The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 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.

[ 1 ] The feeling that “men's great works of art are brought forth according to true and natural laws” continuously moved Goethe to seek out these true and natural laws of artistic creation. He is convinced that the effect of a work of art must depend upon the fact that a natural lawfulness shines forth from it. He wants to know this lawfulness. He wants to know for what reason the highest works of art are at the same time the highest works of nature. It becomes clear to him that the Greeks proceeded by exactly the same laws by which nature proceeds as they “developed out of the human shape the sphere of divine formation” (Italian Journey, January 28, 1787). He wants to see how nature brings about this formation so that he can understand it in works of art. Goethe describes how in Italy he gradually succeeded in coming to an insight into the natural lawfulness of artistic creation (see Confession of the Author). “Fortunately I could hold on to a few maxims brought over from poetry and proven to me by inner feeling and long use, so that it was indeed difficult but not impossible for me, through uninterrupted looking at nature and art, through lively effective conversation with more or less insightful experts, and through continuously living with more or less practical or thinking artists, gradually to separate an in general into its parts, without fragmenting it, and to become aware of its different actively interpenetrating elements.” Only one element does not want to reveal to him the natural laws by which it works in the work of art: color. Several canvases are “created and composed in his presence and carefully and thoroughly studied as to components, arrangement, and form.” The artists can give him an account of how they proceed with the composition. But as soon as the topic turns to the use of color everything seems arbitrary. No one knows what relationship holds good between color and chiaroscuro and between the individual colors. Goethe cannot ascertain the basis for the fact that yellow makes a warm and comfortable impression, blue evokes a feeling of cold, that yellow and reddish-blue beside each other produce a harmonious effect. He recognizes that he must first acquaint himself with the lawfulness of the world of color in nature, in order from there to penetrate into the mysteries of the use of colors.

[ 2 ] Neither the concepts about the physical nature of color phenomena which Goethe still had in his memory from student days nor the scientific compendia which he consulted for advice proved fruitful for his purpose. “Along with the rest of the world I was convinced that all the colors are contained in the light; no one had ever told me anything different, and I had never found the least cause to doubt it, because I had no further interest in this subject” (Confession of the Author). But as he began to be interested, he found that he could develop nothing for his purpose out of this view. The originator of this view, which Goethe found to dominate natural scientists and which still occupies the same position today, is Newton. This view asserts that white light, as it goes forth from the sun, is composed of colored lights. The colors arise through the fact that the individual component parts are separated out of white light. If one lets sunlight into a dark room through a small round opening and catches it upon a white screen set up at right angles to the direction of the in-streaming light, one obtains a white image of the sun. If one places a glass prism between the opening and the screen so that the light shines through it, the white, round sun image transforms itself. It appears shifted, drawn out lengthwise, and colored. This image is called the sun spectrum. If one holds the prism in such a way that the upper portions of the light have to take a shorter route within the volume of the glass than the lower portions do, then the colored image is shifted downward. The upper edge of the image is red, the lower edge is violet; the red goes downward into yellow, the violet upward into blue; the middle portion of the image is generally white. Only when the screen is a certain distance from the prism does the white in the middle disappear completely; the entire image appears colored, in the sequence from above downward of red, orange, yellow, green, light blue, indigo, and violet. From this experiment Newton and his followers deduced that the colors are originally contained in the white light but mixed with one another. They are separated from each other by the prism. They have the characteristic that in passing through a transparent body they are diverted from their direction to different degrees, which means they are refracted. The red light is least, the violet is most refracted. They appear in the spectrum in the sequence of their refractibility. If one looks through the prism at a narrow strip of paper on a black background, it also appears diverted. It is both broader and colored at the edges. The upper edge appears violet, the lower red; here also the violet goes over into blue, the red into yellow; the middle is generally white. The strip of paper appears totally colored only when the prism is at a certain distance from it. Again green appears in the middle. Here also the white of the paper is supposedly divided into its colored component parts. The Newtonians have a simple explanation for the fact that all the colors appear only when the prism is at a certain distance from the screen or paper strip, whereas the middle otherwise is white. They say that the more strongly diverted lights from the upper pan of the image and the more weakly diverted ones from the lower pan fall together in the middle and mix into white. The colors appear only at the edges because there none of the more strongly diverted parts of the light from above can fall into the most weakly diverted parts of the light, and none of the more weakly diverted ones from below can fall into the most strongly diverted ones.

[ 3 ] This is the view from which Goethe can develop nothing for his purposes. He therefore wants to observe the phenomena themselves. He turns to Privy Councillor Buettner in Jena who lends him the equipment with which to perform the necessary experiments. He is busy at first with other work and wants, when pressed by Buettner, to return the equipment. But before doing so he takes up a prism, in order to look through it at a completely white wall. He expects it to appear colored to different degrees. But the wall remains white. Only at those places where the white meets dark do colors arise. The window sashes appeared in the liveliest colors. From these observations Goethe. believes that he can know that the Newtonian view is incorrect and that the colors are not contained in white light. The boundary, the darkness, must have something to do with the arising of colors. He continues his experiments. He looks at white surfaces upon black, and at black surfaces on a white background. He gradually forms his own view. A white disk, viewed through a prism, appears shifted. The upper portions of the disk, in Goethe's opinion, shift themselves up over the black border of the background, whereas this black background extends itself up over the lower portions of the disk. If one now looks through the prism, one sees the black background through the upper portion of the disk as though through a white veil. If one looks at the lower pan of the disk, it appears through the darkness lifted up over it. Above, something light has been brought over something dark; below, something dark over something light. The upper edge appears blue, the lower one yellow. The blue goes over toward the black into violet; the yellow goes over downward into red. If the prism is moved away from the observed disk, the colored edges become broader; the blue downward, the yellow upward. When the prism is moved sufficiently far away, the yellow from below extends over the blue from above; through this overlapping green arises in the middle. To confirm this view, Goethe looks through the prism at a black disk upon a white background. Now up above something dark is brought over something light, below something light over something dark. Yellow appears above, blue below. When the edges are broadened by moving the prism away from the disk, the blue below, which goes over toward the middle into violet, is brought over the yellow above, which in broadening gradually takes on a red tone. A peach blossom color arises in the middle. Goethe said to himself that what is correct for the white disk must also hold good for the black one. “If there the light splits up into so many colors ... then here also the darkness would have to be regarded as split up into colors” (Confession of the Author). Goethe now relates to a physicist he knows his observations and the skepticism toward the Newtonian view which has arisen in him from them. The latter declares his skepticism to be unfounded. He explains the colored edges and the white in the middle, as well as their transition into green when the prism is moved the right distance away from the observed object, in accordance with the Newtonian view. Other natural scientists to whom Goethe brings the subject respond in the same way. He carries on by himself the observations in which he would gladly have had the help of people experienced in the field. He has a large prism made out of plate-glass and fills it with pure water. Because he notices that glass prisms, whose cross-section is an equilateral triangle, often hinder the observer by greatly broadening the colors that appear, he has his large prism made with the cross-section of an isosceles triangle whose smallest angle is only fifteen to twenty degrees. Goethe calls those experiments subjective which are set up in such a way that the eye looks at an object through the prism. These experiments present themselves to the eye but are not fixed in the outer world. He wants to add objective experiments to these as well. He uses a water prism for this. The light shines through a prism and the colors are caught on a screen behind the prism. Goethe now lets sunlight go through openings cut into cardboard. He obtains thereby an illuminated space bounded on all sides by darkness. This bounded light mass goes through the prism and is deflected in its direction by it. If one holds up a screen to this light mass issuing from the prism, there arises on it an image which generally is colored on its upper and lower edges. If the prism is placed in such a way that its cross section tapers downward, then the upper edge of the image is colored blue and the lower one yellow. The blue goes over toward the dark space into violet, and toward the lighted middle into light blue; the yellow toward the darkness into red. Also in this phenomenon Goethe traces the color phenomena to the border. Above, the bright light mass streams into the dark space; it lightens something dark, which thereby appears blue. Below the dark space streams into the light mass; it darkens something light and makes it appear yellow. When the screen is moved away from the prism the colored edges become broader; the yellow approaches the blue. With the streaming of the blue into the yellow, when the screen has been moved a suitable distance from the prism, green appears in the middle of the image. Goethe makes visible to himself the streaming of the light into the dark and of the dark into the light, by shaking into the line which the light mass takes through the dark space a fine white cloud of dust which he produces with fine dry hair powder. “The more or less colored phenomenon is now caught by the white atoms and presented to the eye in its entire breadth and length” (Color Theory, didactic part). Goethe finds that the view which he arrived at through subjective phenomena is confirmed by objective phenomena. The colors are brought forth by the working together of light and dark. The prism serves only to shift light and dark over each other.

[ 4 ] After making these experiments Goethe cannot accept the Newtonian view as his own. For him it is the same as with Haller's doctrine of incapsulation. Just as Haller thinks the fully developed organism to be already contained in the germ with all its parts, so the Newtonians believe that the colors, which under certain conditions appear with the light, are already enclosed within it. Against this belief he could use the same words which he brought against the doctrine of incapsulation, that it “rests upon a mere extra-sensory fancy, upon an assumption which one believes one thinks but which can never be demonstrated in the sense world.” For him the colors are new formations which are developed in connection with the light, not beings which are merely unfolded out of the light. Because of his “way of thinking in accordance with the idea” he must reject the Newtonian view. This view does not know the nature of the ideal. It acknowledges only what is factually present, what is present in the same way as the sense-perceptible. And wherever it cannot demonstrate factuality through the senses, it assumes it hypothetically. Because the colors develop in connection with the light, and must therefore already be contained in it as idea, this view believes that they are also factually, materially contained in the light and are only brought out by the prism and the dark border. Goethe knows that the idea is at work in the sense world; therefore he does not transfer something which is present as idea into the realm of the factual. The ideal works in inorganic nature just as in organic nature, only not as sensible-supersensible form. Its outer manifestation is completely material, merely sense-perceptible. It does not penetrate into the sense-perceptible; it does not permeate it with spirit. The processes of inorganic nature run their course in a lawful way, and this lawfulness presents itself to the observer as idea. If a person perceives white light in one place in space and colors in another place which arise in connection with the light, then a lawful relationship exists between both perceptions which can be pictured as idea. But if someone gives this idea a body and sets it out into space as something factual which passes over from the object of the one perception into that of the other perception, then that comes from his crudely physical way of picturing things. It is this crudely physical aspect about the Newtonian view which repelled Goethe. It is the idea that leads one inorganic process over into the other, not something factual which travels from one to the other.

[ 5 ] The Goethean world view can acknowledge only two sources for all knowledge of the inorganic nature processes: that which is sense-perceptible about these processes, and the ideal interconnections of the sense-perceptible which reveal themselves to thinking. The ideal interconnections within the sense world are not of the same kind. There are some which are directly obvious when sense perceptions appear beside each other or after each other, and others which one can see only when one traces them back to some of the first kind. In the manifestation which offers itself to the eye when it looks at something dark through something light and perceives blue, Goethe believes he recognizes an interconnection of the first kind between light, darkness, and color. It is the same thing when something light looked at through something dark gives yellow. The spectrum which appears at the borders allows us to recognize an interconnection which becomes clear to immediate observation. The spectrum which manifests in a sequence of seven colors from red to violet can only be understood when one sees how other determining factors are added to those through which the border phenomena arise. The simple border phenomena have joined in the spectrum into a complicated phenomenon which can be understood only when one traces it back to the basic phenomena. That which stands before the observer in its purity in the basic phenomenon appears impure, modified in that which is complicated by the additional determining factors. The simple facts are no longer directly recognizable. Goethe therefore seeks everywhere to trace complicated phenomena back to simple pure ones. He sees the explanation of inorganic nature to consist of this leading back. He goes no further than the pure phenomenon. In it an ideal interconnection of sense perceptions reveals itself which explains itself through itself. Goethe calls the pure phenomenon ”archetypal phenomenon” (Urphaenomen). He regards it as idle speculation to reflect further upon the archetypal phenomenon. “The magnet is an archetypal phenomenon which one only has to state in order to have explained it” (Aphorisms in Prose). A composite, phenomenon is explained when one shows how it is built up out of archetypal phenomena.

[ 6 ] Modern science proceeds differently from Goethe. It wants to trace the processes in the sense world back to the movements of the smallest particles of the body and, to explain these movements, uses the same laws by which it comprehends the movements which occur visibly in space. To explain these visible movements is the task of mechanics. If the movement of a body is observed then mechanics asks by which force it was set in motion; what distance it travels in a particular time; what form the line has in which it moves; etc. It seeks to represent mathematically the interrelationships of force, of the distance traveled, of the form of the path. Now the scientist states that the red light can be traced back to the oscillating movement of the body's smallest panicles which spreads itself out in space. This movement is comprehended by applying to it the laws won through mechanics. The science of inorganic nature considers its goal to be gradually to go over entirely into applied mechanics.

[ 7 ] Modern physics asks about the number of vibrations in a time unit which correspond to a particular color quality. From the number of vibrations which correspond to red, and from those which correspond to violet, it seeks to determine the physical relationship of both colors. The qualitative disappears from its view; it looks at the spatial and temporal aspects of the processes. Goethe asks what relationship exists between red and violet when one disregards the spatial and temporal and looks merely at the qualitative aspect of the colors. A postulate of the Goethean way of looking at things is that the qualitative is also really present in the outer world and forms one inseparable whole with the temporal and spatial. Modern physics on the other hand must start with the basic view that only the quantitative, only lightless and colorless processes of movement are present in the outer world, and that everything qualitative arises only as the effect of the quantitative upon the sense- and spirit-endowed organism. If this assumption were correct, then the lawful interrelationships of the qualitative could also not be sought in the outer world but would have to be traced back to the nature of the sense organs, of the nervous system, and of the organ of mental picturing. The qualitative elements of processes would then not be for physics to investigate but rather for physiology and psychology. Modern science does proceed in accordance with this presupposition. In its view the organism, in a way appropriate to the constitution of its eyes, optic nerve, and brain, translates one process of movement into the sensation red and another into the sensation violet. Therefore all the outer aspects of the color world are explained when one has seen the interconnection of the processes of movement by which this world is determined.

[ 8 ] A proof for this view is sought in the following observation. The optic nerve senses every outer impression as a light sensation. Not only light but also a bump or pressure on the eye, a tug on the retina when the eye is moved quickly, an electric current conducted through the head: all these also cause a sensation of light. A different sense experiences the same things in a different way. Bumps, pressure, tugs, electrical current, when they stimulate the skin, cause sensations of touch. Electricity stimulates in the ear a sound sensation, in the tongue a taste sensation. One deduces from this that the content of sensation, which arises in the organism through an outer effect, is different from the outer process by which it is caused. The red color is not experienced by the organism because the color is connected with a corresponding process of movement outside in space but rather because the eye, optic nerve, and brain of the organism are constituted in such a way that they translate a colorless process of movement into a color. The law expressed in this way was called the law of specific sense energies by the physiologist Johannes Mueller who first established it.

[ 9 ] This observation proves only that the sense- and spirit-endowed organism can translate impressions of the most diverse kinds into the language of the senses upon which they act, but not that the content of every sense impression is also present only inside the organism. When the optic nerve is tugged there arises an indefinite, completely general stimulation which contains nothing that would cause one to place its content out in space. A sensation which arises through a real light impression is inseparably connected in its content with the spatial-temporal that corresponds to it. The movement of a body and its color are content of perception in exactly the same way. If one pictures the movement in and for itself, one is abstracting from what is otherwise perceived about the body. All the other mechanical and mathematical mental pictures are taken from the world of perception in the same way as movement. Mathematics and mechanics arise through the fact that one pan is separated out from the content of the world of perception and considered in and for itself. Within reality there are no objects or processes whose content is exhausted when one has grasped about them what can be expressed through mathematics and mechanics. Everything mathematical and mechanical is connected to color, warmth, and other qualities. If it is necessary for physics to assume that for the perception of a color there are corresponding vibrations in space, of which a very small expansion and a very great velocity are characteristic, then these movements can only be thought of as analogous to the movements which occur visibly in space. That means, if the world of objects is thought of as in movement, right into its smallest elements, then it must also be pictured as being endowed, right into its smallest elements, with color, warmth, and other characteristics. Whoever takes colors, warmth, sounds, etc. to be qualities which exist as effects of outer processes through the mentally picturing organism and which exist only inside this organism, must also transfer into it everything mathematical and mechanical which is connected with these qualities. Then, however, nothing more is left him for his outer world. The red that I see and the light vibrations which the physicist demonstrates as corresponding to this red are in reality a unity which only the abstracting intellect can separate from one another. I would see the vibrations in space, which correspond to the quality “red,” as movement, if my eye were organized to do so. But I would have connected with the movement, the impression of the red color.

[ 10 ] Modern natural science transfers out into space an unreal abstraction, a vibrating substratum stripped of all qualities of sensation, and is astonished then that one cannot understand what can cause the mentally picturing organism, endowed with nerve apparatus and brain, to translate these indifferent processes of motion into the colorful sense world filled with warmth differentiations and sounds. Du Bois-Reymond therefore assumes that man, because of an insurmountable limit to his knowing, will never understand how the fact that “I taste sweetness, smell the fragrance of roses, hear organ tones, see red” is connected with certain movements of the smallest bodily particles in the brain, whose movements are in turn caused by the vibrations of the tasteless, odorless, soundless, and colorless elements of the outer world of objects. “It is indeed thoroughly and forever incomprehensible that it should not be a matter of indifference to a number of atoms of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, etc. how they lie and move, how they lay and moved, how they will lie and move” (Limits to Knowing Nature, Leipzig, 1882). But there are absolutely no limits to knowledge here. Wherever in space there are a number of atoms in a definite movement, there is necessarily a definite quality (red, for example) also present. And conversely, where red appears movement must be present. Only a thinking which abstracts can separate the one from the other. Whoever thinks of the movement as separated within reality from the other content of the process to which the movement belongs cannot find the transition again from the one to the other.

