The Rudolf Steiner Archive

To-day we will continue our study of subjects connected with art. The lectures are meant to help us in regard to the kind of thoughts which should permeate the work before us. If we would couple right thoughts with the task which we are here beginning in a primitive fashion, the necessity arises to bring before the soul many things that impress us when we study man's achievements in art and their connection with human civilisation.

Herman Grimm, the very intuitive student of art in the nineteenth century, made a certain apparently radical statement about Goethe. He spoke of the date at which humanity would first have developed a real understanding of Goethe, placing it about the year 2000. According to Grimm's idea, therefore, a long time will have to elapse before mankind will have developed to the point of understanding the real significance of Goethe. And, indeed, when one observes the present age, one does not feel inclined to contradict such a statement. To Grimm, Goethe's greatest significance does not lie in the fact that he was a poet, that he had created this or that particular work of art, but that he always created from a full and complete manhood—the impulse of this full manhood lies behind every detail of his creative activity. Our age is very far from understanding this full manhood that lived, for instance, in Goethe. In saying this I have naturally no wish to speak derogatively of the specialisation that has entered into the study of science, which is indeed often deplored—for from one point of view this specialisation is a necessity. Much more significant than the specialisation in science is that which has crept into modern life itself, for, as a result of this, the individual soul, enclosed within some particular sphere of specialised conceptions or ideas, grows less and less capable of understanding other souls who specialise in a different sphere. In a certain sense all human beings are “specialists” to-day so far as their souls are concerned. More particularly are we struck with this specialised mode of perception when we study the development of art in humanity. And for this very reason it is necessary—although it can only be a primitive beginning—that there shall again come into existence a comprehensive understanding of spiritual life in its totality. True form in art will arise from this comprehensive understanding of spiritual life. We need not enter upon a very far-reaching study in order to prove the truth of this. We shall come to a better understanding if we start from something near at hand, and I will therefore speak of one small point in the numerous irrelevant and often ridiculous attacks made against our spiritual movement at the present time.

It is so cheap for people to try, by means of pure fabrications, to slander us in the eyes of the world, saying, for instance, that we are on the wrong track because here or there we have given to our buildings a form that we consider suitable to our work. We are reproached for having coloured walls in certain of our meeting rooms and we are already tired of hearing about the ‘sensationalism’ in our building—which is said to be quite unnecessary for true ‘Theosophy’—that is how people express it. In certain circles ‘true Theosophy’ is thought to be a kind of psychic hotch-potch, teeming with obscure sensations, glorying to some extent in the fact that the soul can unfold a higher ego within. This, however, is really nothing but egotism. From the point of view of this obscure psychic hotch-potch people think it superfluous for a spiritual current to be expressed in any outer form, although this outer form, it is true, can only be a primitive beginning. Such people think themselves justified in chattering about these psychic matters no matter where they may be. Why, then—so they think—is it necessary to express anything in definite forms? We really cannot expect to find any capacity of real thought in people who hurl this kind of reproach at us—in fact we can expect it from very few people at the present time—but, nevertheless, we must be clear in our own minds on many points if we are to be able at least to give the right answers to questions that arise in our own souls.

I want to draw your attention to Carstens, an artist who made his mark in the sphere of art at the end of the eighteenth century as a designer and painter of decided talent. I do not propose in any way to speak of the value of Carstens' art, nor to describe his work—neither am I going to give you a biographical sketch of his life. I only want to call your attention to the fact that he certainly possessed great talent for design, if not for painting. In the soul of Carstens we find a certain artistic longing, but we can also see what was lacking in him. He wanted to draw ideas, to embody them in painting, but he was not in the position of men like Raphael or Leonardo da Vinci—or to take an example from poetry—of Dante. Raphael, Leonardo and Dante lived within a culture that teemed with import—a culture that penetrated into and at the same time surrounded the soul of man. When Raphael painted his Madonnas they were living in men's hearts and souls and in the very highest sense something streamed from the soul of the public in response to the creations of this great artist. When Dante set out to transport the soul into spiritual realms he had only to draw his material, his substance, from something that was resounding, as it were, in every human soul. These artists possessed in their own souls the substance of the general culture of the age. In any work of the scientific culture of that time—however much it may have fallen into disuse—we shall find connecting links with an element that was living in all human souls, even down to the humblest circles. The learned men of the spheres of culture where Raphael created his Madonnas were fully cognisant of the idea at the back of the figures of the Madonna, nay more, the idea was a living thing within their souls. Thus artistic creations seem to be expressions of a general, uniform spiritual life. This quality came to light again in Goethe as a single individual, in the way that was possible at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. So little is this understood in our times, that, in Herman Grimm's opinion, as I have already said, it will be necessary to wait until the year 2000 before the world will again reveal such understanding.

Let us turn again to Carstens. He takes the Iliad of Homer, and he impresses into his penciled forms the processes and events of which he reads. What a different relationship there is to the Homeric figures in the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century from the relationship that existed between the soul of Raphael and the figures of the Madonna and other motifs of that age! In the greatest epochs the content of art was immediately perceptible because it flowed from something that moved the innermost being of man. In the nineteenth century’ it began to be necessary for artists to seek for the content of their creations by dint of effort and we soon find that the artist becomes a kind of ‘cultural hermit,’ one who is only concerned with himself and of whom people ask, ‘What relationship is there between himself and his own particular world of form?’ A study of the history of art in the nineteenth century would reveal the true state of affairs in this connection.

Thus there gradually arose, not only the indifferent attitude to art, but the cold one that exists nowadays. Think of someone in a modern city walking through a picture gallery or exhibition of pictures. The soul is not moved by what is seen, no inner confidence is felt in it. The person is faced by what really amounts to a multitude of riddles—to use a radical expression—riddles which can only be solved if to some extent penetration is made into the particular relationship of this or that artist to nature, or to other things. The soul is faced with purely individual problems or riddles, and the significant thing is, that although people believe they are solving the problems of art, they are, in the vast majority of cases, trying to solve problems not really connected with art itself—to wit, psychological problems. Such problems as: How does this or that artist look on nature—are problems of philosophy or the like and are of no importance when we really penetrate into the great epochs of art. On the contrary, when this penetration is undertaken, the problems that emerge not only for the artist but for the contemplator of the works of art, are truly artistic, truly aesthetic ones. For it is the manner that really concerns the creative artists, while the mere matter, the mere substance, is only the element that flows around him, in which he is immersed. We might even put it thus: our artists are no longer artists. They are contemplators of the world, each from a certain point of view and what they see, what strikes them in the world, this they contrive to shape. But these are theory, problems of history and so forth, while on the other hand our age has almost altogether lost the power—or indeed the heart—to perceive art in its essence, to perceive the manner, not the mere matter.

Our conception of the world—theoretical from its very foundations—is a good deal to blame for this. Practical as men have become in technical, industrial and commercial affairs, they have become eminently theoretical so far as their thinking is concerned. The endeavour to build a bridge between modern science and the conception of the world held by the artist is not only fraught with difficulty, but with the fact that so few people feel there is any need to build it. Words like those of Goethe: “Art is the manifestation of secret laws of nature without which they could never find expression” are wholly unintelligible to our age, although here and there people think they understand them. Our age holds fast to the most external, the most abstract natural laws—laws which are themselves based on utterly abstract mathematical principles—and it will not admit the validity of any penetration into reality which transcends all abstract mathematics or systems of that kind. No wonder our age has lost the living element of soul which feels the working of the very substance of world connections—the substance that must indeed well up from these world connections before art can come into being. The thoughts and ideas evolved by the modern age in regard to the universe are inartistic in their very nature—nay more, they even strive to be so. Colours—what have they become according to modern scientific opinion? Vibrations of the most abstract substance in the ether, etheric vibrations of so many wave lengths. These waves of vibrating ether sought by modern science, how remote they are from the direct, living essence of colour! What else is possible than that man is led wholly to ignore the living essence of colour? I have already told you that this element of colour is, in its very being, fluidic and alive—an element moreover in which our soul lives. And a time will come—as I have also indicated—when man will again perceive the living connection of the flowing sea of colour with the colours of creatures and objects manifested in the external world.

This is difficult for man because, since he has to develop his ego during earthly evolution, he has risen out of this flowing sea of colour to a mode of contemplation that proceeds purely from the ego. With his ego, man rises out of the sea of colour; the animal lives wholly within it and the fact that certain animals have feathers or skins of particular colours is connected with the whole relationship existing between the souls of these animals and the flowing sea of colour. The animal perceives objects with its astral body (as we perceive them with the ego) and into the astral body flow the forces living in the group-soul of the animal. It is nonsense to imagine that animals, even higher animals, behold the world as man beholds it. At the present time there is no understanding of these things. Man imagines that if he is standing near a horse, the horse sees him in exactly the same way as he sees the horse. What is more natural than to think that since the horse has eyes it sees him just as he sees it? This, however, is absolute nonsense. Without a certain clairvoyance a horse would no more see a human being than a human being, being without problems of psychological clairvoyance, would see an angel, for the man simply does not exist for the horse as a physical being, but only as a spiritual being. The horse is possessed of a certain order of clairvoyance and what the horse sees in man is quite different from what man sees in the horse: as we go about we are spectral beings to the horse. If animals could speak in their own language—not in the way they are sometimes made to ‘speak’ nowadays, but in their own language—man would realise that it never by any chance occurs to the animals to contemplate him as a being of similar order but as one who stands higher than themselves—a spectral, ghostlike being. Even if the animals assume their own body to consist of flesh and blood, they certainly have a different conception of the body of man. To the modern mind this of course sounds the purest nonsense—so far is the present age removed from truth!

As a result of the relation between astral body and group-soul, a receptivity to the living, creative power of colour flows into the animal. Just as we may see an object that rouses desire in us and we stretch out towards it by movement of the hand, an impression is made in the whole animal organism by the direct creative power in the colour; this impression flows into the feathers or skin and gives the animal its colour. I have already said that our age cannot understand why it is that the polar bear is white; the white colour is the effect produced by the environment and when the polar bear ‘whitens’ itself, this, at a different level, is practically the same thing as when man stretches out with a movement of his hand to pick a rose in response to a desire. The living creative effects of the environment work upon the polar bear in such a way that an impulse is released within it and it ‘whitens’ itself.

In man, this living weaving and moving in the element of colour has passed into the substrata of his being because he would never have been able to develop his ego if he had remained wholly immersed within the sea of colour and were, for instance, in response to an impression of a rosy hue of dawn to feel the impulse to impress these tints through creative imagination into certain parts of his skin. During the ancient moon period these conditions still obtained. The contemplation of scenes in nature like that of a rosy dawn worked upon man as he then was; this impression was reflected back, as it were, into his own colouring; it penetrated into the being of man in those times and was then outwardly expressed in certain areas of his body. During the earth period, this living bodily existence in the flowing sea of colour had to cease in order that man might be able to evolve his own conception of the world in his ego. So far as his form was concerned he had to become neutral to this sea of colour. The tint of the human skin as it appears in the temperate zones is essentially the expression of the ego, of absolute neutrality in face of the outer waves of colour; it denotes man's ascent above the flowing sea of colour. But even the most elementary facts of Spiritual Science remind us that it is man's task to find the path of return.

Physical body, etheric body, astral body—these were developed during the periods of Saturn, Sun and Moon; the ego has to develop during the earth period. Man must find the ways and means to spiritualise his astral body once again, to permeate it with all that the ego has won for itself. And as he spiritualises his astral body and so discovers the path of return, he must again find the flowing, surging waves of colour out of which he arose in order that his ego might develop—just as a man who rises from the sea only sees what is over the sea. We are indeed already living in an age when this penetration into the spiritual flow of the powers of of nature—that is to say of the spiritual powers behind nature—must begin. It must again be possible for us not merely to look at colours, to reproduce them outwardly here or 'there, but to live with colour, to experience the inner life-force of colour. This cannot be done by merely studying in painting, for instance, the effects of the colours and their interplay as we look at them. It can only be done if once again we sink our soul in the flow of red or blue, for instance, if the flow of the colour really lives—if we are able to ensoul the essence of colour that instead of evolving any kind of colour symbolism (which would of course be the very opposite way of going to work) we really discover what is already living in colour just as the power of laughter exists in a man who laughs. Hence we must seek out the paths of return to the flowing world of colour, for as I have already said, man has risen above it with his ego. If he has no other perception save ‘here is red, here is blue’—which is often the case to-day—he can never press onwards to living experience of the real essence of colour. Still less is this possible when he gives an intellectualistic garb to this inner essence and perceives red as a symbol, blue as another, and so forth. This will never lead to real experience of colour. We must know how to surrender the whole soul to what speaks to us from out of colour. Then, when we are confronted with red we have a sense of attack, aggression—this comes to us from the red. If ladies were all to go about dressed in red, a man possessed of a delicate sense for colour would silently imagine, simply on account of their clothing, that they might at any moment set about him vigourously! In red, then, there is a quality of aggression, something that comes towards us. Blue has an element that seems to pass away from us, to leave us, something after which we gaze with a certain wistfulness, with yearning.

How far the present age is removed from any such living understanding of colour may be realised from what I have already said about Hildebrand, an excellent artist, who expressly states that a colour on a surface is simply that and nothing more; the surface is there, overlaid with colour—that is all—though to be sure it is not quite the same in the case of form which expresses distance, for example. Colour expresses more than mere distance and we cannot help finding it deeply symptomatic of the whole nature of the present age that this is not perceived, even by an artist like Hildebrand. It is impossible to live into the essence of colour if one cannot immediately pass over from repose into movement, realising that a red disc approaches us, and that a blue disc, on the other hand, withdraws. These colours move in opposite directions. When we penetrate deeply into this living essence of colour we are led further and further. We begin to realise—if we really believe in colour—that we simply could not picture two coloured discs of this kind remaining there at rest. To picture such a thing would be to deaden all living feeling, for living feeling immediately changes into the realisation that the red and the blue discs are revolving round each other, the one towards the spectator, the other away from him. The relation between the red that is painted on a figure, in contrast to the blue, is such that the figure takes on life and movement through the very colour itself. The figure is caught up into the universe of life because this is shining in the colours. Form is of course the element that is at rest, stationary; but the moment the form has colour, the inner movement in the colour rises out of the form, and the whirl of the cosmos, the whirl of spirituality passes through the form. If you colour a form you endow it with the soul element of the universe, with cosmic soul, because colour is not only a part of form; the colour you give to a particular form places this form into the whole concatenation of its environment and indeed into the whole universe. In colouring a form we should feel: ‘Now we are endowing form with soul.’ We breathe soul into dead form when, through colour, we make it living.

We need only draw a little nearer to this inner living weaving of colours and we shall feel as if we are not confronting them on a level but as if we were standing either above or below them—again it is as if the colour becomes inwardly alive. To a lover of abstractions, to one who merely gazes at the colours and does not livingly penetrate into them, a red sphere may indeed seem to move around a blue, but he does not feel the need to vary the movement in any sense. He may be a great mathematician, or a great metaphysician, but he does not know how to live with colour because it seems to pass like a dead thing from one place to another. This is not so in reality; colour radiates, changes within itself, and if red moves it will send on before it a kind of orange aura, a yellow aura, a green aura. If blue moves it will send something different on before it.

We have, then, a play of colours as it were. Something actually happens when we experience in colour; thus red seems to attack, blue to pass away. We feel red as something which we want to ward off, blue as something we would pursue as if with longing. And if we could feel in colour in such a way that red and blue really live and move, we should indeed inwardly flow with the surging sea of colour, our souls would feel the eddying vortex of attacks and longings, the sense of flight and the prayer of surrender that intermingle with one another. And if we were to express this in some form, artistically of course, this form, which in itself is at rest, we should tear away from rest and repose. The moment we have a form which we paint, we have, instead of the form which is at rest, living movement that does not only belong to the form but to the forces and weaving being round about the form. Thus through a life of soul we wrest the material form away from its mere repose, from its mere quality of rigid form. Something like this must surely once be painted into this world by the creative elemental powers of the universe. [Note 1] For all that man is destined to receive by way of powers of longing—all this is something that could find expression in the blue. This on the one hand man must bear as a forming, shaping principle in his head, while all that finds expression in the red he must bear within him in a form that rushes upward from the rest of the body to the brain. Two such currents are indeed active in the structure of the human brain. Around man externally is the world—all that for which he longs—and this is perpetually being flooded over by that which surges upward from his own body. By day it happens that all which the blue half contains flows more intensely than the red and yellow: by night, so far as the physical human organism is concerned it is the opposite. And what we are wont to called the two-petalled lotus flower [Note 2] is indeed a true image of what I have here portrayed, for this two-petalled lotus flower does indeed reveal to the seer just such colours and movements. Nobody will really be able to fathom what lives in the world of form as the creative element, as the upper part of the human head, if he is not able to follow this flow of colour that in man is indeed a “hidden” flow of colour.

It must be the endeavour of art again to dive down into the life of the elements. Art has observed and studied nature long enough, has tried long enough to solve all the riddles of nature and to express in another form all that can be observed by this penetration into nature. What lives in the elements is, however, dead so far as modern art is concerned. Air, water, light—all are dead as they are painted to-day; form is dead as is expressed in modern sculpture. A new art will arise when the human soul learns to penetrate to the depths of the elemental world, for this world is living. People may rail against this; they may think that it ought not to be, but such raillery is only the outcome of human inertia. Unless man enters with his whole being into the world of the elements, and absorbs into himself the spirit and soul of the external world art will more and more become a work of the human soul in isolation. This of course may bring many interesting things to light in regard to the psychology of certain souls, but it will never achieve that which art alone can achieve. These things belong to the far, far future but we must go forward to meet this future with eyes that have been opened by Spiritual Science—otherwise we can see in that future nothing but death and paralysis.

This is why we must seek for inner connection between all our forms and colours here and the spiritual knowledge that moves innermost depths of the soul; we must seek that which lives in the Spirit in the same way as the Madonnas lived in Raphael, so lived in him that he was able to paint them as he did. The Madonnas were living in Raphael's very being, just as they were living in the learned men, the labourers in the fields and the craftsmen of his time. That is why he was the true artist of the Madonna. Only when we succeed in bringing into our forms in a purely artistic sense, without symbolism or allegory, all that lives in our idea of the world—not as abstract thought, dead knowledge or science, but as living substance of the soul—only then do we divine something of what the future holds in store.

Thus there must be unity between what is created externally and all that permeates the soul in the innermost depths of her being—a unity that was present in Goethe as the result of a special karma. Bridges must be built between what is still to many people so much abstract conception in Spiritual Science and what arises from hand, chisel and paint brush. To-day the building of these bridges is hindered by a cultural life that is in many respects superficial and abstract, and will not allow life to flow into action. This explains the appearance of the wholly groundless idea that spiritual knowledge might cause the death of art. In many instances of course a paralysing effect has been evident, for instance in all the allegorising and symbolising that goes on, in the perpetual questioning, ‘what does this mean?’ ‘what does that mean?’ I have already said that we should not always be asking what things ‘mean.’ We should not think of asking about the ‘meaning’ of the larynx, for instance. The larynx does not ‘mean’ anything, for it is the living organ of human speech and this is the sense in which we must look at all that lives in forms and colours when they are living organs of the spiritual world. So long as we have not ceased asking about allegorical or symbolical meanings, so long as we interpret myths and sagas allegorically and symbolically instead of feeling the living breath of the Spirit pervading the cosmos, realising how the cosmos lives in the figures of the world of myths and fairy stories—so long have we not attained to real spiritual knowledge.

A beginning, however, must be made, imperfect though it will be. No one should imagine that we take this beginning to be the perfect thing; but like many other objections to our spiritual movement made by the modern age, it is nonsense to say that our building is not an essential part of this spiritual movement. We ourselves are already aware of the facts which people may bring forward. We realise also that all the foolish chatter about the ‘higher self,’ all the rhapsodies in regard to the ‘divinity of the soul of man’ can also be expressed in outer forms of the present age; and of course we know that it is everywhere possible for man to promote Spiritual Science in its mental and intellectual aspects. But over and above this merely intellectual aspect we feel that if Spiritual Science is to pour life into the souls of men it demands a vesture of a different kind from any that may be a product of the dying culture of our day. It is not at all necessary for the outer world to remind us of the cheap truth that Spiritual Science can also be studied in its mental aspect in surroundings of a different kind from those which are made living by our forms. The ideal which Spiritual Science must pour into our souls must be earnest and grow ever more earnest. A great many things are still necessary before this earnestness, this inner driving force of the soul can become part of our very being. It is quite easy to speak of Spiritual Science and its expression in the outer world in such way that its core and nerve are wholly lacking. The form taken by the most vigorous attacks levelled against our spiritual movement creates a strange impression. Those who read some of these attacks will, if they are in their right minds, wonder what on earth they are driving at. They describe all manner of fantastic nonsense which has not the remotest connection with us, and then the opposition is levelled against these absurdities! The world is so little capable of absorbing new spiritual leaven that it invents a wholly grotesque caricature and then sets to work to fight against that. There are even people who think that the whole movement should be done away with. Attack of course is always possible but it is a reductio ab absurdum to do away with an invention that has no resemblance of any kind to what it sets out to depict. It behooves us, however, to realise what kind of sense for truth underlies these things, for this will make us strong to receive all that must flow to us from Spiritual Science, and, made living by this Spiritual Science, shine into material existence. That the world has not grown in tolerance or understanding is shown by the attitude adopted towards Spiritual Science. The world has not grown in either of these qualities.

We can celebrate the inner confluence of the soul with Spiritual Science in no better way than by deepening ourselves in problems like that of the nature and being of colour, for in experience of the living flow of colour we transcend the measure of our own stature and live in cosmic life. Colour is the soul of nature and of the whole cosmos and we partake of this soul as we experience colour.

This was what I wanted to indicate to-day, in order next time to penetrate still more deeply into the nature of the world of colour and the essence of painting.

I could not help interspersing these remarks with references to the attacks that are being made upon us from all sides—attacks emanating from a world incapable of understanding the aims of our Anthroposophical Movement. One can only hope that those within our Movement will be able, by a deepening of their being, to understand something truly symptomatic of our times, the falsehood and untruth that is creeping into man's conception of what is striving to find its place within the spiritual world. We of course have no wish to seclude our spiritual stream, to shut it off from the world; as much as the world is willing to receive, that it can have. But one thing the world must accept if it is to understand us, and that is the unity of the whole nature of man—the unity which makes every human achievement the outcome of this full and complete ‘manhood.’

These words are not meant to be an attack on the present age. I speak them with a certain sense of pain, because the more our will and our efforts increase in this Movement of ours, the more malicious—perhaps not consciously, but more or less unconsciously malicious—do the opposing forces become. I have, moreover, spoken thus because the way in which these things must be looked at is not yet fully understood even among ourselves. The unshakable standpoint must be that something new, a new beginning, is at least intended in our Movement. What lies beyond this ‘intention’ has of course yet to come. We with our building can still do no more than ‘intend.’ Those who can do more than intend—they will come, even though it be not before the time Herman Grimm thinks must elapse before there will be a complete understanding of Goethe. A certain humility is bound up with the understanding of this and there is little humility in modern spiritual life. Spiritual Science is well suited to give this humility and at the same time to bring the soul to a realisation of the gravity of these things.

A painful impression is caused by the opposition arising on all sides against our spiritual Movement, now that the world is now beginning to see real results. So long as the Movement was merely there in a spiritual sense the world could see nothing. Now that it does, and it cannot understand what it sees, dissonant voices are beginning to sound from every side. This opposition will grow stronger and stronger. When we realise its existence we shall naturally at first be filled with a certain sorrow, but an inner power will make us able to intercede on behalf of what is to us not merely conviction, but life itself. The soul will be pervaded by an ethereal, living activity, filled with something more than the theoretical convictions of which modern man is so proud. This earnest mood of soul will bring in its train the sure confidence that the foundations of our world and our existence as human beings are able to sustain us, if we seek for them in the spiritual world. Sometimes we need this confidence more, sometimes less. If we speak of sorrow caused by the echo which our spiritual Movement finds in the world—this mood of sorrow must give birth to the mood of power derived from the knowledge that the roots of man's life are in the Spirit and that the Spirit of man will lead him out beyond all the disharmony that can only cause him pain. Strength will flow into man from this mood of power.

If in these very days one cannot help speaking of things spiritual with a sorrow even greater than that caused by the discrepancy between what we desire in our spiritual Movement and the echo it finds in the world—yet it must be said that the world's disharmonies will take a different course when men realise how human hearts can be kindled by the spiritual light for which we strive in anthroposophy. The sorrow connected with our Movement seems only slight when we look at all the sadness lying in the destiny of Europe. The words I have spoken to you are pervaded with sorrow, but they are spoken with the living conviction that whatever pain may await European humanity in a sear or distant future there may, none the less, live within us a confidence born from the knowledge that the Spirit will lead man victoriously through every wilderness. Even in these days of sorrow, in hours fraught with such gravity, we may in very truth, indeed we must, speak of the holy things of Spiritual Science, for we may believe that however dimly the sun of Spiritual Science is shining to-day, its radiance will ever increase until it is a sun of peace, of love and of harmony among men.

Grave though these words may be, they justify us in thinking of the narrower affairs of Spiritual Science with all the powers of heart and soul, when hours of ordeal are being made manifest through the windows of the world.

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Notes:

Note 1. Translator's Note. Presumably Dr. Steiner was here drawing on the blackboard while he was speaking. The expressions used in the German seem to indicate this.

Note 2. See ‘Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment,’ by Rudolf Steiner. Anthrosophical Publishing Co.

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[ 1 ] Max Dessoir's book Beyond the Soul (Vom Jenseits der Seele) contains a brief section in which the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science advocated by me is portrayed as scientifically invalid. Now it might seem to many that a discussion with people who take Dessoir's point of view about science must prove altogether unfruitful to anyone advocating spiritual-scientific anthroposophy. For, such an advocate asserts the existence of a purely spiritual region of experience that a Dessoir fundamentally rejects and consigns to the realm of fantasy. Discussion of the findings of spiritual-scientific knowledge, therefore, might only seem possible with someone who already has reason to believe that such a spiritual-scientific region exists.

This view would be correct if the advocate of anthroposophy presented nothing more than his own inner personal experiences and simply placed them beside the results of the science based on sensory observation and the scientific processing of such observations. Then one could say: the adherent of natural science refuses in fact to regard the experiences of the spiritual researcher as realities; the researcher in the spiritual realm can only make an impression with his findings on those who have already adopted his own point of view.

[ 2 ] This opinion, however, rests upon a misunderstanding of what I mean by anthroposophy. It is true that this anthroposophy is founded upon soul experiences that are attained independently of sense impressions and independently of scientific judgments based only upon sense impressions. Therefore the two kinds of experiences, sensory and extrasensory, seem at first to be separated by an unbridgeable chasm.

But this is not so. There is a common ground where both approaches must meet, and where discussion is possible. This common ground can be described in the following way.

[ 3 ] Out of experiences that are not just personal to him, the advocate of anthroposophy believes himself justified in stating that human activity in knowledge can be developed further from the point at which those researchers stop who want to base themselves only upon sensory observation and intellectual judgment of such observation.

To avoid continuous, long-winded paraphrases, I would like to use the word “anthropology” from now on to designate that approach in science which bases itself on sensory observation and the intellectual processing of such observation, asking the reader to permit me this uncommon usage. In what follows, "anthropology" means only what I have just described. In this sense, anthroposophy believes itself able to begin its research where anthropology leaves off.¹

[ 4 ] The advocate of anthropology limits himself to relating his intellectual concepts—experienced in the soul—to his sense perceptions. The advocate of anthroposophy observes that these concepts—apart from the fact that we relate them to sense impressions—are able in addition to unfold a life of their own within the soul. And that, by unfolding this life within the soul, these concepts effect a development of the soul itself. The advocate of anthroposophy sees how the soul, if it is sufficiently attentive to this development, discovers spiritual organs within its own being. (In using this expression "spiritual organs," I am adopting and extending the linguistic usage of Goethe when he speaks in his world view of “spiritual eyes” and “spiritual ears.”) ² Such spiritual organs, therefore, are for the soul what sense organs are for the body. These spiritual organs must of course be understood as being entirely of a soul nature. Any attempt to connect them with one or another bodily configuration must be strictly rejected by anthroposophy. Anthroposophy must not picture these spiritual organs as extending in any way beyond the soul realm or encroaching upon the structure of the body. It would regard any such encroachment as a pathological configuration, to be strictly excluded from its domain. The way anthroposophy portrays the development of our spiritual organs should be strong enough proof—to anyone who really informs himself about it—that the researcher in the real spiritual realm arrives at the same conclusions as anthropologists about abnormal soul experiences like illusions, visions, and hallucinations. ³ Any confusion of anthroposophical findings with abnormal, so-called soul experiences rests entirely upon misunderstanding or insufficient knowledge of what anthroposophy actually maintains. And anyone who studies and understands anthroposophy's description of the path to development of our spiritual organs will certainly not fall prey to the notion that this path could lead to pathological configurations or states. The insightful person, in fact, will recognize that every stage of soul experience that a human being passes through on the anthroposophical path to spiritual perception lies in a realm that is entirely of a soul nature; alongside this realm, our sensory experience and normal intellectual activity will continue, unaltered, as they were before this soul realm opened up for us. The great number of misunderstandings holding sway in precisely this area of anthroposophical knowledge stems from the fact that it is difficult for many to bring something of a purely soul nature into the sphere of their attention. The power to picture mentally ⁴ fails such people the moment this ability is not supported by the sight of something sense-perceptible. Their power to picture mentally is then dampened down, even below the level of dreams, into dreamless sleep, where it is no longer conscious. One could say that such people, in their consciousness, are filled with the aftereffects or the direct effects of sense impressions, and that, alongside this fullness, a sleep is occurring that blocks out what would be recognized as being of a soul nature if it could be grasped. One could even say that the essential nature of soul phenomena is subject to such profound misunderstanding by many people just because they cannot wake up to the soul element as they can to the sense-perceptible content of consciousness.

The fact that there are people in this situation whose degree of attention is only at the level produced by ordinary external life need not surprise anyone who can grasp the point, for example, of a reproach which Franz Brentano made to William James on this subject.

Brentano writes that one must “differentiate between our activity of perceiving and its object, i.e., between perceiving and what is perceived” (“and these two differ from each other as certainly as my present memory differs from the past event I am remembering; or, to make an even more drastic comparison: they differ as much as my hatred of an enemy differs from the object of this hatred”), and Brentano adds that one sees this error cropping up here and there. He continues:

William James, among others, embraced this error and went to some length to validate it at the International Congress on Psychology (Rome, 1905). Because, according to James, when I look out into a room, my vision appears along with the room; and, furthermore, because my mental images of sense-perceptible objects differ only in strength from the visual images directly stimulated by these objects; and, finally, because we call some objects beautiful, yet the difference between beautiful and ugly is connected to differences in emotions: therefore, soul and physical phenomena should no longer be regarded as two different classes of phenomena!

I find it hard to understand how the speaker himself could not feel the weakness of these arguments. To appear at the same time does not mean to appear as the same thing; just as existing at the same time does not mean existing as the same thing. Descartes could therefore recommend without self-contradiction that one deny—at least initially—the existence of the room I see, and regard as indubitable only the existence of my vision of the room. But if James' first argument is invalid, then obviously the second is also; for, what does it matter whether imagining differs from seeing only in degree of intensity, since, according to James, even if the degree of intensity were the same in both, the total congruency of imagining with seeing would still only represent congruency with a soul phenomenon? In his third argument, James speaks of beauty.... It is certainly a strange logic that could conclude—from the fact that pleasure in the beautiful is of a soul nature— that the object with whose appearance the pleasure is connected must also be of a soul nature. If that were so, then every dislike would be identical with what one dislikes, and one would have to be careful not to regret a past mistake, since, along with this remorse, the mistake, being identical with the remorse, would repeat itself.

With arguments like these, however, we need not fear that his authority—to which, among German psychologists, there is unfortunately added that of Mach—will cause many to fail to recognize the most obvious differences.⁵

Actually, this “failure to recognize the most obvious differences” is no rare occurrence. It is based on the fact that our power of mental picturing can unfold the necessary attentiveness only for sense impressions, whereas the actual soul activity that is also occurring is present to consciousness as little as what is experienced in a state of sleep. We are dealing here with two streams of experience; one of these is apprehended in a waking state; the other—the soul stream—is grasped simultaneously, but only with an attentiveness as weak as the mental perception we have in sleep, i.e., it is hardly grasped at all. We must by no means ignore the fact that during our ordinary waking state, the soul disposition of sleep does not simply cease, but continues to exist alongside our waking experience, and that the actual soul element enters the realm of perception only when the human being awakens not only to the sense world—as this occurs in ordinary consciousness—but awakens also to a soul existence, as is the case in seeing consciousness. It hardly matters now whether this soul element is denied—in a crudely materialistic sense—by the condition of sleep (to the soul element) that accompanies our waking state, or whether, because unseen, the soul element is confused with the physical, as in James' case; the results are nearly the same: both lead to fatal nearsightedness. But it is not surprising that the soul element so often remains unperceivable, if even a philosopher like William James is unable to differentiate it correctly from the physical.⁶

[ 5 ] With people as little able as William James to distinguish between the actual soul element and the content of what the soul experiences through the senses, it is difficult to discuss that region of our soul's being in which the development of spiritual organs is to be observed. For, this development occurs precisely where his attention is unable to direct itself. This development leads from an intellectual knowing to a knowing that sees.⁷

[ 6 ] But now, through the ability to perceive the actual soul element, we have as yet fulfilled only the very first precondition, which makes it possible to direct our spiritual gaze to where anthroposophy seeks the development of soul organs. For, what meets this gaze at first compares to anthroposophy's description of a soul-being equipped with spiritual organs the way an undifferentiated living cell compares to an organism endowed with sense organs. The soul becomes conscious of possessing the individual spiritual organs themselves, however, only to the extent that it is able to use these organs. For, these organs are not something at rest; they are in continuous movement. And when they are not in use, one also cannot be conscious of their presence. For them, therefore, perceiving and being used are synonymous. In my anthroposophical writings, I describe how the development—and along with it the perceptibility—of these organs comes to light. I will indicate here only a little of what can be said in this regard.

[ 7 ] Anyone who devotes himself to reflection on the experiences caused by sense-perceptible phenomena encounters questions everywhere that this reflection seems unable to answer at first. The pursuit of such reflections leads the adherents of anthropology to set certain limits to knowledge. One need only remember how Du Bois-Reymond, in his discourse on the limits of natural science, states that one cannot know the essential nature of matter or of the simplest phenomenon of consciousness. Now one can stop short at such points in one's reflections and surrender to the opinion: there human knowledge is in fact confronted by insurmountable barriers. And one can resign oneself to the fact that knowledge is attainable only on this side of the barrier, and that beyond this only inklings, feelings, hopes, and wishes are possible, with which “science” could have nothing to do.

Or else one can start at such points to form hypotheses about a region transcending the sense-perceptible world. In this case one employs the intellect, believing that it is justified in extending its judgments out over a region of which the senses perceive nothing. In such an undertaking, one runs the risk that nonbelievers will declare that the intellect has no right to judge a reality for which it lacks the foundations of sense perceptions. For only sense perceptions could provide a content for the intellect's judgment. Without such content, its concepts must remain empty.

[ 8 ] Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not relate to “limits of knowledge” in either of these two ways. It does not form hypotheses about the supersensible world because it must agree with those who feel that any basis for reflection is lost if mental pictures are left in the same form as when taken from sense perceptions, and yet are to be applied in a realm transcending the sense world.

Anthroposophy does not relate to “limits of knowledge” in the first way either, because it realizes that in our encounter with these so-called limits of knowledge, something can be experienced by the soul that has nothing to do with the content of mental pictures gained from sense perception. If the soul focuses only upon this latter content, then, if its self-examination is honest, it must admit that this content can reveal nothing directly to our activity of knowing except a copy of what we experience through the senses. The situation changes if the soul goes further and asks itself: What can be experienced within the soul itself when it fills itself with those mental pictures to which it is led when confronted by our usual limits of knowledge? After sufficient self-examination, the soul can then say to itself: Through such mental pictures I cannot, in the ordinary sense of the word, know anything; but in the event that I really make this powerlessness of my knowing activity inwardly visible to myself, then I become aware how these mental pictures work within my own self. As ordinary cognitive pictures, these mental pictures remain mute; but the more their muteness communicates itself to our consciousness, the more these mental pictures take on an inner life of their own that unites with the life of the soul. And the soul then notices how, with this experience, it is in a situation comparable to that of a blind being who has also not experienced much development of its sense of touch. Such a being would at first keep bumping into things. It would feel the resistance of outer reality. And from this generalized sensation, it could develop an inner life for itself, filled with a primitive consciousness that no longer has merely the general sensation of bumping into things, but that differentiates this sensation and distinguishes between hardness and softness, smoothness and roughness, etc.

[ 9 ] In the same way, the soul can hold and differentiate its experience of the mental pictures it forms in its encounter with the limits of knowledge. The soul learns to experience that these limits represent nothing more than what arises when the soul is touched by the spiritual world in a soul way. The dawning awareness of such limits becomes an experience for the soul that can be compared with the experience of touch in the sense world.⁸ What the soul formerly regarded as limits to knowledge it now sees as a soul-spiritual touching by a spiritual world. And out of the soul's attentiveness to its experiences with the various pictures it makes for itself at this borderland, the general sensing of a spiritual world differentiates for the soul into diverse perceptions of a spiritual world. In this way, the spiritual world's lowest form of perceptibility, so to speak, becomes an experience. This characterizes merely the very first opening of the soul to the spiritual world. But it also shows that the spiritual experiences striven for in what I mean by anthroposophy do not point in the direction of general, nebulous, emotional experiences that the soul has of itself, but rather in the direction of something that can be developed in a lawful way into a true inner experience. This is not the place to show how this first primitive spiritual perception can be intensified by further soul practices in such a way that one can speak of other, in a certain way, higher kinds of perception besides this soul-spiritual blind groping. For a description of such soul practices I must refer the reader to my anthroposophical books and essays. Here only the basic principle of spiritual perception was to be indicated of which anthroposophy speaks.

[ 10 ] I would like, through a comparison, to clarify still further how the whole attitude of soul in anthroposophical spiritual investigation differs from that of anthropology. Picture to yourself a number of wheat kernels. These can be used as food. But one can also plant them in the earth so that other wheat plants can grow from them. Likewise, one can hold mental pictures—gained through sense impressions—within one's consciousness in such a way as to experience them as copies of sense-perceptible reality. Or, one can experience these mental pictures in such a way as to let work in the soul the power these pictures exercise through what they are, irrespective of the fact that they reproduce sense perceptions. The first way that mental pictures were described as working in the soul can be compared with what becomes of wheat kernels when they are taken up as food by a living being; the second way, with the production of a new wheat plant from each kernel.

This comparison, to be sure, is only meant to focus on the fact that from the seed there arises a plant similar to its progenitors; and that from a mental picture working in the soul there arises within the soul a power that is effective in developing spiritual organs. And one must also consider the fact that our first awareness of such inner powers can only be kindled by mental pictures that work as forcefully as those mental pictures we described as occurring at the borderland of knowledge; once awakened, however, this awareness of such powers can find other mental pictures that can also be effective—to a lesser degree, it is true—in helping one progress upon this path.

[ 11 ] At the same time, this comparison points to a result of anthroposophical investigation into the essential nature of our life in mental pictures. Just as a seed, when it is processed into food, is lifted out of the course of development that lies within its own primal being and that leads to the formation of a new plant, so a mental picture too is diverted from its own essential course of development when it is used by the picturing soul to reproduce a sense perception. The development particular to a mental picture through its own essential nature is to work as a power in the development of the soul. Just as little as one discovers the plant's laws of development when one investigates the nutritive value of its seeds, can one discover the essential nature of mental pictures when one investigates the way mental picturing brings forth a cognitive reproduction of the sense-perceptible reality it communicates. This does not mean to say that such an investigation cannot be undertaken. This is just as possible as investigating the nutritive value of seeds. But just as a study of the nutritive value of seeds addresses something different than the developmental laws of plant growth, so an epistemology that investigates how the cognitive power of mental pictures reproduces reality informs us about something different than the essential nature of our life of mental picturing. Just as little as it lies prefigured in the essential nature of a seed to become food, does it lie in the essential nature of mental picturing to provide cognitive reproductions of reality. Yes, we can even say that it is as completely external to the seed's own nature to use it as food as it is to the actual nature of mental pictures to use them to reproduce reality in cognition. The truth is that in its mental pictures the soul grasps its own evolving being. And only through the soul's own activity does it occur that mental pictures become the mediators of any knowledge of reality.⁹

[ 12 ] Now, as to how mental pictures become mediators of such knowledge, anthroposophical observation, which employs spiritual organs, arrives at different conclusions than those epistemologists do who reject this observation. Anthroposophical observation reveals the following.

[ 13 ] Mental pictures, as they are in their own primal nature, do in fact form a part of the life of the soul; but they cannot become conscious in the soul as long as the soul does not consciously employ its spiritual organs. As long as these mental pictures are active in a way corresponding to their own essential nature, they remain unconscious in the soul. The soul lives by virtue of them, but can know nothing of them. These mental pictures must dampen down their own life in order to become conscious soul experiences for ordinary consciousness. This dampening down occurs with every sense perception. Thus, when the soul receives a sense impression, there occurs a laming of our life in mental pictures; and the soul experiences this lamed mental picturing consciously as the mediator of our knowledge of external reality.¹⁰ All mental pictures that the soul relates to an outer sense-perceptible reality are inner spiritual experiences whose life has been dampened down. Everything that one thinks regarding the outer sense world consists of deadened mental pictures. Now it is not as though the life of mental pictures were lost, however; it leads its existence, separated from the realm of consciousness, in the unconscious spheres of the soul. And there it is to be found again by our spiritual organs. Now, just as the deadened mental pictures can be related by the soul to the sense world, so the living mental pictures grasped by our spiritual organs can be related to the spiritual world.

The mental pictures described above as occurring to us at the borderland of knowledge are those that, by their very nature, do not let themselves be lamed; therefore, they resist any relation to sense-perceptible reality. Precisely through this fact, they become the points of departure for spiritual perception.

[ 14 ] In my anthroposophical books, I have called the mental pictures that are grasped as living ones by the soul “Imaginative mental pictures.” One misunderstands what is meant here by “Imaginative,” if one confuses it with the pictorial form of expression that must be used to point to such mental pictures in a suitable way. What is actually meant by "Imaginative" can be clarified in the following way. When someone has a sense perception, while the outer object is making an impression on him, the perception has a certain inner strength for him. When he turns away from the object, he can then only represent it to himself in an inner picture. But this mental picture has little inner strength. It is shadowy, so to speak, when compared with the mental picture that occurs while the outer object is present. If a person wants to enliven the mental pictures that are present in his soul in the shadowy form characteristic of ordinary consciousness, he saturates them with the aftereffects of sense perception. He makes the mental picture into an image he can observe [inwardly]. Such images are certainly nothing other than the results of interaction between mental picturing and sense perception. The “Imaginative” mental pictures of anthroposophy do not arise at all in this way. In order to bring them forth, the soul must know this inner process of uniting the life of mental pictures with sense impressions so exactly that it can prevent any sense impressions—or their aftereffects, as the case may be—from flowing into its life of mental picturing. One can achieve this exclusion of perception's aftereffects only if one has learned to know how mental picturing is gripped by these aftereffects. Only then is one in a position to unite the spiritual organs in a living way with the essential being of mental picturing and thereby receive impressions from spiritual reality. Through this, the life of mental pictures is permeated from an entirely different quarter than in sense perception. One's experiences are essentially different from those to be had from sense perceptions. And yet it is possible to describe these experiences. This can be done in the following way.

When the human being perceives the color yellow he does not merely have a visual experience in his soul; a nuance of feeling accompanies what the soul experiences. This feeling may vary in strength from person to person, but it will never be totally absent. In the beautiful chapter of his Color Theory on the sensory-ethical effects of colors, Goethe describes in a quite vivid manner the participation of our feeling in red, yellow, green, etc. Now when the soul perceives something in a particular region of the spirit, it can happen that this spiritual perception is accompanied in the soul by the same nuance of feeling as occurs in the sense perception of yellow. One knows then that one is having a particular spiritual experience. In this mental picture, of course, one does not confront what one confronts in a sense perception of a yellow color. Yet, as a nuance of feeling, one has the same inner experience as when the eye is confronted by a yellow color. One says then: I perceive the spiritual experience as “yellow.” In order to express oneself even more exactly, one could perhaps say: I perceive something that is like “yellow” for my soul. But this description is unnecessary for anyone who has learned from anthroposophical literature how the process leading to spiritual perception occurs. This literature points clearly enough to the fact that the reality accessible to spiritual perception does not confront the spiritual organs like a rarefied sense-perceptible object or process, or in such a way that it could be reproduced through mental pictures that are perceptible in the ordinary way.¹¹

[ 15 ] Just as the soul, through its spiritual organs, learns to know the spiritual world lying outside of the human being, so it also learns to know the spiritual being of man himself. Anthroposophy regards this spiritual being as a member of the spiritual world. Anthroposophy proceeds from observation of one part of the spiritual world to mental pictures about the human being of what reveals itself in the human body as a spiritual human being. Working from the opposite direction, anthropology also arrives at mental pictures about the human being. When anthroposophy develops the kinds of observations described in this essay, it arrives at views about the spiritual being of man that manifests in the sense world through its body. The flower of this manifestation is human consciousness, which allows sense impressions to live on in the form of mental pictures. By proceeding from experiences of the spiritual world outside man to man himself, anthroposophy ultimately finds the human being living in a sense-perceptible body and, in this body, elaborating his consciousness of sense-perceptible reality. The last thing anthroposophy, on its path, discovers about the human being is the soul's living activity in mental pictures, which anthroposophy is able to express in coherent imaginative pictures. Then, at the end of its path of spiritual investigation, so to speak, anthroposophy can employ its vision further and see how the real life of mental pictures is lamed by the perceiving senses. With the light it sheds from the spiritual quarter, anthroposophy shows this lamed life of mental pictures to be characteristic of man's life in the sense world, insofar as he forms mental pictures. In this way, as one of the last results of its investigations, anthroposophy arrives at a philosophy of the human being. What lies on its path down to this point is to be found purely in a spiritual realm. With the results of what it has found on its spiritual path, anthroposophy arrives at a characterization of the human being who lives in the sense world.

[ 16 ] Anthropology investigates the realms of the sense world. Proceeding on its way, it also arrives at the human being. He presents himself to anthropology as drawing together the facts of the sense world in his bodily organization in such a way that from this drawing together a consciousness arises through which outer reality is presented in mental pictures. The anthropologist sees mental pictures arising from the human organism. In observing this, he must come to a halt in a certain sense. With mere anthropology, he cannot apprehend the inner, lawful connectedness of mental pictures. Just as anthroposophy, at the end of its path through spiritual experiences, still looks at the spiritual being of man—insofar as this manifests through the perceptions of the senses—so anthropology, at the end of its path through the sense world, must look at the way the sense perceptible human being is active in mental picturing in its encounter with sense perceptions. And when it observes this, anthropology finds that this activity is not sustained by the organic laws of the body, but by the thought-laws of logic. But logic is not a region that can be entered in the same way as the other regions of anthropology. In thinking that is governed by logic, laws hold sway that can no longer be regarded as those of the bodily organization. As the human being works with these laws, the same logical activity reveals itself in him that anthroposophy encounters at the end of its path. It is just that the anthropologist sees this logical activity in the light shed from the sense-perceptible realm. He sees the lamed mental pictures and, by acknowledging the existence of logic, he also concedes that in these mental pictures laws are operative from a world that is indeed united with the sense world, but does not coincide with it. In man's life of mental pictures, which is carried by a logical activity, there manifests to the anthropologist the sense-perceptible human being who extends into the spiritual world. In this way, as the final results of its investigations, anthropology arrives at a philosophy about the human being. What lies on its path up to this point lies purely in the sense world.¹²

[ 17 ] If these two paths—the anthroposophical and the anthropological—are followed in the right way, they meet at the same point. Anthroposophy brings with it to this meeting a picture of the living spiritual human being and shows how he develops, in sense-perceptible existence, the consciousness that is present between birth and death while the life of supersensible consciousness is lamed. Anthropology, at this meeting point, shows a picture of the sense-perceptible human being who apprehends himself in consciousness, but who extends up into spiritual existence and lives in that essential beingness which reaches beyond birth and death. At this meeting point, a really fruitful understanding is possible between anthroposophy and anthropology. This understanding will occur if both progress to a philosophy of the human being. The philosophy of the human being that emerges from anthroposophy will in fact produce a picture of him painted in an entirely different medium than that provided by an anthropological philosophy of the human being; but those who look at both pictures will be able to find a harmony between their mental pictures similar to that between the negative of a photograph and the corresponding positive print.

