The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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

Curtsey Betsy jets cleric
lastly light sceptic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some remarks were added.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Someone compared groups of plants with temperaments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rudolf Steiner then gave the following assignments:

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

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

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

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

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

The understanding of the spiritual-scientific view of life not merely with the mind but with the heart has as a result a corresponding revolution in artistic creation and enjoyment. The forces which we derive from this world-outlook can also flow into the understanding of the world from the point of view of Art. We have recently tried to indicate with our building (the Goetheanum at Dornach) at least a small part of the spiritual-scientific impulses which can flow into artistic forms. We would see a time, before us, if we examine closely the experiences and feelings to be derived from spiritual science, when the path to Art would be in many respects different from what it has been in the past, when the means of artistic creation will be experienced in the human soul much more intensively than before, when colours and sounds will be much more intimately felt in the soul, when, as it were, colours and sounds can be felt morally and spiritually in the soul, and when in the creations of the artists we shall meet the traces of their souls' experiences in the Cosmos.

In essentials the attitude of artistic creation and artistic appreciation in the past epoch was a kind of external observation, an appeal to something that affects the artist from outside. The need to refer to Nature and to the model for outward observation has become greater and greater. Not that in the Art of the future there is to be any one-sided rejection of Nature and outward reality. Far from it, but there will be a much more intimate union with the external world; so strong a union with it, that it covers not merely the external impression of colours and sound and form, but that which one can experience behind the sound and colour and form, in what is revealed by them.

In this respect mankind will make important discoveries in the future; it will unite its moral-spiritual nature with the results of sense-perception. An endless deepening of the human soul can be foreseen in this domain. Let us take first of all a single point. We will take the case when we direct our gaze to a surface evenly covered with vermilion. Let us assume we succeed in forgetting everything else round us and concentrating entirely on experiencing this colour, so that we have the colour in front of us not merely as something that works upon us, but as something wherein we ourselves are, with which we ourselves are one. We shall then be able to have the experience: you are now in the world, you yourself have become colour in this world, your innermost soul has become colour. Wherever you go in the world, your soul will be filled with red, everywhere you live in red and with red and out of red. But we will not be able to experience this in intensive soul-life, unless the feeling is transformed into the corresponding moral experience, into real moral experience. If we float through the world as red, and have become identical with red, we shall not be able to help feeling that this red world in which one is oneself red is pierced with the substance of divine wrath, which pours upon us from every direction on account of all the possibilities of evil and sin in us. We shall be able to feel we are in the illimitable red spaces as in a judgment court of God, and our moral feelings will be like what a moral experience of our soul would become in all-embracing “illimitable” space. Then when the reaction comes, when something rises in our soul one can only describe it by saying that one learns to pray.

If one can experience in the colour red the radiation and fusion of the divine wrath with all that can lie in the soul as the possibility of evil, and if one can experience in red how one learns to pray, then the experience of the colour red is enormously deepened. Then we can also experience how red can express itself plastically in space.

We can then understand how we can experience a Being who radiates goodness, who is filled with divine goodness and mercy, a Being such as we long to experience in space. Then we shall feel the need of expressing this divine mercy and goodness in a form which arises out of the colour itself. We shall feel the need of allowing space to recede, so that the goodness and mercy may shine forth. As clouds are driven asunder so space is rent by goodness and mercy and we shall get the feeling: you must make that a red which is fleeing.

Here we shall have to indicate faintly a kind of rose-violet streaming into the fleeing red. We shall then be taking part with our whole soul in a self-forming of colour, and with our whole soul shall feel an echo of what those beings have felt who specially belong to our earth, and who, when they had ascended to the Elohim-existence, learnt to fashion the world of forms out of colours. We shall learn to experience something of the Spirits of Form, who as spirits are the Elohim. And we shall then understand how the forms of the colours can be realities as is indicated in my first and second Mystery Plays, and we shall understand a little of how the colour-surface becomes something we have overcome, because we go out with colour into the Universe. If this is accompanied by strong desire, a feeling can arise like that in Strader when, looking at the picture of Capesius, he says: “I fain would pierce this canvas through and through ...”

If you consider this you will see that an attempt has been made in these Mystery Plays to present something of this sort really artistically, how something appears before our soul when it attempts to expand in the cosmic forces, when it feels one with the cosmic spirits. That was in fact the beginning of all art. Then the materialistic time had to come, and this old art, with its inner divine subtlety, had to be changed into the secondary “After-Art, Post-Art” which is essentially the art of the materialistic age, the art which cannot create, but only imitate. It is the sign of all secondary art, all derivative art that it can only imitate, and that it does not create form directly out of the material itself.

Let us assume something else, that we do what we did with the red surface, only with a more orange colour. We shall have quite different experiences with it. If we sink ourselves in the orange surface and become one with it, we shall not have the feeling of the divine wrath bearing down upon us; we shall rather have the feeling that what meets us here, though having something of the seriousness of wrath in a modified form, is yet desirous of imparting something to us, instead of merely punishing us, is desirous of arming us with inner power. If we go out into the Universe and become one with the orange colour we move in such a way that with every step we take we feel that this experience, this living in the orange forces, gives us the impression of becoming stronger and stronger, not merely that the judgment-seat is shattering us. So that orange gives us something strengthening, and does not bring only punishment with it. Thus we experience orange in the Universe.

We feel then the longing to understand the inner side of things and to unite it with ourselves. By living the red we learn to pray, and by living in the orange we experience the desire for knowledge of the inner nature of things. And if it is a yellow surface, and we do the same thing, we feel ourselves transferred to the beginning of our time-cycle. We feel: now you are living with the forces out of which you have been created, when you entered upon your first earth-incarnation. One feels an affinity between what one was during the whole of the earth's existence, and what comes towards one from the world into which one carries the yellow oneself.

And if one identifies oneself with green, and goes with it through the Universe, which can quiet easily be done by gazing at a green field, and by shutting out all else and concentrating entirely upon it, and by then trying to dive down into it—as if green were the surface of a coloured sea—one experiences an inner increase of strength in what one happens to be in that one incarnation. One experiences a feeling of inner health, but a the same time of inner selfishness—a stimulus of the inner egoistic forces.

And if one did the same with a blue surface, one would go through the world with the desire, as one proceeded, to overcome the egoism, to become macro-cosmic. One would feel the desire to develop self-surrender, and one would feel happy to remain in this condition to meet the divine mercy. Thus one would go through the world feeling as I blessed with the divine mercy.

So one learns to know the inner nature of colour, and as I said, we can get an idea of a time when the preparation through which the painter as artists will go, will mean a moral experience in colour of this kind; when the experience preparatory to artistic creation will be much more inward, much more intimate than it has ever been.

These are, after all, only a few indications I am giving you, which will be developed much further in the future, and will take hold of the souls of men and instigate them to artistic production. The adaptation of the material culture of old to modern times has dried up the soul and made it passive. Souls must be taken hold of and stimulated again by the inner forces of things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As you may have realized, a basic feature of the various considerations in which we have been engaged in recent weeks is the effort to gather material that will help us understand the difficult times we live in. Such understanding can only come about through a completely new way of looking at things. It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that a healthy development of mankind's future depends upon a new understanding taking hold in a sufficiently large number of human beings.

I should like these discussions to be as concrete as possible, in the sense in which the word, the concept “concrete,” has been used in the lectures of past weeks. Great impulses at work in mankind's evolution at any given time take effect through this or that personality. Thus it becomes evident in certain human beings just how strong such impulses are at a particular time. Or, one could also say that it becomes evident to what extent there is the opportunity for certain impulses to be effective.

