The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Everything in the world, each event and every act of human conduct has two sides, which are, as it were, polar opposites.

Yesterday it was my task to point out to you that through a feeling understanding of our spiritual-scientific world outlook, the human soul should acquire reverence and devotion for the spiritual worlds. The opposite pole to this devotional attitude is energetic work on our inner life, an energetic taking-in-hand of the evolutionary factors of our own soul, making a point of always using our experiences for the purpose of learning something from them and making progress with regard to our inner forces, so that—whatever meets us in life and whatever takes place around us, whether it is easy to understand or not—we shall always avoid the danger of losing ourselves. May we always have the chance of keeping hold of ourselves and of finding within ourselves the strength to develop an understanding for what can encounter us in an often incomprehensible way, and may the kind of devotion for things we were talking about yesterday make such an impact on the development of our souls, that we acquire a proper understanding of universal existence; this, my dear friends, is the New Year greeting I wanted to give you today at the start of the year. We have just been remembering devotion, and I would like to follow that with a reminder of the energetic work on our inner life. The full moon shining down on us out of the cosmos on New Year's Eve is a symbol for the sequence in which we are remembering these things. If it had been the other way round, and the year had started with the new moon, I should have done the right thing in bringing these reminders to you in the opposite order. I should then have closed the year with a reminder of the power of inner development and should have had to leave the thoughts on reverence until today.

We must attach more and more importance to really noticing a symbol like this that shines on us out of the macrocosm. And in our quiet moments this year let this indication work on us in such a way that it can have a special significance, to think first about the transformation the power of reverence can bring about in us, then to follow this with thinking about the transformation that the power of inner preservation, the maintaining of inner soul energy, should bring about in us.

The sequence of these thoughts has been set for the coming year by the writing of the stars, and the world will gradually come to realise again that reading the star script really has a meaning for man. So let us try even in details like this to pay heed to the great law of human existence and to strive for harmony between the macrocosm and the microcosm. The macrocosm is speaking to us over these days in the most obvious way and we shall find how to keep our microcosm in harmony with the macrocosm, if we conduct ourselves in line with it, in the course of this year that has begun amidst such painful events.

If you try and notice what has been the prevailing mood of our talks in the last few days you will discover that, regarding the facts that spiritual science has made significant for us, we live in a time of change, in a time of hope, as it were, for we should now be getting an inkling of the direction the further course of human cultural development should take; of the change that has to come about from a purely materialistic world conception to a spiritual one. What is meant here, however, cannot really fully take place unless it enters every sphere of life and particularly takes hold of the spiritual cultural areas to a marked degree.

We have already had various indications showing that an understanding of the spiritual-scientific outlook, which has taken hold of our feelings and is not merely rational, is bound to bring a change into both artistic creativity and artistic appreciation, because the forces we gain from this can give us an artistic conception of the world. And in our Goetheanum building we have just made the attempt to show at least a small part of what can take an artistic form, from out of spiritual-scientific impulses.

We can see a time coming when we shall be able to enter fully into the feelings that can arise from the spiritual-scientific world conception, a time when the way to artistic creation will in many respects be different from the past; it will be much more alive and the medium of artistic creation will be experienced much more intensely in the human soul; the soul will be capable of experiencing colour and sound far more inwardly, in a kind of moral-spiritual way, and in artists' creations we shall meet, as it were, traces of the artists' experiences in the cosmos.

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

Human beings will make important discoveries in the future in this respect. They will actually unite their moralspiritual nature with the results of sense perception. An infinite deepening of the human soul can be foreseen in this domain. Let us pick a particular example to start from. We will simply imagine that we are looking at a surface shining all over with the same shade of strong vermilion, and let us assume we succeed in forgetting everything else around us and concentrate entirely on experiencing this colour, so that we have the colour in front of us, not merely as something that works upon us but as something with which we ourselves are united, that we are within. You will then be able to feel as though you were in the world, and in this world the whole of you has become colour, the whole of your innermost soul, and wherever your soul goes in the world you will be a soul filled with red, living in, with and out of red. Yet you will not be able to experience this intensely in the soul unless the corresponding feeling is transformed into moral experience, real moral experience.

If we float through the world as though we were red, had identified ourselves with red, and our very soul and the whole world were entirely red, we shall not be able to help feeling that this whole red world is filling us with the substance of divine wrath, coming towards us from all sides in response to all the possibilities of evil and sin in us. In this infinite red space we shall be able to feel as though we were before the judgment of God, and our moral feeling will become the kind of moral experience our souls can have in infinite space. And when the reaction comes, when something emerges in our soul as we are having this experience in infinite red or, I could also say in the one and only red, I can only describe it by saying we learn to pray. If you can experience the raying and glowing of divine wrath, together with all the possibilities of evil in the human soul, and if you can experience in the red how one learns to pray, the experience of red is enormously deepened. We can also experience the form red takes on when it enters space.

We can then understand how we can experience a being that radiates goodness and is full of divine kindness and mercy, a being that we want to feel in the realm of space. Then we shall feel the need of expressing this divine mercy and goodness in a form which arises out of the colour itself. We shall feel the need to let space be pushed aside so that goodness and mercy may shine forth. Before space was there it was all concentrated at the centre, and now goodness and mercy enter space and, just as clouds are driven apart, space is rent asunder and recedes to make way for mercy, and we have the feeling that what is being scattered must be drawn in red. Here in the centre (a drawing was done) we shall have to indicate faintly a kind of magenta shining into the scattering red.

We shall then be present with our whole soul as the colour takes on form. And with our whole soul we shall feel an echo of how the beings who belong especially to our earth process felt, when they had ascended to the Elohim stage and learnt to fashion the world of forms out of colours. We shall learn to experience something of the creative activity of the Spirits of Form who are the Elohim, and we shall then understand how colour can create forms, as indicated in our first Mystery Play. We shall also understand something of how the surface nature of the colour becomes something that has to be overcome, as it were, because we accompany colour into the cosmos. If strong desire is also present, a feeling can arise like Strader has when he sees the portrait of Capesius, and says he would like to pierce the canvas.

You will see that an attempt has been made in these Mystery Plays really to show in artistic form what it is like for the soul, when it attempts to expand in the cosmic forces and to feel what the spirits of the cosmos are feeling. That was, in fact, the beginning of all art. But the materialistic age had to come, and ancient art, with its divine quality of differentiation, in which spirit was revealed in matter, had to change into secondary, materialistic ‘after’-art, which the art of the materialistic age is, in essence; the kind of art which cannot create but only imitate. The sign of all secondary art, all after-art, is that it needs objects to imitate, and that it does not produce the form primarily out of the material.

Let us take another example. Let us imagine we do the same thing with a more orange coloured surface that we did with the red surface. We shall experience something quite different this time. If we submerge ourselves in it and unite with it, then instead of feeling divine wrath bearing down upon us, we shall have the feeling that what comes to meet us here has much less of the serious side of wrath about it and does not only want to punish us, but wants to impart itself to us and arm us with inner strength.

When we enter the world and unite with the orange surface we move in such a way that with every step we take, we feel that by experiencing orange, by living in the forces of orange, we are becoming stronger and stronger, and that what comes to us out of orange does not come merely to punish us and break us with its judgment, but is a source of strength. This is how we go into the world in orange. We then feel the longing to understand the inner nature of things and to unite it with ourselves. By living in red we learn to pray, by living in orange we experience the desire for knowledge of the inner nature of things.

If we do the same thing with a yellow surface we feel as though we were transported back to the beginning of our cycle of time. We feel that we are then living in the forces out of which we were created when we entered upon our first earthly incarnation. You feel an affinity between what you are throughout the whole of earth existence, and what comes to meet you from the world into which you take the yellow with which you are united.

And if you identify yourself with green and accompany green into the world—which can be done very easily by gazing at a green meadow, shutting out everything else and concentrating completely on it, and then trying to immerse yourself in the green meadow as if the green were the surface of a coloured sea—you experience an inner increase in strength in what your are in that particular incarnation. You feel yourself becoming inwardly healthy, yet at the same time becoming inwardly more egoistic, you feel a stimulus of the egoistic forces within you.

If you did the same with a blue surface, you would go through the world with the desire to accompany the blue forever and to overcome your egoism, become macrocosmic, as it were, and develop devotion. And you would find it a blessing if you could remain like this for your meeting with divine mercy. You would feel blessed by divine mercy if you could go through the world like this.

Thus we learn to know the inner nature of colour and, as I said before, we can foresee a time when an artist's preparation will mean a moral experience in colour of this kind, when the experience preparatory to artistic creation will be much more inward and intuitive than it ever was in past ages. For these are only a few indications I am giving you, and they will be developed much further in the future. They will take hold of men's souls and enliven them with a tremendous sense for artistic creativity, whereas the materialistic culture that has entered our modern age has dried up the soul and made it passive. Souls must be stimulated again by a power from within; they must be taken hold of by the inner forces of things. As a specific example I have taken the colours that flood the world.

The world of sound will deepen and enliven the life of soul in a very similar way. During the period that is now drawing to a close, the essential thing was that a person experienced a tone as such, and the relationship of one tone to another. In the future people will be able to experience what is behind the tone. They will regard the tone as a kind of window through which they enter the spiritual world, and then it will not depend on vague feeling of how one tone is added to another, to form melodies for instance, but by going through the tone the soul will also experience a moral-spiritual quality behind the separate tones. The soul will enter the spiritual world as though through a window. The secrets of the individual tones will be discovered in this experience behind the tones.

We are still a long way away from this feeling of being able to go from the sense world to the spiritual world through the window of each tone. But this will come. We shall experience the tone as an opening made by the gods from the spiritual world yonder to this physical-material world, and we shall climb through the tone out of the physical-material world into the spiritual world. Through the tonic, for example, which we experience as absolute and not in reference to previous tones of the scale, we experience danger as we pass from the sense world into the spiritual world. We are threatened on entry with being taken captive; the tonic wants to suck us in most horribly through the window of the tone and make us completely disappear in the spiritual world. Assuming that we experience the tonic as absolute, we shall feel that we are still too weak in a spiritual sense in the physical world, and that we are sucked up by the spiritual world when we climb through this window. This is the moral experience to be had on entering the spiritual world through the tonic. I am over-simplifying it now, though; we shall have a very differentiated experience which contains an infinite variety of detail.

When we climb out of the physical world into the spiritual world through the window of the second, we shall have the impression of powers in the spiritual world yonder that, as it were, take pity on our weakness and say, ‘Well! so you were weak in the physical sense world! if you only climb into the spiritual world through the tonic I must dissolve you, suck you up and break you to pieces. But, if you enter through the second, I will offer you something from the spiritual world and remind you of something that is there.’ The peculiar thing is that when we climb from the physical to the spiritual world through the second, it is as though a number of tones rang out to receive us. We enter a totally silent world if we enter the spiritual world through the absolute tonic. If we enter through the second we come to a world where, if we listen, various quiet high-pitched tones ring out wanting to comfort us in our weakness. Yet we must go through the window in a way we most certainly could not do in a physical-material house, for the owner would give us a strange look if we were to walk in through the window and take the whole window with us. But in the spiritual world that is what you have to do, take the tones with you and, in union with them, live over there in the beyond, the other side of the thin partition that separates us from the physical-material world, and in which we have to imagine the tones as windows.

If you enter the spiritual world through the third, you will have the feeling of an even greater weakness. If you enter the spiritual world this way, you will feel that you were really very weak in the physical-material world, where its spiritual content is concerned. But with regard to the third—and remember that you have become sound; you yourself have become a third—you will feel that there are friends over there who, although they themselves are not thirds, approach you according to the kind of disposition you had in the physical-material world. If you enter through the second, it is like a gentle sounding of many tones, with whom you share life in general when you enter through them, whilst tones that are, as it were, friends with one another, come to meet you through the third. People who want to become composers will have to enter especially through the third, for that is where the tone sequences, the tone compositions are, that will stimulate their artistic creativity. You will not always be met by the same tone friends, for which ones you meet will depend on your mood and your feeling and your temperament—in fact how you are disposed to life at the time when you go through the third into spiritual life. This results in an infinite variety of possibilities.

If you penetrate through the fourth into the spiritual world, you will have a strange experience. Although no new tones appear from any direction, those that have come before, when you were experiencing the third, will live lightly in the soul as memories. And you will find that in continuing to live with these tone memories they perpetually take on a fresh colouring; at one time they become as bright and cheerful as can be, at other times they descend to the utmost sadness; now they are as bright as day, now they sink down to the silence of the grave. The modulating of the voice, the way the sound ascends and descends; in short, the whole mood of a tonal creation will have its origin along this path, from these sound memories.

The fifth will produce experiences that are more subjective, that work to stimulate and enrich the life of the soul. It is like a magic wand that conjures up the secrets of the sound world yonder, out of unfathomable depths.

Experiences of this kind will come to one when one no longer just looks at the things and phenomena in the world, or just listens to them, but experiences them from within. These are the kind of experiences mankind must have, particularly through colour and sound, but also through form; in fact, altogether through the realm of art, in order to get away from the purely external relationship to things and their functioning—which is characteristic of the materialistic age—and to penetrate into the inner secrets at the heart of things.

Then something tremendously significant will happen to man, and he will be filled with the awareness of his connection with the divine spiritual powers, which are sub-conscious when his awarenesss is confined to the material realm, and which guide and lead him through the world. And then, above all, he will have inner experiences, such as experiencing the forces which guide man from one incarnation to the next.

If we omit to heat a locomotive, it cannot pull a train. The forces which make things happen in the world have to be continually stimulated. The forces which drive mankind forward also need to be stimulated. And this does happen. However, man has to learn that he is connected with these forces.

I once had the following remarkable experience. There was a lawyer, a famous advocate, in the town where I lived for a while, an extraordinarily famous advocate, whom the people absolutely flocked to, because they believed he was bound to win the most difficult lawsuits. And this was often the case. His legal dialectic was extraordinary, and people who knew him had the deepest respect for it. Now he was once entrusted with the difficult case of a rich man. The rich man would have to suffer a severe penalty if the lawsuit resulted in his being sentenced. The advocate used his greatest dialectic and the most wonderful of his legal skills. He made a long speech, and the people who heard him were convinced that if the jury were not to acquit the accused, nothing further could be done about it. Everyone who heard the advocate's amazing skill were absolutely convinced the jury would now withdraw and acquit the accused.

But in the law court there was not only a skilful counsel but also a skilful judge, and although the hour was not yet so advanced that a judgment could no longer be given, the judge said, ‘Let us close the session for today and continue tomorrow.’ So the jury's session was to take place the following morning, and this gave them time to think the matter over again during the night. The following day came. This ‘overnight delay’ as he called it, had already proved very irksome for the advocate. The session began, the jury withdrew, and everyone awaited their return with tense expectation, most of all our advocate. The jury came back after only a quarter of an hour, and when the advocate heard them coming back from the conference room so soon, he fainted. Yes, he fainted. He did recover again, and a friend helped him up. The accused really had been sentenced, but the advocate only heard this after he had recovered from fainting.

Now what could be said about the course of events looked at from the point of view of external perception? One could say that the advocate was a very ambitious man, for he cared so much about winning this lawsuit that he lost consciousness before the verdict was pronounced. As soon as he saw that the jury had only conferred for a short time he was sure the accused had been sentenced, for if they had acquitted him they would, of course, have taken much longer.
But that was not how the matter stood; it only appeared to be so from an external point of view. There was a kind of second layer of events behind what I have just told you. This other layer, or story, is like this: Before this lawsuit took place this advocate had become addicted to what one can call the demon of gambling—I knew him well, of course. He used the sums of money entrusted to him, as deposit to gamble with. It was an absolute passion with him, and not long before this lawsuit began he had reached the point where he had gambled away large sums of money entrusted to his care. But he had been promised that if he should win this suit, he would be paid so much that he could more or less balance the difference.

So he did not faint only out of wounded ambition; he fainited when the jury returned with the verdict after only a quarter of an hour, because his existence had in fact been destroyed. For he had no hope any more of replacing the deposit money he had lost. Therefore his whole existence had depended on the outcome of the lawsuit. He fainted as symbolic indication that he was now completely ruined for this incarnation. He had to escape to America after that, and had to endure a not very enviable existence there for the rest of his life.

An example of this sort shows us that judgment can very often be wrong, for some people might never have had the chance to hear anything about what went on behind the lawsuit. If these people had only heard the clever advocate during the lawsuit and seen him fainting, they could very well have concluded that some people are so ambitious that they lose consciousness if a speech of theirs misfires. And they could have left it at that.

To be able to judge correctly you would therefore have to know a further layer of facts. In many instances you would even have to know several more layers, otherwise you could be correct with regard to the layer you can see and yet make a wrong judgment. That is the external aspect. But the matter has more behind it. The fellow also had to find a way of getting from this incarnation to the next one. And here we have an example of how wise world guidance puts into the soul the forces it needs to lead it from one incarnation to the next. The man was in such inner conflict that it had destroyed his existence. He was in a terrible position. A situation had been created in which there were no forces left to carry him over to his next incarnation. Also, a situation had been created in which forces of that nature could not be brought to his conscious mind. So his consciousness had to be extinguished for a moment. During short breaks in consciousness all kinds of other spirituality can enter the human soul. And in that moment he received forces capable of restoring his impulse to go forward into the next incarnation. Of course an impulse like this can be given in many different ways. What I have described here was one particular case.

These impulses are always there. But I just wanted to show you that man's conscious life is linked with an ongoing process in the unconscious, and that in man's conscious life there are really points where the consciousness is suppressed so that something can enter out of the unconscious. Sometimes these unconscious moments need not be long; they can be short spells similar to fainting. Yet a tremendous amount of spiritual life forces can stream into the human being at such moments, both good and bad, and capable of good and evil.

What I want to show you with this example is that, in observing the world, mankind must try to notice links of this kind, which are of no significance to a materialistic outlook.

You will gradually reach the point of becoming so perceptive for living links that you will recognise the moments in which the spirit comes near to each human being. In the future the world will no longer be explained so unequivocably as it is now, on the basis of material causes, but matter will be relegated to its right place, and at the same time people will realise that the material phenomenon is not the only thing, for spirit shines through
it.

We have seen that colours and sound are windows through which we can ascend spiritually into the spirit world, and life also brings to us windows through which the spiritual world enters our physical world. The advocate's fainting fit was this kind of window. If we interpret this phenomenon correctly we have to say that spiritual life streams down to us through this window. It is clear to us that these forces flowing into us cannot be explained on a purely material level. So there are windows in the tones through which we ascend from the physical-material world into the spiritual world; and there are also windows through which, if we remain in the physical-material world, the spirit can descend to us.

If we do not perceive the fact that spirit descends to us through such windows, it is like someone opening a beautiful book who cannot read. He has the same thing in front of him as someone who can read, but if he cannot read he sees unintelligible scribble on the white pages which, at the most, he can just describe. Only a person who can read is capable of following a biography, perhaps, or a piece of information that has been laid down in these strange signs. A person who cannot read world phenomena is like a cosmic illiterate where these phenomena are concerned. A person who can read, however, reads the ongoing process of the spiritual world in them. It is characteristic of the present materialistic age that materialism has made people illiterate with regard to the cosmos, almost a hundred per cent so. At a time when people are so proud of having reduced the percentage of illiteracy in civilised countries to such a great extent, they are enthusiastically heading towards illiteracy where the cosmos is concerned.

It is the task of spiritual science to eliminate this cosmic illiteracy. Few people nowadays are illiterate in the ordinary sense. In the time of ancient clairvoyance human beings were far less illiterate in the spirit. But this must not make us conceited. It is a fact that when we acquire an inkling of our task in the spiritual-scientific stream, we ought to change from being illiterate to becoming people who can read the cosmos. Yet we should remain humble, for the times are such that we are still very much in need of the elementary level of education. We can hardly read yet, but only spell out the letters. Yet we can be gripped by the impulse to change, an impulse which is breaking in upon mankind through these things. And if we are gripped by them we shall have the right attitude to what the signs of the times are demanding of us, and we shall enter into them as people who rightly belong to the spiritual-scientific world conceptual stream.