[ 18 ] This essay, I hope, has shown how the question raised at the beginning—about the possibility of a fruitful discussion between anthropology and anthroposophy—can be answered in the affirmative, especially from the anthroposophical point of view.

• 1. Although the anthroposophy advocated by me stands on a completely different ground, with its results, than the presentations of Robert Zimmermann in his book Anthroposophy (1881), still I believe myself justified in using the concept by which he characterized the difference between anthroposophy and anthropology. As the content of his anthroposophy, however, Zimmermann only draws together into an abstract schema the concepts provided by anthropology. For him, the knowing vision that is the basis for what I mean by anthroposophy lies outside the domain of scientific procedure. His anthroposophy differs from anthropology only through the fact that the former first submits the concepts it receives from the latter to a process like that of Herbart's philosophy, before making these concepts into the content of its purely intellectual schema of ideas.
• 2. A more detailed presentation and justification of this notion of “spiritual organs” can be found in my book The Riddle of Man, Mercury Press, 1990, page 125ff. and in my books on Goethe's world view.
• 3. The inner experiences that the soul must undergo in gaining the use of its spiritual organs are described in a number of my books, but especially in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment and in the second part of Occult Science, an Outline.
• 4. Sich Vorstellen means to visualize, to picture to oneself mentally. The ability to “place something before oneself inwardly is a crucial factor in spiritual development and as such is referred to constantly in this essay. How do we hold something up before our inner eye? What is the attention we focus upon it? Who does this? What is the nature of mental pictures (Vorstellungen) themselves? Such questions are among the many painful riddles that ordinary consciousness cannot solve, and that bring us up against an invisible world. Translator.
• 5. See F. Brentano, Research into a Psychology of the Senses, Leipzig, 1907, p. 96f.
• 6. The awakening of those soul faculties which, in ordinary consciousness, are unawakened is described in more detail in my book The Riddle of Man, page 132ff.
• 7. For a more extensive validation of what is stated here, please see addendum 1: The Philosophical Validation of Anthroposophy.
• 8. Limits to knowledge like those discussed above do not merely present themselves in the small number of which most people are aware; they occur in great number along the paths that intelligent reflection, according to its own inner nature, must take in order to gain a relation to true reality. Please see addendum 2: The Appearance of Limits to Knowledge.
• 9. A more detailed case is made for these views in the last chapter of my book The Riddles of Philosophy: “Sketch of a Perspective of an Anthroposophy.”
• 10. Please see addendum 3: The Abstractness of Our Concepts.
• 11. For further clarification of what has just been expressed, please see addendum 4: An Important Characteristic of Spiritual Perception.
• 12. Like the thoughts before footnote 7, what has been indicated here can be clarified further in a certain direction by addendum 1: The Philosophical Validation of Anthroposophy.

Gentlemen, have you perhaps, during the long period in which we have not been able to give lectures, been able to come up with any particular questions that you would like to discuss?

Questioner: I would like to ask whether today's cult, with its actions, still has a relationship to the spiritual world and how the various cults of different peoples relate to each other.

Dr. Steiner: Yes, gentlemen. It is interesting to consider how a cult comes into being and what it seeks.

Perhaps I might take this opportunity to tell you something that is currently of interest to us, in that it ties in with my last trip to England. The course in Penmaenmawr was held near an ancient place of worship, on the west coast of England in Wales, where there is an island off the coast called Anglesey, and there are still ancient places of worship on the surrounding mountains. They are in ruins and can only be seen, I would say, in ruins today, but from which, if you know anthroposophy, you can clearly see what they actually meant to be there.

You see, it would be just as if one were to go out here to these mountains and find such places of worship up there. There you find them, so to speak, everywhere on the mountains, and mainly where the mountain has such a flat area at the top, where there is a hollow, a plain at the top of the mountain that is slightly deeper. These old places of worship were then located there. Today they are piles of rubble, but you can still clearly see what they looked like. The smaller ones consist of stones that were probably once carried by the ice to the place in question, but were also dragged to the place where they were needed. These stones were placed in such a way that they form a kind of rectangle, next to each other (see following drawing). When I look at it from the side, it looks like this: there is a capstone that covers the whole thing up there. These are the small ones. The large places of worship consist of stones of a similar kind (see drawing below), which are placed in a circle, exactly twelve of them. This is a cult that was probably practiced in its heyday three to four millennia after our time there, at a time when the population was not very dense, a very sparse population, and at a time when there was hardly anything other than some agriculture and livestock farming. In this population, writing and reading were completely unknown in the heyday when this cult was practiced. So writing and reading were not even considered possible!

Now one can ask what this cult actually meant. I say to you explicitly: reading and writing did not exist in those days. Now you know that if you want to make crops flourish in the most favorable way possible, you have to sow them at different times and do one thing or another with them at different times. And with the cattle, one must also take into account the different times for mating and so on. This depends on the connection of the earth with the whole environment of the world, of which I have often told you. Now, today we have our farmer's almanac, we look it up, we know what day of the year it is, and people then forget that it does not depend on human will. You can't set the days as you please, but you have to set the days as they follow from the stars, as they follow from the position of the moon, and so on. Now, today the calendar maker proceeds in such a way that he calculates it according to the old traditions. You have calculations that you can use to calculate when this or that day is. This is calculated because people once determined it according to the position of the sun. Today, you can also determine it according to the position of the sun, but the people who generally follow such things do not follow the position of the sun or stars, but simply what is calculated, according to the calendar. Now, that was unthinkable in those days because reading and writing did not exist at all. Such things only came later. So that takes us back, as I said, three to four thousand years before the present time. And reading and writing in these areas hardly takes us back more than two to three thousand years. These are very old conditions, and the reading and writing that existed back then was, of course, not at all comparable to what we have today. In any case, the majority of the population did not know it.

If you look at such a circle up on the mountain, you can imagine: the sun seems to go around – we know that it is stationary, but that is not true, you can say that because that is how things are – so the sun goes around in a circle in space. As a result, it casts a different shadow from each of these stones, and you can follow that shadow throughout the day. You can say: When the sun rises in the morning, there is the shadow, now it goes a little further, there is the shadow, and so on. But the shadow also changes over the course of a year because the sun rises at a different point each time. This changes the shadow. It became like this in March, a little later like this. And the wisdom of the scholar or priest, as you will, of the Druid priest, who was appointed to observe these things, consisted in his being able to judge this shadow, so that he could know: when the shadow, let us say, falls on this point, then this or that must be done in the spring in the fields. He could tell people that. He could see that from the position of the sun. Or if the shadow fell on this point, then the bull had to be led around, the animals had to be mated, because that had to be on a certain day of the year. So the priest could tell from these things what had to happen throughout the year.

But in fact the whole of life was actually determined by the course of the sun. Today, as I said, people do not think that they themselves do this because they find it in the calendar. But in those days one had to go to the sources oneself, had to read the matter from the universe, so to speak.

At a very specific time, let's say in the fall, for example, it was determined exactly what had to be done with the fields; the so-called bull festival was also set at a certain time of the year based on the information provided by these people. Then the bull was led around; otherwise it was kept away from the cattle and so on. The old festivals were also set up according to these things, but they are definitely related to such things. An order like this is called a Druidic circle today. This dahier (reference is made to the drawing) is a dolmen or table 23 Kromlech. The strange thing is that the stones are standing like that and are covered on top, so that there is shade inside.

Well, you see, gentlemen, people know that sunlight is sometimes stronger and sometimes weaker, because they feel it in the way they sweat or freeze. But what people do not know is that the shadow is just as different as the light. Depending on the light, the shadow is different. But today people have given up the habit of determining the difference of the shadow. The old people have first of all acquired the ability to determine the differences of the shadow. But in the shadow one sees the spiritual. The rays of the sun do not only have a physical, but they also have a spiritual. And in there the Druid priest observed the spirituality of the sun's rays, on which it depended whether one should cultivate this or that plant better in a certain country, because that depends on the spirituality that is carried down from the sun to the earth. And in addition, the effects of the moon were extremely well observed in this shadow. The effects of the moon, for example, have a great influence on the mating of cattle, and this was used to determine the time of mating. So that actually the whole year has been divided according to these solar observations.

If you were to dig under one of these cromlechs, you would also find that it was also a burial place. These things were set up in particular where people were buried at the same time. This again has the significance that, in fact, when man has left his body, this body has a different composition than anything else. The soul, the spirit, has lived in the body throughout the lifetime. When the body disintegrates, it has different properties from those found in the rest of the mountainous area. And these forces, when they flowed up there, made it possible to see properly in the shade. These people were familiar with completely different natural forces than those known later.

And when you see at some mountain site - which, by the way, is more pronounced across the country, I saw this in Ilkley, where the first course took place during the English trip - individual stones high up, but in such a way that the place was well chosen – from such a high vantage point one could see the whole country from afar – then one finds such signs, swastikas, with which so much mischief is being made in Germany today. This swastika is worn by people who no longer have any idea that this was once a sign that was supposed to indicate to those who came from afar: There are people who understand these things, who see not only with their physical eyes, but also with their spiritual eyes – I have described these spiritual eyes as lotus flowers in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” – and they wanted to draw attention to this: we can see with these lotus flowers.

So here you see a cult that essentially consisted of people wanting to get the spiritual from the world around them for their social circumstances, for their living conditions on earth. This can still be seen in the objects today, and that is why this area is extremely interesting. These were the last of such places of worship, because after that people moved back to the west coast, because then those people came from the east who had spread writing in ancient times. This first writing is called runes. The letters were formed by putting sticks together, so quite differently than in modern times. And that is when the subject of what is now described as Norse mythology first arose: Wotan, Thor and so on. That came later, and it came because the writing was transplanted there.

When I speak of the shadow, there is no need to be terribly surprised, because an animal can see something in the shadow. You just have to pay attention to how a horse behaves strangely when it is standing somewhere on a street in the evening where there is lighting, and it looks at its shadow on a wall. You just have to know that the animal, the horse, does not see its shadow the way we see it. We have eyes that look straight ahead, a horse has eyes that look sideways. This means that it does not see the shadow as such at all, but it perceives the spiritual essence in the shadow. Of course people say: the horse is afraid of its shadow. But it is really the case that it does not see the shadow at all, but it perceives the spiritual essence in the shadow. And so these primitive people also perceived differences in the shadows throughout the year, just as one perceives differences in the heat of the sun and in the cold. This is a cult that was practised there. And you can see from what I have described that such cults, which originated in ancient times, were necessary. They were there because they were needed. They replaced everything that could be read later, because at the same time it was the way people interacted with the gods. People prayed less, but they communicated what flowed into life, what had a relationship to life, a meaning.

Now another cult, which you can still find in many places, especially in Central Europe. There you find such cult sites, there you find certain images. These images show a bull, and on top of the bull sits a kind of rider with a so-called Phrygian cap, with a kind of revolutionary cap. This was adopted from there later. And then you see on the same image below a kind of scorpion, which is biting into the genitalia of the bull. Then you also see how the one who is sitting at the top plunges a sword into the front of the bull's body. And when it is like this, with the bull (it is drawn), the rider at the top, the scorpion here, the sword that plunges, then you see how the starry sky is formed above it. Above, the starry sky spreads out. These are again the so-called Mithras cults. The first are the Druid cults; and what I am now describing are the Mithras cults. While the Druid cults are in the west on the coasts – we also find them in other areas, but I just told you about the area where I was able to examine them myself – these cults are found from Asia across the whole of the Danube, that is, through present-day southern Russia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Bavaria, the areas of the Odenwald, the Black Forest and so on. Once these cults, these Mithras cults, had spread. And they meant something very specific. Because, you see, why did people put a bull there in the first place? That's the first question we have to ask.

I told you: in spring, the sun rises in a certain constellation, today actually in the constellation of Pisces. – Astronomers still show the constellation of Aries. But that is wrong, in reality it is the constellation of Pisces. For a long time, for two thousand years, the sun rose in the constellation of Aries, even earlier in the constellation of Taurus. And so people said: The sun always rises in the constellation of Taurus in spring, when growth begins. And they associated what lives in the human body, not in the head, but in the rest of the human body, namely what is associated with growth, with the fact that the sun's rays are changed, that the constellation of Taurus is behind them. And that is why they said: If we want to describe the animal-like person, we have to draw the bull, and the actual person, who is ruled by his head, only sits on it. - So that the bull represents the lower animal-like person, and the one who sits up there with the Phrygian cap represents the higher person. But the whole is actually only one person, lower person and higher person.

And now people said to themselves: Oh, it is bad when the lower man is in control, when man gives himself entirely to his animal instincts, when man only follows his passions that come from the belly, from sexuality and so on! The higher man must rule over the lower man. That is why they expressed it this way: This one, who rides, has the sword and thrusts it into the loins of the lower man. That is to say, the lower man must be made small in the face of the higher man. Furthermore, the scorpion is there, biting into the genitals, to show: if the lower man is not made small by the higher man, is not controlled, then the lower man also harms himself, because the forces of nature come over him and destroy him. So this whole human destiny between the lower and higher man was expressed in this image.

Above it was the starry sky. It is very significant that the starry sky was spread out. The sun rises in spring at a certain point, so it rose at that time in the constellation of Taurus. But it advances a little bit every day. This advance is twofold. First, the vernal point advances. The sun rises a little further away from the point where it rose the previous year, so that three thousand years ago the sun rose in Aries, even earlier in Taurus. Today it rises in Pisces in spring. This way it gradually comes all the way around. Over the course of 25,920 years, the sun goes all the way around. But it also goes around every year, so that the sun does not rise in the vernal point on the following day – it only rises on March 21 – and on the following day it rises a little further away from this point, and so on. Throughout the year, it also goes around all the signs of the zodiac in the zodiac.

Now those who had to serve the cult of Mithras had to observe when the lower man, the animal man, was more difficult to control: when the sun was in the constellation of Taurus, when it particularly drives towards the forces of growth. When the sun rises in the constellation of Virgo, say in October, more towards December at that time, the lower human being was not so strong, the rule did not need to be so strongly developed. The population had no feeling for these things, but those who observed the Mithras cult had to know this. And so those who practiced this Mithras cult could say: Now it is difficult to rule the lower man, now it is spring; now it is easier, now it is a certain time in winter. And so in the cult of Mithras, man himself was used to get to know the seasons again, as well as the whole course of the sun and moon through the constellations. The Druids used more the external signs, the shadows; here in the service of Mithras, more the effect on man was used. And so this cult of Mithras was also completely connected with life.

So there were the most diverse cults. Of course, one must be clear about it: if one wants to observe such things as were observed with the Druids, one needs very specific areas of the earth. — One can still see that today. If one lives there in Wales — the course there lasted a fortnight — then one has a constant rapid change between, I would say, small cloudbursts and sunshine. It changes by the hour, so that you have a completely different air than here; it is always more filled with water. When you have such air, as it is where the Druids were, then you can make such observations. In the areas where the Mithraic cult spread, one could not have made such observations because the climate was different. There one had to take the observations more from the inner life of man. He was more sensitive to such things. And so the cults were different depending on the region. This Mithraism was widespread in the Danube regions, in Bavaria, as far as here in Switzerland, probably less here, but probably also in older times. Now, this Mithraism was still widespread long after Christianity emerged in these regions. The last remnants were still found in the times when Christianity was spreading, especially in the Danube regions, for example. There you can still find these images today in caves, in rock caves. Because these observations and cults were practiced in rock caves. There was no need for the external sunlight, but rather the peace and quiet inside the rock cave. The spiritual effects of the sun and the stars also go into this.

Once I have explained these two cults to you, you can see the meaning of cults in general. There were the most diverse cults. The Negroes still have their cults today, which are simpler, more primitive, but which also show in a simple way how one wants to get to know the spiritual environment of the universe. Then, at a certain time — this time lies again about one and a half to two millennia back — something emerged from the most diverse cults, which were particularly in Asia and Africa, from all these cults, so to speak, where they had merged. A piece was taken from this cult, another piece was taken from that cult, and from the melting together of the most diverse cults, especially the Egyptian and Persian cults, the cult arose that you know today as the Catholic cult. It was melted together from all of this. You can see how it was melted together when you look at the altar, for example. You need not go very far, you will still see today that the altar is something like a gravestone. Even if there is no corpse under it, it is still similar in shape to a gravestone. Just as people in ancient times knew that forces emanate from the corpse, so it was retained in this form.

You will find in Catholic churches the strange fact that the relationship to the sun and the moon is indicated. You will know from Catholic churches what is placed on the altar on particularly festive occasions (drawing $. 282): the monstrance, the so-called Santissimum. Yes, gentlemen, that is nothing more than a sun, and in the center of the sun is the host, conceived as the sun, and here below is the moon, a sign that this cult comes from a time when people wanted to directly observe the sun and the moon as I have shown you for the Druid cult. Only people have forgotten this. When writing and its associated practices spread, they no longer looked at the great outdoors. They looked at a book – and after all, the Gospel is also just a book – and they looked at the sun and moon signs that are in the Holy of Holies, in the monstrance on the altar.

And so, through all the details of Catholic worship, one can see how it leads back to the ancient cults, which still had their connection to the great universe. Of course, this has been completely forgotten. It was the case that in the first three or four centuries AD, people everywhere still knew a great deal about the actual meaning of the cult, because at that time the present cult was formed and spread more from Rome and was put together from the most diverse individual cults. But here around, for example, and especially in the Danube countries, the cult of Mithras was still known. It was considered to have a connection to the universe. Therefore, in the first centuries, what was left of the old cults was systematically eradicated, and only those cults remained that were no longer considered to be related to the universe. And so, isn't it true, people look at the Catholic cult today and attach great importance to the fact that it is not understood, that they do not see that it was once related to the sun and the moon. Because religion and science were one in ancient times, and art was part of it.

Of course, a time came when people said to themselves: Yes, but what is the point of all this? It's for nothing! You can read about the festivals and the times when this or that should happen in the calendar! — It's for nothing, people said. And then came the cult storming, the iconoclasm, then came Protestantism, the Protestant principle, which started against the cult. One now understands why, on the one hand, all the people once stood up for the cult and later all the people turned against the cult, when one bears this history in mind. At the time when I told you that the Druid cult held sway, yes, gentlemen, the enthusiasm sometimes shown today, let us say, for this or that movement, it is all nothing compared to the great enthusiasm that held sway among the people for their Druid cult in those days! They would all have let themselves be stoned and beheaded for this Druid cult. But why? Because they knew that without knowing exactly what is going on in the universe in an orderly way, one cannot live at all, one cannot celebrate the festival of Taurus at the right time, one cannot sow one's grain, one's rye, at the right time.

Later on, this was just forgotten, and that is why people said: Yes, something must have a purpose in life! – and went against it. That humanity at different times behaves so very differently towards these things can only be understood from the fact that such events have taken place, that the matter has been completely forgotten and that today one can only see in these, as they are called, symbols, what actually happened. Where symbols are, there is only the weakest understanding, because where there are realities, one does not need symbols. When one sets up the altar as with the Druids, in order to really observe the sun, one does not put up a picture of the sun!

Yes, that is what has led, for example, to the fact that certain cults, except for the Catholic cult, have preserved themselves with great rigidity to this day.

You see, this Druid cult was a pure farming and cattle-breeding cult, as it was in its heyday, because life consisted of farming and cattle-breeding. Later, in such areas where farming and cattle-breeding used to be the only ones, where this cult was particularly justified, the one that became more of a craft arose. When the Druid cult flourished, everything was agriculture and cattle breeding, and people covered themselves with animal skins and so on. All the crafts - there were no machines - were of course still the same: what the individual made himself was based on what others made. If he had time, he made what he needed to wear or as an object, for example, he made his knife out of a hard stone that he worked, and so on. The times for agriculture and livestock farming were important; he wanted to find out from his gods when he had to take the necessary measures. But then craftsmanship became more important. Now, you see, gentlemen, the craft, of course, has no greater relationship to the starry sky than agriculture and livestock. But on the other hand, the habits had remained, and so a kind of cult was established for the craft, which was taken from these old cults that had a relationship to the sky. And one of these cults, which has remained the most rigid, is the freemason cult. But it consists of pure symbols. In reality, no one really knows what these symbols refer to. Especially when they began to build man-made structures, they applied what they were accustomed to doing in this cult to the construction of works of art. And in architecture, if you want to be very precise, it actually makes a certain amount of sense. You model the forms of the building on what the stars express and so on, if you really want to build. And so the Masonic cult emerged. But when the Masonic cult emerged, people no longer knew what the individual symbols meant. And so the Masonic cult today consists of nothing but symbols, and people don't even know what the symbols refer to, they talk the most confused stuff about the things. You can say: The more the cults are practiced, the less one understands of the things. — And so the understanding of the cults that are most practiced in the present has actually been lost everywhere.

But surely these ancient people needed a cult for their lives in the outside world. If today we want to have a cult again - and we are indeed working on a renewal of Christianity, in Germany there are already individual churches under the direction of Dr. Rittelmeyer - yes, if we are going to create a cult today, it must again have a somewhat different meaning than the ancient cults. For the old cults were effective, and today we simply know from calculation when a day falls, when March 21 is and so on, from ordinary astronomy. The ancients could not do that. In ancient times they had to point to this shadow, as I have described to you. But today something else is necessary. Today it is necessary that people can come to understand something at all about what exists in the spiritual universe. No astronomy, nothing tells people today about what is going on in the universe!

People fall prey to the greatest fallacies. For example, they point telescopes out into the starry world. Now they point the telescope in a certain direction at a star. Yes, gentlemen, I turn the telescope, the instrument, and in another direction I see another star. And on the other hand, it is calculated that the stars are so far away that this can no longer be seen clearly, but only calculated in terms of light years, according to how fast the beam of light travels. One calculates how far the beam of light travels in one year. That is a distance that is even more difficult to express in figures than when you pay for a midday meal in Germany in German currency. That is difficult enough to express! But to express this, how fast a beam of light moves, what a long way it covers in a year, this number goes into the billions. Therefore, one does not speak of it, but one only says: A star lies so far away that the light would take so and so many light years. Yes, gentlemen, now I point my telescope in that direction, I look into it and see the star. It needs, let's say, 300,000 light years to get here; the light needs that long. But the other star, it may be far back, it may need 600,000 light years. Then I look there, but I don't get the present form of the star at all, but a past one. And when I look there, what I see is not really there now. The star still appears to me, but I only see what it used to be, because the light took 300,000 years to get here. So I see an object that is not really there, that took 300,000 years to become visible there!

So you see, when you look around with the telescope, you don't really see the true shape of the starry sky! That is one thing. The other thing is this: people believe that where they see the stars, there is something. But the truth is that there is nothing there, that where you see stars is where the ether ends! This does not apply to the sun and the moon – to the sun it applies to some extent, to the moon not at all – but it does apply to the stars: there is nothing there! There is a hole in the universe. It is remarkable how anthroposophy and real science almost converge here. When we founded our institutes in Stuttgart, I said: One of our first tasks is to prove that where there is a star, there is absolutely nothing, that nothingness shines. Because there is something all around, you see a kind of light where there is nothing. Well, actually we are rather poor people with our research institutes, and the Americans are rich. Since that time, news has come from America that even with ordinary science it has been discovered that there is actually nothing where there are stars.

So anthroposophy works with the most advanced science. Only through anthroposophy can things be better judged. I am telling you these things because you can see from them that people really know nothing about the universe. They judge everything in the universe wrongly. And where does that come from?

You see, gentlemen, that comes from a very specific cause. Imagine: there is a human head, there is the brain. When a person perceives something external, for example through the eye, he perceives the external, needs the brain to do so, so that he can have the perception. But inside the brain there is a small brain, just back there (see drawing). It is built quite differently from the large brain. This little brain is constructed very strangely. It is as if it is made of leaves when you cut through it. So it sits back there.

This small brain does not perceive anything from the outside. The large brain, which I have colored green in the drawing, is what we need to have external earthly impressions. The small brain does not perceive anything from the outside. But when a person becomes inwardly absorbed, when he proceeds as I have described in my books, then this small brain begins to be particularly active, and one feels inwardly how seemingly this small brain becomes larger and larger, as if it were growing. And so it grows, and you feel as if you were standing under a tree. That is why the Orientals depict Buddha under the bodhi tree. He still knew this cerebellum as an organ of perception. This is being rediscovered today. This little brain begins to be active when you become inwardly absorbed in the human aspect. But then you perceive not the external material, but the spiritual. Then, with the little brain, one begins to perceive the spiritual again, and in the spiritual one begins to perceive laws and so on. Today, these must be brought into a cult. Precisely the innermost part of the human being must be brought into a cult today, because the human being, with his inner being in his little brain, separated from the great brain, has the path, has the organ that leads out into the spiritual world.

Today, we can at best stand at the beginning of how to build a cult from the inner being of man. Then this cult will contain inner truths. Just as one knew through the Druid cult when to crown the bull, to set the bull festival, to lead the bull through the community, so that reproduction is regulated in the right way, so one will know — precisely when one sets up a cult in this way, which now develops the spiritual perception that is maintained by the cerebellum — what one has to do in social human life. Before that, people will only speculate, they will only think up all kinds of things, they will do it as they do in Russia. When it is admitted that one must first know in a spiritual way what has to happen in humanity because it flows from the universe, then one will also have a real social science for the first time, which in turn will be wanted from the environment of the universe.

So you have to learn to think. And as soon as you see something like the destroyed rocks lying around today, so that you can only see from the traces what once was, like on the island of Anglesey or in the other places in the coastal areas there , in Penmaenmawr, where the course was held – yes, when you come across such things, you see: much has been lost in humanity, but it is needed, and today, especially in spiritual terms, new insights are needed. Work must be done with new insights.

That is what I wanted to answer your question. I believe that from this you can understand how a cult was just as necessary as a knife that was needed for survival, and how the uselessness of the cult later led to it being eradicated and then continued without being understood.

I will let you know next week when I can have the next lesson – I have to go back to Stuttgart these days, but I will be back in the next few days.

[ 1 ] We will now continue to answer the questions we took up last time. You must be quite clear that the answers to these questions are among the most difficult. I will try to make them as easy as possible. I have already mentioned that, to find a way to spiritual vision, first one must become accustomed to completely independent thinking. Second, one must have the ability to think backward. You must therefore attempt to think backward those things that normally occur in daily life in a 1, 2, 3, sequence. For instance, as I told you last time, when I give a lecture, you should try to think it through backward, from the end to the beginning. These two aspects constitute the absolute first steps.

[ 2 ] In connection with the second question I want to explain something else. As you know, a human being can live only within a specific temperature range. When it becomes very hot in the summer, one sweats but can still tolerate it. However, were it to become progressively hotter, a point would be reached when one would no longer be able to live. Similarly, a human being can tolerate a given degree of cold, and if it gets colder than that, one freezes.

The fact is that one cannot see spiritual beings between the two extremes within which the human body lives: i.e., between the cold at which one freezes and the heat that is still barely tolerable. Within these extremes, where human life is possible, we cannot see spiritual beings. It is not surprising therefore that one cannot perceive spiritual beings when one is in the body.

As I told you last time, when we begin to think backward and approach the point of consciously seeing spiritual beings, we often fall asleep. Unless they have trained themselves to stay awake, most people go to sleep.

One can also perceive spiritual beings at temperatures higher than those normally tolerable. One could see spiritual beings at such higher temperatures, but of course one cannot tolerate them. At lower temperatures likewise one could perceive spiritual beings if one could transform oneself into a snow-being, but of course one would freeze in the process. Thus, what seems so unlikely to people is actually a fact: spiritual beings withdraw themselves from the temperatures that are tolerable to humanity in its physical body.

[ 3 ] A human being cannot tolerate those temperatures in his body, but he can tolerate them in his soul; but of course the soul goes to sleep. The soul does not freeze, the soul does not burn, the soul goes to sleep.

[ 4 ] There are two ways to gain an idea of what it would be like to experience the extreme temperatures outside those one ordinarily lives in. I will give you an example. When one has a fever, one reaches inwardly a temperature that one cannot bear. One does not immediately reach so high a temperature that one dies because the warmth is created from within, one is able to bear it. However, when one's fever enters these higher temperatures one may speak in a way that is not normal on the earth. What people babble in their fever has no relation to what we are used to on earth. Now, the materialist may say: Yes, but there are nevertheless untrue thoughts produced that are cooked up in the heat of fever.

[ 5 ] A person, when he enters into a state of high temperature, first of all feels feverish, then speaks nonsense. The soul cannot speak nonsense. Even when the soul is living in a high fever, it cannot speak nonsense. It seems or appears to speak nonsense at higher bodily temperatures because the body is not in order.

You can verify the truth of this by the following example. Let us think about our experience with those glass spheres one sometimes finds in flower gardens—a sphere that is actually a kind of mirror in which the environment is reflected. If you look at yourself in one of these, you will find yourself with a face that you would rather not have n reality. (He sketched this.) You would hate to have that kind of face. You will not say, however, "Oh no! What kind of a thing did I turn into?" You would not believe that this is really your own face, just because it looks changed in the sphere. Similarly, if your soul talks nonsense when you have a fever, you will not say that your soul is talking nonsense; but rather you will assume that whatever is said by your soul seems nonsensical because it is spoken out of a sick brain—just as your face looks distorted and flattened out because it is reflected by a false mirror. So you must say to yourself: When I have a fever and speak nonsense, it is my soul that is speaking through a sick brain. When I see myself reflected in a glass sphere, it is not that I have another face, but that my face appears distorted. In the same way the speech of one sick with a fever appears distorted because it is spoken out of a sick body and a brain that is not working properly.

Now, we might ask why the brain does not work properly? It is because the whole blood circulation is too fast. You can verify this by feeling your pulse when you have a fever. The blood circulation produces warmth which rises to the head—you feel a fever—and your soul now appears reflected as by a distorted mirror.

[ 6 ] The opposite can also happen, but this will not happen as a result of lying in the snow and letting oneself freeze, because then one would actually die of freezing. This opposite experience can happen, but only as the result of something spiritual.

We come now to a strange subject. Carefully consider the following: Let's assume one begins to concentrate, to think powerfully about the smallest things (it is better to think about the small things that most people wouldn't even want to give time to)—for example, a triangle. Let us say we have a triangle, and we divide it into four equal parts so that we have four equal triangles. (He draws on the blackboard).

You can see that the whole triangle is greater than the four smaller triangles. From this I can make a general statement and say: The whole is greater than the parts. (He writes the sentence on the blackboard.) But now let's assume that a well-fed stockbroker comes by and I tell him: Hey, just think, the whole is greater than its parts. He will say, No, that is too boring for me. He would say it again if I continued to speak to him and said: the blackboard is a physical body with a given size and extension, the table is also a body with a given size and extension, and I then constructed the general statement: All bodies have extension—are extended in space. (He writes the sentence on the blackboard.)

If a whole conference were given to you, if a lecture was given consisting in the single statement "all bodies have extension," you would walk away, saying, Gosh, that was boring! Let's say I were to come to you and make other obvious remarks like the meadow is green, the rose is red, these things have colors, and yesterday there was a trial in court and the judge passed judgment, the judgment had no color. Then I went to another place and there also was a trial and a judgment, and it had no color either. And therefore I said: judgments have no color. (He writes the sentence on the blackboard.)

[ 7 ] Let's assume someone stood in front of you for an hour and told you: judgments have no color. You would think to yourself: I have spent a whole hour listening to someone bore me. This is the ultimate boredom. But why are these statements so boring? I should not be telling them to you humorously; I should be standing before you stiff and severe like a professor, announcing: Gentlemen, today we will consider the statement, "Judgments have no color," and then of course I would have to lecture for a whole hour to prove that judgments have no color; all bodies have extension etc.

I could also give you another instance: draw a line from one point to another; this is a straight line. All others are curved, and when you look at it you would immediately say the straight line is the shortest way; all others are longer. Here again I could write down a general statement: The straight line is the shortest distance between two points. Again, if I were to speak for a whole hour on the subject, you would find it exceedingly boring.

The Whole is Greater Than Its Parts
All Bodies Have Extension
Judgments Have No Color
The Straight Line is The Shortest Distance Between Two Points

[ 8 ] There is a German professor who said that it is quite possible to perceive things of the spiritual world, but that the only things that we can perceive of the spiritual world are what reside in such statements as: the whole is greater than its parts, judgments have no color, bodies are extended, and the straight line is the shortest distance between two points. This, he says, is all one can know of the spiritual world. Of course, most students are extremely bored by his lectures. It is also the case that people today have come to believe that science has to be boring, and therefore many of the students are actually excited by this professor! This, of course, is just an aside.

[ 9 ] The real story is the following. Taken by themselves, sentences such as "the whole is greater than its parts" and "the straight line is the shortest distance between two points" cause the back of our head to become cold. This is what usually happens: the temperature drops and the area at the back of one's head becomes cold. When the temperature drops you begin to freeze and you want to get away from such statements—they are so boring. It is a fact—boredom causes a drop in temperature at the back of the head—not the whole body, but just at the back of the head. What cools it down is not snow or ice but something of a spiritual nature, insofar as there are subjects that hold no interest for the human being.

[ 10 ] It is of course possible to make fun of these sentences, but the fact remains, that patiently to think such thoughts over and over again means to put oneself, again and again, deliberately into a state of dreadful boredom, and this is a good way to reach in the direction of a true spiritual perception. It is remarkable that the very things men do not want in general are the things they must practice if they wish to have a real look into the spiritual world. Mathematics for many is boring; it causes a drop in temperature at the back of the head; and precisely because it is a cold subject for most, and precisely because they have to work at it, those people who do, have the least trouble reaching into the spiritual world. Those who overcome this resistance and experience again and again the truth of these statements are those who can create artificially a state of boredom in themselves. They have the easiest way into the spiritual world.

[ 11 ] I have told you already, when one has a fever one's pulse speeds up. One warms up, and this warmth reaches into one's head and into one's brain, and in this way the warmth causes one to talk nonsense. If, on the other hand, one struggles with such statements as we have mentioned, this causes one's blood to slow down, and there is an accumulation of salts deposited in the back of the brain. Most people react in one of two ways to this. Some get a stomachache and they notice this right away, as soon as they start to think of these statements, and so they stop. One can go on thinking, as for example Nietzsche did. He always tortured himself with such statements when he was a young man, and the salts accumulated in his head, and in his case he suffered dreadful migraines. The objective is to be able to think such thoughts without causing a migraine or a stomachache.

One must find a way to be completely healthy while at the same time artificially producing in oneself a state of boredom. Thus, if someone were to tell you quite honestly how to reach into the spiritual world, he would have to tell you first of all to learn how to create boredom artificially in yourself. Short of this you have no hope of reaching the spiritual world. But look now at our contemporary world. What is it that people want at this time? People today are constantly trying to drive away boredom. Just look at all the things and all the places people run to in order not to be bored. They always want to be amused; but what does that mean, to want to be amused all the time? It means that they really want to run away from the spirit! It has no other meaning; and people today always want to be amused, which makes it clear that wherever anything spiritual might be present people of our time always run away from it immediately. People are not conscious of this, they do it unconsciously, but the fact remains that they want amusement and to run away from the spirit.

Well, gentlemen, only those can reach into the spirit who are not afraid of renouncing amusements and of living in such sentences. When one can manage to live artificially in those sentences without getting a stomachache or a migraine, but can actually tolerate living in such sentences for many hours at a time, then it becomes possible to contemplate the spiritual world.

[ 12 ] An additional change must take place in this act of holding oneself consciously in these sentences. One notices, if one has been living with these sentences for a while, that they start to turn around. If I think about the sentence "the large triangle is greater than its parts" for a long time, if I think about it for a very long time, there comes a point when the sentence somehow turns around. It even starts to become interesting, for I start to have the following perception: If I have a triangle here, and I consider one quarter of that triangle and take it out, it somehow begins to grow with me and it no longer remains true that the whole is greater than the parts. Suddenly that quarter part is larger for me, I see that it has grown, so that I now must say: The whole is smaller than the parts! (The sentence is written on the blackboard.) [ 13 ] By doing this, I have worked myself into a position where I can see how things work in the spiritual world. Things there are the opposite of the way they are in the physical world.

In the physical world, the whole is always greater than its parts. In the spiritual world, the part is greater than the whole. It is impossible to know a human being without knowing that the part is greater than the whole.

Contemporary science always wants to look at the smallest parts, the components of things. If, for example, we study the liver of a person, we find that it is smaller than the person in the physical realm. But if we start looking at it from a spiritual point of view, we find that it grows and grows to gigantic proportions; it actually becomes a whole world in itself. If one cannot see this, then it is impossible to perceive the liver at all in a spiritual way. Therefore you must first honestly arrive at the statement: the whole is smaller than the part, or the part is greater than the whole.

[ 14 ] In the same way, if you think for a long time—long enough—about the statement: All bodies have surfaces, or are extended, then there is a danger that the back of your brain will freeze. If you think upon this sentence in this way, all the bodies shrivel into one; they stop having surfaces—external surfaces—and in the end you arrive at the statement: Bodies do not have surfaces, they are not extended. (The sentence is written on the blackboard.)

[ 15 ] Now I will take a funny example, funny for the physical world, but of the highest seriousness in the spiritual world. It could seem that there is nothing more foolish than to say: in Buxtehude there was a trial, and judgment was passed—it has no color. In Trippstrill, judgment was passed in the course of a trial—and this also had no color. But if you think about judgments for a long time, they in fact acquire color. Just as you can say the rose is red, so you can say the judgment in Buxtehude was a kind of dirty yellow, and the judgment in Trippstrill was red. There can even be some judgments that are a beautiful red, although this is rarely the case.

As you begin to understand this, you begin to grow into the sentence: All judgments made by human beings have color. (The sentence is written on the blackboard) Only now does one reach the point of being at all capable of thinking about the spiritual world, because it has the opposite characteristics of the physical world.

[ 16 ] The straight line is the shortest path between two points. This is true to such an extent that all geometry is built upon it. It is one of the first statements in geometry. It is as true in the physical world as anything ever can be true in the physical world. But if one thinks about it long enough—if some being goes from village A to village B, and that being is not a physical but a spiritual being, the way will seem very short if he walks in a half circle. The sentence then changes to: The straight line is the longest way between two points.(The sentence is written on the blackboard.)

The whole is smaller than its parts
No bodies have extension
Judgments have color
The straight line is the longest distance between two points

[ 17 ] You must admit there is something here that astonishes you, but the world as a whole does not like these kinds of things, and people will say: If someone says that judgments have color, he must have a fever or he is mad! Of course, the whole point is that one reaches these things in full consciousness without the use of one's body. The spiritual world has characteristics that are the opposite of the physical world and one may come to this realization through the simplest statements, for the simplest statements are the hardest to believe.

As you know, if someone starts telling you interesting things about the spiritual world, everybody starts listening; for instance, if someone starts talking about ghosts. But if someone tells you first that you must get used to creating boredom in yourself artificially—it has to be artificially—this doesn't seem so interesting. If you are just naturally bored by external science, nothing comes of it; it has to be done artificially, through an inner effort that enables you to reach the state of boredom without getting a migraine or a stomachache. The body must not participate in that state of boredom. The moment your body is involved, it is clear that you will get a migraine or a stomachache. Don't listen when people tell you, Do not let professor so and so bore you. Such advice will be of no help, it will not make you see into the spiritual world. What you must do is gradually overcome both migraines and stomachaches.

You see, the student is sitting here—the professor bores him to death—he should be getting a migraine or a stomachache, but he doesn't. What happens in this case is that other organs come into play which do not hurt. People, in fact, do get sick when the physical body is involved in the boredom. If you induce the boredom in the way contemporary science does, it only makes people sick.

If one teaches people in the right way, one gives them the ability to produce, through their own powers, in total freedom, the boredom which, when penetrated, will gradually allow entrance to the spiritual world. One must take hold of absolutely basic judgments in the physical world and see how they are turned upside-down in the spiritual world.

There is one extremely good way in which it is possible to work on oneself. For example: let us say you have experienced something very boring, so boring that you walked away from it because it was so boring, so boring that you could not stand it anymore, (you were so happy when it was over!) In such a case it is important that you start very, very slowly thinking it through again. [ 18 ] Let me tell you that I have learned a great deal from this kind of exercise in my life. When I was young, I listened to many dreadfully boring lectures; but before it even started, I would look forward to a boring lecture, because it brought about the kind of result sleep normally does in life. I was very happy. I would tell myself: You are going to listen to a few hours of boring lectures. When the lecture started and the professor started to speak, I often had the feeling: He is talking too much, he is disturbing me in my boredom. But afterward I would think very deeply about every single thing he had said, not that it interested me—it didn't interest me at all—but I relived every single hour. I relived it from the very beginning exactly the way it had been presented. Sometimes I went over it so thoroughly that it would actually take two hours. I would have two hours of artificial boredom. In this process, one can make an extraordinary discovery. This kind of discovery is one that could be made at the end of the nineteenth century. Imagine that you have come out of a lecture by a giant rhinoceros—this can happen!—and that you have been bored to death.

Now you can meditate, as the saying goes, on this boring lecture, bringing everything that was boring back into yourself, into your soul. Then suddenly, behind that giant rhinoceros of a man who was presenting you with all this boring stuff, a higher man, something like a completely spiritual human being, will emerge. The whole lecture hall is thereby transformed for you. I am putting this in a way you can understand rationally. The lecture hall becomes transformed in such a way that behind the professor the spiritual—a truly and deeply intelligent man—appears. I knew many professors of the nineteenth century with whom this was the case; but of course I don't want you to talk about this, because people would think it a terrible thing. [ 19 ] For the truth is that humans are not inwardly as unconscious or as stupid as they pretend to be. Often they are quite smart. The dumbest are often quite smart, and the opposite is also true. But they don't know their own intelligence. It is a very deep secret: behind a person there often stands the true nature of his soul and spirit, which he cannot perceive in himself. [ 20 ] This is already a way of reaching into the spiritual world.

As you know, at the end of the nineteenth century there existed a materialistic natural science, and people today still adore this materialist science. I must admit however, that this science was tremendously useful to me. What it did, from start to finish, was bring up the most boring statements. It is as if the modern scientist licks his fingers with enjoyment when he thinks he has discovered that all humans descended from apes. But if one thinks about this statement again and again, with complete energy, it changes! It changes into another statement that is spiritually correct. That is to say, humans do not descend from apes but from a spiritual being.

[ 21 ] There are different points of view here. A child was once sent to school. There he heard for the first time from his teacher that humanity is descended from apes—too early as it turned out. When he returned home, he said to his father, "Hey, I heard today that humanity is descended from apes. Just think of that!" "Well," said his father indignantly, "You're certainly a stupid fellow. That may be the case for you, if you like, but not for me!" You see, for the father—he took it with reference to the soul—the story was quite unbelievable.

[ 22 ] From all that I have told you you will see that one can find one's way into natural scientific thinking in two ways. If you have not studied natural science, as many did in the nineteenth century and indeed still do, instead of simply parroting the conclusions, you can think about them—but think about them in a meditative way. Think them over for hours and hours, and you will find that what is true in the spiritual world comes forward. If you think for a long time about plants and minerals, and you have thought all the things about them that people tell you these days in such a dreadfully materialistic way, then you finally come to the meaning of things like the meaning of the zodiac, the meaning of the stars, all the secrets of the stars.

The surest way to this goal is to start with those simple statements that are taken for granted, and proceed forward from there. The part is greater than the whole, bodies have no extension, judgments have color, the straight line is the longest path between two points. In saying these kinds of sentences you tear yourself away from your physical body. When you have experienced all this, you come to the point where you can use your etheric body instead of your physical body. You can then start thinking with your etheric body—your etheric body thinks everything upside-down, or in the reverse of the way it appears in the physical world. It is the etheric body that gradually brings one into the spiritual world. At precisely this point, however, very often one gets stuck: one must still accustom oneself to one thing more.

You may know that one can read very strange things these days. I was in a small southern Austrian town (which is no longer in Austria) and I found an evening paper. It had a so-called editorial; it was a very interesting story, in all detail—every particular—a political story. There were three columns—it was all very interesting. Then at the end—still on the same page, there was a small disclaimer that said: We are sorry to notify our readers that everything in today's editorial article is based on false information and therefore not a word of it is true! This is the kind of thing that can happen to you today. This of course is rather an extreme case, but whenever you read newspapers it can happen that on every single page there is something that is not true at all. At some later point what one is now reading will be exposed as untrue. My feeling is that most people have become dreadfully insensitive in such matters, and they take in, quite evenhandedly, both truth and lies. The mind has become blunted in this way, so that truth and lies are both taken in the same way. This makes it impossible to reach into the spiritual world.

[ 23 ] I told you last time that when someone becomes crazy, only his body is sick; the soul is not sick, it remains healthy. I told you that when someone hallucinates in a fever, it is only his thoughts that become caricatures—for the soul itself is intact. One must get used to these things, if one wants to penetrate the spiritual world. One must get used to feeling pain in one's soul when something is not right, and to finding that something that is correct gives one a spiritual joy. One must rejoice about the truth the way one would if one were to receive a million dollars. One must be happy when one is told some truth. The opposite case is that when something is discovered to be a lie, a suffering is felt in the soul—not in the body—suffering as if one had a dreadful illness. The suffering need not be so severe that the soul has to become sick, but it must be possible for the soul to experience pain and joy just as, when the body is disturbed in a physical way, one feels pain and joy. This means that one must come to the point where one feels the truth in the same way that one experiences happiness, cheerfulness, and general pleasure in the physical world. One must eventually come to the point where one suffers such pain in the face of untruth that one's soul becomes sick—as one can be in a bodily way. If someone heaps lies upon you, you must be able to say inwardly: Damn it, this person has just sold me deadly nightshade. This must be true in an inner way. Now of course, if you look at the current world—for instance, at the newspapers—one eats that deadly nightshade all the time. You must constantly nourish yourself spiritually, for the soul has to remain healthy. You must continually be spitting out what is bad, spiritually, if your spirit is to remain healthy. One has to get used to this fact, because one cannot be without newspapers. Once you come to the spiritual world, you will have to be used to the bad taste of newspapers; and to feeling joy when you read something exceptionally good—the same kind of joy, in my opinion, that you would have when you eat something that tastes very good.

Truth, and the striving for truth, must taste good to you; and lies, once you are conscious of them, must taste bitter and poisonous. You must not only know that judgments have color, but also that printer's ink nowadays is mostly wild cherry juice. You must be able to experience this in all honesty and rectitude, and once you can do so you will be in a state of spiritual transformation. [ 24 ] People read these days about alchemy, and believe it in an external way. They believe that they can change copper to gold, and there are charlatans who will tell you all kinds of superstitious variations of this. Of course, in the spiritual world these things are possible; but one must believe in the truth of the spirit. One must be able to tell oneself that the printer's ink used is the same everywhere, materially, whether it has printed a true book or a lying newspaper. In the second case, the printer's ink is really the wild cherry juice, and in the other it is like liquid gold. Things that in the physical world are exactly the same are quite different in the spirit. [ 25 ] Of course, if intelligent people today hear the statement "printer's ink can be liquid gold or wild cherry juice" they will tell you that you are only speaking 'metaphorically'. It is only a metaphor! But the metaphorical must become spiritual reality and one needs to understand how metaphors become spiritual.