In order to describe certain characteristic aspects of our time I have here and elsewhere drawn attention to a man who died recently. Today I would like once more to speak about the philosopher Franz Brentano who died a short time ago in Zürich.¹ He was certainly not a philosopher in a narrow or pedantic sense. Those who knew him, even if only through his work, saw him as representing modern man, struggling with the riddle of the universe. Nor was Brentano a one-sided philosopher; what concerned him were the wider aspects of essential human issues. It could be said that there is hardly a problem, no matter how enigmatic, to which he did not try to find a solution. What interested him was the whole range of man's world views. He was reticent about his work and very little has been published. His literary remains are bound to be considerable and will in due course reveal the results of his inner struggles, though perhaps for someone who understands not only what Franz Brentano expressed in words but also the issues that caused him such inner battles, nothing actually new will emerge.

I would like to bring before you what in our problematic times a great personality like Franz Brentano found particularly problematic. He was not the kind of philosopher one usually meets nowadays; unlike modern philosophers he was first and foremost a thinker, a thinker who did not allow his thinking to wander at random. He sought to establish it on the firm foundation of the evolution of thought itself. This led to his first publication, a book dealing with Aristotle's psychology, the so-called “nus poetikos.”² This book by Brentano, which is long out of print, is a magnificent achievement in detailed inquiry. It reveals him as a man capable of real thinking; that is, he has the ability to formulate and elaborate concepts that have content. We find Franz Brentano, more especially in the second half of his book about Aristotle's psychology, engaged in a process of thinking of a subtlety not encountered nowadays, and indeed seldom at the time the book was written. What is especially significant is the fact that Franz Brentano's ideas still had the strength to capture and leave their mark in human souls. When people nowadays discuss things connected with the inner life, they generally express themselves in empty words, devoid of any real content. The words are used because historically they have become part of the language, and this gives the illusion that they contain thought, but thinking is not in fact involved.

Considering that everywhere in Aristotle one finds a distinct flaring up of the ancient knowledge so often described by us as having its origin in atavistic clairvoyance, it is rather odd that people who profess to read Aristotle today should ignore spiritual science so completely. When we speak today about ether body, sentient body, sentient soul, intellectual soul, consciousness soul, these terms are coined to express the life of soul and spirit in its reality, of which man must again become conscious.

Many of the expressions used by Aristotle are no longer understood. However, they are reminders that there was a time when the individual members of man's soul being were known; not until Aristotle did they become abstractions. Franz Brentano made great efforts to understand these members of man's soul precisely through that thinker of antiquity, Aristotle. It must be said, however, that it was just through Aristotle that their meaning began to fade from mankind's historical evolution. Aristotle distinguishes in man the vegetative soul, by which he means approximately what we call ether body, then the aesthetikon or sensitive soul, which we call the sentient or astral body. Next, he speaks of orektikon which corresponds to the sentient soul, then comes kinetikon corresponding to the intellectual soul, and he uses the term dianoetikon for the consciousness soul. Aristotle was fully aware of the meaning of these concepts, but he lacked direct perception of the reality. This caused a certain unclarity and abstraction in his works, and that applies also to the book I mentioned by Franz Brentano. Nevertheless, real thinking holds sway in Brentano's book. And when someone devotes himself to the power of thinking the way he did, it is no longer possible to entertain the foolish notion that man's soul and spirit are mere by-products arising from the physical-bodily nature. The concepts formulated by Brentano on the basis of Aristotle's work were too substantial, so to speak, to allow him to succumb to the mischief of modern materialism.

Franz Brentano's main aim was to attain insight into the general working of the human soul; he wanted to carry out psychological research. But he was also concerned with an all-encompassing view of the world based on psychology. I have already drawn your attention to the fact that Franz Brentano himself estimated that his work on psychology would fill five volumes, but only the first volume was published. It is fully understandable to someone who knew him well why no subsequent volumes appeared. The deeper reason lies in the fact that Brentano would not—indeed according to his whole disposition, he could not—turn to spiritual science. Yet in order to find answers to the questions facing him after the completion of the first volume of his Psychology he needed spiritual knowledge. But spiritual science he could not accept and, as he was above all an honest man, he abandoned writing the subsequent volumes. The venture came to a full stop and thus remains a fragment.

I would like to draw attention to two aspects of the problem in Brentano's mind. It is a problem which today every thinking person must consciously strive to solve. In fact, the whole of mankind, insofar as people do not live in animal-like obtuseness, is striving, albeit unconsciously, to solve this problem. People in general are either laboring in one direction or another for a plausible solution, or else suffering psychologically because of their inability to get anywhere near the root of the problem. Franz Brentano investigated and pondered deeply the human soul. However, when this is done along the lines of modern science one arrives at the point that leads from the human soul to the spirit. And there one may remain at the obvious, and recognize the human soul's activity to be threefold in that it thinks; i.e., forms mental pictures, it feels and it wills. Thinking, feeling and willing are indeed the three members of the human soul. However, no satisfactory insight into them is possible unless through spiritual knowledge a path is found to the spiritual reality with which the human soul is connected. If one does not find that path—and Franz Brentano could not find it—then one feels oneself with one's thinking, feeling and willing completely isolated within the soul. Thinking at best provides images of the external, spatial, purely material reality. Feeling at best takes pleasure or displeasure in what occurs in the spatial physical reality. Through the will, man's physical nature may appease its cravings or aversions. Without spiritual insight man does not experience through his thinking, feeling and willing any relationship with a reality in which he feels secure, to which he feels he belongs. That was why Brentano said: To differentiate thinking, feeling and willing in the human soul does not help one to understand it, as in doing so one remains within the soul itself. He therefore divided the soul in another way, and how he did it is characteristic. He still sees the soul as threefold but not according to forming mental pictures of thinking, feeling and willing. He differentiates instead between forming mental pictures, judging or assessing, and the inner world of fluctuating moods and feelings. Thus, according to Brentano, the life of the soul is divided into forming mental pictures, judgments, and fluctuating moods and feelings.

Mental pictures do not, to begin with, lead us out beyond the soul. When we form mental pictures of something, the images remain within the soul. We believe that they refer to something real, but that is by no means established. As long as we do not go beyond the mental picture, we have to concede that something merely imagined is also a mental picture. Thus, a mental picture as such may refer to something real or to something merely imagined. Even when we relate mental pictures to one another, we still have no guarantee of reality. A tree is a mental picture; green is a mental picture. To say, The tree is green, is to combine two mental pictures, but that in itself is no guarantee of dealing with reality, for my mental picture “green tree” could be a product of my fantasy.

Nevertheless, Brentano says: When I judge or make assessments I stand within reality, and I am already making a judgment, even if a veiled one, when I combine mental pictures as I do when I say, The tree is green. In so doing I indicate not only that I combine the two concepts “tree” and “green,” but that a green tree exists. Thus I am not remaining within the mental pictures, I go across to existence. There is a difference, says Brentano, between being aware of a green tree and being conscious that “this tree is green.” The former is a mere formulation of mental pictures, the latter has a basis within the soul consisting of acceptance or rejection. In the activity of merely forming mental pictures one remains within the soul, whereas passing judgment is an activity of soul which relates one to the environment in that one either accepts or rejects it. In saying, a green tree exists, I acknowledge not merely that I am forming mental pictures, but that the tree exists quite apart from my mental picture. In saying, centaurs do not exist, I also pass judgment by rejecting as unreal the mental picture of half-horse, half-man. Thus according to Brentano, passing judgment is the second activity of the human soul.

Brentano saw the third element within the human soul as that of fluctuating moods and feelings. Just as he regards judgment of reality to consist of acknowledgments or rejections, so he sees moods and feelings as fluctuating between love and hate, likes and dislikes. Man is either attracted or repelled by things. Brentano does not regard the element of will to be a separate function of the soul. He sees it as part of the realm of moods and feelings. The fact that he regards the will in this way is very characteristic of Brentano and points to a deeply rooted aspect of his makeup. It would lead too far to go into that now; all that concerns us at the moment is that Brentano did not differentiate will impulses from mere feelings of like or dislike. He saw all these elements as weaving into one another. When examining a will impulse to action, Brentano would be concerned only with one's love for it. Again, if the will impulse was against an action, he would examine one's dislike for it. Thus for him the life of soul consists of love and hate, acknowledgment and rejection, and forming mental pictures.