Yesterday we concluded our psychosophical observations by pointing for one thing to our surging soul life that can be reduced to two elements, reasoning, and the inner experiences of love and hate. Then we referred to the sensations given us by the soul, those that fill our soul life like the continually rising and falling waves of the sea. Finally, we indicated one sensation appearing in this restless sea that is radically different from all other everyday experiences of the outer world. We experience our sensations while in contact with the outer world, and they are then transformed within us in such a way as to enable us to live on with them. But in the midst of this surge stimulated by the messages of our senses, one perception makes its appearance totally different in kind from all other perceptions. All others are instigated by external sense stimuli, are further worked over within us, and become sensations. They start as perceptions, then become sensations within perception, and finally live on in what remains of the sensations in us. The ego perception, however, is an entirely different matter. The perception of the ego appears in the midst of the other surging activity; it is omnipresent and differs from all other sensations by reason of the fact that it cannot be engendered from without. This condition discloses a sort of contrast in the soul life, the ego sensation as opposed to all others.

The mysteries concealed in this contrast will come to light in the course of these lectures, but it is not too soon to acquire a feeling for them by keeping the contrast clearly in view. Into all other experiences we infuse our ego perception, so that even from a quite abstract consideration of this contrast we can learn that everything surging in the soul comes from two directions. What we must do is to envision the contrasting elements of the human soul life both abstractly, in detail, and concretely, comprehensively, until we feel it in our soul.

In truth, man's soul life is primarily anything but a simple entity. It is a dramatic battlefield upon which the contrasts are constantly in action. A finely attuned feeling harking to the life of this human psyche will not fail to recognize the dramatic character of the human soul life, and we cannot but feel a certain impotence in facing these struggling powers in our souls, a certain submission to the conflicting elements of life. The most insignificant among us, as well as the greatest genius, is chained to this conflict, to this dual nature of soul life.

In order to arouse the feeling within you that even the greatest genius is subject to the domination of these conflicting elements, a poem by Goethe was recited at the beginning of yesterday's lecture. Should any of you have picked up his Goethe since then and re-read this poem, he must have experienced a strange sensation—one that should underlie this lecture cycle. It is not our intention to describe in an abstract way, but rather to infuse blood, so to speak, into our description of the soul. We want to enter into the living soul.

If you heard the recitation of the poem, The Wandering Jew (Der Ewige Jude), that was given yesterday, and later read it over at home, you must have been struck by the difference in the two versions. As a matter of fact, something was done that so-called science would term barbarism; the poem was specially prepared for the recitation, cuts and alterations were made, and the whole thing was changed to present an entirely different picture. Philologists would frown upon such a procedure, but it is justified by its special purpose of opening up a wider perspective into the human soul.

The alterations were made for the following reason. Goethe wrote the poem in his earliest youth, but the content of the version you heard yesterday is such as the mature soul of his ripe age could have endorsed. He would have been ashamed, however, of the portions omitted, would have turned from them. Only one who approaches Goethe with such profound veneration as I feel for him may be permitted to speak of one of his poems, upon occasion, as I have done today of The Wandering Jew.

This poem is the work of Goethe's early youth. Youth expresses itself here as youth naturally does. Goethe wrote it when he was a regular good-for-nothing, one from whom surely nothing could be learned. But may we say this of anything he wrote? We can say unhesitatingly that at the time he wrote The Wandering Jew he could not even spell correctly, hence it should be permissible to point out worthless passages. There is a strong proclivity nowadays to unearth the earliest works of great men, if possible in their original form. Now, the youthful soul of Goethe embraced something that was not himself. Conceptions rumbled there that derived entirely from his environment, his milieu. The nature of his environment, to be sure, does not concern us, that concerned only Goethe, but from all this something fused in his soul, something composed on the one hand of what was properly psychic in his soul, and on the other, of its eternal-spiritual content, of a temporal and an eternal-spiritual element.

The result of all this is something eternal, and it does concern us. These two aspects, one of which concerns only Goethe and the other, us as well, these two souls in the youthful Goethe were separated in yesterday's recitation as by an incision. Whatever remained in the old Goethe of what had swayed the young Goethe was retained. All that was present only in his youth was extirpated. There you can see how two kinds of forces influence a genius: those proceeding from his environment and those working out of himself toward the future.

As we contemplate Goethe's soul in his youth it appears as a battlefield upon which a struggle is in progress between the Goethe that accompanied him throughout his life and something else—something he had to fight down. Without this struggle, Goethe would not have become Goethe. There the antithesis becomes patent. It is indispensable to the progress of humanity, for were the soul a unified being it could not progress but would remain stationary.

It is, therefore, important to acquire a feeling for the polarity, the struggle of contrasting elements in the soul life. Unless we do so we shall not be able to understand what must be said concerning the soul life. It is precisely when contemplating such a typically magnificent soul life as Goethe's that we look upon it as upon a drama; we seek to approach it in timid veneration, because this conflict, unrolling as the life of a soul, reveals in a single incarnation the entire destiny of the soul life.

Another point arises in connection with this soul drama. Let us recall the contrasts in Goethe's soul, as they were disclosed in yesterday's recitation, and see what else we can deduce. We find that in later years Goethe followed but one of the impulses we discussed yesterday. He embraced in his soul what we disentangled from the temporal elements that he later discarded. Throughout his life and involuntarily Goethe, like every man, was subject to these two powers of his soul life.

By reason of possessing a soul, nobody is altogether his own master. Man is subject as well to an inner influence that has power over him, that his knowledge cannot compass at the outset. Had Goethe at that early age been able to grasp all that was active in his soul, he could not have written the poem as he actually did. Man is a vassal of his soul life. Something holds sway and acts there that presents itself to the soul life as an outer world.

Just as the red rose forces us to visualize it as red, and as we carry the red color with us as memory, so there lives in us something that compels us to fulfill the inner drama of our soul life in a certain definite way. In the matter of all sense perceptions the outer world masters us, and a similar inner master must be recognized in our soul life as well if we observe the latter as it progresses in time from day to day, from year to year, from one life epoch to the next, and becomes ever richer as it is driven forward by an inner power. This simple, concrete case alone suffices to show that in our soul life we must recognize an outer master, the compulsion of sense perceptions, but also, that we have an inner master as well. Failure to recognize this inner master leads to illusion.

In so far as we stand at a given point in space, we have a master in the outer world, and as we progress in our soul life it is incumbent upon us to observe the dramatic contrast within us, for thus we will know that there is such a master within us as well, the master that causes us to lead a different soul life at seven than at twenty-one, thirty-five, or a still greater age.

In the last analysis this soul drama, so concretely exemplified in Goethe, is composed of reasoning and the experiences of love and hate. It was said that reasoning leads to visualization, and that love and hate have their source in desire. You might object that the statement, “reasoning leads to visualization,” contradicts the simple fact that visualizations arise from sense sensations of the outer world because, when we see a rose, the visualization “red” arises without our reasoning. Hence, in this case at least, reasoning does not lead to visualization—rather the reverse; the visualization would have to be there, and then the reasoning would follow. But that only appears to be a contradiction. Keep it firmly in mind, for it is by no means easy to fathom. We must observe a number of matters if we would find the key to this seeming contradiction. First of all, you must pay attention to the fact that visualizations lead a life of their own in the human soul life. Please grasp that sentence in its full significance. Visualizations are like parasites, like live beings in the inner soul, that lead their own existence there.

On the other hand, desire as well leads to an existence of its own in the soul life, and the latter is actually under the dominion of these independent visualizations, longings and desires. You can easily convince yourselves of the independence of visualizations by remembering that it is not always in your power to recall them at will. Occasionally they refuse to be recalled, and we say that we have forgotten, and the possibility of forgetting proves the presence of a foreign force that opposes the reappearance of these visualizations. Sometimes those we had but yesterday resist our greatest efforts to remember them. This conflict is actually a struggle that takes place between visualization and something else that is present in our soul in this epoch.

The visualization need not necessarily have vanished for good. It may return some time without anything having occurred in the outer world to cause its reappearance. It is simply that a visualization is a being that may temporarily refuse to appear in our soul. The adversaries we meet there, the opposing visualizations, act in different ways with a great variety of results. This conflict between our own soul forces and the visualizations varies greatly in different people, to such an extent, in fact, that the distance between the extremes is terrifying.

There are people, for example, who are never at a loss to recall their store of conceptions and knowledge, and others so forgetful, so impotent in this respect as to overstep the bounds of what is normal and healthy, so that they are rendered unfit for life. For a genuine psychologist the readiness with which he remembers, recalls conceptions, is of great importance because it is a measure of something lying much deeper in his soul life. The proximity or remoteness of his visualizations is for him an expression of inner health or sickness. All of us, in fact, can find in this detail a subtle indication of our constitution, right down to our corporeality. Judging by the intensity with which man must combat this resistance of the visualizations, the psychologist can diagnose his ailment. His gaze penetrates the human soul and observes something beyond in the soul life.

In addition to this, there is something else to be considered if you would visualize from another angle how these conceptions lead a life of their own within us. Our visualizations at any given age, in their totality, are something we do not wholly master, something to which we submit. Under certain life conditions we can realize this as, for example, whether or not we understand a person speaking to us depends upon our soul life. You, for instance, understand what I say in my lectures, but if you brought others unacquainted with my subject, many of them, no matter how well educated, would understand nothing at all. Why? Because those in question have for years been accustomed to other conceptions. These constitute the obstacle to an understanding of the other, more up-to-date concepts. Thus we find that it is precisely the old conceptions that combat the new ones approaching them. It is of no avail whatever to want to understand something unless we have within us a store of conceptions that will make it possible to understand. Conceptions are opposed by conceptions and, if you examine your soul life, you will find that your ego plays a minor role in the process.

Watching or listening to something that interests you offers the best opportunity to forget your ego, and the more deeply you are absorbed, the greater is this opportunity. Looking back at such a moment, you will realize that something was taking place in you in which your ego had little part. It was as though you had forgotten your ego; you had lost yourself, entranced. That is what always occurs when we understand something particularly well. What happens, though, when we fail to understand something? We oppose our present store of conceptions to the new ones, and something like a dramatic conflict takes place in our soul. Conceptions battle with conceptions, and we ourselves, within the soul, are the battlefield of the two armies of conceptions.

There is something significant in the soul life that depends upon our having or not having the conceptions necessary for understanding a matter. If we listen unprepared to an exposition, for example, a curious phenomenon comes to light. At the moment when we fail to understand, something like a demon approaches us, as it were, from the rear. When we listen understandingly and attentively this does not occur. What is this demon? It is one's ego, weaving in the soul, attacking from the rear. As long as we understand and can remain absorbed it does not put in an appearance, only at the moment when we fail to understand.

What is the nature of this inability to understand? Undoubtedly something that weaves its way into the soul life, so to speak, and engenders an uncomfortable feeling in us. One's own soul makes itself felt as uneasiness, and an examination of this condition shows the soul life to be of such a nature that the conceptions already there are not indifferent to the new ones that approach. The new ones impart to the old ones a feeling of well-being or the reverse. Though this feeling of uneasiness is not necessarily violent, it is nevertheless a force that continues to work in the soul life, attacking something deeper.

The malaise resulting from failure to understand can have a detrimental effect even on the body. In diagnosing the finer shades of sickness or health—those that are connected with the soul life—it is of great importance to note whether the patient must frequently cope with matters he does not understand, or whether he readily comprehends everything with which he has to deal. Such considerations are far more important than is generally believed.

We have learned that visualizations lead their own life, that they are like beings within us. Recall, now, those moments of your soul life during which the outer world gave you nothing; even when you wished to be stimulated by it, it passed you by, leaving no impressions. This is another case in which you experience something in your soul. It is something that in everyday life we call boredom. In everyday life, boredom is a condition in which the soul longs for impressions; it develops a desire that remains unsatisfied.

How does boredom arise? If you are observant you will have noticed something that is not often recognized. Only the human being can be bored, not animals. Whoever believes that animals can be bored is a poor observer of nature. People, on the other hand, can positively be classified according to their capacity for boredom. Those leading a simple soul life are bored far less than the so-called educated ones. In general, people are far less bored in the country than in the city, but to verify this you must there observe the country people, not city people who are momentarily in the country. People of the educated strata and classes whose soul life is complicated are prone to boredom. We find, then, a difference even among the different classes.

Boredom is by no means something that arises simply of its own accord in the soul life, but is a result of the independent life led by our conceptions. It is these old conceptions desiring new ones, new impressions. The old conceptions crave fructification, desire new stimuli. For this reason we have no control whatever over boredom. It is merely a matter of the conceptions having desires that, unfulfilled, develop longings in us. That is why an undeveloped, obtuse person with few conceptions is less bored; he has few visualizations that could develop longings within him. But neither are those who continually yawn with boredom the ones who have achieved the highest development of their ego. This is added lest you might infer that the most highly developed people would be the most bored. There is a sort of cure for boredom; and in a higher stage of development boredom again becomes impossible. More of this later.

There is a definite reason why animals are not bored. When an animal has its eyes open it is continually receiving impressions from the outer world. External events run their course as a process of the outer world, and what occurs within the animal keeps pace in time. The animal has thus finished with one impression by the time the next one comes along. Outer occurrence and inner experience coincide. It is man's prerogative, on the other hand, to be able, within himself, to hold a tempo in the sequence of his soul events different from the one obtaining in the world process outside. As a consequence, man is able to close his mind to stimuli that have repeatedly made an impression on him in the past; he shuts himself off from the outer course of time. Within him, however, time continues to pass, but because no impressions reach him from without, time remains unoccupied, and this time void is permeated by the old conceptions.

Now, the following can occur. Observe the progress of the animal's soul life; it parallels the external course of time. The inner soul life of the animal proceeds in such a way that the animal is actually subject to the outer passing of time or—which is the same thing—to the perceptions of its own life and body (this becomes outer perception too, as in digestion). That is something that interests the animal tremendously. The animal is constantly receiving inner stimuli from the outer course of time, and every moment of its life is interesting. When the outer perceptions of an animal cease, the passing of time ceases as well.

This is not the case in human beings. For us outer objects cease to be of interest when we have seen them too often. We no longer let them enter our soul worlds, yet the external passing of time continues just the same. Our inner soul life stops, and time flows on with the soul. What is it, though, that acts upon this void in time? It is the desire of the old conceptions yearning for the future. There emanates from the soul, from the old conceptions, the desire for new impressions, new contents. That is boredom. The difference between man and animal is that man has the advantage of conceptions that live on and develop their own lives oriented toward the future; that means that he has a soul life directed toward the future.

While animals are continually stimulated from without, the human being is constantly swayed by the desire of the soul life, because the old conceptions crave new impressions. Later I shall draw attention to possible illusions.

As stated above, however, there is a cure for boredom. It is brought about when the old conceptions persist not merely as something that excites desire, but when they have a content of their own, so that through our own incentive we can infuse something into the time not filled from without. When our conceptions themselves carry into the future something that interests us, we have the higher soul development. Whether or not this power plays a part in a man's development, whether or not his conceptions embrace something that interests him, satisfies him, constitutes a significant difference.

Beginning, then, at a certain stage of development, the human being can be bored, but he can cure himself of this by filling himself with conceptions that will satisfy his soul life in the future as well. That is the difference between those who are bored and those who are not. There are people who can be cured of boredom and others who cannot, and this points to the independent life of our conceptions, a life we cannot control, a life to which we are subject. Unless we see to it that our conceptions have content we must inevitably be bored, but by giving them a content we can for the future protect ourselves against boredom.

This again is extraordinarily significant for the psychologist, for our normal life demands a certain balance between fulfillment of the soul's desires and outer life itself. When this balance is not maintained, boredom results, and an empty, bored soul—destined nevertheless to continue living in time—is poison for the body. Much boredom is a real cause of sickness. The term “deadly boredom” rests on a true feeling. It acts as a veritable poison, though one does not exactly die of it. Things of that sort have an effect far transcending the soul life.

These elucidations may seem pedantic to you at the moment, but they will enable us later on to shed a wondrous light on the miracles of the human soul life. Fine distinctions are necessary if we are to become acquainted with this wonder drama of our soul life playing around its hero, its ego. Hidden in our soul life is someone who is really infinitely wiser than we are ourselves; indeed, the prospect would be black were this not so.

In ordinary life people indulge in the most curious conceptions regarding the nature of body, soul, and spirit. These things are jumbled in the wildest ways. What was formerly known by means of more clairvoyant observation has gradually been forgotten and eradicated. At that time people analyzed life correctly, distinguishing between the physical, the psychic and the spiritual life in which man has his being. Then, in the year 869, the Ecumenical Council at Constantinople felt impelled to abolish the spirit and to set up the dogma that man consists of body and soul. A study of the dogmatism of the Christian Church would reveal to you the far-reaching consequences of this alteration, this abolition of the spirit. Anyone still recognizing the spirit became at once a preposterous heretic in the eyes of the Church.

The aversion to the spirit is based upon a misinterpretation of the absolute justification for the relation of body, soul, and spirit. Everything becomes confused as soon as one ceases to think of body, soul, and spirit, but then, that's the way people have become; they confuse everything. The result in this case is that a clear view of the spiritual life has disappeared.

Even though nowadays people habitually fall into the error of inadequate differentiation, there is a good spirit watching over them who has kept alive a dim feeling for the truth. This is brought about by the fact that in man's environment something like the spirit of speech is active. Speech is really more intelligent than human beings. True, people abuse speech by regulating and distorting it, but it is not possible to ruin it altogether. Speech is more intelligent than human beings themselves, hence the stimuli it holds for us exert the right influences; whereas, when we bring our own soul life to bear, we make mistakes. I will show you that we have the right feeling when we speak, that is, when we yield ourselves to the soul of speech, not to our own.

Imagine you are in the presence of a tree, a bell, and a man. You begin to reason from what the outer world has to tell you, from immediate sense impressions. In other words, you set your soul life in motion, for reasoning is, of course, something that takes place in the soul. You look at the tree; the tree is green. The inference expressed in your verdict, the tree is green, is expressed in accord with the genius of speech. Now suppose you want to express something regarding the bell, something to be judged through sense impressions; the bell rings. The moment the bell rings you will express your perception in the verdict, the bell rings. Remember all that while we now turn to the man. This man speaks. You perceive his speech, and you express outer perception in the words, the man speaks. Keep in mind the three verdicts—the tree is green, the bell rings, the man speaks. In all three we are concerned with sense impressions, but when you compare these with the judgment of speech you will feel that they reveal themselves as something quite different. When I say, The tree is green, I express something that is conditioned by space; the form in which the judgment is expressed implies this. I express what is true now, what will be true three hours hence, and so forth; something permanent.

Take the next verdict, the bell rings. Does this express something spatial? No, that doesn't exist in space; it proceeds in time, it is in a state of flux, in the process of becoming. Because the genius of speech is highly intelligent you can never speak of something fixed in space in the same way as you do of something proceeding in time. If you examine these verdicts more closely you will find that in referring to all that is in space speech permits only the use of an auxiliary verb, not a direct verb: an auxiliary verb that helps you, in speaking, to live in time. True, we can employ a verb when we may have something else in mind. We can say, “The tree greens,”¹ without the auxiliary verb, but when we do that we are switching from what is purely spatial to something that moves in time, that becomes, to the rise and decline of the greenness. Truly, a genius works in speech, even though much of it is ruined by man. Speech actually does not permit the use of a direct verb in connection with a spatial concept. The purpose of a verb is to indicate something temporal.

The employment of a verb necessarily indicates a state of becoming. You might object that instead of saying, “The bell rings,” we could say, “The bell is ringing,” but think what that would involve! A paraphrase of that sort ruins the language.²

Now we come to the third verdict, the man speaks. There, too, you use a verb to express sense perception, but consider what a difference there is. The verdict, the bell rings, tells us what is in question, the ringing, but in the verdict, the man speaks, something is told that is not the point at all. The sense stimulus arising from speech is not the point. We are concerned with something that is not expressed at all in the verb, namely, the content of what is spoken.

Why does speech stop there? Why do you halt, as it were, before reaching the point? Because when you say, “The man speaks,” you wish your own inner being to confront the man's soul directly. You wish to characterize what confronts you as something pertaining to the inner life. In the case of the bell, this quality is inherent in the verb, but when your inner life meets a living soul you take good care not to intrude thus.

