The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Recently, many members of the Anthroposophical Society, especially those with a scientific background, have come to believe that a discussion should take place between what is given in Anthroposophy as world knowledge and what is given today as scientific world knowledge based on the assumptions of the second half of the 19th century. Yes, it is believed that if one, as it were, accommodates science in a certain way, responds to it as much as possible, this could result in something extraordinarily favorable for anthroposophy.

It is precisely because scientific activity has entered the Anthroposophical Society, which in other respects is to be welcomed as an extremely gratifying fact, that an extraordinary number of errors have arisen with regard to the point mentioned.

We must not forget that in the course of the 19th century, under the influence of what was gradually called and is still called science, general human knowledge has taken on a character in relation to which anthroposophical knowledge of the world is quite different. One must assume that anyone who has grown into present-day scientific life with their habitual way of thinking will find it impossible to switch to the anthroposophical view without further ado. Therefore, one must be aware that no kind of approval of the anthroposophical view of the world can come from this side in the near future.

Those people who either have not grown into today's scientific work with their habitual way of thinking or who, as young people, grow into it and then out of it again, will be the ones who will mainly recognize the validity of anthroposophical world knowledge.

To bring a little life into what I have just said, I would like to speak today about an initial perspective on the path of Anthroposophy through the world. I would like to structure these three lectures somewhat aphoristically so that friends who have come from far away can take as much with them as possible. I would like to tie in with all kinds of phenomena in the life of civilization today, but in the main I would like to seek the content for these lectures in purely anthroposophical discussions.

We know what the facts are that a person experiences when they pass through the gate of death. Today, in order to present the physical perspective of anthroposophy to our souls, so to speak, we will first consider only the very first period of life after passing through the gate of death. It has often been mentioned how, throughout their entire life on earth, human beings have such a close connection between their physical body and their etheric body or formative forces that this connection is maintained throughout their entire life on earth.

When a person interrupts the ordinary state of consciousness during their life on earth through the state of sleep and dreams, they carry the astral body and the ego out of the physical and formative forces. These, in turn, are so closely connected that they do not separate. Thus, in the course of a normal twenty-four-hour day, the separation that occurs in the course of a normal day is such that the physical body and the etheric or formative body on the one hand and the ego and the astral body on the other hand separate, while each side forms a closely knit whole.

When a person now passes through the gate of death, it is different. Then it happens that the physical body is discarded first and that for a very short time a connection is established between the I, the astral body and the etheric body, which was not present during life on earth. This connection gives the first experiences that a person goes through after death, which only last for days. What are these experiences?

They consist of the person, as if melting away from himself, seeing everything that he has taken in through his senses and also through the mind, which combines the perceptions of the senses, during his life on earth.

During our life on earth, we become accustomed to seeing colored things and processes that shine in colors in our view when we look out into the world. But we also retain the impressions of colors in our memory, albeit in a weakened form. We carry them with us through our memory. It is the same with the impressions of the other senses. And if we are honest in self-observation, then we say to ourselves: Actually, when we sit in the quiet chamber and let our memories, that is, our inner selves, play, what we experience from our inner selves is composed of the shadowy images of external impressions. In our ordinary consciousness, we live either in the immediate, vivid impressions of the external world or in the shadowy memories of it. We will talk tomorrow about what we have beyond that. Today we only want to call to mind very strongly that during our whole life on earth this consciousness is filled with colors and color processes that spread over things, with sounds, with sensations of warmth and cold, in short, with the impressions that we receive through the senses, and with their shadowy afterimages in the inner life of the soul, as one might also say, in memory. Let us consider this as a kind of starting point.

Everything we experience melts away when we pass through the portal of death. Within a few days, so to speak, everything that fills our soul from birth to death has dissolved into the greater cosmos. This can be called: The etheric body or formative forces of the human being separate from the I and the astral body, after first entering into a connection with them that did not previously exist in earthly life.

Now let us imagine more precisely what this experience is like. I will make a schematic drawing for this purpose. Let us assume that the physical body of the human being is characterized by this schematic drawing; the etheric or formative body is characterized by this schematic drawing (shaded in yellow). We only experience what I have characterized as this, this interrelated structure of physical and etheric bodies, when we are stuck inside after waking up. So we actually always experience it from the inside. And to help us recall this as accurately as possible, I would like to design the drawing in the following way. I will indicate green for the part of the etheric body that seems inward. The physical body is discarded at death anyway, so we need not consider it at this point. And I will indicate what is directed outwards from the etheric body with this red line.

I just said that we only experience this structure of the etheric body from the inside after waking up; so, in a sense, we only experience what shines inward in the green. We do not experience what shines outward in the red.

When we have passed through the gate of death and enter into a certain connection with the etheric body with our ego and our astral body, this connection happens in the following way. You must now imagine that the whole etheric body turns like a glove when you turn all the finger linings inside out, as you would normally do with the skin, turning the inside out. So that I now have to draw what is colored red on the outside in the earthly state as the inner part, and what is colored green on the inside, I have to draw green on the outside. The entire etheric body turns in on itself. But this turning around is connected with an immeasurably rapid enlargement of the etheric body. It grows, it becomes gigantic, it expands immeasurably far into the universe, so that I would now have to make the drawing something like this (large green board 8 circles).

And whereas we used to be in there with our ego and our astral body, we are now (red circle) facing the etheric body that expands into the cosmic, but we look at it from its other side. That which we previously carried with us without meaning, the red on the outside, is now turned inwards. What was previously turned inwards and what alone has meaning for us during our life on earth is now turned outwards, no longer of any concern to us, and disperses into the universe. But in this green – of course presented schematically – is contained everything that we have had within us during our life on earth as a colored, sounding, and so on world.

As green, so to speak, goes through the etheric body turning to the other side, we lose it completely and we get a very different world as an impression. We must not imagine that we can still have the same world that we had during our life on earth after death. This world goes away. To imagine, for example, that after death we could experience, for my sake, in a different edition, the content of earthly life, that is quite wrong, that does not correspond to the facts. What we experience through the turning of the etheric or formative body is indeed of a gigantic size compared to the content of earthly life, but it is something quite different. We experience the whole of our earthly education through the fact that the outside is now turned inwards, in powerful impressions that are different from the sensory impressions. We do not experience the blush of the rose, but we experience how we have formed the blush of the rose within us as an idea. That is where it begins to be not as calm as it is in physical life. There, in earthly life, the roses are so beautifully arranged in a rose garden, and each one gives peace, and one feels suspended in the peace. Now the rose garden becomes something completely different, now the rose garden becomes an event in time. And as we gradually let our gaze wander from one rose to the next, as we formed the image of the first rose, the second, the third rose and so on within us, this, as in a living becoming, in a lightning-fast rippling and weaving, one rose after the other arises, but not as roses, but as images that unfold, this now emerges as our inner life as if in a sea of events. And so we are confronted with something we have not seen during our life on earth: the becoming of this earthly life, the gradual development of this earthly life. We know how our soul has become from childhood on. That which we have left completely unnoticed during our earthly life is now playing out in us. It is as if we had stepped out of ourselves, had become a second person and were watching how we gradually formed the simple ideas of childhood, the more complicated ones of later years, and so on. We see the emergence of all this earthly life from its inner side. We see how this earthly life, this earthly existence, is formed from hour to hour. Yes, we gain the impression that this whole earthly life is actually formed from the cosmos. For everything we perceive grows into the immeasurable, into the cosmic, and by growing into it, we become clear about the fact that what has been formed in us in earthly life is also formed from the cosmos.

And now we are gradually getting a valid idea of what it is like to live this human life on earth. Let us take as our starting point what is more or less believed today with regard to this life on earth. Man eats, and in doing so he takes the substances that are outside into his own organism. This is an undeniable fact. He also changes these substances. He changes them in his mouth, and then all the more so in the rest of his organism. What is absorbed goes into the whole organism, really goes into the whole organism. Science will still come and say: But we are also constantly losing substances to the outside. We need only think of how you cut your nails and your hair if you are not yet bald. You can see from the dandruff and so on how the human being loses matter, loses substance. And it is common knowledge today that in this way, by constantly losing matter, the human being completely rebuilds itself over the course of about seven years.

So that, if I want to put it drastically, everything sitting here on the chairs, in terms of the material, was scattered all over the world eight or nine years ago. Let me put it this way: what is sitting here on these chairs could only have gathered over the last seven to eight years. If what was in all of you more than seven or eight years ago were still sitting here in muscle tissue and so on – you are already older, so you will have regenerated several times – you would not all be sitting here.

So, of what you carried as your muscle meat, blood and other things at home or elsewhere seven or eight years ago, nothing is sitting there; you have gradually cut it off, shed it and so on.

But if science is now materialistically oriented, then how does it answer? It says something like this: During these last seven years we have all been eating. That which we have eaten now is here, and that which we ate earlier is no longer here. For example, each of you sitting here has a heart, doesn't he? Now, the physical matter of this heart, so science tells you, has renewed itself in the last seven to eight years. So you definitely have a new heart compared to your condition nine years ago, let's say. Yes, you could say something like that, if you think in terms of the present.

But it is not so. This idea exists only because people do not know what I have just explained to you, do not include it at all in the realm of their scientific observation and thinking. They know nothing of that reversal of the ether or formative forces of the body, of what shows us, after we have passed through the gate of death, how the whole being has actually come into being bit by bit. Because if one knows this, then one is also able to look into the human organism quite differently. And only then does one learn to recognize the truth.

One can believe that the cabbage, potatoes, other vegetables, cherries, plums and so on that one has enjoyed over the past few years have gradually accumulated this heart matter. But it has not. Essentially – listen to me when I say this – the heart you carry within you has not much to do with the material you have taken in over the last seven to eight years. Rather, the heart you carry within you today has essentially arisen in a very mysterious way out of the ether of the cosmos, which you have drawn together into the density of the heart over the last seven to eight years. So it is not that your heart has been renewed out of physical matter of the last seven to eight years, but it has been renewed out of the cosmos. You have renewed your heart and your other organs out of the ether. You have actually made yourself into a new person over the past few years, not from the earth, but from the cosmos. This can be seen from the effects of the etheric body after death, how it has worked during the whole of life on earth, that we have always regenerated ourselves from the cosmos.

Now your materialistic conscience – after all, everyone has to have one of those – will say: But we did eat. We did absorb external matter, and internal processes took place as a result.

Yes, but these internal processes have less to do with your actual, deeper nature than you might think.

Now we can even state a fact that may seem somewhat grotesque to today's thinking: You are all sitting there now; what you have renewed in yourselves over the past seven to eight years did not live in the cabbage and on the potato fields, but lived out in the universe in the sun, moon and stars, coming down from there, and you formed yourselves anew out of the universe. In doing so, we have pointed out an error that simply has to arise from today's thinking. They seek only the relationships of human regeneration to physical earth matter, but not to ether. And the consequence of this is that once one has become accustomed to the ideas presented in current physiology, one cannot help but regard everything that is given from the anthroposophical point of view as a kind of fantasy. Therefore, we must be clear about how fruitless discussions are today, how only by mastering both fields, contemporary science and anthroposophy, can we shed light on them from both sides, but how we must not give ourselves over to the hope – because if we give ourselves over to this hope, it is actually to the detriment of anthroposophy! - that those who are accustomed to materialistic ideas can be drawn over to it so easily by a discussion. One must have very clear and precise ideas about this. Then one will realize that, first of all, the whole way in which one appropriates anthroposophy must be appropriated by people before they can even enter into this anthroposophical way of looking at and knowing things.

I said that essentially we actually regenerate our new human being from the cosmos. We do not find the substances in the cosmos that we then find in the heart, of course not, because there they are so thin that they cannot be detected by physical means on earth. There they are ethereal. But what appears as dense heart matter at a certain age has only just condensed from the cosmic ether. So what is there today was all still out in the heavens, in the stars, nine or ten years ago, and what has remained, what has pushed its way in from the matter that should actually have formed out of the ether, that is what causes illness. When we carry physical matter that is too old within us, then that is one cause of illness. And deep insights into the nature of disease are gained when one knows how matter, instead of being expelled, persists; for all matter that is taken up as physical earth matter is actually doomed to be expelled again. If it persists in the organism, then it becomes the cause of disease.

You can also see from this how this really real knowledge, which we can only gain by having an insight into what occurs in us as first experiences shortly after we have completely discarded the physical body, plays a practical role. So after death, everything that we have had in the way of sense impressions and the mind's processing of sense impressions melts away from us. We look at the world quite differently. Minerals, plants, and animals, as we previously looked at them, are not there at all. How people become, that is there.

We have passed through the gateway of death. We have thereby resigned from the scene of the earth. We have stepped onto the scene of the cosmos: Another world surrounds us. It is as if we had stepped out of a small chamber of earthly existence into the majestically vast chamber of the cosmos, and we feel spread out over the cosmos, would truly not fit into the small earthly chamber. So we have entered the scene of the cosmos. And on this scene of the cosmos we must now remain until we descend again to our earthly existence, only that we now enter into contact with completely new worlds, with worlds whose essence belongs to the higher hierarchies.

This consideration, which one gains so directly in connection with man, must, however, be extended to the whole of nature. And I would like to characterize to you what has to happen there in the following way.

Let us assume, for example, that we have gone back a very long time in evolution, in the evolution of the earth. We would encounter very different living creatures and very different events on earth. You know that there have been periods of time when giant animals of a lower kind lived that no longer exist today. The entire species has died out and is no longer present. The paleontologist and geologist search for individual remains in the formations of the earth. Let us assume that I would draw schematically this very old development, where, for example, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, these strange beasts, would have lived here on earth. Yes, these creatures were not formed out of physical earthly matter, they were formed out of the cosmos, out of ether. And when the time approached when these creatures gradually died out, the entire etheric matter remained, if I may put it that way. (See drawing: yellow.) Now there were no more creatures. But all the etheric matter from which these creatures had formed remained behind, just as our etheric body remains behind. And this etheric matter was the cause that in later times, after this etheric formation had passed through the cosmos, other beings formed in earthly existence. Of these, in turn, the etheric remained behind. From these, other entities formed. And finally, the world of animals emerged as it exists today.

So if you have three consecutive periods here, first period, second period, third period, you have, let's say, consecutive animal forms. But for the following one to always arise from the previous one, a passage through the cosmos with the help of the ether is necessary, just as a passage through the cosmos between two earth lives is necessary for man. And if we finally have entities here (see drawing: red), then that can in turn pass into the ether, and there, formed out of the ether in a certain period, the human being can appear. But the influence has always happened in a roundabout way through the cosmos.

Now comes the purely materialistic observer. He sees all this, and now he believes that one thing has arisen out of the other. Certainly, on earth it also follows; but an etheric activity, a cosmic activity lies in between.

In the 19th century, it became common practice to look only at what follows on the earth, but not at what cosmic activity is beyond the earthly. Therefore, the consideration remained: ultimately man, before that simpler forms, still simpler forms and so on. This is what we can obtain as the development of organisms through natural science, which does not involve the etheric. This natural science could obtain nothing other than what it did obtain. If one admits its presuppositions, that one should not get involved in the ethereal, one poses the question in such a way that one should only consider that which belongs to earthly existence; yes, then there is no other choice than to present the physical evolutionary current. Darwinists have done this, Haeckel has done this, and to demand more as earth science or even to want to polemicize against what has come about as earth science is nonsense. Because only when one adds the knowledge of the ethereal world can that arise which belongs to it. So you see, there is no point in direct polemic; but if someone wants to remain on the ground of natural science, he can. And to the other, who speaks of some other principles of formation in what is on earth, he can always say: Yes, that has no significance at all. That is not there, he will say, when he has become accustomed to the merely earthly way of looking at things.

If one wants to speak differently, then one must first acquire knowledge of the ethereal world. So for a valid, reasonable polemic against today's science, the only thing left to do is to say: In your field, o naturalist, you are quite right, nothing else can come of it, we do not deny that, we fully admit that. But if you want to talk to us about what we mean, well, then you must first familiarize yourself with the elementary processes in the cosmic ether, then we can talk to each other. Otherwise you are not grounded in reality if you do not start from these things.

You see, a member sitting here has written a little book on botany from a spiritual scientific point of view. A very disparaging review of it appeared recently in a local paper. Well, what can one say about that! I said: Imagine you were the botanist who wrote this review, you had never heard of anthroposophy and this second edition of your little book came to your notice. It is only natural that you would write just like him! The fact that you do not do so, but on the contrary have written the little book yourself, is the very reason why you have taken up anthroposophy in the first place. You only have to put yourself in the other person's shoes for once, and then you can write all these opposing things yourself. But you see, if you want a person who has once put himself in one direction with all his habits of thought to be different, if you want him to be an anthroposophist, it seems to me almost like someone who has had a blonde daughter suddenly wants a black one. It doesn't work like that. What man has become through today's science is not something that can be changed in the twinkling of an eye. You have to think realistically.

The period that followed the mid-19th century gave the whole state of mind a very specific character. I will give you an example of this from a completely different angle.

You know that there is something today called analytical psychology, psychoanalysis. I have often said here that psychoanalysis produces some beautiful things; but, first of all, it arises from an incomplete, amateurish knowledge of human physiology, so it is amateurishness. Then it arises from an amateurish knowledge of the human soul, of human psychology. That is also amateurism. And because one usually follows the other, the things multiply, and psychoanalysis is actually amateurism squared. - If you multiply d by d, you get d?. But it does have an effect, even if only in an amateurish way, if it is pursued further. And one can also understand that this thing could gradually emerge from inadequate physiology and psychology. But it does rub off on people's minds, this way of thinking does rub off!

Today we have an enormous literature about it. You could fill a large library with psychoanalytic literature. People argue terribly in it, so that if you go into the polemics, it is sometimes quite interesting. Well, this psychoanalysis has also been mentioned here from time to time. One can really fill a library with what has been written about it. But if so much is written in this field, then there must be a lot of study in it, at least on the surface. This colors the state of mind of people.

Now there is something very peculiar. You see, in 1841, there was already a psychoanalytic literature in Central Europe. But it consisted of only fourteen lines. They read: “In our modern overcrowded consciousness, we throw many things around that we cannot develop because we lack the time. They remain in us in the form of tasks that we could work on. They are, to quote Tieck, unborn souls that, yearning for existence, hover in the background of our own soul as if in a limbo."

You see, in these fourteen lines - if you make the lines longer, there is even less - the principle of the whole of psychoanalysis is contained. At that time, it was called “unborn souls” that live in the background of the soul in a limbo, struggling for existence. Now it is called “hidden provinces in the depths of the soul,” “soul provinces,” and so on. In those days, however, it was considered such an insignificant thing that it was noted in a few lines. Today our civilization has come to write entire libraries about it. But everything essential, everything fundamental, is contained in those fourteen lines. But in those days, when it was all contained in just fourteen lines, the libraries were filled with different books than they are filled with today, and people who wanted to learn took in different material.

If today, as a young student, you somehow study psychology and are supposed to write a dissertation, you can't avoid psychoanalysis. You have to study it. Yes, it rubs off on the soul. In 1841, the essential was expressed in these fourteen lines. It was not considered something so important that could have such a tremendous significance for human thought. And so it has been with many things.

It means something tremendous, whether we look at any field of facts or whether we do not look. In those days, in 1841, people slept through psychoanalysis. This thought, which I read to you in the fourteen lines, only emerged in a single person, in Karl Rosenkranz. He dreamt about it once. Dreams pass quickly and do not have much influence on life. But people filled their waking hours with other things. Today, on the other hand, much is missed because one has to be awake for psychoanalysis and similar things.

This matter really needs to be looked at carefully, then it will be possible to say where to start in order to bring anthroposophy to bear in the world. In any case, polemics are not the answer. Polemics are almost like someone lying in a room and snoring terribly, and cannot be woken up at all, and someone else is watching, and now the person watching is trying hard to make the snorer, who is sleeping through everything, understand

what the other is saying. He cannot understand him. Nor is it possible for two fields of spiritual life to communicate with each other if each sleeps for the other's field and only watches for his own.

Now there will still be many who sleep for anthroposophy. They will not wake up so quickly for anthroposophy. But one would like the anthroposophists to wake up for the others, so that they know why anthroposophy is the all-embracing one, not only out of their blind faith but out of a real insight into the quality of the other and also encompasses what the others consider to be the only one, and how anthroposophy broadens the horizon because it goes beyond those areas that the others consider to be merely within a narrow horizon.

In this way I have presented one of the perspectives, the perspective that arises when we ask about the details of what surrounds us as the earth world and what melts away after death. It is the physical perspective. In order to be understood, it leads us into that which is immediately adjacent to it, into the etheric.

Later, we will look at the soul perspective, how the human being awakens to the soul perspective, and then conclude with a consideration of the spiritual perspective of anthroposophy. These will be the three perspectives of anthroposophy.

Last night dear Frau Dr. Leyh died. I believe from the very fact of her expending so much energy in playing her part in this organisation during the last weeks of her life on earth, in spite of severe illness that made it hard for her to come up and down here—I believe that from the keenness with which she shared in our work you will have been able simply through these facts, particularly when you have so constantly seen her here, to feel what a delightful and precious personality has left us if one is to speak in the terms of outer space.

Those of our friends who tended her devotedly during the last days of her earthly life, who stood by her in friendship and devotion, have shown in every case of this standing-by, in all the help given her, how fond they had become of this personality. I need not dwell at length on what we all feel in our hearts. Those who have now had the opportunity of knowing this personality so well in her intimate circle, not only during her suffering of the last weeks but all through her spiritual striving, her wonderful spiritual struggles, which came to such a grand conclusion that even on her last day she was deep in many great ideas about our world-outlook—those with her in her intimate circle, and also those less intimately connected with her (as I said, I need not labour this) will send their thoughts towards the spiritual region
where henceforth our good friend will be. They will be following her and will use every moment possible to be together in spirit with one whom physically they have been permitted to be so closely connected with in the spirit of our world conception, in times when the friend who has gone could joyfully follow but also in times when she had to follow only with sorrow, what our Anthroposophical development wills.

In token of this, my dear friends, we will rise from our seats.

Yesterday I wanted to make it clear that, looked at from one side, the actual content, the deeper content, of the Christ impulse that has come into the world through the Mystery of Golgotha, has not been entirely imparted to mankind either all at once nor during the relatively long time that there has been a Christianity up to now. During the whole of the future, ever more and more of the content of the Christ impulse will be imparted to mankind; in fact there is deep truth in the saying of Christ Jesus; “For, lo, I am with you away even unto the end of the world.” And Christ did not mean that He would be inactive among men but that He would be revealing Himself actively, entering into their souls, giving souls encouragement, giving them strength; so that when these souls know what is happening within them they find the way, they are able to find the connection with the Christ and feel themselves strong for their earthly striving.

But just in this age of ours, this age of consciousness, it is necessary for all this to be clear, as far as may be today, and as I have said the content will flow forth in an ever clearer and richer stream for men. For this very reason it is already necessary today to make clear to ourselves what actually belongs to the revelation of the Christ impulse. To come to a right understanding on this point we must first be permeated by the knowledge that the human race has really developed, really changed, in the course of the earth period. One can best describe the change by saying that when we look back into very ancient times on earth, times long before the Mystery of Golgotha, we find on close scrutiny that the bodily nature of man was more spiritual than it is today. And it was this bodily nature of man that allowed the visions to arise which in a certain way revealed to atavistic clairvoyance the supersensible world. But this faculty, this force, for making oneself acquainted with the spiritual world by atavistic clairvoyance, became gradually lost to mankind. And just at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha was approaching there was indeed a crisis. This crisis showed that the force in connection with the revelation of the spiritual had sunk to its lowest degree in man's bodily nature.

Now from that point of time, from that critical point, there had to arise a strengthening of the soul and spirit, a strengthening of the power of soul and spirit, corresponding to the weakening of bodily power. Here in the earthly body we have to count on our body as an instrument. Man would simply not have been capable of acquiring in his soul and spirit the new strength necessary to meet the lowering of his bodily forces, had he net received help from a region that was not of the earth, a region outside the earth, had not something entered the earth from outside—namely, the Christ impulse. Man would have been too weak to make any progress by himself.

And this can be seen particularly clearly if we look at the nature of the old Mysteries. What purpose did these old Mysteries serve? On the whole it may be said: the great masses of our forefathers (which means of ourselves, for in our former life we were indeed the very men we now call forefathers) these men in very ancient days were furnished with a much duller consciousness than that of today. They were more instinctive beings. And the men of this instinctive nature would never have been able to find their way into a knowledge that is nevertheless necessary for man's good, for his support, for his growing powers of consciousness. And certain personalities initiated into the Mysteries, whose Karma called them to do so could then proclaim to the others who led a more instinctive life the truths that may be called the truths of salvation. This instruction, however, could only be given in those olden days out of a certain constitution of the human organism, the human being, a constitution no longer existing. The Mystery Ceremonies, the organisation of the Mysteries in their various stages, depended upon a man becoming a different person through the Mysteries. Today, this can no longer really be pictured because through external arrangements (recently I have given an account of these in the Egyptian Mysteries) (cf. R LII.) it is not possible at the stage we are in today. By bringing about certain functions, certain inner experiences of soul, the man's nature really became so transformed that the spiritual was liberated in full consciousness. But the pupil in the Mysteries was prepared to begin with in such a way that this spiritual did not become free in the chaotic condition that it does today in sleep; a man could really perceive in the spiritual. The great experience undergone by Mystery pupils was that after initiation they knew about the spiritual world as a man through his eyes and ears knows about the physical world of the senses. After that they were able to proclaim what they knew of the spiritual world.

But the time came when a man's nature could no longer be straightway transformed in this manner by such doings as those in the ancient Mysteries. Man did indeed change in the course of history. Something different had to come and the different thing that came was actually what at a certain stage man had experienced in the Mysteries, the inner resurrection, enacted as historical fact on Golgotha. Now this had happened historically. A man, Jesus—for outwardly as a man going about He was the man Jesus—had gone through the Mystery of Golgotha. Those who were His intimates knew, however, that after a certain time He appeared among them as a living being (how this was we will not go into today) and that therefore the resurrection is a truth.

