The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] A few questions were put to me last time. I will now answer them, but in a somewhat different order than they were asked. The questions are:

[ 2 ] What is the relationship between coming to see the secrets of the universe and one's conception of the world and of life?

[ 3 ] How far must one go before one finds higher worlds on the path of natural science?

[ 4 ] Do the forces from the cosmos influence the whole of humanity?

[ 5 ] What connection do plants have with the human being and the human body?

[ 6 ] These are, of course, very complicated questions and so I would like to organize my remarks in such a way that the answers emerge gradually. One cannot do otherwise with such complicated questions because if you ask, How can I come to see the secrets of the universe?—this means, How can I arrive at a true spiritual science? Now, you must not imagine that this is something easy to do nowadays. Most people, when they hear that something like Anthroposophy or spiritual science exists, think to themselves: Very well, if that is so, I too will acquire for myself the capacity to see the spirit. I will manage it within a week then I will be able to know everything for myself.

[ 7 ] Needless to say, it is not as simple as that. One has to realize that a great deal is required to master even ordinary science. In order to undertake the simplest observations, one must first learn how to use the instruments. Of course it is comparatively easy to use a microscope, but if one wants to investigate something with the help of a microscope one cannot simply say: I will now put a piece of muscle or the like under the microscope and look into it; then I will know what goes on in the muscle. If you were to proceed like that, you would see nothing. To see something under a microscope, one must first prepare the slides. A piece of muscle is no use by itself: one must make very thin slices with a fine razor, and sometimes a little must be removed and another cut made so that finally one has a very thin film. And very often even then the microscope does not help. For if you have such a sliver of muscle or cell under the microscope, you will probably still see nothing. What one must do is ask oneself: How can I make visible what is under the microscope? Then, often, what one must next do is color what one wants to see with certain dyes to make it visible. But then one must realize one has changed something. One has to know how it would be if one had not changed it. But these things are still really quite simple.

If one wants to observe the stars with a telescope one must first learn how to handle a telescope, although this is much simpler than a microscope. You know there are people who set up telescopes in the streets for people to look through. By itself, this does not help much. For this again requires lenses and a clock, which in turn one must then also learn to handle, etc. These are only examples to show you how complicated it is to investigate the simplest things in the physical world.

[ 8 ] Now, to investigate the spiritual world is really much more difficult, for more preparation is necessary. People imagine they can learn to do it in a week. But this is not so. Above all, one must realize that one has to activate something one has within oneself. What ordinarily is not active must be made active.

[ 9 ] To make things clear for you I must explain that in all investigation of the spiritual world, as in normal science, one must frequently start with some knowledge of what is not normal. You can only learn how things really are if you know how they are when they are not normal. I once gave you a particular example of this. We have to consider this because people in the outside world call people mad who investigate the spiritual world, however normal they may be. We must therefore set about our investigations in such a way that in the end we arrive at the truth. Of course one must not think one can achieve anything by concerning oneself overmuch with what is diseased and abnormal, but one can learn much from it.

[ 10 ] For instance, there are people who are not normal because they are, as is said, mentally deranged. What does this mean? There is no worse word in the world than "mentally deranged" (geistesgestört) for the spirit can never be deranged. Consider the following case for instance: If somebody is deranged for twenty years—this happens—and afterward recovers, what has occurred? Perhaps for twenty years this person says that he is being persecuted by others—that he suffers, as one says, from paranoia—or he says that he sees all kinds of specters and apparitions which are not there, etc. This can continue for twenty years. Now somebody who has been deranged for twenty years can become normal again. But in these cases you will always notice one thing. If someone was deranged for three, five or twenty years and recovers, he will not be quite the same as he was before. Above all you will notice that he will tell you, after he has recovered, that throughout the time he was ill he was able to look into the spiritual world. He will tell you all sorts of things that he saw in the spiritual world. If one then pursues the matter with the knowledge one has gained of the spiritual world as a completely healthy person, one finds that some of what he says is rubbish but. that also much of it is correct. This is what is so strange, someone can be deranged for twenty years, recover, and then tell you that he has been in the spiritual world and has experienced these things. And if one knows the spiritual world as a healthy, normal person, one must admit that he is right in many instances. [ 11 ] If you speak to him during his mental ill-ness, he will never be able to tell you anything sensible. He will tell you the nonsense he experiences. People who are mentally disturbed over a long period do not actually experience the spiritual world during their illness. They have not experienced anything of the spiritual world. But after they have recovered they can, in a certain way, look back to the time they were ill, and what they have not experienced appears to them like glimpses into the spiritual world. This conviction that they have seen much of the spiritual world only appears when they have recovered.

[ 12 ] One can learn much from this. One can learn that the human being contains something that is not used at all during the time he or she is insane. But it was there, it was alive. And where was it? It was not in the outer world for the person told you that the sky was red and the clouds green—all kinds of things. The sick one saw nothing properly in the outer world, But the inner being, which the person cannot use in the deranged state, is in the spiritual world. When he or she can use the brain again and can look back on what the spiritual being lived through, then spiritual experiences come.

[ 13 ] From this we see that a human being who is mentally ill lives spiritually in the spiritual world. The spirit in the person is perfectly healthy. What, then, is ill in a mentally ill patient? It is, in fact, the body: the body cannot use the soul and spirit. When a person is called mentally ill, there is always something ill in the body, and obviously when the brain is ill one cannot think properly. In the same way, when the liver is ill, one cannot feel properly.

[ 14 ] This is why "mentally ill" (geisteskrank) is the most incorrect expression that one can use, for "mentally ill" does not mean that the spirit (geist) is ill. It means the body is so ill that it cannot use the spirit which is always healthy. Above all you must be quite clear that the spirit is always healthy. Only the body can become ill, with the result that it cannot use the spirit in the right way. When someone has a diseased brain it is like having a hammer that breaks with every blow. If I say to someone who does not have a hammer, You are a lazy fellow, you are not even able to strike a blow—then this is, of course, nonsense. He could well strike a blow but he does not have a hammer. It is therefore nonsense to say someone is mentally ill. The spirit is perfectly healthy, only it lacks the body through which to act.

[ 15 ] A good example of what one can learn in this way comes from considering how our thinking works. From what I have told you, you will see that, though one has the spirit, one needs a tool for thinking, and this is the brain. In the physical world one needs the brain. It is not particularly clever of materialism to say one needs a brain. Obviously one needs a brain. But this postulate explains nothing about the spirit. We can also learn that the spirit can completely withdraw itself. In the case of mental illness the spirit does withdraw completely. And it is important to know this, because this shows that people today—and now I am going to tell you something that will really surprise you—cannot think at all. They delude themselves that they can think, but they cannot. I will show you why people cannot think.

[ 16 ] You will object: But people go to school; nowadays one already learns to think quite well even in grade school. So it seems, at least. Nevertheless, people today cannot think at all. It only appears as if they could. In grade school we have grade school teachers. These have also learned something; ostensibly they have also learned to think. Those from whom they have learned have, as one says in Stuttgart, "swollen heads." These are very clever people according to present ideas. They have been to a university. Before they went to university they went to high school. There they learned Latin. If you think back a bit you might say: But my teacher did not know Latin. Perhaps not, but he learned from teachers who did. And what they learned was entirely under the influence of the Latin language. Everything one learns today is under the influence of the Latin language. You can see this from the fact that when someone gives you a prescription, he writes it in Latin, It stems from the time when everything was written in Latin. It is not so long ago, only thirty to forty years, that if one went to university one was obliged to write one's thesis in Latin. [ 17 ] Everything one learns today is under the influence of Latin. This is because in the Middle Ages, up to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—this is not so long ago—all teaching was in Latin. For instance the first person to lecture in German was a certain Thomasius¹ in Leipzig. This was not long ago, it was in the seventeenth century. Everywhere lectures were given in Latin. Everybody who learned anything had to go through the Latin language and in the Middle Ages everything one could learn was in Latin. If one wanted to learn anything new one had to learn Latin first. You may protest: But surely not in the grade schools. But there were no grade schools before the sixteenth century. Only gradually, as the vernacular was adopted by science, did grade schools come into existence. So, you see, Latin influences our whole thinking. All of you think like people who have learned to think under the influence of Latin. And if you were to say that the Americans, for instance, could not have learned Latin so long ago—well, today's Americans emigrated from Europe! They too depended on the Latin language.

[ 18 ] Latin has a certain peculiarity. It was developed in ancient Rome in such a way that it thinks by itself. It is interesting how Latin is taught in high schools. One learns Latin; and then one learns thinking, correct thinking according to Latin syntax. So one's whole way of thinking does not depend on anything one does, but on what the Latin language does. You understand, don't you, that this is something quite significant. Anybody today who has learned something does not think for himself: the Latin language thinks in him, even if he has not learned Latin. Strange as it is, one meets independent thinking today only in the few people who have not been to school very much.

[ 19 ] I am not suggesting that we return to illiteracy. We cannot do this. In no realm do I advocate going backward, but one must understand how things have become as they are. Therefore it is important to be able to go back to what the simple person knows, though he has not had much schooling. He is not very forthcoming because he is used to being laughed at. In spite of everything, it is important to know that contemporary human beings do not think for themselves, but that the Latin language thinks in them.

[ 20 ] You see, as long as one cannot think for oneself, one can in no way enter the spiritual world. This is the reason why modern science is opposed to all spiritual knowledge; because through Latin education people can no longer think for themselves. This is the first thing to learn—independent thinking. People are quite right when they say: the brain thinks. Why does the brain think? Because Latin syntax goes into the brain and the brain thinks quite automatically in modern humanity. What we see running round the world are automatons of the Latin language who do not think for themselves.

[ 21 ] In recent years something remarkable has happened. I hinted at it last time, but you may not have noticed it, because it is not easy to see. Something remarkable has happened in recent years. Now, as you know, besides the physical body, we have the etheric body. (I will not speak for the moment of the rest.) The brain belongs to the physical body. The etheric body is also in the brain and one can only think independently with the etheric body. One cannot think independently with the physical body. One can think with the physical hotly only when—as with Latin—the brain is used like an automaton. But as long as one only thinks with the brain, one cannot think anything spiritual. To think something spiritual one must start to think with the etheric body—with the etheric body which, in the case of the mentally ill, is often not used for years. It has to be awakened to an inner activity.

[ 22 ] This is the first thing one has to learn: to think independently. Without independent thinking, one cannot enter the spiritual world. But it is, of course, necessary first of all to find out that one has not learned to think for oneself in one's youth! One has only learned to think what has been thought for centuries through the use of the Latin language. And if one really grasps this then one knows that the first condition for entry into the spiritual world is this: Learn to think independently!

[ 23 ] Now we come to what I wanted to point out when I said that in recent times something remarkable has happened. The people who, more than anyone else, thought along Latin lines were the people of learning—those who, for instance, created physics. They worked it out with thoughts derived from Latin and with the physical brain. When we were small, when I was about as old as young E. here, we learned physics which was worked out with a Latin brain. We only learned what was thought out with a Latin brain. Since then a lot has happened. When I was small the telephone was just being invented. Until then it did not exist. After this followed all the other great inventions that everyone now takes for granted as if they had always been there. They only appeared in the last decades. This caused more and more people to become involved in science who were not Latin trained. This is rather a strange thing. When one looks into the scientific life of the last decades one finds more and more technicians of this kind involved in science. These people had not had much to do with Latin and so their thinking did not become so automatic. And this non-automatic thinking was then picked up by others. This is why today physics is full of concepts and ideas that fall apart. They are most interesting. There is, for instance, Professor Gruner² in Bern who two years ago spoke about the new direction in physics. He said that all the concepts have changed in the last years.

[ 24 ] The reason that one does not notice this is because if you listen to lectures on popular science people tell you what was thought twenty years ago. They cannot tell you what is thought today because they themselves cannot think yet. If you take the thoughts of thirty years ago as valid, it is just like taking a piece of ice and melting it; the ideas melt away. They are no longer there if one wants to follow them exactly. We must see this. If someone learned physics thirty years ago, and sees what has become of it today, he wants to tear his hair out, because he has to confess: I cannot handle all this with the concepts I have learned. This is how it is. And why? Because in recent years, through the development of humanity, the human being has reached the point when the etheric body is supposed to begin to think, and human beings do not want this to happen. They want to go on thinking with the physical body. The concepts fall apart in the physical body, and yet human beings do not want to learn to think with the etheric body. They do not want to think independently.

[ 25 ] Now you see why, in the year 1893, it became necessary for me to write the book The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,³ It is not the contents of this book that are so important, though obviously at that time one wished to tell the world what is said in it, but the most important thing is that independent thinking appeared in this book for the first time. No one can possibly understand this book who does not think independently. From the beginning, page by page, a reader must become accustomed to using his etheric body if he would think the thoughts in this book at all. Hence this book is a means of education—a very important means—and must be taken up as such.

[ 26 ] When this book appeared in the nineties people did not know at all what to make of it. It was as if someone in Europe wrote Chinese and no one could understand it. It was of course written in German, but people were completely unaccustomed to the thoughts expressed in it, because all connection with Latin was purposely cast off. For the very first time, quite consciously, it was intended that there should be no thoughts in it that are influenced by Latin, but only independent thoughts. Only the physical brain is a Latin scholar. The etheric body is no Latin scholar. And therefore one has to try to express such thoughts in a language one can only have in the etheric body.

[ 27 ] I will tell you something else. People have noticed, of course, that concepts have changed in the last decades. When I was young the professor filled the whole blackboard with writing. You had to learn it all and then you did well in your exams. But recently, people have begun to notice what Gruner said in his inaugural lecture: none of our concepts would remain valid if there were no solid bodies, only fluids. If the whole world were liquid, as Gruner imagined in his lecture, then our concepts would be invalid and we would have to think quite differently.

[ 28 ] Yes, of course one would have to think differently if there were no solid bodies. In that case you, as you sit here, could do nothing with the concepts you learned in school. If you, say, as a fish, suddenly became clever and had the idea that, as a fish, you wanted to attend a human university, then you would learn something that does not exist for a fish, because it lives in water. A fish only has a boundary sensation of a solid body; the moment it touches the body, it is immediately repulsed. So, if a fish began to think, it would have to have thoughts quite different from those a human being has. But a human being likewise needs such different thoughts, because other thoughts escape him, so that he has to say to himself: If everything were liquid I would have to have quite different thoughts. [ 29 ] Well, have I not told you about the condition of the earth when there were no solid bodies and when everything was fluid, even the animals? I have told you of this condition. Can you not then understand that present day thinking cannot reach back to these conditions? It cannot think them. So present day thinking cannot make anything of the beginning of the world. Naturally, then, a human being today begins to say to himself: Good heavens! If the world were fluid we would have to have quite different concepts. But in the spiritual world there are no solid bodies. So, with all the concepts with which Latin has gradually schooled us, we are unable to enter the spiritual world. We must wean ourselves of these concepts.

[ 30 ] Here is another hidden truth. In Greek times, which preceded the Latin era (the Latin era only began in the fifth or sixth century B.C. but the Greek period is much older), in Grecian times there was still a knowledge of the spirit, One could still see into the spiritual world. When Rome emerged with the Latin language, this was gradually extinguished. Now I must again say something you will find curious, but you will understand it. Who has used Latin, only Latin, throughout the centuries? More than anyone, the Church. It is precisely the Church that claims to teach humanity about the spirit that has contributed the most to drive out the spirit. In the Middle Ages all universities were ecclesiastical. Of course one must be grateful to the Church for founding the universities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but it founded them in Latin, and Latin thought has no possibility of attaining the spirit. And so it gradually came about that human beings only have concepts relating to solid bodies. Just look at the Romans, they only introduced dry, prosaic and unspiritual concepts into the world. And this was the reason that all ideas became so material. How would the Greeks have described the sacrament of the Eucharist? They would certainly not have described it as if the elements were actually blood and flesh. This stems from materialism. So even the concept of the Eucharist has become materialistic and this is connected with the Latin language.

[ 31 ] Latin is entirely logical. I have worked with many people who were Latin in their whole attitude to life, although they spoke German. If one wanted to make something clear one quickly translated it into Latin, because since the time of Christ only in Latin does one think logically. But this logical thinking only applies to solid bodies. If one wants to enter the spiritual world one needs fluid concepts.

[ 32 ] There is for instance the Theosophical Society. It also wanted to reach the spiritual world. The Theosophical Society says that man has a physical body, an etheric body, etc. But these people are materialistic because they think the physical body is dense, the etheric body is a little thinner and the astral body thinner still. But all these are still bodies, they never become spirit. If one wants to reach the spirit one has to find concepts which are constantly changing.

Even when I draw something on the blackboard you will notice that I take this into consideration. When I draw the physical body I try to portray physical man as he is. But if I try to draw the etheric body, I would never dream of representing it in the same way. I would do it like this. The human being has an etheric body which expands.

But you must know that this is not so much the etheric body, but the picture of one instant. In the next moment it is different. So if I wish to draw the etheric body, I would have to draw, quickly wipe it off, draw differently, again wipe it off, draw again and wipe it off. It is in constant movement. With the concepts we have today, we cannot catch up with these movements. This is what you have to keep in mind, concepts must become mobile. People must get into the habit of it, This is why it is necessary that thinking become completely independent.

[ 33 ] But this is not enough. I will tell you something more. As you know a human being develops, but one does not usually notice it. However, when a person is quite young, one does notice it. One knows that a child who is only four years old can neither write nor read nor do sums. An eight year old child can perhaps do these things. Here one can see development. But in later life when we have made our way, we are so terribly superior that we don't admit that we can still develop. But we do, throughout our lives, and it is remarkable how we develop. Our development goes like this: Imagine this is man:

I will draw him diagrammatically. When the child is quite young its development proceeds from the head. After the change of teeth, the development proceeds from the chest. Therefore one must watch how a child between seven and fourteen breathes—that it breathes adequately, etc. So this is a picture of the older child. (Nowadays one would have to say it differently. Children do not like to be called children any more. From fourteen onward one must call them "young ladies" and "young gentlemen.") Only at puberty does the development proceed from the limbs and from the whole human being. So one can say that only when one has reached puberty is one developing from the whole being. And this goes on throughout our twenties and thirties. But when one becomes older—some of you can already see it in yourselves—there is a certain retrogression. This need not be the case if one has adopted a spiritual mode of life, but in normal life there is a certain retrogression as one gets older. It is just the task of Anthroposophy to see to it that in the future one does not regress as one gets older. Slowly and gradually this must happen.

[ 34 ] Now there are people whose mental capacities diminish alarmingly. But the mind, the spirit, cannot diminish. It is again only the body. It is interesting that often it is the most brilliant people who regress very much in old age. You may have heard that Kant was reckoned to be one of the wisest men, but in old age he became feeble-minded. His body regressed so much that he could not express his wise mind any more. And so it often is. Especially the very intelligent become feeble-minded in old age. It is an exaggerated form of what happens to everybody. Eventually in old age there comes a point when one can no longer use the physical body. The reason for this is mainly be-cause the arteries harden with excessive deposits of calcium, And the more this happens, the less one can make use of the physical body. As, up to the fortieth year, development proceeds from the head into the whole body, so, in the same degree, the process reverses. As one proceeds from the forties to the fifties one comes back to using the chest more, and in old age one goes back to using the head. So if one becomes really old, one again has to use one's head much more. But now one would have to use the finer head—the etheric head. But this is not learned in Latin education. And it is just those who, in the last decades, had a materialistic Latin education who were most strongly affected by senility.

[ 35 ] In old age one must go back to childhood. There are people in whom this is very noticeable. They become mentally weaker and weaker. The mind, the spirit, however, remains completely intact. Only the body becomes weaker and weaker. In the end such people can no longer do the things they first learned to do in life. Such things happen. Let us say somebody gets old. He can no longer do the work he used to do. He can only do what he did as an older child. Finally he cannot even do this. He can only play and can only understand ideas he learned when playing. There are even very old people who can only understand what their parents or their nurse told them in the very first years of their lives. The saying about returning to second childhood is well founded. One really does return to childhood.

[ 36 ] Actually it is not a misfortune, that is, if one has developed a spiritual life. In fact it is rather fortunate, for as long as one is a child, one can use one's etheric body. If a child tears around and shouts and does all kinds of things, this is not done by the physical body—except if it has a stomachache, but even then the stomachache has to be transferred to the etheric and astral bodies so that the child throws itself about as a result. What tears around is not the physical body. Now one grows old and returns to childhood. Gradually one has learned not to tear around any more, but one no longer uses the etheric body like a child, but for something more sensible. So it can be fortunate that one returns to childhood.

[ 37 ] This is the second point. The first was that in order to enter the spiritual world one has to learn to think in the right way. We shall have to speak further about how one achieves this. The matter is very complicated. Today we have to concentrate on the question why there has to be independent thinking. One must break away from much in modern education, for what one learns in modern education is not independent thinking, it is Latin thinking. Do not imagine that the thinking emerging from socialist theories being developed today is free thinking! It has all been learned from what originally came from Latin, but people do not know it. The worker may have this or that intention in his will, but when he begins to think he thinks in bourgeois concepts and these originate in Latin thinking. So the first thing one has to learn is independent thinking. [ 38 ] The second thing is that one must learn not only to live in the present moment, but to be able to turn back into the life one led in childhood. If you want to penetrate into the spiritual world you must continually remember to ask yourself how it was when you were twelve years old. What did you do? One must not do this superficially, but imagine it in great detail. Nothing is better than to begin to try to picture: Oh yes, there I was twelve years old—I can see it quite clearly—there was a pile of stones by the roadside and I climbed up on it. Once I fell off it. There was a hazel bush and I took out my pocket knife and cut off some branches and cut my finger. It is important really to visualize what one did so many years ago; in this way one gets away from just living in the present. If you think the way one learns to think today, you think with your present physical body. But if you turn back to when you were twelve, you cannot think with your physical body as it then was, for it is no longer there (I told you the physical body is renewed every seven years) so you have to think with your etheric body. If you think back to something that happened twelve or fourteen years ago, you call on your etheric body. This is the way to call up inner activity.

[ 39 ] Above all, one should get accustomed to think in a new way, different from one's usual thinking. How do you think? You know we met here at nine o'clock. I began by reading to you the questions on the slips of paper. Then I proceeded with various observations and we have now arrived at saying: We have to think back into the life we lived when we were twelve or fourteen years old. Now when you get home, you can, if you find it really interesting, think through these thoughts again. One can do this. Most people do it. They go through it once again. But you can do something different. You can ask yourself: What did he say last? The last thing he said was that one should think back to one's early life, to the age of twelve or fourteen years. Before that he said one has to have independent thinking. Earlier still he described how Latin gradually took over. Before that, how a person who was mentally ill for a time and then looks back on it, says he has experienced extraordinary things. It was further explained to us how the inner being cannot be mentally ill—only the body can be ill. Now you have run backward through the whole lecture.

[ 40 ] But in the world things do not run backward. I could possibly have given you the lecture backward in the first place, but then you would not have understood it. One has to begin at the beginning and then look at the whole as it gradually unfolds, but once one has understood it, one can think it backward. But things do not run backward. So I tear myself free from things. I say: Just to be contrary, I will think things exactly not the way they go in the outer world, but I will think them backward. This requires a certain strength. When I think backward I have to make myself inwardly active. A person who wants to look through a telescope has to learn how to handle it. In the same way a person who wants to see into the spiritual world must learn how to handle it. He must think backward many times. One day the moment will come when he knows: Ah, now I am entering the spiritual world.

[ 41 ] You see, throughout your whole life you have accustomed your physical body to thinking forward, not backward. When you begin to think backward your physical body does not take part in it. Something strange happens. This is the first advice to those who ask: How can I reach the spiritual world? You can also read this in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment.⁴ What is said there repeatedly is: At least learn to go backward through the course of the day; then other things, People have, of course, only learned to think with their physical body. They notice this and have to make a great effort to think backward, but they have only learned to think with the physical body, not with the etheric body. Now there is an all-out strike by the etheric body; yes, a real "general strike." And if people would not fall asleep so easily, they would know that, if they began to think backward, they would arrive at the spiritual world. But the moment the vision begins, they fall asleep. People fall asleep, because the effort is too great. So one must exert one's entire will and all one's strength not to fall asleep. In addition, one must have patience. Sometimes it takes years, but one must have patience.

[ 42 ] If somebody could tell you what you experienced unconsciously when you went to sleep after thinking backward, you would see that it was something very wise. The most stupid people begin to have extraordinarily wise thoughts in their sleep, but they do not know anything about it.

[ 43 ] So today I have drawn your attention to the fact that one must first learn to think independently. Well, one can do this. I do not want to say—for I am not a conceited fool—that only my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity serves this purpose, but it was quite consciously written in a way that would lead to independent thinking. Independent thinking; thinking backward accurately over things that happened when you were ten or twelve years old, or over other things one has experienced—with these we have at least begun to describe how one tears oneself free from the physical body and how one finds one's way into the spiritual world.

We will pursue this further and eventually deal with all four questions.

• 1. Christian Thomasius (1655-1728), philosopher and jurist, delivered the first lectures in the German language at Leipzig University in 1687.
• 2. Dr. P. Gruner, Professor of Theoretical Physics, gave the Presidential Address, entitled New Guidelines for Physics (1922)," at the eighty-seventh Founder's Day celebration of the University of Bern on the 26 November, 1921.
• 3. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (also called The Philosophy of Freedom). First published in German in 1894 and in English in 1916, this basic work of Rudolf Steiner exists at present in two English editions: Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, New York, 1986 (translated by William Lindemann) and Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1988 (translated by Rita Stebbing).
• 4. Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. First published in book form in German in 1909. English editions appeared in 1909 and 1910. Two versions are currently available in English: Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, New York, 1983 (translated by Henry B. and Lisa D. Monges); and Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1985 (translations by Max Gysi (1909) and Clifford Bax (1910) revised by D.S. Osmond and C. Davy).

In one of my recent lectures here, I pointed out that in the present day, education and teaching not only demand a certain traditional kind of didactic-pedagogical, as they are called, knowledge and skills, but that, above all, it is necessary for the educator and teacher of the present day to penetrate the great cultural currents of the present day. The educator is dealing with the growing humanity. This growing humanity will have to face many more questions and will have to be placed in them than those that have already been experienced in the past up to the present. And it is necessary that the educator and instructor, in dealing with the growing generation, has some inkling of the age and its character into which the present young generation of humanity is growing.

It should be more or less clear to everyone by now how those who speak in the ordinary sense of guilt or misconduct between these or those nations cling to the surface of things. It should be clear today that one cannot clearly see the course of events in the present and the recent past if one cannot free oneself from those ideas of guilt or atonement that apply to the individual life of people. For what has happened and what is still happening, such concepts as tragedy and fate are much more applicable than the concepts of injustice, guilt, atonement or the like. And however little humanity is inclined to raise its own present judgment to a higher level, it will have to be raised. For does not the struggle that humanity has fought point clearly and unmistakably to the fact that, in terms of cultural history, one might say anthropological history, there was a restlessness in humanity that gripped humanity almost all over the world? If one asks here and there: What did people clearly do or think in 1914? - then the judgments are all over the place. One must look at the elementary inner restlessness that has come over humanity all over the world. And this inner restlessness, which is clearly expressed today, has first of all been lived out, one might say, in physical warfare. This physical battle was more physical than previous wars, for how much that is purely mechanical and machine-like has taken part in this weapon fight! But just as this battle was such that it cannot be compared with anything in history, so it will be followed by a spiritual battle that also cannot be compared with anything in history. The extreme physical battle on the one hand will be followed by a spiritual battle, which will also represent an extreme of what humanity has experienced so far in its historical development. It will be seen that the whole earth will take part in this spiritual battle, and that in this spiritual battle Orient and Occident will stand with contrasts of a spiritual and mental kind as they have never been before.

These things always announce themselves through all kinds of symptoms, the significance of which is not always appreciated strongly enough. Much will depend on how the Anglo-American world, as the Occidental world, will behave towards the Oriental world in the future. For the Anglo-American world will not find it as easy as with Central and Eastern Europe physically to cope with the Orient spiritually. That half-starved India is today, crying out for a reorganization of all human conditions, means something tremendous in the present. For when this half-starved India rises, then, through the legacy of the spiritual heritage of the most ancient times, it will be a much more elemental enemy for the Occident, for the Anglo-American world, than Central Europe was with its materialistic outlook.

Our young generation is growing up in this great spiritual struggle, for which all social and other aspirations of the present are only the prelude, so to speak, only the propaedeutic. In this spiritual struggle, our young generation is growing up, and it will have to be armed with forces that today's humanity, even pedagogical humanity, often does not dream of. If present-day humanity wants to pursue social pedagogy, it needs to go back to completely different things than what can be learned from today's scientific methods, which are mostly natural scientific methods. In many cases, the most absurd stuff has found its way into our education system, for the very reason that there is an urge to bring something deeper from human nature into this education system, but because people still resist true reality, which cannot be conceived without spiritual reality. Just imagine that today in education, all kinds of stuff from so-called analytical psychology, from psychoanalysis, is being sought to be introduced into the educational system. Why is this happening? It is happening because people are incapable of thinking spiritually, and so they want to psychoanalytically examine the development of the spirit from the physical nature of the human being. Everywhere there is a resistance to spiritual knowledge that spoils the endeavor in which we are to engage.

Through the various materialistic inclinations of the past, we have developed a certain human attitude in ourselves as human beings. With this we live in the world today. How much this human attitude – I am not talking about a single nation, but about humanity – is worth, can be seen from the fact that millions of people have been killed and even more have been crippled as a result of this attitude of humanity. But let us now look not formally, externally, stereotypically, but let us look inwardly at the growing generation and at what we have to do for them in education and teaching. Let us look at it in the light of that knowledge of humanity, that anthropology, which we who have been involved with anthroposophy for many years should be familiar with. The smallest observation of human life borders on the greatest, most significant cultural currents and forces.

How often has it been discussed here how three successive developmental ages of man differ from each other in relation to the full development of human nature. We must, as I have often said, distinguish in the growing human being the age up to the time when he gets the permanent teeth, that is, until the change of teeth. This change of teeth is a much more important symptom for the whole human development than is usually assumed by today's natural science, which is only attached to external appearances. Over and over again, it must be emphasized that natural science has celebrated its greatest triumphs in these externalities; however, it cannot penetrate into the interior of things. Precisely because it is so great in terms of externalities, it cannot penetrate into the interior.

If we wish to understand the human being in this first stage of life, we must first consider the fundamentals of human inheritance. I have already spoken about this. These conditions of inheritance are only understood one-sidedly if we look at them only through the eyes of present-day natural science. Inheritance is such that two distinctly different influences are at work: the maternal and the paternal element. The maternal element is that which transmits to the human being more of the characteristics of the general folk culture, of the folk element. From the mother, the human being inherits more of the general: that he grows into a particular folk culture with a particular folk character. The mysterious aspect of motherhood consists in transmitting from generation to generation, through physical forces, the characteristics of the folk culture. The specific contribution of fatherhood is to throw the individual individuality of the human being into this generality, that which the human being is as an individual human being. Only when the details of human character are considered in the way suggested by the principles of inheritance will it become clear what is actually present in a newborn human being.

But then, for the first years of life, it should be noted that during this time, the human being is entirely an imitative creature. Everything that a person acquires up to about the seventh year is acquired through being an imitative creature. But through this, the life of the growing child is connected to the most intimate cultural characteristics of an age. Those whom the child imitates first are the child's role models. Everything they carry within themselves, with their most intimate peculiarities, is passed on to the growing generation. This imitation takes place entirely in the subconscious, but it is tremendously significant, and it becomes especially significant from the moment when whatever is learned by imitation from the child, when learning to speak occurs. Before learning to speak, imitation is initially still an imitation in appearance; when learning to speak begins, imitation extends into the inner qualities of the soul. The growing human being then takes on the likeness of those around him. And much more than one usually thinks, language becomes ingrained in the basic character of the growing human being. Language has an inner, a soul character of its own, and the growing child takes on a good deal of the soul of the person with whom he develops by speaking. This assimilation is very strong, very powerful; it extends into what we call the astral body. It is so strong that it needs a counterpole. That is there. And in the unbiased observation of this counterpole, the very mystery in the development of nature and being reveals itself, which today's external observation of nature cannot penetrate.

If external physical nature – let me express myself as I have no language to express these things – were more effeminate than it is, then through the acquisition of language, the human being would become entirely an imprint of that of which he learns to speak. But a kind of dam has been built against this, in that the physical nature of the human being is most strongly hardened during these first seven years. And the culmination of this hardening is expressed in the eruption of the permanent teeth. The eruption of the permanent teeth marks the completion of an inner hardening of the human physical body that continues throughout life, from birth, or at least from the appearance of the first teeth, which are purely inherited teeth, until the permanent teeth come through. These are two opposite poles: the extremely mobile inner development in speech, and the outer hardening, where, as it were, the human being rebels against it and says: I am also still there, I do not want to be just an image. — And this hardening expresses itself in what finally appears as a culmination point in the second teeth, the permanent teeth.

This process takes place in the first years of a person's life. What is the most important educational principle for this age? It is what we ourselves are. If we do not pay attention to what we ourselves are, right down to our innermost being, we educate badly, because the development of the human being at this age does not depend so much on what we tell him as on what we show him. He is a mimetic human being. You can experience it, as I have already mentioned: a child at this age, before the teeth change has taken place, steals, for example. The parents come and are beside themselves that he has stolen. If you see through the circumstances, you ask: how did it actually come about that the child stole? Well, he simply opened a drawer somewhere and took out money. That is what people tell you. If you understand the circumstances, you have to say: Don't worry about it, because it's not theft. The child has seen all along that the mother simply goes to the drawer at a certain time of day and takes money out of it. He has no particular concept of it; he is an imitator, he imitates things; if you forbid him to do so, he simply does not understand yet. It is not necessary for the harsh concepts of theft to immediately follow this act. The important thing is that we pay attention to ourselves and remember that children in these years are imitators.