[ 26 ] I will give you an example—it actually comes out of the history of the Social Democratic party. You probably did not experience this as much in this country. At one point the party split; on one side were those led by Bernstein—happily making all kinds of compromises with the middle class—and on the other side, led by Bebel, were the radicals.⁵ I am sure you have heard about Bebel in books. At one point in Dresden there was a party convention, and Bebel got angry about the others and said he was going to put some order into social democracy. He gave a big angry speech. In the course of it he said: Well, if this or that happens on the other side, it feels like a louse running across my liver. Now everybody would say this is only meant metaphorically. Of course there is no such thing as a louse on his liver! But then one can ask: Why use such an expression? Why is it possible to speak in terms that suggest a louse walked on your liver? For the most part it is extremely unpleasant when people have lice, it is extremely unpleasant; it is actually a distressing feeling.

[ 27 ] Not everyone is as lucky as a certain sorry fellow who was always picking lice from his head. Someone asked him once, "How is it that you are so skillful and always manage to find a louse?" He answered, "Its easy. If I miss the one I'm aiming for, I get the one beside it." It does not happen to all of us to aim for a louse and miss and still get one!

Generally, when people have lice, it's terribly unpleasant—a horrible feeling. I remember a case when I was a tutor and one of the boys entrusted to me came home after being out. He had been sitting on all kinds of benches in a big city and he started to have dreadful pains in his eyes. Everyone was wondering which specialist to take him to for his terrible pains but I said, "Why don't we first try a lice-killing cream on his eyebrows?" Indeed, it was then noticed that he was full of lice, and once the cream went to work, his eyes stopped tearing. Now, you should have seen how upset people—the mother and the aunt—looked when they suddenly discovered that he had lice. Their feelings were so intense that they had repercussions in their livers; they had pains in their bellies. They said, "My God, our child has lice, what a terrible thing!" When this happened, the sensation was really as though they had lice running across their livers.

In the case of the Social Democratic party, it was not a matter of people getting lice, but rather of some people doing things that seemed so awful, so repugnant to the others, that the sensation was the same—the same as would have been experienced in earlier times, or would still be experienced in some classes of society, at the thought of having lice on one's liver. So you can see, in the way the expression was formed, it did correspond to a reality. Latterly, however, these expressions have been used in a way that only refers to spiritual matters or matters of the soul. But again, one has consciously, deliberately, to make those connections. One must really be able to experience, not just the sound of the phrase, but the actual sensation that it came from.

[ 28 ] Let us say I have a newspaper in front of me: most of the things that are printed in it must be felt by me as if the printer's ink was a somewhat toxic deadly nightshade juice. I wonder what people would do if they truly experienced that these days? Think for a moment how much deadly nightshade juice is used when, for instance, people talk about war guilt—Germany's war guilt in the first World War, or Germany's innocence in the war—and the fact that people, just by reason of belonging to this or that nation, feel comfortable when they claim innocence, using all manner of untruthful statements. They feel good doing this, but not because what they say is actually true.

So, how in today's world can one reach the spirit? One must, first of all, make a firm decision, a very intense commitment, to be very different from these contemporaries—and yet get along with them. For of course it is not going to be very helpful to just stand on a stage and insult people. One way or another, one has to find an avenue for truth. This is extremely difficult, as I have shown you today. [ 29 ] Today I had to present difficult things so that you would see that it is not easy to enter the spiritual world. You will see that it is good to work with difficult things. Later on we will come to things that are easier, less strenuous. Next time, I will show you the whole way into the spiritual world.

• 5. Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932), socialist theoretician, writer, and politician, who rejected revolution and established revisionism as a moderate, evolutionary path for socialism in the 1890's.
  
  August Bebel (1840–1913), co-founder of the Social Democratic Labor Party with William Liebknecht in 1869, writer, politician.

Question: Is it possible to hear more about the personality of Jesus Christ?

Dr. Steiner: You see, gentlemen, that the question that is being asked is timely, and so we will discuss it today. I must say from the outset that what I am going to say will only be fully understandable to those who have been here for a long time, while those gentlemen who have only come today will slowly find their way into what we are discussing.

So the question that has been put to me and that we will discuss is about the personality of Christ, who was thirty-three years old when he died.

“On the third day he rose from the grave, resurrected. How did that happen, and where did this personality acquire the strength and power? And then you would be so kind as to talk about his ascension after forty days.”

Since time is just right, I will discuss this as it really happened, after we have already discussed the other thing; but, as I said, it can only be fully understood by those who have been here longer. The others will also understand it once we are together here more often.

Well, you see, at first the whole thing about Christ's personality and his destinies was actually quite unknown in the very early days after it happened. You don't have to look at it the way we look at it today, because today we have the feeling that the events in Palestine that are linked to the personality of Jesus became known throughout the world in one fell swoop. This is not the case. Rather, the situation is that in the time when the fate of Christ Jesus was unfolding, the so-called Roman Empire was widespread, a mighty world empire, and Palestine also belonged to this mighty Roman world empire.

You know that we still have a rather unfortunate legacy from this Roman Empire, the so-called Roman law. Perhaps you know that students at universities of so-called legal scholarship have to study for a very long time the so-called Roman law. Now, Roman law was conceived at a time when social conditions were quite different, so that Roman law has naturally become something highly unsuitable for today. But justice is still being done according to Roman law today.

So we have just this one inheritance from this Romanism. We have many other things as well; but this one inheritance, the so-called Roman law, is something that can be noticed by all of you.

Now, this Roman rule was extraordinarily widespread. I will just give you a small idea of how widespread Roman rule was. You just have to imagine the south of Europe: here we have Spain (it is being drawn), here we have Italy; then we have Greece, then we have the Black Sea. Then we have a lot of small islands. There Asia Minor comes over, and over there, in the area I want to mark, there was the small country of Palestine with Jerusalem, Nazareth and so on.

Roman rule now extended over all these lands. The Romans had occupied all these lands with their rule. So it was a very extensive Roman rule! Rome is located there. Of course, everything that was government-related and so on took place in Rome, so it was very far away from Palestine. And what happened in Palestine was very little known in Rome at that time. And those writers who wrote in Rome did not write about it for about a hundred years after the fact that had occurred with Christ Jesus in Palestine! It was only about a hundred years later that people in Rome understood the significance of what had happened in Palestine. And they did not treat it much differently in Rome at the time, except to say: Well, an unknown person has been crucified over there in Palestine. At that time, being crucified meant something like being hanged later. So it didn't cause any particular sensation. It was only after a hundred years had passed, and Roman rule had become more and more tyrannical and luxurious, that it became apparent that, while the people in Rome were enjoying their luxurious lives, Christianity had slowly spread here, and it was only then that they first noticed the Christians. And the Christians in Rome were initially not tolerated at all. Whoever was a Christian was something very much persecuted in Rome. And now I have to tell you why Christians were persecuted in Rome, because otherwise you would not be able to understand at all what the idea is behind the view that arose at the time: that a god died in Palestine, in Jerusalem. You have to realize what the views in the world actually were at that time.

You see, for a Roman in this first Christian century, that is, for a Roman at the time when it was written - they didn't write it back then, they calculated according to the Roman calendar, but if it had been our calendar, they would have written 1 or 10 or 50 for all I care - so if you had asked a Roman back then: Who is God? — he would have said: Emperor Augustus, or: Emperor Tiberius. — Just as today [1923] a Chinese, when you ask him: Who is God? — points to the Chinese emperor. So you must be clear about the fact that in those days for the Romans the ruler, the one in power, was at the same time their god. And that was the first thing the Romans noticed about the Christians: that they were not aware that a human being on earth could be a universal god. The Romans only knew that some human being sitting on the throne, who had powerful rule, was the god, was the highest thing, that had to be worshipped. And so the Romans did honor their emperor in a way that amounted to worship.

Yes, it was the same all over the world in those days. Over there in the Orient, where the great empires once were, the Persian Empire, the Assyrian, the Babylonian Empire and so on in the old days, it was also the case that the ruler was the god. “God” meant nothing more than the one to whom one turned when one needed something. He was the supreme one. He was seen as a helper. He was not always a helper, but he was seen as a helper.

I would like to point out that you are likely to know the word “God” in your language. When children are baptized, people have to be godparents. Now there are areas, I believe also here in Switzerland, where the man is called the Lord and the woman is called Gottel. This means that the godparents have to provide help. This is the same “God”. And the god was only the one who was the general god of the world. If you want to understand the things of the earlier times, you must always go back to the earlier times. So the god was the general god of the world. The name Goethe, the name of the German poet Goethe, also comes from the same word.

And that was the first thing one heard about the Christians: that the Christians did not believe that a human being on earth could be a universal god. For the Romans, this was something they could not grasp at all. Such terrible people, who do not accept the emperor as god, yes, they are very dangerous people. And the Christians, on the other hand, referred to the saying: Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's. — So, they referred to Jesus' saying, where the matter of Caesar and God is cut apart. God is the invisible. God is that which does not dwell in a visible man on earth. That is what the Christians claimed. And that was the big difference between the Romans and the Christians. And the consequence of that was that the Romans considered the Christians to be the most dangerous people of all, undermining the authority of the state because they did not offer sacrifice to the emperor in the temple. The sacrifices in the temples were offered to the emperor by the people. Now, the Christians sacrificed to a God who died in Palestine and who cannot be seen anywhere. That was something the Romans could not understand. And so the first Christians had to perform their sacrifices underground, under the earth. And these underground passages that they dug out there, in which they buried their dead and performed their sacrifices, are called catacombs. There are such extensive catacombs under the earth in Rome, in Italy in general, like small cities. The first Christians performed their sacrificial services there in the first centuries, while above, the Romans had large circuses, huge circuses. And there they had, for example, in such circuses, made a point of somehow tying a person they despised to a stake, to a pillar, and, after smearing him with pitch, setting him on fire and burning him alive. And they watched it in the circuses, just as people watch bullfights today. It was something that was quite common.

Just imagine this picture: above, the wild Romans in the circuses, who tied the pitch-coated man to the column and burned him alive. That amused them very much. And below, the Christians who performed their religious services in the catacombs. That was the difference, gentlemen, between below ground and above ground, which could not be more sharply defined. One must only consider that.

It is true that things were also quite terrible in the Middle Ages with the Inquisition. But as bad as the Romans behaved in the heyday of their imperial era, the Christians did not behave as badly as that later on. You just have to hold on to that. That is just true.

So the first thing one heard in Rome was that the Christians do not want to recognize a visible God. Now, of course, more and more has become known about what was actually meant by this Christ Jesus, and I have already told you some of it. For example, I have pointed out to you that there were actually two Jesus boys – the name Jesus was just as common a name in Palestine as Sepperl or Michel are today – one of whom died very young, and they were, one might say, playmates, extraordinarily capable, talented children.

Now, this story, which you all know from the Bible, about how the twelve-year-old Jesus taught the scribes in the temple, is something that is based on a truth. Of course, you don't have to tell yourselves: if a twelve-year-old boy goes to university today, the professorial council would not have much respect for him. Today's teachings cannot be compared with those of that time. You should not think that I am conservative or even reactionary, but I have to tell you the facts as they are. Nowadays we take it for granted that we have to send our children to school. Gifted children in particular learn an enormous amount of material that is not suited to them. We have to prepare things in such a way that they suit the children, as we do in the Waldorf school. But in general, children learn an extraordinary amount of material that does not suit them. Of course, adults are better at doing the things that do not suit them than children are. But what is driven out of children when they learn our present-day reading and writing, well, gentlemen, people today pay no attention to that. Children, if you know how to listen to them properly, will say extraordinarily clever things. They have brought this with them from the spiritual life before they descended to earth. And this one Jesus boy, he brought an extraordinary amount with him. And because the two Jesus boys were playmates, they actually always knew the same things. Now one of them has died. And so now the Gospels tell only of one Jesus boy, because people liked that better. But that doesn't help us understand the Gospels. If you read the Gospels of Matthew and Luke today, they contradict each other. The whole genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew is described differently than in the Gospel of Luke. Why? Yes, because the things really refer to two Jesus boys.

I have told you that I have really been dealing with this question from a spiritual-scientific point of view for years, and I have come to the conclusion that there are two Jesus boys, and that the Gospel of Matthew is about a different Jesus boy than the Gospel of Luke.

Now one of them died in his twelfth year, while the other remained. So when it says in the Gospel: “Jesus increased in wisdom, spirit and power,” this is only true of the one.

You see, I found that long before I told you that there were two such Jesus children. It was not known that somewhere in history it is reported that there are two Jesus children until we came across a picture in northern Italy. There this story is depicted of Jesus in the temple, where he teaches the scribes. And there, strangely enough, is this second Jesus child. He is leaving. The one who is teaching and the other who is leaving – that is not the usual Jesus child, we know him! So there are two Jesus children in it, so you can say that in certain centuries people still knew: a second Jesus child existed. He walks away. Only after I had found that out could I know that this second Jesus child is depicted. So you see, gentlemen, for centuries people have known this. But the church has never actually allowed such things, which correspond to the real truth, to come up.

Now, as I have already told you, there are simply certain things in the life of man where one says, there is an enlightenment. Of course, people don't accept that. But you see, there are such revelations, and I will give you an example that was given to me only yesterday by a member of this group. I could give you hundreds of examples, but I will give you this latest example. Mr. Pfeiffer, you don't mind if I do, do you?

There is a very important chemist, Kekulé, an impeccable scholar, simply a real chemist who has written many books on chemistry. Now there are two important scientific views that come from Kekulé. I don't need to explain these views to you in more detail; that would take us hours, it's not important now. These two

important chemical views relate to the structure of substances, such as benzene, in their smallest parts. And these views, which Kekulé established, play an extraordinarily important role in chemistry. Anyone who knows chemistry knows that today everyone is talking about Kekule's theories.

But what did Kekulé himself experience? Kekulé recounts that he was once in London, where he lived quite a distance out of town – before he had formulated any of his theories – and had to take one bus after another to get to the other end of the city at night. He had an acquaintance there whom he visited in the evening. He always had to take one bus after another because he spent the night there. Once he was driving home after spending a long time talking about chemistry with an acquaintance who was also a chemist. He was driving home and sitting on the top of the bus. He dozed off and began to fall asleep. And as he began to fall asleep on top of the omnibus, he dreamt: There is an atom, there is another, there is a third atom; and there are then small atoms that are held together by the large ones (it is drawn). He dreamt of the substance, the matter, how it is made. He dreamt all this on the top of the omnibus. As soon as he comes home, he writes it down carefully. That was the one theory. You see, it was a dream to him. It was given to him, a completely materialistic theory.

The second is the so-called benzene theory. He dreamt that at another time, though not in London, but when he had dozed off at another place.

Yes, gentlemen, you see, a completely materialistic chemist had to confess that he could not have come up with his ideas and inventions through thinking, but that he was enlightened about these two things through a dream. It was all a real inspiration.

Now I would like to know why people object when it is said that the Jesus who was left behind became something completely different in his thirtieth year. Of course, Kekule did not immediately become a completely different person because the inspiration was only a small one. But the knowledge of the whole world entered into Jesus when he was thirty years old. In those ancient times, this was something that was entirely possible, and similar things are still possible today. So you just have to imagine that the Jesus of Nazareth, who had been left behind, was enlightened in his thirtieth year with all that is called the Christ. It entered into him, just as Kekulé's benzene theory entered into him. As a result, he had become a completely different person. And those who now understood something of the matter said: the Romans have a god on the throne. The god on the throne, they said, came into being through the ordinary powers of the earth. Such gods on the throne do not usually have revelations; at least not usually, do they; they do not have such revelations at the age of thirty.

Now, the Christians said: Our God is not appointed by men, He is appointed by the world powers themselves.

But now they had to say something else. You see, what was said about Jesus in those days was not as vague as what I am telling you now. I have to tell you slowly and gradually, which is why the matter is only vague at first. But it was more specific in the following way. You see, today, in order for individual people to become wise according to the view of our time, we have universities. After being made clever for a long time in the so-called grammar school or in secondary school, one comes to the university. There one is now given the finishing touches of cleverness. But you will not always find that the people who come out of the university have become different people in the university, but rather they have learned something externally.

This was certainly not the case in older times. In older times there was no distinction between churches and theaters and schools, but it was all one, and that was called mysteries. That is where people were educated back then. And the most important thing that people were taught in the mysteries was the so-called knowledge of the sun.

You see, when we were talking about natural science, I always told you what influence the sun has on everything that happens on earth. Plants do not grow merely because they are driven out of the ground below, but because the sun drives them out. The power of the sun is in all of us, as is the power of the earth. And I have drawn your attention to the fact that this solar power is not just a dead force, but a wise, living force. I have given you many examples. You have seen that what happens among animals happens wisely, intelligently, judiciously. Yes, when you look up at the sun, the learned imagine it is a ball of gas. Yes, gentlemen, that is about as clever as if we could all get on a big airplane and fly to the moon, as Jules Verne described. We could sit on the moon and look for our work and I would say to you: There, gentlemen, down there, you see, there is the earth. The Earth is a single body, there is nothing else on it. — You would not believe me, gentlemen, because you came up with me. You would believe that there are people on it after all. People who have souls are on Earth.

But that is exactly what the scholars are doing with the sun today. You sit there on the earth, look up at the sun and say: There is nothing up there but burning gas. — But that is real nonsense. The sun is inhabited, even if not by such people as can be seen with the eyes, but it is inhabited.

And this knowledge of the sun was the main thing taught to students in the ancient mysteries. And that is why these students were called sun disciples. It was said: Up there on the sun, there are the forces, the spring forces, the sun forces, there is that which draws everything out of the earth. And so someone who had learned in ancient times the secrets of the sun was called a sun disciple, and later, when he was fully trained, a sun master. And what Jesus of Nazareth suddenly knew at the age of thirty was this solar wisdom. This solar wisdom had come over him. Now you may have already seen that when plants that are beautifully green and full of energy on the earth are below ground in the cellar, they turn completely whitish and appear paralyzed. This is because the solar power does not enter them. This solar power in the mystical, spiritual sense is drawn into Jesus. And those who understood this said: Now the Christ is drawn into Jesus.

You see, now this remarkable thing happened. The Jews, who mainly lived here in Palestine (please refer to the board), had long since heard from their prophets that something must happen so that the earth can be taught from outer space itself. But you can be quite sure that if someone were to write a “Wilhelm Tell” today, as Schiller wrote it, and it were to be performed in the theater, people would say: That's nonsense, it's something very bad. They would not recognize it. And 'Wilhelm Tell' was first recognized by the few people who knew Schiller; then it spread. It is always the case in our social order, it has always been the case, that the majority of people let themselves be led by the hair. So the Jews also let themselves be led by their hair and, when that happened, and they were no longer led by the mysteries, but when someone appeared who had this solar knowledge, they said: But there is someone who claims that everything he says is true! You know, of course, what is done to people who speak a truth that is not yet known among the people. It was a great truth and wisdom that Jesus of Nazareth, in whom the Christ now lived, had to proclaim. Well, and then they crucified him. And he actually went through death.

And now I come to the question as it was put to me directly. You see, gentlemen, today's enlightened theologians are often even worse than their unenlightened counterparts. The unenlightened theologians say: Well, they laid Christ in the grave, and after three days he rose again with flesh and blood, just as he was. Well, of course, the enlightened people said: We don't believe that because no one comes out of the grave. But, I would like to say, it is at least something to profess. It may be debatable, but it is something to profess.

But what do enlightened theologians say? You see, one of the most enlightened theologians, who is well known and named, is Harnack. What does he say about the resurrection? You see, Harnack says: What happened on the third day in the garden of Gethsemane – that is where the grave was – you can't know. So the enlightened theologian says: What happened there on the third day in the garden of Gethsemane, that cannot be known. But many people have gradually come to believe that Christ was resurrected there. So that is the Easter belief, and we assume that we should hold to this Easter belief.

You see, I once raised this question - it was a long time ago - in the Berlin Giordano Bruno Association. The chairman was an academic who thought he knew a great deal about these matters, and he said: Harnack could not have asserted that, because what would that mean if Harnack asserted that one should not believe what really happened, but only in what people believe about it! That would be just like the Holy Robe of Trier, where people also say: Well, whether the Holy Robe of Trier is really the one that Christ wore, nobody knows, but so and so many believed in it, so we believe in it too! — Thus said the Protestant about the Catholic belief in the Holy Shroud of Trier. Or another example is that of the bones of St. Anthony. When they were examined closely, they were found to be veal bones. So the people who believed in them did not make much of it either, but said that it did not matter whether it was reality or not, but whether people believed it.

But it does not depend on that at all; what matters is what happened! Now the Bible actually tells the story in a wonderful way, only people do not pay attention to how it is told. The Bible does not say that such and such happened, but everywhere it says: such and such people have seen, really seen. That is what is told.

So it is related that the women came out, and what they saw at the grave – take that as sophistry if you want! It is related that the Christ met the disciples at Emmaus, and so on; that the Christ was seen, that is related.

Now, remember that I told you that a person does not consist only of this material body that is laid in the grave, but that a person also consists of the etheric body, the astral body, and the I. I have described this to you in detail. Now the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth has indeed been laid in the grave. I have studied this question a great deal, and it is extraordinarily significant that it is stated in the Gospel itself that an earthquake occurred. There was such an earthquake. It made a split and the body was taken up by the earth, so it was really no longer there. And the disciples did not see this physical body, but the etheric body, the supersensible body. The women and the disciples saw Christ in the etheric body, no longer Jesus of Nazareth, but Christ, that which was now the transformed inner man.

Of course, you have to imagine that what happened there was something extraordinarily magnificent for the disciples. You just have to consider that if there is someone among you with whom you have grown so close as friends, who is snatched from you by crucifixion, or as we would say today, by the gallows, you are intimately connected with him – that must have created a state of mind. This state of mind made the disciples almost clairvoyant for these things. And they really saw Christ again and again in the early days, more often than is mentioned in the Gospels. But it was the supersensible Christ.

And you see, when you read the letters of Paul, you read about the famous event of Damascus that Paul experienced. Near Damascus he came into a kind of sleeping state, and there the Christ appeared to him in the clouds. And pay attention to how Paul tells it. He once said: You can't take away my faith in the Christ, because I, like the other apostles, have seen the Christ.

So Paul is not saying that the other apostles saw Christ in the physical body; otherwise he would have to claim that he too saw Christ in the physical body. He explicitly claims that he saw the Christ in the clouds, thus the supersensible Christ, and by saying that he and the other apostles saw the Christ, he is already indicating that the other apostles, like him, saw the Christ in his supersensible body. And isn't it true that people believe that the unbelieving Thomas had to place his hands in the wounds as an objection to this? That just wants to say: the presence of the Christ, that he was there, this experience was so strong that Thomas himself could have the strong faith to touch him. So everything was related to the supersensible Christ.

The wounds were something that touched the hearts of the disciples, especially the apostles. It would be much less vivid if it were not mentioned that the wounds could be touched. Why the wounds in particular? Why not lay his hands on the face or something like that? He would have sensed that something was there. He laid his finger on the wounds because the wounds made a special impression, and what the disciple really became aware of in the Christ actually depended on the higher vision.

So that one can say: For forty days in a row, the disciples were clear about one thing: the Christ is still there.

And from this the Christian teaching arose – which is the original Christian teaching, and which ties in with what I told you last Monday. The Christian teaching arose from this: When Christ is buried, there is only the body in the grave, which of course disappears; Christ showed us the immortal in Himself; He walked around in His immortality for forty days. We have seen him. And he appeared to Paul even much later. So he is always there.

And so we can say today: He is always there. Only the disciples, because this power of vision has disappeared in them, have not seen him after forty days. That's when they said, “Now he has left us: Ascension.” This is an event that naturally filled the disciples with great sadness. They said: Even though he died, even though his enemies crucified him, he was still with us for forty days. Now he is no longer with us. Now he has returned to the vastness of the world.

And then they became truly sad. Not in an ordinary sadness, but in a very deep sadness. And the ten days that are now being talked about, these ten days were for the disciples and apostles something where they went very deeply into their hearts, where they reflected with inner strength on everything the Christ had ever said to them. These ten days were enough for them to say to themselves afterward: Yes, we can know all of this ourselves; this wisdom – they said to themselves, impressed by the strong impression – this wisdom itself resides in us. And now, after ten days, they felt the strength to teach this wisdom as well. The fiery tongues – that is the image of it – came upon their heads. That is Pentecost, the Pentecostal idea, the fiery tongues. Through their great sorrow, when they had lost sight of everything except the Christ, they had reflected so deeply that they were able to teach themselves.

And it is beautifully told that they now began to “speak in all languages”. But here we must realize something about the way people spoke in those ancient times. Of course we must not suppose that it is claimed that the apostles began to speak Chinese or Japanese or even German, but rather that it is meant that, through the way they spoke in those ancient times, they had now become tolerant through all that they had thought in the ten days between Ascension Day and Pentecost. Now, for them, there was no longer any difference between religions, but they proclaimed one religion for all people. That is what is meant by being able to speak in all languages; they proclaimed one religion for all people.

And that is the most beautiful thought of Pentecost; one religion for all people. You see, the thing that has done the most harm to people is always fanaticism in religion, the exclusiveness in religion, that you have Christianity and Buddhism and Judaism and all sorts of things. Why is it that you have so many religions? That you have so many religions comes from the fact that these religions are earth religions, real earth religions.

What do I mean by that when I say: earth religions? Now, you see, there is a time when we go back, let's say – it's 1923 today – to the time when I told you that Christ Jesus lived in Palestine, so at the turn of the age. Now we go further back, let's say, to the year 3500 before Christ Jesus, so back to ancient times, there are people down there in Egypt who also spoke of their God about 3000 or 3500 years before Christ, only in old words. They called him Ra, for example. They spoke of their god, but they said: the god is in the city of Thebes, for example, and in the city of Thebes there was a kind of building with a special artistic, tomb-like structure. The god lived in there. That was the oldest form of worship, that he was in a certain place.

Yes, gentlemen, if someone lived where we live today, he probably did not say: the god is in Thebes; because that was something that not only could not be reached in ancient times, but of which nothing was known at all. They knew nothing of Thebes. So those who were down here, in Egypt, where the Nile flows, said: the god who lives in Thebes. And those who were here, in our area, they also had such local deities. For example, there was a local deity in what is now Alsace, or in Münster. So people worshiped God in a particular place. Yes, that is the reason why there are different religions: the Theban religion, the religion of Münster, the religion of Alsace. There the religions split.

And later, when people wandered more on earth, they could no longer accept any place for God, because then they would have contradicted themselves. They had migrated, and there they no longer accepted the place as God, but the man who led them. And so, gradually, the dignity of God passed to the emperor and the princes. For the people, the prince was emperor. Many princes arose.

You see, in Rome there was still something of this religion, in that the Romans still worshiped their emperor as a god.

But what was Christianity? Christianity said nothing of the sort. What is to be worshipped is not bound to a place on earth, not to a person on earth, but to the power of the sun, the sun's vitality, which the Christ has taken up in himself. And the sun is precisely universal. For no one in Europe can say that when the sun shines on his head it is a different sun from that of the Egyptians, the Chinese or the Australians. Those who truly recognize that the power of Christ comes from the sun must recognize the universal religion for all people.

It was the universal religion for all people, even if people did not always understand it. And it dawned on the disciples that the religion of the sun is there. This is expressed by the fact that they were able to speak in all languages. They were able to bring a religion of reconciliation and tolerance for all people. That is the idea of Pentecost. But as you know, the idea of Pentecost has not yet been fulfilled today. And it must be fulfilled. It must still become quite clear that what the Christ brought to Earth does not depend on a doctrine at all, but on a fact.

When today European missionaries come to an Indian or a Chinese, they demand of them that they believe in what is said about the Christ in Rome. The Indians or Chinese cannot bring themselves to do that, because it has been developed from European conditions. You cannot get people to do that. But if it were said as I have told you today, it could be understood all over the world. Because what applies to all people is the idea of Pentecost.

I have now tried to explain to you the idea of Ascension Day and the idea of Pentecost, which is what the Lord, who recorded the question, wanted to know. I also find it very fitting because today is the day before Ascension Day and in ten days the Pentecost follows. I was very happy to be able to tell you this.

Now I have to go to Norway. I will let you know when the next lecture will be. Goodbye.

DR. STEINER: I should like to speak of various matters to-day which can show you once more how the earth is connected with the whole universe—in which, as you know, it exists as a spherical body. From this aspect, then, let us consider the rivers and oceans.

You are aware that only a part of the earth's surface is solid land; for the most part the earth is a water-sphere, an ocean. And of the rivers it may be said that they have their source—they rise, as one says—somewhere on the earth and then make their way to the sea.

Let us take the Danube, for instance. You know that the Danube rises in the Black Forest. Or take the Rhine which rises in the Southern Alps. The Danube flows through various valleys into the Black Sea; the Rhine flows through various valleys into the North Sea. Now when we think of rivers and seas we generally only consider their course and where they flow out into the sea. Rivers give us a good deal of pleasure but we do not reflect on the great significance that rivers and oceans really have for the whole life of the earth.

We have as a rule more knowledge about the fluids in the human body. Man, as I have told you, consists for the most part of a volume of fluid, with the blood as a special kind of fluidity running through its veins. We also know that this flowing blood is of the greatest significance for life; it forms life, it maintains life. As physical men we are entirely dependent on the blood flowing rightly through the body and, moreover, taking a definite course. Were it to deviate from this course we should not be able to live. The fact that the arrangement of rivers and seas has just as great a significance for the earth is generally not considered at all. It is not usually realised that water actually forms the blood circulation of the earth. Why is this not realised as a rule?

Well, you see, the blood makes a more striking impression. It is red, it contains all sorts of substances and people say to themselves that blood is in fact a peculiar substance. As to water, one simply thinks—Oh, well, it's just water! It makes less impression and the substances which it contains in addition to hydrogen and oxygen, are not present to the same extent as, for instance, the iron in the blood. So people don't consider the matter again. Nevertheless it is true that the entire water-circulation is of immense importance for the life of the earth. Just as little as the human organism could live without a circulation of blood, could the earth exist if it had no circulation of water.

The water-circulation has a distinct character—namely, it takes its start from something that is quite different from that into which it enters when it finds its outlet in the ocean. If you follow up the rivers you find that they contain no salt: the water in the rivers is fresh water. The sea contains salt and all that the sea brings to maturity is founded on this salt-content. That is of extraordinary importance: water begins to circulate on the earth in a fresh, salt-free condition and ends in the ocean in a salty condition.

The subject is generally dismissed by the statement that such a river as the Rhine rises somewhere or other, takes this course (a sketch was made) and then flows into the sea. That in fact is just what is seen externally. But what is not considered is that whereas the river, the Rhine, for example, flows externally like this from the Southern Alps to the North Sea, there is a kind of stream of force under the earth, returning from the mouth of the river to its source. And what happens there (above the earth) is that the river is fresh water, contains no salt; what returns there (under the earth) is all the time carrying salt into the earth in the direction of the river. The earth acquires salts which actually come out of the sea. It would have no salt if the stream of salt did not return under the earth from the river's mouth to its source. The so-called geology which investigates the interior of the earth should always bear in mind that wherever there are river-beds, somewhat deeper in the ground there are deposits of salt.

Now, if there were no salt-deposits in the earth, no plant-roots would grow. For plant-roots only grow in the soil by obtaining the salt for nourishment. The plant is most salty in the root, above it gets less and less salty and the blossom has little salt. And if one asks whence it comes that the ground can bring forth plants, it must be replied: because it has a water-circulation. Just as in us the blood arteries go out from the heart and the veins return, bringing back the blue blood, so in the earth the arteries of rivers and streams branch out on the one hand, while below the earth the veins of salt return. Thus there is a genuine circulation.

Is there then some special reason for the fact that the earth consists on the one hand of a fluid salt-body, on the other hand of dry land, and that salt is continuously brought in from the sea while there is none in the fresh water rivers that course through the land?

Yes, you see, if one really investigates sea-water, one discovers that this salty sea-water stands in but slight connection with the universe. Just as with us, for example, the stomach is but slightly connected with the outer world—in fact, merely through what it receives—so there is very little connection between the interior of the sea and the heavens. Land, on the contrary, has a strong connection with the heavens—land through which the rivers flow, where plants are brought forth through the salty deposits, particularly, however, where there are flowing waters.

If we view the matter in this way then we approach the mountain springs in quite a different spirit! We delight in the rippling of the springs, in their beautiful flow, their wonderfully clear waters and so on. Yes, but that is not the only thing! Springs are in fact the eyes of the earth! The earth does not see out into the universe through the sea, because the sea is salt and that gives it an interior character like our stomach. The springs with their fresh water are open to the universe, just as our eyes look freely out into space. We can say therefore that in countries where there are springs, the earth looks far out into the universe; the springs are the earth's sense organs, whereas in the salt ocean we have more the earth's lower body, its bowels. It is naturally not the same as in the human body; there are not such enclosed organs, organs that can be delineated. It would be possible to sketch them, but they are not so evident. However, the earth has its bowels in the sea and its sense organs in the land. And everything through which the earth stands in connection with the cosmos comes from fresh water, everything through which the earth has its intestinal character comes from salt water.

Now I will furnish you with a proof that this is so. I once told you that the reproductive process in man and animal also stands in connection with the heavens. I said that it is not merely a development of the egg in the maternal body, but that forces from the universe work in upon it and bring about its roundness. We see the movement of the universe outside us as round, and thus this little egg is an image of the universe, because the forces work in upon it from all sides. And so where the reproductive process is at work, the heavenly is actually working into the earthly. You see the same thing in the eye, it is a sphere. I described the eye recently and how it is formed from the universe inwards. Sense organs and the eye are built in from the universe. If you observe the spleen you see that it is not spherical, it is formed more by terrestrial forces, the intestinal forces of the earth. That is just the difference.

If one only pays real attention to things then they give one proofs. I will presently give you a proof taken from sea and land, but first I will interpolate something else. I have told you that recently we have been making researches in our biological laboratory on the importance of the spleen. When we cannot eat regularly—we all eat more or less irregularly—the spleen is there to balance it all out: it is the regulator. We have produced the proof of this in our laboratory and there is a little booklet by Frau Kolisko (Not published in English.) which describes it all. While this experiment was being made we were obliged by the requirements of modern science to produce a palpable and evident proof. (This will no longer be necessary when science accepts super-sensible proofs, but it is still necessary to-day.) So we took a rabbit and removed the spleen and let the rabbit go on living without its being harmed in any way. This operation can be done with all care, and it was a complete success. Later the rabbit died from an accidental chill in no way connected with the operation. Then we dissected the body and were anxious to see the effect of the removal of the spleen. The interesting thing is ... now, what must be said by Spiritual Science? What remains when one has cut out the physical spleen? Well, now, if the spleen is here (a sketch was made) and one cuts it out, removes it, on this spot there still remains the etheric body of the spleen and its astral body. The spleen is given its form by the earth which has developed it. If one removes the physical spleen, leaving the etheric spleen, as was the case with the rabbit, what must happen? The following should happen. Whereas the physical spleen is dependent on the earth, inclines to the earth, the etheric spleen, which has now become free and is no longer hampered by the physical spleen, must come again under the influence of the heavens. And lo and behold, when we dissected the rabbit there was a small, round body, formed of fine white tissue! Thus there was complete confirmation. Something appeared which according to the expectation of Spiritual Science ought to appear. In a relatively short time a small webbed body about the size of a nut had arisen. Therefore you see that one only has to go to work in the right way and one finds proofs everywhere for the statements of Spiritual Science. You can gather from this that pronouncements made out of spiritual knowledge can enter quite concretely into the physical realm, if right methods are pursued.

Now just as the white body was formed here through the surrounding influences, so are the rudiments of man and animal formed spherically in the ovum through the influence of the heavens.

This knowledge makes us realise that fish are in a special situation, for they never actually come on to the land. They can at most gasp a little on land, but they cannot live on land, they must live in the sea. Hence fish are organised in a particular way; they do not come where the earth is open to the universe. It is therefore with great difficulty that fish develop sense organs and in particular the organs of reproduction, for the formation of these is dependent on the influence of the cosmos. Fish must make careful use of whatever light and warmth falls into the sea from without in order that they may breed and develop sense organs. But nature, as we know, attends to many things. You see it with the so-called goldfish: they use their whole skin for receiving the influence of the light and hence they become so golden. Fish take every opportunity of snapping up what falls into the water from the universe. They must lay their eggs wherever some light can enter, so that they may be hatched from outside. Thus fish are organised, as it were, to live under the water; they do not come out of the water.

What I am saying does not apply so very much to freshwater fish—fresh water can be penetrated from the universe—but it applies very much to sea fish. And these show that they are organised to make use of all that enters the salt water from the universe in order to be able to breed.

The salmon, however, forms a quite remarkable exception. It has in fact an extraordinary organisation. It must live in the sea in order to develop proper muscles and to give its muscles right nourishment it needs the earth-forces found primarily in the salt of the sea. But when the salmon lives in the sea it cannot breed. Its organism shuts it off completely from the universe and salmon would have long ago died out if they had had to breed in the sea. The salmon is an exception; whereas it becomes strong in the sea and develops its muscles, it is practically blind and it cannot reproduce its species there. The reproductive organs and sense organs get weak and stunted; on the other hand, salmon in the sea get fat. Now in order not to die out—we can see this by the salmon here in the North Sea—they make a journey every year up into the Rhine, and so get the name of “Rhine salmon.” But the Rhine makes the salmon thin, it loses its muscles again; the fat it gained in the salt ocean it loses in the Rhine. Yet in the Rhine the salmon can breed, for while it gets slender, the sense organs and in particular the reproductive organs, in both male and female, become well developed. Thus every year the salmon must journey from the salt ocean to the freshwater Rhine in order to breed. Then while the old are still alive and the young ones are there, they all make the journey back again to the sea in order to get rid of their slimness and regain their fat.

You see how this is all in full accord. Where the earth is salty the earth forces are at work upon the organs that are developed by the earth. Our own muscles are developed by the earth when we move with the forces of gravity. Gravity is the earth-force and works upon everything muscular, everything bony. The earth shares its salt with us and we get strong bones and muscles. With this salt excretion of the earth, however, we could do nothing for our senses and the reproductive organs; they would wither away. These must always come under the influence of extraterrestrial forces, the forces coming from the heavens. And the salmon shows what a distinction it makes between fresh and salt water. It goes into salt water to take up earth forces and get fat.

Thus the earth can be said to have a kind of circulation with respect to animal-life as well, as for instance, in the case of salmon.

This circulation drives the salmon alternately into the sea and into the river. They go to and fro, to and fro. The whole salmon community goes to and fro. One can see so clearly from the salmon how everything alive on the earth is in movement.

If we have learnt this from the salmon, it gives us the picture of something else, something that is always before our eyes and is such a wonderful spectacle: the birds of passage. They travel to and fro in the air, the salmon travels to and fro in the water. Salmon migration in the water is the same as bird migration in the air, except that salmon go to and fro between salt water and fresh water and the birds between the colder and warmer regions that they need. In order to come into the right earth-forces of warmth, birds must go to the south and there they develop their muscles. In order to have the forces of the heavens they must come into the purer air of the north; there they mature the reproductive organs. Such creatures need the whole earth. Only the higher animals, the mammals, and man, have become more independent of the earth, have emancipated themselves and reached a greater independence in their own organisation.

This, however, is only apparently the case. In reality we human beings are at the same time actually two people. We are still more—I have told you: physical man, etheric man, etc. But even in the physical man we are really two people, a right man and a left man. The right half of the body is vastly different from the left. I think the minority of you sitting here would be able to write with the left hand; we write with the right hand. But the part of the nervous system connected with speech is situated in the left half of the brain. There are strongly marked convolutions there but none in the corresponding place at the right side. In a left-handed person this is reversed; those who are left-handed have the speech-organisation on the right—not the external organisation, but the internal, which arouses speech. In this respect man is extremely different on left and right. But this is so elsewhere too; the heart is situated more to the left, the stomach is on the left, the liver on the right. But even organs ostensibly symmetrical are not wholly so. Our lungs have (here) on the left two lobes, on the right, three. So the right side of man differs very much from the left side. What is the reason of this? Let us start from something very simple. We do not, as a rule, learn to write with the left hand but with the right hand. This is an activity which depends more on the etheric body. The physical body is heavier and is more developed on the left, the etheric body more on the right. The left forms two lobes; the right, being more active, brings more life into the lungs and forms three lobes. On the left, man is more physical, on the right, more etheric. [See Dr. Steiner's lectures entitled: Anthroposophy, Psychosophy, Pneumatosophy, found in Wisdom of Man, of the Soul, and of the Spirit ] And so too with speech. For right-handed people more nourishment is required by the left part of the brain than the right. And so every possible arrangement is made for man to contain the earth-forces on the left, and more the etheric forces of the heavens on the right.

As our modern science is only willing to recognise matter, it is just material things about which it does not know very much. In the education of children it has introduced the harmful practice of making children learn everything with the left and right hand equally. Well, but man is not in the least organised for that! If that practice is carried to excess, education will make people half insane, for the human body is organised to be more physical on the left and more etheric on the right. But what does modern science care about physical, etheric? Both are the same to the scientists—left man, right man. We must be able to penetrate these things through spiritual science if we are to know anything about them. So on the left, man is more earthly, and on the right if the word is not misunderstood—more heavenly, more cosmic.

Man has however already largely emancipated himself, as I have said. He develops this left-earthly element, this right-heavenly element in such a way as to be able to carry it about as physical man. It is no longer remarked that on the left he has a tendency to the earth and on the right to the heavens. But there are people who have a greater tendency to the earth and they generally lie on their left side for sleep. People lie on the right side either when they are tired of the left or when they occupy themselves with forces inclining more to the heavens. Such matters are naturally difficult to observe since all sorts of other things come into consideration. When a person lies on the right side it may only be because that is the dark part of the room—that too could be a reason. And although one is not by any means bound to find it so, yet on the whole people tend to sleep on their left side, since that is the earth-side. But man has really emancipated himself from the earth and is independent in what he does. It can be observed however in the animal; one sees the secrets of the world everywhere revealed in a very remarkable way.

Imagine that the surface of the sea is here (drawing on blackboard); underneath is the salt sea-water with all sorts of substances in it. Now there are certain fish which are quite remarkably organised. They are organised with a very strong inclination to earth-forces, while other fish snatch eagerly at all the light and air that come into the water. They cannot breathe in the air as they have no lungs; they collapse and die in the air, but with their gills they snap at all the air and light coming into the water. But there is a fish called halibut in the larger variety and sole or plaice in the smaller variety which is very good for food. It has great nutritive value, more perhaps than any other fish, and this shows that it inclines to the earth, since foodstuffs come from the earth. The halibut sides with the earth, so to speak. So what may one expect from these fish? We may expect them to show by their habits that they side with the earth. And so they do; they lie down on one side and this becomes pale and white. And so thoroughly do they lie on the one side that the head is twisted round and the eyes are both placed on the other side. A sole looks like this from below (sketch); there it is quite flat and white, and on the other side, above, both the eyes are set and the head is turned round, because the sole always lies on the left side. The left side produces the nourishment and is pale and white. The other side takes on colour from the heavens, etc., becomes bluish, brownish and the eyes and head are turned away from the food side. So the sole is quite lop-sided, it has all the organs on the one side while the other is flat and pale. The halibut really produces a great deal of nutritive substance because it inclines to the earth. Some become over 600 lb. in weight. Halibut therefore give a clear demonstration: they always lie on one side since it is the earth that attracts them. If a man could lie just as forcibly every night on his left side, his head would twist round and he too would always peer out from one side. But it does not get as far as this with man; he has emancipated himself, as I have said, and maintains his independence.

Still, even man can be affected. One may find, for example, a person with a remarkable complaint: he sees with the right eye, or at any rate sees with one eye somewhat better than with the other. If this is not inborn, one can generally discover by questioning that he lies on the other side for sleeping. The earth-forces are working on the side upon which one very frequently lies and the eye becomes somewhat weak-sighted. It is not affected so strongly as in the case of the halibut, but still slightly. The eye that is turned away from the earth becomes somewhat stronger. You see how remarkable these connections are. I have said that nature somewhere or other shows us with what forces she is working. When one sees a sole—the smaller ones are to be seen in any fish market, the larger ones are in the ocean—one realises that the nutritive part can only be formed just where it is, it must be separate. If these fish need anything from the heavens they must always take on that direction and the reproductive organs can be developed. These fish go about it differently from the salmon; salmon migrate, they go from the North Sea to the Rhine in order to be able to breed. Soles always lie on the one side, so that the heavens work from the other side and in this way they can develop their senses and reproductive organs.

And the earth itself, what does the earth do Well, if there were only the salt sea, the earth would long ago have perished; it cannot exist by itself alone. There are not only the salt seas but the freshwater rivers and streams, and the freshwater receives from universal spaces the reproductive forces for the earth. The salt ocean can bring in nothing from the wide universe which will give the earth continuous refreshment. When you go to a spring and the wonderfully pure water is bubbling out, you will notice how green everything is near the spring, what a wonderful scent there is. All is so fresh. Yes, and what is so fresh there by the spring refreshes the whole living earth as well. The earth opens itself there as if through the eyes and sense organs to cosmic space. And one can observe how living creatures like the salmon and the sole make their way to where they can find this. They have a kind of instinct to attach themselves to the earth. The salmon seeks the fresh waters direct, the sole turns to the light by so arranging its body. It cannot come to the springs, but the springs are where the earth turns to the light. The sole, the fish, must turn direct to the light with its own body.

These things are immensely instructive, because they show us what is still present in man, but cannot be so well observed since he has broken away from the earth. And if one is not observant of such things one has really no understanding of the whole life of the earth. Indeed, if we look at the ocean and observe the sole, we can realise: Yes, by means of the sole the ocean opens itself everywhere to the heavens! Soles are a proof that the sea is thirsty for the heavens, since its salty content turns away from the universe. One can say that soles express the thirst of the sea for light and air. And if we look at our own circulation, we too, in fact, have fine sense organs, the organs of touch, at the places where we are saltier, where the muscles are situated. Here too man makes himself open to the outer world, though not directly, as through the eyes. These places correspond as it were to the places where soles are to be found in the sea. Soles make themselves open to the heavens and this gives them an extraordinary acuteness. Just as we become skilful when we are able to make good use of our external organs of touch, so the sole becomes skilful through the sea, because it makes itself open to the heavens. Look at what is underneath in the sea—it is heavy and clumsy. Soles, oh! they get terribly cunning, they become sly creatures just by turning away from the sea on one side. Although they turn to the earth-forces as well, they feel: the earth-forces are just for themselves. They accumulate nutritive material—up to about 600 lb. as I said—but soles have these fine sense organs through which they open themselves to the heavens. They eat other fish—smaller ones. But if a sole approached, the other fish would flee away from it on all sides as if from a spectre. For other fish consider it necessary to have eyes at the sides—a sole affects them exactly as if a human being were approaching. The fish would rapidly get away and soles would have nothing to eat if they were not cleverer than the others. But the other fish, those which have an eye at either side, are in fact not so clever as they do not turn so definitely to the heavens. A sole seeks out places where the sea has a sort of little shore in the shallower parts, and there it lies down. It bores into the ground with its flat body, uses its jaws to cover itself a little with sand and then whirls up sand, but so fine that a fish can swim through. Then come the fishes and crabs, do not notice the sole, and instantly when they have passed over, it snatches and snaps at them! The sole does it very cleverly indeed! But of course only a creature could do it which is linked in a close connection with the forces of the universe.

Such a creature then has developed its physical body on one side and on the other side it develops especially powerfully the invisible etheric body. We can see just by such things that the forces of intelligence in us are not derived from earthly forces. Earthly forces makes us muscular, give us salts; forces from the heavens give us forces which are at the same time those of reproduction and of intelligence.

You see, a man in a certain way is actually a small earth-sphere. Man too consists, as I have often said, of about 90 per cent of water. Man too is a fish, for the solid part which is only 10 per cent, swims there in the water. We are really all of us fish, swimming in our own water. It is even admitted by science that in essentials we are a small ocean. And as the sea sends out rivers, so does our sea, our fluid body send out salt-free juices. We too have our freshwater streams. They lie outside the muscles and bones. On the other hand, within the muscles and bones we have the same salt deposits as the sea has. Our nourishment is actually in the bones and muscles. We are therefore, in this respect too, a small earth-sphere: we have our salt sea in us.

If the fluidity, the freshwater streams become too strong—which can easily occur in children if the milk is not rich enough in salts—then the child becomes rickety, gets the so-called “English sickness.” When a person gets too much salt he becomes too much a sea, his bones become brittle and the muscles unwieldy and clumsy. There must always be a balance between our salt consumption and what is contained in other foods.