[ 11 ] Only that about a process which is movement can be traced back again to movement; that which belongs to the qualitative element of the world of colors and light can also be traced back only to a similar qualitative element within the same realm. Mechanics traces complex movements back to simple ones which are immediately comprehensible. Color theory must trace complicated color phenomena back to simple ones which can be recognized in the same way. A simple process of movement is an archetypal phenomenon just like the emergence of yellow out of the interworking of light and dark. Goethe knows what the mechanical archetypal phenomena can accomplish for the explanation of inorganic nature. Whatever is not mechanical within the world of objects he leads back to archetypal phenomena which are not of a mechanical kind. Goethe has been reproached for having thrown out the mechanical way of looking at nature and for limiting himself only to the observation and stringing together of the sense-perceptible (see Harnack, for example, in his book, Goethe in the Period of his Completeness). Du Bois-Reymond finds (Goethe and More Goethe, Leipzig, 1883) that “Goethe's theorizing limits itself to allowing other phenomena to emerge from an archetypal phenomenon, as he calls it, in somewhat the way fog assumes successive shapes without any intelligible causal connection. It was the concept of mechanical causality which was totally lacking in Goethe.” But what else does mechanics do than let complex processes go forth out of simple archetypal phenomena? Goethe did exactly the same thing in the sphere of the color world that the physicist accomplishes in the sphere of processes of motion. Because Goethe is not of the view that all processes in inorganic nature are purely mechanical, it has therefore been denied that he has any concept of mechanical causality. Whoever does this only shows that he is himself in error as to what mechanical causality signifies within the world of objects. Goethe remains in what is qualitative about the world of light and colors; he leaves it up to others to express the quantitative, mechanical, mathematical. He “sought to keep his theory of color absolutely at a distance from mathematics, although right away certain points manifest clearly enough where the help of the art of measurement would be desirable ... But this lack may even be of benefit, inasmuch as it can now become the business of the ingenious mathematician himself to seek out where color theory needs his help, and how he can make his contribution to the perfecting of this pan of natural philosophy” (Paragraph 727 of the didactic pan of the Color Theory). The qualitative elements of the sense of sight, light, darkness, colors, must first be understood out of their own interconnections, be traced back to archetypal phenomena; then there can be investigated on a higher level of thinking what the relationship is between these interconnections and the quantitative, the mechanical-mathematical elements in the world of light and colors.

[ 12 ] Goethe wants to trace the connections within the qualitative realm of the color world back to the simplest elements in just as strict a sense as the mathematician or the mechanic does in his sphere. “We must learn from the mathematicians to take care to place next to each other only the elements which are closest to each other, or rather to deduce from each other the elements which are closest to them, and even where we use no calculations, we must always proceed as though we were obliged to render account to the strictest geometrician.—For actually it is the mathematical method which, because of its carefulness and purity, reveals right away any jump in its assertions, and its proofs are actually only detailed expositions showing that what is presented in combination was already there in its simple components and in its whole sequence, was viewed in its full scope and was correctly and irrefutably devised under all conditions” (The Experiment as Mediator between Subject and Object)

[ 13 ] Goethe draws the principles of explanation for phenomena directly from the realm of observation. He shows how the phenomena are interconnected within the experienceable world. For grasping nature he rejects mental pictures which point outside the region of observation. Any kind of explanation that oversteps the field of experience by bringing in factors to explain nature which by their very nature are not observable contradicts the Goethean world view. Just such an explanation is the one which seeks the nature of light in a light substance that as such is not perceived itself but that can only be observed as light in its way of working. Among this kind of explanation is the one which reigns in modern natural science, according to which the processes of movement of the world of light are carried out, not by the perceptible qualities which are given to the sense of sight, but rather by the smallest particles of imperceptible matter. It is not contrary to the Goethean world view to picture to oneself that a particular color is connected to a particular process of movement in space. But it is altogether contrary to it to maintain that this process of movement belongs to some realm of reality located outside of experience, belongs to the world of matter which can, indeed, be observed in its effects, but not in its own being. For one who adheres to the Goethean world view the vibrations of light in space are processes which should not be accorded a kind of reality different from the rest of the content of perception. They elude direct observation not because they lie beyond the realm of experience but rather because human sense organs are not so finely organized that they directly perceive movements of such minuteness. If an eye were organized in such a way that it could observe in every detail the vibration of a thing which repeats itself four hundred billion times in one second, then such a process would present itself in exactly the same way as a process in the crudely perceptible world. That means, the vibrating thing would manifest the same characteristics as other things of perception.

[ 14 ] Every kind of explanation which traces the things and processes of experience back to other ones not located within the field of experience can attain content-filled mental pictures about this region of reality lying beyond observation only by borrowing certain characteristics from the world of experience and carrying them over onto the unexperienceable. In this way the physicist carries over hardness, impenetrability, onto the smallest elements of bodies, to which he still further ascribes the ability to attract and repel their own kind; on the other hand he does not attribute color, warmth, and other characteristics to these elements. He believes he explains an experienceable process of nature by leading it back to one that is not experienceable. According to Du Bois-Reymond's view, to know nature is to lead the processes in the world of objects back to the movements of atoms which are caused by their attracting and repelling forces (Limits to Knowing Nature, Leipzig, 1882). Matter, the substance filling space, is considered to be what is moving in all this. This substance is supposed to have been there from all eternity and will be there for all eternity. But matter is not supposed to belong to the sphere of observation but rather to be present beyond it. Du Bois-Reymond therefore assumes that man is incapable of knowing the real nature of matter itself, that he therefore leads the processes of the world of objects back to something whose nature will remain forever unknown to him. “We will never know better than we know today what haunts the space here where matter is” (Limits to Knowing Nature). When considered more exactly this concept of matter dissolves into nothing. The real content which one gives to this concept is borrowed from the world of experience. One perceives movements within the world of experience. One feels a pull when one holds a weight in one's hand, and a pressure when one lays a weight upon the palm of one's hand held out horizontally. In order to explain this perception one forms the concept of force. One pictures to oneself that the earth draws the weight to itself. The force itself cannot be perceived. It is ideal. But it belongs nevertheless to the sphere of observation. The mind observes it, because the mind sees the ideal relationships of the perceptions to one another. One is led to the concept of a force of repulsion when squeezing a piece of rubber and then letting it go. It restores itself to its previous shape and size. One pictures to oneself that the compressed parts of the rubber repel each other and again occupy their previous space. The way of thinking now under consideration carries such mental pictures, derived from observation, into an unexperienceable sphere of reality. It therefore in reality does nothing more than to trace something experienceable back to another experienceable something. Only, it arbitrarily shifts the latter into the sphere of the unexperienceable. It can be shown, of any way of picturing things which speaks of something unexperienceable within its view of nature, that it takes up a few scraps from the sphere of experience and relegates them to a sphere of reality located beyond observation. If one takes the scraps of experience out of the mental picture of the unexperienceable, there then remains a concept without content, a non-concept. The explanation of something experienceable can only consist of one's leading it back to something else which is experienceable. One finally arrives at elements within experience which can no longer be traced back to other ones. These are not further explainable, because they need no explanation. They contain their explanation in themselves. Their immediate being consists of what they present to observation. For Goethe, light is such an element. According to his view, a person has come to know the light who without preconception perceives light in its manifestation. The colors arise in connection with light and their arising is understood when one shows how they arise in connection with light. Light itself is given in direct perception. One knows what is ideally inherent in it when one observes what connection there is between it and the colors. From the standpoint of the Goethean world view it is impossible to ask about the real nature of light, about something unexperienceable which corresponds to the phenomenon “light.” “For actually it is a vain undertaking to express the real nature of a thing. We become aware of workings, and a complete history of these workings would very well comprise, if need be, the real nature of that thing.” This means that a complete presentation of the workings of something experienceable comprises all the manifestations which are inherent in it as idea. “We struggle to no avail to portray the character of a person; but put together his actions, his deeds, and a picture of his character will come to meet us.—The colors are deeds of the light, deeds and sufferings (Leiden). [Translator's note: Leiden, like “to suffer,” connotes a positive “allowing,” as well as its more familiar meaning.] In this sense we can expect from them disclosures about the light” (didactic pan of the Color Theory, Preface).

[ 15 ] Light presents itself to observation as “the simplest, most undivided, most homogeneous being that we know” (Correspondence with Jacobi). Confronting it is the darkness. For Goethe darkness is not the completely powerless absence of light. It is something active. It confronts the light and enters with it into a mutual interaction. Modern natural science sees darkness as a complete nothingness. According to this view, the light which streams into a dark space has no resistance from the darkness to overcome. Goethe pictures to himself that light and darkness relate to each other like the north and south pole of a magnet. The darkness can weaken the light in its working power. Conversely, the light can limit the energy of the darkness. In both cases color arises. A view in physics that thinks of darkness as that which is completely inactive cannot speak of any such interaction. It must therefore trace the colors back to light alone. Darkness arises for observation as a phenomenon just as much as light does. What is dark is content of perception in the same sense as what is light. The one is only the opposite of the other. The eye that looks out into the night mediates the real perception of darkness. Were the darkness an absolute nothingness, then no perception at all would arise when the human being looks out into the dark.

[ 16 ] Yellow is a light which has been dampened by the darkness; blue is a darkness which has been weakened by the light.

[ 17 ] The eye is organized to mediate to the mentally picturing organism the phenomena of the world of light and color and the interconnections of these phenomena. In this it does not conduct itself in a merely receptive way but rather enters into a lively interaction with the phenomena. Goethe's striving is to know the nature of this interaction. He regards the eye as something altogether living and wants to gain insight into what its life manifests. How does the eye relate itself to the individual phenomenon? How does it relate itself to the interconnections of the phenomena? Those are questions which he poses 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 also experiences the interrelationships that exist between the individual perceptions. For, “the eye has the light to thank for its existence. Out of indifferent animal auxiliary organs, the light calls forth an organ for itself of its own kind; and thus the eye forms itself in connection with the light for the light, so that the inner light can come to meet the outer light” (didactic pan of the Color Theory, Introduction).

[ 18 ] Just as light and darkness act in opposition to each other in outer nature, so are the two states, into which the eye is brought by the two phenomena, opposite to each other. When one keeps one's eye open in a dark space, a certain lack makes itself felt. If on the other hand the eye is turned toward a brightly illuminated white surface, it becomes unable for a time to distinguish moderately illuminated objects. Seeing into the dark increases receptivity; seeing into brightness weakens it.

[ 19 ] Every impression upon the eye remains for a time within it. Whoever looks at the black cross-pieces between window panes against a bright background will, when he closes his eyes, still have the phenomenon before him for a while. If, while the impression still lasts, one looks at a light gray surface, the cross appears bright, the panes, on the other hand, dark. A reversal of the phenomenon occurs. It follows from this that the eye is predisposed through the one impression to create out of itself the opposite one. Just as in the outer world light and darkness stand in a relationship with each other, so also do the corresponding states in the eye. Goethe pictures to himself that the place in the eye upon which the dark cross fell is rested and receptive to a new impression. Therefore the gray surface works upon it in a livelier way than upon the other places in the eye which previously have received the stronger light from the window panes. The bright produces in the eye an inclination to the dark, the dark an inclination to the bright. If one holds a dark image in front of a light gray surface and, when the image is taken away, looks fixedly upon the same spot, the space which the dark image occupied appears much lighter than the rest of the surface. A gray image against a dark background appears brighter than the same image does against a light background. The eye is predisposed by the dark background to see the image as brighter, but the light background as darker. Through these phenomena there is indicated to Goethe the great activity of the eye “;and the quiet opposition which every living thing is driven to show when any particular state is presented it. Thus, breathing in already presupposes breathing out, and vice versa ... It is the eternal formula of life which manifests itself here also. When the eye is offered the dark, it then demands the bright; it demands dark when one confronts it with bright and precisely through this shows its liveliness, its right to grasp the object by bringing forth from itself something which opposes the object” (Para. 38 of the didactic pan of the Color Theory).

[ 20 ] In the same way as light and darkness, color perceptions also call forth a counter activity in the eye. Hold a small piece of yellow paper in front of a moderately illuminated white screen and look fixedly at the small yellow surface. After a while take the paper away. At the place which the paper filled, one will see violet. The eye is predisposed by the impression of the yellow to produce the violet out of itself. In the same way blue will bring forth orange, and red green as a counter activity. Every color sensation therefore has a living connection in the eye with another. The states into which the eye is brought by perceptions stand in a relationship similar to that of the contents of these perceptions in the outer world.

[ 21 ] When light and darkness, bright and dark, work upon the eye, then this living organ comes to meet them with its demands; when they work upon things outside in space, then the things enter into interaction with them. Empty space has the characteristic of transparency. It does not at all affect light and darkness. These shine through it in their own lively nature. The case is different when space is filled with things. This filling of space can be such that the eye does not become aware of it because light and darkness in their original form shine right through it. Then one speaks of transparent things. If light and darkness do not shine unweakened through a thing, then it is called turbid. A turbid filling of space offers the possibility of observing light and darkness, bright and dark in their mutual relationship. Something bright, seen through something turbid, appears yellow; something dark, seen through something turbid, appears blue. What is turbid is something material which has been brightened by light. Against a brighter livelier light located behind it, what is turbid is dark; against a darkness that shines through it, it acts like something bright. Therefore, when something turbid confronts the light or darkness, there really work into one another an existing brightness and an existing dark.

[ 22 ] If the turbidity, through which the light is shining, gradually increases, then the yellow passes over into yellowish red and then into ruby red. If the turbidity, through which the dark is penetrating, lessens, then the blue goes over into indigo and finally into violet. Yellow and blue are basic colors. They arise through the working together of brightness or dark with turbidity. Both can take on a reddish tone, the former through an increasing of the turbidity, the latter by a lessening of it. Red, accordingly, is not a basic color. It appears as a color tone connected to yellow or blue. Yellow, with its reddish nuances which intensify as far as pure red, is close to the light; blue, with its shades, is related to the darkness. When blue and yellow mix, green arises; if blue which has been intensified to violet mixes with yellow which has been darkened into red, then the purple color arises.

[ 23 ] Goethe pursues these basic phenomena within nature. The bright disk of the sun, seen through a haze of turbid vapors, appears yellow. Dark cosmic space, viewed through the vapors of the atmosphere which are illumined by the light of day, presents itself as the blue of the heavens. “In the same way the mountains also appear blue to us: for, through our viewing them at such a distance that we no longer see their local colors, and that light from their surfaces no longer works upon our eye, they act as a pure dark object which now appears blue through the vapors between them and us” (Para. 156 of the didactic part of the Color Theory).

[ 24 ] Out of his absorption in the works of painters the need grew in Goethe to penetrate into the laws to which the phenomena of the sense of sight are subject. Every painting presented him with riddles. How does chiaroscuro relate to the colors? In what relationships do the individual colors stand to one another? Why does yellow give a happy mood, blue a serious one? Out of the Newtonian theory of color there was no way of gaining a viewpoint from which these mysteries could be revealed. This view traces all colors back to light, arranges them sequentially side by side, and says nothing about their relationships to the dark, and also nothing about their living connections to each other. From insights gained along his own path, Goethe was able to solve the riddles which art had posed him. Yellow must possess a happy, cheerful, mildly stimulating character, for it is the color closest to light. It arises through the slightest toning down of the light. Blue points to the dark which works in it. Therefore it gives a feeling of cold just as “it also reminds one of shadows.” Reddish yellow arises through the intensification of yellow toward the dark pole. Through this intensification its energy grows. The happy, cheerful feeling passes over into the blissful. As soon as the intensification goes still further, from reddish yellow into yellowish red, the happy, blissful feeling transforms itself into the impression of something forceful. Violet is blue which is striving toward the bright. Through this the restfulness and cold of blue become restlessness. In bluish red this restlessness experiences a further increase. Pure red stands in the middle between yellowish red and bluish red. The storminess of the yellow appears lessened, the languid restfulness of the blue enlivens itself. The red gives the impression of ideal contentment, of the equalizing of opposites. A feeling of contentment also arises through green, which is a mixture of yellow and blue. But because here the cheerfulness of the yellow is not intensified, and the restfulness of the blue is not disturbed by a reddish tone, the contentment will be a purer one than that which red brings forth.

[ 25 ] When a color is brought to it, the eye right away asks for another one. When it looks at yellow, there arises in it the longing for violet; when it perceives blue, it then demands orange; when it sees red, it then desires green. It is comprehensible that the feeling of contentment arises when, beside a color which is presented to the eye, another one is placed for which, in accordance with its nature, it is striving. The law of color harmony results from the nature of the eye. Colors which the eye asks for side by side have a harmonious effect. If two colors appear side by side which do not ask for each other, then the eye is stimulated to react. The juxtaposition of yellow and purple has something one-sided, but happy and magnificent. The eye wants violet next to yellow in order to be able to live in accordance with its nature. If purple takes the place of violet then the object asserts its claims over against those of the eye. It does not accomodate itself to the demands of this organ. Juxtapositions of this kind serve to indicate what is significant about the things. They do not want unconditionally to satisfy but rather to characterize. Those colors lend themselves to such characteristic connections which do not stand in complete opposition to each other but which also do not go directly over into each other. Juxtapositions of this latter kind give something characterless to the things on which they occur.

[ 26 ] The becoming and being of the phenomena of light and colors revealed itself to Goethe in nature. He also recognized it again in the creations of the painters in which it is raised to a higher level, is translated into the spiritual. Through his observations of the perceptions of sight Goethe gained a deep insight into the relationship of nature and an. He must have been thinking of this when, after the completion of the Color Theory, he wrote to Frau von Stein about these observations: “I do not regret having sacrificed so much time to them. Through them I have attained a culture which would have been difficult for me to acquire from any other side.”