There you see manifest the genius of speech, expressed in the difference between what relates to the locality (space), to the process of becoming (time), and to matters of the inner man (the soul). In describing it we halt as in timid awe before the inner substance, before the matter that really concerns us. In speaking, therefore, and halting at the portal, we do homage to the inner soul activity. In the course of these lectures we will see how important it is for us to rise to a certain feeling for the matter, a feeling that will enable us to define the soul life as something enclosing itself on all sides, something surging to this boundary and there piling up against it. It is important that you should learn to know the soul in its true being as a sort of inner realm. You should understand that what must come from without meets something resisting from within, so that when sense experiences approach the soul we can think of the soul as a circle within which everything is in flux. Sense experiences approach from all directions; within, the soul life swirls and surges. What we have learned today is the fact that the soul life is not independent; the soul experiences the independent life of the visualizations that lead an existence in time.

This life of the visualizations in the bounded soul is the cause of our greatest bliss and our deepest suffering, in so far as these originate in the soul. We shall see that the spirit is the great healer of the ills caused in our souls by sorrow and suffering. In physical life hunger must be appeased, and this acts beneficially, but if we overload ourselves beyond the demands of hunger we tend to undermine our health. In the soul life the case is analogous. Conceptions demand to be satisfied by other conceptions. New conceptions entering the soul can also act beneficially or detrimentally. We shall see how in the spirit we have something that not only acts beneficially, never the reverse, but prevents and opposes the overloading of the soul life as well.

• 1. A bit far-fetched in English, or at best specifically poetic, but quite a common form in German.
• 2. Not the English language, of course, but in German that particular use of the present participle is a sort of last resort. It sounds so artificial that one can simply say that it is not German, though it occasionally appears in doubtful verse for purposes of rhyme or meter.

Yesterday I wanted to show how we must come to an education, steeped in artistic form. I drew attention to how in earlier times the teacher took his start from the artistic, which he did in higher education by treating as arts what today has become entirely abstract and scientific, namely, grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. This was done in such a way that the young human being started by recognizing in his teacher: This man can do something which I cannot do. And through this alone the right relationship was established between the younger and the older generations. For this relationship, my dear friends, can never develop along the path of intellectuality. As soon as one stands consciously on the ground of the intellect or without the ideas inwardly revealed in the intellectual or mind soul, there is no possibility of differentiating between human beings. For human nature is so constituted that when it is a matter of making something clear through the consciousness soul, everyone thinks that the moment he has concepts he is capable of discussing them with anyone. Thus it is, with the intellect. For the intellect neither man's maturity nor his experience comes into consideration; they only do so when it is a question of ability. But when their elders have ability the young quite as a matter of course pay tribute to maturity and experience.

Now, in order to understand these things thoroughly we must consider from a different point of view the course taken by mankind's evolution. Let me tell you what spiritual science has discovered about the course of history, with regard to the intercourse between men.

External documentary history can go back only a few thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha and what is to be found can never be estimated rightly because spiritual achievements, even in the time of ancient Greece, cannot be grasped by modern concepts. Even for the old Grecian times quite other concepts must be used. Nietzsche felt this. Hence the charm of his brief, unfinished essay on Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, where he deals with philosophy in connection with the general development of Greek culture up to the time of Socrates. In Socrates he saw the first flicker of pure intellectuality; everything philosophical in the tragic age of Greek development proceeded from wide human foundations for which, when expressed in concepts, these were only the language through which to convey what was experienced. In the earliest times philosophy was quite different from what it later became. But I only want to mention this in passing.

I really want to point out that with spiritual Imagination, and especially with Inspiration, we can look back much further into human evolution and, above all, into men's souls. Then we find when we go very far back, some seven or eight thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, that the young had a natural veneration for great age. This was a matter of course. Why? Because what exists today only in earliest youth existed then for the whole evolution of man.

If we look at the human being with less superficiality than is often done today, we find that the whole evolution of the human soul changes at about the change of teeth, during the sixth, seventh or eighth year. Man's soul becomes different, and again it changes at the time of puberty. I have discussed this fully in my book The Education of the Child from the Standpoint of Spiritual Science. On occasion it is noticed that man's soul becomes different in the seventh year and again in the fourteenth or fifteenth. But what people no longer notice is that changes still take place at the beginning of the twenties, at the end of the twenties, in the middle of the thirties, and so on.

Whoever is able to observe the life of soul in a more intimate way knows such transitions in man, that human life runs its course in rhythms. Try to perceive this, let us say, in Goethe. Goethe records how he was cured of certain childlike religious ideas by the Lisbon earthquake, thus about the time when he was changing his teeth, and how puzzling everything was for him. He tells how as a small child he began to reflect: Is there a good God ruling the world, when one sees that countless people have been swept away through these terrible fiery forces in the earth?—Especially in these decisive moments of his life, Goethe was prone to let external events work upon his soul so as to be conscious of its changes. And he says concerning this period of his life that he became a strange kind of pantheist, how he could no longer believe in the ideas imparted by the older people in his home and by his parents. He tells how he took his father's music-stand on which he set out minerals, placing on top a little candle that he lit by holding a burning-glass to catch the first rays of the morning sun. In later life he explained that he had wanted to bring an offering to the great God of Nature by lighting a sacrificial fire, kindled from Nature herself.

Take the first period of Goethe's life, then the following one, and so on till you piece together this whole life out of parts of about the length of his childlike episode, and you will find that with Goethe something always happened during such times fundamentally to change his soul. It is extraordinarily interesting to see that the fact of Schiller's urging Goethe to continue Faust only found fruitful soil in Goethe because at the end of the eighteenth century, he happened to be at a transitional period of this kind. It is interesting too that Goethe re-wrote Faust at the beginning of a following life-period. Goethe began Faust in his youth in such a way that he makes Faust open the book of Nostradamus. There we have the great scene:

“What powers celestial, lo! ascend, descend
Each unto each the golden vessels giving!”

But turn the page and there we find:
“Thou, Spirit of the Earth, to me art nearer.”

Goethe rejects for Faust the great tableau of the macrocosm and allows only the earth-spirit to approach him. And when at the beginning of the nineteenth century he was persuaded by Schiller to revise Faust he wrote the “Prologue in Heaven.” Anyone who observes his own life inwardly will discover that these changes hold good. Nowadays we only notice them when we deliberately train ourselves to look deeply into our own life.

In ancient times, six thousand, seven thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, these changes were so noticeable that they were experienced in the life of soul as the change of teeth or puberty is today. And, indeed, approximately up to the middle of life, up to the thirty-fifth or thirty-sixth year, life was on the up-grade. But then it began to decline. People experienced the drying-up of life. But while certain products of metabolism become deposited through sluggishness in the organism and the physical organism becomes increasingly heavy and lethargic, it was also felt that up to the greatest age the soul and spirit were on the ascent, how the soul is set free with the drying up of the body. And people in olden days would not have spoken with such ardour of the patriarchs—the word itself only arose later—had they not noticed externally in men: True, he is getting physically old, but he has to thank his physical aging for lighting-up his spirit. He is no longer dependent on the body. The body withers, but the soul becomes free.

In this modern age it is most unusual that such a thing happens, for instance, as occurred at the Berlin University. Two philosophers were there, the one was Zeller—the famous Greek scholar—and the other Michelet. Zeller was seventy years old and thought he ought to be pensioned off. Michelet was ninety and lectured with tremendous vivacity. Eduard von Hartmann told me this himself. Michelet is supposed to have said: “I don't understand why that young man doesn't want to lecture any more.” Michelet was, as I said, ninety years old!

Today people seldom keep their freshness to such a degree. But in those times it was so, especially among those who concerned themselves with spiritual life. What did the young say when they looked at the Patriarchs? They said: It is beautiful to get old. For then one learns something through one's own development that one cannot know before. It was perfectly natural to speak in this way. Just as a little boy with a toy horse wants to be big and get a real horse, so, at that time, there was the desire to get old because it was felt that something is then revealed from within.

Then came the following millennia. It was still experienced up to a considerable age, but no longer as in the old Indian epoch—in the terminology of my Occult Science. At the zenith of Greek culture, man still had living experience of the change occurring in life in the middle of the thirties. Men still knew how to distinguish between body and spirit, and said: At the age of thirty, the physical begins to decline, but then the spiritual begins to blossom forth. This was experienced by the soul and spirit in the immediate presence of men. The original feeling of the Greeks was based upon this, not upon that phantasy of which modern science speaks. To understand the fullness of Greek culture, we should bear in mind that the Greeks were still able in consciousness to come to thirty, five-and-thirty, six-and-thirty years, whereas a more ancient humanity grew in consciousness to a far greater age. Herein consists the evolution of humanity. Man has more and more to experience out of Nature unconsciously what is for a later time; this requires him to experience it consciously for consciously it must again be experienced. Whoever observes himself can recognize the seven-yearly changes; the length of time is not pedantically exact, but approximate. A man who looks back to the period of his forty-ninth, forty-second, thirty-fifth years can recognize quite well: At that time something happened in me by which I learnt something which out of my own nature I could not previously have done, just as I should not have been able to bite with my second teeth before I had them. To experience life concretely is something that has been lost in the course of man's evolution. And today if anyone does not inwardly train himself to observe, these epochs from the thirtieth year onwards are completely blurred. Comparatively speaking, an inner transformation can still be noticed at the beginning of the twenties—even up to the end of the twenties, though it is then rather less noticeable. But with the present human organization man receives something from his natural evolution only up to his twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh year, and this limit will recede more and more. In earlier times men were not free in their organization, destined as they were to have these experiences out of their own nature. Freedom has become possible only by the withdrawal of Nature. To the extent Nature ceases freedom becomes possible. Through his own striving, through his own powers, man must arrive at finding the spiritual, whereas formerly, the older he became the more did the spiritual thrive.

Today emphasis is no longer placed on what the old become merely by growing older. Intellectualism is left which, between the eighteenth and nineteenth years, can develop so that from then onwards one can know with the intellect. But as far as intellectuality is concerned, one can at most reach a greater degree of proficiency but make no qualitative progress. If one has fallen a victim to the desire to prove or to refute everything intellectually, one cannot progress. If someone puts forward what is the result of decades of experience but wants to prove it intellectually, an eighteen-year-old could refute him intellectually. For whatever is possible intellectually at sixty is equally possible at nineteen, since intellectuality is a stage during the epoch of the consciousness soul which in the sense of deepening is of no help to progress, but only to proficiency. The young may say: “I am not yet as clever as you are; you can still take me in.” But he will not believe the other to be his superior in the sphere of intellect.

These things must be emphasized to become intelligible. I do not wish to criticize. I am saying this only because it is part of the natural evolution of humanity; we should be clear about the following characteristic of our age, namely, that if man does not strive out of inner activity for development and maintain it consciously, then with mere intellectualism at his twentieth year he will begin to get rusty. He then receives stimuli only from outside, and through these external stimuli keeps himself going. Do you think that if things were not like that people would flock to the cinema? This longing for the cinema, this longing to see everything externally, depends on the human being becoming inwardly inactive, on his no longer wanting inner activity.

The only way to listen to lectures on Spiritual Science, as meant here, is for those present to do their share of the work. But today that is not to people's liking. They flock to lectures or meetings with lantern slides so that they can sit and do as much as possible without thinking. Everything just passes before them. They can remain perfectly passive.

But our system of teaching is ultimately of this character, too, and anyone who on educational grounds objects to the triviality of the modern object lesson is said to be behind the times. But one has to oppose it, for man is not a mere apparatus for observing, an apparatus that wants simply to look at things. Man can live only by inner activity. To listen to Spiritual Science means to invite the human being to co-operate with his soul. People do not want this today. Spiritual Science is an invitation to this inner activity, that is to say, it must lead all studies to the point where there is no more support in external sense-perception because then the inner play of forces must begin to move freely. Not before thinking moves freely in this inner play of forces can Imagination be reached. Thus the basis for all Anthroposophy is inner activity, the challenge to inner activity, the appeal to what can be active when all the senses are silent and only the activity of thinking is astir.

Here there lies something of extraordinary significance. Just suppose you were capable of this. I will not flatter you by saying that you are. I only want to ask you first to assume that you are capable of it, that you can think in such a way that your thoughts are only an inner flow of thoughts. What I called pure thinking in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity was certainly not well named when judged by outer cultural conditions. For Eduard von Hartmann said to me: “There is no such thing, one can only think with the aid of external observation.” And all I could say in reply was: “It has only to be tried and people will soon learn to be able to make it a reality.” Thus take it as a hypothesis that you could have thoughts in a flow of pure thought. Then there begins for you the moment when you have led thinking to a point where it need not be called thinking any longer, because in a twinkling—in the twinkling of a thought—it has become something different. This rightly named pure thinking has at the same time become pure will, for it is willing, through and through. If you have advanced so far in your life of soul that you have freed thinking from outer perception, it has become at the same time pure will. You hover with your soul, so to speak, in a pure flight of thought. But this pure flight of thought is a flight of will. Then the exercise or the striving for the exercise of pure thought begins to be not an exercise in thinking only but also an exercise of the will, indeed an exercise of the will that goes right to the center of the human being. For you will make the following remarkable observation. It is only now, for the first time, that you can speak of thinking, as it is in ordinary life, as an activity of the head. Before this you really have no right to speak of thinking as an activity of the head, for you know this only as external fact from physiology, anatomy, and so on. But now you feel inwardly that you are no longer thinking so high up, you begin for the first time to think with the heart. You actually interweave your thought with the breathing process. You actually set going of itself what the Yoga exercises have striven for artificially. You notice that as thinking becomes more and more an activity of the will it wrenches itself free first from the breast and then from the whole human body. It is as though you were to draw forth this thinking from the extremity of your big toe! And if with inner participation you study what has appeared with many imperfections—for I make no claims for my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity—if you let it work upon you and feel what this pure thinking is, you will experience that a new man is born within you who can bring out of the spirit an unfolding of the will.

Does man know before this that he has a will? He really has no will, for he is given up to instincts connected with his organic development. He often dreams that he does this or that out of an impulse of the soul, but he really does it because of the good or bad condition of his stomach. But now you know that you have permeated the physical organism with what fills it with consciousness. You do not need to be a clairvoyant for this. All you need do is to be interested in the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and let it work upon you. For this Philosophy of Spiritual Activity cannot be read as other books are today. It must really be read so that once you get into the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity you have the feeling that it is an organism, one member developing out of another, that you have found your way into something living. People immediately say: Something is going to get into me which will take away my freedom. Something is entering me that I do not want to have.

People who entertain such thoughts are like those who were to say that if the human being at two or three years has to get used to speaking a certain language, he will thereby lose his freedom. The human being ought to be warned against language for he will no longer be free when brought into this chance association of ideas. He ought to be able to speak at will now Chinese, now French, now German. Nobody says this because it would be too absurd, and life itself refutes such nonsense. On the other hand there are people who either hear or see something of Eurythmy and say that it, too, rests upon the chance association of the ideas of individuals. But one should be able to assume that philosophers would say: One must look into this Eurythmy and see if in evoking gestures we may not have the foundations of a higher freedom and find that it is only an unfolding at a higher level of what is in speech.

So one need not be surprised—for really nothing that goes beyond intellectualism is regarded without prejudice today—that people get goose-flesh when one tells them that a certain book must be read quite differently from other books, that it must be read in such a way that from it something is really experienced. What is it that must be experienced? It is the awakening of the will out of the spiritual. In this respect my book was intended as a means of education. The intention was not only to give it content but to make it work educationally. Hence you find in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity an exposition on the art of forming concepts, a description of what takes place in the soul when one does not keep with one's concepts to the impressions from outside, but lives within the free flow of thoughts.

That, my dear friends, is an activity which aims at knowledge in a far deeper sense than the external knowledge of Nature, but it is at the same time artistic, wholly identical with artistic activity. So that the moment pure thinking is experienced as will, man's attitude becomes that of an artist.

And this, my dear friends, is like-wise the attitude we need today in the teacher if he is to guide and lead the young from the time of the change of teeth to puberty, or even beyond puberty. The mood of soul should be so that out of the inner life of soul one comes to a second man, who cannot be known as is the outer physical body, which can be studied physiologically or anatomically, but who must be livingly experienced and may rightly be called, in accordance with the real meaning of the terms, “life body” or “ether body”. This cannot be known through external perception but must be inwardly experienced. To know this second man a kind of artistic activity must be unfolded. Hence there is this mood in the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity which most people never discover—everywhere it touches the level of the artistic. Only most people do not discover this because they look for the artistic in the trivial, in the naturalistic and not in free activity. Only out of this free activity can education really be experienced as art, and the teacher can become an artist in education when he finds his way into this mood. Then in our epoch of the consciousness soul all teaching will be so arranged as to create an artistic atmosphere between teacher and pupil. And within this artistic atmosphere there can develop that relation between led and leader which is an inclining towards the leader, because he can do something which he is able to show forth artistically, and one feels that what he can do one would like to be able to do oneself. Thus no opposition is aroused because it is felt that one would destroy oneself by opposing.

Because of the way writing is taught today, it often happens that even as a child—for in the child there is always a being who is cleverer than the teacher—one asks: Why should I be bothered to write? I have no kind of relationship to writing—which is really what the North American Indians felt when they saw European script. They felt the black signs to be witchcraft. The feeling of the child is very similar. But let us awaken in the child what it means to look at black, red, green, yellow, white. Let us call up in him what it is when we surround a point by a circle. Let us call up the great experience contained in the difference there is when we draw two green circles and in each of them three red circles, then two red and in each of them three green, two yellow with three blue ones in them, then two blue containing three yellow circles. We let the children experience in the colors what the colors as such are saying to the human being, for in the world of color lives a whole world. But we also let the children experience what the colors have to say to one another, what green says to red, what blue says to yellow, blue to green and red to blue—here we have the most wonderful relation between the colors. We shall not do this by showing the child symbols or allegories, but we shall do it in an artistic way. Then we shall see how out of this artistic feeling the child gradually puts down figures out of which the letters then develop as writing once developed from picture-script. How foreign to the child today are B, G, or any other sign that has developed through inner necessity to its present form. What is a G, K, or U to a seven-year old? He really has not the slightest kinship with it. it has taken the human being thousands of years to acquire this relationship. The child must acquire an aesthetic relation to it. Everything is exterminated in the child because the written characters are not human; and the child wants to remain human.

In order to understand youth in its relation to the older generation we must go right into the art of education. The cleft between age and youth must be bridged not by hollow phrases but by education that is an art, education which is not afraid to find its support in real spiritual-scientific knowledge. That is why I said a few days ago: Where does this art lead to? It leads to experience of the real spiritual. And where goes what the age has gradually developed in such a way that it believes it must be given as a matter of course to the young? Where does that lead? It does not lead to the Spirit but to that which is devoid of Spirit. It is regarded a sin to bring the Spirit into what goes by the name of knowledge and science.

Science does not leave the human being alone even in earliest childhood. It cannot very well be otherwise. For the teacher is so drilled in systematized botany (and many books are entirely given over to systematized botany) that he believes he is committing a sin if he speaks to the children about botany in a way that is not scientific. But what is found in a botanical textbook cannot mean anything to a child before he is ten, and it is not until he is at least eighteen or nineteen that it can acquire any real significance for him.

Such is the situation. Now I have no intention of creating another intellectual theory about education. The aim is to create an artistic atmosphere between the older and the younger. But when this comes about, something happens which must occur if young people are to grow into the world in a healthy way. What the human being of today grows into can be described quite concretely. Between the ninth and tenth years an undefined feeling lives in the soul of every human being who is not a psychopath. There need not necessarily exist either a clear or unclear concept of this. But it begins to live within the human being from his ninth or tenth year. Up till then what is called the astral body alone is concerned with man's life of soul. But from that time onwards the force of the ego nature first begins to stir. It is not formulated in concepts. But in the life of feeling, deep within the soul, there lives unconsciously a question in the heart of the growing human being. This question takes different forms in different people. But a question arises which put in the form of a concept might be expressed as follows: Up to now the astral body has believed in other human beings; now I need something that somebody says to me so that I may believe in him or in others in my environment. Those who as children have most resisted this are those who need it most. Between the ninth and tenth years the human being, to strengthen his ego, begins to be dependent on an older person in whom he can trust—without this trust needing to be drummed in—in whom he can believe with the help of the artistic atmosphere that has been created. And woe betide it if this question which may still be one for many children up to their sixteenth or seventeenth year and sometimes even to the years I mentioned yesterday, the eighteenth or nineteenth—woe betide it if nothing happens to enable this question of the young to be answered by the old so that the young say: I am grateful that I have learnt from the old what I can learn only from the old; what he can tell me, he alone can tell me, for it will be different if I learn it when I am old.