Now what is it that lies in other foodstuffs? Look at a plant: you know now that plants grow because there are salt streams under the earth, returning from the river-mouth, which spread out and make the plants grow. So the plant finds its salt within the earth, but when it emerges from the earth it goes on growing towards the blossoms. The blossom becomes beautifully coloured because it takes up the light. There in the blossom the plant absorbs the light, in the root it absorbs the salt. There outside it becomes a light-bearer, there beneath it becomes a salt-bearer. Down below it is like the sea-part of the earth, up above it is like the heavens. The root is rich in salt, the blossom rich in light. In earlier times this was much better known and what is in the blossom was called “Phosphor.” To-day when everything is materialistic, phosphor is only a solid body. Phos = light, phor = bearer, phosphor = light-bearer; phosphor was actually that in the blossom which carried the light. The mineral “phosphorus” has received its name because of the way it gives out light when it is ignited. But the real light-bearer is the plant- blossom. The plant-blossom is phosphorus. Therefore for those organs in our human body, which as it were contain the freshwater currents, we need light; for the muscles, the bones, for that in us which ought to become salty we need precisely salt and solid ingredients in our food. Between them there must be the right balance—each must be consumed in the right quantity.

And so it is too with the earth. However far you may have travelled you will not have seen—nor has the globe-trotter, nor the genuine world traveller anywhere seen that the earth has prepared itself a meal! But nevertheless it does nourish itself, substances are continuously being exchanged, the earthly element is ascending all the time through mist and fog. And you know that the rain-water which falls is distilled; it is pure water and contains nothing else. But the sea is nourished through the salt in rarefied condition from cosmic space. There is no need to keep to meal-times! It is only we men, who have broken away from the earth, who must procure our food from it. The earth is nourished by the fine substances to be found everywhere in the universe. It is fed continuously, but one does not notice it because it is such a fine and delicate process. You see, if you look at a man quite superficially, you do not notice that he is continually absorbing oxygen. So too with the earth, one does not notice that all the time it is receiving nourishment from cosmic space.

Now we human beings keep to our meal-times. There we take our nourishment, through the stomach into the lower body. This is quite obvious, extremely obvious. But in breathing it is less obvious. It is in respect of the obvious that social questions arise. One man is better off, another worse off. Men all want to be well off—social questions arise in respect of the obvious. But social questions are not so clear in respect of the air which we all inhale. There it is not so easy to say that one man deprives another—there is a little truth in it, but not very much. In the case of our lower body we differ entirely from the earth. In the matter of breathing we are more like the earth, our breathing is performed almost unnoticed. But in fact we are all the time absorbing iron through our hearing—not only do we hear—we are absorbing iron in a very fine state. Through the eyes we absorb light and other substances too. This can be discovered from those people who are lacking in these substances. Through the nose in particular we take in an immense amount of substance without noticing it! With our lower body we have broken away from the earth and made ourselves free. So there we can only absorb foodstuffs created by the earth, baked and made more solid. We can take in the air because it is in the cosmos, and with our head and the senses we do what the earth does. There we receive nourishment out of the universe in the same way as the earth itself. The head is not formed spherically without reason; it deals with the universe just as the earth does. Only down below gravity enters, there the human body is developed according to the earth; physical hands—this gravity draws downwards. Gravity has not such an influence on the head; that remains spherical. So there we must pass from the visible to the invisible. One must say: The soles would die in spite of feeding on fish and crabs—for they only eat these for the sake of the pale, flat under-body—if they were not to take in what comes from the universe through having made themselves one-sided. These are the fine, the delicate connections through which one looks into the laws and secrets of the cosmos.

This is what Spiritual Science must call attention to again and again, namely, that one must learn to know the true laws, not through crude superficial observation but through fine and delicate perception.

[ 1 ] Besides the current of world conception that, through the idea of evolution, wants to bring the conception of the phenomena of nature and that of the spirit into complete unity, there is another that expresses their opposition in the strongest possible form. This current also springs from natural science. Its followers ask, “What is our basis as we construct a world conception by means of thinking? We hear, see and touch the physical world through our senses. We then think about the facts that our senses supply concerning that world. We form our thoughts accordingly concerning the world at the testimony of the senses. But are the statements of our senses really to be trusted?”

Let us consult actual observations. The eye conveys to us the phenomena of light. We say an object sends us red light when the eye has the sensation of red. But the eye conveys sensations of light to us also in other cases. When it is pushed or pressed, or when an electric current flows through our head, the eye also has sensations of light. It is, therefore, possible that in cases in which we have the sensation of a light-sending body, something could go on in that object that has no semblance to our sensation of light. The eye, nevertheless, would transmit light to us.

The physiologist, Johannes Mueller (1801–58), drew the conclusion from these facts that what man has as his actual sensation does not depend on the external processes but on his organization. Our nerves transmit sensations to us. As we do not have the sensation of the knife that cuts us but a state of our nerves that appears to us as pain, so we also do not have a sensation of the external world when something appears to us as light. What we then really have is a state of our optic nerve. Whatever may happen outside, the optic nerve translates this external event into the sensation of light. “The sensation is not a process that transmits a quality or a state of an external object to our consciousness but one that transmits a quality, a state of our nerves caused by an external event, to our consciousness. This Johannes Mueller called “the law of specific sense energies.” If that is correct, then our observations contain nothing of the external world but only the sum of our own inner conditions. What we perceive has nothing to do with the external world; it is a product of our own organization. We really perceive only what is in us.

[ 2 ] Natural scientists of great renown regarded this thought as an irrefutable basis of their world conception. Hermann Helmholtz (1821–94) considered it as the Kantian thought—that all our knowledge had reference only to processes within ourselves, not to things in themselves—translated into the language of natural science (compare Vol. I of this book). Helmholtz was of the opinion that the world of our sensations supplies us merely with the signs of the physical processes in the world outside.

I have been convinced that it is necessary to formulate the relation between the sensation and its object by declaring the sensation to be merely the sign of the effect of the object. The nature of the sign demands only that the same sign be always given to the same object. Beyond this requirement there is no more similarity necessary between the sensation and its object than between the spoken word and the object that we denote with it. We cannot even call our sense impression pictures, for a picture depicts the same by the same. In a statue we represent one bodily form through another bodily form; in a drawing we express the perspective view of an object by the same perspective in the picture; in a painting we depict color through color.

[ 3 ] Our sensations, therefore, must differ more from the events they represent than pictures differ from the objects they depict. In our sensual world picture we have nothing objective but a completely subjective element, which we ourselves produce under the stimulation of the effects of an external world that never penetrates into us. This mode of conception is supported from another side by the physicist's view of the phenomena of sensation. A sound that we hear draws our attention to a body in the external world, the parts of which are in a certain state of motion. A stretched string vibrates and we hear a tone. The string transmits the vibrations to the air. They spread and reach our ear; a tone sensation is transmitted to us. The physicist investigates the laws according to which the physical particles outside move while we hear these tones. He finds that the subjective tone sensation is based on the objective motion of the physical particles. Similar relations are observed by the physicist with respect to the sensations of light. Light is also based on motion, only this motion is not transmitted by the vibrating particles of the air, but by the vibrations of the ether, the thinnest matter that fills the whole space of the universe. By every light-emitting body, the ether is put into the state of undulatory vibrations that spread and meet the retina of our eye and excite the optic nerve, which then produces the sensation of light within us. What in our world picture appears as light and color is motion outside in space. Schleiden expresses this view in the following words:

The light outside ourselves in nature is motion of the ether. A motion can be slow and fast; it can have this or that direction, but there is obviously no sense in speaking of light or dark, of green or red motion. In short, outside ourselves, outside the beings who have the sensation, there is no such thing as bright and dark, nor are there any colors.

[ 4 ] The physicist expels colors and light from the external world because he finds only motion in it. The physiologist feels that he is forced to withdraw them into the soul because he is of the opinion that the nerve indicates only its own state of irritation no matter what might have excited it. The view that is given with these presuppositions is sharply delineated by Hippolyte Taine (1828–93) in his book, Reason. The external perception is, according to his opinion, nothing but hallucination. A person who, under the influence of hallucination, perceives a death skull three steps in front of him, has exactly the same perception as someone who receives the light rays sent out by a real skull. It is the same inner phantom that exists within us no matter whether we are confronted with a real skull or whether we have a hallucination. The only difference between the one perception and the other is that in one case the hand stretched out toward the object will grasp empty air, whereas in the other case it will meet some solid resistance. The sense of touch then supports the sense of sight. But does this support really represent an irrefutable testimony? What is correct for one sense is also valid for the other. The sensations of touch can also turn out to be hallucinations.

The anatomist Henle expresses the same view in his Anthropological Lectures (1876) in the following way:

Everything through which we believe to be informed about an external world consists merely of forms of our consciousness for which the external world supplies merely the exciting cause, the stimulus, in the language of the physiologists. The external world has no colors, tones and tastes. What it really contains we learn only indirectly or not at all. How the external world affects a sense, we merely conclude from its behavior toward the other senses. We can, for instance, in the case of a tone, see the vibrations of the tuning fork with our eyes and feel it with our fingers. The nature of certain stimuli, which reveal themselves only to the one sense, as, for instance, the stimuli of the sense of smell, is still inaccessible to us. The number of the properties of matter depends on the number and on the keenness of the senses. Whoever lacks a sense loses a group of properties without a chance of regaining them. A person who would have an extra sense would have an organ to grasp qualities of which we have no other inkling than the blind man has of color.

[ 5 ] If one glances over the physiological literature from the second half of the nineteenth century, one sees that this view of the subjective nature of the world picture of our perceptions has gained increasing acceptance. Time and again one comes across variations of the thought that is expressed by J. Rosenthal in his General Physiology of Muscles and Nerves (1877). “The sensations that we receive through external impressions are not dependent on the nature of these impressions but on the nature of our nerve cells. We have no sensation of what exerts its effect on our body but only of the processes in our brain.”

[ 6 ] To what extent our subjective world picture can be said to give us an indication of the objective external world, is expressed by Helmholtz in his Physiological Optics:

To ask the question if cinnabar is really red as we see it or if this is only a sense deception is meaningless. A red-blind person will see cinnabar as black or in a dark yellow-gray shade; this is also a correct reaction for the special nature of his eye. He must only know that his eye happens to be different from that of other people. In itself one sensation is neither more nor less correct or incorrect than the other, even if the people who see the red have the great majority on their side. The red color of cinnabar exists only insofar as the majority of men have eyes that are of a similar nature. One can say with exactly the same right that it is a quality of cinnabar to be black for red-blind people. It is a different question, however, if we maintain that the wave length of light that is reflected by cinnabar has a certain length. This statement, which we can make without reference to the special nature of our eye, is only concerned with the relations of the substance and the various systems of ether waves.

[ 7 ] It is apparent that for such a conception all phenomena of the world are divided into two completely separated parts, into a world of motions that is independent of the special nature of our faculty of perception, and a world of subjective states that are there only within the perceiving subjects. This view has been expressed sharply and pointedly by the physiologist, Du Bois-Reymond (1818–96), in his lecture, On the Limits of Natural Science, which he gave at the forty-fifth assembly of German naturalists and physicians on August 14, 1872 in Leipzig. Natural science is the reduction of processes we perceive in the world to motions of the smallest physical particles of a “dissolution of natural processes into mechanics of atoms,” for it is a “psychological fact of experience that, wherever such a dissolution is successful” our need for explanation is for the time being satisfied. Moreover, it is a known fact that our nervous system and our brain are of a material nature. The processes that take place within them can also be only processes of motion. When sound or light waves are transmitted to my sense organs and from there to my brain, they can here also be nothing but motions. I can only say that in my brain a certain process of motion goes on, and I have simultaneously the sensation “red.” For if it is meaningless to say of cinnabar that it is red, it is not less meaningless to say of a motion of the brain particles that it is bright or dark, green or red. “Mute and dark in itself, that is to say, without qualities,” such is the world according to the view that has been obtained through the natural scientific conception, which

...knows instead of sound and light only vibrations of a property-free fundamental matter that now can be weighed and then again is imponderable. . . . The Mosaic word, “And there was light,” is physiologically incorrect. Light came into being only when the first red eye spot of the infusoria differentiated for the first time between light and darkness. Without the substance of the optic and auditory sense this world, glowing in colors and resounding around us, would be dark and silent. (Limits of Natural Science.)

Through the processes in the substance of our optic and auditory senses a resounding and colorful world is, according to this view, magically called into existence. The dark and silent world is physical; the sounding and colorful one is psychic. Whereby does the latter arise out of the former; how does motion change into sensation? This is where we meet, according to Du Bois-Reymond, one of the “limits of natural science.” In our brain and in the external world there are only motions; in our soul, sensations appear. We shall never be able to understand how the one can arise out of the other.

At first sight it appears is if, through the knowledge of material processes in the brain, certain processes and latent abilities can become understandable. I am thinking of our memory, the stream of the association of our thought pictures, the effect of exercise, specific talents and so forth. But a little concentration at this point tells us that this view is an error. We would only learn something concerning the inner conditions of our mental life that are approximately of the same nature as our sense impressions, but we should learn nothing that would explain how the mental life comes into existence through these conditions. What possible connections can there be between certain motions of certain atoms in my brain, on the one hand, and, on the other, such undeniable and undefinable facts expressed by the words: I feel pain; I am delighted; I taste something sweet, smell the scent of roses, hear the sound of an organ, see red, and also the certainty that immediately follows from all this, Therefore I am. It is altogether incomprehensible that it should not be a matter of perfect indifference to a number of atoms of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, etc., what their position is and how they move, how this has been and how it will be.

There is no bridge for our knowledge that leads from motion to sensation. This is the credo of Du Bois-Reymond. From motion in the material world we cannot come into the psychical world of sensations. We know that sensation arises from matter in motion, but we do not know how this is possible. Also, in the world of motion we cannot go beyond motion. For our subjective perceptions we can point at certain forms of motions because we can infer the course of these motions from the process of our perceptions, but we have no conception of what it is that is moving outside in space. We say that matter moves. We follow its motions as we watch the reactions of our sensations, but as we do not observe the object in motion but only a subjective sign of it, we can never know what matter is. Du Bois-Reymond is of the opinion that we might be able to solve the riddle of sensation if the riddle of matter were disclosed. If we knew what matter is, we should probably also know how it produces sensations, but both riddles are inaccessible to our knowledge. Du Bois-Reymond meant to check those who wanted to go beyond this limit with the words, “Just let them try the only alternative that is left, namely, supra-naturalism, but be sure that science ends where supra-naturalism begins.”

[ 8 ] The results of modern natural science are two sharply marked opposites. One of them is the current of monism. It gives the impression of penetrating directly from natural science to the most significant problems of world conception. The other declares itself incapable of proceeding any further with the means of natural science than to the insight that to a certain subjective state there is a certain corresponding process of motion. The representatives of the two currents vehemently oppose each other. Du Bois-Reymond rejected Haeckel's History of Creation as fiction (compare Du Bois-Reymond's speech, Darwin versus Galiani). The ancestral trees that Haeckel constructs on the basis of comparative anatomy, ontogeny and paleontology appear to Du Bois-Reymond to be of “approximately the same value as are the ancestral trees of the Homeric heroes in the eyes of historical criticism.” Haeckel, on the other hand, considers the view of Du Bois-Reymond to be an unscientific dilettantism that must naturally give support to the reactionary world conceptions. The jubilation of the spiritualists over Du Bois-Reymond's “Limitation Speech” was so much the more resonant and justified, as Du Bois-Reymond had, up to that time, been considered an important representative of the principle of scientific materialism.

[ 9 ] What captivates many people in the idea of dividing the world dualistically into external processes of motion and inner, subjective processes of sensation and perception is the possibility of an application of mathematics to the external processes. If one assumes material particles (atoms) with energies to exist, one can calculate in which way such atoms have to move under the influence of these energies. What is so attractive in astronomy with its methods of strict calculations is carried into the smallest elements. The astronomer determines the motion of the celestial bodies by calculating the laws of the mechanics of the heavens. In the discovery of the planet Neptune we experienced a triumph of the mechanism of the heavens. One can also reduce the motions that take place in the external world when we hear a tone and see a color to laws that govern the motions of the celestial bodies. Possibly one will be able in the future to calculate the motion that goes on in our brain while we form the judgment, two times two is four. The moment when everything that can be expressed in mathematical formulas has been calculated will be the one in which the world has been explained mathematically. Laplace has given a captivating description of the ideal of such an explanation of the world in his Essai Philosophique sur les Probabilités (1814):

A mind that would know for a given moment all forces that activate nature as well as the mutual position of the entities of which nature consists would, if its power of comprehension were otherwise sufficient, comprehend in the same formula the motions of the largest celestial body and of the lightest atom. Nothing would be uncertain for such a mind, and the future as well as the past would be within the scope of its perfect and immediate knowledge. Man's power of reasoning offers, with the perfection that it has given to astronomy, a feeble imitation of such a mind.

Du Bois-Reymond says in connection with these words:

As the astronomer predicts the day on which a comet reemerges from the depth of world space after years in the firmament of heaven, so would this mind read in its calculation the day when the Greek cross will shine from the mosque of the Hagia Sophia and when England will burn its last coal.

[ 10 ] There can be no doubt that even the most perfect mathematical knowledge of a process of motion would not enlighten me with regard to the question of why this motion appears to me as a red color. When one ball hits another, we can explain the direction of the second ball but we cannot in this way determine how a certain motion produces the red color. All we can say is that when a certain motion is given, a certain color is also given. While we can explain, apparently, as opposed to merely describe, what can be determined through calculation, we cannot go beyond a mere description in anything that defies calculation.

[ 11 ] A significant confession was made by Gustav Robert Kirchhoff (1824–87) when, in 1874, he defined the task of mechanics: “It is to describe the motions occurring in nature in the most complete and simple way.” Mechanics applies mathematics. Kirchhoff confesses that with the help of mathematics no more can be obtained than a complete and simple description of the processes in nature.

To those personalities who demand of an explanation something essentially more than just a description according to certain points of view, the confession of Kirchhoff could serve as a confirmation of their belief that there are “limits to our knowledge of nature.” Referring to Kirchhoff, Du Bois-Reymond praises the wise reserve of the master, who characterizes the task of mechanics as that of describing the motions of the bodies, and places this in contrast to Ernst Haeckel, who “speaks of atom souls.”

[ 12 ] An important attempt to base his world conception on the idea that all our perceptions are merely the result of our own organization has been made by Friedrich Albert Lange (1828–73) with his History of Materialism (1864). He had the boldness and consistency of thought that does not allow itself to be blocked by any obstacle but follows its fundamental conception to its last conclusion. Lange's strength lay in a forceful character that was expressed in many directions. His was a personality able to take up many things, and he had sufficient ability to carry them out.

[ 13 ] One important enterprise was his renewal of Kant's conception that, with the support of modern natural science, we perceive things not as they require it, but as our organization demands it. Lange did not really produce any new conceptions, but he did throw light into given thought worlds that is rare in its brightness. Our organization, our brain, in connection with our senses, produces the world of sensation. I see “blue,” or I feel “hardness,” because I am organized in this particular way. I combine the sensations into objects. By combining the sensations of “white” and “soft,” etc., I produce, for instance, the conception of wax. When I follow my sensation with my thoughts, I do not move in the external world. My intellect produces connections within the world of my sensations according to the laws of my reason. When I saw that the qualities I perceive in a body presuppose a matter with laws of motion, I also do not go outside of myself. I find that I am forced through my organization to add the thoughts of processes of motion to my sensations.

The same mechanism that produces our sensations also produces our conception of matter. Matter, equally, is only a product of my organization, just as color and tone. Even when we speak of things in themselves, we must be clearly aware of the fact that we cannot go beyond our own realm. We are so organized that we cannot possibly go beyond ourselves. Even what lies beyond our realm can be represented to ourselves only through our conception. We become aware of a limit to our world. We argue that there must be something beyond the limit that causes sensations in us. But we can only go as far as to that limit, even the limit we set ourselves because we can go no further. “A fish can swim in water in the pond, not in the earth, but it can hit its head against the bottom and the walls.” In the same way we live within the realm of our conceptions and sensations, but not in the external things. We hit against a limit, however, where we cannot go any further, where we must say no more than that beyond this is the unknown. All conceptions we produce concerning this unknown are unjustified because we cannot do anything but relate the conceptions we have obtained within ourselves to the unknown. If we wanted to do this, we should be no wiser than a fish that would say, “Here I cannot go any further. Therefore, I want to go into some other kind of water in which I will try to swim in some other way.” But the fact is that the fish can swim only in water and nowhere else.

[ 14 ] This is supplemented by another thought that belongs with the first line of reasoning. Lange, as the spirit of an inexorable desire for consistency, linked them together. In what situation am I when I contemplate myself? Am I not as much bound to the laws of my own organization as I am when I consider something else? My eye observes an object. Without an eye there is no color. I believe that there is an object in front of me, but on closer inspection I find that it is my eye, that is to say, I, myself, that produces the object. Now I turn my observation to my eye itself. Can I do this in any other way except by means of my organs? Is not the conception that I obtain of myself also just my idea? The world of the senses is the product of our organization. Our visible organs are like all other parts of the phenomenal world, only pictures of an unknown object. Our real organization remains, therefore, as unknown to us as the objects of the external world. What we have before us is merely the product of both. Affected by an unknown world through an unknown ego, we produce a world of conceptions that is all we have at our disposal.

[ 15 ] Lange asks himself the question: Where does a consistent materialism lead? Let all our mental conclusions and sense perceptions be produced by the activity of our brain, which is bound to material conditions, and our sense organs, which are also material. We are then confronted with the necessity of investigating our organism in order to see how it functions, but we can do this only by means of our organs. No color without an eye, but also no eye without an eye.

The consistently materialistic view is immediately reversed into a consistently idealistic one. There is no break to be assumed in our nature. We must not attribute some functions of our being to a physical nature and others to a spiritual one, but we are justified to assume physical conditions for everything, including the mechanism of our thinking, and we should not rest until we have found them. But we are as much justified if we consider as mere pictures of the really existing world, not only the external world as it appears to us, but also the organs with which we apprehend this world. The eye with which we believe we see is itself only a product of our imagination. When we find that our visual pictures are produced by the structure and function of the eye, we must never forget that the eye with all its contrivances—the optic nerve as well as the brain and the structures we may still discover in it as causes of our thinking—are only ideas that, to be sure, form a world that is consistent and interconnected in itself, but merely a world that points beyond itself. . The senses supply us, as Helmholtz says, with the effects of the things, not with faithful pictures, and certainly not with the things themselves. Among these effects are also the senses themselves as well as the brain and the molecular movements assumed in it. (History of Materialism, 1887.)

Lange, therefore, assumes a world beyond our world that may consist of the things in themselves or that may not even have anything to do with this “thing in itself,” since even this concept, which we form at the limit of our own realm, belongs merely to the world of our ideas.

[ 16 ] Lange's world conception, then, leads to the opinion that we have only a world of ideas. This world, however, forces us to acknowledge something beyond its own sphere. It also is completely incapable of disclosing anything about this something. This is the world conception of absolute ignorance, of agnosticism.

[ 17 ] It is Lange's conviction that all scientific endeavor that does not limit itself to the evidence of the senses and the logical intellect that combines these elements of evidence must remain fruitless. That the senses and the intellect together, however, do not supply us with anything but a result of our own organization, he accepts as evidently following from his analysis of the origin of knowledge. The world is for him fundamentally a product of the fiction of our senses and of our intellects. Because of this opinion, he never asks the question of truth with regard to the ideas. A truth that could enlighten us about the essence of the world is not recognized by Lange. He believes he has obtained an open road for the ideas and ideals that are formed by the human mind and that he has accomplished this through the very fact that he no longer feels the need of attributing any truth to the knowledge of the senses and the intellect. Without hesitation he considered everything that went beyond sensual observation and rational combination to be mere fiction. No matter what the idealistic philosophers had thought concerning the nature of facts, for him it belonged to the realm of poetic fiction.

Through this turn that Lange gave to materialism there arose necessarily the question: Why should not the higher imaginative creations be valid if even the senses are creative? What is the difference between these two kinds of creation? A philosopher who thinks like this must have a reason for admitting certain conceptions that is quite different from the reason that influences a thinker who acknowledges a conception because he thinks it is true. For Lange, this reason is given by the fact that a conception has value for life. For him, the question is not whether or not a conception is true, but whether it is valuable for man. One thing, however, must be clearly recognized: That I see a rose as red, that I connect the effect with the cause, is something I have in common with all creatures endowed with the power of perception and thinking. My senses and my reason cannot produce any additional values, but if I go beyond the imaginative product of senses and reason, then I am no longer bound to the organization of the whole human species. Schiller, Hegel and every Tom, Dick and Harry sees a flower in the same way. What Schiller weaves in poetic imagination around the flower, what Hegel thinks about it, is not imagined by Tom, Dick and Harry in the same way. But just as Tom, Dick and Harry are mistaken when they think that the flower is an entity existing externally, so Schiller and Hegel would be in error if they took their ideas for anything more than poetic fiction that satisfied their spiritual needs. What is poetically created through the senses and the intellect belongs to the whole human race, and no one in this respect can be different from anybody else. What goes beyond the creation of the senses and of reason is the concern of the individual. Nevertheless, this imaginative creation of the individual is also granted a value by Lange for the whole human race, provided that the individual creator “who produces it is normal, richly gifted and typical in his mode of thinking, and is, through his force of spirit, qualified to be a leader.”

In this way, Lange believes that he can secure for the ideal world its value by declaring that also the so-called real world is a product of poetic creation. Wherever he may look, Lange sees only fiction, beginning with the lowest stage of sense perception where “the individual still appears subject to the general characteristics of the human species, and culminating with the creative power in poetry.”

The function of the senses and of the combining intellect, which produce what is reality for us, can be called a lower function if one compares them with the soaring flight of the spirit in the creative arts. But, in general and in their totality, these functions cannot be classified as a principally different activity of the mind. As little as our reality is a reality according to our heart's desire, it is nevertheless the firm foundation of our whole spiritual existence. The individual grows out of the soil of the species, and the general and necessary process of knowledge forms the only secure foundation for the individual's rise to an esthetic conception of the world. (History of Materialism.)

[ 18 ] What Lange considers to be the error of the idealistic world conception is not that it goes beyond the world of the senses and the intellect with its ideas, but that it believes it possesses in these ideas more than the individual thinker's poetic fantasy. One should build up for oneself an ideal world, but one should be aware that this ideal world is no more than poetic imagination. If this idealism maintains it is more than that, materialism will rise time and again with the claim: I have the truth; idealism is poetry. Be that so, says Lange: Idealism is poetry, but materialism is also poetry. In idealism the individual is the creator, in materialism, the species. If they both are aware of their natures, everything is in its right place: the science of the senses and the intellect that provide proofs for the whole species, as well as the poetry of ideas with all its conceptions that are produced by the individual and still retain their value for the race.

One thing is certain: Man is in need of an ideal world created by himself as a supplement of reality, and the highest and noblest functions of his spirit are actively combined in such creations. But is this free activity of the spirit to be allowed repeatedly to assume the deceptive form of a proof-establishing science? If so, materialism will emerge again and again to destroy the bolder speculations and try to satisfy reason's demand for unity with a minimum of elevation above the real and actually provable. (History of Materialism.)

[ 19 ] In Lange's thinking, complete idealism is combined with a complete surrender of truth itself. The world for him is poetry, but a poetry that he does not value any less than he would if he could acknowledge it as reality.

Thus, two currents of a distinctly natural scientific character can be distinguished as abruptly opposing each other in the development of modern world conception: The monistic current in which Haeckel's mode of conception moved, and the dualistic one, the most forceful and consistent defender of which was Friedrich Albert Lange. Monism considers the world that man can observe to be a true reality and has no doubt that a thinking process that depends on observation can also obtain knowledge of essential significance concerning this reality. Monism does not imagine that it is possible to exhaust the fundamental nature of the world with a few boldly thought out formulas. It proceeds as it follows the facts, and forms new ideas in regard to the connections of these facts. It is convinced, however, that these ideas do supply a knowledge of a true reality. The dualistic conception of Lange divides the world into a known and an unknown part. It treats the first part in the same fashion as monism, following the lead of observation and reflective thought, but it believes that nothing at all can be known concerning the true essential core of the world through this observation and through this thought. Monism believes in the truth of the real and sees the human world of ideas best supported if it is based on the world of observations. In the ideas and ideals that the monist derives from natural existence, he sees something that is fully satisfactory to his feeling and to his moral need. He finds in nature the highest existence, which he does not only want to penetrate with his thinking for the purpose of knowledge, but to which he surrenders with all his knowledge and with all his love.

In Lange's dualism nature is considered to be unfit to satisfy the spirit's highest needs. Lange must assume a special world of higher poetry for this spirit that leads beyond the results of observation and its corresponding thought. For monism, true knowledge represents a supreme spiritual value, which, because of its truth, grants man also the purest moral and religious pathos. To dualism, knowledge cannot present such a satisfaction. Dualism must measure the value of life by other things, not by the truth it might yield. The ideas are not valuable because they participate in the truth. They are of value because they serve life in its highest forms. Life is not valued by means of the ideas, but the ideas are appreciated because of their fruitfulness for life. It is not for true knowledge that man strives but for valuable thoughts.

[ 20 ] In recognizing the mode of thinking of natural science Friedrich Albert Lange agrees with monism insofar as he denies the uses of all other sources for the knowledge of reality, but he also denies this mode of thinking any possibility to penetrate into the essential of things. In order to make sure that he himself moves on solid ground he curtails the wings of human imagination. What Lange is doing in such an incisive fashion corresponds to an inclination of thought that is deeply ingrained in the development of modern world conception. This is shown with perfect clarity also in another sphere of thinking of the nineteenth century. This thinking developed, through various stages, viewpoints from which Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) started as he laid the foundations for a dualism in England. Spencer's dualism appeared at approximately the same time as Lange's in Germany, which strove for natural scientific knowledge of the world on the one hand and, on the other, confessed to agnosticism so far as the essence of things is concerned. When Darwin published his work, The Origin of Species, he could praise the natural scientific mode of thought of Spencer:

Mr. Herbert Spencer, in an Essay (1852), has contrasted the theories of the Creation and the Development of organic beings with remarkable skill and force. He argues from the analogy of domestic production, from the changes which the embryos of many species undergo, from the difficulty of distinguishing species and varieties, and from the principle of general gradation that species have been modified; and he attributes the modification to the change of circumstances. The author (1855) has also treated Psychology on the principle of the necessary requirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. (The Origin of Species, Historical Sketch.)

Also, other thinkers who followed the method of natural science felt attracted to Spencer because he tried to explain all reality from the inorganic to the psychological in the manner expressed in Darwin's words above. But Spencer also sides with the agnostics, so that Lange is justified when he says, “Herbert Spencer, whose philosophy is closely related to ours, believes in a materialism of the phenomenal world, the relative justification of which, within the realm of natural science, finds its limit in a thought of an unknowable absolute.”

[ 21 ] It is quite likely that Spencer arrived at his viewpoint from assumptions similar to those of Lange. He had been preceded in England by thinkers who were guided by a twofold interest. They wanted to determine what it is that man really possesses with his knowledge, but they also were resolved not to shatter by doubt or reason the essential substance of the world. They were all more or less dominated by the sentiment that Kant described when he said, “I had to suspend knowledge in order to make room for belief.” (Compare the first volume of this book.)

[ 22 ] The beginning of the development of the world conception of the nineteenth century in England is marked by the figure of Thomas Reid (1710–96). The fundamental conviction of this man can be expressed in Goethe's words as he describes his own activity as a scientist as non-speculative: “In the last analysis it seems to me that my method consists merely m the practical and self-rectifying operations of common sense that dares to practice its function in a higher sphere.” (Compare Goethe's Werke, Vol. 38, p. 595 in Kürschner's Deutsche National Literatur.) This common sense does not doubt in any way that it is confronted with real essential things and processes as it contemplates the world. Reid believes that a world conception is viable only if it upholds this basic view of a healthy common sense. Even if one admitted the possibility that our observation could be deceptive and that the true nature of things could be different from the picture that is supplied to us by our senses and our intellect, it would not be necessary to pay any attention to such a possibility. We find our way through life only if we believe in our observation; nothing beyond that is our concern.

In taking this point of view Reid is convinced that he can arrive at really satisfactory truths. He makes no attempt to obtain a conception of things through complicated thought operations but wants to reach his aim by going back to the basic principles that the soul instinctively assumes. Instinctively, unconsciously, the soul possesses what is correct, before the attempt is made to illumine the mind's own nature with the torch of consciousness. It knows instinctively what to think in regard to the qualities and processes of the physical world, and it is endowed instinctively with the direction of moral behavior, of a judgment concerning good and evil. Through his reference to the truths innate in “common sense,” Reid directs the attention of thought toward an observation of the soul. This tendency toward a psychological observation becomes a lasting and characteristic trait in the development of the English world conception.

Outstanding personalities within this development are William Hamilton (1788–1856), Henry Mansel (1820–71), William Whewell (1794–1866), John Herschel (1792 – 1871), James Mill (1773–1836), John Stuart Mill (1806 – 73), Alexander Bain (1818–1903) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). They all place psychology in the center of their world conception.

[ 23 ] William Hamilton also recognizes as truth what the soul from the beginning feels inclined to accept as true. With respect to fundamental truths proofs and comprehension ceases. All one can do is observe their emergence at the horizon of our consciousness. In this sense they are incomprehensible. But one of the fundamental manifestations of our consciousness is also that everything in this world depends on something that is unknown to us. We find in this world in which we live only dependent things, but not absolutely independent ones. Such independent things must exist, however. When a dependent thing is found, an independent thing is assumed. With our thinking we do not enter the independent entity. Human knowledge is meant for the dependent and it becomes involved in contradictions if its thoughts, which are well-suited to the dependent, are applied to the independent. Knowledge, therefore, must withdraw as we approach the entrance toward the independent. Religious belief is here in its place. It is only through his admission that he cannot know anything of the essential core of the world that man can be a moral being. He can accept a God who causes a moral order in the world. As soon as it has been understood that all logic has exclusively to do with the dependent, not the independent, no logic can destroy this belief in an infinite God.

Henry Mansel was a pupil and follower of Hamilton, but he expressed Hamilton's view in still more extreme forms. It is not going too far to say that Mansel was an advocate of belief who no longer judged impartially between religion and knowledge, but who defended religious dogma with partiality. He was of the opinion that the revealed truths of religion involve our knowledge necessarily in contradictions. This is not supposed to be the fault of the revealed truths but has its cause in the limitation of the human mind, which can never penetrate into regions from which the statements of revelation arise.

William Whewell believed that he could best obtain a conception concerning the significance, origin and value of human knowledge by investigating the method through which leading men of science arrived at their insights. In his History of the Inductive Sciences (1840), he set out to analyze the psychology of scientific investigation. Thus, by studying outstanding scientific discoveries, he hoped to find out how much of these accomplishments was due to the external world and how much to man himself. Whewell finds that the human mind always supplements its scientific observations. Kepler, for example, had the idea of an ellipse before he found that the planets move in ellipses. Thus, the sciences do not come about through a mere reception from without but through the active participation of the human mind that impresses its laws on the given elements. These sciences do not extend as far as the last entities of things. They are concerned with the particulars of the world. Just as everything, for instance, is assumed to have a cause, such a cause must also be presupposed for the whole world. Since knowledge fails us with respect to that cause, the dogma of religion must step in as a supplement. Herschel, like Whewell, also tried to gain an insight into the genesis of knowledge in the human mind through the observation of many examples. His Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy appeared in 1831.

[ 24 ] John Stuart Mill belongs with those thinkers who are deeply imbued with the conviction that one cannot be cautious enough in determining what is certain and uncertain in human knowledge. The fact that he was introduced to the most diversified branches of knowledge in his boyhood, most likely gave his mind its characteristic turn. As a child of three he received instructions in the Greek language, and soon afterwards was taught arithmetic. He was exposed to the other fields of instruction at a correspondingly early age. Of even greater importance was the method of instruction used by his father, James Mill, who was himself an important thinker. Through him vigorous logic became the second nature of John Stuart. From his autobiography we learn: “Anything which could be found out by thinking I was never told until I had exhausted my efforts to find it out for myself.” The things that occupy the thinking of such a person must become his destiny in the proper sense of the word. “I have never been a child, I have never played cricket. It is, after all, better to let nature take its own course,” says John Stuart Mill as one whose destiny had so uniquely been to live almost exclusively in thinking. Because of his development, he had to experience to the fullest the problems concerning the significance of knowledge. How can knowledge, which for him was life, lead also to the source of the phenomena of the world? The direction in which Mill's thought developed in order to obtain clarity concerning these problems was probably determined early by his father. James Mill had proceeded by starting from psychological experience. He had observed the process by which idea is linked to idea in man's mind. Through connecting one concrete idea to another we obtain our knowledge of the world. We must then ask ourselves: What is the relation between the order in which the ideas are linked and the order of the things in the world? Through such a mode of conception our thinking begins to distrust its own power because man can associate ideas in a manner that is entirely different from the connection of the things in the external world. This mistrust is the basis of John Stuart Mill's logic, which appeared in 1843 as his chief work under the title, System of Logic.

[ 25 ] In matters of world conception a more pronounced contrast is scarcely thinkable than that between Mill's Logic and Hegel's Science of Logic, which appeared twenty-seven years earlier. In Hegel we find the highest confidence in thinking, the full assurance that we cannot be deceived by what we experience within ourselves. Hegel experiences himself as a part, a member of the world, and what he experiences within himself must also belong to the world. Since he has the most direct knowledge of himself, he believes in the content of this knowledge and judges the rest of the world accordingly. He argues as follows: When I perceive an external thing, it is possible that the thing shows only its surface to me and that its essence remains concealed. This is not possible in my own case. I understand my own being. I can then compare the things outside with my own being. If they reveal some element of my own essence on their surface, I am justified in attributing to them something of my own nature. It is for this reason that Hegel expects confidently to find outside in nature the very spirit and the thought connections that he finds within himself.

Mill, however, experiences himself not as a part of the world but as a spectator. The things outside are an unknown element to him and the thoughts that man forms concerning them are met by Mill with distrust. One observes men and learns from his observations that all men die. One forms the judgment that all men are mortal. The Duke of Wellington is a man; therefore, the Duke of Wellington is mortal. This is the conclusion the observer comes to. What gives him the right to do so? This is the question John Stuart Mill asks. If a single human being would prove to be immortal, the whole judgment would be upset. Are we justified in supposing that, because all men up to this time have died, they will continue to do so in the future? All knowledge is uncertain because we draw conclusions from observations we have made and transfer them to things we cannot know anything about, since we have not observed them directly. What would somebody who thinks like Hegel have to say about such a conception? It is not difficult to imagine the answer. We know from definite concepts that in every circle all diameters are equal. If we find a circle in the real world, we maintain that its diameters, too, are equal. If we observe it a quarter of an hour later and find that its diameters are unequal, we do not decide [ 26 ] that under certain circumstances the diameter of a circle can also be unequal. But we say that what was formerly a circle has for some reason been elongated into an ellipse.

If we think like Hegel, this is the attitude we take toward the judgment, all men are mortal. It is not through observation but through an inner thought experience that we form the concept of man. For the concept of man, mortality is as essential as the equality of the diameters is for the concept of the circle. If we find a being in the real world that has all the other characteristics of man, we conclude that this being must also have that of mortality, in the same way that all other properties of the circle allow us to conclude that it has also that of the equality of diameters. If Hegel came across a being that did not die, he could only say, “That is not a man.” He could not say, “A man can also be immortal.” Hegel makes the assumption that the concepts in us are not arbitrarily formed but have their root in the essence of the world, as we ourselves belong to this essence. Once the concept of man has formed within us, it is clear that it has its origin in the essence of things, and we are fully justified in applying it to this essence. Why has this concept of mortal man formed within us? Surely only because it has its ground in the nature of things. A person who believes that man stands entirely outside of the order of things and forms his judgments as an outsider can argue that we have until now seen men die, and therefore we form the spectator concept: mortal men. The thinker who is aware that he himself belongs to the order of things and that it is they that are manifested within his thoughts, forms the judgment that up to this time all men have died; to die, then, is something that belongs to their nature, and if somebody does not die, he is not a man but something else. Hegel's logic has become a logic of things: For Hegel, the manifestation of logic is an effect of the essence of the world; it is not something that the human mind has added from an outside source to this essence. Mill's logic is the logic of a bystander, of a mere spectator who starts out by cutting the thread through which it is connected with the world.

[ 27 ] Mill points out that the thoughts, which in a certain age appear as absolutely certain inner experiences, are nevertheless reversed in a later time. In the Middle Ages it was, for instance, believed that there could not possibly be antipodes and that the stars would have to drop from the sky if they did not cling to fixed spheres. Man will, therefore, only be capable of the right attitude toward his knowledge if he, in spite of his awareness that the logic of the world is expressed in this knowledge, forms in every individual case his judgment through a careful methodical examination of his conceptual connections guided by observation, a judgment that is always in need of correction.

It is the method of observation that John Stuart Mill attempts to determine with cool detachment and calculation. Let us take an example. [ 28 ] Suppose a phenomenon had always occurred under certain conditions. In a given case a number of these conditions appear again, but a few of them are now missing. The phenomenon in question does not occur. We are forced to conclude that the conditions that were not provided and the phenomenon that failed to occur stood in a causal relationship. If two substances have always combined to form a chemical compound and this result fails to be obtained in a given case, it is necessary to inquire what condition is lacking that had always been present before. Through a method of this kind we arrive at conceptions concerning connections of facts that can be rightly considered as being grounded in the nature of things. Mill wants to follow the methods of observation in his analysis. Logic, which Kant maintained had not progressed a single step since Aristotle, is a means of orientation within our thinking itself. It shows how to proceed from one correct thought to the next. Mill's logic is a means of orientation within the world of facts. It intends to show how one obtains valid judgments about things from observation. He does not even admit mathematics as an exception. Mathematics must also derive its basic insights from observation. For example, in all observed cases we have seen that two intersecting straight lines diverge and do not intersect again. Therefore we conclude that they will never intersect again, but we do not have a perfect proof for this statement. For John Stuart Mill, the world is thus an alien element. Man observes its phenomena and arranges them according to what they announce to his conceptual life. He perceives regularities in the phenomena and through logical, methodical investigations of these regularities he arrives at the laws of nature. But there is nothing that leads him to the principle of the things themselves. One can well imagine that the world could also be entirely different. Mill is convinced that everybody who is used to abstraction and analysis and who seriously uses his abilities will, after a sufficient exercise of his imagination, have no difficulty with the idea that there could be another stellar system in which nothing could be found of the laws that have application to our own.

Mill is merely consistent in his bystander viewpoint of the world when he extends it to man's own ego. Mental pictures come and go, are combined and separated within his inner life; this is what man observes. He does not observe a being that remains identical with itself as “ego” in the midst of this constant flow of ideas. He has observed that mental pictures emerge within him and he assumes that this will continue to be the case. From this possibility, namely, that a world of perceptions can be grouped around a center, arises the conception of an “ego.” Thus, man is a spectator also with respect to his own “ego.” He has his conceptions tell him what he can know about himself. Mill reflects on the facts of memory and expectation. If everything that I know of myself is to consist of conceptual presentations, then I cannot say: I remember a conception that I have had at an earlier time, or I expect the occurrence of a certain experience, but I must say: A present conception remembers itself or expects its future occurrence. If we speak, so Mill argues, of the mind as of a sequence of perceptions, we must also speak of a sequence of perceptions that is aware of itself as becoming and passing. As a result, we find ourselves in the dilemma of having to say that either the “ego” or the mind is something to be distinguished from the perceptions, or else we must maintain the paradox that a mere sequence of perceptions is capable of an awareness of its past and future. Mill does not overcome this dilemma. It contains for him an insoluble enigma. The fact is that he has torn the bond between himself, the observer, and the world, and he is not capable of restoring the connection. The world for him remains an unknown beyond himself that produces impressions on man. All man knows of this transcendent unknown is that it can produce perceptions in him. Instead of having the possibility of knowing real things outside himself, he can only say in the end that there are opportunities for having perceptions. Whoever speaks of things in themselves uses empty words. We move on the firm ground of facts only as long as we speak of the continuous possibility of the occurrence of sensations, perceptions and conceptions.

[ 29 ] John Stuart Mill has an intense aversion to all thoughts that are gained in any way except through the comparison of facts, the observation of the similar, the analogous, and the homogeneous elements in all phenomena. He is of the opinion that the human conduct of life can only be harmed if we surrender to the belief that we could arrive at any truth in any way except through observation. This disinclination of Mill demonstrates his hesitation to relate himself in his striving for knowledge to the things of reality in any other way than by an attitude of passivity. The things are to dictate to man what he has to think about them. If man goes beyond this state of receptivity in order to say something out of his own self about the things, then he lacks every assurance that this product of his own activity has anything to do with the things. What is finally decisive in this philosophy is the fact that the thinker who maintains it is unable to count his own spontaneous thinking as belonging to the world. The very fact that he himself is active in this thinking makes him suspicious and misleads him. He would best of all like to eliminate his own self completely, to be absolutely sure that no erroneous element is mixed into the objective statements of the phenomena. He does not sufficiently appreciate the fact that his thinking is a part of nature as much as the growth of a leaf of grass. It is evident that one must also examine one's own spontaneous thinking if one wants to find out something concerning it.

How is man, to use a statement of Goethe, to become acquainted with his relation to himself and to the external world if he wants to eliminate himself completely in the cognitive process? Great as Mill's merits are for finding methods through which man can learn those things that do not depend on him, a view concerning man's relation to himself and of his relation to the external world cannot be obtained by his methods. All these methods are valid only for the special sciences, not, however, for a comprehensive world conception. No observation can teach what spontaneous thinking is; only thinking can experience this in itself. As this thinking can only obtain information concerning its own nature through its own power, it is also the only source that can shed light on the relation between itself and the external world. Mill's method of investigation excludes the possibility of obtaining a world conception because a world conception can be gained only through thinking that is concentrated in itself and thereby succeeds in obtaining an insight into its own relation to the external world. The fact that John Stuart Mill had an aversion to this kind of self-supporting thinking can be well understood from his character. Gladstone said in a letter (compare Gompertz: John Stuart Mill, Vienna, 1889) that in conversation he used to call Mill the “Saint of Rationalism.” A person who practices thinking in this way imposes rigorous demands on thinking and looks for the greatest possible precautionary measures so that it cannot deceive him. He becomes thereby mistrustful with respect to thinking itself. He believes that he will soon stand on insecure ground if he loses hold of external points of support. Uncertainty with regard to all problems that go beyond strictly observational knowledge is a basic trait in Mill's personality. In reading his books we see everywhere that Mill treats such problems as open questions concerning which he does not risk a sure judgment.

[ 30 ] The belief that the true nature of things is unknowable is also maintained by Herbert Spencer. He proceeds by asking: How do I obtain what I call truths concerning the world? I make certain observations concerning things and form judgments about them. I observe that hydrogen and oxygen under certain conditions combine to form water. I form a judgment concerning this observation. This is a truth that extends only over a small circle of things. I then observe under what circumstances other substances combine. I compare the individual observations and thereby arrive at more comprehensive, more general truths concerning the process in which substances in general form chemical compounds. All knowledge consists in this; we proceed from particular truths to more comprehensive ones. We finally arrive at the highest truth, which cannot be subordinated to any other and which we therefore must accept without further explanation. In this process of knowledge we have, however, no means of penetrating to the absolute essence of the world, for thinking can, according to this opinion, do no more than compare the various things with one another and formulate general truths with respect to the homogeneous element in them. But the ultimate nature of the world cannot, because of its uniqueness, be compared to any other thing. This is why thinking fails with regard to the ultimate nature. It cannot reach it.