[ 27 ] The Goethean color theory differs from that of Newton and of those physicists who construct their views upon Newton's mental pictures, because Goethe takes his start from a world view different from that of these physicists. Someone who does not really see the connection described here between Goethe's general picture of nature and his theory of color cannot do anything other than believe that Goethe came to his views on color because he lacked a sense for the physicist's genuine methods of observation. Someone with insight into this connection will also see that within the Goethean world view no other theory of color is possible than his. He would not have been able to think differently about the nature of color phenomena than he did, even if all the discoveries made since his time had been spread out before him, and if he himself could have employed with exactness the modern experimental methods which have become so refined. Even if, after becoming aware of the discovery of the Frauenhofer lines, he cannot fully incorporate them into his view of nature, neither they nor any other discovery in the realm of optics contradict his conception. The point in all this is only to build up this Goethean conception in such a way that these phenomena fit themselves into this conception. Admittedly, someone who stands on the point of view of the Newtonian conception would not be able to picture to himself anything of Goethe's views on colors. But this does not stem from the fact that such a physicist knows of phenomena which contradict the Goethean conception but rather from the fact that he has accustomed himself to a view of nature which hinders him from knowing what the Goethean view of nature actually wants.

Morning:
Imagine you're out in cosmic space surrounded by light, and that a voice from the four compass points (only one voice from four different directions) says to you:

Be a strong I.
Give thy heart to the Spirit of the World.
(Then soul quiet.)

Evening:
Retrospect. Imagine you're out in cosmic space surrounded by darkness, and you tell the eastern full moon:

I will be a strong I.
I will give my heart to the Spirit of the World.
(Then soul-quiet.)

__________

Morning,
3–4 minutes: Think of a star that's over your head:

By the lighting
Of the star
Over my head
I will hold
The power
In my heart
To helping the powers in my soul.

Evening,
4–5 minutes: Imagine that the Christ comes to you from the sun and says to your heart:

I give you
My graceful word
And my loving power
And you will
Make progress
In your soul
And in your I.

__________

Morning:
Imagine a that alternates between blue and red:

I will
Send my thoughts
To thee
Messenger of Gods
And be
In thy being
For time and eternity.
(Then soul-rest)

Evening:
Retrospect. Imagine that the sun says:

In harmonies
With the Planet Sphere
Tell I
As representer of Christ
To thine heart
“The God Word
Streams in My Light.”

Then 5 min. quiet meditation.

__________

Evening,
3–4 minutes: I go into the spiritual world. Then 10 minutes: Imagine a charcoaled cross with 7 pink violet roses.

So as out of the black cross
The red roses,
So out of the darkness of the world
The clearness of Christ's life.

Morning,
15 minutes: Retrospect of the preceding day. Then imagine a white, gleaming sunlight-cross with 7 green roses.

So as the green life
In the white sunlight,
So Christ's life
In the course of man's evolution.

Then the 6 exercises.

Today the essential thing for which I would like to use our time is to develop some things that will provide the basis for tomorrow's discussion. These things are an expansion of what was described yesterday.

Consider how birth or, say, conception, is the entry into the life a person leads between birth and death. Think of what we have said in the course of the past years about how a human being enters the physical body. We know that in a certain sense the three lower realms of nature—the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms—flow together in man, and that he rises above these three realms that are joined together symbiotically in him. But as a being of soul and spirit he also grows into these realms. Man becomes human by descending to the physical plane and growing into the mineral, plant and animal realms. After death, he ascends again. Then something similar happens from a spiritual point of view: in the spiritual world something happens that resembles the growing into the three kingdoms of physical existence on earth. With all such descriptions you must be clear that everything that has already been said in earlier presentations still holds true. Everything we have previously said about how a human being grows into the spiritual world after passing through the gates of death still holds good—the further details that arise are only to be taken as additions to that. Thus we can say: as a human being grows into the spiritual worlds he is received into the realm of morality, the aesthetic realm and the realm of wisdom, or truth. Now, in this life when we speak of the moral realm, the realm of the good, the aesthetic realm, the realm of the beautiful, and the realm of truth, of wisdom, naturally we are speaking more or less abstractly. But the forces in the spiritual world into which a human being grows and which are left behind when physical existence is once more taken up, are absolutely concrete forces. They are real, spiritual modes of existence. We use names like these just to summarise. Here on earth, a person's aura carries a kind of remnant of the things he received when he had ascended to the spiritual world. Having left behind the realms of wisdom, of beauty, of truth, mankind must enter the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. But the three spiritual realms continue to shine into the human aura, so that if we include his spiritual parts, then the whole man is a being who lives most directly in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, and lives more at a distance from that which, so to speak, comes down from the three spiritual realms, hovers before him, and shines and weaves through him. The light from the three spiritual realms shines over a human being. A schematic kind of a drawing will help us see how these things are connected with human nature, but please note that it is just a schematic drawing. All that I am going to show you is just schematic, but it will clarify much for you if studied carefully. For the sake of clarity, I will draw everything to do with the I like this (green). Everything to do with the astral body will be yellow; everything to do with the etheric human being, lilac, and everything to do with the physical human being, red.

Now we will take a schematic look at mankind. We will observe how mankind stands in the cosmos, in so far as a human being is a moral being, that is, through his participation in the moral forces of the cosmos. Then we will observe mankind in so far as a human being participates, in the way we described yesterday, in the aesthetic impulses of the cosmos. And then we will observe mankind's participation in the impulses of wisdom. Thus we are going to outline a kind of psychic physiology—forgive the slightly nonsensical form of the expression, but you will understand what I mean. Naturally, this outline is meant imaginatively.

When we observe the human being who stands in the moral sphere, you will be especially reminded of what we said yesterday—that the Greeks felt and experienced the relationship between the physical and the soul-spiritual more strongly than is the case today. Hence Plato, for example, was able to give a clear account of how man is taken hold of, gripped, by moral impulses coming from the spiritual universe. Plato says that there exist four virtues. The whole of morality takes hold of the whole human being. But all that is naturally to be taken with the well-known grain of salt. Naturally, even though it grips the whole person, the human being is subsequently divided up into the particular virtues. The first virtue Plato mentions is wisdom—wisdom now understood as a virtue, not as science. Since wisdom as a virtue is related to the way truth is experienced, it takes hold of those forces that flow from the moral sphere to the head. Therefore it can be pictured like this. (See drawing.) And therefore Plato says: The head of the moral man is gripped by wisdom; the breast is gripped by the virtue of strength of heart (Starkmut)—I cannot find a better word—strength of mind, or industriousness, but a kind of industriousness that includes the forces of the heart: an industriousness of the soul.

The person who does not give in to his animal instincts is not necessarily wise. The wise human being—wise in the sense implied by strength of heart—is the one who possesses moral ideas, ideas he can grasp and according to which he is able to direct his life. But even though the moral impulse is grasped in the form of moral ideas, it nevertheless streams into the physical person, into the body. Therefore we can picture morality as flowing into a human being here (green); here it flows into the I. That is where the Platonic moral sphere of wisdom would be located.

Whenever strength of heart—strength of mind, industriousness of the soul—streams down out of the moral sphere, it streams into the area of the chest, which encloses the heart. We can say: When morality radiates down, it is here, in the area of the chest and heart, where it particularly takes hold of the astral. So we will show this next in-pouring (yellow). Thus we now have wisdom as virtue in the head (green), strength of heart as virtue in the area of the chest (yellow).

Plato calls the third virtue temperance, sophrosyne, and he quite rightly assigns it to the abdomen. Human desires are aroused in the abdomen, and the temperate person is the one who is able to rule over his desires by thinking about them, feeling his way into them and consciously experiencing them. It is no virtue to live a life that simply chases after desires. Animals can also live like that. Temperance first arises when the desires are made as conscious as it is possible for them to be made. This happens in the etheric body; for, to the extent that thought, temperance and courage are human, they must be taken hold of by the etheric body. Therefore we must put this (violet) into our drawing. Thus, as I said yesterday, the moral sphere takes hold of the whole physical human being. And the head is included, as I explicitly stated yesterday.

And then Plato refers to a fourth, comprehensive virtue that flows into the whole physical body, which is actually invisible, as I showed you yesterday. He calls this virtue dikaiosyne. We have to translate this as justice, although the modern sense of the word does not entirely match Plato's meaning. Plato's word, ‘justice’, is not meant abstractly. It refers to the ability to give our lives direction, the ability to know ourselves and to orient ourselves in life. So we can say that here (red) the moral sphere, as justice, as uprightness, streams into the whole physical body. This gives us a schematic indication of how, in the human aura, morality streams into the human being.

Now we want to indicate how aesthetic impulses stream into man. Here there is a slight displacement. Things are simply displaced upward by one stage. What we previously pictured as within the head must now be pictured higher (green), so that it is hovering around the head. In aesthetic experience, the etheric stream circumvents the I and flows directly into the astral body, giving one the impression that the I hovers in the etheric that surrounds the head. A person who feels and responds a little to beauty does not need to be very clairvoyant to experience how he seems to live in the space that surrounds his head while he is contemplating a work of art. Within the head, however, the person is gripped directly; there the astral body is taken hold of, which we will draw in with these (yellow) rays.

On the other hand, beauty works in the area of the breast in such a way as to allow that surging back and forth I described yesterday.

One could say that the aesthetic glows through the region of the breast. And beauty actually affects nothing beyond what belongs to the aura of the head, the head itself, and the breast. In other words, in the case of beauty, not all of the area wherein sophrosyne lives comes into consideration. But our materialistic age is distinguished by the way it so thoroughly involves the sphere of sexuality in artistic considerations—a piece of mischief for which our age is responsible, for it is precisely in the contemplation of beauty that such things are absolutely irrelevant and should be absolutely out of the question. Thus, only the lowest kind of aesthetic considerations, those that no longer have anything to do with art, are to be located in the physical body (red).

Now we want to use the same schema for picturing the man who is striving for truth. Once more, there is a displacement, a kind of outward displacement. Yesterday I mentioned that the striving for truth circumvents both the I and the astral body and flows directly into the etheric portion of the head where thoughts are generated. So here, directly into the head, is where I must draw the ether streaming into the etheric body, here where thoughts are generated. On the other hand, when we strive for truth—and this is something one only notices after initiation—it only affects the I and the astral body outside us, in the aura; then it streams into the etheric portion of the head; then into the breast, where its life already affects the physical body (red). If we are to feel truth—and we must feel truth—it has to work into us; it must stream down into the region of the breast. Spirituality has to be experienced in the way we experience the moral.

All of the preceding lives in the aura of the physical plane and therefore applies to the physical plane. In this instance, that into which we enter after death participates in the aura on the physical plane. Just as our physical organism connects us to the forces of the mineral, plant and animal realms, so the moral sphere, the aesthetic sphere and the sphere of wisdom connect us to the forces of the spiritual world.

Even though some of the things I have said have come out very badly—perhaps they will come out better later—I want to present something further to you, something that belongs in the context of the whole. One can say: Whereas it is our physical body that connects us with the realm of physical becoming, our brain connects us with certain elemental beings, namely those elemental beings that belong to the sphere of wisdom. In the third drawing, that which we indicated with yellow was still outside; in the second drawing, it is internal. The green that here (drawing 2) is hovering around the head is even further outside. To etheric observation, this green hovers in the immediate vicinity of our head. The I lives in it, and alongside the I are found the elemental beings of the myths and sagas. There they are called elves, fairies, and so on. When we enjoy something aesthetically, all that is hovering around our heads.

But here (drawing 3), it is spiritual beings from the astral sphere that are hovering around us. It is possible to picture how perception and truth take hold of a person as he wakes from sleep. Although it is not physically visible, the way a person is taken hold of and received on awakening can be expressed in words. Today I would like to put into concrete words how man comes alive in the sphere of truth and wisdom when he awakens. The words are not so bad in their present form, and perhaps they will be improved later. A person should speak to the spirits that surround and take hold of him when he awakens in the following manner:

O, Ye!, from spheres of light stream through this head,

—spoken to the spirits!—

Stream through it—

—the head—

Move there in ways which spirits pure are led,
Damp well down his brain's insane confusion;

with the ordered processes of thought that dissipate madness—

Damp well down his—man's—brain's insane confusion,
From his striving untangle all doubt's fire and fear,

—just feel the words! They scatter doubts, banish them as wisdom pours in!—

To guide him within from the paths of illusion.

he would be following a path of illusion if he only followed—the path of dreams; in so far as he enters the sphere of truth, the surrounding spiritual world frees his inner being from false paths.—

In daily experience four goals are clear;

we still have to discuss this; everything here divides into fours—

In daily experience four goals are clear,
Now lead him on untouched by apprehension.

—lead man toward his goals—

First strive for countenance that fills with light,
Then spirit's quest for power hold fast.
Once lame-wingd senses move again in flight,
His day in freedom can unfold.

—It will be freed from everything dreamlike and arbitrary that would otherwise rule it with the force of necessity—

Thus truest spirit duty it fulfils:
Through holy light to lead him where he wills.

—So might man address the spirits that take hold of him when he awakens to the life of truth.

When a person awakens to the life of beauty, other spirits surround him. This is already something that is easier to convey to you. These are spirits that live in the sphere of the I:

O Ye!, surround this head with airy circling,
Your paths in noble elfin fashion tracing,
And soften in the heart its harvest grim,

—for this reaches into the heart—

Remove reproach's bitter, glowing arrows,

—the reproaches are reproaches of conscience, but also of pleasure and displeasure, which have to do with the surging world of the soul.—

Within him make all pure from horror's gleam.

—Earlier the brain was involved, now it is the inner world.—

Within him make all pure from horror's gleam.
Four in number are the nightly hollows,
Now, friendly, fill them up without a seam.
First lower head down on the pillow cool,

—That corresponds to the words of the earlier verse: First strive for countenance that fills with light,—

Bathe it then in dews from Lethe's flood released;

—In the case of wisdom, the words go: To spirit's quest for power hold fast,—

Soon limbs, cramp-stiffened, will again grow supple,

—Corresponding to: Once lame-winged senses move again in flight,—

In rest, against the day his strength's increased.

—Corresponding to: His day in freedom can unfold.—

Fulfil most comely duty of the elf,

—These are elemental beings. There (drawing 3) it was spirits who live in the etheric, so the verse said: Thus truest spirit duly it fulfils, Through holy light to lead him where he wills.—

Return to holy light man's self.

Here (drawing 1), we are concerned with the influence of the entire cosmic sphere: morality. As I said, the whole of the universe influences the entire human being. That calls for the following words:

O Ye!, stream through this head with strength to move,

—Morality, and will, is revealed when man is moved to deeds.—

O Ye!, stream through this head with strength to move,
And in good earthly deeds yourselves soon prove.

—For the right employment of the will in the world follows from these, and also temperance.—

So boldly stamp out torment of absurdity,

—which emanates from the body in the guise of desires. Yesterday I described how what rules in the bodily passions is related to moral impulses.—

So boldly stamp out torments contradictory,
Ennoble desire's power, wherein dark forces surge,
Abduct his soul, away from spirit-fatality.

—This spirit-fatality is nothing but the consequence of animal passions.—

In human obsession, pathways four do merge,

—In earlier times, one called drives that originate in the body ‘obsessions’—

Tear them away from embrace of infirmity.
Conquer the fires in which the senses groan,
Illumine that which dies in pleasure,
And hear how speak in ensouled tone
The powers that match eternal measure.

—For deeds of karma work in eternity.—

Attempt to strive in world-willed action,
Awaken him to life-benediction.

And there you have a description of the threefold manner in which the surrounding cosmos takes hold of the human aura.

How do the spirits that grip him take hold of the man of wisdom?

O Ye!, from spheres of light stream through this head,
Move there in ways which spirits pure are led,
Damp well down his brain's insane confusion;
From his striving untangle all doubt's fire and fear,
To guide him within from pathways of illusion.

In daily experience four goals are clear;
Now lead him on untouched by apprehension.

First strive for countenance that fills with light,
Then spirit's quest for power hold fast.
Once lame-winged senses move again in flight,
His day in freedom can unfold.
Thus truest spirit duty it fulfils:
Through holy light to lead him where he wills.

The aesthetic sphere comes especially to the fore in the third act of the second part of Faust, when Faust is united with Helen, who personifies beauty:

O Ye!, surround this head with airy circling,
Your paths in noble elfin fashion tracing,
And soften in the heart its harvest grim,
Remove reproach's bitter, glowing arrows,
Within him make all pure from horror's gleam.

Four in number are the nightly hollows,
Now, friendly, fill them up without a seam.

First lower head down on the pillow cool,
Bathe it then in dews from Lethe's flood released,
Soon limbs, cramp-stiffened, will again grow supple,
In rest, against the day his strength's increased.
Fulfil most comely duty of the elf,
Return to holy light man's self.

And then the moral sphere:

O Ye!, stream through this head with strength to move,
And in good earthly deeds yourselves soon prove.
So boldly stamp out torment of absurdity,
Ennoble desire's power, wherein dark forces surge,
Abduct his soul, away from spirit-fatality.

In human obsession, pathways four do merge,
Tear them away from embrace of infirmity.

Conquer the fires in which the senses groan,
Illumine that which dies in pleasure,
And hear how speak in ensouled tone
The powers that match eternal measure.
Attempt to strive in world-willed action,
Awaken him to life-benediction.

You see, the more profound elements are only revealed when one approaches these things spiritually and really takes hold of their spiritual content. Now, in a single stroke, the Faust of Part Two appears before us—the Faust around whom Goethe placed a hovering circle of elves. He represents the human being who stands within the spiritual-aesthetic sphere. And there are parallel occurrences when he stands within the sphere of wisdom and truth, or within the moral sphere.