Through this can be created something in an educational way which, applied in the right way, can be of the greatest significance for the epoch of the consciousness soul, which, in fact, in the earliest times of the Patriarchs, was already alive between young and old. Then, every young person said to himself: The old man with his snow-white hair has experiences which can only come when one is as old as he. Before then the necessary organs are not there. Therefore he must tell his experiences to us. We are dependent on what he relates because he alone can relate it. Certainly I shall one day be as old as he. But I shall not experience what he tells for thirty-five or forty years. The times will have progressed by then and I shall experience something different. But what I want to learn is only to be learnt from him.

Here is something in the spiritual realm which may be compared with feeding at the mother's breast. Just as the infant might say: “I too shall one day give the breast to a child, but now it is my mother who must give it to me”—so it is in the spiritual life. In the foundations of the spirit life of the world it is as though a chain were there, reaching from the past over into the future, which must be received by each generation into itself, must be carried onwards, re-forged, perfected. This chain has been broken in the age of intellectualism. This was generally felt among those growing up about the turn of the nineteenth century. Try to feel that you did experience something of the kind, even if at the time you were not able to express it. Try to sense that by feeling this, you were feeling about it in the right way. And if you sense this you will realize the true significance of the youth movement today, the youth movement which has, and must have, a Janus-head, because it is directed towards experience of the spiritual—an experience of the spiritual which carries thought so far that it becomes will, that it becomes the innermost human impulse.

We have been seeking now for will at its abstract pole where it is thought. In the days to follow we will seek it in the deeper spheres of man's being.

In the short lecture I gave this afternoon before the eurythmy performance, I pointed out how we can see from the relationship that modern humanity has to the festivals of the year how we are entering into materialism. However, one must then grasp the concept of materialism much more deeply than is usually the case. The most dangerous characteristic of the present time is not that people are infected with materialism, but the much more dangerous characteristic is the superficiality of our age.

This superficiality is not only present in relation to spiritual worldviews, but it is also present in relation to materialism itself. It is taken for granted in superficial appearances. This afternoon, for example, I pointed out how, in different times of the year, something like the moods to which people in older times still yielded also came to expression in the festive events of those older times. Various moods were incorporated into the winter solstice festival, the spring festival, the St. John's festival, the Michaelmas festival, those very specific, cult-like or at least cult-like events, which must overcome people when they consciously experience the course of the year.

In this way, the human soul received nourishment, whereas today we only nourish the body. We still take part in the course of the day. When the sun sends forth its morning gold in its own revelation as dawn, we eat our breakfast. When the sun is at its zenith, when it pours its warmth and light particularly lovingly over the human race on earth, we devote ourselves to our midday meal, and so on through five o'clock tea and supper. In these festive events of the day, we join in the course of the day with the sun, by inwardly experiencing this fiery ride of the sun around the world. We experience what the sun performs in its fiery ride around the world by completing hunger and satiation. And so the mood for the human physical organism is there in a very distinct way at certain times of the day. We could call breakfast, lunch, tea and supper the festivals of the day. The human physical organism participates in what takes place in the relationship between the earth and the cosmos.

In a similar way, in older times, when the soul life was felt more intensely from the old instinctive states of clairvoyance, the course of the year was experienced. Certain things even played into the other from one sphere. You only need to remember what remains of these things: Easter eggs, St. Martin's geese and so on. In this way the lower, bodily region plays into the soul region, which must also experience the course of the year in a soul-like way. Now, a materialistic age would still be most likely, I do not want to say for Easter eggs, but for St. Martin's geese and the like, one would also be in favor of the course of the year.

But in olden times these things were not meant with reference to the actual festive mood, but they were attuned to the hunger and satiation of the soul. The human soul needed something different at Christmas time, something different at Easter time, at Midsummer time and at Michaelmas time. And one can really compare what was in the events of the festivities with a kind of consideration for the hunger of the soul precisely in the seasons that occur and with a satiation of the soul in these seasons.

Now we can say: If we look at the course of the sun during the day, we can apply to it that which is good for our body. If we look at the course of the sun during the year, we can apply to it that which is good for our soul.

If festivals are to be revived, then this must naturally happen out of a much more conscious state: out of such an awakening of the soul as is striven for through the anthroposophical world view. We cannot merely restore the old festival seasons historically; we must find them again out of our own soul nature through the newer insights and views of the world. But we distinguish not only between body and soul in man, but also between spirit.

Now it is already difficult for modern man to surrender to certain ideas when speaking of soul. The story becomes blurred and indefinite. Not only that one has experienced how in the 19th century people began to speak of a psychology, a doctrine of the soul without a soul. Fritz Mauthner, the great critic of language, even said: Soul is something so indeterminate that we do not really know any soul, we only know certain thoughts, sensations, feelings that are experienced in us, but we do not know a unified soul in it. We should therefore no longer use the word “soul” at all in the future. We should speak of this indeterminate inner wiggling and no longer say soul, but “soul”. Thus Fritz Mauthner advises that a future Klopstock who writes a “Messiade” should no longer say: “Sing, unsterbliche Seele, der sündigen Menschen Erlösung...”, but rather: “Sing, unsterbliches Geseel, der sündigen Menschen Erlösung...”, if that still makes sense at all within this Geseellehre! So in the future we would not have a psychology, but a soul science.

Now we can really say: the modern man no longer knows anything about the connection between his soul and the course of the sun throughout the year. He has become a materialist in this respect too. He adheres to the feasts of the body, which follow the course of the sun throughout the day. The festivals are celebrated out of traditional custom, but they are not felt to be alive. And we have, in addition to having a body and a soul - or, in the sense of Fritz Mauthner, a Geseel - we also have spirit.

Now, in the course of the world, there are also historical epochs. The human spirit also lives through these historical epochs, which extend beyond the course of a year and span centuries, if it feels them with feeling. In the old days, people experienced them very well. Anyone who is able to enter in the right way, borne by the spirit, in the way that people in older times thought their way into the course of time, knows, as has been said everywhere: At this or that turning point in time, some personality appeared who in turn revealed something spiritual from the heights of the world. And then this spiritual essence has become established, just as sunlight becomes established in the physical world. When such an epoch then entered its twilight, something new emerged.

These historical epochs are related to the development of the spirit of humanity just as the course of the year is related to the development of the soul. Of course, precisely when the development of the spirit must be grasped in a living way, it must be done by learning to understand how changes and metamorphoses occur in the development of humanity through conscious spiritual knowledge. Today, people would rather overlook these metamorphoses altogether. They are somehow outwardly affected by the effects, but inwardly they do not want to deal with the changes that come from the spirit and express themselves in external world events.

One should only look at how a certain way of thinking, feeling and feeling arises in our time among children and young people, which was still foreign to the earlier generation; how great changes occur, which, if one looks at the right elements, are entirely comparable to the development of the year in the development of humanity. Therefore, we should listen to what each age proclaims as its needs, and pay attention when a new age is dawning and demanding something different from people than previous ages have demanded. But for that, people today have only a limited organ.

The great interconnections of life can come to us when we approach the festive mood in the right way from our present consciousness, when, for example, we really let something like the St. John's mood into our soul, and if we try to gain from the St. John's mood that which will help our soul to develop, that which supports our engagement by the cosmos coming to our aid.

Certainly, modern humanity has become more or less indifferent to the things that are connected with the greatness of world development. Today, people no longer have a heart for the insights of the great world connections. The spirit of pettiness has made its way in, I would say the spirit of microscopy and atomization in phenomena that, when you talk about them today as I have to do here, naturally give the impression of the paradoxical.

I would like to point out a particular phenomenon in connection with the St. John's mood. The connection will be somewhat remote, but I would like to point it out. Even if one does not have a very developed sense of the course of the year, what is more natural than to have the impression from the growth of plants, from the growth of trees, that When spring comes, the green sprouts and shoots, and more and more growth, sprouting and blossoming occurs. The whole process of active growth, which gives the impression that the cosmos, with the effects of the sun, is calling upon the earth to open up to the universe, all of this then enters into the time around St. John's Day.

Then the sprouting and budding begins to recede again. We are approaching the time when the earth draws its forces of growth back into itself, when the earth withdraws from the cosmos. How natural it is that from the impression one receives from the course of the year, one forms the idea that the snow cover belongs to winter, that it belongs to winter that the plants, so to speak, creep into the soil of the earth with their being, that it belongs to summer that the plants come out, grow towards the cosmos. What could be more natural than to develop the idea – even if in a deeper sense it is actually correct to have the opposite idea – that the plants are dormant in winter and awake in summer?

I do not want to speak now about this sleeping and waking in terms of right and wrong ideas. I just want to speak about the impressions that one gets, so that people have the idea that summer belongs to the development of vegetation, winter to the withdrawal and creeping away of vegetation. After all, a kind of world feeling develops for the human being. One gets into the feeling of a connection with the warming and illuminating power of the sun when one sees this warming and illuminating power of the sun again in the green and flowering plant cover of the earth, and you get into a feeling as if you were an earth hermit in winter, when the plant cover is not there and the snow coat closes the earth from the cosmos, calling for inner activity. In short, by feeling and sensing in this way, you tear yourself away from your earthly existence with your earthly consciousness, so to speak. You place yourself in the greater context of the universe.

But now comes modern research, which I am not criticizing here – what I am going to say now is not meant as a scolding, but as a praise, even in relation to research itself – now comes modern research and shrugs its shoulders when it comes to the great cosmic connections. Why should one feel uplifted by the divinely illuminating, warming power of the sun when the trees bud, turn green, and the earth is covered with a blanket of plants? Why should one feel a connection with the universe through these plants growing out of the earth? It disturbs one. Cosmic feelings disturb one. It is no longer possible to reconcile having such feelings with one's materialistic consciousness. The plant is a plant, after all. It is as if the plant has a mind of its own when it blossoms only in spring and agrees to bear fruit in summer. How does that happen? You are dealing not only with a plant, but with the whole world! If you are supposed to feel, sense or recognize these things, you are dealing with the whole world, not just with the plant! It's not appropriate! You are already trying not to deal with the substances that are available in powder or crystal form, but with the atomic structures, with the atomic nucleus, with the electromagnetic atmosphere and so on! So you are trying to deal with something that is complete, not with something that points to many things. You should now admit to the plant that you need a sensation that reaches out into the cosmos! It is a terrible thing not to be able to narrow one's field of vision to the mere individual object! We are so accustomed to it: when we look through the microscope, everything around is closed off, there is only the small field of vision; everything happens in such a small, closed way. One must also be able to look at the plant by itself, not in connection with the cosmos!

And lo and behold, at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, researchers achieved something extraordinary in precisely this area. It was certainly already known from individual plants in relation to hot houses, 'green houses and so on, that one can overcome the summer and winter, but on the whole, at this turn of the 19th to the 20th century, not enough had been achieved to overcome the fact that plants do need a certain winter rest. Discussions were held during this time about the situation of tropical plants. Those researchers who no longer wanted to know anything about the connection with the cosmos claimed that tropical plants grow all year round. The others, who still held on to the old conservative view, said: Yes, when you come to the lush green world of the tropics, you only think that because the plants go dormant at different times, some only for up to eight days. So you don't see it when a particular species is dormant. There were extensive discussions about the behavior of tropical plants. In short, there was a sense of tremendous unease about this connection between the plant world and the cosmos.

Now, just at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, the most interesting and ingenious attempts have been made in this direction, and a whole range of plants, not just annuals but also trees, which are much stronger, have actually been successfully weaned from their stubbornness, their cosmic stubbornness. We have succeeded in overcoming the dependency on cosmic conditions by creating certain conditions that make plants that were thought to be annuals become perennial. In the case of the majority of our forest trees growing in temperate climates, we have actually succeeded in creating conditions that cause trees that were thought to have to have this winter time, to lose their leaves in winter and stand there withered, to become evergreen. For that was the premise of certain materialistic explanations. In this respect, an extraordinarily ingenious achievement has been made.

It was discovered that the cosmic can be driven out of the trees if the trees are brought into closed rooms and the soil is properly nourished with nutrient salts, so that the plants, which would otherwise find nothing in the wintertime when the soil is so low in nutrient salts, now also find their nutrient salts there. If you provide sufficient moisture, enough warmth and enough light, the trees will grow.

Only one tree in Central Europe resisted this research drive at the beginning of the 20th century. It was the beech, the copper beech. It was hounded from all sides, and now it was said to be willing to be locked up in closed rooms! It was provided with the necessary nutrients, with the necessary moisture and warmth – but it remained stubborn and continued to demand its winter rest. But she was all alone.

And now, in this 20th century, in 1914, we have to note - I do not want to talk about the outcome of the world war, but about another great historical event - the great, powerful event that Klebs, a researcher who was extraordinarily favored by research in this field, succeeded in exorcising the beech's cosmic stubbornness. He simply succeeded in growing beech trees in closed rooms, providing them with the necessary conditions in closed rooms: the appropriate sunlight, which could be measured. And lo and behold, the beech did not resist; it also yielded to what the researchers wanted.

I am not referring to a phenomenon that I have reason to criticize, because who could not admire such tremendous research effort. Besides, it would of course be madness to want to refute the facts. They are there, they are like that, they are absolutely like that. So it is not a matter of agreement or refutation, but something else.

Why should it not be possible to create hair growth outside of humans and animals if the necessary conditions for hair growth could be found somewhere on neutral ground? Why not? The appropriate conditions just need to be somehow produced. I know that there are some people in our time who would prefer their hair to grow on their heads rather than be produced externally by some kind of cultivation! But we could imagine that this would also succeed. Then we would seemingly no longer need to somehow connect what happens on earth with the cosmos.

Of course, one can have all due respect for research, but one must nevertheless see deeper into these things. Apart from what I developed here some time ago about the nature of the elements, I would like to say the following today. It must be clear that, for example, the following is the case. We know that once upon a time the Earth and the Sun were one body. That was a long, long time ago, in the Saturn era, the Sun era. Then there was a brief repetition of this state during the Earth era. But something remained behind in the earth that belongs there. Today we are bringing it out again. And we are not only bringing it out of the repetition that occurred during our time on earth by heating our rooms with coal, but we are bringing it out by using electricity. For from those times when, according to the old Saturn time, in the solar time, the sun and the earth were one, the foundation was laid for us to have electricity on earth. With electricity, we have a force that has been connected to the earth since ancient times, which is solar power, solar power hidden in the earth.

Why should not the stubborn beech tree, if only we tackle it hard enough, make use of the solar energy flowing in from the cosmos, instead of using the solar luminosity obtained from the earth in the form of electricity!

But it is precisely when we consider these things that we realize how much we need a deepening of our whole knowledge. As long as people could believe that solar energy came only from the cosmos, they came from the immediate present observation of each year to an awareness of their cosmic connection in plant growth. In the present age, when materialistic considerations would sever that part of the Cosmos which can be so easily seen as a cosmic effect, we must, when we look at the apparent autonomy of the plant, have a science that remembers that the cosmic connection between earth and sun existed in older times, but in a different form. We need, precisely, on the one hand, to be restricted as if under a microscope, but on the other hand, we need an all the more intensive breadth of vision, and it is precisely in the details that it becomes clear how we need this breadth of vision.

It is not at all a matter of us on anthroposophical ground revolting in an amateurish way against the progress of research. But since the progress of research, by its very nature, must increasingly lead us to that earthworm nature of which I have often spoken here, so that we have no free view into the distance, we must gain the broader view, the great cosmic We need the counter-pole everywhere. Not antagonism towards research, but we need the spiritual, the spiritual counter-pole. That is the right point of view for us to take. And I would like to say that it is also a St. John's mood when we inscribe this in our minds, when we realize how we must now live in a world-historical St. John's mood, how we must turn our gaze out into the vastness of the cosmos. We need this. We need this especially in our spiritual knowledge. Today, mere talk of the spiritual is not enough; what is needed is a real penetration into the concrete phenomena of the spiritual world. What is brought out of the cosmic development of the Earth, by drawing attention to the development of Saturn, the Sun, the Moon, the Earth, and so on, has enormous implications in terms of knowledge, including knowledge of history.

When, on the one hand, materialistic science, in such brilliant research results as those of Klebs, draws our attention to the fact that even the stubborn beech tree can be made to do without sunlight and light, as it otherwise only does under the influence of sunlight, then this leads us, if we have no spiritual knowledge, to crumbling everything in the world and narrow our field of vision. There is the beech tree in front of us, the electric light promotes its growth, but we know nothing but this, which arises in the narrowest field.

If we are endowed with spiritual insight, we say something different. Then we say to ourselves: If the beech's Klebs withdraws the present sunlight, then it must give it to it in the form of electricity, the ancient sunlight. Then our vision will not be narrowed, but on the contrary, our vision will be expanded into the vastness. Oh well, say the people who do not want to know anything more about the spiritual course of the year, one day is like the other: breakfast, lunch, tea time, supper time; it's good if there is something better at Christmas, but basically it goes on like this day after day throughout the year. We only look at the day, that is, at the outward material of the human being: Oh well, cosmic connections! Let us emancipate ourselves from such a world view! Let us realize that even the wayward beech no longer needs the cosmos. If we lock it in a closed prison, we only need to provide it with electric light of sufficient strength, and it will grow without the sun! — No, it just does not grow without the sun. We just have to know how to seek out the sun in the right way when we do something like that. But then we must also be clear about the fact that it is something different, a different relationship. When we look with a broad view, it turns out that it is something different whether we let the beech thrive in the cosmic sunlight, or whether we give it the light that has become Ahrimanic, originating from ancient times. And we recall what we have often said about the normal developmental process and the Luciferic on the one hand, and the Ahrimanic on the other.

If we have a sufficient insight into this, then we will not lick our fingers out of sheer cleverness that we have now overcome the cosmic obstinacy of the beech, but we will go much further. We will now proceed to the juices of the beech and examine the effect on the human organism, we will examine the effect on the human organism of the beech that we have left to its own devices and of the beech that we have removed its stubbornness with the electric light, and we will perhaps learn something very special about the healing properties of one beech and the other. Then we have to go into the spiritual!

But how do you deal with these things today? You have an admirable interest in research. You sit in a classroom, you are an experimental psychologist, you write down all sorts of words that have to be memorized, you test memory, you experiment on children, and you discover something tremendously interesting. Once you have awakened an interest in something, then of course all things in the world are interesting; it depends only on the subjective point of view. Why should one not be able to make it so that a stamp collection is much more interesting than a botanical collection? Since that can be the case, why should it not be possible for something like that to happen in another area? Why should one not be able to gain some interest from the tortures to which children are subjected when they are experimented on? But everywhere one wonders whether there are not higher obligations, whether it is at all advisable to experiment with children in this way at a certain age. The question arises as to what one is corrupting there. And the even stronger question arises as to what is spoiled in the teachers when, instead of demanding a lively, warm relationship from them, an experimental interest is demanded from the results of experimental psychology. So it really depends on whether, when one puts oneself in the right relationship to the sensory world with such research, one also puts oneself in the right relationship to the supersensible world.

Now, of course, it will be able to roar with joy to certain people who speak of the necessary objectivity of research: So he wants to claim that there are some spirits who find it immoral when the beechwood glue takes its stubbornness in this way! — That doesn't occur to me at all. It doesn't occur to me in my dreams. Everything that is done should be done, but you have to have the counterweight to it. And in an age in which we have emancipated ourselves from cosmic perception regarding the growth of beech trees, there must also be a perception on the other hand, in a civilization that absorbs such things, of how spiritual progress occurs in the evolution of humanity. In an age such as our own, a sense of the times is essential. I do not wish to restrict research, but it must be felt that something else must be set against it. There must be an open heart for the fact that at certain times, these and those things from the spiritual world always reveal themselves. If, on the one hand, materialism becomes overgrown and leads to strong and great results, then those who have an interest in such results should also have an interest in the research results about the spiritual world.