Thus we may say: In the course of human evolution the fact once came about that at a certain place on earth the news was proclaimed that through a force coming from beyond the the earth, the Christ impulse, a man had triumphed over death: and thus the overcoming of death could actually be one of the experiences, one of the practical experiences, of earthly existence. And what was the consequence? The consequence was that in the historical evolution of man there had taken place something intellectually incomprehensible, something which should now develop in a special way, something belonging to the progress of man. For it is incomprehensible to the human intellect that a man should die, be buried and rise again. To save the evolution of the earth something therefore was necessary, something had to happen, in the physical course of earthly evolution that is incomprehensible to the understanding which can be employed quite well where nature is in question, but incomprehensible to the intellect that is applied to nature. And it is only honourable to admit that the farther men progress in the development of this intellect—and development in the consciousness age is pre-eminently development of the intellect—the more incomprehensible must the event of Golgotha become for this intellect that is above all directed to external nature. We can put it like this—anyone only conscious of the way the ordinary intellect is applied when directed to Nature, must in honesty gradually come to own that he does not understand the Mystery of Golgotha. But he must give himself a shake for nevertheless he must understand. This is what is essential—to give oneself a shake, and simply think oneself out above the sound human understanding. This is essential, it is something that necessarily must happen—to give oneself this shake so as in spite of all to learn to understand something apparently incomprehensible precisely for the highest human force.

There must be ever more and more a going back—the greater the development of the intellect upon which the flourishing of science depends, the more the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha will have to retreat before the intellectual development. It was for this reason also that in a certain sense historically chosen for understanding the Mystery of Golgotha—in the way I have explained the Mystery of Golgotha to you—it was not the cultured Hebrews, nor the cultured Greeks, nor the cultured Romans, who as I said yesterday converted it into different conceptions, but above all it was the northern barbarians, with their primitive culture, who in their primitive souls received the Christ Who came to them just as He came to Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed in the sense of what I was discussing with you yesterday it may be said: The Christ came first to the man Jesus of Nazareth in the event of Golgotha. There mankind was shown—the mankind of the Hebrews, the mankind of the Greeks, mankind of the Romans—the most important of all happenings in earthly existence. But after that Christ came once again, united Himself with the men who peopled the East and the North of Europe, who by no manner of means possessed the culture of the Hebrews nor of the Greeks, nor of the Romans. There He did not unite Himself with individual man, there He united Himself with the folk souls of these tribes. Yesterday, however, we had to emphasise that these tribes gradually evolved. They had to a certain degree to overtake at a fifth stage what at a fourth stage had been accomplished by the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin peoples. And yesterday we dwelt on the fact that it was only at Goethe's epoch that the epoch of Plato was reached for this later time. In Goethe himself, for the fifth post-Atlantean period, the Platonism of the Greeks of the fourth post-Atlantean period was repeated. Yet in Goetheanism man still had not come to the point at which he already faced the entirely new form of grasping the Mystery of Golgotha, but, as I said yesterday, he was in a state of expectation.

This attitude towards the Mystery of Golgotha on the part of more recent mankind can be particularly well studied if one comes to a real understanding of the personality, but for the moment the personality of soul and spirit of Goethe. It is absolutely in accordance with Spiritual Science for us to ask the following question: Where do Goethe and those who belong to him, the various minds who were in connection with him, stand as the eighteenth century passed into the nineteenth; where does Goetheanism stand with regard to mankind's evolution, with regard to understanding the Christ impulse? We might first consider how Goethe actually stood within European evolution.

Now it will be well here to recall something I have often said to you during these years of catastrophe, it will be just as well to go back to the answer to the question—where are the European periphery tending with their American off shoots? We should not forget that whoever turns his gaze without prejudice to these civilisations on the periphery of Europe, knows that in what English culture consists, in the cultures too of France, Italy, the Balkans, as as there has been progression here, but even behind the culture of Eastern Europe, all this has been rayed out from the centre of Europe; all these cultures have been radiated out. Naturally it would be dreadfully prejudiced to believe that what today is Italian culture, Italian civilisation, is anything but what has been radiated throughout Italy from mid-Europe, but absorbed into the Latin nature, still there in the language and outer form. It would be shocking prejudice to think that English civilisation is intrinsically different from what has streamed out from mid-Europe, and actually merely appropriated again in its language and so on in another way, in reality far less than the Italian or French way. But all that France, England, Italy and, even in mare respects, what Eastern Europe is, has been rayed out from central Europe. And in this centre there has now remained what indeed we have just found left after the streaming out of these cultures, what has remained as the womb out of which Goetheanism has evolved. We are faced today by this fact, a fact to be calmly accepted, that what has rayed forth into the periphery is working with all its power to bring to naught, to
nullify, even where soul and spirit are in question, everything existing in mid-Europe from which it has streamed. There will come a time when the world will look in a quite different way from how it does today upon this monstrous phenomenon in human events, where the world is reedy to set up as idols fourteen corpses of western thought. At some future date mankind will realise that there came about what may be called the absolute desire to exterminate what thus radiated out in all directions. It goes without saying that the tragedy of this fact will bear its fruit.

For connected with this fact, we see appearing in a further step forward of Europe's evolution, with the exception of the period during recent decades when other forces may be said to have held sway, all that prepared a way for itself and developed throughout the centuries by reason of the personal characteristics of those who in the most various directions developed these civilisations—we see all this streaming forth from the whole of Central Europe. How little inclination mankind has today for forming unprejudiced judgment on this point: I think I may say that, at the time the last traces were to be found of what assured the matter a fully scientific basis, I myself actually stood in intimate connection with it; my old friend, Karl Julius Schröer, was studying the various dialects, the various languages and the various natures of those sections of the people looked upon as German nationals of North Hungary, of Siebenburg and formerly of the various districts in Austria. Whoever observes here all that refers to the unpretentious dictionary and grammar of the Zips-German of Siebenburg Saxony in Schröer's studies which, in personal collaboration with him in the studies he was then making concerning the spread of mid-European culture, I was permitted to comment upon, whoever does this may say that he was still connected with a knowledge unhappily no longer even noticed today amid the confusion and turmoil of events. But let us look at this Hungary where, you must know, purely Magyar culture has been-supposedly established in the course of recent decades, since the year 1867; let us look there, not with political unreality, political delusion, political hatred, let us look in conformity with the truth. It will then be discovered that in the regions that afterwards, later, were supposed to be magyarised as countries of the Magyars, men from the Rhine were moved in—like the Siebenburg Saxons, men from further west, like the Germans of Zips, men out of modern Swabia, like the Germans of Bana. All this is the leaven forming the basis of the Magyar culture over which is now simply poured what then in reality was only developed very late as Magyar culture. At the basis of this Magyar culture, however, though perhaps not in anything expressible in language, but rather in the feelings, in the experiences, in the whole national character, there has always flowed in what has for centuries come from Central Europe.

Astonishing as it is, were you just to take the whole of European history, you could make a study of this in all the periphery regions of Europe. In the east the Slav wave came up against what radiated from the centre, and what radiated from the centre was pushed aside by the Slav wave—in the west by the Latin wave. And through a tragic chain of events, having, however, an inner historical necessity, the periphery then turned against what still remained in the womb of the centre, turned in such a way that from this turning a fact becomes clear—it may be believed or not, it may easily be mocked or scoffed at or not—what remained in mid-Europe grew out of Goetheanism, grasped by soul ant spirit in its reality and its truth, all this no longer meets with any understanding in the best intelligence of the periphery. Of this it might be said: The actual substance of what is the essence of mid-Europe is spoken of everywhere, even in the American countries, as though people had no notion of it. People may have no notion of it, but world history will bring it to the surface. This is what can give one strength in a certain sense to be able to hold fast to it.

It is true, my dear friends, on Silvester eve I gave you here a picture worked out by a man who is well able to make a calculation about the future relations of central Europe. (see Z 269.) If everything is fulfilled, even if only part is fulfilled, of what the periphery countries are wanting, these relations cannot be otherwise. But out of all this, the extermination of which for external existence has been decided upon, indeed the extermination of which will be fulfilled above everything else during the next years, the next decades—for so it has been determined in the councils of the periphery powers—within all this there has been the last shaping of what we described yesterday; there was within it the last shaping of what is nevertheless important as a leaven for the evolution of men. It must flow in, this evolution simply must go on of which I gave you a picture in what has to do with the Magyars. This radiating will indeed continue.

But particularly in central Europe all that during the last decades has certainly been very little understood there, will have to be grasped. Something of the nature of what lies in the aims of the threefold ordering of social existence, as I have presented it, will have to be understood. It will be central Europe itself that will be called upon to understand this threefold ordering. And perhaps if this centre of Europe has no external state, if this centre of Europe is obliged to live tragically in chaos, there will then be the first beginnings of understanding that we have to overcome those old outlooks for which the periphery of Europe is at present struggling, for these old outlooks will be unable to be maintained even by the European periphery. The old concept of the state will vanish, it will give place to the separation into three parts. And what constitutes Goetheanism will indeed have to enter this external life. Whether or not it is given this name is immaterial. The essential thing is that Goethe's world-outlook foresees what simply must be made clear also where the forming of human society is concerned. But all this can be discovered only if we take the trouble to understand this representative, this most representative being of all Germans—Goethe. For he is such a perfect representative of the German nature just because he is so entirely without national Chauvinism or anything at all reminiscent of Chauvinism or nationalism, as understood today. There must be an attempt to understand this man who represents all that is new, this most modern man, at the same time this most fruitful of men in his being for all that is spiritual culture. It cannot be said that mankind have yet reached a high point in their comprehension of Goethe. In his environment Goethe felt very mush alone. And even were Goethe one of those personalities who accustom themselves to social intercourse, who even develop a certain adroitness and grace in society so that a possible relation is set up to their environment, even were this so, the real Goethe living in the inner circle of Weimar and later in outward appearance the stout Privy Councillor with the double chin—the man who inwardly lived in this stout Privy Councillor felt lonely. And in a certain way he may be said still to be alone today. He is alone for a quite definite reason and must feel himself alone. This feeling of cultural isolation, this feeling of his that he was not understood, perhaps underlay his remarkable saying of later years: “Perhaps a hundred years hence Germans will be different from what they are now, perhaps from scholars they will have grown into human beings.”

My dear friends, this saying must touch us in the very depths of our soul. For, you see, we may look at the last years of the eighties, for example. When after the death of the last of Goethe's grandchildren in Weimar the Archives of Goethe and Schiller and the Goethe Society were founded, these were founded by a gathering of men—truly I want to say it in the best sense of the word—by a gathering of scholars. In fact the Goethe cult was organised by men, by personalities, who really had not grown out of scholars into men. One may even go farther. You know how much I revere Herman Grimm, the art historian, the subtle essayist (cf. The Story of My Life, also E.N.43.) and I have never made any secret of my admiration nor spoken to you in any different way about my admiration for Herman Grimm. I have also unconditionally admitted to you that I consider what has come from Herman Grimm's pen about Goethe as the best book as biography, as monography, that has been written about him. But now take this book of Herman Grimm's; it is written out of a certain human affection and width of outlook, but take it as giving a picture of Goethe himself which arises when you have let the book have its affect upon you. What is this figure Goethe? It is just a ghost, a ghost rather than the living Goethe. If these things are taken earnestly and in a spirit worthy of them one cannot help feeling that should Herman Grimm meet Goethe today, or had he met Goethe during his life time, because he harboured fervent admiration for him in the tradition built up about Goethe, he would have been ready at any moment to say: Goethe is predestined to be the spiritual king not only of mid-Europe but of all mankind. Indeed Herman Grimm, had it come his way, would have even gone to great lengths to serve as herald, had it been a question of making Goethe king of all earthly culture. But neither can one get free of the other feelings Had Herman Grimm got into conversation with Goethe, or Goethe with Herman Grimm, Herman Grimm would hardly have found it possible to understand what was in the depths of Goethe's being. For what he portrays in his book, although undoubtedly the best he knew of Goethe, is nothing but the shadow thrown by Goethe on his surroundings, the impression he made upon his age. There is nothing here, not even the slightest suggestion, of what lived in Goethe's soul—but merely a ghost out of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and not what was living deep down in Goethe.

This is a remarkable phenomenon which must be pondered in the soul in all seriousness and with due consideration. And if we look away from all this well, not Goetheanism but Goethe-worship that even a hundred years after Goethe is in reality far more scholarly than human, if we look back at Goethe himself, beneath much of what is great, much of what is grandiose confronting us in Goethe, we see one thing above all. Much, curiously much in Goethe—just take The Mysteries Frau Dr. Steiner recited here a short time ago, take the Pandora, take the Prometheus Fragment, (cf. E.N. 36) or some other work, take the fact that The Natural Daughter is only the first part of an incomplete trilogy, or the fact that in this fragment there was expressed something of the very greatest that lived in Goethe, and you have the strange, the quite strange, fact that when Goethe set himself to express what was greatest he never brought it to a conclusion. This was because he was sufficiently honest, not outwardly to round off the matter, to bring it to perfection, as a poet, an artist, will even do, but simply to leave off when the inner source of strength became dry. This is the reason wily so much remained unfinished: But the matter goes further, my dear friends. The matter goes far enough for us to be able to say: In an external way Faust is certainly brought to a conclusion, but how much in Faust is inwardly unsound, how much in it is like the figure of Mephistopheles itself. Read what I have said about Faust and about the figure of Mephistopheles in the recently published booklet on Goethe, where I spoke of how Goethe in his Mephistopheles set up a figure that in reality does not exist, for In this figure the two figures of Lucifer and Ahriman merge into one another and interweave in a chaotic way. And in the course of the week you will see presented here the last scenes before the appearance of Helen, before the third Act of the second part of Faust, something completed in Goethe's advanced age, something, however, on the one hand impressive, deep, powerful, on the other hand though finished to outward appearance, inwardly quite unfinished. It contains everywhere hints of what Goethe was hankering after, which however would not come into his soul. If we regard Faust from the point of view of its human greatness we have before us a work of gigantic proportions; if we look from the point of view of the greatness that would have lived in it had Goethe in his time been able to bring forth all that lay in his soul, then we have a frail, brittle work everywhere incomplete in itself. (see R LV.)

What Goethe left to those coming after him is perhaps the most powerful testament. That they should not only acknowledge him, that they do not acknowledge him today as a great scholar, or even as a man of certain culture, is easy to understand but Goethe did not make our attitude to him as easy as that. Goethe has to live among us as if he were still alive; he must be further felt, further thought. What is most significant in Goetheanism does not remain where Goethe was, for in his time he was not able to bring it into his soul out of the spiritual, and only the tendency is everywhere present. Goethe demands of us that we should work with him, think with him, feel with him, that we should carry on his task just as though he were standing behind each one of us, tapping us on the shoulder, giving us advice. In this sense it may be said that the whole of the nineteenth century and up to our own time, Goethe has been given the cold shoulder. And the task of our time is to find the way back to Goethe. Strictly speaking nothing is more foreign to real Goetheanism than the whole earthly culture, external earthly culture, with the exception of the modicum of spiritual culture that we have—nothing is more foreign than the earthly culture of the end of the nineteenth century or even of the twentieth century. The way back to Goethe must be found through the Spiritual Science of Anthroposophy.

This can be understood only by one who can go straight for the question: where did Goethe stand actually and in reality? You have from Goethe the most honest human avowal (I spoke of this yesterday) that he started out from paganism as it also corresponded to Platonism. The boy erected for himself a pagan altar to Nature, then the man Goethe was most strongly influenced not by all that was derived from the traditional Christianity of the Church, this fundamentally always remained foreign to him because his world-outlook is a world-outlook of expectancy, of awaiting the new understanding of the mystery of Golgotha. Those who in the old, traditional sense embraced the faith of the Christian Church in comfort, or even wished within this Christian Church to carry through all manner of purely outward reforms, were not in reality, closely related to him inwardly, where soul and spirit are concerned. Actually he always felt as he did when, travelling with the two apparently good Christians Lavater and Baswdow; two men who represented a progressive but at the same time old ecclesiastical Christianity, he said: “Prophets to right, prophets to left and the worldling in the middle.” It was his actual feeling between two of his contemporaries that he thus gave voice to; as opposed to the Christians around him he was always the definite non-Christian for the very reason that he was to prepare mankind for the Christ mood of waiting.

And so we see three men in a remarkable war having the very greatest influence upon his spiritual culture. These three men are actually thorough worldlings in a certain sense; ordinary Christian ministers were not popular with Goethe. The three personalities having such a great influence upon him are, first Shakespeare. Why had Shakespeare such a decisive influence upon Goethe? This was simply because Goethe aimed at building a bridge from the human to the superhuman, not in accordance with any abstract rule, not out of an intellectuality open to influence, but out of what is human itself. Goethe needed to hold fast to the human so that within it he might find the passage over from the human to the superhuman. Thus we see Goethe making every effort to model, to form the human, to work out of the human as Shakespeare did to a certain degree. Look how Goethe took hold of The History of Godfried Von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand, Berlichingen's autobiography; how altering it as little as possible he dramatised this history and moulded the first figure of his Götz von Berlichingen; how then he formed a second figure out of him, this time more transformed, having more shape—then a third. In a way Goethe seeks his own straight forward path which holding to Shakespeare's humanity, but out of the human he is wanting to form the superhuman.

This he first succeeded in doing when, on his Italian travels (read his letters), he believes he can recognise from what is near to him, from the Greek works of art, how the Greeks pursued the same intentions, the divine intentions, according to which nature herself proceeds. He goes on his own path, his own individual, personal,true, path of experience. He could not accept what those around him said—he had to find his own way.

The second mind that had an enormous influence upon him, was that of a decided non-Christian, namely, Spinoza. In Spinoza he had the possibility of finding the divine in the way this divine is found a man wishing to make a road for himself leading from the human to the superhuman. Fundamentally Spinoza's thoughts bear the last impression of the intellectual age of the old Hebrew approach to God. As such, Spinoza's thoughts are very far from the Christ-impulse. Spinoza's thoughts, however, are such that the human soul as it were finds in them the thread to which to hold when seeking that way. There within men is my being, from this human being I seek to press on to what is superhuman. This way that he could follow, that he did not have to have dictated to him, that be could fellow while following Spinoza, this path Goethe in a certain sense, at a certain stage in his life, looked upon as his.

And the third of the spirits having the greatest influence upon him was the botanist Linnaeus. Why Linnaeus? Linnaeus for the reason that Goethe would have no other kind botanical science, no other science of the living being, but one which simply placed the living beings in juxtaposition, in a row as Linnaeus has done. Goethe would have nothing to do with the abstract thinking that thinks out all kinds of thoughts about plant classes, species and so on. What he considered important was to let Linnaeus work upon him as a man who placed things beside one another. For from a higher standpoint than that of the people who follow up the plants in an abstract way, what Linnaeus conscientiously placed next to each other as plant forms Goethe wanted to pursue after his own fashion, just as the spirit makes itself felt in this side by side arrangement.

It is just these three spirits who really could give Goethe what was lacking in the intimate circle of his life at the time, but was something he had to find outside; it is just these spirits who had the strongest influence upon him. Goethe himself had nothing of Shakespeare in him, for when he came to the climax of his art he created his Natural Daughter, which certainly contained nothing of Shakespeare's art but strove after something entirely different. He could, however, develop his inmost being only by educating himself in Shakespeare. Goethe's world-outlook had nothing in it of the abstract Spinoza; what was deep within Goethe, however, as his way to God could only be reached through Spinoza. Goethe's morphology had nothing of the placing side by side of the organic being, as in the case of Linnaeus, but, Goethe needed the possibility of taking from Linnaeus what he himself did not have. And what he had to give was something new.

Thus then did Goethe develop and came to his fortieth year, brought up on Shakespeare, Linnaeus and Spinoza; and having gone through what in the way of art Italy could show him he said when there about these works of art: “Here is necessity, here is God”. And as he lived in the spirit of his epoch there took place in him in a strong but unconscious way, also, however, to a certain extent consciously, what may be called his meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold.

And now, bearing in mind his passing the Guardian of the Threshold in the early nineties of the eighteenth century, compare words sounding like prayers to Isis in ancient Egypt, reminiscent of the old Egyptian Isis, such as those in the Prose-Hymn to Nature just recited to you by Frau Dr. Steiner—compare these words in which Goethe had still a quite pagan feeling, with those that as powerful imagination meet you in The Fairy tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, there you have Goethe's path from paganism to Christianity. But there in pictures stands what Goethe became after going through the region of the Threshold, after he passed the Guardian of the Threshold. It stands there in pictures which he himself was unable to analyse for people in intellectual thoughts, which all the same are mighty pictures. Whither are we obliged to go if we wish to understand the Goethe who wrote the fairy tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily? Consider what is written about the fairy tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily in the little book on Goethe already mentioned. (see Goethe's Standard of the Soul) When we really look at this we are confronted by the fact that Goethe created this fairy story of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily as a mighty Imagination, after passing the Guardian of the Threshold.

This fairy tale of The Green snake and the Beautiful Lily that has sprung from a soul transformed, sprang forth after the soul found the bridge from pagan experience as it still finds utterance in the Hymn in Prose. “Nature! we are surrounded and enveloped by her, unable to step out of her, unable to get into her more deeply. She takes us up unasked and unwarned into the circle of her dance, and carries us along till we are wearied and fall from her arms” . . . “Even the unnatural is Nature . . . Everything is her life; and death is merely her ingenious way of having more life . . .” and so on and so forth.

This pagan Isis mood is changed into the deep truths, not to be grasped at once by the intellect, lying in the mighty Imaginations of The Green Snake end the Beautiful Lily where Goethe set down uncompromisingly how all that man is able to find through the external science of Europe can only lead to the fantastic capers of a will-of-the wisp. He shows also, however, that what man develops within must lead him to develop the powers of his soul in such a way that the self-sacrificing serpent who sacrifices his own being to the progress of human evolution can became the model which enables the bridge to be built from the kingdom of the physical world of the senses to the kingdom of the superphysical; and between these there rises the Temple, the new temple, by means of which the supersensible kingdom may be experienced.

Certainly, in this fairy story of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily there is no talk of Christ. But just as little as Christ asked of a good follower that he should always just be saying Lord, Lord! is he a good Christian who always says Christ, Christ! The manner in which the pictures are conceived, the way the human soul is thought out in its metamorphosis in this fairy story of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, the sequence of the thoughts, the force of the thoughts—this is Christian, this is the new path to Christ. For, why is this? In Goethe's day there were a number of interpretations of this fairy tale and since then in addition to those there have been many more. We have thought to throw light on to the fairy tale from the standpoint of Spiritual Science. My dear friends, I may, (here in this circle I may venture to speak out about this) I have the right to speak about this fairy tale. It was at the end of the eighties of the nineteenth century when the knot of this fairy tale untied itself for me. And I have never since forsaken the path that should lead farther and farther into the understanding of Goethe, with the help of the mighty Imaginations embodied In the fairy tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. It may be said that the intellect that leads us quite well in our search for scientific truths, this intellect that can quite well guide us in acquiring an external outlook on nature and its conditions, at this precise moment so favourable to such an outlook, when anyone wishes to understand the fairy tale, this intellect is found absolutely wanting. It is necessary here to let the intellect be fructified by the conceptions of Spiritual Science. Here you have, transformed for our age and its conditions, what is necessary to all mankind for understanding the Mystery of Golgotha.

For understanding the Mystery of Golgotha the intellect must first be re-forced; it must move itself, jerk itself. No jerk is needed for understanding external nature. It has become ever more impossible for Latin culture as well as for the German—for the Latin because it is too greatly decedent, for the German culture because up to now it has not sufficiently evolved—it has become ever more impossible out of mere intellectuality to school the soul so far that it can find the new way to the Mystery of Golgotha. When, however, you develop the possibility in you, can you re-shape the forces of the soul so that they begin in a natural inner speech to find the passage over to the pictorial for which Goethe strove, then you school the forces of your soul so that they find the way to the new comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha. This is what is important.

Goethe's significance does not lie only in that he accomplished; it lies above all In what he does to our soul when we fully surrender ourselves to the profoundest depths of his being. Then gradually mankind will be able even consciously to find the path an which to pass the Guardian of the Threshold, the path Goethe fortunately, took while still, unconscious, and on that account was unable to finish just those works in which he wished to express all that was deepest in him. In this soul of Goethe's there lived a shimmering and glimmering of what was conscious and what was unconscious, what was attainable and what was out of reach. When we let such a poem as The Mysteries work upon us, or when we let Pandora work upon us, or any of the things Goethe left unfinished, we have the feeling that in this very incompletion there lies something that must free itself in the souls of those following after Goethe, something that will have to be completed as a great spiritual picture.

Goethe was lonely. Where it was a question of Goethe's real being he was lonely, lonely in his evolution. Goetheanism contains much that is hidden. But, my dear friends, even though the nineteenth century has not yet produced human beings out of scholars, whereas Goethe struggled through out of a scholarly to a human world-outlook, evolution must indeed go forward with the help of Goethe's impulse. I said yesterday and repeat today that the force bound up with the Mystery of Golgotha once united itself in a little known province of the Roman Empire with the man Jesus of Nazareth, and then with the Folk souls at central Europe after that, however, this force became inward. And out of what was weaving there inwardly in central Europe came such results as we find in Goethe and the whole of Goetheanism. But it is just the nineteenth century that has had a great share in letting Goetheanism lie in its grave. In every sphere the nineteenth Century has done everything possible to leave Goetheanism in its grave.

The scholars Who in Weimar founded the Goethe Society at the end of the eighties of the nineteenth century would much rather have belonged to those who buried Goetheanism than to those who could raise any thing of this Goetheanism from the deed. Quite certainly the time has not come for Goetheanism to be able to live yet for the external life. The time depends on what we have often spoken of, namely, on the renewal of the human soul through Spiritual Science. Whatever may come to this Europe that now in a certain sense would bring about its own death, the grave which above all, first of all, the lack of thought in modern culture is digging, this grave will nevertheless also be a grave from which something will rise again. I have already pointed to the fact that the Christ spirit united itself with the folk souls of middle Europe; Goetheanism arose in the bosom of these folk souls. A resurrection will come, a resurrection not to be conceived as political, a resurrection that will have a very different appearance—but resurrection it will be. Goetheanism, my dear friends is not alive, Goetheanism for outer culture is still resting in the move: Goetheanism must however rise again from the dead.