Starting from these premises Brentano did his utmost to find solutions to the two greatest riddles of the human soul, the riddle of truth, and the riddle of good. What is true (or real)? What is good? If one is seeking to justify the judgment of thinking about reality or unreality, the question arises, Why do we acknowledge certain things and reject others? Those we acknowledge we regard as truth; those we reject we regard as untruth. And that brings us straight to the heart of the problem: What is truth? The heart of the other problem concerning good and evil, good and bad, we encounter when we turn to the realm of fluctuating moods and feelings. According to Brentano, love is what prompts us to acknowledge an action as good, while hate is the rejection of an action as evil. Thus ethics, morality, and what we understand by rights, all these things are a province of the realm of moods and feelings. The question of good and evil was very much in Brentano's mind as he pondered the nature of man's life of feelings fluctuating between love and hate.

It is indeed extremely interesting to follow the struggle of a man like Brentano, a struggle lasting for decades, to find answers to questions such as What right has man to assess things, judging them true or false, acknowledge or reject them? Even if you examine all Brentano's published writings—and I am convinced that his as yet unpublished work will give the same result—nowhere will you find him giving any other answer to the question What is true? In other words: What justifies man to judge things except what he calls the “evidence,” the “visible proof”? He naturally means an inner visible proof. Thus Brentano's answer amounts to this: I attain truth if I am not inwardly blind, but able to bring my experiences before my inner eye in such a way that I can survey them clearly, and accept them, or by closer scrutiny perhaps reject them. Franz Brentano did not get beyond this view. It is significant indeed that a man who was an eminent thinker—which cannot be said about many—struggled for decades to answer the question What gives me the right to acknowledge or reject something, to regard it as true or false? All he reached was what he termed the evidence, the inner visible proof.

Brentano lectured for many years in Vienna on what in Austrian universities was known as practical philosophy, which really means ethics or moral philosophy. Just as Brentano was obliged to give these lectures, so the law students were obliged to attend them, as they were prescribed, compulsory courses. However, during his courses Brentano did not so much lecture on “practical philosophy,” as he did on the question How does one come to accept something as good or put something down as bad? Due to his original views, Franz Brentano did not by any means have an easy task. As you know, the problem of good is always being debated in philosophy. Attempts are made to answer the question: Have we any right to regard one thing as good and another as bad? Or the question may be formulated differently: Where does the good originate, where is its source, and what is the source of the bad or evil? This question is approached in all manner of ways. But all around Brentano, at the time when he attempted to discover the criterion of good, a peculiar moral philosophy was gaining ground, that of Herbart, one of the successors of Kant's.³ Herbart's view of ethics, which others have advocated too but none more emphatically than he himself, was the view that moral behavior, in the last resort, depends upon the fact that certain relationships in life please us, whereas others displease us. Those that please us are good, those that displease us are bad. Man as it were is supposed to have an inborn natural ability to take pleasure in the good and displeasure in the bad. Herbart says, for example: Inner freedom is something which always, in every instance, pleases us. And what is inner freedom? Well, he says, man is inwardly free when his thinking and actions are in harmony. This would mean, crudely put, that if A thinks B an awful fellow but instead of saying so flatters him, then that is not an expression of inner freedom. Thinking and action are not in the harmony on which the ethical view of inner freedom is based. Another view on ethics is based on perfection. We are displeased when we do something we could have done better, whereas we are pleased when we have done something so well that the result is better, more perfect than it would have been through any other action. Herbart differentiates five such ethical concepts. However, all that interests us at the moment is that he based morality on the soul's immediate pleasure or displeasure.

Yet another principle of ethics is Kant's so-called categorical imperative, according to which an action is good if it is based on principles that could be the basis for a law applying to all.⁴ Nothing could be more contrary to morality! Even the example Kant himself puts forward clearly shows his categorical imperative to be void of moral value. He says: Suppose you were given something for safekeeping, but instead you appropriated it. Such an action, says Kant, cannot be a basic principle for all to follow, for if everybody simply took possession of things entrusted to them, an orderly human society would be an impossibility. It is not difficult to see that in such a case, whether the action is good or bad cannot be judged on whether things entrusted to one are returned or not. Quite different issues come into question.

All the modern views on ethics are contrary to that of Franz Brentano. He sought deeper reasons. Pleasure and displeasure, he said, merely confirm that an ethical judgment has been made. As far as the beautiful is concerned, we are justified in saying that beauty is a source of pleasure, ugliness of displeasure. However, we should be aware that what determines us when it is a question of ethics, of morality, is a much deeper impulse than the one that influences us in assessing the beautiful. That was Brentano's view of ethics, and each year he sought to reaffirm it to the law students. He also spoke of his principle of ethics in his beautiful public lecture entitled “Natural Sanction of Law and Morality.”⁵ The circumstances that led Franz Brentano to give this lecture are interesting. The famous legislator Ihering had spoken at a meeting about legal concepts being fluid, by which he meant that concepts of law and rights cannot be understood in an absolute sense because their meaning continually changes in the course of time.⁶ They can be understood only if viewed historically. In other words, if we look back to the time when cannibalism was customary, we have no right to say that one ought not to eat people. We have no right to say that our concepts of morals should have prevailed, for our concepts would at that time have been wrong. Cannibalism was right then; it is only in the course of time that our view of it has changed. Our sympathy must therefore lie with the cannibals, not with those who refrained from the practice! That is, of course, an extreme example, but it does illustrate the essence of Ihering's view. The important point to him was that concepts of law and morality have changed in the course of human evolution which proves that they are in a state of flux.

This view Brentano could not possibly accept. He wanted to discover a definite, absolute source of morality. In regard to truth he had produced “the evidence” that what lights up in the soul as immediate recognition is true, i.e., what is correctly judged is true. To the other question, what is good, Brentano, again after decades of struggle, found an equally abstract answer. He said: Good and bad have their source in human feelings fluctuating between love and hate. What man genuinely loves is good; i.e., what is worthy of love is good. He attempted to show instances of how human beings can love rightly. Just as man in regard to truth should judge rightly, so in regard to the good he should love rightly.

I shall not go into details; I mainly want to emphasize that Brentano, after decades of struggle, had reached an abstraction, the simple formula that good is that which is worthy of love. Instead, it has to be said that Brentano's greatness does not lie in the results he achieved. You will no doubt agree that it is a somewhat meager conclusion to say, Truth is what follows from the evidence of correct judgment; the good is what is rightly loved. These are indeed meager results, but what is outstanding, what is characteristic of Brentano, is the energy, the earnestness of his striving. In no other philosopher will you find such Aristotelean sagacity and at the same time such deep inner involvement with the argument. The meager results gain their value when one follows the struggle it cost to reach them. It is precisely his inner struggles that make Franz Brentano such an outstanding example of spiritual striving. One could mention many people, including philosophers, who have in our time tried to find answers to the questions, What is truth? What is the good? But you will find their answers, especially those given by the more popular philosophers, far more superficial than those given by Brentano. That does not alter the fact that Brentano's answers must naturally seem meager fare to those who have for years been occupied with spiritual science. However, Brentano had also to suffer the destiny of modern striving man, lack of understanding; his struggles were little understood.

A closer look at Brentano's intensive search for answers to the questions, What is true? What is good? reveals a clarity and comprehensiveness in outlook seldom found in those who refuse spiritual science. What makes him exceptional is that without spiritual science no one has come as far as he did. Nowhere will you find within the whole range of modern philosophical striving any real answers concerning what truth is or what the good is. What you will find is confusion aplenty, albeit at times interesting confusion, for example in Windelband.⁷ Professor Windelband, who taught for years at Heidelberg and Freiburg, could discover nothing in the human soul to cause man to accept certain things as true and reject others as false. So he based truth on assent, that is, to some extent on love. If according to our judgment of something we can love it, then it is true; conversely, if we must hate it, then it is untrue. Truth and untruth contain hidden love and hate. Herbartians, too, judge things to be morally good or morally bad according to whether they please or displease, a judgment which Brentano considered to be applicable only to what is beautiful or ugly.