But this lies at the very heart of Christianity. A correct view of Christianity, after the Mystery of Golgotha and in the continuing effect of Christ's earthly existence, sees in the nature of Christ the Christ-power, the Christ-impulse. And that means that when the autumn mood sets in, when everything becomes arid and barren, when the sprouting and budding in the nature of the senses ceases, then one perceives precisely the sprouting and budding of the spirit, when one can feel the glistening and glowing of the spirits in the tree as it sheds its leaves, and these spirits now accompany man through the winter.

But in the same way, we must learn to feel how, in an age that, from a certain point of view, rightly sets about understanding the details, narrowing our view of the details, our view must also fall on the big, the comprehensive. That is the St. John's mood in relation to Christianity. We must understand intuitively that the St. John's mood is the starting point for the event that lies in the words: “He must increase, but I must decrease.”

That means that the impression on man of all that is conquered by sense research must decrease. And precisely by penetrating more and more into the individual senses, the impression of the spiritual must become ever stronger and stronger. The sun of the spirit must shine ever more brightly into the human heart, the more the sun that works in the sense world diminishes.

We must feel the St. John's mood as the entrance into spiritual impulses and as the exit from sensual impulses. We must learn to feel the St. John's mood as something in which it weaves and blows, spiritually and demonically blows from the sensual into the spiritual, from the spiritual into the sensual. And we must learn to shape our spirit lightly through the St. John's mood, so that it does not just stick like pitch to the fixed contours of ideas, but that it finds its way into weaving, blowing, living ideas. We must be able to notice the glowing of the sensual, the dying away of the sensual, the glowing of the spiritual in the dying away of the sensual. We must feel the symbol of the illumination of the St. John's night moth as something that also has its meaning in the dimming of the lighting.

The St. John's night moth glows, the St. John's night moth dims again. But by glowing, it leaves alive in us the life and weaving of the spiritual in the twilight of the senses. And when we see the little spiritual ripples everywhere in nature, just as we see symbolically in the sensual the glowing and damping of the Johanniswürmchen, then we will, when we can do this with full, bright, clear consciousness, find the right Johannis mood for our age. And we need this right Midsummer mood, for we must go through our time in such a way that the spirit learns to become fervently alive, and that we learn to follow meaningfully the fervently alive spiritual.

St. John's mood - towards the future of humanity and the earth! No longer the old mood, which only understands the sprouting and sprouting of the external, which is glad when it can also imprison this sprouting and sprouting, can put under electric light that which otherwise thrived happily in sunlight. We must learn to recognize the flashing and blossoming of the spirit, so that electric light becomes less important to us than it is in the present; but that we may thereby sharpen our view, the Johannic view, for that ancient sunlight that appears to us when we open up the great spiritual horizon, not only the narrow earthly horizon, but the great horizon from Saturn to Vulcan.

If we allow the light that appears to us on this great horizon to have the right effect on us, then all the trivialities of our age will be able to appear to us in this light, and we will move forward and upward. Otherwise, if we do not make up our minds to do so, we will move backward and downward.

Today, it is all about human freedom, about human will. Today, it is all about the independent human decision between forward or backward, between upward or downward.

Certain questions will increasingly obtrude themselves upon those who really think, even though in these times of overwhelming materialism these thinkers would prefer to keep them more or leas at a distance. There are many such questions, and today I should like, out of all of them, to pick a few that arise from man, in spite of resisting it, becoming aware of the spiritual world. To such questions belong those, for instance, raised in the course of everyday life; certain men die young, others in old age, others again in middle life. Concerning the fact that on the one hand young children die and on the other hand people grow to old age and then die—concerning this fact questions arise in man to which by the means today called scientific the answer can never be found. Everyone has to own this after inner reflection. Yet in human life these are burning questions; and surely anyone can feel that infinitely much in life must receive enlightenment when we can really get down to these questions: why do some human beings die early, some as children, some as adolescents, some in the middle of the normal period of life? Why do other die old? What significance has this in the whole cosmos?

Men still had ideas, concepts, with which to answer these questions up to that point of time described in these lectures, the time at the beginning of the fourth post-Atlantean period, that is, up to approximately the middle of the eighth pre-Christian century. Men had concepts that came down out of ancient wisdom. In those olden times before the eighth pre-Christian century, ideas were in fact circulating everywhere in the cultural life of the earth giving men, in conformity with the mind of those times, the solution to such questions as are here mentioned. What today we call science cannot connect the right meaning with these questions and has no idea that there is something in them for which men should be seeking a possible answer. All this arises because since the point of time indicated, all conceptions related to spiritual and therefore to immortal man have actually been lost. Only these conceptions remain that are connected with man's transitory nature, man between his birth and his death. I have drawn attention to how in all the old world-conceptions they spoke of the Sun as being threefold; the same sun that is perceived out there by the physical senses as a shining sphere in cosmic space. But behind this sun the wise men of old saw the soul-sun, according to the Greeks Helios, and behind this soul-Sun again, the spiritual-Sun, still identified by Plato, for example, with the Good. Modern men do not see any real sense in speaking of Helios, the soul-Sun, or for that matter of the spiritual-Sun, the Good. But as the physical sun shines upon us here between birth and death, there shines into our ego, if I may say so, during the time we pass between death and a new birth, the spiritual sun identified by Plato with the Good. And during this time between death and a new birth, to speak of a shining sphere in the way it is spoken of in our modern materialistic world-conception has no meaning. Between death and a new birth there is only meaning when we speak of the spiritual-Sun Plato still referred to as the Good. A concept of this kind is just what should show us something. It should lead us to reflect how the matter really stands with regard to the physical representation we form of the world. It is not taken seriously in its full sense, at any rate not so seriously that our outlook on life is actually permeated by it, that in all our physical representations of the world, in what is spread out perceptibly before us, we have to see a kind of illusion, Maya.

It is indeed fundamentally this kind of representation of the Sun that anyone accepts when taking as his authority modern physics, astrophysics, whatever you like to call it. If he were able to travel to the place where the physicist places the sun, on approaching it he would—now let us turn from the conditions of human life and assume that absolute conditions of life could prevail—he would become aware of overpowering heat, this is how he would picture it. And when he had arrived inside the space that the physicist considers to be filled by the sun, he would find in this space red hot gas or something of the kind. This is what the physicist considers to be filled by the sun, he would find in this space red hot gas or something of the kind. This is what the physicist actually pictures—a ball of glowing gas or something like it. But it is not so, my dear friends, that is definitely maya, complete illusion. This representation cannot hold water in face of true physical perception that is possible, let alone what can actually be perceived spiritually. Were it possible to get near the sun, to reach where the sun is, we should find yes, indeed, an getting near, we should find something that would have the same effect as going through floods of light. But when we came right inside, where the physicist supposes the sun to be, we should find first what we could only call empty space. Where the physical sun is supposed to be there is nothing at all, absolutely nothing. I will draw it diagrammatically (blue centre in yellow circle, diagram not available) but in reality nothing is there; there is nothing, there is empty space. But it is a strange kind of empty space: When I say there is nothing there I am not speaking quite accurately—there is less than nothing there. It is not only empty space for there is less than nothing there. And that is something that is an extraordinarily difficult idea for the modern western man to picture. Even today men of the east take this as a matter of course; for them there is absolutely nothing strange or difficult to understand when they are told that less than nothing is there. The man of the west thinks to himself—especially when he is a hard and fast follower of Kant, and there are far more followers of Kant today than those who are consciously so—he thinks to himself that if there is nothing in space then it is just empty space! However this is not the case, there can also be exhausted space. And if indeed you were to look right through this corona of the sun, you would feel the empty space into which you would then enter most uncomfortable—that is to say it would tear you asunder. By that it would show its nature, that it is more—or it is less, however we can best express it, than empty space. You need only seek the help of the simplest mathematical concept and when I say empty space is less than just emptiness you will no longer find my meaning so puzzling. Now let us assume you possess some kind of property. It can also happen that you have given away what you possess and have nothing. But we can have less than nothing, we can have debts. Then we do actually have less than nothing. If we pass from fullness of space to its ever diminishing fullness, we can come to empty space; and we can still go an beyond mere emptiness just as we can go beyond having nothing to having debts. It is a great weakness of the modern world outlook that it does not know this particular kind of—if I may so express it—negative materiality, that it only knows emptiness or fullness and not what is less than emptiness. For because knowledge today, the world outlook today is ignorant of what is less than emptiness, this world outlook is more or less held in the bonds of materialism, strictly confined by materialism—I should like to say, under the ban of materialism. For in man also there is a place that is emptier than empty, not in the whole of him but where there are layers of what is emptier than empty. As a whole, man, physical man, is a being who materially fills a certain space; but there is a certain member of man's nature, of the three I have referred to, that actually has something in it like the sun, emptier than empty. That is—yet, my dear friends, you'll have to put up with it—it is the head. And it is just because man is so organised that his head can become empty and in certain parts more than empty, that this head has the power to make room for the spiritual. Now just picture the matter as it actually is.

Naturally we have to picture things diagrammatically, but use your imagination and picture that everything materially filling your head I am going to draw in the following way. This is the diagram of your head (see red in diagram 5). but now, if I want to draw it properly, I shall have to leave empty places in this head, these naturally are not very big; but there inside are empty places. And into these empty places can enter what I have recently been calling the young spirit. In these spaces the young spirit with its rays, as it were, is drawn (see yellow in diagram 5).

Now, my dear friends, the materialists say that the brain is the instrument of the soul-life, of the thinking. The reverse is the truth. The holes in the brain, what indeed is more than holes, or one could just say as well less than holes, what therefore is emptier than empty, that is the instrument of the soul-life. And here where the soul-life is not, into which the soul-life is continually pushing, where the space in our skull is filled with brain substance here nothing is thought, here is no soul-experience.

We do not need our physical brain for our life of soul; we need it only to lay hold of our soul-life, physically to lay hold of it. And if the soul-life were not actually alive in the holes of the brain, pushing up everywhere, it would vanish, it would never reach our consciousness. But it lives in the holes of our brain that are emptier than empty.

Thus we have gradually to correct our concepts. When we stand in front of a mirror we do not perceive ourselves but only our reflected image. We could forget ourselves ... We see ourselves in the mirror. In the same way man does not experience himself by putting together with his brain what is lying in the holes in that brain. He experiences the way in which his soul-life is everywhere reflected by pushing up against the brain substance. It is reflected everywhere, and man experiences it; what he experiences is actually its reflected image. All that has slipped into the holes, however, because it is then permeated by consciousness in the contrary sense is what makes man conscious when without the resistance of the brain he goes through the gate of death. Now I should like to draw another diagram. Take the following: forgive me if I am rather drastic in portraying the brain and how the holes are left (blue in diagram 6). Here is the brain substance and here the brain leaves its holes and into these holes goes the life of the soul. (yellow)

This soul-life, however, continues, just outside the holes. There come to what naturally is only seen near man but projects indefinitely—man's aura. Now let us think away the brain and imagine we are looking at the soul-life of an ordinary man between birth and death. We should then have to say that seen in this way the condition of the real man between birth and death is such that actually his face is turned to his body thus (see lilac). It is true I shall have to draw this diagram differently. He turns his soul-life to the corporeal. And when we look at the brain the soul-life stretches out like a feeler that creeps into the holes of the brain. What there I made yellow here I make lilac, because that is more appropriate for the view into the living man. Thus, that would be what runs into the brain of the living man.

If after this I want to draw, let us say, physical man, I could best indicate that by perhaps here drawing in for you the boundary set to the faculty of memory. You would go outside there and there you would have the outer boundary, the boundary of cognition, of which I have also spoken to you. For that you will just have to remember diagram 5 and diagram 3 drawn yesterday).

But now this is the reality—when man is looked at spiritually from without, his soul-life stretches into him thus... so I will draw the single elongation only where the brain is concerned (diagram 7). But this soul-life in itself is also differentiated. So to follow up this soul-life further I should have to draw... another region here (red under the lilac), here another region blue); thus all this would belong to what constitutes man's aura. Then another region (green). You see how this part I am now drawing lies beyond the boundary of man's cognition. Then the region (yellow)—in reality all this belongs to man—and this region (orange.)

When man is asleep this moves more or less out of the body, as it was drawn yesterday (diagram 2), but when man is awake it is more or lass within the body. So that actually, perceived with the soul, the aura is in the immediate vicinity of the body. And if the physical man is described this is done by saying that this physical man consists of lungs, heart, liver, gall and so on; This is done in physical anatomy, this is done in physiology. But you can do the same when describing the man of soul and spirit who in this way actually stretches out into the holes in man, in what is more than empty in man. You can describe this in the same way—only then you must mention of what this soul-and spirit man consists. just as in physical man the organs are differentiated, here the different currents must be separated. It can be said: in here where it is red, physical man would stand thus in profile, the face turned in this direction, for example, the eyes here (diagram 7), and here would be the region of burning desire (red). That would be part of the man of soul-and-spirit who has taken his substance from the region known in my book Theosophy as the region of burning desire. Thus something taken from burning desire and introduced into man gives this part of him.

If I am describing this in detail what I have here colored lilac I should have to call soul-life. As you know, a certain part of the soul-sphere, of the soul-land, has been given the name soul-life. This substance of it would have this violet color,this lilac, and forms in man a part of his soul-spiritual being.

And if we continue in this way the orange here would have to be called active soul-force. So that you have to remember that your soul-life is what during your life between birth and death enters you with most intensity by way of your senses. And behind, checking itself, not so well able to enter, held up by the soul-life, there is the active soul-force.

Still further behind there is what is called soul-light (yellow in diagram 8). To a certain extent attached to this soul-light, pressing itself through, there would be what is taken from the region of liking and disliking which I should have to give to the green area. Wishes, we should ascribe to the sphere of what is approximately blue. And now pushing up here, the real blue, that is approaching blue red, this would be the region of mobile susceptibility. These are auric currents that I here call burning desire, mobile susceptibility, and wishes. As you know, these auric currents, these auric streams, constitute the world of soul, they also constitute the man of soul and spirit who may be said to be built out
of the ingredients of this soul world.

Then when death comes the physical body falls away, and man withdraws what has projected into the holes in the body. He takes it away and by so doing (we can now think away physical man) he comes into a certain relation with the soul-world and then with the spirit-land as you will find it described in Theosophy. He has this relationship by having in him its ingredients, but during physical life these are bound up with the physical body and then they become free. Becoming free, however, as a whole it is gradually changed. During physical life—if I leave out the differentiations and draw the soul-life thus—the feelers (lilac in diagram 8) reach out into our holes; after death these feelers are drawn back. By their being drawn back, however, the soul-life itself becomes hollowed out and the life of the spirit coming from the other side rises into the life of soul (yellow).

In the same degree as man ceases to dive into the physical, the soul-spiritual lights up and, from the other side, penetrates his aura with light. And just as man is able to acquires a consciousness through the reflection caused by the continual pushing of the soul-spiritual against the physical body, he now acquires a consciousness by drawing himself back against the light. This light is that of the Sun, the original light that is the Good. Thus, whereas during his physical life as man of soul and spirit he pushes against what is related to the Sun, namely, against the more than empty holes in the brain, after death when he withdraws himself he pushes against the other Sun, the Good-Sun, the original sun.

You see, my dear friends, how the possibility of receiving concepts of life between death and a new birth is bound up with the basic ideas of primeval mysteries. For we are placed into this whole cosmic life in true way I have been picturing during these last few days. It is true, however, that we have to go more deeply into the framework of actual human evolution throughout earthly time to come to correct concepts of these matters. I think you will agree it might be possible that someone through a special stroke of luck—if one might so call it—were able to see clairvoyantly, the whole of what I have been describing. This stroke of luck, however, could only bring him to the point of seeing ever changing images. It is something like this—a man through some kind of miracle—but nowadays it would not happen through a miracle—or let us say through clairvoyant vision, super-sensible vision, a man might see something of the nature of what I have been trying to picture, namely man's life of soul and spirit. You will find it obvious that this should look rather different from what a short time ago I was describing as the normal aura, if you understand what I was describing only a few days ago as the aura revealed when the whole man is seen, that is, physical man with his encircling aura. But now I have taken out the man of soul und spirit, so that this man of soul and spirit has been abstracted from the physical man.

From this you recognise that in one case the colors have to be arranged in one way, in another case in another way; you recognise also that for super-sensible consciousness things look very different. Try simply to see man's aura—as it is while man is in the physical body—then look at this aura. Turn your attention that is, from the man of soul and spirit, and try to see the man why stretches out his organs into physical man. But when you see the man during the time between death and a new birth, then you also see how the whole changes. Above all, the region that is red here (Diagram 7) goes away, goes here, and the yellow goes below, the whole gradually gets into disorder. These things can be perceived but the percept has something confusing about it. Therefore it will not be easily possible for modern man to bring meaning and significance into this confusion if he does not turn to other expedients.

Now we have shown that man's head points to the past whereas the extremities man points to the future. This is entirely a polaric contrast, both the head and the extremities of man (remember what was said yesterday) are actually one and the same, only the head is a very old formation, it is overformed. That is why it has the holes; so far the extremities man has not these holes; on the surface he is still full of matter. To have these holes is a sign of over development. Development in a backward sense can be seen in the head and much hangs on that. Much depends too on man being able to understand that extremities man is a recent metamorphosis—the head an old metamorphosis. And because extremities man is a recent metamorphosis he has not so far developed the capacity to think in physical life but his consciousness remains unconscious; he does not open up to the man of soul and spirit such holes as are in the brain.

You see it is infinitely important for spiritual culture, and will in future become more and more so, for us to perceive that these two things that outwardly, physically, are as totally different from one another as the head man and extremities man, are according to soul and spirit, one and the same, and only differ because they are at different stages of development in time. Many mysteries lie in this particular fact that two equal physical things at different stages of their development in time, can be really one and the same that, though outwardly physically different, this is only due to the conditions of their change, of their metamorphosis.

Goethe with his theory of metamorphosis began in an elementary way to form concepts by which all this can be understood. Whereas otherwise since ancient times there has been a deadlock in the formation of concepts, with Goethe the faculty of forming concepts once more arose. And these concepts are those of living metamorphoses. Goethe, it is true, always began with the most simple. He said: when we look at a plant we have its green leaf; but the green leaf changes into the flower petal, into the colorsome petal of the flower. Both are the same, only one is the metamorphosis of the other. And as the green leaf of the plant and the red petal of the rose are different metamorphoses, the same thing at a different stage, man's head and his extremities organism too are simply metamorphoses of one another. When we take Goethe's thought on the metamorphosis of the plant we have something primitive, simple; but this thought can blossom into something of the greatest and can serve to describe man's passing from one incarnation to the next. We see the plant with its green leaf and its blossom, and say: this blossom, this red blossom of the rose is the metamorphosis of the green leaf of the plant. We see a man standing before us and say: that head you are carrying is the metamorphosis of arms, hands, legs, feet of your previous incarnation, and what you now have as arms, hands, legs and feet will be changed into your head of the next incarnation.

Now, however, will come an objection that evidently sits heavily on your souls. You will say: good gracious but I leave my legs and feet behind, my arms and hands too; I do not take them into my next incarnation ... how then should my head be made out of them? It is true, this objection can be made. But once again you are coming here up against Maya. It is not true that you actually leave behind your legs, feet, hands, arms. It is indeed untrue. You say that because you still cling to Maya, the great illusion.