Then comes the second age, which extends from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. This is the actual school period. During this school period, as I have often mentioned, the peculiar thing is that something completely different occurs in a person's life than the imitative principle of the first years of life. We must not allow ourselves to be talked into accepting such generalizations, as people love to bandy them about. That is nonsense, however it is usually meant. Nature is constantly making leaps. Just think how great a leap there is in plants from the green leaf to the colored petal of the flower. If you think that nature does not leap over an abyss, it may be right; but there can be no question of a continuous development without discontinuity in nature. This is also true for an actual observation of human development. While the human being is an imitator in the first seven years of life, he enters the age from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, where the principle of authority is the decisive factor for him. During this period something in the human being degenerates if the child is not given the healthy opportunity to develop trust in the person educating and teaching him, to trust not with the not yet awakened intellect but to do what is expected of him out of trust in the educator's authority, because the other person says it should be done and presents it as such. These things are not to be considered only from the point of view of today's tendency to absolutize everything in life, and from the point of view of the desire to make even the child an absolutely inwardly free being. If that is desired, and if it is done at this age, then the human being is not made free, but rather is made without support for life, quite without support, inwardly empty. If a person has not learned between the ages of seven and fourteen to have such trust in people that he orients himself towards them, something will be missing in the coming life in terms of inner strength and willpower, which he must have if he is to truly rise to life.

Therefore, all teaching should preferably be based on this absolute looking up to the educator. This cannot be drummed into the child, it cannot be beaten into the child; it must lie in the quality of the educator and teacher themselves, and there the matter goes right to the innermost core. These things do not take place in the same sphere as that in which we as educators say something to the child, but they take place primarily through what we as educators are in relation to the child. The way we speak, the tone of our speech, whether it is permeated with love or mere pedantry, whether it is permeated with factual interest or a mere sense of duty, is something that vibrates beneath the surface of things. This is of the utmost importance in the interplay between authoritarian action and the sense of authority. The relationship between the growing child and the educator or instructor is much more intimate than one might think. The child is now no longer merely imitating, but must grow into the most intimate, instinctive coexistence with the educator and instructor. This can be achieved even with the largest school classes; the excuse that it cannot be achieved does not apply. For anyone who has observed life knows that there is a great difference between two teachers, one of whom enters the classroom and the other enters it, quite apart from how many children are in the classroom. The one who, in the evening, as one often heard in German countries in the past, always felt the need to drink so much beer that he had the necessary heaviness in bed – that is a saying that one could often hear – will, not so much because he drank beer, but because of his inclinations, will open the classroom door and enter the room quite differently than someone who may have acquired the necessary heaviness in the evening before by, let us say, pondering a more serious matter regarding this or that ideological question. This is just one example, which could of course be varied in a hundred different ways. Only when one fully appreciates the benefit that a person receives from being able and allowed to develop a belief in authority between the time their teeth change and the time they reach sexual maturity, only when one fully appreciates this benefit, does one actually have the right judgment about what can happen in teaching and educating during this period of a person's life.

People often ask: What should we do with children? They then say: It is good at this or that age to tell children fairy tales, to let them retell fairy tales. Or they say: At this age, one should not talk to children so much in abstract terms, but rather in symbols and images. And I have pointed out that one can discuss even the most meticulous things with children, for example, the question of immortality. You point out to the child the chrysalis of an insect and how the butterfly flies out, and you point out that just as the butterfly comes out of the chrysalis, the soul of a human being passes through the gateway of death, out of the physical body into another form of existence. Yes, it is good to tell a child this. And yet, often you do not achieve any significant goal with it. Why not? Because in many cases you are asking the child to believe in it, and you do not believe in it yourself, you consider it to be a mere comparison. But this plays a significant role in the subconscious. These things are not meaningless. There is more to the relationship between people than can be expressed in external terms. There is a relationship between the whole person and the whole person. If you yourself do not believe in such a symbol, then there is no authority for the child, then you are not a role model for the child, even if you do everything else to secure your authority. You will say, of course: Yes, I cannot believe that the transition to death, to the post-mortem state, is somehow expressed in real terms by the butterfly hatching from the chrysalis. Well, I believe in it because it is actually true, because in fact the things of reality are real symbols, because it is indeed the case that in the physical world the butterfly emerges from the chrysalis according to the same laws by which, in the spiritual, the immortal soul emerges from life through the portal of death. But present-day humanity does not know such laws; it considers them wishy-washy. It has the belief that it must teach children something that has been overcome for the old. But then we cannot educate, then we cannot teach.

We can only gain a sense of authority if we pass on to the children what we ourselves believe fully, even if we have to dress it up in completely different forms for the children; but that is not the point. However, no human relationship can be established without sincerity and truthfulness at its core. And truth must prevail between people in all relationships. Only by turning to the truth will we be able to bring into the world what is now missing in the world. And because it is missing, misfortune has come. Do you not see the effect of dishonesty everywhere in the world, even the tendency, the longing for dishonesty? Is truth still spoken in world politics? No, under the present circumstances not at all! But we must start from the lowest human being to cultivate the truth again. Therefore, we must look into the secrets of the developing human being and ask: What does the developing human being demand of us in terms of education and teaching?

Those who, between the ages of seven and fourteen or fifteen, have not developed the ability to look to someone other than their authority figure, are, above all, incapable of developing the most important thing in human life for the next stage of life, which begins with sexual maturity: the feeling of social love. For with sexual maturity, not only does sexual love arise in man, but also what is in fact the free social devotion of one soul to another. This free devotion of one soul to another must develop out of something; it must first develop out of devotion through the feeling of authority. That is the state of the doll for all social love in life, that we first go through the feeling of authority. People who are fond of flirting and antisocial behavior arise when the sense of authority is not brought to life in teaching and education between the ages of seven and fourteen or fifteen.

These are things of the utmost importance for the present time. Sexual love is only, so to speak, a specific, a section of general human love; it is what emerges as the individual, the particular, and what adheres more to the physical body and the etheric body, while general human love adheres more to the astral body and the I. But the ability to love socially also awakens, without which there would be no social institutions in the world. This only awakens on the basis of a healthy sense of authority between the change of teeth and sexual maturity, that is, during the person's time at school. No matter how much people talk about a unified school system – and it is quite justified, of course – no matter how much they talk today about developing individuality and whatever the abstractions are called with which pedagogical puppets are made today: what matters is that we regain the ability to look inside human nature and, above all, to develop a feeling for the fact that the human being lives at all. Today, people have no sense at all that the human being is a living being that develops over time. Today, people only have a sense that the human being is something timeless; for today, people only talk about the human being without taking into account that he is a developing being, that something new is drawn into his overall development with each age.

If the things that lie within the program of the threefold social organism were fully explained to people today, they would still seem like a kind of madness to many in the widest circles. For you see, self-government is demanded, for example, for the educational system, separation from state and economic life with regard to the actual spiritual side of education. It is only through the emancipation of the spiritual life that it will be possible to restore man's rights. For today no one knows that the inner developmental impulses in the first years of life until the change of teeth are different from those in the time that follows until sexual maturity, and still different after sexual maturity; and no one knows today that when life goes downhill, when a person is in the second half of life, they undergo developmental states again. Who today considers that a person matures in life and that someone who, for example, is in his late forties or fifties has more to say through his life experience than someone who is only twenty years old? The course of life is something real. Today, however, it is not real for many people because they are educated and trained in such a way that they are no longer able to really gain experience in the second half of their lives. Today, people do not become older than twenty-eight years, so to speak, then they just vegetate along with the experiences up to the age of twenty-eight. But it does not have to be that way! A person can be a learner throughout their entire life, learning from life. But then they must be educated to do so; during their school years, the powers within them must be developed that can only become strong during this time, so that they are not broken again by later life. Today, people go around somehow getting a kink in their lives. Why is this so? Because in the period from the age of seven to fourteen they have not been made strong enough to withstand life. These connections must be given due attention, and other connections must not be forgotten. When we grow very old, we develop qualities that are connected with our very earliest childhood. What we imitated then develops at a higher level in the very last stage of life. And what we have gone through in the period from the change of teeth to sexual maturity occurs somewhat earlier, in the forties. And so what a person goes through in their very earliest childhood develops in their very latest stage of life. Human life is a real fact in its development. And we will not achieve real socialization until we treat human beings humanely. If we know nothing about human beings except that they come of age at twenty-one and are then capable of being accepted into all possible bodies and of talking about everything, then we will never establish socialism; we will only arrive at a levelling down to a human abstraction. Therefore, in the actual democratic state, where every mature person faces every mature person, everything that concerns man according to the equality of all men must be restricted, that is to say, everything that comes from mere legal concepts. It is precisely for this reason, in order not to kill reality, that the possibilities must arise again for what is bound to the becoming of man to be handed over to free development: spiritual life and economic life. It will develop in such a way that we will also have colleges of elders in spiritual and economic life again, because people will trust the art of administration more in those who have grown old than in those who are still young. The way will not be to have the state supervise the schools, as it is now, but the way will be to base the spiritual life on self-government. One often has the feeling that when a person has grown old, he is no longer suitable for one thing or another for which he was suitable in the past. In Austria, for example, there is a law according to which university teachers may only lecture until they are seventy, then they are granted a year of grace at most; but after that they are no longer allowed to lecture. I believe this law is still in force. I can even claim that it would be good if this age limit were lowered even further. But then, if a person is a university teacher, they would first have to enter the office of care and provision, the administrative office of teaching. The intimate bond between spirit and nature, which people today rave or ramble about, I believe, should be seriously sought again. We should not make arrangements that are made to the exclusion of any consideration of natural development, for example, to the exclusion of the fact that man is not an absolute being who is born at thirty-five years of age, remains that age, and does not grow older than thirty-five years. Instead, everything should be built on the development of the human being.

Let us assume the following case: we create a socialist institution today that is entirely to our liking, so that we are fully satisfied according to the view we have today of what takes place between people in a social context. And let us assume – which would also happen if one did not at the same time understand socialization in the spiritual sense – that socialization would take place entirely from today's world view. Then something would have to happen that has not yet occurred in the development of mankind: the next generation would be a generation of rebels. They would be the worst kind of revolutionaries, and they would have to be for the simple reason that they all wanted to bring something new into the world, and we here have only preserved the old. This shows how important it is to take into account the process of becoming, how we must not only consider that a person is a person, but also bear in mind that a person is a being that is born as a small child and dies with white hair, or even without hair. Today's natural science does not yet look into these things, and from today's natural science we learn for all other branches of life.

A very good, even brilliant, magnificent reflection of the scientific way of thinking in relation to social concepts is Marxism; it is science that has become social science, and is therefore basically absolutely barren. For Marxism teaches that everything will come of itself. People are particularly annoyed by the fact that so much is being written about the new formation in the sense of the threefold social organism. They say that they fully agree with my criticism of the present capitalist order, that they fully endorse the threefold order itself; but, they continue, they have to fight it in every way. These are the fruits of the present state of mind: people actually agree with something completely, but they have to fight it sharply. This is the result of applying the scientific way of thinking to all areas of life. The reason why this scientific way of thinking has become so powerful is that it is limited to the study of the dead. People only believe that it is an ideal that will one day be realized, that a living thing can be created in the laboratory through all kinds of combinations. But this will never happen through the scientific paths of today, because the scientific path of today only leads to dead concepts and is only great for grasping the dead. But with this grasping of the dead, one can never gain concepts for the living. We must achieve this possibility: to find concepts, ideas, sensations, impulses of will for the living; and this is especially necessary in the field of education.

As I have often stated in other places, today there is a very ingenious philosopher who saw the task of his science in something very strange. Above all, this philosopher wrote a thick book many years ago: “The Whole of Philosophy and its End”. In it, he proved that there can be no such thing as a philosophy. That is why he became a professor of philosophy at a university. Then he wrote a very ingenious book about the mechanics of spiritual life, a very ingenious book. He is a person called Richard Wahle, who has absorbed and realized the scientific way of thinking in the most ingenious way, who basically does not encounter the spiritual in his way of thinking. He just says that he does not want to deny the spiritual because he does not want to talk about the spiritual to such an extent that he does not deny it; but he only sees the known primary factors. He constructs the world entirely according to the scientific way of thinking. He is very clever, he is full of spirit. That is why he has also come to the conclusion – and this is something significant in this book 'On the Mechanism of Spiritual Life' – that is actually the scientific world view for today's human being. He asks himself: What do I have when I create the world view that today's scientist can form? And he comes to the answer: Then I have nothing but ghosts in my head; I get no reality, I have only ideas of a ghostly nature. — This is, strangely enough, correct: natural science gives nothing but ghosts. When it speaks of the atom, it is actually speaking of an atomic ghost; when it speaks of the molecule, it is speaking of a molecular ghost; when it speaks of natural laws and natural forces, they are all ghost-like. Everything is a ghost, even the law of causality. For the law of causality, as it is understood today, lives from the great illusion that what follows always arises from what has gone before, but this is not the case at all. Imagine a first, a second, and a third event. These do not need to arise from one another; the second does not need to arise from the first, nor the third from the second. Rather, the successive events can be like waves that arise from a completely different element of reality, and for each successive event you would have to look for the deeper causes somewhere completely different from the merely preceding event. I have been philosophically proving all this for decades. You only have to really study my writing “Truth and Science” and my “Philosophy of Freedom” to see that all this can be philosophically and rigorously scientifically proven. Wahle then summarized this by saying: “The scientific world view lives in the presentation of a ghostly world view. And that is true. Today's humanity does not have a conception of reality, but only a conception of ghosts, however much humanity today does not want to believe in ghosts. This belief in ghosts has in fact taken refuge in the scientific world view and is misleading people because they believe that they are fully immersed in reality. That is the revenge of the world spirit. But human nature is such that one thing never comes without the other.

What we form as a natural image, as a ghostly natural image today, is intellectual. But a human soul quality never takes on a certain character without the other soul qualities also changing in a corresponding way. While we scientifically create a ghostly image of nature, our inner will character also changes, and through this — something that today's people do not see because it is too fine for today's gross observation, but which nevertheless exists —, through the fact that our outer way of looking at things is ghostly, our will becomes nightmarish, in that the finer soul qualities arise from similar soul foundations as the inarticulate form of movement, or even speech, that takes place under the nightmare. And such a nightmare of humanity accompanies everything social, accompanies education, as our ghostly image of nature. Our social life is still a nightmare today because our image of nature is a ghost. One follows from the other. The convulsive restlessness that has taken hold of humanity today almost everywhere on the globe is a consequence of this inner life, of this ghostly conception of nature and the resulting psychological nightmare of the world of will and of the world of emotion.

This is what will lead to the fact that the genetic makeup that has been preserved in the Orient out of ancient spirituality must turn against the Occident, which has developed the qualities I have been talking about today. The farther west one goes, the more man lives under the unnatural influence of a ghostly image of nature on the one hand and under the convulsive, nightmare-like anti-social being on the other. The Orient, with its ancient spirituality, will rebel against this, and this will give character to the spiritual war that will follow the physical war. And the coming generation will have to live under this unrest. But under this unrest, what is called social organization must also develop. Therefore, there is no other way to counteract this than to let the abilities that lie in the human soul develop most strongly through social life. But this can only be done by organizing the social organism. For only by allowing each link – the economic, the legal, and the spiritual – to develop in its own way can they acquire a higher unity in the future. It would be a grave mistake to believe that a dichotomy would lead to anything. Today, some people talk about developing an economic life and a political life separately. This would lead to nothing more than the two, the economic and the political state, sabotaging each other; for the restless element of the spirit, which can only develop independently as a third link, would have to be present in both. The spiritual power of economic life would sabotage the spiritual power of state life, and the spiritual power of state life would sabotage the spiritual power of economic life. It is therefore essential that we really turn our attention to this threefold order and do not believe that we can make an advance payment in the form of a twofold order. It depends on the threefold order of the social organism. The smallest details of life will, in the near future, combine with the greatest things in life. Today, anyone who wants to can already come across the following phenomena.

In Anglo-American circles – as I mentioned earlier – people were already talking about this world conflagration, this world war, in the 1880s, because they were generous, albeit in a Western, selfish way, and reckoned with the driving forces of history. I have not yet traced it back further, but it is enough to know that in the 1880s, people in England were already talking about a world war in a similar way, not just that it would come, but that it would lead – and I am quoting the actual words that were spoken – to socialist experiments in Central and Eastern Europe, which people in Western Europe would not tolerate because they did not want to provide the conditions for such experiments. These are all facts. I am not talking about guilt or misconduct, and we must also stick to the facts. Everything that has happened so far has developed from quite significant foundations. The beginning of the socialist experiment in Russia is there. Today it has failed, as you know, can be regarded as having failed. Its defenders are always, like people in general, more papist than the Pope, are always more Leninist than Lezin; because Lenin already knows very well today that he will get nowhere with what he has brought about. And why is he getting nowhere? Because he neglected to establish a free spiritual life. If you want to go as far as Lenin did in the social sphere, you also need a free spiritual life, otherwise you become ossified and bureaucratic to the point of impossibility for the rest of social life. Today, the Russian experiment has already proved that the spiritual life must be free. But one must understand such a fact. And if people in Central Europe do not want to understand the necessity of the emancipation of intellectual life, especially of the school and teaching system, then a very terrible spiritual war will come between Orient and Occident.

Today the English, who have coped relatively easily with Central Europe in their politics, have failed to reflect on historical possibilities and impulses, today the English have to ask themselves: How will we cope with India? That need not be our concern, but it will soon be a very significant concern for Anglo-American politics, because the Indians will demand a socialization, but one that the Europeans can hardly even dream of. First of all, the stomachs of a huge part of the Indian people are rumbling. First of all, a large part of this people, mysteriously supported by all the demons that accompany the inheritance of ancient spirituality, lives with the call: “Away from England!” And England is no longer England at that moment if it does not have India. But this will not be a simple process; it will be a very significant process. Perhaps sleepy souls will oversleep it. You can't oversleep the physical war, but to oversleep the spiritual war, people might still manage to do that; because they have such a strong somnolence today, the so-called civilized people, that they oversleep the most important things. But the matter will still take place. And with all the powers that lie at the very core of the soul, the human being will be in the midst of this struggle.

The one who must first consider that we are heading for such times must be the educator and teacher. And from the thought, from the presentiment of what is to come, the strongest impulses must arise, which pedagogy, which education and teaching will need in the near future. What is to be taught and how must arise, not out of sophisticated fantasies about pedagogical and methodological minutiae, but out of an understanding of the great cultural currents of the present day, and this must shine forth into the teaching and education of the very near future.

Our last discussions here were about the possibility, on the one hand, of seeing in the natural realm that which is connected in a certain way with the moral, with the soul, and on the other hand, of seeing in the soul again what is present in the natural. In this very area, humanity today is confronted with a, one might say, disturbing puzzle. Not only that, as I have often mentioned in public lectures, when man applies the laws of nature to the universe and looks at the past, he must say to himself: Everything around us has emerged from some primeval nebulous state, that is, from something purely material, which then differentiated and transformed itself in some way, and from which the beings of the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms emerged, and from which man also emerged. This will be there again in a certain way, albeit in a different form than at the beginning, as a purely physical thing, even at the end of the universe. But then what is born in us as morality, our ideals, will have basically faded away and been forgotten, and there will be the great churchyard of the physical, and nothing will have any meaning within this final physical state, which has arisen as a spiritual development in man, because it was just a kind of bubble. The only reality would be that which develops physically out of the primeval mist to the strongest differentiation of the various beings, only to return again to the general slag-like state of the world.

Such a view, which must be arrived at by anyone who honestly – that is, honestly to himself – professes the natural philosophy of the present day, can never build a bridge between the physical and the moral-spiritual. Therefore, such a view always needs, if it does not want to be completely materialistic and actually see the only thing in the world in material processes, always needs a kind of second world, so to speak, brought out of abstraction, which, if only the first world is recognized as given for science, would then be given to faith alone. And this belief, which is expressed in the fact that it in turn thinks: That which arises in the human soul as good cannot remain without compensation in the world; there must be certain powers which - however one thinks of it philosophically, it comes out the same - reward good and punish evil and so on. In our time there are people who profess both views, although they are incompatible. There are people who, on the one hand, accept everything that the purely scientific world view has to offer, who go along with the Kant-Laplacean theory of the primeval nebula, who go along with all that is put forward for a slag-like final state of our development, and who then also profess some religious world view: that good works somehow find their reward, evil sinners are punished and the like. The fact that there are numerous people in our time who allow both the one and the other to be presented to their soul stems from the fact that there is so little real activity of the soul in our time, because if there were this inner activity of the soul, then one could not simply assume, out of the same soul, on the one hand, a world order that excludes the reality of morality, and yet, on the other hand, assume some powers that reward good and punish evil.

Contrast the moral and physical worldviews, which arise from the intellectual and emotional laziness of many people today, with something like what I explained here last time as a result of spiritual science. I was able to point out that we see the world of light phenomena around us first, that we look at everything in the outer nature that appears to us through that which we call light. I was able to point out to you how one has to see in all that exists around us as light, what dying world thoughts are, that is, world thoughts that were once, in the distant past, the thought worlds of certain entities, thought worlds from which world entities of long ago recognized their world secrets. What were thoughts in the beginning now shine out to us, in that they are, so to speak, the corpse of a thought, a world thought that has died. They need only open my “Occult Science” and read the relevant pages to know that when we look back into the distant past, the human being as we understand him today did not yet exist. He was only a kind of sensory automaton, for example, during the Saturn period. But you also know that the universe was inhabited in those days, as it is now. But in those days, other beings that inhabited this universe took the place within this universe that man occupies today. We know, of course, that those spirits whom we call archai or primal beginnings, that these entities were at the human stage during the old Saturn time. They were not human as humans are today, but they were at the human stage. With a completely different constitution, they were at the human stage. Archangels were at the human stage during the old sun time and so on.

We are looking back into the distant past and saying to ourselves: Just as we now go through the world as thinking beings, so these entities went through the world as thinking beings with the character of humanity. But what lived in them then has become an external world thought. And that which lived in them then in thought, so that it could only be seen from the outside as their aura of light, is then seen in the universe, appearing in the facts of light, so that we have to see dying worlds of thought in the facts of light. And now darkness plays a role in these light facts, and in contrast to the light, that which can be called the will in a soul-spiritual sense lives out in the darkness, which can also be called love with a more oriental turn of phrase. So that when we look out into the world, we see, on the one hand, the world of light, if I may say so; but we would not see this world of light, which would always be transparent to the senses, if darkness did not make itself perceptible in it. And in what now permeates the world as darkness, we have to look for what lives in us as will in the first stage of the soul. Just as the world outside can be seen as a harmony of darkness and light, so too can our own inner being, insofar as it initially spreads out in space, be seen as light and darkness. Only for our own consciousness is the light thought, imagination, the darkness in us will, goodness, love, and so on.

You see, we get a world view in which what is in the soul is only soul and what is outside in nature is only natural; we get a world view in which what is outside in nature is the result of earlier moral processes, where the light is dying worlds of thought. But this also means for us: When we carry our thoughts within us, they are initially, in that they live in us as thoughts, released from our past by virtue of their power. But we continually permeate our thoughts with the will from the rest of our organism. For precisely what we call purest thoughts are remnants from the distant past, permeated by the will. So that even pure thinking - I have stated this very energetically in the new edition of my “Philosophy of Freedom” - is permeated by the will. But what we carry within us goes back to distant futures, and in distant futures what is now in us as the first germ will shine in the outer phenomena. There will then be beings who look out into the world as we now look out from the earth into the world, and these beings will say: “Nature shines around us.” Why does it shine for us as it does? Because deeds have been accomplished by people on earth in a certain way, because what we now see around us is the result of what people on earth have carried within themselves as a seed. — We now stand there, looking out into the natural world around us. We can stand there like dry, sober abstractors, we can analyze light and its phenomena as physicists do: we will analyze these phenomena coldly, as laboratory people; this will produce some very beautiful and ingenious results, but we do not then stand as full human beings in relation to the outer world. We can only face the outer world as fully human beings if we can feel what appears to us in the dawn, what appears to us in the blue firmament, what appears to us in the green plant, if we can feel what we perceive in the rippling wave – for light does not only refer to the light that can be perceived through the eye, but I use the term light here for all sensory perceptions. What do we see when we perceive what is around us? We see a world that can indeed uplift our soul, that reveals itself in a certain way for our soul as something we must have in order to be able to look meaningfully out into a meaningful world. We do not stand there as fully human beings when we merely face this world by analyzing it dryly as physicists. We only face this world as a whole human being when we say to ourselves: What glows there, what sounds there, is ultimately the result of what beings developed in their souls long ago in the distant past; we must be grateful to them. We do not look out into the world like dry physicists, we look out with feelings of gratitude towards those beings who, let us say, during the ancient Saturn time, lived as humans for so many millions of years, as we live today as humans, and who thought and felt in such a way that we have the wonderful world around us today. That is a significant result of a world view saturated with reality, in that it leads us to look out into the world not just as a dry, sober person, but full of gratitude for those beings in the most distant past who, through their thinking and their deeds, have brought about the world around us that lifts us up. Imagine this only with the necessary intensity, let yourself be filled with this idea of being obliged to thank the distant prehistoric men, because they have made our environment. Let yourself be filled with this thought, and then bring yourself to say to your soul: We must arrange our thoughts and feelings in the appropriate way, in a way that we have in mind as a moral ideal, so that those beings who come after us can look at an environment for which they must be just as grateful to us as we can be grateful to our distant ancestors, who now literally surround us in terms of their effects as guiding spirits. We see a luminous world today; millions of years ago it was a moral world. We carry a moral world within us; after millions of years it will be a world of light.

You see, a complete world view leads to this world-sensation. An incomplete world view, admittedly, leads to all kinds of ideas and concepts, to all kinds of theories about the world, but it does not fulfill the full human being, because it leaves his sensation empty. This has a very practical side, although today's man hardly yet realizes its practical side. But anyone who is honest about the world today knows that he must not let it go into decline; he wants to look to a school and college of the future where people do not go in at eight in the morning with a certain casual, indifferent feeling, and come out at eleven or twelve or one o'clock with the same casual, indifferent feeling, at most with a little pride that they have once again become so and so much smarter - let's assume they have become. No, one can direct one's gaze into a future perspective in which those who leave at eleven or twelve or one o'clock leave the places of learning with feelings towards the world that go out into the universe, in that, in addition to cleverness, the feeling toward the emerging world, the feeling of gratitude toward the very distant past, in which beings worked who shaped our surrounding nature as it is, and the feeling of great responsibility that we have because our moral impulses in us become later appearing worlds. It remains a belief, of course, when one wants to tell people: the primeval fog is real, the future slag is real, in between beings create moral illusions that rise up in them as foam. Belief does not say the latter; it would have to say it if it were honest. Is it not something essentially different when man says to himself: Yes, that which is retribution, that exists, because nature itself is so constituted that this retribution occurs: your thoughts become shining light. The moral world order reveals itself. What is the moral world order at one time is the physical world order at another time, and what is the physical world order at any one time was the moral world order at another time. Everything moral is destined to emerge into the physical. Does the person who views nature spiritually still need proof of a moral world order? No, in the spiritually comprehended nature itself lies the justification of the moral world order. One rises to this image when one regards man, I would like to say, in his full humanity.

Let us start with an occurrence that we all go through every day. We know that falling asleep and waking up are based on the human being in his I and his astral body detaching from the physical body and the etheric body. What does this actually mean in relation to the cosmos? Let us imagine that the physical body, etheric body, astral body and I are connected with each other for waking. Now let us imagine them separated for sleeping: What is the, I would say, cosmic difference between the two? You see, when you look at the state of sleep, you experience the light in this state of sleep. By experiencing the light, you experience the dying world of thoughts of the past. And by experiencing the dying world of thoughts of the past, you are inclined to have a receptivity to perceive the spiritual as it extends into the future. The fact that man today has only a dull perception of it does not change the matter. What is essential to us now is that we are receptive to the light in this state.

When we now submerge ourselves in the body, we become inwardly soulful – when I say inwardly soulful, it means that we are souls and not scales – we become soulful receptive by immersing ourselves in the body, in contrast to the light, for the darkness. But this is not a mere negative, but we become receptive to something else. Just as we were receptive to light when we slept, we become receptive to heaviness when we wake up. I said we are not scales; we do not become receptive to heaviness by weighing our bodies, but by immersing ourselves in our bodies, we become inwardly receptive to heaviness. Do not be surprised that this is somewhat vague at first when it is expressed. For the actual soul experience, ordinary consciousness is just as dormant when awake as it is when asleep. In sleep, a person in today's normal consciousness does not perceive how he lives in the light. When awake, he does not perceive how he lives in heaviness. But that is how it is: the basic experience of the sleeping human being is life in the light. In sleep, the soul is not receptive to heaviness, to the fact of heaviness. Heaviness is, as it were, taken from him. He lives in the light. He knows nothing of heaviness. He first learns to recognize heaviness inwardly, then subconsciously. But the imagination immediately picks up on this: he learns to recognize heaviness by immersing himself in his body.

This can be seen in spiritual scientific research in the following way. If you have raised yourself to the level of knowledge of imagination, then you can observe the etheric body of a plant. When you observe the etheric body of a plant, you will have the inner experience: This etheric body of the plant, it continually draws you upwards, it is weightless. If, on the other hand, you look at the etheric body of a human being, it has weight, even for the imaginative presentation. You simply have the feeling: it is heavy. And from there one then comes to recognize that, for example, the etheric body of the human being is something that, when the soul is in it, gives the soul heaviness. But it is a supersensible archetypal phenomenon. When asleep, the soul lives in the light and therefore in lightness. When awake, the soul lives in heaviness. The body is heavy. This force is transferred to the soul. The soul lives in heaviness. This means something that is now transferred to consciousness. Think of the moment you wake up, what does it consist of? When you are asleep, you are lying in bed, you do not move, the will is paralyzed. However, the images are also paralyzed, but the images are only paralyzed because the will is paralyzed, because the will does not shoot into your own body, does not make use of the senses, and therefore the images are paralyzed. The basic fact is the lameness of the will. What makes the will active? The fact that the soul feels heaviness through the body. This coexistence with the soul [heaviness] gives the earthly human being the fact of the will. And the cessation of the will of the human being himself occurs when the human being is in the light.

So you have presented the two cosmic forces, light and gravity, as the great contradictions in the cosmos. Indeed, light and gravity are cosmic contradictions. If you imagine the planet: gravity pulls towards the center, the light points away from the center into the universe (arrows). One thinks of the light only as being at rest. In truth, it points out from the planet. Anyone who thinks of gravity as a force of attraction, in other words in Newtonian terms, is actually thinking in a rather materialistic way, because they are thinking that there is actually something like a demon or something sitting inside the earth, with a rope that you can't see, and it is pulling the stone towards it. People talk about a force of attraction, which no one can ever prove anywhere other than in their imagination. But people talk about this force of attraction. Now, people may not want to sensualize this thing, but they may talk about the force of attraction in Newtonian terms. In Western culture, it will always be the case that whatever is there must be presented in some way that can be sensed by the senses. So someone could say to people: Well, you can imagine the force of attraction as an invisible cord; but then you must at least imagine light as a kind of swinging down, as a kind of flinging off. You would then have to imagine light as a flinging-off force. For those who prefer to remain in reality, it is enough if they can simply understand the cosmic contrast between light and gravity.

And now, you see, what I am about to say concerns many things related to the human being. When we look at the everyday event of falling asleep and waking up, we say: when we fall asleep, we leave the field of heaviness and enter the field of light. By living in the field of light, he gets, if he has lived long enough without gravity, again a vivid desire to be embraced by the gravity, and he returns to the gravity again, he wakes up. It is a continuous oscillation between life in the light and life in the gravity, waking up and falling asleep. If someone develops their sensory abilities to a higher degree, they will be able to directly perceive this as a personal experience, this sense of rising from heaviness into the light, and then being taken up by heaviness when waking up.

But now imagine something else, now imagine that the human being is bound to the earth as a being between birth and death. He is bound to the earth by the fact that in this state between birth and death, when his soul has lived in the light for a while, it will always hunger for heaviness again and return to a state of heaviness. When we talk about this in more detail, a state has been reached in which this hunger for heaviness no longer exists, then man will follow the light more and more. He does this up to a certain limit (see red line in the illustration). He follows the light up to a certain limit, and when he has reached the outermost periphery of the universe, he has used up what gravity gave him between birth and death. Then a new longing for gravity begins, and he returns to his path (see white line in the illustration) to a new incarnation. So that also in that interim between death and a new birth, around the midnight hour of existence, a kind of hunger for heaviness arises. This is initially the most general concept for what man experiences as a longing to return to a new earth life. But now, while man returns to a new earth life, he will have to go through the sphere of neighboring, of the other celestial bodies. These have the most diverse effects on him, and the result of these effects he then brings with him into this physical life by entering it through conception. From this you can see that it is important to ask: what position do the stars occupy in the spheres through which the person passes? For, depending on the sphere through which the person passes, his longing for the heaviness of the earth takes on different forms. Not only the earth, so to speak, radiates a certain heaviness, which the person longs for again, but also the other heavenly bodies, whose spheres he passes through as he moves towards a new life, have an effect on him with their gravity. So that man, by returning, can indeed come into different situations, which justify saying, for example, that man returning to earth longs to live in the gravity of the earth again. But he first passes through the sphere of Jupiter. Jupiter also radiates a heaviness, but one that is suitable for adding a certain joyful note to the longing for the heaviness of the earth. So not only will the longing for the heaviness of the earth live in the soul, but this longing will also receive a joyful nuance. The person passes through the sphere of Mars. He longs for the heaviness of the earth. A joyful mood is already in him. Mars also has an effect on him with its heaviness, planting, as it were, the activity in the soul that joyfully longs for earthly heaviness, to enter into this earthly heaviness in order to make powerful use of the next physical life between birth and death. Now the soul has already progressed so far that in its subconscious depths it has the impulse to long clearly for the heaviness of the earth and to make powerful use of the earthly incarnation, so that the longing joy, the joyful yearning, is expressed with intensity. Man still passes through the sphere of Venus. A loving grasp of the tasks of life is added to this joyful longing, which tends towards strength.