One really has to call on the assistance of the feelings if one is to grasp these things. In pursuing them, one is somehow reminded of Nietzsche's remark, ‘The world is deep, deeper than the day has thought!’ The day represents physical life, physical perception, physical experience. ‘The world is deep, deeper than the day has thought!’ And that it is, especially when the entire human being is included as part of it—this being who is following a path of cosmic evolution, and who, for us in our present stage, is beyond our powers to grasp. That means that in our present state of being we do not understand much about ourselves. So much, so inconceivably much, has gone into our becoming what we are. And there is so inconceivably much contained in the Earth evolution that is still to come, and in our passage through the spheres of Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan! Only little by little does one disentangle oneself from the implications of current thought and approach that which, because it is more spiritual, is more difficult to conceive and is rarely touched on by the habitual thinking of people of today. Observing man as he presently is on Earth, we see that the seeds, so to speak, of what will develop during Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan already are hidden within him. But the human being is also the result of the Saturn, Sun and Moon spheres. Yesterday I said that wisdom and everything concerned with truth was established on Old Sun and will be completed on Jupiter. Let us picture that graphically once more.

The seed that was planted on Old Sun will more or less complete its development on Jupiter. Thus we can say: The period within which truth develops stretches from Sun to Jupiter. On Jupiter truth will have become thoroughly inward, and so will have become wisdom: Truth becomes wisdom!

Everything that belongs to the aesthetic sphere began on Old Moon. It will be completed on Venus. We could draw it in like this: From here, Moon, to completion here, Venus. This is where beauty develops. You see how it overlaps.

Everything contained within these two streams—and the third stream, also—is actually resting unconsciously in the depths of our being. And now, on Earth, the sphere we can call the sphere of morality is beginning. It will be completed on Vulcan. So we have a third, overlapping stream, the stream of morality. To these must be added a fourth stream that will be completed when the goals of the Earth sphere are achieved. Morality begins on Earth; but Earth also marks the completion of a higher order, one that was already beginning on Saturn. So we have another stream, another order, that flows from Saturn to Earth, and we will now call that the stream of justice—justice in the sense that was explained earlier. As you know, the senses had their beginnings on Saturn. These senses have the tendency to scatter a human being in all directions. You know that we distinguish twelve senses. The development of the twelve senses through Sun, Moon and Earth leads mankind to justice, to a rightness and uprightness that also includes moral justice and moral uprightness once it has been taken hold of by the moral nature of the Earth. Moral justice first makes its appearance on Earth. And justice works inwardly to counter the peripheral tendency of the senses; the sphere—or stream—of justice works toward the centre.

Everything pictured here is contained within the human being, but, as you know, the prevailing awareness includes only the smallest part of what is actively living and weaving in man. Nevertheless, this all continues to live in the depths of his being, working and weaving. And yet one can ask oneself: Are things as they appear? Is it really true that men grasp so little of how humanity is carried by this broad stream of being out of which it emerges?

Such an awareness is not just restricted to circles of the initiated. It is developing in humanity. There really are people who experience what lives and works in the streams which are carrying mankind along. Thanks to what could be called their natural gifts they feel it surge up during especially privileged moments. This is manifested in the most various ways. There are men who feel the depths of humanity in a higher sense than is often the case with external, philistine notions of religion. People often speak of guilt, and there are some pastors who try to deepen their flock's sense of things by leading them to experience guilt. But that is a superficial way of looking at things. This superficiality also has its justification, but one can go deeper. And those who have a deeper experience feel how morality connects with that glowing, resounding force that is streaming up from the powers that rule in the human depths. Self-knowledge would be much more common if people were not so timid and so afraid of getting to know themselves. But the awareness of what rules in the depths is already suppressed in the unconscious levels of the soul because people have such unconscious fear and inhibition and anxiety about confronting themselves in all their manifoldness and complexity. And when it does surge up, what comes glowing and gleaming from out of the depths really does make a sphinx-like impression. The experiences of others who have really felt such things in their own soul can be deeply moving.

The following literary passage expresses beautifully how the human depths can appear to a man from out the surging dreams of his soul life. One must imagine someone who has laid himself down to rest after the toils and the burdens of the day. But as he rests, out of the darkness and shadow, the human depths rise up before his soul in powerful dreams. Here is how a Polish poet once described it:

And in the secret magic of the night,
There, before my palace,
My dreams took hold of the ghostly mists and built
Unimaginable blossoms with dead eyes
That formed a balefully grinning Medusa
In the moonlight drenched with dew,
And she waxed monstrous.—
As the moon streamed into my chamber
And lay across the bed of my exhaustion—
I was roused from sleep by lecherous,
Monstrous desires
Which shuddered on my stammering lips
And sent hot fires of fever streaming from my eyes
Towards creatures that were yours!
Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!
—My guilt, my most great guilt!

These words of Jan Kasprowicz⁹ are a beautiful, lyrical expression of a quite wonderful experience, an experience that is at once questioning and also touches on the answers. The question is contained in the way this literary work makes the transition from memories of the day, through the aesthetic sphere, into the moral sphere—mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! One should not shrink from the questions that rise up out of the surging depths of life. These things are not there to rouse fear, but to kindle questions. The ‘unimaginable blossoms with dead eyes that formed a balefully grinning Medusa’ are questions, questions that have taken on the shapes of the plant kingdom. And as for how that is connected with the moon, we only have to remind ourselves of the stream that begins on Moon to understand how the silent floods of moonlight connect outer physical reality with spiritual experience. One has here a wonderful description of a spiritual experience:

And in the secret magic of the night.
There, before my palace,
My dreams took hold of the ghostly mists and built
Unimaginable blossoms with dead eyes
That formed a balefully grinning Medusa
In the moonlight drenched with dew,
And she waxed monstrous.—
As the moon streamed into my chamber
And lay across the bed of my exhaustion—
I was roused from sleep by lecherous,
Monstrous desires

—just think of the third speech, to the spirits of the moral sphere—

I was roused from sleep by lecherous,
Monstrous desires
Which shuddered on my stammering lips
And sent hot fires of fever streaming from my eyes
Towards creatures that were yours!
Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!
—My guilt, my most great guilt!

Then think of how the moral sphere shines into the stupefying fires of the senses, conquering them and illuminating that which dies in pleasure—and of how it is greeted by the resounding of ensouled powers that match eternal measure.

Yes, if one wants to delve deeply into everything that relates to humanity, one must certainly call on the help of the feelings. That is the only way one ever will arrive at a picture of how, when a human being steps onto the physical plane, he can live his way into the spiritual realms—the realms of morality, of aesthetics, and of that which has to do with conceptions and with truth. For a human being does not just enter into the mineral, plant and animal realms. Man remains human as he passes through all these realms. Mankind descends through the realms of mineral, plant, animal and human; and mankind ascends through the moral, the aesthetic, and through the realm of truth and wisdom. In this way, humanity participates in that wonderful stream of being that develops as it flows through Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth and on towards Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. There are lesser streams that overlap and unite in man, creating the separate forces he needs in the course of his development. These are granted to humanity from out of the deep impulses that rule the cosmos.

• 9. Jan Kasprowicz (1860 – 1926): The source of the cited text has not yet been discovered.

Theorem: Light seen through dark, appears yellow. Dark seen through light, appears blue. At the boundary between light and dark, colors appear.

1. If you look at a black circle on a white field through a convex-cut glass, the circle enlarges, and around it you see a yellow border.

Also when the dark spreads into the light, yellow appears.

2. If you magnify a white circle on a dark field through a convex ground glass, you see a blue edge (Figure 2)

3. If you look at a white circle on a black field through a concave-cut glass, you see a reduced circle surrounded by a yellow rim.

4. If you look at a black circle on a white background through a concave cut glass, you see it surrounded by a blue border, because as the white spreads into the dark, blue appears.

White and black are the two poles of light. Yellow and blue are the two poles of color. Green is the mixture of yellow and blue. (Gray is the mixture of white and black.) All other colors are shades.

Color is created by light and dark interacting at their boundaries without mixing. When they mix, white-gray or a hazy color is created.

If one looks at a black circle through a prism, the shape elongates and becomes an ellipse. Two edges are formed, one yellow and one blue; where it is narrow, the yellow edge is formed, where it is wide, the blue edge. In the other case the analogous event happens.

A white stripe, viewed through the prism, is shifted so that on one side light is passed over dark, on the other dark is passed over light; thus in the first case a blue edge stripe is formed, in the second a yellow one is formed.

If I take a wider prism, a red stripe joins the yellow one, and a violet one joins the blue one on the outside.

If the prism is still wider, orange still emerges in between on one side and indigo on the other.

If the prism is of a width such that the two poles of color mix, the result is green.

All colors seen in such a way through a prism are subjective.

Now let's move on to objective colors—in a darkroom.

By letting the rays of light pass through a prism, we deflect the white circle formed on the screen, draw it out, and it acquires colored edges.

What was seen subjectively earlier emerges precisely in objective colors on the screen.

Today we will concern ourselves with three important ideas connected with parts of human nature. These may be said to form guiding threads through the entire world. They are as follows: Activity or Movement; Wisdom, which is also called Word, and thirdly Will. When we speak of activity we usually mean something very general. The esotericist however sees in activity the foundation of the whole universe as it surrounds us. The original form of the universe is for the esotericist a product of activity. What is seemingly completed is really a stage of continuous activity, a point in continuity. The whole world is in ceaseless activity. In reality this activity is Karma.

When speaking about man, we speak of his astral body as being Karma, as being activity. Actually the astral body is that part of the human being which is closest to him. What man experiences, so that he differentiates between well being and misfortune, happiness and sorrow, emanates from his astral body. Love, passion, joy, pain, ideals, duty, are bound up with the astral body. When one speaks of joy and sorrow, desires, wishes, etc., one is speaking of the astral body. Man continually experiences the astral body, but the seer perceives its form. This astral body is in continuous transformation. At first it is undifferentiated, so long as man has not yet worked upon it. In our time however man works upon it constantly. When he distinguishes between what is allowed and what is forbidden, he works into it out of his ego. Since the middle of the Lemurian Age until the middle of the Sixth Root-Race man works upon his astral body.

Why does man work upon it? He works upon his astral body because, in the sphere of activity, every single activity calls forth a counter effect. If we rub our hand on a tabletop it becomes hot. The warmth is the counter effect of our activity. Thus each activity calls forth another. Through the fact that certain animals migrated to the dark caves of Kentucky they no longer needed their eyesight but only sensitive organs of touch, in order to find their way about. The result was that the blood withdrew from their eyes and they became blind. This was the result of their activity, of their migration into the caves of Kentucky.⁷

The human astral body is in continual activity. Its life consists in this. In a narrower sense this activity is called human karma. What I do today has its expression in the astral body. If I give somebody a blow, that is activity and calls forth a counter blow. This is balance restoring justice—karma. Every action calls forth its counter action. With this must be considered the concept of cause and effect. In karma there is always something needing to be brought into balance; something further is always demanded.

The second guiding thread in human nature and in the universe is wisdom. Just as karma has something needing to be balanced, wisdom has something of rest, of equilibrium. It is therefore also called rhythm. All wisdom, according to its form, is rhythm. In the astral body there may perhaps be much sympathy, then there is much green in the aura. This green was once called forth as complementary colour.

Originally, instead of the green, there was red, a selfish instinct. That has been changed into green through activity, karma. In wisdom, in rhythm, everything is completed, balanced. In man everything rhythmical, filled with wisdom, is in the etheric body. The etheric body is therefore that in man which represents wisdom. In the etheric body repose, rhythm holds sway.

The physical body actually represents the will. Will, in contrast to absolute rest, is the creative element, that which is productive. Thus we have the following ascent: firstly karma, activity, what needs to be balanced; secondly wisdom, what has been brought to rest; thirdly will, such an overabundance of life that it can sacrifice itself. Thus activity, wisdom, will, are the three stages in which all being flows.

Let us study from this point of view the human being as he stands before us. In the first place man has his physical body. As he is at the present time, he has no influence at all upon his physical body. What man physically is and does is brought about from outside by creative forces. He cannot himself regulate the movement of the molecules of his brain; neither of himself can he control the circulation of the blood. In other words, the physical body is produced independently of man and is also sustained for him by other forces. It is as it were only lent to him. Man is incarnated into a physical body produced for him by other forces. The etheric body too is in a certain respect produced for him by other powers. On the other hand, the astral body is formed partly by other powers, partly by man himself. That part of the astral body which is formed by man himself becomes his karma. What he himself has worked into it must have a karmic effect. This is the undying, the non-transient in him. The physical body has come about through the karma of other beings; but that part of man's astral body in which he has worked since the Lemurian Age, that is his karma. Only when man through his work has transformed the whole of his astral body, has he reached the stage of freedom. Then the whole of his astral body is transmuted from within. He is then entirely the result of his own activity, of his karma.

If we select some particular stage of development we always find a part of man's astral body which is his own work. That, however, which is the result of his own work lives also in the etheric body and the physical body. In the physical body lives what man has made out of himself, through the physical body it lives in the physical world. He would be unable to form concepts about the physical world if he did not work in it through his organs. What man experiences in his astral body he builds into himself. In what he observes in the physical world his three sheaths are active. When for instance he sees a rose, all three sheaths are engaged. To begin with he perceives red. In this the physical body is engaged. In a camera obscura the rose makes the same impression. Secondly, the rose is conceived in the etheric body as a living idea. Thirdly, the rose gives pleasure to the person and in this the astral body is engaged. These are the three stages of human observation. Here the innermost part of man works through the three bodies into the external world. What man takes in from the outer world, he takes in through these three bodies.

Desire underlies all those things involving human activity or karma. Man would have no reason to be active if he had no desires. He has however the desire to take part in the world surrounding him. This is why we also call his astral body his body of desires.

An inner connection exists between man's activity and his organs. He needs his organs both for the lowest and the highest impulses. He also needs them in art. When someone has once and for all absorbed everything from the world, he has no further use for his organs. Between birth and death man accustoms himself to perceive the world through his organs. After death what he is thus accustomed to must slowly be put aside. If he still wishes to make use of his organs to perceive the world, then he finds himself in the condition which is called Kamaloka. It is a condition in which there is still desire to perceive through the organs, which however are no longer there. If after death a person could say that he had no further desire to use his organs, Kamaloka would no longer exist for him. In Devachan everything which man formerly perceived around him with his organs, is there perceived from within—without organs.

Karma, man's activity through the astral body, is something which has not reached a state of balance. When however the activity gradually comes into a state of balance, equilibrium is brought about. If one strikes a pendulum it gradually reaches a state of balance. Every activity which has not reached a state of balance finally comes to rest. Irregularities which are few in number can be observed, but when they are extremely numerous they balance each other. By means of an instrument, for instance, one can observe the irregularities caused in a town by electric trams. In a small town, where the trams are fewer the instrument continually shows strong oscillations, but in a big town, where the movement is greater and more frequent, the instrument is much quieter, because the many irregularities equalise themselves. So it is also in Devachan with each single irregularity.

In Devachan man looks into himself. He observes what he has taken in. He must observe this for as long as is needed for it to reach a rhythmical condition.

A stroke calls forth a counterstroke; but only through many intermediate happenings does the counterstroke return. The effect however persists during the intervening period. The inter-relationship between stroke and counterstroke is worked over in Devachan and transformed into wisdom. What has been worked over and transformed into wisdom is metamorphosed in man into rhythm in contradistinction to activity. What has been changed into rhythm passes over into the etheric body. After Devachan one has become wiser and better because in Devachan all experiences have been worked over. That part of the astral body, which as vibrations has been worked into the etheric body, is immortal. When a man dies that part of the astral body is preserved which he has worked over and transformed, also the very small part of the etheric body which has been worked through; the remaining part of the etheric body is dissolved in the cosmic ether. In so far as this very small part has been worked through, to that degree is his etheric body immortal. Hence when he returns he again finds this small part of the etheric body. What needs to be added to bring about completion determines the duration of his sojourn in Devachan.

When a human being has progressed so far that he has transformed his entire etheric body, Devachan is no longer necessary. This is the case with the occult pupil who has perfected his development and who has transformed his etheric body so that it remains intact after death and has no need to pass through Devachan. This is called the renunciation of Devachan. It is permissible to allow someone to work on one's etheric body when one is certain that he no longer brings anything of evil into the rest of the world; otherwise he would work his harmful instincts into it. Under hypnosis it can happen that the one hypnotised works into the world the harmful instincts of the hypnotist. In the case of normal people the physical body prevents the etheric body from being dragged and drawn hither and thither. When however the physical body is in a state of lethargy it is possible for the etheric body to be worked into. If one person hypnotises another and works harmful instincts into him, these also remain with him after death. Many of the practices of black magicians consisted in their creating willing servants by this means. It is the rule of white magicians to allow nobody to have his etheric body worked into unless by someone whose instincts have passed through catharsis. In the etheric body rest and wisdom prevail. When something bad enters into it, this element of evil comes to rest and therefore endures.

Before the human being as pupil is led to that point at which of his own choice he can work on his etheric body, he must at least, to a certain extent be able to evaluate karma in order to achieve self-knowledge. Meditation therefore should not be undertaken without continual self-knowledge, self-observation. By this means, at the right moment man will behold the Guardian of the Threshold:⁸ the karma which he has still to pay back. When one reaches this stage under normal conditions it merely signifies the recognition of his still existing karma. If I begin to work into my etheric body, I must make it my aim to balance my still remaining karma. It can happen that the Guardian of the Threshold appears in an abnormal way. This happens when a person is so strongly attracted to one particular life between birth and death, that because of the very slight degree of inner activity he cannot remain long enough in Devachan. If someone has accustomed himself to be too outward looking, he has nothing to see within. He then soon comes back into physical life. His desires remain present, the short Devachan is soon over, and when he returns, the collective form of his earlier desires still exists in Kamaloka; he comes up against this also. He incarnates. The old is then mingled with his new astral body. This is his previous karma, the Guardian of the Threshold. He then has his earlier karma continually before him. This is a specific form of the Double.