What indeed with the ordinary consciousness you refer to as your arms, hands, legs and feet, are not your arms, hands, legs and feet at all, but what as blood and other juices fills out the real arms, hands, feet and legs. This again is a difficult idea but it is true. Suppose that here you have arms, hands, feet and legs, but that what is here is spiritual, spiritual forces. Now please to think that your arms, hands, legs and feet are forces—super-sensible forces. Had you these alone you would not see them with your eyes; they are filled out, these forces, with juices, with the blood, and you see what as mineral substance, fluid or partly solid—the smallest part solid—fills out what is invisible (hatching in diagram 9). What you leave in the grave or what is burnt is only what might be called the mineral enclosure. Your arms and hands, legs and feet are not visible, they are forces and you take them with you, you take the forms with you. You say: I have hands and feet. Anyone who sees into the spiritual world does not say: I have hands and feet, he says; there are spirits of form, Elohim, they think cosmic thoughts, and their thoughts are my arms and hands, my legs and feet; and their thoughts are filled out with blood and other fluids. But neither are blood and the other fluids what they appear physically; these again are the ideas of spirits of wisdom, and what the physicist calls matter is only outer semblance. The physicist ought to say when he comes to matter: here I come to the thoughts of the spirits of wisdom, the Kyriotetes. And where you see arms, hands, feet, legs, you cannot touch them but should say: here the spirits of form are building into these shapes their cosmic thoughts.

In short, my dear friends, strange as it sounds, there are no such things as your bodies, but where your body is in space there intermingled with one another live the cosmic thoughts of the higher hierarchies. And were you able to see correctly and not in accordance with Maya, you would say: into here there project the cosmic thoughts of the Exusiai, the spirits of form, the Elohim. These cosmic thoughts make themselves visible to me by being filled out with the cosmic thoughts of the spirits of wisdom. That gives us arms and hands, legs and feet. Nothing, absolutely nothing, as it appears in Maya is there before the spiritual vision, out there stand the cosmic thoughts. And these cosmic thoughts crowd together, are condensed, pushed into one another; for this reason they appear to us as these shadow figures of ours that go around, which we believe to have reality. Thus, as far as the physical man is concerned, he does not exist at all.

With certain justification we can say that in the hour of death the spirits of form separate their cosmic thoughts from those of the spirits of wisdom. The spirits of form take their thoughts up into the air, the spirits of wisdom sink their material thoughts into the earth. This brings it about that in the corpse an aftershadow of the thoughts of the spirits of wisdom still exists when the spirits of form have taken back their thoughts into the air. That is physical death—that is its reality.

In short, when we begin to think about the reality we come to the dissolution of what is commonly called the physical world. For this physical world derives its existence from the spirits of the higher hierarchies pushing in their intermingled thoughts, and I beg you to imagine that finely distributed quantities of water are introduced in some way which form a thick mist. That is why your body appears as a kind of shadow-form, because the thoughts of the spirits of form penetrate those of the spirits of wisdom, the formative thoughts enter the thoughts of substance. In face of this conception the whole world dissolve into the spiritual. We must, however, have the possibility of imagining the world to be really spiritual, of knowing that it is only apparent that my arms and hands, my feet and legs are given over to the earth. That is what it seems; in reality the metamorphosis of my arms and legs, hands and feet begins there and comes to completion in the life between death and a new birth, when my arms and legs, hands and feet become the head of my next incarnation.

I have been here telling you many things that perhaps at least in their form may have struck you as something strange. But what is all this ultimately of which we have been speaking but an ascending from man as he appears, to man as he really is, ascending from what lives externally in Maya to the successive ranks of the hierarchies.

It is only when we do this, my dear friends, that we are able to speak in a form that is ripe today of how man is permitted to know a so-called higher self. When we simply rant about a higher self, when we simply say: I feel a higher self within me . . . then this higher self is a mere empty abstraction with no content; for the ordinary self is in the hands of Maya, is itself Maya. The higher self has only one meaning when we speak of it in connection with the world of the higher hierarchies. To talk of the higher self without paying heed to the world that consists of the spirits of form and the angels, archangels and so on, to speak of the higher self without reference to this world, means that we are speaking of empty abstractions, and at the same time signifies that we are not talking of what lives in man between death and a new birth. For as here we live with animals, plants and minerals, between death and a new birth we live with the kingdoms of the higher hierarchies of whom we have so often spoken. Only when we gradually come nearer to these ideas and concepts (in a week, perhaps, we shall be speaking of them) shall we approach what can answer the question: why do many human beings die as mere children, many in old age, others in middle age?

Now, my dear friends, what I have just given you in outline are concrete concepts of what is real in the world. Truly they are not abstract concepts I have been describing, they are concrete concepts of world reality. These concrete concepts were given, for a more atavistic perception, it is true, in the ancient mysteries. Since the eighth pre-Christian century they have been lost to human perception, but through a deepening of our comprehension of the Christ-Being they must be found again. And this can only be realised on the path of spiritual science.

Let us make ourselves from a certain point of view another kind of picture of human evolution. We will here keep before us exceedingly important concepts. Now it can be said that when we go back in the evolution of man we discover—and I have often described this—that in ancient days men had more of the group-soul, and that the individual souls were membered into what was group-soul. You can read about this in various cycles:¹ we can then diagrammatically represent human evolution and say: in olden days there were group-souls and each of these split up (it would appear thus to soul perception but different for the perception of the spirit). But each of these souls clothed itself with a body that here in this figure I indicate with red strokes. (Diagram 10).

Up to the time of the Pythagorean school this drawing, or something like it, was always made and it was said: look at your body, so far as that is concerned men are separated, each having his own body (that is why the red strokes are isolated). Where the souls are concerned however, mankind is a unity, since we go back—it is true a long way back—to the group-soul. There we have a unity. If you think away the red, the while will form a unified figure (see diagram.)

There is sense in speaking of this figure only if we have first spoken of the spiritual as has been done here today; for then we know everything that is working together in these souls, how the higher hierarchies are working together on these souls. There is no sense in speaking of this figure if our gaze is not fixed on the hierarchies. It was thus that they spoke up to the time of the Pythagorean School; and it was from the Pythagorean School that Apollonius learned what I spoke about yesterday and about which I shall be talking further in these next weeks. But then after the eighth pre-Christian century, when the Pythagorean Schools were in their decadence, the possibility of thus speaking was lost. And gradually the concepts that are concrete, that have reality by being related to the higher hierarchies—these concepts have become confused and hazy to people. Thus there has come to them in the place of Angels, Archangels, Archai, Spirits of Form, Spirits of Movement, Spirits of Wisdom, Thrones, instead of all this concrete weaving of the spirit, they arrived at a concept that now played a certain part in the perception of the Greeks—the concept of the pneuma. Everything became hazily confused: Pneuma, universal spirit, this indistinct concept still so loved today by the Pantheists ... spirit, spirit, spirit ... I have often spoken of how the Pantheists place spirit everywhere; that goes back to Greek life. Again this figure is portrayed ... but you can now see how what was once concrete, the fullness of the Godhead, now became an abstract concept—Pneuma. The white is Pneuma, the red physical matter (see diagram 10) if we are considering the evolution of man. The Greeks, however, at least still preserved some perception of this Pneuma, for they always saw something of the aura. Thus, for them, what you can picture in these white branches was always of an auric nature, something really perceptible. There is the great significance of the transition from that constituted Greece to all that was Roman—that the Greeks still in their perception experienced Pneuma as something actual and spiritual, but that the Romans did so no longer. Everything now becomes quite abstract with the Romans, completely abstract; concepts and nothing more. The Romans are the people of abstract concepts.

My dear friends, in our days you find in science the same diagram! You can come upon it today in materialistic books on science. You will find the same diagram, exactly the same, as you would have found in the old Mysteries, in the Pythagorean Schools, where everything was still related to the hierarchies. You have it with the Greeks where everything is related to the Pneuma; again today you find it drawn, and we shall see what it has now become. Today the scientist says as he makes this same drawing on the blackboard for his students: in the propagation of the human race the substance of the parents' germ cells passes over to the children; but part of this substance remains so that it can again pass over to the children and and again there remains some of this to pass over anew to the children. And another part of the germ cell substance develops so that it can form the cells of the physical body. You have exactly the same diagram, only the modern scientist sees in the white (see diagram) the continuity of the substance of the germ cell. He says; if we go back to our old human ancestors and take this germ cell substance of both male and female, and then go to present day man and take his, it is still the same stream, the substance is continuous. There always remains in this germ substance something eternal—so the scientist imagines—and only half of the germ plasma goes over into the new body. The scientist has still the same figure but no longer has the pneuma; the white is now for him the material germ substance—nothing is left of soul and spirit, it is just material substance. You can read this today in scientific books, and it is taken as a great and significant discovery. That is the materialising of a higher spiritual perception that has passed through the process of abstraction; in the midst stands the abstract concept. And it is really amusing that a modern scientist has written a book (for those whose thinking is sound, it is amusing) in which he says right out: what the Greeks still represented as Pneuma is today the continuity of the germ substance. Yes, it is foolish, but today it counts for great wisdom.

From this you can, however, see one thing, it is not the drawing that does it! And you will therefore understand why to a certain extent I have always been against drawing diagrams so long as we were still trying to run our Anthroposophy within the Theosophical Society. One had only to enter any theosophical branch and the walls as a rule would be plastered with all manner of diagrams; there were drawings of every possible thing with words attached; there ware whole genealogical trees and every possible kind of sketch. However, my dear friends, these drawings are not important. What matters is that we should really be able to have living conceptions; for the same drawing can represent the soul-spiritual in the flowing of hierarchies, the purely material in the continuous germ-plasm. These things are seen very hazily by modern man. Therefore it is so important to be clear that the Greeks still knew something of the real self in man, of the real spiritual and that it was the Romans who made the transition to the abstract concept. You can see all this in what is external. When the Greek talked about his Gods, he did so in a way that made it quite evident that he was still picturing concrete figures behind these Gods. For the Romans the Gods, in reality, ware only names, only expressions, abstractions and they became abstractions more and more. For Greek a certain idea was ever present that in the man before him the hierarchies were living, that in each man the hierarchies were living a different life. Thus the hierarchies were living differently in every man. The Greek knew the reality of man, and when he said, that is Alcibiades, that is Socrates, or that is Plato, he still had the concept that there in Alcibiades, Socrates or Plato ware rising up, within each in a different way, the cosmic thoughts of the hierarchies. And because the cosmic thoughts arose differently these figures appeared different.

All this was entirely lacking in the Roman. For this reason he formed for himself a system of concepts that reached its climax when from the time of Augustus on and actually from an earlier date, the Roman Caesar was held to be God. The Godhead gradually became an abstraction and the Roman Caesar was himself a God because the concept of God had become completely abstract. This applies to the rest of their concepts; and it was particularly the case with the concepts that lived deeply in the Roman nature as concepts of rights, moral concepts. Thus, in place of all that in olden days was a living reality, there arose a number of abstractions. And all these abstractions lasted on as a heritage throughout the middle ages and descended to modern times, remaining as heritage down to the nineteenth century—abstract concepts carried into every sphere.

In the nineteenth century there came something startling. Man himself was entirely lost sight of among all these abstract concepts! The Greeks still had a presentiment of the real man who descends here after being formed and fashioned out of the cosmos; in the time of the Roman empire all knowledge of him was lost. The nineteenth century was needed to rediscover him through all the connections I have been showing you and will go on showing you even more exactly. The discovery of man took place now from the opposite pole. Greece wanted to see man as descending from the hierarchies, divine man; in place of this the Romans set up a series of abstract concepts; the nineteenth century—the eighteenth century too but particularly the nineteenth—was needed to rediscover man from the other side, from his animal side. And he could not be grasped with abstract concepts; this was the great shock. This was the great shock and the deep cleft that arose; what is this actually that stands there on two legs and fidgets with its hands, and eats and drinks all manner of things; what is it? The Greeks still knew, then a change took place when concepts became abstract. Now it comes as something startling to men of the nineteenth century; it stands there and there are no concepts with which to grasp it. It is taken for simply a higher form of animal. On the one hand, in science it produces Darwinism, on the other hand, in the spiritual it brings about socialism which would place man into society as a mere animal. Here is man standing transfixed before himself—what is this thing? And he is powerless to answer the question.

That is the situation today; that is the situation that will produce not only concepts that are right or wrong according as men will them, but is called upon to create facts either catastrophic or beneficial. And the situation is—the shock men have when seeing themselves. We must find the elements once more for te understanding of spiritual man. These elements will not be found unless we turn to the theory of metamorphosis. There lies the essential point. Goethe's concepts of metamorphosis are alone able to grasp the ever changing phenomena which offer themselves to the perception of the reality.

Now one might say that spiritual evolution has always moved in this direction. Even at the time when the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz in the seventeenth century was being published in so wonderful a way—other writings too—the endeavour was already there to provide for the arising of a social structure for man compatible with his true nature. (In Das Reich I have referred to this in a series of articles concerning The Chemical Wedding). In this way the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz by the so-called Valentin Andreae arose. On the other hand, however, there also arose the book he called Reformation des Ganzer Menschengeschlectes (Reformation of the whole Human Race), where he gives a great political survey of how social conditions ought to be. Then, it was the thirty years war that swept the thing away! Today, there is the possibility that the ordering of the world either sweep things away once more ... or carry them right into human evolution. With this we are touching an the great fundamental questions of the day, with which men should be occupying themselves instead of with all the secondary matters that engross them. If only men concerned themselves about basic questions they would find means and ways of bringing fruitful concepts into modern reality—then we could get away from abstract concepts.

It is not very easy to distinguish reality from illusion. For that, we must have the will to go right into life with all seriousness and all good will, and not be bound down by programmes and prejudices. I could tell many tales about this but now I will refer to one fact only. In the beginning of the nineties of the last century a number of people foregathered in various towns of Europe and brought about something of an American nature, namely, the Movement for Ethical Culture. At that time it was the intellectuals who were connected with founding these societies for Ethical Culture. These people produced very beautiful things, and if today you read the articles written at that time by the promoters of Societies for Ethical Culture ... if you have a taste for butter, you will probably even today be enchanted by all the beautiful, wonderfully beautiful ideals, in which these people indulged. And indeed it was no pleasant task to go against this reveling in butter: However, I wrote an article at the time in one of the first numbers of Die Zunkunft (The Future), against all this oiliness in “ethical culture,” and denounced it in awful words. Naturally it was a shameful deed—how should it not have been when these people had set out to make the whole world ethical, moral—how should it not have been disgraceful to turn upon anything so good: At that time I was living in Weimar but on paying a visit to Berlin I had a conversation with Herman Grimm who said:

“What is the matter with ‘ethical culture'? Go and see the people themselves. You will find that here in Berlin those who hold meetings about ethics are really thoroughly nice kind people—one could not have any objection to them. They can even be congenial and very pleasant.” This was not to be denied and at the moment Herman Grimm had just as much right on his side as I had. Outwardly and momentarily, one of us was as right as the other, one could be proved right just as well as the other. And I am not for maintaining that from the point of view of pure logic my grounds for opposing these ethical philosophers were any more sound than those brought forward by them—I wouldn't be sure. But, my dear friends, from all this highfalutin idealism the present catastrophe has arisen! And only those people were right, and have been justified by events, who said at the time; with all your talking and luxuriating in buttery ideals, by means of which you would bring universal peace and universal morals to man, you have produced nothing but what I then called social carcinoma that had to end in this catastrophic present. Time has shown who was working with concrete concepts, who with merely those that are abstract. When they are simply abstract in character, there is no distinguishing who is right and who is wrong. The only thing that decides is whether a concept finds its right setting in the course of actual events. A professor teaching science in a university can naturally prove everything he says to be right in a most beautiful and logical way. And all this goes into the holes in the head (and this today I naturally may be allowed to say with the very best intention). But you see it is not a question of bringing forward apparently good logical grounds; for when these thoughts sink into a head such as Lenin's they become Bolshevism. What matters is what a thought is in reality, not what can be thought about it or felt about it in an abstract way, but what force goes to the forming of it in its reality. And if we test the world-conception that is chiefly talked of today—for the others, specified yesterday, were more in picture form—when one brings socialism to the test, it is not a question today of sitting oneself down to cram (as we say for ‘study') Karl Marx, or Lassalle, or Bernstein, to study their books, to study these authors. No! It is a question of having a feeling, a living experience for what will become of human progress if a number of men—the sort of men who stand at a machine—have these thoughts. That is what matters, and not to have thoughts about the social structure in the near future that are learnt in the customary course of modern diplomatic schooling, Now is the time when it is important to weigh thoughts so as to be able to answer the question: what are the times wanting for the coming decades? Today the time has already come when it is not allowed to sit in comfort in the various magisterial seats and to go on cherishing what is old. The time has come when men must bear the shock of seeing themselves, and when the thought must rise up in those responsible anywhere for anything: How is this question to be solved out of the spiritual life?

• 1. For example: Universe, Earth and Man, and Egyptian Myths and Mysteries.

[ 1 ] About the time of the beginning of his friendship with Goethe, Schiller was occupying himself with the ideas which found expression in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.¹In 1794, he elaborated these letters, which were originally written for the Duke of Augustenberg, for Die Horen. The direction of thought in the verbal discussions and the correspondence which took place at that time between Goethe and Schiller approximated again and again to the orbit of ideas contained in these letters. Schiller's thoughts encountered this question: “What condition of the human soul forces corresponds in the best sense of the word to an existence worthy of man?” “It may be urged that every individual bears within himself, at least in adaptation and destination, a purely ideal man. The great problem of his existence is to bring all the incessant changes of his outer life into conformity with the unchanging unity of this ideal.

Thus writes Schiller in the fourth letter. It is Schiller's aim to build a bridge from man as he is in immediate reality, to the ideal man. There exist in human nature two impulses which hold it back from idealistic perfection when they develop in an unbalanced way—the impulses of the senses and of reason. If the sense impulse has the upper hand man is the servant of his instincts and passions. In action that is irradiated by human consciousness is mingled a force that clouds this consciousness. His acts become the result of an inner necessity. If the reason impulse predominates man strives to suppress the instincts and passions and to give himself up to an abstract necessity that is not sustained by inner warmth. In both cases man is subject to coercion. In the first his sense nature subdues the spiritual; in the second his spiritual nature subdues that of the senses. Neither the one nor the other gives man in the kernel of his being which lies between the material and the spiritual, full and complete freedom. Complete freedom can only be realised in harmonisation of the two impulses. The material sense nature must not be subdued, but ennobled; the instincts and passions must be permeated with spirituality in such a way that they themselves come to be the fulfilment of the spiritual element that has entered into them. And reason must lay hold of the soul nature in man in such a way that it imparts its power to what is merely instinctive and passional, causing man to fulfil its counsels as a matter of course from out of his instinct and with the power of passion. “When we have desire for someone who is worthy of our disdain, we have painful experience of the constraint of Nature. When we are antagonistic to another who merits our respect, we have painful experience of the constraint of the intellect. As soon, however, as he interests our affections and wins our respect, the coercion of feeling and the coercion of reason both disappear, and we begin to love him. A man whose material nature manifests the spiritual qualities of reason, and whose reason manifests the basic power of passion, is a free personality.” Schiller would like to found harmonious social life in human society upon the basis of free personalities. For him the problem of an existence really worthy of man was allied to the problem of the formation of man's social life. This was his answer to the questions facing man-kind at the time when he expressed these thoughts, as a result of the French Revolution (27th Letter). [ 2 ] Goethe found deep satisfaction in such ideas. On 26th October, 1794, he writes to Schiller on the subject of the Aesthetic Letters as follows: “I read the manuscript sent to me with the very greatest pleasure; I imbibed it at one draught. These letters pleased and did me good in the same way as a delicious drink that suits our nature is easily imbibed and shows its healthy effects on our tongue through a pleasant humour of the nervous system. How could it be otherwise, since I found such a coherent and noble exposition of what I have long recognized to be true, partly experiencing it, partly longing to experience it in life.

[ 3 ] Goethe found that Schiller's Aesthetic Letters expressed all that he longed to experience in life in order to become conscious of an existence that should be really worthy of man. It is therefore comprehensible that in his soul also, thoughts should be stimulated which he tried in his own way to elaborate in Schiller's direction. These thoughts gave birth to the composition that has been interpreted in so many different ways,—namely the enigmatical fairy tale at the end of the narrative which appeared in Die Horen under the title of Conversations of German Emigrants. The fairy tale appeared in this paper in the year 1795. These conversations, like Schiller's Aesthetic Letters, had as their subject the French Revolution. This concluding fairy tale cannot be explained by bringing all sorts of ideas from outside to bear upon it, but only by going back to the conceptions which lived in Goethe's soul at that time.