[ 31 ] In such modes of conception we always sense, as an undertone, the thinking that developed from the basis of the physiology of the senses (compare above to the first part of this Chapter). In many philosophers this thought has inserted itself so deeply into their intellectual life that they consider it the most certain thought possible. They argue as follows: One can know things only by becoming aware of them. They then change this thought, more or less unconsciously, into: One can know only of those things that enter our consciousness, but it remains unknown how the things were before they entered our consciousness. It is for this reason that sense perceptions are considered as if they were in our consciousness, for one is of the opinion that they must first enter our consciousness and must become part of it in the form of conceptions if we are to be aware of them.

[ 32 ] Also, Spencer clings to the view that the possibility of the process of knowledge depends on us as human beings. We therefore must assume an unknowable element beyond that which can be transmitted to us by our senses and our thinking. We have a clear consciousness of everything that is present in our mind. But an indefinite consciousness is associated with this clear awareness that claims that everything we can observe and think has as its basis something we can no longer observe and think. We know that we are dealing with mere appearances and not with full realities existing independently by themselves. But this is just because we know definitely that our world is only appearance, that we also know that an unimaginable real world is its basis. Through such turns of thought Spencer believes it possible to arrange a complete reconciliation between religion and knowledge. There is something that religion can grasp in belief, in a belief that cannot be shaken by an impotent knowledge.

[ 33 ] The field, however, that Spencer considers to be accessible to knowledge must, for him, entirely take on the form of natural scientific conceptions. When Spencer himself ventures to explain, he does so in the sense of natural science.

[ 34 ] Spencer uses the method of natural science in thinking of the process of knowledge. Every organ of a living being has come into existence through the fact that this being has adapted itself to the conditions under which it lives. It belongs to the human conditions of life that man finds his way through the world with the aid of thinking. His organ of knowledge develops through the adaptation of his conceptual life to the conditions of his external life. By making statements concerning things and processes, man adjusts himself to the surrounding world. All truths have come into being through this process of adaptation, and what is acquired in this way can be transmitted through inheritance to the descendants. Those who think that man, through his nature, possesses once and for all a certain disposition toward general truths are wrong. What appears to be such a disposition did not exist at an earlier stage in the ancestors of man, but has been acquired by adaptation and transmitted to the descendants. When some philosophers speak of truths that man does not have to derive from his own individual experience but that are given a priori in his organization, they are right in a certain respect. While it is obvious that such truths are acquired, it must be stressed that they are not acquired by man as an individual but as a species. The individual has inherited the finished product of an ability that has been acquired at an earlier age.

Goethe once said that he had taken part in many conversations on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and that he had noticed how on those occasions the old basic problem had been renewed, “How much does our inner self contribute to our spiritual existence, how much the external world?” And Goethe goes on to say, “I had never separated the two; when I was philosophizing in my own way on things, I did so with an unconscious naïveté and was really convinced that I saw with my eyes my opinion before me.”

[ 35 ] Spencer looks at this “old basic problem” from the point of view of natural science. He believed he could show that the developed human being also contributed to his spiritual existence through his own self. This self, is also made up of the inherited traits that had been acquired by our ancestors in their struggle with the external world. If we today believe we see with our eyes our opinions before us, we must remember that they were not always our opinions but that they were once observations that were really made by our eyes in the external world. Spencer's way of thinking, then, is, like that of John Stuart Mill, one that proceeds from psychology. But Mill does not go further than the psychology of the individual. Spencer goes from the individual back to his ancestors. The psychology of the individual is in the same position as the ontogenesis of zoology. Certain phenomena of the history of the individual are explainable only if they are referred back to phenomena of the history of the species. In the same way, the facts of the individual's consciousness cannot be understood if taken alone. We must go back to the species. We must, indeed, go back beyond the human species to acquisitions of knowledge that were accomplished by the animal ancestors of man. Spencer uses his great acumen to support this evolutionary history of the process of cognition. He shows in which way the mental activities have gradually developed from low stages at the beginning, through ever more accurate adaptations of the human mind to the external world and through inheritance of these adaptation. Every insight that the individual human being obtains through pure thought and without experience about things has been obtained by humanity or its ancestors through observation or experience. Leibniz thought he could explain the correspondence of man's inner life with the external world by assuming a harmony between them that was pre-established by the creator. Spencer explains this correspondence in the manner of natural science. The harmony is not pre-established, but gradually developed. We here find the continuation of natural scientific thinking to the highest aspects of human existence. Linnaeus had declared that every living organic form existed because the creator had made it as it is. Darwin maintained that it is as it is because it had gradually developed through adaptation and inheritance. Leibniz declared that thinking is an agreement with the external world because the creator had established this agreement. Spencer maintained that this agreement is there because it has gradually developed through adaptations and inheritance of the thought world.

[ 36 ] Spencer was motivated in his thought by the need for a naturalistic explanation of spiritual phenomena. He found the general direction for such an explanation in Lyell's geology (compare in Part 2 Chapter I). In this geology, to be sure, the idea is still rejected that organic forms have gradually developed one from another. It nevertheless receives a powerful support through the fact that the inorganic (geological) formations of the earth's surface are explained through such a gradual development and through violent catastrophes. Spencer, who had a natural scientific education and who had for a time also been active as a civil engineer, recognized at once the full extent of the idea of evolution, and he applied it in spite of Lyell's opposition to it. He even applied this idea to spiritual processes. As early as 1850, in his book, Social Statistics, he described social evolution in analogy with organic evolution. He also acquainted himself with the studies of Harvey and Wolff in embryonic development (compare Part I, Chapter IX of this book), and he plunged into the works of Karl Ernst von Baer (compare above in Part II Chapter II), which showed him that evolution proceeded from the development of a homogeneous uniform state to one of variety, diversity and abundance. In the early stages of embryological development the organisms are very similar; later they become different from one another (compare above in Part II Chapter II). Through Darwin this evolutionary thought was completely confirmed. From a few original organic forms the whole wealth of the highly diversified world of formations has developed.

From the idea of evolution, Spencer wanted to proceed to the most general truths, which, in his opinion, constituted the aim of all human striving for knowledge. He believed that one could discover manifestations of this evolutionary thought in the simplest phenomena. When, from dispersed particles of water, a cloud is formed in the sky, when a sand pile is formed from scattered grains of sand, Spencer saw the beginnings of an evolutionary process. Dispersed matter is contracted and concentrated to a whole. It is just this process that is presented to us in the Kant-Laplace hypothesis of world evolution. Dispersed parts of a chaotic world nebula have contracted. The organism originates in just this way. Dispersed elements are concentrated in tissues. The psychologist can observe that man contracts dispersed observations into general truths. Within this concentrated whole, articulation and differentiation take place. The original homogeneous mass is differentiated into the individual heavenly bodies of the solar system; the organism differentiates itself into the various organs.

[ 37 ] Concentration alternates with dissolution. When a process of evolution has reached a certain climax, an equilibrium takes place. Man, for instance, develops until he has evolved a maximum of harmonization of his inner abilities with external nature. Such a state of equilibrium, however, cannot last; external forces will effect it destructively. The evolutionary process must be followed by a process of dissolution; what had been concentrated is dispersed again; the cosmic again becomes chaotic. The process of evolution can begin anew. Thus, Spencer sees the process of the world as a rhythmic play of motion. [ 38 ] It is certainly not an uninteresting observation for the comparative history of the evolution of world conception that Spencer, from the observation of the genesis of world phenomena, reaches here a conclusion that is similar to one Goethe expressed in connection with his ideas concerning the genesis of life. Goethe describes the growth of a plant in the following way:

May the plant sprout, blossom or bear fruit, it is always by the same organs that the prescription of nature is fulfilled in various functions and under frequently changing forms. The same organ, which at the stem expands as a leaf and takes on a most differentiated shape, now contracts again in the calyx, spreads out in the petal, epitomizes in the organs of reproduction and finally once more swells as fruit.

If one thinks of this conception as being transferred to the whole process of the world, one arrives as Spencer's contraction and dispersion of matter.

[ 39 ] Spencer and Mill exerted a great influence on the development of world conception in the second half of the nineteenth century. The rigorous emphasis on observation and the one-sided elaboration of the methods of observational knowledge of Mill, along with the application of the conceptions of natural science to the entire scope of human knowledge by Spencer could not fail to meet with the approval of an age that saw in the idealistic world conception of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel nothing but degeneration of human thinking. It was an age that showed appreciation only for the successes of the research work of natural science. The lack of unity among the idealistic thinkers and what seemed to many a perfect fruitfulness of a thinking that was completely concentrated and absorbed in itself, had to produce a deep-seated suspicion against idealism. One may say that a widespread view of the last four decades of the nineteenth century is clearly expressed in words spoken by Rudolf Virchow in his address, The Foundation of the University of Berlin and the Transition from the Age of Philosophy into that of Natural Science (1893): “Since the belief in magic formulas has been forced back into the most backward circles of the people, the formulas of the natural philosopher have met with little approval.” And one of the most significant philosophers of the second half of the century, Eduard von Hartmann, sums up the character of his world conception in the motto he placed at the head of his book, Philosophy of the Unconscious: Speculative Results Obtained by the Inductive Method of Natural Science. He is of the opinion that it is necessary to recognize “the greatness of the progress brought about by Mill, through which all attempts of a deductive method of philosophy have been defeated and made obsolete for all times.” (Compare Eduard von Hartmann, Geschichte der Metaphysik, 2 part, page 479.)

[ 40 ] The recognition of certain limits of human knowledge that was shown by many naturalists was also received favorably by many religiously attuned souls. They argued as follows: The natural scientists observe the inorganic and organic facts of nature and they attempt to find general laws by combining the individual phenomena. Through these laws processes can be explained, and it is even possible to predetermine thereby the regular course of future phenomena. A comprehensive world conception should proceed in the same way; it should confine itself to the facts, establish general truths within moderate limits and not maintain any claim to penetrate into the realm of the “unknowable.” Spencer, with his complete separation of the “knowable” and the “unknowable,” met the demand of such religious needs to a high degree. The idealistic mode of thought was, on the other hand, considered by such religiously inclined spirits to be a fantastic aberration. As a matter of principle, the idealistic mode of conception cannot recognize an “unknowable,” because it has to uphold the conviction that through the concentrated penetration into the inner life of man a knowledge can be attained that covers not merely the outer surface of the world but also its real core.

[ 41 ] The thought life of some influential naturalists, such as Thomas Henry Huxley, moved entirely in the direction of such religiously inclined spirits. Huxley believed in a complete agnosticism with regard to the essence of the world. He declared that a monism, which is in general agreement with Darwin's results, is applicable only to external nature. Huxley was one of the first to defend the Darwinian conceptions, but he is at the same time one of the most outspoken representatives of those thinkers who believed in the limitation of that mode of conception. A similar view is also held by the physicist Johaan Tyndall (1820–93) who considered the world process to be an energy that is completely inaccessible to the human intellect. According to him, it is precisely the assumption that everything in the world comes into existence through a natural evolution that makes it impossible to accept the thought that matter, which is, after all, the carrier of the whole evolution, should be no more than what our intellect can comprehend of it.

[ 42 ] A characteristic phenomenon of his time is the personality of the English statesman, James Balfour (1840–1930). In 1879, in his book, A Defense of Philosophical Doubt, Being an Essay on the Foundations of Belief, he expressed a credo that is doubtless similar to that held by many other thinkers. With respect to everything that man is capable of explaining he stands completely on the ground of the thought of natural science. For him, there is no other knowledge but natural science, but he maintains at the same time that his knowledge of natural science is only rightly understood if it is clear that the needs of man's soul and reason can never be satisfied by it. It is only necessary to understand that, in the last analysis even in natural science, everything depends on faith in the ultimate truths for which no further proof is possible. But no harm is done in that this trend of thoughts leads us only to belief, because this belief is a secure guide for our action in daily life. We believe in the laws of nature and we master them through this belief. We thereby force nature to serve us for our purpose. Religious belief is to produce an agreement between the actions of man and his higher needs that go beyond his everyday life.

[ 43 ] The world conceptions that have been discussed under the title, “The World as Illusion,” show that they have as their basis a longing for a satisfactory relationship of the self-conscious ego to the general world picture. It is especially significant that they do not consciously consider this search as their philosophical aim, and therefore do not expressly turn their inquiry toward that purpose. Instinctively as it were, they permit their thinking to be influenced by the direction that is determined by this unconscious search. The form that this search takes is determined by the conceptions of modern natural science. We approach the fundamental character of these conceptions if we fix our attention on the concept of “consciousness.” This concept was introduced to the life of modern philosophy by Descartes. Before him, it was customary to depend more on the concept of the “soul” as such. Little attention was paid to the fact that only a part of the soul's life is spent in connection with conscious phenomena. During sleep the soul does not live consciously. Compared to the conscious life, the nature of the soul must therefore consist of deeper forces, which in the waking state are merely lifted into consciousness. The more one asked the question of the justification and the value of knowledge in the light of clear and distinct ideas, however, the more it was also felt that the soul finds the most certain elements of knowledge when it does not go beyond its own limits and when it does not delve deeper into itself than consciousness extends. The opinion prevailed that everything else may be uncertain, but what my consciousness is, at least, as such is certain. Even the house I pass may not exist without me; that the image of this house is now in my consciousness: this I may maintain. But as soon as we fix our attention on this consciousness, the concept of the ego inevitably grows together with that of the consciousness. Whatever kind of entity the “ego” may be outside the consciousness, the realm of the “ego” can be conceived as extending as far as the consciousness. There is no possibility of denying that the sensual world picture, which the soul experiences consciously, has come into existence through the impression that is made on man by the world. But as soon as one clings to this statement, it becomes difficult to rid oneself of it, for there is a tendency thereby to imply the judgment that the processes of the world are the causes, and that the content of our consciousness is the effect. Because one thinks that only the effect is contained in the consciousness, it is believed that the cause must be in a world outside man as an imperceptible “thing in itself.” The presentation that is given above shows how the results of modern physiological research lead to an affirmation of such an opinion. It is just this opinion through which the “ego” finds itself enclosed with its subjective experiences within its own boundaries. This subtly produced intellectual illusion, once formed, cannot be destroyed as long as the ego does not find any clues within itself of which it knows that they refer to a being outside the subjective consciousness, although they are actually depicted within that consciousness. The ego must, outside the sensual consciousness, feel a contact with entities that guarantee their being by and through themselves. It must find something within that leads it outside itself. been said here concerning thoughts that are brought to life can have this effect. As long as the ego has experienced thought only within itself, it feels itself confined with it within its own boundary. As thought is brought to life it emancipates the ego from a mere subjective existence. A process takes place that is, to be sure, experienced subjectively by the ego, but by its own nature is an objective process. This breaks the “ego” loose from everything that it can feel only as subjective.

So we see that also the conceptions for which the world is illusion move toward a point that is reached when Hegel's world picture is so transformed that its thought comes to life. These conceptions take on the form that is necessary for a world picture that is unconsciously driven by an impulse in that direction. But in them, thinking still lacks the power to work its way through to that aim. Even in their imperfection, however, these conceptions receive their general character from this aim, and the ideas that appear are the external symptoms of active forces that remain concealed.

[ 1 ] At the present stage of evolution there are three possible conditions of soul in which man ordinarily lives his life between birth and death: waking, sleeping and, between the two, dreaming. The last-mentioned will be briefly dealt with in a later part of this book; for the moment we shall consider life simply as it alternates between its two main conditions—waking and sleeping. Before he can “know” for himself in higher worlds, man has to add to these two a third condition of soul.

During waking life he is given up to the impressions of the senses, and to the thoughts and pictures that these evoke in him. During sleep the senses cease to make any impression, and the soul loses consciousness. The whole of the day's experience sinks down into the sea of unconsciousness. Let us now consider how it would be if man were able to become conscious during sleep, notwithstanding that all impressions of the senses were completely obliterated, as they are in deep sleep. Now would any memory remain to him of what had happened while he was awake. Would he find himself in an empty nothingness? Would he now be unable to have any experience at all? An answer to this question is only possible if a condition resembling the description can actually be brought about in man, where his senses remain completely inactive and he has no memory of their activity in his waking hours, and is yet not asleep but awake to another world, a world of reality, even while in relation to the external world around him he is just as he is in sleep.

As a matter of fact, such a state of consciousness can be induced in man if he is prepared to evoke within him the kind of inner experience that spiritual science enables him to develop. And all that is here related about the worlds that lie beyond the world of the senses has been investigated in such a condition of consciousness. In the preceding chapters some information has been given concerning these higher worlds. The present chapter will tell—in so far as lies within the scope of this book—of the means whereby man may achieve the state of consciousness required for such research.

[ 2 ] It is in this one aspect alone that the higher state of consciousness resembles sleep: the sense receive no impressions from without, and the thoughts too which have been evoked by sense-impressions are obliterated. Whereas however in sleep man if bereft of the power to have conscious experience, in this new state of consciousness he retains the power. A capacity for conscious experience is aroused in him, which in ordinary life requires to be stimulated by sense-impressions. The awakening of the soul to this higher state of consciousness may be termed Initiation.

[ 3 ] The path that leads to Initiation takes man out of ordinary day-time consciousness and brings him into a new activity of soul whereas he makes use of spiritual organs of perception. These organs are present in man all the time, in a germinal condition; they require only to be developed.

Now it can happen that at some particular time in his life, without making any special preparation for it, a person discovers that higher organs of this nature have been developing within him. This will mean that a kind of involuntary self-awakening has taken place. He will find that he has through this become a completely changed man. His whole inner experience is no vastly enriched. And he will be fully persuaded that no knowledge of the physical world could ever afford him such bliss, such serene satisfaction, such inner warmth, as can the knowledge that opens up before him now that he has a faculty of cognition that is independent of physical impressions. Strength and confidence will stream into his will from a spiritual world.

Such instances of self-initiation do occur. They should however not lead one to imagine that the right thing to do is simply to wait for it and make no effort towards obtaining Initiation by means of a properly ordered training. We have no need to speak here any further of self-initiation, since it can come about without the person's following any rules or precepts. What we are concerned with is how the organs of perception that are latent in man's soul may be developed by spiritual training. If people do not feel any particular urge to take steps for their own inner development, it is easy for them to think that since the life of man goes forward under the guidance of spiritual Powers, he ought not to interfere in their leadership but should wait quietly for the moment when these Powers shall deem it right to open to him another world. They will feel that any desire to intermeddle in this way with the wisdom of spiritual guidance is quite unjustified, and bespeaks a kind of presumption. One who takes this view will only be persuaded to modify it when a certain line of thought begins to make a strong impression on him—namely when he is ready to say: “The wise guidance of spiritual Powers has given me certain faculties. It has not bestowed these faculties on me for me to leave them unemployed, but rather that I may put them to use. The wisdom of the guidance is to be seen in the fact that seeds have been planted in me of a higher state of consciousness; and I fail to understand the guidance aright if I do not regard it as a duty to set before me the high ideal: that whatever can become manifest to man through the development of his spiritual powers shall become so manifest.” When such a thought has taken strong enough hold, then the mistrust that was felt of any training for the attainment of a higher state of consciousness shall disappear.

[ 4 ] Misgiving can however arise on another account. The development of inner faculties of the soul, someone might feel, implies an intrusion into man's most hidden holy of holies. It involves a change in his whole nature and character, and the method by which the change is to be wrought can obviously not be thought out by the person concerned. Only one who knows the path from actual experience can tell him how he is to reach a higher world; and in applying to such a person for help, he is permitting that person to exercise an influence over the innermost holy of holies of his soul. Nor will this scruple be met if the means whereby the higher state of consciousness is to be attained are set forth in a book. For it makes little difference whether one receives instruction by word of mouth or whether someone who has knowledge of these means has written them in a book and one reads them there. There are moreover among those who possess the requisite knowledge some who think it inadmissible ever to entrust the knowledge to a book. These persons will generally also regard with disapproval all communications to others of truths concerning the spiritual world. To hold such a view in the present epoch of mankind's evolution must, however, be described as out of date. Only up to appoint, it is true, can the means to be employed for higher development be communicated. But if the pupil will apply himself diligently to what is given, he will be able to reach a stage in development whence he can find the way for himself. From all that he has gone through so far, he will obtain a right idea of his further path—and indeed he can do so in no other way.

On all these various grounds misgivings may arise in relation to the path of spiritual knowledge. They disappear, however, when one begins to grasp the true nature of the path of development which is set forth in the school of spiritual training appropriate to our age. Of this path we will now proceed to tell, hinting only briefly, as occasion arises, at other methods.

[ 5 ] The training in question provides one who has the will to seek higher development with instructions that he can follow and so bring about the necessary changes in his soul. Anything like an unwarranted intrusion into the individuality of the pupil could only come into question if the teacher were himself to effect the change by methods of which the pupil was quite unconscious. But a training for spiritual development that is rightly adapted for our times will never employ such methods, turning the pupil into a blind instrument for his own development. It offers him instructions, and the pupil carries them out. As and when there is occasion to do so, it explains to him why this or that instruction is given. The acceptance of the instructions, and their observance, have no need to rest on blind faith. Blind faith should indeed be altogether excluded. If we have studied the nature of the human soul, in so far as it shows itself to ordinary self-observation unassisted by spiritual training, then on learning of the measures recommended we can ask ourselves: What effect will these have on the life of the soul? Before any training is begun, this question, if approached with a healthy and unbiased mind, can receive adequate answer. For it is perfectly possible, before setting out to follow the recommendations, to form a clear and true conception of how they work. Naturally, we cannot have actual experience of their working until we have embarked on the training. But here too we shall find we can accompany the experience all the time with understanding, provided only we are free from preconceived ideas and bring healthy good sense to bear on each step we take. And a genuine spiritual science will in these days recommend for development only such means as will stand that test. Whoever is prepared to enter upon such a training and will not allow himself to be led away by any mistaken prepossession into an attitude of mere blind credulity, will soon find that all misgivings disappear. Objections he may hear others raise against a systematic training for the attainment of a higher state of consciousness will not disturb him in the least.

[ 6 ] Even for those who are endowed with the inner ripeness of soul which can lead them sooner or later to a self-awakening of the organs of spiritual perception—even for such, training is not superfluous; on the contrary, they have particular need for it. For there are few instances where such a person does not have to go down many a dubious by-path before he arrives at self-initiation. The training will spare him this. It will lead him straight forward on the right path. Where self-initiation occurs, it is due to the fact that the soul reached the necessary maturity in former lives. It may easily happen that the person has a dim feeling of his own ripeness, and this makes him disinclined to submit to training. The feeling may give rise to a kind of unconscious pride which hinders him from putting his trust even in a properly ordered school for spiritual training. Or it may be that the more advanced stage of soul may remain hidden in him until a certain age of life and only then begin to manifest. A training could in such an instance be the very means of bringing the ripeness to manifestation, and were the person to debar himself altogether from such training, it might well be that at the time when it should manifest, the faculty he possesses would still remain hidden and emerge again only in one of his later incarnations.

[ 7 ] In this matter of spiritual training, it is important not to let certain fairly obvious misunderstandings gain ground. People may, for instance, have the idea that the training is going to make a great difference to a person's whole conduct and behavior. But there is no question of giving the pupil general precepts on how to lead his life; he will be told of things he can do, inwardly in his soul, which, if he carries them out, will give him the possibility of beholding the supersensible. As for his other activities in life—activities that have nothing to do with observation of the supersensible—these are not directly influenced at all by what he undertakes in the course of training. What happens is simply that the pupil acquires, in addition to them, the gift of supersensible perception. This new activity is as different from the ordinary avocations of life as waking is from sleeping. The one cannot be allowed to disturb the other in the very least. Should anyone be inclined, for instance, to intersperse the ordinary course of his life with impressions that reached him from the supersensible, he would be like a sick person whose sleep was continually being interrupted by unwholesome periods of wakefulness. The trained observer will have it in his own control to evoke at will the state of consciousness wherein he can behold supersensible reality. Indirectly, the training is of course not unrelated to the general conduct and habit of life, inasmuch as anyone lacking in ethical stability and good feeling will either be unable to see into the supersensible, or if he can, it will do him harm. Very much therefore of the instruction that is given to lead the pupil to vision of the supersensible, contributes at the same time to the ennobling of his daily life. And besides this, through being able to see into the supersensible world, the pupil learns to recognize higher moral impulses that hold good also for the physical world. For there are ethical laws that can only be learned in higher worlds.

Another misunderstanding is possible. It might be imagined that some activity of the soul, intended to lead to supersensible cognition, were in some way connected with changes in the physical organism. As a matter of fact, such activities have nothing whatever to do with anything in man that belongs to the province of physiology, or to other aspects of natural science. They are processes purely of soul and spirit, as far removed from the physical as are ordinary healthy thinking and perceiving. The way in which they take place in the soul is no different from the way in which we think our thoughts or come to our decisions. As much or as little as healthy thinking has to do with the body, just so much and so little have the activities of a genuine training for supersensible knowledge. Any kind of training that affects man in a different way is no true spiritual training, but a caricature of it.

It may be assumed that the training now to be described fulfills the conditions we have seen to be necessary. It is only because supersensible knowledge is something that engages all man's faculties of soul that it might seem to demand overwhelming changes in him. Yet in reality it simply amounts to this: instructions are given which, if followed, will enable the pupil to have moments in his life when he can behold the supersensible.

[ 8 ] The ascent to a supersensible state of consciousness has necessarily to take its start from ordinary waking consciousness. The pupil is living in this consciousness before he sets out on the ascent, and the school of spiritual training holds out to him means whereby he may be led forth from it. Among the first of the means put forward in the school which concerns us here, are activities that are already familiar to the pupil in his everyday consciousness. The most significant of them are in fact those that consist in still and silent activities of the soul. The pupil has to give himself up entirely to certain thought-pictures. These are of such a kind as to have in them an awakening power; they awaken hidden faculties of the soul. They differ therefore from the thought-pictures that belong to everyday life, whose purpose it is to portray some external object. Indeed the more faithfully these do so, the truer they are; it belongs to their very nature to be true in this sense. The thought-pictures to which the soul has to devote itself for the purpose of spiritual training have no such part to play. Their function is not to depict an external object; they are formed in such a way as to have in themselves the property of awakening the soul. The best for the purpose are symbolic pictures. Others, however, can also be used. For the actual content is, in fact, of little importance, the main point being that the pupil shall direct the whole power of his soul upon the thought-picture and have nothing else whatever in his consciousness. Whereas in everyday life the soul's powers are distributed among many things, and thought-pictures are continually coming and going, in spiritual training everything depends on the entire concentration of the soul upon one idea of thought-picture, placed, by an act of will, in the very center of consciousness. It is for this reason that symbolic thought-pictures do better than those that depict external objects or activities; for the latter have their point of support in the external world, so that the soul is not driven to rely upon itself alone, as is the case with the symbolic thought-pictures which have been built up by the soul's own exertions. The essential thing is, not what the picture represents, but that it is formed and imagined in such a way as to set the soul entirely free from dependence on the physical.

[ 9 ] It will help us to form a clear conception of what this absorption in a thought-picture implies, if we call up before us the concept of memory. Say we have been looking at a tree and have then turned away so that we no longer see it. We can call up before our mind's eye the thought -picture or mental image of the tree. This thought-picture that we have when the tree is not in view is a memory of the tree. Suppose we hold on to this memory; we let our soul, as it were, come to rest in the memory-picture and try to shut out every other thought. Our soul is now immersed in the memory-picture of the tree. There you have an instance of absorption in a thought-picture—one that reproduces an outer object perceived by the senses. If we now do the same with a thought-picture we ourselves have placed into the field of consciousness, entirely of our will, we shall in time become able to achieve the desired end.

[ 10 ] In order to make this quite clear, let us take an example of absorption of the soul in a symbolic thought-picture. The first thing to be done is to build it up, and this we may do in the following way. We think of a plant, how it has its roots in the soil, how it sends out leaves one after another, and blossoms at length into flower. Now we imagine a man standing beside the plant. The thought lights up in our mind that the man has characteristics and capabilities which can truthfully be called more perfect than are those of the plant. He can move about at will, he can go this way or that way as he feels inclined; whereas the plant is rooted to the spot where it is growing. We may, however, then go on to think to ourselves: Yes, that is so, the human being is more perfect than the plant; but I also find qualities in him, the absence of which in the plant makes it appear to me more perfect in other respects than the human being. For he is filled with desires and passions, and these he sometimes follows in his behavior, with the result that he goes astray, falls into error. When I look at the plant, I see how it follows the pure laws of growth from leaf to leaf, how it opens its blossom, calmly and tranquilly, to the chaste rays of the sun. I perceive therefore that while man is in some respects more perfect than the plant, he buys this comparative perfection at the price of letting impulses and desires and passions have their seat within him, instead of what appear to be the pure forces at work in the plant. Then we can go on to picture to ourselves how the green sap flows right through the plant, and how this green sap is the expression of the pure, unimpassioned laws of growth. And if we then think of the red blood as it flows through the veins and arteries of man, we find in this red blood the expression of impulses and desires and passions.

We then let this whole thought live in our soul. Carrying it a little farther, we call to mind how man is after all capable of development; he possesses higher faculties of soul, by means of which he can refine and purify his impulses and passions. We recognize that thereby the baser element in them is purged away, and they are re-born on a higher level. The blood can then be thought of as the expression of these purified and chastened impulses and passions. And now we turn our thought, let us say, to a rose. We look in spirit at the rose and say to ourselves: In the red sap of the rose, I see the green color of the plant-sap changed to red; and the red rose follows still, no less than the green leaf, the pure, unimpassioned laws of growth. I can let the red of the rose be for me a symbol of a blood that is the expression of chastened impulses and passions which have thrown off their baser part and resemble in their purity the forces that are at work in the rose. And then we try, not merely to go on turning such thoughts over and over in our mind, but to let them come to life in our heart and feeling. A sensation of bliss can come over us as we contemplate the pure and dispassionate nature of the growing plant; and we feel obliged to admit that certain higher perfections have to be purchased by the acquisition at the same time of impulses and desires. This thought can change the bliss that we experienced before into a solemn feeling; and then a sense of liberation can come over us, a feeling of true happiness when we give ourselves up to the thought of the red blood that can become the bearer--even as the red sap in the rose—of experiences that are inwardly pure. In pursuing thus a train of thought that serves to build up such a symbolic picture, it is important to accompany the thought all the time with feeling. Then, having entered right into the experience of the thoughts and feelings, we can re-cast them in the following symbolic picture.

Imagine you see before you a black cross. Let this black cross be for you a symbol for the baser elements that have been case out of man's impulses and passions; and at the point where the beams of the cross meet, picture to yourself seven resplendent bright red roses arranged in a circle. Let these roses symbolize for you a blood that is the expression of passions and impulses that have undergone purification.¹ Some such symbolic thought-picture shall the pupil of spiritual training call up before his soul, and he can do this in the same way as was explained above for a memory-picture. Devoting himself to it in deep, inner contemplation, he will find that the picture has power to call his soul awake. He must try to banish for the time being everything else from his mind. The symbol in question, and that alone, should now hover before him in spirit, as livingly as ever possible.

There is meaning in the fact that the symbolic picture has not simply been put forward as a picture that has in itself as an awakening power, but that it was first built up by a sequence of thoughts concerning plant and man. What such a picture can do for the pupil depends, before he uses it as an object of meditation. Were he to picture it without having gone through the construction of it in his own soul, it would remain cold and would have far less effect, for it is the preparation that endows it with power to enlighten the soul. The pupil should however not be recalling the preparatory steps while engaged in the meditation, but have then merely the symbolic picture hovering before him in spirit, quick with life—letting only the feelings that were aroused by the preparatory chain of thought echo on within him. In this way does the symbolic picture come to be a sign, appropriate to and accompanying the inner experience.

The efficacy if the experience depends upon how long the pupil is able to continue in it . The longer he can do so, without allowing any other idea to disturb the meditation, the greater its value for him. It is, however, also good if, apart from the times that he devotes to the meditation as such, he will frequently build up the picture all over again, letting the thoughts and feelings rise up in him in the way we have described, that the mood of the experience may not pale. The more ready the pupil is patiently to continue renewing the picture in this way, the greater significance will it have for his soul. (In my book Knowledge in the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, other subjects are suggested for meditations on the coming-into-being and passing-away of a plant, on the forces of growth that lie dormant in the seed, on the forms of crystals, etc. In the present book, the intention has been merely to illustrate, by means of an example, the nature of meditation.)

[ 11 ] A symbolic picture such as we have here described does not represent some external object that Nature has produced; and to this very fact it owes its power to awaken capabilities that belong entirely to the soul. Some persons may beg to differ! They may, for instance, say: Agreed, the symbolic picture as a whole is not to be found in Nature, but all its details are borrowed from Nature—the black color, the roses, and so forth; these have every one of them been first perceived by the senses. If any reader be disturbed in his mind by such an objection, let him reflect that these component parts of the picture, which are undoubtedly derived from sense-perception, do not in themselves lead to the awakening of higher faculties in the soul; the awakening is brought about solely by the way in which the single details have been put together to form the picture. For that, no prototype is to be found in the outer world.

[ 12 ] The endeavor has here been made, taking a particular symbolic picture as an example, to give a clear account of how meditation can take its course. For the purpose of spiritual training, a great variety of pictures of this kind can be used, and they can be built up in many different ways. Sentences, formulae, even single words, may also be given as subjects for meditation. In every instance the aim will be to wrest the soul free from sense-perception and rouse it to an activity for which the outer impressions of the physical senses are without significance, the whole import and aim of the activity being to unfold dormant faculties of the soul. Meditations that are directed wholly to certain feelings or emotions are also possible; they are indeed particularly valuable for the soul. Take the feeling of joy. In the ordinary course of life we can rejoice over something we see taking place. Suppose a man who has a healthily developed life of feeling observes someone performing an action that is inspired by real goodness of heart. He will be pleased, he will rejoice in the kind deed. And it may be, he will then to on to ponder over a deed of this nature in somewhat the following way. A deed that proceeded from kindness of heart, he may think to himself, is one in which the doer follows, not his own interests, but the interests of his fellow-man; I may therefore call it a “good” deed. But now he can go further. He can turn right away form the particular action that he observed and that gave him such pleasure, and create for himself the comprehensive idea of loving-kindness, “goodness of heart.” He can picture to himself how it arises in the soul, namely through the person's absorbing, as it were, the interest of his fellow, making them his own. And he can rejoice in this moral conception of kindness. The joy that he now has is no longer over this or that event in the physical world, it is joy in an idea as such. If we try to let joy of this kind live on in our soul for a considerable time we shall actually be practicing meditation upon a feeling. It is not the mere idea that will awaken the inner faculties, but he prolonged surrender of the soul to a feeling that is not just due to a particular external impression.

Supersensible cognition being able to penetrate more deeply into the real nature of things, feelings evoked by spiritual knowledge can be imparted and used for meditation. These will be all the more efficacious in unfolding the inner faculties of the soul. Necessary as this enhanced development will be for the higher stages of the pupil's training, he should nevertheless understand that meditations upon simple feelings and emotions such as the one concerning goodness of heart, if diligently carried out, can take him very far. Since people differ in nature and character, the means that prove most useful for individual pupils will naturally vary. As to the length of time that should be given to meditation, the thing of prime importance is that while engaged in it, the pupil shall remain calm and collected; its efficacy indeed depends on this. In the matter of time he should also be careful not to overshoot the mark. The exercises themselves will help him to acquire a certain inner tact which will teach him how far he may rightly go in this respect.

[ 13 ] The pupil will as a rule have to carry out such exercises for quite a long while before he himself is able to notice any result. Patience and perseverance are absolute essentials in spiritual training. Unless the pupil evokes these qualities within him, going through his exercises so quietly and so regularly that patience and perseverance may be said to constitute the fundamental mood of his soul, he will make little progress.

[ 14 ] It will be clear, from what has been said so far, that deep inner contemplation—meditation—is a means for the attainment of knowledge of higher worlds, and moreover that not just any thought-picture can be taken for meditation, but only one that has been built up in the way described.

[ 15 ] The path that has been indicated leads in the fist place to what may be called “Imaginative cognition”—the first stage, that is, of higher cognition. The cognition that depends upon sense-perception and upon the elaboration of sense-perceptions by an intellect that is bound to the senses—“objective cognition.” Above it are the various stages of higher cognition, the Imaginative being the first. The word Imagination may well raise distrust in the minds of those who take it to mean some idea that is engendered by mere fancy—some “imaginary” idea or mental picture unrelated to reality. In spiritual science however, Imaginative cognition is to be understood as a cognition that results from the soul's having attained to a supersensible state of consciousness. What is perceived in this condition of consciousness are spiritual facts and spiritual beings whereto the senses have no access. Since this first supersensible consciousness is awakened in the pupil by his giving himself up in meditation to symbolic pictures or “imaginations,” it may be termed “Imaginative consciousness” and the cognition connected with it “Imaginative cognition”—meaning by this a cognition that is able to have knowledge of what is real in another sense than are the facts and objects perceived with the physical senses. The content of the thought-picture in the imaginative meditation is not the important thing; what is important is the faculty of soul that is thereby developed.

[ 16 ] Another very understandable objection may be put forward to the employment of symbolic mental pictures. The building up of such pictures, it may be alleged, is carried out by a dreamlike thinking that makes use of arbitrary fancy, and the result can only be of questionable value. There is, however, no occasion to harbor any such misgiving in regard to the thought-pictures which form the basis of a right and sound spiritual training. Such thought-pictures are expressly chosen with this end in view—namely, that the relation they may have to external reality can be disregarded and their value sought purely in the power with which they work upon the soul when attention has been withdrawn from the outer world, when all sense-impressions and even all the thoughts the mind can entertain in response to sense-impressions have been eliminated.

If we want to form a clear and true picture of the process of meditation, we shall find it helpful to compare it with sleep. On the one hand it resembles sleep, while on the other hand it is the very opposite. For it is a sleep which in comparison with ordinary day-consciousness gives signs of a higher awakeness. The truth of the matter is that, having to concentrate upon one particular symbolic or other thought-picture, the soul is obliged to summon up from its depths much stronger forces than it is accustomed to employ in ordinary life or for the ordinary process of cognition. Its inner activity is enhanced thereby. The soul liberates itself from the body, even as it does in sleep. Only, instead of going over into unconsciousness, it now has living experience of a world it did not know before. Thus, the soul is in a condition which, although in its liberation from the body it may be likened to sleep, has nevertheless to be described as an enhanced awakeness in comparison with ordinary consciousness. The soul comes in this way to a living experience of itself in its inmost, true and independent being, whereas in ordinary waking life, when its forces are less strongly developed, it is only with the help of the body that the soul attains consciousness at all. It does not under these conditions have any conscious experience of itself, becoming conscious only in the picture which, like a reflection from a mirror, the body—or, one should rather say, the bodily processes conjure up before it.

[ 17 ] The symbolic pictures that are built upon in the way described cannot of course be said to have relation as yet to anything real in the spiritual world. Their purpose is to detach the soul from sense-perception, and from the instrument of the brain with which in ordinary life the intellect is bound up. This detachment cannot be effected until man feels; Now I am forming a thought-picture by the use of forces that need not assistance from the senses or from the brain. The very first experience that befalls the pupil on his path is this liberation from the physical organs. He can then say to himself, My consciousness is not extinguished when I abandon sense-perceptions and abandon also my ordinary intellectual thinking; I can lift myself right out of this thinking, and I then feel myself a living spiritual being, side by side with what I was before. Here then we have the first purely spiritual experience: the pupil becomes aware of himself as an I, an Ego, purely in the soul and spirit. A new self has arisen out of the self that is bound up with the physical senses and the physical intellect. Had the pupil freed himself from the world of the senses and the intellect without deep inner meditation, he would have fallen into the void of unconsciousness. Naturally, he already had in him this being of pure soul and spirit before he practiced meditation, but it had then no instruments whereby it could observe in the spiritual world. It was not unlike a physical body that has no eyes to see with, no ears to hear with. The force that has been expended in achieving meditation has created organs of soul and spirit, has called them forth out of what was hitherto unorganized soul-and-spirit being.

What the pupil has in this way himself created, is also what he first perceives. Therefore his first experience is a kind of self-perception. It is in accord with the whole nature of spiritual training that, thanks to the self-education that he is undergoing, man is at this stage fully conscious that he is perceiving himself in the picture-worlds (Imaginations) which appear as a result of the exercises. These pictures seem to the pupil to be alive, and in a new world; yet he must recognize that, to begin with, they are nothing else than the reflection of his own being, strengthened as this now is by reason of the exercises he has carried out. Moreover not only has the pupil to come to a right conclusion on this point; he must in addition develop such a strong will that he is able at any moment to wipe out the pictures, to dismiss them altogether from consciousness. He must have it in his power to exercise authority over them in perfect freedom and confidence. And he will be able to do this, provided the training has been on sound lines. Otherwise, the pupil would be in the same plight in the realm of spiritual experience, as a man would be in the physical world if, when he turned to look at some object, his eye were to remain fettered to that object so that he was quite unable to look away from it. There is however one exception. One group of inner picture-experiences must not be blotted out at this stage of spiritual training. It is a group that relates to the heart and kernel of the pupil's own being; in the Imaginations of this group he is made acquainted with the very ground of his being, with that within him which passes through repeated earth lives. At this moment in his development he begins to feel—as a direct experience—the reality of repeated earth lives. In respect of everything else that he experiences in this realm there must be the freedom of which we spoke.

Only after the pupil has acquired the faculty of wiping out the Imaginations, does he approach the real external world of the spirit. In place of the pictures that have been wiped out, something else appears, and in this the pupil begins to attain knowledge of spiritual reality. His feeling of himself, from being dim and vague, reaches a clarity and definition hitherto unknown. And he has now to go further; he has to advance from this perception of himself to observation of the world of soul and spirit that surrounds him. This he will be able to do when he directs his inner experience in a way that will now be indicated.

[ 18 ] To begin with, the soul is weak over against all that offers itself for perception in the world of soul and spirit. The pupil will already have had to expend considerable energy of soul in order to hold fast in meditation the symbolic or other pictures which he built up out of the data of the world of sense. But if he wants in addition to attain to actual observation in a higher world, he will have to do more than this. He must be able to abide in a condition wherein not only the stimuli of the external world no longer influence his soul, but even the Imaginative thought-pictures are completely obliterated from his consciousness. For the moment has now arrived when that which has been formed and fashioned within him by dint of deep inner concentration of soul can come to view. Everything now depends upon the pupil's having sufficient inner energy of soul to allow it to be actually seen by him spiritually; it must not escape his notice, as invariably happens when the forces of the soul are too little developed. The soul-and-spirit organism that has come to development within him and that the pupil has now to apprehend in self-perception is frail and evanescent. Many and serious are the disturbances that come from the outer world of sense and from memories of the same, and that persist in the mind even when the pupil does his utmost to shut them out. Nor is it only the disturbances of which we can be aware that come into question; still more serious are those of which we are totally unaware in ordinary life.

The very conditions however under which the life of man takes its course make possible here a transition stage. What the soul is unable to achieve when awake on account of these disturbances from the physical world, it can achieve in sleep. One who devotes himself to meditation will, if sufficiently attentive, begin to notice something new about his sleep. He will be aware that he is not always fully asleep the whole time, but that there are moments when his soul, although he is asleep, is nevertheless active in some way. At such times, the natural processes of sleep keep away the influences of the external world which he is not yet strong enough to keep away by his own efforts while awake. And now that the exercises in concentration and meditation have begun to take effect, the soul is released from complete unconsciousness during sleep and is able to eel the world of soul and spirit. This can come home to the pupil in either of two ways. He may be well aware during his sleep: “I am now in another world,” or he may have the memory when he wakes up: “I have been in another world.” A greater inner energy is of course required for the first way than for the second, which will accordingly for a beginner be the more frequent of the two. And it may be that gradually the point is reached when the pupil, on awakening, has the impression: During the whole time that I have been asleep I have been in another world; I emerged from it only when I awoke. Moreover his memory of the beings and facts of this outer world will grow more and more definite. This will mean that the pupil has attained in one or another form what may be called “continuity of consciousness” (the persistence of consciousness during sleep.) There is no implication that he will always retain consciousness during sleep. He will have made good progress in this direction if, while in general he sleeps as others do, there are times when during sleep he can be consciously giving into a world of soul and spirit; or again if, when awake, he can look back upon short periods of such consciousness.

It must not be forgotten that this is only a transition state. It is good for his spiritual training that the pupil should go through this stage, but he must not imagine that it can afford him conclusive evidence in regard to the world of soul and spirit. He is, in this condition, still uncertain and cannot yet rely on his perceptions. Thanks however to experiences of this nature he does gradually gather power to attain the like result also in waking life—that is, to hold off the disturbing influences of the physical world upon his senses and upon his inner life, and so attain that “observing” in soul and spirit where no impressions enter by way of the senses, where the brain-bound intellect is silent, and where even those thought-pictures are banished from consciousness, upon which he had been meditating in preparing for seeing in the spirit. (Things published in the name of spiritual science should invariably be the outcome of spiritual observations made in a fully wide-awake condition.)

[ 19 ] There are two inner experiences, important in the course of spiritual training. The one enables the pupil to say to himself: If I now turn aside from every impression that can reach me from the surrounding physical world, I do not, when I look within, behold there a being that is totally inactive, but a being that is conscious of itself in a world of which I can know nothing as long as I only lay myself open to impressions that come to me through sense-perception and through everyday thinking. At this moment, the pupil can have the feeling that he has himself given birth to a new being that is there within him as the very heart and kernel of his soul, a being possessed moreover of entirely different qualities from those that have been his up to now.

The second experience is as follows. The pupil discovers that he can now have beside him the self he has been hitherto, as if it were another and distinct self. He is in a sense confronted by the being within which he has until now been confined. He feels he is temporarily outside what he has hitherto been accustomed to call his very own self, his I. It is as if he were living, with perfect calm and composure, in two selves. The first of them he knew before; the second self now confronts the first as a new-born entity. Moreover he feels the first becoming in a way self-subsistent, independent of the second, rather as man's body has an independent existence of its own apart from this first self. This is an experience of very great moment; for the pupil knows now what it means to live in that higher world which, with the help of his training, he has been endeavoring to reach.

[ 20 ] The second, the new-born self, can now be brought to perceive in the spiritual world. Within it there can unfold for the spiritual world what the sense-organs are for the physical. When this development has reached the required stage, the pupil will be able to do more than feel himself as a new-born I. Just as he perceives the physical world by means of his senses, so will he now begin to perceive around him spiritual facts and spiritual beings. Here we have then a third significant experience. In order to pass through this stage successfully, the pupil will have to reckon with the fact that along with the strengthening of the soul's forces, self-love and self-conceit begin to assume proportions that are quite unknown in ordinary life. It would argue a complete lack of understanding, were we to imagine that this was no more than the ordinary kind of selfishness and self-love. Self-love grows so strong at this stage of the pupil's development, that it can actually seem to him like a force of Nature working within him, and a strenuous disciple of the will is required to et the better of this prodigious self-conceit. The latter does not come as a result of spiritual training. This self-conceit is always there in man, but only when the pupil comes to have real experience of the Spirit is it raised up into consciousness. Hand in hand therefore with spiritual training must always go the training of the will. The pupil is conscious of a tremendous urge to feel blissfully happy in the world which he has created within him. What he must now be able to do is to wipe out, as described above, the very thing he has taken such pains to achieve. Having reached the Imaginative world, he must there contrive to extinguish self. In opposition to this self-effacement are ranged within him the excessively strong impulses of self-opinion and self-conceit. It might easily be imagined that exercises for spiritual training were something quite apart and had nothing whatever to do with moral development. To this one can only reply that the moral force needed to overcome this self-conceit cannot possibly be acquired unless the whole ethical tone and disposition of the pupil be raised to a proportionate level. Progress in spiritual training is out of the question, unless progress be made at the same time in the ethical sphere. Lack of moral strength makes conquest of self-conceit impossible . The allegation that genuine spiritual training is not ipso facto moral training is entirely mistaken

Only one who has no personal knowledge of such experience could here interpose the question: How are we to know, when we think we have spiritual perceptions, that we are facing realities and not the mere creations of our fancy—visions, hallucinations and the like? As a matter of ace, a pupil who has reached the above stage in proper spiritual training can distinguish between the figments of his own fancy and spiritual reality, just as a person of normal intelligence is able to distinguish between the mental picture of a hot iron and a real one he touches with his hand; he knows the difference by virtue of a sound and healthy experience of life. So too in the spiritual world, life itself provides the touchstone. In the world of the senses, we know that if we imagine a hot iron, then however hot we picture it, it will not burn our fingers; so does the pupil of Spirit know whether he is only imagining that he confronts a spiritual fact or whether real facts and real beings are making their impressions on the organs of spiritual perception that have been awakened in him. The instructions he will need to follow during his training to save him from falling a victim to illusion in this regard will be set forth in the following pages.