You see, we are talking about different types of gravity emanating from celestial bodies and relating them to what can live in the soul. Again, by looking out into space, we seek to address the spatial-physical at the same time as the moral. If we know that the will lives in the forces of gravity and if we know on the other hand that the light is opposed to the will, we may say: From Mars light is reflected, from Jupiter light is reflected, from Venus light is reflected; in the forces of gravity the modification through the light lives at the same time. We know that dying world thoughts live in the light, and that nascent worlds live in the forces of gravity through will-germs. All this radiates through the souls as they move through space. We consider the world physically, and at the same time we consider it morally. A physical and a moral aspect do not coexist. Man is only inclined to say this in his limitedness: on the one hand is the physical, on the other the moral. No, these are only different aspects, they are unified in themselves. The world, which develops towards the light, develops at the same time towards retribution, towards revealing retribution. A meaningful cosmic order reveals itself out of the natural cosmic order.

One must be clear about the fact that one does not arrive at such a world view through a philosophical interpretation, but that one grows into it by gradually learning to spiritualize physical concepts through spiritual science; in this way it moralizes itself. And when one learns to see through the world of the physical into the world in which the physical has ceased to exist and the spiritual is present, one recognizes: morality is present there.

You see, people today could really come to this conclusion from certain ideas. I just want to show this to you at the end, although it is outside the way of thinking of most of you. I would like to say that it takes a great deal of study to understand what I have just said. So you have this line, which is not an ellipse, but which differs from the ellipse in that it is more curved here (drawing on the left) – you often see this line on buildings – the ellipse would be something like this (dotted line). But this is only one special form of this line; this line can also, if you change the mathematical equation, take on this shape (lemniscate). It is the same line as the other one. Sometimes I go around like this and close here; but under certain conditions I don't go up to the top like that, but go around like this and then return again and close at the bottom. But the same line has another form. If I start here, I only appear to close here; now I have to get out of the plane, out of the room, have to go over here, come back here. Now I have to go out of the room again, have to continue the line here and close it at the bottom. Only the line is somewhat modified. These are not two lines, it is only one line, and it also has only one mathematical equation; it is a single line, only that I go out of the room. If you continue this idea, then the other is also possible: I can simply take this line (lemniscate), but I can also imagine this line in such a way that its half lies within the space; by getting around here, I have to go out of the space. I have to go out of the room, then I finish it like this: here is the other half, but it is only outside the usual room, it is not inside the usual room. It is also there. And if one were to develop this way of thinking, which mathematicians, for example, could have today if they wanted, if one were to develop this way of thinking, one would come to a different conception of going out of space and coming back into space. This is something that corresponds to reality. For every time you set out to do something, you think the thing you have set out to do; before you want to, you go out of the room, and when you move your hand, you go back into the room. In between, you are out of the room, and you are on the other side of the room.

This idea must be developed thoroughly — from the other side of the room. Then one comes to the idea of the truly supersensible, but above all, one comes to the idea of the moral in its reality. The reality of the moral can be so difficult to imagine from today's world view because people want to imagine everything they want to imagine in space, to determine it in terms of mass, weight and number, whereas in fact reality at every point, I might say, in space transcends space and returns to space. There are people who imagine a solar system, comets in the solar system, and they say: The comet appears, then it goes through a huge long ellipse and then it comes back after a long time. — That is not true for many comets. It is the case that comets appear, they go out, scatter here, stop, but form again from the other side, form again from here and come back from there, describe lines that do not return at all. Why? Because comets leave space and return from a completely different place. It is entirely possible in the cosmos for comets to disperse from space and return from a different place in space.

In tomorrow's continuation of these considerations, I will not torment you with the ideas that I presented to you in the last ten minutes, because I know that they would be far removed from the range of ideas of a large number of you. But I must sometimes point out that this spiritual science, as it is cultivated here, could count on the most highly developed scientific ideas if the opportunity were available, if in other words there were the possibility of really permeating with spirit what is being done today in a spiritless way, especially in the so-called exact sciences. Unfortunately, this possibility does not exist; in particular, things like mathematics and so on are mostly done in the most spiritless way today. And that is why, as I emphasized during my recent public lecture in Basel, spiritual science is for the time being dependent on making itself felt to educated laymen — which many people who now want to be considered learned reproach it for. If scholars were not so lazy when it came to spiritual contemplation, spiritual science would not need to assert itself only before educated laymen, because it can count on the highest scientific ideas and, up to these highest scientific ideas, also counts on complete accuracy because it is aware of its responsibility.

Of course, the scientists behave in a very peculiar way in the face of these things. You see, there is a learned gentleman - I already pointed him out in a public lecture recently - who has obviously heard that university courses have been held here in Dornach. He had heard something about the Waldorf School and had apparently read my inaugural address for the Waldorf School and another essay in the “Waldorf-Nachrichten”. In the inaugural address, I mentioned a pedagogue out of context who is a kindred spirit of that scholar in many ways. On such occasions, the gentlemen who so often accuse anthroposophy of leading to suggestion or autosuggestion are immediately hypnotized because they hear: “Someone was mentioned who is a scientific comrade of mine.” The gentleman then became very attentive. Now it became obviously clear to him from all that has been achieved at the Dornach School of Spiritual Science. Nevertheless, he could not refrain from writing the following: “At the anthroposophical college courses in Dornach near Basel, which took place in the fall of this year, it was hoped that great and powerful ideas would be introduced from here to initiate a new development of our nation and breathe new life into it. Anyone who examines the ethical foundations of this movement at its true value cannot share this hope unless these foundations are subjected to critical examination, which is what the above lines are intended to encourage.

Now, why were these “above lines” actually written? So the university courses, their ethical basis must be examined, subjected to criticism, because they must have something to do with what such a gentleman now has to declaim, what he calls the moral low, because he begins his essay, which he has titled “Ethical Mis »: «In times of a moral low such as the German people have probably never experienced, it is doubly important to defend the great landmarks of morality, as established by Kant and Herbart, and not to let them be shifted in favor of relativistic inclinations. The words of Baron von Stein, that a people can only remain strong through the virtues by which it has become great, must be considered one of the most important tasks in the midst of the dissolution of all moral concepts today.

Now the man dates the dissolution of moral concepts since the war and finds one very remarkable: “That a writing of the leader of the anthroposophists in Germany, Dr. Rudolf Steiner, is involved in this dissolution, must be particularly regretted, since one the idealistic basic feature of this movement, which aims at a strong internalization of the individual human being“ - that is what he has taken from a few essays in the ‘Waldorfnachrichten’ - ‘cannot be denied, and in his plan of the threefold social order, which was discussed in No. 222 of the ’Tags”, one can find healthy ideas that promote the welfare of the people. But in the book “The Philosophy of Freedom” (Berlin 1918), he takes his individualistic approach to such an extreme that it leads to the dissolution of the social community and must therefore be fought."

So you will see: in 1918, the “Philosophy of Freedom” was written out of the moral low that resulted from the war! Of course, the good man did not care about the “Philosophy of Freedom” for decades, when it was around, only read the last edition, namely 1918, so carefully that he did not notice how old this book is, that it certainly dates from the time when he talked about how wonderfully far we have come, to what clarification, where he has not yet spoken of a moral low for a long time: Well, so! Such is the conscientiousness of these youth educators. The man is not only a professor of philosophy, but above all an educator. So he not only has to teach at universities, but also educate children pedagogically. And he is so well educated himself that he perceives the writing as having been written in 1918, the “Philosophy of Freedom.” Therefore, it is also easy for him to report on the purpose of this writing. Consider the situation: in 1893, the “Philosophy of Freedom” appears. So the ideas arise at that time. If one assumes that the “Philosophy of Freedom” was published at that time, what sense do the following words make, which are almost the culmination of the whole essay: “But these free people of Dr. Steiner are no longer human. They have already entered the world of angels on earth. Anthroposophy has helped them to do so.”

Now, I ask you: in 1893, the “Philosophy of Freedom” was published with the intention of providing people with the ethics that anthroposophy helps them to achieve: “Would it not be an unspeakable blessing in the midst of the manifold confusions of earthly life to be able to place oneself in such surroundings? Assuming that a small group succeeds in stripping away all that is human and entering into a purer existence in which the truly free are allowed to live fully beyond good and evil, what remains for the broad masses of the people who are most closely intertwined with the material needs and worries of life?

So you see, the matter is presented as if the “Philosophy of Freedom” had been published in Berlin in 1918, and anthroposophy was there to educate the people described in the “Philosophy of Freedom”!

With this conscientiousness our scholars write about things today. It is the same conscientiousness with which a doctor of theology writes that a nine-meter-high statue of Christ has been fabricated, with Luciferian features at the top and animalistic features at the bottom, despite the fact that the statue of Christ has a purely human ideal face at the top and is still a wooden block at the bottom, in other words, is not there at all yet. He does not just describe it as if someone had told him, this doctor of theology, but he writes as if he had established this fact, as if he had been there himself. This reminds me of the anecdote I mentioned in Basel in public, about how someone determines whether he is sober or drunk when he comes home in the evening: he lies down in bed and places a cylinder in front of him on the bedspread; if he can see it clearly, he is sober; if he sees it double, he is drunk. You have to be at least in that state if you see what is being made here as a statue of Christ as that doctor of theology saw it.

But, leaving these attacks aside, in this case one can still ask the question: What kind of theologians are they? What kind of Christians are they? What kind of educators are they for young people, who have such a relationship to truth and truthfulness, and what must a science look like that is endowed with such a feeling for truth and truthfulness? But such a science is actually represented today by most people in lecterns and in books; humanity lives from such science. Among all the other tasks it has, spiritual science also has the task of purifying our spiritual atmosphere from those vapors of untruthfulness, of mendacity, which does not just prevail in the outer life, which can be proven today down to the depths of the individual sciences. And it is from these depths that what has such a devastating effect on social life emanates. The courage must be mustered to shine the right light on these things. But for that, it is necessary first to warm to a world view that really bridges the moral world order and the physical world order, in that the shining sun can be seen both as the concentration of descending of thought worlds, and that which bubbles up from the depths of the earth can be seen at the same time as the preparation of that which lives on into the future, in the form of germs, volitional forces that permeate the world volitionally. We will continue this discussion tomorrow.

Prayers were said from various sides before the start of the lecture, and a particular wish was expressed to hear more closely about the battle of Luther's soul.

[ 1 ] Rudolf Steiner: Yes, my dear friends, if I want to continue exploring which what we started, in various directions, it is important that I firstly touch on what existed in ancient Christianity, and then what unfolded out of the various forces working from ancient Christianity leading to the rise of the Evangelical-Protestant experience. We must be quite clear that during the time in which the Mystery of Golgotha took place, those people who would at least have a tendency to accept Christianity, were still of a totally different soul constitution, than what was later the case. The Mystery of Golgotha took place in the human evolution during a time in which it had basically nothing at all to do with, I could call it, pursuing the objective course of the world in a spiritual-scientific way. This is quite extraordinary. When you try to deepen yourself particularly into the objective course of the world, as it is presented in its totality, incorporating the physical, soul and spiritual, you have a strong impression regarding the development in the 8th century before Christ. Once again, you will get this strong impact—this can already be noticed in outer knowledge—regarding the time which I've often spoken about, in the 15th century.

[ 2 ] The time epoch stretching from the 8th century BC to 15th AD creates roundabout an epoch in which humanity's development, if you follow this development spiritual-scientifically, was unfolding and can be called the Mind- or Intellectual Soul; in other words, it was the epoch of the Mind- or Intellectual Soul development. In its purest form it comes out of the Greek people's evolution. I call it Mind Soul but ask you, please, not to connect an intellectual concept to this term. Should you want to study the Mind Soul today, as it had developed out of Greekdom, then you need to study such individuals who had in a certain sense some kind of clairvoyance, not schooled clairvoyance but an atavistic one; inherited clairvoyance which can still pop up in some people at present. You can see that the content of the world appears to such people as imaginative, made up of images. If you should ask them to describe their pictorial impressions—of course only if no physical deformation disorder is involved, but when the whole thing is pure—you discover an extraordinary amount of understanding in the images thus depicted. They describe some processes in the spiritual world in pictures. They receive the images, but they get the sense of them as well. They can't help it if they include understanding in the images they receive because they take place together. Up to the 15th Century the soul constitution of many people were still not as developed as the mind is today, but they were inspired by their minds, they could have revelations in the mind. Only after the 15th Century did intellectualism develop which means that the mind had to be actively laboured with inwardly in the soul. Logic had to be developed, it was something to be worked at; it was not, so to speak, just given to the soul. That is the essential difference in the soul constitution of more modern people in comparison with those in this earlier epoch.

When you go still further back, to the evolutionary period of mankind, before the 8th century BC, then you arrive at an epoch where such pictorially filled imaginations initially developed as involuntary imaginations. You get to an epoch which reached back to the 3rd century and find that just this reading in the cosmos which I've described for you this morning, unfolded and appeared in the human soul as pictorial imaginations, still existed in the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, in naive and simple mind natured people. By contrast we have an epoch since the 15th century in which human consciousness must veer to freedom, and this can only happen when people create their own thought forms, out of themselves.

[ 3 ] If we simply study world processes objectively, we initially have no reason to believe in the Mystery of Golgotha. We need to attain intuitive knowledge in the sense in which I've depicted in my book "Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its attainment," and then you get the idea that the Mystery of Golgotha can be seen as falling out of the entire remaining course of the world view. (Writes on the blackboard.) If I namely have 8 centuries BC before here, the 15th century, then we have a particular process which must be considered as flowing together, and now gives a particular impact in our years of one or zero.

[ 4 ] To a certain extent we can research from the oldest times the evolution of the earth and man, and we will reach a certain stage in the development, but we do not arrive at seeing the Mystery of Golgotha within this research. We definitely come through research of this evolution, if we do not look at the Mystery of Golgotha, to the feeling: we are moving to the end of the earth, as human beings we must find our grave in the earth.—This way we arrive at quite a decisive conclusion of the earth dying away. Then we can turn our gaze to the Mystery of Golgotha and so we will find that the earth was renewed, fructified by the Mystery of Golgotha, that a new seed from the expanse contained up to that moment evolutionary streams, and that this new seed, having arrived through the Mystery of Golgotha, forms the foundation for the renewal of the earth. This is primarily the meaning of the Gospel's words which I mentioned yesterday when I said: The spiritual beings who remained on the earth would have perished with the earth (if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place): The demons screamed when they saw the Christ, because he stripped them of their rulership. This is certainly a real process. You can be quite certain it isn't merely about accepting some or other event given in the Bible, but it is about a clear observation of the processes.

[ 5 ] The Mystery of Golgotha does not even fall in the middle of these time slots (between 8 BC and 15 AD), because the middle of this time is in about the middle of the 4th century. Therefore, this event doesn't even fall into the middle, so one could say: The event of Golgotha is something which took place in contrast to the world of necessity, taking place through divine freedom entering into the earth. It is a deed of freedom coming out of the divine worlds, it certainly was given to humanity from outside, as a gift from the divine world order. As a result, it can't be understood by those who want to observe the continuous historic processes, they may not be able to discover something within it like the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 6 ] To suggest that, I often express it this way: If, let's say, a Mars inhabitant came down to earth, he would find much he can't understand, but he would be able to start understanding something when he looks at something like the painting of the last supper of Leonardo da Vinci. To this extraordinary image and what is intended with the Christ, he would be able to see something which would indicate the central point of earthly events to him. That is obvious only through comparison, but it is a comparison which I've often had to make to indicate what is important here.

Particularly for those who had a strong feeling for the sense of the Mystery of Golgotha as fallen out of the ordinary earthly course, like all that the Roman Catholic Church has gradually become, still a kind of departure came about from the original meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha. It has crystallized into an historic anecdote. When Leonardo da Vinci was appointed to paint the Last Supper, he worked slowly, for a long time. Actually, he needed more than ten years. Then a new Prior arrived and wanted this painting chap to finish off the thing at last. The painting had been completed up to the figure of Judas when the new Prior asked when it would at least be complete. Leonardo said that up to that point he had not been able to complete the painting because he had no model for Judas. Now however, he had in the Prior a model for Judas, and he could complete the painting.

With this anecdote there is definitely a crystallization of the feeling which in the Roman Catholic Church had as a departure from the original sense of the Mystery of Golgotha, how one would far rather take a Prior and make a Judas out of him than anyone else.

[ 7 ] This attitude of mind can be studied up to the middle of the 4th century, and then again, how it prepares itself for intellectualism from the middle of the 4th century onwards. For example, you can already see, when you study the writing of Scotus Eriugena, how in the 10th century on the one hand, the tendency plays in towards intellectualism that would later fully emerge, and on the other hand in what one could call the gifts of understanding out of higher worlds. This appeared strongly in that time in which it prepared itself from the middle of the previous epoch up to the 15th century of our present epoch. It is conclusively quite different before the middle of 4 AD; it continues into the 5th century, the times are not so strictly separate. You always find strong experiences towards the Mystery of Golgotha present in the first centuries after the event, as the supersensible spiritual plays into the earthly. This permeation of outer spiritual into the earthly became ever more difficult for the ordinary state of mind. We are just seeing in the centre of this previously mentioned period, a personality wrestling with every possible thing, just to get along. It is with such a turn that the one side of the human state of mind really changed, and on the other side a new kind of understanding necessary for the Mystery of Golgotha. This personality, as you know, was Augustine.

Within his soul, Augustine just couldn't come to terms completely with how the spiritual worked into matter. Augustine for instance sought amongst the Manichaeans for a possibility of how to recognise the spiritual in the material. He didn't manage; he actually only managed by withdrawing completely into himself, in order to depend on the self-assurance of his human I, which made him one of the precursors of the famous Descartes declaration: "Cogito, ergo sum." (I think, therefore I am.) This principle is found with Augustine already. However, on the other hand he was confronted with a certain doubt about the teaching, and this doubt was eating him up. One can certainly understand out of the configuration of the time, why Augustine felt this way. How the old heathen point of view of the church fathers, namely Clemens von Alexandria, was still completely accepted, so that in the oldest Christian times they were totally overtaken by the pagan in Christian teaching, and this Augustine could no longer accept, because in his human soul constitution it was no longer appropriate. The teaching content was also shaped in such a way that, essentially in the time of the Council of Nicaea, it had been brought as abstract dogmas which could then be absorbed by intellectualism. So the human soul in Augustine's time, I can mention, was already driven towards intellectualism. From then on Augustine could do nothing other than accept the dogmatic Catholic Church content, in order to find a teaching content.

[ 8 ] Through this, a great crack came about in the Catholic Church. What appeared from the ceremonial of course could not correspond to a soul content. Humanity didn't come in the same way to the undermining of the ceremonial content, as it came to the drying up of the soul content. So it happened in the Catholic Church that the soul content dried out dogmatically, while the ceremonial content actually sustained itself. This ceremonial content of the Catholic Church didn't come out of Christianity, but it came out of far older ceremonial processes. Out of such times it stirred, from a time in which people still had a living reading of the cosmos in which, as a sacrificial offering, it could be accomplished from the reading in the cosmos. What was drawn from the ancient ceremonies of the mysteries, was then Christianized. The Mass offering is also certainly taken from the ancient mystery ceremonies and Christianized. However, what remained as symbolic in the act of sacrifice, is what actually continued within the Catholic Church.

[ 9 ] The Catholic Church was actually on this point always consequential, also when it became a worldly establishment under Constantine, as it went over into the political field. It was, one could say, really ironclad in its consequentiality. It has maintained its ceremonies in the most conservative way and in order not to go under, suffocated its soul content with dogmatism. No wonder that the ceremonial content became more and more strange as an experience, because people had no lively relationship to it anymore, and the dogmatic content was experienced as something obsolete—while it had been lively knowledge in olden times, knowledge experienced by a different soul constitution. The dogmatic content could not hold true compared with what came out of purely worldly knowledge. However, the Catholic Church had to remain absolutely consequential, and it has remained in its conserved state right up to the present. It has remained conservative by not participating in the state of mind/soul constitution residing in the present day. It has remained so, that it demands faith in preserved dogmas, which corresponds to a knowledge of an earlier soul constitution so that what is learnt about the Catholic Christ in the Church today is completely bound up with a dogmatic content which believes it presents a level of knowledge which mankind had actually reached at the end of the 14th century AD.

[ 10 ] What Anthroposophy wants to developed is regaining the supersensible substance of knowledge; the kind of supersensible knowledge which has died in dogma; Anthroposophy wants to enable the achievement of a new understanding for the Mystery of Golgotha, because the dogmas of the Catholic Church can no longer penetrate into an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. This is extraordinarily important, that the dogmas of the Catholic Church no longer can allow the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha to come through. The ritual of mass lets the souls penetrate to something different, to taking an interest in the symbols of the ritual. It is already so, that the Roman Catholic Church has remained in line with its ironclad consistency even into the 19th Century. Some things appear as quite strange if you examine the dogmas instituted by the Catholic Church before the 19th Century. I would like to give you an example so you can see what a kind of abyss exists, in order for you to reach an insight as to how such an abyss can once again be bridged over.

[ 11 ] Once I had a conversation with a very learned theologian regarding the Conceptio immaculate, the immaculate conception, which was only instituted in the 19th Century. You perhaps know that this doesn't deal with the immaculate reception of Jesus himself, but of the immaculate conception of Mary; that means St Anna conceived Mary in an immaculate conception. This is actually the dogma laid down in the 19th century. The other dogma—that of the immaculate conception of Jesus—had existed already for a long time. As a "singular grace" it can be seen by those who can even see the emergence of dogmas from the imaginative content, even if they can't approve of it at all because its content is deadened by it—but one can see it.

So, in my conversation with this theologian, I said to him that it was impossible to reconcile the idea of the immaculate conception with modern conscious. I said to him, one isn't compelled to lead the modern consciousness over into dogma in relation to the individual case; one is not compelled to apply logic in an individual case because the singular also, according to scholastic opinion, evades follow-up. The moment you assume a series of facts, in other words a backward looking of a series of facts, where you rise up from the immaculate conception of Mary to the immaculate conception of St Anna, it is necessary to continue and then you, out of necessity, must accept an entire generation line of immaculate conceptions.—Now the theologian turned to me and said that is not correct, because then we come back to David—this is how he expressed it—and then the story would be quite disastrous, and that could not be allowed.

You see, with today's consciousness this has a certain stroke of frivolity, but it certainly is something which can be made known, how within the Roman Catholic Church the entire relationship to the truth is something quite different.

[ 12 ] In this depiction of our conversation I wanted to firstly stress the kind of perception of truth we lived in during the middle of the 15th Century. The Catholic clergy was not experiencing the perception of truth like modern consciousness does, but a truth-conception corresponding to an earlier time epoch. They were not aware of the view of truth that reckons with the consequences of truth for the inner life of a human being. Quite a different attitude to the truth existed, and as it had changed from olden times, was not clearly understood. We need to look back at the evolution of humanity which means that the soul constitution essentially has changed. Basically, there is no incorrect expression other than that nature had made no leaps. Nature in fact makes continuous jumps. Take for example a green foliage leaf to the coloured flower petal—that is a jump. In the same way we have leaps in the course of time, apparently quite a sharp advancement from one soul state into another. However, people don't always grow in the same degree but allow old points of view to continue and as a result their souls atrophy, as we are able to notice if we look at the enormous leap which has come about in modern human soul constitutions and which has not been participated in by a large number of people.

[ 13 ] Now we must clearly see that such an inner kind of experience, as can be describe as an historical consciousness, which can be acquired, stands out particularly strongly in a person who, through a certain education in the Church, it can especially be applied, when we think of a case like Luther's. If you want to understand Luther's soul then you must be clear that be comes out of the after effects of Augustinism, and that it is precisely in his time, just a bit after the beginning of the intellectualist age, that he is confronted with one of the most serious soul conflicts imaginable. Why was this so? You must just imagine: Augustine had come to an agreement on the recognition of the Christian-Catholic dogma, but for him this was connected with his living within something which was still alive, and even more alive among the Manicheans with whom he had met. What was still full of life in his time was the observation of original sin, in general the consideration of higher processes taking place in relation to lower earthly processes. People still have trouble today to make such things comprehensible.

[ 14 ] If we position ourselves at the beginning of earth evolution, we can gradually enter into an imagination of the origins of what we today call a human being. There were higher beings who were in a certain way connected with earthly evolution. The Old Testament indicates one such higher being having become the snake, a being who we call Lucifer today. This higher being, so it is described in the Bible, actually initiated the original sin. In the beginning of earthly existence, this being was there and the original sin was actually due to the calculation of man's precursors of his ancestors, who then appeared as the serpent of paradise. What this pre-human being had begun by the seduction in paradise was transferred on to the human beings. During that time, what played into human thoughts, existed there as primal guilt, within which man got trapped and later dragged it along, because he originally had become entangled and then in fact he now transferred it from one generation to the next through the blood.

As a result of this primal sin the Christ appeared on the earth—I am speaking in the consciousness of this time period—in order to gradually heal people from their dying through what Lucifer had done to them. That we outwardly know so little about the constitution of consciousness, is a result of the really innumerable things proclaimed by the Roman Catholic Church, which is based on this ancient tradition. Above all, everything Gnostic was eradicated and also later the reproduction of anything that still had an older soul constitution was made exceedingly difficult. You know the writing of Scotus Eriugena had been lost and only later rediscovered, and for centuries people knew nothing about Scotus Eriugena because all copies of his writing which one could get hold of, had been burned. It is certainly so that it deals with looking again at an event which took place in the supersensible world and into what human beings had become entangled.

[ 15 ] Among the impulses of such observations, I could say something worked behind human events, active through superhuman events of other beings who actually were also involved with human evolution, in order for Augustine's teaching regarding predestination, to develop. Augustine saw the incarnation of people on earth as something much rather, if it could be expressed it would be by saying: The human being is actually the result of the battle of superhuman beings.—This meant individuals had no intrinsic worth; that only happened in the middle of the 15th century. Augustine believed it quite possible to think of human development as beyond their will, accomplished by the destinies of superhuman beings. His teaching could only be alive in him if a part of the human being, not the sinful part, but a part, be destined for demise and another part of the human being destined for bliss, the teaching which is not usually presented in all its meaning, when it is to be experienced. Today this can't be experienced in devotion, which was possible for Augustine. Into this soul constitution something also played that one can call original sin, which is balanced out by the Mystery of Golgotha. People in Luther's time still expressed it in this way, but they lived in another time of a soul constitution as in the time of Augustine. It was quite impossible to find one's way into these ideas with all of one's soul. In this way Luther experienced the illumination through his soul, as an Augustine monk.

[ 16 ] Now I must speak to you about my conviction which is based—even though it is called a conviction—on knowledge. For me it certainly is knowledge. I am not in the position to speak in the same way about chance or coincidences like other people because coincidences also belong to an order of things which is usually ignored. I can't attach it to an actual incident in Luther's life, I can't be indifferent to a lightning strike in a tree beside him, but I can see it, according to my knowledge, only as the effect of a truly supersensible intrusion. You can think about it in any way you like, but if I speak sincerely and honestly, I certainly regard part of Luther's soul constitution as this pointing in, if I may call it so, of God's finger, not out of belief but out of recognition. Luther's state of mind or soul constitution became something quite different under the influence of such a deed; it happened so that certain inner sources were opened. These sources, or better said, the effectiveness of these sources, had already been prepared through the wrestling with misunderstood lore. It could not rise up, it was like a turning point in the soul itself, but it could not consciously show itself. Then it rose up into consciousness and became a turning point for only that which was happening. If I want to express myself roughly, the body has been softened, so to speak, and what had been prepared in Luther for a long time, permeated through a soft body.

Now Luther gradually became aware of all the dangers in which modern man lives. It isn't easy to say in how far this went into Luther's clear consciousness, and it's also not that important. In any case this position of modern man played into Luther's soul on the one hand as a streaming from earlier times, and on the other hand, what man should be since the middle of the 15th century. The entire dangers of modern man flooded Luther's soul. What did this consist of? It consisted of—I'm speaking in a Christian way—man being afflicted with the deeds or the sequences of deeds of superhuman beings in which he had become entangled. Through what had been an entanglement of original sin in the lower human being as inherited traits, man entered into the next epoch in a different manner than he would have if there had been no original sin through the Fall. As a result, that which should appear in humanity as intellect came through in a far more abstract measure than how life used to be in former times, when it was afflicted with something subhuman through original sin. To a certain extent, what man was to experience intellectually became diluted, more abstract, which in earlier life had been more dense, more natural, than it should be for mankind. It was only now that man was basically condemned to fall away from God through his intellectualism. The whole danger of intellectualism which pushes too far to greater abstraction, lived itself out in Luther's soul, and Luther really experienced it with such vehemence as described in his vicious battle at Wartburg Castle.

[ 17 ] We have two opposite poles which can clearly be determined in the newer evolution of mankind. On the one hand is Luther, positioned in the great spiritual battle after the middle of the 15th century—of course a little later—and now as a result, while he wanted to loosen himself from intellectual dangers, first renounces the intellect and seeks justification outside the intellect which can lead him to the divine, as it were, beneath the intellect.

The other pole is Faust. He took on the intellect with all his senses, resulting in his deteriorating into the dangers of the intellect, as he entered into all the individual dangers of the intellect. It is not for nothing that these personalities are a kind of landmark for modern mankind: on the one side Luther and what he connected to, and on the other side Faust, and what he associates with. It was truly no small deed of Goethe when he wanted to reshape Faust in such a way that he would not perish. Lessing already thought about it. If freedom is to be achieved for humanity, the intellect needs to be engaged with, but humanity should not be pushed away from the divine. The Faust fragment of Lessing ends with the words (of the angels to the devil): "You shall not prevail!" which Goethe remodelled. He said to himself there should be a possibility not to be separated from the divine when mankind engages with the intellect—but he needs it for the development of freedom. In this terrible battle Luther stood. He saw how the intellect contained within itself the danger that man also strangulates his soul from the divine, how man succumbs to the death of the soul. That which is devoured by the intellect—in anthroposophy we call it "becoming Ahrimanic"—which totally enters into the intellect, becomes devoured, it is cut off from the divine. This is what Luther felt for modern man.

Historically it was so that on the one hand there was the Catholic Church where people were absolutely not within the intellect, it even wants to save people by preventing them from entering into the intellect, it wanted to preserve them from progress made in the 15th century onwards by conserving such dogmas like the one which claims infallibility, such as the dogma regarding the immaculate conception, as I've mentioned earlier. They couldn't manage consequently in the Roman Catholic sense without the infallibility dogma because they even deny its intellectual meaning, declaring it unfit for development and incapable of understanding the spiritual world. A reinforcement was needed for what people had to believe, indicating the sovereignty of the Papal Command for the Truth. There is nothing more untimely, but basically nothing greater than this determination of the dogma of infallibility, to completely contradict all consciousness of the time and all human desires for freedom. It is the last consequence of the secularization of Catholicism in an iron clad consequence of tremendous genius. One must say if you take, on the one hand, the ironclad consequence of the Roman clerics in their determination of the infallibility dogma, and on the other hand the kind of polemics of a Dollinger, the latter is of course philistine in the face of tremendous ingenuity—you could even call it devilish—something is carried out, because it was once the consequence to that which Rome has come to since the secularization of Christianity by Constantine.

[ 18 ] So it happened that in the bosom of the Roman Catholics, two souls could live next to one another. On the one hand was the submission to the rigid dogma, which no human being could touch save the infallible Pope—because the Council had lost its power since the determination of the infallibility dogma—and on the other hand the unhindered care of outer science as an external manipulation to which one is devoted and partake off, but don't attribute any meaning to the actual content of religious doctrine. Just consider from a modern consciousness, what the justification of the Roman Catholic doctrine looks like. I suggest you read for instance such writing as "The Principle of Catholicism and Science" by Hertling, the previous German Imperial Chancellor.

Firstly, you'll discover that it was a world historic mistake for this man to have become the Imperial Chancellor but on the other hand you will learn something about the unusual thoughts modern people had and how these two souls could justifiably live in the same bosom. It is also remarkable that this writing on the principle of Catholicism appears in French. It is therefore extraordinarily interesting that the writer of this work, whose name doesn't come to my mind at the moment, has a perpetually logical conscience and therefore he has to make a differentiation between the Roman Catholic teaching material and what constitutes the content of outer science. That is why he proposes two concepts next to each other, the idea of truth and the idea of science, which he always sees as two disparate ideas. He says something can very well be scientific, but truth is something else; what is true does not need to be scientific. In some or other way he comes to the conclusion that science doesn't have anything to do with what one acknowledges directly as containing truth. So on the one hand things worthy of contemplation are mentioned, but are already beaten, on the other hand the most grotesque somersaults are being beaten in order for these two souls to become reconciled with one another.

[ 19 ] So, on the one hand we have the continuation of symbolism, the symbolism that led to the enormous upswing of art in the Renaissance period in central Europe. Art Historians need only dig deep enough to discover that without the Catholic symbolism the entire artistic development of Giotto, Cimabue, from Leonardo to Rafael and Michelangelo would have been impossible, because the artistic development is certainly a propagation of Christian artistic subjects and belongs so strongly in Christianity that people can't, for example, understand why the Sistine Madonna looks like she does.

Look at the Sistine Madonna, she is magnificent. As far as one can see there are images of clouds which transform purely into angelic heads, and how the Madonna herself, with the Child, condenses out of the angles who reside in the clouds. It is as if the angelic forms have condensed out of the cloud images and have descended down to the earth, yet everything is wonderfully lifted into the spirit. Then the two curtains (he sketches on the blackboard) and below that a coquettish female figure and a terrible priestly figure, all things which absolutely do not belong to it. Why is this so? It is simply from the basis of Raphael having initially intended with this image, to give a soul experience with the picture of Mary on a certain feast day of Mary—now this is on the Feast of Corpus Christi—where people walk around in a procession with a picture of the virgin Mary that is carried under a canopy and comes to the altars where people kneel down. This is why there are these curtains (points to sketch on blackboard) with the kneeling female and male forms in a chapel, in front of the picture of Mary. Well, that is the kind of elementary school way of looking at what Raphael painted. What is actually meant here stands right in the Roman Catholic cult—absolutely right inside it.

