The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today we will have a brief interlude in our lectures. We will not be talking about an anthroposophical topic, but about a purely philosophical subject. As a result, this evening will have to bear the essential character of being boring. But it is perhaps good for anthroposophists to immerse themselves in such boring topics from time to time, to let them get to them – for the reason that they have to hear over and over again that the sciences, especially philosophical science cannot deal with anthroposophy because only dilettantes occupy themselves with it, people who have no desire to devote themselves to serious, rigorous research and serious, rigorous thinking. Dilettantism, amateurism, that is what is repeatedly reproached by learned philosophers of anthroposophy. Now the lecture that I gave in Stuttgart and which will be available in print here next Wednesday will be able to show you from a certain point of view how philosophy itself will first be able to find the way, the bridge to anthroposophy, when it first finds its deepening within itself. This lecture will show you that the philosophers who speak of the dilettantism of anthroposophists simply cannot build a bridge from their supposed scientific approach to anthroposophy, which they so despise, because they do not have philosophy itself, because, so to speak, they indulge in the worst dilettantism in their own field.

There is indeed a certain plight in the field of philosophy. In our present-day intellectual life, we have a fruitful, extraordinarily significant natural science. We also have to show purely scientific progress in other areas of intellectual life, in that positive science has succeeded in constructing exact instruments that can be used in various fields, measuring spaces and revealing the smallest particles. Through this and various other means at its disposal, it has succeeded in advancing external research to a point that will be greatly increased in the future by the expansion of methods. But the fact remains that this external research is confronted with a philosophical ignorance, especially on the part of those who are researchers, so that although it is possible, with the help of today's tools, to achieve great and powerful results in the external field of facts, it is not possible for those to whom are the ones who are supposed to make these discoveries, it is not possible for them to draw conclusions from these external results for the knowledge of the mind, simply because those entrusted with the external mission of the sciences are not at all at a significant level of education in terms of philosophical thinking. It is one thing to work in a laboratory or a cabinet with tools and an external method in research, and it is quite another to have educated and trained one's thinking in such a way that one can draw valid conclusions from what one can actually research, conclusions that are then able to shed light on the origins of existence.

There were times when there was less philosophical reflection and when people who were called to it had trained their thinking in a very particular way, and when external research was not as advanced as it is today. Today the opposite is the case. There is an admirable external research of facts, but an inability to think and to work through concepts philosophically in the broadest sense. Yes, we are actually dealing not only with such an inability on the part of those who are supposed to work in research, but also with a certain contempt for philosophical thinking. Today, the botanist, the physicist, the chemist do not find it necessary to worry about the most elementary foundations of thought technology. When they approach their work in the laboratory or in the cabinet, it is as if one could say: Yes, the method works by itself. Those who are a little familiar with these things know how the method works by itself, and that basically it is not such a world-shattering event when someone makes a discovery of facts that may be deeply incisive, because the method has been working for a long time. When the empirical researcher comes across what is important, a physicist or chemist comes along and wants to report something about the actual reasons underlying what he is researching, then he starts thinking and the result is that something “beautiful” comes out, because he is not trained in thinking at all. And through this untrained, this inwardly neglected thinking, which clings to the scholar as well as to the layman, we have arrived at a state where certain dogmas are authoritatively bandied about, and the layman accepts them as something absolutely certain. Whereas the original cause that these dogmas have come into being at all lies only in this neglected thinking. Certain conclusions are drawn in an incredible way.

We will take as an example such a conclusion, which has a certain historical significance. When a bell rings, people say to themselves: I hear a sound; I will investigate to see what the external, objective cause of it is. And now they find, and in this case through exact experiment, through something that can be established externally through facts, that when a sound comes from an object, then the object is in a certain way inwardly shaken, that when a bell sounds, its metal is in vibration. It can be demonstrated by exact experiment that when the bell vibrates, it also sets the air in certain vibrations, which propagate and strike my eardrum. And as a consequence of these vibrations – so the initial conclusion, quite plausible! – the tones arise. I know that a string vibrates when I have one; I can prove this in the world of facts by placing little paper tabs on the string, which come off when the string is bowed. Likewise, it can be demonstrated that the string in turn sets the air in vibration, the air that then strikes my ear and causes the sound. For sound, this is something that belongs to the world of facts, and it is not difficult to follow when it is explained. One need only put the facts together and draw conclusions from them, and then what has been said will emerge. But now the matter goes further, and there is a tremendous hitch. People say: Yes, with the ear we perceive sound, with the eye we perceive light and colors. Now it seems to them that because sound appears, so to speak, as an effect of something external, color as such must also be the effect of something external. Fine! The exterior of the color can be imagined similarly, as something that vibrates, like the air in the case of sound. And just as, let's say, a certain pitch corresponds to a certain number of vibrations, so one could say that something will also move at a certain frequency, which causes this or that color. Why should there not be something outside that vibrates, and not something that transmits these vibrations to my eye and causes the impression of light here? Of course, you cannot see or perceive through any instrument what vibrates in this case. With sound it is possible. It can be determined that something vibrates; with color it cannot be perceived. But the matter seems so obvious that it does not occur to anyone to doubt that something must also vibrate when we have a light impression, just as something vibrates when we have sound impressions. And since one cannot perceive what vibrates, one simply invents it. They say: Air is a dense substance that vibrates when sound is produced; the vibrations of light are in the “ether”. This fills the whole of space. When the sun sends us light, they say, it is because the sun's matter vibrates, and these vibrations propagate through the ether, striking the eye and creating the impression of light.

It is also very quickly forgotten that this ether was invented in a purely fantastic way, that it was speculated into existence. This has taken place historically. It is presented with great certainty. It is spoken of with absolute certainty that such an ether expands and vibrates, so much so that the public opinion is formed: Yes, this has been established by science! How often will you find this judgment today: Science has established that there is such an ether, the vibrations of which cause the light sensations in our eye. You can even read in very nice books that everything is based on such vibrations. This goes so far that the origins of human thought are sought in such vibrations of the ether: A thought is the effect of the ether on the soul. What underlies it are vibrations in the brain, vibrating ether, and so on. And so, for many people, what they have thought up, speculated on, presents itself as the real thing in the world, which cannot be doubted at all. Yet it is based on nothing more than the characterized error in reasoning. You must not confuse what is called ether here with what we call ether. We speak of something supersensible; but physics speaks of the ether as something that exists in space like another body, to which properties are attributed like those of the sensual bodies. One has the right to speak of something as a real fact only if one has established it, if it really exists outside, if one can experience it. One must not invent facts.

The ether of the modern scientist is imaginary, and that is what matters.

It is therefore an enormous fantasy at the basis of our physics, an arbitrary fiction of mysterious secrets.

Therefore, at the basis of our physics there is an enormous fantasy, an arbitrary fiction of mysterious ether vibrations, atomic and molecular vibrations, all of which cannot be assumed to be possible because nothing other than what can actually be perceived can be regarded as actual. Can any of these ether vibrations be perceived as physics assumes them to be? We would only have an epistemological justification for assuming them if we could establish them by the same means by which we perceive other things. We have no other means of establishing things than sensory perception. Can it be light or color that vibrates in the ether? Impossible, because it is supposed to produce color and light first. Can it be perceived by other senses? Impossible; it is something that is supposed to produce all perceptions, but at the same time it cannot possibly be perceived by the concept that one has put into it. It is something that looks very much like a knife that has no handle and no blade, something where, so to speak, the front part of the concept automatically consumes the back part. But now something very strange is achieved, and you can see in it a proof of how justified – however bold the expression may sound – the expression 'neglected' is in relation to philosophical thinking. People completely forget to take into account the simplest necessities of thought.

Thus, by spinning out such theories, certain people come to say that everything that appears to us is nothing more than something based on vibrating matter, vibrating ether, motion. If you would examine everything in the world, you would find that where there is color and so on, there is nothing but vibrating matter. When, for example, a light effect propagates, something does not pass from one part of space to another, nothing flows from the sun to us. In the circles concerned, one imagines: Between us and the sun is the ether, the molecules of the sun are dancing; because they dance, they make the neighboring ether particles dance; now the neighboring ones also dance; because they dance, the next ones dance in turn, and so it continues down to our eye, and when it dances in, our eye perceives light and color. So, it is said, nothing flows down; what dances remains above, it only stimulates to dance again. Only the dance propagates itself. There is nothing in the light that would flow down. - It is as if a long line of people were standing there, one of whom gives the next one a blow, which the latter in turn passes on to the third and the fourth. The first does not go away, nor does the second; the blow is passed on. This is how the dance of atoms is said to propagate. In a diligently and eruditely written brochure, which one has to acknowledge insofar as it is at the cutting edge of science, someone has achieved something nice. He wrote: It is the basis of all phenomena that nothing moves into another part of space; only the movements propagate. So if a person walks forward, it is a false idea to think that he carries his materiality over into another part of space. He takes a step, moves; the movement is generated again, and again with the next step, and so on. That is quite consistent. But now such a scholar is advised, when he takes a few steps and has to recreate himself in the next part of space because none of his body comes across, that he just doesn't forget to recreate himself, otherwise he could disappear into nothingness. Here you have an example of how things lead to consequences! People just don't draw the consequences. What happens in public is that people say to themselves: Well, a book has been published, someone has set out these theories, he has learned a lot, and that's where he concocted these things, and that's for sure! - That there could be something completely different in it, people don't think of that.

So it is a matter of the fact that the matter is really not so bad with the dilettantism of anthroposophy. It is true that those who stand on the ground of intellectual erudition can only regard anthroposophy as dilettantism; but the point is that on their own ground people have spun themselves into concepts that are their thinking habits. One can be lenient when someone is led by their thought habits to have to create themselves over and over again; but nevertheless, it must be emphasized that on this side there is no justification for speaking from their theoretical point of view down to the dilettant antism of anthroposophy, which, if it fulfills its ideal, would certainly not make such mistakes as not to try to draw the consequences from the premises and to examine whether they are absurd. From anthroposophy you can draw conclusions everywhere. The conclusions are applicable to life, while they are not there, cannot be applied to life, only apply to the study!

These are the kinds of things that should draw your attention to the errors in reasoning, which are not so easy to see for those who are not familiar with them. Today, the sense of authority is much too strong in the interaction between scholars and the public in all circles; but the sense of authority has few good foundations today. One should be able to rely on it. Not everyone is able to follow the history of science in order to be able to get from there the things that teach them about the scope of purely external research and of research into ideas. Thus it is perfectly justified to ascribe great significance to Helmholtz merely because of his invention of the ophthalmoscope. But if you follow this discovery historically, if you can follow what has already been there and how it only needed to be discovered, you will see that the methods have worked here. Today, basically, one can be a very small thinker and achieve great, powerful things if the relevant means and methods are available. This does not criticize all the work in this field, but what has been said applies.

Now I would like to give you the reasons, from a certain point of view, why all this could have happened. There are an enormous number of these reasons; but it will suffice if we keep one or two in mind. If we look back in the history of intellectual life, we find that what we call thinking technique, conceptual technique, originated in Greek intellectual life, and had its first classical representative in Aristotle. He achieved something for humanity, for scholarly humanity, that was undoubtedly extremely necessary for this scholarly humanity, but which has fallen into disrepute: purely formal logic. There is much public discussion about whether philosophical propaedeutics should be thrown out of grammar schools. It is considered superfluous, that it could be done on the side in German, but that it is not needed as a special discipline. Even to this consequence, the snobbish looking down on something like the technique of thinking has already led. This technique of thinking has been so firmly established by Aristotle that it has been able to make little progress. It does not need it. What has been taught in more recent times has only been taught because the actual concept of logic has even been lost.

Now, in order for you to see what is meant by this, I would like to give you an understanding of formal logic. Logic is the study of concepts, judgments, and conclusions. First, we need to understand a little bit about how concepts relate to judgments and conclusions. Man first of all acquires knowledge on the physical plane through perception. The first thing is sensation, but sensation as such would be, for example, an impression, a single color impression. But objects do not appear to us as such single impressions, but as combined impressions, so that we always have before us not mere single sensations, but combined ones, and these are the perceptions. When you have an object before you that you perceive, you can turn away from the object your organs of perception and it remains as an image within you. When this remains, you will be able to distinguish it very well from the object itself. You can look at this hammer, it is perceptible to you. If you turn around, an afterimage remains. We call this the representation.

It is extremely important to distinguish between perception and representation. Things would go very well if it were not for the fact that so little thinking technique is available that these things are made extremely complicated from the outset. For example, the sentence that is supported by many epistemologies today - that we have nothing but our representations - is based on error. Because one says: you do not perceive the thing in itself. Most people believe that behind what they perceive are the dancing molecules. What they perceive is only the impression on their own soul. Of course, because otherwise the soul is denied, it is strange that they first speak of the impressions on the soul and then explain the soul as something that in turn consists only of dancing atoms.

When you tackle things like this, you get the image of the brave Munchausen, who holds himself up in the air by his own hair. No distinction is made between perception and imagination. If one were to distinguish, one would no longer be tempted to commit this epistemological thoughtlessness, which lies in saying: “The world is my imagination” – apart from the fact that it is already an epistemological thoughtlessness to attempt to compare perception with imagination and then address perception as imagination. I would like someone to touch a piece of glowing iron and then to state that he is burning himself. Now he should compare the idea with the perception and then say whether it burns as much as this one. So the things are such that you only have to grasp them logically; then it becomes clear what they are. We must therefore distinguish between perception, in which we have an object in front of us, and the idea, in which this is not the case.

In the world of ideas, we distinguish again between idea in the narrower sense and concept. You can get an idea of the concept of a concept from the mathematical concept. Imagine drawing a circle on a piece of paper. This is not a circle in the mathematical sense. When you look at what you have drawn, you can form the idea of a circle, but not the concept. You have to imagine a point and then many points around it, all equidistant from the one center. Then you have the concept of a circle. With this mental construction, it is correct; what is drawn, what consists of many small chalk mountains, does not match at all. One chalk mountain is further away from the center than the other.

So when you talk about concept and idea, you have to make the distinction that the idea is gained from external objects, but that the concept arises through internal mental construction. However, you can read in countless psychology books today that the concept arises only from the fact that we abstract from this or that, what confronts us in the outside world. We believe that in the external world we only encounter white, black, brown, yellow horses and from this we are supposed to form the concept of the horse. This is how logic describes it: we omit what is different; first the white, black and so on color, then what is otherwise different and again different and finally something blurry remains; this is called the concept of “horse”. We have abstracted. This, it is thought, is how concepts are formed.

Those who describe the matter in this way forget that the actual nature of the concept for today's humanity can only be truly grasped in the mathematical concept, because this shows first what is constructed internally and then found in the external world. The concept of a circle cannot be formed by going through various circles, green, blue, large and small, and then omitting everything that is not common, and then forming an abstraction. The concept is formed from the inside out. One must form the thought-construction. Today, people are just not ready to form the concept of the horse in this way. Goethe endeavored to form such inner constructions for higher regions of natural existence as well. It is significant that he seeks to ascend from representation to concept. Anyone who understands the matter knows that one does not arrive at the concept of the horse by leaving out the differences and keeping what remains. The concept is not formed in this way, but rather through internal construction, like the concept of a circle, only not so simply. What I mentioned in yesterday's lecture about the wolf that eats lambs all its life and yet does not become a lamb, occurs here. If you have the concept of the wolf in this way, you have what Aristotle calls the form of the wolf. The matter of the wolf is not important. Even if it eats nothing but lambs, it will not become a lamb. If one looks only at the matter, one would have to say that if it consumes nothing but lambs, it should actually become a lamb. It does not become a lamb because what matters is how it organizes the matter, and that is what lives in it as the “form” and what one can construct in the pure concept.

When we connect concepts or ideas, judgments arise. If we connect the idea “horse” with the idea “black” to “the horse is black,” we have a judgment. The connection of concepts thus forms judgments. Now it is a matter of the fact that this formation of judgments is absolutely connected with the formal concept technique that can be learned and that teaches how to connect valid concepts with each other, thus forming judgments. The study of this is a chapter of formal logic. We shall see how what I have discussed is something that belongs to formal logic. Now formal logic is that which discusses the inner activity of thinking according to its laws, so to speak the natural history of thinking, which provides us with the possibility of drawing valid judgments, valid conclusions.

When we come to the formation of judgments here, we must again find that more recent thinking has fallen into a kind of mousetrap. For at the door of more recent thinking stands Kant, and he is one of the greatest authorities. Right at the beginning of Kant's works, we find judgments in contrast to Aristotle. Today we want to point out how errors in reasoning are made. Right at the beginning of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, we find the discussion of analytical and synthetic judgments. What are analytical judgments supposed to be? They are supposed to be where one concept is strung on to another in such a way that the predicate concept is already contained in the subject concept and one only has to extract it. Kant says: If I think the concept of the body and say that the body is extended, then this is an analytical judgment; for no one can think the concept of the body without thinking the body extended. He only separates the concept of the predicate from the subject. Thus, an analytical judgment is one that is formed by taking the concept of the predicate out of the subject concept. A synthetic judgment, on the other hand, is a judgment in which the concept of the predicate is not yet so wrapped up in the concept of the subject that one can simply unwrap it. When someone thinks the concept of the body, they do not think the concept of heaviness along with it. So when the concept of heaviness is added to that of the body, one has a synthetic judgment. This is a judgment that not only provides explanations but would also enrich our world of thought.

Now, however, you will be able to see that this difference between analytical and synthetic judgments is not a logical one at all. For whether someone already thinks the predicate concept when the subject concept arises depends on how far he has progressed. For example, if someone imagines the body in such a way that it is not heavy, then the concept “heavy” is foreign to him in relation to the body; but anyone who, through his mental and other work, has already brought himself to think of heaviness in connection with the body, also needs only to unwrap this concept from his concept of “body”. So this is a purely subjective difference.

We must proceed thoroughly with all these matters. We must seek out the sources of error with precision. It seems to me that the one who grasps as purely subjective that which can be isolated from a concept, and that he will not really find a boundary between analytical and synthetic judgments and that he could be at a loss to give a definition of it. It depends on something quite different. What is it that it depends on? We shall come to that later! It seems to me, in fact, to be quite significant what happened when, during an examination, the two judgments were mentioned. There was a doctor who was to be examined in logic as a subsidiary subject. He was well versed in his subject, but knew nothing at all about logic. Before the exam, he told a friend that he should tell him a few things about logic. But the friend, who took this a little more seriously, said: If you don't know anything yet, it's better to rely on your luck. Now he came to the exam. As I said, everything went very well in the main subjects; he was well-versed in those. But he knew nothing about logic. The professor asked him: So tell me, what is a synthetic judgment? He had no answer and was now very embarrassed. Yes, Mr. Candidate, don't you know what that is? the professor asked. No! was the answer. An excellent answer! cried the examiner. You see, people have been trying to figure out what a synthetic judgment is for so long that they still don't know what it is. You couldn't have given a better answer. And can you tell me, Mr. Candidate, what an analytical judgment is? The candidate had now become more impertinent and answered confidently: No! Oh, I see you have penetrated to the heart of the matter, the professor continued. People have been searching for what an analytical judgment is for so long and haven't come up with it. You don't know that. An excellent answer! The fact has really happened; it always seemed to me, though it cannot necessarily be taken as such, as a very good characteristic of what distinguishes both judgments. In fact, nothing distinguishes them; one flows into the other.

Now we must still realize how it is possible to speak of valid judgments at all, what such a judgment is. This is a very important matter.

A judgment is initially nothing more than the connection of ideas or concepts. “The rose is red” is a judgment. Whether a judgment is valid because it is correct is a different matter. We must realize that just because a judgment is correct does not necessarily make it a valid judgment. To be a valid judgment, it is not enough just to connect a subject with a predicate. Let us look at an example! “This rose is red” is a correct judgment. Whether it is also valid is not certain; for we can also form other correct judgments, which are not necessarily valid. According to formal logic, there is no reason to object to the correctness of a judgment; it could be quite correct, but it could still lack validity. For example, someone could imagine a creature that is half horse, a quarter whale, and a quarter camel. We will now call this animal “taxu.” Now it is undoubtedly true that this animal would be ugly. The judgment, “The taxu is ugly,” is therefore correct and can be pronounced in this way according to all the rules of correctness; for the taxu, half horse, quarter whale and quarter camel, is ugly, that is beyond doubt, and just as the judgment “This rose is red” is correct, so is this. Now, one should never express a correct judgment as valid. Something else is necessary for that: you must be able to transform the correct judgment. You must only regard the correct judgment as valid when you can say, “This red rose is,” when you can take the predicate back into the subject, when you can transform the correct judgment into an existential judgment. In this case, you have a valid judgment. “This red rose is.” There is no other way than to be able to include the concept of the predicate in the concept of the subject. Then the judgment is valid. ‘The taxus is ugly’ cannot be made into a valid judgment. You cannot say, ‘An ugly taxus is.’ This is shown by the test by which you can find out whether a judgment can be made at all; it shows you how the test must be done. The test must be made by seeing whether one is able to transform the judgment into an existential judgment.

Here you can see something very important that one must know: that the mere combination of concepts into a logically correct judgment is not yet something that can now be regarded as decisive for the real world. Something else must be added. We must not overlook the fact that something else is required for the validity of the concept and judgment. Something else also comes into question for the validity of our conclusions.

A conclusion is the connection of judgments. The simplest conclusion is: All men are mortal. Caius is a man - therefore: Caius is mortal. The subclause is: Caius is a human being. The conclusion is: Caius is mortal. This conclusion is formed according to the first figure of conclusion, in which the subject and predicate are connected by a middle term. The middle term here is “human being,” the predicate term is “mortal,” and the subject term is “Caius.” You connect them with the same middle term. Then you come to the conclusion: Caius is mortal. This conclusion is built on the basis of very definite laws. You must not change these. As soon as you change something, you come to a train of thought that is no longer possible. Nobody could find a correct final sentence if they were to change this. That would not work. Because it does not work that way, you can see for yourself that thinking is based on laws. If you were to say: The portrait is an image of the person, photography is an image of the person, you would not be allowed to form the final sentence from this: Photography is a portrait. It is impossible to draw a correct final sentence if you arrange the concepts differently than according to the specific laws.

Thus you see that we have, so to speak, a real formal movement of concepts, of judgments, that thinking is based on very specific laws. But one never comes close to reality through this pure movement of concepts. In judgment, we have seen how one must first transform the right into the valid. In the conclusion, we want to convince ourselves in another form that it is impossible to approach reality through the formal conclusion. For a conclusion can be correct according to all formal laws and yet not valid, that is, it cannot approach reality. The following example will show you the simplicity of the fallacy: “All Cretans are liars,” says a Cretan. Suppose this Cretan says it. Then you can proceed according to quite logical conclusions and yet arrive at an impossibility. If the Cretan says this, then if you apply the premise to him, he must have lied, then it cannot be true. Why do you end up with an impossibility? Because you apply the conclusion to yourself, because you let the object coincide with purely formal conclusions, and you must not do that. Where you apply the formality of thought to itself, the pure formality of thought is destroyed. That doesn't work.

You can see from another example that the correctness of thought goes on strike when you apply thought to itself, that is, when you apply what you have thought up to yourself: An old law teacher took on a student. It was agreed that the student would pay him a certain fee, a portion of which would be paid immediately and the rest when he had won his first case. That was the agreement. The student did not pay the second part. Now the law teacher says to him: “You will pay me the fee under all circumstances.” But the student claims: “I will not pay it under any circumstances.” And he wants to do this by taking the teacher to court for the fee. The teacher says: Then you will pay me all the more; because either the judges will order you to pay – well, then you have to pay – or the judges will rule that you do not have to pay, then you have won the case and therefore pay again. – The student replies: I will not pay under any circumstances; because if I win the case, then the judges grant me the right not to pay, and if I lose, then I have lost my first case and we agreed that if this were the case, I would not have to pay. - Nothing has come of a completely correct formal connection because it goes back to the subject itself. Formal logic always breaks down here. Correctness has nothing to do with validity.

The mistake of not realizing that one must distinguish between correctness and validity was made by the great Kant, and that was when he wanted to refute the so-called ontological proof of the existence of God. This proof went something like this: If one imagines the most perfect being, it would lack a property for its perfection if one did not ascribe existence to it. Thus, one cannot imagine the most perfect being without existence. Consequently, it is. Kant says: That does not apply, because the fact that existence is added to a thing does not add any more property to it. - And then he says: A hundred possible dollars, dollars conceived in thought, have not a penny more or less than a hundred real ones. But the real ones differ considerably from the imagined ones, namely through being! - So he concludes: One can never infer existence from a concept that has only been grasped in thought. Because - so he argues - however many imagined thalers one puts into the wallet, they will never become actual. So one must not proceed with the concept of God by trying to extract the concept of being from thinking. But in transferring the purely logical-formal from the one to the other, one forgets that one should distinguish between, that dollars are something that can only be perceived externally, and that God is something that can be perceived internally, and that in the concept of God we must disregard this quality of being perceived externally. If people agreed to pay each other with imaginary dollars, they would not need to distinguish between real and imaginary dollars. If, then, in thinking a sensory thing could be ascribed its being, then the judgment would also apply to this sensory thing. But one must realize that a correct judgment does not necessarily need to be a valid one, that something must be added.

So we have today passed by some of the fields of philosophy, which does no harm. It gave us a sense that the authority of today's scientists is somewhat unfounded and that there is no need to be afraid when anthroposophy is presented as dilettantism. For what these authorities themselves are capable of saying when they begin to move from facts to something that could lead through a conclusion to a reference to the spiritual world is really quite threadbare. And so today I wanted to show you first how vulnerable this thinking is, and then to give you an idea that there really is a science of thinking. Of course, this could only be done in sketchy form. We can go into it in more depth later, but you have to be prepared for the fact that it will be somewhat boring.

It has been some time since it has been possible to have a branch meeting here in Mannheim, and today we are once again able to fulfill such a task. In recent times, you, my dear friends, have attentively and eagerly acquired the knowledge that can be called the more important ideas and insights of our spiritual scientific worldview. Therefore, it is perhaps not inappropriate for us to speak today about something that, on the one hand, turns our gaze to the whole of our spiritual scientific movement and, on the other hand, also gives us the opportunity to utilize what we have acquired in spiritual knowledge, namely about the human being and his development , to utilize it, so to speak, in the service to which every human being should be devoted, and which, for anthroposophists in particular, should take on a special form through their insights, through the perceptions they can gain from the spiritual-scientific world view. You know, my dear friends, that the development of humanity is progressing, that epoch follows epoch, age follows age, and each age has its special task. We can distinguish between larger and smaller ages in the historical development of humanity, and in each age there are very special moments when it is necessary not to fail to penetrate the actual task, the actual mission of that age. We may note that in the successive periods of time, tasks are set for people from the spiritual worlds, tasks that are very special for this or that age, and for us humans it is then a matter of doing the right thing, of knowing something about these tasks, of absorbing into our soul a realization of these tasks. We really live in an age in which it is urgently necessary for a number of people to gain knowledge again of what is to be done today or in our presence, preferably in the spiritual realm. I would like to begin by bringing two periods of time that are very close to us to your mind's eye, two periods of time that are close to us because one of them belongs to the past and much of its spiritual wealth and products still extends into our present; but the second period has hardly begun. We are standing at the beginning of a new period, a smaller cycle or period of humanity, standing, so to speak, at the boundary. Therefore, it is of very special importance to understand these two periods a little. The one period covers approximately that epoch which began with Augustine and ended with the approach of the 16th century. In occult science it is said that this period covers the time from Augustine to Calvin. Then, following this, we have another period that covers the time from Calvin to the last third of the 19th century. And we are again at the starting point of a period with new tasks, the observance of which is extremely important for the immediate future of humanity. Let us now try to form a rough idea of what happens at the beginning of a new period. When one period ends and another begins, something is ending and something is beginning. Something is decaying and something is germinating, as if rooted, like a new dawn for a sunshine that is preparing as the sunshine of a new age. And the peculiarity of such a transitional age – you know that people speak of transitional ages in different senses, but we are really dealing with a transitional age today in a very meaningful sense – is that new forces of culture must be added to humanity.

To characterize this, I will consider a great task for all of humanity; that is the advent of Christianity. If we form an idea of the way in which Christianity arose, we have to say: Actually, it was rejected by precisely those who were at the forefront of culture. But at the same time, those who were at the forefront of culture had reached a state of decline. Try to imagine Roman culture in decline and try to imagine the communities to which Paul preached. These were people who, so to speak, naively but with fresh energies faced the culture, with a lively sense of what was to come, which one did not really count among the highest blossoms of the culture of the time. These were the new forces, but sometimes even born from the lowest layers of the people. Because the complicated social life of the upper leading circles, when it has developed for a time, must come down, but especially because science, with its concepts, ideas and so on, arrives at a point where it cannot develop further, something new, something popular, must intervene. We have put a major turnaround in front of us. In a sense, we are facing another turning point today. What has been achieved with great dedication as scientific thoughts and ideas has actually reached a point where everyone who is insightful must say: it really cannot go any further – the scientific concepts and ideas that are being pursued today in official currents are on the verge of decay. And the whole way in which spiritual life is approached, where the great currents of this spiritual life flow, is in full decline. I would like to describe with a few stark words how this decline could actually be observed with relatively rapid steps by those who observe such things at all.

