The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bearing in mind what we sought to study yesterday, let us consider how matters actually stand in regard to what we call man's Saturn evolution.

If we remember the course of yesterday's lecture,¹ we know that there is concealed within us, within our human being, something that was first implanted in us during the Saturn period, namely, the first rudiments of our physical bodily nature. What we have acquired from the ancient Saturn evolution can be met with nowhere today in the external world. In primeval ages the Saturn evolution arose and again passed away; it possessed characteristics, forces, which seek in vain if we look around us today. For even if we look out to the stars in cosmic space we do not at first find what prevailed within the old Saturn evolution.

After this ancient Saturn evolution had died away, there came as you know, the Sun evolution and then the Moon evolution and today we are living in the Earth evolution. Three evolutionary periods have gone by. And all that formed their peculiar characteristics has passed away with them and is no more to be found in our field of vision. We can only find the characteristics of the Saturn evolution among the hidden occult activities which pulsate through the world. We can still, as it were, uncover the forces which at that time worked upon our physical body.

If you recollect what was shown in my book Outline of Occult Science you are aware that there was an active co-operation at that time between the Spirits of Will and the Spirits of Personality. This co-operation still exists today though it cannot be discerned externally. We find it if we look into what we call our personal karma. Please note, my dear friends, that our personal karma is woven in such a way that what befalls us in successive earth lives is connected as cause and effect. The forces active in our personal stream of destiny cannot be investigated by the official Natural Scientist. He will find nothing among the forces disclosed in the field of Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Physiology etc., which calls forth the connection of cause and effect that comes to expression in our personal karma. The laws prevailing there are withdrawn from physical observation as well as from the historical observation pursued today by the so-called cultural-scientist of a materialistic colouring. The modern investigation of historical evolution, the history which is written nowadays of Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, up to our own time, contains laws which have nothing to do with the forces active in our karma. Thus the historian, the modern materialistic scientist studying civilization does not discover the laws dependent on man's personal karma.

History is looked upon as a continuous stream and no one considers to what extent historical evolution depends on the fact that human souls, for instance, who were personalities in ancient Roman times are present again today. The fact that they participate in current events and that the way in which they do so flows out of their personal karma finds no place in modern materialistically coloured history.

If we seek therefore for forces having something of the nature-forces of old Saturn we have to go to the law of our personal karma. Only when we learn to read what is in the surrounding cosmos and not merely to observe it, do we gain an insight into how the laws of ancient Saturn are still in a certain way active.

If we turn our attention to the ordering and out-streaming of the twelve Signs of the Zodiac as a cosmic script, and consider what radiating forces pour into human life from Aries, Taurus, Gemini etc., we are then thinking in the sense of forces which were Saturn forces. And if we try to bring personal karma into connection with the constellations which relate to the zodiacal signs, we are then living approximately in the sphere of that world-conception which must be employed for the laws of the ancient Saturn epoch.

Thus nothing visible has remained, nothing that may be perceived, and yet there is still remaining an invisible element which may be interpreted out of the signs of the cosmos. Anyone who thought that Aries, Taurus, Gemini etc., made his destiny would be living under the same delusion as a man who had been sentenced by a certain legal passage and then conceived a special hatred of this paragraph in the law and believed that it had sent him to gaol. Just as little as a legal paragraph printed on the white page can sentence a man, can Aries, Taurus, or Gemini, bring about destiny. Yet one can read from the star-script the connection between the cosmos and human destiny. And thus we can say that what follows from the star script is a remainder of the ancient Saturn evolution, is indeed the ancient Saturn evolution become entirely spiritual, but leaving its signs behind in the star-script of the cosmos.

When we proceed from the Old Saturn evolution to the Moon evolution we must be clear that at first there is nothing so directly (I said; at first, so directly) in our surrounding field of vision; external nature contains in the first place in the main no forces which resemble those of the Old Moon evolution. These forces of the Old Moon have also drawn back into concealment, but they have not yet become spiritual to the same degree as the Old Saturn laws. The Saturn laws have become so spiritual that we can only investigate them in the laws of our personal destiny, that is to say, quite outside space and time. When we observe human life as a whole we still find today these ancient Saturn laws, still find what cannot be seen when we confront a man in the physical world.

We have said that in meeting man in the physical world, we have the physical body as coming from the Old Saturn evolution, the etheric from the Old Sun evolution; the astral body from the Old Moon, and the Ego. And when we look at man externally and observe his form it is solely this embodiment of the ego which is not a relic from other periods of evolution. It is the laws of Earth which prevail and are active when the ego fashions man for itself and embodies itself. The laws of the Moon evolution, the laws of the astral body have already withdrawn and are no longer outwardly active. Now if we encounter a man we shall say: “You, O Man, as you confront me as material man are an embodiment of the Ego. But deep in the background of your being lies your invisible personal destiny.” How this invisible human destiny is determined comes under the rule of ancient Saturn laws. There we are already appealing to something entirely spiritual when, from the earthly laws of the embodiment of the Ego, we look towards the ancient Saturn laws. If, however, we look from what stands before us in the human being towards what still prevails in him from the Old Moon laws we find something not so spiritual. But this too has withdrawn from the external activity of the world, this too is not directly under the active forces of Earth-existence.

Where then must we seek for what has remained behind from the ancient Moon activity? We must we seek it protected and embedded, veiled from Earthly existence. For it is active in the period before man enters Earth existence through his physical birth, it is active before the external physical ray of light can penetrate his eye, it is active before he can first draw breath. It is active from the conception to birth, active in the embryonic life. I beg you expressly to notice, however, it is not active in that which develops from the ovum to the external physical human being; in what grows from the ovum, becoming greater and greater through continuous division, the forces of the Earth are working. But it is active in what exists only in the mother and dies away during the embryonic development, in what is lost with the birth and perishes. In all that envelops the earthly human being and cares for its nourishment before it is born, in all that ensheaths the growing human being and then falls away from it—in that rule the ancient Moon laws. And with this we have something that goes beyond the single human life, that forms a connection between the individual man and his ancestors and is included in the concept of heredity.

Thus we see something that existed during the Old Moon evolution still playing an active part, though not in the external world. In the outer world it acts only, so to say, as a dying away in human development, as something that is overcome as soon as the human being draws the first active breath for earthly life.

If one would study the laws of the Old Moon existence—or at any rate a part of them—purely physiologically and not clairvoyantly, the only way to do so today would be to study the laws at work in the sheaths surrounding the human embryo before it draws the first breath, enfolding it and nourishing it. What is there enclosed in the mother's body, what can only thrive during earthly evolution within the protecting sheath of the maternal body was the whole nature during the Old Moon evolution; it filled the whole field of vision.

Thus there die not only beings in so far as they have a sheath-nature, but whole types of natural laws, and exist in succeeding ages solely as last remains. Now you will have to ask the question: How does it stand with what is derived from the Sun?

Let us look at yesterday's diagram. We have seen that through all complications that appear here, we have to do with the complete human being, with his physical body, etheric body, astral body, Ego,—etheric body, astral body, ego,—astral body, ego, and with the ego itself.

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All that is above the dividing line is really the hidden part of human nature. If we wish to study the laws underlying the foundation of the physical body we must look to super-sensible laws determining man's destiny. If we look towards that which rules in the astral body and finds its embodiment in the physical body, we have something that is not so spiritual, so super-sensible, but something that melts from the sense-perceptible into the super-sensible. For the part that falls away from the human embryo becomes so to say more and more atomistic. The nearer the human being approaches birth the more it dissolves materially and becomes increasingly spiritual. For that which is attached to the human being as astral body and etheric body has originated through the spiritualising of those parts of the embryonic sheaths which fall away.