Thus there is plenty of confusion, and not the slightest possibility of reaching insight into the soul's essential nature. All that is left is despair, which is so often all there is left after one has studied the works of modern philosophers. Naturally they do pose questions and often believe to have come up with answers. Unfortunately that is just when things go wrong; one soon sees that the answers, whether positive or negative, are no answers at all.

What is so interesting about Brentano is that, if only he had continued a little further beyond the point he had reached, he would have entered a region where the solutions are to be found. Whoever cannot get beyond the view ordinarily held of man will not be able to answer the questions What is true? What is false? It is simply not possible, on the one hand to regard man's being as it is regarded today, and on the other to answer such questions as What is the meaning of truth in relation to man? Nor is it possible to answer the question What is the good? You will soon see why this is so. But first I must draw your attention to something in regard to which mistaken views are held both ways, that is the question concerning the beautiful.

According to Herbart and his followers, good is merely a subdivision of beauty, more particularly beauty attributed to human action. Any questions concerning what is beautiful immediately reveal it to be a very subjective issue. Nothing is more disputed than beauty; what one person finds beautiful another does not. In fact, the most curious views are voiced in quarrels over the beautiful and the ugly, over what is artistically justified and what is not. In the last resort the whole argument as to whether something is beautiful or ugly, artistic or not, rests on man's individual nature. No general law concerning beauty will ever be discovered, nor should it be; nothing would be more meaningless. One may not like a certain work of art, but there is always the possibility of entering into what the artist had in mind and thus coming to see aspects not recognized before. In this way, one may come to realize that it was lack of understanding which prevented one from recognizing its beauty. Such aesthetic judgment, such aesthetic acceptance or rejection, is really something which, though subjective, is justified.

To confirm in detail what I have just said would take too long. However, you all know that the saying “taste cannot be disputed” has a certain justification. Taste for certain things one either has or has not; either the taste has been acquired already or not yet. We may ask, why? The answer is that every time we apply an aesthetic evaluation to something we have a twofold perception. That is an important fact discovered through spiritual investigation. Whenever you are inclined to apply the criterion of beauty to something, your perception of the object is twofold. Such an object is perceived in the first place because of its influence on the physical and ether bodies. This is a current that streams, so to speak, from the beautiful object to the onlooker, affecting his physical and ether bodies regardless whether a painting, a sculpture or anything else is observed. What exists out there in the external world is experienced in the physical and ether bodies, but apart from that it is experienced also in the I and astral body. However, the latter experience does not coincide with the former; you have in fact two perceptions. An impression is made on the one hand on the physical and etheric bodies and on the other an impression is also made on the I and astral body. You therefore have a twofold perception.

Whether a person regards an object as beautiful or ugly will depend upon his ability to bring the two impressions into accord or discord. If the two experiences cannot be made to harmonize, it means that the work of art in question is not understood; in consequence, it is regarded as not beautiful. For beauty to be experienced the I and astral body on the one hand, and the physical and ether body on the other must be able to vibrate in unison, must be in agreement. An inner process must take place for beauty to be experienced; if it does not, the possibility for beauty to be experienced is not present. Just think of all the possibilities that exist, in the experience of beauty, for agreement or disagreement. So you see that to experience beauty is a very inward and subjective process.

On the other hand what is truth? Truth is also something that meets us face to face. Truth, to begin with, makes an impression on the physical and ether bodies and you, on your part, must perceive that effect on those bodies. Please note the difference: Faced with an object of beauty your perception is twofold. Beauty affects your physical and ether bodies and also your I and astral body; you must inwardly bring about harmony between the two impressions. Concerning truth the whole effect is on the physical and ether bodies and you must perceive that effect inwardly. In the case of beauty, the effect it has on the physical and ether bodies remains unconscious; you do not perceive it. On the other hand, in the case of truth, you do not bring the effect it has on the I and astral body down into consciousness; it vibrates unconsciously. What must happen in this case is that you devote yourself to the impression made on the physical and ether bodies, and find its reflection in the I and astral body. Thus, in the case of truth or reality you have the same content in the I and astral body as in the physical and ether bodies, whereas in the case of beauty you have two different contents.

Thus the question of truth is connected with man's being insofar as it consists of the lowest members, the physical and ether bodies. Through the physical body we participate only in the external material world, the world of mere appearance. Through the ether body we participate solely in what results from its harmony with the whole cosmos. Truth, reality, is anchored in the ether body, and someone who does not recognize the existence of the ether body cannot answer the question Where is truth established? All he can answer is the question Where is that established which the senses reflect of the external world; where is the world of appearance? What the senses reflect in the physical body only becomes full reality, only becomes truth, when assimilated by the ether body. Thus the question concerning truth can only be answered by someone who recognizes the total effect of external objects on man's physical and ether bodies.

If Franz Brentano wanted to answer the question What is truth? he would have been obliged to investigate the way man's being is related to the whole world through his ether body. That he could not do as he did not acknowledge its existence. All he could find was the meager answer he termed “the evidence.” To explain truth is to explain the human ether body's relation to the cosmos. We are connected with the cosmos when we express truth. That is why we must continue to experience the ether body for several days after death. If we did not we would lose the sense for the truth, for the reality of the time between death and new birth. We live on earth in order to foster our union with truth, with reality. We take our experience of truth with us, as it were, in that we live for several days after death with the great tableau of the ether body. One can arrive at an answer to the question What is truth? only by investigating the human ether body.

The other question which Franz Brentano wanted to answer was What is the good? Just as the external physical object can become truth or reality for man only if it acts on his physical and etheric bodies, so must what becomes an impulse towards good or evil influence man's I and astral body. In the I and astral body it does not as yet become formulated into concept, into mental picture; for that to happen it must be reflected in the physical and etheric bodies. We have mental pictures of good and evil only when what is formless in the I and astral body is mirrored in the physical and ether bodies. However, what expresses itself externally as good or evil stems from what occurs in the I and astral body. Someone who does not recognize the I and astral body can know nothing about where in man the impulse to good or evil is active. All he can say is that good is what is rightly loved; but love occurs in the astral body. Only by investigating what actually happens in the astral body and I is it possible to attain concrete insight into good and evil. At the present stage of evolution the I only brings to expression what lives in the astral body as instincts and emotions. As you know, the human “I” is as yet not very far in its development. The astral body is further, but man is more conscious of what occurs in his I than he is of his astral body. As a consequence man is not very conscious of moral impulses, or, put differently, he does not benefit from them unless the astral impulses enter his consciousness. As far as the man of today is concerned, the original, primordial moral impetus is situated in his astral body, just as the forces of truth are situated in his ether body. Through his astral body man is connected with the spiritual world, and in that world are the impulses of good. In the spiritual world also holds sway what for man is good and evil; but we only know its reflection in the ether and physical bodies.

So you see it is only possible to attain concepts of truth, goodness and beauty when account is taken of all the members of man's being. To attain a concept of truth the ether body must be understood. Unless one knows that in the experience of beauty the ether and astral bodies distinctively vibrate in unison—the I and physical body do too, but to a lesser degree—it cannot be understood. A proper concept of the good cannot be attained without the knowledge that it basically represents active forces in the astral body.

