its spirit light, freely surrendered to the spirit world, for which it had longed before this darkened condition, but did not find. ...

“Previously I had read the Nietzsche who had written; now I saw the Nietzsche who, from far distant spirit fields carried within his body ideas which still shimmered in beauty, despite the fact that on the way they had lost their original power of light. I saw a soul which had brought rich gold of enlightenment from earlier earth lives, but which it could not bring to full radiance in this life. I had admired what Nietzsche had written, but now behind my admiration I glimpsed a radiant picture.

“In my thoughts I could only stammer about what I had seen, and that stammering is the content of my book. ... It was the picture of Nietzsche which had inspired it.

“Frau Foerster-Nietzsche had asked that I arrange the Nietzsche library. Thus I was permitted to spend several weeks in the Nietzsche Archives in Naumberg. It was a beautiful task that brought before me books that Nietzsche had read. His spirit lived in the impressions these volumes made. ... A book by Emerson, covered with marginal notes, bore traces of the most devoted, intense study. ...

“My relationship with the Nietzsche Archives was a very stimulating episode in my life in Weimar. ...”

In 1897 Nietzsche's mother died, and his sister took him into her home, where he passed his last years. In this same year Rudolf Steiner wrote his Goethes Weltanschauung, Goethe's Conception of the World, a rich harvest from his work in Vienna and Weimar in close study of Goethe's contribution to the knowledge of man and nature. This book marked the end of Steiner's residence in Weimar, for he now moved to Berlin to assume the editorship of Das Magazin für Litteratur, a well-known literary periodical which had been founded by Joseph Lehmann in 1832.

On the twenty-fifth of August, 1900, Friedrich Nietzsche died. He was buried in the graveyard at Röcken near the church where his father had preached, and the parsonage where he had been born fifty-six years before.

In Berlin, two weeks after Friedrich Nietzsche's death, Rudolf Steiner gave a Memorial Address in his honor, the text of which is included in the present volume.

In his Fors Clavigera, John Ruskin wrote, “Youth is properly a forming time—that in which a man makes himself, or is made, what he is to be. Then comes the time of labor, when, having become the best he can be, he does the best he can do. Then the time of death, which, in happy lives, is very short; but always a time. The ceasing to breathe is only the end of death.”

For the Fighter for Freedom, the end of death had come at last.

PAUL MARSHALL ALLEN

Englewood, New Jersey
February, 1960