If you took part in this life, as it was expressed in literature, through books and the like, in science, then you grew up with a seriousness, with a seriousness that is now regarded as old-fashioned, that is no longer understood. The tone of weekly magazines, for example, was quite different in the 1970s than it is today. It was, if we may use the expression, much, much more dignified. Back then, there were very specific views within this intellectual current regarding how to relate to drama, poetry, and so on. That has changed, as one thought back then. In those days there was also a certain way of writing poetry, in which one satisfied less strict demands, for example, writing plays for small festive occasions, more for fun, for a joke. Sometimes there was quite a bit of talent in it. In particular, the students at their assemblies performed plays in which there was quite a bit of talent. Now one got a little older and could look around at the literary currents, and one found among them esteemed products that were, however, exactly the same as what had previously been considered only good for the day. That became literary maturity for the intellectual movement. In order not to cause too much offence, I do not want to mention any names. Today we are already at the point that we have nothing but printed trivialities in the broadest sense – entire bookstores are filled with them. Just thirty to forty years ago, one would have been sorry for the ink to write them down. When a person is going through such a change, they do not judge things starkly enough, but this is how cultural history will have to characterize our late 19th century. Indeed, we are facing a decline of traditional intellectual life, and this could easily be demonstrated by the decline of scientific theories. Therefore, we should not be surprised if what is to emerge as a new spiritual movement, what is to bring something new to human development, finds little support among what is today called the official intellectual life; if the members of these circles say: There are such associations of half-wits who call themselves Theosophists, who are basically quite uneducated people mostly — and so on. These are necessities that are present in every transitional age. Fresh forces must come from below, and what springs up in this way will then become necessary for the later age in order to really create an ascending movement. Now I said: we have seen two ages go by. The age from Augustine to Calvin, for example, was an age that sought to internalize all the soul forces of man, all the forces of man. This tendency to introspection was to be seen in all fields during this time; external natural science was less practised, people's attention was less directed to the outer laws and phenomena of nature. In the starting point of Augustine himself, in which we see our spiritual-scientific structure of the human being prefigured in a certain way, we find the idea of the influence of supersensible powers that make use of the human being as an instrument. As this epoch continued, what strange phenomena we encounter: the mysticism of Meister Eckhart, Suso, Johannes Tauler and many others. Although outer science receded into the background during this epoch, we find in it another remarkable way of embracing nature with a genius-like intuitive gaze. We see how this is elevated in such people as Agrippa von Nettesheim, for example. Phenomena such as Paracelsus and Jakob Böhme present themselves to us as the fruits of this deepening of the human soul in those centuries. Such a current can only last for a certain length of time. It has an ascending direction, a culmination, a high point and a descending line. As a rule, such a direction is replaced by something that appears to be a counter-image in a certain way.

In fact, the following centuries are a counter-image to this trend. The internalized image of the human soul is gradually forgotten. Times are coming when natural science has achieved such infinite triumphs. The great phenomena of a Copernicus, Kepler, Galilei occur, right up to those of the 19th century such as Julius Robert Mayer, Darwin and so on. A vast amount of external facts is brought to light.

And yet, people at the beginning of the new epoch were different from those of later times. A man like Kepler, for example, who had such a significant impact on physical science, was a pious man, a man who felt deeply, deeply connected to Christianity in his innermost being. And Kepler, the discoverer of Kepler's three laws, which are basically nothing more than time and space laws clothed in mathematical formulas, something quite mechanical, oh, this Kepler - he spent much more time than on such explain how things were in the great world at that time, when the mystery of Palestine took place on earth; how Saturn, Jupiter and Mars were related to each other when Christ Jesus was born. Kepler's great thoughts were directed towards this. He was able to give mankind what he had to say about the science of the stars in purely mathematical terms. What he carried in his heart, in his deepest heart, remained his property in an age that only served the outer life.

Or take Newton. Where would you not refer to Newton as the discoverer of the laws of gravity? But where would it also be emphasized - when Haeckel, for example, talks about the epoch-making phenomenon of Newton - where would it be emphasized that Newton was so Christian that in his quietest and most sacred hours he wrote a commentary on the Apocalypse in his own way? But he could not give it to humanity. He was able to give humanity the purely mechanical law of gravity in the age dedicated to the external summarization of natural phenomena. And this age has just expired with the last third of the 19th century.

Now an age is beginning that must necessarily be a counter-image to the previous one. And the task of preparing this counter-image, which is to continue to work in such a way that everything we have often spoken of can come to pass, is the spiritual-scientific world view, which in turn must bring a deepening of the human soul. But each age must work differently than the one before. It would be wrong to simply study as it was done correctly from Augustine to Calvin. We may let such phenomena have their effect on us, but we must know that today, after such an age of natural science, we must seek the spiritual world differently than in the past. Is there anything else, apart from what man can think in the abstract, from which one can recognize that man is really compelled and forced to grasp the world anew in every age?

If you study Paracelsus today, for example, you will find that he is an unfathomable spirit for today's trivial external research, a spirit who has particularly looked deeply into the secrets of healing and medicine. And anyone who delves into what he had to say about healing this or that form of illness will be able to learn something quite tremendous and magnificent from Paracelsus. Let us assume that a physician who is at the level of the real level of the spiritual life of our time would delve so deeply that he would want to apply what would result from Paracelsus' instructions. For certain great things, quite correct things would arise, but the physician of the present day could no longer acquire some of them. For if he were to apply some of the remedies indicated there, it would not help, because human nature has changed since the 16th century, because everything in the world changes and everything progresses. Things outside do not obey our arbitrary knowledge, which moves in steps. They move forward, and we have the task of investigating with our knowledge, our insight. We must learn anew, as Paracelsus learned. And if we most faithfully do as he did, we will find something quite different in many respects. Thus, we have very special spiritual tasks in our time.

Now I would like to characterize in a few broad strokes how it is written in the stars that human culture must progress in the near future. It is not left to the hand of man alone to give this culture a direction. The old views would not fit the change in the real circumstances. Things take their course, and spiritual science has the task of saying what course things are taking, it gives us the guidance to understand our time.

We are standing at the dawn of a completely new human life and thinking. Three things are of particular importance and significance in human spiritual life: firstly, religion; secondly, science; and thirdly, the way people live together, the feelings and perceptions that people develop for each other, and what takes place in the social sphere. These three are the most important, so that it is of particular importance to follow in the successive epochs what forms these three must take, that which comes into consideration as religion, as science or social life. And there are certain demands that man simply must understand, that are beyond his control.

Why must religion, science and social life change from epoch to epoch? Simply because human nature changes. We do not learn that human nature consists of different parts for the sake of learning that. We do not learn that the human being consists of a physical body, a life body and an astral body with sentient, intellectual and conscious soul so that a few people can have something to do with it and can acquire these classifications. We learn these classifications because they have a far-reaching significance for human life. And you can sense this far-reaching significance if you think back to the culture that was Egyptian-Chaldean, for example, when it was the sentient soul that was primarily important. There, the higher beings primarily worked through this. And in the Greco-Latin period, in the time of the emergence of Christianity, everything that came from the divine-spiritual heights and worked into humanity worked on the mind soul. And today it works on the consciousness soul. We understand nothing at all about the relationship between the human being and the great forces of the world if we do not know how this human nature is structured. What are we preparing today by devoting ourselves to spiritual-scientific insight? In our time, it is especially the consciousness soul that is cultivated. All external thinking and knowledge, all useful thinking, this thinking according to the principle of usefulness, is based to a certain extent on the development of the consciousness soul. But something like the light of the spirit self is already pushing its way into this. Now the remarkable thing is that in our time we have two parallel currents, one that rushes down into decay and one that rises to future glory. The one that rushes down into decay has not yet arrived at that decay. At the same time, it is the source of great discoveries that still have a tremendous future. This too has its beneficial effects. Certainly, for a long time to come mankind will benefit from that which is, after all, heading towards decay. But the kind of thinking that invents balloons is the thinking of decay. And the thinking that deals with the structure of humanity is the thinking of the future of humanity.

But these two do show a common transition. We can see that in all fields. I would like to start by giving you a very practical example: the field of monetary transactions. This changed quite considerably in the 19th century. A tremendous turnaround has taken place. If you follow the period immediately preceding the last third of the 19th century, all monetary speculation was tied to the individuality, to the personality. It was the purely financial and speculative genius of the Rothschilds that introduced money everywhere and led it back again to and from the money centers. And if we follow the history of the great banking houses, we have examples everywhere of how monetary transactions took place entirely out of the nature of the human being, based on the consciousness soul, on the individual human being. This has changed. We just do not talk much about it yet because it is only just beginning. Today, the consciousness soul no longer exclusively rules in monetary transactions; today, something of a kind of grouping prevails: the share capital, the company, the association, that which is supra-personal.

Try to follow what is only just beginning to emerge today and what will come more and more. Today it is almost irrelevant who stands as a personality here or there. What human beings have worked into the circulation of money is already working without personality, is already working by itself. In a descending current, you have the spread of the consciousness soul to the spirit self.

Here we have it in the current of decay; and we have it in the current of ascending life, where we seek that which the individual capable personality has achieved, where we seek to gain the help of those powers through inspiration, which will give us the inspirations from the spiritual world again. There, too, we go from the personal to the superpersonal. Thus, there are common characteristics for the ages with regard to both the declining and the ascending currents. In particular, however, one must be careful not to take into account in any age what authority is present in that age. As long as one does not have spiritual insight, one can go very far astray.

This is particularly the case in one area of human culture, in the area of materialistic medicine, where we see how exactly that is decisive, which the authority has in its hands and more and more lays claim to, where that wants to lead to something much, much more terrible and dreadful than any rule of authority of the much-criticized Middle Ages. We are already living in it, and it will become ever stronger and stronger. When people mock so terribly at the ghosts of medieval superstition, one might well ask: Has anything changed in relation to that? Has the fear of ghosts gone away? Don't people fear many more ghosts today than they did back then? It is much more terrible than is generally believed what goes on in the human soul when it is presented with the fact that there are 60,000 germs on the palm of the hand. In America, it has been calculated how many such germs are in a single male mustache. Should we not, then, decide to say: These medieval ghosts were at least decent ghosts, but today's bacillus ghosts are too puny, too indecent ghosts, to justify the fear that is only just beginning and that makes people, especially here, in the field of health, fall into a terrible belief in authority. We must say that we see the character of the transition period everywhere. We must only look at the phenomena in the right way, and we see this character everywhere.

Now we ask ourselves: What do the stars, the teachings and revelations of theosophy tell us about further development in these three most important areas of life? What must it become in the future and how must we work so that the creative, fruitful spirit self can be guided over into the consciousness soul in the right way in the spiritual sense? The prophetic stars, that is, the teachings of spiritual science, tell us the following about this future form: According to the whole way in which people have tried to bring religion into the currents of humanity, in the past centuries, religion is an amalgamation of two things, one of which, in the strict sense of the word, cannot actually be called religion; the other is religion.

What then is religion in reality? It is something that we must characterize as an attitude of the human soul: an attitude towards the spiritual, towards the infinite. Basically, we can characterize it well if we start with the basics of these attitudes, which then only have to be developed to the highest degree. If we walk across a meadow and have an open soul for what is green and blooming there, we will feel something joyful for the glories that reveal themselves through the flowers and grasses, through that which is reflected in the landscape, which glistens in the dew. If we can muster such an attitude, if our heart opens up, then it is not yet religion. It can only become religion when this feeling intensifies for the infinite that is behind the finite, for the spiritual that is behind the sensual. When our soul feels in such a way that it senses communion with the spiritual, then this mood corresponds to what is alive in religion. The more we can intensify this mood for the eternal within us, the more we foster religion in ourselves or in other people.

But now the necessary development of the times has brought about a situation in which what should basically be impulses that direct human feeling and perception from the transitory to the non-transitory has been combined with certain ideas and views of what it is like in the realm of the supersensible. But through this religion has become connected in a certain sense with what is actually spiritual science, with what must actually be regarded as science. And today we see how religion in this or that form can only be maintained in this church belief if very specific dogmas are maintained at the same time. But this produces what can be called the rigid dogmatic adherence to certain ideas about the spiritual world. Such conceptions should naturally progress as the human mind progresses. And it is this progress that should give the truest religious feeling the greatest joy, for it shows the greater the glories of the divine spiritual world and the greater their significance.

True religious feeling would not have consigned Giordano Bruno to the stake, but would have said: Oh, it is great for God to send people of this kind down to earth and to reveal such things through them. - In this way, the field of scientific research would necessarily have been recognized alongside the religious field, a field that extends to both the external and the spiritual world. This must progress, it must be suited from epoch to epoch to the human spirit, which progresses. In regard to this scientific research, a great change occurred when the 16th century approached. Before the age of Copernicus, Kepler and Galilei, things looked very strange at the teaching institutions and universities. Aristotle is certainly a great sage, but what he did was the greatest thing for his time. What the Middle Ages did with him was a very strong misunderstanding of his spirit, and in the end they no longer understood it at all, had no more idea of what he meant. Nevertheless, they always taught according to him.

In order to show you how knowledge must change from epoch to epoch as the human spirit progresses, so that misunderstandings do not arise, I would like to go into more detail about an event connected with Aristotle. Aristotle worked from a time when there was still an awareness that a body of ether was present in human nature, not just blood, nerve cords and so on. If one were to draw the etheric body, for example, one would get a very different drawing from what today's anatomists find and draw of this human being. How one draws it today was not given much importance in the time in which Aristotle created, because the etheric human being was still known. If you wanted to draw that, you would have to see a center here where the heart is, and draw rays emanating from there, important rays, but then going to the brain and having to do with the whole way a person thinks. Thinking is regulated when we look at the etheric body, from a center near the physical heart. Aristotle described this to illustrate the peculiar nature of thought. Later, people no longer understood what Aristotle meant, and they began to confuse the word for 'nerve' with the material nerve. It was believed that Aristotle meant the physical nerve cords when he described the etheric currents. With the transition to the materialistic period, Aristotle was no longer understood. So you can see that something completely wrong was learned. It was said that the main nerves emanate from the heart. Now came the scientific materialistic research, as inaugurated by Copernicus and Galileo, and then people came to the conclusion that the nerves emanate from the brain, namely the physical cords. And then they began to say: Aristotle is wrong. Thus Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno were opponents of Aristotle. The medieval Aristotelians did not adhere to the teachings of Aristotle, but to what they dreamt up about Aristotle. Thus it could happen that when Galileo showed a friend of his, who was an Aristotelian, the nerves running to the brain on a corpse, this friend preferred to trust Aristotle rather than his own observations. He believed in what he had imagined from the teachings of Aristotle. We see, then, how the stream of spiritual science was diverted in Aristotle's time into material science, the merits of which are not to be denied, and which has worked and continues to work for the benefit and salvation of humanity. But now we are in a time when we have to come up into the spiritual.

We are on the threshold of a time when science will again have to learn to understand the spiritual reality, when science will have to become what is called pneumatology in occultism, that is, spiritual teaching. What was science in the past century? The teaching of abstract ideas and natural laws that no longer had any connection with real spiritual life. Science is on the verge of becoming pneumatology, of returning to the spirit. This is written in the stars of theosophy. And since religion must always create an atmosphere for the spiritual, only in those ages can science and religion work in harmony when science works the spirit into pneumatology. Then science can be the right interpreter of spiritual life and support the mood that should in turn live in religion.

What is beginning is in such stark contrast to what has passed. Take, for example, what has passed in the various Protestant religious denominations: how they have tried not to let any scientific thinking into the area that should be dedicated to faith. Think of Luther and Kant. Kant said that he had to suspend knowledge so that he could have free rein for faith in freedom, immortality and God.

At that time, science was directed towards the external, sensual physical, it knew no interpretation of the supersensible, the spiritual. Therefore, what had been handed down in sacred documents had to be preserved as unadulterated as possible. This had its good justification. Now we are facing a different age, where theosophy guides us into the spiritual world, and now we will see how, little by little, a time is approaching when what is emerging is to be achieved by science being supported and enlightened precisely by theosophy. Religion and science will work together again in the next age. Science will become something that must gradually apply to all people. It will become understandable for everyone. Therefore, what is emerging as a parallel course of religion and science will, in the broadest sense, produce what could be called individualism in religion: every single heart will find its way into the spiritual world in an individual religious way. It is preordained for our age that that which can be common science in the spiritual will serve as an interpreter and guide in the religious realm in the most individual and personal way.

Again, it is shown in a remarkable way how, even here in decline, the personal moment points to something super-personal. The signs of decline also show this. And how does this pointing to a super-personal reality show itself in certain church conditions? What was it, then, when in a certain church those who are its custodians appealed to inspiration? [...] The things must be seen in relation to their spiritual character. Much of what is evident today, particularly in the religious life of the various denominations, points to this shining of the spirit self into what we call the consciousness soul, in both the ascending and descending sense.

This is particularly evident in the third of the three areas of human spiritual life. There will be a spreading of knowledge, knowledge of which today's practice of life has no real idea. One principle of this realization will be that the happiness of an individual human being can never be bought at the expense of the lesser happiness of others. In the future, the personal moment will be transferred into the transpersonal, and the egotistical into the trans-egotistical, into that which connects people. Gradually, a person will not want to be happy without knowing that others are equally happy. This mood, which is the opposite of our current way of life, is being prepared. There is only one way to create this mood, and that is through the realization of the real human essence and its composition, as spiritual science gives it to us. One must know man if one wants to be man.

We see these three things at the starting point of their development. What is the purpose of spiritual science? It should teach us to understand everything that must come. Now I want to say radically how people can relate to this. I will hypothetically assume for a while that what is today Theosophy and still represents a very small current would be seen by those who come into contact with it as a fantasy and reverie, and that it would be suppressed. Those who hold the anti-theosophical point of view would simply make it impossible for theosophy to flourish, because anti-theosophy is heading towards science. Then it would be impossible to gain an understanding of what has been described to you as the necessary development of science, religion and human life practice, written in the stars. Then people would exclude themselves from understanding these things. In which case, what would people be like? People would then be on Earth like a herd of some kind of animal that had ended up in completely alien climatic conditions that it cannot adapt to. The consequence of this would be that the animals would wither away and gradually perish. In this way, people would all fall prey to decay, decadence, premature destruction. Not through extinction, for instance. They would become more beast-like, which would be much worse than extinction, so that only the base passions and instincts and desires would really still be alive; that people would only desire to eat this or that, and they would use all their thinking to be able to produce that food. They would build factories to produce the best flour and the best bread, ships and balloons to bring fruit from the most distant regions and to deliver the products they want to enjoy. They would use tremendous ingenuity for the “rise of culture” – that is what they would call it. They would use infinite intelligence and mental power for this, but only to set the table in the end. Just think about what the phrase “rising culture” means from this point of view! Isn't the essential thing that infinite mental power is applied to it? If we only use it to telegraph: I need so many sacks of flour - then great intellectual power is used to produce something that ultimately only serves what we might call the animal in man. Materialism has led to a peak of intelligence and intelligent culture. But that has nothing to do with spirituality. Let us assume that people would be eliminated. What would the gods have to do? They would say to themselves: Now we have had a generation that did not understand the mission on earth. So we have to send down another generation, a generation of souls that will accomplish the mission on earth.

But small circles will already find understanding for what spiritual life of the future must be, and therefore the earth mission will be completed by people, and that which our fifth post-Atlantic culture, dedicated to the consciousness soul, will replace as the sixth, will already be achieved by a small circle of people who will spread throughout the rest of humanity. But this can only be achieved if people's free will intervenes. For once the ego has taken hold in human nature, man must also develop free will for the development of the ego. So it depends on each individual whether he wants to show understanding for spiritual development, or whether he wants to steer the descent that humanity is taking today.

A way of life must be developed that is based on the principle that the happiness of the individual cannot be attained at the expense of the happiness of another. If man does not want to understand this, he promotes the downward, withering, brutalizing development of humanity. Today we as human beings stand before this decision in a certain respect: to want or not to want spiritual science, and that means to want either the ascent or the decline of humanity. We should feel this in everything we do, we should feel that through our karma we have been placed like a new material in the development of humanity, like those who are to give up their powers as elementary powers, who must work their way up.

When we feel this way, we already have a practical sense of theosophy, a practical feeling, and we are aware of what we are actually doing when we develop the seemingly insignificant activity that we develop in such anthroposophical branches. Not as a hobby, a quirk of individuals, but as an understanding of the deepest needs of a newly emerging age.

I wanted to show you how things are interrelated so that we can truly understand the progress of humanity. Think for a moment about the sentence that man is a self-conscious being, that he must therefore know what he is, and only by knowing himself in his essence can he fulfill his destiny in the world; that therefore all those who do not want to know anything about the essence of man do not have the will to place themselves in the world in the right way. Do you remember how a spirit spoke that had an inkling of much of what is emerging today as Theosophy? Johann Gottlieb Fichte once spoke of his lofty ideas in the lectures 'On the Destination of the Scholar'. When he wanted to write a preface to these lectures, it occurred to him that now this will reach people who will just say: Yes, very nice ideas, but impractical. How can one introduce into life what is being said here? Yet Fichte was well aware that life is constantly guided by ideas.

Let us point out one example here. Who built the Simplon Tunnel? No engineer today can work without differential and integral calculus. Leibniz, who invented differential and integral calculus, is basically building all the tunnels and bridges in our time. The spiritual is everywhere the guiding force in all of life, and we can learn from what Fichte wrote, learn to strengthen ourselves in our theosophical consciousness when people say, “Oh, those are such eccentric ideas, nothing practical.” Fichte says in response: We know that ideas cannot be directly translated into life, and so do those who hold this against us. Perhaps we know it even better. But the fact that others do not want to know anything about ideas at all merely proves that the wise world government, the divine world government, will not be able to count on them. May a benevolent Nature, in which they believe, give them, at the right time, rain and sunshine, good digestion and, if possible, some good thoughts. In a way, we can strengthen ourselves by saying: we do know that, as Theosophists, we must cultivate an understanding for what must come. May a kind nature give them what Fichte said, but also what they need in spirit, what they believe they do not need. May the spirit give them ever wiser and wiser thoughts, so that they too will see spiritual science not as a reverie, but as an important impulse for humanity!

My aim yesterday was to show how the state of mind or consciousness of humanity has changed over the course of historical and prehistoric times, and I wanted to show this for the reason that it might make it easier to recognize the necessity of rising to a different state of mind in order to gain real, essential knowledge. And that is to a state of mind that differs from the one in which one has become accustomed to, which one cultivates in everyday and scientific life today and which one recognizes as something absolute that has existed as long as there have been people and that will exist as long as one will have the right to speak of people walking on earth. If we see how the soul has taken on a different inner constitution throughout the course of human development, then it will be easier for us to acknowledge a transformation of the present soul condition as well.

In order to tie in with what I said yesterday, I would now like to repeat in a few words, summarizing what can be derived from the last observations. I said that humanity, insofar as it can be regarded as civilized humanity, has actually only come to the present state of mind since the 15th century, and this state of mind is characterized, on the one hand, inwardly by the fact that we strive for an intellectual interpretation of the world, that we make use of our intellect to comprehend that which we call the world.

This intellectualistic orientation towards the world now also corresponds to a very specific area of the world, which can be grasped and understood through it. It is the world of mineral events and mineral forms, the world that has not yet risen to life. Today, it is often believed that even within purely intellectual endeavor, life may perhaps be grasped; but this only happens because one does not recognize the belonging together of the intellect in the inner and the inanimate in the outer world. If we go back beyond the 15th century and enter the period that, calculated backwards, lasts from the 15th century to the 8th century BC, we find a different arrangement of the human soul. And this arrangement is most characteristically encountered in the Greek mind.

There we are not dealing with an intellectual soul condition; concepts are not yet separated from words in the strict sense of the word. The Greeks essentially arrived at the workings of their soul not by inwardly visualizing concepts with a certain abstraction, as we do, but rather they heard, as it were, the sound of the words, even if it was not outwardly audible. What for us lives in the abstractness of concepts was tinged for him, if I may use the paradox, by the spiritually grasped sound, through the soundlessly, purely internally experienced sound. Just as we live in abstract concepts, so the Greek lived in the externally soundless sound. But this enabled him to perceive the living world as an external world. And so we see that wherever the Greeks wanted to form, let us say, ideas about the universe, about the cosmos, based on their presuppositions, they did not use the ideas taken from geology, physics, and chemistry that we use today, but rather what had settled in their souls through the growth, development, prosperity, , arising, passing away of that which lives vegetably.

If we go back even further, we come, however, to times that we can no longer count as historical in the strict sense of the word, then we come to the 8th century BC, to a period roughly up to the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. And if we look around at the peoples who could be considered civilized at the time, we find that the essential of the soul's life was no longer sought in the inwardly experienced words, but in the imaginative shaping of the word structure, the language structure. Rhythm and thematic – that is, what lines up tone by tone, what penetrates into the world of sound and also into the world of noise, so that we only make it alive in our soul when we rise to the poetic shaping of language – that was the actual element of life of the, if I may use the word, educated peoples of that time. And they found satisfaction not by expressing some external thing or event through words, as the Greeks did, but by inwardly feeling, as it were, that which they believed to live everywhere in the world as rhythm, as harmony.

Thus, inner rhythm and inner harmony were what characterized the state of soul during that period. And if we ask ourselves what realm could be penetrated externally by such an inner state of soul, we find that it is the realm of that world of beings which can experience in itself intuitive perception. Thus, what is the animal world, what is the sentient world, what lives in the perception of the objective, that inwardly came to life for the people of that ancient time in the state of soul of which I have spoken.

And if we go back to even older times, you can guess that in a certain respect there must have been an awareness of the human being himself. In our own age we have a recognition of dead nature; this was preceded by a recognition of living nature. And if we go back further in time, we come to those times of which, from certain quarters, only the outlines can be discerned today, namely, the world-views that emerged from more or less enlightened Catholicism. Those very thinkers who have settled into, not the decadent state of Catholicism, but what in older times was Catholic philosophy, speak of an original revelation of mankind. One must indeed see many things in their proper light if one wants to judge these things appropriately. The Catholic Church has become something different from what she was, for example, in the times of the Catholic Church Fathers.

One need only look at Origen and one will find that Origen is already trying to bring everything that has been gained in philosophical depth in his time into Christian thinking. And so we also find among the older Church Fathers a clear awareness that there was once a primordial revelation to humanity. And those Catholic writers who have retained the better forces of Catholicism still speak today of the primordial revelations, which only later disappeared into paganism, which was increasingly heading towards decadence, so that the knowledge was lost. So that in these primal revelations of an instinctive humanity, that which was later brought by Christianity in its developed form was shown.

It is interesting when writers such as Otto Willmann talk about the primal revelation, when they going back to the mysteries and beyond the mysteries and pointing to such a primal revelation, by which people in those times in the 3rd and beyond the 3rd millennium of the pre-Christian era were inspired, if such a primal revelation is sought. It is not necessary for us to get involved in a more precise description of what is said about the primal revelation. But let us characterize in a spiritual-scientific sense what can be found when we go back to these prehistoric times of human civilization, where, through an instinctive state of mind, I will call it for the moment, not only the sentient but the human itself can be explored, that is, that which lives in man above the animalistic, the actual, the specifically human. Indeed, there was a time when the corresponding knowledge was instinctive, not even something that would be accepted today as knowledge, but a kind of direct experience, a dimly dreamlike experience, but one that contained something of the essence of the human being, so that one could objectify what the human being actually is as if through an inner living into this human essence. This epoch cannot be considered historically, although historical remains from it have certainly remained. How one has to look at these historical remains will become clear from what I would now like to give as a characteristic of this epoch itself.

When we speak of the state of mind that we now have as the humanity, the intellectualist soul, we are speaking of something that lies within the soul for ordinary experience, for ordinary experience, as we call the soul more or less clear or more or less trivial today. Even if we look at it in that epoch, for which Greek observation is typical, we are speaking of an inner experience of the word, and thus again of something that is within the soul. And even if we go back to the 9th or 10th century BC, to the 2nd millennium, to the end times of the 3rd millennium, we are still speaking of something that takes place in the soul, although it must be admitted must be admitted by anyone who knows these things precisely from their own observation that at the moment when the soul experience emerges from the word and enters into this rhythmic experience, into this experience of harmonies and, I would like to say, musically imaginative themes, then what is experienced in the soul always resonates quietly with the physical. Just as it can be felt that every time a person has a vivid dream, something happens in their physical being that leads to the constitution of dreaming, so the person of the characterized period knew that when he brought to life within himself something harmonious, rhythmic, thematic, it was as if the secrets of the world were revealed or unveiled to him, and something of the physical moved along with it. When we speak of our abstract, intellectualistic conception of the world, we have no physical resonance in our consciousness. We can devise theories about what might happen in the human nervous system when logical-intellectualistic thinking takes place. But such theories are only thoughts; they are not alive, they are not experienced.

In the same way, we still have to speak of the Greek soul when we realize how the word lived in this soul. But as I said, we already move beyond the purely soul realm to a slight involvement of the body when we ascend to the previous period. And we move even more from what we call the soul realm today into the realm of the body when we ascend to the ancient instinctive knowledge that existed in the earlier centuries of the third millennium BC and even earlier. There was a direct soul experience with the character of a physical experience. In those older times, one actually experienced a process that we today describe as physical – I do not want to discuss now whether with complete justification or with partial injustice – a physically described process where later experienced as soul-life, as we call it.