Thus Franz Brentano actually came as far as the portal leading to the knowledge he sought. His answers appear so meager because they can be properly understood only if they are related to insight of a higher order. When he says of truth that it must light up and become directly visible to the eye of the soul, he should have been able to say more; namely, that to perceive truth rightly one must succeed in taking hold of it independently of the physical body. The ether body must be loosened from the physical body. This is because the first clairvoyant experience is that of pure thinking. You will know that I have always upheld the view, which indeed every true scientist of the spirit must uphold, that he who grasps a pure-thought is already clairvoyant. However, man's ordinary thinking is not a pure thinking, it is filled either with mental pictures or with fantasy. Only in the ether body can a pure thought be grasped, consequently whoever does so is clairvoyant. And to understand goodness one must be aware that it is part and parcel of what lives in the human astral body and in the I.

Especially when he spoke about the origin of good, Franz Brentano had an ingenious way of pointing to significant things; for example, that Aristotle had basically said that one can lecture on goodness only to those who are already habitually good. If this were true, it would be dreadful, for whoever is already in the habit of being good does not need lectures on it. There is no need to instruct him in what he already possesses. Moreover, if those words of Aristotle's were true, it follows that the converse is true also, that those not habitually good could not be helped by hearing about it. All talk about goodness would be meaningless; attempts to establish ethics would be futile. This is also a problem to which no satisfactory solution can be found unless sought in the light of spiritual science.

In general it cannot be said that our actions spring from pure concepts and ideas. But, as those who have studied The Philosophy of Freedom will realize, only an action that springs from a pure concept, a pure idea, can be said to be a free action, a truly independent action.⁸ Our actions are usually based on instincts, passions or emotions, only seldom if ever on pure concepts. More is said about these matters in the booklet Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science.⁹ I have also elaborated on it in other lectures.

In the first two seven-year periods of life—the first lasting up to the change of teeth, to about the seventh year, the second lasting till puberty—a human being's actions are predominantly influenced by instincts, emotions and the like. Not till the onset of puberty does he become capable of absorbing thoughts concerning good and evil. So we have to admit that Aristotle was right up to a point. He was right in the sense that the instincts towards good and evil that are in us already during the first two periods of life, up to the age of 14, tend to dominate us throughout life. We may modify them, suppress them, but they are still there for the whole of our life. The question is, Does it help that with puberty we begin to understand moral principles, and become able to rationalize our instincts? It helps in a twofold manner, and if you have a feeling and sense for these things, you will soon see how essential it is that this whole issue is understood in our time.

Consider the following example: Let us say a human being has inherited good tendencies, and up to the age of puberty he develops them into excellent and noble inclinations. He becomes what is called a good person. At the moment I do not want to go into why he becomes a good person, but to examine more external aspects. His parents we must visualize as good, kind people and so, too, his grandparents. All this has the effect that he develops tendencies that are noble and kind, and he instinctively does what is right and good. But let us now assume that he shows no sign, after having reached puberty, of wanting to rationalize his natural good instincts; he has no inclination to think about them. The reason for this we shall leave aside for the moment. So up to the age of 14 he develops good instincts but later shows no inclination to rationalize them. He has a propensity for doing good and hardly any for doing bad. If his attention is drawn to the fact that certain actions can be either good or bad he will say, It does not concern me. He is not interested in any discussions about it; he does not want to lift the issue into the sphere of the intellect. As a grown man he has children—whether the person is man or woman makes of course no difference—and the children will not inherit his good instincts if he has not thought about them. The children will soon show uncertainty in regard to their instinctive life. That is what is so significant.

Thus, such a person may get on well enough with his own instincts, but if he has never consciously concerned himself about good and evil, he will not pass on effective instincts to his children. Furthermore, already in his next life he will not bring with him any decisive instincts concerning good and evil. It is really like a plant which may be an attractive and excellent herb, but if it is prevented from flowering no further plants can arise from it. As single plant it may be useful, but if the future is to benefit from further plants, it must reach the stages of flower and fruit. Similarly a human being's instincts may, unaltered, serve him well enough in his own life, but if he leaves them at the level of mere instincts, he sins against posterity in the physical as well as spiritual sense. You will realize that these are matters of extreme importance. And, as with the other issues, only spiritual science can enlighten us about them.

In certain quarters it may well be maintained that goodness is due solely to instincts; indeed, that can even be proved. But anyone who wants to do away with the necessity for thoughtful understanding of moral issues on this basis is comparable to a farmer who says: I shall certainly cultivate my fields, but I see no point in retaining grains for next year's sowing—why not let the whole harvest be used as foodstuff? No farmer speaks like that because in this realm the link between past and future is too obvious. Unfortunately, in regard to spiritual issues, in regard to man's own evolution, people do speak like that. In this area great misconceptions continuously arise because people are unwilling to consider an issue from many aspects. They arrive at a onesided view and disregard all others. One can naturally prove that good impulses are based on instinct. That is not disputed, but there are other aspects to the matter. Impulses for the good are instincts active in the I and astral body; as such they are forces acting across from the previous life. Consequently one cannot, without spiritual knowledge, come to any insight concerning the way human lives are linked together either now or in the course of man's evolution.

If we now pass from these more elementary aspects to some on a higher level, we may consider the following: On the average, people living today are in their second incarnation since the Christian chronology began. In their first life it was sufficient if they received the Christ impulse from their immediate environment in whatever way possible. In their present, or second incarnation that is no longer enough; that is why people are gradually losing the Christ impulse. Were people now living to return in their next incarnation without having received the Christ impulse anew they would have lost it altogether. That is why it is essential that the impulse of Christ find entry into human souls in the form presented by spiritual science. Spiritual science does not have to resort to historical evidence but is able to relate the Christ impulse directly to the kinds of issues we are continually discussing in our circles. This enables it to be connected with the human soul in ways that ensure it is carried over into future ages when the souls incarnate once more. We are now too far removed from the historical event to absorb the Christ impulse the way we did in our first incarnation after the Christ event. That is why we are going not only through an external crisis, but also an inner crisis in regard to the Christ impulse. Traditions no longer suffice. People are honest who say that there is no proof of historical Christ. But spiritual knowledge enables man to discover the Christ impulse once more as a living reality in human evolution. The course of external events shows the necessity for the Christ impulse to arise anew on the foundation of spiritual science.

We have been witnessing so very many ideals on which people have built their lives for centuries suffering shipwreck in the last three years. We all suffer, especially the more we are aware of all that has been endured these last three years. If the question is asked, What has suffered the greatest shipwreck? there is only one answer: Christianity. Strange as it may seem to many, the greatest loss has been to Christianity. Wherever you look you see a denial of Christianity. Most things that are done are a direct mockery of Christianity, though the courage to admit this fact is lacking. For example, a view widely expressed today is that each nation should manage its own affairs. This is advocated by most people, in fact by the largest and most valuable part of mankind. Can that really be said to be a Christian view? I shall say nothing about its justification or otherwise, but simply whether the idea is Christian or not. And is it Christian? Most emphatically it is not. A view based on Christianity would be that nations should come to agreement through human beings' understanding of one another. Nothing could be more unchristian than what is said about the alleged freedom, the alleged independence—which in any case is unrealizable—of individual nations. Christianity means to understand people all over the earth. It means understanding even human beings who are in realms other than the earth. Yet since the Mystery of Golgotha not even people who call themselves Christian have been able to agree with one another even superficially. And that is a dreadful blow, especially in regard to feeling for and understanding of Christianity. This lack has led to grotesque incidents like the one I mentioned, of someone speaking about German religion, German piety, which has as much sense as speaking about a German sun or a German moon.

These things are in reality connected with far-reaching misconceptions about social affairs. I have spoken about the fact that nowadays no proper concept of a state exists. When people who should know discuss what a state is or should be, they speak about it as if it were an organism in which the human beings are the cells. That such comparisons can be made shows how little real understanding there is. As I have often pointed out, what is lacking, what we need more than anything else, are concepts and views that are real and concrete, concepts that penetrate to the reality of things. The chaos all about us has been caused because we live in abstractions, in concepts and views that are alien to the reality. How can it be otherwise when we are so estranged from the spiritual aspect of reality that we deny it altogether? True concepts of reality will be attained only when the spirit in all its weaving life is acknowledged.