[ 4 ] Most of the attempts to interpret this composition are recorded in the book entitled Goethe's Wonder Compositions by Friedrich Meyer von Waldeck Heidelberg (Karl Wintersche Universitätsbuchhandlung). Since the publication of this book new attempts at explanation have of course been made.

[ 5 ] I have tried to penetrate into the spirit of the fairy tale, taking as my starting point the hypothesis of the Goethean school of thought from the ninetieth year of the eighteenth century onwards, and I first gave expression to what I had discovered in a lecture delivered on 27th October, 1891, to the Goethe Society of Vienna. What I then said has expanded in all directions. But everything that I have since allowed to be printed or that I have said verbally about the fairy tale, is only a further elaboration of the thoughts expressed in that Lecture and my Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation, published in 1910, is also a result.

We must look for the embryonic thought underlying the fairy tale in the Conversations of which it formed the conclusion. In the Conversations Goethe tells of the escape of a certain family from regions devastated by war. In the conversations between the members of this family there lives all that was stimulated in Goethe's conceptual world as a result of his interchange of ideas with Schiller. The conversations revolve around two central points of thought. One of them governs those conceptions of man which make him believe in the existence of some connection between the events of his life,—a connection which is impermeable to the laws of material actuality. The stories told in this connection are in part phantom, and in part describe experiences which seem to reveal a “Wonder” element in contrast to natural law. Goethe did not write these narratives as the result of a tendency towards superstition, but from a much deeper motive. That soothing, mystical feeling which many people have when they hear of something that cannot be explained by the limited reason directed to the facts of natural law, was quite alien to Goethe. But again and again he was faced by the question: does there not exist for the human soul a possibility of emancipating itself from conceptions emanating from mere sense perception and of apprehending a supersensible world in a purely spiritual mode of conception? The impulse towards this kind of activity of the faculty of cognition may of course be a natural human aspiration based on a connection with this supersensible world,—a connection that is hidden from the senses and the understanding bound to them. And the tendency towards experiences which appear to sever natural connections may be only a childish aberration of this justifiable longing of man for a spiritual world. Goethe was interested in the peculiar direction of the soul's activity when giving way to this fondness for the sweets of superstition rather than for the actual content of the tales and stories to which these tendencies give birth in unsophisticated minds.

[ 6 ] From the second central point of thought flow conceptions concerned with man's moral life, the stimulus for which is derived not from material existence, but from impulses which raise man above the impacts of material sense existence. In this sphere a supersensible world of forces enters into the soul life of man.

[ 7 ] Rays which must ultimately end in the supersensible proceed from both these central points of thought. And they give rise to the questions about the inner being of man, the connection of the human soul with the sense world on the one side and with the supersensible on the other. Schiller approached this question in a philosophical attitude in his Aesthetic Letters; the abstract philosophical path was not Goethe's. He had to give a picture form to what he wrote, as in the case of the fairy tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. In Goethe's imagination the different human soul powers assumed the form of figures in the fairy tale, and the whole soul life and soul striving of man was personified in the experiences and the lives of these figures. When anything of this kind is said one has to be prepared for the objection which will come from certain quarters that in this way a composition is lifted out of the realer of imagination, of phantasy, and made into an inartistic, symbolical representation of abstract concepts; the figures are removed from real life and transformed into symbols or even allegories that are not of the nature of art. Such an objection is based on the notion that nothing but abstract ideas can live in the human soul as soon as it leaves the realm of sense materiality. It ignores the fact that there is a living supersensible mode of perception as well as one that is of the senses. And in the fairy tale Goethe moves with his figures in the realm of supersensible perceptions and not of abstract concepts. What is here said about these figures and their experiences is not in any sense a statement that this figure means one thing, and that another. Such symbolical interpretation is as far removed as it could possibly be from the standpoint of this Essay. For it, the Old Man with the Lamp and the Will-o'-the-Wisps in the fairy tale are nothing more nor less than the phantasy figures as they appear in the composition. It is absolutely necessary, however, to look for the particular thought impulses which stimulated the imagination of the poet to create such figures. Goethe's consciousness did not of course lay hold of these thought-impulses in abstract form. He expressed himself in imaginative figures because to his genius any abstract form of thought would have been too lacking in content. The thought-impulse holding sway in the substrata of Goethe's soul had as its outcome the imaginative figure. Thought, as the intermediate stage, lives only subconsciously in his soul and gives the imagination its direction. The student of Goethe's fairy tale needs the thought content, for this alone can enable his soul to follow the course of Goethe's creative phantasy in re-creative imagination. The process of growing into the content of this thought involves nothing more nor less than the adaptation of organs enabling us to live in the atmosphere that Goethe breathed spiritually when he created the fairy tale. This means that we focus our gaze upon the same soul world as Goethe. As a result of Goethe's control of this soul world, living, spiritual forms—not philosophical ideas, burst forth before him. What lives in these spiritual forms lives also in the human soul.

[ 8 ] The mode of conception which permeates the fairy tale is also present in the Conversations. In the discussions narrated there, the human soul turns to the two world spheres between which man's life is placed—the material and the supersensible. The deeper nature of man strives to establish a right relationship to both these spheres for the purpose of attaining a free soul understanding that is worthy of man, and of building a harmonious social life. Goethe felt that what he brought to light in the narratives did not come to expression fully in the Conversations. In the all-embracing picture of the fairy tale he had to bring those human soul problems upon which his gaze was directed, nearer to the immeasurably rich world of spiritual life. The striving towards the condition truly worthy of man to which Schiller refers and which Goethe longs to experience, is personified in the Young Man in the fairy tale. His marriage with the Lily, who embodies the realization of the world of Freedom is the union with those forces which slumber in the human soul and when awakened lead to the true inner experience of the free personality.

[ 9 ] The “Old Man with the Lamp” plays an important part in the development of the fairy tale. When he comes with his lamp into the clefts of the rocks, he is asked which is the most important of the secrets known to him. He answers, “the revealed,” and when asked if he will not divulge this secret, replies, “When I have learnt the fourth.” This fourth secret, however, is known to the Green Snake, who whispers it in the Old Man's ear. There can be no doubt that this secret concerns the condition for which all the figures in the fairy tale are longing. This condition is described at the end of the tale. A picture portrays the way in which the soul of man enters into union with the subterranean forces of its nature. As a result of this, the soul's relationship to the supersensible,—the kingdom of the Lily,—and to the material,—the kingdom of the Green Snake, is so regulated that in experience and in action it is freely receptive to impulses from both regions. In union with both the soul is able to fulfil its true being. It must be assumed that the Old Man knows this secret; for he is the only figure who is always master of the circumstances; everything is dependent on his guidance and leadership. What then can the Snake say to the Old Man? He knows that the Snake must be offered up in sacrifice if the longed-for goal is to be attained. But this knowledge of his is not unconditional. He must wait until the snake from out of the depths of her nature is ripe to make the sacrifice. Within the compass of man's soul life is a power which bears the soul's development on to the condition of free personality. This power has its task on the way to the attainment of free personality. When this is achieved the task is over. This power brings the human soul into connection with the experiences of life. It transforms into inner wisdom all that science and life reveal, and makes the soul ever riper for the desired spiritual goal. This attained, it loses meaning, for it establishes man's relation to the outer world. At the goal, however, all external impulses are changed into inner impulses of the soul, and there this power must sacrifice itself, must suspend its functions; it must, without separate existence of its own, live on now in the transformed man as the ferment permeating the rest of soul life. Goethe's spiritual outlook was particularly concerned with this power in human life. He saw it working in the experiences of life and of science. He wanted to see its application without the outcome of preconceived ideas or theories of an abstract goal. This goal must be a result of the experiences themselves. When the experiences are mature they must themselves give birth to the goal. They must not be stunted by a predestined end. This soul-power is personified in the Green Snake. It devours the gold,—the wisdom derived from life and science, which must be so worked upon by the soul that wisdom and soul become one. This soul-power will be sacrificed at the right time; it will bring man to his goal, will make him a free personality. The Snake whispers to the Old Man that it will sacrifice itself. It confides to him a mystery that is revealed to him, but of which he can make no use so long as it is not fnlfllled by the free resolve of the Snake. When this soul power in man speaks to him as the Snake speaks to the Old Man, “the time has come” for the soul to realise life experience as life wisdom; harmony between the material and the supersensible is re-established. The Young Man has had premature contact with the supersensible world, and has been paralysed, deadened. Life revives in him and he marries the Lily when the Snake,—the soul experience, is offered up in sacrifice. [ 10 ] Thus the longed for consummation is attained. The time has now also come when the soul is able to build a bridge between the nether and the further regions of the river. This bridge is built of the Snake's own substance. From now on, life experience has no separate existence; it is no longer directed merely to the outer sense world as before. It has become inner soul power which is not consciously exercised as such, but which only functions in the reciprocal illumination of the material and super-sensible life of man's inner being. This condition is brought about by the Snake. Yet the Snake by itself cannot impart to the Young Man the gifts whereby he is able to control the newly fathomed soul kingdom. These gifts are bestowed on him by the Three Kings. From the Brazen King he receives the sword with the command: “Take the sword in your left hand and keep the right hand free.” The Silver King gives him the sceptre with the words: “Feed my sheep.” The Golden King sets the Crown of Oak on his head, saying, “Acknowledge the Highest.” The fourth King, who is formed of a mixture of the three metals, Copper, Silver and Gold, sinks lifelessly to the ground. In the man who is on the way to become a free personality there are three soul forces in alloy:—Will (Copper), Feeling (Silver), Knowledge (Gold). In the course of existence the revelations of life experience give all that the soul assimilates from the operation of these three forces. Power, through which virtue works is made manifest in Will: Beauty (beautiful appearance) reveals itself in Peeling; Wisdom, in Knowledge. Man is separated from the state of “free personality” through the fact that these three forces work in his soul in alloy; he will attain free personality to the degree in which he assimilates the gifts, each of the three in its specific nature, in full consciousness and unites them in free conscious activity in his own soul. Then the chaotic alloy of the gifts of Will, Feeling and Knowledge which has previously controlled him, falls asunder.

[ 11 ] The Wisdom King is of Gold. Gold personifies Wisdom in some form. The operation of Wisdom in the life experience that is finally sacrificed has already been described. But the Will-o'-the-Wisps too, seize upon the Gold in their own way. In man there exists a soul quality,—(in many people it develops abnormally and seems to fill their whole being)—by which he is able to assimilate all the wisdom that life and science bestow. But this soul quality does not endeavour to unite wisdom wholly to the inner life. It remains one-sided know-ledge, as an instrument of dogma or criticism; it makes a man appear brilliant, or helps to give him a one-sided prominence in life. It makes no effort to bring about a balance through adjustment with the yields of external experience. It becomes superstition as described by Goethe in the Wonder Tales of the Emigrants, because it does not try to harmonise itself to Nature. It becomes learning before it has become life in the inner being of the soul. It is that which false prophets and sophists like to bear through life. All endeavour to assimilate the Goethean life-axiom: “Man must surrender his existence if he would exist” is alien to it. The Snake, the selfless life-experience that has developed for love's sake to conscious wisdom, surrenders its existence in order to build the bridge between material and spiritual existence.

[ 12 ] An irresistible desire presses the Young Man onward to the kingdom of the Beautiful Lily. What are the characteristics of this kingdom? Although men have the deepest longing for the world of the Lily, they can only reach it at certain times before the bridge is built. At noon the Snake, even before its sacrifice, builds a temporary bridge to the supersensible world. And evening and morning man can pass over the river that separates sense-existence from supersensible existence on the Giant's Shadows—the powers of imagination and of memory. Anyone who approaches the ruler of the supersensible world without the necessary inner qualification must do harm to his life like the Young Man. The Lily also desires the other region. The Ferryman who conveyed the Will-o'-the-Wisps over the river can bring anyone back from the supersensible world, but can take no one to it.

[ 13 ] A man who desires contact with the supersensible world must first have developed his inner being in the direction of this world through life experience, for the supersensible world can only be grasped in free spiritual activity.

The Prose Aphorisms express Goethe's opinion of this goal: “Everything that sets our spirit free without giving us mastery over ourselves, is harmful.” Another aphorism is: “Duty, when a man loves the commands he gives to himself.” The kingdom of pure supersensible activity—Schiller's “Reason Impulse,” is that of the Lily; the kingdom of pure sense-materiality—Schiller's “Sense Impulse” is the home of the Snake before its sacrifice. The Ferryman can bring anyone to the realm of sense but cannot convey them to the realm of spirit. All men have involuntarily descended from the supersensible world. But they can only re-establish a free union with this supersensible world when they have the will to pass over the bridge of sacrificed life-experience. It is a union independent of “Time,” of all involuntary conditions of soul. Before this free union has taken place there exist two involuntary conditions of soul which enable man to attain to the supersensible world—the kingdom of the free personality. One such condition is present in creative imagination or phantasy which is a reflection of supersensible experience. In Art man links sense existence to the supersensible. In Art he manifests also as free creative soul. This is depicted in the crossing which the Snake makes possible at noon. The Snake typifies life-experience not yet ready for supersensible existence. The other condition of soul sets in when the conscious soul of man—of the Giant in man who is an image of the macrocosm—is dimmed, when conscious cognition is obscured and blunted in such a way that it becomes superstition, hallucination, mediumistic trance. The soul power existing in this way in obscured consciousness is for Goethe one with that power that is prone by force and despotism to lead men to the state of freedom in a revolutionary sense. In revolutions the urge towards an ideal state lives obscurely; it is like the shadow of the Giant which lies over the river at twilight. What Schiller writes to Goethe on 16th October, 1794, is also evidence of the accuracy of this idea of the Giant. Goethe was on a journey which it was his intention to extend to Frankforton-the-Main. Schiller writes: “I am indeed glad to know that you are still far away from the commerce of the Main. The shadow of the Giant might well lay rough hands upon you.” The result of caprice, the unregulated “laissez faire” of historical events, is personified in the Giant and his shadow, by the side of the obscured consciousness of man. The soul impulses leading to such happenings are certainly associated with the tendency towards superstition and chimerical ideology.

The “Old Man's” lamp has the quality of only being able to give light where another light already is. One cannot but be reminded here of the saying of an old Mystic, quoted by Goethe: “If the eye were not of the nature of the light it could never see the sun; if God's own power were not within us, how could Divinity delight us?” [ 14 ] Just as the lamp does not give light in the darkness, so the light of wisdom, of knowledge, does not shine in the man who does not bring to it the appropriate organ, the inner light. What the lamp denotes will become still more intelligible if we take heed of the fact that it can in its own way shed light upon what is developing as a resolution in the Snake, but that there must first be knowledge of the Snake's willingness to make this resolution. There is a kind of human know-ledge which is at all times a concern of the highest endeavour of man. It has arisen from the inner experience of souls in the course of the historical life of mankind. But the goal of human endeavour to which it points can only be attained in concrete reality out of the sacrificed life-experience. All that the consideration of the historical past teaches man, all that mystical and religious experience enables him to say about his connection with the supersensible world,-all this can find its ultimate consummation only by the sacrifice of life-experience. The Old Man can change everything by his lamp in such a way that it assumes a new life-serving form, but actual development is dependent upon the ripening of the life-experience.

[ 15 ] The wife of the Old Man is she whose body is pledged to the river for the debt which she has come to owe it. This woman personifies the human powers of perception and conception as well as humanity's memory of its past. She is an associate of the Old Man. By her aid he has possession of the light that is able to illumine what is made evident already by external reality. But the powers of conception and of remembrance are not united in life with the concrete forces active in the evolution of the individual man and in the historical life of humanity. The power of conception and of remembrance cleaves to the past; it conserves the things of the past so that they make their claims upon all that is becoming and evolving in the present. The conditions—maintained by memory—in which the individual and the human race are always living, are the crystallisation of this power of the soul.

Schiller writes of them in the third of the Aesthetic Letters: “He (man) was introduced into this state by the power of circumstances, before he could freely select his own position. Before he could adjust it according to the Laws of Reason, necessity has done so according to Natural Laws.” The river divides the two kingdoms, of free spiritual activity in supersensible existence and of necessity in material life. The unconscious soul powers, the Ferryman, transport man, whose origin is in the supersensible kingdom, into the material world. Here in the first place he finds himself in a realm wherein the powers of conception and remembrance have created conditions in which he has to live. But they separate him from the supersensible world; he feels himself beholden to them when he must approach the power (the Ferryman) that has brought him unconsciously out of the supersensible world into the material sense world. He can only break the power which these conditions have over him, and which is revealed in the deprivation of his freedom, when with the “Fruits of the Earth” that is to say, with self-created life wisdom, he frees himself from the obligation imposed upon him by the conditions, from coercion. If he cannot do this, these conditions—the water of the river—take his individual wisdom away from him. He is swallowed up into his soul being.

[ 16 ] On the river stands the Temple in which the marriage of the Young Man with the Lily takes place. The “marriage” with the supersensible, the realisation of the free personality, is possible in a human soul whose forces have been brought into a state of regularity that in comparison with the usual state is a transformation. The life experience previously acquired by the soul is so far mature that the force directed to it is no longer exhausted in adapting man to the world of sense. This force becomes the content of what is able to stream into man's inner being from the supersensible world in such a way, that, acts in the material sense world become the fulfilment of supersensible impulses. In this condition of soul, those spiritual powers of man which previously flowed along mistaken or one-sided channels, assume their new significance in the character as a whole,—a significance adequate for a higher state of consciousness. The wisdom of the Will-o'-the-Wisps, for example, which has broken loose from the sense world and has wandered into superstitution or chaotic thought, serves to open the door of the Palace, that is the personification of the soul condition wherein the chaotic alloy of Will, Feeling and Cognition holds man in chain within a constricted inner life shut off from the supersensible world.

[ 17 ] In the wonder pictures of the composition Goethe approached the panoramic evolution of the human soul before his spiritual vision in that frame of mind which is conscious of estrangement in face of the supersensible until it attains those heights of consciousness where life in the sense world is permeated by the supersensible, spiritual world to such an extent that the two become one. This process of transformation was visible to Goethe's soul in delicately woven figures of phantasy. Through the Conversations of German Emigrants shines the problem of the relation of the physical world to a world of supersensible experience free of every element of sense with its consequences for the communal life of man. This problem finds a far-reaching solution at the end of the fairy tale in a panorama of poetic pictures. This Essay merely indicates the path leading to the realm where Goethe's imagination wove the fabric of the fairy tale. Living understanding of all the other details can be developed by those who realise the fairy tale to be a picture of man's soul life as it strives towards the supersensible world. Schiller realised this fully. He writes: “The fairy tale is full of colour and humour and I think that you have given most charming expression to the ideas of which you once spoke, namely, in reference to the reciprocal interplay of the powers and their reaction on each other.” [ 18 ] For even when it is objected that this reciprocal interaction of the powers refers to powers of different men, we can plead the well-known Goethean truth that although the soul powers from one point of view are distributed among different human beings, they are nothing but the divergent rays of the collective human soul. And when different human natures work together in a common existence we have in this mutual action and reaction nothing more nor less than a picture of the multifarious forces and powers constituting in their reciprocal relationships the one collective individual being, Man.

• 1. This essay is an elaboration of my article Goethe's Secret Revelation which appeared in the Literary Magazine in 1899, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Goethe's birthday.!