Many of the popes of the notorious papal age, as for example Alexander VI, have had such a Double in their next incarnation. There are people, and at present this is not infrequent, who have their previous lower nature continually beside them. That is a special kind of insanity. It will become ever stronger and more threatening, because materialistic life becomes ever more widespread. Many people who now yield themselves up completely to materialistic life will in their next incarnation have the abnormal form of the Guardian of the Threshold at their side. If now the influence of spirituality were not to be very strongly exercised, a kind of epidemic seeing of the Guardian of the Threshold would arise as the result of the materialistic civilisation. Of this the neurotic tendency of our century is the precursor. It is a kind of losing oneself in the periphery. All the neurotics of today will be harassed by the Guardian of the Threshold in their next incarnation. They will be pursued by the difficulties of a too early incarnation, a sort of cosmic premature birth. What we have to strive for in Theosophy is a sufficiently long time in Devachan, in order to avoid too early incarnations.

From this aspect we must consider the entrance of Christ into world history. Previously, anyone who wished to achieve a life in Christ had to enter into a Mystery school. There a state of lethargy was induced in the physical body and only through the purified priesthood could there be added to the astral body what was still needed for its purification. This constituted initiation.

But through the coming of Christ into the world, it came about that a man who felt himself drawn to Christ could receive from him something which could take the place of this old form of initiation. It is always possible that someone through union with Christ can preserve his astral body in so purified a condition that he is able to work into his etheric body without doing harm to the world. When one bears this in mind the expression ‘vicarious atonement through death’ receives a quite other significance. This is what is meant by the atoning death of Christ. Before this, death in the Mysteries had to be suffered by everyone who wished to obtain purification. Now the One suffered for all, so that through the world-historic initiation a substitute has been created for the old form of initiation. Through Christianity much that is of a communal nature has been brought about, which previously was not communal. The active power of this substitution is expressed in the fact that through inner vision, through true mysticism, community with Christ is possible. This has also been embodied in language. The first Christian initiate in Europe, Ulfilas, himself embodied it in the German language, in that man found the ‘Ich’ within it. Other languages expressed this relationship through a special form of the verb, in Latin for instance the word ‘amo’, but the German language adds to it the Ich. ‘Ich’ is J. Ch. = Jesus Christ. It was with intention that this was introduced into the German language. It is the initiates who have created language. Just as in Sanskrit the AUM expresses the Trinity, so we have the sign ICH to express the inmost being of man. By this means a central point was created whereby the tumultuous emotions of the world can be transformed into rhythm. Rhythm must be instilled into them through the Ich. This centre point is literally the Christ.

All western nations have developed activity, passionate desires. An impulse must come from the East in order to bring into, them a more tranquil condition. There is already a precursor of this in Tolstoi's book, ‘On Doing Nothing’.⁹ In the activity of the West we find chaos in many spheres. This is continually on the increase. The spirituality of the East should bring a central point into the chaos of the West. What throughout long periods of time had its function as karma, passes over into wisdom. Wisdom is the daughter of karma. All karma finds its compensation in wisdom. An initiate who has reached a certain stage of development is called a Sun Hero, because his inner being has become rhythmical. His life is an image of the sun which in its rhythmical course traverses the heavens.

The word ‘Aum’ is the breath. The breath is related to the word as the Holy Spirit is to Christ, as the Atma is to the I.

• 7 . Often quoted by Rudolf Steiner. See: Darwin, Origin of Species, Chapter 5.
• 8 . See: Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and the Third Mystery Play.
• 9 . Published 1893. A detailed description of Tolstoi's ideas in contrast to Western ideas is to be found in Rudolf Steiner's lecture 3.11.1904. Theosophy and Tolstoy. (Typescript).

If we dive down within us, we'll find a lot of beings there. This may seem strange to us at first, but the more we learn to look into spiritual worlds, the more we'll see that a number of spiritual beings are working in us—often to undo the destruction that we men bring about through foolishness. Let's ask ourselves where disease comes from. We know that every disease has a physical cause and also a spiritual one that must be looked for in immorality, passions or other mistakes in this existence but mostly in the previous one. The overcoming of every disease releases force, but this doesn't mean that one should drag out an illness as long as possible to make rapid progress. Everyone should do his best to get well fast. But if he's been sick for three weeks or six months, he should look at this as karma and bear it patiently and calmly.

But there's another reason why disease is something beneficial. Since the Lemurian epoch and on through Atlantis until the Mystery of Golgotha, mankind sank ever more deeply into matter. Through the fact that we follow our drives and passions, we were brought ever further away from the goals that the Gods set for us. Disease is what bends this downward impulse and gives us an upward direction again.

Modern science condemns theosophical teachings and calls them dreams, but just read John's Gospel or any theosophical book and one will see the enlivening, refreshing effect it has, whereas a materialistic or monistic book desiccates one's soul. And since purely materialistic thinking only uses up forces the consequence in the next existence is that such people will be feeble-minded. Their brain will be a spongy watery mass; they'll want to think, but won't be able to. This feeble-mindedness is a good thing that keeps these people from sinking irrevocably. For through the fact that the brain is kept from materialistic thinking, the eternal can work on the core of the man's being after two successive incarnations, and influence it so that it strives upward again.

Something you'll all experience sooner or later in meditation is that one feels entirely loosened, the etheric body expands, one feels carried out to distant world boundaries, and then suddenly, one feels as if one were riveted to this world again, that one can't get away from it; it's as if one were sitting in a vise. That's good. It's our karma from previous incarnations that holds us fast like this. If our exercise would immediately take us up into the spiritual world before we took care of our karma, the result would be a long fall. Mehazel is the leader of these hosts who fix us to the earth. Like Samael, Azazel, and Azael, we get to know him when we descend into our interior. Then we'll really see that our interior is a field of action for demons, and as it says in the Bible: My name is Legion. We're supposed to become acquainted with these beings on our esoteric path so that we become sensible and gradually outgrow them. Azael works in such a way that he harmonizes what arises through dullness with respect to the spiritual world. We take over Azael's work when we acquire equanimity. Equanimity doesn't mean to jubilate or to complain about pain, but to recognize the reality of karmic action in everything. We shouldn't just believe in the karma idea theoretically, but should sense that karma is active in everything that hits us. This is the scourging stage in Christian initiation, that is, one should calmly confront all the pains of life that hit us like the blows of a whip and know that they're conditioned karmically. That's true equanimity.

We know that the physical world is only an inverted mirror image of the astral world. A very important meditation to make the words “The world is only maya” effective is the following. Everything around is really there in reverse. What we see from above downwards is really there from below upwards. A plant's root is above and the flower down below. The starry heavens we have before us is the result of spiritual beings who are really active behind us. Any sound that's received by the left ear comes from the right. We must become familiar with these facts and also with complementary colors. If someone has a lot of red spots imagine that they're green, or imagine that projecting limbs are cavities. One imagines the green in a plant as reddish purple and a brown root as dark blue. One should permeate all of these exercises with reverence and devotion. That's the feeling with which we can hope to approach the world's Godhead; whereas God remains an abstraction to mere thinking. If we glow through our thinking with reverence, devotion and humility, we may hope to penetrate the spiritual world.

Dr. Steiner: Today, we will primarily discuss the problem children we spoke with.

We will need to look at M.H. often. We will have to ask E.S. many things.

We can give some of the children in the fourth grade specific exercises, for instance, E.E. could learn the phrase, “People gain strength for life through learning.” You could allow him to say this each morning in the course of the first period. F.R. could learn, “I will pay attention to my words and thoughts,” and A.S. could learn, “I will pay attention to my words and deeds.”

We should have H.A. in the fifth grade do complicated drawings, for instance, a line that snakes about and comes back to its own beginning. He could also draw eurythmy forms. He should learn the phrase, “It is written in my heart to learn to pay attention and to become industrious.”

You will need to force T.E. in the seventh grade to follow very exactly and slowly. She should hear exactly and slowly what you say to her. That should have a different tempo than her own fragmented thinking. Think a sentence together with her, “I will think with you.” Only think it twice as slowly as she does.

O.R., in eighth grade, is sleepy. He is a kind of soul-earthworm. That kind of sleepiness arises because people pass things by and pay no attention to them. He shouldn’t play any pranks on anyone, nor disturb anyone’s attention.

In regard to the slow thinking in the third grade, you could take a phrase like, “The tree becomes green,” and turn it around to “Green becomes the tree,” and so forth so that they learn to turn their thinking around quickly.

My general impression is that, in spite of all of the obstacles, you should maintain the courage to continue your teaching. Although there is not much time left in this year, we still have much to do.

There is some discussion of afterschool care.

Dr. Steiner: The children should avoid comparing their teachers. You should pay attention to the children’s physical symmetry and asymmetry and seek what lies parallel in their souls. To do that, you must know each child’s peculiarities well. There is something called “flame symmetry,” that is, how things interact through harmonious motions. Ellicot first noticed it and did some work with it. What the teacher thinks affects the child when the teacher is really present. The main thing is that you take an interest in each child. A teacher asks about how to get through all the material and about homework.

Dr. Steiner: You should present homework as voluntary work, not as a requirement. In other words, “Who wants to do this?”

A teacher asks about a reading book.

Dr. Steiner: In the reading lesson, not all of the children need to read. You can bring some material and hand it around, allowing the children to read it, but not all need do so. However, the children should read as little as possible about things they do not understand very well. The teachers are reading aloud to the children too much. You should read nothing to the children that you do not know right into each word through your preparation. A teacher asks about modeling.

Dr. Steiner: You could use a column seen from a particular perspective as an example, but you should not make the children slavishly imitate it. You need to get the children to observe, but allow them to change their work.

A teacher: How far should I go in history before turning to something else? In the seventh grade, I have gotten as far as the end of the Caesars in Roman history, and in the eighth grade, I am at the Punic Wars.

Dr. Steiner: Make an effort to get to Christianity and then do two months of German. Do Goethe and Schiller in the eighth grade.

[Dr. Steiner tells an anecdote about a child who is asked, “Who are Goethe and Schiller?” The child replies, “Oh, those are the two statues sitting on the piano at home.”]

You should teach German history differently in the eighth grade than in the seventh.

A teacher asks a question.

Dr. Steiner: The teachers should write essays for The Social Future. They should tell about their pedagogical experiences, in particular, of the children’s feelings. Modern pedagogical literature is absolutely worthless before Dittes. However, through such writings, we can make it more human.

A teacher: Should we form a ninth grade next year?

Dr. Steiner: A ninth grade is certainly desirable. The school regulations no longer apply then, and we can be quite free. The ninth grade will arise spontaneously out of the results of the eighth grade.

The objection might easily be raised to an address such as this to-day that symbolic and allegoric meanings are forced out of something which a poet has created in the free play of his imaginative fancy. The day before yesterday we set ourselves the task to explore the deeper meaning of Goethe's ‘Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily,’ as it was then presented to our eyes. It will always happen that such an analysis or explanation of a work of fantasy will be turned down with the remark: ‘Oh, all sorts of symbols and meanings with profound applications are looked for in the figures of the work.’ Therefore I want to say at once that what I shall say to-day has nothing whatever to do with the symbolic and allegoric interpretations often made by Theosophists about legends or poetic works. And because I know that again and again the objection has been made to similar explanations which I have given: ‘We are not going to be caught by such symbolic meanings of poetic figures,’ I cannot stress the fact sufficiently that what is to be said here must be taken in no other sense than the following. We have before us a poetic work, a work of comprehensive imaginative power or fantasy, that goes to the depths of things: ‘The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.’ We may well be allowed the question, whether we may approach the work from any particular point of view, and attempt to find the basic idea, the true content of this so poetic a product.

We see the plant before us. Man goes to it and examines the laws, the inner regularity, by which the plant grows and flourishes, by which it unfolds its nature bit by bit. Has the botanist, or even someone who is no botanist, but arranges the growth of the plant in his imagination, the right to do it? Can one object: the plant knows nothing of the laws you are discovering, the laws of its growth and development! This objection against the botanist or the lyric poet who expresses the sensations derived from the plant in his poetry would have the same weight as the objection one could bring against such an explanation of Goethe's story. I do not want things to be taken as if I were to say to you: There we have a Snake, which means this or that, there we have a Golden, a Silver, and a Brazen King, who stand for this or that. I do not intend to expound the story in this symbolic, allegoric sense, but more in such a way that as the plant grows according to laws of which it is itself unconscious, and as the botanist has the right to discover these laws of its growth, one must also say to oneself that it does not follow that the poet Goethe was consciously aware of the explanations which I shall give you. For it is as true that we must consider the inevitability, and the true ideal content of the story as it is that we discover the laws of the plant's growth; that the plant grows in accordance with the same inevitability which originated it, though it is itself unconscious of it.

So I ask you to take what I shall say as if it presented the sense and the spirit of Goethe's methods of thought and idea-conception and as if he who, as it were, feels himself called upon to put before you the ideal philosophy of Goethe, were justified—that you might find a way to it—in expounding the product of Goethe's invention, in emphasizing the figures, and in pointing out their correlation—just as the botanist demonstrates that the plant grows in accordance with laws he has discovered.

Goethe's psychology or soul-philosophy, namely, what he considers determinative for the nature of the soul, is illustrated in his beautiful Fairy Story of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily; and if we are to understand each other in what I have to say it will be a good thing if, in a preliminary study, we make the spirit of his soul-world clear. It has been already pointed out in the previous address that the world-conception represented here starts from the view that human knowledge is not to be looked upon as something stationary once for all. The view is widely held that man is as he is to-day, and being what he is he can give unequivocal judgment on all things; he observes the world with his sense-organs, takes in its phenomena, combines them with his reason, which is bound to his senses, and the result is an absolute knowledge of the world which must be valid for all. On the other side—but only in a certain way—stands the spiritual scientific world-conception which is represented here. This starts from the premise that what is to become our knowledge is continually dependent on our organs and our capacity for knowledge and that we ourselves are, as men, capable of development; that we can work on ourselves, and raise higher such capabilities as we have on a given level of existence. It holds that we can educate them, and they can be developed still further, even as man has developed himself from an imperfect state to his present position, and that we must come to a deeper penetration of things, and a more correct view of the world by rising to higher standards. To put it more clearly, if also more trivially: if we leave out altogether a development of humanity and look only at people as they are around us; and then turn our eyes on those men whom one reckons as belonging to primitive races in the history of civilization, and if we ask ourselves what they can know of the laws of the world around us and compare it with what an average European with some ideas of science can know of the world, we shall see there is a great difference between the two. Take, for instance, an African negro's picture of the world and that, let us say, of an European monist, who has a sense of reality through having absorbed a number of the scientific ideas of the present age: the two are entirely dissimilar.

But on the other hand Spiritual Science is far from depreciating the world-picture of the man who takes his stand on pure materialism, and from declaring it invalid. It is more true to say that in these things it is considered that in every case a man's world-picture corresponds to a stage in human evolution, and that man is able to increase the capabilities in him and to discover by means of the increase other new things.

It lies thus in the purview of Spiritual Science that man reaches ever higher knowledge by developing himself, and what he experiences in the process is objective world-content, which he did not see before because he was not capable of seeing it. Spiritual Science is therefore different from other one-sided world-conceptions, whether spiritualistic, or materialistic, because it does not recognize an absolute, unchangeable truth, but only a wisdom and truth belonging to a given stage of evolution. Thus it adheres to Goethe's saying: ‘Man has really always only his own truth, and it is always the same.’ It is always the same because what we instil into ourselves through our power of learning, viz., the objective, is the same.

Now how does man succeed in developing the capabilities and powers that lie in him? One may say that Spiritual Science is as old as human thought. It always took the view that man has before him the ideal of a certain knowledge-perfection, the object of his aspiration. The principle contained in this was always called the ‘principle of initiation.’ This initiation means nothing other than increasing the powers of man to ever higher stages of knowledge, and thereby attaining deeper insight into the nature of the world around him. Goethe stood completely and all his life long, one may say, on this principle of development towards knowledge, this principle of initiation; which is shown us most particularly in his Fairy Tale.

We shall understand each other most easily if we proceed from the view which is held most often and most widely to-day, and which is to a certain extent in opposition to the initiation-principle.

To-day one can hear in the widest circles those people who think about such things and believe themselves to have an opinion on them representing, more or less consciously, the point of view that in what concerns truth and objective reality only physical observation, or objects of physical observation can be decisive in formulating ideas. You will constantly hear it: that alone can be Science which is based on the objective foundation of observation, and by this one understands so frequently is meant only the observation of the senses and the application of the human reason and capacity to formulate thoughts to these sense-observations. Every one of you knows that the capacity to formulate ideas and concepts is a capacity of the human soul among other capacities and every one of you also knows that these other capacities of the soul are our feeling and our will. Thus, even with this comparative superficial review, we may say: man is not merely an ideating, but also a feeling and willing being. Now those who think they must put forward the purely scientific point of view will always repeat: in science, only the power of thought may enter, never human feeling, never what we know as will-impulses, for otherwise that which is objective would become clouded, and that which the power of thought might achieve by being kept impersonal, would only be prejudiced.

It is correct enough that when a man introduces his feeling, his sympathy or antipathy, into the object of a scientific enquiry, he finds it repulsive or attractive, sympathetic or antipathetic. And where should we be if he were to consider his desire as a source of knowledge, so that he could say about a thing, I want it or I do not want it? Whether it displeases or pleases you, whether you desire it or not, is entirely the same to the thing. As true as it is that he who believes himself able to stand on the firm ground of science can confine himself only to externals, so true it is that the thing itself compels you to say it is red, and that the impression you get concerning the nature of a stone is the correct one. But it does not lie in the nature of the thing that it appears to you ugly or beautiful, that you desire it or not. That it appears to you red has an objective reason; that you do not desire it has no objective reason.