There was something tragic in Franz Brentano's destiny right up to his death—tragic, because he did have a feeling for the direction modern man's spiritual striving should take. Yet, had he been presented with spiritual science he would have rejected it, just as he rejected the works of Plotinus as utter folly, as quite unscientific.¹⁰ There are, of course, many in the same situation; their spirit's flight is inhibited through the fact that they live in physical bodies belonging to the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. This provokes the crisis we must overcome. Such things do, of course, have their positive side; to overcome something is to become stronger.

Not till the concrete concepts of spiritual science are understood and applied can things be done that are necessary for a complete revision of our understanding of law and morality, of social and political matters. It is precisely spirits like Brentano that bring home the fact that the whole question of jurisprudence hangs in the air. Without knowing the super-sensible aspect of man's being, such as the nature of the astral body, it is impossible to say what law is or what morality is. That applies also to religion and politics. If wrong, unrealistic ideas are applied to external, material reality, their flaws soon become apparent. No one would tolerate bridges that collapse because the engineer based his constructions on wrong concepts. In the sphere of morality, in social or political issues wrong concepts are not spotted so easily, and when they are discovered, people do not recognize the connection. We are suffering this moment from the aftereffect of wrong ideas, but do people see the connection? They are very far from doing so. And that is the most painful aspect of witnessing these difficult times. Every moment seems wasted unless devoted to the difficulties; at the same time one comes to realize how little people are inclined nowadays to enter into the reality of the situation. However, unless one concerns oneself with the things that really matter, no remedy will be found. It is essential to recognize that there is a connection between the events taking place now and the unreal concepts and views mankind has cultivated for so long. We are living in such chaotic times because for centuries the concepts of spiritual life that were at work in social affairs have been as unrealistic as those of an engineer who builds bridges that collapse. If only people would develop a feeling for how essential it is, when dealing with social or political issues, indeed with all aspects of cultural life, to find true concepts, reality-permeated concepts! If we simply continue with the same jurisprudence, the same social sciences, the same politics, and fill human souls with the same religious views as those customary before the year 1914, then nothing significant or valuable will be achieved. Unless the approach to all these things is completely changed, it will soon be apparent that no progress is being made. What is so necessary, what must come about is the will to learn afresh, to adjust one's ideas, but that is what there is so little inclination to do.

You must regard everything I have said about Franz Brentano as an expression of my genuine admiration for this exceptional personality. Such individuals demonstrate how hard one must struggle especially when it concerns an impulse to be carried over into mankind's future. Franz Brentano is an extremely interesting personality, but he did not achieve the kind of concepts, ideas, feelings or impulses that work across into future ages. Yet it is interesting that only a few weeks before his death he is said to have given assurances that he would succeed in proving that God exists. To do so was the goal of his lifelong scientific striving. Brentano would not have succeeded, for to prove the existence of God he would have needed spiritual science.

Before the Mystery of Golgotha, before mankind's age had receded to the age of 33, it was still possible to prove that God exists. Since then mankind's age has dropped to 32, then 31, later 30 and by now to 27. Man can no longer through his ordinary powers of thinking prove that God exists; such proof can be discovered only through spiritual knowledge. Saying that spiritual science is an absolute necessity cannot be compared to a movement advocating its policies. The necessity for spiritual science is an objective fact of human evolution.

Today I wanted to draw your attention once more to the absolute necessity for spiritual science and related philosophical questions. However, it will be fruitful only if you are prepared to enter into such questions. What mankind is strongly in need of at the present time is the ability to enter into exact, clear-cut concepts and ideas. If you want to pursue the science of the spirit, anthroposophy, theosophy—call it what you will—only with the unclear, confused concepts with which so much is pursued nowadays, then you may go a long way in satisfying egoistical longings, gratifying personal wishes. You will not, however, be striving in the way the present difficult times demand. What one should strive for, especially in regard to spiritual science, is to collaborate, particularly in the spiritual sense, to bring about what mankind most sorely needs. Whenever possible turn your thoughts, as strongly as you are able, to the question: What are human beings most in need of, what are the thoughts that ought to hold sway among men to bring about improvement and end the chaos? Do not say that others, better qualified, will do that. The best qualified are those who stand on the firm foundation of the science of the spirit. What must occupy us most of all is how conditions can be brought about so that human beings can live together in a civilized manner.

We shall discuss these things further next time.

• 1 . Franz Brentano, see note 2 to Lecture I.
• 2 . Franz Brentano, Die Psychologie des Aristoteles, in particular his ideas of “nus poetikos.” “The nus poetikos is the light that illuminates phantasms, and makes the spiritual within the empirical visible for our spiritual eyes,” from a supplement on the “Activity of the Aristotelian God”; Mainz, 1867, p. 172.
• 3 . Johann Friedrich Herbart, 1776–1841, German philosopher.
• 4 . Immanuel Kant, 1725–1804, Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Judgment, available in various editions and translations in English.—from Critique of Practical Reason, Part 1, section 7, the Categorical Imperative: “Act so that the principles underlying your will at any time could also be a principle for a universal law.” Compare also his Foundation for a Metaphysics of Morals, second section.
• 5 . Franz Brentano, Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis, a lecture held on January 23, 1889, at the Vienna Law Society; published in Leipzig, 1889.
• 6 . Rudolf von Ihering, 1818–1892, jurist. His views were expressed in a lecture “Über die Entstehung des Rechtsgefuhls,” given several years before Brentano's (see above note) at the Vienna Law Society.
• 7 . Wilhelm Windelband, 1848–1915, German philosopher.
• 8 . Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Freedom (Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, NY, 1964).
• 9 . Rudolf Steiner, Education of the Child (Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1965).
• 10. Plotinus, 204-270, neo-Platonic philosopher.

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

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

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

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

__________

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

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

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

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

__________

Morning:
Imagine a that alternates between blue and red:

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

Evening:
Retrospect. Imagine that the sun says:

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

Then 5 min. quiet meditation.

__________

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

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

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

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

Then the 6 exercises.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—spoken to the spirits!—

Stream through it—

—the head—

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

with the ordered processes of thought that dissipate madness—

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

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

To guide him within from the paths of illusion.

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

In daily experience four goals are clear;

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

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

—lead man toward his goals—

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

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

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

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

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

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

—for this reaches into the heart—

Remove reproach's bitter, glowing arrows,

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

Within him make all pure from horror's gleam.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fulfil most comely duty of the elf,

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

Return to holy light man's self.

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

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

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

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

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

So boldly stamp out torment of absurdity,

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

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

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

In human obsession, pathways four do merge,

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

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

—For deeds of karma work in eternity.—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then the moral sphere:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you, honored attendees, consider the ideas that Theosophy seeks to awaken about the actual spirit world, the so-called devachan world, to be somewhat improbable, then it may be retorted that it is certainly not new and certainly not strange when the theosophist points to this higher world that exists outside of our sensory world. Today, in order to delve a little deeper into the world of Devachan, I would like to begin my talk with the words of a German thinker who is well known to all of you, who had a great influence on his time, who knew how to speak of higher worlds not only in a dreamy way, but who, through the power and fire of his words, was able to intervene in the events of his present at the time: I am referring to Johann Gottlieb Fichte. We all know the power that he drew from the supersensible world, which made his words flow in rousing speeches with which he inspired the youth of his time to take part in the events that were necessary at that time. We know the “Speeches to the German Nation,” which are an act that does not belong to a dream-like world, but to immediate reality. When Johann Gottlieb Fichte gave the introductory lectures to the science of teaching in Berlin, he began this most mature fruit of his research and reflection before his students with the following sentence:

“This doctrine presupposes a completely new inner sense by which a new world is given that is not at all present for the ordinary person. This is not to be understood as some kind of exaggeration, rhetorical phrase that is only said to demand a lot, with the quiet hope that less may be granted – but it is to be understood literally, as it is said.”