I would like to point out that when one comes from such experiences of humanity, which are so different from our own, one also has a difficult time using words. The things themselves become different, very unlike what one experiences today. Our languages have been formed for our present-day experiences, and one must try to use the languages in such a way that one can return to something that is no longer directly present experience today, and which can therefore only be touched upon weakly with the word usages that we have today. Therefore, I have to say that what we today call the soul did not really live in the inner soul state of these old people. Something actually lived in them that we today would describe as physical, even as bodily, in the same way as thinking or inward hearing of the word lives in a person today. So this old man experienced inhaling, holding his breath and exhaling not as we do, who have outgrown our involvement in the breathing process. He experienced this breathing as we only experience it in abnormal states, for example when we go through states of fear in our dreams and then wake up and notice that our breathing is disturbed. In this pathological state, we notice something of the interaction of the breathing process with the occurrence of images in front of our consciousness. We have outgrown the images that arise before consciousness when the normal breathing process takes place, because we have grown up to perceive the rhythmic in language, the harmonious in language, the thematic in language, to the inner coloring of the word, because we have grown up completely in our time to abstract conception, to the intellectualistic conception of the world.

But these three periods were preceded by another one, when man still, if I may use the expression, lived down in what we today call his physical body, and lived with his process of knowledge, which was inhaling, holding his breath, and exhaling. And what did man experience with inhaling? Today, this can only be taught by the imaginative knowledge of which I spoke in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in my “Occult Science in Outline”. For what was experienced in that ancient epoch when inhaling was essentially an imagination; man's own imagination, the imagination of man as a figure was experienced when inhaling. Man felt this in breathing in – of course he had to focus his attention on it, in everyday life he did not always focus his attention on it – but he could, as it were, stop his everyday soul life and then he could experience it. He experienced it especially in moments when everyday consciousness was somewhat subdued. That was necessary for this. We would say today that he experienced the figure of the human being when he drew in his breath and approached the state of falling asleep or waking up; when he held his breath, he experienced the merging of this figure with the inner soul. He had the opportunity to experience the human form in the inhalation, the mistiness of this form in the retention of breath, and the connection of this auric mistiness of the form with the soul. Then, in exhaling, he experienced the soul's surrender to the outer world, the harmony of man with the outer world.

I said explicitly that the person could experience this in special moments. He could, as it were, focus his attention on the breathing process and then perceive such. He really did attain an instinctive knowledge - if you want to call it knowledge - by observing his breathing process, especially when he steered this breathing process inwardly, which resulted from practice. It was, so to speak, a descent into the physical body, through which the human being could be brought to knowledge.

Of course, we must not imagine that in those ancient times man spent the whole day from morning till evening only becoming acquainted with himself. I therefore said: when he directed his attention to it. But this attention could easily be drawn from the whole constitution of the human being.

Now, I said that this goes back to ancient times; but what has been preserved historically from those times is the method of knowledge, the breathing method, the yogic breathing, which is practiced in certain schools in India. This has been transmitted to a later time by the fact that it was elementary and natural in an earlier time. For a later time, certain preparations and certain manipulations of the breathing process were necessary. In earlier times, these manipulations arose as something that man learned in the course of his life, just as one learns to speak today.

What is called yogic breathing is an inheritance from an earlier time, when the whole soul constitution was different than it was later, and when man faced the world in an instinctive way through this different soul constitution. For it was, of course, very instinctive to grasp the essence, the secret of things, through breathing, not through thinking and inner speech, but through breathing. Where today we ponder intellectually in order to assemble individual facts into overall phenomena and to find natural laws through the calculating mind, and so on, there one inhaled that which, as the essence of the human being himself, should arise as instinctive knowledge within human nature.

It is of great importance to realize that not every human epoch corresponds in the same way to every other. Just as the constitution of the soul of people has changed, so too has the bodily constitution, albeit in a more subtle way. And it must be said that those who today believe that they can reawaken, for example, the process of breathing by penetrating the secrets of the world, as this breathing process was carried out in ancient times and as it has been preserved in natures who are, after all, constituted differently from modern European natures, are on the wrong track. It is absolutely necessary that, in addition to following the external history of the development of humanity, which has become a matter for the nineteenth century in particular, we now familiarize ourselves with an inner pursuit of what has taken place as a development of the soul parallel to this external physical development. One does more justice to the portrayal of external physical development if one is able to see the spiritual-soul development on the other side.

Those for whom these four types of human soul condition are now fully objective will be able to sense how the soul is viewed in a special way. First we have a state of soul that is actually no longer a state of soul at all, but a bodily state that lives in the breathing process; then there is the state that lives in the rhythmic-harmonic, in the imaginative-thematic process; then there is the state of the silent experience of the word, and finally that which lives in the intellectual process; and when one has all this in objective form, then one sees the soul in such a way that one must ascribe to it the most diverse possibilities for relating to the world. And it is necessary for the present time to know that there are such different possibilities, let us say, such different types of consciousness, and that for each state of consciousness other levels of cosmic life and cosmic existence come to light.

Today, it is often believed that there is only one state of consciousness, which one then tries to describe as something that can only be taken absolutely alone. But by wanting to limit oneself to this one state of consciousness, one simultaneously limits oneself to a single level of cosmic existence and cosmic experience. And we can truly say of today's state of consciousness that it is far removed from the realization of the actual human being. It clings to constructing a human being out of physiology and biology. For what we call psychology today is basically a collection of hackneyed words for something for which there is no real soul content left.

Humanity must first move forward again to grasp the living alongside the dead, the sentient alongside the living, the human alongside mere sentient cognition. As I said, I have made these remarks to facilitate an idea that leads to what is necessary today if we want to approach the human again, if we want to get to know the human again. For this human does not reveal itself to the state of consciousness that is primarily attuned to the dead, to the mineral.

We speak of the I, we think we can speak of the I. The fact that we have a word for this I is no proof that we also have a soul content with this word. There are philosophers today who understand the I only as a summary of what is experienced as an idea, as a feeling. In a sense, only that which is drawn from one idea to another, from one feeling to another, from one feeling to the idea as connecting lines, that which is itself quite abstract, is often understood today as the ego. But one can say that in a sense, even this understanding has a limited justification. For what is experienced in the soul when one speaks of such consciousness of the self is basically not even content.

You see, we can have a white surface, we can speak of white - I have used the image several times before -, we see the white, but we also see the black here in the middle. There is no white there, the white is missing, and yet we see the black through the white (it is drawn).

Those who are really able to analyse the soul can see that today we experience something in the soul that can be compared to this white. We experience pain and pleasure, we experience this and that sensation, love, hate, and so on. We experience perceptions, although these are already something rather gray for ordinary consciousness when they want to be relived in reflection; but we experience the I with this consciousness in the same way as the black in the white here. Where we experience nothing, where we experience a kind of hole in our consciousness, that is where we place the ego for ordinary consciousness. No wonder we speak of the ego; we are also speaking here of the black hole. What a person experiences from waking up to falling asleep does not include the ego. The question may arise before us: How do we even come to a possibility of gaining ideas for the ego? Yes, here the person who is seriously seeking knowledge is led to something else. He finds no starting point for gaining ideas for the I anywhere in the world around us. As a rule, what surrounds us is sometimes outside and sometimes inside in the soul. Basically, it is the same. And if we can only find a hole for the ego within, we cannot find a point of reference outside, even under ordinary circumstances, where we can place our ego, so to speak.

Those who seriously strive for knowledge find a way to approach the ego in the events of the world only with one phenomenon: that of death. It is precisely at the point where the human being ceases to exist at death, when, as it were, the human body is surrendered to the external forces from which

it was withdrawn from birth or from conception to death, then, when we are now in a position to form an idea of the human being, now that we no longer have the possibility of drawing conclusions about the human being from the body, only then does the possibility begin for us to approach the ego. We must begin with the phenomenon that is, so to speak, most inexplicable among the external phenomena, most inexplicable because it can no longer be grasped by ordinary consciousness, and can least be brought into consciousness.

But if we can decide to look at death in this way, if we do the same with the phenomenon of death as I have described for the struggle with concepts in general, where mere abstract knowledge becomes an inner experience, if we approach the phenomenon of death in this way, then we gradually learn to see through that death, when it confronts us at the cessation of life, is actually only something like a sum, like an integral, I would say, of individual processes that always take place in man from birth on. We are always dying, but we die in very small portions, so to speak. When we begin our life on earth, we also begin to die. But again and again, and again, what is given to us as vitality through birth overcomes death. Death always wants to work in us. It only ever manages a very small portion of its work and is then overcome. But what seems to us to be vividly compressed in death at that one moment is constantly taking place in life, like differentials, and is a continuous, ongoing process.

If we follow this, we see that in the human inner organic process, there are not only anabolic processes. If there were only anabolic processes, we would never be able to achieve thinking consciousness, because that which merely lives, that which is merely vital, takes away our consciousness, makes us unconscious. The death processes in us, the dying processes, the destruction processes of the vital, which always take place differentially in us, are what bring us consciousness, what make us thinking, level-headed beings. We would always fall into a kind of rashness, into a kind of unconsciousness, if we only lived. If it were true that life in plants is at a certain level, in animals at a higher level, and in humans at an even higher level, if it were always a matter of an increase, of a potentization of life, we would never develop a thinking consciousness.

We have life in plants. But as life ascends to animals, it already begins to subside in animals. But in humans, there is a continuous dying process. This continuous dying process, which not only dampens life but undermines it – it is only rebuilt in turn – is the organic process that underlies conscious thinking. To the extent that we have the continuous process of dying within us, we have the possibility of thinking in our physical life.

But if we learn to observe, we can see the building process (see drawing, red), the vital building process of the vegetable kingdom, which also works in us. one then understands how this anabolic process is dampened by the animalistic (green), but how a continuous falling out (black) takes place, an inner decay, and if one finally rises to have a realization of this inner decay, then one also has that which always maintains itself against this decay. One has the process of dying, but one also has a perpetual fighter against the process of dying; one has the process that represents the life of the ego.

That is where the ego lives. By seeing, in higher knowledge, in higher contemplation, how a continual depositing takes place through the nervous process of man, how, as it were, an inner sediment is formed, one also sees how the I continually wrings itself out of this sediment formation, out of this inner sediment formation. One cannot gain a view of the true self until one is able to observe this inner sediment formation. The self lives in the human being, of course, but the human being perceives this self by experiencing the process of dying, the process of inner decomposition. And the one who has now grasped how the ego is a constant fighter against this process of dying has grasped how the ego is something that as such has nothing to do with death at all; he has vividly grasped what otherwise designated dialectically or logically as immortality.

But this is the way to see immortality, because it leads to entities that belong to a different order of existence from that which precipitates as sediment. One arrives in a region where death has no meaning, where death loses the possibility of being formed as an earthly sensation. Thus we approach the I when we study death. I have only hinted at this, for this study of death is a very detailed one, and for those who attach a certain importance to it, it can also be said that the pursuit of this perpetual sedimentation, this formation of sediment, in contemplation appears as if there were a perpetual continuous inner flaring up of sparks of darkness, thus in contrast to sparks of light: sparks of darkness in an even luminous aura.

But we must form other concepts if we want to approach what can lead us to a kind of knowledge of the human being. I must start from something else if I want to form this other concept. I had to refer you to death and how to overcome it, because the aim was to get to the ego. I would now like to refer you to the following: consider the life of plants, but first of all the actual plant. This is the annual plant, because in the perennial plant and in the tree we are already confronted with a complication that would necessitate a separate consideration. In the annual plant, you find the germinating of growth from the seed, the shooting of the leaves, the emergence of growth up to the flower, up to fertilization, the development of the fruit containing the seed for the following plant. We see, as it were, the result of the fruit, which in turn develops into a plant.

You will easily be able to imagine that the plant, as it develops from those early stages where the leaf emerges, to fertilization, unfolds forces within itself that reach their culmination at the very moment of fertilization. But then the downward path begins, and the plant decays again. And by observing this cycle of the plant world, you will see the essential nature of the plant. As I said, we will not deal with perennial plants and those plants that leave behind a trunk like a tree. What I said about the annual plant, which comes to an end with a single fertilization, would only be more complicated; but we grasp the essential nature of the plant by looking at the nature of the plant that comes to an end with fertilization. When properly observed, the plant-like quality lies precisely in the life that culminates in fertilization and, by culminating in fertilization, descends in the other direction. Therein lies the plant-like. If we seek the essence of the plant, we must search in a similar way to how we must search for the human being's sense of self in the continuous dying. We say of the human being that the death with which he first ends his physical being is actually always within him as a force. When he is born, he begins to die, begins to develop, I would say, differentials of dying; he dies continually. The dying process is within him. In the plant, that which culminates last is continually present. Just as we culminate in death, so they culminate in fertilization. Just as we grasp our inner being, our ego, in death, so we grasp the essence of the plant in fertilization. The plant comes to life in fertilization; what develops in the leaf is only a metamorphosis, only a preliminary stage of fertilization.

When you come to animals, the situation is as follows: the animal is fertilized, but at first the fertilization does not mean withering, but it can be fertilized again. Of course, we always come to borderline questions, but we want to grasp the living and feeling in certain characteristic main points. Just as the plant being, the actual plant being, culminates in fertilization – of course, anyone can doubt that this is the actual plant being, but we grasp the plant being where it manifests itself – so the animal does not culminate in fertilization, but overcomes fertilization. That which is the higher animal carries something else within itself. If it were to carry only that which lives in fertilization, it would have to undergo the same thing as the characteristic plant: it would have to die. But it carries something beyond fertilization. And when we come to man, he not only overcomes what the animal overcomes, but he overcomes death itself.

These things of which I have now spoken should not be taken dogmatically; nor should they be taken in such a way that one formulates definitions from them, for then one immediately goes astray. But if someone were to say that a plant is what perishes in fertilization, and that an animal is what retains something beyond fertilization, then they are formulating definitions instead of acquiring concepts. One can only come to an understanding if one acquires concepts for certain stages of life and existence. And just as one must acquire the concept of the ego by bringing the ego to death, so one must acquire the concept of the animal by observing how fertilization is overcome in something that lives in the animal beyond fertilization. One must observe the plant, regarding fertilization, or rather what takes place in fertilization, as a continuous process.

But then, when one has risen to such concepts, these concepts themselves become something living in the soul life. And these concepts, once grasped, themselves fertilize the soul life. So that we are now in a position not only to grasp the human being's ego, but also, by appropriating what remains in the animal beyond fertilization, we gradually arrive at a concept of the human being's astral body. And when we appropriate what lives continuously in fertilization, we also arrive at a concept of the human being's etheric body. If we grasp the actual I as that which escapes this sedimentation, then we must grasp the astral body in a different way. We must grasp this astral body in the following way. Let us not consider what grows, feeds and reproduces as dying away. We consider the whole physical being as dying away when we want to come to the I. So now we consider that which grows, which reproduces, not as dying, but only as continually paralyzed, so that there is now not something that conquers death, but something that conquers the paralysis of vitality, which thus, whenever vitality sinks, always again whips up this vitality

Then we have, just as here (see drawing page 195) dark sparks spurt out of the light, here (see drawing page 200, red) there is continually a dark (blue) clouding, if I may say so, clouding out of a bright color glowing. One must use these expressions in order to have ideas in these parts of being. I would like to say that the I sparks out of the light, it clouds out, tinting, cloudily tinting a light tint, when the astral element in the etheric element conquers the dulling of the vitality. I am trying to be as precise as possible, but you understand that these things, which are no longer accessible to intellectualistic knowledge but only to the imaginative, cannot be expressed by intellectualistic concepts either, but that they have to be expressed through imagination.

It can also happen, can't it, that people take such imaginations for the thing and then don't know their way around, as certain critics of anthroposophy do. But these people make the mistake that someone would make — as paradoxical as it is, but it is so — who, when someone says the word 'hedgehog', imagines a real, prickly hedgehog. The word 'hedgehog' is, of course, not the hedgehog. Just as little as these images are the corresponding being, but we can only penetrate through these images to what is really there in the supersensible being. Ultimately, it is a sensualization.

Those who are familiar with the whole process do not, of course, need to be told what Bruhn, for example, says in his little book about anthroposophy: that anthroposophy confuses the supersensible with the sensual. That is about as clever as accusing a mathematician of confusing what he writes on the blackboard with mathematics. But that is how criticism is usually written about what one does not want to understand, because one does not want to choose the paths to it that are necessary. So what it is about is that we have to find our way back to what can bring the human being before our soul again. Imaginations once occurred in the course of the breathing process; imaginations must again arise through which we can approach the true nature of the human being. Only we cannot reach them through a breathing process, but through those processes which I have tried to describe in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in my “Occult Science”.

I wanted to give you some hints today about how another soul condition must be sought out of today's intellectual soul condition. This other soul-condition is not the same as the consciousness of direct vision. It is not at all necessary to attain the consciousness of direct vision, but this other soul-condition can be had. It develops out of a truly intellectualized inner development, when one is in earnest and sincere about this intellectualized inner development and knows where its limits are. Then it will develop without fail. And the person most likely to arrive at such a view of an inner metamorphosed state of mind is the person who is living in the scientific concepts of modern times. For if he lives into them in such a way that one can live with them, if he does not merely humbly accept them, but if he lives into them in such a way that one can really live through them inwardly, then he will not be led by them to an ignorabimus, but will be led to a special experience, to a real struggle, precisely at the boundary where otherwise the ignorabimus is placed, is impaled. And so this other state of mind is kindled. But everything depends on approaching the scientific concepts themselves in an honest and thoroughly truthful manner. Then one does not stop at them, they become germs from which something else grows; then one does not stop at laying these scientific concepts next to each other and looking at them, but one sinks these bean germs into the earth, that is, the intellectualistic concepts of nature into the depths of the soul. There they flourish in a new state of mind. What has been developed over the past few centuries carries within it the potential to give rise to new seeds of knowledge. We have to look at an age that, in turn, reveals a different state of soul from that which the age of Galileo, the 15th century, brought forth. We have to advance to a deeper knowledge of the world by coming to a more intense experience of our own human interior.

Today I would like to add a somewhat more extensive consideration about cosmic observation to our reflections. We, as human beings, must be thoroughly aware that we live on earth in the time that passes between birth and death, and that we consider everything that makes an impression on us, in the narrower and broader sense, with our senses and also with our intellect, but only from the point of view of our earthly residence. We often become aware of how much we are bound to this earthly abode by our external physical body. We learn already in school that a human being can only live if he breathes the air that surrounds him and that consists of a certain mixture of oxygen and nitrogen. Man is completely dependent on this air for his vital functions. We only need to consider how different our physical life would be if, for example, there were more oxygen in the air around us than there actually is. Let us assume that there were more oxygen in the air, then we would live faster, that is, we would have a much shorter lifespan on earth calculated by years. Time would be compressed, so to speak, and our lifespan would have to be shorter. This is basically just a very rough approximation. We can imagine that our entire human organism would be different if every single thing in our environment that has an influence on us were to be changed just a little. Such a consideration is indeed often made today. People are becoming aware of their physical dependence on their environment. However, at most one is only very clearly aware in the abstract that man also has a soul-spiritual being, and basically one never has such precise ideas about this spiritual-soul being as one has about the physical-bodily being. The physical-corporal aspect of our organization is so well known that one can say how differently abundant oxygen in the air would affect a person. Regarding the spiritual-soul being, one does not think so much, thoughts that would go something like this: If this spiritual-soul being were different from what it is, could it then be on earth between birth and death?

Just as our body is adapted to the amount of oxygen in the air, and how many other things in our body are adapted to the conditions that are just near the earth's surface, so too is our soul and spirit perfectly adapted between birth and death to what is immediately at the earth's surface. And when one becomes fully aware of this, then one will also be able to say: Just as the human being could not live as an earthly human being out there, just a few miles from the earth's surface, so too would the human soul, with its thinking, feeling and willing, not be able to live in a different way in other than earthly conditions, just as it lives in the earth's environment. Elsewhere, in a different position to the earth, it would have to be organized differently again as a spiritual-mental being. Just as the human body would derive no benefit from its lungs, once they were organized, if they were miles away from the earth's surface, so the human soul, with its thinking, feeling and willing, as it develops in earthly life, would be unable to function under other than earthly conditions.

One could not get any clear idea of these things at all if it were not possible for those people who seek an inner soul development to come to different soul experiences than are the case in ordinary thinking, feeling and willing. You all know from the descriptions in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' that one can arrive at quite different soul moods and dispositions, that one can arrive at a quite different soul content. One can arrive at a soul content that not only has ordinary thinking but also imagination, that lives in pictures instead of thoughts. One can go further and arrive at inspiration. Just as our lungs, with the air, perform their inhalation in relation to the physicality of the air, so too can one, so to speak, inspire and breathe in the spiritual and soul substance of the spiritual and soul substance spread throughout the world. And just as the lungs, when they inhale oxygen, draw their life from this oxygen, as the whole human body draws its life from this oxygen, so too the human soul draws its life from the inspirations that take place when such higher knowledge is acquired. And it is the same with the further level of knowledge, with intuition.

Then the soul rises to a completely different inner content. Then it experiences something essentially different. But this different experience is connected, as you know, with what can be called a soul-like going out of the body. We no longer feel so within our body when we ascend to imagination, inspiration and intuition as we feel when we are in ordinary earthly life. It is then with the spiritual-soul being just as if, for example, the lungs were transformed into an organ that breathes light instead of air. Then it could indeed live a few miles outside the earthly with the organism to which the lungs belong. Now, in the physical that is not possible at first, at least not for a human being, but it is possible for the spiritual and soul in us when we leave our body and then experience imagination, inspiration and intuition in our soul, we actually leave the earthly point of view, we already come to the point of view that we had before we descended into a physical body. We come through the fact that we ascend to imagination, inspiration and intuition, actually from an earthly view of the world to a cosmic view of the world. We are just simply no longer on earth, but we look at the earthly from a different point of view.

This is not of great significance when it comes to observing human souls. However, it is of great significance when it comes to getting to know the spiritual in the cosmos itself. I will make this clear to you in a schematic drawing. Imagine that here is the earth, the human being on earth. Man sees the elements in his earthly surroundings. We can call them solid, liquid and gaseous. He perceives the fiery, the warm. But then what immediately belongs to the earth's surface ceases. By perceiving the fiery, the warm, man already rises to the perception of the earth's surroundings. He enters the light-filled realm, into that which we call the light ether. It is indeed our special characteristic that we can perceive the light ether through our looking, our seeing. But when imaginative perception occurs in a person, then he does not feel standing here on earth and letting his gaze wander out into the light ether, but then he actually feels as if he were perceiving and looking at the whole from the outside (drawing, red).

Particularly in relation to what I am discussing here, it is possible to speak quite definitely about how this happens. If you are standing on the earth and let your gaze wander freely into the cosmos, then by day you are looking into the light everywhere. By night you look up at the starry sky. There you make use, if I may say so, of the perceiving power of your eye. But the power of will is also constantly directed at this perceiving power of your eye. You actually use this power of will in earthly seeing only for the adjustment of the eye. But when you ascend to imaginative cognition, this willpower is trained more and more, especially for the individual senses. You feel how you, as it were, step out into space through your eyes and increasingly come to look at the cosmos from the outside.

You do not have to believe that what I am describing here consists of your eye becoming huge, and then growing all the way over, and that you then look at the cosmos from the outside as you now look at the cosmos from the inside. You do not achieve this through the power of perception, but precisely through the will becoming clairvoyant. It is an experience in which the will expands, but in which you yourself are present. In this case you also look at the stars from the outside, as a person, when he is in the spiritual world as a soul, also looks at the stars from the outside, from where there are no more stars, not from the etheric region, but from the astral region, from which one can say that there is still space, and from which one can also say that there is no more space. It does not make much sense to speak of what I have just indicated as if there were still space. But one feels as if one had space within oneself. But then you do not see any stars. You know you are looking at the stars, but you do not see any stars, you see images. You actually see images everywhere within the stellar space. It suddenly becomes clear to you why in the old days, when people depicted spheres, they didn't just paint stars, but pictures.

But now imagine looking through these pictures. Then you become aware that forces radiate down to Earth from all these pictures; only that these forces radiate together. If you look at a radiant star from here, from the Earth, you have the feeling that the rays diverge. If you look at it from outside, you have the feeling that the rays, the light effects that emanate from the pictures, are not only light effects but also power effects, and that they go together. These power effects go as far as the earth. And what do they do there? Yes, you see, they form the shape of the plants, for example. And the one who looks imaginatively says: the lily is a plant form on earth that was created in this form and shape by this group of stars. Another, a tulip shape, was created by another group of stars.

And so you see what is on earth as plant cover (green), as if it were really painted by the starry sky. It is actually the case that the form of the plant body is determined, created, by the cosmos. And now you can easily understand: if you look further in, if you see the fixed stars out there, then closer to the earth you see the planets Saturn, Jupiter, Mars and so on. They are moving. The fixed stars show you the constellations at rest, which give the plants their shape. But the moving planets send down forces of movement. It is these that the plants first draw out of the root, then make them grow higher and higher, and so on. Just as the shape of the plants is formed from the fixed starry sky, so the movement is formed from the movement of the celestial bodies closer to the earth. Only what takes place in the plant itself, this metabolism, that, for example, the plant absorbs carbonic acid, assimilates it, as they say, and secretes the carbon, so that it forms its carbon body, that is from the forces of the earth itself. We can therefore say: When we look at the plant in its entirety, its form is from the starry sky, its growth is from the planetary movement, and its metabolism is from the earth.

These are things that are regarded as foolishness by those who call themselves true scientific minds today, but they are the very reality. For he who regards the plant in its growth and form as it is done today, resembles one — I must here use a simile that I have often applied — who looks at a magnetic needle that points with one side to the north, with the other side to the south, and who now says: This is due to the magnetic needle, that one point points to the north, the other to the south. It is not due to the magnetic needle, but natural science naturally assumes that the whole earth is a great magnet, that it attracts the one point to the north and the other to the south. In natural science, the whole earth is used to explain the direction of the magnetic needle. But in the same way, if you want to explain the whole form of the plant, you have to use the whole universe. The plant is formed out of the whole universe. It is simply an awful absurdity that the same people who, for example, use the whole earth to explain the direction of the magnetic needle, want to explain the plant only in terms of its cells and their forces. Just as the magnet needle can only be understood when it is placed in the whole magnetic context of the earth, so can plants only be understood when they are placed in the whole cosmic context, when one comes to say: Here I am walking across a region, let us say, of central Europe; for this central Europe, during the time of flower growth, these constellations have a particular significance; hence the plants of this area grow here, because the heavens cause certain plants to grow on the earth in a particular area.

If we wish to observe plants from this point of view, if we go as far as the form, then we must actually take the whole Cosmos to help us. With the animals we need go only as far as the constellations of the zodiac. I have already spoken about this. The stars outside the zodiac have no influence on animals. The animal has thus already become more independent, no longer depends in its organic formation on the whole cosmos, but only on what is in and under the zodiac.

Man has become even more independent, because only the planets influence him, not in so far as he is a soul, but in so far as he is a physical organism. Only where it passes over into the moral, into the soul, must we go beyond the planetary influence, as was done in the older, really good views of astrology, not in today's lay and amateurish ones, which are still behind. But from all this you can see that one must say, in a certain way, but always only to the extent that one takes the external into account: this applies to the plant. For the animal, the form is connected with the zodiac, the growth with the planetary movement and the metabolism with the earth.

If we go up to the human being, then we can no longer ascribe his form to any constellation, but only to the whole universe as such; we can only say: the sphere; not to the individual constellations, but to the whole sphere. I have therefore said on one occasion – and it has already been printed – that in a certain sense the human brain is a reflection of the whole starry sky, not of a single group of stars. Thus, the sphere for form. For growth, in a certain sense, planetary motion too, but now the entire planetary motion, not individual planets, as it is for the plant, for the animal; and for metabolism, again, the earth.

Plant:

Form, starry sky
growth, planets
metabolism, earth

Animal:

Form, zodiac
growth, planets
metabolism, earth

Human being:

form, sphere
growth, planet
metabolism, earth

What was the progress in the development of knowledge? Basically, until the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, no one who came into consideration with regard to knowledge doubted the things I have just discussed. Even if this ancient knowledge was not the fully conscious knowledge that we are striving for today through anthroposophy, for example, there was still a kind of dream-like but clairvoyant knowledge in those ancient times, at least up to the Mystery of Golgotha. And those people who were recognized as knowing something about the world had no doubt at all that when they looked at a plant blossom, they had to relate it to some configurations in the starry sky. And so with other things.

Then this knowledge increasingly disappeared during the first four centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha. After the great eradication of ancient knowledge - I have often described this eradication - only those insights remained that were handed down into the Middle Ages, were often distorted, and are now recorded in old books and are still enjoyed by some people who do not want to take refuge in the new knowledge but always want to look back to the old.

The realization that we are now consciously embracing, the cosmic realization of everything that appears here on our earth as a form, this cosmic realization that we are striving for today, was not present in conscious clairvoyance, but it was present in a certain way. It dawned on people more and more. And then, after man had devoted himself for some time to the artistic shaping of the word in drama, to the thought in dialectics, to the sound and word connection in rhetoric, to the contemplation of number in arithmetic, to the contemplation of form in geometry, after man had devoted himself to this artistic training of the human soul forces for several centuries, the world view emerged that no longer searches out there in the universe, that no longer asks: What is out there that a lily blossom or a tulip blossom can arise on earth? Instead, a worldview emerged that only calculates the present position of the stars, the size of the stars, which only mathematics can explain, which at most accepts mechanics and physics as astrophysics when the stellar world, when the extraterrestrial comes into consideration.