The question could now arise: how does it stand with regard to the Sun part? Can we find the Sun portion somewhere in the world? This too withdraws from sense perception. Whereas what we call karma, personal destiny, or, one might say, the Saturn part of man, lies in lofty spiritual regions, we have seen that we need not ascend so high in the case of the Moon part, for we found it still ensheathed in the sensible. Nor in the case of the Sun part need we ascend so high as for the Saturn part. One can still apprehend it but it is not easily recognised.

I should like to give you an example of something where you can still recognise the Sun-part that is active, although attention can only be directed to it in a veiled way. Those of you who have acquainted yourselves with the new edition of my book, Riddles of Philosophy in Outline will have found that four periods in the development of Philosophy are distinguished. I have called the first period “The World-conceptions of the Greek Thinkers”. This lasted from 800 B.C.—in round numbers—or 600 B.C. to the birth of Christ, i.e. into the age of the origin of Christianity. A second period lasted from the rise of Christianity to about 800 – 900 A.D. up to the time of John Scotus Erigena. Then came a third period which I have called “the World-conception of the Middle Ages”, and which lasted from 800, 900 A.D. to 1600 A.D. And then there is the forth period up to our own time; we are just in this period. Eight-hundred year periods have been assigned to the history of philosophy, presented in such a way as was possible in a book meant for a public still quite unacquainted with Spiritual Science.

The intention was to give everything that could stimulate the mind and let the spiritual structure of these periods work upon one. The characteristic of the first period consists in the fact that a transition is found from a very remarkable ancient thinking to what one can call the life of thought in ancient Greece. Our age has not made much progress in the understanding of such differences, the difference, for instance, between the thought life of our own time and that of ancient Greece. Our clumsy thinking believes that thought lived in an ancient Greek head just as it lives today in the head of modern man. Thought lived in Socrates, Plato, even in Aristotle quite differently from how it lives in present-day mankind; this present thought-life first awoke in the 7th, 6th century B.C. Before that there was no actual life of thought. As my book sets out, one can speak of a beginning, of a birth of thought-life in this age of ancient Greece.

People have conceived that most curious ideas about the great philosophical figures of Thales, Anaxagoras, Anaximenes, etc. It has been pointed out, for instance, that Thales believed that the world originated out of water, Anaxagoras out of air, Heraclitus from fire. I have shown how these ancient philosophers formed their philosophies from the human temperament. They were not based on speculation, but Thales established water as the original ground of things because he was of a watery temperament; Heraclitus founded the fire-philosophy because he was of a fiery temperament and so on. You find that shown in detail in my book.

Then comes the actual thought-life. And in the epoch described here the thought-life is still essentially different from that of modern times. The Greek thinker does not draw up thoughts from the depths of his soul, but thought is revealed to him just as external sound or colour is revealed to modern man. The Greek perceives the thought; he perceives it from outside and when we speak of Greek philosophy we must not speak of such a mode of thinking as is normal today, but of thought-perception. Thus in the first period we are concerned with thought-perception. Plato and Aristotle did not think in the way the modern philosopher thinks, they thought as today we see, perceive. They looked out into the world, as it were, and perceived the thoughts which they expound to us in their philosophies just as much as one perceives a symphony. They are thought-perceivers. The world reveals to them a thought-work; that is the essential character of the Greek thinker. And this perception of the thought-work of the world was brought to the highest pitch of perfection by the Greek thinker.

If the philosophers of today believe that they understand what Plato and Aristotle perceived as a universal symphony of thoughts, that is only due to a childish stage of the modern philosopher. The modern philosophers have a long way to go before they can fully grasp what Aristotle represents as Entelechy, what he gives as the members of the human soul nature—Aesthetikon, Orektikon, Kinetikon etc. The inner activity of thinking, where one draws the thoughts out of oneself, where one must make subjective efforts in order to think, did not as yet exist in Greece. It is completely foolish to believe that Plato thought he perceived thoughts. To believe that Aristotle already thought in the modern sense, is nonsense ... he perceived thoughts.

Modern man can hardly imagine what that is, for he makes no concepts of actual evolution. He gets slight goose-flesh if one tells him that Plato and Aristotle did not think at all in the modern sense, and yet it is a fact. In order that thinking in the modern sense might take root in the modern human soul, an impulse had to come that seized its inmost part, an impulse that has nothing to do with the thought-symphony in the surrounding world but which grips man's inmost being. This impulse came from Christ and hence this period of philosophy lasts up to the time of Christ.

In the second period we are concerned with a thinking that is still not man's own individual thought, but is stimulated by the impulse coming from the external world. If you go through all the systems of thought of the philosophers of the second period up to the time of Scotus Erigena you will find everywhere how the Christ-Impulse rules in them. It is what has flowed out of Christ himself, one might say, that gives man the first stimulus to create thoughts from within outwards. This gave the stamp, the physiognomy of the patristic philosophy of the Church Fathers, the philosophy of Augustine and others up to Scotus Erigena. We can therefore say that we no longer have thought-perception, but thought-inspiration stimulated by the spirit.

It was different again in the third period when the inner impulse proceeding from Christianity began to be seized by men themselves. In this third period man begins to be conscious that it is he who thinks. Plato and Aristotle did not think, but they could as little doubt that thought has a fully objective validity as a man seeing green on a tree can doubt that it has a fully objective validity.

In the second period it was the intense belief in the Christ Impulse that gave certainty to the awakening thought. But then began the period when the human soul began to say: “Yes, it is actually you yourself who thinks, the thoughts rise up out of you.” The Christ-Impulse gradually faded and man became aware that the thoughts arose out of himself. It began to occur to him that perhaps he framed thoughts that had nothing at all to do with what is outside. Was it possible that the objective external world had nothing to do with his thoughts?

Think of the great difference between this and the thoughts of Plato and Aristotle: Plato and Aristotle perceived thoughts and therefore they could not doubt that the thoughts were outside. Now, in the third period men became aware: ‘One creates thoughts oneself ... well, then, what have thoughts to do with objective existence outside?’ And so the need arose to give certainty to thinking,—to prove thinking as was said. Only in this period could it occur to Anselm of Canterbury, for instance, to create validity for the idea of God;—for one did not see thoughts as perception. In the former Greek thinking that would have been a complete nonsense, because at that time thoughts were perceived. How can one doubt that God exists when thoughts of the Godhead are as clearly to be seen outside as the greenness of the tree? Doubt first began in the third period when men became aware that they themselves produced the thoughts. The need arose to establish the connection of that which one thinks with that which is outside. In essentials this is the epoch of scholasticism—the becoming aware of the subjectivity of thinking.

When you consider the whole thought-structure of Thomas Aquinas it stands entirely under the aegis of this epoch. The consciousness is present throughout; concepts are created within, concepts are linked together in the same way as the laws of subjectivity. Thus a support must be found for the idea that what is created inwardly also exists outside. There is still at first an appeal to traditional dogmatism, but there is no longer the same attachment to the Christ-Impulse as in the second period of philosophical development.

Then comes the fourth evolutionary period; the independent rule of thought from the external thought-perception, the independent creation of thought from within: free creation of thought, that free creation that comes to light so magnificently in the thought-structures of Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Decartes, and their successors, Leibniz etc. If we follow up these edifices of thought we observe that they are produced entirely out of the inner being. And everywhere we find that these thinkers had an intense desire to prove that what they created in themselves had also real validity externally. Spinoza creates a wonderful ideal-edifice. But the question arises: Now is that all merely created within, in the human spirit, or has it a significance in the world outside? Giordano Bruno, and Leibniz create the monad which is supposed to be a reality. How does something thought out by man as monad exist at the same time as a reality in the outer world? All the questions which have arisen since the 16th, 17th century are concerned with the endeavour to bring free thought-creation into harmony with external world existence. Man feels isolated, abandoned by the world in his free thought creation. We are still standing in the midst of this.