Fichte introduces this view of the supersensible world — that is, at a time when no one had yet thought of founding a theosophical society — with the words that one is dealing with the manifestations of a sensory organ that is not present in the ordinary human being. He then continues:

But quite new conditions would arise if a blind person were to receive sight through an operation. The comparison is correct with regard to higher vision. What is not expressed in Fichte's words is that every human being actually has this tool and only needs to develop it. Only good will is needed to receive the spiritual world revealed. Every spiritual blind person can be made to see. This must be emphasized so that it becomes clear that the spiritual world is accessible to anyone who wants to seek it out. The messages that are given about it are only intended to hint at what is to be given later.

The first step is to get a description of the spiritual world. As theosophists know, there is a way to gain insight into this world through description. We are not dealing with a world that lies in some other place in the cosmos, but with a world that surrounds us everywhere, that is present everywhere around us. This spiritual world is present at every point in our world. When we speak of the spiritual world or Devachan, we are not wandering into another world, but unlocking our organs, reaching a different state. One could object that such a state is something extraordinary in man, that one cannot imagine it and that nothing similar can be demonstrated in a person's life. That is not correct; the rest of life flows quietly by without such a radical change occurring. But in fact a transition such as that which transforms the man of sense perception into the seer takes place once in the life of every human being, only we are unaware of it. Everyone sitting here has already gone through a similar radical revolution of consciousness at some time in their life. We must only reckon life not from the moment of seeing the outer world, but from the first state of the germ in the mother's womb. If we look at the human being from the first state in the mother's body, then such a change has taken place for everyone. The state of consciousness of the human germ, its perceptive faculty, is quite different from that of the later human being. Anyone who is able to observe this knows what important things happen to a person in the first months of existence before birth, and knows that the human being's faculty of perception has already changed radically [at birth]. The germ has a perceptive faculty that is essentially different from the perceptive faculty of the human being who sees the light of day and has an awake consciousness. The human germ perceives in a way that we call astral perception. The human germ therefore has an astral perception. Only later does the outer, waking consciousness develop. From the astral life to the waking consciousness, the human being develops. A similar change, something like a new birth, is the opening of the so-called devachanic sense, which is granted to the seer so that he may perceive a new world. The human germ perceives the dark currents in the astral world. It perceives the feelings that prevail in its environment. You can see this in the influences of the existing conditions on the embryo in the mother's womb. This change, this transformation of the germ's astral consciousness into an awakened, sensory consciousness, occurs in every human being at some point.

Thus it is the world in which we live that is revealed to us in this new state of consciousness. What we perceive in this world is initially incomprehensible to us; we are led step by step to perception in this devachan or spiritual world. Our perception in devachan is the same as when a child's senses open in the first days of life. A world presents itself to us, which reveals itself in glittering colors that are at first incomprehensible to us, and in sequences of the most varied tones. At first, one does not know how to interpret these colors and tones, which do not belong to our physical world and which differ essentially from the colors and tones of our physical world, until one has become acquainted with their meaning and context in this spiritual world. The one who enters this world, left to himself, often does not know what to do. It sometimes happens that the devachanic sense is suddenly opened in a person; such a person then drifts helplessly in this world of spiritual existence. Only the one who is led into this world by a person who was already a seer in a former life and who can methodically introduce him to this spiritual world learns to understand the meaning of these phenomena. He then learns to structure the succession of sounds and colors and to combine them, just as we combine consonants and vowels to form a meaningful word. The sounds and colors of the spiritual world appear to us like vowels and consonants, and when we learn what the vowels and what the consonants mean, we have the opportunity to learn to spell and read. We learn that a certain type of being that lives here in the spiritual world communicates through this language of color and sound. This is the training offered to the chela, the disciple, who has to enter these higher worlds to become partakers of these higher truths. We then learn to know that it is not a random combination, a random arrangement of the appearance of colors, sounds and forms, but that what appears to us is the expression of spiritual entities whose language this is. When we have learned to know and read the letters, a whole new world opens up to us.

I have indicated that a lower world than the Devachan world is incorporated into our physical world, which becomes known to us first, that is the astral world. For the student, it sometimes merges with the Devachan world. In the beginning, one cannot distinguish exactly what belongs to the astral world and what belongs to the Devachan world. Only gradually does one learn to distinguish them. Today I would like to give an example of how one can learn to distinguish between what is astral and what belongs to the devachan world, the spiritual world, which is our true home.

The human being as he presents himself to us in the physical world is only part of the human being. In truth, for the one who can see, the human being is a being that has many other sides to his existence than those that appear to the physical eye. I am talking about what is known as the human aura. The human aura is something that essentially belongs to the whole person. I have described part of this human aura in the introduction to the eighth issue of Lucifer. It is something that appears to the seer just as the ordinary physical form appears to the human being's sensory eye. The physical form is only the middle part of the human being, which, so to speak, rests in an oval-shaped cloud of mist. This cloud of mist, the aura, belongs to the human spiritual body just as much as to the physical human being. It is much larger than the physical body, on average perhaps twice as long and three to four times as wide. What appears to the seer's eye as a continuation of the physical body are light formations and color formations of the most diverse kinds. This aura of the human being, this body of light, does not appear in indeterminate clouds, more or less structured in colors, but as a kind of mirror image, as an imprint of what is going on inside the person. A person's passions, instincts and drives are expressed in this aura; everything that we call inner life is expressed in it. Contemporary physics should actually find it most comprehensible that we speak of this, for what does the physicist say? There are oscillating movements of the ether; this oscillating movement transforms what is outside into color. It is the same with our inner world. Within us are urges, instincts, and passions that emanate from every person standing before us. Just as this appears before us as color, so too do perception, sensation, and feeling appear to us, transformed through the spiritual eye, as a colorful aura.

Just as the physical world appears to the physical eye as color, so the spiritual world appears to the spiritual eye in a wonderful blaze of color, only on a higher plane. This shows an immense mobility of color. We see the human being surrounded by an oval body of light in which he floats, and which does not appear to be at rest, but as if flowing, streaming, radiating and losing itself at a certain distance from the human being. In the devachan realm, which appears to be in constant motion, the person has a basic color within them. The person's lasting mood and lasting character traits are revealed in the aura by a lasting color tint, formed by clouds that flow through it in waves. We see how wavy currents run through the aura from bottom to top, flashing through it like lightning, and how the aura is suffused with beautiful blue-red, brown-red and blue colors. We see the most diverse and varied colors, which change according to the different occasions. Go to church and observe the auras of the devotees. You will find completely different color tones than in a gathering in which political passions or human selfishness prevail. You will see the moods of the soul that daily needs bring radiating in forms of brick-red and carmine color, sometimes having a darker color nuance. And if you go to a church and observe the worshippers, you will see the colors blue, indigo, violet and pink. And if you examine the aura of a person who lives in the world of thought, contemplatively pondering scientific problems, you will see the thought forms shining within his aura, reflecting the thought that is not touched by any passion.

When we learn what is shown in the aura, we read, on the one hand, what moods and temperaments live in a person and what takes place in their consciousness; on the other hand, we see all ideas, from the most mundane to the highest, most spiritual, to the feelings of divine worship and the most sublime compassion, reflected in the aura. At first we can probe nothing, but we gradually learn and notice that there are two distinctly different entities in the aura. First, there are cloud-like formations with indefinite outlines that stream in more from the periphery of the skin. We learn to distinguish these cloud-like formations from the appearances that emanate more from the heart, chest and head and have a radiant character. These radiations always emanate from an inner center. So we learn to distinguish the cloud-like formations from those that have a radiant character. The cloudy formations, ranging from brown to dark orange, come from the physical body, from the lower nature of the person, from the passions and drives. In this way, we distinguish the spiritual part of the aura from the lower, astral part. We learn to understand the most common colors. The aura of today's Europeans usually has green colors that often fade into yellow. This green represents the actual intellectual part, the conscious part; it thus expresses the basic mood of the soul life of today's Europeans. When a person is in a trance, you will notice that all green tones disappear from the aura. So anyone who understands how to perceive the aura will not have a difficult time distinguishing between a fraud and someone who is truly in a trance. Likewise, a doctor experimenting with hypnosis in a clinic – we consider this to be somewhat improper, but it does happen sometimes – could very precisely distinguish whether the test subject is deceiving him or whether they are truly in a state of trance or hypnosis, if he can observe the disappearance of the green color in the aura. The shades of green also disappear in the aura of a person who is fainting, and they always disappear in the aura of a sleeping person.