If there is the earth here and a mole in the earth here, the mole has a certain view of the world. But there is not much of the sun in this world view. In more recent times, people have lost the opportunity to look up from the lily blossom, from the tulip blossom into the starry sky, just as the mole does not have the opportunity to look up beyond the darkness of the earth. And there, human beings are stuck in the earth, water, air and fire. At most, they look out into the light like an earthworm does when it comes out during a rain shower and perhaps perceives something of the scant light out there. With regard to the spiritual world, humanity has gradually become entangled in a kind of mole existence. For only what man can find in his own inner being, the mathematical connections, he seeks outside in the cosmos; but he does not seek the concrete and spiritually real outside in the cosmos. One could say that the experience of freedom could only come to man through leading this mole-like existence for a while, through looking at the lily and no longer knowing that a picture of heaven is reflected in the lily; through looking at the tulip and no longer knowing that a picture of heaven is reflected in the tulip. In this way he has turned his powers more inward, and has attained the experience of freedom. But today we have reached the point where we must again grasp the spiritual universe in the eye of our soul. That which for centuries appeared only as the mathematical, mechanical structure of space must again appear to the soul's eye as a spiritualized cosmos. One can truly say: For centuries, humanity in the civilized world has led a spiritual life of privation, albeit for the purpose of cultivating human freedom; for everything that is experienced in the progress of humanity has meaning. But one must see through this meaning, one must not stop at one stage of development, but one must go along with the development and must be clear today: Now that humanity has developed the experience of freedom in its earthly mole-like existence, it must turn again to the contemplation of the spiritual, the spiritual world, not only the mathematical world.

But try to imagine vividly what I am dealing with now. It is really as if it had become dark in the soul in relation to the first four centuries after Christ, as if people had previously looked out and seen the light of the Spirit in the cosmos, figuratively speaking. There was just enough time, because this vision of the soul lasted for another four centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha, even if it became increasingly duller and duller, for the event of Golgotha, the Christ event, to still be viewed spiritually in the first centuries. Only the literature that refers to this spiritual view of the Christ event has also been eradicated. After all, there is nothing of this literature left except what the opponents wrote. Man faces the Mystery of Golgotha in such a way that, apart from the simple, seemingly simple accounts of the Gospels, he does not have the great accounts that the spiritualists of the first four centuries still gave. He has only the accounts of the opponents. We have about as much of the greatest portrayals of the mystery of Golgotha as posterity would have of anthroposophy if it only read the writings of Kal/ly. I think one would not get a very adequate picture. You always have to bear in mind how these first four centuries worked to eradicate precisely the most intense insights that were still available when one looked out into the cosmos and knew that the Christ came to earth from a spiritual cosmos. One had to understand the spiritual cosmos in order to be able to understand how the Christ came to earth from the spiritual world and embodied himself in a human being. Then nothing remained, because humanity immersed itself only in the earthly, as the memories of the Mystery of Golgotha. The memories were passed down from generation to generation. And what was passed down as a memory was called a revelation, and it was sought to comprehend it with the intellectualism that was emerging more and more.

What is it then that is our task today in the face of these things? It is our task to learn to look out into the universe again and to be able to see spirit everywhere, not just by immersing ourselves in ourselves and wanting to experience the spiritual there, but by being able to experience the spirit in all the forms of the cosmos outside of us. That is our right, that must happen again. We must again penetrate into the luminous spirit of the whole cosmos, then we will also see the Mystery of Golgotha in a new light.

I have shown you how, in the last third of the nineteenth century, this merely confessional adherence to the Mystery of Golgotha was actually no longer present. I have told you that a spirit like Kar} Julius Schröer said as early as the beginning of the seventies: The religious issues are actually an anachronism. He believed that people are already striving for something completely different, for a different kind of piety, for a different kind of connection with the spiritual world. But it has essentially taken these last fifty years for only weak attempts to be made, such as the one I mentioned in Werfel's “Mirror Man.” But now one sees that individual people are drawn to rediscover their connection with the spiritual world. But do not think that this connection with the spiritual world can be easily found. It cannot be easily found for the reason that today what is called science has acquired terrible authority, and is practised everywhere as official science. But it has emerged from these secret activities. I do not mean this in a derogatory sense. Please do not think that I am criticizing the times by speaking of 'moles'. I am just trying to characterize. I really do not want to say anything derogatory, because basically, since the 15th century, great things have been achieved by these cosmic moles, who are called human beings.

If you do not believe this, then study the geography of moles or earthworms from a spiritual scientific point of view. This is a dream-like geography, but it is magnificent; it is just not suited to man. And if you were to study the geography of plants! The plant does not even dream in its etheric body, but what can be discovered in the etheric body is truly more magnificent than what can be learned at a faculty today. So, I do not mean any disrespect when I say: a mole existence, because I value it highly.

But the world is evolving, and now is the time for us to reconnect with spiritual perception, with spiritual insight. People cannot continue to live without immersing themselves in this spiritual insight. And now one must become quite clear how these things have actually worked in the last fifty years. And here I would again like to present a characteristic personality. Sometimes one can study personalities much more precisely than one can describe more impersonal and abstract, in terms of how things develop in relation to human cultures and their progress.

In these past reflections, I have referred you to Brentano and Nietzsche in order to show you, by way of what human souls have gone through, how evolution actually was. Today I would like to show you something more from the other side, how a person has been understood by his fellow human beings.

In the 1820s, on July 22, 1822, a certain Gregor Mendel was born (we are celebrating his 100th birthday today). I mentioned him the other day when I said that, while we were in Vienna, articles about Gregor Mendel appeared everywhere because his 100th birthday is approaching. This Gregor Mendel was born the son of a farmer in a Silesian village, studied with great difficulty and very good progress, and was ordained a priest in Moravia at the age of twenty-four. He thus became a Catholic priest. Gregor Mendel was an exceptionally good student, as they say, both as a grammar school student and even at the seminary. It was common practice in Austria at the time – it was in the forties or fifties of the last century – for particularly well-behaved, hard-working students to be given scholarships by their convents. They were then sent to university to be trained as secondary school teachers, because almost all positions in the grammar and secondary modern schools - I also mentioned this recently when I described our trip to Vienna - were filled by monks or priests. In Austria, priests taught at the schools that are called secondary schools here, up to and including university.

He was sent to Vienna to study mathematics and the exact natural sciences. After three years of study, you then had to take the teaching examination at that time. Mendel registered for the teaching examination, apparently thinking that because he had always received such excellent grades, it would be just as easy to pass the examination. He failed the teacher training examination, had to repeat it, and failed again, so that he could not repeat it a third time; because if you fail twice in such an important matter, you cannot continue.

Through all kinds of circumstances, as it once was in old Austria, a school principal somewhere in Moravia once said: Well, we don't have anyone else who has come through and gotten a good report card; but we need a teacher, so we'll just hire Gregor Mendel. And so he became a secondary school teacher for fifteen years. There is no denying that he nevertheless became one of those secondary school teachers who were sent to these higher schools as priests.

But then he particularly indulged his love of science, conducting a large number of experiments on the way inheritance occurs, especially in plants. He collected plants, planted plants, those, let's say, that have a reddish flower, and those that have whitish flowers. Then he allowed those that had reddish flowers to fertilize those that had whitish flowers, and then he got plants with nothing but reddish flowers, which were daughter plants. But in the second generation it was different. There was a certain number of reddish flowers, whitish flowers, mottled flowers, and so on. In short, Gregor Mendel said to himself: I must seek the atoms, the actual atomistic in the plant world, in the organic world in general. Those who are familiar with the development of intellectual life know how much thought was given to inheritance in those days. There are an enormous number of inheritance theories. But Gregor Mendel did not pay much attention to these inheritance theories. Instead, he planted his pea plants and observed how inheritance takes place when he allows a white pea to be fertilized by a reddish one. He to see if he got a red, white or mottled pea, and in this way he determined over generations how, for example, the color is formed, how inheritance is formed at all under different conditions, proportions and the like in peas.

Yesterday I described the time – it was in the 1960s – when all of this came about, which I have described, which worked in Herman Grimm's “Unüberwindlichen Mächten”, in Paul Heyses “Kinder der Welt”, in Du Bois-Reymonds “Grenzen des Naturerkennens” and so on from the most diverse sides. In Mendel's case, it worked in such a way that he established the conditions of inheritance.

The examiners at the two teaching exams were at least concerned enough about Gregor Mendel to fail him twice, and to give him the certificate: Completely unsuitable to teach any science to high school or secondary school students! — The other people, the later ones, were no longer concerned about Gregor Mendel at all. The books he wrote about the laws of inheritance are pretty much gathering dust in the libraries. Nobody cared about them anymore.

But for about twenty or twenty-five years, you can find that people cared more and more about Gregor Mendel. They dug up his laws of inheritance. Because now we are facing a very special phase of science. In the epoch in which Herman Grimm wanted to show how human intellect cannot overcome class prejudices because it is not powerful, in the epoch in which Du Bois-Reymond pronounced his “Ignorabimus”, in which Paul Heyse wrote his “Children of the World”, thus in the epoch in which reason, intellect, has become increasingly powerless and sapless, but where there was nevertheless a tendency towards a new piety among non-denominational people, which has now lasted for fifty years. At the same time, efforts were being made everywhere to develop atomism to de-soul science, and Gregor Mendel also endeavored to discover botanical and zoological atomism. He tried to compose each plant according to its inheritance from red and white flowers, from large and small, from thick and thin flowers, to see how thick and thin, red and white flowers, once they are there, remain as unchanging as atoms remain unchanging. Back then, people said, for example: in carbonic acid we have coal and in hydrocarbon we have coal. Hydrocarbon is something completely different from carbonic acid, but in both there is coal. The atoms that are there as coal are the same in carbonic acid and in hydrocarbon.

Mendel said: I have a red pea flower, and I have a white pea flower. Now the children that are born may be red. But now the children in turn have children, some of whom are red, some of whom are white, and some are mottled, speckled with red and white. And now it continues again: they have children, and among these there are again red, white and mottled ones, and so on. - Now we have the atomistic approach in relation to plants. If we look only at the color, red and white, then where the peas are red, only the white is hidden; it is also inside, only hidden. But with the further children, there it comes out again, just as the carbon is in the carbonic acid and in the hydrocarbon, in substances that are quite different from each other. That is the essential thing in the atoms, the carbon is here and is there; that is the same everywhere, the solid, the eternal atoms. The eternal atoms in plants, which are passed on by inheritance, are the colors, but also, for example, whether the plant is thick or thin, large or small; but the white is preserved, it is only sometimes hidden. Just as oxygen is present in water, so here the white is hidden in the red children and comes to light again when it has the opportunity.

Gregor Mendel was truly a great man, because he sought out what was then considered appropriate for the time, atomism for the inanimate world, in the right place, for the plant world, in line with the thinking of his time. He also made very interesting observations about the animal world, although he failed his teaching exams twice. He did all that, but at the time, no one paid any attention.

Then came the time when the discovery of radium and so on blew apart the atomism in the inanimate world. Recently, a rectorate speech was given in Berlin that seems to have dealt with this very nicely: you can't stick to the old atomism anymore. But people can't catch their breath quickly. Now they are losing their breath when they no longer have atomism. It no longer works in physics, and it doesn't really work in chemistry either. So, after Gregor Mendel had been gathering dust for a long time, his laws of inheritance were excavated, and today you can find everywhere that people are talking about Mendelism, that Mendelism is mentioned as something of the very first rank in the theory of inheritance, one hundred years after his birthday. The centenary of Gregor Mendel is now being celebrated in learned academies everywhere.

It is an interesting life: the priest, who remained unnoticed during his lifetime and who failed his teaching exams twice, has nevertheless achieved something that a large number of academies around the world are celebrating as a very first intellectual accomplishment. In the case of Brentano, I have shown you the man from within, how he viewed the world, how he felt about the Vatican Council and the dogma of infallibility. In the case of Nietzsche, I have tried to show you something similar. In the case of Gregor Mendel, I wanted to show you more how others viewed him. Because it is, after all, interesting that the learned body twice failed him in his teaching exams, that he then remained completely unnoticed and now rules the world in terms of the so-called laws of inheritance. What is that? Basically, it is nothing more than the emergence of the last phase of intellectualism and, indeed, something else, which I would like to talk about tomorrow. But the emergence of intellectualism, the last gasps of intellectualism, which is so closely linked to atomism, can be seen in the relationship between the world and Gregor Mendel and also the world and Mendel today.

I truly have no desire to take anything away from Gregor Mendel's fame. On the contrary, I have taken this opportunity today to introduce you to a truly great man, so that you will think of this great man here too. He is a great man. But it is precisely by studying the inner and outer destinies of great men that we can study the further development of humanity. It is not the small men, but the great ones, with whom one must study this, and Gregor Mendel is a great man, and you can be assured that I am more pleased that he is being celebrated today in all kinds of scientific academies than that I am pleased that he failed twice. You can believe that. But the fate of Gregor Mendel is extremely interesting. And I would like to say: this current clinging to atomism in the organic world is extremely characteristic of our time and actually belongs to all the phenomena that I wanted to describe to you in these days, which I examined yesterday from a different point of view and which I presented to you today from the point of view of Mendelism, for the centenary of Johann Gregor Mendel.

I would like to say a few words about the building concept, with the direct support of the building. From the outset, the view could arise that if one has to talk about such a building, it indicates that it does not make the necessary impression as an artistic work; and in many cases, what is thought about the building of Dornach, about the Goetheanum in the world, is thought from a false point of view influenced by a [one-sided] view. For example, the opinion has been spread that the building in Dornach wants to symbolize all kinds of things, that it is a symbolizing building. In reality, you will not find a single symbol in it when you look at it, as they are popular in mystical and theosophical societies. The building should be able to be experienced entirely from the ki-based feeling and has also been created from these artistic feelings in its forms, in all its details. Therefore, it must only work through what it is itself.

Explaining has become popular, and one then complies with such requests for explanations; but in mentioning this here before you, I also say that such an explanation of an artistic work always seems to me to be not only half, but almost completely unartistic, and that I will now give you a kind of lecture in front of the building, a lecture that I fundamentally dislike, if only because I have to speak to you in abstract terms about what emerged in my mind as details when designing the building, the models and so on, and what was created from life. I would rather speak to you about the building as little as possible.

It is already the case that a new style, a new artistic form of expression, is viewed with a certain mistrust in the present day. I can still hear a word that I heard many decades ago when I was studying at the Technical University [in Vienna], where Ferstel gave his lectures. In one of them, he says: “Architectural styles are not invented, an architectural style grows out of the character of a nation.” Therefore, Ferstel is also opposed to any invention of a desired new architectural style, a new type of construction. What is true about this idea is that the style, which is supposed to stylize the characteristics of a people, must emerge not from an abstraction, but from a living world view, which is at the same time a world experience and, from this point of view, comprehensively encompasses the chaotic spiritual life of contemporary humanity. On the basis of this thoroughly correct idea, it becomes necessary to transform what was characteristic of previous architectural styles into organic building forms by incorporating the symmetrical, the geometric-static, and so on.

I am well aware of what can be said – and, from a certain point of view, justifiably said – by those who have become psychologically attuned to previous architectural styles against what has been attempted here in Dornach as an architectural style: the transference of geometrical-symmetrical-static forms into organic forms. But it has been attempted. And so you can see in these forms of building that this building here is an as yet inadequate first attempt to express the transition from these geometric forms of building to the organic. It is certain, of course, that the development of humanity is moving towards these forms of building, and when we again have the impulses of clairvoyant experience, I believe that these forms of building will play the first, leading role.

This building should be understood in the same way through its relationship with the organizing forces of nature as the previous buildings are understood through their relationship with the geometric-static-symmetrizing forces of nature. This building is to be viewed from this point of view, and from this point of view you will understand how every detail within the building idea for Dornach must be completely individualized here. Just think of your earlobe: it is a very small part of the human organism, but you cannot imagine that an organic form like the earlobe is suitable for growing on the big toe. This organ is bound to its place within the organism. Just as you find that within the whole organism a supporting organ is always shaped in such a way that it can have a static-dynamic effect within the organism, so too the individual forms in our building in Dornach had to be such that they could serve the static-dynamic forces. Every single form had to be organized in such a way that it could and had to be in its place what it now appears to be. Look at each arch from this point of view, how it is formed, how it flattens out towards the exit, for example, how it curves inwards towards the building itself, where it not only has to support but also to express support in an organic way, thereby helping to develop what only appears to be unnecessary in organic formation. Ordinary architecture leaves out what the organism develops, that which goes beyond the static. But one senses that the idea of building has been transferred to the organic design of the forms, and that this is also necessary.

You will have to consider every column from this point of view; then you will also understand that the ordinary column, which is taken out of the geometric-static, has been replaced by one that does not imitate the organic - everything is so that it is not imitated naturalistically - but transferred into organically made structures. It is not imitating an organic structure. You will not find it if you look for a model in nature. But you will find it if you understand how human beings can live together with the forces that have an organizing effect in nature, and how, apart from what nature itself creates, such organizing forms can arise. So you will see in these column supports how the expansion of the structure, the support, the inward pointing, and, in the same way as, say, in the upper end of the human thigh, the support, the walking, the walking and so on, is embodied statically, but organically and statically.

From this point of view, I would also ask you to consider something like the structure with the three perpendicular formations at the top of the stairs here below (Figs. 23, 24). The feeling arises here of how a person feels when he is striving to ascend the stairs. He must have a feeling of security, of spiritual unity in all that goes on in this building, indeed in all that he sees in this building. Everything came to me entirely from my feelings. Believe it or not, this form came to me entirely from my artistic feelings. As I said, you may believe it or not, it was only afterwards that it occurred to me that this form is somewhat reminiscent of the form of the three semicircular circles in the human ear, which, when injured, cause fainting, so that they immediately express what gives a person stability. This expression, that a person should be given stability in this building, comes about in the experience of the three perpendicular directions. This can be experienced in this structure without having to engage in abstract thought. One can remain entirely in the artistic realm.

If you look at the wall-like structures, you will find that natural-looking forces have been poured into the forms, but in such a way that in these forms, which are radiator covers (Fig. 26), the concrete material of the structure is worked out first, and then, further up, the material of the wood, so that they are metamorphosed. You will find that in these structures, the process of metamorphosis is elevated to the artistic. It is the idea of the building that should have a definite effect on such radiator covers, which are designed in such a way that you immediately feel the purpose and do not need to explore it intellectually first. This is how these elementary forms, half plant-like, half animal-like, came to be felt. One only realizes that they must be so when one has shaped them out of the material. And it also follows that it is necessary to metamorphose them depending on whether they are in one place or another, depending on whether they are long and low or narrower and higher. All this is not the result of calculating the form, but the forms shape themselves out of the feeling in their metamorphosis, as for example here, where we have come so far, where the building is a concrete structure in its basement and where one has to empathize with the design of what the concrete is. You enter here at the west gate. Here is the room for checking in your coat. The staircase, which leads up on the left and right, takes you up to the wooden structure containing the auditorium, the stage and adjoining rooms. Please follow me up the stairs to the auditorium.

We first enter a kind of vestibule (Fig. 27). You will feel the very different impression that the wooden paneling creates compared to the concrete paneling on the lower floor. I would like to note here: When one has to work with stone, concrete or other hard materials, one has to approach it differently than when one has to work with a soft material, for example, wood. The material of wood makes it necessary to focus one's entire perception on the fact that one has to scrape corners, concaves, and hollows out of the soft material, if I may use the expression. It is scraping, scraping out. You deepen the material, and only by doing so can you enter into this relationship with the material, which is a truly artistic relationship. While when working with wood you can only coax out of the material what gives the forms if you focus your attention on deepening, when working with hard material you do not have to do with the recesses. You can only develop a relationship with the hard material by applying it, by working convexly, by applying raised areas to the base surfaces, for example when working with stone. Grasping this is an essential part of artistic creation, and it has been partially lost in more recent times.

You will see when we enter the auditorium how each individual surface, each chapter, is treated individually. In this organic structure, a chapter can only be such that one feels: In what follows each other, no kind of repetition can be created, as is otherwise the case with symmetrical-geometric-static architectural styles. In this building, based on organic ideas, you have only a single axis of symmetry, which goes from west to east. You will only find a symmetrical arrangement in relation to this, just as you can only find a single axis of symmetry for a higher organism, not out of arbitrariness, but out of the inner organization of forces of the being in question.

At this point, I would also like to mention that the treatment of the walls also had to be completely different under the influence of the organic building idea than it was before. A wall was for earlier architects what demarcates a space. It had the effect of being inside the room. This feeling had to be abandoned in this building. The walls had to be designed in such a way that they were not felt as a boundary, but as something that carries you out into the vastness of the macrocosm; you have to feel as if you are absorbed, as if you are standing inside the vastness of the cosmos. Walls had to be made transparent, so to speak, whereas in the past every effort was made to give the wall such artificial forms that it was closed, opaque. You will see that the transparent is used artistically at all, and that was driven out of elementary backgrounds into the physical in these windows that you see here and that you will see in the building.

If you see windows in the sense of the earlier architectural style, you will actually have to have the healthy sense: they break through the walls, they do not fit into the architectural forms, but they only fit in through the principle of utility. Here, artistic feeling will be needed down to the last detail. It was necessary to present the wall in such a way that it is not something closed, but something that expands outwards, towards infinity. I could only achieve this by remembering that you can scratch out designs from single-colored window panes, as if using an erasing method, a glass etching method. And so, monochromatic window panes were purchased, which were then processed in such a way that the motifs one wanted to have were scratched out with the diamond stylus. So for this purpose, an actual glass etching technique was conceived, and from this the windows emerged.

When you consider the motifs of the windows, you must not think that you are dealing with purely symbolic designs. You can see it already on this larger windowpane (Fig. 109): nothing is designed on these window panes other than what the imagination produces. There are mystics who develop a mysticism with superficial sentences and strange ideas and constantly explain that the physical-sensual outer world is a kind of maja, an illusion. Often people approach you and say that so-and-so is a great mystic because he always declaims that the outer world is a maja. The human physical countenance has something that is maya, that is absolutely false, that is something quite different in truth. What appears on this windowpane is not something that symbolizes; it is an essence that is envisaged, which only does not look to the spiritual observer as it appears to the senses. The larynx is the organ of vision for the etheric; the larynx is already Maja as a physical larynx, and that which is a merely physical-sensual vision is not reality.

What is the spiritual meaning behind this? The spiritual fact is that the human being is truly being whispered in the ear, left and right, what the secrets of the world are. So that one can say: the bull speaks in the left ear, the lion in the right ear. If one wants to depict something like this as a motif in a picture or in words, one can only put into the word what is already in the picture itself. It must be clearly understood, however, that such a picture can only be understood by someone who lives in the world view from which it originated. A person who does not have a living Christian feeling will not be able to relate to the pictorial representations that Christian art has produced.

The artist experiences a great deal when he immerses himself in a vision; but such an experience must not be translated into abstract thoughts, otherwise it will immediately begin to fade. One example of the artist's experience is this: when Leonardo da Vinci painted his Last Supper, which has now fallen into such disrepair that it can no longer be appreciated artistically, people thought it took too long. He couldn't finish the Judas because this Judas was supposed to emerge from the darkness. Leonardo worked on this painting for almost twenty years and still hadn't finished it. Then a new prior came to Milan and looked at the work. He wasn't an artist; he said that Leonardo, this servant of the church, had to finally finish his work. Leonardo replied that he could do it now; he had always only sketched the figure of Judas because he had not found the model for it; now that the prior was there, he had found the model for Judas in him, and the picture would now be quickly finished. — There you have such an external, concrete experience. Such external, concrete experiences play a much greater role in all the artist's work than can be expressed in such brief descriptions.

You have [now] entered the building through the room below the organ and the room for musical instruments, dear attendees. If you look around after entering, you will find the building idea initially characterized by the fact that the floor plan (Fig. 20) represents two not quite completed circles that interlock in their segments. It seems to me that the necessity for shaping the building in this way can already be seen when approaching the building from a certain distance and if one has an idea of what is actually supposed to take place in the building. I will now explain further what is connected with the building idea. First of all, I would like to point out that you can see seven columns arranged in symmetry solely against the west-east axis, closing the auditorium on the left and right as you move forward. These seven columns are not formed in such a way that a capital shape, a pedestal shape or an architrave shape above it is repeated, but the capital, pedestal and architrave shapes are in a continuous development. The two columns at the back of the organ room have the simplest capital and pedestal motifs (Figs. 28, 33): forms that, as it were, strive from top to bottom, with others striving towards them from bottom to top. This most primitive form of interaction between above and below is then metamorphosed in the following architrave, capital and pedestal forms (Figs. 35-54).

This progressive metamorphosis came about through the fact that, when I was forming the model (Fig. 22), I tried to recreate what occurs in nature by force. What happens in nature, where an unnotched leaf with primitive forms is first formed at the bottom of the plant, and then this primitive form metamorphoses the higher you go, into the indented, more intricately designed leaf, even transformed into a petal, stamen and pistil, which must be imitated - although not in a naturalistic way - one must place oneself inwardly and vitally into it and then create from within, as nature creates and transforms, as it produces and metamorphoses. Then, without reflection, but from much deeper soul forces than from reflection, one gets such transformations of the second from the first, the third from the second, and so on.

It is possible to misunderstand that, for example, in the fifth column and in the architrave motifs above the fourth column, something like a caduceus appears (Figs. 41, 42). One could now believe that the caduceus was stuck in these two places by the intellect. I believe that someone who had worked from the intellect would probably have placed the caduceus in the architrave motif and, because the intellect has a symmetrical effect, the column motif with the caduceus below it. Someone who works as we have here finds something different. Here, with the motif that you see as the fourth capital motif, this Mercury staff emerged just as a petal emerges from the sepal, only through sensing the metamorphosing transformation, without me even remotely thinking of forming a Mercury staff. I did not think of a past style, but of the transformation of the fourth capital motif from the third. One can see how the forms that have gradually emerged in the development of humanity have developed quite naturally.

Then we come to the epoch when the human being intervenes in his or her psychological development. If we work this into the column in an individualizing way, what is worked on earlier on the surface of the architrave comes later. That is why you see the caduceus on the capital later than on the architrave. A plant that is thin and delicate develops different leaf shapes than a sturdy one. Compare just a shepherd's purse with a cactus, and you will see how the filling and shaping of space is expressed in the figurative design.

At the same time, a cosmic secret arises in this way of feeling evolution through. There has been much talk of evolution in recent times, but little feeling about it. One only thinks it through with the mind. One speaks of the evolution of the perfect from the imperfect. Herbert Spencer and others have done much harm to this, and the thought has arisen that is completely justified in front of the mind, but which does not do justice to the observation of nature: In intellectual thinking, one assumes that in evolution, the simpler forms are at the beginning and that these then become more and more differentiated and differentiated. Spencer, in particular, worked with such evolutionary ideas. But evolution does not show it that way. There is, however, a differentiation, a complication of the forms; but then one comes to a center, and then the forms simplify again. What follows is not more complicated, but what follows is simpler again. You can see this in nature itself. The human eye, which is the most perfect, has, so to speak, achieved greater simplicity than the eye forms of certain animals, which, for example, have the xiphoid process, the fan, which has disappeared again as the eye in evolution moved further up to become human.

It is therefore necessary for man to connect with the power of nature, to feel the power of nature, to make the power of nature his own power and to create from this feeling. Thus, an attempt has been made to design this building in an entirely organic way, to design every detail in its place as it must be individualized from the whole. So you can see, for example, that the organ (Figs. 28-30) is surrounded by plastic motifs that make it appear as if the organ is not simply placed in the space, but that it works out of the whole remaining organic design, as if growing out of it. So everything in this building must be tried to be made in this way.

Here you see the lectern (Fig. 68) on which I am standing. Initially, the idea was to create something here that would, as it were, grow out of the other forms of construction, but in such a way that it would also express the fact that from here, through the word, one strives to express everything that is to be expressed in the building. At the moment when a person speaks here, the forms of what is spoken must continue in such a way that, just as the nose betrays in its form what the whole person is through his or her countenance, so too can the forms of what is spoken continue in such a way that the whole human being is revealed through the form of the nose. Anyone who has made artistically inspired nose studies can create the 'architectural style', the physiognomy of the whole human being, from a nose study. No one can ever have a different nose than they have, and there could never be a different lectern than the one that is here. However, if you claim this, it is meant according to your own view; you can only act according to your own view.

That an attempt has been made here to truly metamorphose the body can be seen from the fact that the motifs here in the glass windows are in part really such motifs that arise as images of the soul's life. For example, look at the pink window here (Fig. 113). You will see on the left wing something coming out like the west portal of the building; on the right wing you see a kind of head. There you see a person sitting on a slope, looking towards the building, and another person looking towards the head. This has nothing to do with speculative mysticism; it has to do with an immediate inner visual experience. This building could not have been created in any other way than by sensing the shape of the human head in a mysterious way, and the organic power on the one hand and the shape of the human head on the other hand result in the intuitive shape of the building. Therefore, the person sitting on the slope sees the metamorphosis of the building in his soul, sometimes as a human head, sometimes as the building revealing itself to the outside world. This provides a motif that leads, if I may say so, to an inner experience.

There you will find in the blue windowpane (Fig. 111) a person who is aiming to shoot a bird in flight. In the right-hand pane you will see that the person has fired. The bird in the left-hand field is in a sphere of light. Around the man you find all kinds of figures vividly alive in the astral body, one when he is about to shoot, the other when he has shot. This is reality, but it is from mundane life. I can imagine that those who always want to be dripping with inner elevation take offence when they experience such things as they are meant here, that a human shooting is simply depicted. Yes, I was pleased when an Italian friend once used a somewhat crude expression about theosophists, who are such mystics. The friend who had already died said it, and I may say it in the very esteemed company here, because the person concerned was a princess, and what a princess says can certainly be said. She glossed such people, who always want to live in a kind of inner elevation, by saying that they are people with a “face up to their stomachs”. I also do not repeat her not quite correct German.