But now what is this whole diagram?

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If we go back to the perception of thoughts which prevailed in the time of the old Greek philosophers then we must say: Philosophic thought in ancient Greece—in spite of the fact that it was the age of the intellectual or mind-soul in ancient Greece—was still a perceptive thinking, was still deeply influenced by the sentient soul, in fact by the sentient, the astral, body. It still clung to the external. The thinking of Thales, of the first philosopher was still influenced by the etheric body. They created their Water—Air—Fire—Philosophies out of their temperament, and the temperament lives in the etheric body. One can therefore say that the philosophy of the sentient body goes into the philosophy of the etheric body. Then we come into the Christian period. The Christ- Impulse penetrates into the sentient soul. Philosophy is experienced inwardly but in connection with what one can feel and believe; the influences of the sentient soul are present. In the third period, that of scholasticism, the intellectual or mind-soul is the essential element of philosophical development. Now the development of philosophy follows a different course from that of human evolution in general. And for the first time since the 16th century we now have philosophy coinciding with the general evolution of mankind, for we have the free thoughts ruling in the consciousness soul.—Consciousness soul! The magnificent example of how free thought prevails from the abstraction of existence up to the highest spirituality, how a thought-organism, leaving aside the world entirely, rules purely in itself, that is the philosophy of Hegel—the thought that lives solely in the consciousness.

If you follow this scheme it is actually the part that I could not show in my book for the public, though it lies in it. And if you read the descriptions given of the separate epochs you will, if you are proper Anthroposophists, very clearly connect them with what I have written here (see diagram). There is thus a development corresponding to that of man himself: from the etheric body to the sentient body, to the sentient soul, to the intellectual soul, to the consciousness soul. We follow a path like the path of man's evolution, but differently regulated. It is not the path of human evolution, it is different. Beings are evolving and they make use of human forces in the sentient soul, in the intellectual soul etc. Through man and his works pass other beings with other laws than those of human development.

You see—these are activities of the Sun-laws!

Here we need not ascend to such super-sensible regions as when we investigate human destiny. It is in the philosophical development of mankind that we have an example of what remains from the Sun-laws.

We had yesterday to write here Angeloi as corresponding to the etheric body (see diagram).

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Such Angeloi evolve. And while men believe that they themselves philosophise, Sun-laws work in them—inasmuch as men bear within them what the Sun-evolution laid down in their physical and etheric bodies. And the laws of the Sun-existence, working from epoch to epoch, cause philosophy to become precisely what it is. Because they are Sun-laws, the Christ, the Being of the Sun, could also enter them during the second period. Preparation is made in the first period and then the Christ, the Sun-Being, becomes active in the second period.

You see how everything is linked together. But inasmuch as the Christ, the Sun-Being, enters in, he comes into connection with an evolution which is not the human evolution, not man's earthly evolution, but actually Sun-evolution within Earth existence.

Sun-evolution within Earth existence! Just think what we have actually reached in these reflections. We are considering the course of philosophical development, philosophical thought since the time of ancient Greece, and when we consider how this has evolved from philosopher to philosopher we say to ourselves: there are active within not earthly laws, but Sun laws! The laws which at that time held sway between the Spirits of Wisdom and the Archangels come to light again on earth in the philosophical search for wisdom. Read in the book Occult Science how the Spirits of Wisdom enter during the Sun-evolution. Now during earthly evolution they enter again not into what is new but into what has remained from the Sun-evolution. And man develops his philosophy not knowing that in this development the Spirits of Wisdom are pulsing through his soul. The Old Sun existence lives in the evolution of philosophy; it really and truly lives within something that has stayed behind, something that is connected with the Old Sun-evolution.

Human beings, passing from generation to generation, evolve as external personalities in earthly evolution. But an evolution of philosophy goes through it from Thales up to our present time; the Sun-evolution lies within it. This gives opportunity for beings who have stayed behind to make use of the forces of philosophical evolution in order to carry on their ancient Sun existence; beings who remained behind during the Sun-evolution, who neglected at that time to go through the development that one can pass through in one's etheric body, sentient body, and sentient soul—in cooperation with Spirits of Wisdom and Archangeloi. These Spirits that missed their evolution during the Sun time can use man's philosophical evolution in order to be parasites within human evolution. They are Ahrimanic spirits!

Ahrimanic spirits yield to the enticement of creeping parasitically into what men strive for in philosophy and so of furthering their own existence. Men can thus evolve philosophically but at the same time they are exposed to Ahrimanic, Mephistophelean spirits.

You know that Ahriman and Lucifer are harmful spirits as long as one is not aware of them, as long as they work in secret. As long as they do not emerge and let men face them eye to eye spiritually Ahriman and Lucifer are harmful in one or another way. Let us suppose that a philosopher appears who develops thought of such a nature that one can grasp it in merely earth existence. He develops thoughts that can live through the instrument of earthly reasoning. That is Hegelian thought! It is pure thought, but only such as can be grasped with the instrument of the physical body and this as we know ends at death.

Hegel has achieved thought that is the deepest which can be thought in earthly life—but which must lose its configuration with death. Hegel's tragedy lies in the fact that he did not realise he grasped the spirit in logic, in nature, in soul-life, but only the spirit that exists in the form of thought and does not accompany us when we go through death. To have put this clearly before his mind he would have had to say: If I could believe that what goes through thought, that is to say what I think about abstract being by means of logic, thoughts of nature, thoughts of the soul and up to philosophy—if I could believe that this leads me behind the scenes of existence than I should be deceived by Mephistopheles!

This was realised by another: Goethe realised it and represented it in his Faust as the conflict of the thinker with Mephistopheles, with Ahriman. And in this fourth period of the evolution of philosophy we see how Ahriman presses into the Sun-evolution and how one has to face him consciously, really recognising and comprehending his nature.

Hence today we are also standing at a turning point of the philosophical thought of the outer world. In order to avoid falling prey to the allurements of Ahriman and becoming mephistophelean wisdom, philosophy must get behind this wisdom, must understand what it is, must flow into the stream of Spiritual Science.

Read the two chapters preceding the last one in the second volume of my Riddles of Philosophy. You will see that I tried to present the world concepts prevailing in the world, the philosophical concepts of the world, in order then in a concluding chapter to add A brief view of an Anthroposophy. There you will see how philosophy today in the free emancipated life of thought represents something which, to be sure, rises into the consciousness soul, but how this life, through the consciousness soul, must lay hold of what comes from Spirit itself, philosophically at first, otherwise philosophy must fall into decadence and die.

Thus you see at least one example of the working of the Sun-evolution in human earthly life. I said that one could encounter these sun-laws if one studied the course of philosophical evolution, though one does not always recognise that it is sun-law which is active in it. This must be recognised by Spiritual Science. Just reflect that in reality a Being is evolving which little by little acquires the same members as man himself.

If one were to go still farther back into ancient times one would find that not alone the etheric, but the physical body too gave rise to the forming of world concepts. It is difficult to give clear characteristics of the age that goes back beyond the 12th – 14th centuries B.C.; it lies before Homer, before historical times. But then something was evolving which is not man as man lives upon the earth.

Something lives in history which passes through the etheric body, the sentient body etc., a real, actual Being. I said in my book that in the Grecian era thought was born. But in modern times it comes to actual self-consciousness in the consciousness soul: thought is an independent active Being. This could not of course be said in an exoteric book intended for the public. The anthroposophist will find it however if he reads the book and notes what was the prevailing trend of its presentation. It is not brought into it, but results of itself out of the very subject matter.