[ 20 ] Basically, everything contained in this Roman Catholic ritual is what Luther saw in Rome. Isn't it tremendously symbolic, historically symbolic, historically symptomatic, that Luther saw only corruption in Rome, not being actually touched deeper by what flowed out into depictions in art, how he was not deepened inwardly by art, but that he only saw moral corruption? Here we see how the soul in fact was positioned through his particular development in the historical becoming of mankind, he was like a soul at war, thrown this way and that, searching for a way out. Despite all this, like the doom of Lutherism in particular, comes the big problem: How do we as human beings absorb intellectualism, so that we are not doomed but that we overcome the fear of becoming doomed, because it is necessary for human freedom to integrate us?

Modern intellectualism presses strongly into our human consciousness. The evangelical church reckoned with it for centuries, the Catholic Church kept itself completely distanced from it. The evangelical church gradually withdrew back on to faith because with intellectualism, as it developed in the world, it didn't agree, so it increasingly withdrew from knowledge by depending on belief; it now rests within a faith in which the doctrine content is to be sought. The Catholic Church had doctrine content, but it was allowed to dry up. From the intellectual point of view the way to individuals can't be found, who see themselves isolated from those superhuman forces which could still be felt as being connected to Augustinism.

Basically we in humanity stand right in this battle today, only, if I could put it that way, we have come to the cutting edge, so that we simply stand there and say: We need a pure concept of faith so that we have a religion opposite intellectualism, because we can't take up the old Catholic doctrine, for it has dried out.—With this dried out dogmatic content the evangelical church rejected the ritual in the most varied forms. This is what started with Luther, putting us today on the knife edge; we must become aware of the seriousness of this position. It is a struggle for the power of faith in the soul, who wants to save the faith at the cost of not having the existing doctrine content at all. However, without content we can't learn, and it appears impossible to simply rediscover a bridge to what Catholicism has secularised.

[ 21 ] Now my dear friends, I come to the question of how we should proceed. It is like this: you see, with all this there was also an evangelical consciousness introduced in the evolution of humanity, in the individual human development, because the earlier evangelical consciousness to a certain degree entangled man in the supernatural, superhuman processes and acts of superhuman beings. With Augustus it was expressed somewhat differently, that the progress of humanity was permeated with the superhuman element ... (gap in notes). People saw the superhuman battle raging as something like Christ fighting against the enemy who wants to lead him into the temptation of appearing super human; that the one who drew near to the Christ was one to whom original guilt was traced back to, and it is shown how Christ turns against the original sin. This understanding has now come to an end. Earlier, this understanding had been adhered to, for what was supersensible-divine permeated earthly matter, and there already has been an intention present for specialization to make a dividing border between the supernatural, and that part of man entangled in sensuality.

This dividing border is done through consecration. Consecration is actually the separation of the human being, or that part of the human being, from being entangled in the earthly. The ordination of the priesthood is only one part because there are also implements and so on; everything possible is consecrated. Once during a war, the Pope consecrated the bullets but that is only due to the secularization of Catholicism.

[ 22 ] Do you see that consecration is really the dividing boundary between two worlds, and there is certainly the awareness in Catholicism—even if it is not present in individual priests—that a consecrated priest is active in another world when he does something, that he is also speaking from another world when he speaks of the Gospels, even though all his ordinary actions are in the earthly world. This differentiation could not be understood since the 15th century. In historic Catholicism, throughout, was this strong differentiation where, in circles of ordained priests, it was consciously stressed. Only now and then some bishop, by mistake, will bring something non-Catholic into Catholicism, namely modern consciousness, and that leads to absurdities. There was for example a pastoral letter written which claimed that the priest in the fulfilment of the sacrament at the altar would be more powerful than Christ Jesus, because he forces Christ Jesus to be present in the sacrament; Christ Jesus has to be present when the priests demands it; the result is that the priest is now more powerful than Christ.—This is the content of a pastoral letter of not long ago. You can come across such things when out of modern consciousness something is understood which should be understood in quite a different mood, namely that which lies beyond the earthly sphere and separated from it by the consecration.

[ 23 ] The principle of consecration comes from far, far back. It already existed in the oldest oriental religions and it was particularly developed on (the Greek island of) Samothrace. Catholicism took it over from ancient times but for the newer consciousness it was totally lost.

Tomorrow I will try to add further elements to it, so that you can come to a full understanding of the principle of consecration, and also priest ordination, without which the apostolic succession won't be comprehensible

[ 1 ] The views on the value and fruitfulness of philosophy have undergone a profound change within our nation in recent times. Whereas at the beginning of the century Fichte, Schelling and Hegel worked with bold intellectual courage to solve the riddles of the world and considered the human faculty of knowledge capable of penetrating into the deepest mysteries of existence, today we avoid entering into the central problems of the sciences because we are convinced that it is impossible for the human mind to answer the ultimate and highest questions. We have lost confidence in thinking. The despondency in the philosophical field is becoming more and more general. We can see this in the transformation that an important and meritorious contemporary philosopher has undergone since his first appearance in the mid-seventies. I am referring to Johannes Volkelt. In 1875, in the introduction to his book on "The Dream-Fantasy", this scholar sharply criticized the half-heartedness and feebleness of the thinking of his contemporaries, which did not want to penetrate the depths of objects, but tentatively and uncertainly groped around on their surface. And when he gave his inaugural speech in 1883 on taking up the professorship of philosophy in Basel, this timidity had affected him to such an extent that he proclaimed it a necessary requirement of philosophical thinking to dispense with clear, universally satisfactory solutions to the ultimate questions and to be content with finding the various possible solutions and the ways and means that could lead to the goal. However, this means declaring uncertainty to be a characteristic feature of all in-depth research. A clear proof of the discouragement in the philosophical field is the emergence of a myriad of writings on epistemology. No one today dares to apply his cognitive faculty to the study of world events until he has anxiously examined whether the instrument is suitable for such a beginning. The philosopher Lotze mocked this scientific activity with the words: the eternal sharpening of knives has already become boring. - However, epistemology does not deserve this mockery, as it is responsible for solving the big question: To what extent is man capable of taking possession of the secrets of the world through his knowledge? - Once we have found an answer to this question, we have solved an important part of the great problem of life: What is our relationship to the world? - It is impossible for us to avoid the task of testing and sharpening our tools for such important work. It is not the operation of epistemological research that is lamentable, but the results of this research in recent decades present us with a depressing picture. The "sharpening of the knives" has been to no avail, they have remained blunt. Almost without exception, epistemologists have come to the conclusion that the tentativeness in the field of philosophy necessarily follows from the nature of our cognitive faculty; they believe that the latter cannot penetrate to the bottom of things at all because of the insurmountable limits set for it. A number of philosophers maintain that the critique of knowledge leads to the conviction that there can be no philosophy apart from the individual empirical sciences and that all philosophical thought has only the task of providing a methodological foundation for individual empirical research. We have academic teachers of philosophy who see their real mission in destroying the prejudice that there is a philosophy.

[ 2 ] This view is damaging the entire scientific life of the present. Philosophers, who themselves lack any stability within their field, are no longer able to exert the kind of influence on the individual specialized sciences that would be desirable to deepen research. We have recently seen in a characteristic example that the representatives of individual research have lost all contact with philosophy. They drew the false conclusion from the Kantian approach, which they rightly describe as unfruitful for true science, that philosophy as such is superfluous. Hence they no longer regard the study of it as a necessary need of the scholar. The consequence of this is that they lose all understanding for a deeper conception of the world and do not even suspect that a truly philosophical view overlooks it and knows how to grasp its problems much more thoroughly than they themselves can. Eduard von Hartmann's "Philosophy of the Unconscious" was published in 1869. In one chapter of the book, the author attempted to deal philosophically with Darwinism. He found that the prevailing view of Darwinism at the time could not stand up to logical thinking and sought to deepen it. As a result, he was accused of dilettantism by natural scientists and condemned in the harshest possible terms. In numerous essays and writings he was accused of lacking insight into scientific matters. Among the opposing writings was one by an anonymous author. What it said was described by respected natural scientists as the best and most pertinent thing that could be said against Hartmann's views. The experts considered the philosopher to be completely refuted. The famous zoologist Dr. Oskar Schmidt said that Anonymus' writing had "completely confirmed the conviction of all those who are not sworn to the unconscious that Darwinism" - and Schmidt means the view of Darwinism held by natural scientists - "is right". And Ernst Haeckel, whom I also admire as the greatest German natural scientist of the present day, wrote: "This excellent paper says essentially everything that I myself could have said about the philosophy of the unconscious to the readers of the history of creation..."

[ 3 ] When a second edition of the work was later published, the author's name on the title page was Eduard von Hartmann. The philosopher had wanted to show that it was not at all impossible for him to familiarize himself with scientific thought and to speak in the language of natural scientists if he wanted to. Hartmann thus provided proof that it is not the philosophers who lack an understanding of natural science, but conversely the representatives of the latter who lack insight into philosophy.

[ 4 ] The situation is no better with literary history. The followers of Scherer, who currently dominate this field, show in their writings that they lack any philosophical education. Scherer himself was alien and hostile to philosophy. With such an attitude, however, it is impossible to understand the German classics, because their creations are completely imbued with the philosophical spirit of their time and can only be understood from this.

[ 5 ] If we want to summarize these facts in a few words, we must say: the belief in philosophy has experienced a deep shake-up in the widest circles.

[ 6 ] According to my conviction, for which I will provide some evidence in a moment, the current characterized here is one of the saddest scientific aberrations. But before expressing my own opinion, allow me to indicate where the reason for the error lies.

[ 7 ] Our philosophical science is under the powerful influence of Kantianism. This influence is more significant today than it has been at any time. In 1865, Otto Liebmann demanded in his essay "Kant and the Epigones" that we must return to Kant in philosophy. - He saw the salvation of his science in the fulfillment of this demand. He was merely expressing the view of the vast majority of philosophers of our time. And natural scientists, insofar as they are still concerned with philosophical concepts, also see Kant's doctrine as the only possible form of central science. Starting from philosophers and naturalists, this opinion has also penetrated the wider circles of educated people who have an interest in philosophy. Kant's view has thus become a driving force in our scientific thinking. Without ever having read a line by Kant or heard a sentence from his teachings, most of our contemporaries view world events in his way, for a century the proud-sounding word has been uttered again and again: Kant had liberated thinking humanity from the shackles of philosophical dogmatism, which made empty assertions about the essence of things without undertaking a critical investigation into whether the human mind was also capable of making out something absolutely valid about this essence. - For many who utter this word, however, the old dogma has been replaced by a new one, namely that of the irrefutable truth of Kant's fundamental views. These can be summarized in the following sentences: A thing can only be perceived by us if it makes an impression on us, exerts an effect. But then it is always only this effect that we perceive, never the "thing in itself". We cannot form any concept of the latter. The effects of things on us are now our perceptions. What we know of the world is therefore not the things, but our ideas of the things. The world given to us is not a world of being, but a world of imagination or appearance. The laws according to which the details of this imaginary world are linked can of course not be the laws of the "things in themselves", but those of our subjective organism. What is to become an appearance for us must obey the laws of our subject. Things can only appear to us in a way that corresponds to our nature. We ourselves prescribe the laws of the world that appears to us - and this alone we know.

[ 8 ] What Kant thought he had gained for philosophy with these views becomes clear if we take a look at the scientific currents from which he grew and which he confronted. Before the Kantian reform, the teachings of the Leibniz-Wolff school were the only dominant ones in Germany. The followers of this school wanted to arrive at the fundamental truths about the nature of things by means of purely conceptual thinking. The knowledge gained in this way was regarded as clear and necessary as opposed to that gained through sensory experience, which was seen as confused and random. Only through pure concepts was it believed that scientific insights into the deeper context of world events, the nature of the soul and God, i.e. the so-called absolute truths, could be gained. Kant was also a follower of this school in his pre-critical period. His first writings are entirely in its spirit. A change in his views occurred when he became acquainted with the explanations of the English philosopher Hume. The latter sought to prove that there is no such thing as knowledge other than experience. We perceive the sunbeam, and then we notice that the stone on which it falls has warmed up. We perceive this again and again and get used to it. We therefore assume that the connection between the sun's rays and the warming of the stone will continue to apply in the same way in the future. However, this is by no means a certain and necessary knowledge. Nothing guarantees us that an event which we are accustomed to seeing in a certain way will not take place quite differently on the next occasion. All propositions in our sciences are only expressions established by habit for frequently noticed connections between things. Therefore, there can be no knowledge about those objects which philosophers strive for. Here we lack experience, which is the only source of our knowledge. Man must be content with mere belief about these things. If science wants to deal with them, it degenerates into an empty game with concepts without content. - These propositions apply, in the sense of Hume, not only to the last psychological and theological insights, but also to the simplest laws of nature, for example the proposition that every effect must have a cause. This judgment, too, is derived only from experience and established by habit. Hume only accepts as unconditionally valid and necessary those propositions in which the predicate is basically already included in the subject, as is the case, in his view, with mathematical judgments.

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

[ 10 ] But it is also clear that these concepts can only receive their content from the outside, from experience. In themselves they are empty and meaningless. We do know through them how an object must appear to us if it is given to us at all. But the fact that it is given to us, that it enters our field of vision, depends on experience. How things are in themselves, apart from our experience, is therefore not something we can determine through our concepts.

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

[ 12 ] We have seen that Kant adopted this view in order to save as much as possible of each of the two opposing philosophical doctrines from which he proceeded. This tendency gave rise to a contrived view of our cognition, which we need only compare with what direct and unbiased observation reveals in order to see the entire untenability of Kant's thought structure. Kant thinks of our experiential knowledge as having arisen from two factors: from the impressions that things outside us make on our sensibility, and from the forms in which our sensibility and our understanding arrange these impressions. The former are subjective, for I do not perceive the thing, but only the way in which my sensuality is affected by it. My organism undergoes a change when something acts from the outside. This change, i.e. a state of my self, my sensation, is what is given to me. In the act of grasping, our sensuality organizes these sensations spatially and temporally, the mind again organizes the spatial and temporal according to concepts. This organization of sensations, the second factor of our cognition, is thus also entirely subjective. - This theory is nothing more than an arbitrary construction of thought that cannot stand up to observation. Let us first ask ourselves the question: Does a single sensation occur anywhere for us, separately and apart from other elements of experience? - Let us look at the content of the world given to us. It is a continuous whole. If we direct our attention to any point in our field of experience, we find that there is something else all around. There is nowhere here that exists in isolation. One sensation is connected to another. We can only artificially single it out from our experience; in truth, it is connected with the whole of the reality given to us. This is where Kant made a mistake. He had a completely wrong idea of the nature of our experience. The latter does not, as he believed, consist of an infinite number of little mosaic pieces from which we make a whole through purely subjective processes, but it is given to us as a unity: one perception merges into another without a definite boundary. If we want to consider an individuality separately, we must first artificially lift it out of the context in which it is located. Nowhere, for example, is the individual sensation of red given to us as such; it is surrounded on all sides by other qualities to which it belongs and without which it could not exist. We must disregard everything else and focus our attention on the one perception if we want to consider it in its isolation. This lifting of a thing out of its context is a necessity for us if we want to look at the world at all. We are organized in such a way that we cannot perceive the world as a whole, as a single perception. The right and left, the top and bottom, the red next to the green in my field of vision are in reality in uninterrupted connection and mutual togetherness. However, we can only look in one direction and only perceive what is connected in nature separately. Our eye can only ever perceive individual colors from a multi-membered color whole, our mind individual conceptual elements from a coherent system of ideas. The separation of an individual sensation from the world context is therefore a subjective act, conditioned by the peculiar arrangement of our mind. We must dissolve the unified world into individual perceptions if we want to observe it.

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

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

[ 15 ] The reason why we can only take possession of the objective form of the world in the detour described above lies in the dual nature of man. As a rational being, he is very well able to imagine the cosmos as a unity in which each individual appears as a member of the whole; as a sensual being, however, he is bound to place and time, he can only perceive individual of the infinitely many members of the cosmos. Experience can therefore only provide a form of reality conditioned by the limitations of our individuality, from which reason must first gain the objective. Sensual perception thus distances us from reality, while rational contemplation leads us back to it. A being whose sensuality could view the world in one act would not need reason. A single perception would provide it with what we can only achieve by combining an infinite number of them.

[ 16 ] The examination of our cognitive faculty that we have just undertaken leads us to the view that reason is the organ of objectivity or that it provides us with the actual form of reality. We must not allow ourselves to be deceived by the fact that reason appears to lie entirely within our subjectivity. We have seen that, in truth, its activity is intended precisely to abolish the subjective character that our experience receives through sensory perception. Through this activity, the contents of perception themselves re-establish in our minds the objective context from which our senses have torn them.

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

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

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

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

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

[ 22 ] Such a dualism is also Kantianism. Appearance and the "as-itself" of things are not opposites within the given world, but one side, the "as-itself", lies outside the given. - As long as we separate the latter into parts - however small these may be in relation to the universe - we are simply following a law of our personality; but if we consider everything given, all phenomena, as one part and then oppose it with a second, then we are philosophizing into the blue. We are then merely playing with concepts. We construct a contrast, but cannot gain any content for the second element, because such a content can only be drawn from the given. Any kind of being that is assumed to exist outside the latter is to be relegated to the realm of unjustified hypotheses. Kant's "thing-in-itself" belongs in this category, and no less the idea that a large proportion of modern physicists have of matter and its atomistic composition. If I am given any sensory perception, for example the perception of color or heat, then I can make qualitative and quantitative distinctions within this perception; I can encompass the spatial structure and the temporal progression that I perceive with mathematical formulas, I can regard the phenomena as cause and effect according to their nature, and so on: but with this process of thinking I must remain within what is given to me. If we practise a careful self-criticism of ourselves, we also find that all our abstract views and concepts are only one-sided images of the given reality and only have sense and meaning as such. We can imagine a space closed on all sides, in which a number of elastic spheres move in all directions, bumping into each other, bouncing against and off the walls; but we must be clear that this is a one-sided idea that only gains meaning when we think of the purely mathematical image as being filled with a sensuously real content. But if we believe that we can explain a perceived content causally through an imperceptible process of being that corresponds to the mathematical structure described and that takes place outside our given world, then we lack any self-criticism. Modern mechanical heat theory makes the mistake described above. The same can be said of modern color theory. It, too, places something that is only a one-sided image of the sensory world behind it as its cause. The whole wave theory of light is only a mathematical image that represents the spatio-temporal relationships of this particular field of appearance in a one-sided way. The undulation theory turns this image into a real reality that can no longer be perceived, but is rather the cause of what we perceive.

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

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

[ 25 ] A scientific dissection of our cognitive activity leads, as we have seen, to the conviction that the questions we have to ask of nature are a consequence of the peculiar relationship in which we stand to the world. We are limited individualities and can therefore only perceive the world piecemeal. Each piece, considered in and of itself, is a riddle or, to put it another way, a question for our cognition. However, the more details we get to know, the clearer the world becomes. One perception explains another. There are no questions that the world poses to us that cannot be answered with the means it offers us. For monism, therefore, there are no fundamental limits to knowledge. This or that can be unresolved at any given time because we were not yet in a position in terms of time or space to find the things that are involved. But what has not yet been found today may be found tomorrow. The limits caused by this are only accidental ones that disappear with the progress of experience and thought. In such cases, the formation of hypotheses comes into its own. Hypotheses may not be formed about something that is supposed to be inaccessible to our knowledge in principle. The atomistic hypothesis is a completely unfounded one. A hypothesis can only be an assumption about a fact that is not accessible to us for accidental reasons, but which by its nature belongs to the world given to us. For example, a hypothesis about a certain state of our earth in a long-gone period is justified. Admittedly, this state can never become an object of experience because completely different conditions have arisen in the meantime. However, if a perceiving individual had been there at the assumed time, then he would have perceived the state. In contrast, the hypothesis that all sensorygualities owe their origin only to quantitative processes is unjustified, because processes without quality cannot be perceived.

[ 26 ] Monism or the unified explanation of nature emerges from a critical self-examination of man. This observation leads us to reject all explanatory causes outside the world. However, we can also extend this view to man's practical relationship to the world. Human action is, after all, only a special case of general world events. Its explanatory principles can therefore likewise only be sought within the world given to us. Dualism, which seeks the basic forces of the reality available to us in a realm inaccessible to us, also places the commandments and norms of our actions there. Kant is also caught up in this error. He regards the moral law as a commandment imposed on man by a world that is alien to us, as a categorical imperative that he must obey, even when his own nature develops inclinations that oppose such a voice sounding from the hereafter into our here and now. One need only recall Kant's well-known apostrophe to duty to find this reinforced: "Duty! thou great and sublime name, who dost not hold in thyself anything that is pleasing and ingratiating, but dost demand submission", who dost "lay down a law... before which all inclinations fall silent, even if they secretly work against it." Monism opposes such an imperative imposed on human nature from the outside with the moral motives born of the human soul itself. It is a delusion to believe that man can act according to other than self-made imperatives. The respective inclinations and cultural needs generate certain maxims that we call our moral principles. Since certain ages or peoples have similar inclinations and aspirations, the people who belong to them will also establish similar principles to satisfy them. In any case, however, such principles, which then act as ethical motives, are by no means implanted from outside, but are born out of needs, i.e. generated within the reality in which we live. The moral code of an age or people is simply the expression of how one believes it is best to approach the prevailing cultural goals within it. Just as the effects of nature arise from causes that lie within the given nature, so our moral actions are the results of motives that lie within our cultural process. Monism thus seeks the reason for our actions within human nature in the strictest sense of the word. However, it also makes man his own lawgiver. Dualism demands submission to moral commandments taken from somewhere; monism points man to himself, to his autonomous being. It makes him the master of himself. Only from the standpoint of monism can we understand man as a truly free being in the ethical sense. Duties are not imposed on him by another being, but his actions are simply guided by the principles that everyone finds lead him to the goals that he considers worth striving for. A moral view based on monism is the enemy of all blind faith in authority. The autonomous man does not follow a guideline which he is merely supposed to believe will lead him to his goal, but he must realize that it will lead him there, and the goal itself must appear to him individually as a desirable one. This is also the basic idea of the modern state, which is based on the representation of the people. The autonomous individual wants to be governed according to laws that he has given himself. If the moral maxims were determined once and for all, they would simply have to be codified and the government would have to enforce them. Knowledge of the general human moral code would be sufficient for government. If the wisest person, who knows the contents of this holy book best, were always at the head of the state, the ideal of a human constitution would be achieved. This is roughly how Plato conceived the matter. The wisest would command and the others would obey. The representation of the people only makes sense on the condition that the laws are the expression of the cultural needs of an age, and these latter are again rooted in the aspirations and wishes of the individual. Through the representation of the people it is to be achieved that the individual is governed according to laws which he can say correspond to his own inclinations and aims. In this way the will of the state is to be brought into the greatest possible congruence with the will of the individual. With the help of popular representation, the autonomous individual makes his own laws. Through the modern constitution of the state, then, that which alone has reality in the realm of morality, namely individuality, is to be brought to bear, in contrast to the state, which is based on authority and obedience, and which has no meaning unless one wishes to attribute an objective reality to abstract moral norms. I do not wish to assert that we may at the present time present the ideal state I have characterized as desirable everywhere. The inclinations of the people who belong to our national communities are too unequal for that. A large part of the people is dominated by needs too base for us to wish that the will of the state should be the expression of such needs. But mankind is in a state of continuous development, and a sensible popular education will try to raise the general level of education so that every man can be capable of being his own master. Our cultural development must move in this direction. We do not promote culture through paternalistic laws that prevent people from becoming the plaything of their blind instincts, but by encouraging people to seek a goal worth striving for only in their higher inclinations. Then we can let them become their own legislators without danger. The task of culture therefore lies solely in the expansion of knowledge. If, on the other hand, associations are formed in our time that want to declare morality to be independent of knowledge, such as the "German Society for Ethical Culture", this is a fatal error. This society wants to induce people to live according to general human moral standards. Indeed, it also wants to make a code of such standards an integral part of our teaching. This brings me to an area that has so far been least touched by the teachings of monism. I am referring to pedagogy. What is most incumbent upon it: the free development of individuality, the only reality in the field of culture, is what has been most neglected up to now, and the budding human being has instead been locked into a network of norms and commandments which he is to follow in his future life. The fact that everyone, even the least of us, has something within himself, an individual fund that enables him to achieve things that only he alone can achieve in a very specific way: this is forgotten. Instead, they are put through the torture of general conceptual systems, tied to conventional prejudices and their individuality is undermined. For the true educator, there are no general educational norms, such as those that the Herbartian school wants to establish. For the true educator, every person is something new and unprecedented, an object of study from whose nature he draws the very individual principles according to which he should educate in this case. The demand of monism is that, instead of implanting general methodological principles in prospective educators, they should train them to become psychologists who are capable of understanding the individualities they are to educate. Monism is thus suited to serve our greatest goal in all areas of knowledge and life: the development of the human being towards freedom, which is synonymous with the cultivation of the individual in human nature. That our time is receptive to such teachings, I believe I can infer from the fact that a young generation enthusiastically acclaimed the man who for the first time transferred the monistic teachings to the field of ethics in a popular manner, albeit reflected from a sick soul: I mean Friedrich Nietzsche. The enthusiasm he found is proof that there are not a few among our contemporaries who are tired of chasing after moral chimeras and who seek morality where alone it really lives: in the human soul. Monism as a science is the basis for truly free action, and our development can only take the course: through monism to the philosophy of freedom!

Lyrical speaking for spiritual life; dramatic speaking for rights-relationships; epic speaking for economic conditions. About economic life within the social organism. The formulation of key sentences. Speech exercises.

I have tried to characterize how one can formulate a lecture on the threefold order from out of one thought, and then arrange it in sections. What one can generally say concerning the whole social organism, as well as references to what can occur in the first two realms—namely that of the spiritual life and that of the judicial, the body politic was contained in what I said. [Note 1] You will have understood from that, how preparing oneself for the content of such a lecture, one can proceed.

Now, one can also prepare oneself for the form of delivery by immersing oneself into the thoughts and feelings. We shall perhaps understand each other best if I say that the preparation should be such that we try hard first to sense and then to utter what is related to the spiritual life in a more lyrical language (without, of course, resorting to singing, recitation, or some such thing),—in a lyrical manner of speech, with quiet enthusiasm, so that one demonstrates through the way of delivering the matters that everything one has to say concerning the spiritual life comes from out of oneself. One should by all means call forth the impression that one is enthusiastic about what one envisions for the spiritual part of the social organism. Naturally, it must not be false, mystical, sentimental enthusiasm; a made-up enthusiasm. We achieve the right impression if we prepare ourselves first in imagination, in inner experience—even so far as to modulation—how, approximately, something like that could be said. I say specifically, “how, approximately, something like that could be said,” for the reason that we should never commit ourselves word for word; rather what we prepare is, in a sense, a speech taking its course only in inward thoughts; and we are certainly ready to re-formulate what we finally come out and say.

But when we speak about rights-relationships, we should make the attempt to speak dramatically. That implies: when we lecture about the equality of men, discussing it by means of examples, we should try as much as possible to put ourselves into the other person's position with our thinking. For instance, we should call to mind the image of how a person who seeks work, asserts his right to work in the sense of Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage (the threefold social order). By making it evident that on one hand we are speaking from the other person's position, from out of his assertion of rights, we should then make it evident how through a slight change in the tone of voice we pass on to the topic of how one ought to meet such an assertion out of general humanitarian reasons. So it is dramatic speaking, very strongly modulated, dramatic lecturing, that calls forth the impression in listeners that one could think one's way into the souls of other persons; that is the manner we should employ in speaking about the rights-relationships.

When lecturing on economic conditions, the main point is that we speak directly from experience. If, in the spirit of the threefold social organism, one speaks about economic relationships, one should not permit the belief to arise that there even could be such a thing as a theoretical political economy. Instead, one should limit the main discussion to describing cases taken from the economic life itself; either cases that one repeats, or cases that one construes as to how they should be or could be. But with the latter cases—saying how they should or could be—one must never neglect to speak out of economic experience. Actually, when lecturing on the economic life, one should speak in an epic style. Particularly, when presenting what is written in the Kernpunkte, one should speak as if one had no preconceived ideas at all concerning the economic life, and had no notions that this should be thus and so; instead, one should speak as if one were informed on all and everything by the facts themselves.

One can evoke a certain feeling, for example, that it is correct to permit the transfer of the administration of monetary funds from one who is not involved in it himself anymore, to somebody who once again can participate in it. But one can only speak about something like that if one presents it to people by means of descriptions of what takes place if there are legacies merely due to blood-relationships, or what can take place when such a transfer is occasioned in the way it is described in the Kernpunkte. Only by placing such a matter before people in a living way, as if one were copying reality, can one speak in such a way that the speech truly stands within the economic life. And just in this way, one can make the idea of “associations” [Note 2] comprehensible and plausible. One will make it plausible that an individual person really knows nothing about the economic life; that if he wants to arrive at a judgement as to what must be done in the life of the economy, he is basically completely dependent on communicating with others. A sound economic view can only emerge from groups of people and one is therefore dependent on associations.

Then, one will perhaps meet with comprehension if one calls attention to the fact that much of what exists today actually came out of ancient, instinctive associations. Just consider for a moment how today's abstract market brings things together, whose combination and redistribution to the consumer cannot be surveyed at all. But how has one arrived at this market-relationship in the first place? Basically, from the instinctive association of a number of villages located around a larger township, at a distance that one could travel back and forth on foot in one day, where people exchanged their products. One did not call that an association. One did not coin any word for it, but in reality it was an instinctive association. Those people who here came together for the market were associated with all of those who lived in the surrounding villages. They could count on a set circulation of goods that resulted from experience. Therefore they could regulate production according to consumption in truly alive relationships. There certainly existed such associative conditions in such primitive economies; they just didn't call themselves that.

All this has become impossible to over-see, with the enlargement of the economic territories. In particular, it has become senseless in regard to the world economy. The world economy which has come into being only in the last third of the 19th century, has reduced everything into an abstract realm; that is, it has reduced everything in the economic life to the turn-over of money or its monetary value, until this reduction has proven its own absurdity.

Indeed, when Japan fought a war with China and Japan won the war, one could very simply pay the war reparations by way of the Chinese Minister's handing a check to the Japanese Delegate, which the latter then deposited in a bank in Japan. This is an actual course of events. There were values contained in this check, which is money and has monetary value. It represented values. If you imagine how at that time everything should have been transported from one territory into the other this would have been a difficult process under modern-day conditions. But owing to the manner in which Japan and China were placed within the whole world economy, it could be done this way. However, all this has led itself to a point of absurdity. In the dealings between Germany and France, it has proven itself to be impossible. [Note 3] I am therefore of the opinion that the state of affairs can best be explained out of the economic relationships themselves, and then one can explain the necessity for the associative principle.

Once again, one should have to divide this subject matter regarding the economic life in a certain way, and one would have to pass on to several concluding sentences of which I have already said that they again should be conceived verbatim or at least almost word for word.

So, how will the preparation for a speech appear, in fact? Well, one should try one's best to get into the situation or the subject that the audience is prepared for, by formulating the opening sentences in a way one considers necessary. One will have greater difficulty in the case of completely unprepared listeners; less difficulty, if one addresses a group that one finds already involved in the matter, at least possessing the corresponding feelings concerning the assertions one makes. Then, one will neither write down the rest of the speech nor jot down mere catch-words. Experience shows that neither the verbatim composition nor the mere noting down of catch-words leads to a good speech. The reason for not writing down the speech is because it ties one down and easily causes embarrassment when the memory falters; this is most frequently the case when the speech is written down word for word. Catch-words easily mislead one to formulate the whole preparation too abstractly. On the other hand, if one needs to have such a support, what one should best write down and bring along as notes are a number of correctly formulated sentences that serve as catch-phrases. They do not make the claim that one delivers them in the same way as a part of the speech; instead, they indicate: first, second, third, fourth, and so on; they are extracts, so to speak, so that from one sentence perhaps ten or eight or twelve will result. But one should write such sentences down. One should therefore not write down, “spiritual life conceived as independent”; instead, “the spiritual life can only thrive if it freely works independently out of itself.” (Catch-phrases, with other words.) If you do something like this, you will then have the experience yourself that owing to such catch-phrases, you can in a relatively short time most readily attain to a certain facility of speaking freely, a speaking that only contains the ladder of catch-phrases.

Concerning the conclusion, it is often very good if, in a certain sense, at least gently, one leads back to the beginning; if therefore the end, in a sense, contains something that, as a theme, was also contained in the beginning.

And then, such catch-phrases readily give one the opportunity to really prepare oneself in the way indicated above by having noted these sentences down on one's piece of paper. So, let us say, one ponders the following: what you have to say for the spiritual life must have a sort of lyrical nature within you; what you have to say concerning the rights-relationships must have a kind of dramatic character in your mind; and what concerns the economic life must live in your mind in a narrative, epic form; a quiet, narrative, epic character. Then, the desire, as well as the skill, to word the catch- phrases in the formulation that I have indicated, will indeed begin to arise instinctively. The preparation will result quite instinctively in such a way that the manner in which one speaks merges indeed into what one has to say concerning the subject. For this it is, however, necessary to have brought one's command of language to the level of instinct, so that one indeed experiences the speech-organs the way one would, for instance, feel the hammer, if one wanted to use the hammer for something. That can be achieved, if one practices a little speech-gymnastics.

It's true, isn't it, when one practices gymnastics, those are not movements that are later executed in real life; but they are movements that make one flexible and dextrous. Similarly, one should make the speech-organs pliable and adroit; but making the latter pliable and dextrous is something that must be accomplished so that it goes together with the inner soul life, and so that one learns to be aware of the sound in speaking. In the seminar courses that I held over two years ago in Stuttgart for the Waldorf school teachers, I put together a number of such speech exercises that I now want to pass on to you. They are mostly of a kind that, by their content, does not prevent one from learning to merge oneself purely into the element of speech; they are only designed for practicing speech-gymnastics. If one tries again and again to say these sentences aloud, but in such a way that one always probes: how does one best use his tongue, how does one best use his lips so as to produce this particular sequence of sounds?—then one makes oneself independent of speaking and, instead, places that much more value on mental preparation for lecturing.