[ 21 ] It is of the utmost importance that by the time the pupil becomes conscious of a new-born self within him, his whole character and morale shall have reached a high level. For it is like this. It belongs to man's I or Ego, to control his sensations and feelings and ideas, also his impulses, desires and passions. Perceptions, mental pictures and ideas cannot be simply let loose in the soul; they must e regulated by the exercise of a thoughtful discretion. The I, the self, administers the laws of thought, thereby bringing order into man's thinking and ideation. It is the same with his desires and impulses, his inclinations and passions. These are guided and controlled by his moral principles. Thus the self, by the exercise of ethically sound judgment and discretion, becomes man's guide in this domain. When now we have succeeded in drawing out of our ordinary self a higher self, the former will become to some extent independent. But it will at the same time be deprived of the energies now devoted to the higher self. Let us see what will happen if a pupil wants to give birth to his higher self, when he has not yet developed adequate ability or certainty in his application of the laws of thought nor in his power of judgment and discretion. He cannot leave to his ordinary self any more ability in the field of thought than he has hitherto developed. Should this not suffice, then his everyday self, continuing on its own, will exhibit a thinking that is disordered, confused and fantastic. Since for such a person the new-born self can only be weak, the lower self, confused as it is, will gain control over his beholding in the supersensible, and he will fail to show discrimination in regard to what he observes there. Had he developed sufficiently his faculty for logical thinking, there would have been no difficulty in allowing his everyday self to assume independence.

The same applies in the realm of ethics. If a pupil has not acquired firmness in moral judgment, if he is not sufficiently master of his inclinations, his impulses and passions, he will be conferring independence on his everyday self when it is still in a condition of relative subjection to them. It can happen that such a person will not recognize in reference to his supersensible experience the same need to conform to a high standard of truth as he does in respect of what the outer physical world presents to his consciousness. Should he thus have a lax regard or truth, he could easily take for spiritual reality all manner of things that are nothing but figments of his own fancy. What is needed is that, before the higher self begins to be active in its quest for knowledge of the supersensible, the pupil's sense of truth be infused with a firmness of moral judgment and with a stability of character and of conscience, that have been developed in the self now left behind. This is not by any means said with intention to frighten people away from spiritual training; it is nevertheless a consideration that needs to be taken very seriously.

[ 22 ] If the pupil is firmly resolved to leave nothing undone that will help to make his first self reliable in the strict performance of its functions, then he has no need to be afraid of this event that comes as a result of spiritual training—the liberation, that is, of a second self for attainment of knowledge in the supersensible. He must however not forget that self-deception is apt to be particularly strong when one is deeming oneself “ripe” for some new step. In the school of spiritual training we have here described, the pupil's life of thought undergoes a development which precludes the danger, so very often alleged, of being led astray. Thanks to the development of the life of thought, the pupil is able to undergo all necessary experiences of the inner life in such a way that there is no fear of their being accompanied by delusive and mischievous creations of the fancy. Where adequate development of the life of thought has been lacking, the experiences can well evoke serious uncertainty in the soul of the pupil. If the pupil is prepared in the way here recommended, he will acquire knowledge of the new experiences in much the same way as a man of healthy mind gets to know the objects he perceives in the physical world. Development of the life of thought tends rather to make him an observer of what he himself is experiencing, whereas without it he is absorbed in the experience—as it were, unreflective and unheeding.

[ 23 ] In a proper school of spiritual training certain qualities are set forth that require to be cultivated by one who desires to find the path to the higher worlds. First and foremost, the pupil must have control over his thoughts (in their course and sequence.) over his will, and over his feelings. The control has to be acquired by means of exercises , and these are planned with two ends in view. On the one hand, the soul has to become so firm, so secure and balanced that it will retain these qualities when a second self is born. And on the other hand, the pupil has to endow this second self, from the start, with strength and steadfastness.

[ 24 ] The quality that thinking needs above all is objectivity. In the world of the physical senses life itself is our great teacher in this respect. Let a man fling his thoughts hither and thither in a purely arbitrary manner, he will find himself obliged to suffer life to correct him if he does not want to come into conflict with it. He must of necessity bring his thinking into correspondence with the facts. But when he turns his attention away from the physical world, this compulsory correction fails him; and if his thinking has not then the ability to be its own corrector, it will inevitably follow will-o'-the-wisps. The pupil of the spirit must therefore undertake exercises in thinking in order that his thinking may be able to mark out its own path and goal. Stability, and the capacity to adhere firmly to a once chosen subject, are what the pupil's thinking has to acquire. There is therefore no occasion for the exercises to deal with remote or complicated objects, much rather should they have reference to simple objects that are ready to hand. Whoever succeeds in directing his thought, for at least five minutes daily, and for months on end, to some quite commonplace object—say, for example, a needle or a pencil—and in shutting out during those five minutes all thoughts that have no connection with the object, will have made very good progress in this direction. (A fresh object may be chosen each day, or one may be continued for several days.) Even a person who considers himself a trained intellectual thinker should not be too proud to qualify for spiritual training by an exercise of this simple nature. For when we are riveting our thought for a considerable time upon something that is entirely familiar, we may be quite sure that our thinking is in accord with reality. If we ask ourselves: what is a lead pencil made of? How are the different materials prepared? How are they put together? When were lead pencils invented? And so on, we can be more sure of our thoughts being consistent with reality than if we were to ponder the question of the descent of man—or, let us say, of the meaning of life. Simple exercises in thinking are a far better preparation for forming commensurate conceptions of Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution than are complicated and learned ideas. As to our thinking, what is important at this stage is not the object or event to which it is directed, but that it should be strong and vigorous and to the point. If it has been educated to be so in reference so simple physical realities that lie open to view, it will acquire the tendency to be so even when it finds itself no longer under the control of the physical world and its laws. The pupil will find he gets rid in this way of any tendency he had before to loose and extravagant thinking.

[ 25 ] As if in the world of thought, so also in the sphere of the will, the self has to become master. Here too, as long as we remain in the world of the physical senses, life itself may be said to be our master. Some vital need asserts itself and the will feels impelled to satisfy the need. But one who undergoes a higher training has to acquire the habit of strict obedience to what he tells himself to do on his own initiative. In learning this he will be less and less inclined to cherish pointless desires. Dissatisfaction and instability in the life of will come from setting one's heart on some aim, of the realization of which one has formed no clear notion. Dissatisfaction of this kind can bring the whole inner life into disorder at the moment when a higher self is ready to come forth from the soul. A good exercise for the will is, every day for months on end, to give oneself the command: Today you are to do this, at this particular hour. One will gradually manage to fix the hour and the nature of the task so as to render the command perfectly possible to carry out. In this way we rise above that deplorable state of mind which finds expression in words such as: I would like to do this, I wish I could do that—when all the time there is no real expectation of fulfillment. A great poet made a prophetess say: “Him I love who craves for the impossible”² And the same poet says in his own name: “To live in the Idea is to treat the impossible as thought it were possible.”³ Such words should however not be quoted as refuting the above recommendation. For the demand that Goethe and his prophetess (Manto) are making can only be met by one who has first educated himself in the achievement of desires that are possible of fulfillment—in order then, by dint of his strengthened will, to be able to treat the “impossible” in such a way as to change it by his will into the possible.

[ 26 ] Passing on now to the world of feeling, the pupil must succeed in reaching a certain equanimity of soul. For this he will need to have under his control all outward expression of pleasure or pain, of joy or sorrow. Such advice will be certain to meet with prejudice. Surely, if he is not to rejoice over what is joyful, not to sorrow over what is sorrowful, the pupil will become utterly indifferent to the life that is going on around him! But this is not at all what is meant. The pupil shall by all means rejoice over what if joyful and sorrow over what is sorrowful. It is the outward expression of joy and sorrow, of pleasure and pain that he must learn to control. If he honestly tries to attain this, he will soon discover that he does not grow less, but actually more sensitive than before to everything in his environment that can arouse emotions of joy or of pain. If the pupil is really to succeed in cultivating this control it will undoubtedly involve keeping close watch upon himself for a long time. He must not be slow to enter with fullness of feeling into pleasure and pain, but must be able to do so without losing self-control and giving involuntary expression to it. What he has to suppress is not the pain—that is justified—but the involuntary weeping; not the horror at a base action, but the outburst of blind fury; not the caution in face of danger, but the giving way to panic—which does no good whatever.

Only by the practice of an exercise of this kind can the pupil attain the inner poise and quiet that he will have need of when the time comes for the higher self to be born in the soul, and more especially when this higher self becomes active there. Otherwise the soul may lead an unhealthy lie of its own alongside the higher self—like a kind of double. It is important not to fall a victim to self-deception in this manner. It may seem to many a pupil that he already possesses a good measure of equanimity in ordinary life and will not therefore need this exercise. In point of fact, such a one is doubly in need of it. A man may remain perfectly calm and composed in relation to the exigencies of everyday life, and then, when he rises into a higher world, exhibit a sad lack of poise—all the more so indeed, since the tendency to let himself go was there all the time, only suppressed. It must be clearly understood that what a pupil appears to have already of some attribute of the soul is a little account for spiritual training; what is far more important is that he should practice regularly and systematically the exercises he needs. Contradictory as such a statement may sound, it is true nevertheless. Say that life has endowed us with this or that virtue; for spiritual training it is the virtues we ourselves have cultivated that are of value. Are we by nature easily excitable, it is for us to rid ourselves of this excitability; are we by nature calm and imperturbable, we must bestir ourselves to bring it about through our own self-education that the impressions we receive from without awake in us the right response. A man who cannot laugh has just ad little control over his life as a man who without self-control is perpetually giving way to laughter.

[ 27 ] It will be a further help to the education of his thinking and feeling, if the pupil acquire a virtue that I will call positiveness. A lovely legend is related of Christ Jesus. It tells how He is walking with a few other persons, and they pass by a dead dog. The other turn away from the revolting sight. Christ Jesus speaks admiringly of the beautiful teeth of the animal. One can train oneself to meet the world with the disposition of soul that this legend displays. The spurious, the bad and the ugly should not hinder us from finding, wherever they are present, the true, the good and the beautiful. Positiveness must not be confused lack of discrimination, or with an arbitrary shutting of one's eyes to what is bad, or false, or “good for nothing.” He who admires the “beautiful teeth” of a dead animal sees also the decaying body. The unsightly corpse does not, however, prevent him from seeing the beautiful teeth. We cannot deem a bad thing good or an error true; but we can take care not to be put off by the bad from seeing the good, nor by the false from seeing the true.

[ 28 ] The thinking, and together with it the willing, reaches a certain maturity if one tries never to let past experiences rob one of open-minded receptivity for new ones. To declare in the face of some new experience: “I never heard of such a thing, I don't believe it!” should make no sense at all to a pupil of the Spirit. Rather let him make the deliberate resolve, during a certain period of time to let every thing or being he encounters tell him something new. A breath of wind, a leaf falling from a tree, the prattle of a little child, can all teach us something, are we but ready to adopt a point of view to which we have perhaps not hitherto been accustomed. One can, it is true, carry this too far. We must not, at whatever age we have reached, put right out of our minds everything we have experienced hitherto. We have most decidedly to base our judgment of what confronts us now upon past experience. That is on the one side of the balance, but on the other there is the need for the pupil of the Spirit to be ready all the time for entirely new experiences; above all, to admit to himself the possibility that the new may contradict the old.

[ 29 ] These then are five qualities of soul the pupil has to acquire n the coursed of a right and proper training: control over the direction of his thoughts, control of his impulses of will, equanimity in the face of pleasure and pain, positiveness in his attitude to the world around him, readiness to meet life with an open mind. Lastly, when he has spent consecutive periods of time in training himself for the acquisition of these five qualities, the pupil will need to bring them into harmony in his soul. He will have to practice them in manifold combinations—two by two, three and one at a time, and so on, in order to establish harmony among them.²

[ 30 ] These exercises have been assigned a place in spiritual training, because when thoroughly and effectually carried out they have not only their more immediate result in the cultivation of the desired qualities, but indirectly a great deal more will follow from them that is of no less importance for the pupil on his path to the spiritual worlds. Whoever gives sufficient time and care to their practice will, while he is doing them, come up against many blemishes and shortcomings in his soul, and will moreover find in the exercises themselves the means of strengthening and stabilizing his thought life, as well as his life of feeling and indeed his whole character. He will undoubtedly need many more exercises, adapted to his own individual faculties, to his particular character and temperament. These will emerge when the above have been practiced in all thoroughness. One will indeed discover, as time goes on, that these six exercises give one indirectly more than at first appears to be contained in them. Suppose the pupil is lacking in self-confidence. He will after a time begin to notice that, thanks to the exercises, he is gaining the self-confidence of which he stands in need. And it will be the same with other qualities of soul wherein he may be deficient. (Several exercises, described in more detail, will be found in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment.)

It is important that the pupil shall find it possible to go on developing the said six qualities in ever increasing measure. His control over this thoughts and sensations must become great enough to enable him to set aside times of complete inner quiet, when all the joys and sorrows, all the satisfactions and anxieties of everyday life—nay more, even all its tasks and demands are banished from mind and heart. In such times that alone which he himself wills to admit shall be allowed entry to his soul. Here again it is possible that some reader may feel misgiving. Will not the pupil become estranged from daily life and its tasks, if he withdraws from it in this way, banishing it from mind and heart for certain stated times during the day? In reality, however, this is far from being so. One who devotes himself in this way to periods of inner quiet, will find that he grows stronger in many respects for the tasks of daily life, and fulfils them, not only no less well, but decidedly better than before.

Such periods will have special value for the pupil if during them he refrains entirely from thinking of his own personal affairs and rises to the contemplation of the concerns of mankind at large. Should he be able at such times to fill his soul with communications that come from higher spiritual worlds, letting these take no less firm hold upon his interest than do his personal cares and concerns in ordinary life, he will be richly rewarded.

One who makes serious endeavor to gain this mastery over his life of soul will also find his way to a self-observation by means of which he will be able to regard his own concerns as coolly and quietly as if they had no connection with himself. To be able to look upon all experiences that come to one in life, all joys and sorrows, in the very same way as one looks upon those of others is a good preparation for spiritual training. The pupil will find he can gradually attain the necessary ability in this direction, if every evening when the day's work is done, he lets pass before his mind's eye pictures of the day's experiences, watching himself go through them. This will mean that he is looking at himself as he is in daily life—from without. To begin with, let him take small sections of the day. That will give him practice; and he will find that he grows more and more skilful in this “looking backward” until at last he is able to picture the whole day through in quite a short span of time. This beholding of our experiences in backward direction has a special value for spiritual training: it helps us disengage our thinking from its accustomed habit of holding on to the outer, material and sense-perceptible events. When we think backwards, we picture the events correctly, but we are no longer sustained by the obvious external sequence. The pupil needs this liberation if he is to make his way into the supersensible world. He will find too that by this freedom his thinking and ideation are strengthened, and in a thoroughly healthy manner. It is accordingly good also to review other things in backward order—a play, for example, a story, a melody, and so on.

A pupil of the Spirit will have it increasingly as his ideal to meet the events of life with inner quiet and confidence, forming his judgment on them, not as to how they accord with his own particular disposition but on the basis of their inherent meaning and inner value. By holding this ideal ever before him, he will be laying in his soul the foundation for that deep inner contemplation—of symbolic and other thoughts and also of feelings—of which we have been hearing.

[ 31 ] It is essential for the pupil to fulfill the above conditions, for supersensible experience has to be built upon the ground on which he stands in ordinary life before he enters the supersensible world. His experience there is dependent in two ways on the point he reached before setting out. If he has not taken special care to see that an ability for sound judgment is at the very foundation of his spiritual training, he will develop supersensible faculties which perceive the spiritual world inaccurately and falsely. His organs of spiritual perception will evolve in a wrong way. As in the world of the senses we cannot see correctly with imperfect or diseased eyes, so in the spiritual world we cannot perceive correctly with organs lacking the foundation of sound judgment and discrimination.

Should it happen that a pupil sets out on the path with an immoral character, his power of vision, when he mounts up into the spiritual worlds, will be dim and clouded. He will be like a man in the world of the senses who gazes at it in a condition of stupor. With this difference, however: whereas the latter will have little of any consequence to tell, the observer in the spiritual world—even in his stupor—is more awake than man is in ordinary consciousness, and will accordingly give information of what he sees there. The information will however be erroneous.

[ 32 ] The trustworthiness of the Imaginative stage of cognition can be assured if the pupil will lend support to his meditation by acquiring the habit of what may be called “sense-free” thinking. When we form a thought, basing it on something we have observed in the physical world, the thought is dependent on the physical senses. This is, however, not the only kind of thought we are able to entertain. There is no need for our thinking to be empty of content when it is no longer being filled with the data of sense-observation. The surest way to attain sense-free thinking, the way too that lies nearest at hand for the pupil, is to let his thinking lay hold of the facts of the higher world, communicated in spiritual science. These facts cannot be observed with the physical senses. Yet the pupil will find that with sufficient patience and perseverance he can grasp them. It is impossible to undertake research in the higher world, impossible to observe there for oneself, without spiritual training; one can however without higher training understand what is communicated by those who have carried out such research. If someone asks: But how can I take on trust what spiritual researchers say, when I cannot see it for myself?—the question is in reality unjustified. For it is perfectly possible, by simple reflection, to arrive at the sure conviction that the communications are true. If anyone finds himself unable to do so, it is not because it is impossible to “believe” something one does not see; it is due to the fact that the thought he has given to it has not been sufficiently free from prejudice, not comprehensive or deep enough. To be quite clear on this point, we must be ready to recognize that man's thinking can, if he applies it with energy and determination, grasp more than is generally supposed. For this thinking has within it an inner reality of being which has connection with the supersensible world. Man is, as a rule, unconscious of the connection, since he is accustomed to apply his thinking faculty to the sense-world alone; hence, when he hears of communications from the supersensible world, he sets them down as incomprehensible. They are however thoroughly comprehensible—and not alone to those whose thinking has been educated through spiritual training, but to every thinking person who is conscious of the full power of his thinking and ready to apply it.

By continuously apprising ourselves of what spiritual science tells, we grow accustomed to a thinking that does not take its start from outer observation by the senses. We learn now within our mind thought weaves on thought, thought seeks out thought, even when the connections have not been suggested by sensory observation. We make the significant discovery that the world of thought is inherently alive, and that when we are really and truly thinking we are already in the realm of a supersensible and living world. We say to ourselves: There is something in me that is developing a living organism of thought; moreover I myself am at one with it. As we continue to devote ourselves to sense-free thinking, we actually come to feel that there is something of real being—real inner substance—flowing into our inner life, even as when we observe with the senses there flow into us by way of our physical organs the properties of the things of sense.

[ 33 ] Out there in space, says the observer of the sense-world, is a rose. I do not feel it in any way strange or remote, for it makes itself known to me by means of its color and its scent. We need only be sufficiently free from preconceived ideas to be able also to say, when sense-free thinking is at work in us: Something quite real is making itself known to me, uniting thought with thought, forming within me a living body of thought. Yet there is an essential difference between the feeling we have towards the things we see in the external world of sense and on the other hand towards the reality of being that communicates itself to us in sense-free thinking. The observer of the external world of the senses will feel that he himself is outside the rose he is seeing with his eyes, while one who is devoting himself to sense-free thinking will feel within him the reality that is making itself known to him. He feels himself at one with it. And anyone who (whether quite consciously or less so) is only prepared to attribute reality to what confronts him as an external object, will naturally not entertain the idea that something inherently real can also become known to him through his being inwardly united and at one with it. There is an inner experience we need, to see the matter rightly. We have to learn to distinguish between the associations of thought which we ourselves produce more or less arbitrarily, and those we experience within us when we have silenced our own arbitrary will. In the latter instance we can say: I remain perfectly still, I myself bring about no association of thought with thought; I give myself up to that which “thinks in me.” We are then perfectly justified in saying: Something real is at work in me—no less justified than when on seeing the rose color and perceiving its scent, we say: A rose is there making an impression on me.

The fact that we receive the content of the thoughts from communications made by the researcher in the Spirit does not contradict this. True, the thoughts are already there; but it is not possible for us to think them without creating them anew every time in our soul. That is really the whole point. The researcher in the Spirit awakens in his hearers and readers thoughts that they have to evoke out of themselves, whereas one who is describing a “real” object—real in the world of the senses—is calling attention to what his hearers and readers can observe in the external world.

[ 34 ] (The path that leads to sense-free thinking by way of the communications of spiritual science is thoroughly reliable and sure. There is however another that is even more sure, and above all more exact; at the same time, it is for many people also more difficult. The path in question is set forth in my books The Theory of Knowledge implicit in Goethe's World-Conception and The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. These books tell of what man's thinking can achieve when directed, not to impressions that come from the outer world of the physical senses, but solely upon itself. When this is so, we have within us no longer the kind of thinking that concerns itself merely with memories of the things of sense; we have instead pure thinking which is like a being that has life within itself. In the above-mentioned books you will find nothing at all that is derived from communications of spiritual science. They testify to the fact that pure thinking, working within itself alone, can throw light on the great questions of life—questions concerning the universe and man. The books thus occupy a significant intermediate position between knowledge of the sense world and knowledge of the spiritual world. What they offer is what thinking can attain, when it rises above sense-observation, yet still holds back from entering upon spiritual, supersensible research. One who wholeheartedly pursues the train of thought indicated in these books is already in the spiritual world; only it makes itself known to him as a thought-world. Whoever feels ready to enter upon this intermediate path of development will be taking a safe and sure road, and it will leave him a feeling in regard to the higher world that will bear rich fruit through all time to come.)

[ 35 ] The end in view for which the pupil engages in meditation upon symbolic thought-pictures or upon certain feelings, is neither more nor less than the development, within the astral body, of higher organs of perception. These organs are created out of the substance of the astral body itself; they bring the pupil into contact with a new world, and in this new world he learns to know himself as a new I or Ego. They differ from the organs with which we observe the world of the physical senses in that they are active. Eye and ear remain passive, allowing light and sound to act upon them; of the organs of perception that belong to the soul and spirit it can truly be said that while they are perceiving they are in continual activity, and furthermore that they comprehend, quite consciously, the objects and facts that they perceive. This gives us the feeling that when we “know” with our soul and spirit, the very knowing is at the same time a blending with the facts we come to know; we feel we are living within them.

The several organs of soul and spirit that develop in this manner may be called, by way of comparison, lotus-flowers; the name accords with the form in which supersensible consciousness has to picture them—picture them, that is Imaginatively. (It need hardly be said that such a designation has no more direct relation to reality than has the expression “Flügel” or “wing” in the word “Lungenflügel” meaning “Lobe of the lung.”) Specific kinds of meditation work upon the astral body in such a way as to lead to the development of one or other of these “lotus flowers.” After all that has been given in this book, it should be quite unnecessary to stress the fact that we have not to think of these organs of perception as though the symbolic picture of them which the name suggests were a direct imprint of their real nature. They are supersensible and consist in a definite activity of the soul; indeed they only exist in so far and for so long s the activity continues. We could as little speak, in connection with them, of anything observable by the senses, as we could of seeing a mist or cloud around a man when he is thinking! Those who insist on picturing the supersensible in sensual terms will inevitably be involved in misunderstandings. Superfluous as this remark should be, I let it stand, since one is constantly meeting with people who believe in the supersensible and yet want to picture it in far too sensual a way; also there are opponents of supersensible knowledge who imagine that when the scientist of the Spirit speaks of “lotus flowers” he thinks of them as tangible objects howsoever refined—objects perceptible to the outer senses.

Every meditation undertaken for the attainment of Imaginative cognition has its influence, if rightly carried out, upon one or other of these organs. (In my book Knowledge of the Higher Words and its Attainment meditations and exercises are given that take effect on this or that particular organ.) A proper spiritual training will arrange the several exercises in such order as to enable these organs of the soul to develop singly, together, or in due succession, as the case may be. This development asks for great patience and perseverance on the part of the pupil. The degree of patience a man gains in the ordinary course of life will not suffice. For it will be a long time—in many instances a very long time indeed—before the organs are so far developed that the pupil can make use of them for perceiving in the higher world. The moment he does become able to do this, he enters upon the stage of Enlightenment, so-called in contradistinction to the stage of Preparation, Probation or Purification, where the pupil is engaged upon the exercises that are given for the development of the organs. (The word “Purification” is used, because by means of the exercises he undergoes, the pupil “cleanses” a certain region of his inner life, casting out from it everything that has its source in the external world of the senses.) It may well happen that even before he reaches the stage of Enlightenment, a man will frequently experience sudden flashes that come from a higher world. These he should receive with thankfulness. The fact that he has them enables him already to bear witness to the spiritual world. He must however not weaken in his resolve if no such moments come during the time of Preparation—which may perhaps seem to him to be lasting all too long. Anyone who allows himself to grow impatient because he can still “see nothing” has not yet succeeded in finding his right relation to a higher world. He alone has done so who can look upon the exercises he undertakes in his training as an end in themselves. With these he is in very truth doing work upon something in him that is of the nature of soul and spirit, namely, upon his astral body. And even when as yet he “sees nothing,” he can feel: I am really working and functioning in soul and spirit. If however he has made up his mind beforehand as to what he is going to “see,” he will not have this feeling. He will in that case be disregarding what is in truth of incalculable significance. He should on the contrary be paying careful attention to all that he experiences while doing the exercises. For this is radically different from anything he meets with in the world of sense. Already at this stage he will remark that in working upon his astral body he is not working into some indifferent substance, but that in his astral body lives a world of quite another kind—a world of which his life amid the outer senses tells him nothing. Even as the external world of the senses works upon the physical body, so are the higher Beings working upon the astral body. The pupil will “impinge” upon the higher life in his own astral body, provided he himself does not stand in the way. If he is continually saying to himself: “I can perceive nothing at all,” it will generally mean that he has formed his own idea of what the spiritual percept has to look like, and since he does not see it in the form he has imagined, he says: “I see nothing at all.”

[ 36 ] The pupil who has the right attitude to his exercises will find increasingly that the very doing of them is something he can love for its own sake. He knows moreover that the doing of them places him already in a world of soul and spirit, and he waits with patience and above all with devotion for what is to come. This mood in the pupil can be best lifted into consciousness in the following words: “I am resolved to carry out whatever exercises are right for me, and I know that I shall meantime be receiving as much as is important for me to receive. I do not demand it, I am not impatient; I simply hold myself ready all the time to receive it.” It is quite wrong to contend: “So then the pupil is to grope his way on in the dark, perhaps for an incredibly long time, with no means of knowing that he is on the right path until success prove it to him!” For it is simply not true that the pupil has to wait for the exercises to achieve their end before he can be assured of their validity. If he undertakes them in the right spirit he need not wait for their eventual outcome; the satisfaction that he has in doing them will of itself make it clear to him that he is on the true path. Proper practice of exercises belonging to a path of spiritual training brings with it a sense of satisfaction that is no mere satisfaction but certain knowledge. The pupil knows: I am engaging in an activity which I can see is taking me forward in the right direction. Every pupil of the Spirit can have this certainty at every moment, if only he observes his experiences with sensitive discernment. If he is crudely inattentive, he is letting them go past him like a person out walking who is so deeply absorbed in his own reflections that he does not see the trees on either side of his path—although he could quite well be seeing them if he would only turn his eyes in their direction.

It is indeed undesirable that any other result than this one, which always attends the doing of the exercises, should be induced before the time is due. For it may well be that a seemingly successful result is no more than the smallest fraction of what should ensue in right and proper course. In spiritual development a partial success will often lead to a prolonged postponement of complete success. Moving familiarly among such forms of spiritual life as disclose themselves at an imperfect stage renders one insusceptible to influences that lead to higher levels of development. The seeming boon—namely the fact that one has after all had sight of the spiritual world—is not really a boon at all; this kind of “beholding” cannot impart objective truth but only delusive pictures.

[ 37 ] The organs of soul and spirit, the lotus flowers, that are in course of development in one who is undergoing training, reveal themselves to supersensible consciousness in the neighborhood, as it were, of particular bodily organs. From among the number of these organs of the soul, mention will here be made of the following. There is, first, the organ that is perceived as though about midway between the eyebrows (the so-called two-petalled lotus-flower;) then, the organ in the region of the larynx (the sixteen-petalled lotus-flower;) thirdly, the organ in the region of the heart (the twelve-petalled lotus-flower;) and then a fourth in the neighborhood of the pit of the stomach. Others come to view near other parts of the physical body. (The appellation two-or sixteen-petalled is not inappropriate, for the organs in question are in appearance comparable to flowers with these numbers of petals.)

[ 38 ] The lotus-flowers become manifest to the consciousness of the pupil in his astral body. As soon as he has developed one or other of them, he knows that he has it. He feels he can make use of it and that in doing so he does actually enter a higher world. The impressions he receives there still resemble in many respects those of the physical world. One who has attained Imaginative cognition will thus be able, in speaking of this new higher world, to describe his impressions by reference to sensations, for example, of warmth or of cold; or he may compare them to hearing music or speech, or to the effect upon him of light or color. For this is the kind of feeling he has of them. He is however conscious that perceptions acquired in the Imaginative world tell of something altogether different from those acquired in the world of sense. He knows that what gives rise to them is not physical or material, but of the nature of soul and spirit. Suppose he receives an impression resembling the sensation of warmth. He will not ascribe it, for example, to a piece of hot iron, but will consider it as emanating from some soul situation or event of a kind that he has hitherto been aware of only in his inner life of soul. He knows that his Imaginative perceptions are due to things and happenings of the nature of pure soul and spirit, even as his physical perceptions are due to facts and entities of a material, physical nature.

Along with this resemblance of the Imaginative to the physical world there is at the same time a significant difference between them. One ever-present feature of the physical world shows itself in the Imaginative world in a totally different way. In the physical world we can observe a continual coming into being and passing away again, a constant alternation of birth with death. In the Imaginative world we find instead perpetual transformation taking place—one thing changing into another. For instance, in the physical world we see a plant droop and die. In the Imaginative world, as the plant fades away, another form—invisible to the physical senses—is all the time seen to be arising, into which the dying plant gradually changes. When the plant has quite disappeared, before us in its place is this new form, fully developed. Birth and death are conceptions which lose their meaning in the Imaginative world. In their place we have the concept of transformation or metamorphosis—one thing changing into another.

This is how it is that the truths concerning the being of man which have been communicated in the chapters on “the Nature of Humanity” become accessible to Imaginative cognition. With the physical senses, only the processes of the physical body can be perceived, and these take place in the “realm of birth and death.” The other members of man's nature—the life-body, the sentient body and the I—are subject to the law of transformation; Imaginative cognition is therefore able to perceive them. One who has progressed to this stage can see how at death something as it were releases itself from the physical body and lives on further in a different kind of existence.

[ 39 ] But spiritual development does not come to an end in the Imaginative world. If we wanted to remain in that world and go no farther, we would be unable to give any explanation for the changes that were taking place; we could not find our bearings in the world to which we had gained access. The Imaginative world is a restless place. Everywhere in it there is movement, nothing but movement and change; nowhere does it come to rest. Only when we develop beyond the stage of Imaginative cognition and reach what may be called “cognition through Inspiration” do we find a resting-place.

It is not essential that one who sets out to attain knowledge of the supersensible world shall first acquire Imaginative knowledge in full measure and only then proceed to Inspiration. A pupil's training may be so regulated that exercises leading to Imagination are continued side by side with exercises for the development of Inspiration. He will then, in due time, come into a higher world where he does not merely perceive but can also orientate himself—a world in which he can begin to see meaning. In point of fact, it will indeed generally happen that as the pupil progresses, glimpses of the Imaginative world are first of all vouchsafed him, and that then, after a time, he has the feeling: Now I am beginning also to find my bearings.

Yet it must also be realized that the world if Inspiration is something different and new, compared to that of Imagination. With Imaginative cognition we perceive events and processes in mutual transformation. With Inspiration we come to know the inner qualities of the beings who are undergoing transformation. With Imagination we see the manifestation of these beings in the realm of soul. With Inspiration we penetrate to their inner spiritual nature; above all, we come to know a multiplicity of beings and learn of the connections between them. In the physical world we also have to do with a multiplicity of beings or entities of various kinds, but in the world of Inspiration this multiplicity is of quite another character. There each single being has its distinctive connections with other beings, connections that are determined, not as in the physical world by some outward impressions that the beings make upon one another, but by their inner character and spiritual nature. When we perceive a being in the world of Inspiration, we are not looking at some external influence that the being is exerting upon another being, comparable with the influence exerted by one physical being upon another; what confronts us there is a relationship between two beings that comes about solely through the inner character both of the one and of the other. There is in the physical world one kind of relationship to which this may bear comparison—such a relationship as obtains between the several sounds or letters of a word. Say we have before us the word “bold.” The word comes about through the sounding together of the sounds b-o-l-d. The sounds b and o, for example, do not collide or react on one another in some external way; they act together and each fulfils it part within the whole by virtue of its inner character. The activity of “observing” in the world of Inspiration can therefore be compared with reading. The beings in that world present themselves to the observer like letters that he must first learn and that will then be revealed to him in their several relationships, forming as it were a spiritual script or supersensible writing. Spiritual science may therefore avail itself of this comparison and call the knowledge acquired through Inspiration: the Reading of the Hidden Script.

[ 40 ] How the Reading of the Hidden Script is done, and how what is read may be communicated shall now be explained with reference to the earlier chapters of the present book. A description was given in the first place of the being of man, telling of how it is built up of several members. Then it was shown how the world in which man is evolving has itself passed through various stages of evolution—the Saturn condition, then the Sun, the Moon and now the Earth condition. Imaginative cognition brings within our reach perceptions that make us acquainted, on the one hand with the members of man's being, on the other hand with the successive conditions of our Earth and the changes it has undergone up to the present time. We then had to go further and learn of the relationship that exists between the Saturn condition of our Earth and the physical body of man, between the Sun condition and his ether-body and so on. We were shown how the seed for the physical body came into being as long ago as the Saturn condition, and has continued developing throughout Sun, Moon and Earth conditions right up to its present form. It became necessary also to show, for example, what changes came about in the being of man owing to the separation of the Sun from the Earth, and again what further changes were wrought in him by the parallel event in respect of the Moon; and then what kind of co-operation was needed to bring about those still later changes in mankind that found expression during the Atlantean time and the epochs that followed it—the Indian, Persian, Egyptian and so on. The picture that was given of these connections was derived not from Imaginative perception, but from knowledge attained through Inspiration, from Reading in the Hidden Script. In relation to this “reading” the perceptions of Imagination are like the individual letters or sounds. Nor is it only explanations of this kind for which the reading is required. The course of man's life could not be understood if we were to study it with the help of Imaginative knowledge alone. We would, it is true, perceive how at death the soul-and-spirit members disengage themselves from what remains behind in the physical world; but we would not understand how the events that happen to man after death are related to past and future conditions, unless we already know our way about the world we perceived Imaginatively. Without the knowledge acquired through Inspiration, the Imaginative world is like a script at which we merely stare, without being able to read it.

[ 41 ] When the pupil of the Spirit goes forward from Imagination to Inspiration, he very quickly realizes what a mistake it would be to neglect to cultivate an understanding for the great events and phenomena of the Universe and to want to restrict his attention to the facts that bear upon his more immediate human interests. It can easily happen that one who has not been initiated into these matters will say: “The one thing of importance for me is to learn about the destiny of the soul of man after death. If I can receive information upon that, then I am satisfied. Why does spiritual science set before me such remote matters as the Saturn and Sun conditions of our Earth, the separation of the Sun—and later of the Moon—from the Earth, and so on? Whoever has been introduced in the right way to the whole subject of higher knowledge will come to see that he cannot attain authentic information about man's destiny after death, until he has first learned about those greater themes that might have seemed unnecessary. A picture of the condition into which man is brought after death will remain for him quite unintelligible and therefore worthless, if he cannot bring it together with conceptions that have grown out of these more remote themes. The very simplest observation that can be made by means of supersensible cognition requires him to be acquainted with them. When, for instance, a plant passes from the flowering stage and begins to bear fruit, then if we are watching it with supersensible powers of observation, we see a change taking place in an astral entity which in the flowering time has been enveloping the plant from above like a cloud. But for the “fertilization” as it is called (leading from flower to fruit,) this astral entity would have passed on into an altogether different form from the one it has assumed in consequence of fertilization. And we can only comprehend the whole process when seen with supersensible perception if we have prepared our understanding by studying the great cosmic event which the Earth and all her inhabitants experienced at the time of the separation of the Sun. Before fertilization the plant it is in a similar condition to that of the whole Earth before the Sun went out from her. After fertilization, the flower of the plant is like the Earth was when the Sun had left and the Moon forces were still within her. If we have mastered the conceptions that can be acquired by studying the separation of the Sun from the Earth, then the significance of the “fertilization” of a flowering plant will present itself to us in a way we can express by saying that before it the plant is in a Sun-like, and after it in a Moon-like condition. It is not too much to say that the smallest event in the world can only be rightly comprehended when we recognize in it an image of the great cosmic events. Without this recognition we are as far from understanding its real nature as we would be from understanding a Raphael Madonna that was all covered over except for one little patch of blue.

Everything that happens to man is in this way an image, having its prototype amid those great events of cosmic evolution with which his existence is bound up. If we would understand what supersensible consciousness perceives in human life—whether in the life between birth and death, or in the life between death and a new birth—we shall find we are able to do so if we take to our help the sublime conceptions that can be gained from dwelling on the great events of cosmic evolution. These will furnish us with the key to an understanding of the life of man. From the point of view of spiritual science, study of Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution is thus at the same time study of man.

[ 42 ] Through Inspiration we learn how the Beings of the higher world are related to one another. A still further stage of knowledge opens up the possibility of coming to know these Beings in their innermost nature. This stage may be given the name of Intuitive cognition. (the words “intuitive” and “intuition” are sometimes used for a kind of vague insight or sudden notion that may or may not quite accord with truth. What is here meant by “Intuition” is altogether different. It means a kind of cognition that is of the utmost light-filled clarity, a cognition that carries with it absolute assurance of its validity.) To have knowledge of an object perceived by the senses is to be outside the object and judge it in accordance with the impression it makes upon us from without. To know a Spirit-Being through Intuition is to become one with that Being, to be inwardly united with him. Stage by stage the pupil of the Spirit rises to a knowledge of this kind. With Imagination, he is already beyond feeling that his perceptions reveal the mere external characteristics of the Beings he perceives. Imagination leads him to recognize, in his perceptions, emanations of a living reality of soul and spirit. Inspiration takes him a step further into the inner essence of the spiritual Beings: he learns to understand what they are to one another. In Intuition, he penetrates right into their inner being.

Once again we can refer to the account of evolution that has been given in this book, in order to demonstrate the significance of Intuition. The foregoing chapters do not only relate how Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution took their course, they also tell of Beings who took part in this progress in many different ways. Allusion was made to the Thrones or Spirits of Will, to the Spirits of Wisdom, Spirits of Movement and so forth. And in connection with Earth evolution itself, the Spirits of Lucifer and of Ahriman were mentioned. The whole edifice of the Universe was traced back to Beings who all had their share in bringing it into existence. What can be learned concerning these Beings is acquired by Intuitive cognition. And the Intuitive cognition is likewise needed if we want to understand the course of human life. What is released from the physical body after death passes through various stages, as time goes on. The situation in which man finds himself immediately after death is, up to a point, capable of description by the exercise of Imaginative cognition. What happens later, however, when man is further on in the time between death and a new birth, would have to remain totally incomprehensible if Inspiration did not supervene. Inspiration is required to discover what can be said about the life of man in Spirit-land when the time of purification is over. Then comes a state where even Inspiration no longer suffices, where it loses the way and fails to understand. In the course of man's development between death and a new birth, he enters upon a time where Intuition alone can follow him. The part of man that undergoes this experience is however always in him, and if we would understand it in its true inwardness, then we must look for it also—again by means of Intuition—during the time between birth and death. Whoever is content with a knowledge of man acquired by Imagination and Inspiration will find himself without means of access to what goes on in man's very innermost being from one incarnation to the next. It is therefore only with Intuitive cognition that adequate research can be made into repeated lives on Earth and into the workings of Karma. Everything that claims to be true information concerning these must be derived from research that is made by means of Intuitive cognition. And if man desires knowledge of himself in his inmost being, this too he can attain only through Intuition. By means of Intuition he perceives that within him which goes forward from one Earth-life to another.

[ 43 ] The faculties of cognition that belong to Inspiration and Intuition—these too can only be attained by means of exercises in the realm of soul and spirit. The exercises are akin to those given for the attainment of Imagination, described above ads deep inner contemplation (meditation.) Whereas however the exercises leading to Imagination are still associated with sense-impressions, in those that lead to Inspiration all such association must be increasingly eliminated. In order to make quite clear what has now to happen, let us return once more to the symbol of the Rose Cross. When we meditate upon the Rose Cross we have before us a picture, the component parts of which are derived from the sense-world—the black color of the cross, the roses, and so forth. But the assembling of the parts to form the Rose Cross is a deed the origin of which is no longer in the sense-world. If now the pupil of the Spirit will try to let the black cross and also the red roses—pictures, both of them, of objects real in the world of the senses—disappear completely from his consciousness, retaining there nothing but the spiritual activity which brought the parts together, in this activity he has the substance of the kind of meditation that can lead him, in course of time, to Inspiration. He should look into his own soul and ask himself: What was I doing when I brought cross and roses together to form a symbolic picture? What I was doing—the process I was bringing about in my soul—that will I now hold fast; the picture itself I will let disappear from consciousness. And now, without letting the picture rise up before me, I will feel what my soul was doing to produce the picture. I will for the time being live a completely inward life, living solely in my own activity that created the picture. I will enter, that is, into deep contemplation, not of any picture, but of my own picture-creating activity.

Meditation of this kind has to be undertaken by the pupil in connection with many different thought-pictures. It will in time lead him to knowledge through Inspiration. To take another example. We meditate the thought-picture of a sprouting, and then again of a dying plant. First, we let the picture rise up in our mind of a plant that is gradually coming into being; we see it sprouting from the seed, we see how it unfolds leaf after leaf and finally brings forth blossom and fruit. Then we see it begin gradually to wither, until at last it died right away. Meditating upon such a picture, we begin to acquire a feeling of the process as such—the process of coming-into-being and dying-away. If we want to go further and reach the corresponding Inspiration, we shall have to do the exercise in another way. We shall have to concentrate our attention on the activity of soul that we ourselves engaged in, in order for the picture of the plant to arrive at the idea of the coming-into-being and dying-away. The plant has now to disappear entirely from consciousness, and we then left meditating upon what we have been doing in our own soul. Only by means of such exercises is the ascent to Inspiration possible.

To begin with, the pupil will not find it altogether easy to be quite clear in his mind as to how he is to set about an exercise of this nature. If he has been accustomed to let his inner life be determined by external impressions, then, when he wants to develop in his soul an inner life that has broken loose from all connection with external impressions, then, when he wants to develop in his soul an inner life that has broken loose from all connection with external impressions, then, he will be at a loss how to proceed. Hence on the path to Inspiration it will be still more essential than before to accompany the given exercises with all those precautionary measures that were recommended to him when setting out to attain Imagination—measures for ensuring stability and confidence, alike in his powers of discrimination, in his life of feeling and in his conduct and character. If he succeeds with these, the pupil will find they have a twofold effect upon him. He will not run the risk of losing his balance when he attains to vision of the supersensible; and he will also become capable of fulfilling quite exactly and faithfully the demands made upon him by the new exercises. The pupil will need to develop here a specific mood and disposition of soul, with the feelings that rightly belong to it; till he has done so, he may well find the exercises difficult. If however he will patiently and perseveringly cultivate within him the qualities of soul that are favorable to the birth of supersensible cognition, it will not be long before he finds himself able to understand the exercises and also to carry them out. Let him make a habit of communing often with his own soul—but not with a view to musing upon himself! Rather should he set out before his mind's eye the successive experiences he has met with in life and consider them quietly. The effort will be well rewarded. He will find that his thought and ideas, and also his feelings, are enriched by bringing these experiences into relation with one another. He will come to realize how true it is that we gain new experience not only by having new impressions or undergoing new events in life; but also by letting the old work on within us. The pupil who really succeeds in letting his experiences—yes, and even the opinions he had gained—play upon one another, as though he himself, with his sympathies and antipathies, his personal interests and feelings, were in no way concerned, will be preparing within him particularly good ground for the growth of the faculty of supersensible cognition. He will in very truth develop what one may call a rich inner life.

What is throughout of the very first importance is that balance and harmony should reign among the various qualities and inclinations of the soul. When man devotes himself to some particular activity of soul, he tends all too easily to become one-sided. Having realized how beneficial is the habit of inner reflection, of sojourning now and again in the world of one's own thoughts, he may grow so fond of doing this that he tends increasingly to shut himself off from the impressions of the world around him. Such a habit could only lead to a bare and arid inner lie. He will advance farthest who retains, along with the ability to withdraw into his own soul, an open-minded receptiveness for all that the external world offers for his perception. And here we should not have in mind merely such objects and events as are commonly considered important; everyone—be his situation in life never so mean and never so circumscribed—can find experience enough within its walls, provided he foster in mind and heart a sensitiveness to all that goes on around him. He has no occasion to go out in search of experiences; they are around him on every hand.

Emphasis has also to be laid on the way in which we receive and reflect upon our experiences. You may, for instance, happen to discover one day that a person whom you revere has some feature in his character which you cannot but regard as a blemish. As you think it over, the discovery may affect you in either of two ways. You may simply say to yourself: Knowing what I now know, I can no longer revere him as I did. Or, you may ask yourself the question: How can it have come about that this person, for whom I have such veneration, has to labor under a defect of this kind? Ought I not perhaps to look upon the fault, not just as a fault, but as a result of the life he has led, perhaps even consequent upon his qualities of greatness? Having seriously faced this question, you may perhaps find that your reverence for him is, after all, undiminished by the discover of a flaw in his character. Every such experience will have taught you something: your understanding of lie will be the truer for it. You would of course be making a bad mistake if you let your appreciation of this way of meeting life mislead you into excusing anything and everything in people or in things to whom or to which you are partial; or if you allowed yourself to drift into a habit of shutting your eyes to whatever is blameworthy, imagining that you were thereby furthering your own inner development. For this you will certainly not be doing, if it is to satisfy your own inclinations that you refrain from blaming faults and try instead to understand and condone them. It will e helpful only if this attitude is called for by the nature of the case, irrespective of whether you yourself are to gain or lose by its adoption. It is undoubtedly true that one can never learn by passing judgment on a fault but only by coming to understand it. Anyone however who in his desire to understand the fault proceeds to banish from his mind all sense of displeasure at it, will be making little headway in his development. So here we have again an instance where what is required is not one-sidedness in one or other direction, but balance and harmony between the several virtues of the soul.

This is true in quite a special degree of on property of the soul that is of outstanding significance for higher development—I mean, the feeling of reverent devotion. One who cultivates this feeling or who has always possessed it as a kind of gift of Nature, has a good foundation upon which to build the faculties of supersensible cognition. Has he been able in childhood to look up with devotion and admiration to persons who stood for him as lofty ideals, then his soul will provide good ground whereon new powers of cognition can grow and flourish. And whoever in later life, in years of riper judgment, gazes up at the starry heavens, filled with wonder and boundless devotion at the revelation he there divines of sublime spiritual powers, will be well on the way to grow ripe for knowledge of supersensible worlds. The same holds true of one who is able to feel wonder and admiration at the powers that are active in the life of man. And of no less significance is also that reverence which a person of maturer years may continue to cherish in full measure for other human beings whose worth he divines or recognizes. Indeed only where such reverence is present, is it possible to come within sight of the higher worlds. A man who is incapable of reverence will not progress very far on the path of knowledge. To one for whom there is nothing in all the world that he deems worthy of his esteem, the real nature of things will ever remain a closed book.