You see from this that very many impulses of transformation as regards the spiritual life are coming forward in our time. For here we see something evolving that is like a human being except that it has a longer duration of life than an individual man. The individual man lives on the physical plane: for seven years he develops the physical body, for seven years the etheric body, for seven years the sentient body etc. The Being which evolves as philosophy (we call it by the abstract name ‘philosophy’) lives for 700 years in the etheric body, 700 – 800 years in the sentient body (the time is only approximate), 700 – 800 years in the sentient soul, 700 – 800 years in the intellectual or mind-soul and again 700 – 800 years in the consciousness soul. A Being evolves upwards of whom we can say: if we look at the very first beginnings of Grecian philosophy this Being has then just reached the stage of development which corresponds in mankind to puberty; as Being it is like man when he has reached the 14th – 16th year. Then it lives upwards to the time when a human being experiences the events between the 14th and 21st year; that is the age of Greek philosophy, Greek thought. Then comes the next 7 years, what man experiences from the age of 21 to 28; the Christ Impulse enters the development of philosophy. Then comes the period from Scotus Erigena up to the new age. This Being develops in the following 700 – 800 years what man develops between the ages of 28 and 35 years. And now we are living in the development of what man experiences in his consciousness soul: we are experiencing the consciousness soul of philosophy, of philosophical thought.

Philosophy has actually come to the forties, only it is a Being that has much longer duration of life. One year in a man's life corresponds to a hundred years in the life of the Being of philosophy. So we see a Being passing through history for whom a century is a year; evolving in accordance with Sun-laws though one is not aware of it.

And then only there lies further back another Being still more super-sensible than the Being that evolves as humanity except that a year is as long as a century. This Being that stands behind evolves in such a way that its external expression is our personal destiny, how we bear this through still longer periods, from incarnation to incarnation. Here stand the Spirits regulating our outer destiny and their life is of still longer duration than the life of those for whom we must say that a century corresponds to a year.

So you see, it is as if we look there into differing ranges of Beings, and how, if we wished, we might even write the biography of a Being who stands spiritually as much higher than man as a 100 years is longer than a year.

An attempt has been made to write the biography of a such a Being as had its puberty at the time of Thales and Anaxagoras, and has now reached the stage of its self-consciousness and since the 16th century has entered, so to say, into its ‘forties’. The biography of this Being has furnished a ‘History of Philosophy’.³

From this you see, however, how Spiritual Science gives vitality to what is otherwise abstract, and really animates it. What dry wood for instance, is the usual ‘History of Philosophy’! And what it can become when one knows that it is the biography of a Being which is interwoven in our existence, but evolves by Sun-laws instead of Earth-laws!

It was my wish to add these thoughts to what we have been considering lately about the life-forces which arise in us when we look at Spiritual Science not as a theory but seek it in the guidance to living. And it is just through Spiritual Science that we find the living. What is so unalive, so dry, and withered as the history of philosophy comes to meet us out of the mist as though we looked up to it as a Goddess who descends from divine cloud-heights, whom we see young in ancient times, whom we see grow even if with the slowness where a century corresponds to a year of human life. Yet all this becomes living—the sun rises for us like the Sun within Earth existence itself. For just as the sun rises on the physical plane, so do we see the ancient Sun still radiate into the earthly world in a Being that has a longer lifetime than man. As we follow man's development on the physical plane from birth to death so we follow the development of philosophy by seeing a Being within it. When in this way we look at what Anthroposophy can be to us we reach the point of seeing in it not only a guide to knowledge but a guide to living Beings who surround us even though we are unaware of them.

Yes, my dear friends, something of this was only felt by Christian Morgenstern. And by feeling this, feeling it in the deepest part of his soul, our friend Christian Morgenstern could put into writing a beautiful sentiment, a true anthroposophical sentiment which shows how a soul can express itself which in its inmost being knows itself to be one with our Anthroposophy—not merely as with something giving us various facts of knowledge—but as something that gives us life. In the wonderful poem Lucifer by Christian Morgenstern we have a wonderful example of this. The feeling of this poem lives entirely in the inspiration of which ones feels a breath when, as we have tried to show today, one finds the transition from the presentation of the idea in Anthroposophy to the grasping of living beings.

Lucifer

“I'll keep my light from light of your excluded,
I want you not, your light shall be precluded,
Until my light's my own and separated.

So do I bring the Evil to expression
As Spirit of negation, self-possession,
Yet is new world by ranks of mine created.

By off'ing to un-erring Beings resistance,
A race of err-ant gods has found existence
Who act on their—and not your—discretion.

Who have not walked in Truth from the beginning
Who only reach the Truth through suffering, sinning,
Who only read the truth through sin's transgression.”

Luzifer

“Ich will mein Licht vor eurem Licht verschliessen,
ich will euch nicht, ihr sollt mich nicht geniessen,
bevor ich nicht ein Eigenlicht geworden.

So bring ich wohl das Bose zur Erscheinung
Als Geist der Sonderheit und der Verneinung,
Doch neue Welt erschafft mein Geisterorden.

Aus Widerspruch zum unbeirrten Wesen,
Aus Irr-tum soll ein Gotterstamm genesen,
Der sich aus sich—und nicht aus euch—entscheidet

Der nicht vom Anbeginn in Warheit wandelt,
Der sich die Wahrheit leidend erst erhandelt,
Der sich dies Wahrheit handelnd erst erleidet.”

Christian Morgenstern

If the feeling in this poem leads you to reflect how alive something can becomes that is understood theoretically in Anthroposophy, so that, as it were, one can grasp the Beings who approach us out of the dark abyss of existence, if you take this poem, stimulated by feelings I wished to arouse through today's lecture, then you will see that this figure of Lucifer is really perceived, fashioned in a wonderful way. It is a model example of how what is brought to us by Anthroposophy can become alive and grip our whole soul.

• 1. “The Ego perceived externally as Speech and Song, as creative fantasy, as inner experience.” Dornach, 9th Jan. 1915 (Z69)
• 3. Riddles of Philosophy

The scene from “Faust” just presented, which comes at the end of the second act of Part II, forms the bridge for Faust's entrance into ancient Greece. Those who have gone most deeply into Goethe's world-conception will see how, through it he has penetrated deeply into the spiritual, in both universe and the mystery of man, in so far as the latter is connected with what is spiritual in the universe. It should first be emphasised, on the one hand, that what Goethe meant by saying he had put a great deal in a veiled way into Part II of “Faust”, applies especially to this profound, most significant scene. In this second part of “Faust” there is much wisdom. On the other hand, when represented on the stage, this wisdom is able through its imagery to make a great appeal to the senses.

If we are to understand Goethe's Faust, particularly the second part, we must always keep these two aspects in mind. As Goethe says, the simple minded spectator of Faust will experience pleasure and aesthetic satisfaction in its series of pictures; the Initiate, however, is meant to find there profound secrets of life. If we start with what the pictures give us, this scene represents a festival of the seas to which Homunculus has been taken by Thales. This festival, however, contains a great deal that is veiled, and is meant actually to introduce the demonic powers dwelling in the sea,—that is, the spiritual powers.

Why does Goethe have recourse to the demonic powers of ancient Greece when wishing to lead Faust to the highest point of self-knowledge and self-understanding in human evolution? It may be stated that Goethe was perfectly clear that it is impossible for man ever to arrive at a true conception of his own nature by merely acquiring knowledge received through the senses and the understanding associated with them. True knowledge of man can only be imparted through true spiritual perception. So that all the knowledge and perception of man sought simply through the external physical world, to which the senses and the physical understanding are directed, is no real knowledge of man at all. Goethe indicates this by introducing Homunculus into his poem.