I shall now read you a number of such sentences whose content is often senseless, but they are designed to make the speech-organs pliable and fit for public speaking. [Note 4]

Dass er dir log, uns darf es nicht loben.

(That he told lies, 't'is not to be lauded.)

is the easiest one.

Something a bit more complicated:

Nimm nicht Nonnen in nimmermuede Muehlen.

(Take not nuns in never-tired mills.)

One should increasingly try, along with the sequence of sounds, to make the organs of speech pliable; to bend, to hollow, to take possession of them [Note 5]

Another example:

Rate mir mehrere Raetsel nur richtig.

It is naturally not enough to say something like this once, or ten times; but again and again and again, because even if the speech-organs are already pliable, they can become still more so.

An example that I consider to be particularly useful is the following:

Redlich ratsam
Ruestet ruehmlich
Riesig raechend
Ruhig rollend
Reuige Rosse

With this, one has the opportunity to regulate the breath in the pauses, something one has to pay attention to and that can be particularly well done through such an exercise.

In a similar way, not all the letters, nor all the sounds, have the same value for this practicing. You make progress if you take the following, for example:

Protzig preist
Baeder bruenstig
Polternd putzig
Bieder bastelnd
Puder patzend
Bergig bruestend

If you succeed in finding your way into this sequence of sounds, you gain much from it.

When one has done such exercises, then one can also try to do those exercises that cannot but result in bringing a mood into the speaking of the sounds. I have tried to give an example of how the sounds can pour into the mood in the following:

and now it passes more into the sounds, through which, here in particular, the mood in the sound itself is held fast:

You will always discover, when you do these exercises in particular, how you are able, without letting the breath disturb you, to regulate the breathing by simply holding yourself onto the sounds. In recent times, one has thought up all kinds of more or less clever methods for breathing and for all kinds of accompanying aspects of speaking and singing, but actually, all of those are no good, because speech with everything that belongs with it, with the breath, too, should by all means be learned through actual speaking. This implies that one should learn to speak in such a way that, within the boundaries that result from the sound sequence and the word relationships, the breath also regulates itself as a matter of course. In other words, one should only learn breathing during speech—in speaking itself. Therefore, the exercises of speech should be so designed that, in correctly feeling them regarding their sounds, one is obliged—not by the content but by the sounds—to formulate the breath correctly because he experiences the sound correctly.

What the verse below represents, points once again to the content of the mood. It has four lines; these four lines are arranged so that they are an ascent, as it were. Each line causes an expectation, and the fifth line is the conclusion and brings fulfilment. Now one should really make an effort to execute this speech movement that I have just characterized. The verse goes like this:

In den unermesslich weiten Raeumen,
In den endenlosen Zeiten,
In der Menschenseele Tiefen,
In der Weltenoffenbarung:
Suche des grossen Raetsels Loesung.

(In the immeasurably wide realms,
in the never-ending ages,
in the human soul's depths
in the world's revelation:
seek the great riddle's answer.)

There you have the fifth line representing the fulfillment of that escalating expectation that is evoked in the first four lines.

***

Speech exercises and speech gymnastics; the effect of coffee and tea upon the speaker; respect for the audience through proper preparation.

One can also attempt to, well, let me say, bring the mood of the situation into the sounds, into the mode of speaking, the how of speech. And for that I have formulated the following exercise. One should picture a sizable green frog that sits in front of him with its mouth open. In other words, one should imagine that one confronts a giant frog with an open mouth. And now, one should picture what sort of reactions, effects, one can have regarding this frog. There will be humor in the emotion as well as all that should be evoked in the soul in a lively manner. Then, one should address this frog in the following way:

Lalle Lieder lieblich
Lipplicher Laffe
Lappiger lumpiger
Laichiger Lurch

Picture to yourself: that a horse is walking across a field. The content does not matter. Naturally, you must now imagine that horses whistle! Now you express the fact that you have here in the following manner:

Pfiffig pfeifen
Pfaeffische Pferde
Pflegend Pfluege
Pferchend Pfirsiche

and then you vary that by saying it this way:

Pfiffig pfeifen aus Naepfen
Pfaeffische Pferde schluepfend
Pflegend Pfluege huepfend
Pferchend Pfirsiche knuepfend

And then—but please, do learn it by heart, so that you can fluently repeat the one version after the other—there is a third version. Learn all three by heart, and try to say them so fluently that during the speaking of one version you will not be confused by the other. That is what counts. Take as the third form:

Kopfpfiffig pfeifen aus Naepfen
Napfpfaeffische Pferde schluepfend
Wipfend pflegend Pfluege huepfend
Tipfend pferchend Pfirsiche knuepfend

Learn one after the other, so that you can do the three versions by heart, and that one never interferes when you say the other.

Something similar can be done with the following two verses:

Ketzer petzten jetzt klaeglich
Letztlich leicht skeptisch

and now the other version:

Ketzerkraechzer petzten jetzt klaeglich
Letztlich ploetzlich leicht skeptisch

Again, learn it by heart and say one after the other!

One can achieve smooth speech if one practices something like the following:

Nur renn nimmer reuig
Gierig grinsend
Knoten knipsend
Pfaender knuepfend

One has to accustom oneself to say this sound sequence, ‘Nur renn ...’. You will see what you gain for your tongue, your organs of speech, if you do such exercises.

Now, such an exercise that lasts a bit longer, through which this flexibility of speech can be attained—I believe actors have already discovered afterwards that this was the best way to make their speech pliable:

Zuwider zwingen zwar
Zweizweckige Zwacker zu wenig
Zwanzig Zwerge
Die sehnige Krebse
Maher suchend schmausen
Dass schmatzende Schrnachter
Schmiegsam schnellstens
Schnurrig schnalzen

And then: one occasionally requires presence of mind in direct speech. One can acquire it by something like the following:

Klipp plapp plick glick
Klingt Klapperrichtig
Knatternd trappend
Rossegetrippel

Then, for further acquisition of presence of mind in speaking, the following two examples can be placed together:

Schlinge Schlange geschwinde
Gewundene Fundewecken weg

The ‘Wecken weg’ is in there, too, but as a sound-motif, thus:

Gewundene Fundewecken
Geschwinde schlinge Schlange weg

The following example is useful for putting some muscle into speech, so that one is in a position, in speaking, to slap somebody down in a discussion sometimes (something that is quite necessary in speaking!):

Marsch schmachtender
Klappriger Racker
Krackle plappernd linkisch
Kink von vorne fort

Then, for somebody who stutters a little, the following two examples should still be mentioned:

Nimm mir nimmer
Was sich waesserig
Mit Teilen mitteilt

For everyone who stutters, this example is good. When stuttering, one can also say it in the way below:

Nimmer nimm mir
Waesserige Wickel
Was sich schlecht mitteilt
Mit Teilen deiner Rede

The point is, of course, that the person who stutters must make a real effort.

One should by no means believe that what I want to call speech-gymnastics, can or should only be practiced with sentences that are meaningful for the intellect. Because in those sentences that contain sense for the intellect, the attentiveness for the meaning instinctively outweighs anything else too much, so that we do not rely correctly on the sounds, the saying. And it is really necessary that, in a certain sense, we tear speaking loose from ourselves, actually manage to separate it from ourselves. In the same way as one can separate writing from one's self, one can also tear speaking loose from oneself.

There are two ways to write for the human being. One way consists of man's writing egotistically; he has the forms of the letters in his limbs, as it were, and lets them flow out of his limbs. One emphasized such a style of writing for a certain length of time—it is probably still the same today—when one gave lessons in penmanship for those who were to be employed in business offices or people like that. I have, for example, observed at one time how such a lesson in writing was conducted for employees of commercial establishments so that the persons in question had to develop every letter out of a kind of curve. They had to learn swinging motions with the hand; then they had to put these motions down on paper; this way, everything is in the hand, in the limbs; and one is not really present with anything but the hand in writing. Another form of writing is the one that is not egotistical; it is the unselfish style of writing. It consists of not really writing with the hand, as it were, but with the eye; one always looks at it and basically draws the letter. Thus, what is in the formation of the hand is of importance to a lesser degree: one really acts like one does when sketching, where one is not the slave of a handwriting. Instead, after a while, one has difficulty in even writing one's name the same way one has written it just the time before. For most people it is so terribly easy to write their name the way they have always written it. It flows out of their hand. But those persons who place something artistic into the script, they write with the eye. They follow the style of the lines with the eye. And there, the script indeed separates itself from the person. Then—while it is in a certain respect not desirable to practice that—a person can imitate scripts, vary scripts in different ways. I do not say that one should practice that especially, but I mean that it results as an extreme when one paints one's script, as it were. This is the more unselfish writing. Writing out of the limbs, on the other hand, is the more selfish, the egotistic way.

Speech is also selfish, in most people. It simply emerges out of the speech-organs. But you can gradually accustom yourselves to experience your speech in such a way that it seems as if it floated around you, as if the words flew around you. You can really have a sort of experience of your words. Then, speaking separates itself from the person. It becomes objective. Man hears himself speak quite instinctively. In speaking, his head becomes enlarged, as it were, and one feels the weaving of sounds and the words in one's surroundings. One gradually learns to listen to the sounds, the words. And one can achieve that particularly through such exercises. That way, there is in fact not just yelling into a room anymore—by yelling, I do not mean shouting out loud only; one can yell in whispering, too, if one actually speaks only for one's own sake, the way it emerges out of the speech-organs—instead one really lives, in speaking, with space. One feels the resonance in space, as it were. This has become a fumbling mischief in certain speech-theories—theories of speech-teaching or speech-study, if you will—of recent times. One has made people speak with body-resonance, with abdominal resonances, with nasal resonances, and so forth. But all these inner resonances are a vice. A true resonance can only be an experienced one. One experiences such a resonance not by the impact of the sound against the interior of the nose; instead one feels it only in front of the nose, outside. Thus, language in fact attains to abundance. And of course, the language of a speaker should be abundant. A speaker should swallow as little as possible.

Do not believe that this is unimportant for the speaker; it is rather of great significance for the speaker. Whether we present something in a correct way to people depends most certainly on what position we are able to take in regard to speech itself. One doesn't have to go quite so far as a certain actor who was acquainted with me, who never said “Freundrl” [Austrian dialect for “Friend”—note by translator] but always “Freunderl”, because he wanted to place himself into every syllable. He did that to the extreme. But one should develop the instinctive talent not to swallow syllables, syllable-forms, and syllable-formations. One can accomplish that if one tries to find one's way into rhythmic speech in such a way that, placing one's self into the whole sound-modulation, one recites to oneself:

Und es wallet und siedet und brauset und zischt,
Wie wenn Wasser mit Feuer sich mengt ...
(Quote from Schiller's The Diver)

So: it is a matter of placing one's self not only into the sound as such but into the sound-modulation, into this “growing round” and the angularity of sound.

If somebody believes that he could become a speaker without putting any value on this, then he labors under the same misconception as a human soul that has arrived at the point between death and a new birth, when it once again will descend to the earth, and does not want to embody itself because it does not want to enter into the moulding of the stomach, the lungs, the kidney, and so forth. It is really a matter of having to draw on everything that makes a speech complete.

One should at least put some value on the organism of speech and the genius of language as well. One should not forget that valuing the organism of speech, the genius of language, is creative, in the sense of creating imagination. He who cannot occupy himself with language, listening inwardly, will not receive images, will not be the recipient of thoughts; he will remain clumsy in thinking, he will become one who is abstract in speaking, if not a pedant. Particularly, in experiencing the sounds, the imagery in speech-formation, in this itself lies something that entices the thoughts out of our souls that we need to carry before the listeners. In experiencing the word, something creative is implied in regard to the inner organization of the human being. This should never be forgotten. It is extremely important. In all cases, the feeling should pervade us how the word, the sequence of words, the word-formation, the sentence-construction, how these are related to our whole organism. Just as one can figure out a person from the physiognomy, one can even more readily—I don't mean from what he says but from the how of the speech—one can figure out the whole human being from his manner of speech.

But this how of his speech emerges out of the whole human being. And it is by all means a matter of focusing—delicately of course, not by treating ourselves like we were the patient—on the physical body. It is, for example, beneficial for somebody who, through education or perhaps even heredity, is predisposed to speaking pedantically; to try, with stimulating tea that he partakes of every so often, to wean himself from pedantry. As I have said, these things must be done with care. For one person, this tea is right; for another, the other tea is good. Ordinary tea, as I have repeatedly mentioned, is a very good diet for diplomats: diplomats have to be witty, which means having to chat at random about one thing after another, none of which must be pedantic, but instead has to exhibit the ease of switching from one sentence to another. This is why tea is indeed the drink of diplomats. Coffee, on the other hand, makes one logical. This is why, normally not being very logical by nature, reporters write their articles most frequently in coffee-houses. Now, since the advent of the typewriter, matters are a little different, but in earlier days, one could meet whole groups of journalists in coffee-houses, chewing on their pen and drinking coffee so that at last, one thought could align itself with the next one. Therefore, if one discovers that one has too much of what is of the tea-quality, then coffee is something that can have an equalizing effect. But, as was mentioned before, all this is not altogether meant, as a prescription, but pointing in that direction. And if somebody, for example, is predisposed to mix some annoying sound into his speech—let's say if somebody says, “he,” after every third syllable, or something like that—then I advise him to drink some weak senna-leaf-tea twice a week in the evening, and he will see what a beneficial effect that will have.

It is indeed so: since the matters that come to expression in a lecture, in a speech, must come out of the whole person, diet must by no means be overlooked. This is not only the case in an obvious sense. Of course, one can hear by the speech whether it comes from a person who has let endless amounts of beer flow down his gullet, or something like that. This is an obvious case. He who has an ear for speech knows very well whether a given speaker is a tea-drinker or a coffee-drinker, whether he suffers from constipation or its opposite. In speech, everything is expressed with absolute certainty, and all of that has to be taken into consideration. One will gradually develop an instinct for these matters if one becomes sensitive to language in one's surroundings the way I have described it.

However, the various languages lend themselves in different ways, and in varying degrees, to being heard in the surroundings. A language such as the Latin tongue is particularly suitable for the above purpose. The same with the Italian. I mean by this, to be heard objectively by the one who is speaking himself. The English language, for example, is little suited for this, because this language is very similar to the script that flows out of the limbs. The more abstract the languages are, the less suitable they are to be heard inwardly and to become objective. Oh, how in former times the German Nibelungen-song sounded:

Uns ist in alten maeren von heleden lobebaeren, von freude unt hôchgezîten, von küener recken strîten		Wunders vil geseit von grôzer arebeit; von weinen unde klagen, müget ir nu wunder hoeren sagen.
Ez wuohs in Buregonden daz in allen landen Kriemhilt geheizen; Dar umbe muosen degene		ein vil edel magedîn, niht schoeners mohte sîn, diu wart ein schoene wîp, vil Verliesen dën lîp.

That hears itself while one is speaking! Through such things one must learn to experience language. Naturally, languages become abstract in the course of their development. Then one must bring the concrete substance into it from within, permeate it with the obvious. Abstractly placed side by side, what a difference:

Uns ist in alten maeren Uns wird in alten Märchen

wunders vil geseit Wunderbares viel erzählt

and so forth!

But if one becomes accustomed to listening, this can certainly also be brought into the more modern language, and there, much can be done in speech towards the latter's becoming something that has its own genius. But for that, such exercises are required, so that listening in the spirit and speaking out of the spirit fit into one another. And so, I want to repeat the verse one more time:

Erfuellung geht
Durch Hoffnung
Geht durch Sehnen
Durch Wollen
Wollen weht
Im Webenden
Weht im Bebenden
Webend bindend
Im Finden
Findend windend
Kuendend.

Only by placing the sound into various relationships, does one arrive at an experiencing of the sound, the metamorphosis of the sound, and the looking at the word, the seeing of the word.

Then, when something like what I have described today as creating a disposition through catch-sentences, as our inner soul-preparation, is united with what we can in the above way gain out of the language, then it all works toward public speaking.

One more thing is required besides all the others I have already mentioned: responsibility! This implies that one should be aware that one does not have the right to set all of one's ill-mannered speech-habits before an audience. One should learn to feel that for a public appearance one does require education of speech, a going-out of one's self, and plasticity in regard to speech. Responsibility towards speech! It is very comfortable to remain standing and to speak the way one normally does, and to swallow as much as one is used to swallow; to swallow (verschlucken), to squeeze (quetschen), and to bend (biegen) and break (brechen), and to pull (dehnen) at the words just the way it suits one. But one may not remain with this squeezing (Quetschen) and pushing (Druecken) and pulling (Dehnen) and cornering (Ecken) and similar speech-mannerisms. Instead, one must try to come to the aid of one's speaking even in regard to the form. If one supports one's speaking in this manner, one is quite simply also led to the point where one addresses an audience with a certain respect. One approaches public speaking with a certain reserve and speaks to an audience with respect. And this is absolutely necessary. One can accomplish this if, on the one side, one perfects the soul-aspect; and, on the other side, formulates the physical in the way I have demonstrated in the second part of the lecture. Even if one only has to give occasional talks, such matters still play an important part.

Say, for example, that one has to give discussions on the building, the Goetheanum. Since one naturally cannot make a separate preparation for each discussion, one should basically, in that case, properly prepare oneself, the way I have explained it, at least twice a week for the talk in question. One should actually only extemporize, if one practices the preparation, as it were, as a constant exercise.

Then one will also discover how, I should like to say, the outer form unites itself with the substance. And we shall have to speak about this point in particular one more time tomorrow: about the union of the form-technique with the soul-technique.

The course is brief, unfortunately; one can barely get past the introduction. But I would find it irresponsible not to have said what I did say in particular in the course of these lectures.

Notes:

Note 1.The threefold social organism, as depicted by Rudolf Steiner, is composed of three parts: the two mentioned above and the economic realm.

Note 2.(See The Threefold Social Order for details on “Associations.”)

Note 3.Rudolf Steiner refers here to the war-reparations demanded of Germany by France.

Note 4.The speech-exercises are rendered in the original German, since the emphasis is on their sound, primarily; a translation is often useless as well as extremely difficult.

Note 5.In trying to illustrate how one must take hold of one's speech-organs via the exercises. Rudolf Steiner modifies the four words in a manner that is highly original and unusual, and untranslatable as well. But they thus indicate a living working, an active doing. “Gesehmeithgen,” to make pliable; “zu biegen,” to bend; “zu hohlen,” to make hollow; “zu erhabenen,” to have or possess by effort.

There is in our culture certainly no document that has intervened so deeply and so intensively in the whole spiritual life as the Bible. One would have to write a history, not of centuries, but of millennia if one wanted to describe the effect of the Bible on humankind. If one completely wanted to refrain from the influence of this document on the mainstream, one would still find something immeasurable in the Bible concerning the influence and the deep effects on the human soul. Certainly, one may say that just our modern time presents exceptionally many things, because one could show that today not only those who stand on the ground of the Bible are deeply influenced by this human document, but also that those who have turned away from the Bible are subject to its influence. For the Bible is really not only a document, although it is it in the most particular measure, because it fulfils the soul with a sum of images about the world and life giving the soul a worldview, but the Bible was, for millennia, an enormous means of education of the souls.

It has meant something not only to the imagination, and means something to it even today, but it is maybe important and more essential what we must regard as an effect on the emotional life, on the ways of thinking. There we must often admit today that the Bible only developed the emotions, the sensations of those who combat the Bible.

But who looks around only a little at the spiritual life of humankind, in particular at that of our western humankind and that which is connected with it, that will note what an immense reversal has taken place concerning the position of humankind or, at least, of a big part of humankind to the Bible.

Those who stand still firmly on the ground of the Bible today could maybe think too little of that to which is pointed with it. They could say, even if there may be some people who turn away from the Bible who state that the Bible can no longer be that for humankind what it was for millennia, it is presumably only a temporary phenomenon. We believe in the Bible; whatever the gentlemen say who believe to stand on the ground of science, it may seem to them fantastic—we rely on the Bible! One could find this judgment among certain personalities very much common, and it is only a matter of course. For someone who is still able to take the happiness, the certainty and the strength of his soul from the Bible cannot put enough in the balance according to his character against those phenomena that exist around him as criticism and refusal of the Bible.

However, such a judgment would be rather careless. It would be even selfish in a certain way, for the human being—if he pronounces such a judgment—says to himself: the Bible gives me this or that; whether it gives the same to other human beings, I do not care about.—Such a human being does not pay attention to the fact that humankind is a whole. What single human beings experience, think and feel at first flows down into the whole humankind and becomes common property.

Somebody who says, I do not want to hear what the critics and the scholars say about the Bible today, I do not care about it judges only for himself. He does not remember whether also his descendants, whether those human beings who follow him can have the chance to gain such a satisfaction from this document if criticism and science are about to take this document away from humankind. The power of the authorities who are involved in the life of this document is big and strong. It means, actually, to act blind and deaf towards that which goes forward round one if one wants to start only from the just characterised point of view of naive faith, undeterred faith. Today one has to hear what can shake the respect and the meaning of this human document with our fellow men. The shock, the radical changes that took place in the course of the last centuries with reference to this document are enormous.

Still a few centuries ago, the Bible was believed to be something that enjoyed unconditional authority; it was believed to be of higher divine origin. This belief, this assumption is shaken long-since and will be shaken more and more by always new reasons. At first, neither our modern science nor the present natural sciences turned against the old view of the Bible. Already more than hundred years ago, the more materialistic way of thinking—we are allowed to use the expression, because we have often explained it here—considered the Bible from the purely external point of view. We speak about the Old Testament first. For centuries, it was believed to be—like the New Testament—an inspiration of higher powers. It was believed to be written out of a consciousness that could rise to a sphere of truth to which the sensuous consciousness could not rise.

The first to shake this belief in the fact that the Bible was written out of a higher human consciousness, that it is due to another authority than to any authority of a human writer was that one said to oneself: if one reads the Bible, it turns out that it is no uniform document. In the eighteenth century, the French doctor Astruc (Jean A., 1684–1766) wrote, one says, the human beings would have written under the influence of higher powers the chapters of the Bible that we call the history of creation by Moses. However, we read the creation story and find that single parts are not in accordance with each other; we find stylistic and objective contradictions. Hence, we must suppose that not a single author, Moses or anybody else, wrote this document, because somebody who describes the conditions successively as a single person would not bring in inner contradictions.

I can only outline all these contradictions: old documents would be taken from different sides and combined by various authors. These were the first objections against the Bible. We want now to characterise the spirit of this kind of opposition against the spiritual origin of the Bible, apart from that how the things happened.

One sees there how immediately in the beginning in tremendous, overpowering pictures the creation is unrolled. In them, the so-called Six-Day Work is told. One tells further on how within this creation the human being originated, how he came to the sin, how he developed from generation to generation. There one notes that in the first parts, in the first verses, a name is chosen for the divine powers, for God, different from the fourth verse of the second chapter on. One sees there that really these two names of the divine alternate, the Elohim and Yahveh or Jehovah. There somebody must ask himself, should an author have called the divine with two different names? Where from this may come? He says to himself that that or those who put together the document finally found old traditions or also old documents which they interlinked and formed a whole from them. The one may come from this tribe, the other from that tribe, and one interlinked them. This one makes itself noticeable. Starting from this one notes, going on, that similar and other contradictions appear.

Thus, one got around to separating and tearing the original documents in different pieces. If today anybody wanted to put together a Bible from the different pieces and fragments from which one thought that it must be composed, if anybody printed with blue letters everything that one counts among one document, with red letters what among a second, with green letters what among a third and so on, then a strange document would originate. However, it has already come about—the so-called Rainbow Bible!

The ancient, venerable document is there, one would like to say, disassembled in the single pieces from which it should be composed. The Bible is, of course, a document of which one believes, however, to be able to prove that it is due not to Moses, but that parts of it originate from this or that clerical council in relatively late time. Other parts of the Bible are put together from legends and myths that one gathered from here and there from religious views of this or that school. What became a whole this way cannot be believed to be something that was brought into history with a raised human consciousness that is able to behold into the spiritual worlds.

However, nobody is allowed to believe that these both talks, which I have to hold today and on Saturday, are intended to lower any way the diligence and the sedulity of the works just only briefly outlined. To somebody who knows the spiritual means that was used to tear the Bible to small pieces and to explain them, the diligence and the sedulity and the skill of the researchers of all these works become apparent. They appear to him as the most tremendous that was maybe performed in science. In relation to the formal, in relation to the industrious research one cannot find anything comparable. If we look closely at the result of this research performed by modern theologists, so just from those, who due to their profession believe to stand on the ground of Christianity, we must say to ourselves, it must cause another relation to the Bible as it was for centuries. If this research comes to fruition, the Bible—many things had to be discussed to reason it in detail—cannot longer exist as the document that comforts and raises the human beings in the saddest problems of life.

Apart from that, numerous human beings have looked around in the fields of scientific research, in geology, in the developmental history of animals and plants, in the history of civilisation, in anthropology and so on. These human beings are hardly able to conceive anything reading the Bible. One has to be also fair in this respect and not position oneself simply on the ground of naive faith and say that this signifies nothing. They are often those who are the most conscientious ones in their feeling of truth, in their thirst for knowledge. They say to themselves, I see that research standing on firm ground has found

That the earth developed throughout geologic periods,
That the earth developed from a mist of higher temperature to the present form,
That the inanimate develops and from this inanimate the living being,
That everything developed from the simple up to the most complex being, the human being,
That the forms of civilisation ascended to the modern complex forms.

Numerous human beings say, if we see which tremendous geological periods were necessary to receive the earth when it had not yet produced amphibians nor mammals, if we survey all that and open ourselves to that, what shall we to do if the Bible tells us that the world was created within six or seven days? We have no use neither for the creation in six or seven days nor for anything else. Which use are we able to make of the Flood, of the miraculous rescue of Noah if we read that Noah brought so many animals in the ark, and so on?—Thus, it happens that some human beings gifted with dignity and serious sense of truth oppose so sharply and vigorously against the Bible based on the modern scientific viewpoint, in so far as it wants to extent to a worldview. All that exists in our worldview. We are not able to deny all that.

However, there the question arises: does one take all things really into consideration that are to be taken into consideration in relation to the Bible if either the first viewpoint, the historical one, or the second, the physical-historical view is asserted? There one has to say that already the third viewpoint exists in relation to the Bible, a viewpoint that develops from that real research method and human viewpoint that is characterised in these talks as the spiritual-scientific or anthroposophic one. We have to deal with this viewpoint in relation to the Bible today and the day after tomorrow. What a viewpoint is this? One often says today, the human being is not allowed to rely on external authority, he has to approach world and life without presuppositions and to investigate truth, and one believes to insult just the Bible if one takes up such a viewpoint. Does one really insult the Bible with it? One can compare the spiritual-scientific or anthroposophic viewpoint to something that happened to humanity concerning something else, even if less significant, some centuries ago. We come to an understanding of the spiritual-scientific viewpoint concerning the Bible the easiest, if we compare it with the radical changes in relation to the view of the earth.

There we see that all schools, the lower and the higher ones, taught about the external nature in the whole Middle Ages following up old writings, indeed, writings of a great personality, of the old Greek philosopher and naturalist Aristotle. Thus, if you could go back with me to the sites of the spiritual life of the older time, you would find that that was not communicated in the old schools and training centres which was found in laboratories, but which was printed in the books by Aristotle. Aristotle was the authority and his books were the Bible of the natural sciences at that time. Where one only communicated and taught what Aristotle had already said about the matters. Now the times came when a new aurora arose concerning the view of nature, the new way of the physical view of Copernicus, Kepler and Galilei and all the others up to now. What was the basic feature of this aurora? While one had taken before Aristotle as a firm starting point, and spoke about nature as he had spoken, now Copernicus, Kepler and Galilei used their own senses of observation and research. They themselves looked at nature and investigated what life could show them. Thus, they wanted to describe and explain nature according to that which they themselves had seen. There they came into conflict with the teachings of Aristotle's strict believers.

It is more than a mere anecdote, it means the deep truth of a process that happened at that time: one tells that a believer of Aristotle was asked to have a look at a corpse and to observe that it is not right that the nerves go out from the heart—as Aristotle teaches—but from the brain. The believer of Aristotle was persuaded to look at this. Then, however, he said, if I look at this, it seems that nature contradicts Aristotle. However, if nature contradicts Aristotle, I do not trust nature but Aristotle.—Natural sciences faced tradition that way. The view of the researcher was rejected in the light of that which was reproduced and repeated as tradition for centuries. If we read Giordano Bruno's writings, we see the opposition against Aristotle out of the new spirit that tells and explains what the human being himself should see.

We look at the whole matter again differently today. We face the immediate scientific observation and Aristotle differently. We know that a lot of that which was read out from him in the Middle Ages was only an ambiguous interpretation of his writings. Aristotle was a researcher out of the spirit of his time who looked immediately into nature and communicated what he was able to say. If we understand Aristotle correctly, if we can defer to what he said, then he does no longer seem to contradict the immediate scientific observation, as he seemed to contradict at that time. Then we can become his admirers again, because just concerning the origin of the nerves from the heart instead of from the brain, it becomes apparent that he meant something else, namely something that is still correct for our time.

In a quite similar way, the spiritual-scientific research faces not only these documents—the writings by Aristotle—but also the western original document, the Bible. What has happened in relation to the observation and investigation of the external nature since the sixteenth century takes place again in relation to the investigation of the spiritual undergrounds of the world. Out of the spirit of that research, I have characterised in the last three talks, how humankind tries to penetrate again into those worlds that are not discernible by the outer senses. However, they are discernible to the higher developed senses of the human being, to the spiritual senses of the human being with which we can behold also in the spiritual world as we can see with the physical senses in the physical world.

It is not necessary to keep on explaining because I have often enough said that the human being is able to develop the forces in himself that he can perceive not only the sensuous things, but that he can perceive a spiritual world between and behind the sensuous, a spiritual world that is much more real than the sensuous world. With good reason, humankind had forgotten the methods of spiritual research for a while. The big progress, the big conquests in the physical world were done because the instruments were perfected in such a way, as it was the case during the last centuries. However, if one thing extends in the human nature, other abilities take a backseat. That is why we see how during the last centuries the scientific methods blossomed for the external physical world of facts. Never were instruments that are more stupendous invented to pick up the secrets of nature and to investigate her principles. The concerning abilities were extended and perfected tremendously, but those abilities have withdrawn with which the human being is able to behold into in the spiritual world. Hence, it is not surprising that the human being was convinced that the spiritual could also be explained from the material existence.

However, we stand before the dawn of an epoch today when humankind becomes aware again that there are still instruments and tools different from those in the physical and physiological laboratory where they are used so excellently. Indeed, we have to do it with an instrument that differs thoroughly from the other. We deal with the basic and original instrument that we have to see in the human being himself. We get to know the human being by the methods of concentration and meditation in the course of the winter. These are other methods that the human being can apply to his soul and by which he gets around to seeing the environment unlike he has seen it before. He can get around to saying to himself: I am like an operated blind-born who could deny the colours and the light of the world before.—However, the moment had now come that he himself could see. Now he could see that something else is behind that which the senses and the mind perceive. Now he sees into the spiritual things; now he does not know, not hypothetically, by speculative philosophy that the sensuous, the material is only like a compression of the spiritual, that that which we see with the senses relates to something spiritual behind it as ice relates to water. The water is thin, the ice is solid, and somebody who is not able to see the water, but can see the ice would say, there is nothing round the ice.—Somebody, who can see only with the senses, states that there is nothing but sensuous processes, nothing but sensuous events everywhere.

However, we must penetrate into this supersensible field, into these supersensible events, and then we can recognise and explain the spiritual. Who has not developed spiritual ears and eyes sees nothing but compression—like the ice in the water—all over the world, as well as the primordial mother of substance, the spiritual in which the sensuous is only embedded does not appear to him. If the geologist shows us how, for example, a human being could sit on a chair in the universe and could watch how the world has developed: the external sensuous view would be as the natural sciences describe it. Spiritual science has to object nothing to that which natural sciences have to say in the positive sense. However, it becomes apparent to someone who is in the right know of the physical science that before the first forming of the physical the spiritual was there. There it becomes apparent how the progress became only possible because the spiritual helped, and that the spirit is mostly involved in the development.

So this spiritual worldview points to the fact that the human being can make himself the instrument of the investigation of the important bases of the world, and, finally, our view gets around to investigating the spiritual original grounds and beginnings independently. Thus, spiritual science stands there, independently of any document. It says, we do not do research in a document first. We do not do research as it was done once, in the books by Aristotle, we do research in the spiritual world. We adapt ourselves in such a way: what you learn as usual school geometry, the Euclidean geometry, was written down in its first beginnings by Euclid, the great mathematician. Today we can accept it as a document and understand it historically. However, who learns geometry at school today, is he still learning after the elementary book of Euclid? One works, learns, and recognises by the things themselves. If one constructs, for example, a triangle, the internal lawfulness appears to the mind out of the thing itself. Then with that which you have gained in such a way, you can move up to Euclid and recognise what he already wrote in his textbook. Thus, the spiritual scientist does also research, regardless of the books, only with his organs how the world has developed. He finds the development of the world, the development of the earth at that time before the earth crystallised in its present form. He investigates the spiritual processes and finds how at a certain point our mind starts in the earthly existence; he shows that the human being appears first and has not developed from subordinated creatures, but that he was first there as a descendant of spiritual beings.

We can go back to former times when still the spiritual primordial grounds existed. We find the human being connected with these spiritual processes, and only later, the lower creatures develop besides the human being. As well as in the development generally certain things remain behind and other advance, the lower also diverted from the higher. The spiritual researcher knows that spiritual organs can be developed by methods that the spiritual researcher is able to show.