In a certain respect modern psychology has got beyond the point of view just described. It is not my task here to speak for or against that tendency of modern psychology which says: ‘When we consider psychic phenomena and the soul-life, we must not confine ourselves only to intellectualism, we must regard man not merely in what concerns the power of conception, we must also consider the influences of the world of feeling and will.’ Perhaps some of you know that this belongs to Wundt's system of philosophy, which takes the will to be the origin of soul-activity. In a way that is in some respects fundamental, whether one agrees with it or not, the Russian psychologist Losski has pointed out the control of the will in human soul-life, in his last book called ‘Intuitivism.’ I could say much to you if I wanted to show how concerned the theory of the soul is to overcome the one-sidedness of intellectualism, and if further, I wanted to show you that the other powers also play a part in human soul-power.

If you carry the thought a step further, you will be able to say that this shows how impossible the demand is that the power of formulating ideas, limited as it is to observation, may lead to objective results in science. When science itself shows its impossibility, shows that everywhere Will plays a part, on what grounds would you then establish the purely objective observation of anything? Because you prefer to recognize only matter as objective, subject as you are to the tricks played by the will and your habits of thought, and because you have not the habit of thought and feeling to recognize also the spiritual element in things, therefore you omit the latter altogether in your theories. It is not a question, if we want to understand the world, of what kind of abstract ideals we set before us, but of what we can accomplish in our souls.

Goethe belongs to those people who reject the principle most categorically that knowledge is produced only through the thinking capacity, the one-sided capacity to form ideas. The prominent and significant principle expressed more or less clearly in Goethe's nature is that he considers that all the powers of the human soul must function if man is to unravel the riddles of the world.

Now we must not be one-sided and unjust. It is quite correct, when the objection is raised that feeling and will are qualities subjected to the personal characteristics of a man, and when it is asked where we should come to if not only what the eyes see and the microscope shows, but also what feeling and will dictate were considered as attributes of things! All the same that is just what we have to say in order to understand someone who, like Goethe, stands for the principle of initiation and development, namely, that, given the average feeling and will in man to-day, they cannot be applied to the acquirement of knowledge, that, in fact they would lead only to an absolute disharmony in their knowledge. One man wants this, the other that, according to the subjective needs of feeling and will. But the man who stands on the ground of initiation is also quite clear that of the powers of the human soul—thinking, representation, feeling, will—the capacity to construct thoughts and to think has advanced furthest, and is most inclined and adapted to exclude the personal element and to attain objectivity. For that soul-power which is expressed in intellectualism is now so advanced that when men rely upon it, they quarrel least, and agree most in what they say. Feeling and will have not had the chance of being developed to this point. We can also justifiably find differences when we examine the region of ideas and their representation. There are regions of the idea-life which give us completely objective truths, which men have recognized as such, quite apart from external experience, and these truths are the same if a million people differ in their opinions about them. If you have experienced in yourself the reasons for it, you are able to assert the truth even if a million people think otherwise. For instance, everyone can find such truths confirmed as those dealing with numbers and space dimension. Everyone can understand that 3 x 3 = 9, and it is so, even if a million people contradict it. Why is this the case? Because regarding such truths such as mathematical truths, most people have succeeded in suppressing their preference and their aversion, their sympathy and their antipathy, in short, the personal factor, and letting the matter speak for itself. This exclusion of the personal in the case of thought and the capacity to formulate ideas has always been called the ‘purification’ of the human soul, and considered the first stage on the way to initiation, or, as one might also say, on the way to higher knowledge.

The man who is versed in these things says to himself: It is not only with regard to feeling and the will that people are not yet so far that nothing personal enters into it, and that they can verify objectivity, but also with regard to thought the majority are not yet so far as to be able to give themselves up purely to what the things, the ideas of the things themselves say to him, as everyone can in mathematics. But there are methods of purifying thought to such a point that we no longer think personally, but let the thoughts in us think, as we let mathematical thought do. Thus, when we have cleansed thought from the influences of personality, we speak of purification or catharsis, as it was called in the old Eleusinian mysteries. Hence man must reach the point of purifying his thinking, which then enables him to comprehend things with objective thought.

Now, just as this is possible, so is it also possible to eliminate all the personal factor from feeling, so that the appeal of things to the feelings has no longer any say, to the Personal, or to Sympathy and Antipathy; nothing but the nature of the thing is evoked, in so far as it cannot speak to mere concept capacity. Experiences in our souls which have their roots or origin in our feelings, and which therefore lead to inner knowledge, and lead deeper into the nature of a thing, speaking however to other sides of the soul than mere intellectualism, can be purified of the personal element as well as thought, so that feeling can transmit the same objectivity as thought can. This cleansing or development of the feelings is called in all esoteric doctrine ‘enlightenment.’ Every man capable of development, and striving after it in no casual way, (that lies in intention of the personality) must take pains to be stirred only by what lies in the nature of the thing. When he has reached the point where the thing rouses in him neither sympathy nor antipathy, where he allows only the nature of things to speak, so that he says: whatever sympathies or antipathies I have are immaterial and are not to be taken into consideration, then it lies in the nature of the thing that the thought and action of the man assume this or that direction—then it is a declaration of the innermost nature of the thing. In esoteric doctrine this development of the will has been called ‘consummation.’

If a man takes his stand on the ground of spiritual science, he says to himself: ‘If I have a thing in front of me, there is in it a spiritual element, and I can so stimulate my mode of conception, that the essence of the thing is represented objectively through my concepts and ideas. Hence there is present in me the same thing that works externally, and I have recognized the essence of the thing through my mode of conception. But what I have recognized is only a part of the essence.’ There exists in things something which can speak not to thought at all, but only to feeling, and indeed only to purified feeling or to feeling which has become objective. The man who has not yet developed in himself by this cultivation of the feelings such a part of the essence, cannot recognize the essence along these lines. But for the man who says to himself that feeling as well as the capacity to think can provide a basis of knowledge (not the feeling as it is, but as it can become by means of well-founded methods of the teaching of cognition) for such a man it becomes gradually clear that there are things deeper than thought possibilities, things which speak to one's soul and the feelings. There are also things which reach even down to the will.

Now Goethe was particularly convinced that this really is the case, and that man really has in him these possibilities of development. He stood firmly on the ground of the principle of initiation, and he has shown us the initiation of man through the development of his soul and the development of the three powers of will, feeling and thought by representing them in his Fairy Tale.

The Golden King represents the initiation for the thought-capacity, the Silver King represents the initiation with knowledge capacity of objective feeling, and the Brazen King the initiation for knowledge capacity of the will. Goethe has emphasized that man must overcome certain things if he wishes to receive these three gifts. The Youth in the story represents man in his struggle for the highest. As Schiller in his Æsthetic Letters depicts man's aspiration towards complete humanity, so Goethe depicts in the Youth man's aspiration for the highest, wanting straight away to reach the Beautiful Lily, and attaining then inner human perfection, given him by the three Kings.

How that happens is pointed out in the course of the story. You remember that in the subterranean Temple, into which the Snake looks because of the earth's power of crystallization, one King was in each of the four corners. In the first was the Golden, in the second the Silver, in the third the Brazen King. In the fourth was the King who was a mixture of the other three metals, in whom, therefore, the three composite parts were so welded that one could not distinguish them. In this fourth King, Goethe depicts for us the representative of that stage of human development in which will, thought and feeling are mixed together. In other words he stands for that human soul which is governed by will, thought and feeling, because it is itself not master of these three capacities. On the other hand in the Youth, after he receives the three gifts from the three Kings separately, so that they are no longer chaotically mixed, that stage of knowledge is represented which does not allow itself to be ruled by thought, feeling and will, but which, on the contrary, rules over them. Man is ruled by them as long as they flow chaotically and intermingled in him, as long as they are not pure and independent in his soul. Until man has reached this separation, he is not capable of being effective through his three knowledge-capacities. When he has reached this point, however, he is no longer the subject of Chaos, but on the contrary himself controls his thought, his feeling and his will, when each is as pure and unalloyed as the metal of the respective Kings: his mode of Conception, pure as the Golden King (for nothing is mixed in him); his mode of Feeling, where nothing is added or mixed, but pure as the Silver King; and so too the Will, pure as the brass of the Brazen King; Concepts and Feelings no longer govern him, for he stands, in his nature, free; he is capable, in a word, of comprehension by means of thought, of feeling and will as required, making use of each separately. He can grasp according to necessity and the nature of things either by means of thinking, feeling or willing. Then he has advanced so far that the whole pure knowledge-capacity which we see in thought, feeling and will, leads him to a deeper insight, and he really steeps himself in the current of events, in the inner nature of things. Of course only experience can teach that this is possible.

Now it will not be difficult to agree, after what I said just now, that if Goethe makes the Youth represent striving mankind, we may see in the Beautiful Lily another soul-condition, namely, that soul-condition which man attains when the beings lying in things spring forth in the soul, and he thereby raises his existence by blending the things in himself with the nature of things in the external world. What man experiences in his soul by growing out of himself, by becoming master of the powers of the soul, victor over the chaos in his soul; what man then experiences, that inner blessedness, that unity with things; their awakening in him, is shown us by Goethe in his representation of the union with the Beautiful Lily. Beauty here is not merely aesthetic beauty, but a quality of man brought to a certain stage of perfection. So that we shall also now find it easy to understand why Goethe makes the Youth proceed in his effort to reach the Beautiful Lily, in such a way that all his powers at first disappear. Why is this?

We understand Goethe's presentation of such a scene if we hold fast to a thought he once expressed: ‘Everything which gives us mastery over ourselves without liberating us, leads us into error.’ Man must first be free, he must reach the point of being master of his inner soul-powers, and then he can attain union with the highest soul-condition, with the Beautiful Lily. But if he sets out to attain it unprepared, with still immature powers, they are lost and his soul is shrivelled. Hence Goethe points out that the Youth seeks this liberation which will make him captain of his soul. The moment his soul-powers are no longer chaotic, but are purified, cleansed and ordered, he is ready to reach that condition of soul which is symbolized by his union with the Beautiful Lily.

So we see that Goethe constructs these figures in free creative fantasy, and if we look upon them as representing soul-powers, we see that they permeate and work in his whole soul. If we look upon them like this, if we are as sensitive to these figures as in a way Goethe was—Goethe who unlike a second-rate didactic poet was not content to say what this or that soul-quality meant, but used it to express what he felt himself, then we shall realize what is expressed in these poetic figures. And therefore the various figures stand in the same personal relationship to each other as the soul-powers of a man stand to each other.

It cannot be clearly enough insisted upon that there is no question of the characters meaning this or that. That is certainly not the case. Rather is it that Goethe felt this or that in this or that soul-activity and transformed his feelings in connection with one or the other soul-activity into one or the other figures.

Thus he created the sequence of the story's events, which is still more important than the figures themselves. We see the Will-o'-the-Wisps and the Green Snake, and that the former cross over from the other side of the river and reveal quite peculiar qualities. They absorb the gold greedily, even lick it from the walls of the Old Man's room, and then throw it about prodigally. The same gold which in the Will-o'-the-Wisps is a sign of worthlessness, as we are also shown by the fact that the Ferryman has to refuse it—otherwise the river would surge up¹—the Ferryman may take only fruits in payment—this gold—what effect does it have in the body of the Green Snake? The Snake, after taking it, becomes internally luminous! And the plants and other things round her are also lit up because she takes into herself what in the case of the Will-o'-the-Wisps is a symbol of worthlessness.

But a certain importance is ascribed even to them. You know that the Old Man at the critical moment calls upon the Will-o'-the-Wisps to open the Temple gates, so that the whole train can enter in. Precisely the same thing which happens here in the case of the Green Snake, is to be found in the human soul, a thing we came across particularly clearly two days ago in the conversation between Goethe and Schiller. We saw that Schiller, as he spoke with Goethe about the way in which nature should be regarded, was still of the opinion that the drawing with a few strokes by Goethe of the proto-plant was an idea, an abstraction, which one receives when one omits the differentiating features and puts together the common ones. And we saw that Goethe thereupon said that if that was an idea, then he saw his ideas with his eyes. At this moment there were two quite different realities in opposition. Schiller trained himself completely to take Goethe's way of looking at things; so that it shows no lack of honour to Schiller if he is taken as an example of that human soul which moves in abstractions, and preferably in those ideas of things which are comprehended by the mere reason. That is a particular inclination of the soul, which, if a man wishes to attain a higher development, can, in certain circumstances, play a very dangerous part.

There are people whose inclination lies in the direction of the abstract. Now when they combine this abstraction with something they come across as soul-power, this is, as a rule, the concept of unproductivity. These people are sometimes very acute, they can draw fine distinctions, and connect this or that concept wonderfully. But you also often find with such a soul-condition, that the spiritual influences, inspirations, are excluded. This soul-condition, characterized by unproductivity and abstraction, is represented to us in the Will-o'-the-Wisps. They take up the gold wherever they find it; they lack any inventive faculty, are unproductive and can grasp no ‘ideas.’ These ideas are alien to them. They have not the will unselfishly to yield themselves up to things, or to stick to facts or to use concepts only as far as they are interpreters of facts. All they care about is to stuff their reasons full of concepts, and then scatter them about prodigally. They are like a man who goes to libraries, collects wisdom there, and takes it in and then gives it out again correspondingly. These Will-o'-the-Wisps are typical of that soul-capacity which is never able to grasp a single literary thought, or feeling, but which can nevertheless grasp in beautiful forms what creative spirits have produced in literature. I do not mean to say anything against this kind of soul. If a man did not have it nor cultivated it when he was insufficiently endowed with it, he would lack something which must be present when it comes to the real capacity for knowledge. In his picture of the Will-o'-the-Wisps, in the whole circumstances in which they appear and act, Goethe shows the manner in which such a soul-type functions, in relation to other soul-types, how it harms and benefits. In truth, if someone wanted to climb to higher stages of knowledge and had not this faculty of soul, there would not be the means to open the Temple for him. Goethe shows the advantages equally with the drawbacks of this soul-condition. What he gives us in the Will-o'-the-Wisps represents a soul-element. The moment it wants to lead an independent life in one direction or another, it becomes harmful. This abstraction leads to a critical faculty which makes men learn everything indeed, but incapable of further development, because the productive element is missing in them. But Goethe also clearly shows how far there is value in what the Will-o'-the-Wisps represent. What they contain can become something valuable; in the Snake the Will-o'-the-Wisps' gold turns to something valuable in so far as she illumines the objects round about her.

What lives in the Will-o'-the-Wisps, when worked out in another way, will become extremely fruitful in the human soul. When man strives so to regard his experiences of concepts and ideas and ideal creations not as something abstract in themselves, but as capable of leading to and interpreting the realities round him, so that he thinks as selflessly and willingly of his observations as of the abstract quality of the concepts, then he is as regards this soul-power in the same position as the Green Snake: then he can produce light and wisdom out of the purely abstract concepts. Then he is not brought to be in the vertical line which loses all connection and relation to the horizontal plane. The Will-o'-the-Wisps are the Snake's relatives, but of the vertical line. The gold-pieces fall through the rocks, are absorbed by the Snake which thereby becomes inwardly luminous. He who approaches the things themselves with these concepts absorbs wisdom.

Goethe gives us also an example of how one is to work on the conceptions (Begriffe). He has the conception of the proto-plant. Primarily it is an abstract conception, which, were it worked out in the abstract, would become an empty picture, killing all life, as the gold, thrown down by the Will-o'-the-Wisps, killed the Pug-dog. But just think what Goethe does with the conception of the proto-plant. If we follow him on his Italian journey, we see that this conception is only the ‘leit-motif’ going from plant to plant, from being to being. He takes the conception, goes from it over to the plant, and sees how this is made in one or another shape, taking on quite different shapes, in lower or higher places, and so on. Now he follows from step to step how the spiritual reality or form creeps into every physical form. He himself creeps about like the Snake in the crevices of the earth. Thus for Goethe the conception-world is nothing else but that which can be spun into objective reality. The Snake for him is the representative of that soul-power which does not struggle upward selfishly to higher regions of existence in an attempt to raise itself above everything, but which continually and patiently lets the conception be verified by observation, patiently goes from experience to experience. When man not merely theorizes, not merely lives in the conceptions, but applies them to life and experience, then he is as far as this soul-power is concerned, in the position of the Snake. This is so in a very wide sense. He who takes philosophy not as a theory, but as what it is meant to be, he who regards the conceptions of spiritual science as exercises for life, knows that just such conceptions, even the highest, are meant to be applied in such a way that they merge into life and are verified by daily experience. The man who has learnt a few conceptions but is incapable of applying them to life is like a man who has learned a cooking-book by heart, but cannot cook. As the gold is a means to throw light on things, so Goethe illuminates the things round him by means of his ideas.

This is the instructive and grand thing about Goethe's attitude to Science, and his every effort, that his ideas and conceptions have reality and have the effect of lighting up all objects round him. The day before yesterday special importance was laid on the universality in Goethe which gives the reason why we never have the feeling: that is Goethe's ‘meaning.’ He stands there, and when we see him, we find only that we understand things better which before were not so clear. For this reason he was capable of becoming the point of agreement between two hostile brethren, as we saw the day before yesterday.

If we wanted to discuss every feature in this fairy tale and characterize every figure in it, I should have to speak not for three hours but for three weeks on it. So I can give you only the deeper principles contained in the story. But every feature shows us something of Goethe's method of thought and his opinion of the world.

Those soul-powers which are represented in the Will-o'-the-Wisps, in the Green Snake and in the Kings, are on one side of the River. On the other side lives the Beautiful Lily, the ideal of perfect knowledge and perfect life and work. We heard from the Ferryman that he can bring the people (gestalten, forms) from the other side to this, but can take no one back again. Let us apply this to our whole soul-mood or soul-condition and our improvement.