Now Homunculus is the result of the knowledge of man to which Wagner is capable of aspiring with ideally conceived physical means, such ideally conceived means as would. naturally be considered by ordinary science to be its goal, from which, however, no result can be expected either today or in the future. Goethe advances the hypothesis that it might be possible to produce a Homunculus in a retort, that is, to gain such complete knowledge of combining the forces of nature that a human being could be intellectually put together out of various ingredients. But it is no man who arises thus, even when all that can be attained in the physical world is thought out to the highest point of perfection—no man arises, no homo, but only a homunculus. Considered dramatically, this homunculus is simply the image of himself that a man can form with the help of his reason, of his ordinary earthly knowledge. How can this man-made image that is a homunculus provide a true conception of man? How can it be brought about that in this conception man does not stop short at the simple homunculus but pushes on to the homo? It is clear to Goethe that this goal can only be reached through knowledge acquired by the human soul and spirit when free of the body.

Now, by most various ways Goethe endeavours to reach the realm to which a human being must come if he wishes to acquire complete knowledge of man, that is, the knowledge acquired when free of the body. Goethe really wishes to show that it is possible too out of the body to gain knowledge, decisive knowledge, concerning the nature of man. He was by no means one of those who plunges lightheartedly into such matters. His whole life through he was striving to to make his soul more profound. For it was clear to him that when a man grows old, he does not live in vain, but that the forces of knowledge are always increasing, so that in old age it is possible for us to know more than in our youth. But he realised, also the problematic nature of the sojourn of soul and spirit outside the body. Hence he sought in the most varied ways to bring man, to his Faust, knowledge in the form of pictures, that we call Imagination. And he does this first in the Romantic Walpurgis-Night of Part I, and then again in the Classical Walpurgis-Night where he takes the Imaginations from ancient Greece, whither he would transport Faust. We might perhaps say that Goethe thinks that, when a man leaves the body in order to change Homunculus into Homo, into man, he has Imaginations appearing to different people in different forms. And, in the perception of the ancient Greeks, these Imaginations in some degree still approached spiritual reality. Setting before the soul the demonic world of ancient Greece, we can see how, in this traditional realm of myths, when outside the body with his soul and spirit, in highly developed atavistic clairvoyance, man contemplated nature from whose womb he sprang. I might therefore say that Goethe, not wanting to invent an imaginative world himself, calls in the Greek world in order to tell us that, whatever a man may contrive out of his ordinary knowledge, he still remains a Homunculus; if, however, he wishes to become a real man, he must first advance to the world of Imagination, Inspiration, and so on. That is how the nature of man should first be conceived.

Why does Goethe choose a sea-festival, or rather the dream of a sea-festival? To understand his feelings, we must take ourselves back into the conceptions of the old Greeks, to which Goethe himself went back in his representation of this gay feast. We must realise that, to the Greeks, there was a special significance in foresaking the land and sailing out to the open sea. The Greeks, like all ancient peoples, still lived in the outside world. Just as a change took place in these people when they forsook the level ground, the plain, and went up into the mountains—a change experienced by modern man in an abstract prosaic way—so the was some tremendous change in their soul on leaving dry land for the open sea. This feeling that the open sea has special power to release the soul and spirit from the body was universally experienced in olden times, and much is connected with the feeling.

I must ask you, my dear friends, to remember what an important part in the various symbols, on the path of knowledge, was played by the Pillars of Hercules in ancient myths. It was constantly said that when a man has gone through various stages of knowledge he sails, through the Pillars of Hercules. This meant that he sails out into the limitless, open sea, where he no longer feels himself within reach of any coast. For man today that has ceased to mean very much, but for the Greek it meant entering a completely different world. Once past the Pillars of Hercules, he became free of all that bound him to earth, above all through his bodily forces. In olden days, when everyday matters were still experienced by soul and spirit, sailing over the open sea wan felt as freeing one from the body.

Goethe's poetical works were not like those of lesser poets; he wrote out of his feeling for the cosmos, and when he speaks of all that he transposed into the Greek world, he transposes himself there with his whole soul. It is of this that we must constantly remind those who read Goethe as if he were any other poet—those who, whey they are reading Goethe, have no consciousness of having been carried into another world.

Now as the scene begins, we see the ‘alluring Sirens.’ Goethe presents a scene that, though externally in picture-form, might equally be one of everyday life. For the Sirens are collecting wreckage for the Nereids and Tritons. Considered from the other side, however, these alluring creatures, these voices, are not only within man but also outside him. They are the voices of different stages in the world, and on these stages, as I have often shown, inner and outer flow together. The Siren-sounds are those that entice the souls of men out of their bodies, and set them in the spiritual cosmos.

Let us sum up all this. First, Goethe shows a festival of the sea, or rather, dreams evoked during this festival. Secondly, this festival took place during the night, under the influence of the Moon. Goethe arranges everything to show that here it is a question of having to gain a conception independently of the body, a conception of the kind that would be attained consciously, outside the body, is then experienced in pictures. And now we see that, while on the one hand, Goethe wishes to satisfy those who keep to the superficial—this is not said in any belittling sense—by making the Sirens collect wreckage for the Nereids and Tritons who covet it, yet these Nereids and Tritons are on the way to Samothrace to seek the Kabiri and bring them to the festival of the sea. By introducing the Gods of the primeval Samothracian sanctuary into this scene, Goethe shows that he is touching upon the highest human and cosmic secrets. What, then, must take place when Homunculus is to become Homo, when the outlook of Homunculus is to become the outlook of Homo? What must then actually happen?

Now the idea of Homunculus, as understood within the world of the senses, must be taken out of that world and transposed into the world of soul and spirit where, between falling asleep and waking, man has his being. Homunculus must be taken into the world man experiences when, free of his body, he is united with the existence of soul and spirit. It is in this picture-world that we must now find Homunculus, he must then transfer this picture of Homunculus, he must then transfer this picture into that other world, the world of Imagination, Inspiration, and so forth. There alone can the abstract idea of Homunculus be grasped by the real forces of being, those forces that never enter human knowledge when we stop short at the understanding through the senses. When Homunculus, the idea of Homunculus, is separated from the body and transferred to the world of so and spirit, then in all earnestness everything becomes real. Then we have to come upon those forces that are the real ones behind the origin and evolution of man.

In all this Goethe is showing that he had a profound and significant comprehension of the Samothracian Kabiri, that he had a feeling how, in primeval times, these Kabiri were worshipped as guardians of the forces connected with the origin and evolution of mankind. Thus, by evoking from the age if atavistic clairvoyance, pictures of the divine forces associated with human evolution, Goethe was touching upon what is highest.

When dealing with the Samothracian Mysteries, the conception of the Greeks referred back to what was very ancient. And it may be said that the ideas about these Samothracian Mysteries about the Kabiri divinities, permeated all the various ideas the Greeks held about the Gods, all their ideas concerning the connection between these Gods and mankind. And the old Greek was convinced that his idea of human immortality was a legacy bequeathed to the Greek consciousness by the Samothracian Mysteries. It was to the influence of these Mysteries he felt he owed the idea of man's immortality, the idea of man's membership of the world of soul and spirit.

Goethe therefore wishes at the same time to suggest that, were the impulses of the Greeks, that are associated with the Kabiri of Samothrace, grasped in a state free of the body, perhaps the abstract human idea of Homunculus might be united with the true evolutionary forces of man. In the Greek consciousness there was definitely something that could live again, vividly, in Goethe when he touched on this profound mystery. To take an example, this may be seen in what the Greeks used to say of Philip of Macedonia how, by watching the Mysteries of Samothrace, he found Olympia. And the Greeks had in their consciousness how, at that time, the great Alexander decided to descend to these parents when coming to earth, when soul to soul before the divinities of Kabiri Philip of Macedon and Olympia found each other. Those things must be touched upon for the awe to be felt which the Greeks actually experienced when the Kabiri were in question, an awe shared later by Goethe.