Thus, the spiritual research teaches the origin and evolution of the world according to principles which are independent of any document, only out of own principles, as well as one learns mathematics regardless how it has developed in the course of history. In the same way as the researcher has appropriated knowledge of this wisdom, he approaches the Bible. He looks at the Bible. It becomes apparent now, why there are contradictions in the Bible from the viewpoint of the historical-critical biblical studies as well as from the viewpoint of scientific research. Both viewpoints come from one big error that originated from the fact that one thought generally to be supposed to understand the truth of the Bible from the viewpoints of physical-sensuous perception. One thought that it is possible to approach the Bible with such criteria. One did not yet have the research results of the anthroposophic spiritual science.

I want to show with single examples what I have just said. Spiritual science shows us that we come investigating the earthly creation with the methods of geology et cetera only to a certain point, and that then the human development seems to proceed backwards in the uncertain. Why? The sensuous science, may it hope it ever so much, will never be able to pursue the human being back to the origin, because sensuous science can find the sensuous only. However, the mental and spiritual have led the way of the sensuous in the human being. He was soul first and at even former times, he was spirit, then he descended to the earthly existence. Only as far as the physical life is involved in the descent of the human being in the earthly existence, natural sciences can show this course of development.

We cannot investigate the soul life with the usual forces of the sensuous observation. Geology can also be no guide to us. It gives us the investigation of that which remained behind as sense-perceptible matters. It can only say what one would see if anybody sat on a chair in the universe and saw everything that developed on earth. Spiritual science does not defer to this. However, one must have developed spiritual eyes and ears to see the human being as a spiritual being in primeval times. If one does not have these organs, the soul and the spirit of the human being disappear. However, if one has the spiritual eyes, the sensuous disappears, and the spiritual picture originates. One cannot see this, however, in the same way as the sensuous. One must appropriate quite different concepts of knowledge if one wants to go back to such primeval times. What one sees developing there from the human being when it was only a soul does not appear in sensuous concrete perception as the external sensuous world offers it. This appears to us as pictures. Our consciousness becomes a picture consciousness, an imaginative consciousness by the development of the internal forces of the soul. Then the consciousness is filled with pictures. We see in another condition of consciousness, what has happened at that time, now in pictures. Pictorial is that which goes forward inside of the seer.

The rudiment that still exists of the seer's gift is the dream. However, it is chaotic. The vision of the qualified seer also exists in such pictures, but these pictures correspond to reality. It corresponds to the condition as the physical-sensuous human being can make a distinction whether his mental images correspond to reality or are only fantasy. Who wants to stop with the sentence: “The world is my mental image” and “the external things only stimulate the mental image,” to that I might propose that he should have a piece of glowing iron in his nearness and feel how it burns. Then he has to leave it and feel whether the mere mental picture still burns in such a way. There is just something that makes a distinction between the mere mental picture and that perception that is stimulated by the external object. Hence, one is not allowed to say that the seer lives only in the phantasms. He has just so developed in this field that he can make a distinction what is a mere speculative fiction, or what is a picture of the reality of a spiritual-mental world. The pictures become the means of expression of a spiritual-mental world. If the seer looks with supersensible senses back at times, before there are sensuous objects, the true spiritual beings and events present themselves. The spiritual researcher speaks not about forces that are abstractions, but about real beings. As to him, the spiritual phenomena become truth and beings, and the spiritual world becomes populated again by spiritual beings.

Imagine the primeval development of the human being when a force or being intervened in his evolution, in his whole figure that this being or force differs certainly from other beings who have intervened even earlier. We can trace back the spiritual-mental of the human being who is quite supersensible even further; we can trace back it in even higher spheres where we find even higher beings. If the spiritual researcher approaches the beginning of the Bible, it becomes apparent to him that the pictures are exactly given which show the mental-spiritual in the development of the human being, before he has come into the physical life. The spiritual researcher is able to say to himself—if he finds his own imaginations again in the external documents—that he recognises them as truth. If he goes back now to the times when the human being was connected with the even higher spheres, he has to choose another name for these basic beings, and he finds really that the passages which lead the way of the fourth verse of the second chapter have another name of God. It complies exactly with the results of spiritual research that a new name of God appears from the fourth verse of the second chapter on. Thus, we are as spiritual researcher in the same position in which today an expert of geometry is. He can find geometry out of himself, and then he appreciates the work of Euclid who found the same. Thus, we see the development in the marvellous pictures of the Old Testament, and now something extremely strange appears. The text of the Bible becomes light and clear, as it could not become with the scientific critics.

A researcher said: what the elohim did must be due to a side different from that which comes from Yahveh If anyone wants to apply that seriously, it is weird. We want to try it. Imagine this passage in the Bible: “The serpent which was the most cunning of all creatures the LORD God had made asked the woman: Is it true that God has forbidden you to eat from any tree of the garden (Genesis 3:1)?” If you read “God” instead of “Elohim” or “Yahveh,” it is not translated correctly. It is weird. In the original text you read, “The serpent which was the most cunning of all creatures Yahveh had made.” Where you read, “Is it true that God has forbidden you ... you read “Elohim” in the original text. In the translation, the woman keeps on saying “God.” Then in the eighth verse, one says, “The man and the woman heard the voice of the LORD God.” However, you read in the original text, the voice of the Yahveh God.—Thus, we have now put together the story of the serpent, so that it becomes explicable that those who used the names “Yahveh” or “Elohim” meant different beings. According to the opinion of the Bible critics, this comes from different traditions.

The passage “Is it true that God has forbidden you to eat from any tree in the garden?” comes from the Elohim tradition.—You see, the Bible is really so composed of pieces that even in the middle of the sentences the different traditions are taken together.

If you approach the Bible with spiritual-scientific research, then you recognise that this must also be that way. There is talk of the fourth verse of the second chapter that the world creation goes over from the elohim to the Yahveh God. He is that power which unfolds everything that happens then up to the Fall of Man. Spiritual science shows that Yahveh is that God who speaks within the human being in our ego, he is the I-am. This being of the I-am causes everything that is said from the fourth verse of the second chapter on. This being, Yahveh, who intervenes now, is a being who belongs to a former development, but seceded ... (gap in the transcript). Hence, there is talk of the Yahveh God. However, the serpent knows nothing about Yahveh; therefore, it must turn to that which is of its own substance, up to the moment when this takes place which has just to take place by Yahveh. Only in the eighth verse of the third chapter, the name Yahveh appears again.

Thus, you get the consciousness by spiritual research that the Bible is a document in which nothing is accidental. A modern author may ask himself, why should this God not assume another name?—The ancient initiates do not have these stylistic forms of the modern authors. Where exactly and precisely should be spoken, you cannot talk in any stylistic form. What there is written and what there is omitted has its meaning. If the name Yahveh appears and if it is omitted, this means something highly essential. However, you must carry out the principle to read the Bible extremely exactly. Read the Bible if you have it! Read the Six-Day Work. You find the passage, if you keep on reading from the first verse of the second chapter to the Sabbath, “When the LORD God made the earth and the heavens...” One interprets these verses normally as a hint to the preceding, as if the Seven-Day Work had been told and one still said now, the Seven-Day work was made in such a way.—“This is the story of the heavens and of the earth after their creation,” and then, “When the Lord God made the earth and the heavens” (Genesis 2:4).

Who studies the original text, detects the following: The fourth verse of the second chapter does not refer to the preceding, but to the following; even as later—in the chapter after the Fall of Man—“This is the list of Adam's descendants” (Genesis 5:1) refers to the following, to the next generations, to that which originated from Adam. This is said in the same way as: which follows there, “This is the story of the heavens and the earth after their creation” (Genesis 2:4). Here the same Hebrew word is used. Someone who reads exactly knows that the creation of the spiritual world is described from the words “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” to the third verse of the second chapter. Then from the fourth verse of the second chapter on it is said: after the heavens and the earth were created the following is described. It is the most wonderful transition if one understands the matter, from the Six-Day Work to the following. Who gets involved in these matters finds that no better composed book exists than the Bible, in particular its oldest parts. The confidence that one is able to approach the Bible without spiritual research, that one is able to approach it with external documents has dissolved this perfect and harmonious work, so that it seems to be composed of nothing but pieces and fragments.

One also has to follow up on the principle to read the Bible exactly and to have it. One does not have the Bible if one has only the text that suggests what it depends on. One must have the principle to go into the Bible. It is told to us during the fourth day of the Six-Day Work how the sun and moon originate, how the sun and moon cause day and night (Genesis 1:14–18). Already before, however, it was spoken in the Bible of day and night (Genesis 1, 5). One can deduce from that: day and night, which depend on the sun and moon (Genesis 1: 14–18), cannot be meant with “day” and “night,” which do not depend on the sun and moon (Genesis 1: 5). Here one can see a palpable tip where the Bible speaks of the sensuous solar day and the sensuous solar night. These originate due to the rotation of the earth around the sun. However, we can see, where the Bible points beyond this sensuous day to the supersensible, the spiritual.

Those who could investigate the Bible spiritually said always to themselves if anyone has the visionary gift and can find the sense of the Bible in reality, this sense of the Bible must have come also from visionary gift. If we are able—because our soul has put itself in another state of consciousness—to look into the tremendous pictures of the Bible, then we know that the writer must also have been under the inspiration of the spiritual world. We may probably say: the time begins when one should understand more and more that there are four levels to look at the Bible today.

The first level is that of naive faith. It takes the Bible with undeterred certainty and anticipates nothing of the objections that are made against the Bible today.

The second level: these are the clever people, the Bible critics, who find—either by investigating internal contradictions or by the scientific point of view—that the Bible was the primitive legend work of a humankind not yet doing research. They are way beyond the Bible, they do no longer need it, and they attack it from the most different directions and say: it was good for the childish humankind. Now, however, humankind has outgrown the Bible.—These are the clever ones, the freethinkers.

Then there is the third level: the human being outgrows this cleverness. Indeed, the human beings of this level are also freethinkers, but they are way beyond this second point of view; they see symbolic and mythical covers of inner soul experiences in the stories of the Bible—the Old and the New Testaments. You see what the human soul imagines shown in the Bible in symbols in the abstract. Some freethinkers have been forced to this attitude. They had to transform the viewpoint of the freethinker into that of the mythical symbolist.

Then there is the fourth point of view. This is that of spiritual science I have characterised today. The day after tomorrow we follow up on this spiritual-scientific viewpoint. It shows the spiritual facts again in simple descriptions, indeed, in such a way as one can see these spiritual facts in imaginations. These are the facts that are described in the Bible.

Someone who had to leave the naive viewpoint and has become a clever person or maybe a symbolist as researcher may get to the viewpoint on which the spiritual researcher stands, and then he can become able to take the Bible again literally, to take the words literally in a new sense to understand them really.

For centuries, one did not criticise the Bible in reality. The Bible critics have fought against their own imaginary creation, against that which they themselves have made of the Bible. The adversaries of the Bible are such even today; they fight against their own imaginary relation, against that which they believe to understand of it; they do not affect the Bible at all. The Bible can be taken literally, one must only understand the words correctly.

There is a certain tendency today that turns against such a remark: not the letter, the spirit must decide. “The letter kills, the spirit brings back to life,,” and you name it from certain relations of the letters.

I wish we could bring the real Bible letter of the world again as soon as possible. The world would be surprised about the contents of the original text. As something completely new, it will appear to humankind. One is not allowed to peddle the saying around: the letter kills, the spirit brings back to life. It is usually the gentlemen's own spirit that is reflected in the letters (Faust I, v. 578–579). That applies to the symbolist in particular. If he is trivial, he puts something trivial into the symbols; if he is witty, he puts something witty into the symbols. It is with this word like with Goethe's words:

And so long as you don't have it,
this: “Die and be transformed!”
you will only be a gloomy guest
on the dark earth.

These words suggest how the human being should come beyond the sensuous view, generally beyond the usual nature. Who would take these words as an instruction to neglect the physical has ignored that the spirit develops bit by bit from the physical. That also applies to the letter and the spirit. You must have the letter first, then you can decipher it, and then you find which the spirit is. Indeed, the letter kills, but it creates the spirit at its death, and this saying corresponds to the other: who does not have it, this “die and be transformed” remains only a gloomy guest on the dark earth.

I could draw your attention only to the criticism of the Bible and to the viewpoints, which spiritual science takes towards the Bible. From the few indications I have given today, you may guess that by the work of spiritual science something like a recapture of the Bible can take place. Spiritual science shall find wisdom, independently from the Bible. However, spiritual science comes and recognises then what flowed into this Bible, and then one experiences what many have experienced out of spiritual science towards the Bible. Some things could elevate them, but the most do no longer make sense to them. Only with the help of spiritual science, the human beings understand what is said with this or that in the Bible. However, there are still other contestable passages, and one comes to the viewpoint to say, in the Bible are passages that contain deep spiritual truth, but something flowed into it that was integrated as something inorganic.—If you go on, you discover something again, and you notice that it was due to you yourselves that you were not far enough to understand the matter. You reach the point to say to yourselves, where I have believed once that the sense of the Bible cannot be maintained compared with science, there I see now: I understand the one that I have to consider the Bible with trust and admiration; I do just not yet understand the other. However, the time comes when I understand it, and I find the viewpoint where I can look into it.

Spiritual science leads to the right appreciation of the Bible. We have spoken about the beginning of the Bible, about the creation from the spiritual-scientific viewpoint. The biblical studies have to go through a crisis. The investigations of spiritual science are coming up to meet them, and in new figure the old light of the Bible shines again to humankind in the future.

Nowadays, if you start to discuss, with someone who is interested in these matters, the possibility of achieving a knowledge of spiritual life in conjunction with the sensuous and physical world, you will generally meet with a sympathetic reception. At any rate, the question will be raised: Are there paths by which man can reach some kind of spiritual knowledge? even though it may often turn out that the only knowledge of a spiritual world allowed is one that takes the form of general concepts and ideas, a vague pantheism perhaps or a conception of life reminiscent of mysticism. If however you should then attempt, as it became necessary for me to do in my book Occult Science, to describe a real cosmology, a science of the origin and development of the world in specific terms, discussion with a rationalist is usually at an end. He reacts strongly to the suggestion that anyone today might be in a position, on some epistemological basis or other, to make a statement about a spiritual origin of the world, about forces operating spiritually in the world's development, and about the possibility that this development, after having passed through a sensuous and physical phase, might lead back once more into a spiritual form of existence. The reaction of the rationalist to such a suggestion, implicit in the specific descriptions in Occult Science, for example, is to avoid having anything to do with someone who makes claims of this kind. He will think that, if a man sets out to make specific statements about such matters, he is probably on the verge of losing his reason; at least, we cannot compromise ourselves by becoming involved in discussing these details.

It is naturally impossible, in a single lecture, to present any details of cosmology as they follow from the philosophy of life I am advocating. Instead, I should like today to try and show you how spiritual science can arrive at a cosmology and a knowledge of the spiritual impulses underlying the world's development. The reproach that is usually levelled at anyone who now attempts such a task is that of anthropomorphism, that is of taking features of human mental life and projecting them—in accordance with one's wishes or some other predilections or prejudices—onto the cosmos. A closer examination of the way in which the philosophy of life presented here attains its cosmological results, however, should be enough to demonstrate that there cannot be the slightest question of anthropomorphism. On the contrary, this philosophy seeks its data about the world and its development through a spiritual cognition that is just as objective as the scientific study of nature.

You will have gathered, from the lectures I have given so far, what the view of the world I am advocating aims at in its research methods. On the one hand, it desires to preserve everything that humanity has acquired over the last three or four centuries in scientific conscientiousness and a sure and careful method of seeking truth. In particular, this view of life certanly does not wish to exceed the limits of natural knowledge, in so far as this is appropriate, but to observe carefully where the limits of purely natural knowledge are located. The existence of such limits is much discussed today, and has been for a long time. We can say that the opinions of trained natural scientists on this subject today are founded on notions that more philosophically inclined minds derive from Kant, and other minds, to whom a more popular treatment appeals, from Schopenhauer and others. A great deal of material bearing on this point could be given.

Now it is probably true to say that Kant and Schopenhauer, and all those who follow in their wake, are dangerous guides to the discernment of the limits of natural knowledge, because these thinkers, very enticingly as I would say, stopped short at a certain point in their consideration of the human cognitive faculty and the capacities of the human psyche. They drew the line at a certain point; and their approach to this point is extraordinarily shrewd. Yet the fact remains that, as soon as we become aware of the need to consider man as a whole and to take into account all that can follow from man's physical and spiritual organism in the shape of cognitive activity and inner experience, we shall also realize that a one-sided critique of the cognitive faculty can only lead to one-sided conclusions. If we wish to examine the relation of man to the world, in order to establish whether there is a path that leads from man to knowledge of the world, we must take him as a whole and consider him in his entire being.

It is from this point of view that I should now like to raise the question: Assuming that the limits of our knowledge of nature, which scientists too have been discussing since Du Bois-Reymond (though they are viewed very differently today from the way he saw them half a century ago), did not exist, what would be man's position in the world? Assuming that man's theoretical cognitive faculty, by which he connects his concepts with observations and the results of experiments in order to arrive at the laws of the universe, could also penetrate without difficulty into the organic realm; if it could advance as far as life, there would be little reason why it should stop short of the higher modes of existence—the realms of soul and spirit. Assuming therefore that the ordinary consciousness we employ in the sciences and work with in ordinary life were able at all times not only to approach the outside of life, but also to penetrate below the surface of things to their inner being: if there were thus no limit of knowledge, what sort of constitution would a man need? Well, his relation to the world would be such that his entire being, his inmost experience, would be constantly entering into everything with its spiritual antennae. Though this may appear paradoxical to some people, a dispassionate observer of life and of the relationship of man to the world will realize: a being whose ordinary everyday consciousness was unlimited would inevitably lack the capacity to love.

And if we reflect on the significance of this capacity for our whole life, and on what we are in life because we can love, we shall conclude: on this mortal earth we should not be men, in the sense in which we must in fact be men, if we did not have love. But love demands that we should meet another individual, whatever realm of nature it may belong to, as self-contained individuals. We must not invade this other individual with our clear and lucid thinking; on the contrary, at the very moment when we develop love, our essence must become active—that part of us which is beyond clear and pellucid concepts! The moment we were able to invade the other individual with clear and lucid concepts, love would die. Since man must be a creature of love by virtue of his task on earth, and since when man has a certain capacity it conditions his whole being, we can conclude: man definitely needs limits to his knowledge of the outside world, and must not penetrate beyond them if, within his ordinary consciousness, he is to fulfil his task here on earth. The property that enables him to be a creature of love has its obverse side in his ordinary knowledge, which has to stop at the limit that is set for us in order that we may be creatures capable of love.

This is just an outline that each individual can fill out for himself; even so, it reveals something that has certain consequences. It shows, for example, that we must go forward from the premises of Kantian philosophy, and look at man as a whole, inhabiting life as a living creature. This is the first thing that the view of the world I am advocating has to say about the limits of scientific knowledge—and we shall be hearing more about them.

Here is one of the two guiding principles for any view of life and the world that is to be taken seriously today. The other, to which I have already drawn attention in the last few days, can be described by saying: any view of life and the world that is to be taken seriously today must not lose itself in nebulous mysticism. It is a fact that even noble minds at the present time, observing that natural science is limited and cannot provide us with a springboard into the spiritual world, throw themselves into the arms of mysticism, especially the older forms of humanity's mystical endeavour. Yet in face of the other kinds of knowledge man requires* today, this certainly cannot be the right way. Mysticism seeks, by looking within man, to reach the actual foundations of existence. But once again, human knowledge is limited when it comes to looking within man. Assuming that man were capable of looking into himself without limit, to the point where the deepest essence of human nature is manifest, where man is in touch with the eternal springs of existence and links his personal existence with that of the cosmos: what would he then have to do without?—Those who gain great inner satisfaction from mysticism often summon up the most varied things from within themselves. I have already indicated that what is brought up in this way ultimately turns out, on closer examination by a true student of the soul, to rest on some external observation. This observation sinks into subconscious depths, is permeated by feeling and will and organic process, and then appears again in an altered form. Anything observed can undergo a transformation or metamorphosis so great that the mystic will believe he is drawing from the depths of his soul something that must demonstrate the eternal foundations of the soul itself. Even such outstanding mystics as Meister Eckhart or Johannes Tauler are not completely free from the error that creeps in when we mistake altered concepts of ordinary consciousness for independent revelations of the human soul.

Objective reflection on this state of affairs, however, enables us to answer the question: What would man have to do without if, in ordinary consciousness, he could see right into himself at any moment? He would have to do without something that is essential for the well-ordered existence of our soul: a reliable memory.

For what is the relation of memory to the claims of mysticism? What I am now going to outline in a rather popular way I could also present quite scientifically. But we only need an explanation, and this can be conveyed in popular terms. When we observe the outside world and inwardly transform what we experience there as whole men, so that it can later reappear as memory, the spiritual result of our external observation actually falls on something like a mirror within us. This is a simile, but at the same time it is more than a simile. Impressions from outside cannot be allowed to stimulate us so much that we carry them down into our deepest self. It must be possible for outside stimuli to be reflected. Our organism, our human essence must behave like a reflecting device. Ought we, then, to break through this reflecting device in order to reach what lies behind the mirror?

That is what the mystic is trying to do, without knowing it. But we need our reliable, well-ordered memory. If there are any gaps in it, as far back into our childhood as we can remember, we shall fall victim to pathological mental states. Man must be so constituted that he retains the experiences that come from outside. He cannot therefore be so constituted that he can penetrate directly into his deepest self. If we make the mystic's attempt to penetrate into our innermost self with ordinary consciousness, we shall only reach the reflecting device. And it is right, from the point of view of our humanity, that we should there come up against the concepts we have absorbed from outside. Here again, we must look at the whole man, as he needs to be if he is to possess a memory, in order to see that mysticism is impossible for ordinary consciousness.

There are thus two limits to ordinary consciousness: a limit of natural knowledge, in relation to the outside, physical and sensuous world; and a limit in relation to mystical endeavours. And it is just from a clear insight into these two limits that there can in turn arise that other endeavour I have described here as befitting a modern search for the spiritual world. I mean the endeavour to draw from the soul dormant powers of cognition, so that by attaining a different form of consciousness we can see into the spiritual world.

With the kinds of knowledge I have been speaking of in the last few days, we can look at man as a creature capable of love and as a creature capable of memory. When we do so, we shall recognize that ordinary consciousness (operating through the senses, the intellect and the logical faculty) must call a halt in face of the outside world: for it is only by treating itself as a mere instrument for systematizing the outside world that it can become capable of developing further and creating that vitalized thinking of which I have spoken in previous lectures.

When we examine our own reaction to nature by means of this vitalized thinking, we find that, at the very moment when we have developed our logical faculty to the point where it provides a means of systematizing external phenomena, our ordinary consciousness is extinguished in the act of cognition. However clear our consciousness is up to a certain point in a given process of knowing nature, at this point it really goes over in part into a state of sleep, into the subconscious. Why is this? It is because at this point there must come into operation the faculty that diffuses something more than abstract thinking into the world around us: one that carries our being out into it.

For inasmuch as we love, our relationship to the world around us is not one of cognition but one of reality, a real relationship of being. Only by developing vital thinking are we able to carry over our experience into the reality of things. We pour out our vitalized thoughts; follow up the beginnings of spiritual life that exist outside (in the shape of spiritual world-rhythm and appearance); and, by cultivating empty consciousness as I have described, advance further and further into the spiritual world, which is linked with the physical and sensuous one. Compared with ordinary consciousness, we feel, in a super-sensible act of cognition of this kind, as if we have been awakened from sleep. We eavesdrop on our being as it becomes a living thing.

Here is something that can make a more shattering impression on the seeker after spiritual experience than anything he can obtain by repeating the experience of the profoundest mystic.

More moving than the latter's absorption in his inner self is the moment of realizing that, at a certain instant of higher cognition, man must pour out his own self as being into the outside world, and that the act of cognition transforms mere knowledge into real life, into a real symbiosis with the outside world.

At first, however, this is linked with an appreciable intensification of the sense of self. What happens is something like this: in ordinary cognition of the outside world, our ego goes as far as the frontiers of nature. Here, the ego is repulsed. We feel surrounded on all sides by psychic walls, so to speak. This in turn has repercussions on the sense of self. The sense of self has its own strength, and it gets the right temper precisely through the fact that, along with this feeling of something like confinement, there is intermingled that self-surrender to the world and its creatures that comes of love. In super-sensible cognition, the self is made even stronger, and there is, we may say, a danger that it will transform the love that rightfully exists on earth into a selfish submersion in things, that it will effusively thrust and insinuate itself into things. By so doing, the self will expand.

That is why, in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, I attach so much weight to the preparatory exercises. These exercises are aimed at self-discipline in relation to the sense of self, and at helping us to develop the necessary capacity for love in ordinary life and ordinary consciousness, before attempting to move into the super-sensible world by means of higher knowledge. We must be mentally, physically and spiritually healthy in this respect, before we can enter the spiritual world in a way that is healthy. If we are, then no one will be able to raise the more or less philistine objection that there is something uncomfortable about listening in to our own capacity for love. To do so makes a shattering impression, it is true. We see ourselves as never before in ordinary consciousness. What we attain in higher cognition, however, does not incorporate itself into the memory—if it did, we should be capable of marching through life fondly contemplating our own capacity for love, which would make us inadequate as people. And, remembering this, you will know what to make of these demands on super-sensible knowledge.

So much for the relation of super-sensible knowledge to the capacity for love, from an intellectual standpoint. But what do we experience as a result of it?

It is clear from what I have said already that we effuse our intensified self into our surroundings. In this way the self moves forward to the spiritual sphere, and we now come up against the curious fact that, by making ourselves increasingly able to enter into the outside world, we actually arrive at knowledge of our psychic and our spiritual self.

Goethe's instinct in rejecting the knowledge of self that results from brooding introspection was, I would say, a healthy one. He had hard things to say about this kind of mystical self-knowledge. Man can attain true self-knowledge only if, by strengthening his otherwise dormant powers of knowledge, he attains the capacity to explore with his self the outside world. It is in the world outside that man finds his real knowledge of self! We must learn to reach a true knowledge of the world, in the modern sense, by turning many familiar concepts almost back to front. And so it is with the concept of self-knowledge: look out at the world, travel further and further into the distance; in strengthening, by the development of cognitive powers, your capacity to explore these distances, you will find your real self. We can therefore say: the cosmos allows us to penetrate it to gain super-sensible knowledge; and what it gives back to us as a result of this penetration is precisely our knowledge of self.

Let us look at this other aspect of experience, which is sometimes sought by a false mystical path. I have shown how the human will can be developed, and how it is possible to develop dormant powers. The will can be developed to such an extent that the whole man becomes a kind of sense-organ, or rather spirit-organ—becomes, that is, as transparent in soul and spirit as the human eye is transparent. We need only recall how selfless (in a material sense) the human eye must be to act as the organ of sight. If the eye were to fill with self-assertive material, our field of vision would at once grow dim. Our entire human nature must come to be like this, on the spiritual plane. Our entire being, soul and spirit, must become transparent. With what is vital in our will, we can then enter the spiritual world even during our earthly existence. There now supervenes, however, what I already hinted at yesterday: by seeing the spiritual world, we are enabled to comprehend our inner self. And, as I explained yesterday, when as physical and sensuous beings we confront the outside world, we enter into its sensuous and physical phenomena with our entire being, and carry away with us psychic memory-images. Indeed, our soul is made up of these images. We can say therefore: what is physical and sensuous without is seen as semblance within. Conversely, I would say: in attaining the capacity to look out, through the spirit-organ that is our self, into the outside world as a spiritual one, with spiritual entities and events, we perceive our own inner physical body. We learn to know the substance of our lungs, heart and other organs. The spirituality of the outside world is reflected by the physical nature within us, just as the physical outside world is reflected by our spiritual, abstract nature.

But the way thus opened up to us of learning to know ourselves by contemplating the outside world, turns out to be a very concrete one. We come to know the place of the individual organs in man's total substance. Gradually, we learn to perceive the harmony between the individual processes in these organs.

The first discovery we make is as follows: what the mystic is angling for in his clouded waters turn out, ultimately, to be transformed memories; but they often contain an admixture of something produced by an organic activity. He doesn't know this, of course. He believes that he is piercing the internal mirror that underlies memory. He is not piercing it. The processes of our organic being beat like waves upon the other side of the mirror. The mystic is not aware of what is really going on: he is only aware of a change in the memories that are reflected. Without becoming guilty of philistinism in the process, we are forced to reduce much that is beautiful, poetic, mystical, to prose and say: much that this or that mystic has drawn up from his soul in this way is not the expression of spiritual existence, but only a consequence of the surge of inner organic processes. Wonderful mystical accounts of ancient and recent times—from which those who take pleasure in such things can gain an extraordinarily poetic impression—are in the last analysis, for anyone who can see things objectively, no more than the expression of inner processes in human nature itself. It seems philistine to have to say: something mystical makes its appearance; it strikes us as poetic, and yet to anyone who understands, it represents the impact of certain vital processes on the memories. For the serious seeker after knowledge, it does not become entirely valueless on that account. For the truth in anything that is said does not reside in the way in which it is presented, which may be agreeable to limited minds, but rather in the fact that a genuine attempt is being made to get nearer to the root of the matter.

The nebulous mystic remains caught in ordinary consciousness. The man who goes beyond this and, after first ensuring his psychic health by means of preparatory exercises that emphasize the formation of a healthy memory, pierces this mirror of memory and really looks into himself, will see there the effects of wide-ranging processes, originating in the spiritual outside world and continuing still in the spiritual world. In this way we come to know man, and to say to ourselves: what the abstract idealist may regard as something base in man, because he is looking at it only physiologically or anatomically, from the outside—man's inner organism—is a wonderful consequence of the entire cosmos.

And when we really come to know this inner organism, this is what we discover: when we look into our spiritual self and go back in memory over much that we have experienced in life, we can then, from what we revive within us at a congenial hour, conjure up these experiences before our mind's eye, if only as shades. From the image-content our soul has absorbed from the outside world, we can once again conjure up this world before our soul in a way that satisfies us. If we also learn to know our comprehensive inner organism, and learn how its individual parts are spiritually derived from the cosmos, our entire being, as we now perceive it, will present itself as a record of cosmic memories. We look into ourselves, not now with the eye of the nebulous mystic, but with an awakened “mind's eye,” and can perceive the nature of our lungs, our heart, the whole of the rest of our organism, looked at spiritually, inwardly. All this presents itself to us as memory of the world, recorded in man just as our memory of the life between birth and the present is recorded in the soul. There now appears in us what we can call knowledge of man as a memory of the world, a replica of the world's development and of the course of the cosmos.

The first thing to do is to familiarize yourselves with the detailed exercises that must be undertaken before man arrives at such a knowledge of self—not the brooding self-knowledge of ordinary introspection, as it is called, but the self-knowledge that sees in each of our internal organs something like a combination of spiritual elements resulting from certain spiritual processes in the cosmos. Once they have understood this aspect of man, people will no longer accuse us of transposing what is in our soul anthropomorphically into the world, in order to explain the world in a spiritual way. Instead, they will say: We first attempt, cautiously and seriously, to penetrate inside man, and there will then be revealed to us the cosmos, just as when we look at memories the sum of personal experience reveals itself.

Such things may appear paradoxical to present-day consciousness, and yet this consciousness is on the way to apprehending them. There is a longing to follow up certain trends of thought that are already there. When men do so—a certain amount of practice is, of course, required—the thoughts that lie along these lines will develop more and more into vitalized thoughts. And when, in addition to this, the will has been developed, men will enter increasingly upon this kind of self-knowledge and see that, whilst on the one hand the continual advance of the self into the outside world leads to knowledge of self, penetration into the depths of man's nature leads outward from man to knowledge of the world.

To cultivate a disinterested approach to these matters, it is necessary to look at the nature of man in a way that is different from that usually adopted today. People today dissect man's bone system, muscle system and nervous system, and take the results as a definition of his physical being. They can then envisage man as if he were a creature of solid material constituents. Yet everyone today knows that, essentially, man is not made up of solid constituents: for the most part—some ninety per cent, in fact—he is a column of water. Everyone today knows that the air I have just breathed in was previously outside in the world, and that the air I now have functioning within me will later be outside once more and belong to the world. And finally, everyone can comprehend that the human organism has a continuous exchange of heat. When we look at man in this way, we gradually escape from our illusion of his solidity. We recognize it as an illusion, and yet we cling to it in our soul, as if believing that man resembled the rough sketch anatomy gives of him. With equal justification, we shall come to regard the liquid in man as part of his being—what vibrates, surges and creates in man the liquid being. We shall come to perceive that the air in man is also part of his being. And finally, we may come to comprehend that the air inside us that vibrates, surges, moves up and down, diffuses itself through the currents in our veins and functions within us, is warmed in some places and cooled in others.

The soul-spiritual element that we carry within us today in this more or less abstract form suffers from a marked semblance character, so that we can really only perceive it from within, as we say. Nor can we escape from this perception from within by looking at what physiology and anatomy tell us about man. All the magnificent results that ordinary science has achieved present us with a solid shape of complex structure; yet it is one quite different in kind from what we observe within us when we visualize our thinking, feeling and volition, and we cannot find a bridge from one to the other. We can watch the struggles of psychologists to establish a relationship between what they comprehend in its abstractness and semblance nature—the only way that is open to their inward perception—and what exists outside. The two things are so far apart that we cannot establish a connection between them directly, through ordinary consciousness. But if we proceed without prejudice and fix our eyes, not upon an illusion of the solid man, but upon man as a being of liquid, a being of air and heat, then by a process of empathy with ourselves we shall become aware of the flow of heat and cold in the currents of our respiratory circulation, if we provide a basis on which we can do so.

We can reach such a basis by the path of higher knowledge as I have tried to describe it in the last few days. In learning to apprehend the air that vibrates inside us, we remain more or less within the physical realm; but when we apprehend it and then transfer the vitalized thinking that detects something of reality within, the bridge is established for us. And if we become aware of man down to the details of his temperature variations, and condense the psychic element until, out of its abstractness, it attains to reality, we shall find the bridge.