Now, dear attendees, the same idea was then also implemented in painting. I can only talk about the actual painting, about spiritual painting, by referring to the small dome. Only in the small dome was it possible for me to carry out what I have indicated as the challenge of a newer painting: that here, behind the emergence from the color experience, drawing disappears altogether. I had one of my characters in the first mystery drama express this as follows: that the forms appear to be the work of color. For when one feels with the feeling for painting, then one feels the drawing, which is carried into the pictorial, as a lie. When I draw a horizontal line, it is actually a reproduction of something that is not there at all. When I apply the blue sky as a surface and the green below, the form arises from the experience of the color itself. In this way, every pictorial element can be formed. Within the world of color itself lies a creative world, and the one who feels the colors paints what the colors say to each other in creation. He does not need to stick to a naturalistic model; he can create the figures from the colors themselves. It is the case that nature and also human life already have a certain right to shape the moral out of the colored with a necessity.

Yesterday, Mr. Uehli quite rightly pointed out how newer painters already have an intuitive sense of such effects created by light and dark, by the colors themselves, and how they come to paint a double bass next to a tin can. They are pursuing the right thing in and of itself, that it is more important to see how the light gradates in its becoming colored when it falls on a double bass and then continues to fall on a tin can. That is the right thing. But the wrong thing is that this is again based on naturalistic experience. If you really live in the colors, something other than a tin can and a bass violin arises from the colors. The colors are creative, and how they come together is a necessity arising from the mere colors, which you have to experience. Then you don't put a tin can next to a bass violin because that is outside the colors.

So here I have tried to paint entirely from the colors. If you see the reddish-orange spot and the black spot next to the blue spot, it is first of all a vivid impression from the colors. But then the colors come to life, then figures emerge from them, which can even be interpreted afterwards. But just as little as one can make plants here with the human mind, one can just as little paint something on them that one has thought up with the human mind. One must first think when the colors are there, just as the plant must first grow before one can see it.

And so a Faust figure with Death and the Child came into being (Figs. 69-74). The whole head emerged out of the colors, with all the figures in it. Only in the realm of the human soul does something spiritually real take shape of its own accord. For example, you can see above the organ motif how something is painted (Fig. 31) that a person with a philistine attachment to the sensual world would naturally perceive as madness. But you will no longer perceive it as madness when I tell you the following: if you close your eyes, you will, as it were, feel something like two eyes looking at each other, inside the eye. What takes place inwardly can certainly be further developed in a certain way. Then what, when viewed in a primitive way, looks like two eyes glowing out of the darkness and what is seen when it is experienced inwardly, can be projected outwards and experienced in such a way that an entire beyond, an entire world-genesis can be seen in it. Here again an attempt has been made to create out of color what the eye experiences when it looks into the darkness and sees itself. One need not merely read the secrets intellectually, one can see them – suddenly they are there.

In a similar way, attempts were made to bring other motifs into reality, again not from the naturalistic imitation of signs and forms, but entirely from color. The ancient Indians and their inspiration, the seven Rishis, who in turn were inspired by the stars, to paint with an open-topped head (Fig. 32, far right) is, if you do it that way, abstract, actually nonsense; I say that quite openly. But when one experiences what was experienced in the ancient Indian culture in the relationship between the disciple and the guru, the teacher, one feels as if the ancient Indian did not have a skullcap, but as if it had evaporated and as if he were not the one human being who lives in his skin, but one feels as a sevenfold being, as if his soul power was composed of the seven soul rays of the holy Rishis of ancient Atlantis, enlightening him, and that he then communicated to his world that which he revealed, not from his own spirit but from the spirit of the holy Rishis. The more one works out what is said here, the more one comes closer to what has been painted here. The intuitive perception has first placed itself in ancient India, in ancient Atlantis. That which can be seen there has been painted on the wall here, and only afterwards can one speculate when it is there. This is how the message can relate to artistic creation. This is how everything in this building should actually come about.

You will find this building covered with Nordic slate. The building idea must be felt through to the point of radiating outwards. The slate, or the material used to cover it, must shine in a certain way in the sunlight. It seemed to happen by chance here – but of course there is always an inner necessity underlying it. When I saw the Nordic slate in Norway from the train, I knew that it was the right thing to cover the building with. We were then able to have the slate shipped from Norway in the pre-war period. You will feel the effect when you look at the building from a distance in good sunshine.

My main concern during the construction was the acoustics. The building was of course also provided with scaffolding on the inside during construction so that work could be carried out above. This did not produce any acoustics, the acoustics were quite different, that is, it was a caricature of acoustics. Now it so happens that the acoustics of the building were also conceived from the same building idea. My idea was that I had to expect that the acoustic question for the lecturer could be solved from occult research. You know how difficult it is; you cannot calculate the acoustics. You will see how it has been done, but to a certain degree of perfection in the acoustics.

You may now ask how these seven pillars, which contain the secret of the construction, are related to the acoustics. The two domes within our building are so lightly connected that they form a kind of soundboard, just as the soundboard of a violin plays a role in the richness of the sound. Of course, since the whole, both the columns and the dome, are made of wood, the acoustics will only reach perfection over the years, just as the acoustics of a violin only develop over the years. We must first find a way to have a profound effect on the material in order to be able to feel through the building idea what is now sensed as the acoustics of this building. You will understand that the acoustics must be sensed best from the organ podium. You will also see that when two people talk to each other here in the middle, an echo can be heard coming down from the ceiling. This seems to be an indication from the world essence that one should only speak from the stage or the lectern within the building and that the building itself does not actually tolerate useless chatter from any point.

Now, dear attendees, I have tried to tell you what can be said in this regard while looking at the building. I will have to supplement what I have spoken today in my presentation of the building idea, which I will give at the final event next Saturday. Then I will say what can still be said. Now we have to clear the hall for the next lecture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Du Bois-Reymond says in connection with these words:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear attendees! For many years now, I have had the honor of giving a lecture here almost every winter, as in various cities in Germany, on topics in the field that I dare to call spiritual science. In our fateful time, however, it will be appropriate to turn our attention to the events of which we are all participants and witnesses during this time. This seems all the more appropriate to me, esteemed attendees, as it is my conviction, flowing not from a dark feeling but from spiritual science itself, that precisely what spiritual scientific world knowledge is, is intimately connected with what the German people and the German soul have produced as the world picture of German idealism, which revealed itself most impressively and powerfully out of this German soul at the end of the eighteenth and in the first half of the nineteenth century, but which has continued to work and has worked into our days.

In the true sense of being a study of spiritual life, spiritual science wants to be a continuation of what the natural scientific world view has achieved for the outer world of the senses. But to mature the spirit for such an understanding of the spiritual foundations of the world, this world view of German Idealism seems to me – as I said, I say this from the knowledge of the spirit itself – but this world view of German Idealism seems to me to be the actual root and the actual source. Therefore, allow me this evening to present a kind of reflection on this world view of German idealism and its influence on the present, its effect on the whole of time formation and on the world-historical development of humanity.

Of course, this world view of German idealism is born, entirely born, as we shall see, out of the essence of German nationality, and in this respect one could deny it a certain comprehensive validity according to the saying often heard today: All knowledge, all science must actually assume an international character and becomes untrue to itself if it proves to be in any way shaded by the aspect of one nation.

As plausible as it may seem at first, I would like to say, as self-evident as such an assertion appears, one must still say that from a deeper world view point of view it is misleading. It seems self-evident because it is, I would say, the most extraordinary thing that can be said about science and penetration into world knowledge. When we speak of the internationality of knowledge and insight, we are actually saying no more than that the sun or the moon are the common thought of all people. That is what they are; but the way in which what people have to say about the sun and the moon speaks from the souls, from the hearts of people, this way, it is different according to the talents, according to the spiritual directions and dispositions of the different peoples. The most diverse talents are involved in order to make this knowledge fruitful for human spiritual culture in one direction or another. That is precisely what is at stake: the extent to which what can be known can penetrate into all human spiritual development in a healthy way. But in this the talents, the soul directions of the different peoples have their very distinct specificity. Otherwise, how could it be otherwise meaningful to understand that one of the most German minds, Goethe, when he had begun his journey through the world, in order to see not only what was offered to him in the contemplation of art, but also what nature could offer him. How else could it have been possible for him to write to his German friends from Italy: “After all the natural phenomena and facts I have seen in public, I would now most like to take a trip to India - so said Goethe - not to discover it, but to see what I have discovered in my own way.

The way in which we view what is given to everyone is what matters when we consider the actual impulses and driving forces for the progress of humanity as a whole.

Now it is precisely possible for spiritual science to look at the souls of nations in a truly cognitive way. To do so, however, one must start from a spiritual-scientific insight that - like so many insights today - may be regarded by some as paradoxical, perhaps even fantastic. But what I will say next about the souls of different peoples from a spiritual-scientific point of view is something that may still seem fantastic and paradoxical to the present day, but which human knowledge wants to incorporate, just as certain physical and certain scientific knowledge has incorporated.

If we consider the soul today in the light of current psychology, we see everything that swirls and lives in the soul in terms of impulses of will, feelings, perceptions, thoughts and ideas as a unity. Of course it is; but that does not lead to any real knowledge. Nor does one come to a real understanding of the soul itself, as one might come to a real understanding of light if one did not perceive its interaction with material existence, with material things that confront it, in such a way that one would believe that one would emerge from the light the different shades of colors: the reddish-yellow nuance on one side, the green nuance in the middle, the bluish-violet nuance on the other side - just as the physicist, in his interaction with material existence, must observe these color shades, structured from this one light , and how he cannot come to an understanding of the deeds of light, as Goethe says, in any other way, one cannot come to an understanding of what the human soul actually is if one does not, I would say, also divide it into three shades of its being. And so we call the first shade of the soul being - corresponding, as it were, to the red-yellow shades of light in the rainbow - [...] then the human sentient soul. The human sentient soul contains everything that often wells up unconsciously and subconsciously from the dark depths of the soul. Everything that lives in a person without them immediately having an intellectual grasp of it – their passions, their desires and so on, as well as what gives people this or that temperament – all this wells up in the sentient soul. But in this sentient soul is contained at the same time, in a certain way, if also, one might say, in a natural way, that which can be called the eternal powers of the human soul, which pass through births and deaths and can reappear in repeated earthly lives.

Let us distinguish – as it were, as a parallel phenomenon for the greenish shading of the light – let us distinguish the so-called intellectual or emotional soul. This is the part of the soul through which man acquires an overview, a rationally considered overview, a level-headed overview of that which would otherwise live indeterminately and unconsciously in his soul as affects, as inner tremors.

And as the third shade of life - corresponding to the color blue-violet in the light - we speak of the consciousness soul. It is that through which the human being is most connected, from his soul existence, with the surrounding physical world in which he finds himself; it is that which contains within itself the most temporal, the most transient, power of human being; it is also that through which the human being appears individually as a personality, through which he puts the world to use, through which he puts that which he deliberately lets flow out of the subconscious soul life into practical life.

And just as the one light, the one sunlight, lives in the different colors of the rainbow, so the one I, the one, self-aware being of man, lives in the totality of the shades of the soul. And just as the light appears as the unity of that red and green and blue, as the unity of everything, so the self appears, so the personality, the individuality of man, the actual I appears.

I cannot say more today in the way of an introduction to this scientifically well-founded fact, law of the soul, because it seems appropriate to me to apply this law of the soul to the different national souls, insofar as they are spread over European intellectual life.

We have to say that [...] what can be called the soul of a nation is just as much a reality for spiritual science, something alive in itself, not just an abstract concept that summarizes the characteristics of a nation, but something alive in itself. You will also find the necessary references for this in our spiritual science literature, especially in my Theosophy.

And here we must say that the individual nations differ so much that in one nation more of the shades of the sentient soul comes to the fore, in another nation more of a different shade of soul life. In this way the European peoples are structured according to their folk souls – not the individual people, but to the extent that these individual people belong to the folk soul – they bring to manifestation that which lives as the shade of the rainbow in the individual folk souls.

In this context, the approach that I would like to say is justified by spiritual science shows us that when we look to the south, to the Italian people – to some extent this also applies to the Spanish people – when we look to the Italian people, we see that the folk soul of the Italian people is expressed through the shades of the and everything that can be observed in the various expressions of this Italian national soul, in its good and bad aspects, is connected with the fact that the Italian national soul is dominated by the shades of the sentient soul, that everything springs from the sentient soul.

Today, we only want to emphasize the best qualities of the Italian people that come from their emotional soul; but it will be seen that the Italian people, insofar as they appear as a national soul – not as individual human beings, as I said – must have a certain one-sidedness because their expressions and revelations come from the emotional soul. Yes, if we take the greatest – I will refrain from the development of art, the actual visual arts, but they could very easily prove exactly what I have to say – if we take the greatest – Dante, Giordano Bruno – we learn, precisely when we immerse ourselves in them, that what they have achieved in a gloriously designed world view is created entirely from the sentient soul. One only has to read Giordano's work to see how he has become a great inspirer. When one delves into what he has brought, it is like an expression of feeling for the world view that man can create out of the abundance of the world's phenomena. Feeling lives in this one of the greatest [spirits of] Italians, in Giordano Bruno. I would just like to hint at this.

It is particularly important to look at the French national soul from the point of view that has been gained. This French national soul shows itself to the spiritual-scientific gaze in such a way that it actually sets the tone for the chiseling of the intellectual soul. Everything in the French spirit that appears great but also one-sided stems from the fact that the intellectual soul finds particular expression there. And today we shall mention only that which has influenced the development of an actual world view. The greatest Frenchman in this field, under whose influence French world-view life still stands today, was born at the end of the sixteenth century and lived into the seventeenth century, namely Descartes or Cartesius; but it is precisely in this Descartes or Cart esius, the man of world-view who emerged at the dawn of the newer development of world-view — one can see how in him in particular everything lives that can lead from the intellect to a world-picture. His saying, “I think, therefore I am,” has become famous. Thinking, that is, that which lives in the soul of the intellect, is now based on the being of the soul itself.

The human mind still has the peculiarity of building the world as if it were externally mechanical. It is indeed the peculiarity of the mind that it is unable to penetrate the inner vitality of the world, that it shrinks back, as it were, from the inner vitality, and that it wants to construct everything. But this is particularly evident in Descartes, in Cartesius. And now we will draw attention to one particular way in which this world view of Descartes came about: I would say that it is the one-sided expression of intellectual life. Descartes looks at the world; and after he has given himself over to doubting everything (and this doubt is also, in turn, an expression of the intellectual way of looking at the world), he comes to saying to himself how he can form a world picture that has sensuality. Indeed, this world view becomes such that everything mechanical only wants to be included in it. The world appears as a great mechanism. And it is characteristic of this – I would say genuinely French – world view that Descartes explicitly states: we can only perceive soul in ourselves, as humans. Animals are moving machines. Descartes denies that animals, or indeed all of nature except for human beings, have souls. Animals are automatons.

Thus, for Descartes, the whole of nature except for human beings is like a complicated machine, and animals are within this complicated machine. Indeed, it is precisely the rational mind that recoils from the living. And this intellectualism, it remained in its one-sidedness, and in the end it led to the fact that precisely from France and right up to our times the impetus has been given to establish the actual materialism of the world view, of mechanism, one might say, the world view,

Dear attendees, one could very easily reproach the one who describes the relationships of the folk souls in this way today: Yes, you are describing the feelings of the present time, because the war has brought about a situation in which what we ourselves regard as our world view, as the source of our national identity, is being vilified and even defamed from all sides in Europe. And so we are now trying – I would say – in this time to either justify or avenge ourselves.

Now, esteemed attendees, there are listeners here who know that what I am saying about the different national souls in these difficult times of European events is something I have said again and again for many years, long before this war, and not only to Germans but also to members of other European nations. I consider this to be a firm result of spiritual scientific knowledge about European conditions.

The mechanistic nature of this worldview has been so ingrained in French culture to this day that it has allowed what was French, materialistic or mechanistic world view to emerge. And today we may recall how Goethe, even as a young man, confronted the French mechanistic worldview from his German consciousness, which seeks to take account of the living soul and the vitality of the worldview. He said: They bring us this mechanical play, a mechanism only, a worldview as if the whole world were just a game, a real automaton! Yes, if only what one sees in the world of phenomena could at least be explained to one! These are moving atoms! But then, when he has explained how the atoms collide, he withdraws and leaves the whole world unexplained.

This is what repels Goethe, even as a young man, about the one-sidedness that arises from a purely intellectual development of a world view. And basically, to this day, we can see how this mechanistic world view affects what we seek in a worldview, a folk worldview. For only a few individuals have tried to work their way out of it, for example, the famous philosopher Bergson, I don't know whether one can still mention him today, after the beginning of the war, after the mood of the French, or whether the word Bergson is now taboo as his name in France, I don't know. It is precisely Bergson who, since the war broke out, one might say, has continually presented his French to his French in the most savage manner against the German essence, namely against the German world view, and has managed to that it is precisely the Germans – who were great in a certain way, especially during the period of German idealism – but who have now fallen so low in the present day, [the Germans] have become a nation that only trains itself mechanically and in a machine-like way. The Germans have become a nation that itself represents only a kind of machine!

Bergson probably thought – Bergson, who formed this view of the German people because the Germans opposed the French with cannons and rifles – he probably formed this view because he believed that the Germans will oppose the products of what he calls the “greatness, the great age” of the Germans to the French cannons and French rifles by reciting Novalis and Schiller and Goethe, because that is all they would rely on, right!

Well, this Bergson, he has in a sense worked his way out. But I showed in my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” - which was not written during the outbreak of the war, but appeared at the very beginning of the war and was finished long before - that those of Bergson's thoughts that are reasonably plausible could be found long before that in much more intense and much more thorough form in the minds of German thinkers! But quite apart from that, Bergson always wants to be seen as the one who brought the French a world view that went far beyond the mechanistic and materialistic view of things.

Now, this world view, how did Bergson himself present it to the Germans in his lectures, to these Germans who are said to have come down so much since the time of their greatness? It is just a shame that it has been possible to prove, especially in recent times, that Bergson copied entire pages – not just repeating, but copying – from the German philosopher Schelling, the German philosopher Schopenhauer, and so on, and so on!

What the Frenchman is able to counter as a higher world view to the German, whom he defames, esteemed attendees, is something he himself has copied! It is necessary to bear these things in mind more often in the present if one wants to have an understanding of the mutual relationship between the European peoples and what is now being said about this relationship by the opponents of this German essence.

And, dearest attendees, when we turn our eye to the British national soul, we find that this British national soul bears the very shade of the consciousness soul. And in every detail of this British national soul, one can see how it expresses this consciousness soul, how the British, the Englishman in particular, has the intention of putting what wells up from his inner being into the service of practical life alone.

This is what English culture has in itself, without taking into account the development of the whole world view. Starting with Milton and Bacon, it can be seen everywhere that a world view was actually sought that was to be placed only at the service of the actually immediately tangible life. But I will refrain from that now, I will only point out that in the very last period, this English national character, insofar as it really arose from the British national character, has led to a very peculiar direction: truth, that is what a person who has a sense of truth regards as something that is intimately and genuinely connected to the soul as a reality. Ladies and gentlemen: The English – and in this case in harmony with the Americans – have developed a world view that they call pragmatism. What is this pragmatism? Well, this pragmatism, dear attendees, is characterized above all by the fact that it treats the truth, the concept, the idea of truth itself, in a highly peculiar way. Truth as something that connects the soul with reality, with spiritual reality, is something that this pragmatism, this primeval English product, does not recognize at all. Man perceives truth as an idea, as an idea - in the sense of pragmatism - purely for the purpose of dealing with the external world of the senses, with external tangible reality, in order to intervene in it. In the sense of this pragmatism, truth is a concept that proves useful for practical life. One could say that truth is a tool for usefulness in the very outermost sense, including scientific truth, when understood in this way. Truth has no independent significance, but only serves as a tool for finding one's way in the outer life – that is what this pragmatism has brought forth.

Do we not see this consciousness soul, which places everything that the human being produces in a spiritual way only at the service of the external life? Do we not see it at work in all the details - most honored attendees - that are found in the three peoples mentioned, that order and inner understanding will come into the matter when they are considered in terms of the guidelines that can only be briefly sketched here, but which can be fully substantiated from the insights of spiritual science?

And if we now turn our gaze to the center of Europe, let us turn our gaze to German spiritual life, insofar as it is rooted in its national character. Let us turn our gaze to that spiritual striving within the German people that is to lead to a world view, to such a world view that at least corresponds to the German being, the German national character, then we find confirmed in the most comprehensive way that spiritual science also shows in other respects that this German soul is shaded in such a way that it appears like light in three different color shades: in reddish-yellow, in greenish, and in bluish-violet. That the German soul is such that the I, the self-awareness, works through the three different soul nuances, the unity of the soul-living, working through all three soul nuances, this turns out to be the essence of the German national spirit, the German national soul, in a truly lively, penetrating observation.

And this can be said in a completely objective sense; it does not require any kind of one-sided nationalistic view, as we see it emerging from the Italian, French, and British national souls.

The German is in a position to be able to truly rely on what an insight into his nature, striven for in the soul, gives him, and [he is in a position] to understand his nature from this insight.

And if one wants historical proof that this I, this self, the whole living personality in German national character is really effective through the three soul nuances, then one can present precisely the three great world-view men who, at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, so clearly emerged within German intellectual life and sought to reveal German national character at the highest spiritual level. Kant, who tried to educate himself from philosophy, was indeed ahead of them; but we do not want to look at him, although he provided the foundation for the others, so to speak.

But before our soul we want to place one of the most German men, one of those men who knew - even when they strove with their thoughts to the highest, to a world view - that they can only gain this world view in the right sense, in the living sense, within the German essence if this world view is the result of a conversation with the German national spirit itself. And so Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, knew that in the world view he created, German essence was most wonderfully revealed. How does he appear to us when we first consider his personality only in terms of appearance?

Allow me, esteemed attendees, to mention just a few essential traits of his life, so that we can see how this whole man, Fichte, attempts to obtain, from the unity of human life, from the self itself, that which illuminates the world in its deepest life and can bring it to knowledge for man.

The young Fichte, how does he appear to us? Two traits, wonderfully real in this sensitive beauty, we can hardly find them in any other mind: the six-year-old son of a simple, rural man is first of all a decent student; and because he is such a good student, he is given the book “Gehörnte Siegfried” by his father as a Christmas reward - he can already read. It soon becomes apparent that Johann Gottlieb Fichte is becoming somewhat inattentive in his studies; he is reproached for this. We see him one day standing by the stream that flows past his parents' house, throwing into it the “Gehörnte Siegfried”, which has become so dear to him, on which he has pinned his entire soul. And when his father comes along, the father realizes the reason for the boy's strange behavior: he could not tolerate, in the face of the iron concept of duty that was already living in him at the root of his soul, that what was dear to him as a human being, as a personality, should remain with him if he could violate his duty over it. Thus, even the boy Fichte, the six-year-old boy, feels trapped in a world that is, I would say, completely permeated by forces of duty.

Later, when Johann Gottlieb Fichte was nine years old, the village where his parents lived was visited by the estate neighbor. He actually wanted to hear the sermon on Sunday; but he came too late. What happened? Because the pastor had already delivered the sermon, they showed him the young boy, the nine-year-old boy in the blue farmer's coat, who at first behaved awkwardly, but then, when he saw what they wanted from him, came to life and now the whole sermon, which he had listened to as a nine-year-old boy, had listened to as a nine-year-old boy, and he now recites it word for word to the neighbor of the estate, so that everything he said comes from his soul – he had connected with the innermost view of his soul with what he had just heard, and so he could let it flow out again from the innermost. Thus he lived a spiritual life in the immediacy of his own being. Thus he was prepared to find in Fichte the world picture of German idealism, which was able to flow to him, I might say, admittedly from a certain one-sided point of view, but still from a genuinely German one.

Fichte's fundamental awareness of the fact that what lives in the human being, what is inside this I, how it contains the source forces of the world itself – that which pervades and permeates the world in a divine-spiritual way – how this can be found if only man plunges completely into the depths of his inner being, this is evident in all of Fichte's work. He was appointed to the professorship in Jena relatively early, which at that time was the center of German intellectual life. But the way in which Fichte as a teacher affected his listeners is really quite different from what one - I would say usually dreams of.

People who heard Fichte characterize him in the following way: When Fichte spoke, it was like rolling thunder that discharged in sparks of lightning; and when he spoke, he wanted to educate not only good, but great individuals. And one of those who had listened to some of those standing nearby said: What Fichte said revealed that he had not practical, but bold images, energetic images, that his imagination was not graceful in the proper sense but forceful and powerful, and that he speaks in the realm of thought, in the realm of ideas, not like one who merely makes grand words, but like one who is able to rule in this invisible, in this supersensible world.

When Fichte spoke to his listeners, he did not merely seek to communicate to them the content of what he had to say to them. He never spoke the same thing twice about a subject; he never spoke in such a way – I would say that he had only a certain content in his soul that he wanted to convey to his listeners, but rather he had in his own inner being an overall feeling of what he wanted to say, an overall feeling, and above all he sought to establish an inner bond between himself and each individual listener. He wanted that which lived in his soul to become active, not just as a word, but as a force in each individual listener, [but] that it resound in each individual listener himself. He wanted to pour a living fluid over his entire audience. He wanted the listeners, when they had heard his phrases, to leave with a different inner life than when they came. He wanted to awaken something in them. But that is how he worked, vividly, seizing the self.

And so Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, was able to completely negate, I would say, that which emerged from Descartes' rational world view. Striving to be in one's own self and to strive for the divine in the self, by starting from thinking, and because one thinks, one shows – Fichte could not approve of that either – so the self would have been something dead. For him, the ego was something that could never become dead, for the reason that it constantly creates itself. It cannot cease to be - because it constantly creates itself. That is to say: He saw the essence of the ego - Fichte - in the will. And by the fact that the ego wills itself, it places itself into the world through its own power.

But this also had to result in a world view for Fichte that saw in the will that pervades the world as the actual active force in the world. And the wonderful thing about Fichte is that he says: This external sense world, as it presents itself to us, is not the true, real one. Why is it there? It is there so that man can appear within this sensory world as a sensual being; so that in this human being the will that permeates the world and expresses itself as the divine duty that permeates the world, so that this will forms a material, in order to fulfill the duty, in order to fulfill the moral. Thus, for Fichte, the whole world is permeated by moral substance, by moral reality. For him, the whole world is a spiritual whole of duty, and that which exists as an individual is so that duty, so that the will, so that the divine that is alive in the will can live out itself.

Fichte calls the external sensual world matter, the sensualized material of duty. If one tries to hold together Fichte's placing in a divine-moral world order with the mechanistic materialism that emerged from a unified rational world view, as with Descartes —- Cartesius —, one tries to recognize how this Johann Gottlieb Fichte lived - I would like to say - a certain inner connection of the soul with what, as the divine, flows through and permeates the world, how he then tried to see this connection in the individual national spirits. But Fichte could only ascribe to the German national spirit the ability of a national spirit to grasp this living connection with the universal spirit in the ego. And so Fichte became quite aware that the German national spirit, in connection with the development of humanity, would be called upon to bring living knowledge in place of mechanistic, dead knowledge.

But what is true is that the “Addresses to the German Nation” are pulsating with an ethos, a world-historical sense of duty. Fichte delivered these magnificent addresses in Berlin, in the midst of the enemies who had invaded Berlin at that time, and during his Address to the German Nation, where he sought to show how the German national spirit is called upon to grasp, out of the living self, the connection of the human being with the spirit of the world, when he delivered these speeches, which can still have a wonderfully inspiring effect on the German mind today, the marching French regiments drummed outside. He could have been captured by the enemy at any moment. But he also stood firm as the German man, aware that he had to express the world-historical mission of the German national spirit.

One need not, honored attendees, take a one-sided view today that one should accept the philosophy, the worldview, of such a mind in terms of its content as dogma. Today we can go beyond that. We do not have to profess everything that Fichte said here or there, or what the others said, which we will discuss later; we can turn our attention to the way these people strive and how, in this striving, they show – which Fichte was also fully aware of – that they wanted to draw from the depths of the German national spirit.

Thus, we see Johann Gottlieb Fichte as one of those who, out of German Idealism, sought a world view. We want to look at this striving in him, and also in the others, not at what they said. One need not be a follower of anyone whom one finds to be a great and admirable personality, but one can continue to be inspired by the individual striving, even in those areas where one believes that one cannot go with him in terms of the content of a teaching. But it is not the doctrine that matters, it is the personality that matters, which, as it stands, can serve to characterize the German people themselves, because it must lie in the essence of the German people if, as I would say, with Fichte, such a thing can arise from this German essence with such awareness as Fichte brought forth from this German essence.

Then we see Fichte's succession from another, from Schelling. Schelling is also such a personality. I am convinced, dear attendees, that precisely these three figures, whom I am speaking of here, will be called upon again when the time, which is certainly a time of great hopes and activity that we are living through, but which is also a difficult time of trial, when this time will bear fruit.

We see Fichte's successor in Schelling. In him, too, we have a personality who wants to create a world picture directly from the depths of the ego, because he is clear that the divine-spiritual is at work in what man experiences in his innermost being, and that this divine-spiritual floods through all nature and all being and can be grasped in its activity in the world. If only man is able to experience his ego strongly enough within himself.