The ability to see the astral aura is the first to develop in the seer. The seer perceives this manifestation of the person relatively soon and learns to distinguish the astral aura from the mental aura. The radiant aura is from the world of Devachan; it is spirit and belongs to that which goes with the person beyond death. It is that which comes from the true spiritual home. What fades from brownish to greenish, to greenish tones, belongs to the transitory; man sheds it with the physical shell or in Kamaloka, in order to then enter the actual spiritual world. This is a higher kind of perception, a higher kind of spiritual sense, when the devachan sense opens up to us. The devachanic world differs quite significantly from the physical world. The physical world is immobile and dead, while the devachanic world is characterized by a complexity and ease of movement without parallel. It is a world that is always moving within itself, and is in a state of perpetual activity.

Now the disciple, who strives for higher development, must learn to find his way in this devachan world. When we perceive in the physical world, things remain as they are, and our perception is based on things. The table and the chair remain still; they do not conform to our perceptions, but our perceptions must conform to the table and the chair. This is not the case in the spiritual world. In Devachan there are no such still things; and therefore, there is an enormous responsibility on the one who consciously enters Devachan. We must be clear about the fact that every thought that flashes through our brain is a real, actual process in the Devachan world. The thought in the external physical world is only a shadow of reality compared to the thought in Devachan. The real thought does not live in our brain. It is not a shadow, a reflex image that appears in our consciousness, but it is an entity that lives in Devachan. In truth, our thoughts are entities that belong to the spiritual world. When you think a thought, you bring about a change in the devachan world. To make this clear, I would like to show you by way of example what happens in the devachan world when you think a thought. Those who have access to the devachanic sense do not just see silhouettes of thoughts, but see the essence of the thoughts as a real object. Imagine harboring some thought or other, a thought that relates to another person. The thought becomes visible to the seer; the thought radiates out like a wave of light emanating from a source of light; and just as the flame radiates light in all directions, so the thinking entity of the person radiates in all directions. And just as light spreads in the physical world, so do the rays of thought spread in the world of Devachan, so that we can indeed see how thoughts radiate from every human being. Therefore you will also understand that the Christ is depicted with a corona of rays. This is not some fantastic thing, but corresponds to a higher perception.

When thoughts radiate, they are first in space and spread out in space, just as light radiates and spreads out in space. Let us take a particular thought. If this thought is conceived in such a way that it is directed only at you, that it concerns only you, then it radiates in that way. But if it refers to another person, then in Devachan it takes on the appearance of light falling on an object and being reflected back from it; and just as an object appears illuminated by light, so the person concerned appears illuminated by the world of thought. When someone radiates a thought that relates to another person – let us assume, for example, the wish that the other person may become healthy – then we can see this thought radiating, just as we see light spreading in all directions. But this thought, which relates to a specific person, does not just flow through the devachan realm, but seeks to be realized in the person's immediate environment. This thought then flows to the person to whom it relates. These are processes that you can perceive in the devachan world. You can perceive how exalted thoughts of man are caught in the devachan space and form a kind of floral structure, beautiful geometric figures that do not exist in the earthly realm. Although it may seem fantastic, all this is true reality for those who can observe in Devachan. Those who learn to move in Devachan learn to consciously send out their thoughts and to become aware of the harvest they will reap through these thoughts. They learn that every thought in Devachan is a fact, and they strive to produce only favorable effects with their thoughts. The uninitiated person sends his thoughts blindly into Devachan, while the initiate learns to give form to his thoughts. This is what gradually becomes clear to the student.

I would like to draw your attention to something in particular. Last time I mentioned that there are two departments in Devachan, so to speak. First, there is the lower division, the Rupa-Devachan, which is the world of the devachanic continent, the devachanic sea and the devachanic atmosphere; these are basically permeated through and through with sensation. Then I described the Akasha fabric, the pure etheric fabric of Devachan. These are all the lower regions of Devachan. Then there are the three higher regions of Arupa-Devachan. In these higher regions, the highest spiritual beings reside: the Dhyani-Chohans, the planetary spirits, and so on. These high spiritual beings also include those we know as Mahatmas, as the spiritual leaders of humanity. These have reached such a high level of development that they can teach the rest of humanity and transmit to it the great truths of existence. For the person who has access to the devachanic sense and is able to observe in the devachan, communication with these advanced human brothers is also possible. He learns to understand the language in which they communicate with each other, and he also learns to speak to them. It is then up to him to translate the messages he has received into everyday language. Such teachings, translated into everyday language, are what we proclaim as theosophical truths. Originally coming from highly developed human brothers and sisters, flowing down from the highest spiritual worlds, these teachings were transmitted to us by a few suitable personalities. But since we have learned to “read”, we understand the eternal secrets of world existence. To be able to translate them into the ordinary language of everyday life, we must learn to look up to these high minds, to the masters, whom we call Mahatmas in Theosophy.

It is of particular interest to observe how the chela relates to these masters in the devachan world. I have already described how thought works in the devachan, how it radiates out to fulfill its destiny. This is not the case, or at least not in the same way, with the thoughts that the chela reverently sends up to the masters or mahatmas to ask them for insights into deeper truths. The thought that the chela sends up to the spiritual guides still takes a very special path that differs from that of the other thoughts. It is as if this thought did not fully flow up to the goal to which it is directed. This thought, this call for information about the higher worlds, first flows into the area that I have described as the Akashic field. Then the thought returns to the disciple, not as it ascended, but enriched, permeated and glowing with what emanates from the Master. This is the reason why it is always emphasized that the Master is the higher self of man. In a certain sense, our own thoughts speak to us again when we enter into contact with these highly developed human spirits. Nothing alien should be brought into us; the Masters do not want to make us into slaves, not even into slaves in spirit. The masters therefore send us not their thoughts, but our own, so that we may recognize that it is the substance that we ourselves have emanated. These are individual experiences of someone who is able to move as an embodiment between birth and death within Devachan, whose sense of Devachan is already here in the physicality, who can lift the spirit out of the shell of physicality.

In the realm of devachan, we also find a large number of lower beings who are regular inhabitants there: these are the temporarily disembodied, those who are between two embodiments. Between two embodiments, people spend a long time in devachan.

If today I have described the experiences that someone in the body can undergo in devachan, then next time I would like to describe what someone who is disincarnate in devachan goes through, that is, the course of the stay in devachan between two lives. This will complement the picture considerably; and if you then add this picture to today's, you will have the opportunity to grasp this world of Devachan more clearly. You will understand some of what initiates say without it being expressed in ordinary daily use or in our literature as what it actually is. Initiates only ever spoke in hints until well into the 19th century. The allusions were always comprehensible to those whose minds had been opened. For those who know the world of causes, the words of an initiate who is not usually taken as such – Goethe – will be understood correctly. Goethe himself said that he had included many secrets in the second part of his Faust that only the initiate can understand. And in mystically clear language, he pointed out what the earthly, the sensually perceptible, is for him: that it points to a higher world, of which it is an expression. If we understand this correctly, then we will know that Goethe, as an initiate, drew higher knowledge from the supersensible world, and then we will understand what he wanted to say with the words:

All that is
transient is but a parable;
The inadequate
here comes to pass;
The ineffable
here is done.

The Theosophical movement seeks to describe, little by little, what many have considered “ineffable”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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