From an external point of view they are simply ocean-deities. The Greeks knew that, in an age relatively not very ancient, Samothrace had been inundated, rent asunder, and reduced to confusion by most fearful volcanic storms. The nature-demons had shown their power here in such a terrific way that it still remained in historic memory among the Greeks. And in the woods, in the forests of Samothrace, at that time very dense, the Kabiren Mysteries were concealed. Among the many different names they bore is one Axieros; a second, Axiokersos; a third, Axiokersa; the fourth was Kadmyllos. And a vague feeling existed that there were also a fifth, sixth and seventh. But man's spiritual gaze was mainly fixed on the first three. The old ideas of the Kabiri centered round the secret of men's becoming; and the initiate it in to the holy Mysteries of Samothrace was supposed to come to the perception that what is seen spiritually in the spiritual world corresponds to what happens on earth when, for an incarnating soul a man arises, a man comes to birth. In the spiritual world the spiritual correlate of the human birth was supposed to be watched.

Through such vision, Goethe believed he could change the idea of a homunculus to that of homo. And it was to this vision the Samothracian Initiates were led. We cannot see a man in his true nature when we regard him as a being enclosed within his skin and when we are under the delusion that all we are concerned with in man stands before us in external, physical human form, visible to the external eye. Whoever wishes really to know man must go beyond what is enclosed within the skin and look upon the human being as extending over the entire universe. He must have in mind, what extends spiritually outside the skin.

Now many of the ideas about the Gods depend on this impulse of the Greeks to see the human being outside his skin. And connected with these ideas there was an exoteric and an esoteric side. The exoteric side of man's becoming related, however, to the whole of nature's becoming; the connection of man's becoming with the becoming of nature was involved when, later, the Greeks spoke of Demeter, of Ceres. The esoteric side of Ceres, of Demeter, of the world in its becoming, was the Kabiri. We must know how to look at him, if in any way we are to be able to penetrate the secret of man.

You see, to look at man simply as a figure standing on the physical earth is, really, to deceive yourself about him. For the human being has been united from a threefold stream, a trinity. And as three lights cast their beams on a point—a circle—and we see the fusion of the lights and then refuse to recognise how one, perhaps yellow, another blue, and the third of reddish colour flow together into one, refuse to see this harmony, preferring to believe that what has arisen from a mingling of lights is a unity and so deceive ourselves in believing this mixed product we see before us as man in his skin to be a unity. He is not a unity and if we take him for one we shall never read the secret of mankind. At the present time man is unconscious of not being a unity. But he was conscious of it while atavistic clairvoyance glowed warmly through human knowledge. Thus, the Initiates of Samothrace put men together out of Axieros standing in the middle, and the two extremes, Axiokersos and Axiokersa, whose forces were united with those of Axieros. We might say than that there are three—Axieros, Axiokersos, and Axiokersa. These three forces flowed together to form a unity. The higher reality is the trinity; the unity springs from the trinity. This is what comes before the eye of man.

It might also be said that the Samothracian Initiate learned to know man who stood, physically perceptible, before him. He was told: You must take away from this man the two extremes, Axiokersos and Axiokersa, that only ray into him. Then you can retain Axieros. So the matter stands thus: Of the three, Axieros represents the centre condition of the human being, and the others the two invisible ones, merely shine upon him.

Thus, in the Mysteries of Samothrace, man is shown to be a trinity. Goethe asks himself: Can the idea of the abstract Homunculus perhaps be changed into that of the complete Homo by turning to what, in the Samothracian Mysteries, was regarded as the secret of man—the human trinity? And he said: This trinity can only be arrived at as a conception when man, with his soul and spirit, leaves the body. This is what he told himself.

We must, however, always emphasise that, as regards spiritual perception, Goethe was only a beginner. What is so wonderful about all that Goethe stands for will, as I said recently, only be rightly understood when we think of it as being continually developed, being necessarily developed in order to lend to ever greater heights. In Goethe himself we have the theory of metamorphosis, from leaf to leaf, from the green leaf of the foliage to the coloured petal of the flower, or from the spinal vertebrae, perhaps, to the bones of the head—this secret, if rightly understood, leading from one incarnation to another, from one earth-life to another, as I have often shown you. Hence, from the standpoint of Goethe's own conception of the world, we may ask: How then should the Mystery of Samothrace be pictured today? The Samothracian Mystery, as such, with its Kabiri-symbolism of the secret of humanity, corresponds entirely with the atavistic clairvoyant world-conception; but the living content of knowledge at any one human period, cannot be continued on in the right way, and must be re-moulded. It is not suitable for a return to old conceptions adapted to a quite different state of human evolution; the conceptions must be transformed. The Samothracian Mystery has naturally only historical value. Today we should say: We represent how in the centre of the Representative of Man there stands Axieros, how he is encircled by Axiokersa, and how Axiokersos must be placed in connection with all that is earthly—thus giving us the Representative of Man, Lucifer and Ahriman. And here we have the re-moulding suited to the present age, and on into the future, of the holy Mystery of Samothrace.

It might be said: Were Goethe to appear among us today, wishing, in conformity with all that man has since won for himself, to tell us what is able to change Homunculus to Homo, he would point to the Representative of Man, surrounded by, and in combat with, Lucifer and Ahriman. I beg of you, however, not to make an abstraction of these things, not to apply the favorite modern method of settling these matters by a few abstract concepts, and taking them for symbols. the more you feel that a whole world, containing the secret of man, lies hidden in the figure of the Representative of Man in connection with Lucifer and Ahriman; the more you repudiate the pride, the unjustified, childish pride, of modern man in his abstract scientific concepts; the more you open your soul to a world giving you a view of this image of the mystery of man—then the nearer you come to this secret.

Spiritual Science meets with all kinds of opposition today. But one of its strongest opponents is man's desire for abstraction, his desire to label everything with a few concepts. Goethe's teaching is, in feeling, the exact opposite of this mischievous modern habit of pasting concepts everywhere. One has peculiar experiences in this regard. Men come to a movement like Spiritual Science from very different motives. There are many who wish to reduce everything to abstractions. For instance, man consists of seven principles—I once had the experience, a horrible experience, of someone explaining Hamlet by attributing to him the principle of Buddhi on one place, in another, Manes, and so on. That, my dear friends, is something much worse than all materialism. These quite abstract explanations, all this symbolising of an abstract nature is, regarded inwardly, much worse than any external materialism. Anyhow, we see that, in showing his Nereids and Tritons on the way to Samothrace to fetch the holy Kabiri, Goethe wished, above all, to raise the idea of Homunculus to a very high human plane.

And so, with regard to the Kabiri, we must experience what the ancient peoples did with regard to their deities. These deities of primeval peoples appear primitive to man today—mere idols. This is so because modern man has no understanding for idols. This is so because modern man has no understanding for all that flows out of elemental forces. Not even in art does man rise today to anything really creative. He keeps to a model, or judges what is represented for him in art by the question: Is it like?—Often indeed one hears the objection that it is not natural, because, among men today, there is very little real artistic feeling. In any case, whoever wishes to understand the sometimes grotesque looking figures of the ancient Gods, must try to form an idea of the beings belonging to the third elemental world, from which our world springs, on the one hand in its mineral, on the other, in its organic products.