We find ourselves on earth as beings with souls. These or the other soul-capacities work upon us as talents, as more or less developed soul-powers. They are in us; but we have also something else in us. In us human beings if we take ourselves properly there is the feeling, the knowledge that the powers of our soul, which finally interpret the nature of things to us, are closely related to the elemental spirits (grundgeister) of the world, with the Creative, Spiritual forces. The longing for these creative forces is the longing for the Beautiful Lily. Thus we know that everything derived on one hand from the Beautiful Lily, strives on the other to return to her. Unknown forces unmastered by us have brought us from the world on the other side over the river-boundary to this side. But these forces, characterized by the Ferryman, and working in the depths of unconscious nature, cannot take us back again, for otherwise man would return, without his work and co-operation, to the kingdom of the divine, precisely as he came over. The forces which as unconscious nature-forces have brought us over into the kingdom of struggling humanity, may not lead us back again. For this other forces are required; and Goethe is aware of it. But he wants to show also how man must set about being able to re-unite with the Beautiful Lily. There are two ways. One leads over the Green Snake; we can cross by it and gradually find the kingdom of the spirit. The other way goes across the Giant's shadow. We are shown that the Giant, otherwise without strength, stretches out his hand at dusk, and its shadow falls across the River. The second road leads over this shadow. Whoever wishes therefore to cross by clear daylight to the kingdom of the spirit must use the way provided by the Snake; and whoever wishes to cross at dusk can use the way leading across the Giant's shadow. Those are the two ways to reach a spiritual picture of the world. The man who aspires to the spiritual world—not with human concepts and ideas, not with those forces which are symbolized by the worthless gold (as spirits of bare sophistry) and the Will-o'-the-Wisps—but by proceeding patiently and selflessly from experience to experience, succeeds in reaching the other bank in full sunlight.

Goethe knows that real research does not stop at material things, but must lead over beyond the boundary; beyond the river which separates us from the spiritual. But there is another way, a way for undeveloped people, who do not want to take the road of knowledge, but a way represented by the Giant. He himself is powerless, only his shadow has a certain strength. Now what is powerless in a true sense? Take all the conditions possible to man when his consciousness is reduced, as in hypnotism, somnambulism and even dream-conditions; everything by which the clear consciousness of day is subdued, whereby man is subject to lower soul-power than in clear consciousness, belongs to this second way. Here the soul, by surrendering its ordinary daily functional power of the soul, is led into the real kingdom of the spirit. The soul, however, does not itself become capable of crossing into the spiritual kingdom, but remains unconscious and is carried across like the Shadow into the kingdom of spirit. Goethe includes in the forces represented by the Giant's shadow everything which functions unconsciously and from habit, without the soul-powers which are active during clear consciousness taking part. Schiller, who was initiated into Goethe's meaning, once, at the time of the great upheavals in Western Europe, wrote to Goethe: ‘I rejoice that you have not been roughly caught in the shadow of the giant.’ What did he mean? He meant that had Goethe travelled further West, he would have been caught in the revolutionary forces of the West.

Then we see that the objects of man's quest, the height of knowledge, is represented in the ‘Temple.’ The Temple represents a higher stage of man's evolution. Goethe nowadays would say that if the Temple is something hidden, it is under the narrow crevices of the earth. Such an aspiring soul-force as is represented in the Snake can feel the shape of the Temple only dimly. By absorbing the ideal, the gold, she can illumine this shape, but fundamentally the Temple can be there to-day only as a subterranean secret. But though Goethe leaves the Temple as something subterranean for external culture, he points out that to a further-developed man this secret must be unlocked. In this he indicates the current of Spiritual Science which to-day has already caught up wide masses of people, which in a comprehensive sense seeks to make popular the content of Spiritual Science, of the principle of initiation, and of the Temple's secret. The Youth is therefore to be regarded in this truly free Goethean sense as the representative of aspiring mankind. Therefore the Temple is to rise beyond the River, so that not only a few individuals who seek illumination can cross and re-cross, but so that all people can cross the River by the bridge. Goethe, in the Temple of Initiation above the earth puts before us a future state, which will have arrived when man can go from the kingdom of the senses into the kingdom of the spiritual, and from the kingdom of the spiritual into the kingdom of the senses.

How is this attained in the Fairy Tale? Because the real secret of it is fulfilled. The solution of the story is to be found in the story itself, says Schiller, but he has also pointed out that the word that solves it is inserted in a very remarkable way. You remember the Old Man with the Lamp, which illuminates only where there is already light? Now, who is this Old Man, and what is the Lamp? What is its curious light? The Old Man stands above the situation. His lamp has the peculiar quality of changing things, wood into silver, stone into gold. It has also the quality of shining only where there is already a receptivity, a definite kind of light. As the Old Man enters the subterranean Temple he is asked how many secrets he knows. ‘Three,’ he replies. To the Silver King's question, ‘Which is the most important,’ he answers: ‘The open one.’ And when the Brazen King asks whether he would tell it them also, he says: ‘As soon as I know the fourth.’ Whereupon the Snake whispers something in his ear and he says at once:

‘The Time is at Hand.’

The solution of the riddle is what the Snake whispered in the Old Man's ear, and we have to find out what that is. It would lead us too far to say at length what the three secrets mean. I shall only hint at it. There are three Kingdoms which in evolution are so to speak stationary: the mineral, the vegetable and the animal Kingdoms, which are completed, as compared with progressive man, who is still developing. The inner development of man is so vehement and important that it cannot be confused with the development of the other three nature kingdoms. What the secret of the Old Man contains is the fact that one Kingdom of nature has arrived at the present point of a full-stop, and this is what explains the laws of the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms. But now comes the fourth kingdom, that of man, the secret which is to be revealed in the human soul. The secret which the Old Man must first discover, is of this kind. And how must he discover it? He knows of what it consists, but the Snake has to tell him first. This indicates to ns that man has still to go through something special, if he wants to attain the goal of evolution as the three other kingdoms have done. What this is the Snake whispers to the Old Man. She tells how a certain soul-power must be developed, if a higher stage is to be reached; she says that she has the will to sacrifice herself for this, and she does in fact sacrifice herself. Hitherto she has made a bridge when here and there someone wished to cross; but now she will become a permanent bridge, by falling in pieces, so that man will have a lasting connection between this side and that, between the spiritual and the physical. That the Snake has the will to sacrifice herself must be taken as the condition of revealing the fourth secret. The moment the Old Man hears that the Snake will sacrifice herself, he can even say: ‘The time is at hand!’ It is that soul-power which adheres to the external. And the way to be trodden is not to make this soul-force and inner science the ultimate end but self-surrender. That really is a secret, even if it is called an ‘open secret,’ that is, when any who will can know it. What is regarded in a wide circle as end in itself—everything we can learn in natural science, in political science of civilization, in history, in mathematics and all other sciences can never be an absolute end. We can never come to a true insight into the depths of the world, if we consider them as ends in themselves. Only if we are at all times ready to absorb them and regard them as means, which we offer as a bridge to let us cross over, do we come to real knowledge. We bar ourselves off from the higher, true knowledge unless we are also ready to sacrifice ourselves. Man will get an idea of what initiation is only when he ceases to carve for himself a world-conception out of external-physical concepts. He must be all feeling, with all-attuned soul, such a soul as Goethe describes in his ‘Westöstlichen Divan’ as the highest acquisition of man:

‘And so long thou hast not this, Death and Birth!
Thou art but a sorry guest, on this dark Earth.’

Death and Birth! Learn to know what life can offer, go through with it, but surpass, transcend yourself. Let it become a bridge for you, and you will wake up in a higher life and be one with the essence of things, when you no longer live in the illusion that, cut off from the higher ego, you can exhaust the essence of things. When Goethe speaks of the sacrifice of the idea and the soul-material, in order to acquire new life in higher spheres, and of the deepest inner love, he likes to think of the words of the mystic Jacob Böhme, who knows from experience this self-surrender of the Snake. Perhaps Jacob Böhme has pointed out just this to him and made it so clear to him that a man can live, even in the physical body, in a world which otherwise he would tread only after death, in the world of the eternal, the spiritual. Jacob Böhme knew also that it depends on the man, whether he can, in the higher sense, slide over into the spiritual world. He shows it in the saying: ‘Who dies not before he dies, is ruined when he dies.’ A significant saying! Man, who does not die before he dies, that is, who does not develop in himself the eternal, the inner kernel of being, will not be in a position, when he dies, to find again the spiritual kernel in himself. The eternal is in us. We must develop it in the body, so that we may find it outside the body. ‘Who dies not before he dies, is ruined when he dies.’ So it is also with the other sentence: ‘And so death is the root of all life.’

Thus we see that the things of the soul can only illumine a place where light already is: the Lamp of the Old Man can only shine where there is already light. Once more our attention is directed to those special soul-powers, of devotion and religious self-surrender, which for hundreds and thousands of years have brought the message of spiritual worlds to those who could not seek the light by way of Science or otherwise. The light of the different religious revelations is represented in the Old Man, who has this light. But to him who does not bring an inner light to meet the sense of religion, the Lamp of Religion gives no light. It can shine only where light already is and meets it. It is the Lamp which has transfigured man, which has led all mortality across to a life of soul.

And then we see that the two Kingdoms are united through the Snake's sacrifice. After it goes, so to say, through incidents symbolic of what man has to go through in his higher development in an esoteric sense, we see how the Temple of Knowledge is brought by means of all the three human soul-powers across the river, how it rises and each soul-power performs its service. This is meant to show that the soul-powers must be in harmony, since we are told: the single personality can achieve nothing; but when all work together at a favourable moment, when the strong and the weak co-operate in the right relationship, then the soul can acquire the ability to reach the highest state, the union with the Beautiful Lily. Then the Temple moves out of the hidden crevices up to the surface for all who strive in truth after knowledge and wisdom. The Youth is endowed with the knowledge-powers of thought by the Golden King: ‘Know and recognize the highest.’ He is endowed with the knowledge-powers of feeling by the Silver King, which Goethe expresses beautifully with the words: ‘Tend the sheep!’

In feeling are rooted art and religion, and for Goethe both were a unity—already at the time when he wrote on his Italian journey concerning Italy's works of art: ‘There is necessity, there is God!’

But there is also the doing—when man does not apply it to the struggle for existence, but when he makes it into a weapon for gaining beauty and wisdom. This is contained in the words spoken by the Brazen King to the Youth: ‘The Sword in the left hand, the right free!’ There is a whole world in these words. The right hand free to work the self out of human nature.

And what happens with the Fourth King, in whom all three elements are mingled together? This mixed King melts into a grotesque figure. The Will-o'-the-Wisps come and lick what gold there is off him: man's soul-powers here still want to examine what sort of stages of human development, now overcome, there once were.

Let us take yet another feature: namely, when the Giant comes staggering in and then stands there like a statue, pointing to the hours: when man has brought his life into harmony, then the subordinate has a meaning for what is intended to be methodical order. It ought to express itself like a habit. The unconscious itself will then receive a valuable meaning. Hence the Giant is depicted like a clock.

The Old Man with the Lamp is married to the Old Woman. This Old Woman represents to us nothing else but the healthy, understanding human soul-power, which does not penetrate into high regions of spiritual abstractions, but which handles everything healthily and practically, as, for instance, in religion, represented by the Old Man with the Lamp. She is the one to bring the Ferryman his pay: three heads of cabbage, three onions and three artichokes. Such a stage of development has not passed beyond the contemporary. That she is so treated by the Will-o'-the-Wisps is no doubt a reflected picture of how abstract minds look down with a certain amount of scorn on people who take things in directly by instinct or intuition.

Every point, every turn of this story is of deep significance, and if we enter into one more explanation, it must be of an esoteric kind, and you will find that one can really only give the method of explanation. Bury yourselves in the story, and you will discover that a whole world is to be found there, very much more than it has been possible to indicate to-day.

I should like to show you in two examples how much Goethe's spiritual world-view runs through his whole life, how in things of spiritual knowledge he stands in agreement in extreme old age with what he had written earlier.

While Goethe wrote ‘Faust’ he adopted a certain attitude which harks back to a symbol of a deeper evolution-path of nature. When Faust speaks of his father, who was an alchemist, and had taken over the old doctrines credulously, but had misunderstood them, he says that his father also made

‘... a Lion red, a wooer daring, Within the Lily's tepid bath espoused.’

Faust I, Scene II, p. 32.

That is what Faust says, without knowing its significance. But such a saying can become a ladder leading to high stages of development. In the Fairy Tale Goethe shows in the Youth the human being striving for the highest bride, and that with which he is to be united he calls the Beautiful Lily. You notice this Lily is to be found already in the first parts of ‘Faust.’

And, again, the very nerve of Goethe's philosophy which found expression in his Fairy Tale, is to be found also in ‘Faust:’ in Part II, in the Mystic Chorus, where Faust confronts the entry into the spiritual world, where Goethe sets down his avowal of a spiritual world-conception in monumental words. He shows there how the ascent on the road of knowledge follows in three successive stages, namely, the purification of the thought, the illumination of feeling and the working out of will. What man attains through the purification of the thought leads him to recognize the spiritual behind everything. The physical becomes a symbol of the spiritual. He goes deeper still, in order to grasp what is unattainable to thought. He then reaches a state at which he no longer regards things by means of thought, but is directed into the thing itself, where the essence of it, and what one cannot describe become accomplished fact. And that which one cannot describe, that which, as you will hear in the course of the winter addresses, must be thought of in another way, that whereby one must advance to the secrets of the will, he labels simply ‘the indescribable.’ When man has completed the threefold road through thought, feeling and will, he is united with what is called ‘eternal womanhood’ in the Chorus Mysticus, the goal of the human soul's development, the ‘Beautiful Lily’ of the Fairy Tale.

Thus we see that Goethe utters his deepest conviction, his secret revelation there also, where he brings his great confessional poem to an end, after rising up through thought and feeling and will to union with the Beautiful Lily, up to that state which finds its expression in the passage of the Chorus Mysticus, which expresses the same thing as Goethe's philosophy and spiritual science, as well as the Fairy Tale:

‘All things transitory
But as symbols are sent:
Earth's insufficiency
Here grows to Event:
The Indescribable,
Here it is done:
The Woman-Soul leadeth us
Upward and on!’

• 1. and the waves rear up like horses—aufbäumen. Ed.

It is, of course, only possible to give aphoristic indications here of what will have to be communicated in detail as time goes on, if your connection with the movement at the Goetheanum is to be continued in any real way.

It must be emphasized, above all, that in the very nature of things, one cannot heal in opposition to karma. The fundamental attitude of the physician must be that no healing is possible if it runs counter to karma. In his will-to-heal, the physician's attitude must, from the very outset, tend in two directions. First of all, there must be the unconquerable will that karma be fulfilled. The physician needs this above all for himself, for as you have heard, in a sense, he loses, so far as he himself is concerned, the effect of what he uses for his patients. It can, of course, be transformed so that it will also be effective for him, but all you need to know, in the first place, is what I have already said on this subject. The physician, too, is naturally subject to karma so far as his own health and illness are concerned. But when the proper attitude is present, when therapeutic knowledge penetrates deeply into the human soul, it can be said that the consciousness of karma becomes more and more an actual revelation of karma.

Karma has its two sides. You must regard karma in such a way that you relate your destiny to the earthly life immediately preceding the present one. Karma, in this aspect, is the expression of what the previously earthly lives have brought. But you have also to think of karma in the fifth or sixth subsequent earthly life, in the fifth or sixth life following the present one. Then you will have the results of what is happening now. If you carry this thought to its conclusion, you will realize that karma, too, is in the becoming, that what is happening now adds one thing or another to karma. It can also be said that here and there our deeds may give a turn to karma. Nobody who understands karma can ever be a fatalist.

The one direction of the physician's attitude is, therefore, towards karma. This leads to a sense of security and sureness in life, gives a firm standpoint. The other direction, however, is this; that the will-to-heal must always be present. This will must never, under any circumstances, weaken. It must be at work in therapy all the time, so that it can be truly said that everything possible is being done, even when one is of the opinion that the patient is incurable. You must suppress this opinion and do everything possible about healing. I merely indicate this, aphoristically.

What we have to do today is to deepen, in the esoteric sense, those things that may result in the awakening of soul forces in medical study. The content of the esoteric teaching must assume a particular form, must become a special activity, for the physician. The physician will not be able to content himself with looking at things as they are looked at in ordinary life. This is just what ordinary science does. Science does not call upon forces of soul which are not applied in ordinary life; on the contrary, science throws all its weight upon the side of not calling upon such forces. But the ordinary, current view of life does not enable us to know that some substance or process in the world contains healing forces. The healing forces are only revealed by things when we approach them with certain awakened powers of soul. It will be for you, step by step, to awaken these powers of soul in order that things may speak to you in such a way that in your work as physicians you are able to help human beings by their means. What is of importance is that what I have said to you about the attitude of the physician shall be infinitely deepened in your souls.

I will take a simple subject, to begin with, and treat it in the way in which it ought to be treated in medical study. It will seem aphoristic here, but when there is time, it will be developed.

Think of the form that is revealed to you in the bony skull. We can take this bony skull and draw it. Look at its form and contrast this form with what is revealed to you by a long bone—let us say the thigh bone. These bones are not quite on their own, for manifold physical forces play around the bony skull; equally manifold forces play around the long bones. But the reality of a long bone will only be revealed to you if you study it in connection with the whole universe.

Just think of a long bone. Its forces are such that they pass through its length, and when the human being assumes his true earthly posture, they actually go down to the central point of the earth. But that is not the essential. The essential thing about a long bone is that it introduces these forces into the connection that exists between the central point of the earth and the moon. Therefore whatever is placed in the body like the long bone of the thigh or the bone of the upper arm, or a muscle lying in a similar position, is really inserted into the forces which connect the earth with the moon. You can picture it like this. Here you have the earth. (See diagram below.)

Forces stream up to the moon from the earth and these forces include everything that is involved, let us say, in the position in which the thigh is when the human being is standing or walking.