If for Fichte the divine essence is something that permeates the world – I would like to say – like a great weaving and working morality, then for Schelling the divine essence is first of all the great artist who, out of the artistic weaving of his own being, first confronts nature in order to see his own truth, his own being and working in the mirror of nature. For Schelling, God's work of art is nature. No natural science that is to be abstractly intellectual - a natural science that works in such a way that with every idea that is brought forth about nature, the human soul feels at the same time related to nature. But Schelling feels this nature in such a way that he says: Now man has emerged, now other animated beings have emerged in nature. But all of nature had preceded this, as it were, as the unconscious and subconscious, which had to be present beforehand like a skeleton. The whole spiritualized world view is nature; as the past and at the same time as the solid ground for the present; as the past in terms of material on which the spirit can stand, having prepared its existence in the existence of nature. And so, for Schelling, nature and spirit grow together, but they grow together in such a way that what lives out of Schelling as a world view of German idealism is again connected to the entire personality, not just one-sidedly with the sentient soul, one-sidedly with the consciousness soul, one-sidedly with the mind soul, but out of the fullness of the soul's being. One would like to say: This whole Schelling was there.

Those who knew him personally described how, even in old age, he spoke with his eyes sparkling, as if he wanted to pour out to his listeners through the shining gaze of his eyes what lived in his inner being as a spiritualized, ensouled nature, whereby he always felt that the soul of man was interwoven with all of nature. Schelling felt that this world view, which I would describe as having been woven out of the German mind, out of the soul of the emotions – as was the case with Fichte, out of the soul of the will – carried him to ever greater heights, to the point where he could ultimately be understood only to a limited extent. God as the artist, nature as a wonderful work of art, knowledge of nature through the senses, which Schelling believed was so interwoven with the human ego that he was carried away to say: To recognize nature is to create nature.

Of course, these spirits were one-sided; but they were as one-sided as all human beings are one-sided, who have the faults of their virtues, not the faults of their small characteristics. - To recognize nature is to create nature! He felt that whatever lives as a force in nature can be grasped by the soul if that soul only grasps itself in its own ego, that nature can be recreated.

And the third one is the much-maligned Hegel, who is, however, revered by some in the present day. If Fichte tried to revive in the will that can permeate everything, in the ego, if Schelling tried to create an idealistic world view in the world mind that comes to life in the ego and spiritualizes and ensouls everything, then Hegel tries to create a world view out of pure concepts, out of the idea. And with Hegel in particular it is obvious that he wanted to grasp a world picture in concepts, in ideas, to compare this Hegelian world picture with the mechanistic, with the intellectual one of Cartesius, of Descartes: there everything is intellectual! But what did Hegel want? Hegel did not want the concept, the idea, in such a way that his world picture was only an instrument, as it were, to recognize an external reality. Hegel wanted to have this world in such a way that the human soul, for its part, experiences the concepts themselves, that it lives with its I into the icy regions, but thereby also forms the experience of the pure concept. For Hegel had the inner experience - one may call it the inner experience - that when man grasps the ideas of the world in their purity, that he may then partake with the innermost part of his I-being in what, as divine thought itself, underlying all of the world, participating in the thought-work of the Godhead, because a thought in the soul is, so to speak, only an ideational representation of that which, as a divine thought, permeates the world - that is what Hegel wanted.

This world view is also one-sided, because it reduces the divine spiritual beings that underlie the world to mere logic, because the whole world is reduced to a mere skeleton of its reality. But it is significant that for once — I would like to say — there appeared a stage in the development of the German being, this inwardly living feeling and interweaving of a thought that permeates the world: I want to unite myself with the thought that is active in the world, and I am convinced that in so doing I have not only something in my soul that outwardly reflects the world, but that when thoughts flow through my soul, it is divine activity itself that allows its thoughts to appear in my soul — those thoughts according to which minerals, plants, animals and human beings are created. Outside, God creates the form and the facts according to the ideas; then, having stripped them of the material, he lets these ideas flow through the human soul, and man participates by surrendering to this flow in a mysticism that is not vague, not an emotional mysticism, but an idea-mysticism, crystal clear: Man participates in the efficacy of divine thoughts in the world!

Yes, esteemed attendees, with these three figures – who, much more than one might think, also in the period when they were rarely mentioned, in the second half of the nineteenth century and up to the present day, live on in the German essence – in these three figures, the world view of German idealism presents itself to us, that German idealism that was called upon – and we can see this directly and objectively in these minds, the spirits of this German idealism, - was called upon - I would say cognitively, I emphasize explicitly, not religiously, but cognitively - although the cognitive is a support of the religious, the religious emerges from another part - to conjure up the second great tidal wave in terms of a human world view from the depths of human existence.

Let us look across to Asia. Asia, especially India, still retains, I would say, an ancient world view in which the human being has also tried to come to that from the depths of his being, which as divine-spiritual flows through, works through and lives through the world. But how does the Asian and the descendant of this ancient Asian, the present-day Indian, attempt to make the divine-spiritual activity and flow in the world present in their own soul being? By attenuating and paralyzing the soul and paralyzing the I. The I must be extinguished so that the human being can give themselves over to the general flow of Brahman. This is the ancient striving for a world picture, I would say, the primeval striving for a world picture. Characteristic of this is that the ego is tuned down, paralyzed to the point of extinction, so that what the human being experiences in his ego does not stand in the way when he wants to revive in his soul that which flows through the world in a divine-spiritual way, giving it soul. To extinguish himself so that the Divine may work in him, that is the ideal of this Pan-Asiatic world picture.

This world picture was no longer possible when the greatest event in the world development of humanity had taken place. This world picture was no longer possible when the Christ Impulse had entered into humanity. From the religious side, humanity was given a deepening, of such magnitude that the Asian religion may never again emerge in its strength, for it could never again be adequate to this event, in which the Christ Impulse lives as the highest event. It was the destiny of the German national spirit to have created an understanding of earthly existence that is adequate to the Christ Impulse.

And these three spirits are like the three symptoms in which the striving for such a world view is expressed. As I said, how does one not seek such a world view by extinguishing the self! We have seen how these three spirits in particular – Fichte, Schelling and Hegel – want to fully live out the I, how they place it at the center of the three soul shades, not by extinguishing the I, but precisely by fully experiencing it, by elevating the I; how the divine-spiritual flows into this I, that is what was incumbent on the German national spirit. And it could do so because it was able to let the I shine through the three soul nuances, just as the unified light shines through the three rainbow nuances.

To place oneself in the more recent development of the world as those who now place everything that is recognized of the existence of nature and soul in the service of such an idealistic world view, that was the duty of the greatest German thinkers, who knew themselves to be one with what the truly German national spirit wants in the further development of humanity.

It seems appropriate to me to point this out to you today, esteemed attendees. What will become of the great external events will be decided by weapons and other circumstances. But it seems appropriate to me, especially in the present, to delve into the nature of the German national spirit itself, which is now being reviled and slandered from all sides, and which, precisely because it must work in the manner indicated, is so little understood by those who, out of their hatred, today all around us, not only misunderstand the German world view, but also want to misunderstand it. But they cannot understand it because they work in a one-sided way, in the one-sidedness of their particular shade of soul; whereas the German must work out of his nature, out of his whole being, towards a wholeness.

A kind of reverent mood is poured out over what the German spirit is meant to achieve in the world. This German national soul is particularly predisposed to acquiring knowledge through nature and the soul, and then enriching this knowledge in the soul so that this knowledge is like the soul's approach to the divine being.

If we do not see this – and I would like to read these words to you literally – if we do not see this beautifully when we look at those who always wanted to visualize from the depths of the German being, that which is the German folk spirit? Do we not see this striving - to know what the German can know, how to make it accessible to the divine-spiritual, to develop a devout mood in science as well? How beautiful and wonderful it is, for example, when a German — and that is precisely why he may perhaps be mentioned today — who appears in Austria as one of the greatest German-Austrians, delves into the German essence, even if he has not perhaps arrived at the concepts that have been developed today and presented to us, so as to feel the full expression of what has been developed in ideas today here: I am referring to Robert Hamerling, Austria's greatest German poet of modern times, who spoke the beautiful words, feeling like a German in Austria, spoke the beautiful words: Austria is my fatherland; but I feel it: Germany is my motherland - thus expressing the unity that has been so firmly forged today through Germany and Austria, through Central Europe. All these peculiarities of the German national soul, which I have been trying to develop today from the idealistic world view of the Germans - at the time when they believed they could turn back the tide, when the Germans came over from Asia, bringing with them the urge to grasp the Allgeist, which they would later express in their art, in their education, in their philosophy, in all their being and working in the world, by elevating the ego, not by dampening the ego. And there, as in a beautiful poet's dream in his “Germanenzug”, Robert Hamerling remembers - the old ancestors of the Germans are still sitting over there in Asia, while these old ancestors of the Germans are moving into Europe, into the West , Robert Hamerling describes beautifully how these Teutons are camped on the border of Asia and Europe, how the sun goes down - he beautifully describes the moon that rises, the whole landscape -, how the Teutons are camped. Only one is awake: the blond Teut, the youth. But in front of Teut, the future destinies of the Germans are written in the stars in wonderful signs. And the genius of the Germans, the spirit of the German people, speaks to the blond Teut, to the leader of the Germanic peoples to the German West. And Hamerling says beautifully:

"To whom does the word break out of the depths of the soul one day
Like your people, so rich, so tender, so powerful?
Who breathes so solemnly into the sounds of the strings
His innermost self? Who draws the senses so magnificently
Into the blue of heaven, granite hieroglyphics
of the soul's upsurge from the narrowness of life?
Who finally ties the strands
of the searching thought to the stars
so boldly and strives and fights on all paths?
Who is led so high, so deep by his urge, his foreboding?
Who grasps the near and the far so faithfully?
Where are all the zones of earth and heaven
reflected as in your thinking, O Teuton?

Not from such a self-exalting consciousness, not from national immodesty, as we often find among our opponents today, but from a devout consideration of the nature of the German, of the spiritual nature that has prevailed throughout world history.

The poet speaks of duty, the Austrian poet, in complete harmony with those who have created a German world view, an imaginative world view of the Germans, out of the German world view.

That is why it is so profoundly true what the “Philosophus teutonicus” Jakob Böhme said about all research and reflection on that world view that has a right to exist, which, fundamentally, for the German national character - so Jakob Böhme believes - the search for knowledge, for science, must be a path to God, even if it does not encroach on religion. Jakob Böhme expresses this, thereby characterizing the guiding principle for the world view of German idealism, beautifully from the depths of the German mind. Jakob Böhme says:

“When you see the depths”

he means the depths of heaven

"When you look at the depths of heaven

This is the union of the most beautiful sense of the German national character with the highest striving for knowledge of that which, in a divine and spiritual sense, permeates, interweaves and suffuses the world. Thus, in order to elevate his ego, the German seeks to penetrate into the innermost nature of things, and this is indeed something that can be understood only to a limited extent.

One can see how little it can be understood! There is one of those who, shortly before the beginning of this war, used to move around in Germany as foreign spirits, talking about all kinds of friendships with the German essence, about all kinds of understanding that they claim to have acquired for the German essence: that is Emile Boutroux. Shortly before the war, he even lectured at German universities about how one should revere the depths of the German spirit. And now the true Frenchman [Boutroux] is telling his fellow Frenchmen – he wants to be funny, of course, the good [Boutroux] wants to be funny – he is telling them what a difference there is between the French, the English and the Germans; what we - though for the French, certainly in a joking way - have sought today from the depths of the German character, yes, Boutroux talked about that in a similar way to his French not too long ago. He said: Yes, when the French want to recognize a lion or a hyena – you don't get the news exactly, but that's roughly how he spoke – and in any case, what I am saying is essentially not inaccurate – when the French describe a lion or a hyena, they go to the menagerie and observe the lion or the hyena; when the English want to recognize a lion or a hyena, they travel around the world and observe the life of the lion or the hyena. But when the Germans want to recognize a lion or a hyena, they neither go to a menagerie nor travel around the world, but retreat to their study and design the image of the lion and the hyena from within, without looking at the outside!

It is certainly a witty saying, and we are accustomed to the French speaking wittily from their intellectual culture; it is just a shame that this joke is by Heinrich Heine, repeated by Boutroux, because it comes from Heine; and the Frenchman, who we are accustomed to making good jokes, made a German joke in this case, to make a witty comment about the English and the French! This is another illustration of how the opponents of Germanness try to ascribe to themselves something higher than what a German can live with!

However, this same man recently told his Parisians what a barbaric people the Germans actually are; one can already deduce this from the word. For example, he said: the Germans have no word for generosity; therefore they don't even have this quality, they lack it, only the French have it. On the other hand, the Germans have a word that the French don't have: that is the word 'Schadenfreude'; so only the Germans have the quality of Schadenfreude. The French don't have this ignoble quality. And similar things more are what indicates the spirit from which one today vilifies and degrades the German essence.

But one has not always looked at this German essence in this way! And it would be particularly interesting to see which minds have tried to find their way into this German essence, as one can also see from this just how little account is taken of the actual meaning of this German essence, this spirit. Take, for example, the writer of “The Life of Jesus” — Ernest Renan — he wrote in a corresponding way even during the Franco-Prussian War about German essence to David Friedrich Strauß, who wrote about German essence. Strangely, the Frenchman, Ernest Renan, wrote; he says that at a certain age he realized what this German essence actually means. And he makes an interesting comparison. He says that after he had absorbed the French character in his education, he approached the German character through Goethe and Herder, and it was as if he encountered realities instead of mere concepts, whereas before he had only seen a lot of faded paper flowers. And then he compares the height of German intellectual life, which has been revealed to him in this way, by saying that everything he got to know outside of this German essence seems to him, well, like elementary mathematics to differential and potential mathematics. We shall see in a moment how such a mind itself utilizes, in terms of feeling, what has come to it through contact with the German essence.

But first, let us see a little more of how this Central European, German essence is viewed in the East, in that East from which the European West, that is to say our West, is currently suffering so much for what is, after all, its sphere of influence, its work for freedom and democracy today, this European West. If we have to consider the Russian national soul, we have to say: in Russia's national soul, the direct driving force of the I, everything still lives as something external. The Russian receives his religion as a foreign one, the Greek-Christian religion, which he does not have within him in the form of rebirth, as the German has experienced it from his innermost being, but which he accepts as something like a cloud that hovers over him, that he has from outside. While the Italian works from the sentient soul, the Frenchman from the intellectual and mind soul, the Englishman, the Briton from the consciousness soul, the German from the actual self, the person who truly belongs to the Russian national soul, works from the subconscious of the ego, which still has the ego that the ego has not yet absorbed into itself, which the ego still wants to see in a mystical darkness. This Russian soul, this eastern Russian soul, works like the national soul that has not yet fully come to consciousness.

And this is why this still immature national soul has not only so misunderstood the German national soul, but also all the national souls of Western Europe, especially in the course of the nineteenth century and up to our own times, so infinitely misunderstood them.

People have not even noticed what the relationship is, let us say, between the nature of the German spirit and the Russian spirit. In selfless German modesty, one has naturally included the great Russians – Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky. They are not to be disparaged here; they can be fully recognized; but one must become aware of the gulf that exists between the Russian and the German essence, and which, especially in the Russian essence, has come to such an immature outbreak and revelation in our own time.

In the course of the nineteenth century, we encounter the best Russian minds, which - I would like to say - philosophically and artistically express, as in a world view, what, in political terms, the “Testament of Peter the Great” – whether it is forged or not, that is not the point now – which, in political terms, aims to achieve the complete annihilation and replacement of Western and Central Europe, as it exists today, with Eastern Europe! [The “Testament of Peter the Great” is the only thing that should be considered sustainable.] But everything, I would like to say, even Russian literary-philosophical and artistic thought, is in the service of this “Testament of Peter the Great”. And this is what we encounter again and again in all of nineteenth-century Russian intellectual life.

Then we encounter the best minds in Russia, who turn their gaze to what minds like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel have achieved. I would say that Herzen is able to observe this in a single such spirit. He seeks to delve into what Western culture has brought forth; he finds that it has all grown old, has become decrepit, that it must all disappear, that it is all superficial, because he cannot comprehend how this world view of German Idealism is inwardly lived and interwoven; and so it becomes worthless to him. In his book From the Other Bank, Herzen expresses how all these ideals that have sprung up in Western Europe must be destroyed and how something else must take their place.

One of Herzen's opponents, also a Russian, wrote to Herzen: So you want to destroy everything that has emerged in Western Europe: Greater, more significant – as a Russian wrote to Herzen, one of his Russian opponents, to appeal to his conscience – Greater than all the ideals of Central Europe, is the Russian sheepskin coat to you? – the friend wrote to Herzen!

What does he mean by the “Russian sheep's clothing”? Well, Herzen said it: In what this European culture, this European spiritual life has brought forth, there cannot be anything redemptive, anything salvific for humanity; but that which is salvific for humanity is the Russian peasant; that is, the one who, in all his originality, contains within him that which must flood the whole of Western and Central Europe. And this appears to be so deeply ingrained in Russian souls, especially in the most Russian of Russians, for example in Dostoyevsky, the great artist – whom we want to acknowledge in terms of his skill – that it is increasingly apparent in his work, when we take a closer look at it, that he regards German culture in particular as decrepit and obsolete, and that he already sees Russia as destined to be the redeemer. Basically, the delusional rage that is now to be poured out over Europe is nothing more than the brutal expression of this tendency, which has even found expression in great Russian writers; however, care has been taken to ensure that the good Germans do not become too aware of this, which, I might say, has always lived and breathed between the lines of Russian intellectual life! And so it comes about that - and those who know me better know how much I appreciate Tolstoy - but what is in Tolstoy, especially in such older works as “Anna Karenina” and so on, that shows how he - Tolstoy - always aimed to depict the German character in such a way that it appears decrepit and inferior.

Why have the Germans paid so little attention to such things? Why are they now surprised at the fact that hatred is being heaped on them from all sides? Well, you only have to take the fact that, for example, the older translations of Tolstoy, namely those works by translators that people still read, up to the last translation in the middle of the nineteenth century by [Raphael Löwenfeld], which people no longer read, these translations all either left out the passages in question entirely or translated them differently, so that no one actually knows the real Tolstoy!

It will be necessary, dear honored attendees, to go a little deeper into the nuances that live in the expressions of souls, so that the German knows how to fulfill his mission in the world. And so it came about that even insightful Russian minds, such as the great philosopher Soloviev, rebelled against this generally Russian view, against the view of those who, according to a Russian world view, had grown old and died, and that Russianism should overthrow this European essence.

If I emphasize individual personalities, it is because I want to cite facts and show by individual characteristics how many there are.

There is, for example, one Danilewski, who attempts to address the question in broad terms, entirely in the spirit of the Russian essence I have just hinted at, how Russia must expand, how Europe's west and center are ripe to because the European West and the Center have fulfilled their task; and Danilewski once asks the question in a book that is so completely formed from the Russian point of view: Why does Europe not love us, why does Europe fear us? Now he seeks to answer this question from his own point of view, and Danilevsky writes for his Russians something like this: Europe does not love us because Europe instinctively senses that we are the ones who are actually the only ones still entitled to exist, and who are to replace what lives in the rest of Europe. But Soloviev takes up this question, and Soloviev is one of those who has drawn from this life himself. And the great philosopher Solowjow, who, unbiased by his own Russian nature, takes up this question: Why does Germany not love us? He does not answer this question in the way Danilewski and the spirits of the most diverse kinds of Russians speak, that Europe feared Russia, but Solowjow answers Danilewski's question: Why does Europe not love us? Why does Europe fear us?” and Danilevsky's answer to this: ‘Because Europe instinctively senses that the Russians are the only ones who are still entitled to exist and should replace what is still alive in the rest of Europe,’ Solowjow replies to these words of Danilevsky:

“And yet both the content of his book and his later admissions, as well as those of his like-minded friend”

referring to a certain Strachow

“point to a different answer: Europe looks at us with apprehension and fear”

Solovyov wrote his reply, and it is certainly necessary for anyone who wants to get to know the conditions in the Russian east to listen to these Russians. Solovyov himself says:

"Europe regards us with apprehension and mistrust because dark and obscure elemental forces live in the Russian people, because its spiritual and cultural forces are poor and inadequate, but because its demands are clearly and sharply defined. The calls for what the Russian people want as a nation resound powerfully out to Europe: that it wants to destroy Turkey and Austria, conquer Germany, and seize Constantinople and, if possible, India.

And when we are asked how we intend to replace what we have destroyed and failed to accomplish, how we plan to rejuvenate the world intellectually and culturally, we either have to remain silent or spout meaningless phrases. And if Danilevsky's bitter confession is true, that Russia is beginning to fall ill, then instead of dealing with the question “Why doesn't Europe love us,” we would have to deal with another, more important question that is closer to us: “Why and how did we become ill?” Physically, Russia is still quite strong, as it showed in the last Russian war; so our suffering is a moral one. We are burdened, according to the words of an old writer, by the sins hidden in the national character and not conscious to us - and so it is necessary above all to bring these into the light of clear consciousness. As long as we are spiritually bound and paralyzed, all our elementary instincts must only harm us. The essential, indeed the only essential question of true patriotism is not the question of power and vocation, but of the sins of Russia."

Thus the Russian Solowjow, from a spiritual insight into the Russian character, thus the great philosopher Solowjow about Russia itself. And it is interesting to see this in conclusion: how have others perceived this relationship between Russia and the West, even the further West – with whom they are now in league or who is in league with them, one does not quite know how to say – how have others perceived this relationship with their further West? Oh, there are also interesting facts here! For example, a book by the Russian writer Yushakov was published in 1885. In 1885, he wrote a book in which he speaks quite differently from how he was later spoken of regarding the views that he attributes to his Russian people. It is interesting to take a look at Yushakov's ideas.

This man looks across to Asia and says: Yes, over there in Asia, we have peoples who have brought a very old culture from ancient times into more recent times. These peoples, how they have been mistreated by the Europeans. Russia must look across to Asia, and must bring redemption to this sacred, venerable, but by the Europeans mistreated Asian culture, this spiritual culture of Asia. Nice words Jushakow speaks. He says that Russia alone is capable – because it cannot yet grasp the human interior in such a way that it has been made sick and aged by the ego as in the European West – Russia alone can feel related to this Asia, which is now lying prostrate, groaning under the rape of Europe. And an old myth brings Yushakov back to mind when he says: Over there in Asia, Iranian, Turanian peoples are fighting. He himself also includes the Indians, the Persians, and so on, among the Iranian peoples. And then Yushakov says: These have found a wonderful, ancient myth of Ormuzd and Ahriman for their destiny. But we always see Ahriman and Ormuzd at work over there in Asia forever. And there, in his book, Yushakov says – in 1885 – and he points this out in his memoirs, that the Iranians worshiped the good Ormuzd over there in Asia; the good Ormuzd gave the Iranians all the fruits and crops that the earth can produce; they took them for themselves. Then they joined forces with Ahriman. These Europeans have worked like Ahriman, like the evil Ahriman himself. But Russia, by working across into Asia, will liberate people from the evil Ahriman. What the Asians have received under the blessing of the good Ormuzd, the selfish Europeans have appropriated for themselves. Russia will cross over to Asia and help by founding an alliance, yes – Yushakov says it, I have to repeat it to you – an alliance that will be formed with the greatest ideals in the world, as the most spiritual alliance in the world – Yushakov says it all, I am only repeating it. It will be formed by Russian peasants and Cossacks, who will rush over to Asia, which is groaning under European rule, and will carry over what Russia will be able to bring. Then the peasantry and Cossacks will advance into Asia, and Russia will redeem Asia from Ahriman. 1885, think Sic, written by Jushakow. It is interesting to hear some of what Jushakow said at the time in the book, which is called: “The Anglo-Russian Conflict”. It says that the comrades of Ahriman, the evil god – from whom Russia must liberate Asia and bring order and harmony – are primarily the English.

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

“England exploits millions of Hindus, but her very existence depends on the obedience of the various peoples inhabiting the rich peninsula.”

And so he continues, Yushakov:

“I do not wish anything similar for my homeland – I can only be pleased that it is sufficiently far removed from this state, which is as brilliant as it is sad.”

Apparently because these Russians were so keen to distance themselves from this Englishness, so that they could free Asia from this hideous England, they soon allied themselves with this England, not to free Asia, but to destroy Europe.

One must also look at world development from this intellectual perspective in the nineteenth century, and in this way delve into what actually constitutes the German character and how it stands now, this German character, which has to defend itself in a way against the ring that has been formed around it, yes, in a way that can be simply hinted at when numbers are spoken.

These people – who want to keep Germany and Austria locked up in a big fortress today – are taking a stand for freedom, for the rights of small nations, and for all sorts of things they believe in. You only have to look at the numbers: 777 million people in the so-called Entente around the Central European powers, against 150 million; 777 million are “fighting” - let's put that in quotation marks - “fighting” against 150 million, and fighting in such a way that to this day still want to strike at the very essence of their actual bravery, they also want to strike at the German spirit, which they believe they understand so well, that 777 million people are turning against 150 million, joining forces to starve them out, to defeat them with starvation, the better part of bravery.

Actually, they had no need to be envious of what the Central Europeans were taking away from them; for the Entente Powers possess 68 million square kilometers of the earth, compared to 6 million square kilometers of the Central European Powers. One need only let these numbers speak. These numbers speak to this day, and will also speak in world history, ladies and gentlemen, that after all, within these 150 million present-day Central Europeans and on these 6 million square kilometers of Central European soil, those people live who have the world-historical, spiritual mission that we were allowed to speak of, and which they ascribe to themselves not ascribe it to themselves out of national chauvinism, but out of their spiritual gifts, out of the spirit of their Germanness, to which they have not devoted themselves through their egoism, but to which they have to approach if they want to offer the best of their being on the altar of this their national spirit. And those who feel this German essence in Central Europe feel a close bond with it, especially the best in Austria and Germany – and I am allowed to speak about this since I have spent thirty years of my life in Austria:

Precisely the best Austrians, those who have grown up with Central European culture, like the excellent philosopher Carneri, know how to experience and fathom the relationship between their own people and the German national spirit and German essence not out of national chauvinism but out of a sure knowledge of the essence of their own people.

For example, Carneri, the most important Austrian philosopher, says of the English: “Carneri, a wonderful man who, out of the deepest suffering, has founded a spiritual world view that is so completely in line with our time, a conceptual world view from German-Austria. Carneri talks about how the English have really focused their attention on external practical culture and he says: It has become so practical, this culture, that the English had to learn from the Germans the fact that the great playwright and poet Shakespeare lived among them. For it is true that it is only through the Germans delving into Shakespeare that Shakespeare has been recognized at all. And if one day someone has to write the story of Shakespeare's greatness, it will not be an English chapter in intellectual history that they have to write, but a German one.

All this characterizes the nature of the German world view, which creates out of all intellectual inner life, in contrast to everything around it. And so we may well believe that this is what the German must strive for above all else: spiritual science, knowledge of the spirit, just as there is knowledge of nature. Knowledge of the spirit, which must be based above all on the sources, on the roots that lie in the world view of German idealism. This is, as I said, not a conviction born out of blind national sentiment, but a conviction born out of knowledge. It is that which humanity is to scientifically fathom in the future about the spirit, that this must grow out of German national culture – and above all out of the ideal world view of German national culture – as it has been attempted to describe today.

And how little understanding there is among other nations today – let me say this in conclusion – this war can show the German so clearly how little understanding there is on the part of other nations towards the world view of German idealism and the German spirit, and how he must first ensure and strive to ensure that what he is called upon to create out of the depths of the German being can become part of the world development of humanity. The French, how did they look at this world view of German idealism? Or the Russians, for example, how did they look at this world view that the Germans have formed, this world view? The Russians look at it as if it only existed to be destroyed by them, as something decrepit and worn out. While we must see roots and leaves in it, from which the blossoms and fruits must first ripen in the future! We want to commit ourselves to this view! But the Russians need a new delusion; because the ego does not yet live in their soul, they must dream of a new delusion. They need a new delusion.

What do the French need? What do the French need today if they want to characterize their relationship to the German essence? Well, perhaps one could refer to one of their youngest poets to avoid doing them an injustice. What do the French want? They have been so accustomed to their nature being everywhere in Europe, just as the Germans were accustomed to their nature living in the Germans themselves, just as the Germans were accustomed to the way they felt the power, the driving force of what, for example, also lived in this world view of German idealism, up to Lessing, until they had to free themselves, the Germans, [so] these French were so accustomed that their nature lived everywhere in Europe. And after that, they believed that nothing could actually be done without what they did and what they produced intellectually, that everything had to come from them, that they had to be the cause of everything. In a very interesting and witty poem, Rostand, one of their own poets, recently illustrated how the French – that is, his own – national character can be compared to the cock crowing in the morning; and when the cock crows, the sun rises. And because the sun rises when the cock crows, the Frenchman believes that with his crowing he makes the sun rise. So he says to himself: If I don't crow, the sun can't rise!

This is said by the French poet Rostand himself as a characteristic of the French nature. The Frenchman thinks: If he doesn't crow, nothing at all can happen in the world. And that is why it is so incredible that he no longer occupies the position he once did; for it is actually the case that the German character, as expressed by Ranke, for example, is to be defended against the delusion of the crowing of the French national spirit, as early as 1870, when the Germans had to face the French: “We are still fighting against Louis XV!”