Should anyone on the other hand allow himself to be misled by feelings of reverence and devotion to the complete annulment of his own healthy self-assertion and self-confidence, he too will be sinning against the law of harmony and balance. The pupil of the Spirit will work continuously at his development, that he may grow ever more and more mature; and if he is doing this, then it is only right that he should have confidence in himself and feel assured that his powers are growing all the time. Would he see the whole matter in its true light, let him say to himself: Hidden within me are spiritual powers, and I can call them forth out of my inner life. Hence when I see something that commands my respect because is higher than I, not only should I feel reverence for it, but I may be confident that I myself shall in time come to the stage of development where I am like it.

[ 44 ] The more a man is able to be attentive to happenings or situations in his life which in the ordinary course are unfamiliar to him and would elude his judgment, the greater ability will he have to lay the foundation for right development on the path into the spiritual worlds. An example can help make this clear. A person comes into a situation where it is open to him to carry out some particular action—or to leave it undone. His judgment says to him: Do it! But he has in his soul an unaccountable feeling that draws him back. It may happen that he pays no heed to this feeling but simply goes ahead in accordance with the verdict of his judgment. Or again, it may happen that he yields to this inexplicable urge within him, and refrains. If then he follows up the matter to see what happens later, it may turn out that had he obeyed his judgment, harm would have come of it, but that good has resulted from his leaving the action undone. Such an experience can set going in the pupil a train of thought that may run as follows. Within me, he may say to himself, lives something which guides me better than can my faculty of judgment at its present stage of development. I must keep an open mind for this “something” which is on a much higher level than I can reach with my present powers. If we pay careful heed to situations of this kind as we meet them in life, we shall receive considerable benefit from doing so. We shall begin to sense (and this itself is already a sign of health in our inner life) that there is more in man than comes within the range of his ordinary judgment. The very recognition of such a fact widens the soul. Here again, however, we might be led into highly questionable byways. Should we acquire the habit of constantly shutting down our faculty of judgment because some dim feeling impels us to take another course, we might well become the plaything of all manner of undefined motives. And from such a habit the way leads all too quickly into weak-mindedness and superstition.

Fatal for the pupil of the Spirit is superstition of every sort. He can only hope ever to find the right and true path to the realm of Spirit-life by carefully guarding himself from superstition, from flights of fancy, and from all day-dreaming. A person who feels glad when he is brought up against something in life which is “beyond human understanding” will not be the one to enter the spiritual world in the right way. Fondness for the “inexplicable” is emphatically not a qualification for discipleship of the Spirit. Indeed the pupil should utterly discard the notion that a true mystic is one who is always ready to surmise the presence of what cannot be explained or explored. The right way is to be prepared to recognize on all hands hidden forces and hidden beings, yet at the same time to assume that what is “unexplored” today will be able to be explored when the requisite ability has been developed.

[ 45 ] There is a certain mood of soul which it is important for the pupil to maintain at every stage of his development. He should not let his urge for higher knowledge lead him to keep on aiming to get answers to particular questions. Rather should he continually be asking: How am I to develop the needed faculties within myself? For when by dint of patient inner work some faculty develops in him, he will receive the answer to some of his questions. Genuine pupils of the Spirit will always take pains to cultivate this attitude of soul. They will thereby be encouraged to work upon themselves, that they may become ever more and more mature in spirit, and they will abjure the desire to extort answers to particular questions. They will wait until such time as the answers come.

Here again, however, there is the possibility of a one-sidedness, which may prevent the pupil from going forward in the way he should. For at some moment he may quite rightly feel that—according to the measure of his powers—he can answer for himself even questions of the highest order. Thus at every turn moderation and balance play an essential part in the life of the soul.

[ 46 ] Many more qualities of soul could be cited that may with advantage be fostered and developed, if the pupil is seriously wanting to work through a training for Inspiration; and in connection with every one of them we should find that emphasis is laid on the supreme importance of moderation and balance. These attributes of soul help the pupil to understand the exercises that are given for the attainment of Inspiration, and also make him capable of carrying them out.

[ 47 ] The exercises for Intuition demand from the pupil that he let disappear from consciousness not only the pictures to which he gave himself up in contemplation in order to arrive at Imaginative cognition, but also that meditating upon his own activity of soul, which he practiced for the attainment of Inspiration. This means that he is now to have in his soul literally nothing of what he has experienced hitherto, whether outwardly or inwardly. If, after discarding all outward and inward experience, nothing whatever is left in his consciousness—that is to say, if consciousness simply slips away from him and he sinks into unconsciousness—then that will tell him that he is not yet ripe to undertake the exercises for Intuition and must continue working with those for Imagination and Inspiration. A time will come however when, after all experiences, inner and outer, have been banished from it, consciousness is not left empty, but something remains in it to which the pupil can now give himself up in deep contemplation even as he formerly gave himself up to what came to him from outer or inner impressions. This “something” is of a very special nature. In relation to all that the pupil has hitherto experienced and learned it is entirely new. When he feels it there in his consciousness, he knows: This is something of which up to now I have had no knowledge at all. It is a clear perception and I perceive it, just as I should perceive a note of music that my ear was hearing; yet it can only enter my consciousness through Intuition, even as the music can only enter there by way of the ear. In Intuition the impressions man receives are stripped bare of the last remnant of connection with the physical senses. The spiritual world now begins to lie open for his cognition in a form that has nothing in common with the properties of the sense-world.

[ 48 ] Imaginative cognition is attained when the lotus-flowers unfold from the astral body. As a result of the exercises undertaken for the attainment of Inspiration and Intuition, movements and currents make their appearance of man's ether- or life-body, which were not there before. These movements are the organs that enable man to add to his faculties the “Reading of the Hidden Script” and yet further powers that lie beyond. The changes that are wrought in his ether-body when a pupil has attained Inspiration and Intuition, reveal themselves to supersensible cognition in the following way. Somewhere as if in the neighborhood of the physical heart one becomes conscious of a new center in the ether-body, which forms itself into an etheric organ. From this center all manner of movings and streamings run out to the various parts of the physical body. The most important of these go to the lotus-flowers, flow right through them and through their several petals, then turn outwards and pour themselves into outer space like rays of light. The more highly developed a pupil is, the larger is the circle around him in which these currents are perceptible. Under a properly regulated training this center in the neighborhood of the heart does not however develop right at the beginning. Preparation has to be made for it. A preliminary center appears first in the head, is then transplanted into the region of the larynx and finally comes to rest in the neighborhood of the physical heart. If development is irregular, it may be that this organ is formed in the region of the heart form the outset. There will then be a danger that instead of attaining calm and objective supersensible perception, the pupil might develop into a fantastic dreamer.

As he progresses further, the pupil comes to the point where he can release these currents and memberings of his ether-body from dependence on the physical body, and make use of them directly, without reference to the physical body. The lotus-flowers serve him then as instruments by means of which he moves his ether-body. Before this can happen, certain special streams and rays must have been forming in the whole circumference of the ether-body, enclosing it as though with a fine network, rendering it a distinct, self-contained entity. Then there is nothing to hinder the movements and streamings that are going on in the ether-body from making contact with the external world of soul and spirit and from uniting with it, so that what is happening without and what is happening within—that is to say, within the human ether-body—are able to come when the human being can perceive consciously the world of Inspiration. This kind of cognition shows itself from the first to be of quite a different character from the cognition that relates to the physical world. Here, we receive impressions through our senses and then proceed to entertain ideas and concepts about these impressions. The acquisition of knowledge by means of Inspiration is not like that. The “knowing” is achieved in one single act; there is no thought-process following the perception. What in the act of cognition by means of the physical senses is acquired only subsequently in the concept, is in the Inspirational cognition given simultaneously with the percept. This being so, the pupil would flow right into the surrounding world of soul and spirit, would merge with it and be unable to distinguish himself from it, had he not formed before in his ether-body the network that has just been described.

[ 49 ] The exercises that are given for Intuition influence not only the ether-body; they also leave their mark on the supersensible forces that are at work in the physical body. This must not be taken to mean that changes are effected there, perceptible to ordinary sense-observations. Supersensible cognition alone can form any true idea of them; they are right outside the scope of a cognition that is concerned with externals. The changes come about as a result of the pupil's consciousness being so far matured that, notwithstanding his having banished from it all that he has experienced in the past, whether outwardly or inwardly, he is nevertheless able to have conscious experience in Intuition.

Yet the experiences that come with Intuition are intimate, are tender and delicate. Man's physical body, at its present stage, is quite coarse in comparison; consequently, it offers stubborn resistance to these results of the exercises for Intuition. If however the exercises are preserved in with energy and patience, and with the necessary inner quiet, they will at length overcome the formidable hindrances that the physical body presents. The pupil will begin to notice that he is gradually bringing under his control certain activities of his physical body that formerly took their course without his being in the least conscious of them. He will become aware also of a change of another kind. He may observe that for a short while he feels a need so to order his breathing—or some other bodily process—as to bring it into harmony with what his soul is doing in the exercises or whatever else he is undertaking in inner, meditative life. The ultimate ideal is that no exercises of any kind should be done with the physical body as such, not even breathing exercises; so that whatever happens in the physical will occur simply and solely as an outcome of the exercises for Intuition.

[ 50 ] When the pupil is making his way upwards on the path that leads to higher worlds, he will remark at a certain stage that the interconnection of the activities of his personality is beginning to assume a new form. In the world of the physical senses the I sees to it that the various faculties of the soul co-operate in an orderly manner. In the affairs of everyday life these faculties—we refer here especially to Thinking, Feeling and Willing—always stand in a certain recognized relation to one another. Let us say we are looking at some object. It pleases us, or perhaps we dislike it. That is to say, a feeling associates itself, almost inevitably, with our mental picture, our idea of the object. Very possibly we may also wish we could possess it or we may feel impelled to alter it in this or that particular. That is to say, desire and will unite themselves with the thought and the feeling. That this association comes about is due to the fact that the I unites ideation (thinking,) feeling and willing into a harmonious whole, thus bringing order into the forces of our personality. This healthy harmony would be broken if the I were to show itself powerless in the matter—if desire, for example, were to branch off in another direction than feeling or thinking. If someone thought that a particular course was right, and yet his will were set on following another course—one that did not comment itself to him—his soul would certainly not be in a healthy condition. The same could be said of a person who was bent on having, not what he liked, but rather what he disliked.

[ 51 ] The pupil will, however, find that on the way to the attainment of higher powers of cognition, thinking, feeling and willing do definitely separate one from another, each of them assuming a kind of independent existence. A thought, for instance, will not now of its own accord stir up a particular feeling and evoke a particular volition. The situation will be that while in our thinking we can perceive a thing objectively and truly, yet before we can have any feeling about it or come to any resolve in the matter, we shall need to develop within us a distinct and independent impulse. While engaged in supersensible observation, our thinking, feeling and willing do not continue to simply three powers of the soul raying out, as if were, from the I, as a single center of our personality; they become independent beings. It is as though they were three separate personalities. The implication is that our I or Ego needs to be made all the stronger, for it has no longer merely to ensure that order reigns among three faculties of soul; it has to guide and lead three beings. This partition into three distinct beings must, however, only be allowed to subsist during the time of supersensible observation. Here again we see how important it is to include among the exercises for more advanced training those that give stability and firmness to the faculty of thoughtful judgment, to the feeling life and to the life of will. For if we fail to bring with us into the higher world the necessary stability and firmness of soul, then we shall very soon find how weak the I will prove itself to be—not fit guide for the thinking, feeling and willing! Should such weakness manifest in the I, it will be as though the soul were being pulled in different ways by distinct personalities; its inner integrity will inevitably be destroyed. If, however, development has taken its right course, the change will signify a genuine advance. The Ego does not lose control but remains in command even of the independent beings that now constitute the soul.

As development proceeds, a further step is taken. The thinking that has become independent evokes a fourth being of soul and spirit, a being that may be described as a direct inpouring of spiritual streams that are of the nature of Thought. The whole Universe now confronts the human being as a mighty edifice of Thought even as the plant or animal world confronts him in the realm of the physical senses; he beholds it before him like a mighty edifice built of thought. The Feeling too and the Will, that have become independent, evoke powers in the soul which become active there as independent beings. And there appears in addition yet a seventh power, a seventh entity which bears resemblance to one's own I—to the I as such.

[ 52 ] With this whole experience another is united. Before reaching the supersensible world man wads familiar with thinking, feeling and willing purely as inner experiences of the soul. No sooner has he entered the supersensible world than he begins to perceive things that are the expression, not of anything physical, but of soul and spirit. Underlying what he is able to perceive in the new world are beings of soul and spirit. These beings present themselves to him as an external spiritual world, just as stones and plants and animals present themselves to the senses in the physical world. The pupil can however perceive a significant difference between the world of soul and spirit that is now unfolding before him and the world he has been accustomed to observe with the help of the physical senses. A plant in the latter remains as it is, whatever man may feel or think about it. It is not so with the pictures of the soul-and-spirit world. These change according as man has this or that thought or feeling towards them. Man himself stamps them in this way with a character that is derived from his own being. Suppose a certain picture appears before him in the Imaginative world. To begin with, he may perhaps be quite indifferent to it; in that case, it will manifest in a certain form. But the moment he begins to feel pleased with it or to take a dislike to it, it will change its form. This is what is so striking about the pictures of the supersensible world: they are not only the expression of something outside of man and independent of him, they also reflect what the man is himself. They are, in fact, thoroughly permeated with his being. His being overlays them as with a veil. And what man sees when he is faced with a real spiritual being, is not that being at all, but something he himself has produced. He may thus have before him something true in itself, yet what he sees may still be false. Nor is it only what he is ware of in himself that works in this way; there is nothing in him that does not leave its mark on the Imaginative world. Someone may, for instance, have deeply hidden inclinations, held in check by dint of education or force of character; they will nevertheless be making their impression on the world of soul and spirit. That world receives its coloring according to the entire being of the man, irrespective of how much or how little he himself may know of his own nature and character.

If the pupil is to be capable of going forward from this stage of development, he must learn to make a clear distinction between himself and the surrounding spiritual world. To this end he has to learn to put a stop to any kind of influence that he himself might exert upon the world of soul and spirit that is around him. The only way to ensure this is to be fully cognizant of what it is that he is taking with him into the new world. In other words, it is a matter of acquiring, first and foremost, genuine and searching self-knowledge. Once he has that, he will be able to see with clear, unclouded vision that world of soul and spirit by which he is surrounded. Now thanks to certain facts in the whole development of man, self-knowledge of this kind cannot but arise—as it were, quite naturally—when a man enter the higher world. In the everyday physical world man develops, as we know, his I or Ego, his consciousness of self; and this his I acts as a center of attraction for his whole personality. All his inclinations, his sympathies and antipathies, his passions and propensities, his views and opinions group themselves around his Ego. A man's Ego too is the center of attraction for what we call his Karma. If we were able to see this our Ego naked and undisguised, we would at the same time be perceiving that we have yet to undergo such and such strokes of destiny in our present and future incarnations, owing to the way we lived and the tendencies we acquired in past incarnations. Therefore this Ego, with all its encumbrances, must necessarily be the first picture that confronts the human soul on ascending into the world of soul and spirit. According to a certain law of the spiritual world, this—the man's “Double”—is bound to be the very first impression man receives on entering the spiritual world.

We can well understand the law when we reflect how in his life on the physical plane man perceives himself only in so far as he experiences himself in thinking, feeling and willing. In other words, he perceives himself only from within; his “self” does not confront him from without, as do the stones and plants and animals. Moreover, the knowledge he thus gains of himself is very partial and incomplete.

For there is that in human nature which hinders him from attaining deeper self-knowledge. It is the urge, wherever dawning self-knowledge compels him to admit some imperfection in his character, and he does not want to deceive himself about it—the urge to set to work to alter the unpleasant trait.

[ 53 ] If he is not obedient to the urge, but turns his attention away from himself and remains as he is, then it need hardly be said that he robs himself of the possibility of attaining self-knowledge in that direction. If on the other hand he examines himself intently and, refusing to give way to self-deception, boldly faces the trait he has observed in his own character, then either he will find he can improve it, or it may be that—such as he is at present—he is unable to do so. In the latter instance, a feeling will steal over him that one can only call a kind of shame. This is, in fact, how healthy human nature works: self-knowledge gives rise to a sense of shame—a feeling that may show itself in many ways. Now as we know, in everyday life the sense of shame has a particular effect upon us. A man of healthy feeling will take care that those aspects of his character which make him eel ashamed shall not take effect in the world at large—shall not find expression in his deeds. Shame is thus a power that impels man to shut something up inside him and not allow it to be seen.

Thinking this over carefully, we shall have little difficulty in understanding that spiritual science ascribes even more far-reaching effects to an experience of the soul that is very nearly akin to the familiar one of a sense of shame. Spiritual research discovers in the depths of the human soul a kind of hidden sense of shame of which in physical life man is unconscious. This hidden feeling is none the less active in the soul. It works there in much the same way as does the sense of shame of which a man is normally conscious. It prevents his having before him in a clearly perceptible picture his real and inmost being. If this feeling were not there, man would see displayed before him what he is in very truth. He would no longer experience his thoughts and ideas, his feelings and his will in a merely inward way, but would perceive them even as he perceives the stones and animals and plants. Thus does a hidden sense of shame conceal man from himself. Nor is that all; it hides from him at the same time the entire soul-and-spirit world. For since his own inner being is hidden from him, he cannot get sight of that domain within him where he should now be endeavoring to develop the organs that will enable him to attain knowledge of the world of soul and spirit. He misses the opportunity of so transforming his inner being that it may acquire organs of spiritual perception.

When however in the pursuit of a right spiritual training man labors to promote the development within him of these organs of perception, the very first impression that confronts him is his own self. He perceives what he truly is, he perceives his Double. This perception of oneself is inseparable from perception of the world of soul and spirit. In ordinary life in the physical world, the hidden sense of shame is continually shutting for man the door into the world of soul and spirit. Is he about to take one step into that world, at once an unconscious sense of shame comes in the way and hides from him that corner of the soul-and-spirit world which was on the point of coming into view. The exercises, however, that have been described open the way to yonder world. In effect, the sense of shame which he bears hidden within him is a great benefactor to man. For the measure of intelligent discrimination and of right feeling and strength of character we can acquire in ordinary lie without special training will not suffice us when we have to face our very inmost being in its true form. We would not be able to endure it; we would lose our self-confidence, we would even lose all consciousness of self. That this may not happen, we have yet again to have recourse to those precautionary measures that need to be taken alongside of the exercises for the attainment of higher powers of cognition—namely the special exercises for the cultivation of sound judgment, good feeling and strength of character. In the course of a right and healthy spiritual training, the pupil learns incidentally enough of the truths of spiritual science and also of the measure he requires to take in order to attain self-knowledge and self-observation, for him to be able to face his own Double with courage and with strength. What it will mean for him then is simply that he sees in another form, as a picture belonging to the world of Imagination, what he has already made acquaintance with here in the physical world. If in the physical world we have grasped the law of Karma with our understanding, we shall have no occasion to be horror-struck when we behold the seeds of our future destiny visibly before us in the picture of our Double. If we have made an intelligent study of the evolution of the world and of man, and have learned how at a particular moment in this evolution the forces of Lucifer penetrated into the human soul, we shall not be unduly disturbed when we become conscious of the presence, in the picture of our own being, of the Luciferic beings and their activities.

We can however see from this how necessary it is that man should not demand entry into the spiritual world until he has learned and understood certain essential truths of that world by the simple exercise of his everyday intelligence, developed in the physical world. If spiritual development follows the right and normal path, then before he aspires to enter the supersensible world the pupil will already have mastered with his ordinary intelligence the whole of the earlier contents of this book.

[ 54 ] In a training where care is not taken to develop in the pupil certainty and stability in his powers of judgment and discrimination as well as in his emotions and his moral character, it may happen that the higher world presents itself to him before he has the inner faculties with which to fact it. The encounter with his Double, will in that event cause him great distress and lead him astray. If on the other hand—as would also be possible—he were completely to elude the meeting with the Double, he would still be just as incapable of coming to any true knowledge of the higher world. For he would then be unable to distinguish between what the things around him really are and what he himself is seeing into them. To be able to do this, he must first have seen the distinct picture of his own being; then he can separate and distinguish from his environment whatever has flowed over into it from his own inner life.

As far as his life in the physical world is concerned, the moment man begins to draw near to the world of soul and spirit, the Double immediately makes himself invisible and therewith also conceals from him the whole soul-and-spirit world. The Double stands in front of it like a Guardian, forbidding entrance to those who are not yet competent to enter. He may therefore rightly be called “The Guardian of the Threshold of the World of Soul and Spirit.”

Besides meeting with him when approaching the supersensible world by the method that has been described, man also meets this Guardian of the Threshold when he passes through physical death. And in the course of the time between death and a new birth, while man's soul and spirit are undergoing development, the Guardian progressively reveals himself to him. There, however, the encounter cannot disquiet man unduly, since he now has knowledge of the higher worlds which between birth and death were not within his ken.

[ 55 ] Were man to enter the world of soul and spirit without encountering the Guardian of the Threshold, he would be liable to succumb to one delusion after another. For he would never be able to distinguish between what he himself brings into that world and what rightly belongs to it. A sound and proper training, however should lead the pupil only into the realm of truth, never into the realm of illusion. The training itself should ensure that the meeting with the Guardian will follow as a necessary consequence. For this meeting with his Double is one of the testing experiences that are indispensable to the pupil aspiring to conscious perception in supersensible worlds, and that protect him from the possibility of illusion or false fantasy.

It is of urgent importance that every pupil of the Spirit should take himself in hand and see to it that he does not become a visionary and a dreamer, for then he would all too easily fall a victim to delusion and self-deception (suggestion and auto-suggestion.) Where the instructions for training are faithfully carried out, the very sources of delusion are destroyed in the process. It is naturally not possible to enter here in detail into all the steps that have to be taken by the pupil in this connection. We can only indicate wherein their main import lies.

There are two chief sources for delusions of this kind. They may, in the first place, be due to the fact that reality receives a coloring from the nature an disposition of the pupil himself. In ordinary life in the physical world there is comparatively little danger of delusion arising from such a source; the external world impresses its true form upon the observer in all distinctness, however, much he would like to color it in conformity with his own wishes and interests. No sooner, however, does he enter the world of Imagination that its pictures change under the influence of these desires and interests of his, and he has then before him, giving every appearance of reality, what are in effect merely his own creations, or forms that he has at least helped to create. But in meeting the Guardian of the Threshold the pupil learns to know what he has within him; thus he knows well what he may be bringing with him into the world of soul and spirit, and so this first source of delusion is eliminated. Thanks to the preparation he undergoes before entering the world of soul and spirit, the pupil has already grown accustomed to eliminate self in his observation of the physical world and to let its objects and events speak to him purely by virtue of their own inherent nature. If the preparation has been sufficiently thorough, he can await unperturbed the meeting with the Guardian. This meeting will put him to the final test as to whether, when he confronts the world of soul and spirit, he will be able there too to eliminate himself.

[ 56 ] Besides this, there is another source of delusion. It shows itself when we interpret incorrectly some impression we receive. A simple example of this in everyday life is the illusion we fall into when we are sitting in a train and think that the trees are moving in the opposite direction to that of the train, whereas it is really we ourselves who are moving with the train. There are of course countless instances where an illusion of this nature is more difficult to dispel than in the simple example of the moving train; nevertheless it will easily be seen that in the physical world ways and means can always be found of correcting such illusion, if with sound judgment we avail ourselves of every circumstance that can serve to make the matter clear. No sooner, however, have we penetrated into supersensible realms than we find a different state of affairs. In the world of the senses the facts are not altered by our misconception of them; thus the way is left open for unprejudiced observation to correct the delusion by reference to the facts. In the supersensible world this cannot so easily be done. Suppose we are wanting to observe some supersensible fact, and as we approach it we come to a wrong conclusion about its nature. The correct conception we have formed, this we now carry into the fact itself, and it becomes so closely interwoven with the latter that the one cannot readily be distinguished from the other. What we then have is not the mistake within ourselves, and the true fact in the object observed; the mistake has been incorporated in the outer fact—has become part of it. It is therefore no longer possible simply to correct the illusion by looking at the fact again with open mind.

We have here been describing an all too frequent source of deception and false fantasy for one who approaches the supersensible world without due preparation.

Yet even as the pupil becomes able to rid himself of delusions that arise form the phenomena of the supersensible world being colored by his own character and inclinations, so must he now also find the way to render powerless this second source of delusion. He is able to obliterate what comes from himself if he has first made acquaintance with his own Double; he will be able to get rid of this second source of delusion when he has learned to recognize from its very nature and character whether a fact of the supersensible world is reality or mere delusion. If delusions looked exactly like realities, there would naturally be no possibility of distinguishing them. But it is not so. In the supersensible world delusions have properties peculiar to themselves by which they can be distinguished from realities. And it is important for the pupil to know what are the properties by which he may recognize realities. One who is unacquainted with spiritual training will very naturally doubt the possibility of ever being safe from delusion, when the sources of it are so numerous. How, he will say, is any pupil of the Spirit ever to be sure that all the higher knowledge he imagines himself to have gained does not rest on delusion and self-delusion? The one who argues in this way has failed to observe that in every genuine spiritual training the sources of delusion are dispelled—dried up as it were, through the whole way the training proceeds.

In the first place, the genuine pupil of the Spirit will in the course of his preparation have learned a great deal about all the things that can give rise to illusion and self-deception, and will thus be one his guard against them. In this respect he has far more opportunity than his fellow-men of learning to lead his life with calm detachment and sound judgment. All that he learns and experiences is calculated to save him from having anything to do with vague premonitions and uncontrolled fancies. His training makes him very careful. Moreover, every right and true training introduces the pupil from the start to grand and sublime conceptions, teaching him of events in the great Universe; he has to put forth his best powers of discernment to grasp the great cosmic facts, and will find these his powers growing ever finer and keener in the process. Only one who shrinks from venturing into realms so remote, preferring to cling to “revelations” that are nearer home, will be in danger of missing that sharpening of his mental faculties which can ensure for him the ability to distinguish clearly between deception and reality.

With all this, however, we have not yet touched on the most important factor of all—namely, what is latent in the exercises themselves. The exercises that belong to a right and proper spiritual training have necessarily to be so regulated and arranged that the pupil, while engaged in meditation, is fully conscious of all that is taking place in his soul. As he sets out on the road to Imagination, he forms, to begin with, a symbolic picture. In this picture are still contained mental images that owe their origin to what he has perceived in the outer world. He is not the sole creator of the picture; something besides himself has shared in the creation of its content. This means that he may still be under an illusion as to how the content of the picture has come about; he may ascribe it to a mistaken source. When the pupil progresses further and embarks on exercises for Inspiration, he banishes this content from consciousness and gives himself up entirely to the contemplation of his own activity of soul, which formed the picture. Here again, error may still creep in. For the particular character of his soul's activity he is indebted to his education—in the widest sense of the word. It is impossible for him to be fully informed of its origin. But now there comes the time when even the pupil's own activity of soul has to be expelled from consciousness. If there is still anything left, this remaining content is fully exposed to view. Nothing can intrude here that cannot be perceived and appraised in all its parts and aspects. The pupil has in his Intuition something that reveals to him the essential character of pure reality in the world of soul and spirit. From now onward, in everything that enters his field of observation he can look for what he has learned to recognize as the characteristic marks of soul-and spirit reality, and will thus be able to discern between what is real and what is only apparent. And he can be assured that in applying this test he will be just as safe from the risk of delusion in the supersensible world as in the physical world—where it would be quite impossible for him to mistake an imaginary bar of hot iron for one that could really burn him.

It will of course be understood that the pupil can have this relation only to facts of the supersensible worlds that he has seen for himself—that have thus become for him a matter of actual experience—and not to those communicated by others, which he comprehends with his ordinary powers of understanding, aided by a natural and healthy feeling for the truth. He will indeed be at pains to draw a sharp dividing line between the spiritual knowledge he has acquired in the one and in the other way. He will be ready and willing to receive communications about the higher worlds and will summon up his beset powers of judgment to comprehend them. On the other hand, when he describes something as the fruit of his own experience and spiritual observation, he will always first have tested whether it showed itself to him with the qualities he has learned to recognize in a genuine Intuition.

[ 57 ] The pupil of the Spirit having now undergone the meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold, further experiences await him as he ascends into supersensible worlds. In the first place, he will notice that there is an inner connection between this Guardian of the Threshold and what was described above as a seventh power in the soul, which took on the form of an independent being. In truth, this seventh being is, from a certain point of view, none other than the Double, than the Guardian himself, whose presence sets the pupil a specific task. He has to place what he is in his ordinary self—which he has now before him in picture—under the leadership and guidance of his new-born Self. A kind of struggle will ensue, the Double striving continually to gain the upper hand. If the pupil can succeed in establishing a right relation to the Double, not allowing him to do anything that is not inspired by the new-born I, he will find that his true human powers gain in strength and in stability.

In the matter of self-knowledge the situation is somewhat different in the higher world from what it is in the physical. In the physical world self-knowledge is a purely inward experience, whereas in the higher world from the very outset the new-born Self manifests as an external phenomenon of Soul. The pupil sees it there before him as a distinct being. He is not however able to have a complete perception of this new-born Self. For no matter how many stages he may have reached on the path into supersensible worlds, there are always higher stages ahead; and at every one of them the pupil will perceive more of his Higher Self. At any particular stage, it can be only partially revealed to him. When the pupil first begins to be aware of the Higher Self, he is strongly tempted, as it were, to regard it from the vantage-point he has gained in the physical world. Indeed it is good that he should feel thus tempted; it is even necessary if his development is to proceed in the right way. For he has to contemplate what appears to him as his Double, the “Guardian of the Threshold,” he has to see all this in face of the Higher Self, and so perceive the vast disparity between what he is now and what he is meant to become. Once the pupil enters upon this comparison, the Guardian of the Threshold begins to assume another form, presenting himself as a picture of all the hindrances that stand in the way of the development of the Higher Self. The pupil now sees what a burden he is dragging about with him all the time in the ordinary self. And should the preparation he has undergone have failed to give him the strength to say at this point: I am not going to stand still, but shall make ceaseless effort to carry my development ever on and on in the direction of the Higher Self—should he not be strong enough to say this, he will falter and shrink from what is yet in store for him. He will indeed have entered into the world of soul and spirit, but as one who has relinquished all idea of making further efforts for his development. He then becomes a prisoner of the form that stands before him in the Guardian of the Threshold. The significant thing, however, is that he does not eel himself a prisoner; he imagines he is passing through an entirely different experience. The form that is evoked by the Guardian of the Threshold may even give rise in his soul to the impression that in the pictures he beholds at this stage of his development he already has a complete survey of the possible Worlds; that he has arrived at the very summit of knowledge and has no need to exert himself any further. Far indeed from seeing himself as a prisoner, he feels he is now the possessor of inexhaustible riches, even of all the secrets of the Universe. That such an experience—the complete reversal of the true state of affairs—should be possible will not astonish us, when we remember that the man undergoing it is in the world of soul and spirit, a world where thing are apt to show themselves in their opposites. Attention was called to this characteristic of the soul-and-spirit world in an earlier chapter, when studying the life after death.

[ 58 ] In the figure that the pupil is perceiving at this stage of this development, there is more than in the form in which the Guardian of the Threshold first presented himself to him. At that time he could perceive in the Double all the qualities that the ordinary self possesses in consequence of the influence of the Luciferic powers. In the course of evolution, however, owing to the influence of Lucifer, another power has found its way into the human soul; we called it in earlier sections of this book the power of Ahriman. This s the power that hinders man, so long as he is living in physical existence, from having sight of the soul-and-spirit Being who underlie what the senses perceive at the surface of the outer world. What the soul has become under the influence of this power, the pupil now beholds—as in a picture—in the figure that confronts him in the experience we are now describing. If he is duly prepared for this experience, he will assign to it its true meaning; and then, quite soon, yet another figure will be revealed to him. It is the “Greater Guardian of the Threshold,” so called to distinguish Him from the “Lesser Guardian,” hitherto described. The Greater Guardian tells the pupil that he must not remain at this stage but must press forward with untiring energy. He calls upon him to realized that the world into which he has won his way can only become truth for him if he perseveres in his efforts. Otherwise it will change for him into illusion. Were a pupil to submit himself to a wrong kind of training and come to this experience unprepared, he would, on approaching the “Greater Guardian of the Threshold,” find himself completely overwhelmed—overwhelmed with a feeling that can only be compared with boundless fear and terror.

[ 59 ] The meeting with the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold afforded the pupil the opportunity of testing whether he is proof against the delusions that may arise through carrying his own being into the supersensible world; and the experiences that lead him at long last to the Greater Guardian of the Threshold will now enable him to discover whether he can stand up to the delusions that spring from the second source above mentioned. If he is proof against the captivating delusion which makes the picture-world he has attained seem to him like a rich possession—when all the time he is but a prisoner thereof—he will be protected from taking appearance for reality in the further course of his spiritual evolution.

[ 60 ] The “Guardian of the Threshold” will to some extent assume an individual and different form for every single person. For the meeting with him is the very experience by means of which the personal character of supersensible perceptions is eventually overcome and the way opened into a region of experience that is free from all personal coloring—a region universally valid, to which every human being has equal access.

[ 61 ] Having come thus far in his experience, the aspirant is now able to make distinction in the surrounding world of soul and spirit between what is himself and what is outside him. He will now be in a position to appreciate how necessary it was to study the evolution of the world as described in this book, in order to arrive at a true understanding of man and of his life. For we can only understand man's physical body if we know how it has been built up right through the Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth evolutions. So too for the other members of man's being. To understand the ether-body, we need to follow its development through Sun, Moon and Earth evolutions. And if we are to understand all that has to do with the Earth's own evolution at the present time, we shall need to know how it has gradually unfolded, stage by stage. One who has undergone spiritual training will be in a position to recognize the relationship between what is contained in man and the corresponding facts and beings of the world around him. For it is so indeed: there is no member or part of man that does not stand in some relation to the rest of the world—the world in its entirety. In this book it has hardly been possible to do more than give indications in barest outline of this universal correspondence. But we must not forget that the physical body, for example, was, during Saturn evolution, only in its very first beginnings. Its organs—heart, lung, brain and so on—developed out of these first beginnings, during the Sun, Moon and Earth periods. They therefore are connected with Sun, Moon and Earth evolution. The like must be said of man's other members—the ether-body, the sentient body, the sentient soul and so on. The whole of the immediately surrounding world has gone to the forming of man; no single part or feature of him that has not its corresponding process or being in the world without. And when he has reached the above-described stage in his development, the pupil of the Spirit learns to recognize this relationship of his own being to the great world. Such is the characteristic experience at this stage: he becomes conscious of the correspondence that exists between the “little world,” the Microcosm—the world, that is, of man himself—and the “great world,” the Macrocosm.

When the pupil has worked his way through to this perception, a new experience awaits him. He begins to feel as though he has grown together with the whole vast structure of the Universe, retaining, however, at the same time the consciousness of himself as a fully independent being. A feeling nevertheless comes over him, as if he were being merged into the whole vast Universe, were becoming one with it—yet without losing his individuality. This stage of development may be described as the “becoming one with the Macrocosm.” It is essential not to think of it as though implying that separate consciousness should cease and the human individuality be poured out into the All. Such an idea could arise only from an inexact and untrained way of thinking.

We may now set down in order the stages on the way to higher powers of cognition, attained in the training for Initiation that has here been described:

1. Study of spiritual science. To begin with, the pupil applies himself to this study with the powers of thought and sound judgment acquired in the physical world.
2. Attainment of Imaginative Cognition.
3. Reading of the Hidden Script. (This stage is equivalent to Inspiration.)
4. Living one's way into the Spiritual World that is around one (equivalent to Intuition.)
5. Knowledge of the relationships between Microcosm and Macrocosm.
6. Becoming one with the Macrocosm.
7. A fundamental mood of soul determined by the simultaneous and integral experience of the foregoing stages.

[ 62 ] The reader is not however to imagine that the seven stages necessarily follow one another in precise order. Much will depend on the individual character of the pupil. If can be that an earlier stage has only partially been reached when a pupil begins to undertake exercises belonging to the next. For example, it may be perfectly right, when he has had but a few genuine Imaginations, for him already to be doing exercises designed to bring Inspiration or Intuition, or even knowledge of the relationship of Microcosm to Macrocosm, within the reach of his own personal experience.

[ 63 ] When the pupil has got so far as to have an experience of Intuition, then in addition to having knowledge of the pictures that belong to the world of soul and spirit, and being able to read from the Hidden Script how these pictures are interrelated, he also comes to know the Beings through whose co-operation the world to which man belongs has been called into existence. Then too he learns to know himself in his own archetypal form as a soul-and-spirit being in the world of soul and spirit. He has wrestled his way through to a perception of his Higher Self, and now sees clearly what he has still to achieve in order to gain control over his Double, the “Guardian of the Threshold” who stands there before him, continually calling upon him to work on further at his development. This “Greater Guardian of the Threshold” now becomes for him the Ideal, the Example that he will do his utmost to follow. Having once come to this resolve, the pupil will be enabled to recognize who it is that is there before him as the “Greater Guardian of the Threshold.” For now this Greater Guardian changes for the eyes of the pupil into the figure of Christ, whose nature and whose part in the evolution of Earth have been explained in the earlier chapters of this book. Through this experience the pupil is initiated into the sublime Mystery that is connected with the name of Christ. Christ shows himself to him as the great human Prototype and Example, united with the Earth's true evolution.

Having thus come through Intuition to a knowledge of Christ in the spiritual world, the aspirant will find that he is able also to understand what took place historically on Earth in the fourth post-Atlantean period—the time of the Greek and Roman civilization. How the great Sun Being, even the Christ, intervened in Earth evolution, and how He is still working in it now and on into the future, the pupil of the Spirit knows henceforth from his own experience. This then is what he attains through Intuition: the very meaning and significance of Earth evolution are communicated to him.

[ 64 ] The path to knowledge of the supersensible worlds that has here been described is one that everyone can tread, no matter what his situation or circumstances in life. When speaking of such a path, we must not forget that the goal of knowledge and truth has been and is the same throughout all epochs of Earth evolution, but that the starting-point has been different in different epochs. Man cannot set out today from the same starting-point as did, for example, the candidate for Initiation in ancient Egypt. Neither can the exercises that were given to a pupil in ancient Egypt be simply taken over by a man of the present age. Since that epoch men's souls have been through sundry incarnations, and this moving on from incarnation to incarnation is not without meaning and purpose. The capabilities and qualities of the soul change from one incarnation to the next. Even a superficial study of history will convince us that since the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of our era the conditions of life have been very different from what they were before; men's opinions and feelings, even their capacities, have quite altered from what they were in earlier times. The path to higher knowledge that has here been described is one that is adopted for souls who are incarnated in the immediate present. It takes for its starting-point the situation of a human being of today, living under any of the typical conditions of the present age. As evolution progresses, the outer forms of man's life on Earth undergo change; so too in the paths of higher development every succeeding epoch calls for new ways and new methods. It is of vital importance that at every stage harmony should reign between man's life in the world at large and the Way of Initiation.

• 1. It is of no consequence how far the above thoughts can be justified from the side of Natural Science, the whole point being to evolve thoughts in regard to plant and man, which can be arrived at without reference to any theory, by simple and direct observation. Thoughts of this kind concerning objects in the world around us have their significance, alongside of the theoretical ideas of science which are, in their right place, no less significant. Here we are not putting forward thoughts for the purpose of presenting facts in scientific terms; what we ant to do is to create a symbolic picture that shall prove capable of influencing the soul, irrespective of any criticisms that could be leveled at the composition of the picture.
• 2. Goethe, Faust, Part II, Act II.
• 3. Goethe: Proverbs in Prose.
• 2. Goethe, Faust, Part II, Act II.

When the riddles of existence touch the human soul, they become not only great problems in life, but life itself. They become the happiness or sorrow of man's existence. And not a passing happiness or sorrow only, but one he must carry for a time through life, so that by this experience of happiness or sorrow he becomes fit or unfit for life.

Now, man's attitude to his own soul is such that the most important questions about it and about its spiritual essence do not arise from any actual doubts he has regarding the spiritual element within him. It is precisely because he is certain of his spiritual substance and because he cannot help seeing in it his human dignity and his true significance as a man, that the question of the fate of his soul becomes for him a tremendous riddle. To deny the mind in man himself does not, of course, occur to even the most rigid materialist. He acknowledges the mental as such, regarding it as a result of physical, material processes. Yet anyone who, with no such theory but simply from his deepest emotional needs, queries the fate of this soul of his, will find himself confronted by a plethora of phenomena and experiences. And these become riddles to him just because he is fully conscious of the mental or spiritual life, and must accordingly ask: Is this spiritual life a passing breath, rising from physical existence and returning with it once more into the generality of natural phenomena, or is it connected with a spiritual world within which it has eternal significance?

Of the many experiences in the realm of the psyche which present the riddles of the soul to our “mind's eye,” I will select only two.

There are, it may be objected, very few people on whom such experiences obtrude so much that they become even conscious, let alone theoretical, problems. But that is not the point. The point is that these experiences take hold of the subconscious or unconscious, establish themselves there, and flow up into consciousness only as a general temper or distemper of the soul, making us courageous and vigorous in life or making us dejected, so that at no point can we properly come to grips with life. As I have said, I want to pick out only two of these experiences.

The first appears before the “mind's eye” every evening when we fall asleep, when the mental and psychic experiences that have floated up and down during the day sink down into the unconscious as if extinguished. Now, when he looks at this experience or, as is most often the case, when the unconscious awareness of it affects his soul, man is overcome by a sense of the powerlessness of his mental life in face of the outside world. And just because man sees in this life his most valuable and dignified quality and cannot deny that he is in the true sense of the world a spiritual being, he is assaulted from within by this sensation of powerlessness, and has to ponder the question: Does the general process of nature overtake mental experiences when man passes through the gate of death, just as it always does at the onset of sleep? The first experience, if I may so put it, is a sense of the powerlessness of mental life.

The second experience is in a way a direct opposite of the first. We perceive it distinctly or indistinctly, consciously or unconsciously, when on waking, perhaps after passing through a fantastically chaotic dream world not attuned to reality, our spirit descends into our bodily existence. At such times we feel it informing our senses, feel too that our psychic experience is being permeated by the interplay between the outside world and our senses, which are of course physical and physiological. We feel the spiritual element descending further into our body; we inform our organs of will with it and become alert and self-possessed, able to make use of our body, our organism. On reflection, however, we cannot help realizing: Anatomy and physiology make a valiant attempt to penetrate and analyse the bodily functions from without; yet looking from within, we ourselves, by means of ordinary consciousness, do not know anything about the interrelationship between our spiritual element and our bodily functions. A glance at the simplest bodily function controlled by the will, the lifting of an arm or movement of a hand, tells us: First there exists in us the thought or concept of this arm-lifting or hand-movement. How this thought or concept flows down into our organism, however, how it informs our muscles, and how finally there comes about what again we know only through observation—what actually goes on inside remains hidden from ordinary consciousness. So, too, in that wonderful mechanism that physics and physiology show us, the human eye or some other sense-organ, there remains hidden the spiritual element that informs this wonderful mechanism.

We are thus faced with problems both by the powerlessness of our mental life and by the darkness into which we feel our spirit descending when it flows down into our own body. We are forced to conclude (most people certainly don't do so consciously, but it affects them as the temper of their soul): this spiritual element in its relationship with the organism is unknown to us just when it is creative; it is unknown to us at the very point in physical life where it manifests its outgoing function.

What every naive individual thus experiences extends, in a different form, to psychology itself. It would need a great many words to explain scientifically how these enigmas creep into the subject; but we can put it, rather superficially perhaps, as follows.

On the one hand, psychology looks at the mind and asks: What is the relation between this and the physical, the external and corporeal? In looking at the physical, on the other hand, and at what physical science has to say about it, some people—and in this respect psychology has a long history—believe that we must regard the mental as the really effective cause of the physical; others believe that we must regard the physical as the really empowering element, and the mental only as a kind of effect of it. The unsatisfactory nature of both views has been perceived by recent psychologists. They have therefore set up the curious theory of psycho-physical parallelism, according to which one cannot say that the body affects the mind or the mind the body, but only: corporeal processes are parallel to mental ones, and mental processes to bodily ones; one can only say what mental processes accompany the corporeal or what corporeal ones the mental.

Psychology itself, moreover, is conscious of this powerlessness of the mind! If we attempt to examine the mind, even as it presents itself to the psychologist, with ordinary consciousness, we find that it has something passive about it, so that we cannot see how it can penetrate dynamically the life of the body. Anyone who looks at the psychic characteristics of thinking and feeling (volition is impenetrable, so that for psychology much the same is true of will as of thinking and feeling)—anyone who looks at thinking and feeling with the tools of psychology finds them powerless, and cannot locate anything that would really be capable of effectively activating the physical. It is then that the psychologist experiences his sense of the powerlessness of mental life in the eyes of ordinary consciousness. The most varied attempts have certainly been made to overcome this feeling. But the disputes of philosophers and the changing philosophies that have succeeded one another provide the impartial observer of humanity with factual evidence of the impossibility for ordinary consciousness of approaching the mind's experience. Everywhere there obtrudes a sense of the powerlessness of the mind as it is perceived by ordinary consciousness.

With regard to this particular point, a series of works have appeared here in Vienna which represent milestones in the development of philosophy. Although I cannot associate myself in any way with their content, I believe that, from the standpoint of ordinary consciousness, these books are extraordinarily significant. They include Richard Wahle's The Whole of Philosophy and its End, which is designed to show that ordinary consciousness is incapable of reaching any significant conclusion about mental life, and that what philosophical investigation is here attempting ought to be handed over to theology, physiology, aesthetics and social science. And Richard Wahle went on to work out these ideas still more clearly in his Mechanism of Mental Life. We may say: here for once ordinary consciousness is revealed as basically incapable of saying anything about the problems of mental life. The ego, the psyche, everything that earlier psychology brought to light—all these collapse in face of the self-criticism of ordinary consciousness.

In recent years, however, psychology has, understandably and indeed of necessity, not attempted to deal directly with the things of the mind—in face of which, as we have seen, ordinary consciousness is powerless—but has sought to discover something about what are usually called mental phenomena indirectly, via the physical phenomena that spring from them. In this way, experimental psychology has come into being. This is a necessary product of our present attitude to life and methods of research. And anyone taking the philosophical standpoint that I do will never for one moment deny that experimental psychology is completely justified, though he may not perhaps agree entirely with this or that detail of its methods and results.

It is here that the other enigma of the soul comes in. However much we learn about what can be experienced by the human body in experimental psychology, the fact remains: everything that appears to be discovered in this way about purely psychic functions is, strictly speaking, only indirect knowledge, acquired via the body. It all belongs to a sphere which, at man's death, is given over to the general process of nature, so that through it can be learnt nothing about the soul, whose fate in the world is of such paramount concern to man. Thus we may say: for psychology, also, the great riddle of the soul reappears.

This point, too, has been made by a modern psychologist who for many years lived and worked here in Vienna, and who will never be forgotten by those who sat at his feet here, as I did. In the first volume of his unfinished work on psychology, he asks: What can any psychology ever achieve by establishing—whether experimentally or non-experimentally, I might add—how concepts combine and separate, how attention operates, how memory develops in life etc.?—if, precisely because of the scientific character of this psychology, with its emulation of natural science, we must renounce all claim to understand the fate of the human soul once the body crumbles into its elements? This was said not by some eccentric or other, but by that rigorous thinker Franz Brentano, who made psychology his central concern in life and who sought to apply to his work the strict scientific method of modern times. Yet he it was who presented the riddle of the soul to his contemporaries in the way I have just outlined, as something scientifically unavoidable.

From all this the impartial observer today must draw a conclusion. It is that, in the study of man, scientific methods will take us only to the point they have now reached; but that we cannot deal with the soul by means of ordinary consciousness, entirely adequate as this is for science and for ordinary life. And so, since for scientific reasons this fact must be apparent to the impartial observer today, I speak to you from the standpoint of a philosophy of life that concludes: it is impossible, with the soul-powers that manifest themselves to ordinary consciousness and operate in ordinary life and ordinary science, to investigate the life of the soul. There must be developed other powers, which to ordinary consciousness are more or less sleeping or, let us say, latent in the soul.