You know how the scene begins. The Nereids and Tritons are on their way to Samothrace to fetch the Kabiri, amongst whom Homunculus is to be transformed into Home. In the meantime, while they are on their journey, Thales, who is to be the guide of Homunculus in becoming man, betakes himself to the old sea God, Nereus. It was Thales, the old philosopher of nature, whom first Homunculus had sought out. Now, Goethe is neither a mystic in the bad sense of the word, not a mere natural philosopher, when it is a question of finding reality. Hence Thales himself cannot be made to help Homunculus to become Home. Goethe had a deep respect for Thales conception of the world, but did not attribute to him the ability, the force, to advise Homunculus how to become man, complete man. For this, one should betake oneself outside the body to a demonic power—to old Nereus. Goethe brings the most various demonic powers to Homunculus. What kind of power is this Nereus? Now we can see this by the way the old sea-God speaks in Goethe's poem. It might be said that Nereus is the wise, prophetic, but somewhat philistine inhabitant of the spiritual world nearest man, the world man first enters on leaving the body. And, we ask, does he know at all how Homunculus is to become man? Nereus has indeed understanding, even to the point of prophetic clairvoyance; and he makes noble use of this understanding, but even so does not really succeed in reaching what is innermost in the human being. Because of this he feels men do not listen to him, do not heed his counsel. He has, as it were, no access to the human soul. On many occasions he has advised men, warned men; once he warned Paris against bringing so much misery on Troy, but to no effect. Now Nereus, since he is not hampered by a physical body, has developed on the physical plane to a very high degree human understanding that is possessed in a much less degree by man. But even with this understanding he cannot help Homunculus very far on the road to becoming Homo. What Nereus is able to say does not entirely meet the case. So by that nothing is actually gained for Homunculus' task.

Nereus says, however, that although he will not concern himself in giving Homunculus advice about becoming Homo, he is expecting his daughters, the Dorides (or Nereides). In particular, he expects Galatea, the most outstanding of them; for they are to attend the ocean-festival. Galatea! and Imagination of a mighty kind.

What the question is here, is to see how things are connected in the world. It is not very easy to speak on this point, because of the soul's desire today to reduce everything to abstractions. But anyone who looks into these matters may experience a great deal. There are, no doubt, well-intentioned people who say they believe in the spirit. Certainly, it is not a bad thing at least to believe in the spirit; but how do they answer the weighty question: What do you mean exactly by the ‘spirit’ in which you believe? What is the spirit? Spiritualists generally renounce all claim to learning anything of the spirit by doing much that is quite unspiritual. Spiritualism is the most materialistic doctrine that can exist. Certain souls more finely tuned speak indeed of the spirit, but what is it exactly that they have i mind when so speaking? That is why very modern and sceptical minds prefer to forgo the spirit—I mean, of course, only in thought—prefer to give up the spirit as against what can be known today through the senses. Read the article called “Spirit” in Fritz Mauthner's Dictionary of Philosophy; there you will probably be able to get bodily conditions but not those of the head.

Now, you see, in Spiritual Science one should rise above all this abstract talking, even if it is about the spirit. Follow what is said in Spiritual Science, and you will see how it rises progressively as we work. Everything is drawn upon that, step by step, can lead into the actual spiritual world. What is said is not merely the spoken word but derives its force from a method of comparison. Only think how, by the very way Spiritual Science is presented here, it becomes comprehensible that man is pursuing a certain path in life, in the physical body. Read, for instance, what is given comprehensively in the October number of Das Reich (1918). It is shown there how, and by means of what forces, a human being while quite a child has the closest affinity to the material world; how in middle life his soul gains in importance; how in later life he becomes spiritual. This, however, he often does not recognise because he is not prepared for it. He becomes spiritual as the body falls into decay, as the body becomes dry and sclerotic the spirit becomes free, even during the waking condition. Only, a man is very seldom conscious of what he is able to experience if he grows old with a certain gift. I mean here with a gift of the spiritual; that is to say if, not simply growing decrepit in body, he experiences the soul becoming young, becoming spirit.

This makes us realise, my dear friends, that the spirit cannot be seen in an old man or old woman; naturally it is invisible. The decrepit body can be seen but not the spirit growing young and fresh. Wrinkles may be perceived in the flesh of the cheeks, but not the growing fullness of the spirit; that is supersensible. We can, however, indicate where the spirit may be found here in the world where we are leading our everyday existence. And if we then say: The whole of nature is permeated by spirit, we reach the point when we realise that outside in nature where the minerals and plants make manifest the external world, there dwells something of the same force into which we men and women grow as we become old. There you have the visible expression of it. To say, in a pantheistic way, that outside lives the spirit, means nothing at all, because spirit then remains a mere word. But if we say, not in a direct abstract way, but with the necessary and various details: To find the force that as you grow old is always becoming stronger in you, look to the innermost and most active of the forces of nature—then we are speaking of a reality. The essential thing is to set the one force by the side of the other, and to notice the place of each. These things can be livingly realised by turning one's gaze to the force-impulses in the whole connection of a physical human being's descent to earth—from conception, throughout the embryonic life till birth. The dull, dry-as-dust scientist stops short at this force; it is true, he examines it punctiliously but only in his own way, and then comes to a standstill. When a man is able to survey the world from the standpoint of Spiritual Science, he knows, however, that this force is also present in other places. Acting more quickly, the very same force makes itself felt when you wake in the morning, when you wake out of sleep. Exactly the same force, though in a more tenuous form, is present, as the one leading from conception through the embryonic life to birth; it is the identical force. This force is not only in you, in your innermost being; it is diffused outside, throughout everything and every process in the whole wide cosmos.

This force is the daughter of cosmic intelligence. You see, if we wish to describe these things, we must touch on many matters that, today, are quite out of the ordinary. What then does the modern scientist do, when wishing to come upon the secret of physical germination? He uses the microscope; he examines the germ-cell under the microscope, before it is fertilised, after it is fertilised, and so on. He has no feeling that what he thus examines in the smallest object under the microscope is constantly before his eyes in the macrocosm. The very same process that goes on, for example, in the womb of the mother, before and during conception, and during the whole embryonic life, this same process, this very same process, goes on macrocosmically when, after the seed has sunk down into the earth, the earth sends forth the little plant. The warmth of the womb, the warmth of the pregnant mother, is exactly the same as is the sun outside for the whole vegetation of the world. It is important to be able to realise that what can be seen in the smallest object under the microscope, can be looked upon macrocosmically all around in the external world. When we wander about among he growing plants, we are actually in the womb of the world. In short, the force underlying the becoming of man is outside in the whole macrocosmic world, seething and weaving there. Imagine this force personified, imagine this same force of human becoming grasped spiritually in its spiritual counterpart outside the human body, and you have Galatea, with those akin to her, her sisters, the Dorides. In these Imaginations we are led into a mysterious but quite real world. This is one of the most profound scenes written by Goethe, who was conscious that, at the most advanced age, man may have a premonition of these secrets of nature.

There is something overwhelmingly significant in Goethe beginning Faust in his youth and then, shortly before the end of his life, writing such scenes as are now being shown. For sixty years he was striving to find the way of putting into outward form what, at the beginning of that time, he had conceived. He draws upon everything he considers relevant to raise the idea of Homunculus to the idea of Homo, and to present man's becoming outside the body, in all its mystery. He draws upon the Kabiri Mystery, and the mystery of becoming man as it appeared in the figure of Galatea. And he knows that reality is so all-embracing, so profound, that the Imaginations awakened by the Kabiri impulses, by the Galatea-impulse, can do no more than hover on its surface. The mystery is far greater than what can be contained even in such impulses.

Goethe himself tried every means of approaching the secret of life in a true and living way. Thus he evolved his theory of metamorphosis, in which he follows up the different forms in nature—how one form develops out of another. Now Goethe's theory of metamorphosis must not be regarded in and abstract way. He shows us this himself. It is perhaps because it can only be conceived and brought to man's soul in a world-outlook free of the body that, with his theory of metamorphosis Goethe approaches what was atavistically experienced in the old Proteus-myth. Perhaps Proteus, who in his own becoming takes on such different forms, perhaps through his experiences it would be possible to find how Homunculus can become Homo. (You know how, in this scene, Goethe introduces him, and we present him, as tortoise, man, dolphin, three forms appearing one after another.)