Let the building that we have sought to set up on this hill bear testimony to the sincerity of our purpose, with the necessary courage for the present time to undertake the bringing to life of G0etheanism. For this, it is true we should need the courage to understand and penetrate in its ungoethean way what has up till now called itself Goetheanism. We should have to learn to acclaim Goethe's spirit to the same degree as the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth have disowned it, denied it in every possible sphere. Then the path of knowledge acquired through Spiritual Science, a path that is to be found unconditionally, will be connected with the historical path of the resurrection of Goetheanism. But it will also be connected with what can come from this resurrection of Goetheanism, that is, the impulse towards a new understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, that right understanding of the Christ which is necessary for our particular age. Perhaps the pathfinder of the Christianity necessary for mankind in the future will be recognised as the decidedly non-Christian Goethe who, like Christ Himself, did not ask for the constant repetition of “Lord, Lord . . .” but that man should carry his spirit in his heart, in his mind; and that in Goetheanism it should not always be a matter of “Christ, Christ . . .” but all the more that what has flowed into men as reality from the Mystery of Golgotha should be preserved in the heart, so that this heart should gradually change abstract and intellectual knowledge, the present knowledge about nature, into something by means of which the supersensible world is seen, so that men may be given the force for a deeper knowledge of the world and for a shaping of the social structure that is worthy of the human being.

Yesterday we found that in a certain way there is, after all, something like proof of the existence of the spirit that will satisfy our personal consciousness, provided the latter is rightly understood. We maintained that error and the possibility of correcting it are evidence of the existence of the spirit, in so far as our personal consciousness is concerned, and in order to understand this we cited an attribute of the spirit that appears self-evident. That is, its supersensibility, as we call it, for we based our statement on the fact that the root of error must be sought in the super-sensible realm. I said that it would naturally be impossible to present all the arguments necessary to prove such a matter in full detail, but that it might be extremely interesting to show how the possibility of error appears only in that realm to which man raises himself by casting off the coercion of the outer physical world through all that he can learn through perception alone.¹

One fact suffices to indicate the method by which it could be shown that at bottom it is only through his own nature and being that man is exposed to the temptation to fall into error through a connection with the outer world. It has been repeatedly pointed out that modern science really gathers from all sides certain proofs of the conclusions arrived at by spiritual science, but the proponents of external science fail to interpret them with sufficient open-mindedness.

We will cite one of these facts, established by the naturalist, Huber, through the observation of caterpillars spinning a cocoon. There is a caterpillar that builds its web in successive phases or stages, so that one can describe the process as spinning in the first stage, second stage, and so forth, up to seven. Now, Huber took a caterpillar working on the third stage and set it on another web of which six stages were finished, and a strange thing happened. At first the caterpillar felt shocked, as one might interpret its behavior, but then it continued to spin, not the seventh stage, but the fourth, fifth, etc. It obeyed a sure inner life, following only its own dictates. When Huber took one of the caterpillars away from its own cocoon and put it in another that had also arrived at the third stage, it continued the work in the regular way. It was not reacting to an outer impression at all. It did not say to itself, “Now I must spin the fourth stage.” It was following an inner urge, and this it did even when the outer impression emanated from another stage.

This is an extremely important fact, because it shows that in animal beings outer impressions can in no way effect what in man we call right or wrong—the category “subject to error.” The human being can be confused by something external, because the nature of his organization is such as to cause him to obey not only his inner life of impulses, but the impulses entering from without as well. In this sense only man confronts an outer world. Fundamentally, this accounts for all possible illusions in respect to the concept of the spirit; at least, there is a connection.

Now, in order to find the right transition from science to our anthroposophical doctrine of the spirit, let us call to mind again what a keen teacher of the present, Brentano, brought forward to characterize the soul and its capacity as such, and to facilitate the right transition to the spirit realm I will indicate by diagrams on the blackboard what is in question.

Brentano classifies our psychic faculties as visualizations, reasoning and what we can call emotions—the phenomena of love and hate. Well, if we imagine the whole extent of our soul life as organized in this way, we should have to observe that visualizations and emotions, if closely studied, bear a different relation to the soul and to whatever else may enter our enquiry than do judgments. That is exactly what the soul-teachers, the psychologists, pride themselves on. They divide visualizations from reasoning because in reasoning they see something more than a mere combination of visualizations. Our psychologist by no means sees in this the essence of reasoning, where something is to be settled; nor can all this ever have any foundation as such, because, as he argues, when we combine visualizations it might also be a case of establishing the possibility of combining visualizations. If, for example, we were to combine the visualizations “tree” and “golden”—not “tree” and “green”—we would be forced to admit axiomatically that no tree is golden. Now, what is really the premise of the judgment in this context? It is that we should be able, so to speak, to form a valid proposition out of every such judgment. From the compound visualization, “a tree is green,” I can form the valid proposition, “a green tree is.” Not until then have I passed judgment. Only when I try to form the proposition do I know whether the combination of visualizations permits of establishing anything. “A golden tree is”—that won't do. So when one asks whether a judgment can proceed from a combination of visualizations, this would involve the second question: Can a valid proposition be formed in the case?

Now let me ask you this. If you were to traverse the entire extent of the soul life, searching everywhere in the soul, could you anywhere discover the possibility of simply forming a valid proposition out of a combination of visualizations? What can impel you to form the proposition, “a green tree is,” out of the compound visualization, “the tree is green?” What is it that induces you to do this? Only something that is primarily not within your soul, because in the whole realm of the soul you can find nothing of the sort. When you want to make the transition from the compound conception to the proposition, to the thesis that settles something, you must emerge from the soul life and seek something which, as your inner feeling tells you, is not of the nature of the soul but with which the soul makes contact. That means that there is no way of accomplishing the transition except through perception. When a combination of conceptions is joined by what we can call perception, then and only then is it possible to speak of forming a judgment within the present meaning.

This shows further that in the first instance we know nothing more of all that we visualize than simply that it lives in the soul, and that something more is needed if we are to pass from conception to reasoning. That emotions exist only in the soul everybody will doubtless believe even more readily than that this is the case with visualizations, for if they had their being anywhere but within the soul they could not bear so individual a character as they do in different people. We need waste no time explaining that emotions live primarily in the soul.

We must enquire next if it is in any way possible to maintain that visualizations and emotions live only in the soul. Although we know that without the aid of outer perception we cannot directly arrive at a verdict, because visualizations and emotions are inner processes of the soul, we must still ask whether anything justifies our speaking of visualizations and emotions as though they existed only within the soul. Well, in respect to visualizations we could first point out that when living in them we by no means feel as though we mastered them completely in our soul, as though they were not coercive or the like. We learned yesterday that error is of a spiritual, super-sensible nature and can enter the realm of our visualizations, but that the latter in turn can overcome error; otherwise, it would never be possible to get beyond error. Bearing this in mind we must recognize the fact that we have in our soul a kind of battlefield of a conflict between error and—well, something else. All error is of a spiritual nature, and we must have something adequate to oppose it, otherwise we could never rise above it. There is, indeed, a means of overcoming error, as everyone knows. Since error is spiritual, we cannot overcome it through mere perception from the sense world. In the lectures on Anthroposophy I pointed out that the senses as such do not err. Goethe once emphasized that. It is not the senses that err but what goes on in the soul; therefore, error can only be corrected within the soul, and primarily through visualization. It is by means of visualizations, then, that we get past error.

We found yesterday that in a certain way error is a sort of abortive species of something else, of something we could designate as precisely the element in us that raises us to higher regions of the soul life. The chief characteristic of error is its non-agreement with the world of perception, and we came to realize that on the path to the higher world we must devote ourselves in meditation, concentration, and so forth, to conceptions that also fail to agree with our perception. The rose cross itself, for example, is a conception that shares with error its lack of agreement with outer perception. We said, however, that when error is employed on the path of spiritual life it would have a destructive effect in us, and experience shows this to be the case.

How, then, can we achieve conceptions that, though at variance with the outer world of perception, nevertheless awaken higher soul forces in a healthy, normal way? How can we proceed from what is merely false to allegorical conceptions such as we have described? We can do this by not letting ourselves be guided by the outer sense world, the world of perception, in compounding such visualizations, nor, on the other hand, by forces that lead us into error. We must avoid both of these and appeal to forces in the soul, which, however, we must first awaken. The day before yesterday we characterized them as inner stirrings growing only out of the soil of morality and beauty. We must break, as it were, with impulses and passions such as are imprinted in us by a world that after all must be termed external; we must work within ourselves in order to be able to call up, quite experimentally, forces in our soul that at the outset we lack entirely. By doing this we learn to form allegorical conceptions that in a sense have a certain objective validity, though one not applicable to the outer world of perception.

We start by forming the conception of man as he presents himself to us in the present time, a being of whom, in a certain sense, he himself can by no means approve, with whom he cannot be satisfied, and of whom he must say that such as he is now, he must be conquered. Then, by the side of this conception we place the other: that he feels he must strive to realize his own higher nature, a nature that would give him complete mastery over all that in his present form he disapproves of. That this second conception cannot be classed as perception is shown by the fact that it does not refer to the present or the past, but to man's future. Then, from such stirrings, we combine conceptions that ordinarily, under the guidance of the world of perceptions, would not coincide. We bring together the black cross, symbol of what must be caused to die, and the red roses, symbol of the life that must arise from it. In inner meditation we visualize the rose cross, a visualization that can only be called unreal, yet did not come into being like an external error but was born of the noblest impulses of our soul.

We have, then, brought forth out of the noblest impulses of our soul a visualization corresponding to no outer perception and if we apply this visualization—that is, if we give ourselves up to it in conscientious inner devotion and let it work upon us—we find that our soul expands in a healthy way and attains to heights not reached before. Thus, experience shows the soul to be capable of development. By means of a visualization that is outwardly an error we have performed something that manifests itself as intrinsically right.

The next question is whether or not we can endow all that crowds into us through outer perception with power over such a visualization that has nothing in common with this outer perception. Can we lend it the power to exercise any force that will make of the visualization something different in our soul from what it makes of error? We must remember that the quality in us that has converted this allegorical visualization into something different from anything that could arise out of error is the opposite of what functions forcefully in error. We said that in error we felt the Luciferic forces; now we can say that in the transformation of an allegorical visualization in the soul, in the wholesome guiding of the allegorical visualization to a higher aspect of the soul, the lofty stirrings we feel are the opposite of Luciferic. They are of the nature of the divine-spiritual.

The deeper you penetrate into this interrelationship, the more directly you will feel the inner influence of the super-sensible through this experience of transforming an allegorical visualization. Then, when we see that the super-sensible effects something in us, achieves something, operates in us, then what had previously been mere visualization in the soul, abiding within the soul element, becomes something quite different, something that we must now term a conclusion such as the soul, as primarily constituted, cannot bring about through outer perception. Nor can a visualization perform in the soul what has been described. Just as visualization, when coming in contact with the ordinary outer world, leads to reasoning, so the inner life of a visualization, not lacking direction but amenable to guidance as set forth, leads out beyond the visualization itself and transforms it. It becomes something that may not be a verdict but is at least a visualization fraught with significance and pointing out beyond the soul. This is what in the true sense of the term we call imagination. Summing up: When visualization comes in contact with the outer world through perception, it points to reasoning, but through the inner process we have described it points to what we call inner imagination in the true sense.

Just as perception is not mere visualization, so imagination is not visualization either. By means of perception, the life of visualization comes in contact with a primarily unfamiliar outer world. By means of the process described, visualization adapts itself to what we may call the imaginative world. Just as there is a real transition from the mere conceptual complex, “a tree is green,” to the verdict, “a green tree is,” so there is an analogous transition from the mere life of conceptions to what is comprised in imagination, in a conception filled with other than the yield of a spatial outer world. There we have the process that in our imaginative life enriches our conceptions.

There is, however, something that intervenes between imagination and visualizations. Imagination has a way of announcing itself quite realistically the moment it appears. When our soul really attains to imagination, it senses in its life of visualizations something akin to what it feels in its life of perceptions. In the latter the soul feels—well, its direct contact with the outer world, with corporeality; in imagination it feels an indirect contact with a world that at first also appears to it as an outer world, but this is the outer world of the spirit. When this spirit begins to live in the visualizations—those that really attain to imagination—it is just as coercive as outer corporeality. Just as little as we can imagine a tree as golden when we are in contact with the outer world—just as the outer world forces us to visualize in a certain way—so we feel the compulsion emanating from the spirit when visualization rises to imagination. In that case, however, we are at the same time aware that this life of visualizations expresses itself independently of all the ways and means by which visualizations are ordinarily given a content. In ordinary life this takes place by reason of our having perceptions through our eyes, ears, etc., and of our nourishing the life of visualizations with these perceptions, so that it is filled from the content of our perceptions. In imagination we suffer our visualizations to be filled by the spirit. Nothing must intervene that might become the content of our soul by way of the bodily organs, nothing that enters us through our eyes or ears. We are directly conscious of being free of all that pertains to outer corporeality. We are as directly free of all that as we are—to use a material comparison—of the processes of the outer body during sleep. For this reason, as far as the total organism is concerned all conditions are the same during imagination as during sleep, except that imaginative consciousness takes the place of the unconsciousness of sleep. What is otherwise wholly empty, what has separated from the body, is filled with what we may call imaginative conceptions. So the only difference between a man in sleep and one in imagination is that the parts that in sleep are outside the physical body are devoid of all conceptions in ordinary sleep, whereas in imagination they are filled with imaginative conceptions.

Now, an intermediate condition can appear. It would be induced if a man in sleep were filled with imaginative conceptions but lacked the power to call them to consciousness. Such a condition is possible, as you can gather from ordinary life. I will merely remind you that in ordinary life you perceive any number of things of which you are not aware. Walking along the street, you perceive a whole world of things that you do not take into your consciousness. This is shown when you dream of curious things, for there are dreams that are indeed strange in this respect. You dream, for example, that a man is standing by a lady and the lady says this or that. Well, the dream remains in your consciousness, you remember it, but after you've thought about it you have to admit that the situation actually occurred, only you would have known nothing of it if you hadn't dreamed of the experience. The whole event passed your consciousness by, and not until you dreamed it did the picture enter your consciousness. That happens often.

Thus, perceptions that have occurred can leave consciousness untouched, and imaginations that indeed live in the soul can also leave consciousness untouched so that they do not appear directly. In that case they appear to consciousness in a manner similar to that of the perceptions we have just described. They appear to us in semi-consciousness, in dreaming. Imaginations of that sort can shine into our waking day-consciousness and there fluctuate and pass. An imagination of that sort does enter the everyday human consciousness, but there it experiences changes. It expresses itself in what is called ‘imagination,’ ‘imagination’ based on world truths, the real basis of all artistic creation, in fact, of all productive work of man.

Because this is so, Goethe, who knew well how art comes into being, often maintained that ‘imagination’ is by no means something that arbitrarily manipulates cosmic laws, but that it is subject to the laws of truth. Now, these laws of truth act absolutely out of the world of imagination, but here they integrate the ordinary world of perceptions in a free manner, so that true ‘imagination’ is something between ordinary conception and imagination. ‘Imagination,’ rightly understood, not conceived of simply as something that isn't true, bears direct witness to the progress of conceptions toward the point where they can flow over into the super-sensible region of the imaginative world. This is one of the points at which we are able to perceive the direct streaming in of what we can call the spiritual world into our ordinary world.

Now let us examine the other aspect, the emotions. It has already been said that the psychologist under discussion keeps within the soul, that he therefore follows up all that concerns impulses of will only as far as these remain within the soul, and that he stops short at the emotions. Everything that men do is motivated by a desire, a passion, an urge, that is, that element within the region of the soul that must be called emotion. Of course, nothing happens through emotions alone, and as long as we remain within the soul nothing need happen. No matter how violently we intensify any emotion, we cannot thereby make something happen that is independent of the soul because nothing that remains in the soul is a true expression of will. If the soul never emerged out of itself, but merely kept wanting to experience desires and emotions—anything from the deepest reverence to disgust—nothing would happen that is independent of the soul. When we recognize will in its true form as a fact, the region of emotions points out beyond the soul as well.

The manner in which this sphere of emotions points out beyond the soul is singular. What does it suggest first of all? Well, if we take the simplest expression of will—if we raise a hand, walk about, strike the table with some instrument or do anything else that involves the will—we see that something takes place in the realm of reality that we can call a passing over of our emotions by way of an inner impulse to the hand movement, to something that is certainly no longer in our soul. Yet in a certain way it is within us because all that happens as a result of a genuine will impulse when we set our body in motion, and as a continuation of this, something external as well, lies by no means outside the circle comprising the being of man. Here, through emotions, we are led on the other side into an externality, but into a quite different kind of externality, into our own corporeality, which is our own externality. We descend from our psychic to our bodily self, to our own corporeality, but for the moment we do not know how we accomplish this in external life. Imagine the effort it would cost if, instead of moving your hand, you had to construct an apparatus, possibly worked from the outside by springs or the like, that would produce the same effect as you do in picking up this chalk! Imagine that you would have to be able to think out all that and realize it by means of a machine. You can't think that out and there is no such machine; yet that apparatus exists. Something occurs in the world that is certainly not in our consciousness, for if it were we could easily build the apparatus. Something takes place, then, that really pertains to us, but of which we have no immediate knowledge.

We must ask what would have to take place to make us aware of a movement of the hand, or of any motion of the body obeying the will? Another reality as well, the one that is outside us, would have to be able to enter our consciousness instead of halting before it. We would need to have before us a process such as takes place in our own body without penetrating consciousness—a process equally external, yet connected with consciousness in such a way that we would be aware of it. We should have to have something that we experienced in the soul, yet it would have to be something like an outer experience in this soul. So something just as ingenious as the picking up of the chalk would have to take place in our consciousness—just as ingenious and just as firmly based on abiding external laws. Some external event would have to enter our consciousness, acting in accord with prevailing laws, that would have the following effect. We would not think, as we would in the case of actions of the will, “I will pick up this chalk,” and consider that as representing one side of our soul life, strictly divided off from something we don't recognize as an external perception but, rather, these two processes would have to coincide, be one and the same. All the details of the hand motions would have to occur within consciousness.

Now, that is the process that takes place in the case of intuition. We can put it this way. When we can grasp with our own consciousness something that comes to full expression within this consciousness—not merely as knowledge but as an event, a world event—we are dealing with intuition, or more precisely, with intuition in the higher sense, such as is meant in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. Within intuition, then, we are dealing with the governing will. While that shrewd psychologist, Brentano, finds only emotions within the soul, not will, because the will does not exist for ordinary consciousness, it remains for the consciousness that transcends ordinary consciousness to find something that is a higher event. It is the point at which the world enters and plays a part in consciousness. That is, intuition.

Here again we have a sort of transition, only it is a little less readily noticeable than the one leading from imagination to ‘imagination’. This transition sets in when we acquire such power of self-observation as to enable us not merely to will something and follow this by the deed, with thoughts and deeds standing dynamically side by side, so to speak, but to start expanding our emotions themselves over the quality of our deeds. In many cases this is even useful, yet it can happen in life that in performing an action we are gratified or disgusted by it. I don't believe an unprejudiced observer of life can deny the possibility of so expanding the emotions as to include likes and dislikes for one's own actions, but this co-experiencing of them in the emotions can be intensified.

When this has been intensified to the point of its full potentiality in life, this transition reveals what we can call the human conscience. All stirrings of conscience occur at the transition from the emotions to intuition. If we seek the location of conscience, we find it at this transition. The soul is really open laterally on the side of imagination and on that of intuition, but it is closed on the side where we encounter the impact, as it were, of outer corporeality through perception. It achieves a certain fulfillment in the realm of imagination, and another when it enters the realm of intuition—in the latter case through an event.

Now, since imagination and intuition must live in one soul, how can a sort of mediation, a connection of the two, come about in this single soul? In imagination we have primarily a fulfilled image of the spiritual world, in intuition, an event that impinges out of the spiritual world. An event we encounter in the ordinary physical world is something that leaves us no peace, so to speak. We try to understand it, then we seek the essence underlying it. It is the same in the case of an event in the spiritual world that is to penetrate our consciousness. Let us consider this more closely. How does imagination first of all penetrate consciousness? Well, we found it first on the side of the emotions, but there, though it enters consciousness, enters the soul, it does so primarily on the side of the emotions, not on the side of visualization. It is the same in the case of intuition. Intuition can enter the soul life without providing the possibility of being visualized. Imagination, too, can occur without our being aware of it, in which case we have ‘imagination’ directly affecting the world of visualizations. Intuition, however, is to be found on the side of the emotions.

You see, in the whole spiritual life of man intuition is linked with the emotions. I will give you an example, a well-known dream. A couple had a son who suddenly became ill and in spite of all that could be done he died within a day. The parents were profoundly affected. The son continually occupied their thoughts, that is, their memory; they thought of him a great deal. One morning they found that during the night both had had the same dream, which they recounted to each other. (You can find this dream cited by a certain materialistic interpreter of dreams who turns the most grotesque somersaults in attempting to explain it.) They dreamt that the son demanded to be exhumed, as he had been buried alive. The parents made all possible efforts to comply with this demand, but as they lived in a country in which exhumation was not permitted after so long a lapse of time, it could not be done. How can we arrive at a sort of explanation of the phenomenon presented in this dream? Well, one premise is obvious. The parents' continuous recollection of the son, who was present in the spiritual world as a spiritual being, created a bridge to him. Let us suppose you admit that a bridge to the deceased was built through memory. You cannot possibly assume that, when all the intervening veils have been pierced, enabling the deceased to influence the two people, and when both have the same dream in which he tells them, “I am buried alive; go and see!”—you cannot assume that he really said that. Instead, there simply came about a contact in the night between parents and son. He did tell them something, or endeavored to instill something into their souls, but since the parents had no way of bringing to consciousness what it was that the son had instilled into their souls, their accustomed conceptions stood in the way of the real events. What the son manifestly wanted was something quite different because such visualizations could only have been gathered from the visualization substance of their accustomed life.

The other part I will explain to you by means of another dream, the dream a peasant woman had. This peasant woman dreamt she was going to town, to church. She dreamt vividly of the long walk on the road and through the fields, of arriving in the town, entering the church, and listening to the sermon, which moved her deeply, but it was, above all, the end of the sermon that went to her heart. The pastor spoke there with special warmth, and with the concluding words he spread out his arms. Suddenly his voice was transformed. It began to resemble the crowing of a rooster. Finally it sounded actually like a cock crowing, and the outspread arms seemed to her like wings. At the same moment the woman woke up, and out in the barnyard the rooster crowed. This crowing of the rooster had produced the whole dream, but you will admit that it might have produced other dreams just as well. Suppose, for instance, that a thief had been awakened by it. He might have been wondering how to break a lock, and some other astute rascal had been giving him directions that then turned into the cock-crow. That might have been the conception. You see, it need have no connection with what really entered the soul. The peasant woman was floating, so to speak, in a world of devotion and, when this was shattered, she still had the feeling of being elsewhere, but her entire consciousness was filled by the cock-crow. What manifested itself could therefore only express itself in symbols.

When anyone gets practice in passing from such dreams to reality, he finds that before he can arrive at spiritual reality he must penetrate some form of emotion—a sorrow or joy, a tension of this or that feeling. He must form wholly new conceptions if he would arrive at what the spiritual world comprises, and as a rule spiritual events are much closer to the emotions than to conceptions. The conceptual life of dreams is not conclusive in reporting what has happened there. There we have the spiritual event impinging. We are present in the spiritual world throughout our sleeping life, but our visualization is unable to characterize what we visualize. A similar condition prevails between intuition and the emotions. That is why mystics arrive at a vague, hazy soul experience of the higher worlds before attaining to any concretely outlined conceptions of them, and many mystics remain satisfied with that. Those whose souls truly meditate in the higher worlds, however, all describe in the same way the conditions of blissful devotion, their frame of mind in directly experiencing the spiritual world.

If we then endeavored to proceed through intuition, which sways the soul, we would not get very far; instead, we must proceed more from the other side, must try to develop imagination, to focus our attention on the imaginative world, in order not merely to wallow in emotions but to arrive at concrete images. If we do that, a sort of contact enters our life between intuition, which is not yet understood but rather felt, and imagination, which still floats in unreality and consists only of images. This contact finally enables us to ascend to the plane we can describe by saying that we have arrived among the beings who bring about spiritual events. Approaching these beings is what we call inspiration, and in a sense we have here the reverse of the processes confronting us in the outer corporeal world.

In confronting the outer corporeal world we have, so to speak, the thoughts we frame about objects. The objects are given, and we think about them. Here it is the event, the “object,” that appears in intuition primarily as emotion, so that imagination as such would remain in suspension. Not until the two unite, until intuition streams into imagination and visualizations are set free by imagination so that we feel imagination as coming to us from beings, not until then does the essence of the beings stream into us as an event, and what the imaginations have provided flows into intuition. We perceive in the event a content comparable to that of visualizations. These thoughts, for the perception of which imagination has prepared us, we then perceive by means of the event provided by intuition.

I have described to you today how man ascends to the spiritual world on the other side of his soul life, as it were. I have anticipated a little in the matter of what only spiritual science itself can give, but I had to do this in order that tomorrow we might be able to understand each other more readily in the principal subject—a description of the spiritual world itself.

• 1. Dr. Steiner could employ the non-German word Imagination in the sense familiar to students of anthroposophy, without much danger of confusion, because it is practically never used in German to mean ‘imagination’ in the common sense (that is Phantasie). In this lecture the two terms are offset, one against the other, and in translation a difficulty arises in our having but the one word in English: there is no synonym for ‘imagination’. The best solution available seems to be as follows: whenever ‘imagination’ is used in the ordinary sense (Phantasie) it will appear in inverted commas, but without these it has the technical meaning. If the reader will bear this purely arbitrary device in mind he should not be startled when he runs across something like “imagination leads to ‘imagination’.”