To adopt the right attitude to such a conception of life, we need something which, if I may say so, is found only rarely in people today. I would call it intellectual modesty. There must come a moment in life when we say to ourselves: When I was a little child, I developed a mental life that was so dim and dreamy that it has been forgotten like a dream. Only gradually did there arise from this dream-like mentality of the child something that enables me to orientate myself in life, to bring my thoughts, my impulses and my decisions into step with the world, and to become a capable being. Out of the vagueness and lack of differentiation of the child's mental life, interwoven with the body, has emerged that experience which derives from our inherited qualities, as these develop with the growth of the body, and which derives also from our customary education.

Anyone looking back, with intellectual modesty, on his development during his life on earth, will not be above saying to himself at a certain point: Why shouldn't this continue? The soul-powers which are the most important to me today, and by which I orientate myself in life and become a capable being, were dormant during my existence as a child. Why shouldn't there be dormant in my soul other powers that I can develop from it?

We cannot help reaching this conclusion, which springs from intellectual modesty. I call it intellectual modesty because men are inclined to say: the form of consciousness I have once attained as an adult is that of the normal person; any impulse in the life of the soul to be different from this so-called normal consciousness is eccentric or hallucinatory or visionary or something similar. The philosophical standpoint from which I speak definitely starts from a healthy psyche and attempts on this basis to develop powers dormant in the soul, cognitive powers, which then become clairvoyant powers in the sense in which I spoke yesterday of exact clairvoyance. What the soul has to undertake I indicated yesterday. I mentioned my books Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, Occult Science, Riddles of the Soul and so on. There you will find details of those exercises which, starting from a healthy soul-life, lead upward to the development of the soul, which thus in fact attains a kind of spiritual vision with which it can see into a spiritual world, just as with the ordinary sense-organs it can perceive the physical and sensuous world. In each of these books there is a first part, which is accepted as something that can be definitely useful to man even by many opponents of the philosophy of life I am advocating. It shows that by certain exercises of an intellectual, emotional and moral kind man can produce in himself a state of soul and body that can be regarded as wholly healthy. They also enable him to be on his inner guard against anything which, deriving from an unhealthy life of the soul, leads to mediumism, hallucinations and visions. For everything brought about in this way is unacceptable to a true psychology. Visions arise not from the sphere of the soul, but because morbid structures exist in the organism; the same is true of mediumism. None of these have anything to do with sound psychology and sound psychic development, and indeed from the point of view of this sound psychology all must be condemned. Opponents today, however, find fantastic and harmful the exercises which follow these preparatory ones, and which are designed to draw from the soul those powers of thinking, feeling and volition which, once they are trained, introduce man into a spiritual world in such a way that he learns to orientate himself in it and can enter it at will.

I have already suggested how, as modern man, we manage by certain mental exercises to remove thinking from its ordinary state of passive surrender to the phenomena of the outside world, and to what appear inwardly as memories but are also connected with the outside world. We transcend this kind of thinking by carrying out exercises in meditation seriously, patiently and energetically, and by repeating them over and over again. Depending on predisposition, it may take one person years, another not so long; but each can note, as he arrives at the crucial point, how his thinking, from what I have previously called dead and abstract thinking, becomes inwardly vital thinking in tune with the rhythm of the world. A balanced view of the world and of life thus strives, not to conjure up visions or hallucinations from the soul, but to experience the life of thoughts and concepts with an intensity that we otherwise experience only through the outward senses.

You need only compare the vitality of our experience of the colours we perceive through the eye, and the sounds we hear through the ear, with the pallor of our experience of thought in ordinary consciousness. By energizing our mental life in the way I suggested yesterday, we can gradually give the mere life of thought and concept the same intensive quality as the life of the senses. Man today, seeking to know the spiritual, does not therefore, if he is a reasonable being, seek hallucinations and visions. He strives quite calmly to achieve the ideal of the life of the senses, with its intensity and plasticity, in his mental activity. And if you devote yourselves as students of the spirit to meditations such as I have described, you need not be in any way dependent on the unconscious or subconscious. You can refer to the exercises, they are all directed at what I am trying to describe—and you will find that everything that is carried out by way of exercises in the life of the soul is done as consciously, as reasonably, as precisely we may say, as are operations in mathematics or geometry.

To sum up: we are concerned here not with the old nebulous clairvoyance, but with a clairvoyance brought about by fully conscious and balanced experiences and exercises of the soul. The self-possession at each step is such that we can compare what a man experiences and makes of himself here with what we otherwise experience in the case of a geometrical problem. If not, the exercises have no value.

A conceptual life of this kind is energized; is independent of breathing; is set free of the body; is a spiritual function only; and in it, as we know by direct perception, thinking is carried out not by the body, but in the purely spiritual sphere. Only when modern man attains this kind of conceptual life does he feel his thinking, in contrast to abstract thinking, as something vital and not as something dead. Our sensation when we experience the transition from ordinary abstract thinking to vital thinking is exactly as if we found a dead organism suddenly come to life. And although this vital thinking is a spiritual process, it is not so linear, not so superficial as ordinary abstract thinking. It is full and plastic. And this plasticity is what counts.

Now, however, a very great deal depends on our carrying over the balanced attitude, required during the actual exercises, to the moment when this vitalized or plastic thinking appears in us. If at this moment we surrender ourselves to the images we have struggled to achieve, believing we find in them realities of a spiritual kind, then we are, not students of the spirit but simply fantasy-mongers. This is something we must certainly not become; for it could not provide us with a firmly based philosophy of life for modern man. Only when we say to ourselves: we have attained one component of spiritual life, but it is a semblance component; it merely tells us something about powers that operate within ourselves—about what we ourselves can do through our own human nature; only when we really say to ourselves: this imaginal knowledge cannot give us any information about any kind of outside world, not even about what we are in the outside world; only if we perceive ourselves in this semblance-making and know ourselves as a power living within it—only then do we have the right attitude to this experience and feel ourselves as spiritual beings outside the body, and yet feel ourselves only in ourselves, with an inner plasticity.

Only by having the courage to continue the exercises to the next stage do we attain true spiritual perception. This next stage not only involves developing the capacity to focus our consciousness upon certain concepts that are readily comprehended—as we comprehend geometrical concepts, which we know to contain no unconscious element—so as to increase our strength of soul; it must also, and more particularly, involve being able calmly and at will to banish these concepts from our consciousness. This is, in some circumstances, a difficult task! In ordinary life, forgetting is not particularly difficult, as our ordinary consciousness is only too well aware. But when one has just struggled, although without driving oneself into auto-suggestion—which cannot occur if we are self-possessed—to focus one's consciousness upon certain concepts, then unusual strength is required to banish them from consciousness again. However, one must develop this greater strength gradually; and just as at first we concentrated all our attention and inner strength of soul, so that we might dwell upon such a concept in a state of meditation, so now we must dispel these concepts, and all other concepts, calmly and voluntarily from consciousness. And there must be able to enter, from our will, what one might call “empty consciousness.” What “empty consciousness” (if only for a few moments) implies, can be judged by reflecting on what happens to ordinary consciousness when it has to forgo both sense-impressions and recollections—when for some reason or other man is deprived of external impressions and even memories: he falls asleep; that is, consciousness is depressed and dimmed. The opposite of this is what must happen: completely controlled, conscious wakefulness, despite the fact that the will has swept consciousness completely clear.

If we thus first strengthen the soul and then empty it, yet keep it conscious, there will appear before it, as colour to the eye and sounds to the ear, a spiritual environment. We can look into the spiritual world. And so we may say: to the spiritual investigation here intended, it is perfectly understandable that ordinary consciousness cannot reach the spirit and the soul, and indeed that it turns out, as Richard Wahle found for instance, that ordinary consciousness ought not to speak of an “I” at all! For in this sphere, ordinary experience can only indicate and label with words a dark element which is immersed in and contrasted with the clear light; and which will never emerge until we have developed powers that are usually lacking. It is a sober recognition of the limits of ordinary consciousness, tied to the body, that impels us to develop in ourselves those powers that alone are capable of really discovering the soul and the spirit.

There is another point to consider, however, if you seek to arrive by this path at a sound and not a morbid psychology. Taking the mediumistic, visionary and hallucinatory as morbid, the fact is that anyone who falls into this kind of morbid psychic activity is entirely absorbed into it. For the duration of his sickness of soul, at least, he becomes one with this activity. Quite the reverse with the exercises I have been proposing here. Anyone who explores the soul with their aid does, it is true, leave behind his physical body with its capacity for ordinary thinking and ordinary orientation in life. He steps out of this body and learns to see imaginally, free of body; he develops a visual thinking. Yet not for a moment is he completely subsumed in this higher man, if I may so call it without arrogance. He always remains capable of regaining his body and acting just as calmly as before: there always stands beside this more highly developed man that ordinary man with his healthy common sense who is a sober critic of everything to which in his vision this higher being attains.

By developing plastic, vital thinking and then creating an empty consciousness, we reach a view of our own psychic nature, one that embraces in a single image all we have encountered in this life since we entered it. Our past life does not stand before the soul as is usual in the memory, with isolated reminiscences emerging, independently or after some exertion. Instead, all at once our life is surveyed like a mighty tableau, not in space but in time. All at once, with a single glance of the soul, we survey our life; but we see it as it informs our growth and the energies of our physical body. We see ourselves as we have been here on this earth as thinking, feeling, willing beings, but in such a way that thinking, feeling and willing now densify and at the same time take their places organically within the human substance. We can see into our spiritual life in its direct association with the physical. We cease trying to establish by philosophical speculation how the soul affects the body. In seeing the soul, we also see how at every moment our physical life on earth has been informed by what the tableau shows us. This will be described more fully in the next few days.

The next step must now be to strengthen still further by removing them from our consciousness the energized concepts that we have introduced into ourselves. We do this by continually repeating the exercises, just as we strengthen muscles by repeated exercise. And by continuing with these energized concepts, we also manage to eliminate from our consciousness this whole newly achieved tableau of the life of the soul from birth to the present. This requires more effort than the simple elimination of images, but one does eventually achieve it. We succeed in removing from consciousness what in our earthly existence we call our inner life, so that now our consciousness is empty not only of current impressions, but also of all that we experience within as if in a second and finer body (which yet informs our growth and our memory), a finer being, an ethereal being as it were, a now for the first time super-sensible being. And when we do so, our consciousness, which though fully awake is now empty and yet has attained a greater inward power, will be able to see further in the spiritual world. It will now be able to look at the nature of its own soul before this descended from spiritual worlds to an earthly existence. Now, what we call the eternity of the human soul is taken out of the sphere of mere philosophical speculation and actually beheld. We learn to look at the purely spiritual that we were in a spiritual world, before we descended to clothe ourselves, through conception, foetal life and birth, in a physical earthly body.

Although attained by as exact a method as are mathematical concepts, this may seem fantastic to many people today. Still more paradoxical may appear what remains to be said, not only about the soul when it still had a spiritual existence, but also about the concrete nature of this experience. These things can only be suggested in this lecture; more will be said in subsequent lectures. The suggestions can perhaps be explained in the following terms.

Let us first ask ourselves: What do we actually see when, in ordinary life, as beings who recognize, understand and perceive, we enter into a relationship with our natural environment? We actually see only the external world. This is clear from what I mentioned at the beginning today. We actually see only the outside world, the cosmos. What takes place within us we see, too, but only by making it into something external through physiology and anatomy. Imposing as these sciences may be, we see what is within only by first externalizing it and then investigating it exactly as we are accustomed to do with external processes. Yet it remains dark down there in the region into which we descend, where we feel our spiritual element flowing into our body. In the last analysis, we see in ordinary life only what is outside ourselves; by direct observation we cannot look directly into man and see how the spiritual informs the bodily organs. Anyone, however, who can examine life impartially from the spiritual viewpoint I have established will conclude: noble and great is external appearance and the laws we discover in the external world of the stars and of the sun, which sends us light and warmth; noble and great is our experience when we either simply look—and we are complete men when we do so look—or when we investigate scientifically the laws by which the sun sends us light and warmth and conjures forth the green of plants; noble and mighty is all this—but if we could look into the structure of the human heart, its inner law would be even nobler and greater than what we perceive outside!

Man can sense this with his ordinary consciousness. But the science that rests on exact clairvoyance can raise it to the status of true research. It can say: far-reaching appear to us the changes in the atmosphere, and there exists an ideal of science which, here too, will discover greater and more potent laws; but greater still is what is present and goes on in the structure and functions of the human lung! It is not a question of size. Man is a microcosm in face of the macrocosm. But as Schiller said: “In space, my friend, dwells not the sublime.” He means the highest form of the sublime. This highest form can be experienced only in the human organism itself.

Between birth and death it is not investigated by man with his ordinary consciousness. Exactly the opposite is true, however, of our existence before we unite with the body—our spiritual existence, in a spiritual environment. In this life on earth, the inner world is dark and the outside world of the cosmos bright and full of sound; in the purely spiritual life before our earthly embodiment, the outer cosmic world is dark, and our world is then the inner world of man. We see this inner world! And truly, it seems to us no smaller and no less majestic than does the cosmos when we see it with our physical eyes during our earthly existence. As if it were our “outside world,” we come to understand the law of our spiritual inner world, and we prepare ourselves, in the spiritual realm, for dealing later with our bodily functions, with what we are between birth and death. For what we are between birth and death extends before us like a world, before we descend into this physical existence on earth.

This is not speculation. It is direct perception arising from exact clairvoyance. It is something which, starting from this exact clairvoyance, leads us some way into the connection between the eternal element in man and the life on earth—that eternal element which remains hidden from us between birth and death, and of which we see the first gleams when we are able to perceive it in the still unembodied state. And with this we explore a part of human eternity itself. We don't even have a word in our modern languages for this part of human eternity. We rightly speak of immortality; but we ought also to speak of “unborn-ness.” For this now confronts us as a direct experience.

This is one aspect of exact clairvoyance, one aspect of human eternity, of the great riddle of the human soul, and thus of the supreme problem of psychology in general. The other aspect arises from those other exercises, which I yesterday termed exercises of the will, through which we so take in hand our will that we learn to make use of it independently of the body I explained that these exercises induce us to overcome pain and suffering within the soul, in order to make it into a “sense-organ” (to speak loosely) or a spiritual organ (to speak exactly) of vision, so that we not only look at the spiritual, but see its authentic shape. And when we learn to experience in this way outside our body, not only with our thoughts but with our will itself—that is, with our entire human substance—there appears before the soul the image of death, in such a way that we now know the nature of experience without the body: both in thinking and in willing and in what lies between, feeling. In an imaginally creative way we learn to live without the body. And in doing so we gain an image of our passage through the gate of death; we learn how in reality, too, we can do without the body and how, passing through the gate of death, we enter once more that spiritual sphere from which we descended into this bodily existence. What is eternal and immortal in us becomes not only philosophical certainty, but direct perception. By training the will, we disclose for the soul's contemplation the other side of eternity—immortality—just as unborn-ness is disclosed by the training of thought.

When the soul becomes a spiritual organ in this way, however, it is as if, at a lower level, a man born blind had been operated on. What for those endowed with sight is a world of colours, the blind man has hitherto been accustomed to perceive by touch alone. Now, after the operation, he sees something quite new. The world in which he previously lived has changed. So too, anyone whose “mind's eye” is opened in the way I have described finds that his environment is changed. How far it is changed I wish to bring out today in only one respect.

Even with our unopened “mind's eye” we can see in life how, for example, a man takes his childish steps, then grows up and reaches a fateful moment in his life: he meets someone, and their souls link up so that the two people combine their fates and move on through life together. (As I said before, I want to single out just one event.) In ordinary consciousness we are drawn to regard what happens in life as a sum of chance occurrences; to regard it, too, as more or less chance that we are brought at last to this fateful meeting with the other person. Only a few individuals, like Goethe's friend Knebel, gain an inner wisdom of experience, simply in growing older. He once put this to Goethe in the following words: If at an advanced age one looks back on the course of one's steps in life, one finds that these steps seem to reveal a systematic arrangement, so that everything appears to have been present in embryo and to have developed in such a way that one was led by a kind of inner necessity to what we now see to have been a fateful event. Human existence as seen with the “mind's eye” unveiled is as different from the life observed by the unopened eyes as the world of colour is from the merely tactile one of the blind man.

Looking at the child's soul life and the interplay of sympathy and antipathy, we see how it develops from these first steps; how then, welling up out of his innermost being, the man himself, out of his innermost longings, directs his steps and brings himself to the fateful moment. This is sober observation of life. When we look at life in this way, however, we see it rather as we see the life of an old man. We should not say that an old man's life simply exists “in its own right;” by logical processes we know how to refer it to its infant beginnings; its very idiosyncrasies make us so refer it. What simple logic does for the old man's life is done for human life in general by exact clairvoyance, by true vision: if we are really to look at life as it develops from the innermost longings of the soul, we must follow it back. And when we do so, we come to earlier lives on earth, in which were prepared the longings that appear in the present and lead to our activities.

I have not been able to do more today than suggest that what leads to this comprehensive contemplation of life is not a tissue of fantasy, but an exact method. It is a contemplation which, by means of an advanced psychology, penetrates to the eternal in human nature. And on this foundation there now arises something that is a certainty, something that wells up out of the knowledge appropriate to us as modern men today and forms a basis for true inner piety and true inner religious life.

Anyone with an insight (and I may say that I am using the word “insight” in its literal sense) into the way the individual soul struggles free of the body, in order to enter a spiritual realm, will have a different way of looking at our social life too. Armed with this new attitude, he can see how friendships, relationships of love, and other associations are formed; how soul finds its way to soul, moving outside the family and other social groups; how physical proximity may be a means to the community of souls, the sympathy and togetherness of souls. He now knows that, just as the body falls away from the individual soul, so the physical element and all earthly events fall away from the friendships and from the relationships of love; and he sees how the soul-relationship that has come into being between men continues into a spiritual world, where it can also be spiritually experienced.

On a foundation of knowledge, not of faith, we can now say: as they stride through the gate of death, men find themselves once more together. And just as the body, which impedes our sight of the spirit, disappears in the spiritual world, so too in that world every impediment to friendship and love now disappears. Men are closer together there than in the flesh. A mode of knowledge that may still appear abstract in relation to true psychology culminates in this religious feeling and vision. Yet the philosophy of life I am here presenting does not seek to infringe religious faith. This philosophy can be tolerant; it can recognize fully the value of every individual religious faith, and even exercise it in practice; but at the same time, as a nurse to this religious life, it provides an epistemological basis for this religious life too.

I have sought today to say something basic about the relationship to psychology of a spiritually appropriate modern view of life. I know, better than many an opponent perhaps, the objections that can be raised to the beginnings of such a philosophy. But I believe I also know that, albeit entirely unconsciously, the longing for such a psychology is present today in countless souls. It therefore needs to be said over and over again: just as one does not need to be a painter to feel the beauty of a picture, so too one does not need to be a spiritual scientist oneself—although one can become one up to a point—to be able to test whether what I am saying here is true. Just as one can feel the beauty of a picture without being a painter oneself, so with ordinary common sense one can perceive what the spiritual scientist says about the soul. That one can see it, I think I have established all the more firmly in recognizing how souls thirst for a profounder approach to psychology and to the great riddles of existence in relation to the soul. The aim of a modern view of life such as has been outlined here today does in fact represent the desire of countless people, though they are not ordinarily aware of it; it forms the pain, the sorrow, the privation, the wish of countless people—of all those who are serious about what we must regard as constructive forces in face of the many forces of decline present in our age.

Anyone today who wishes to advocate a philosophy for the times must realize that he has to speak, think and will in harmony with what the souls in our serious age, if in many cases unconsciously, strive for. And I believe—if I may close on this note—that just such a philosophy as I have adumbrated does hold something of what countless souls strive for today, something of what they need as spiritual content and vital spiritual activity for the present and for the immediate future.

During our last meeting here some time ago we spoke of the deeper currents of Christianity with particular reference to the Gospel of St. John and of the great images and ideas accessible to man when he reflects deeply upon this unique text.¹ More than once it has been emphasized that the very depths of Christianity are illuminated by that Gospel and some of those who have heard lecture-courses on the same subject might feel inclined to ask: If the viewpoint reached through studying the Gospel of St. John may truly be called the most profound, can it be widened or enriched in any way by study of the other three Gospels of St. Luke, St. Matthew and St. Mark? Again, those who tend to be mentally lazy might ask: If the deepest depths of Christianity are to be found in the Gospel of St. John, is it still necessary to study Christianity as presented in the other Gospels, especially in the apparently less profound Gospel of St. Luke?

Anyone who might put this question believing such an attitude to be worthy of consideration would be labouring under a complete misapprehension. The scope of Christianity itself is infinite and light can be shed upon it from the most diverse standpoints. Furthermore, as the present course of lectures will show, although the Gospel of St. John is a document of untold profundity, there are facts which can be learnt from the Gospel of St. Luke and not from that of St. John. The ideas which in the lectures on the Gospel of St. John we came to recognize as among the most profound in Christianity, do not by any means comprise all its depths. It is possible to penetrate these depths from another starting-point altogether, basing our studies on the Gospel of St. Luke viewed in the light of Anthroposophy.

Let us once again recall facts in support of the statement that there is something to be gained from the Gospel of St. Luke even if the depths of the Gospel of St. John have been exhaustively studied. A fact revealed to the student of Anthroposophy by every line of the Gospel of St. John is that records such as the Gospels were composed by individuals who, as initiates and clairvoyants, possessed deeper insight than other men into the nature of existence. In everyday parlance the terms ‘initiate’ and ‘clairvoyant’ may be synonymous. But if our studies of Anthroposophy are to lead us into the deeper strata of spiritual life, we must distinguish between one who is an ‘initiate’ and one who is a ‘clairvoyant’, for they represent two distinct categories of human beings who have found their way into the spheres of super-sensible existence. There is a difference between an initiate and a clairvoyant, although an initiate may at the same time be a clairvoyant, and a clairvoyant an initiate of a certain grade. To distinguish with exactitude between these two categories of human beings you must recall the facts described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment,² remembering that strictly speaking there are three stages on the path leading beyond ordinary perception of the world.

The first kind of knowledge accessible to man can be described by saying: he beholds the world through his senses and assimilates what he perceives by means of his intellect and the other faculties of his soul. Beyond this, there are three further stages of knowledge, of cognition: the first is the stage of Imagination, Imaginative Cognition, the second is the stage of Inspiration, and the third is the stage of Intuition—but the term ‘Intuition’ must be understood in its true sense.

The faculty of Imaginative Cognition is possessed by one before whose eye of spirit all that lies behind the world of the senses is unfolded in mighty, cosmic pictures—but these pictures do not in the least resemble anything we call by this name in everyday life. Apart from the difference that the pictures revealed by Imaginative Cognition are independent of the laws of three-dimensional space, other characteristics make it impossible for them to be compared with anything in the world of the senses.

An idea of the world of Imagination may be gained in the following way. Suppose someone were able to extract from a plant in front of him everything perceptible to the sense of sight as ‘colour’, so that this hovered freely in the air. If he were to do nothing more than draw out the colour from the plant, a lifeless colour-form would hover before him. But to the clairvoyant such a colour-form is anything but a lifeless picture, for when he extracts the colour from the objects, then, through the preparation he has undergone and the exercises he has practised, this colour-picture begins to be animated by spirit just as in the physical world it was filled by the living substance of the plant. He then has before him, not a lifeless colour-form but freely moving coloured light, glistening, sparkling, full of inner life; each colour is the expression of the particular nature of a spiritual being imperceptible in the world of the physical senses. That is to say, the colour in the physical plant becomes for the clairvoyant the expression of spiritual beings. Now imagine a world filled with such colour-forms, reflected in manifold ways and in perpetual metamorphosis; your vision must not be confined to the colours, as it might be when confronting a painting of glimmering colour-reflections, but you must imagine it all as the expression of beings of soul-and-spirit, so that you can say to yourselves: ‘When a green colour-picture flashes up it expresses to me the fact that an intellectual being is behind it; or when a reddish colour-picture flashes up it is to me the expression of a being with a fiery, violent nature.’ Now imagine this whole sea of interweaving colours I might equally well say a sea of interplaying sensations of tone, taste, or smell, for all these are the expressions of beings of soul-and-spirit behind them—and you have what is called the ‘Imaginative’ world, the world of Imagination. It is nothing to which the word ‘imagination’ (fancy) in its ordinary sense could be applied; it is a real world, requiring a mode of comprehension different from that derived from the senses.

Within this world of Imagination you encounter everything that is behind the sense-world and is imperceptible to the physical senses—for instance, the etheric and astral bodies. A man whose knowledge of the world is derived from this clairvoyant, Imaginative perception, becomes acquainted with the outward aspect of higher beings, just as you become acquainted with the outward, physical aspect of a man in the physical world who, let us say, passes in front of you in the street. You know more about him when there is an opportunity of talking with him. His words then give you an impression differing from the one he makes upon you when you look at him in the street. In the case of many a man whom you pass by (to mention this one example only) you cannot observe whether his soul is moved by inner joy or grief, sorrow or delight. But you can discover this if you converse with him. In the one case his outward aspect is conveyed to you through everything you can perceive without his assistance; in the other case he expresses his very self to you. The same applies to the beings of the super-sensible world. A clairvoyant who comes to recognize these beings through Imaginative Cognition knows only their outward aspect. But he hears them give expression to their very selves when he rises from Imaginative Knowledge to Knowledge through Inspiration. He then has actual intercourse with these beings. They communicate to him from their inmost selves what and who they are. Inspiration is therefore a higher stage of knowledge than Imagination, and more is learnt about the beings of the world of soul-and-spirit at the stage of Inspiration than can be learnt through Imagination.

A still higher stage of knowledge is that of Intuition—but the word must be taken in its spiritual-scientific sense, not in that of day-to-day parlance, when anything that occurs to one, however hazy and nebulous, may be called ‘intuition’. In our sense, Intuition is a form of knowledge thanks to which we not only listen spiritually to what the beings communicate to us, but we become one with the very beings themselves. This is a very lofty stage of spiritual knowledge for it requires, at the outset, that there shall be in the human being that quality of universal love which causes him to make no distinction between himself and the other beings in his spiritual environment, but to pour forth his very self into the environment; thus he no longer remains outside but lives within the beings with whom he has spiritual communion. Because this can take place only in a spiritual world, the expression ‘Intuition’, i.e. ‘to dwell in the God’ is entirely appropriate. Thus there are three stages of knowledge of the super-sensible worlds: Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition.

It is possible, of course, to attain all these three stages of super-sensible knowledge, but it may also be that in some one incarnation the stage of Imagination only is reached. Then the spheres of the spiritual world attainable through Inspiration and Intuition remain hidden from the clairvoyant concerned. In our present age it is not usual for a person to be led to the higher stages of spiritual experience before having passed through the stage of Imagination; it is hardly possible for anyone to omit the stage of Imagination and be led at once to the stages of Inspiration and Intuition. But what would not be appropriate to-day, could happen and actually did happen in certain other periods of the evolution of man.

There were times when Imagination on the one hand and Inspiration and Intuition on the other were apportioned to different individuals. In certain Mystery-centres there were men whose eyes of spirit were open in such a way that they were clairvoyant in the sphere of Imagination and that world of symbolical pictures was accessible to them. Because with this grade of clairvoyance, such men said: ‘For this incarnation I renounce the attainment of the higher stages of Inspiration and Intuition’, they made themselves capable of seeing clearly and with exactitude in the world of Imagination. They underwent much training in order to develop vision of that world. But one thing was essential for them. Anyone who wants to confine his vision to the world of Imagination and gives up any attempt to advance to Inspiration and Intuition, lives in a world of uncertainty. This world of flowing Imaginations is, so to say, boundless, and if left to its own resources the soul floats hither and thither without being really aware of its direction or goal. In those times, therefore, and among peoples where certain human beings renounced the higher stages of knowledge, it was necessary for those whose clairvoyance had reached the stage of Imagination to attach themselves with utter devotion to leaders whose capacities of spiritual perception were open to Inspiration and Intuition. For Inspiration and Intuition alone can give such certainty in regard to the spiritual world that a man knows with full assurance: Thither leads the path—towards a definite goal! Without Inspiration it is not possible to say: There is the path; I must follow it in order to reach a goal! Whoever, therefore, cannot say this must entrust himself to the wise guidance of someone who says it to him. Hence in so many quarters it is constantly emphasized, and rightly so, that whoever rises, to begin with, to the stage of Imagination, must attach himself inwardly to a Guru—a leader who gives both direction and aim to his experiences. It was also advisable in certain epochs—but this is no longer the case to-day—to allow other individuals to omit the stage of Imagination and to lead them at once to Inspiration or, if possible, to Intuition. Such men renounced the possibility of perceiving the Imaginative pictures of the spiritual world around them; they lent themselves only to such impressions from the spiritual world as issue from the inner life of the beings there. They listened with their ears of spirit to the utterances of the beings of the spiritual world. Suppose there is a screen between you and another man whom you do not see but only hear him speaking behind the screen. It is certainly possible to renounce pictorial vision of the spiritual world in order to be led more quickly to the stage of hearing the utterances of the spiritual beings. No matter whether a person sees the pictures of the world of Imagination or not—if he is able to apprehend with spiritual ears what the beings in the spiritual world communicate regarding themselves, we say of him that he is endowed with the power to hear the ‘inner word’—in contrast to the outer word used in the physical world between man and man.

We can thus conceive that there are people who, without beholding the world of Imaginations, are endowed with the power to apprehend the inner word and can hear and communicate the utterances of spiritual beings. There were periods in the evolution of humanity when, within the Mysteries, these two forms of super-sensible cognition worked in co-operation. Each individual who had renounced the faculty of perception possessed by another, could develop greater clarity and definition in his own faculty and at certain periods this resulted in a truly wonderful co-operation within the Mysteries. There were clairvoyants who had specially trained themselves to see the world of Imaginative pictures, and there were others who, having passed over the world of Imagination, had trained themselves to receive the inner word into their souls through Inspiration. And so the one could communicate to the other the experiences made possible by his particular training. This was possible in times when some degree of confidence reigned between one man and another; to-day it is out of the question, simply because of the character of our age. Nowadays one man has not such strong belief in another that he would listen to his descriptions of the pictures of the world of Imagination and then, honestly believing those descriptions to be accurate, supplement them with what he himself knows through Inspiration. Nowadays, everyone wants to see it all himself—and that is natural in our age. Very few people would be satisfied with a one-sided development of Imagination such as was taken for granted in certain epochs. In our present time, therefore, it is necessary for a man to be led through the three stages of higher knowledge without omitting any one of them.

At each stage of super-sensible knowledge we encounter the great mysteries connected with the Christ Event, about which all three forms of cognition—Imaginative, Inspirational, Intuitive—have infinitely much to say.

If with this in mind we turn our attention to the four Gospels, we may say that the Gospel of St. John is written from the vantage-point of one who in the fullest sense was an Initiate, cognisant at the stage of Intuition of the mysteries of the super-sensible world, and who therefore describes the Christ Event as revealed by the vision of Intuition. But if close attention is paid to the distinctive characteristics of St. John's Gospel it will have to be admitted that the features standing out most clearly are presented from the standpoint of Inspiration and Intuition, while everything originating from the pictures of Imagination is shadowy and lacks definition. Thus if we disregard what was still revealed to him through Imagination, we may call the writer of St. John's Gospel the messenger of everything relating to the Christ Event that is vouchsafed to one endowed with the power of apprehending the inner word at the stage of Intuition. Hence he describes the mysteries of Christ's Kingdom as receiving their character through the inner Word, or Logos. Knowledge through Inspiration and Intuition is the source of the Gospel of St. John.

It is different in the case of the other three Gospels, and not one of their writers expressed his message as clearly as did the writer of the Gospel of St. Luke. In a short but remarkable preface it is said, in effect, that many others had previously attempted to collect and set forth the stories in circulation concerning the events in Palestine; but that for the sake of accuracy and order the writer of this Gospel is now undertaking to present the things which ... and now come significant words ... could be understood by those who from the beginning were ‘eye-witnesses and servants (ministers) of the Word’—that is the usual rendering. The aim of the writer of this Gospel is therefore to communicate what eye-witnesses—it would be better to say ‘seers’ (Selbstseher)—and servants of the Word had to say. In the sense of St. Luke's Gospel, ‘seers’ are men who through Imaginative Cognition can penetrate into the world of pictures and there behold the Christ Event; people specially trained to perceive these Imaginations are seers with accurate and clear vision at the same time as being ‘servants of the Word’—a significant phrase—and the writer of St. Luke's Gospel uses their communications as a foundation. He does not say ‘possessors’ of the Word, because such persons would have reached the stage of Inspiration in the fullest sense; he says ‘servants’ of the Word—people who could count less upon Inspirations than upon Imaginations in their own knowledge but for whom communications from the world of Inspiration were nevertheless available. The results of Inspirational Cognition were communicated to them and they could proclaim what their inspired teachers had made known to them. They were ‘servants’, not ‘possessors’ of the Word.

Thus the Gospel of St. Luke is founded upon the communications of seers, themselves knowers of the world of Imagination; they are those who, having learnt to express their visions of that world through means made possible by their inspired teachers, had themselves become ‘servants of the Word’.

Here again is an example of the exactitude of the Gospel records and of the need to understand the words in the strictly literal sense. In texts based upon spiritual knowledge, everything is exact to a degree often undreamed of by modern man.

But we must now again remember—as always when such matters are considered from the anthroposophical standpoint—that, for spiritual science, the Gospels themselves are not original sources of knowledge in the actual sense. One who stands strictly on the ground of spiritual science will not necessarily take a statement to be the truth simply because it stands in the Gospels. The spiritual scientist does not draw his knowledge from written documents but from the yields of spiritual investigation. Communications made by beings of the spiritual world to the initiate and the clairvoyant in the present age—these are the sources of knowledge for spiritual science. And in a certain respect these sources are the same in our age as in the times just described to you. Hence in our age too, those who have insight into the world of Imagination may be called clairvoyants, but only those who can rise to the stages of Inspiration and Intuition can be called ‘Initiates’. In our present age the expressions ‘clairvoyant’ and ‘initiate’ are not necessarily synonymous.

The content of the Gospel of St. John could be based only upon knowledge possessed by an Initiate capable of rising to the stages of Inspiration and Intuition. The contents of the other three Gospels could be based upon the communications of persons endowed with Imaginative clairvoyance but not yet able themselves to rise to the stages of Inspiration and Intuition. If therefore we adhere strictly to this distinction, St. John's Gospel is based upon Initiation, and the other three, especially that of St. Luke—according to what the writer himself says—upon Clairvoyance. Because this is the case, and because everything that is revealed to the vision of a highly trained clairvoyant is introduced, this Gospel gives us well-defined pictures of what is contained in the Gospel of St. John in faint impressions only. In order to make the difference even more obvious, let me say the following.

Although it would hardly ever be the case to-day, let us suppose a man were initiated in such a way that the worlds of Inspiration and of Intuition were open to him but that he was not clairvoyant in the world of Imagination. Suppose such a man met another, perhaps not initiated but to whom the whole world of Imaginations was open. This man would be able to communicate a great deal to the first who might possibly only be able to explain it through Inspiration but could not himself see it, having no faculty of clairvoyance. There are many to-day who are clairvoyant without being initiates; the reverse is hardly ever the case. Nevertheless it might conceivably happen that someone who had been initiated, could not, although possessing the gift of clairvoyance, for some reason or other perceive the Imaginations in a particular instance. A clairvoyant would then be able to tell such a man a great deal as yet unknown to him.

It must be strongly emphasized that Anthroposophy relies upon no other source than that of the Initiates, and that the texts of the Gospels are not the actual sources of its knowledge. The fount of anthroposophical knowledge is investigated to-day independently of any historical records. But then we turn to the records and compare the findings of spiritual-scientific research with them. What Anthroposophy can at all times discover about the Christ Event without the help of any documentary record is found again in the Gospel of St. John, presented in a most sublime way. Hence its supreme value, for it shows us that at the time when it was composed a man was living who wrote as one initiated into the spiritual world can write to-day. The same voice, as it were, that can be heard to-day, sounds across to us from the depths of the centuries.

The same can be said of the other Gospels, including that of St. Luke. It is not the pictures delineated by the writer of the Gospel of St. Luke that are for us the source of knowledge of the higher worlds; the source for us lies in the results of ascent into the super-sensible world. When we speak of the Christ Event, a source for us is also that great tableau of pictures and Imaginations appearing when we direct our gaze to the beginning of our era. We compare what thus reveals itself with the pictures and Imaginations described in the Gospel of St. Luke; and this course of lectures will show how the Imaginative pictures accessible to man to-day compare with the descriptions given in that Gospel.

The truth is that there is only one source for spiritual investigation when directed to the events of the past. This source does not lie in external records; no stones dug out of the earth, no documents preserved in archives, no treatises written by historians either with or without insight—none of these things is the source of spiritual science. What we are able to read in the imperishable Akashic Chronicle—that is the source of spiritual science. The possibility exists of knowing what has happened in the past without reference to external records. Modern man has thus two ways of acquiring information about the past. He can take the documents and the historical records when he wants to learn something about outer events, or the religious scripts when he wants to learn something about the conditions of spiritual life. Or else he can ask: What have those men to say before whose spiritual vision lies that imperishable Chronicle known as the ‘Akashic Chronicle’—that mighty tableau in which there is registered whatever has at any time come to pass in the evolution of the world, of the earth and of humanity?

Whoever raises his consciousness into the spiritual world learns gradually to read this chronicle. It is no ordinary script. Think of the course of events, just as they happened, presented to your spiritual vision; think, let us say, of the Emperor Augustus and all his deeds standing before you in a cloud-like picture. The picture stands there before the spiritual-scientific investigator and he can at any time evoke the experience anew. He requires no external evidence. He need only direct his gaze to a definite point in cosmic or human happenings and the events will present themselves to him in a spiritual picture. In this way the spiritual gaze can survey the ages of the past, and what is there perceived is recorded as the findings of spiritual investigation.

What happened at the beginning of our era can be perceived by spiritual vision and compared, for example, with what is related in the Gospel of St. Luke. Then the spiritual investigator recognizes that at that time too there were seers able to behold the past; and moreover the accounts they give of happenings in their own times can be compared with what is revealed to-day by spiritual investigation of the Akashic Chronicle.

Again and again it must be realized that we do not have recourse to outer records but to the actual findings of spiritual investigation and that we then try to rediscover these results in the outer records. The value of the records themselves is thereby enhanced and we can come to a decision about the truth of their contents on the strength of our own investigations. They lie before us as, even more faithful expression of the truth because we ourselves are able to recognize the truth. But a statement such as this must not be made without at the same time affirming that this ‘reading in the Akashic Chronicle’ is by no means as easy as observation of events in the physical world! With the help of an example I should like to give you an idea of certain difficulties that may arise.

We know from elementary Anthroposophy that man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. The moment we are no longer observing man on the physical plane but rise into the spiritual world, the difficulties begin. When we have a human being physically before us, we see a unity formed by physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. Whoever observes a human being during waking life has all this before him as unity, but if it is necessary for some reason to rise into the higher worlds in order to observe a human being, the difficulties at once begin. Suppose, for example, we wish to observe a human being in his totality while he is asleep during the night, and rise into the world of Imagination in order, let us say, to perceive his astral body—which is now outside the physical body. The human being is now divided into two. What I am describing will seldom occur in this particular form, for observation of the human being is comparatively easy, but it will help to convey an idea of the difficulties in question.

Suppose someone goes into a room where a number of people are asleep. He sees their physical bodies lying there and, if he is clairvoyant, their etheric bodies too; at a higher stage of clairvoyance he sees their astral bodies. But in the astral world everything interpenetrates—including, of course, the astral bodies of human beings. Although it would not often happen to a trained clairvoyant, when looking at a number of sleeping people he might mistake which astral body belonged to some particular physical body below. As I said, it is an unlikely occurrence because this is one of the first stages of actual vision and because anyone who attains it is well trained in how to distinguish in such a case. But the difficulties become very considerable when spiritual beings—not human beings—are observed in the spiritual world. As a matter of fact the difficulties are already great if a human being is to be observed, not as he is at present, but in his totality, as he passes through incarnations. Thus if you observe a human being now living and ask yourself: Where was his Ego in his previous incarnation? you have to go through the Devachanic world to reach his former incarnation. You must be able to establish which Ego has always belonged to the preceding incarnations of the person in question. You must hold together, in an intricate way, the continuous Ego and the various stages down on the Earth. Mistakes are very possible here and error can very easily occur when looking for an Ego in its earlier bodies. In the higher worlds, therefore, it is not easy to maintain the connection between everything belonging to a human personality and his former incarnations as inscribed in the Akashic Chronicle.

Suppose someone has before him a man—let us call him John Smith—and as a clairvoyant or initiate he asks: ‘Who were the physical ancestors of this man?’—Let us assume that all external records have been lost and there is only the Akashic Chronicle upon which to rely. It would be a matter of having to discover from the Akashic Chronicle the physical ancestors of the man—the father, mother, grandfather, and so on, in order to see how the physical body evolved in the line of physical descent. But then there might be the further question: ‘What were the earlier incarnations of this man?’ To answer that question an entirely different path must be taken than when looking for the physical ancestors. It may be necessary to go back through long, long ages in order to arrive at the previous incarnations of the Ego.

Already you have two streams: the physical body as it stands before you is not a completely new creation, for it springs from the ancestors in the line of physical heredity; nor is the Ego a completely new creation, for it is linked with its previous incarnations. The same holds good for the intermediate members, the etheric and astral bodies. Most of you know that the etheric body is not a completely new creation but that it too may have taken a path leading through the most diverse forms. The etheric body of Zarathustra reappeared in Moses.³ It was the same etheric body. If we were to seek out the physical ancestors of Moses this would give us one line; if we were to seek out the ancestors of the etheric body of Moses we should get another, quite different line; here we should come to the etheric body of Zarathustra and to other etheric bodies. Just as we have to trace quite different lines for the physical body and the etheric body, the same applies to the astral body. Each separate member of the human being might lead to very diverse streams. Thus the etheric body may be the etheric re-embodiment of an etheric body that belonged to a different individuality altogether—not by any means the same in which the Ego was formerly incarnated. And the same can be said of the astral body.

When we rise into the higher worlds in order to investigate the several members of a human being, the individual streams all take different directions, and in following them we come to very intricate processes in the spiritual world. Whoever wishes to understand a human being from the vantage-point of spiritual investigation, must describe him not merely as a descendant of his ancestors, not merely as having derived his etheric body or his astral body from this or that being, but he must describe the paths taken by all these four members until they unite in the present individual. This cannot be done all at once. For instance, we may trace the path followed by the etheric body and reach important conclusions. Someone else may trace the path of the astral body. The one may lay more stress on the etheric body, the other on the astral body, and frame his descriptions accordingly. To those who do not notice everything said about an individual by men who are clairvoyant, it will make no difference whether one says this and another that; it will seem to them that the same entity is being described. In their eyes the one who describes the physical personality only and the other who describes the etheric body are both speaking of the same being—John Smith.

All this can give you an idea of the complexity of circumstances and conditions encountered when it is a question of describing the nature of any phenomenon in the world—whether a human or any other being—from the standpoint of clairvoyant research or Initiation-knowledge. I was obliged to say the foregoing because it will help you to understand that only the most extensive investigation in the Akashic Chronicle can present any being in full clarity to the eyes of spirit.

The Being who stands before us as the Gospel of St. John describes Him—no matter whether we speak of Him as Jesus of Nazareth before the Baptism by John or as Christ after the Baptism—that Being stands before us with an Ego, an astral body, an etheric body and physical body. To give a full description according to the Akashic Chronicle of the Being who was Christ Jesus, we must trace the paths traversed by the four members of His nature in the course of the evolution of humanity. Only then can we rightly understand Him. It is here a question of grasping the meaning of the information regarding the Christ Event given by modern spiritual-scientific investigation, for light must be shed on apparent contradictions in the four Gospels.

I have often pointed out why purely materialistic research cannot recognize the supreme value and profundity of the Gospel of St. John: it is because those who carry out this research cannot understand that a higher Initiate sees differently, more deeply, than the others. Those who have doubts about the Gospel of St. John attempt to establish a kind of conformity between the three synoptic Gospels. But conformity will be difficult to establish and sustain if it is based only upon the external, material happenings. What will be of particular importance in tomorrow's lecture, namely the life of Jesus of Nazareth before the Baptism by John, is described by two Evangelists, by the writers of the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke, and external, materialistic observation will find differences there that are in no way less than those which must be assumed to exist between the Gospel of St. John and the other three Gospels.

Let us take the facts: The writer of the Gospel of St. Matthew relates how the birth of the Creator of Christianity was announced beforehand, how the birth took place, how Magi, having seen the ‘star’, came from the East, being led by the star to the place where the Redeemer was born; he describes how Herod's attention was aroused and how, in order to escape the massacre of the babes in Bethlehem, the parents of the Redeemer fled with the child to Egypt; when Herod was dead it was made known to Joseph, the father of Jesus, that they might return, but for fear of Herod's successor they went to Nazareth instead of returning to Bethlehem.

To-day I will leave aside the Baptist's proclamation, but I want to draw attention to the fact that if we compare the Gospels of St. Luke and St. Matthew we find the annunciation of Jesus of Nazareth described quite differently; the one Gospel relates that it was made to Mary, the other that it was made to Joseph. From the Gospel of St. Luke we learn that the parents of Jesus of Nazareth lived at that place and went to Bethlehem on the occasion of the enrolling. While they were there, Jesus was born. Then came the circumcision, after eight days—nothing is said about a flight into Egypt—and a short time afterwards the child was presented in the temple; the customary offering having been made, the parents returned with the child to Nazareth. A remarkable incident is then described—how on the occasion of a visit with his parents to Jerusalem the twelve-year-old Jesus remained behind in the temple, how his parents sought and found him there among those who expounded the scriptures, how among the learned doctors of the Law he gave evidence of profound knowledge of the scriptures. Then it is related how the parents took the child home with them again, how he grew up ... and we hear nothing particular about him from that time until the Baptism by John.

Here we have two accounts of Jesus of Nazareth before the Christ descended into him. Whoever wishes to reconcile the accounts must consider how, according to the ordinary materialistic view, he can reconcile the story in the Gospel of St. Matthew that directly after the birth of Jesus his parents, Joseph and Mary, fled with the child into Egypt and subsequently returned, with the other story of the presentation in the temple narrated by St. Luke.

In these lectures we shall find that what seems a complete contradiction to the ordinary mind will be revealed as truth in the light of spiritual investigation. Both accounts are true!—although presented as accounts of events in the physical world they are in apparent contradiction. Precisely the three synoptic Gospels of St. Matthew, St. Mark and St. Luke ought to compel people to adopt a spiritual conception of events in the history of humanity. For it is surely obvious that nothing is attained by ignoring apparent contradictions in such records or by speaking of ‘fiction’ when realities prove too great an obstacle.

We shall have opportunity here to speak of things of which there was no occasion to speak in detail when we were studying the Gospel of St. John namely, the events that took place before the Baptism by John and the descent of the Christ into the three bodies of Jesus of Nazareth. Many riddles of vital significance concerning the essence of Christianity will find their solution when—as the outcome of research into the Akashic Chronicle—we hear of the being and nature of Jesus of Nazareth before the Christ took possession of his three bodies.

Tomorrow we shall begin by considering the nature and the life of Jesus of Nazareth as revealed in the Akashic Chronicle, and then ask ourselves: How does the knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth compare with what is described in the Gospel of St. Luke as imparted by those who at that time were ‘seers’ or ‘servants’ of the Word, of the Logos?

• 1. This lecture-course was given by Dr. Steiner in Basle, November 1907. It has not been published in English. Other lecture-courses on the same subject, published in English, were given by him in Hamburg, May 1908, and in Cassel, June–July 1909. (See list of publications at the end of this volume.)
• 2. Revised edition, 1963. (Rudolf Steiner Press, London.)
• 3. See also Lectures Four and Five.