The French need a new delusion. The Russians need a new mission. The English – well, one really doesn't want to do them an injustice. What should one say so as not to do them an injustice? They declaim to the world: for the sake of the violation of Belgium's neutrality, for the sake of justice and democracy, we must undertake this war to the point of destroying the German essence; for these Germans are disgraceful people. They preach the principle of might over right. It is likely that one only forgets, as a result of a particularly refined education, that the English minister who decreed this – only recently – that the phrase “might over right” comes from the English philosopher, English utilitarian philosopher Thomas Hobbes. But: “might over right” – and England has adhered to this phrase for centuries. [gap in the transcript] as a professor in England himself, where he said: freedom and democracy, that is something that cannot be united, which should be advocated after the last English history, but that Great Britain's expansion [gap in the transcript], he says, is also a truth, also a practical truth, as the English world view must strive for. Yes, what can you say? “Might is right” – since Thomas Hobbes this principle has been winding its way through English history, concealing the real reasons why England tramples underfoot the entire mission of the German people. Yes, one would not want to do such things an injustice, but one must say: the English need a new lie to drown out that which cannot be compensated for.

The Russians need a new delusion; the French need a new conceit; the English need a new lie. The Italians – yes, a very outstanding man told me even before the Italian war broke out: “Italy needs this war!” There are people, of course, who are not so naive as to have believed that Italy could not join the Entente in this war. Italy needs this war; we must have this war; the Italians have become lethargic, sluggish and lazy; they are actually on the road to the abyss - said this important political figure at the time - and need to have something that will shake them up again, that will awaken them to life, otherwise they will become completely rotten and sluggish! What do these Italians need? These Italians needed a new sensation in order to have something at the same time – just as the French needed imagination, the English needed a new lie, the Russians needed a new delusion, a new mission, so the Italians needed a new saint, something very special! – They truly have a saint, namely, holy egoism – sacro egoismo – which is preached everywhere and on whose altar people are sacrificed. And the apostle of modern Italian nationalism, the hierophant, is Gabriele d'Annunzio! Perhaps history will one day rank him among the buffoons of the mind – that can be said without any national chauvinism. But he will nevertheless stand without dignity as the one who also made sacrifices to this new egoism, the sacro egoismo, which Italy represents and to which they have dedicated themselves, this new saint!

When we see all this going on around us, we can truly say that, without the Germans needing to become as nationally egotistical as those who want to surround, encircle and contain them, we can truly say that, from the inner fertility and knowledge of the greatness of the German essence, to which we humbly bow, we cannot, in arrogance, say that we experience in the German essence: It is the germs, it is the roots, it is the leaves – and the blossoms and the fruits must develop from them. And we can look to the future with confidence and hope!

And finally, I would like to say that – as if in a unified thinking – those who understood the German essence in Central Europe always felt it. One of my teachers in Austria once spoke a beautiful word. I may perhaps read it to you at the end, a little poem. It is called “Austria and Germany”. Today, when Austria and Germany are welded together, I may perhaps read it, this little poem:

"Let Russia and England wisely deliberate,
Perhaps not even find it unwelcome
If we get into a little bit of a fight here,
If they take away our good right!

You, German brothers, will not - advise here,
The enemy's attack will only unite us
And all ambition will fade among us
Before: being one people in word and deed.

And if one among us has failed,
If discord has reigned in a German heart,
There is only one thing that now inspires us:
What we have in common, in joy and in sorrow!
So may we also have in common:
A German war, if not a German peace!

Thus spoke the German of Austria in 1859. Those who feel that they are part of the German national spirit, who recognize it without national chauvinism, are so united in their awareness that loyalty springs from the soul to this German essence. Then this Karl Julius Schröer, who has remained so unknown, but who felt German essence in Austria quite extraordinarily, then he said:

A spirit arises, a giant to behold
[Who does not yet long gather all his strength
The German spirit rises up, aflame with courage
Wherever you look in all German regions.
He has been called a master in many a field,
In art and knowledge, in the building system,
he is first to be seen
then he will be truly recognized by the world.

To see him as a whole, this also includes the symptom that so clearly shows how the immortal martial forces come from the German essence. Likewise, the idealistic world view of the German stems from the primal power of the German essence, which has borne its roots and its leaves, and - looking towards it - we may have faith in the future: it must struggle through to its blossoms and fruits in the future, undisturbed by the hatred of the opposition.

This awareness wells up in us as 150 million people facing 777 million, as standing on 6 million square kilometers against 68 million square kilometers; this wells up in us from the spiritual, from the soul, from the heart of the German spiritual being!

So let us speak out of the knowledge itself and out of the most justified feeling: Yes, by being aware of our essence, we may believe, we may hope that the blossoms and fruits to the roots and leaves of the German being will unfold in the future.

Therefore, we can confidently live into the future of this German national spirit, also from the depths of the German endeavor.

And so may it be, because it must be so!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This address was given at the Second Annual Congress of the Federation of European Sections of the Theosophical Society.

It was then edited for printing by St. George Publications in 1982.¹

Anthroposophy will only be able to fulfill its great and universal mission in modern civilization when it is able to grasp the special problems which have arisen in every land by reason of the intellectual possessions of the people. In Germany, these special problems are in part determined by the inheritance bequeathed to her intellectual life by the men of genius living at the close of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. Any one who approaches those great minds, Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Novalis, Jean Paul and many others, from the point of view of Anthroposophical thought and its attitude toward life, will have two important experiences. The first being that, as a result of this profoundly spiritual attitude, a new light is thrown upon the working and works of these men of genius; the second, that through them Anthroposophy receives new life-blood, which must, in some way as yet not clear, produce a fructifying and strengthening effect in the future. It may be said without exaggeration that the German will understand Anthroposophy if only he brings his mind to bear upon the highest conceptions for which the leading spirits of his land have striven, and which they have embodied in their works.

It will be the task of future generations to reveal the Anthroposophical and spiritual-scientific basis of the great advancement in the intellectual life of Germany during the period in question. It will then be shown what an intimate knowledge and understanding of the influences at work during this period is obtainable by regarding things from an Anthroposophical point of view. It is only possible on this occasion to make a few references to one man of genius who was the leading light of this age of culture, namely, Goethe. It is possible that new life may be infused into the active principles of Anthroposophy through Goethe's thought and the creations of his mind, with the result that, in Germany, Anthroposophy may appear by degrees to be something akin to the spirit of the people. One thing will be made clear: that the source of the Anthroposophical conception is one and the same as the fount from which Germany's great poet and thinker has derived his creative power.

The most clear-sighted of those among whom Goethe lived acknowledged without any reservation that there was no branch of intellectual life which his attitude toward life and the world could not enrich. But one must not allow oneself to be deceived by the fact that the quintessence of Goethe's mind really lies concealed below the surface of his works. He who wishes to win his way to a perfect understanding of them must become intimate with their innermost spirit. This does not mean that one should become insensitive to the beauties of their style or their artistic form. Nor must one put an abstract interpretation upon his art by means of intellectual symbols and allegories. But, just as a noble countenance excites no less admiration for the beauty of its features because the beholder is able to perceive the greatness of the soul illuminating this beauty, so it is with Goethe's art; not only can it lose nothing, but rather will it gain infinitely, when the outward expression of his creative power is illuminated by that depth of conception of the universe which possesses his soul.

Goethe himself often has shown how justified we are in having such a profound conception of his creative power. On January 29, 1827, he said to his devoted secretary Eckermann concerning his Faust, “It is all scenic and, from the point of view of the theatre, it will please everyone. More than this I did not wish. If only the performance gives pleasure to the majority of the audience, the initiated will not miss the deeper meaning.” It is only necessary to bring an impartial insight to bear upon Goethe's creative power in order to recognize that it is only an esoteric conception which can lead us to a full understanding of his working. He felt within him an ardent desire to discover in all phenomena of the senses the hidden spiritual force. It was one of his principles of search that the inner secrets are expressed in outward facts and objects, and that those only can aspire to understand Nature who look upon the phenomena as mere letters which enable them to decipher the inner meaning of the workings of the spirit. The words: “All we see before us passing, Sign and symbol is alone,” in the Chorus Mysticus, at the end of Faust, are not merely to be regarded as a poetical idea, but as the outcome of his whole attitude toward the world. In Art, too, he saw only a revelation of the innermost secrets of the world; in his opinion, it was through Art that those things are to be made clear which, though having their origin in Nature and being active in her, yet with the means at her disposal, she cannot express. He sought the same spirit in the phenomena of Nature as in the works of a creative artist; only the means of expression were different in the two cases. He was constantly at work on his conception of a gradual process of evolution of all the phenomena and creatures in the world. He regarded man as a compilation of the other kingdoms. The spirit of man was to him the revelation of a universal spirit, and the other realms of Nature, with their manifestations, appeared to him as the path of evolution leading to man. All this was not merely a theory with him, but became a living element in his work, permeating all that he produced. Schiller has given us a fine description of this peculiarity of Goethe's mind, in the letter with which he inaugurates the intimate friendship which united them (August 23, 1794):

For a long time I have watched, although from some distance, the procedure of your mind, and ever with renewed wonder have observed the track that you have marked out for yourself. You seek for the necessary (the absolute) in Nature; but you seek it by the most difficult route, which every weaker spirit will take care to avoid. You grasp in your view entire Nature in order to obtain light on her parts: in the totality of her manifestations, you search for the key to lay open the individual. (Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe, from 1794 to 1805.)

In his book on Winckelmann, Goethe has expressed his opinion as to the position of man in the evolution of the realms of Nature:

When the sound, healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels himself at one with the world as a great, beautiful, worthy whole, when this harmonious feeling of well-being gives him a pure free delight, then might the Universe, could it consciously feel, deeming itself at the goal, cry out for very joy, and be lost in admiration of the climax of its own development and organization.

It was Goethe's life-work to strive to obtain an ever clearer insight into the evolution of the living world. When, after moving to Weimar (about 1780), he embodied the result of his investigation in the beautiful prose-hymn, Nature, we find over the whole a certain abstract tinge of pantheism. He must perforce use words to define the hidden forces of being, but before long these cease to satisfy his ever-deepening conception. But it is in these very words that we first meet with the ideas which we find later in such perfect form. He says there, for instance:

Nature! we are surrounded and embraced by her ... Unasked and without warning she draws us into the circle of her dance and carries us along with her until we are weary and slip from her arms. For ever is she creating new forms; what is, never was before; what has been, never will be again; everything is new, and yet ever old ... Each one of her works has its own individuality, each of her phenomena requires individual comprehension, and yet it all makes but one whole ... She has thought, and is for ever meditating; not as man, though, but as Nature. She has her own all-embracing meaning, which no one can learn from her by observation only ... She envelops man in a mist, and is ever spurring him on toward the light ... She creates wants because she loves action ... She has neither speech nor language, but she creates tongues and hearts through which she feels and speaks ... Her crown is love, through which alone she may be approached ... She has isolated everything in order to draw everything together ... Past and future knows she not. The present is her eternity.

When Goethe (1828), having reached the summit of his insight, looked back upon this stage, he expressed himself thus concerning it:

I would call that former stage of insight the Comparative, which is impelled to express its tendency toward an, as yet, unattained Superlative ... But what is wanting for its fulfillment is the conception of the two great driving-wheels of all Nature, the comprehension of polarity and self-perfecting evolution, the former belonging to matter, insofar as we call it material, the latter opposed to it, insofar as we call it spiritual; the former is everlastingly attracting and repelling, the latter is ever striving to ascend. But, as matter cannot exist and operate without spirit, nor spirit without matter, even so matter has the power to raise itself, nor can spirit be prevented from attracting and repelling.

It was with such a conception that Goethe approached the animal, mineral and vegetable kingdoms to grasp the hidden spiritual unity in the manifest multiplicity of sense-perceptible phenomena. It is in this sense that he speaks of primeval plant, primeval animal. And it was for him Intuition which stood behind these conceptions as the active spiritual force. In his contemplation of things, his whole being strove toward what in Anthroposophy is called tolerance. And ever more and more he sought to acquire this quality by means of the strictest inward self-education. To this he frequently refers; it will suffice to quote a very characteristic example from the Campaign in France (1792):

As I was for the most part almost entirely engrossed by the business and occurrences of the moment, with which kind of life I had reason to be satisfied, of late years particularly, I had the peculiarity of never forming conceptions beforehand of persons whom I expected to meet, or places that I intended to visit, but allowed them to produce their effect upon me without being previously prepared for them.

The advantage that arises from this is very great; one does not require to come back from a previously conceived idea, to blot out a picture arbitrarily painted by ourselves, and painfully to adopt the reality in its place.

Thus he endeavored to rise higher and higher and to reach the point which divided the real from the unreal.

Only here and there do we find references to his innermost convictions. One of these occurs, for instance, in the poem The Mysteries, which contains his confession as a Rosicrucian. It was written in the middle of the 80's in the 18th century, and was regarded by those who knew him intimately as revealing his character. In 1816, he was called upon by a “fraternity of students in one of the chief towns of North Germany” to explain the hidden meaning of the poem, and the explanation which he gave might well stand as a paraphrase of the three objectives of the programme of the Anthroposophical Society.

Only when one is capable of appreciating the full significance of such points in Goethe is one in a position to recognize the higher meaning, to use his own expression, which he has introduced into his Faust for the initiated. In the second part of this dramatic poem is in fact to be found what Goethe had to say concerning the relation of man to the three worlds: the physical, the astral and the spiritual. From this point of view, the poem represents his expression of the incarnation of man. A character which, to the mind that refuses a spiritual-scientific basis, presents insuperable difficulties, is that of Homunculus. Every passage, every word, however, becomes clear as soon as one starts from this basis. Homunculus is created by the help of Mephistopheles. The latter represents the repressive and destructive forces of the Universe which manifest in the realms of man as Evil. Goethe wishes to characterize the part which Evil takes in the formation of Homunculus; and yet from such beginnings is to be produced a man. For this reason, he is led through the lower realms of Nature to the scene of the classical Walpurgis Night. Before he sets forth on these wanderings, he possesses only a part of human nature. What he himself says concerning his connection with the earthly part of human nature is striking.

Homunculus:

Hither and thither, up, down, in and out;
From place to place still hovering about,
Impatient the free air of life to breathe.
Longing to break the glass that is my sheath—
My chrysalis; but everywhere I see
Such sights! I could not venture yet to be.
Now for a secret—I am on the track
Of two Philosophers. Their tongues, clack! clack!
Went evermore, and Nature—Nature was
The word. Keep me not from them. Of the laws
Of earthly being they must somewhat know:
Between them I may learn some little; so
Pass into life by their experience wiser.

Part ii, Act ii.

The Nature of Homunculus becomes quite clear in the light of the following lines which refer to him:

Thales:

He wants your counsel—has come a long distance:
His object is to get into existence.
He is, by what he told me of his birth,
Miraculously come but half to earth:
A lively spark—has every mental quality,
But, luckless fellow, ‘twas his strange fatality
An active, naked spirit, all alone—
Without a shred of body, blood, or bone,
Into the world to be at hazard thrown—
His glass is all he has to steady him:
He wants and wishes body, life, and limb.

Part ii, Act ii.

The following words are also added, “He is, methinks, Hermaphrodite.” Goethe here intends to represent the astral body of man before his incarnation in mortal (earthly) matter. This he also makes clear by endowing Homunculus with powers of clairvoyance. He sees, for instance, the dream of Faust in the laboratory where work is going on with the help of Mephistopheles. Then in the course of the classical Walpurgis Night the embodying of Homunculus, that is, the astral man, is described. He is sent through the realms of Nature to Proteus, the spirit of transformations.

Thales:

Away to Proteus! Question the magician
As to the spark's proposed change of condition.
You thus may learn what transformations he
Must pass through to be anything—to BE.

Part ii, Act ii.

Proteus then describes the road which astral man has to take through the realms of Nature in order to arrive at an earthly incarnation and receive a physical body.

Proteus:

... In the broad sea thy being must commence;
On a small scale one there begins,
Well pleased the smallest to devour;
Till, waxing step by step, one wins
A loftier achievement, ampler power.

Part ii, Act ii.

The passage of man through the mineral kingdom is then described. Goethe makes his entrance into the vegetable kingdom particularly contemplative. Homunculus says:

A tender air is wafted here;
Dear is the greenness, and the fragrance dear.

The philosopher Thales, who is present, adds in elucidation of what is taking place:

Thales:

Obey the noble inspiration,
And at its source begin creation.
Make ready for the great emprize!
By laws eternal still ascending,
Through myriad forms of being wending,
To be a man in time thou'll rise.

The moment, too, when the asexual being has implanted within him the double sex, and therewith sexual love, is also represented:

Sirens:

And all things are gleaming by fire girt around,
Prime source of creation, let Eros be crowned.

That the investing of the astral body with the physical body, composed of earthly elements, is really meant here is expressly stated in the closing lines of the second act:

All:

Hail each softly blowing gale!
Caverns rich in marvels, hail!
Highly honored evermore,
Be the elemental four!

Goethe here makes use of the evolution of beings in the course of the fashioning of the earth in connection with the incarnation of man as a special being. The latter repeats as such the transformations which mankind has undergone in reaching its present form. In these conceptions, he was in line with the theory of evolution held by spiritual science. His explanation of the origin of the lower forms of life was that the impulse which was aspiring to a higher grade had been stopped on a certain level. In his diary of the Journey through Switzerland, of 1797, he noted a conversation with the Tübingen professor Kielmeyer, which is interesting in this connection. In it, the following words occur, “Concerning the idea that the higher organic natures in their evolution take several steps which the others behind them are unable to take.” His studies of plants, animals, and of man are entirely pervaded by these ideas, and he seeks to invest them with an artistic form in the transformation of Homunculus into a man. When he becomes acquainted with Howard's theory of the formation of clouds, “he expresses his thoughts concerning the relation of spiritual archetypes to the ever-changing forms in the following words:

When the deity Kama-Rupa, high and sublime, wanders, wavering, on the breeze, light and heavy, gathers together the folds of his veil, shakes them out again, rejoicing at the variety of forms, remains now motionless, and now disappears as a dream, we are amazed and scarce believe our eyes.

In Faust, we also find represented the relation of the imperishable spiritual man to the mortal envelope. Faust has to go to the Mothers to seek for this imperishable essence, and the explanation of this important scene is developed quite naturally in the second part of the play. Goethe conceives the real being of man as a trinity (in accord with the Anthroposophical teaching of Spirit-self, Life-spirit, Spirit-man). And Faust's visit to the Mothers may be termed in Anthroposophical phraseology the forcible entry into Devachan. There he is to find what remains of Helena. She is to be reincarnated; that is, she is to return from the realm of the Mothers to the earth and, in the third act, we really do in fact see her reincarnated. In order to accomplish this it is necessary to reunite the three natures of man: the astral, the physical, and the spiritual. At the end of the second act, the astral (Homunculus) has put on the physical envelope and this combination is now able to receive within it the higher nature. Such a conception introduces an inner dramatic unity into the poem, whereas with a non-occult forcible entry the individual events remain a mere arbitrary collection of poetical incidents. Without taking into account the spiritual-scientific foundation of the poem, Professor Veit Valentin, of Frankfort, has already drawn attention to the inner connection of Homunculus and Helena in an interesting book, Die Einheit des Ganzen Faust, 1896. But the contents of this work can only remain an intelligent hypothesis if one does not penetrate into the spiritual-scientific substratum underlying it all. Goethe has conceived Mephistopheles as a being to whom Devachan is unknown. He is only at home on the astral plane. Hence he can be of service in the creation of Homunculus, but he cannot accompany Faust into the realm of the Mothers. Indeed, that plane is to him Nothingness. He says to Faust, in speaking to him of that world:

Mephistopheles:

Naught, in the everlasting void afar,
Wilt see, nor hear thy footfall's sound,
Nor for thy tread find solid ground!

Part ii, Act i.

But Faust, with his spiritual intuition, at once divines that in that world he will find the real essence of Man.

Faust:

We'll fathom it! Come on, nor look behind!
In this thy Naught, the All I hope to find.

In the description which Mephistopheles gives of the world which he dares not enter, one understands exactly what Goethe means to express.

Mephistopheles:

Sink then! Arise! This also I might say:—
‘Tis all the same. Escaping from the real,
Seek thou the boundless realm of the ideal.
Delight thyself in forms long past away!
The train-like cloud-procession, glides along:
...

A glowing tripod teaches thee thou hast
The deep attained, the lowest deep, at last;
There by its light the Mothers thou wilt see;
Some sit, while others, as the case may be,
Or stand, or walk: formation, transformation
Of mind etern, eternal recreation!
While forms of being around them hover.

Only by means of the archetype which Faust fetches from the devachanic world of the Mothers can Homunculus, the astral being who has assumed physical form, become a spiritually-endowed entity, Helena in fact, who actually appears in the third act. Goethe has taken care that those who seek to penetrate the depths shall be able to grasp his meaning for, in his conversations with Eckermann, he has lifted the veil as far as it seemed to him practical to do so. On December 16, 1829, he said concerning Homunculus:

For such spiritual beings as Homunculus, who have not yet had their powers obscured and confined by becoming completely human, were reckoned as among the demons.

And, on the same day, he points out further how Homunculus is still wanting in Mind: “Reasoning is not his concern, he wants to act.”

The whole of the further development of the dramatic action in Faust, according to this reading, follows easily on the foregoing. Faust has become acquainted with the secrets of the three worlds. Henceforth, he looks at the world from the point of view of the mystic. One could point out scene after scene which bears this out, but it will be sufficient to draw attention here to a few passages. When, towards the end, Care approaches Faust, he becomes outwardly blind but, in the course of his development, he has acquired the faculty of inward sight.

Faust:

Deeper and deeper night is round me sinking;
Only within me shines a radiant light.

Part ii, Act v.

Goethe once, in answer to the question, “What was Faust's end?” replied definitely, “He becomes a mystic in the end,” and the significant words of the Chorus Mysticus, with which the poem closes, can only be interpreted in this sense. In the West-East Divan he also expresses himself very clearly on the subject of the spiritual development of man. It is to him the union of the human soul with the higher self. The illusion that the real man exists in his outward body must die out; then higher man comes into existence. That is why he begins his poem Blessed Longing with the words: “Tell it to none but to the wise, for the multitude hasten to deride. I will praise the living who longs for death by fire.” And, in conclusion, he adds: “And as long as thou hast not mastered this; dying and coming into existence; thou art but a sad and gloomy guest on the dark earth.”

Quite in harmony with this is the Chorus Mysticus, for its inner meaning is but this: The transient forms of the outer world have their foundation in the imperishable spiritual ones to which we attain by regarding the transient only as a symbol of the hidden spiritual:

Chorus Mysticus:

All of mere transient date
As symbol showeth.

That to which reason, appointed as it is to deal with the world of the senses and its forms, cannot attain, is revealed as an actual vision to the spiritual sight; further, that which this reason cannot describe is a fact in the regions of the spiritual.

Chorus Mysticus:

Here the inadequate
To fullness groweth.

In harmony with all mystical symbolism, Goethe represents the higher nature of man as feminine, entering into union with the Divine Spirit. For in the last lines:

The eternal feminine
Draws us upward.

Goethe only means to characterize the union of the purified soul drawing near to the Divine. All interpretations which are not made in a mystic sense fail here.

Goethe considered that the time had not yet come when it was possible to speak of certain secrets of our being in any other manner than he has done in some of his poems. And, above all, he felt it to be his own mission to furnish such a form of expression. At the beginning of his friendship with Schiller, he raised the question, “How are we to represent to ourselves the relationship between the physical and the spiritual natures of man?” Schiller had tried to answer this question in a philosophical style in his letters Concerning the Aesthetic Education of Man. To him, it was a question of the ennobling and purifying of man; to him, a man under the sway of nature's impulses of sensual love and desires appeared impure; but then he considered just as far removed from purity the man who looked upon the sensual impulses and desires as enemies, and was obliged to place himself under the rule of moral or abstract intellectual compulsion. Man only attained inner freedom when he had so absorbed moral law into his inner being that he desired only to obey it. Such a man has so ennobled his lower nature that it becomes by itself an expression of the higher spiritual, and he has so drawn down into the earthly human nature the spiritual that the latter possesses a direct sentient existence. The explanations which Schiller gives in these Letters form excellent rules of education, for their object is to further the evolution of man so that he may, by absorbing the higher ideal man, come to contemplate the world from a free and exalted point of view. In his way Schiller refers to the higher self of man thus:

Every individual man, one may say, harbors within him, according to his character and type, a pure, ideal man, with whose unalterable unity through all changes it is the great task of his life to harmonize himself.

All that Schiller says in this connection is of the most far-reaching significance. For he who really carries out his injunctions accomplishes within himself an education which brings him directly to that inward condition which paves the way for the inner contemplation of the spiritual. Goethe was satisfied, in the deepest sense of the word, with these ideas. He writes to Schiller:

I read the manuscript you sent me at once with the greatest delight; I swallowed it at one gulp. Just as a delicious drink, in sympathy with our nature, slips down willingly and, while still on the tongue, shows its wholesome workings in a pleasant harmony of the nervous system, so were these letters highly pleasing and beneficial to me; and how could it be otherwise, when I found set forth therein so coherently and nobly what I had long recognized as right, what I partly carried out in my life, and partly wished to carry out?

Goethe now endeavored on his part to set forth the same idea from the depths of his conception of the world—but veiled in imagery—in the problem-tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. It is placed in the editions of Goethe at the end of the Conversations of German Emigrants. The Faust story has often been called Goethe's Gospel; this tale may, however, be called his Apocalypse, for in it he sets forth—as a fairy-tale—the path of man's inner development. Here again, we can only point out a few short passages, it would need a large book to show how Goethe's spiritual insight is concealed in this tale.

The three worlds are here represented as two regions separated from one another by a river. The river itself stands for the astral plane. On this side of it is the physical world, on the other side the spiritual (Devachan), where dwells the beautiful lily, the symbol of man's higher nature. In her kingdom, man must strive if he would unite his lower with his higher nature. In the abyss—that is, in the physical world—dwells the serpent which symbolizes the self of man. Here too is a temple of initiation, where reign four kings, one golden, one silver, one bronze, and a fourth of an irregular mixture of the three metals. Goethe, who was a freemason, has clothed in freemasonic terminology what he had to impart of his mystic experiences. The three kings represent the three higher forces of man: Wisdom (Gold), Beauty (Silver), and Strength (Bronze). As long as man lives in his lower nature, these three forces are in him disordered and chaotic. This period in the evolution of man is represented by the mixed king. But when man has so purified himself that the three forces work together in perfect harmony, and he can freely use them, then the way into the realm of the spiritual lies open before him. The still unpurified man is represented by a youth who, without having attained inner purity, would unite himself with the beautiful lily. Through this union he becomes paralyzed.

Goethe here wished to point out the danger to which a man exposes himself who would force an entrance into the super-sensible region before he has severed himself from his lower self. Only when love has permeated the whole man, only when the lower nature has been sacrificed, can the initiation into the higher truths and powers begin. This sacrifice is expressed by the serpent yielding of its own accord, and forming a bridge of its body across the river—that is to say, the astral plane—between the two kingdoms, of the senses and of the spirit. At first man must accept the higher truths in the form in which they have been given to him in the imagery of the various religions. This form is personified as the man with the lamp. This lamp has the peculiarity of only giving light where there is already light, meaning that the religious truths presuppose a receptive, believing disposition. Their light shines where the light of faith is present. This lamp, however, has yet another quality, “of turning all stones into gold, all wood into silver, dead animals into precious stones, and of destroying all metals,” meaning the power of faith which changes the inner nature of the individual. There are about twenty characters in this allegory, all symbolical of certain forces in man's nature and, during the course of the action, the purifying of man is described, as he rises to the heights where, in his union with his higher self, he can be initiated into the secrets of existence. This state is symbolized by the Temple, formerly hidden in the abyss, being brought to the surface, and rising above the river—the astral plane. Every passage, every sentence in the allegory is significant. The more deeply one studies the tale, the more comprehensible and clear the whole becomes, and he who set forth the esoteric quintessence of this tale at the same time has given us the substance of the Anthroposophical outlook on life.

Goethe has not left the source uncertain from whose depths he has drawn his inspiration. In another tale, The New Paris, he gives in a veiled manner the history of his own inner enlightenment. Many will remain incredulous if we say that, in this dream, Goethe represents himself just at the boundary between the third and fourth sub-race of our fifth root-race. For him, the myth of Paris and Helen is a symbolic representation of this boundary. And as he—in a dream—conjures up before his eyes in a new form the myth of Paris, he feels he is casting a searching glance into the development of humanity. What such an insight into the past means to the inner eye, he tells us in the Prophecies of Bakis, which are also full of occult references:

The past likewise will Bakis reveal to thee; for even the past oft lies, oh blind world, like a riddle before thee. Who knows the past knows also the future: both are joined in To-day in one complete whole.

Much, too, might be quoted to show the underlying elements of spiritual science in the fairy tale, The New Melusine, a Pandora-fragment, and many other writings. In his novel, Wilhelm Meister's Traveling Years, Goethe has given us quite a masterly picture of a Clairvoyante in Makarie. Makarie's power of intuition rises to the level of a complete penetration of the inner mysteries of the planetary system:

She stands with regard to our solar system in a relationship which one hardly dares to express. In the spirit, of the soul, of the imagination, she fosters it, not only gazes at it, but at the same time forms part of it; she sees herself drawn on into those heavenly circles, but in quite a peculiar way; she has wandered since her childhood round the sun, and, in fact, as has now been discovered, in a spiral, circling ever further and further from the center towards the outer regions. If one may assume that beings insofar as they are embodied strive towards the center, but insofar as they are spirits strive towards the periphery, then our friend belongs to the most spiritual; She seems to have been born only to detach herself from the earthly and to force her way into the nearest and furthest realms of existence. This quality, glorious as it is, was laid upon her from her earliest years as a difficult task. She remembers her inner self penetrated, as it were, through and through by shining beings, illuminated by a light which not even the brightest sunlight could rival. She often saw two suns, one, that is, within, and one without in the heavens, two moons, of which the outer retained its size through all its phases; the inner ever more and more decreased.