We have been hearing in recent lectures how fundamental impulses in the development of history are expressed in such phenomena as the strange custom in Egyptian culture of mummifying the human body and in the modern age the preservation of ancient cults—which is also a kind of “mummification”, in this latter case of ceremonies and rites.

Thinking again of Egyptian culture as expressed outwardly in the phenomenon of mummification, we will combine the picture thus outlined with a theme of which I have spoken recently and have frequently expounded here, namely, the theme of ordinary human thinking, how this thought-activity is exercised by man, how he gradually unfolds the faculty of thinking during childhood, becomes to a certain degree accomplished in it during his youth and then puts it into operation until his death. This thinking, this intellectual activity, is a kind of inner corpse of the soul. Thinking, as exercised by the human being in earthly life, is viewed in the right light only when it is compared, as far as its relation to the true being of man is concerned, with the corpse left behind at death.

The principle, which makes man truly man, departs at death, and something remains over in the corpse, which can only have this particular form because a living human being has left it behind him. Nobody could be so foolish as to believe that the human corpse, with its characteristic form, could have been produced by any play of nature, by any combination of nature-forces. A corpse is quite obviously a remainder, a residue. Something must have preceded it, namely, the living human being. Outer nature has, it is true, the power to destroy the form of the human corpse but not the power to produce it. This human form is produced by the higher members of man's being—but they pass away at death.

Just as we realise that a corpse derives from a living human being, so the true conception of thinking, of human thought, is that it cannot, of itself, have become what it is in earthly life, but that it is a kind of corpse in the soul—the corpse of what it was before the human being came down from worlds of soul-and-spirit into physical existence on the earth. In pre-earthly existence the soul was alive in the truest sense, but something died at birth, and the corpse, which remains from this death in the life of soul, is our human thinking. Those who have known best what it means to live in the world of thought have, moreover, felt the deathlike character of abstract thinking. I need only remind you of the moving passage with which Nietzsche begins his description of philosophy in the era of Greek tragedy. He describes how Greek thought, as exemplified by pre-Socratic philosophers such as Parmenides or Heraclitus, rises to abstract notions of being and becoming. Here, he says, one feels the onset of an icy coldness. And it is so indeed.

Think of men of the ancient East and how they tried to comprehend outer nature in living, inwardly mobile pictures, dreamlike though these pictures were. In comparison with this inwardly mobile, live thinking, which quickened the whole being of man and blossomed forth in the Vedanta philosophy, the abstract thinking of later times is veritably a corpse. Nietzsche was aware of this when he felt an urge to write about those pre-Socratic philosophers who, for the first time in the evolution of humanity, soared into the realm of abstract thoughts.

Study the sages of the East who preceded the Greek philosophers and you will find in them no trace of any doubt that the human being lived in worlds of soul-and-spirit before descending to the earth. It is simply not possible to experience thinking as a living reality and not believe in the pre-earthly existence of man. To experience living thinking is just like knowing a living human being on earth. Those who no longer experienced living thinking—and this applies to Greek philosophers even before the days of Socrates—such men may, like Aristotle, have doubts about the fact that the human being does not come into existence for the first time at birth. And so a distinction must be made between the once inwardly mobile and living thinking of the East wherewith it was known that man comes down from spiritual worlds into earth-existence, and the thinking that is a corpse, bringing knowledge only of what is accessible to man between birth and death.

Try to put yourselves in the position of an Egyptian sage, living, let us say, about 2000 B.C.. He would have said: Once upon a time, over in the East, men experienced living thinking. But the Egyptian sage was in a strange situation; his life of soul was not like ours today; experience of living thinking had faded away, was no longer within his grasp, and abstract thinking had not yet begun. A substitute was created by the embalming of mummies whereby, in the way I have described, a picture, a concept of the human form was made possible. Men trained themselves to unfold a picture of the dead human form in the mummy and began, for the first time, to develop abstract, dead thinking. It was from the human corpse that dead thinking first came into existence.

The counterpart of this in modern times is that in occult societies here and there, rituals, cults and ceremonial enactments once filled with living reality have been preserved as dead traditions. Think only of rituals that you may have read, perhaps those of the Freemasons. You will find that there are ceremonies of the First Degree, the Second Degree, the Third Degree, and so forth. All of them are learnt, written or enacted in an external way. Once upon a time, however, these cults were charged with life as real as the life-principle working in the plants. Today, the ceremonies and rites are dead forms. Even the Mystery of Golgotha was only able to evoke in certain priestly natures here and there, those inner, living experiences which sometimes arose in connection with rites of the Christian Churches after the time of Christ. But up to now mankind has not been able to infuse real life into ceremonies and rites—and indeed something else is necessary here.

All present-day thinking is directed essentially to the dead world. In our time there is simply no understanding of the nature of the living thinking which once existed. The intellectualistic thinking current since the middle of the fifteenth century of our era is, in very truth, a corpse and that is why it is applied only to what is dead in nature, to the mineral kingdom. People prefer to study plants, animals and even the human being, merely from the aspect of mineral, physical, chemical forces, because they only want to use this dead thinking, this corpse of thoughts indwelling the purely intellectualistic man.

In the present series of lectures I have mentioned the name of Goethe. Goethe was, as you know, a member of the community of Freemasons and was acquainted with its rites. But he experienced these rites in a way of which only he was capable. For him, real life flowed out of the rites which, for others, were merely forms preserved by tradition. He was able to make actual connection with that spiritual reality of being, which flowed in the way described from pre-earthly into earthly existence and which, as I said, always rejuvenated him. For Goethe underwent actual rejuvenation more than once in his life. It was from this that there came to him the idea of metamorphosis¹—one of the most significant thoughts in the whole of modern spiritual life and the importance of which is still not recognised.

What had Goethe actually achieved when he evolved the idea of metamorphosis? He had re-kindled an inwardly living thinking, which is capable of penetrating into the cosmos. Goethe rebelled against the botany of Linnaeus in which the plants are arranged in juxtaposition, each of them placed in a definite category and a system made out of it all. Goethe could not accept this; he did not want these dead concepts. He wanted a living kind of thinking, and he achieved it in the following way. First of all he looked at the plant itself and the thought came to him that down below the plant develops crude, unformed leaves, then, higher up, leaves which have more developed forms but are transformations, metamorphoses of those below; then come the flower-petals with their different colour, then the stamens and the pistil in the middle—all being transformations of the one fundamental form of the leaf itself. Goethe did not say: Here is a leaf of one plant and here a leaf of another, different plant.² He did not look at the plant in this way, but said: The fact that one leaf has a particular shape and another leaf a different shape, is a mere externality. Viewed inwardly, the matter is as follows. The leaf itself has an inner power of transformation, and it is just as possible for it to appear outwardly in one shape as in another. In reality there are not two leaves, but one leaf, in two different forms of manifestation. A plant has the green leaf below and the petal above. Intellectualistic pedants say: “The leaf and the petal are two quite different things.” Nothing could be more obvious, as far as the pedants are concerned, for the one form is red and the other green. Now if someone wears a green shirt and a red jacket—here there is a real difference. As regards clothing, at any rate in the modern age, philistinism prevails and is, moreover, in its right place. In that domain one cannot help being a philistine. But Goethe realised that the plant cannot be comprised within such theories. He said to himself: The red petal is the same, fundamentally, as the green leaf; they are not two separate and distinct phenomena. There is only one leaf, manifesting in different formations. The same force works, sometimes down below and sometimes higher up. Down below it works in such a way that the forces are, in the main, being drawn out of the earth. Here the plant is drawing forces from the earth, sucking them upwards, and the leaf, growing under the influence of the earth-forces, becomes green. The plant continues to grow; higher up the sun's rays are stronger than they are below, and the sun has the mastery. Thus the same impulse reaches into the sphere of the sunlight and produces the red petals.

Goethe might have spoken somewhat as follows. Suppose a man who has nothing to eat sees another who has quantities of food and gets envious, literally pale with envy. Another time someone gives him a blow and then he reddens. According to the principle that speaks of two distinct and different leaves, it might be argued: Here are two men—two, because one is pale and the other is red. Just as little as there are two men, one who is red on account of a blow and the other who is pale because of envy—as little are there two leaves. There is one leaf; at one place it has a particular form, at another place a different form. Goethe did not regard this as particularly wonderful for, after all, a man can run from one place to another and the men you will see in different places are certainly not two different persons. Briefly, Goethe realised that this observation of things in strict juxtaposition is not truth but illusion, that there is only one leaf—green at one place, red at another; and he applied to the different plants the same principle he applied to the several parts of the single plant. Think of the following. Suppose some plant lives in favourable conditions. Out of the seed it forms a root, a stem, leaves on the stem, then petals, stamens and pistil within the stamens. Goethe maintained that the stamens too are only different formations of the leaf. He might also have said: Intellectualists argue that, after all, the red petals are wide and the stamen as thin as a thread, except perhaps for the anther at the top. In spite of this, Goethe maintained that the wide flower petal and the slender stamen are only different formations of one and the same fundamental leaf. He might have asked: Have you not noticed some person who at one time in his life was as thin as a reed and afterwards became very stout? There were certainly not two different people. Petals and stamens are basically one, and the fact that they are situated at two different places on the plant is immaterial. No man can run swiftly enough to be in two places at once, although the story goes that a clever banker in Berlin when he was being pestered on all sides, once exclaimed: “Do you think I am a bird which can be in two places at once?” ... A human being cannot be in two places simultaneously. The point here is that Goethe was seeking everywhere for manifestations of the principle of metamorphosis, of the unity within multiplicity, of the unity within the manifold. And thereby he imbued the concept with life.

If you grasp what I have now said, my dear friends, you will grasp the idea of Spirit. I have said that the whole plant is really a leaf manifesting in different formations. This cannot be pictured in the physical sense; something must be grasped spiritually—something that transforms itself in every conceivable way. It is spirit that is living in the plant kingdom. Now we can go further. We can take a plant that is normal and healthy because its seed has been properly placed in the earth, it has absorbed the gentle sun of spring, then the full summer sun and has been able to develop its seeds under the weakening sun of autumn. But suppose a plant exists in such conditions of nature that it has no time to develop a root, an adequate stem, leaves or petals, but is obliged to unfold very rapidly—so rapidly indeed that everything about it lacks definition. Such a plant becomes a mushroom, a fungus.

There you have two extremes: a plant that has time to differentiate into all its detailed parts, to develop roots, stem, leaves, flowers, fruit; and a plant placed in such conditions of nature that it has no time to form a root, with the result that everything about it remains indication only; it cannot develop stem and leaves, and is obliged to unfold rapidly and without definition the principle underlying the formation of petals, fruit and seed. Such a plant only just manages to take its place in the earth and unfolds with amazing rapidity what other plants unfold slowly. Think, for example, of the corn poppy. After slowly putting out its green leaves it can proceed to unfold its petals, then the stamens, then the jaunty pistil in the centre. But a mushroom must do all this very rapidly; there is no time for differentiation, no time for exposure to the sun, which would bring the beautiful colours, because the sun is absent during its brief period of development. In the mushroom we have a flower without definition; development has taken place far too rapidly. Here, too, there is fundamental unity. Two quite different plants are basically the same.

But before all this can be really thought through, one must change a little, inwardly. An intellectualist—Goethe might have said, a “rigid philistine”—looks at a poppy with its sappy, red flower and well-developed pistil in the centre. What he really ought to do is at the same time to look at a mushroom and keep the concept he has formed of the poppy so mobile and flexible that he is able to see within the poppy itself, in tendency at least, some kind of mushroom or toadstool. But that, of course, is asking too much of a pedant. You will have to place before him the actual mushroom so that his intellect may drag itself away from the poppy without inner exertion, without being kindled to life—for all he need do is to incline his head very slightly. Then he will be able to visualize the one object beside the other separately, and all is well!

Such is the difference between dead thinking and the inwardly alert, live thinking unfolded by Goethe in connection with the principle of metamorphosis. He enriched the world of thought by a glorious discovery. For this reason, in the Introductions to Goethe's works on Natural Science which I wrote in the eighties of last century, you will find the sentence: Goethe is both the Galileo and the Copernicus of the science of organic nature, and what Galileo and Copernicus achieved in connection with dead, outer nature, namely, clarification of the concept of nature to enable it to embrace both the astronomical and the physical aspects, Goethe achieved for the science of organic nature with his living concept of metamorphosis. Such was his supreme discovery.

This concept of metamorphosis can, if desired, be applied to the whole of nature. When a picture of the plant-form came to Goethe out of this concept of metamorphosis, it immediately occurred to him that the principle must also be applicable to the animal. But this is a more difficult matter. Goethe was able to conceive of one leaf proceeding from another; but he found it much more difficult to picture the form of one of the spinal vertebrae, for instance, being metamorphosed, transformed, into a bone of the head—which would have meant the application of the principle of metamorphosis to the animal and also to the human being. Nevertheless Goethe was partially successful in this too, as I have often told you. In the year 1790, while he was walking through a graveyard in Venice, he was lucky enough to come across a sheep's skull, the bones of which had fallen apart in a way very favourable for observation. As he examined these animal bones the thought dawned upon him that they looked like spinal vertebrae, although greatly transformed. And then he conceived the idea that the bones, at least, can also be pictured as representing one, basic bone-creating impulse, which merely manifests in different forms.

With respect to the human being, however, Goethe did not get very far because he did not succeed in passing on from his idea of metamorphosis to real Imagination. When real Imagination advances to Inspiration and Intuition, the principle of uniformity is revealed still more strikingly. And I have already indicated how this uniformity is revealed in the being of man when the concept of metamorphosis is truly understood. When Goethe contemplated the dicotyledons and visualised the flowers of such plants in simpler and more and indefinite forms, he could finally see them as a mushroom or fungus. And from this same point of view, when we study the human head, we can conceive of it as a metamorphosis of the rest of the skeleton.

Try to look at one of the lower jaws in a human skeleton with the eye of an artist. You will hardly be able to do otherwise, than compare it with the bones of the arm and of the leg. Think of the leg bones and arm bones transformed and then, in the lower jaws, you have two “legs”, except that here they have stultified. The head is a lazybones that never walks, but is always sitting. The head “sits” there on its two stultified legs. Imagine a man in the uncomfortable position of sitting with his legs bound together by some kind of cord, and you have practically a replica of the formation of the jaws. Look at all this with the eye of an artist and you can easily imagine the legs becoming as immobile as the lower jawbones—and so on.

But the truth of the matter is realised for the first time when the human head is conceived as a transformation of the rest of the body. I have told you that the head of our present earth-life is the transformed body (the body apart from the head) of our previous earth-life. The head, or rather the forces of the head, as they then were, have passed away. In some cases indeed they actually pass away during life! The head—I am speaking, of course, of forces, not substances—the forces of the head are not preserved; the forces now embodied in your head were the forces which were embodied in the other parts of your body in your previous life. In that life, again, the forces of the head were those of the body of the preceding life; and the body that is now yours will be transformed, metamorphosed, into the head of the future earth-life. For this reason the head develops first. Think of the embryo in the body of the mother. The head develops first and the rest of the organism, being a new formation, affixes itself to the head. The head derives from the previous earth-life; it is the transformed body, a form that has been carried across the whole span of existence between death and a new birth; it then becomes the head-structure and attaches to itself the other members. Accepting the fact of repeated earthly lives, we can thus see the human being as a metamorphosis recently perfected. The idea of plant-metamorphosis discovered by Goethe at the beginning of the eighties of the eighteenth century leads on to the living concept of development through the whole animal kingdom up to the human being, and contemplation here leads on to the idea of repeated earthly lives.

Goethe's participation in the ceremonial enactments of the cult to which he belonged was responsible for this inner quickening in his life of thought. Although it was not fully clear to his consciousness, he nevertheless had an inkling of how the human being, still living entirely as a soul in pre-earthly life, carries over forces which have remained from the bodily structure of the previous earth-life and which, having entered into the present life, develop within the protective sheaths of the mother's body into the head structure.

Goethe did not know this consciously but he had an inkling of it and applied it, in the first place, to the simplest phenomena of plant life. Because the time was not ripe, he could not extend the principle to the point that is possible today, namely to the point where the metamorphosis of the human being from one earth-life over to the next can be understood. As a rule it is said, with a suggestion of compassion, that Goethe evolved this idea of metamorphosis because, owing to his artistic nature, something had gone wrong with him. Pedants and philistines speak like this out of compassion. But those who are neither pedants nor philistines will realise with joy that Goethe knew how to add the element of art to science and precisely because of this was able to make his concepts mobile. Pedants insist, however, that nature cannot be grasped by this kind of thinking; strictly logical concepts are necessary, they say, for the understanding of nature. Yes, but what if nature herself is an artist ... presuming this, the whole of natural science which excludes art and bases itself only upon the concepts of logical deduction might find itself in a position similar to one of which I once heard when I was talking to an artist in Munich. He had been a contemporary of Carriere, the well-known writer on Aesthetics. We began, by chance, to speak about Carriere and this man said: “Yes, when we were young, we artists used not to attend Carriere's lectures; if we did go once, we never went again; we called him ‘the aesthetic rapture-monger’.” Now just as it might be the fate of a writer on Aesthetics to be called a “rapture-monger” by artists, so, if nature herself were to speak about her secrets she might call the strictly logical investigator ... well, not a rapture-monger, but a misery-monger perhaps, for nature creates as an artist. One cannot order nature to let herself be comprehended according to the laws of strict logic. Nature must be comprehended as she actually is.

Such, then, is the course of historical evolution. Once upon a time, in the ancient East, concepts and thoughts were full of life. I have described how, to begin with, these living concepts became actual perception through a metamorphosis of the breathing process. But human beings were obliged to work their way through to dead, abstract concepts. The Egyptians could not reach this stage but forced themselves in the direction of dead concepts through contemplating the human being himself in the state of death, in the mummy. We, in our day, have to awaken concepts to new life. This cannot happen by the mere elaboration of ancient, occult traditions, but by growing into, and moreover elaborating, the living concept which Goethe was the first to evolve in the form of the idea of metamorphosis. Those who are masters of the living concept, in other words, those who are able to grasp the Spiritual in their life of soul—they are able, out of the Spirit, to bring a new and living impulse into the external actions of men. This will lead to something of which I have often spoken to Anthroposophists, namely, that men will no longer stand in the laboratory or at the operating table with the indifference begotten by materialism, but will feel the secrets revealed by nature to listening ears as deeds of the Spirit which pervades and is active in her. Then the laboratory table will become an altar. Forces leading to progress and ascent will not be able to work in the evolution of humanity until true reverence and piety enter into science, nor until religion ceases to be a mere bolster for human egoism and to be regarded as a realm entirely distinct from science. Science must learn, like the pupils of the ancient Mysteries, to have reverence for what is being investigated. I have spoken of this in the book Christianity as Mystical Fact. All research must be regarded as a form of intercourse with the spiritual world and then, by listening to nature we shall learn from her those secrets, which in very truth promote the further evolution of humanity. And then the process of mummification—which was once a necessary experience for man—will be reversed. The Egyptians embalmed the human corpse, with the result that even now we can witness the almost terrifying spectacle of whole series of mummies being brought by Europeans from Egypt and deposited in museums. Just as human thinking was once rigidified as the outcome of the custom of mummification, so it must now be awakened to life.

The ancient Egyptians took the corpses of men, embalmed them, conserved death. We, in our day, must feel that we have a veritable death of soul within us if our thoughts are purely abstract and intellectualistic. We must feel that these thoughts are the mummy of the soul, and learn to understand the truth glimpsed by Paracelsus when he took some substance from the human organism and called this the “mummy”. In the tiny material residue of the human being, he saw the mummy. Paracelsus did not need an embalmed corpse in order to see the mummy, for he regarded the mummy as the sum-total of those forces which could at every moment lead man to death if new life did not quicken him during the night.

Dead thinking holds sway within us; our thinking represents death of soul. In our thinking we bear the mummy of the soul which produces precisely those things that are most prized in modern civilisation. If we have a wider kind of perception, the kind of perception, for example, which enabled Goethe to see metamorphoses, we can go through rooms where mummies are exhibited in museums and then out into the streets and see the same thing there ... it is merely a question of the level from which we are looking, for in the modern age of intellectualism there is little difference—the fact that mummies do not walk as human beings walk in the streets, is only an externality. The mummies in the museums are mummies of bodies; the human beings who walk about the streets in this age of intellectualism are mummies of soul because they are filled with dead thoughts, with thoughts that are incapable of life. Primordial life was rigidified in the mummies of Egypt and this rigidified life of soul must be quickened again for the sake of the future of mankind. We must not continue to study anatomy and physiology in the way that has hitherto been customary. This was permissible among the ancient Egyptians when corpses of the physical human being lay before them. We must not further mummify the corpse of abstract soul-life we bear in our intellectualistic thinking. There is a real tendency today to embalm thinking so that it becomes pedantically logical, without a single spark of fiery life.

Photographs of mummies are as rigid and stiff as the mummy itself. A typical standard work today on some branch of modern knowledge is a photograph, an image of the mummified soul; in this case it is the soul that has been embalmed. And if doubt arises because as well as the intellect which is certainly mummified, human beings have other characteristics, all kinds of bodily and other urges, for instance, so that the picture of the mummy is not very clear ... nevertheless it is there, unmistakably, in standard text books. The embalming process in such writings is very perceptible. This embalming of thought must cease. Instead of the embalming process applied by the Egyptians to the mummies, we need something different, namely, an elixir of life—not as many people think of this today, as a means of perfecting the physical body, but in a form which makes the thoughts alive, which de-mummifies them. When we understand this we have a picture of a profoundly significant impulse in historical evolution. It is a picture of how spiritual culture was once rigidified in the embalming of mummies and of how an elixir of spirit and soul must be poured into all that has been mummified in modern man in the course of his education and development, so that culture may flow onwards to the future. There are two forces: one manifests in the Egyptian custom of embalming and the other in the process of “de-embalming” which modern man must learn to apply.

To learn how to “de-embalm” the dead, rigid forces of the soul—this is a task of the greatest possible significance today. Failure to achieve it produces phenomena of which I gave one example here a short time ago. A man like Spengler realised that rigidified concepts and thoughts will not do, that they lead to the death of culture. In an article in Das Goetheanum I showed what really happened to Spengler. He realised that concepts were dead, but his own were not living! His fate was the same as that of the woman in the Old Testament who looked behind her. Spengler looked at all the dead, mummy-like thoughts of men and he himself became a pillar of salt. Like the woman in the Old Testament, Spengler became a pillar of salt, for his concepts have no more life in them than those of the others.

There is an ancient occult maxim that “wisdom lives in salt” ... but only when the salt is dissolved in human mercury and human phosphorus. Spengler's wisdom is wisdom that has rigidified in salt. But the mercury that brings the salt into movement, making it cosmic, universal—this is lacking; and phosphorus, too, is lacking in a still higher degree. For when one reads Spengler with feeling, above all with artistic feeling, it is impossible for his ideas to kindle inner enthusiasm, inner fire. They all remain salt-like and rigid and even produce a bitter taste. One has to be pervaded inwardly by the mercurial and phosphoric forces if it is a question of “digesting” this lump of salt that calls itself The Decline of the West. But it cannot really be digested ... I will not enlarge upon this particular theme because in polite society one does not mention what is done with indigestible matter! What we have to do is to get away from the salt, away from rigidity, and administer an elixir of life to the mummified soul, to our abstract, systematized concepts. That is the task before us.

• 1. See The Mystery of the Trinity lecture II, by Rudolf Steiner
• 2. Sketches of leaves of various shapes were made on the blackboard.

In order, gentlemen that the last question may be thoroughly answered. I will, as far as possible, say something about colors. One cannot really understand colors if one does not understand the human eye, for man perceives colors entirely through the eye.

Picture to yourselves, for instance, a blind person. A blind person feels differently in a room that is lighted and in a room that is dark. Though it is so weak a matter that he does not perceive it, yet it has a great significance for him. Even a blind person could not live perpetually in a cellar, he would need the light. And there is a difference if one brings a blind man into a bright room with yellow windows, or into a dark room, or into a fairly light room which has blue windows. That acts quite differently on his life. Yellow color and blue color influence life quite differently. But these are things which one learns to understand only when one has grasped how the eye is affected by color.

Now from what I have hitherto put before you, you will perhaps have realized that two things are most important in man. The first is the blood, for if man were not to have blood he would have to die at once. He would not be able to renew his life every moment and life must be every moment renewed. So if you think away the blood from the body, man is a dead object.

Now think away the nerves too: man would no doubt look just the same, but he would have no consciousness; he could form no ideas, could will nothing, would not be able to move.

We must therefore say to ourselves: For man to be a conscious human being he needs nerves. For man to be able to live at all he needs blood. Thus blood is the organ of life, the nerves are the organ of consciousness.

But every organ has nerves and has blood. The human eye is in fact really like a complete human being and has nerves and blood. Imagine that here [a drawing was made] the eye protrudes, and in the eye little blood-arteries, many blood-arteries spread out. And many nerves too spread out. You see, what you have in the hand, that is, nerves and blood, you have also in the head.

Now think: the external world which is illumined works upon the eye. By day at any rate the world in which you go about is illumined, but it is difficult to form an idea of this wholly-lighted outer world. You get a true idea when you imagine the half-lighted world in the morning and evening, when you see the red of dawn and evening. Dawn and the sunset glow are particularly instructive.

For what is actually there in the glow of dawn and evening? Picture to yourselves the sunrise. The sun comes up, but it cannot shine on you direct as yet. The sun comes when the earth is like this—I am now drawing the apparent path, but that does not matter (in reality the earth moves and the sun stands still, but how we see this makes no difference). The sun sends its rays here [drawing] and then here. So if first you stand there, you do not see the sun at dawn, you see the litÖ¾up clouds. These are the clouds and the light falls actually on them. What is that actually? This is very instructive. Because the sun has not quite risen, it is still dark around you and there in the distance are the clouds lit up by the sun. Can one understand that?

If you stand there you are seeing the illumined clouds through the darkness that is around you. You see light through darkness. So that we can say it is the same thing at dawn and sunset—one sees light through darkness. And light seen through darkness—as you can see in the morning and evening glow—looks red. Light seen through darkness looks red.