Condensed in this way, the life of the soul can link itself with rarefied physical experience. When we begin to penetrate ourselves and thereby perceive how vitalized thought moves in our being of air, if I may so express myself, in which there are certain temperature variations, we gradually see how in fact differences of thought can also operate in our human organism. Thus, a sympathetic thought, for example the verdict: “Yes indeed, the tree is green,” does in fact induce a state of heat, whereas a thought in which antipathy is present, a negative judgment for example, has a chilling effect on our air-heat substance.

In this way, we see how the psychic element continues to vibrate and create through finer materiality into denser materiality. We find it possible to direct our path of knowledge into the human organism too in such a way that we start with the psychic and go on into the material.

This in turn makes it possible for us to advance further and further towards what I have just been describing: an inner knowledge of the human organism. For the psyche will not unveil itself to us until we can trace the various levels of materiality—water, air and fire—in the individual organs. We must first condense the psychic element; only then shall we reach man's physical nature and come in turn, by passing through this, to the spiritual basis of our physical organism. Just as, when we sink shafts into ourselves with the aid of memory, we discover the laid-up experiences of our individual existence on earth, so too, in thus descending into the whole man, we shall find the spiritual element that has come down from the spiritual world through conception, foetal development and so on. In clothing itself in us, with what it acquires from the earth, this spiritual element becomes world-memory. We find the cosmos stored up as recollection inside us. And we thus find it possible—exactly as in ordinary consciousness we can remember the individual experience of personal existence—to survey the cosmos through inward contemplation.

You will perhaps ask: Yes, but when we get back to very early states of the earth by means of this world-memory, how can we avoid the danger of a general description of spirit usurping the concrete world-recollection? Once again, we only need to make a comparison with ordinary memory. Because our memory is well ordered, we shall not, in feeling some experience that has taken place ten years before float to the surface, refer it to events that have only just taken place. The content of the memory itself helps us to date it correctly. Similarly, when we understand our organism aright, we find that each of its separate parts points to the relevant moment in the world's development. In the last analysis, what natural science produces theoretically by extending its observations from the present back into earlier ages can only properly be completed by man's self-contemplation, which leads to a real world-recollection, a world-memory. Otherwise, we shall always be condemned to fall into curious errors when we construct hypothetical theories of world-evolution.

What I am about to say may sound trivial, but it will illustrate my point. The so-called Kant-Laplace theory, now of course modified—the theory of how the individual bodies in the solar system split off from a nebula in the universe—is commonly illustrated by taking a drop of oil, making a hole in a circular piece of card, fastening a pin through it, and rotating the drop of oil by means of the pin. Individual droplets separate off and continue to revolve round the main drop. A miniature solar system forms, and from the standpoint of the ordinary scientist one can say: The same thing, on a larger scale, took place out there in space! But something else is also true: anyone demonstrating something like this, to illustrate the origin of our solar system, would have to take all the factors into account; he would thus have to take into account the teacher standing there and rotating the drop of oil. He would have to place an enormous teacher out in space, to rotate the cloud. This point, however, has been forgotten in the experiment I have described. Elsewhere in life, it is a very fine thing to forget the self; but in an experiment, in illustrating important and serious problems, one must not forget such things. Well, the philosophy of life I am advocating does not forget them. It accepts what is justified in natural science, but also adds what can be seen in the spirit. And here, of course, we do not find an enormous individual, but rather a spiritual world, which has to be superimposed on the material development. We thereby permeate the Kant-Laplace primal nebula which, perhaps rightly, has been posited, with the spiritual entities and forces operative in it. And we permeate what will become of the earth in the so-called heat-death, of which present-day science speaks, with spiritual entities and forces. After the heat-death, these will then carry the spiritual element out into other worlds, just as the spiritual element in man is carried out into other worlds when the body disintegrates into its earthly elements. In this way we attain something significant for our time.

I have demonstrated, I think, that what is ordinarily apprehended only in abstract cognition—the spiritual element, which cannot be reconciled with the material—is infinitely far removed mentally from matter. What has followed from this for our entire cultural life? Because in ordinary consciousness we are unable to reconcile the spiritual and the material, we have a purely material view of the world's history: we form concepts of a purely physical process, with a beginning conceived in purely physical terms, in accordance with the laws of mechanics, and an end conceived, in accordance with thermodynamics, as the heat-death of the earth. At the same time, we are aware of ourselves as men, standing inside this process and evolving from it in a way that is certainly unintelligible to present-day science. If we are honest, however, we have to admit that we can never connect up our mental experience with what goes on outside in the material sphere. And at this deepest level of the soul, interwoven with our thinking, feeling and volition, are moral impulses and religious forces. They live within us, in the spiritual element we cannot reconcile with the material.

And so, perhaps, the man of today, with his consciousness, may conclude: natural science leads us only to a material process; this alone makes up exact science; for moral impulses and religious forces, we require concepts of faith!

This view, however, is incompatible with a serious life of the soul. And in their unconscious minds, serious people today feel (though they may not admit) that the earth has evolved from the purely material. From this emerges a kind of bubble. There arise cloud-formations, and indeed shapes thinner even than clouds, mere illusions. In these exist the greatest value we can absorb as men, all our cultural values. We go on living for a while, and one day there supervenes the earth's entry into its heat-death, which can be foretold on external scientific evidence. At this point, it is as if all life on earth is buried in an enormous graveyard. The most valuable things that have arisen from our human life, our finest and noblest ideals, are buried alongside what was the material substance of the earth. You can say that you don't believe it. But anyone who reacts honestly to what is often thought about these things today by people who reject independent spiritual research, could not avoid the inner dissonance and pessimism that arise in face of the question: What is to become of our spiritual activity if we regard the world in a purely material sense, as we are accustomed to do in exact science as it is called? This is the origin of the wide gulf that yawns in our time between religious and moral life and the natural approach to things.

It seems to me that, in these circumstances, a genuine seership, an exact vision is called for, one suited to modern man, to establish a bridge between spiritual and material, by providing a basis of reality for the spiritual and taking from the material its coarseness as I would call it.

That is above all what we bring before us when we look at things as we have done today. We have seen the spiritual in man himself gradually passing over into his heat and air variations. By descending into the coarser material sphere and seeing how the finer element flows into vitalized thinking, we shall we able to think our way into the cosmos and understand correctly something like the heat-death of the earth—because we know how our own human heat in its differentiation is permeated by vitalized thinking. And from the standpoint of the world-memory that appears in ourselves, we can look at what is spiritually active in the material processes of the world. In this way we arrive at a real reconciliation between what presents itself to us spiritually and what presents itself to us materially.

There is, it is true, much in people's hearts today that still militates against such a reconciliation. For in recent centuries we have grown accustomed to count truths as exact only where they rest upon a solid basis of sensory observation, in which we surrender passively to the outside world. What has been observed on this kind of solid basis is then built up into natural laws and natural theories; and theories are accepted as valid only when they rest upon this solid basis of sensory observation.

Those who think like this are people who will only admit ordinary gravity to operate in space, and who say: “The earth has its gravity, and bodies must fall towards the earth and have a support, because they cannot float about freely in space.” This is true, so long as we are standing on the earth and considering the earth's gravity in relation to its immediate surroundings. But if we look out into space, we know that we cannot say: “The heavenly bodies must be supported,” but must say: “They support one another.” We need to attain this attitude, in a form appropriate to the spirit, for our inner universe of knowledge.

We must be capable of developing truths that specifically do not require the support of sensory perception, but support one another as do the heavenly bodies in space. This is, in fact, a precondition for the attainment of a real cosmology, one that is not made up simply of material processes, but in which the material is shot through with soul and spirit. And such a cosmology is needed by modern man. We shall see how he needs it even for his immediate social tasks. But not until we perceive how the really significant truths support one another shall we understand how we can win through to a cosmology of this kind.

Such a cosmology results when we accept as valid the way in which true self-knowledge is attained. We do not attain it anthropomorphically, by going out into the universe with our own experience of self. By entering the outside world, we discover more and more about our ego and so achieve knowledge of self. And when we then go down into it, our inner self becomes world-memory and we learn world-knowledge. Many people already sense the nature of the secret pertaining to knowledge of the world. I should like to express in two sentences what they divine. Self-knowledge and world-knowledge must be truths that mutually support each other. And of this nature, moving to and fro in a pendulum motion, are the truths that are attained by the philosophy of the world and of life I am here describing: as self-knowledge and as world-knowledge. The two sentences in which I should like to sum this up are the following:

If you would know yourself, seek yourself in the universe; if you would know the world, penetrate your own depths. Your own depths will reveal to you, as in a world-memory, the secrets of the cosmos.

This lecture is also known as The Human Soul and the World of Nature.

It will be clear, I think, from what has been said on earlier occasions that the Spiritual Science cultivated at the Goetheanum has nothing sectarian about it, nor does it set out to found a new religion. It gives full recognition to the progress of natural science in modern times, drawing indeed, in a certain sense, the ultimate necessary consequences of the whole trend and spirit of modern science. This will be particularly evident when we come to consider questions concerning our inner life and our knowledge of the world; and to-day I will ask your attention for one such specific question. It embraces a very wide realm, and all I can do here is to give a few indications towards its solution. I shall try to give these in such a way as to throw light on what we consider to be the tasks of the Goetheanum in Dornach.

The subject before us is concerned with two ideas that man can never contemplate without on the one hand feeling an intense longing awaken within him, and on the other being brought face to face with deep doubts and riddles. These two ideas are: the inner being of Nature and the inner being of the human soul.

In his knowledge man feels himself outside Nature. What would induce him to undertake the labour of cognition, were it not the hope of penetrating beyond the immediate region within which he stands in ordinary life, of entering more deeply into the Nature that presents herself in her external aspect to his senses and his intellect? It is, after all, a fact of the life of soul, and one that becomes more and more apparent the more seriously we occupy ourselves with questions of knowledge, that man feels separated from the inner being of Nature. And there remains always the question—to which one or another will have a different answer according to his outlook on the world—whether it be possible for men to enter sufficiently deeply into the being of Nature to allow him to gain some degree of satisfaction from his search. We have at the same time the feeling that whatever in the last resort can be known concerning the being of Nature is somehow also connected with what we may call the being of man's soul.

Now this question of the being of the human soul has presented itself to human cognition since very early times. We have only to recall the Apollonian saying: “Know thyself.” This saying sets forth a demand which the conscientious seeker after knowledge will feel is by no means easy of fulfillment.

We shall perhaps be able to come to a clearer idea of the tasks of the present day in this connection if we go back to earlier ages and remind ourselves of conceptions that were intimately bound up, for the men of olden times, on the one hand with the knowledge of the inner being of Nature, on the other with the self-knowledge of man. Let us then look for a little at some of these conceptions, even though they will take us into fields somewhat remote from the ordinary consciousness of to-day.

In olden times, these two aims—knowledge of Nature and knowledge of self—were associated in the mind of man with quite strange, not to say terrifying, conceptions. It was indeed not thought possible for man to continue in his ordinary way of life if he wanted to set out on the path to knowledge; for on that path he would inevitably find himself in the presence of deep uncertainties before he could come to any satisfying conviction. In our day we are not accustomed to think of the path of knowledge as something that leads us away from.the natural order of our life; it leaves us free to go forward in everyday life as before. And one must admit that the knowledge offered to us in our laboratories and observatories and clinics is not such as to throw us “right off the rails,” in the way attributed to the path of knowledge that the pupils of wisdom in early times had to tread.

They beheld a kind of abyss between what man is and can experience in ordinary life, and what he becomes and is confronted with when he penetrates into the depths of world-existence, or into the knowledge of his own being. They described how man feels the ground sink away from under his feet, so that only if he be strong enough not to succumb to giddiness of soul can he go forward at all into the field of ultimate knowledge. To tread this path of knowledge unprepared would involve man in a harder test than he is able to meet. Serious and conscientious preparation was necessary before he dare bridge the abyss. In ordinary life man is unaware of the abyss; he simply does not see it. And that, they said, is for him a blessing. Man is enveloped in a kind of blindness that protects him from being overcome by giddiness and falling headlong into the abyss. They spoke too of how man had to cross a “Threshold” in order to come into the fields of higher knowledge, and of how he must have become able to face without fear the revelations that await him at the Threshold. Again, in ordinary life man is protected from crossing the Threshold. Call it personification or what you will, in those ancient schools of wisdom they were relating real experiences when they spoke of man being protected by the “Guardian of the Threshold,” and of undergoing beyond it a time of darkness and uncertainty before ultimately attaining to a vision of reality, a “standing within” spirit-filled reality.

It is inevitable that in our day all manner of confused and hazy notions should connect themselves with such expressions as “Threshold,” “Guardian of the Threshold.” Let me say at once that mankind is undergoing evolution; nor is it only the outer cultural renditions that change and develop, but man's life of soul is changing all the time, moving onward from state to state; consequently the expressions which in olden times could be used to describe intimate processes in the life of soul, cannot bear the same meaning for present-day mankind. What man meant in olden times when he spoke of the Threshold and the Guardian of the Threshold was something different from the processes that take place in man to-day, when he resolves to go forward from ordinary knowledge to super-sensible knowledge; and it is only with a view to making more comprehensible what I shall have to say regarding these latter that I bring in a comparison with ancient conceptions.

What was it of which the men of olden times were afraid? What was it for which the pupil in the School of Wisdom had to be prepared by means of an exact and thoroughgoing discipline of the will—a discipline that should make the will strong and vigorous, able to stand firm in extremely difficult and perplexing situations in Life? Strange though it may sound, it becomes clear to us if we are able to survey the course of human evolution, that what men feared in those times was actually none other than the condition of soul which mankind in general has reached to-day. They wanted to protect the pupil from coming all unprepared to the condition of mind and soul to which we have been brought by the scientific education of the last three or four centuries. Let me illustrate this for you in a particular case.

We all accept to-day the so-called Copernican view of the universe. This view places the sun in the centre of our planetary system; the planets revolve round the sun, with the earth as a planet among the other planets. Ever since the time of Copernicus, this is the picture men have had. In earlier times, quite another picture of the world lived in the general consciousness of mankind. The earth was seen in the centre, and the sun and stars revolving round the earth. Man had, that is to say, a geocentric picture of the world. Copernicus replaced it with a heliocentric picture of the world. Man has now no longer the feeling of standing on firm ground; he sees himself being hurled through space, together with the earth, at a terrific speed. As for how it all looks to the eye, that, we are told, is a mere illusion, induced by relations of perspective and the like, to which human vision is subject.

Now, this heliocentric picture of the world already existed in earlier ages. Plutarch is a writer from whom we can learn a great deal concerning the men of olden times, and how they thought about the world. Let me read you a passage translated from his writings. Plutarch is speaking of Aristarchus of Samos, and he describes the way in which Aristarchus conceived the world. We are therefore taken back into early Greek times, into an epoch many centuries before the Middle Ages, and before Copernicus. In the opinion of Aristarchus, says Plutarch, the universe is much bigger than it looks; for Aristarchus makes the assumption that the stars and the sun do not move, but that the earth revolves round the sun as centre, while the sphere of the fixed stars, whose centre is also in the sun, is so immense that the circumference of the circle described by the earth is to the distance of the fixed stars as is the centre of a sphere to its entire surface.

We find thus in Greek times the heliocentric conception of the world; we find the very same picture as we have to-day of man's place in the planetary system and his relation to the heaven of the fixed stars. In olden times, however, this heliocentric conception of the world was a secret known only to a few, who had undergone a strict training of the will before such knowledge could be imparted to them.

It is important to grasp the significance of this fact. What is common knowledge to-day, freely spoken of by everyone, was in earlier times a wisdom known to a select few. What such a wisdom-pupil knew, for example, concerning the sun and its relation to the earth was considered a knowledge that lay “beyond the Threshold”; man must needs first cross the Threshold before he can come into those fields where the soul discovers this new relationship to the universe. The very same knowledge that our whole education renders familiar and natural to us to-day, was for them on the other side of a Threshold that must not be crossed without due preparation.

What we have shown with regard to the astronomical conception of the world could quite well be worked out for other spheres of knowledge. We should again and again find evidence of how the whole of mankind has in the course of evolution been pushed across what was for Olden times a Threshold on the path to higher knowledge. The apprehension that was felt in those times about the condition of soul evoked by such knowledge, has shown itself frequently in later centuries in the attitude of the churches, which preserve and tend to perpetuate the traditions of the past. Again and again the churches have rejected knowledge that has been attained in the progress of civilisation; and when, for example, the Roman Church refused to acknowledge the teaching of Copernicus (as it did until the year 1827), the reason was the same as [that which] in ancient times prevented the priests from giving out Mystery knowledge to the masses—namely, that the knowledge would bring man into uncertainty if he were not duly prepared beforehand.

Now it is well-known that no power on earth can withstand for long the march of progress; and we in these days have to think in an entirely new way about what one may call the “Threshold of the Spiritual World.” Spiritual Science is no “warming up” of Gnostic or other ancient teaching, but works absolutely on the principles of modern natural science, as I think will have been evident from the example we have been considering.

How was it that men of olden times feared knowledge which today is the common property of all mankind? In my book Die Ratsel der Philosophie¹, I have described the changes that have come about in man's mind and soul since early Greek times. The Greek had not a self-consciousness that was fully detached from the external world. When he thought about the world, he felt himself, so to speak, “grown together” with it; he was as closely united with it as we are to-day in the act of sense-perception. For him thought was also, in a manner speaking, sense-perception. Red, blue, G, C sharp—these are for us sense-perceptions; but thought we ourselves produce by inner activity. For the Greek this kind of inner activity did not yet exist. Just as we get red, green, G, C sharp from sense-perception, so did he get the thoughts too from the external world. He had not yet the independence that comes from the comprehension of self. Only quite gradually has the perception and understanding of the self developed to what it is to-day. Self-consciousness has grown steadily stronger in the course of time, and man has thereby detached himself from surrounding Nature. He has learned to look into himself, inwardly to comprehend himself as something that acts independently. In doing so he has placed himself over against Nature; he stands outside her, that he may then contemplate her inner being from without. And with this detachment of thought from external objective life is connected also the birth of the feeling of freedom, that sense of freedom which is in reality a product only of the last few centuries.

We have come to regard history more and more in its purely external aspect; but if we were to consider it, as we try to do in spiritual science, in a more inward way, we should discover that the experience we have to-day when we speak of “freedom” was not there for the Greek. Although we translate the corresponding word in their writings with our word “freedom,” the feeling we associate with the word was quite unknown to the Stoic, for example, and other philosophers. A careful and unbiased study of Greek times will not fail to make this clear.

I laid stress in my Philosophie der Freiheit² which was written in the early nineties, on the connection of the experience of freedom with what I called “pure thinking”—that thinking which is completely detached from the inner organic life, and which (if the expression be not misunderstood) becomes, even in ordinary life, cognition on a higher level. For when we permeate pure thinking with moral ideas and impulses—that is, with ideas and impulses that are not associated with desires, or with sympathies and antipathies, but solely with pure, loving devotion to the deed that is to be done—when we do this and allow the impulse to quicken in our soul to action, then the action we perform is truly free.

One cannot really put the question concerning freedom in the way that is frequently done, when it is asked: Is man free or unfree? All one can say is that man is on the way to freedom. By cultivating self-evolution and self-knowledge, by achieving inner liberation from his accustomed attitude of mind and soul, man is treading a path that will enable him to rise to pure thinking; and on this path he becomes increasingly free. It is thus not a matter of “either—or,” but rather of gradual approach, or, shall we say, of both. For we are at once free and unfree; unfree where we are still governed by our desires, by what rises up out of our organism, out of the life of instinct; free, on the other hand, where we have grown independent of the instinctive life, where we are able to awaken within us pure love for the deed that has been envisaged in pure thinking.

The condition of mind that leads to the experience of freedom—the condition, namely, of pure thinking, to which man is able to surrender himself—must necessarily, for present-day man, remain an ideal; an ideal, however, that is indissolubly bound up with his worth and dignity as man.

We are on the way to such an ideal, and it is natural science that has set us upon the path. In all the development of natural science in modern times—and the results of this natural science carry authority in the widest circles and tend more and more to become the groundwork of our whole education and culture—one thing stands out clearly. Study the development of natural science and you will be struck with the growing recognition of the value and importance of the thought—the thought that is elaborated by man himself inwardly. This is true in the realm of the inorganic, from physics up to astronomy, as well as in the realm of the organic, and in spite of the fact that scientists base their results everywhere on observation and experiment. And through the work he does in thinking, man develops an enhanced self-consciousness; which means, that his detachment from the inner being of Nature grows.

We can here take once more the example of Astronomy. What Copernicus did, fundamentally speaking, was to reduce to calculation the results of observation. In this way one arrives at a world system that is completely detached from man. The world systems of ancient times were not so; they were always intimately connected with the human being. Man felt himself within the world; he was part of it. In our time man is, so to speak, incidental. He sees himself hurled through universal space together with the planet Earth, and his picture of the whole structure of the world is completely divorced from himself; that which lives in his own inner being must on no account be allowed to play a part in his conception of the universe. Man becomes filled, that is to say, with a thought-content that is the means of detaching him from himself. True, he thinks his thoughts, and in thinking remains always united with his thoughts; but he thinks them in such a way that they have no sort of connection with what rises up out of his organism, out of his life of instinct. He is under necessity so to think that, although the thought remains united with him, it nevertheless wrests itself free from the human-personal in him, so that in his thoughts he becomes, in effect, completely objective.

And this experience brings man to greater consciousness of self. The strenuous efforts required for finding one's way to clear conceptions in the field of astronomy or physics or chemistry to-day, or even only for following in thought the results of others' work, are bound to lead to a strengthening of the consciousness of self.

In the ancient civilisations—and herein lies the great difference between them and our own—education was not directed to the strengthening of self-consciousness. Rather had it the tendency to make man's thinking correspond with what he saw with his eyes. So arose the Ptolemaic conception of the world, which in all essentials is a reproduction of what we perceive with the external senses. Man was not thrust so far out of himself as he is by the modern scientific outlook; hence his self-consciousness did not grow. He remained more within his body—held there, as it were, by enchantment. Consciousness of self he derived from his instincts, and from the feeling of life and vitality within him. Although in our age we have drifted into materialism, this living in the body has been overcome by the development of thinking; and the consciousness of self has grown correspondingly. The very fact that we have become materialists, and lost our awareness of the spiritual in the objects perceived by the senses, has contributed to the achievements of thought. In olden times it was feared that if a man were brought unprepared to the kind of thinking such as is necessary, for example, to grasp the heliocentric system, he would “faint” in his soul; his consciousness of self would not be strong enough to sustain him.

This accounts for the emphasis on the training of the will; for a strong and vigorous will strengthens also the consciousness of self. The preparation of the pupil in the Wisdom School was therefore directed primarily to the will, in order that he might grow strong enough to endure, beyond the Threshold, that picture of the world for which a highly-developed consciousness of self is required.

We see, then, what it was men feared in olden times for the pupil who was to be guided into the inner being of the things of the world, into the inner being of Nature. They were afraid lest he be hurt in his soul, through falling into a condition of uncertainty and darkness, a condition comparable, in the realm of soul, with physical faintness. This danger they hoped to avoid by a thoroughgoing discipline of the will. In ordinary life, they said, man must remain on this side of the realm where the dangerous knowledge is to be found; a Guardian holds him back from the region for which he is unfit, thus protecting him from being overcome by faintness of soul. And their description of the experiences the pupil had to undergo if he wanted to cross the Threshold and pass the Guardian correspond exactly to inner experiences of the soul.

It was told how, when the pupil draws near the Threshold, he immediately has a feeling of uncertainty. If he has been sufficiently prepared, he is able to stand upright in the realm which would otherwise make him giddy; he passes the Guardian of the Threshold and, by virtue of the powers of his soul, enters into the spiritual world—which the Guardian would otherwise not allow him even to behold. But he must be able also to stay in the spiritual world with full consciousness. For the tremendous experiences that await him there call for strength and not for weakness, and if he were to let go, these experiences would have a shattering effect on his whole organisation; he would suffer grievous harm.

And now the strange thing is that in course of evolution a knowledge that could be attained by pupils of the ancient Wisdom Schools only after most careful preparation has become the common property of all mankind. We stand to-day in our ordinary knowledge beyond what the men of old felt to be a Threshold. The purpose they had in view in the ancient Wisdom Schools was that the pupil, when he looked into his own inner being, should feel himself united there with the inner being of Nature. And believing that if he did so unprepared, he would sink into a kind of spiritual faintness, they would not allow him to attempt this exploration until he had received the right discipline and training. And yet in our age everyone penetrates into this region utterly unprepared!

As a matter of fact man is experiencing to-day precisely what the ancients took such care to avoid. He acquires his knowledge of Nature; and he acquires also a strong consciousness of self that enables him to stand upright amid all the knowledge that is current to-day in astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, etc. He imbibes this knowledge and can remain steadfast without losing his balance. Nevertheless there is a quality in his life of soul that the men of old would deeply deplore. Because in the course of evolution we have acquired thought and the feeling of freedom and a stronger selfconsciousness, therefore we do not lose ourselves when we study the results of natural science; but we do lose something, and the loss is only too manifest to-day in the soul-life of mankind everywhere.

In this matter we labour under great illusion; we dream, and we cling to our dreams, and will not let them go. I have often spoken of how natural science brings conscientious students to a recognition of the boundaries of knowledge, boundaries man cannot pass without taking his power of cognition into forbidden—nay, into impossible—regions. A very distinguished scientist of modern times has spoken of the “Ignorabimus,” reading into the word a confession that however far we go in the knowledge we acquire from sense-observation and the intellect, we never penetrate to the inner being of Nature. I here touch on a subject that at once lands us in conflict, as was felt even at a time when natural science was far less advanced than it is to-day. It was Albrecht von Haller who expressed the “Ignorabimus” in the well-known lines:

To Nature's heart
No living soul can reach.
Thrice happy he
To whom she shows
Even her outer shell.

Goethe, who used constantly to hear these words on the lips of those who shared Haller's attitude towards Nature, labeled such thinkers “Philistine.” For him they are men who do not want to rouse themselves to inner activity of soul; for by dint of inner activity the soul of man can kindle a light within—a light which, shining upon the heart of Nature, shall carry the soul into her innermost being. Goethe proclaims this in forcible and trenchant manner in his poem Allerdings, quoting to begin with the words to Haller:

‘To Nature's heart
No living soul can reach.’
O Philistine,
To me and mine
What use in such a speech?
We think, through every part
We enter into her heart.

Still the cry goes,
‘Thrice happy he
To whom she shows
Even her outer shell.’

For sixty years I have heard that cry;
I curse it, but secretly, silently,
Say to myself a thousand times,
Gladly she gives and she gives us all!
Nature is neither kernel nor shell,
She is both in one; she is one and all.

Look in your own heart, man, and tell
If you yourself are kernel or shell!³

Out of an instinctive feeling that was conscious and yet at the same time unconscious, Goethe rejected utterly the separation of the being of man's soul from the innermost being of Nature. He saw clearly that if the soul becomes conscious, in a healthy manner, of its own real being, then that consciousness brings with it the experience of standing within the innermost heart of Nature.

This conviction it was that kept Goethe from accepting Kant's philosophy. They make a great mistake who assert that at one time of his life Goethe came very near to the philosophy of Kant. In contradistinction to what Kant recognised as the human faculty of cognition, Goethe postulated what he called “perceptive judgment.” This means that in order to form a judgment we do not merely pass in abstract reasoning from concept to concept; rather do we use inwardly for thought the kind of beholding we use outwardly in sense perception. Goethe says he never thought about thinking; what he set himself continually to do was to behold the living element in the thought. And in this beholding of the thoughts he saw a way to unite the human soul with the very being of Nature.

Anthroposophical Spiritual Science would go further on the same path. This perceptive judgment—which, as presented by Goethe, was still in its beginnings—it sets out to develop in the direction indicated in my book How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. Faculties of cognition, which in ordinary life, and in the pursuit also of ordinary science, remain latent in man, are led up to “vision,” to a “new beholding.” Just as man perceives around him with the physical eye colours, or light and darkness, so with the eye of the spirit does he now behold the spiritual. By the practice of certain intimate exercises of the soul, he calls forth and develops within him powers that usually remain hidden, and so lifts himself up to a higher kind of knowledge which is able to plunge into the very heart of external Nature. You have frequently heard me speak of the successive stages of this higher knowledge, and I would like here to say a little about their evolution from a particular point of view.

We are accustomed to think of the course of our life as divided between waking and sleeping. These two conditions must, we know, alternate for us if we are to remain healthy in mind and body. How is it with us from the time of awakening to the time of falling asleep? The experiences of the soul are permeated with thoughts; the thoughts receive a certain colouring from the life of feeling; and there is also the life of will, which wells up from dim depths of our being under the guidance of the thoughts, and accomplishes deeds. In the other condition, that of sleep, we lie still; our thoughts sink into darkness; our feelings vanish and our will is inactive. The ordinary normal life of man shows these two alternating conditions. The picture is, however, incomplete; and we shall not arrive at any satisfactory idea of the nature of man if we are content to see the course of his life in this simple manner.

We take it for granted that between waking up and falling asleep we are awake. But the fact is, we are not awake in our whole being. This is overlooked, and consequently we have no true psychology; we come to no right understanding of the soul. If, ridding ourselves of all prejudice, we try to observe inwardly what we experience when we feel, We discover that our feeling life is by no means so illumined with the light of consciousness as is the life of thought and ideation. It is dim, by comparison. For a sense of self, for an experience of self, the life of feeling is undoubtedly every bit as real as—even perhaps in some ways more real than—the life of thought: but clarity, light-filled clarity, is enjoyed by thought alone. There is always something undefined about the life of feeling. Indeed, if we examine the matter carefully, comparing different conditions of soul one with another, we are led finally to the conclusion that the life which pulsates in feeling may be compared with dream life. Study the dream life of man; consider how it surges up from unknown depths of his being; how it manifests in pictures, but in pictures that are vague and indeterminate, so that one does not see all at once exactly how they are connected with external reality. Has not the life of feeling the same quality and character?

Feelings are, of course, something altogether different from dream pictures, but when we compare the degree of consciousness in both, we find it to be very much the same. The life of feeling is a kind of waking dream; the pictures that appear in the dream are here pressed down into the whole organic life. The experience is different in each case, and yet the experience is present in the soul in the same manner in both. So that in reality we are awake only in the life of ideation; in the feeling life we dream even while we are awake.

With the life of the will it is again different. We do not as a rule give much thought to the matter, but is it not so that the impulse of will arises within us without our having any clear consciousness of its origin? We have a thought; and out of the thought springs an impulse of will. Then again we see ourselves acting; and then again we have a thought about the action. But we cannot follow with consciousness what comes between. How a thought becomes an impulse for the will and shoots into my muscle-power; how the nerve registers the movement of the muscles; how, in other words, that which has been sent down into the depths of my being as thought, comes to be carried out in action, afterwards to emerge again when I perceive myself performing the action—all this lives in me in no other way than do the experiences of sleep.

In deep sleep we have in a sense lost our own being; we pass through the experiences of sleep without being aware of them; and it is the same with what comes about through the activity of the will-impulse in man. We dream in our life of feeling, and we are asleep in our willing; dreaming and sleeping are thus perpetually present in waking life. And in these unknown depths of being where the will has its origin, arises also that which we eventually gather up—focus, as it were—in consciousness of self. Man comes to a recognition of his full humanity only when he knows himself as a being that thinks and feels and wills.

Ordinary life, therefore, embraces unconscious conditions. And it is just through the life of ideation becoming separated from the rest of the soul life and lifted up into consciousness, that a way is made for the development of the experience of freedom. Here, in a sense, we divide ourselves up. We are awake in a part of ourselves, in the life of ideation, whilst in relation to another part of us we are as unconscious as we are in relation to the inner being of Nature.

It is at this point that Anthroposophical Spiritual Science steps in with its methods for attaining higher knowledge. This spiritual science is very far removed from any dreamy, obscure mysticism, nor does it support itself, like spiritualism, on external experiment. The foundation for the whole method of spiritual scientific research lies in the inner being of man himself; it can be evolved in full consciousness and will manifest the same clarity as the most exact material conceptions. The world of feeling, which generally, as we have seen, leads a kind of dream life, can become hooded with the same light that permeates thoughts and ideas—which, according to some schools of philosophy, themselves originate in the feelings. By means of exercises described in my book, How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. this lighting up of the world of feeling is brought about, with the result that the region which is usually dreamlike in character now lives in the soul as “imaginative” consciousness. The moment man gives himself up to this imaginative consciousness, something is present for him in consciousness that remains generally beneath the Threshold. He thinks pictures, knowing, however, quite well that he is not dreaming them, but that they correspond to realities.

Spiritual Science then leads on further, to “inspired” consciousness, and here we are taken into the realm of the will. Little by little, we are brought to the point of being able to behold clairvoyantly—please do not misunderstand the expression—how the whole human organisation functions when the will pulsates in it. We see what actually takes place in the muscle when the will is active. Such a knowledge is “inspired” knowledge. Man dives down into his own inner being and acquires a self-knowledge which is generally veiled from him. We come to know more of man than stands before us as “given” between birth and death. Feeling and willing being now also flooded with the light of consciousness, we can know man not only as a created being, perceiving in him that which wakes up every morning and enters again into a body ready-made; we can recognise in him also the creative power which comes down from spiritual worlds at the time of birth or conception, and itself forms and organises the body. In effect, at this further stage man comes to know his own eternal being which lives beyond birth and death; he attains to a direct beholding of the eternal and spiritual in his soul.

As man learns in this way to know himself, not merely as natural man, but as spirit, he finds that he is also now within the inner being of Nature; in the spirit of his own nature he recognises the spirit of the Nature that is all around him. And at this point a fact of deep significance is revealed—namely, that with our modern knowledge of Nature we are already standing on the other side of the Threshold, in the old sense of the word. The men of olden times believed they would lose their self-consciousness if they entered this region unprepared. We do not lose our self-consciousness, but we do lose the world.