These words of Goethe's prove clearly how intimate he is with these matters, and whoever reads through the whole passage will recognize that Goethe so expresses himself, albeit with reserve, that he who looks beneath the surface may feel quite certain of the spiritual-scientific foundation in his being.

Goethe always looked upon his mission as a poet in relation to his striving toward the hidden laws of Life. He was often forced to notice how friends failed to understand this side of his nature. He describes thus, in the Campaign in France in 1792, how his contemplation of Nature was always misunderstood:

... the passionate earnestness with which I addicted myself to this (the study of natural philosophy) seemed inconceivable to all, nobody observing how it sprang from my innermost being itself; they considered this laudable pursuit as a whimsical mistake; in their opinion, I could do something better, and leave my abilities to work in their old direction. They felt the more entitled to do this as my way of thinking did not agree with theirs, expressing rather, in most points, exactly the contrary. No more isolated being can be imagined than I was then, and for a long time afterwards. The Hylozoism, or whatever it may be called, to which I was attached, and the deep foundation of which I left untouched in all its sacred dignity, made me unsusceptible, nay, intolerant, toward that way of thinking which set up as an article of belief the existence of matter as a dead thing, in whatever way it may be supposed to be stirred up and put in motion.

Goethe could only understand artistic work when based on a profound penetration of the truth. As an artist, he wished to give utterance to that which in Nature is suggested without being fully expressed. Nature appeared to him as a product of the same essence which also works through human art, only that in the case of Nature the power has remained on a lower level. For Goethe, Art is a continuation of Nature revealing that which in Nature alone is hidden:

For in that man is placed as the peak of Nature, he perceives himself in his turn as a complete nature, which, in its turn, has within himself to produce a peak. With this objective in view, he raises himself, striving to win his way by all perfections and virtues. Selection, order, harmony, and purpose he calls to his aid, until finally he rises to the production of a work of art. (Winckelmann.)

To understand the world is to Goethe to Hue in the spirit of worldly things. For this reason, he speaks of a perceptive power of judgment (intellectus archetypus), through which Man draws ever nearer to the secrets of our being:

If, then, in a moral sense, we are, through faith in God, to attain to youth and immortality in a higher region, and are to draw near to the Most High, it should surely be the same in an intellectual sense, that only by the contemplation of an ever-creating Nature, we shall become worthy of spiritual participation in her productions.

Thus did Goethe represent to himself Man as the organ of the world, through which its occult powers should be revealed. The following was one of his aphorisms:

For this has man been placed so high that what must otherwise have been unmanifest might manifest through him. Truly may we say: What are even the workings of Nature's elements in comparison with man, who, that he may in some degree assimilate, must first control and modify them?

PLEASE NOTE: Although Rudolf Steiner in giving this address, used the words theosophy, Theosophical Society and occult, we have replaced these with the words Anthroposophy, Anthroposophical Society and, except in two or three cases, Spiritual Science, since, when Rudolf Steiner gave this address, he already had written KNOWLEDGE OF THE HIGHER WORLDS and THEOSOPHY and used the words theosophy, etc., in the sense that they are used in these books and in his subsequent writings and lectures. This was done as an attempt at corrective updating and no polemic is intended.

• 1. Original Translator Unknown. In the case of the quotations in this paper, the translations of Goethe's works by Anna Swanwick and John Anster and R. Farrie have been used freely. G. Calvert's translation of Schiller's work has also been quoted.

My dear Friends,

Every artistic activity has also its esoteric side. For the work that we carry on as artists has to receive its impulses from the spiritual world, and must therefore be rooted in the esoteric. If we forget this, if we forget that all genuine art springs from the spiritual world, then we must either resign ourselves to be guided by rules, or submit to an inartistic naturalism. To routine and mannerisms, or to a naturalism that is lacking in art—to one or the other we are condemned if we forget that what we create artistically has always, without exception, to receive its form from the formative activity of the spirit.

In the art of the stage it is important to remember that we are ourselves the instrument with which we have to work. We have accordingly to succeed in objectifying ourselves to the point where we can be such an instrument, so that we can play upon the organisation of our body as we would, for example, on some musical instrument. That, first of all. And then, standing as it were by the side of our own acting, we have also continually to be taking the most ardent and intense interest in every single word and action that we engage in on the stage.

It is of this twofold aim that I want to speak to you today. In striving to attain it, the actor will be developing a right feeling for his vocation; he will be drawing near to the esoteric—even to the esoteric that belongs to him as an actor.

For you must know, a grave danger lies in wait for the actor, threatens, in fact, more or less everyone who takes any part at all in the work of the stage. The danger is greatest, or has been so in the more decadent days of the art, for those actors who are favourites with the public; they are exposed to it most of all. I mean the danger of becoming so absorbed in the world of the stage as to lose connection with the real world outside. Again and again one makes the acquaintance of actors who have very little feeling or perception for what is happening in real life, who simply do not know the world. They have a thorough knowledge of this or that character in Shakespeare or in Goethe or Schiller. They know Wilhelm Tell, they know Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard II. They know an extravagantly frivolous character out of some comedy or other. In effect they know the world in its reflection in drama, but they do not know real men and women. This state of things can often spread farther and begin to show itself in a section of the public. Do we not frequently have the experience that when we begin to speak of some catastrophe that has taken place, then if someone is present who has any sort of connection with the stage, sure as fate, he will begin at once to recall to us a similar calamity in some play? And a habit of this kind is not without its consequences; it has a distorting and degrading influence on public taste. How often, when we look for evidence of taste, do we find nothing to deserve the name, but instead a complete perversion of taste!

We had a most painful instance of this in the days when Gerhard Hauptmann's Weber was being played. Just think what all those sensitive and impressionable ladies, sitting there in their rustling silks and décolletage—just think what they had to witness as they watched the play through! Things they would certainly never have allowed to come anywhere near them in real life. A dead dog being devoured bit by bit! Had such a sight met their eyes in real life, they would have run from it as they would from a raging lion. But looking at it up there on the stage they enjoyed it, they were thrilled. Yes, it has come to that! Do not misunderstand me. I have no objection to the representation on the stage of a dead dog being devoured—provided the motif is artistically treated. What I deplore is the perversion of taste.

The danger that I want to bring home to you, the danger of becoming at last quite remote from real life and living only in the stage reflection of it, is there above all, as we said, for the actor. The actor is, however, also in a specially favourable position to cope with it. For the very art he is pursuing, once he comes to understand it in the way we have been putting it forward in these lectures, will rescue him from the danger. As soon as he begins to go beyond the exoteric in his work and activity on the stage and to enter into its esoteric aspect, he will be saved from the danger of drifting right away from real life and becoming absorbed in its stage reflection. And the actor will be entering into the esoteric side of his work when he has come to the point where the monologue or dialogue or whatever it may be that he has been practising flows of its own accord in a stream of speech-forming activity. Exercises to this end should be given to the students in a school of dramatic art. Please follow carefully what I am saying. By the time of the dress rehearsal, the actor should be absolutely ready with his part just like a wound-up clock—,the whole stream of well-formed speech running its course without his help; for by then his part should have become an independent being within him Better still, of course, if this is attained a good while before the dress rehearsal.

And now, having succeeded in coming so far, the actor has a possibility that will certainly not be his if in the moment of performance he is obliged still to be giving his attention to the content of his part, in the way one does when reading or listening, where it is the immediate prose content of the words that is vividly present to consciousness. Assuming, however, that the actor has by this time mastered the content, and moreover progressed so far with the forming of the speech that this flows on of itself, a new possibility opens before him. Having set himself free from the forming of the speech, he will be able—and here comes the important point—to devote himself to listening, undisturbed by any conscious forming of it, to the speaking he has created and which is now in full flow, he will be able to surrender himself to its influence, allowing it here and there to fill him with glowing enthusiasm or, at another time, to cause him pain. This is not of course possible until the speaking has, by long practice, been brought into flow in the way I explained; for only then can the actor regain his freedom and, without being disturbed in his soul by the process of creation, participate in the experience of what he has himself created—in the same way as he would in some experience that came to meet him from a fellow human being.

I want you to appreciate the importance of this achievement. The actor should be able to keep himself in reserve, to hold back and not allow himself to be caught in his own creation; and then, having once fully objectified his own creation, be able to experience it from without with all the elemental force of his emotions, letting it arouse in him joy and admiration, or again sorrow and distress.

At this point a certain feeling will begin to dawn in the actor, a feeling that is in reality a part of his own esoteric life and that will prove to be actually stronger with him than with persons who are not actors. The play, he will feel, together with my own part in it, begins now to interest me as something quite outside myself, so soon, that is, as I step on to the stage. For I must first be on the stage. I need the footlights. (That is putting it a little crudely; there might of course be no footlights! You will understand what I mean.) I need the footlights, he will feel, if I am to live in the play; the play then becomes for me something outside myself. And it is this fact of its becoming separate from himself that is such a wonderful experience for the actor. For now he, as it were, retrieves it, participating in it even while he is projecting it; and this new experience has the effect of sending him forth to explore with zest and eagerness the real life in the world outside. For such an actor, there will be no uncertainty about the boundary between real life and the stage.

In our day, unfortunately, the recognition of this boundary is little more than an ideal. I have known plenty of actors who ‘acted’ in real life, and on the stage could only just pass muster. My experience has indeed gone even farther than this. I once witnessed an incident in Berlin that throws a very interesting light on the whole question. We made the acquaintance of a medium who had a most remarkable effect upon people. They were dumbfounded by what he was able to do. He would sit on the sofa and proceed to say, not at all what he himself but what other people had to say. It was quite astonishing. Perhaps it would be Julius Caesar who put in an appearance; the medium would sit there and talk exactly as Julius Caesar might. He could, in fact, be possessed by Julius Caesar or by some other character. I do not now recall any of the others, but this was the kind of susceptibility that showed itself in the medium. People were charmed and bewildered at the same time. Now this medium was by profession an actor, and with him on the stage was a fellow actor who had long been a friend of mine. One day, when I had been present at one of these exhibitions of mediumship, I asked the medium: ‘Does my friend also know you well?’ ‘Oh yes,’ replied the medium, ‘and when he sees me like this, he always exclaims: “What a splendid actor!” I can, however, only reply: “But I am your colleague, and you know quite well that I'm no good at all on the stage.”’ For the medium would never have been able to personify Julius Caesar on the stage. But when he was in mediumistic condition, the people around him believed, and to a certain extent rightly believed, that the real Julius Caesar was speaking in him; and he did it so well that my friend (who afterwards became a Managing Director of some theatre), when he saw him in this condition, took him for an actor of outstanding ability. And little wonder; for it was all there complete, even to the facial expression. But on the stage he was just like a block of wood, standing there without moving a muscle of his countenance.

Here, you see, we are faced with an extreme instance of what the art of acting must never be. For it must never happen that an actor is passive and possessed by his part. And this man was of course simply possessed. I have explained the relationship that an actor should have to his part. It must be objective for him. He must feel it as something that he has himself created and formed; and yet all the time he himself must be there in his own form, standing beside the form he has created. And then this creation of his can thrill him with joy or plunge him into sadness, just as truly as can events and doings in the world outside.

You will learn to find your way to this experience if you study your part in the way I have described. And it is necessary that you should do so. It will bring you to the esoteric in your own being.

Yesterday we were speaking of two things that come into consideration for the stage under present conditions—décor and lighting. I have no desire to dismiss outright the idea of an open-air theatre; but, as I said then, if we want to speak about dramatic art in a practical manner, we can only do so with a view to the stage that is in general use. And so what I had to say about stage décor and lighting had reference entirely to the modern stage. I would like, however, at this point to consider for a moment the theatre more in general. Starting from the experience of the present day, let us now see what it would mean if we had a stage like the stage of Shakespeare's time.

When we see one of Shakespeare's plays performed today, it can give us very little idea of how the play looked on a stage of his own time. There was, to begin with, a fair-sized enclosure not unlike an alehouse yard, and here sat the London populace of those times. Then there was what served for stage, and on the left and right sides of it were placed chairs where sat the more aristocratic folk and also various persons connected with the theatre. These people the actor would thus have in close proximity He would moreover also feel himself only half on the stage and half among the common people down below—and how delighted he would be when he could direct an ‘aside’ to these! The Prologue too, an indispensable figure in the play, addressed his part primarily to the public below. It was indeed quite taken for granted that every effort would be made to attract and please the public. They joined in and made their own contribution to the performance—tittering or howling, yelling or cheering, even on occasion pelting with rotten apples. Such things were accepted as a regular part of the show. And this good-humoured understanding between stage and audience, that had something of a spark of genius about it, infected even the more pedantic and heavy-going among the spectators—for there were such in those days too; they felt themselves caught up into the atmosphere. Shakespeare; himself an actor, understood very well how to take his audience with him. You have only to listen to the cadence of his sentences to be convinced of this. Shakespeare spoke, in fact, straight out of the heart of his audience. It is untrue today to say that people ‘listen’ to a play of Shakespeare's; for we no longer listen in the way people listened when Shakespeare was there on the stage with his company.

I have spoken already of how all work in connection with the theatre can be regarded in an esoteric light, and I want now to carry the matter a little further by describing to you something else the actor needs to develop.

Yesterday I was telling you of an experience that you would perhaps not easily believe could have any connection with the development of an actor—the experience, namely, of the rainbow. But, my dear friends, experiences like that of the rainbow are by their very nature closely connected with the deeper processes of life's happenings. Has it ever occurred to you how little we know of all that goes on in a human being when, simply from eating of a particular dish, he gets bright red cheeks? All kinds of things have been happening inside him that lie entirely beyond the range of direct observation. Similarly you must realise that you cannot expect to reason out logically the effect that the experience of the rainbow has on the actor. But you will soon see how differently that actor will use his body on the stage. Not that his movements will show particular skill, but they will show art. To move artistically has to be learned on an inward path. And the description I gave you yesterday was of one such path. There are many more; and particularly important for the actor is one that I will now describe.

An actor should develop a delicate feeling for the experience of the world of dreams. We could even set it down as an axiom that the better an actor trains himself to live in his dreams, so that he can recall their pictures and consciously conjure up before him again and again all his dream experiences—the better he is able to do this, the better will be his carriage and bearing on the stage. He will not merely be one who carries himself well externally; throughout his part his whole bearing will have art, will have style.

This is where the deeper realm of the esoteric begins for the actor—when he is able to enter with full understanding into the world of dreams. He has then to come to the point where he discerns a difference of which everyone knows and has experience, but which is not generally experienced with sufficient intensity. I mean the following.

Think of how it is with us when we are developing our thoughts and feelings in the full tide and bustle of everyday life. Let us imagine, for instance, we are at a tea-party. A master of ceremonies is darting about, continually making those little jokes of his of which he is so vain, a dancer is exerting all her charm, a stiff-looking professor who has with difficulty been induced to come feels himself in duty bound to express well-feigned admiration of everything, in not quite audible murmurs. One could continue on and on describing some scene of this kind out of everyday life. But now consider the vast difference there is between an experience of this nature—which may be said to approach the extreme in one direction—and the experience you have when, in complete solitude, you let your dreams unfold before you. It is important to discern this difference, to see it for what it is, and then to develop a feeling for what it means to pass from the one experience to the other, to pass, that is, from a condition where you are chafed and exhausted in soul by the racket of the life around you, and go right through to the very opposite experience where you are entirely alone and given up to your dreams. These, one might imagine, could be only feebly experienced; nevertheless, you know as you watch them go past that you are deeply and intimately connected with them. To grow familiar with this path of the soul that takes you from the first experience to the second, to undertake esoteric training that will help you to follow it again and again with growing power of concentration—that, my dear friends, will prepare you to take hold of your work as actors with understanding and with life.

For, in order to make your part live, you have first of all to approach it as you approach real life when it meets you with all its chaotic and disquieting details, and then go on to study the part intently, making it more and more your own, until you come at last Jo feel with it the same sort of intimate bond that you hale with some dream of yours in the moment of recalling it. I am, I know, holding up before you an ideal; but ideals can start you out on the right road.

This kind of preparation has to go forward at the same time as you are bringing the speaking of the part to its full development, that is, to where the speaking flows on of itself in the way I have described. The two paths have to be followed side by side. You have, on the one hand, to come to the point where you are able to dream your part, where the single passages in it begin to merge and lose their distinctness, and you come to feel your part as a unity, as one great whole—not, however, suffering it to lose in the process any of its variety of colouring. The single passages you then no longer perceive as single passages, their individual content disappears; and in that moment you are able to place before your mind's eye a dreamlike impression of the whole of your part right through the play. That is the one path. The other is that you should be able to tear yourself right out of this experience and produce with ease and freedom your formed speaking of the part, producing it and reproducing it again and again. If these two paths of preparation run parallel with one another, then your part will come to life, then it will acquire being.

And I think the actor and the musician or singer can here find themselves in agreement about- the way each understands his art. The pianist, for example, has also to come to the point when, to put it rather radically, he can play his piece in his sleep—when, that is, his hands move right through the piece involuntarily, moving as it were of themselves. And he too must on the other hand be able to be thrilled with delight or plunged into sadness by what his own art has brought into being.

Here again a danger confronts the artist, whether actor or musician. The emotional experience that he owes to his own creation must not develop in the direction of ‘swelled head’. It must not be because of his own ability that the artist is thrilled with delight. (The opposite mood does not so often show itself!) He must on the contrary have his consciousness centred all the time upon the thing he has created and objectified.

If you have prepared your part in this way, working out of a fine sensitiveness for the world of dreams, and if along with this you have succeeded in mastering the art of objectifying your speaking, then you will bring to the stage the very best that the individual actor can bring. And a further thing follows from this too.

When you have come so far as to be able to behold the play there before you in its entirety—the separate scenes and details, each with its own colouring, existing for you only as parts of the whole which lies spread out before you like a tableau—then the exactly right moment has come when you can set about ‘forming’ the stage. For now you will be ready to give it the décor that properly belongs to it, working on the lines I explained yesterday. If you were to build up your picture of the stage like a mosaic, piecing it together out of the feelings you have of the several scenes, it would have no art or order. But if you have pressed forward first of all to achieve this living experience of the play as a whole, so that when you come to ask: What is it like in the beginning? What impression does it make upon me in the middle?, you never, in considering any section of it, lose sight of the whole—then your configuration of the stage will be harmonious throughout, will be a unity.

And only then, my dear friends, only then will you be capable of judging how far you can go with the indoor stage of today, complete with its inevitable footlights and the rest, where nevertheless you will, of course, have somehow to produce when necessary the illusion of daylight; or how far you can go in adapting your external décor in a simple, primitive way to what is spoken by the characters; or again, let us say, how far you can go in staging a play in the open air.

Whatever kind of play you have in hand, it will demand its own particular style, which can be neither intellectually discovered nor intellectually described, but has to be inwardly felt. As we press forward, working in the way I have explained, to a deeper understanding of dramatic art, we shall find for each play the relevant style, we shall perceive it. If we are dealing with the stage conditions that are customary at the present day, we shall want to take our guidance as far as ever possible from the perception we have arrived at of the tableau of the play as a whole. The modern stage with its lighting and its elaborate décor demands that we shall follow the path of preparation that takes us to that dreamlike survey of which I have spoken, where the whole play lies spread out before us like a tableau. For it is a fact that for representations in artificial light, the more the total picture of the play conveys to the actor the impression of half-dreamed fantasy, the better. If you who are acting have let the picture of the stage be born out of dreams, out of dreams that have been cast in the mould of fantasy, then the audience, having this picture before them, will receive the impression of something that is alive and real.

The case will of course be different if your audience is looking, let us say—to go to the opposite extreme—at a background of Nature. For an open-air performance, all you can do in the way of ‘forming’ your stage is to select the spot that seems the most favourable for the piece. You will of course be limited by your possibilities. You have to put your theatre somewhere; you have really no free choice, but must be content with what there is. Let us suppose, however, that you have decided upon a spot and are preparing for an open-air performance.

You have succeeded, we will assume, in having the play before your mind's eye as a complete, continuous tableau. Then, holding fast this perception of the play as a whole, you let Nature appear in the background. (You will need to be quite active inwardly, so as to be able to see both at the same moment.) There behind, you have the real landscape. You cannot alter it, you have to take it as it is. And here in front, of course, are the seats for the audience, which always look so frightful in Nature's world.¹ And now, with all this before you, you must be able to superimpose your own picture of the play, the picture that has emerged out of dream, on to the picture that Nature is displaying in the background, letting it veil Nature's picture as though with a cloud.

The work of forming anything artistically has to be done by the soul. Need we wonder then that, in order to prepare ourselves for it, we have to go back to soul experience? In front, therefore, of the landscape that Nature provides, you will have the experience that has come to you from the play. And then—yes, then you will find, as you hold all this before you and think it through with all the energy you can command, that those rocks, those distant snow-capped mountains, fir-clad slopes, and green meadows—all that whole background of Nature begins to make itself felt, begins to give you inspiration for your masking of the individual figures on the stage—whether you produce the effect by means of make-up, or give them real masks, as did the Greeks, who felt these to be a natural necessity on the stage. And you will find that out in the open, Nature will require you to give far more decided colouring to your speech than is necessary in the intimacy of an indoor theatre. The several actors will also have to be much more sharply distinguished one from another than in an artificially lighted theatre, both in the colouring you give them to accord with their character, and in the colouring that is determined by the situation.

I would strongly recommend students of dramatic art to practise going through such experiences again and again. Their importance is not limited to the help they can give for particular performances, they are important for every actor's development. You cannot be a good actor until you have learned such things from your own experience, until you have felt how the voices of the parts have to be pitched in the one case, and how differently they must be pitched in the other case, where the play is being acted in Nature's own theatre.

In the times in which we are living, the actor has to undergo training if he is to acquire such experiences ; he has to learn them consciously. To Shakespeare they were instinctive. All that I have been describing to you, Shakespeare and his fellow-actors knew instinctively. They had imagination, you see, they had a picture-making fantasy; you can see it from the very way Shakespeare forms his speeches. Yes, they had a picture-making fantasy. And Shakespeare could do two things He had on the one hand a marvellous perception for what the audience is experiencing while an actor is speaking on the stage; you can detect this just in those passages in his plays that are most characteristic of his genius. He could sense. with wonderful accuracy the effect some speech was having upon the spectators sitting on the left of the stage, the effect it was having upon those sitting on the right, and again upon the main audience down in front. A fine, imponderable sensitiveness enabled him to share in the experience of each. And then, on the other hand, Shakespeare had the same delicate, sensitive feeling for all that might go on upon a stage which was, after all, no more than a slightly transformed alehouse! For Shakespeare knew very well, from experience, the kind of things that go on in an alehouse, he had a perfect understanding of that side of life. Shakespeare was by no means altogether the ‘utterly lonely’ figure that some learned old fogeys like to picture him. He knew how to bring on his actors—or take part himself—in a way that sorted well with the primitive realities of the stage of his time.

If you were to act today on the modern stage, with all its refinements of décor, lighting and so forth—if you were to act there today as men acted in Shakespeare's time, then a young schoolgirl who had been brought to the theatre for the first time (the rest of the audience would naturally have grown accustomed to it) would exclaim as soon as the play began: But why ever do they shout so? Yes, if we were to listen without bias to a play acted in true Shakespearian manner, we would have the impression that the actors were shouting, that the whole performance was nothing but a confused, discordant shouting. In those days, however, it was quite in place. Under primitive stage conditions it is not shouting, it is fully developed dramatic art.

In proportion, however, as we go in for more and more décor and lighting effects, it becomes a necessity to subdue, to soften down, not only the speaking voice, but even also the inner intensity of the acting. In such a changed environment it is not possible to act with the same intensity. You should be able to appreciate that this must be so. The ability of an actor, the range of his capacity as an artist, will depend on how far he can feel for himself inner connections of this kind. That way too lies the path that will verily take him into the esoteric side of his calling; for to find this path, he needs to be able to live in such truths, to be able continually to awaken them in his heart, again and again.

If the actor achieves this, if he learns to live in these truths, then gradually it will come about that they form themselves for him into meditations. He can of course have other meditations as well, but the content of his meditation as actor he must find on this path. And then he will begin also to take an increasingly wide interest in all that goes on in real life, outside the stage. For that is a mark of a really good actor. He will retain, throughout his career as actor, the most far-reaching interest in all the little things of life. An actor who is unable to be delighted, for example, with the drollery of a hedgehog, an actor who does not enjoy and admire it in a more delicate way than others do, will never be a first-rate actor. If he is the sort of man who could never exclaim: ‘But how that young lawyer did laugh when he heard that joke! Never in all my life shall I forget it!’—if he is a man who is incapable of throwing out such an exclamation with genuine and hearty enjoyment, then he is incapable also of being a really good actor. And an actor who, having taken off his make-up and left the theatre, is not assailed by all manner of strange dreams, amounting often to nightmare—he too cannot be a first-rate actor. While the actor is on his way home from the theatre, or, as is perhaps more likely, on his way to some restaurant to get a meal, it should really be so that out of all the dream-cloud of the performance, some detail suddenly thrusts itself before his mind's eye. ‘Oh, that woman in the side box,’ he says to himself, ‘how she did annoy me again, holding up her lorgnette to gaze at me just when I had to speak that passage! ... And how it put me out too when at the most critical moment of the play some silly girl right up at the top of the gallery began to giggle—I suppose her neighbour was pinching her!’

While the play is on, the actor knows nothing at all of these little incidents, he is quite unconscious of them. But you know what happens sometimes in ordinary life. You come home and sit down quietly with a book. All of a sudden, a big headline appears right across the page you are reading: ‘Dealer in Spirits. Remigius Neuteufel.’ The words place themselves clearly before you. (I dare say most of you can recall some such experience, though perhaps not quite so pronounced.) All the time you were out, you never saw those words. Suddenly they superimpose themselves on the page that lies open before you, and you read : ‘Dealer in Spirits. Remigius Neuteufel.’ Afterwards it dawns upon you that the words were on a shop sign that you passed on the way home. Without entering your consciousness, they went straight down into your sub-conscious. And had you been a medium and had Schrenk-Nötzing made experiments on you, then you would have produced the effluvia from the appropriate glands (for such things do happen!) and in the effluvia would stand the words: ‘Dealer in Spirits. Remigius Neuteufel.’ That is what would have happened to a medium. In the case of a normal person, the words simply make their appearance in front of the book he is reading, like a somewhat dim hallucination. They are there, you see, in the sub-conscious.

In ordinary life there is no occasion to pay particular attention to an incident of this kind—unless of course one is in the medical profession, when it may be one's duty to investigate such matters with all care and exactness. Art, however, obeys quite other laws in the matter of the human soul. From the point of view of art, an actor can never be an actor of real ability, if the sort of thing I have mentioned does not happen to him now and then on his way home from the theatre, if he does not, for instance, suddenly feel: ‘Heavens, how that old woman up there turned her miserable lorgnette on me!’ He did not notice her during the play, but now as he makes his way home, there she is in front of him, with her grey eyes and frowning eyebrows and untidy hair, her stiff fingers grasping the handle of her lorgnette—it weighs on him like an incubus!

That, however, will only be a proof that the actor lives in all that takes place around him, lives in it objectively. Although he is acting, he stands at the same time fully in life, he participates even in what he does not observe, in what he must not observe at the time—not merely need not, but must not. While, however, he is absorbed in the creation of his part, while his whole consciousness is directed to what he has to say and do, his sub-conscious has on that very account all the better opportunity for making keen and detailed observation of everything that is going on around him. And if he has achieved what I described as an esoteric secret for the stage-actor, namely, that when he leaves the stage he is in very deed and truth away from it, away from everything to do with it, and enters right into real life—if the actor has achieved this secret, then on his leaving the theatre this subconscious in him will begin to make itself felt, and all the various grotesque and distorted pictures that can remain with him from the performance will suddenly display themselves, so that now at last, after the event, he experiences them consciously. Naturally, it may often also be very lovely impressions that come back to him in this way.

I had opportunity once to witness an amazing instance of this kind of memory-experience. The actor Kainz² had just come from a performance, laden as it were with these nightmares, and found himself in a company of friends, including a Russian authoress with whom he particularly liked to share such impressions. It was wonderful to hear these coming out. Kainz was not in the least embarrassed about the matter, or one would naturally not want to talk of it. There they were, all the things he had experienced sub-consciously during the performance—there they were, living on in him in this way, the experience perhaps enhanced in his case by the contempt he felt for the audience. For Kainz was one of those actors who have the utmost contempt for their audiences.

It is things of this nature that can help you to a true understanding of dramatic art. They make no particular appeal to the intellect; but it is by the path of imagination and of picture that we have to travel, following forms that are of fantasy's creation, if we would come at last to the essential being of dramatic art. For this reason dramatic art cannot tolerate in its school the presence of teachers who have not a sensitive artistic feeling. (As a matter of fact, this is true of every art.) And I have always regarded it as a most undesirable addition to the faculty of a school of dramatic art when, for example, a professor of literature is brought in to give lessons to the students. All that goes on in such a school, everything that is done there, must be genuinely artistic through and through. And no one can speak artistically about any art unless he can live in that art with his whole being!

To-morrow, then, we will continue, and I shall have to tell you of another esoteric secret connected with the art of the stage.

• 1. Dr. Steiner made here a coloured drawing on the blackboard.
• 2. Josef Kainz (1858–1910) was well known all over Germany and Austria, and toured also in the U.S.A. Romeo and Hamlet were among his leading parts.