Now I will say something different. Imagine that dawn has gone by and it is daytime. You see freely up into the air, as it is today. What do you see? You see the so-called blue sky. To be sure, it is not there, but you see it all the same. That certainly does not continue into all infinity, but you see the blue sky as if it were surrounding the earth like a blue shell.

Why is that? Now you have only to think of how it is out there in distant universal space. It is in fact dark. For universal space is dark. The sun shines only on the earth and because there is air round the earth the sunbeams are caught and make it light here, especially when they shine through watery air. But out there in universal space it is absolutely black darkness. So that if one stands here by day one looks into darkness, and one should actually see darkness. But one does not see it black, but blue, because all round there is light from the sun. The air and the moisture in the air are illumined.

So you see quite clearly darkness through the light. You look through the light, through the illumined air into darkness. And therefore we can say: Darkness through light is blue.

There you have the two principles of the color-theory which you can simply get from observation of the surroundings. If you thoroughly understand the red of dawn and evening glow you say to yourself: Light seen through darkness or obscurity is red. When by day you look out into the black heavens, you say to yourself: Darkness or obscurity seen through light—since it is light around you—is blue.

You see, men have always had this quite natural view until they became “clever.” This perception of light seen through darkness being red, and darkness through light being blue, was possessed by ancient peoples over in Asia when they still had the knowledge which I have lately described to you. The ancient Greeks still had this concept, and it lasted through the whole Middle Ages until the 14th. 15th, 16th, 17th centuries when people became clever. And as they became clever, they began not to look at nature but to think out all sorts of artificial sciences.

One of those who devised a particularly artificial science about color was the Englishman Newton. Out of cleverness—you know how I am now using the word, namely quite in earnest—out of special cleverness Newton said something like this: Let us look at the rainbow—for when one is clever one does not look at something happening naturally every day: dawn, sunset, one looks at the specially unusual and rare, something to be understood only when one has gone further. However. Newton said: Let us look at the rainbow. In the rainbow one sees seven colors, namely, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. One sees them next to each other in the rainbow:

When you look at a rainbow you can distinguish these seven colors quite plainly.

Now Newton made an artificial rainbow by darkening the room, covering the window with black paper, and in the paper he made a tiny hole. That gave him a very small streak of light.

Then he put in this streak of light something that one calls a prism. It is a glass that looks like this [drawing], a sort of three-cornered glass, and behind this he set up a screen. So he then had the window with the hole, this tiny beam of light, the prism and behind it the screen. Then the rainbow appeared with the red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet colors. What did Newton then say?

Newton said to himself: The white light comes in; with the prism I get the seven colors of the rainbow. Therefore they are already contained in the white light and I only need to draw them out.

You see, that is a very simple explanation. One explains something by saying: It is already there and I draw it out.

In reality he ought to have said: Since I set up a prism—that is. a glass with a cornered surface, not a regular glass plate—when I look through it like this, there is light made red through darkness, and on the other side darkness made blue through light—the blue color appears. And in between lie in fact gradations. That is what he ought to have told himself.

But at that time the aim in the world was to explain everything by seeking to find everything already inside that from which one was really to explain it. That is the simplest method, is it not? If, for example, one is to describe how the human being arises, then one says: Oh well, he is already in the ovum of the mother, he only develops out of it. That is a fine explanation!

We don't find things as easy as that, as you have seen. We have to take the whole universe to our aid, which first forms the egg in the mother. But natural science is concerned with throwing everything inside, which is the simplest possible way. Newton said that the sun already contained all the colors and we had only to draw them out.

But that is not it at all. If the sun is to produce red at dawn, it must first shine on the clouds and we must see the red through darkness; and if the sky is to appear blue, that is not at all through the sun. The sun does not shine into the heavens: it is all black there, dark, and we see the blue through the illumined air of the earth. We see darkness through light, and that is blue.

The point is to make a proper physics where it could then be seen how in the prism on the one side light is seen through darkness and on the other darkness through light. But that is too tiresome for people. They find it best to say that everything is within light and one only draws it out. Then one can say too that once there was a giant egg in the world, the whole world was inside, and we draw everything out of it.

That is what Newton did with the colors. But in reality one can always see the secret of the colors if one understands in the right way the morning and evening glow and the blue of the heavens.

Now we must consider further the whole matter in relation to our eye and to the whole of human life altogether. You see, you all know that there is a being which is especially excited through red—that is, where light works through darkness—and that is the bull. The bull is well known to be frightfully enraged by red. That you know.

And so man too has a little of the bull-nature. He is not of course directly excited through red, but if man lived continually in a red light, you would at once perceive that he gets a little stimulation from it. He gets a little bull-like. I have even known poets who could not write poetry if they were in their ordinary frame of mind, so then they always went to a room where they put a red lampshade over the light. They were then stimulated and were able to write poetry. The bull becomes savage: man by exposing himself to the red becomes poetic! The stimulation to poetry is only a matter of whether it comes from inside or from outside. This is one side of the case.

On the other hand you will also be aware that when people who understand such things want to be thoroughly meek and humble, they use blue, or black—deep black. That is so beautiful to see in Catholicism: when Advent comes and people are supposed to become humble, the Church is made blue; above all the vestments are blue. People get quietened, humble; they feel themselves inwardly connected with the subdued mood—especially if a man has previously exhausted his fury, like a bull, as for instance at Shrove Tuesday's carnival. Then one has the proper time of fasting afterwards, not only dark raiment, black raiment. Then men become tamed down after their violence is over. Only, where one has two carnivals, two carnival Sundays, one should let the time of fasting be twice as long! I do not know if that is done.

But you see from this that it has quite a different effect on man whether he sees light through dark that is red, or darkness through light, that is blue.

Now consider the eye. Within it you have nerves and blood. When the eye looks at red, let us say at the dawn or at something red, what does it experience? You see, when the eye looks at red then these quite fine little blood-arteries become permeated by the red light, and this light has the peculiarity of always destroying the blood a little. It therefore destroys the nerve at the same time, for the nerve can live only when it is permeated by blood. So that when the eye confronts red, when red comes into the eye, then the blood in the eye is always somewhat destroyed and the nerve with it.

When the bull is faced with red it simply feels: Good gracious—all the blood in my head is destroyed! I must defend myself!—Then it becomes savage because it will not let its blood be destroyed.

Well, but this is very good—not only in the bull, but in man and in other animals. For if we look at red and our blood becomes somewhat destroyed, then on the other hand our whole body works to bring oxygen into the eye so that the blood can be re-established.

Just think what a wonderful process takes place there. When light is seen through darkness—that is, red—then the blood is destroyed, oxygen is absorbed from the body and the eye vitalized through the oxygen. And now we know through the renewal of life in our eye: There is red outside. But in order that we may perceive this red, the blood and the nerve in the eye must be a little destroyed. We must send life, that is, oxygen, into the eye. And by our own vitalizing of the eye, by this waking up of the eye we notice: there is red outside.

Now you see, man's health too actually depends on his perceiving rightly the reddened light, on his always being able to take in reddened light properly. For the oxygen which is drawn out of the body vitalizes then the whole body and man gets a healthy color in the face. He can really reanimate himself.

This refers not only to a person who is healthy and able to see, it applies as well to one whose eyes are not healthy and who does not see: When the light works through the bright color then he is vitalized in the head, and this vitalizing acts again on the whole body and gives him a healthy color. So when we live in the light and can take in the light properly we get a healthy color.

It is very important tor people not to be brought up in dark places where they can become lifeless and submissive. People should be brought up in light, bright places with yellowish-reddish light, where they also properly assimilate the oxygen in them through the light.

But you see from this that everything connected with the element of red is actually connected with the development of man's blood. When we look at red the nerve is actually destroyed.

Now just think: We see darkness through light, that is, blue. Darkness does not destroy our blood, it leaves our blood unharmed. The nerve too is undestroyed since our blood is in order. The result is for man to feel himself thoroughly well inwardly. Since blood and nerve are not attacked by blue, man feels thoroughly well inside.

And there is really something subtly refined in creating submissive meekness. When, let us say, the priests there above at the altar are in their blue or their black vestments, and the people sit below and gaze at them, the blood-arteries and nerves in the eye are not destroyed and naturally the people feel very well. It is actually directed to the feeling of well-being of the people.

Do not imagine that that is not known! For they still have their ancient science. The more modern science has only arisen with the men of the Enlightenment, in such men as, for instance. Newton.

Thus we can say: Blue is what sends through man a feeling of well-being, when he says to himself (it is all unconscious, but he says it inwardly): There alone I can live—in the blue. There man feels inwardly himself; in red, on the other hand, he feels as if something were to penetrate into him. One can say that with blue the nerve remains undestroyed and the body sends the feeling of well-being into the eye and hence into the whole body.

That is the difference between the color blue and the color red. And yellow is only a gradation of red, and green is a gradation of blue. So that one can say: according to whether nerve or blood is active, the more sensitive is man to red or to blue.

Now you see, one can apply that to substances. If I want to look for a red for painting, to produce a red color which contains the substances that stimulate man to develop oxygen inwardly, then I gradually arrive at the fact that to get red color for painting I must test the substances of the outer world to find how much carbon they contain. If I combine carbon in the right way with other substances, I discover the secret of making a red for my painting.

If I use plants for getting colors for paints then above all it is a matter of so organizing my processes, diminishing, consuming, and so on, that I obtain the carbon in the paint in the right way. If I have the carbon in it in the right way, then I get the bright, the reddish color.

If on the other hand I have substances which contain much oxygen—not carbon but oxygen—then I obtain the darker colors, such as blue. When I know the living element in the plant then I can really create my colors. Imagine that I take a sunflower: that is quite yellow, a bright color. Yellow is near to red, that is, light seen through darkness. If I now treat the sunflower in such a way as somehow to gel into my paint-color the right process that lies in the flower, then I have a good yellow. Even the outer light cannot have much against it, because the blossom of the sunflower has already taken from the sun the secret of creating yellow. If I therefore get the same process into my artist's color as there is in the blossom, then if I get it thick enough, I can use it normally as paint.

But let me take another plant, the chicory, for instance, the blue flower that grows on the wayside—it grows here too. If I have this blue plant and want to prepare a paint from the flower, I cannot do it, I get nothing from it. On the other hand, if I treat the root in the right way, there is a process in it which actually makes the blossom blue.

When the blossom is yellow then something goes on in the blossom itself which makes yellow; when the blossom is blue, however, the process lies in the root and it only presses upwards towards the flower. So if I want to produce a blue paint from the indigo-plant, where I get a darker blue, or from the chicory, this blue flower, I must use the root. I must treat it chemically till it yields me the blue color.

In this way, through real study, I can find out how to obtain paints from the plant. I cannot do so in Newton's way; he simply says that everything is in the sunlight and one has only to draw it out. (One can apply that at most to one's purse; what I spend for a day I must have in the purse in the morning.) That is how the quite clever people picture it, like a sack in which everything is lying. That, however, is not the case.

We must know, for instance, how the yellow is in the sunflower or in the dandelion. We must know how the blue is in chicory. The processes which make the chicory or the indigo׳ plant blue lie in the root, whereas the processes that make the sunflower or the dandelion yellow lie in the flower.

And so I must imitate chemically, in a chemistry become living, the flower-process of the plant and get the bright, light color. I must imitate the root process of the plant and there obtain the dark color.

You see, what I have related here is plain to the real human understanding; whereas as a matter of fact this business (in the rainbow) with the red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, is a rarity.

Now when Goethe lived the affair had got to the point where people generally believed in what Newton had taught, namely, the sun is the great sack in which lie the so-called seven colors. One need only tempt them out, then they come to light. Everyone believed that; it was taught and in fact is still taught today.

Goethe's nature was not one to believe everything immediately. He wanted to convince himself a little about things that were taught everywhere. People generally say that they do not believe anything on authority. But when it comes to the point of crediting what is taught from the professorial chair, then people are today frightfully credulous, they believe everything that is taught. Goethe did not want to believe everything straightaway, so he borrowed from the university in Jena the apparatus, the prisms and so on which provide the proof. He thought: Now I will do exactly what the professors do in order to see how it actually is.

Well, Goethe did not get down to it immediately and had the apparatus rather a long time without doing anything. He just did something else. So the time became too long for the Hofrat Büttner who needed the apparatus and wanted to have it fetched back. Goethe said: Now I must do the thing quickly—and at least, as he was already packing up, looked through a prism. He said to himself: The rainbow must look beautiful on the white wall if I look through there; instead of white, red, yellow, green and so on must appear. He therefore peered through, anticipating with delight that he would now see the white wall in these beautiful colors,—but he saw nothing: white as before, simply white. Naturally he was extremely surprised and asked himself what was behind it. And his whole theory of color arose out of this.

Goethe said: One must now control the whole affair again. The ancients have said light seen through darkness = red, darkness through light = blue. If I gradate the red somewhat it becomes yellow. If I make the blue go up to red, then it becomes green on the one side and violet on the other. These are gradations. And he then worked out his color theory and in fact better than it existed in the Middle Ages.

Now today we have a physicist's color-theory with the sack from which the seven colors come, which is taught everywhere. And we have a Goethean color-theory which understands the blue of the heavens rightly, understands rightly the morning and evening glow as I have been explaining to you.

But there is a certain difference between the Newtonian and the Goethean theory. For the most part other people do not notice it, for other people look on the one hand to the physicists: there the Newtonian theory of color is taught which stands in the books everywhere. One can very clearly picture to oneself what appears there in the rainbow as red, orange, yellow, green and so on. Well, but there is no prism there! However, one does not reflect further. The Newtonians certainly know, but they do not admit, that when one looks through the rainbow on the one side, then one sees darkness through the sun-illumined rainbow; sees on the other side the blue. But then one also sees in front the surface where one sees light through darkness, and on the other side the red. One must explain everything therefore by the simple principle: light through darkness is red; darkness through light is blue.

But as I have said, people on the one hand see everything as the logicians explain it to them: on the other hand they look at pictures where the colors are used. Well, they do not ask further about the red and the yellow and so on; they do not bring the two things together.

But the painter must bring them together: one who wants to paint must connect them. He must not merely know: There is a sack and the colors are within it—for he has not got the sack anywhere. He must obtain the right thing from the living plant, or living substances, so that he can mix his colors in the right way.

So this is the position today: painters really reflect (—there even are painters who reflect, who do not simply buy their colors): but those painters who reflect upon how they are to obtain these colors and how they should use them, they say: Yes, with the Goethean color-theory one can do something; that tells us something. With the Newtonian color-theory, the theory of the physicists, we painters can do nothing.

The public does not bring painting and the physicists' theory of color together, but the painter does! He therefore likes the Goethean color-theory. He says to himself: Goodness! We don't bother about the physicists: they say something in their own field. They may do what they like; we keep to the Goethean color-theory. The painters look on themselves as artists and not as having to encroach on the teaching of the physicists. That is in fact uncomfortable, enmities arise, and so on.

But that is how things stand today between what is in the books about color and what is true. With Goethe it was simply the defense of truth which impelled him to oppose the Newtonians and the whole modern physics. And we cannot really understand nature without coming to Goethe's color-theory.

Hence it is quite natural that in a Goetheanum Goethe's theory of color should also be vindicated. But then if one does not remain in some religious or moral sphere but also intervenes in the smallest single part of Physics, then one has the physicists' whole pack of hounds upon one.

So, you see, the defense of truth is extraordinarily difficult in modern times. But you should just know in what a complicated way the physicists explain the blue of the sky. Naturally, if I start from a false principle and want to explain the simple thing that the blackness of universal space appears blue through light, then I must make a frightfully complicated explanation of it. And then the red of dawn and sunset! These chapters mostly begin like this; the blue sky—one cannot actually explain that properly today, one could imagine this or that.—Yes, with all that the physicists have, their little hole which so much amused Goethe—the little hole through which they let the light come into the room, in order with the darkness to investigate the light—with all this they cannot explain the simplest facts. And so it comes to the point that color is no longer understood at all.

If one understands, however, that the destruction of the blood calls forth the vitalizing process—for when I have destroyed my blood then I call up all the oxygen in me and renew myself, bring about health—then one also understands the healthy rosy color in man.

If I have darkness round me or continual blueness, well, then I shall not continually reanimate myself, or else I should create too much life in me. And so on the one hand one can understand the healthy rosy countenance from the intake of' oxygen, when one is thoroughly exposed to the light, and one can understand paleness from the perpetual intake of carbonic acid. Carbonic acid, the counterpart of oxygen, wants to go into my head. That makes me quite pale.

Today, for instance in Germany, the children are almost all pale. But one must understand that that comes from too much carbonic acid. And if man develops too much carbonic acid—carbonic acid consists of a combination of carbon and oxygen—then he uses the carbon which he has in him too much for forming carbonic acid. Thus in such a pale child you have all the carbon in him continuously changed into carbonic acid. So he becomes pale. What must I do? I must administer something to him through which this eternal development of carbonic acid inside him is hindered, through which the carbon is held back. I can do that if I give him some carbonate of lime.

In this way the functions are again stimulated, as I have told you from quite a different standpoint, and man keeps the carbon that he needs, does not continually change it into carbonic acid. And since carbonic acid consists of carbon and oxygen, the oxygen comes up into the head and animates the head processes, the life processes. But when the oxygen is given up to the carbonic acid, the life processes are suppressed.

If I therefore bring a pale person into a region where he has a good deal of light, he becomes stimulated not to give up his carbon continually to carbonic acid, because the light sucks the oxygen up into the head. Then he will get a healthy color again. In the same way I can stimulate that through the carbonate of lime, inasmuch as I keep back the oxygen and the person has it at his disposal.

So everything must be interconnected. One must be able to understand health and illness from the theory of color. One can do that only from Goethe's theory, for that rests simply on nature in a natural manner. It can never be done from Newton's color-theory which is merely devised, does not rest on nature at all, and actually cannot explain the simplest phenomena, the red at dawn and sunset and the blue sky.

Now, gentlemen, may I still say something else to you. Think of the old pastoral peoples who drove out their flocks and herds and slept in the open air. During their sleep they were not exposed to the blue sky but to the dark sky. And up there upon it [drawing] are the unnumbered shining stars. Now picture the dark sky with these countless shining stars and there below the sleeping men. From the heavens there streams out a calming force, the inner feeling of well-being in sleep. The whole human being is permeated by the darkness, so that he becomes inwardly quiet. Sleep proceeds from the darkness, but nevertheless these stars shine down. And wherever a star-beam shines the human being becomes inwardly a little stirred up. An oxygen ray goes out from the body. Pure oxygen rays go to meet the rays from the stars and the man becomes entirely permeated inwardly by the oxygen rays: he becomes inwardly an oxygen reflection of the whole starry heavens.

Thus the ancient shepherd folk took into their quietened bodies the whole star heavens in pictures, pictures which the course of the oxygen engraved into them. Then they woke up and they had the dream of these pictures. From this they had their star knowledge, their wonderful knowledge of the stars.

Their dream was not merely that Aries, the Ram, had so-and-so-many stars, but they really saw the animal, the Ram, the Bull, and so on, and felt the whole starry heavens in themselves in pictures. That is what has remained to us from the ancient shepherd folk as a poetic wisdom which sometimes has extraordinarily much that can still be instructive today.

One can understand it when one knows that the human being lets an oxygen ray radiate to each beam of light from the stars, that he becomes wholly sky, an inner oxygen sky.

Man's inner life is as we know an astral body, for during sleep he experiences the whole heavens. It would go badly with us if we were not descended from these ancient pastoral peoples. All men in fact are descended from ancient shepherd folk. We still have, purely through heredity, the knowledge of an inner star-heaven. We still unfold that, although not so well as the ancients. In sleep, when we lie in bed, we have still a sort of recollection of how once the shepherd of old lay in the fields and drew the oxygen into him. We are no longer shepherds and herdsmen but something is still given to us, we still receive something, only we cannot express it so beautifully as it has already become pale and dim. But the whole of mankind today is indeed interconnected, all belong to each other,—and if one would know what man still bears in him today, one must go back to ancient times. Everywhere, all men on earth have proceeded from this shepherd-stage and have actually inherited in their bodies what could descend from these pastoral peoples.

Rudolf Steiner: Good morning, gentlemen! You will have realized from all we've said that our earth in its present form is only the last remains of what was once essentially different. If we want to compare its earlier condition with anything, we can only compare it really—as you have seen—with what one has in an egg cell. Our earth today has a solid kernel of all sorts of minerals and metals. And we have the air around us, and in the air two substances which especially affect us-we could not live without them: oxygen and nitrogen. We can say therefore that in the earth we have a hard kernel of all kinds of substances, seventy to eighty of them, and around us the air-envelope containing mainly nitrogen and oxygen.

Nitrogen and oxygen, however, are only the main constituents. The air always contains other substances, though in very small quantities, such as carbon, hydrogen, sulphur, among others. But these are also the substances contained in the white of an egg, in the white of a hen's egg. Oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon and sulphur! The difference is merely that in the egg white the sulphur, hydrogen and carbon are closely combined with the oxygen and nitrogen, while in the outer air they are present in a much looser way. So the same substances are in the air that are in the hen's egg. The same substances are present in a much smaller amount in the yolk, and we can therefore say that when it hardens, densifies, it becomes what the earth is. One must observe such things if one wants to know what the earth once looked like.

Today, however, things are done in quite a different way, and in order that your judgment of what I am telling you here may not be confused by what is commonly accepted, I would like to give you a small view of this general knowledge. It agrees perfectly with what I say if only one considers it in the right way.

People today do not think about things as we have done here in the last two lectures. They say: Here is the earth; it is made of mineral substance. This mineral earth is convenient to investigate, so let us examine first what lies on top, what we walk on. Then if we make quarries, if we make railway cuttings and open up the ground, we find there are certain layers or strata of earth. The uppermost layer is the one on which we walk. If we go somewhere or other into the depths, we find deeper-lying strata. But these strata are not always lying so nicely above one another that we can say: the one is always above the other.

When you really examine the earth, here you have one stratum [See drawing-red], it is curved over, not level; another stratum below is also curved [green]. And above them comes the stratum on which we walk [white]. Now, as long as we remain on foot on this side of a hill we find an upper layer that could become good arable land if we would use the right manuring methods and so on. But if we are building a railway we may have to remove certain strata and by making these cuttings we come into the depths of the earth. That has led to the discovery that strata are superimposed on one another, not level, but they have been jumbled up in all sorts of ways.

But these strata are sometimes very remarkable. People have asked how one can determine the age of the strata—which layer is older. Of course the most obvious answer is this: When the strata lie above one another, then the lowest is the oldest, the next above, younger, and the one at the very top the youngest of all. But, you see, that is not always the case. In some places it is so, but not everywhere. And one can show in the following way why it is not the case everywhere.

We are accustomed, as you know, in our civilized lands to bury our domestic animals when they die, so that they may not be injurious to people. But if the human race were not so far evolved, what would happen with the animals then? Wherever the animal died, there it would lie. Now at first it remains on the surface. But, as you know, when it rains the soil gets washed up and after a time part of the decaying creature is mingled with the soil thrown up by the rain. There it will remain, and after some time the whole animal is penetrated with earth by the rain or by water that flows down over a slope and then the rest of the earth goes over the animal. Now someone can come along and say: Heavens! The earth looks so uneven there, I must dig and have a look! He need not dig very far, just a little, and then he finds what is left of the skeleton, let us say, of a wild horse. Then he says: Well, now I'm walking on a stratum that only appeared later, the one below was formed when there were wild horses like that. And one can know that that is the next stratum, that the age in which this man lives was preceded by an age in which these horses lived.

You see, what that man does is what the geologists have been doing with all the strata of the earth, ever since the time when they could be reached by quarries, railway cuttings, excavations, and so on. One learns in geology to investigate quarries everywhere, with a hammer or some other instrument, in order to record what is exposed in the mountains through landslides or something similar. One goes hammering everywhere, makes various statements and then one finds in some stratum the so-called fossils. Then one can say: There are strata beneath the ground that contain animals quite different from those of today. Then one discovers in excavating the earth's strata what the animals were like that existed in other ages.

This is nothing so very special, for people often underestimate the time it takes for something like this to happen. People find today in southern regions churches or other buildings just standing there. The people come along, do some digging for some reason or other, and Heavens! there's something under this church that is hard; that's not earth. They dig down and find a pagan temple underneath! What had happened? A relatively short time ago this surface layer on which the church or building stands was not there at all. It was pushed up by man, perhaps with the help of nature-forces, and underneath there is the pagan temple. What was once above, is now below. Layer upon layer has in fact been piled up in the earth. And one must find out, not from the way the strata lie, but from the nature of the fossils, how these animals and the various plants have come into the strata.

Then, however, the following comes about: You find one layer of the earth [See drawing below, yellow], you find another [green]; you are able for some reason or other to excavate [arrow], and if you look merely at the stratification, then it seems as if what I have marked green were the lower layer and what I have marked yellow were the upper layer. You cannot get in here at all, you cannot excavate, there is no railway, no tunnel nor anything else by which one can get in. You make a note that the yellow is the upper stratum, the green the lower. But you must not decide immediately, you must first look for fossils.

Now one very frequently finds fossils in the upper stratum which are earlier, of fish, for example, strange fish-skeletons which are earlier. And perhaps below, one finds interesting mammal skeletons which are more recent. Now the fossils contradict the strata, up above appear the older, the earlier; below, the more recent, the younger. One must realize how that has happened. You see, it is because some sort of earthquake, some inner movement has flung what was below up above the top layer. It is the same as if I were to lay a chair on the table and the original position would be: here the chair-back and here the table-top, and then through an earthquake the table would be turned over the chair.

One can perceive in the most varied instances that there has been an inversion, a turning upside down. And one can come to the following conclusions as to when the inversion took place: It must have happened later than when all the animals were alive, it must have happened after the fossils were formed, otherwise they would lie differently.