The full clarity of thought and idea, to which man owes his consciousness of self, has been achieved by him only in modern times; and now this consciousness of self needs to be carried a step further. The men of old paid particular heed to the training of the will; we have now to press forward, as I emphasised in my “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,” to pure thinking. We must develop our thinking; it must grow into Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. And this will bring us once again to a Threshold, a new Threshold into the spiritual world. We must not remain in the world that offers itself for sense-perception and leaves the inner being of Nature beyond the boundaries of knowledge. We must cross another Threshold, the Threshold that lies before our own inner being.

At this Threshold we shall no longer let our imagination run away with us and conjure up all manner of atoms and molecules to account for the impressions of colour and sound and heat; for when we come consciously to recognise, and be within, our own spirit, then we shall find we are also within the spirit of Nature. We shall learn to know Nature herself as spirit. In the region where to-day we talk of an atomistic world (we are really only postulating behind Nature a second equally material Nature), in the very region where to-day we are losing the world, we shall find the spirit. And then we shall have the right fundamental feeling towards the inner being of Nature and, also, the being of the human soul.

It is, as you see, a different attitude we have to attain from that of olden times. We must be conscious that we are living in conditions the men of old wanted to avoid. This does not mean, however, that we are in danger of losing ourselves; our world of thought has been too strongly developed for that. And if we develop the world of thought still further, then we shall also not lose what we are in danger of losing. The men of olden times were threatened with the loss of self, with a kind of faintness of the soul. We are faced with the danger of losing the world for our ego-consciousness; of being so surrounded and overborne by purely mathematical pictures of the world, purely atomistic conceptions, that we lose all sense of the “whole” world in its infinite variety and richness. In order that we may find the world again—in order, that is, that we may find the spirit in the world—we must cross what constitutes for modern man the Threshold.

We may even put it this way: if the men of olden times feared the Guardian of the Threshold, and needed to be fully prepared before they might pass him, we in our day must desire earnestly to pass the Guardian. We must long to carry knowledge of the spirit into those regions where hitherto we have relied only on external sense-perception in combination with the results of intellectual reasoning and experiment. Knowledge of the spirit must be taken into the laboratory, into the observatory and into the clinic. Wherever research is carried on, knowledge of the spirit must have place.

Otherwise, since all the results that are arrived at in such institutions come from beyond the Threshold, man is thereby cut off from the world in a manner that is dangerous for him. He feels himself in the presence of an inner being of Nature which he can never approach on an external path, which he can approach only by becoming awake in his soul and pressing forward to the immortal part of his own being. As soon, however, as he does this, he is at that moment also within the spirit of Nature. He has stepped across the Threshold that lies in his own being, and finds himself in the presence of the spiritual in Nature.

To point out to man this path is the task of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. It has to give what the other sciences cannot give. And it may rightly claim to be Goethean, for to those who say:

To Nature's heart
No living soul can reach.

Goethe replies:

Nature is neither kernel nor shell,
She is both in one, she is one and all.
Look in your own heart, man, and tell
If you yourself are kernel or shell!

We are “shell” as long as we remain in the life of ideas alone. We sever ourselves from Nature, and all we can do is to talk about her. But the man who penetrates to his own inner “kernel,” and experiences himself in the very centre of his soul—he discovers that he is at the same time in the very innermost of Nature; he is experiencing her inner being.

Such, then, is the kind of impulse that Anthroposophical Spiritual Science is ready to give to the whole of human life, and in particular to the several sciences. These several sciences need not remain the highly specialised fields that they have been hitherto; rather shall each be a contribution to that quest which man must ever follow if he would rise to a consciousness of his true dignity—the quest for the eternal in the human being. All that the individual sciences can teach to-day is still only a knowledge that looks on Nature from without. But if those who are working in them tread, as well as the outer, also the inner path of knowledge, then the knowledge acquired in the different fields can grow into a knowledge of man, a comprehensive knowledge of mankind. We need such a knowledge in our time if we are to guide the social problems of the future into paths where right and healthy solutions can be found—as I have explained in my book, “The Threefold Commonwealth.”

One who carries deeply enough in his heart the development of spiritual science will find himself continually face to face with this question of the connection between the being of man and the inner being of Nature. The specialised sciences cannot help us here; they only spread darkness over the world. The darkness is to be feared, even as the men of olden times feared the region beyond the Threshold. But it is possible for man to kindle a light that shall light up the darkness; and this light is the light that shines in the soul of man when he attains to spiritual knowledge.

• 1. The Riddles of Philosophy
• 2. Philosophy of Spiritual Activity
• 3. English translation from Goethe and Faust; an Interpretation by F. M. Stawell and G. L. Dickinson. G. Bell & Sons, 1928.

My dear friends, I should like to put together various things today which will give us the possibility of going into some important matters that we will speak of in connection with our present subject.

Let us suppose that here were the surface of the earth—arable land, meadow, or what you will (a drawing was made), and plants, any kind of plants grew in this meadow. And suppose that here were a worm or some little creature, that lives and burrows under the earth and has its home under the earth and never comes above the surface. This little grub or caterpillar, or whatever it is, creeps about inside and learns by its creeping about to know the roots of these plants. Naturally, as this creature never comes out above the surface of the earth, it only learns to know the roots of the plants, it learns to know nothing else; it creeps about and learns to recognise the roots. And what will happen is the following, is it not?

When a certain time comes in this creeping about of the caterpillar, processes are going on up above in the plants, in the whole plant nature; real processes are going on which are dependent on the sunshine, on the sun's giving out a certain warmth. The processes which the plants are undergoing naturally also bring about changes in the roots. When the plant above begins to put out fresh shoots and to bear blossoms, changes occur similarly in the roots. All the roots processes are affected when something occurs above. So we can say: when this worm is creeping about underneath, up above, caused by sun-activities, shoots, leaves, fruits are called forth, and processes are then brought about in the roots. But the caterpillar only crawls about in the earth; it creeps from root to root.

Now let us for once suppose—hypothetically we can accept it—that this caterpillar or grub were a worm-philosopher or a caterpillar-philosopher, and evolved a world-conception. Thus it creeps about there down below the earth and makes itself a world-conception. In the picture that it devises as world-conception, there can naturally never play a role, the fact that the sun comes and the shoots spring forth—for the caterpillar can know nothing of this; it creeps around, this caterpillar, this worm, and studies the changes in the roots, and notices quite clearly that something is going on, that the roots become different, and also that in the part of the earth lying round something is happening, and he now expresses all he knows, this worm. He expresses all of this, but in the picture of the world which he makes for himself, never a word is to be found about the existence of the sun, the coming forth of the plants; this indeed is self-evident. That is to say, a world-conception arisen in this worm-philosopher which will give a proper picture of the condition under the earth, whether it becomes damper, becomes warmer ... To be sure he does not know, this worm, whence this warmth comes ... That it becomes warmer, that all sorts of processes go on in the roots, all that he comprehends. And let us suppose the worm were not an ordinary worm-philosopher but was inspired by some modern philosopher of the opinion so current today, that all depends on cause and effect, everything is subjected to causality, as it is expressed in a scientifically philosophical-technical way. Then this worm will creep about down below and will call one thing a cause and another an effect and say: Now the earth becomes somewhat warmer from above downwards; that causes alterations in the roots. With the further processes he will represent the one as cause and the further processes in the roots as effects, and so on ... and a consistent picture will emerge, which classifies all the processes under the earth as cause and effect. But it would not include that fact that the sun shines, and the plants come out, and through this the processes in the roots are changed. Still, the worm's world-picture would be quite a consistent one. It could be a genuine picture of causality, there need be nothing lacking in the chain of cause and effect.

Now you see, it is quite clear to you, I think, that this worm-philosophy represents a one-sided world-conception which is quite correct ... except that it lacks what man considers the most important of all. That is, that the sun comes with its warmth and light and brings about what the worm actually observes down there below; it is clear, indeed, how in fact his whole causality only depends on the fact that he does not come up above the surface of the earth.

You see, as a matter of fact, such worms are the people who philosophize today on the chain of causality, of causes and effects. The image is completely opposite: men makes researches into what their senses see; and move about in what—well, not in what is shut off spatially from above—but in what is shut off through sense observation, and they simply do not perceive the spiritual extended everywhere, that causes the causes. They do not distinguish the spiritual which is behind cause and effect. It is really an exact analogy.

Now if the worm should suddenly come out and see the sun, he could discover that the cause of all he has puzzled out down below is, as a matter of fact, what other beings up above are seeing, and that his world-conception simply does not hold good. He would have to realize that what he himself underneath has had as perceptions of differences, is up above. It is just the same when one raises oneself from ordinary human sight to spiritual sight, for one notes how then something comes into the sense-world which cannot be perceived under ordinary circumstances.

You also see from this how the much vaunted inner completeness of a world-conception means nothing for its correctness. One who can set himself genuinely with his whole heart and soul into this worm-existence can give the assurance that nothing at all in this worm-conception need rest on a logical error. Hence all logic can be correct and complete in itself, there need be no logical error in it, it can be a world-conception completely tenable inwardly. You will realize from this, however, that it is in no way a question of being able or not able to prove something with the instruments of the world in which man is. I have often referred to this from other aspects. This we are not concerned with, whether or not a man can prove something with the means offered by the world in which he dwells. World-conceptions can have ever such fine proofs in themselves, they still remain—well—let us say: worm-world-conceptions. When we let this really work upon our soul, we see what stands behind of great importance: we note how—when we once guess that there are yet other worlds—a kind of general world -the duty arises of entering into those other worlds. For no matter how complete in itself is a world-conception, it does not follow that it gives one any knowledge of the actual events and processes. And this is truly what one finds with the majority of the philosophies of today and the immediate past; they are worm-conceptions. They are complete in themselves in a really extraordinarily logical way, they have an immense amount of value for the worlds in which man dwells; but they are only constructed with the means of the worlds in which man dwells. You see from this that you cannot rely on so-called proofs, unless you first come to understand where these proofs originate. For our time, it is truly a matter of getting a feeling for the way other worlds permeate our world, for the way other worlds allow themselves to become manifest. Certainly, this is difficult. For truly, conditions for the worm are such that he lives underground; the worm would not endure well up above, if he were forced to go out there; first he would have to adapt himself to the new conditions. Thus it is also difficult for the human being, when he detaches himself as soul from his bodily nature, to adapt himself to the new conditions.

Now you can raise a question, my dear friends, you can say: ‘Fine, you have now compared the world in which the human being lives with his senses to the world under the earth. Show us something, anything at all, that limits, truly limits our ordinary sense-world conception in any such way.’ One can raise this point quite seriously. In the course of the process of consecutive formation of Saturn, Sun and Moon, Time (during the Moon-existence) and Space (during the Earth-existence) first entered into humanity's world conception. When we speak of Saturn, Sun and Moon, and use spatial conceptions to aid is that description, we actually speak only in Imaginations, and we must remain conscious throughout of the fact that when we speak of these three worlds in spatial conceptions, these space-conceptions have only as much to do with what was brought to completion in those worlds as ... well, let us say, as the forms of the letters of the alphabet have to do with the meanings of the words. We must not take contemporary conceptions as they are, but rather as signs, as images of these worlds. For Space only has meaning for that which evolves within the span of Earth-existence, and Time has actually only become meaningful since the separation of the Old Moon from the Sun; that is the strict point in which the Old Moon separated from the Sun. Then for the first time it is possible to speak of events occurring in time, as we speak today.

Since, however, we have our mental concepts in time and space—for everything external that we conceive is in space, everything that we bring to consciousness and let arise within, runs its course in time—we are thereby between birth and death, but only between birth and death, shut in by space and time, as the worm dwells down there in its earth. Space and time are our boundaries, just as the earth substance is the worm's boundary. We are worms of space and worms of time; we are so, truly, in a quite high, in a quite exact sense. For as incarnated men we move about in space; we observe things in space, and that which observes is our soul, which itself lives in the concepts (Vorstellungen). Between birth and death time goes on, from falling asleep to awakening time goes on. The comparison is by no means a bad one, when one sees the reality. Insofar as our soul is enclosed in the body, as regards the world-picture it forms, it is truly a worm, who creeps about in space and who, if it wishes to arrive at realities, must come out of space. Then it must also get accustomed to viewing things not merely under time-conditions, but under conditions, for which that which takes its course in time is nothing but an outer sign, like a letter of the alphabet.

Now after I have called attention to this, I will lead these studies over to the realm of soul and spirit. Just as the coming plant is already actually contained in the seed, so, naturally, there was already contained in an earlier germinal state, what has developed for man today on earth in perceptions of space and time. I have already pointed out here in one connection that rudiments were already contained in Saturn, Sun, Moon. So that when here on earth we assign a certain meaning to what goes on around us, we must as it were see this meaning already present, in the old evolution of the Moon, the Sun, etc. With the forming of time and the forming of space, the meaning of life on earth must in some way have prepared itself. The forming of space and time must have so come about that then the meaning of the earth-life was added to it like a kind of flower. Now we can picture these processes—Saturn, Sun and Moon in the following way. We can say: We have an Old Saturn existence which is surrounded by the cosmos; we have an Old Sun-existence, again surrounded by the cosmos; we have an Old Moon-existence but already developing out of it a sort of neighbouring planet (you may read this in my Occult Science and we have then learnt to know that the Earth separates from the Sun and again from the Moon.

If the man of materialistic thought (I will suppose what is most favourable for our Spiritual Science) could prevail on himself to believe in these developments, he would still have to overcome the next step, which consists fundamentally in the fact that the whole evolution (origin of Saturn, of the Sun, further development to Moon, separation of the Moon, separation of Earth, Sun and Moon) all really occurs in order to make Man possible, as he is on earth. Just as the processes of a plant's root- and leaf-building happen in order to make possible the blossom and the fruit, so do all these processes, these macrocosmic processes, happen in order to make possible our life on earth; they arise so that we may live on earth in the way we do. One could also say: These processes are the roots of our earth-life; this life is there so that we can develop on Earth as we do. Let us be quite clear that we have to do with the separation of the Sun on the one hand, the separation of the Moon on the other hand—that we have to do with separations so that our Earth could come into existence as Earth. That is to say, we were left behind on the Earth planet, and Sun and Moon separated from us and work on the earth from outside. That had to come about, otherwise nothing could have developed in us as it does on earth. For everything to develop on Earth in the way it does it was necessary that once in primeval times Sun and Moon were united with the earth and that then they separated, and now let their activity shine in from outside upon the earth. That is absolutely necessary.

Now I should like to show that our inner soul life has taken on quite distinct configurations through the fact that this has taken place. Among the very varied ideas which we have—I could adduce many as examples—and which play a certain role in the whole state of our earth existence, is the idea of ‘possessing something,’ ‘having something.’ This implies that our own person unites itself with something which is outside the personality. We speak in the rarest cases of possessing our arm and our nose, for most people experience their arm or nose as so much belonging to them that they do not speak of a possession. But what could be separated and then belongs to us we describe purely in the legal sense as a possession, a genuine possession. Now the concept of possessing something which is outside could not be formed in us at all, if there had not arisen the separation of what had formerly belonged to the earth, and the being drawn in again of the Sun and Moon to the earth. Our life was quite different on the Old Sun. There Sun and Moon were united as Sun with what were processes of Earth; they were inwardly united with the whole human existence. There the human being could say: ‘Sun activity in me,’ ‘I Sun activity’ (if he could have said ‘I’ already, as the archangels could) ‘I Sun activity’; not ‘the sun shines on me, Sun activity comes toward me.’ This Planet or Fixed Star Sun had to be separated so that we as earth men could develop this special configuration of the possession-concept.

Now this is connected with something else. Imagine an Archangel on the old Sun-existence; he says: ‘I Sun.’ That we see something rests upon the fact that the sun's rays or other light-rays shine on the object and are thrown back to us. Were the sun to shine from the midst of the earth, we should see nothing of the objects which are upon the earth. We should then say: ‘I Sun,’ ‘I Light,’ but we should not separate the individual objects, we should not see them. Thus something else still is connected with this. In the Earth's evolution from Saturn, Sun, Moon to Earth, we have for the first time, through this macrocosmic constellation, the possibility of seeing and perceiving objects as we do now. Such perceptions were naturally not present during the Sun-existence. Although the first rudiments of our sense-organs had already been prepared on Old Saturn, they were only opened upon the Earth, only there were they made organs of perception. These rudiments on Saturn were blind and unperceiving sense-organs. The sense-organs were first opened by the separation of the Sun and the departure of the Moon from the earth. You see from this that two processes go parallel—the activity of our sense-perceptions and the sight of external objects, and running parallel with this, the possession-concept. For how do we come to the concept of possession? You could not imagine that an Archangel during the Sun-existence wished to possess anything. He does not behold things; he is everything. If all objects and beings of the earth were like this, they would never have the urge to want to possess anything. With this development of the senses develops for the first time the possession-concept, the possession-concept is not separable from the development of the senses; these two things run parallel. The senses were on the one side, and something like the possession-concept on the other side. Other concepts can also be taken.

And when we consider in a more comprehensive sense what stands in the religious records, in the Bible (for in such records as the Bible very many things lie concealed)—then we can say: What is given at the beginning of the Bible about the Luciferic temptation is connected with the promise of Lucifer to man that his senses shall be developed: ‘Your eyes shall be opened.’ He means that all senses shall be opened—the eyes only stand for the senses as a whole. In this way he has guided the senses to external things and at the same time called forth the concept of possession. If we wished to relate somewhat more in detail what Lucifer promised to the woman we should have to say: You will become as gods, your senses will be opened; you will distinguish between what pleases you and does not please you, what you call good and evil, and you will wish to possess all that pleases you, that you call good.—One must connect all this with the Luciferic temptation.

Now we must reflect about something, if we wish to grasp aright such a conception as I have now developed. Here is one of the points where it is necessary in a lecture on Spiritual Science to call upon the reflection and meditation of each individual who wants to assimilate what is given. One must reflect upon something; In developing for you the arising of the senses, the perception of objects, and the evolution of the possession-concept, we have not been obliged to introduce any concept of space or time. To be sure, if a man wants to picture these things to himself, if he sketches them on a board, he avails himself of the assistance of the space and time idea. But in order to grasp what this means: 'the senses are opened' or 'the possession-concept is developed' one does not need the idea of space and time. These things are independent of space and time. You do not need to think you are spatially distant from something when you want to possess it; nor do you need to call on the time-processes. I have said, here one must summon self-reflection, for everyone can object: ‘I cannot do it’ ... But if he makes sufficient effort, he can imagine such things without the aid of space and time concept. Indeed, something else is true: when you try to bring such concepts clearly to consciousness, that is, to meditate them as I have just done with you, you gradually come out beyond the idea of space and time. You come out into a world where space and time really do not-play the eminent role in your experience that they play in everyday life.

Now there exists in the evolution of humanity a peculiar longing. Wherever in history we meet with the human race in its innermost striving, we come upon a certain longing. And that is the longing to have concepts which are independent of space and time, which have nothing to do with space and time. Historical events are transformed into myths, or in the historical presentation there is an indication of the spiritual in order to make it possible to show how historical events take a mythical form. And the further we look back in history, for instance, the more we find as historical traditions, the historical facts veiled in the myth. Only reflect how already in ancient Greek history all is veiled in myth and in regard to earlier mid-European history all is enveloped in myth and legend! The further one goes back the more one is removed from the external, merely physical feeling of facts, and the presentation plunges into symbolism. When you study myths you will remark that in the arising of myths there is clearly to be seen the desire to work oneself out of space and time. Not only that fairy tales—the most elementary myths—often depict how some human being (I am thinking of the Sleeping Beauty) passes out of time and enters the timeless, but when you examine myths you will see that you do not rightly know which facts are meant to be spiritual. Something that lies centuries earlier may be related later. Sometimes, too, facts which lie hundreds of years apart in history are welded together in a myth. The myth seeks to lift itself above space and time. This means that there lives in man's existence the longing to rise above this space-condition which makes us think and visualise in space and time. There is a longing to live in such concepts as depict, free of space and time, those realities which rule as the eternal things in the succession of events in our space and time existence, or, if they have once been formed, remain as the eternal things.

You see, if you take what I have just said together with something which I said last time you will see a wonderful connection. I said that if a Luciferic quality was not active in us, we should see that our world of concepts is really in the Old Moon. But now it follows from this that the Old Moon is actually present, has remained, and that it is only Lucifer who bewitches us into thinking that our concept is now in ourself. Thus time becomes there a means of deception and illusion for Lucifer. The ancient Moon-existence endures and so also do things that arise, endure. Our possession-concepts are enduring. This means that what earthly man develops as social earthly-order, by reason of his possession-concept, this remains, this will also still be in existence when the Jupiter and Venus conditions are one day there. And then if corresponding temptations do not come as Luciferic and Ahrimanic temptations, one will see how social orders were formed on earth through the possession-idea. They will then present something like physical orders. For that is a part of Maya-existence, of illusion—the idea that things pass away; in reality they are enduring, in reality they go on subsisting. And already, if one understands things aright, one finds the enduring behind the actual past. You can grasp it to some extent in what I have just related.

But now, if we truly grasp what I have said, we are really looking into profoundly important foundations of our whole earth-existence. For do we not see how beneath the spatial and temporal earth-existence the eternally enduring earth-existence, or existence in general, is veritably spread out? How we have a spatial, a temporal-spatial condition on the surface, and within, the condition of duration. And now comes our mode of viewing things when it takes its course in space and time, our views and concepts that live in space and time. Just consider, how one can picture that concretely in detail, think for once ... nowadays men no longer grasp this thoroughly ... but somewhere or somehow, think simply 'red.’ In order to think 'red' you need no space and you need no time; you can think 'red' to yourself anywhere; it does not have to be there in time or space, because it is thought of just as quality. (red was put on the board.) It is difficult nowadays for a man to picture it because he wants to give the red a boundary. It was not difficult like this for the angels on the Old Moon for they had no desire to distribute red over separate objects. They had time already, but not space. Actually they pictured, that is they experienced 'red' or 'green' or any other colour as flowing current. Try to conceive this vividly: blue = flowing current; red = flowing current; conceive, too, of the other sense-experiences in the same way—streaming, but only in time, letting no real spatial concept, intermingle ... we can say: at the transition from Moon- to Earth-existence one can feel how the mere time-quality was yoked into the spatial. What then actually determines the essential nature of earth existence, that a 'red' is in this way given a boundary and yoked in? On the Moon it would have been impossible to see an enclosed 'red,’ on Earth it is possible to see red enclosed in a boundary. (A sketch of a flower was drawn.) This, however, is connected, inwardly connected, with the separation of the sun from the earth, and with the falling of the sun's rays from outside upon the earth. So that in a true sense I can say: the sunbeam falls on earth from outside. That already shows you that our present existence is inconceivable without the space-concept. Yes, for our present perception and life, this external position of the sun betokens something real.

Now from what I have brought forward you can easily gather that we can really say: colours are harnesses into space. In ‘Theosophy’ I have called that which lives in man after death ‘flowing sensitivity,’ since there he is not bound to space. I therefore spoke of the first world through which he lives as the ‘world of flowing sensitivity.’ For the sun's must first come in from outside, must harness sense-perceptions into space. With this is connected, as I have explained, the fact that man evolves ideas of possession; for in a world of flowing sensitivity a person can never think of possession -time at most is present there—and he would soon see the futility of it if he were to think of possession. It would be rather like thinking of possessing a piece of water, flowing along in a brook. This only arises inasmuch as the sun, separating from the earth, brings the sense-perceptions into the framework of space.

You see, something like this that I have just expounded must be transformed into an experience, a feeling; one cannot leave it as a mere theoretical concept. One must change it into a feeling, one must really get an inner living sensation how as man, as microcosm, one is placed into the macrocosm, and how this very yearning, i.e. to possess something, is connected with the whole development of the macrocosm, with the course of events through which sense observation has developed. When one feels this rightly, when one begins, so to say, to feel cosmically how, for instance, the simple concept: thou wouldst like to possess what thou seest and what pleases thy sight ... how this is born out of the macrocosm, then for the first time one really gets the truly living idea that the human soul nature is dependent on the whole cosmos. Then one gets a strong and vividly living feeling of how in every concept of ordinary life one is connected with the macrocosm, and how actually in all that we picture and conceive and experience in the soul, the macrocosm lives in us. And there exists a continual longing in man to experience such hidden connections as actually exist in life, and to express the experience. This exists—this longing in the human soul, in the heart of man. And let us imagine that there arose in a human soul a vivid feeling and sensation ( I wish to express the cosmic connection of this single soul experience): ‘My eye falls there on an external object; I want to possess it; I will appropriate it’ ... then from such a feeling, one can experience what I might call—the tragedy of Nature. I say 'the tragedy of the world of nature.’ We really take from a whole world,—extending to the Moon and still present as the basis of our world,—we take from it what we wish to possess. What we desire to possess we take away from this world which rests on the basis of our natural world. That we take away. And this it is which must be consistently felt by a human soul felt by a human soul that is really sensitive to nature: that there, in the background of Nature, lies something which she must continually submit to; namely, that man contests Nature, who will give all to all, and says: ‘This belongs to me!’ And now consider with full human feeling this gainsaying of Nature, who gives all to all: This I will have for myself, and that I will have it for myself is induced by the fact that my senses find it good or less good for me, sympathetic or antipathetic. Here one can enter deeply with one's own soul into natural existence, can feel with Nature how something is taken away from her. And it is taken away because the human being, under the impression of his senses, forms the thought that he wants to have for himself what Nature wishes to give to all.

I once felt in my soul, my dear friends, suddenly and with special profoundness, how one can experience this whole relationship that I have just sought to characterize. How one can learn to feel with Nature when she says: Protect myself as I will, world evolution has gone so far that the human being declares that my things are his things. Yes, in a certain moment years ago, I felt that experience most warmly and intimately in my soul. It was years ago in a society where there was to be a programme of Recitations. And as it happens from time to time, especially in Recitation programmes, that the persons concerned are prevented from coming and excuse themselves; so it happened here too, a lady reciter sent her excuses and at once a substitute had been found. And now one may think as one will about the value of the declamation that followed and about the substitute—I will not go into that now,—but he was of a quite particular kind, namely, there was found ready to recite the programme in place of the actress who had fallen out, one of the purest, noblest Catholic priests that I have ever come to know in the world. And one had then, or could have, a quite specially significant experience, which in effect condensed for me into what I just now expressed to you.

For this grave and earnest priest—with all that Catholicism brings with it for the really true and upright priest—had according to the programme to recite the ‘Heidenröslein’ of Goethe. And in this recitation one could really experience something, for the man was not only a priest in the ordinary sense, but he, was so learned and so purely given up to spiritual studies, that many said: ‘This man (I will not mention his name) knows the whole world ... and in addition, three villages ...’ for they found him so wise and experienced in things one can know. Now although the recitation was not particularly good, there actually lay in the whole mode and manner in which he gave the ‘Heidenröslein,’ something immensely significant, since one could feel that his whole perception of the world was derived, one might say, from a perception that had been turned away from everything of a sense nature. One could feel how, precisely through the fact that a priest came forward instead of an actress, the whole cosmic power, the immense cosmic power and fineness that lies in this unique poem ‘Das Heidenröslein’ (see end of lecture for poem and translation) came into the recitation. This poem has, indeed, what one might call a prelude; it is an old folksong. And I have already said that men have ever the longing to experience what lives cosmically in the subsoil of existence. And precisely in this poem ‘Das Heidenr&öslein’ there enters something of this quite grandly sublime cosmic subsoil in infinitely simple images. Therefore one must count ‘Das Heidenröslein’ among the very finest pearls of poetry that ever have been given to the world. Years ago I have also heard of people who have attributed something or other, I know not what, of everyday human, all-too-human, connexions to ‘Das Heidenröslein’; that merely comes from a perverted condition of mind. If people can do that—interpret anything which is not quite pure into the ‘Heidenröslein,’ this appertains to a mind that from its sense-exhalations likes continually to revel in all sorts of ‘sacred love.’ One can indeed revel continuously in ‘sacred love’ from sensations of sense-exhalations but that which underlies as cosmic foundations such a poem as ‘Das Heidenröslein’ can only be felt with pure, with chaste heart, and every misconstruction would show a complete desolation and emptiness of mind.

For let us take the wonderful thing which this ‘Heidenröslein’ has actually become as it has been given us by Goethe, and through the fact that the folk song passed over into the youthful lyric depths of his art. Something quite remarkable it has become: in every line always the very thing that ought to be there! Consider for a moment that one felt what lies in the activity of sense-perceptions and how they have developed throughout cosmic evolution ... and that one wished to describe this. How could one do it better than by taking the red in an object, eliminating the space-boundary and letting echo: ‘Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot’ ... ‘rot’ (red) echoing in ‘Röslein,Röslein,Röslein rot.’ Immediately there confronts us the whole mystery as it is set before us out of the cosmos. The sense-world stands there: ‘Röslein,Röslein,Röslein rot,’ in the continuous ‘Röslein,Röslein,Röslein rot.’ Now in the first line we are shown at once that we are concerned with this mystery—this being able to look out from the senses,’sah ein Knab' ein Röslein stehn, Röslein auf der Heiden.’ Now already in the next line in a wonderful enhancement, which is rarely so beautiful in poetry, a nuance is brought out that now the little red rose begins to become sympathetic—‘War so Jung undmorgenschön’ ... it thus already becomes something which warrants sympathy with what is revealed from the senses. So the next line is inserted with precisely what belongs to it: ‘lief er schnell, es nah zu sehn’: there you have the whole correspondence of the senses with what is presented to them: he runs to see it close to! And now the next line, again an enhancement, but this time in himself; to begin with, the intensification was outside,—‘Röslein auf der Heiden,’—simply the object; then ‘was so young and morning-fair,’ the enhancement outside, and in him ‘ran he fast, it near to see’ ... inasmuch as he ran fast to see it near, ‘Sah's mit vielen Freuden’ (saw it with much joy). You see how the outer corresponds with the inner. Now comes the refrain, ‘Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot, Röslein auf der Heiden,’ in order to show us quite particularly how the correspondence is between him and that which appears outside as the object ‘red.’ And the mysterious connection with possession: ‘Knabe sprach: ich breche dich.’ He wants to possess it, he wants to pluck the little rose, he wants to take it home with him. There is nothing else in it, but what is in it is of wonderful cosmic depth.‘Knabe sprach: ich breche dich, Röslein auf der Heiden. Röslein sprach: ich steche dich ...’We can see in this sentence, ‘ich steche dich’ (I prick thee) the whole mystery of Nature, who wants to protect herself from man's assertion: ‘I will take thy things home.’ She, Nature, would like to do with all her objects as she would have done with the little rose ‘ leave it for all to see who pass by. For in this ‘Röslein sprach: ich steche dich’ is indeed uniquely contained what I have described as a feeling that shares in the tragedy of Nature. ‘bass du ewig denkst an mich’ (that thou must think of me eternally); he must think of Nature forever, for he transforms her permanence into something fleeting, he brings the possession-relation into what has first arisen in space and time. The human being must atone for his having come out of permanence and must therefore at least think of it eternally, it must be perpetuated, made eternal; the untruth must not persist that it is not perpetuated. Then again: ‘und ich will's nicht leiden’ (and I will not suffer it). The little rose simply stands as the representative of the whole of Nature—every natural object actually says this when one wants to possess it. And again, so that attention may be fully fixed on the real subject, ‘Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot, Röslein auf der Heiden...’ And the next verse again shows a wonderful enhancement: he will not let himself be held back—‘und der wilde Knabe brach's Röslein auf der Heiden’—thus he nevertheless determines to possess it! ‘Röslein wehrte sich und stack’ ’¦ Again as the representative of the whole of Nature. ‘Half ihm dock kein Weh und Ach’—this is the general experience of Nature, and we feel that tragedy which expresses itself like a mood in Nature when man wishes to possess her: ‘Musst' es eben leiden’ (she must after all permit, suffer it.) Infinitely profound are these words ‘musst' es eben leiden!’

But this microcosmic mystery has in fact a macro-cosmic counterpart, and if one now leaves the microcosm for the macrocosm one may say—who then in the macrocosm is the wild boy who plucks the little rose on the heath? It is the sunbeam, which separated from the earth with the Sun and which now falls on earth from outside. It actually calls forth on the one hand the little rose on the heath, but then when it sees it, when it is there, quickly gathers it again, makes it wither and fade.

Thus it is in nature everywhere. Nature still gives us a memory of the ‘Musst’ es eben leiden’: next to the rose the thorns, the shrivelled thorns which are a token that Nature nevertheless remembers how the sunbeam takes from her what she possesses. But when we do not merely observe as the materialist does, but include the whole cosmic feeling, the thorn near the rose is also the expression of the grief of nature in contrast to Nature's great joy; the jubilation of nature when the rosebush stands there with all its roses, the grief when the wild boy, the sun-ray comes and makes the roses wither. That is the Goethe-poem in the macrocosm: and one can only say: if anything is fitted to stimulate esoteric feelings, it is such poems, where there is no need to think and attribute all sorts of dry allegories to them, but where one only needs to remember a great truth:—when the true poet goes beyond nature it is because he seeks to put into words what can be felt behind the surface of facts, and beyond space and time.

And when a poet produces something in such simple incidents as a boy's plucking a rose on the heath, which yet speaks so deeply to our hearts, it is because this heart of ours received its rudiments when we ourselves were not yet united with the earth, when we were still united with the ancient Sun existence—and were able to feel with the whole world. Although through the Luciferic-Ahrimanic illusion we now ascribe our feelings to ourselves as I have shown, yet all the same they arise out of the cosmos, and on this rests the fact that we can so inwardly accompany the true poet although he describes the simplest incident of the plucking of a rose. For into what arises from the human soul in the simplest events, the whole cosmos is placed. And we need not make assertions and think it out, but we feel it, when we let such a marvellously delicate poem as ‘Das Heidenrösslein’ work upon us. We feel that the whole world is secreted in it, world mysteries are laid within it,—so that the secrets of art too gradually reveal themselves to us. They unfold as we ascend from the perception and experiencing of objects in a purely external way to an inward perception, as we ascend from microcosmos to macrocosmos and seek gradually to learn the hidden but active mysteries in our souls.Das Heidenröslein—¹

• 1. ‘rosebud’ is not strictly ‘Röslein,’ but is used for the sake of the metre. (Translator)