On the other hand, everything that has a position like that of the skull-covering is membered into the Saturn movement. In the skull there are the rotatory forces which belong to Saturn. So that we can say: The human being is formed from below upwards through the connection between earth and moon. He is rounded off, finished off, by the rotatory forces of Saturn. But these two kinds of forces are counter to each other. In the forces which are contained in the connection between earth and moon there lies everything that gives the human being his plastic form, everything that builds him, plastically. One might say: There is a secret sculptor in these forces; whereas the other forces give rise to a perpetual process of demolition, in which the substances which build up the human being plastically are again disintegrated or dispersed. When you cut a nail, you with your scissors are in the Saturn forces; when you eat, this takes you into the realm of the forces working between earth and moon. All these latter forces are up-building forces. All the other forces pulverize the human being. In this interaction between pulverization and plastic up-building live the soul of man and the spirit of man. Therein they manifest themselves.

All that is connected with the etheric body of man both in the outer world and within man himself is connected with these peripheric forces. Silver is connected, in a certain respect, with the forces of up-building. So that when you notice in a human being that the up-building forces are being overpowered by the forces of demolition, you can as a rule correct this by means of some medicament derived from silver. But if you notice that the up-building forces are rampant, that they are maintaining the human being too strongly within his form, hindering as it were the process of pulverization, you will have recourse to the remedies that come from Saturn, from lead. When we know how the human being is built up, we begin to see how we must act.

What we have to do is find our way into this kind of perception. You see, my dear friends, the true world, the world of the spirit, has always been said, and rightly said, to lie on yonder side of a threshold. The human being lives on this side of a threshold. He has to pass over this threshold in order to attain true knowledge, true insight into the constitution of the world. Speaking generally, it is dangerous for the human being to cross this threshold without preparation. For if he carries with him into the spiritual world on yonder side of the threshold his ordinary sense-perception, permeated with thoughts as in ordinary life, he calls forth illusion, downright illusion before his spiritual eyes, because he then judges things on yonder side of the threshold just as he does here, in the physical world. Therefore there stands at the threshold that spiritual being from whom we learn that quite different concepts are necessary when we cross the threshold, that illusions paralyze our life if we pass over into the spiritual world with the ordinary concepts derived from the world of the senses. This Guardian of the Threshold warns us that we must first acquire the ideas that are needed in the spiritual world. People as a rule do not believe that the concepts which correspond to facts in the spiritual world are so very different from those which are suitable in the physical world. In the physical world, for example, the part is always smaller than the whole. This is an axiom. But it is not so in the spiritual world. There, the part is always greater than the whole.

We understand this from an example drawn from the being of man. If we think of a force which the human being has within him when, for instance, he is building up his body out of mineral matter and then think of the nexus of forces which one part of him contains, then, in the face of the cosmos, that which forms the organ—which is the part—is essentially greater than the whole human being. It is not easy at once to visualize the maxim that the part is greater than the whole because you are accustomed to the sense-world; but in face of the super-sensible world it is absolutely true. We must attain to the insight that in the spiritual world the part can be greater than the whole. Our laws of mechanics and physics do not hold for the super-sensible world, rather precisely the opposite. Here, in the material world, a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. In the spiritual world, it is the longest, because there, if we go in the straight direction, we have the most obstacles to overcome. Every other direction is shorter, there, than the straight one.

We must be absolutely clear that if we want to enter the spiritual world, ideas and concepts are needed that are quite contrary to what is a matter of course in the physical world. Courage is required so that we shall not enter into the spiritual world in confusion. We must have courage enough to pass over the spiritual threshold, over the abyss. If we cross over to the spiritual world, if we pass the Guardian of the Threshold and reach the spiritual world yonder in the soul and spirit, in astral body and ego, consciously, then all is well. But if we do not pass through this experience in the ego and astral body, illusion arises and when this illusion shoots back upon the human being, illness is the result. Whenever a man is ill, he really has the Guardian of the Threshold within him, but in a kind of demonic counterpart.

There again I come to the demonic element of which I already had to speak. When we look at a human being with ordinary perception, all his members are intermixed. On the one side there is the ego and the astral body of the man; on the other side there is the etheric body and the physical body. All seems to be intermixed when we look at him with ordinary sight. And what is essential above all is to learn to distinguish what is of the soul in a human being from what is of the body. When the soul is in the body, and you are looking at a human being, the soul does not appear as it really is. Indeed and in truth the soul is light. You must learn more and more to realize that the human soul, when we behold it in its absence from the body, is light. It belongs to what surrounds us as the etheric elements—it belongs to the light. The human soul belongs entirely to the realm of light. We see it rightly when we see it within light.

On the other hand, the body belongs to heaviness. I have shown how heaviness is overcome, how the brain becomes much lighter than its external weight. But the physical body, in the form in which we perceive it, belongs to heaviness. Just as through chemical analysis you get hydrogen and oxygen out of water, so, if you want to behold man in his true being, you must member him into the soul with its power of radiance and the body with its might of heaviness. These two realities—the soul with its power of radiance, and the body with its might of heaviness—are interwoven in confusion when they are looked at with physical eyes. And because they are thus interwoven in confusion, we cannot see in the body, or in the human being as a whole, the essential nature of the illness. By so adjusting your soul that you can observe the human being in such a way that you see how the nature of the illness is revealed, then, gradually, when you look at lead, or silver, you will realize what healing forces are contained in these substances.

But you must take your medical life in tremendous earnestness. You must take the meditative life with such strength into your soul that through this meditative life you grasp the world differently. And that is why I want to give you now words which, if they are added to the others (see Lecture Four) and truly meditated upon, will bring you into the same relation with particular substances which these substances themselves have to the healthy and the sick human being. You must let the words, which I am now going to write on the board, awaken your souls to the realization that what you see of the human being in ordinary life is not the reality. When you vitalize your souls with what lies in these words, then you will perceive the truth, the true reality of the human being.

What I have said up to now will help you, in a general way, to understand the human being in his relation to the cosmos. Today I should like to give you something that will help you to meditative knowledge of, say, a tiny piece of gold. I hammer it into a thin leaf and when I look through it I see green. In its green appearance it awakens, not from mere vague analogy, the same inner experience as green meadows, the green plant covering of the earth; it does indeed awaken this experience if I look at the gold leaf with deeper forces of soul. If then I really steep myself, with all my forces of soul, in the tiny, shimmering piece of gold, the opposite power of soul is awakened. Then, as well as the green shimmering gold—as I look now towards it and now away from it—a whole world comes to me, a whole world shimmers towards me in a kind of pale bluish-red light. And in that moment I know that the whole world is present in that tiny piece of gold. This little piece of gold which, to begin with, has a green shimmer, is, in reality, a whole sphere. Every tiny piece of gold is a center of a whole sphere and I learn to live and weave in the bluish-red, the bluish-violet colors of a sphere. And then, if you learn to know other qualities of gold you will realize their living connection. For instance, you will experience, but fundamentally and basically, the known quality of gold, namely, that it will not combine with oxygen. Then, you will say to yourselves: The human being lives through having oxygen; he lives through perpetually working in oxygen. In the etheric body, as you know, everything is different. The etheric body is related to what is not anchored in the physical body. Gold is related to the etheric body because it refuses to be combined with oxygen. So that by virtue of this very quality, gold works as a healing power in the etheric body for what oxygen, for example, may give rise to in the physical body. For this reason, gold is, as it were, a remedy that works from the center of the human being.

Through this impression of radiance in the pale bluish-red light, you get at the inner truth of the saying: “Gold is sun; gold is wholly sun.” This one piece of gold reveals to you that in cosmic space, gold is the sun, and that this gold-sun is related to your etheric body.

But this means that you are led to those qualities of a substance that are needed in therapy. But you will only really come to this realization by taking the following meditation, not as mere words, but in all earnestness, and as an unceasing challenge to the soul:

See in thy Soul
Power of Radiance;
Feel in thy Body
Might of Heaviness!

Schau in deiner Seele
Leuchtekraft,
Fühl in deinem Körper
Schweremacht.

But this must be a real exercise. You must practice with the aim of making your soul into something that really streams out into space and is like light, the power of radiance; and you must practice with the aim of making your body into something that through its own inner heaviness is connected with the inner being of the earth. You must have a real inner experience of this tremendous contrast, and then you separate your soul and body, as they should be separated. The verse continues:

In Power of Radiance
Rays the Spirit-I.

In der Leuchtekraft
Strahlet Geistes-Ich.

The human “P” rises up as an inner experience in the soul. It is a picture that you must understand. In the soul that is streaming out, radiating out into the universe, the “I” unfolds. To these words you must add:

In Might of Heaviness
God-Spirit wells.

In der Schweremacht
Kraftet Gottes-Geist.

The men of earlier times spoke, not merely in trivial analogy, but as something in profound correspondence with truth, of the human being, the human body, as being a temple of the Godhead. Just as it is true that the “I” is the ruler within the soul when the soul is conscious, so it is also true that the Divine, the Godhead, is the ruler in the body. You may not really speak of your body as your own, for the body is not of man, but of God. It is so indeed. The body of man grows out of the Divine forces. To man belongs only the soul that is within that body. In the instrument that is your body you must see the temple of God. It is of tremendous importance to know this:

In Power of Radiance [of the soul]
Rays the Spirit-I;
In Might of Heaviness
God-Spirit wells.

In der Leuchtekraft [der Seele]
Strahlet Geistes-Ich
In der Schweremacht
Kraftet Gottes-Geist.

The Divine Spirit is mighty in the human body, just as the “I” is mighty in the human soul. And now comes the important thing:

Yet shall not
Power of Radiance
Lay hold of
Might of Heaviness.

Doch darf nicht
Leuchtekraft
Ergreifen
Schweremacht.

When the human being is asleep it is clear to you that his soul is separated from his body. He has separated soul and body. During sleep the soul has not got hold of the body. But in waking life, too, the condition must be such that although the ego and astral body come down in the physical and etheric bodies, there must be an inner separation, and inner apartness between the power of radiance and the might of heaviness. Chemical combination between the power of radiance and the might of heaviness must not arise; these two powers must be inwardly separate. They must not mingle with each other mechanically nor be inwardly united in any way. The might of heaviness of the body, the power of radiance of the soul must work side by side, the former downwards, the latter upwards, within the same space. For that reason, the following words are important.

Yet shall not
Power of Radiance
Lay hold of
Might of Heaviness,
Nor may
Might of Heaviness
Permeate
Power of Radiance.

Doch darf nicht
Leuchtekraft
Ergreifen
Schweremacht
Und auch nicht
Schweremacht
Durchdringen
Leuchtekraft.

The last two lines merely express the opposite of the first two. That which our external, sense-knowledge continually mixes together, must, in reality, be separate within the human being. When you look at the human being with knowledge that comes from the senses, everything is intermixed; and if the human being were indeed what he appears to be to ordinary perception, he would be ill all the time. The human being can be healthy, but our material perception of him is a condition of illness. As we see him, the human being is perpetually ill, but such perception is, of course, Maya, illusion. In his true being, a man must never be as we see him. In his true being of man, power of radiance and might of heaviness must not be intermingled. They must be inwardly separate from each other. There must be nothing of what happens in water, where hydrogen and oxygen enter into a chemical combination with each other and, in themselves, really disappear. This is what ordinary sense-perception does; it has had the bad taste to adopt chemical ideas and to look at the human being as if he were a combination of the power of radiance and the might of heaviness. These two are separate and must so remain—just as if in water, hydrogen and oxygen were separate, although united.

For when Power of Radiance seizes
Might of heaviness,
And when Might of Heaviness enters
Power of radiance,
Then in World-confusion Soul and Body
Bind each other
Unto Perdition.

Denn fasset Leuchtekraft
Die Schweremacht
Und dringet Schweremacht
In Leuchtekraft,
So binden in Welten-Irre
Seele and Körper
In Verderbnis sich.

In perdition is illness. You must take this in full seriousness, so seriously that it forms your body that you can really look at the human being according to the power of radiance and might of heaviness and that you have the feeling when they take hold of one another, they are enemies. In illness they do lay hold of one another. When the power of radiance lays hold of the might of heaviness (weight), bodily illnesses arise; when the might of heaviness presses into the power of radiance, the so-called mental illnesses arise. Just think of it—in the body lives the Divine Spirit. If the power of radiance seizes upon the might of heaviness, the human being is wrongly appropriating the Divine within him.

If you learn to think about these things with the moral impulses that are necessary, to feel them deeply and then to will with what you have felt, you gradually begin to perceive the things and processes of the world in such a way that when the power of radiance has laid hold of the might of heaviness you realize how you can separate the power of radiance from the might of heaviness through something that gives support to the etheric body from out of the astral body, through some substances or else through some process in the human being. If you really feel these things, you will also understand the healing forces of curative eurythmy. The healing power in curative eurythmy is something that reckons very specially with the cosmic forces in the process of healing. When you do exercises with the consonants in curative eurythmy, you are within the moon forces. When you unfold the powers of the vowels in curative eurythmy you are within the Saturn forces. Through these two kinds of forces in curative eurythmy the human being feels his way directly into the cosmos.

Therapy, of course, is the essential thing in medicine, but there can be no therapy without absolutely useful diagnosis. Suppose we are able to confirm that the formative principle is too strong in a human being, that this formative power is coming from salts or carbohydrates which he cannot keep within bounds; there is too much form in him. If you really observe the more delicate workings of the organism—and the symptoms may be only very subtle—you will find that vowels in curative eurythmy which work against form will have an extraordinarily favorable effect.

Or suppose a child shows a slight tendency to stuttering. I am not, of course, going to make any dilettante statements about stuttering being due to this or that cause; naturally, all kinds of things may be wrong and so be the cause of it. But whatever the trouble may be, in cases of stuttering a predominating formative force is present, and therefore vowel exercises in curative eurythmy will be good, carried out in the sequence that is natural in the being of man, the true manifestation of the being of man. So that much can be achieved with children who have a tendency to stuttering by taking the vowel sequence: A(ah), E(ay), I(ee), 0, U, in curative eurythmy provided one has the necessary patience and love.

If you think about all these things, my dear friends, you will realize the importance of regarding the esoteric principles which I gave you a few days ago and have given today, as a kind of morality in medical study. By morality I mean the feeling of being bound to a duty, the feeling of being obliged, through meditation, to bring the soul into the necessary and lasting attunement for facing the world in the true and right way. If lectures could be given you for a whole year, a great deal could be said in detail and this would be of concrete use to you in practice. But as in these lectures we could only make a beginning, it has been of very particular importance to speak of the development of the medical and therapeutic powers which lie within the human being—to place these powers within your reach. For if, with these esoteric hints, you go to your medical studies, you will see that things become different. Maybe they will become more difficult. If someone of a rather dull intellect (and education makes the intellect dull today) takes up medical studies, a certain inner persistence will carry him through the first and second years and help to master things if, as the result of social circumstances, he feels a moral whip behind him. But he does not become a physician in the real sense. He becomes a person whom society appoints to play the part, but he does not become a physician.

If you let these things work upon you, a more delicate force of soul will develop in you. And in many respects the physiology, psychology and pathology on which medical science is based today will cause you pain. It will really be as though you were being offered stones instead of bread. But you yourselves will, nevertheless, be able to get something out of these stones. What is offered to you will, after all, not be without purpose. It will not be easy for you to learn. There must inevitably be difficulties, for the world with its materialism is still mighty and we must, in some way, find our place in it. Having found this place, it is for us to work our way beyond it. Thus we must certainly become physicians in the way the world demands and then medical studies must be permeated with what can be given from here.

Therefore let me say once again that opportunity will be given for you to link yourselves with us here in the way I have indicated. You must have complete confidence in the way in which the medical section of the Goetheanum will be led by me in association with Dr. Wegman. It is precisely medicine, as it can be pursued here, that can show you how human life can really be experienced—strange as this expression is. Therefore when you are once again out in the world and one thing or another occurs to you, write your wishes and your hearts' desires and an answer will be given to everybody in the monthly circular letter. And in this way—which is, to begin with, the only practicable one—external medical studies will be able to be permeated with what can be given here.

You see, there are extraordinarily few people yet—and they can only be the young ones really—who are able to build the bridge between the spiritual aims of Dornach and the materialistic science that holds sway in the outside world. At the present time it can only be a few, and really only those who are still at the stage of their studies. Why?

I once had to give a lecture about a particular chapter of therapy which was attended by medical students and also a professor, a professor of medicine. I was able to watch this man. He came to the lecture thinking that he would find confirmation of his belief that it would be the usual kind of superficial twaddle talked of by quacks. I was able to make a real study of metamorphosis in watching this professor, for on the one side he was inwardly resisting, but on the other side he was astonished. He was obliged to come to the conclusion that it was not rubbish, but naturally he could not say “Yes” to it, because it completely contradicted what he had regarded for decades as being true and correct. I spoke to him after the lecture and it emerged that he was saying to himself: “I would prefer to keep out of all that.” He could not have gone as far as this if he had really thought it nonsense.

If he had thought it nonsense he would easily have kicked it away in the usual manner. He thought he could kick it away, too, but in reality he could not, and the very most that one could have hoped for from a professor was that he should have said to himself: “I would prefer to keep out of all that.” One could not expect more than this. But a young person must have quite a different attitude. A young person has no antecedents and he, therefore, is still able to absorb things which can lead to the healing of humanity. And if this happens, my dear friends, it will really come to pass that gradually perhaps more quickly than we thinkGoetheanum spirituality will enter into medicine.

But what must happen first is that these things shall be continued with real earnestness, and that you go on doing as Dr. Wegman has told me you have done—that you go on coming to her to make the link in full confidence with the true kind of medical studies and with those things that must flow as time goes on, into the materialistic medicine of today. You can do much for yourselves and also much for the world and for sick humanity if you do not regard what you have now heard as something merely transitory, but as a starting-point for that with which such a good beginning has been made. In this sense we will remain united, my dear friends, remain so united that the center to which you adhere here in Dornach, at the Goetheanum, can work in the world, through you. That is what I wanted to say to you as a kind of warning. Then things will go well and much will be added to what we have spoken of here. It may be an ideal in your life of feeling, but it can become, in very truth, life. And as such we will maintain it, my dear friends.