One comes in this way not to judge the strata simply as they lie one above the other, but one must be able to see how they have changed their positions. The Alps, this mighty chain of mountains stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the region of the Danube, this main mountain range in Switzerland, is not to be understood at all unless one can go into such things. For all the strata that were built up in the Alps have later been thoroughly jumbled up. There what was lowest often lies at the top, and what was at the top is lowest of all. One must first find out how all these shifts have taken place.

It is only when all this is taken into account that one can tell which are the oldest strata and which are the newest. Modern natural science, only going by the externals of research, then naturally says: Those strata are the oldest in which the remains of the very simplest animals and plants are found. Later on, animals and plants grew more complicated, and so we find the most complicated remains in the latest strata. In the oldest strata one finds fossils because the calcium or quartz structure of the animal has been preserved, while everything else has been dissolved. When one comes to the later strata the skeleton has been preserved.

Now there is another remarkable way in which fossils are formed. Sometimes this is very interesting. Picture that there once existed some simple type of ancient creature; it had a body, perhaps with tentacles in front. I am drawing it rather large; in the strata known to geology it will as a rule be smaller. Now this creature perishes lying on this piece of ground, and this particular soil does not penetrate and permeate the creature; it avoids, so to say, the acids in the body. Then something very remarkable occurs: the earth in which the animal lies approaches it from all sides and envelops it, and a hollow space is made in the shape of the animal. That has happened very frequently; such hollow spaces are formed, earth is shaped around the animal. But there is nothing inside; the soil has not been absorbed by the body, but round about, because the animal was scaly, a hollow space is formed. Later, the scales are dissolved and still later a brook winds through.

This then fills the hollow space with stony gravel, [green] and there within, a cast of the animal is finely modeled, by a quite different material. Such casts are particularly interesting, for there we don't have the animals themselves, but their casts.

However, you must not imagine that things are always so easy. Of present man, for instance, with his organism of soft substance, there is extraordinarily little left—nor of the higher animals. There are animals of which only the casts of their teeth have remained. One finds casts of the teeth of a kind of primeval shark which were formed in this way. One comes to realize that every animal has its own form of teeth and man has a different form. The dental formation is always in keeping with the whole structure of the creature. One must have the talent to imagine the appearance of the whole animal from the form of its teeth. So things are by no means simple.

green into fossil cavity">

But as one studies these strata one finds out how things really developed. And then it simply becomes clear that there was a time when such animals as we have now did not exist, when there were much, much simpler creatures, somewhat like our snails, mussels, and so on. But one has to know how much has remained of them. Let us imagine that the following could happen. Just suppose that a small boy who did not like to eat crab sneaked a crab from his parents' dinner-table and played with it. He is not caught and buries it in the garden. Now there is earth over it and the whole business is forgotten. Later the garden belongs to new owners; they dig about and in one place they see some funny little things looking like lime-shells. (You know about the so-called crab's eyes which are not eyes, but little lime-shells in the body of the crab.) Those are the only traces left.

Now one cannot say that those are fossils of some kind of animal; they are fossils of only part of the creature. Similarly in older strata, especially in the Alps, one finds some sort of fossil having that shell-like appearance. That is how they look; they no longer exist today but are found in the earlier strata. One must not suppose, however, that this had been the whole creature. One must assume that there was something around it that dissolved, and only a small piece of the animal is left.

Modern science goes into this very little. Why? Well, it simply says that in this mighty Alpine mass the layers have been mixed with one another, the lowest flung to the top, the uppermost to the lowest—that the strata show it. But can you imagine, gentlemen, that with the present earth-forces such massive mountains could be flung up in that way? The little that happens now on earth is by comparison a dancing through, one fleck lightly tossed on another—today that is all, a sort of dancing through!

If a man lived 720 years instead of seventy-two, he would experience in his old age that he was walking on ground a little higher than before. But we live too short a life. Just think if a fly that only lives from morning till evening were to relate what it experiences! Since it lives only in the summer, it would tell us of nothing but flowers, that there were always flowers. It would have no idea of what goes on in the winter; it would believe that each summer joined on to the one before. We human beings are certainly a little longer-lived than a one-day fly, but still we have a little of the fly nature with our seventy to seventy-two years! We see indeed little of what goes on. Even with the scanty forces prevailing today, there is no doubt that more happens than man usually sees. Yet, comparatively speaking, all that happens is that rivers flow along to the sea and leave alluvial soil behind. So a little soil is deposited, and this then reaches beyond the shores and the fields get a new stratum. That is comparatively little. When one considers how something like this great mountain mass of the Alps has been jolted and shaken through and through, it is obvious that the forces which are active today were active in quite a different way in earlier times.

But now we must try to picture how such a thing can happen. Take, for instance, an egg cell from some mammal. It looks at first quite simple, a nucleus in the center with an albuminous mass all around. Now suppose that the egg is fructified. When it is fructified, the nucleus changes into all sorts of little forms; it develops very strangely into a number of spirals that go up like tails. And then the moment these little coils arise, star-formed structures develop out of the mass. The whole mass comes into formation because there is life in it. What goes on there is very different from what goes on in our earth today. The upheavals and over-turnings that are taking place in the egg cell are the same as what once took place in the massive Alps!

What then is more natural than to say: Well, then the earth must once have been alive, or these convulsions of inverting and overthrusting could not possibly have occurred! The present form of the earth does in fact show us that in past ages when neither man nor higher animal existed, the earth itself was alive. This obliges us to say that the present dead earth has come forth from a living earth. Yet animals can only live on this present dead earth! Just think if the oxygen and nitrogen in the air had not separated off and had not condemned hydrogen, carbon and sulphur to an almost complete passivity: we would then have to breathe in something like egg white—for that was what surrounded the earth.

Now we could imagine—for anything can happen in this world!—that instead of our lungs, we had developed organs able to draw in an albuminous atmosphere like that. Today, of course, we can take it in as food through the mouth. Why could not a sort of lung-organ have evolved, up nearer to the mouth? Anything can originate in this world; any possible thing might come about—even though we would never guess at such changes from observing man's present body. But think, gentlemen—we look today into lifeless air. It has died. Formerly the albumen was living. The air has died because the sulphur, hydrogen and carbon have gone and the nitrogen and oxygen have therefore also perished. We gaze into light-filled air that has died, but this has allowed our eyes to be physical, as they are indeed physical. If everything in our surroundings were living, then our eyes would have to be living too. But if they were living, we would be unable to see with them, and we would always be in a state of unconsciousness: just as a person becomes unconscious when there begins to be too much life in his head, when instead of the regularly developed organs he has all sorts of growths. He is then unconscious intermittently, and later it becomes so severe that he lies there as if he were dead. Likewise in our original condition on the earth, as it was then, we could not have lived consciously. The human being could only awake to consciousness as the earth gradually died. And so mankind evolves on an earth that is dead.

So it is, gentlemen! And this is true not only of nature but also of civilization. If you think back to what I said just now—that below the earth there could be pagan temples and above Christian churches—you will see that the Christian churches are related to the pagan temples just as the upper strata to the lower, only that in one case we have to do with nature, in the other with culture. But one will not understand how the Christian element evolved if one does not observe that it evolved out of paganism as its foundation. In culture too we have to consider these strata.

Now I have said that the human being has actually been there all the time, but as a spiritual being, not a physical being. And that again leads us to look for the real reason why man did not evolve as a physical being earlier. We have said that in the air today there are nitrogen and oxygen, with carbon, hydrogen and sulphur to a lesser degree. In our breathing we ourselves unite the carbon that is in us with the oxygen we inhale and exhale the two together as carbon dioxide. In our human existence we breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide; our life consists of that. We would long, long ago have filled the earth and the air of the earth with carbon dioxide had there not been something else on the earth: the plants. They have the same hunger for carbon that we have for oxygen. They take up the carbon dioxide eagerly, hold on to the carbon and give out the oxygen again.

You see, gentlemen, how wonderfully these things complement each other! We human beings need the oxygen out of the air, we inhale it, unite it with the carbon we have within us and exhale carbon and oxygen together as carbon dioxide. The plants breathe this in and breathe the oxygen out again, and so there is always oxygen in the air.

Well, this is true today but in human evolution on the earth it was not always like that. When we find the fossilized creatures that lived long ago, we realize that they could not have been like our modern animals and plants, particularly not like our present plants. All the primeval plants must have been much more like our sponges, mushrooms, algae. There is a difference between our mushrooms and our other present plants. The latter take in the carbon and form their body from it. When they sink into the ground, their body remains as coal. The coal we mine today is the remains of plants.

All the research we are able to pursue into the kinds of plants that originally existed tells us the following: Our present plants, including the plants which are now providing us with coal, are built up from carbon. But much earlier plants were formed not from carbon but from nitrogen. That was possible because just as carbon dioxide is exhaled today by animal and man, in ancient times a combination of carbon and nitrogen was exhaled. That is prussic acid, the terribly poisonous hydrocyanic acid fatal to all life today. This poisonous prussic acid was once exhaled, and nothing that exists today could then have arisen. The early mushroom-like plants took in the nitrogen and formed their body from it. The creatures about which I spoke last time, the bird-like beings and the heavy, coarse animal-beings, breathed out this poisonous acid, and the plants around them took the nitrogen to form their plant-body. Here, too, we can see that substances still existing today were used in quite a different way in ancient times.

I spoke of this once before to those of you who have been here for some time. I related how in 1906 I had to give some lectures in Paris⁴ on the evolution of the earth, the origin of man, and so forth. The subject led me to say: Can anything in this world show that carbon and oxygen have not always had the role they play today, that nitrogen once had that role, and that once the atmosphere consisted of prussic acid, of hydrocyanic acid?

Now you know that there are old people and young children. Well, if a man of seventy stands here and a child of two next to him, they are both human beings; they stand beside each other, and the one who is now seventy was like the two-year-old sixty-eight years ago. Things of different ages stand side by side. And it is the same in the universe; there, too, the older and the younger are side by side. Our earth, from what I have just now described and what you can still see today, our earth is a greybeard, an ancient fellow, almost dead already-if one does not count the life newly sprung up, one can call it almost dead. But at its side in the universe there are again younger forms which will only later become what our present life is. For instance, we must regard the comets as one of these. We can know, therefore, that since the comets are younger, they must still have conditions that belong to a younger age. The comets are to the earth what the child is to the old man. And if the earth once had prussic acid, the comets must now have it, they must have hydrocyanic acid! If with today's body one were to touch a comet, one would instantly die. It is diluted prussic acid that is in them.

I said in Paris in 1906 that this follows from the premises of spiritual science. Those who acknowledge spiritual science accepted my statement even though it astonished them. Then later, a fairly long time afterward, a comet made its appearance. By that time people had got the necessary instruments and it was then found by ordinary scientific methods that comets do have cyanide, prussic acid, as I had said in Paris in 1906. So it was confirmed.

Naturally, when people hear of this, they call it a coincidence: Oh sure, Steiner made that statement in Paris, and then there was the discovery—just a coincidence. They say this because they know nothing else. But I have now told you why one must take it for granted that there is prussic acid in the comets. It was no accident, it was genuine science by which one first reached this knowledge. Physical research only confirmed it later. People realize now that this is true for all that anthroposophy sets forth; for everything is confirmed later. Quite a number of things will be discovered today outside the Anthroposophical Movement that were already given out many years ago by anthroposophy in a rather different way.

Yes, there are many other things that could be carefully investigated today by science. I am always saying that if people could really travel to a star, they would be amazed to find it different from the modern ideas about it determined by their life on earth. They imagine that it contains a glowing gas. But that is not at all what is found out there. Actually, where the star is, there is empty space, empty space that would immediately suck one up. Suction forces are there. They would suck you up instantly, split you to pieces. If people would work with the same consistent research and the same unprejudiced thinking as we do here, they would also come to see with intricate spectroscopes that there are not gases out there, but negative suctional space.

Some time ago I gave certain individuals the task of investigating the sun and stars with the spectroscope, simply in order to prove by external methods that the stars are hollow spaces, not glowing gases. That can be proved. The persons to whom I gave this task were tremendously enthusiastic when they started: “Oh! then we shall get somewhere!” But sometimes enthusiasm fades away; they delayed too long. And then a year-and-a-half ago news came from America that people were starting to investigate the stars and were gradually finding out that they were not glowing gases but hollowed-out space! It is no disaster, of course, for such a thing to happen. But naturally, it would have been more useful to us – externally—if we had done it. But it doesn't matter, as long as truth comes to light.

On the other hand, however, it can be seen through just such things that anthroposophy really wants to work in collaboration with ordinary science. So it would also like to work with ordinary science on the strata of the earth. One thoroughly accepts what science has to say about the upheavals and overturnings in the Alps. But one cannot go along with the scientists when they assume that these upheavals were caused by forces that are still existing today. The fact is that there were life-forces there then; only life-forces could have flung and tossed these strata of living substance through one another. Anthroposophy already incorporates ordinary science and extends far beyond it, but science always wants to stop whenever it is too lazy to approach things more closely.

So—we will continue on Wednesday at nine o'clock.

• 4. Paris, May 25-June 16, 1906: L'Esotérisme chrétien / Esquisse d'une cosmogonie psychologique, Paris 1957.

Question: Has liquid manure the same Ego-organising force as manure itself?

Answer: The essential point is to have the manure and the liquid manure properly combined. Use them in such a way that they work together, each contributing to the organising forces of the soil. The connection with the Ego applies in the fullest sense to the manure, though this does not hold good, generally speaking, for the liquid manure. Every Ego—even the potentiality of an Ego, as it is in the manure—must work in some kind of connection with an astral factor. The manure would have no astrality if “manure juice” did not accompany it. Thus liquid manure helps—it has the stronger astral force, the dung itself the stronger Ego-force. The dung is like the brain; the liquid manure is like the brain-secretion—the astral force, the fluid portion of the brain, i.e. the cerebral fluid.

Question: Might we have the indications as to the proper constellations?

Answer (by Dr. Vreede): The exact indications cannot be given now. The necessary calculations cannot be done in a moment. Broadly speaking, the period from the beginning of February until August will hold good for the insect preparations. For field-mice, the periods will vary from year to year. For this year (1924) the time from the second half of November to the first half of December would be right.

Dr. Steiner: The principles of an anthroposophical calendar, such as was planned at the time, should be carried out more fully. Then you could follow such a calendar precisely.

Question: Speaking of full Moon and new Moon, do you mean the actual day of the full or new Moon, or do you include the time shortly before and after?

Answer: You call it new Moon from the moment when this picture appears, approximately speaking (Diagram 22). This picture is there; then it vanishes. And you reckon it full Moon from the time when the following picture occurs. New Moon, therefore, from the time when the Moon appears as a quite narrow crescent, and then disappears. Twelve to fourteen days in each case.

Question: Can insects, unobtainable at the season of the given constellation, be kept until the proper time arrives?

Answer: We shall give more exact indications of the time when the preparations should be made. The several forms of insects can no doubt be kept.

Question: Must the weed-seeds be burnt in summer, or can it be done at any time?

Answer: Not too long after collecting the seed.

Question: What of the sprinkling of insect-pepper taken from insects that have never come into actual contact with the earth?

Answer: Sprinkle it on the earth just the same. For the insect, the process does not depend on physical contact, but on the quality communicated by these homoeopathic doses. The insect has quite another kind of sensitiveness; it flees from what ensues when the preparation is sprinkled in the earth. That the insect does not come into direct contact with the earth makes no difference at all.

Question: What of the harmfulness of frost in farming, especially for the tomato? In what cosmic relationship is frost to be understood?

Answer: If the tomato is to grow nice and big, it must be kept warm; it suffers greatly from frost.

As to frost in general, you must realise what it is that comes to expression in the effects of frost. These effects always represent a great enhancement of the cosmic influences at work in the earth. This cosmic influence has its normal mean when certain degrees of temperature are prevalent; then it is just as the plant requires it. If, on occasion, we get frost of long duration or too intense and deeply penetrating, the influence of the heavens on the earth is too strong, and the plants will tend to ramify in various directions, to form thread-like growths, to spread out thinly. And the resulting growths, being thin, will under certain conditions naturally be received by the prevailing frost, and destroyed. Frost, therefore, when it goes too far, is undoubtedly harmful to plant-growth, simply because too much of the heavens comes into the soil of the earth.

Question: Should one treat the bodies of animals with the burnt relics of horse-flies and the like, or should these relics be scattered over the meadows and pastures?

Answer: Wherever the animal feeds. Sprinkle the relics over the fields; they are all to be thought of as additions to the manure.

Question: What is the best way of combating couch-grass? It is very difficult, is it not, to get the seeds?

Answer: The mode of propagation of the couch-grass you have in mind—where it never goes so far as to form seed—will in the end eliminate itself. If you get no seed, you have not really got the weed. If, on the other hand, it establishes itself so strongly that it plants itself and continues to grow rampantly, you then have the means to combat it, for you will soon find as much seed as you require, because, in fact, you need so very little. After all, you can also find four-leaved clover.

Question: Is it permissible to conserve masses of fodder with the electric current?

Answer: What would you attain by so doing? You must consider the whole part played by electricity in Nature. It is at least comforting that voices are now being heard in America—where, on the whole, a better gift of observation is appearing than in Europe—voices, I mean, to the effect that human beings cannot go on developing in the same way in an atmosphere permeated on all sides by electric currents and radiations. It has an influence on the whole development of man.

This is quite true; man's inner life will become different if these things are carried as far as is now intended. It makes a difference whether you simply supply a certain district with steam-engines or electrify the railway lines. Steam works more consciously, whereas electricity has an appallingly unconscious influence; people simply do not know where certain things are coming from. Without a doubt, there is a trend of evolution in the following direction. Consider how electricity is now being used above the earth as radiant and as conducted electricity, to carry the news as quickly as possible from one place to another. This life of men in the midst of electricity, notably radiant electricity, will presently affect them in such a way that they will no longer be able to understand the news which they receive so rapidly. The effect is to damp down their intelligence. Such effects are already to be seen to-day. Even to-day you can notice how people understand the things that come to them with far greater difficulty than they did a few decades ago. It is comforting that from America, at least, a certain perception of these facts is at last beginning to arise.

It is a remarkable fact that whenever something new appears, as a rule in the early stages it is heralded as a remedy—a means of healing. Then the prophets get hold of it. It is strange, where a new thing appears, clairvoyant perception is often reduced to a very human level! Here is a man who makes all sorts of prophecies about the healing powers of electricity, where no such thing would previously have occurred to him. Things become fashionable! No one was able to imagine healing people by electricity so long as electricity was not there. Now—not because it is there, but because it has become the fashion—now it is suddenly proclaimed as a means of healing. Electricity—applied as radiant electricity—is often no more a means of healing than it would be to take tiny little needles and prick the patient all over with them. It is not the electricity—it is the shock that has the healing effect.

Now you must not forget that electricity always works on the higher organisation, the head-organisation both of man and animal; and correspondingly, on the root-organisation in the plant. It works very strongly there. If, therefore, you use electricity in this way—if you pour electricity through the foodstuffs—you create foodstuffs which will gradually cause the animal that feeds on them to grow sclerotic. It is a slow process; it will not be observed at once. The first thing will be, that in one way or another the animals will die sooner than they should. Electricity will not at first be recognised as the cause; it will be ascribed to all manner of other things.

Electricity, once for all, is not intended to work into the realm of the living—it is not meant to help living things especially; it cannot do so. You must know that electricity is at a lower level than that of living things. Whatever is alive—the higher it is, the more it will tend to ward off electricity. It is a definite repulsion. If now you train a living thing to use its means of defence where there is nothing for it to ward off, the living creature will thereby become nervous or fidgety, and eventually sclerotic.

Question: What does Spiritual Science say to the preservation of foodstuffs by acidification, as in the Silage-process?

Answer: If you are using salt-like materials at all in the process—taken in the wider Sense—it makes comparatively little difference whether you add the salt at the moment of consumption or add it to the fodder. If you have fodder with insufficient salt-content to drive the foodstuffs to the parts of the organism where they should be working, the souring of such fodder will certainly be beneficial.

For instance, suppose you have turnips, swedes, etc., in a certain district. We have seen that they are especially fitted to influence the head-organisation. They are excellent fodder for certain animals—young cattle, for example. If, on the other hand, in some district you notice that as a result of such fodder the animal tends to lose hair too early or too much, then you will salt the fodder. For you will know that it is not being sufficiently deposited at those parts of the organism which it should reach; it is not getting far enough. Salt, as a rule, has an exceedingly strong influence in this direction, causing a foodstuff to reach the place in the organism where it ought to work.

Question: What is the attitude of Spiritual Science to the ensiling of the leaves of sugar-beet, etc., and other green plants?

Answer: You should See that you get the optimum effect; you must not go beyond the optimum in the method used. Generally speaking, the souring will not have a harmful effect unless carried to excess by the addition of excessive quantities of admixtures. For the salt-like constituents are precisely those that tend most strongly to remain as they are in the living organism.

Usually the organism (the animal organism also, and the human to a still greater extent) is so constituted that it changes whatever it absorbs in the most manifold ways. It is mere prejudice to think, for example, that any part of the protein you introduce through the stomach is still available after this point in the same form in which you introduce it. The protein must be completely transformed into dead substance, and must then be changed back again by the etheric body of man himself (or of the animal) into a protein which is then specifically human or animal protein.

Thus, everything that penetrates into the organism must undergo a complete change. What I am saying applies even to the ordinary warmth. I will draw it diagrammatically (Diagram 23). Assume that you have here a living organism; here you have warmth in its environment. Suppose on the other hand that you here have a piece of wood, which, though it comes from a living organism, is already dead, and you have warmth in its environment. Into the living organism the warmth cannot simply penetrate; it does not merely penetrate it. The moment the warmth begins to come inside, it is already worked upon by the living organism; it changes into warmth that has been assimilated and transmuted by the living organism itself. Indeed, it cannot rightly be otherwise. Into the dead wood, on the other hand, the warmth will simply penetrate; the warmth inside is the Same as in the surrounding mineral kingdom of the earth.

Not so with living bodies. The moment any warmth begins to penetrate unchanged into our organism, for example—as it would penetrate into a piece of wood—that moment, we catch cold. Whatever enters from outside into the living organism must not remain as it is; it must at once be changed. This process takes place least of all in salt. Hence, with the salts, used in the way you indicate for ensiling the foodstuffs—provided you are just a little sensible and do not give too much (for then in any case the animal would reject the food because of its taste)—you will do no great harm. If it is necessary for preservation, that in itself is a sign that the process is right.

Question: Is it advisable to ensile the fodder without salt?

Answer: That is a process much too far advanced. It is, I would say, a super-organic process. When it has gone too far, it can under certain circumstances be extremely harmful.

Question: Is the Spanish whiting (sometimes used to mitigate the souring effects) harmful to animals?

Answer: Certain animals cannot stand it at all; they become ill at once. Some animals can stand it; I cannot say which at the moment. Generally speaking, it will not do the animals much good; they will tend to become ill.

Question: I imagine the gastric juice will be dulled by using it?

Answer: Yes, it will be made ineffective.

Question: I should like to ask if it is not of great importance in what frame of mind one approaches these matters? It makes a great difference whether you are sowing corn or scattering a preparation for destructive ends. Surely the attitude of mind must come into question. If you work against the insects by such means as are here indicated, will it not have a greater karmic effect than if in single instances you get rid of the animals by some mechanical means?

Answer: As to the attitude of mind—surely the chief point is whether it be good or bad! What do you mean by the “destruction”? You need but consider the whole way in which you have to think about these things in any case. Take to-day's lecture, for instance, and the way it has been held; when, for example, I pointed out how one must know about the things of Nature: how one must see from the outer appearance, say, of the linseed or the carrot, what kind of process it will undergo inside the animal.

You will go through such an objective education if this knowledge becomes a reality in you at all, that it is surely quite unthinkable without your being permeated with a certain piety and reverence. Then you will also have the impulse to do these things in the service of mankind and of the Universe.

If harm were to result from the spirit in which you do them, it could only be a question of your bringing in deliberately evil intentions. Yes—you would have to have downright bad intentions. If, therefore, common morality is at the same time fostered, I cannot imagine how it should have bad effects in any way. Do you conceive that to run after an animal and kill it would be less bad?

Question: I was referring to the manner of destruction—whether it be by mechanical means, or by these cosmic workings—whether that makes a difference.

Answer: This question raises very complicated issues, the understanding of which depends upon your seeing them in large connections. Let us assume, for instance, that you draw a fish out of the sea and kill it. Then you have killed a living thing. You have carried out a process which takes place upon a certain level. Now let us assume that for some purpose you scoop up a vessel of sea-water in which much fish-spawn is contained. You will thus be destroying a whole host of life. Thereby you will have done something very different than in destroying the single fish. You will have carried out a process on an entirely different level.

When such an entity in Nature passes on into the finished fish, it has followed a certain path. If you reverse this path, you are bringing something into disorder. But if I hold up, at an earlier stage, a process which is not yet completed (or which has not yet come to an end in the blind-alley of the finished organism), then I have not by any means done the same thing as when I kill the finished organism.

I must therefore reduce your question to this: What is the wrong I do when I make the pepper? What I destroy by the pepper scarcely comes into question. The only thing that could come into question would be the creatures I need to make the pepper. And to do this, I shall obviously in most cases destroy far fewer animals than if I had to catch them all with much trouble, and kill them. I fancy, if you think it over in a practical way and not so abstractly, it will no longer seem to you so monstrous.

Question: Can human faeces be used, and to what treatment must it be submitted before use?

Answer: Human faeces should be used as little as possible. It has very little effect as manure, and it is far more harmful than any kind of manure could possibly be. If you will use human faeces, so much as will find its way into the manure of its own accord on a normal farm is quite sufficient. Take that as your maximum measure of what is not yet harmful. You know there are so and so many people on a normal farm, and if with all the manure you get from the animals and in other ways there is also mixed what comes from the human beings—that is the maximum amount which may be used.

It is the greatest abuse when human manure is used in the neighbourhood of Large cities; for in large cities there is enough for an agricultural district of immense proportions. Surely you cannot fall a prey to the demented idea of using up the human dung on a Small territory in the neighbourhood of a large city—say, Berlin. You need only eat the plants that grow there; they will soon show you what it means. If you do it with asparagus, or anything that remains more or less sincere and upright, you will soon see what happens.