But Goethe felt that there were still limitations to his theory of metamorphosis. Surely, you may say, a man with such profound, such fundamental knowledge, as Goethe could see what follows from this theory; with it one can watch one leaf of a plant changing into another, up to the petal of the flower, the spinal vertebrae transforming themselves into the bones of the head, the skull-bones? But Goethe—anyone who has worked on Goethe's world-conception knows how he wrestled in this sphere—Goethe knew he could go no farther. Yet he felt: There is something beyond all this.—We know what that something is—the head of the present man is the metamorphosis of the body of the previous man, the man of an earlier life on earth; the rest of his body in this earth-life will, in the next life, become the head. There, for man's life, we have metamorphosis—the crown of metamorphosis. He draws on what he feels about Proteus, but that can lead only to raising the idea of Homunculus to that of Homo. Goethe felt he had made a great beginning with the Protean idea of metamorphosis, but that this had to be developed were Homunculus to become Homo. Goethe in all honesty represents poetically both what he can and what he cannot do, and we see deep into his soul. It is no doubt, easier to picture an abstract, perfect Goethe and to assure ourselves he knew everything. But No! Goethe becomes all the greater by our recognising the limitations he himself so honestly admits, as may be seen, for instance, in his not allowing Proteus—that is, the way he conceives his theory of metamorphosis—to give counsel regarding Homunculus becoming Homo.

Goethe strove, indeed, form the most varied directions to approach this becoming—this growing to true man. For him, artistic conception was not, as it is for so many, fundamentally abstract. He considered that everything expressed in works of art was part of all that is creative in the world. Into this scene he puts all that was to have led him to his heart's desire—to fathoming the mystery of becoming man. As he stood before the Greek works of art, or rather, the Italian work which made Greek art real for him, he said to himself: I am an the track of what the Greeks were doing in the creation of their works of art; they acted in accordance with the same forces as does nature, in her creations. And he had the experience that, if the artist is a true artist, he unites himself in marriage, as it were, with the forces creating in nature; he creates his forms, and all that can be created artistically, out of what is working in the arising, the growing, of plants of animals, of man. But in all this there is still no inner knowledge. That is what Goethe had to admit to himself. The creative forces present themselves to our vision, allow us to feel them, but in metamorphosis we do not go right within them.

There next appear the Telchines of Rhodes. They are such great artists that, naturally. all external human art seems small in comparison. They forged Neptune's trident. They were the first who tried to represent Gods in human form, that is, to create man out of the actual cosmic forces. This art of the Telchines comes nearer reproducing man's becoming, but does not quite reach it. This is what Goethe is wishing to tell us. He expresses it through Proteus who says finally: Even this does not lead to the real mystery of man.

Thus does Goethe wish to evoke a true feeling that there are two worlds—the waking world of day, and the world that is entered when man is free of the body, the world he would see if, during sleep he became awake to this body-free condition. Everything of the kind that he would say, is indicated by Goethe in this scene most delicately and sublimely. Take, for example, the passage where the Dorides bring in the sailor-lads; read the works in which the world is described, how the physical world is set beside the world entered when man is free of the body—how this is pictured in the Dorides set beside the physical sailor boys. They have found each other and yet not found each other. Human beings and spirits meet one another, yet do not meet; they approach each other and remain strangers. In this passage, the relation of the two worlds is wonderfully indicated. Everywhere Goethe endeavours to show how essential it is to place oneself into the spiritual world to find what makes Homunculus into Homo. At the same time he delicately indicates how physical world and spiritual world are together yet apart.

One might say that in his artistic representation, Goethe sees—or rather, makes us see—how Homunculus can become Homo if the soul approaches the intimate mystery of the Kabiri, if it approach what Nereus evoked in his daughter Galatea. All that is active in the true art that works out of the cosmos. But, alas, it is as if one were grasping after reality in a dream, and the dream immediately fades away. It is as though one wished to hold fast what welds together the physical and the spiritual worlds. The Gods will not suffer it; the worlds fall apart.

This difficulty of knowing the spirit is the fundamental experience, the fundamental impulse in the soul of one who watches this scene with true understanding. It is this that leads Goethe to his mighty finale—the shattering of Homunculus against the shell-chariot of Galatea, the shattering that is at the same time an arising, a coming into being, the ascent into the elements, which is a finding of the self in reality.

We will speak again tomorrow of this conclusion of the scene, in connection with its representation.

My dear Friends,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dass er dir log, uns darf es nicht loben.
(That he told lies, 'tis not to be lauded.)

This is the easiest one. Something a bit more complicated:

Nimm nicht Nonnen in nimmermuede Mühlen.
(Take not nuns in never-tired mills.)

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

Another example:

Rate mir mehrere Rätsel nur richtig.

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

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

Redlich ratsam
Rüstet rühmlich
Riesig rächend
Ruhig rollend
Reuige Rosse

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

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

Protzig preist
Bäder bruenstig
Polternd putzig
Bieder bastelnd
Puder patzend
Bergig brüstend

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

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

• Erfüllung geht (Fulfillment goes)
• Durch Hoffnung (Through hope)
• Geht durch Sehnen (Goes through longing)
• Durch Wollen (Through willing)

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

• Wollen weht (Willing wafts)
• Im Webenden (In weaving)
• Weht im Bebenden (Wafts in billowing)
• Webt bebend (Weaves billowing)
• Webend bindend (Weaves binding)
• Im Finden (In finding)
• Findend windend (Finding winding)
• Kuendend (Calling)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lalle Lieder lieblich
Lipplicher Laffe
Lappiger lumpiger
Laichiger Lurch

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

Pfiffig pfeifen
Pfaeffische Pferde
Pflegend Pfluege
Pferchend Pfirsiche

and then you vary that by saying it this way:

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

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

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

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

Something similar can be done with the following two verses:

Ketzer petzten jetzt klaeglich
Letztlich leicht skeptisch

and now the other version:

Ketzerkraechzer petzten jetzt klaeglich
Letztlich ploetzlich leicht skeptisch

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

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

Nur renn nimmer reuig
Gierig grinsend
Knoten knipsend
Pfaender knuepfend

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

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

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

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

Klipp plapp plick glick
Klingt Klapperrichtig
Knatternd trappend
Rossegetrippel

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

Schlinge Schlange geschwinde
Gewundene Fundewecken weg

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

Gewundene Fundewecken
Geschwinde schlinge Schlange weg

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

Marsch schmachtender
Klappriger Racker
Krackle plappernd linkisch
Kink von vorne fort

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

Nimm mir nimmer
Was sich waesserig
Mit Teilen mitteilt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uns ist in alten maeren
Wunders vil geseit
von heleden lobebaeren,
von grôzer arebeit;
von freude unt hôchgezîten,
von weinen unde klagen,
von küener recken strîten
müget ir nu wunder hoeren sagen.

Ez wuohs in Buregonden
ein vil edel magedîn,
daz in allen landen
niht schoeners mohte sîn,
Kriemhilt geheizen;
diu wart ein schoene wîp,
Dar umbe muosen degene
vil Verliesen dën lîp.

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

Uns ist in alten maeren wunders vil geseit

and

Uns wird in alten Märchen Wunderbares viel erzählt

and so forth!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 1. The threefold social organism, as depicted by Rudolf Steiner, is composed of three parts: the two mentioned above and the economic realm.
• 2. See The Threefold Social Order for details on “Associations.”
• 3. Rudolf Steiner refers here to the war-reparations demanded of Germany by France.
• 4. The speech-exercises are rendered in the original German, since the emphasis is on their sound, primarily; a translation is often useless as well as extremely difficult.
• 5. In trying to illustrate how one must take hold of one's speech-organs via the exercises. Rudolf Steiner modifies the four words in a manner that is highly original and unusual, and untranslatable as well. But they thus indicate a living working, an active doing. “Gesehmeithgen,” to make pliable; “zu biegen,” to bend; “zu hohlen,” to make hollow; “zu erhabenen,” to have or possess by effort.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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