Moreover, you must bear in mind that if you eat this kind of dung for growing plants which animals will eat, the eventual result is even more harmful, for in the animals much of it will remain at this level. In passing through the organism, many things remain at the level which the asparagus preserves when it goes through the human body. In this respect crass ignorance is responsible for the most awful abuses.

Question: How can red murrain (Erysipelas) in swine be combated?

Answer: That is a veterinary question. I have not considered it, because no one has yet asked my advice about it. But I think you will be able to treat it by external applications of grey antimony ore in the proper doses. It is a veterinary, a medical question, for this is a specific disease.

Question: Can the Wild Radish,¹ which is a bastard, also be combated with these peppers?

Answer: The powders of which I have spoken are specifically effective only for the plants from which they are derived. Thus, if a plant is really the outcome of crossing with other species, one would expect it to be immune. Symbioses will not be affected.

Question: What about green manuring?

Answer: It also has its good side, especially if you use it for fruit-culture, in orchardry. Such questions cannot be answered in an absolutely general way. For certain things, green manuring is useful. You must apply it to those plants where you wish to induce a strong effect on the growth of the green leaves. If this is your intention, you may well supplement other manures with a little green manuring.

• 1. Raphanus raphinastnrm

RUDOLF STEINER: In the speech exercises that we will take now, the principal purpose is to make the speech organs more flexible.

Curtsey Betsy jets cleric
lastly light sceptic

One should acquire the habit of letting the tongue say it on its own, so to speak.

Tu-whit twinkle ‘twas
twice twigged tweaker
to twenty twangy twirlings
the zinnia crisper
zither zooming shambles
this smartened smacking
smuggler sneezing
snoring snatching.

Both these exercises are really perfect only when they are said from memory.

From “We Found a Path” (by Christian Morgenstern):

Those who don’t know the goal
can’t find the way,
they will trot the same circle
all their lives long,
and return in the end
whence they began,
their piece of mind
more disturbed than before.

RUDOLF STEINER: Now we will proceed to the task that we have been gnawing at for so long.

Someone presented a list of the human soul moods and the soul moods of plants that could be said to correspond to them.

RUDOLF STEINER: All these things that have been presented are reminiscent of when phrenology was in vogue, when people classified human soul qualities according to their fantasies, and then searched the head for all kinds of bumps that were then associated with these qualities. But things are not like that, although the human head can certainly be said to express human soul nature. It is true that if a person has a very prominent forehead, it may indicate a philosopher. If a person has a very receding forehead and is at the same time talented, such a person may become an artist. You cannot say that the artist is located in a particular part of the head, but through your feelings you can differentiate between one or another form. You should consider the soul in this way. The more intellectual element drives into the forehead, and the more artistic element allows the forehead to recede. The same thing is also true in the study of plants. I mean your research should not be so external, but rather you should enter more deeply into the inner nature of plants and describe conditions as they actually are.

Some remarks were added.

RUDOLF STEINER: When you confine yourself too much to the senses, your viewpoint will not be quite correct. The senses come into consideration insofar as each sense contributes to the inner life of human beings, whatever can be perceived by a particular sense. For example, we owe several soul experiences to the sense of sight. We owe different soul experiences to other senses. Thus we can retrace our soul experiences to these various senses. In this way the senses are associated with our soul nature. But we should not assert unconditionally that plants express the senses of the Earth, because that is not true.

Someone cited samples from the writings of Emil Schlegel, a homeopathic doctor from Tübingen.

RUDOLF STEINER: Schlegel’s comparisons are also too external. He returns to what can be found in the mystics—Jacob Boehme and others—to the so-called “signatures.” Mystics in the Middle Ages were aware of certain relationships to the soul world that led them into deeper aspects of medicine. You find, for example, that a definite group of plants is associated with a quality of soul; mushrooms and fungi are associated with the quality that enables a person to reflect, to ponder something, the kind of inner life that lies so deeply in the soul that it does not demand much of the outer world for its experience, but “pumps,” as it were, everything out of itself. You will also find that this soul quality, most characteristic of mushrooms, is very intimately associated with illnesses of a headache nature; in this way you discover the connection between mushrooms and illnesses that cause headaches. Please note that you cannot make such comparisons when teaching about animals.

There are, as yet, no proper classifications of plants, but by means of these relationships between human soul qualities and groups of plants you must try to bring some kind of classification into the life of plants. We will now attempt to classify the plant kingdom.

You must first distinguish what are properly seen as the different parts of the plant—that is, root, stem (which may develop into a trunk), leaves, blossoms, and fruits. All the plants in the world can be divided into groups or families. In one family the root is more developed; the rest of the plant is stunted. In another the leaves are more developed, and in others the blossoms; indeed, these last are almost entirely blossom. Such things must be considered in relation to each other. Thus we can classify plants by seeing which system of organs predominates, root, trunk, leaves, and so on, since this is one way that plants vary. Now, when you recognize that everything with the nature of a blossom belongs to a certain soul quality, you must also assign other organic parts of the plant to other soul qualities. Thus, whether you associate single parts of the plant with qualities of soul or think of the whole plant kingdom together in this sense, it is the same thing. The whole plant kingdom is really a single plant.

Now what are the actual facts about the sleeping and waking of the Earth? At the present time [September] the Earth is asleep for us, but it is awake on the opposite side of the Earth. The Earth carries sleep from one side to the other. The plant world, of course, takes part in this change, and in this way you get another classification according to the spatial distribution of sleeping and waking on the earth—that is, according to summer and winter. Our vegetation is not the same as that on the opposite side of the Earth.

For plant life, everything is related with the leaves, for every part of a plant is a transformed leaf.

Someone compared groups of plants with temperaments.

RUDOLF STEINER: No, you are on the wrong track when you relate the plant world directly to the temperaments.

We might say to the children, “Look children, you were not always as big as you are now.¹ You have learned to do a great many things that you couldn’t do before. When your life began you were small and awkward, and you couldn’t take care of yourselves. When you were very small you couldn’t even talk. You could not walk either. There were many things you could not do that you can do now. Let’s all think back and remember the qualities you had when you were very young children. Can you remember what you were like then and what kinds of things you did? Can you remember this?” Continue to ask until they all see what you mean and say “No.” “So none of you know anything about what you did when you were toddlers?

“Yes, dear children, and isn’t there something else that happens in your lives that you can’t remember, and things that you do that you can’t remember afterward?” The children think it over. Perhaps someone among them will find the answer, otherwise you must help them with it. One of them might answer, “While I was asleep.” “Yes, the very same thing happens when you are very young that happens when you go to bed and sleep. You are ‘asleep’ when you are a tiny baby, and you are asleep when you are in bed.

“Now we will go out into nature and look for something there that is asleep just like you were when you were very young. Naturally you could not think of this yourselves, but there are those who know, and they can tell you that all the fungi and mushrooms that you find in the woods are fast asleep, just as you were when you were babies. Fungi and mushrooms are the sleeping souls of childhood.

“Then came the time when you learned to walk and to speak. You know from watching your little brothers and sisters that little children first have to learn to speak and walk, or you can say walk and then speak. That was something new for you, and you could not do that when you began your life; you learned something fresh, and you could do many more things after you learned to walk and speak.

“Now we will go out into nature again and search for something that can do more than mushrooms and fungi. These are the algae,” and I now show the children some examples of algae, “and the mosses,” and I show them some mosses. “There is something in algae and mosses that can do much more than what is in the fungi.”

Then I show the children a fern and say, “Look, the fern can do even more than the mosses. The fern can do so much that you have to say it looks as if it already had leaves. There is something of the nature of a leaf.

“Now you do not remember what you did when you learned to speak and walk. You were still half asleep then. But if you watch your brothers and sisters or other little children you know that, when they grow a little older, they do not sleep as long as when they were first born. Then came the time when your mind woke up, and you can return to that time as your earliest memory. Just think! That time in your mind compares with the ferns. But ever since then you can remember more and more of what happened in your mind. Now let’s get a clear picture of how you came to say ‘I.’ That was about the time to which your memory is able to return. But the I came gradually. At first you always said ‘Jack wants.. .’ when you meant yourself.”

Now have a child speak about a memory from childhood. Then you say to the child, “You see, when you were little it was really as though everything in your mind was asleep; it was really night then, but now your mind is awake. It is much more awake now, otherwise you would be no wiser than you used to be. But you are still partly asleep; not everything in you is awake yet; much is still sleeping. Only a part of you has awakened. What went on in your mind when you were four or five years old was something like the plants I am going to show you now.”

We should now show the children some plants from the family of the gymnospernms—that is, conifers, which are more perfectly formed than the ferns—and then you will say to the children, “A little later in your life, when you were six or seven years old, you were able to go to school, and all the joys that school brought blossomed in your heart.” When you show a plant from the family of the ferns, the gymnosperms, you go on to explain, “You see there are still no flowers. That was how your mind was before you came to school.

“Then, when you came to school, something entered your mind that could be compared to a flowering plant. But you had only learned a little when you were eight or nine years old. Now you are very smart; you are already eleven years old and have learned a great many things.

“Now look; here is a plant that has leaves with simple parallel veins

and here is another with more complicated leaves with a network of veins. When you look at the blossoms that belong to the simple leaves, they are not the same as those on the plants with the other kind of leaf, where the blossoms and everything else are more complicated than in those with the simpler leaves.”

Now you show the children, for example, an autumn crocus, a monocotyledon; in these plants everything is simple, and you can compare them to children between seven and nine. Then you can continue by showing the children plants with simple blossoms, ones that do not yet have real petals. You can then say, “You have plants here in which the green sepals and the colored petals are indistinguishable, in which the little leaves under the blossom cannot be distinguished from those above. This is you! This is what you are like now.

“But soon you will be even older, and when you are twelve, thirteen, or fourteen you will be able to compare yourselves with plants that have calyx and corolla; your mind will grow so much that you’ll be able to distinguish between the green leaves we call the calyx and the colored leaves called petals. But first you must reach that stage!” And so you can divide the plants into those with a simple perianth—compared to the elevenyear- old children—and plants with a double perianth—those of thirteen to fourteen years.² “So children, this is another stage you have to reach.”

Now you can show the children two or three examples of mosses, ferns, gymnosperms, monocotyledons, and dicotyledons, and it would be a fine thing at this point to awaken their memory of earlier years. Have one of them speak of something remembered about little four-year-old Billy, and then show your ferns; have another child recall a memory of seven-year-old Fred, and then show the corresponding plant for that age; and yet another one could tell a story about eleven-year-old Ernie, and here you must show the other kind of plant. You must awaken the faculty of recalling the various qualities of a growing child and then carry over to the plant world these thoughts about the whole development of the growing soul. Make use of what I said yesterday about a tree, and in this way you will get a parallel between soul qualities and the corresponding plants.

There is an underlying principle here. You will not find parallels accidentally according to whatever plants you happen to pick. There is principle and form in this method, which is necessary. You can cover the whole plant kingdom in this way, with the exception of what happens in the plant when the blossom produces fruit. You point out to the child that the higher plants produce fruits from their blossoms. “This, dear children, can only be compared to what happens in your own soul life after you leave school.” Everything in the growth of the plant, up to the blossom, can be compared only with what happens in the child until puberty. The process of fertilization must be omitted for children. You cannot include it.

Then I continue, “You see, dear children, when you were very small you really only had something like a sleeping soul within you.” In some way remind the children, “Now try to remember, what was your main pleasure when you were a little child? You have forgotten now because, in a way, you were really asleep at that time, but you can see it in little Anne or Mary, in your little baby sister. What is her greatest joy? Certainly her milk bottle! A tiny child’s greatest joy is the milk bottle. And then came the time when your brothers and sisters were a little older, and the bottle was no longer their only joy, but instead they loved to be allowed to play. Now remember, first I showed you fungi, algae, mosses; almost everything they have, they get from the soil. We must go into the woods if we want to get to know them. They grow where it is damp and shady, they do not venture out into the sunlight. That’s what you were like before you ‘ventured out’ to play; you were content with sucking milk from a bottle. In the rest of the plant world you find leaves and flowers that develop when the plants no longer have only what they get from the soil and from the shady woods, but instead come out into the sun, to the air and light. These are the qualities of soul that thrive in light and air.” In this way you show the child the difference between what lives under the Earth’s surface on the one hand (as mushrooms and roots do, which need the watery element, soil, and shade), and on the other hand, what needs air and light (as blossoms and leaves do). “That is why plants that bear flowers and leaves (because they love air and light) are the so-called higher plants, just as you, when you are five or six years old, have reached a higher stage than when you were a baby.”

By directing the children’s thoughts more and more—at one time toward qualities of mind and soul that develop in childhood, and then toward the plants—you will be able to classify them all, based on this comparison. You can put it this way:

Pleasures of infancy (babies): Mushrooms and Fungi
Pleasures of early childhood (the awakening life of feeling, both sorrows and joys): Algae, Mosses
Experiences at the awakening of consciousness of self: Ferns
Experiences of fifth and sixth year, up to school age: Gymnosperms, Conifers
First school experiences, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth and eleventh year: Parallel-veined plants, Monocotyledons; Plants with simple perianth
Experiences of the eleven-year-old: Simple dicotyledons
School experiences from twelfth to fifteenth year: Net-veined plants, Dicotyledons; Plants with green calyx and colored petals

“You are not smart enough yet for these last experiences (the plants with a green calyx and colored blossoms), and you won’t know anything about them until you are thirteen or fourteen years old.

“Just think; how lovely! One day you will have such rich thoughts and feelings, you will be like the rose with colored petals and green sepals. This will all come later, and you can look forward to it with great pleasure. It is lovely to be able to rejoice over what is coming in the future.” The important thing is that you arouse within children’s hearts a joyful anticipation of what the future will bring them.

Thus, all the successive soul qualities before puberty can be compared with the plant kingdom. After that the comparison goes no further because at this point the children develop the astral body, which plants do not possess. But when the plant forces itself into fertilization beyond its nature, it can be compared with soul qualities of the sixteenth to seventeenth year. There is no need to call attention to the process of fertilization, but you should speak of the process of growth, because that agrees with reality. The children would not understand the process of fertilization, but they would understand the process of growth, because it can be compared with the process of growth in the mind and soul. Just as a child’s soul is different at various ages, so also the plants are different because they progress from the mushroom to the buttercup, which is usually included among the most highly developed plants, the Ranunculuses. It is indeed true that, when the golden buttercups appear during spring in lush meadows, we are reminded of the soul life and soul mood of fourteen-and fifteen-year-old boys and girls.

If at some time a botanist should go to work along these lines in a thoroughly systematic way, a plant system would be found that corresponds to fact, but you can actually show the children the whole external plant world as a picture of a developing child’s soul. Much can be done in this way. You should not differentiate in the individualized way practised by the old phrenologists, but you should have one clear viewpoint that can be carried right through your teaching. Then you will find that it is not quite correct to merely take everything with a root nature and relate it to thought. Spirit in the head is still asleep in a child. Thus, thinking in general should not be related to what has root nature, but a child’s way of thinking, which is still asleep. In the mushroom, therefore, as well as in the child, you get a picture of childlike thinking, still asleep, that points us toward the root element in plants.

Rudolf Steiner then gave the following assignments:

1. To comprehensively work out the natural history of plants as discussed up to this point;

2. The geographical treatment of the region of the lower Rhine, from the Lahn onward, “in the way I showed you today when speaking of lessons in geography”: mountains, rivers, towns, civilization, and economics.³

3. Do the same for the basin of the Mississippi.

4. What is the best way to teach the measurement of areas and perimeters?

• 1. According to the Waldorf curriculum, the children are around eleven years old when they are taught about the plant kingdom.
• 2. The perianth is the envelope of a flower, particularly one in which the calyx and corolla are combined so that they are indistinguishable from one another; these include such flowers as tulips, orchids, and so on. The perianth is single when it has one verticil, and double when it has both calyx and corolla.
• 3. See Practical Advice to Teachers, lecture 11.

A journey through the most recent German poetry

[ 1 ] The feeling that “great works of Art are produced by men according to true and natural laws” was an ever-present stimulus to Goethe to search for these laws of artistic creation. He was convinced that the effectiveness of a work of Art must depend on a natural conformity to law that it reveals. He wishes to discover this conformity to law. He wanted to know why the highest works of Art are at the same time the loftiest productions of Nature. It became clear to him that the Greeks proceeded according to the same laws which Nature follows when they developed “the circle of divine form out of the human structure” Italian Journey, 28th Jan., 1787.). His aim is to see how Nature brings about this form in order that he may understand it in works of Art. Goethe describes how in Italy he gradually acquired an insight into the natural law of artistic creation (Kürschner, Nat. Lit. Bd. 36.). “Happily I could always hold fast to certain maxims taken from poetry, which inner feeling and long usage had preserved in me, so that as the result of an uninterrupted perception of Nature and Art, animated conversations with connoisseurs of more or less insight, and the life I continually led in the company of more or less practical or thoughtful artists, it became possible for me, though not without difficulty, gradually to analyse Art for myself without dissecting it and to become conscious of its interpenetrating elements.” But one particular element will not reveal to him the natural laws in accordance with which it is active in a work of Art, namely colour. Several pictures were “designed and composed in his presence and carefully studied according to their parts, arrangement and form.” The artists were able to tell him how they proceeded with their composition. But as soon as it came to the question of colour everything seemed to depend on caprice. No one knew what relation prevailed between colour and chiaroscuro—light and shade—or between the single colours. Nobody could tell Goethe, for instance, why yellow makes a warm, pleasant impression, why blue evokes a feeling of cold, why yellow and reddish-blue side by side produce an effect of harmony. He realised that he must first acquaint himself with the laws of the world of colour in Nature in order from there to penetrate into the secrets of colouring.

[ 2 ] The ideas concerning the physical nature of colour-phenomena which still lingered in Goethe's memory from his student days, and the scientific treatises which he consulted, alike proved fruitless for his purpose. “With the rest of the world I was convinced that all colours were contained in light; I never heard anything but this, and I never found the slightest cause for doubting it, because I had then no further interest in the matter” (Confessions of the Author. Kürschner. Nat. Lit. Bd., 36.2.). When, however, his interest began to be aroused, he found that he “could evolve nothing for his purpose” out of this view. Newton was the founder of this view which Goethe found to be prevailing among Nature investigators and which, indeed, still occupies the same position to-day. According to this view, white light, as it proceeds from the sun, is composed of colours. The colours arise because the constituent parts are separated out from the white light. If we allow sunlight to enter a dark room through a small round opening, and catch it on a white screen placed perpendicular to the direction of the instreaming light, we obtain a white image of the sun. If we place between the opening and the screen a glass prism through which the light streams, then the white circular image of the sun is changed. It appears as though distorted, drawn out lengthways, and coloured. This image is called the solar spectrum. If we place the prism so that the upper portions of light have to traverse a shorter path within the mass of glass than the lower, the coloured image is extended downwards. The upper edge of the image is red, the lower, violet; the red passes downwards into yellow, the violet upwards into blue; the central portion of the image is, generally speaking, white. Only when there is a certain distance between the screen and prism does the white in the centre vanish entirely; the entire image then appears coloured, from above downwards, in the following order: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Light Blue, Indigo, Violet. Newton and his followers conclude from this experiment that the colours are originally contained in the white light but intermingled with each other. They are separated from each other by the prism. They have the property of being deviated in varying degrees from their direction when passing through a transparent body, that is to say, of being refracted. The red light is refracted least, the violet most. They appear in the spectrum according to their degree of refrangibility. If we observe through a prism a narrow strip of paper on a black background this also appears deviated. It is at the same time broader and coloured at the edges. The upper edge appears violet, the lower red; the violet here also passes over into the blue and the red over into yellow; the middle is generally white. Only when there is a certain distance between the prism and the strip does this appear wholly in colours. Green again appears in the middle. Here also the white of the strip of paper is said to be resolved into its colour constituents. That all these colours appear only when there is a certain distance between the screen or strip of paper and the prism, whereas otherwise the centre is white, the Newtonians explain simply. They say: In the middle the more strongly refracted colours from the upper portion of the image coincide with those that are more weakly refracted from below, and blend to make white. The colours only appear at the edges because here into these portions of light that are more weakly refracted, no strongly refracted colours can fall from above, and into those portions that are more strongly refracted none of the more weakly refracted portions can fall from below.

[ 3 ] This is the view from which Goethe could evolve nothing useful for his purpose. He had therefore to observe the phenomena himself. He went to Büttner in Jena who lent him the apparatus with which he could make the necessary experiments. He was occupied at the time with other work and was, at Büttner's request, about to return the apparatus. Before doing so, however, he took a prism in order to look through it at a white wall. He expected that it would appear in various degrees of colour, but it remained white. Colours only appeared at those places where the white contacted dark. The window-bars appeared in the most vivid colours. From these observations Goethe thought he had discovered that the Newtonian view was false, that colours are not contained in the white light. The boundary, the darkness, must have something to do with the origin of the colours. He continued the experiments. He observed white surfaces on black, black surfaces on white backgrounds. Gradually his own view was formed. A white disc on a black background appeared distorted on looking through the prism. Goethe thought that the upper parts of the disc extend over the adjacent black of the background, whereas this background extends over the lower parts of the disc. If one now looks through the prism one perceives the black background through the upper part of the disc as through a white veil. If one looks at the lower part of the disc it appears through the overlying darkness. Above, the light is spread over the dark; below, dark over light. The upper edge appears blue, the lower, yellow. The blue passes over into violet towards the black—the yellow into red below. If the prism is moved further from the disc the coloured edges spread out, the blue downwards, the yellow upwards. At a sufficient distance the yellow from below extends over the blue from above, and green arises from their overlapping in the middle. In confirmation of this view Goethe observed a black disc on a white ground through the prism. Now dark is spread over light above, light over dark below. Yellow appears above, blue below. As the edges are extended by placing the prism farther away from the disc, the lower blue, which gradually passes over into violet in the centre, spreads over the upper yellow and the yellow, as it extends, gradually takes on a reddish shade. The colour of peach-blossom arises in the middle. Goethe says to himself: what holds good for the white disc must also hold good for the black. “If the light is there resolved into colours here also the darkness must be regarded as being resolved into colours” (Confessions of the Author. Kürschner. Nat. Lit. Bd., 36.). Goethe now imparts his observations and the doubts which had grown out of them with regard to the Newtonian view to a Physicist of his acquaintance. The Physicist considered his doubts to be unfounded. He interpreted the coloured edges and the white in the centre, as well as its transition into green when the prism is removed further away from the object observed, according to Newton's view. Other Nature investigators whom Goethe approached did the same, and so he continued the observations in which he would have liked to have had assistance from trained specialists alone. He had a large prism of plate-glass constructed which he filled with pure water. He noticed that the glass prism whose cross-section is an equilateral triangle is, on account of the marked dispersion of the colours, often a hindrance to the observer; therefore he had his large prism constructed with the cross section of an isosceles triangle, the smallest angle of which was only 15 to 20 degrees. Goethe calls the experiments performed when the eye looks at an object through the prism, subjective. They present themselves to the eye but are not rooted in the outer world. He wants to add to these objective experiments. To this end he made use of the water-prism. The light shines through a prism and the colour-image is caught on a screen behind the prism. Goethe now caused the sunlight to pass through the openings in cut pasteboard. In this way he obtained an illuminated space bounded by darkness. This circumscribed beam of light passes through the prism and is refracted by this from its original direction. If one places a screen before the beam of light issuing from the prism, there arises on it an image which is, generally speaking, coloured at the edges above and below. If the prism is placed with the narrow end below, the upper edge of the image is coloured blue and the lower edge yellow. The blue passes over towards the dark space into violet, and towards the light centre into light blue; the yellow passes over towards the darkness into red. In this phenomenon, too, Goethe derived the appearance of colours from the boundary. Above, the clear light-beams radiate into the dark space; they illumine a darkness which thereby appears blue. Below, the dark space radiates into the light-beams; it darkens the light and makes it appear yellow. When the screen is moved further from the prism the coloured edges get broader, the yellow approaches the blue. Through the streaming of the blue into the yellow, when there is a sufficient distance between the screen and the prism, green appears in the middle of the image. Goethe made the instreaming of the light into the dark and of the dark into the light perceptible by agitating a cloud of fine white dust which he produced from fine, dry hair-powder along the line by which the light-beam passes through the dark space. “The more or less coloured phenomenon will now be caught up by the white atoms and presented in its whole length and breadth to the eye of the spectator” (Farbenlehre, Didactic Part., para. 326.). Goethe found that the view he had acquired of the subjective phenomena was confirmed by the objective phenomena. Colours are produced by the working together of light and darkness. The prism only serves to move light and darkness over each other.

[ 4 ] After these experiments Goethe cannot adopt the Newtonian conception. His attitude to it was the same as his attitude to Haller's Encasement Theory. Just as according to this theory the developed organism with all its parts is contained in the germ, so the Newtonians believe that the colours which appear under certain conditions in the light, are already contained in it; Goethe could use the same words against this belief which he used against the Encasement Theory, that it “is based on a mere invention, devoid of all element of sense experience, on an assumption which can never be demonstrated in the sense world” (Essay on K. Fr. Wolf. Kürschner. Nat. Lit., Bd. 33.). To Goethe colours are new formations which are developed in the light, not entities that have merely developed out of the light. He had to reject the Newtonian view because of his own mode of thinking in conformity with the idea. The Newtonian view has no knowledge of the nature of the idea. It only acknowledges what is actually present, present in the same sense as the sensible-perceptible. Where it cannot establish the reality through the senses it assumes the reality hypothetically. Because colours develop through the light, and thus must already be contained ideally within it, the Newtonians imagine that they are also actually and materially contained in it, and are only called forth by the prism and the dark border. Goethe knows, however, that idea is active in the sense-world; therefore he does not transfer what exists as idea into the realm of the actual. Idea works in inorganic just as in organic Nature, but not as sensible-supersensible form. Its external manifestation is wholly material, merely pertaining to the senses. It does not penetrate into the sensible; it does not permeate it spiritually. The processes of inorganic Nature run their course according to law, and this conformity to law presents itself to the observer as idea. If one perceives white light in one part of space and colours that arise through the light in another, a causal connection exists between the two perceptions and this can be conceived of as idea. When, however, this idea is given embodiment and transferred into space as something concrete which passes over from the object of the one perception into that of the other, this is the result of a crude mode of thinking. It was this crudeness that repelled Goethe from the Newtonian theory. It is the idea which leads over one inorganic process into another, not a concrete thing that passes from the one to the other.

[ 5 ] The Goethean world-conception can only acknowledge two sources for all knowledge of the inorganic processes of Nature: that which is sensibly perceptible in these processes and the ideal connections between the sensible-perceptible which reveal themselves to thought. The ideal connections within the sense-world are not all of the same kind. Some of these connections are immediately obvious when sense perceptions appear side by side, or after, each other, and there are others which can only be penetrated if one traces them back to others of the first kind. In the phenomenon which presents itself to the eye when it beholds darkness through light, perceiving blue, Goethe thinks he recognises a connection of the first kind between light, darkness and colour. It is just the same when light is perceived through darkness, and yellow arises. One can perceive in the border-phenomena of the spectrum a connection which becomes evident through direct observation. The spectrum which shows seven colours in a sequence from red to violet can only be understood by realising that other conditions are there as well as those which give rise to the border-phenomena. The single border-phenomena have united themselves in the spectrum into one complicated phenomenon which can only be understood if one deduces it from the basic phenomena. That which stands before the observer in the basic phenomenon in its purity, appears impure and modified in the phenomena complicated by the additional conditions. The simple facts can no longer be directly recognised. Therefore Goethe seeks everywhere to lead back the complicated phenomena to the simple and pure. To him the explanation of inorganic Nature lies in this. He goes no further back than the pure phenomenon. An ideal connection between sensible perceptions is revealed therein—a connection which is self-explanatory. Goethe calls this pure phenomenon the primary or basic phenomenon (Urphänomen). He regards it as idle speculation to think further about the primary phenomenon. “The magnet is a primary phenomenon which one need only express in order to explain it” (Prose Aphorisms. Kürschner. Nat. Lit. Bd., 36.). A compound phenomenon is explained when we show how it is built up out of primary phenomena.

[ 6 ] Modern natural science sets to work differently from Goethe. It seeks to trace back processes in the sense-world to movements of the smallest parts of bodies and in order to explain these movements it makes use of the same laws which it applies to the movements which transpire visibly in space. It is the task of mechanics to explain these visible movements. When the movement of a body is observed mechanics ask: By what forces has it been set in motion? What path does it travel in a definite time? What form has the line in which it moves? It tries to present mathematically the relations between the force, the path traversed, and the form of its path. The scientist says: Red light can be traced back to the vibratory motion of the tiniest parts of a body, and this motion is propagated through space. This motion becomes comprehensible when the laws discovered in mechanics are applied to it. The science of inorganic Nature considers its goal to be a gradual and complete passing over into applied mechanics.

[ 7 ] Modern physics enquires after the number of vibrations in unit time which correspond to a definite colour. From the number of vibrations corresponding to red, and from the number corresponding to violet, it seeks to determine the physical connection of the two colours. The qualitative disappears before its gaze; it observes the spatial and time elements of processes. Goethe asks: What is the connection between red and violet when we disregard these spatial and time elements and consider only the qualitative? The Goethean mode of observation presupposes that the qualitative is also actually present in the outer world, and that it forms, with the temporal and spatial, one inseparable whole. Modern physics, on the contrary, has to proceed from the basic conception that in the outer world only the quantitative, dark and colourless processes of motion are present, and that the qualitative only arises as the effect of the quantitative, on an organism endowed with sense and mind. If this assumption were correct, the ordered connections between the qualitative could not be sought in the outer world, but would have to be deduced from the nature of sense-organs, nervous mechanism, and organs of presentation. The qualitative elements of processes would not be the object of physical investigation but of physiology and psychology. Modern natural science proceeds along the lines of this assumption. According to this view the organism translates one process of movement into the sensation of red, another process into that of violet according to the constitution of its eyes, optic nerves and brain. The external aspect of the world of colour is thus explained if the connection between the processes of movement by which this world is determined have been perceived.

[ 8 ] A proof of this view is sought in the following observation. The optic nerve experiences each external impression as the sensation (Empfindung) of light. Not only light but also a blow or pressure on the eye, an irritation of the retina by a quick movement of the eye, an electric current conducted through the head—all these things give rise to the sensation of light. Another sense (organ) experiences the same stimuli in a different way. If blows, pressure, irritation, or electric currents stimulate the skin they cause sensations of touch. Electricity excites in the ear a sensation of hearing, on the tongue one of taste. It is concluded from this that the content of sensation arising in the organism as the result of an influence from outside differs from the external processes by which it is caused. The colour red is not sensed by the organism because it is united with a corresponding process of movement outside in space, but because the eye, optic nerve and brain of the organism are so constituted that they translate a colourless process of movement into a colour. The law expressing this was called by the physiologist, Johannes Müller, who first enunciated it, the Law of the Specific-Sense-Energies.

[ 9 ] This observation only proves that the sense-and mind-endowed organism can translate the most diverse impressions into the language of the particular senses on which they fall. This does not, however, prove that the content of each sense-experience exists only within the organism. Irritation of the optic nerve causes an indefinite, wholly general stimulus which contains nothing that causes us to localise its content outside in space. The sensation arising as the result of a real impression of light is, by its content, inseparably united with the spatial-time process corresponding to it. The movement of a body and its colour are in quite the same way contents of perception. When we conceive of the movement per se we are abstracting from all else which we perceive in the body. All the other mechanical and mathematical conceptions are, like the movement, drawn from the world of perception. Mathematics and mechanics arise as the result of one portion being separated off from the content of the perceptual world and studied by itself. In reality there are no objects or processes whose content is exhausted when we have comprehended in them all the elements that can be expressed through mathematics and mechanics. All that is mathematical and mechanical is bound up with colour, warmth, and other qualities. If physics has to assume that vibrations in space, of minute dimensions and a very high velocity correspond to the perception of a colour, these movements can only be thought of as analogous to the movements which go on visibly in space. That is to say, if the corporeal world is conceived of as in motion, even to its most minute elements, it must be conceived of as endowed with colour, warmth and other qualities also down to its most minute elements. Those who regard colours, warmth, tones and so on, as qualities which only exist inwardly as the effects of external processes on the sensitive (vorstellenden) organism, must also transfer everything mathematical and mechanical connected with these qualities to within. But then there is nothing left for the outer world. The red which I see, and the light vibrations which the physicist indicates as corresponding to this red, are in reality a unity, which only the abstracting intellect can separate from each other. I should see the vibrations in space which correspond to the quality “red” as movement if my eye were organised for this. But united with the movement I should have the impression of the red colour.

[ 10 ] Modern Natural Science transfers an unreal abstraction, a vibrating substratum devoid of all perceptual qualities into space, and is astonished that it cannot understand what causes the receptive (vorstellenden) organism with its nerve apparatus and brain to translate these indifferent processes of movement into the variegated sense-world, permeated by degrees of warmth and sounds. Du Bois-Reymond assumes, therefore, that man, because of an insuperable barrier to his knowledge, will never understand how the fact: “I taste something sweet, smell the fragrance of roses, hear the tone of the organ, see red” is connected with definite movements of the tiniest molecules in the brain—movements which in their turn are caused by vibrations of tasteless, odourless, soundless and colourless elements of the external corporeal world. “It is absolutely and eternally incomprehensible that it should not be a matter of indifference to a number of Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen atoms how they are placed and move, how they were placed and moved and how they will be placed and will move” (Grenzen des Naturerkennens. Leipsig, 1882. S. 35.). But there are no boundaries to knowledge here. Wherever a collection of atoms exists in space in a definite movement, there also necessarily exists a definite quality (e.g. Red). And vice-versa, wherever red appears, there the movement must exist. Only the abstracting intellect can separate the one from the other. Those who think of the movement as actually separated from the remaining content of the process to which the movement belongs, cannot rediscover the transition from the one to the other.

[ 11 ] Only what is movement in a process can again be derived from movement; that which belongs to the qualitative aspect of the world of light and colours can also only be traced back to a qualitative element within the same sphere. Mechanics leads back complicated movements to simple movements which are directly comprehensible. The theory of colours must lead back complicated colour-phenomena to simple colour phenomena which can be penetrated in the same way. A simple process of movement is just as much a primary phenomenon as the appearance of yellow from the inter-working of light and dark. Goethe knows what the primary mechanical phenomena can accomplish towards the explanation of inorganic Nature. He leads back that which is not mechanical within the corporeal world to primary phenomena which are not of a mechanical nature. Goethe has been reproached with condemning the mechanical consideration of Nature and limiting himself simply to the observation and classification of the sensible-perceptible (Cp. Harnack's Goethe in der Epoche seiner Vollendung. S. 12.). Du Bois-Reymond (Goethe und kein Ende. S. 29) finds that “Goethe's theorising limits itself to deriving other phenomena out of a primary phenomenon, as he calls it. It is rather like one shadowy picture following another without any illuminating causal connection. What was wholly lacking in Goethe was the concept of mechanical causality.” What does mechanics do, however, but derive complicated processes from simple, primary phenomena? Goethe has accomplished in the region of colour just what mechanics perform in the realm of movement. It is because Goethe does not consider all processes in inorganic Nature to be purely mechanical that he has been accused of lacking the concept of mechanical causality. His accusers merely show that they themselves err concerning the significance of mechanical causality within the corporeal world. Goethe remains within the qualitative realm of the world of light and colours. He leaves to others the quantitative and mechanical elements which can be expressed mathematically. He “endeavoured throughout to keep the theory of colours apart from mathematics, although clearly, certain points arise where the assistance of the art of measurement would be desirable. But this very want may in the end be advantageous, since it may now become the business of the ingenious mathematician himself to ascertain where the doctrine of colours is in need of his aid and how he can contribute to the complete elucidation of this branch of physics” (Farbenlehre. S. 727.). The qualitative elements of the sense of sight—light, darkness and colours—must first be understood from out of their own connections. They must be traced back to primary phenomena; then at a higher level of thought it is possible to investigate the relation existing between these connections and the quantitative, the mechanical-mathematical element in the world of light and colours.

[ 12 ] Goethe seeks to lead back the connections within the qualitative element of the world of colours to the simplest elements, just as strictly as the mathematician or mechanician does in his sphere. “We have to learn from the mathematician the careful cautiousness with which he proceeds step by step, deducing each step from the preceding one and even where we employ no calculation, we must always proceed as if we had to render account to the strictest geometrician. For it is really the mathematical method which, on account of its cautiousness and purity, immediately reveals any gap in an assertion, and its proofs are in truth only detailed affirmations that what is brought into connection has already existed in its simple parts and its entire sequence, that its whole range has been examined and found to be correct and irrefutable under all conditions” (Kürschner. Nat. Lit. Bd., 34. Versuch als Vermittler vom Subjekt und Objekt.).

[ 13 ] Goethe derives the explanatory principles for the phenomena directly from the sphere of observation. He shows how the phenomena are connected within the world of experience. He rejects conceptions which lead out of and beyond the realm of observation. All modes of explanation that overstep the field of experience by drawing in factors which, by their very nature cannot be observed, are contrary to the Goethean world-conception. Such a mode of explanation is that which seeks the nature of light in a medium which cannot itself be perceived as such but can only be observed in its mode of working as light. To this category also belong the methods which hold sway in modern natural science, where light vibrations are executed, not by the perceptible qualities revealed to the sense of sight but by the smallest parts of an imperceptible substance. To imagine that a definite colour is united with a definite process of movement in space does not contradict the Goethean world-conception. But the assertion that this process of movement belongs to a region of reality transcending experience, i.e. the world of substance which can be observed in its effects, but not in its own being, contradicts it absolutely. For an adherent of the Goethean world-conception the light vibrations are processes in space and have no other kind of reality than that which inheres in any other content of perception. They elude immediate observation not because they lie beyond the region of experience, but because the organisation of the human sense-organs is not subtle enough to have direct perception of movements so minute. If an eye were so organised that it could observe in all details the oscillations of a body occurring four hundred billion times a second, such a process would resemble a process in the crude sense-world. That is to say, the vibrating body would manifest the same properties as other objects of perception.

[ 14 ] Any explanation which derives objects and processes of experience from others lying beyond the field of experience can only attain to adequate conceptions of the realm of reality, lying beyond observation, by borrowing certain attributes from the world of experience and carrying them over to what cannot be experienced. Thus the physicist carries over hardness and impenetrability to the tiniest corporeal elements to which he also ascribes the power of attracting and repelling similar elements; on the other hand he does not ascribe to these elements, colour, warmth and other qualities. He believes that he explains a process of Nature which can be experienced by tracing it back to one that is not capable of being experienced. According to Du Bois-Reymond's view the knowledge of Nature consists in tracing back processes in the corporeal world to movements of atoms brought about by their forces of attraction and repulsion (Grenzen des Naturerkennens. 1882. S. 10.). Matter, the substance filling space, is regarded as being endowed with movement. This substance has existed from eternity, and will exist for all eternity. Matter itself does not belong to the realm of observation but lies beyond it. Du Bois-Reymond, therefore, assumes that man is incapable of knowing the nature of matter as such, and that because of this he derives the processes of the corporeal world from something whose nature will always remain unknown to him. “We shall never know more than we do to-day as to what ‘haunts’ space where matter is” (Grenzen des Naturerkennens. S. 22.). This concept of matter dissolves into nothingness before a more exact consideration. The real content given to this concept is borrowed from the world of experience. Man perceives movements within the world of experience. He feels a pull if he holds a weight in the hand, and a pressure if he places a weight on the surface of the hand held horizontally. In order to explain this perception he forms the idea of force. He imagines that the Earth attracts the weight. The force itself cannot be perceived. Its nature is ideal, but it belongs, nevertheless, to the realm of observation. The mind observes it because it beholds the ideal relations among the perceptions. Man is led to the concept of a repelling force if he presses a piece of india-rubber and then leaves it to itself. It re-assumes its former shape and size. He imagines that the compressed parts of the rubber repel each other and again assume their former volume. The mode of thinking of which we have spoken carries over conceptions which have been drawn from observation to a region of reality transcending experience. Thus it does nothing in reality but derive one experience out of another, only it places the latter arbitrarily in a region lying beyond experience. It can be shown in regard to any mode of thought which speaks of a transcendental region that it takes certain fragments from the region of experience and relegates them to a sphere of reality transcending observation. If these fragments of experience are removed from the conception of the transcendental there only remains a concept devoid of content, a negation. The explanation of any experience can only consist in tracing it back to another possible experience. Ultimately we come to elements within experience that can no longer be derived from others. These cannot be further explained because they are in no need of explanation. They contain it within themselves. Their immediate being consists in what they present to observation. To Goethe light is an element of this kind. According to his view, whoever freely perceives light in manifestation has understood it. Colours arise in light and their origin is understood if we show how they arise therein. Light itself is there in immediate perception. We know what is ideally contained in it if we observe the connection that exists between it and colours. From the standpoint of Goethe's world-conception it is impossible to ask concerning the nature of light, concerning the transcendental element corresponding to the phenomenon “Light.” “It is really useless to undertake to express the essential nature of a thing; we perceive effects, and a complete history of these effects would in all cases comprise the nature of the thing.” That is to say, a complete account of the effects of an experience embraces all the phenomena which are ideally contained therein. “It would be useless to try to describe a man's character, but put together his actions, his deeds, and a picture of his character will stand before us. Colours are acts of light, its active and passive modifications. In this sense we may expect from them some illumination concerning light itself” (Farbenlehre. Didactic Part. Preface.).

[ 15 ] Light presents itself to observation as “the simplest and most homogeneous, undivided entity that we know” (Correspondence with Jacobi, p. 167.). Opposed to it there is darkness. For Goethe darkness is not the complete, passive absence of light. It is something active. It opposes itself to light and interplays with it. Modern natural science regards darkness as a complete nullity. The light which streams into a dark space has, according to this modern view, no opposition from the darkness to overcome. Goethe imagines that light and darkness are related to each other like the north and south poles of a magnet. Darkness can weaken the light in its power of action. Vice-versa, light can limit the energy of darkness. Colour arises in both cases. A physical view which conceives darkness as perfect passivity cannot speak of such an inter-working. It has therefore to derive colours out of light alone. Darkness appears as a phenomenon for observation just as does light. Darkness is a content of perception in the same sense as light. The one is merely the antithesis of the other. The eye which looks out into the night mediates the real perception of darkness. If darkness were the absolute void, there would be no perception on looking out into the dark.

[ 16 ] Yellow is light toned down by darkness; blue is darkness weakened by light.

[ 17 ] The eye is adapted for transmitting to the sensitive organism the phenomena of light and colour and the relations between them. It does not function passively in this connection, but enters into living interplay with the phenomena. Goethe endeavoured to cognise the manner of this inter-working. He considers the eye to be wholly living and seeks to understand the expressions of its life. How does the eye relate itself to the individual phenomenon? How does it relate itself to the connections between phenomena? These are questions which he puts to himself. Light and darkness, yellow and blue, are opposites. How does the eye experience these opposites? It must lie in the nature of the eye that it experiences the mutual relations which exist between the single perceptions. For “the eye has to thank the light for its existence. The light calls forth out of indifferent auxiliary animal organs, an organ that is akin to itself; the eye forms itself by the light for the light, so that the inner light can meet the external light” (Farbenlehre. Didactic Part. Introduction.).

[ 18 ] Just as light and darkness are mutually opposed to each other in external Nature, similarly the two states in which the eye is placed by these two phenomena are also opposed to each other. If we keep our eyes open in a dark space a certain lack is experienced. If, however, the eye is turned to a strongly illuminated white surface it becomes incapable, for a certain time, of distinguishing moderately illuminated objects. Looking into the dark increases its receptivity; looking into the light weakens it.

[ 19 ] Every impression on the eye remains within it for a time. When we look at a black window cross against a light background, we shall, when we shut our eyes, still have the phenomenon for some time before us. If while the impression still lasts, we look at a light grey surface, the cross appears light, the panes, on the contrary, dark. A reversal of the original phenomenon thus occurs. It follows from this that the eye has been disposed by the one impression to produce the opposite out of itself. As light and darkness stand in relation to each other in the outer world, so also do the corresponding states of the eye. Goethe thinks that the region in the eye on which the dark cross fell is rested and becomes receptive to a new impression. Therefore it is that the grey surface works more intensely on it than on the rest of the eye which previously received the stronger light from the window panes. Light produces in the eye the inclination to dark, dark the inclination to light. If we hold a dark object before a light-grey surface and look fixedly at the same place when it is removed, the space it occupied appears much lighter than the remaining surface. A grey object on a dark ground appears lighter than the same object on a light ground. The eye is disposed by the dark ground to see the object lighter, and by the light to see it darker. These phenomena are indications to Goethe of the great activity of the eye, “and to the passive resistance which all that is living is forced to exhibit when any definite state is presented to it. Thus inbreathing already presupposes outbreathing, and vice-versa. The eternal formula of life is also manifest here. When darkness is presented to the eye, the eye demands light; it demands darkness when light is presented to it and manifests thereby its vitality, its fitness to grasp the object by producing from itself something that is opposed to the object” (Farbenlehre. S. 38.).

[ 20 ] Colour perceptions also evoke a reaction in the eye in a similar way to light and darkness. Let us hold a small piece of yellow paper before a moderately illuminated white surface, and look fixedly at the small yellow patch. If after a little while the paper is removed, we shall see the space which the paper had occupied as violet. The impression of yellow causes the eye to produce violet from out of itself. Similarly, blue will produce orange as reaction, and red will produce green. Thus in the eye every colour impression has a living relation to another. The states into which the eye is put by perceptions stand in a connection similar to that of the contents of these perceptions in the external world.

[ 21 ] When light and darkness work on the eye this living organ meets them with its demands; if they work on things outside in space these interact with them. Empty space has the property of transparency. It does not work on light and darkness at all. They penetrate it unhindered. It is different when space is occupied with objects. This occupation of space may be of such a kind that the eye does not perceive it because light and darkness shine through it in their original form. Then we speak of transparent objects. If light and darkness do not pass through an object unweakened, the object is designated semi-transparent. The occupation of space by a semi-transparent medium furnishes the possibility for observing light and darkness in their mutual relation. Something bright seen through a semi-transparent medium appears yellow, and something dark, blue. The medium is a material substance which is illuminated by the light. It appears dark, compared with a clearer, more intense light behind it, and bright compared with a darkness passing through it. When a semi-transparent medium is thus presented to light or darkness, then brightness and darkness are present and really work into one another.

[ 22 ] If the transparency of the medium through which the light shines gradually decreases, the yellow assumes a yellowish-red hue and finally a ruby-red colour. If the transparency of a medium through which darkness penetrates increases, the blue passes over to indigo and finally to violet. Yellow and blue are primary colours. They arise through the working-together of light or darkness with the medium. Both can assume a reddish hue, the former through decrease, the latter through increase, in the transparency of the medium. Thus red is not a primary colour. It appears as a hue of yellow or blue. Yellow, with its red shades, which deepen to pure red, stands near to light; blue with its shades is allied to darkness. If blue and yellow mingle, green arises. If blue intensified to violet mixes with yellow deepened to red, purple arises.

[ 23 ] Goethe followed up these basic phenomena in Nature. The bright sun orb seen through a haze of semi-transparent vapour appears yellow. The darkness of space seen through atmospheric vapours illuminated by the day-light presents itself as the blue of heaven. “Similarly, the mountains appear blue to us; for when we behold them at so great a distance that we no longer distinguish the local colours, and no light from their surface works on our eye, they resemble so many dark objects, which owing to the interposed vapours appear blue” (Farbenlehre. Para. 156.).

[ 24 ] Out of his deep penetration into the works of Art produced by painters, there arose in Goethe the need to understand the laws which dominate the phenomena of the sense of sight. Every painting presented him with riddles. How is the chiaroscuro related to the colours? What relations do the single colours bear to each other? Why does yellow produce a joyful, and blue a serious mood? The Newtonian doctrine of colours could yield no point of view able to elucidate these mysteries. The Newtonian theory derives all colours out of light, places them side by side in sequence, and says nothing about their relation to darkness or of their living relations to each other. Goethe was able to solve the riddles presented to him by Art by the insight he had acquired along his own paths. Yellow must possess a bright, gay, mildly stimulating character because it is the colour nearest to light. It arises through the gentlest moderation of light. Blue indicates the darkness working in it. Therefore it produces a sense of coldness, just as it “is reminiscent of shadows.” Reddish-yellow arises through the intensification of yellow towards the side of darkness. Through this intensification its energy increases; the gaiety and brightness pass over into rapture. With the further intensification of reddish-yellow into yellowish-red, the gay, cheerful feeling is transformed into the impression of power. Violet is blue striving towards light. The repose and coldness of blue hereby change into unrest. This restless feeling increases in blue-red. Pure red stands in the centre between yellowish-red and bluish-red. The violence of the yellow quietens down; the passive repose of the blue is animated. Red gives the impression of ideal satisfaction, the equalising of extremes. A feeling of satisfaction also arises through green which is a mixture of yellow and blue. The satisfaction is purer here than that produced by red because the gaiety of the yellow is not intensified and the repose of the blue not disturbed through the red shade.

[ 25 ] The eye, when confronting one colour, immediately demands another. When the eye looks at yellow the longing arises for violet; when it perceives blue it desires orange; when it looks at red it yearns for green. It is comprehensible that the feeling of satisfaction should arise, if by the side of one colour presented to the eye there is placed another which the eye desires in accordance with its nature. The law of colour harmony is an outcome of the nature of the eye. Colours which the eye demands in juxtaposition to each other work harmoniously. If two colours appear side by side, the one of which does not demand the other, then the eye is stimulated into opposition. The juxtaposition of yellow and purple has something one-sided about it, but the effect is that of brightness and magnificence. The eye demands violet by the side of yellow in order to express itself according to its nature. If purple appears in the place of violet the object asserts its claims against those of the eye. It does not accommodate itself to the demands of the organ. Juxtapositions of this kind serve to draw attention to the significance of things. They will not satisfy unconditionally but they characterise. Characteristic combinations of this kind demand colours which do not stand in complete contrast to each other, and yet do not merge directly into each other. Juxtapositions of the latter kind impart a kind of characterless element to the objects on which they occur.

[ 26 ] The origin and nature of the phenomena of light and colour were revealed to Goethe in Nature. He found the same thing again in the creations of painters, where it is raised to a higher level, translated into the spiritual. Goethe acquired a deep insight into the relation of Nature and Art as the result of his observations concerning the perceptions of sight. This may well have been in his mind when, after the conclusion of the Doctrine of Colour, he wrote concerning these observations to Frau von Stein: “I do not regret having sacrificed so much time to them. I have thereby attained an education which I could hardly have got elsewhere.”

[ 27 ] Goethe's doctrine of colour differs from that of Newton and of those physicists who build up their views on the basis of Newton's ideas, because it proceeds from a different conception of the world. Those who do not bear in mind the connection that has here been demonstrated between Goethe's general ideas of Nature and his doctrine of colour will be unable to hold any other opinion than that Goethe came to his view of colour because he had no understanding for the physicists' true methods of observation. Those who perceive this connection will also realise that within the Goethean world-conception no other doctrine of colour is possible. Goethe would have been unable to think differently about the nature of the phenomena of colour, even if all the discoveries made in this sphere since his time had been laid before him, and even if he had been able to make use of the experimental methods in their present perfection. Although he could not embody Frauenhof's lines wholly into his conception of Nature after he had become aware of their discovery, neither this nor any other discovery in the realm of optics is an objection to his conceptions. In all these things it is merely a question of so elaborating Goethe's view that these phenomena can find their place in it. It must be admitted that physicists who adhere to the Newtonian point of view can make nothing of Goethe's views of colour. That is not because they possess knowledge of phenomena which contradict Goethe's conception, but because they have grown accustomed to a view of Nature which prevents them from understanding the real aim and object of Goethe's view.