My dear friends,

You will perhaps have noticed that in our considerations here, we are striving for a certain particular goal. We are trying to place together a series of phenomena taken from the realm of heat in such a manner that the real nature of warmth may be obvious to us from these phenomena. We have become acquainted in a general way with certain relations that meet us from within the realm of heat, and we have in particular observed the relation of this realm of the expansionability of bodies. We have followed this with an attempt to picture to ourselves mentally the nature of form in solid bodies, fluids and gaseous bodies. I have also spoken of the relation of heat to the changes produced in bodies in going from the solid to the fluid and from the fluid to the gaseous or vaporous condition. Now I wish to bring before you certain relations which come up when we have to do with gases or vapors. We already know that these are so connected with heat that by means of this we bring about the gaseous condition, and again, by appropriate change of temperature that we can obtain a liquid from a gas. Now you know that when we have a solid body, we cannot by any means interpenetrate this solid with another. The observation of such simple elementary relations is of enormous importance if we really wish to force our way through to the nature of heat. The experiment I will carry out here will show that water vapor produced here in this vessel passes through into this second vessel. And now having filled the second vessel with water vapor, we will produce in the first vessel another vapor whose formation you can follow by reason of the fact that it is colored. (The experiment was carried out.) You see that in spite of our having filled the vessel with water vapor, the other vapor goes into the space filled with the water vapor. That is, a gas does not prevent another gas from penetrating the space it occupies. We may make this clear to ourselves by saying that gaseous or vaporous bodies may to a certain extent interpenetrate each other.

I will now show you another phenomenon which will illustrate one more relation of heat to certain facts. We have here in the left hand tube, air which is in equilibrium with the outer air with which we are always surrounded. I must remind you that this outer air surrounding us is always under a certain pressure, the usual atmospheric pressure, and it exerts this pressure on us. Thus, we can say that air inside the left hand tube is under the same pressure as the outer air itself, which fact is shown by the similar level of mercury in the right and left hand tubes. You can see that on both right and left hand sides the mercury column is at the same height, and that since here on the right the tube is open to the atmosphere the air in the closed tube is at atmospheric pressure. We will now alter the conditions by bringing pressure on the air in the left hand tube, (\(2\) × \(p\)). By doing this we have added to the usual atmospheric pressure, the pressure due to the higher mercury column. That is, we have simply added the weight of the mercury from here to here. (Fig. 1b from \(a\) to \(b\)). By thus increasing the pressure exerted on this air by the pressure corresponding to the weight of the mercury column, the volume of the air in the left hand tube is, as you can see, made smaller. We can therefore say when we increase the pressure on the gas its volume decreases. We must extend this and consider it a general phenomenon that the space occupied by a gas and the pressure exerted on it have an inverse ratio to each other. The greater the pressure the smaller the volume, and the greater the volume the smaller must be the pressure acting on the gas. We can express this in the form of an equation where the volume \(V_1\) divided by the volume \(V_2\) equals the pressure \(P_2\) divided by the pressure \(P_1\).

From which it follows:

This expresses a relatively general law (we have to say relative and will see why later.) This may be stated as follows: volume and pressure of gases are so related that the volume-pressure product is a constant at constant temperature. As we have said, such phenomena as these must be placed side by side if we are to approach the nature of heat. And now, since our considerations are to be thought of as a basis for pedagogy we must consider the matter from two aspects. On the one hand, we must build up a knowledge of the method of thinking of modern physics and on the other, we must become acquainted with what must happen if we are to throw aside certain obstacles that modern physics places in the path to a real understanding of the nature of heat.

Please picture vividly to ourselves that when we consider the nature of heat we are necessarily dealing at the same time with volume increases, that is with changes in space and with alterations of pressure. In other words, mechanical facts meet us in our consideration of heat. I have to speak repeatedly in detail of these things although it is not customary to do this. Space changes, pressure changes. Mechanical facts meet us.

Now for physics, these facts that meet us when we consider heat are purely and simply mechanical facts. These mechanical occurrences are, as it were, the milieu in which heat is observed. The being of heat is left, so to speak, in the realm of the unknown and attention is focused on the mechanical phenomena which play themselves out under its influence. Since the perception of heat is alleged to be purely a subjective thing, the expansion of mercury, say, accompanying change of heat condition and of sensation of heat, is considered as something belonging in the realm of the mechanical. The dependence of gas pressure, for instance, on the temperature, which we will consider further, is thought of as essentially mechanical and the being of heat is left out of consideration. We saw yesterday that there is a good reason for this. For we saw that when we attempt to calculate heat, difficulties arise in the usual calculations and that we cannot, for example, handle the third power of the temperature in the same way as the third power of an ordinary quantity in space. And since modern physics has not appreciated the importance of the higher powers of the temperature, it has simply stricken them out of the expansion formulae I mentioned to you in former lectures.

Now you need only consider the following. You need consider only that in the sphere of outer nature heat always appears in external mechanical phenomena, primarily in space phenomena. Space phenomena are there to begin with and in them the heat appears. This it is, my dear friends, that constrains us to think of heat as we do of lines in space and that leads us to proceed from the first power of extension in space to the second power of the extension.

When we observe the first power of the extension, the line, and we wish to go over to the second power, we have to go out of the line. That is, we must add a second dimension to the first. The standard of measurement of the second power has to be thought of as entirely different from that of the first power. We have to proceed in an entirely similar fashion when we consider a temperature condition. The first power is, so to speak, present in the expansion. Change of temperature and expansion are so related that they may be expressed by rectilinear coordination (Fig. 2). I am obliged, when I wish to make the graph representing change in expansion with change in temperature, to add the axis of abscissae to the axis of ordinates. But this makes it necessary to consider what is appearing as temperature not as a first power but as a second power, and the second power as a third. When we deal with the third power of the temperature, we can no longer stay in our ordinary space. A simple consideration, dealing it is true with rather subtle distinctions, will show you that in dealing with the heat manifesting itself as the third power, we cannot limit ourselves to the three directions of space. It will show you how, the moment we deal with the third power, we are obliged, so far as heat effects are concerned, to go out of space.

In order to explain the phenomena, modern physics sets itself the problem of doing so and remaining within the three dimensional space.

You see, here we have an important point where physical science has to cross a kind of Rubicon to a higher view of the world. And one is obliged to emphasize the fact that since so little attempt is made to attain clarity at this point, a corresponding lack enters into the comprehensive world view.

Imagine to yourselves that physicists would so present these matters to their students as to show that one must leave ordinary space in which mechanical phenomena play when heat phenomena are to be observed. In such a case, these teachers of physics would call forth in their students, who are intelligent people since they find themselves able to study the subject, the idea that a person cannot really know it without leaving the three dimensional space. Then it would be much easier to place a higher world-view before people. For people in general, even if they were not students of physics, would say, “We cannot form a judgment on the matter, but those who have studied know that the human being must rise through the physics of space to other relations than the purely spatial relations.” Therefore so much depends on our getting into this science such ideas as those put forth in our considerations here. Then what is investigated would have an effect on a spiritually founded world view among people in general quite different from what it has now. The physicist announces that he explains all phenomena by means of purely mechanical facts. This causes people to say, “Well, there are only mechanical facts in space. Life must be a mechanical thing, soul phenomena must be mechanical and spiritual things must be mechanical.” “Exact sciences” will not admit the possibility of a spiritual foundation for the world. And “exact science” works as an especially powerful authority because they are not familiar with it. What people know, they pass their own judgment on and do not permit it to exercise such an authority. What they do not know they accept on authority. If more were done to popularize the so-called “rigidly exact science,” the authority of some of those who sit entrenched in possession of this exact science would practically disappear.

During the course of the 19th century there was added to the facts that we have already observed, another one of which I have spoken briefly. This is that mechanical phenomena not only appear in connection with the phenomena of heat, but that heat can be transformed into mechanical phenomena. This process you see in the ordinary steam locomotive where heat is applied and forward motion results. Also mechanical processes, friction and the like, can be transformed back again into heat since the mechanical processes, as it is said, bring about the appearance of heat. Thus mechanical processes and heat processes may be mutually transformed into each other.

We will sketch the matter today in a preliminary fashion and go into the details pertaining to this realm in subsequent lectures.

Further, it has been found that not only heat but electrical and chemical processes may be changed into mechanical processes And from this has been developed what has been called during the 19th century the “mechanical theory of heat.”

This mechanical theory of heat has as its principal postulate that heat and mechanical effects are mutually convertible one into the other. Now suppose we consider this idea somewhat closely. I am unable to avoid for you the consideration of these elementary things of the realm of physics. If we pass by the elementary things in our basic consideration, we will have to give up attaining any clarity in this realm of heat. We must therefore ask the questions: what does it really mean then when I say: Heat as it is applied in the steam engine shows itself as motion, as mechanical work? What does it mean when I draw from this idea: through heat, mechanical work is produced in the external world? Let us distinguish clearly between what we can establish as fact and the ideas which we add to these facts. We can establish the fact that a process subsequently is revealed as mechanical work, or shows itself as a mechanical process. Then the conclusion is drawn that the heat process, the heat as such, has been changed into a mechanical thing, into work.

Well now, my dear friends, if I come into this room and find the temperature such that I am comfortable, I may think to myself, perhaps unconsciously without saying it in words: In this room it is comfortable. I sit down at the desk and write something. Then following the same course of reasoning as has given rise to the mechanical theory of heat, I would say: I came into the room, the heat condition worked on me and what I wrote down is a consequence of this heat condition. Speaking in a certain sense I might say that if I had found the place cold like a cellar, I would have hurried out and would not have done this work of writing. If now I add to the above the conclusion that the heat conducted to me has been changed into the work I did, then obviously something has been left out of my thinking. I have left out all that which can only take place through myself. If I am to comprehend the whole reality I must insert into my judgment of it this which I have left out. The question now arises: When the corresponding conclusion is drawn in the realm of heat, by assuming that the motion of the locomotive is simply the transformed heat from the boiler, have I not fallen into the error noted above? That is, have I not committed the same fallacy as when I speak of a transformation of heat into an effect which can only take place because I myself am part of the picture? It may appear to be trivial to direct attention to such a thing as this, but it is just these trivialities that have been completely forgotten in the entire mechanical theory of heat. What is more, enormously important things depend on this. Two things are bound together here. First, when we pass over from the mechanical realm into the realm where heat is active we really have to leave three dimensional space, and then we have to consider that when external nature is observed, we simply do not have that which is interpolated in the case, where heat is changed over into my writing. When heat is changed into my writing, I can note from observation of my external bodily nature that something has been interpolated in the process. Suppose however, that I simply consider the fact that I must leave three dimensional space in order to relate the transformation of heat into mechanical effects. Then I can say, perhaps the most important factor involved in this change plays its part outside of three dimensional space. In the example that concerned myself which I gave you, the manner in which I entered into the process took place outside of three dimensions. And when I speak of simple transformation of heat into work I am guilty of the same superficiality as when I consider transformation of heat into a piece of written work and leave myself out.

This, however, leads to a very weighty consequence. For it requires me to consider in external nature even lifeless inorganic nature, a being not manifested in three dimensional space. This being, as it were, rules behind the three dimensions. Now this is very fundamental in relation to our studies of heat itself.

Since we have outlined the fundamentals of our conception of the realm of heat, we may look back again on something we have already indicated, namely on man's own relation to heat. We may compare the perception of heat to perception in other realms. I have already called attention to the fact that, for instance, when we perceive light, we note this perception of light to be bound up with a special organ. This organ is simply inserted into our body and we cannot, therefore, speak of being related to color and light with our whole organism, but our relation to it concerns a part of us only. Likewise with acoustical or sound phenomena, we are related to them with a portion of our organism, namely the organ of hearing. To the being of heat we are related through our entire organism. This fact, however, conditions our relation to the being of heat. We are related to it with our entire organism. And when we look more closely, when we try, as it were, to express these facts in terms of human consciousness, we are obliged to say, “We are really ourselves this heat being. In so far as we are men moving around in space, we are ourselves this heat being.” Imagine the temperature were to be raised a couple of hundred degrees; at that moment we could no longer be identical with it, and the same thing applies if you imagine it lowered several hundred degrees. Thus the heat condition belongs to that in which we continually live, but do not take up into our consciousness. We experience it as independent beings, but we do not experience it consciously. Only when some variation from the normal condition occurs, does it take conscious form.

Now with this fact a more inclusive one may be connected. It is this. You may say to yourselves when you contact a warm object and perceive the heat condition by means of your organism, that you can do it with the tip of your tongue, with the tip of your finger, you can do it with other parts of your organism: with the lobes of your ears, let us say. In fact, you can perceive the heat condition with your entire organism. But there is something else you can perceive with your entire organism. You can perceive anything exerting pressure. And here again, you are not limited strictly as you are in the case of the eye and color perception to a certain member of your entire organism. If would be very convenient if our heads, at least, were an exception to this rule of pressure perception; we would not then be made so uncomfortable from a rap on the head.

We can say there is an inner kinship between the nature of our relationship to the outer world perceived as heat and perceived as pressure. We have today spoken of pressure volume relations. We come back now to our own organism and find an inner kinship between our relation to heat and to pressure. Such a fact must be considered as a groundwork for what will follow.

But there is something else that must be taken into account as a preliminary to further observations. You know that in the most popular text books of physiology, a good deal of emphasis is laid on the fact that we have certain organs within our bodies by means of which we perceive the usual sense qualities. We have the eye for color, the ear for sound, the organ of taste for certain chemical processes, etc. We have spread over our entire organism, as it were, the undifferentiated heat organ, and the undifferentiated pressure organ.

Now, usually, attention is drawn to the fact that there are certain other things of which we are aware but for which we have no organs. Magnetism and electricity are known to us only through their effects and stand, as it were, outside of us, not immediately perceived. It is said sometimes that if we imagine our eyes were electrically sensitive instead of light sensitive, then when we turned them towards a telegraph wire we would perceive the streaming electricity in it. Electricity would be known not merely by its effects, but like light and color, would be immediately perceived. We cannot do this. We must therefore say: electricity is an example of something for whose immediate perception we have no organ. There are aspects of nature, thus, for which we have organs and aspects of nature for which we do not have organs. So it is said.

The question is whether perhaps a more unbiased observer would not come to a different conclusion from those whose view is expressed above. You all know, my dear friends, that what we call our ordinary passive concepts through which we apprehend the world, are closely bound up with the impressions received through the eye, the ear and somewhat less so with taste and smell impressions. If you will simply consider language, you may draw from it the summation of your conceptual life, and you will become aware that the words themselves used to represent our ideas are residues of our sense impressions. Even when we speak the very abstract word Sein (being), the derivation is from Ich habe gesehen, (I have seen.) What I have seen I can speak of as possessing “being.” In “being” there is included “what has been seen.” Now without becoming completely materialistic (and we will see later why it is not necessary to become so), it may be said that our conceptual world is really a kind of residue of seeing and hearing and to a lesser extent of smelling and tasting. (Those last two enter less into our higher sense impressions.) Through the intimate connection between our consciousness and our sense impressions, this consciousness is enabled to take up the passive concept world.

But within the soul nature, from another side, comes the will, and you remember how I have often told you in these anthroposophical lectures that man is really asleep so far as his will is concerned. He is, properly considered, awake only in the passive conceptual realm. What you will, you apprehend, only through these ideas or concepts. You have the idea. I will raise this glass. Now, in so far as your mental act contains ideas, it is a residue of sense impressions. You place before yourself in thought something which belongs entirely in the realm of the seen, and when you think of it, you have an image of something seen. Such an immediately derived image you cannot create from a will process proper, from what happens when you stretch out your arm and actually grasp the glass with your hand and raise it. That act is entirely outside of your consciousness. You are not aware of what happens between your consciousness and the delicate processes in your arm. Our unconsciousness of it is as complete as our unconsciousness between falling asleep and waking up. But something really is there and takes place, and can its existence be denied simply because it does not enter our consciousness? Those processes must be intimately bound up with us as human beings, because after all, it is we who raise the glass. Thus we are led in considering our human nature from that which is immediately alive in consciousness to will processes taking place, as it were, outside of consciousness. (Fig. 3) Imagine to yourselves that everything above this line is in the realm of consciousness. What is underneath is in the realm of will and is outside of consciousness. Starting from this point we proceed to the outer phenomena of nature and find our eye intimately connected with color phenomena, something which we can consciously apprehend; we find our ear intimately connected with sound, as something we can consciously apprehend. Tasting and smelling are, however, apprehended in a more dreamlike way. We have here something which is in the realm of consciousness and yet is intimately bound up with the outer world.

If now, we go to magnetic and electrical phenomena, the entity which is active in these is withdrawn from us in contrast with those phenomena of nature which have immediate connection with us through certain organs. This entity escapes us. Therefore, say the physicists and physiologists: we have no organ for it; it is cut off from us. It lies outside us. (Fig. 3 above) We have realms that we approach when we draw near the outer world—the realms of light and heat. How do electrical phenomena escape us? We can trace no connection between them and any of our organs. Within us we have the results of our working over of light and sound phenomena as residues in the form of ideas. When, however, we plunge down (Fig. 3 below), our own being disappears from us into will.

I will now tell you something a bit paradoxical, but think it over until tomorrow. Imagine we were not living men, but living rainbows, and that our consciousness dwelt in the green portion of the spectrum. On the one side we would trail off into unconsciousness in the yellow and red and this would escape us inwardly like our will. If we were rainbows, we would not perceive green, because that we are in our beings, we do not perceive immediately; we live it. We would touch the border of the real inner when we tried, as it were, to pass from the green to the yellow. We would say: I, as a rainbow, approach my red portion, but cannot take it up as a real inner experience; I approach my blue-violet, but it escapes me. If we were thinking rainbows, we would thus live in the green and have on the one side a blue-violet pole and on the other side a yellow-red pole. Similarly, we now as men are placed with our consciousness between what escapes us as external natural phenomena in the form of electricity and as inner phenomena in the form of will.

It will be our task to-day to describe to a certain extent the human being during his sojourn in Devachan between death and new birth. In this connection we must first of all form an idea of that which man gains through the fact that during his passage through the spiritual world he is, to begin with, active for his own sake. We can picture this more easily if we bear in mind the relationship of two things: of that which we experience, and of that which our experience becomes during the time between birth and death.

Consider, for instance, everything which you experience when you learn to write. You would find it difficult, to remember all the things which you had to take in at that time in order to learn the or writing. Think of all admonishments of your teacher. Perhaps even of his anger! All this passed through your soul, and what has remained? The capacity to write. Everything else has become blurred and the art of writing has remained.

This is the course of things in life generally—not only during the life between birth and death, but in the whole life of the universe, both in the physical and in the super-sensible world.

It is possible to form a conception of how the things explained above are active in the super-sensible world. Let us, for example, take Mozart. When he was quite a young boy he heard a long piece of music at St. peters in Rome; according to an old tradition it was not allowed to write down this music, but Mozart wrote it down afterwards, from memory. What memories you must have had! And he could do this as a young boy! How do materialists explained this? They would protest energetically if they were asked to believe that an ox grows out of a piece of earth, that in animals such as the ox arises in a way which does not correspond to Nature. They say: Miracles do not exist ... and they are perfectly right in this. But in the face of spiritual things they become tremendously superstitious and believed in miracles at which point materialists simply accept back such as the one just now described from Mozart's life, and without further ado they place it to the account of heredity. Yet at Mozart's case, an explanation not arising out of a spiritual science describes just as great a miracle as that of an ox growing out of a piece of earth. For it is possible for a human being gradually to acquire an excellent memory if he turns his spirit again and again towards the same object. Memory develops in exactly the same way in which something perfect develops out of something imperfect, and it would be a miracle if Mozart's memory had grown out of nothing!

The answer of spiritual science to such a problem is that even in such a case upgrade developed gradually and naturally. If a materialists seeks an explanation for it, he cannot extricate himself otherwise that by admitting that he must either believe in miracles or that capacity is which does manifest themselves prove that they already existed in a former life and that they followed an entirely natural course of development.

Reincarnation is consequently the logical deduction of such a train of thought. And those who explain, through a materialistic way of looking at things, that such a perfect memory as that of the young boy Mozart can arise out of nothing, should follow their belief to a logical conclusion and admit, for instance, that frogs develop without further ado from mud—A fact which was accepted by a natural scientists before the time of Francesco Redi. Consequently, those who wish to be logical in spiritual science state: Even as an oak-tree grows out of the acorn and develops gradually, so our soul-capacities develop little by little, and when a human being enters life with capacities so highly developed as those of Mozart, this undeniably proves that the human being gained these capacities during former lives on earth. This gives us a clue to the comprehension of man's destiny in the spiritual world.

The essential point is therefore that the experiences of one life transform themselves into capacities for the succeeding life. All the dispositions of character which we bring with us in this life are the fruit of experiences gained during earlier lives on earth. For this reason it is necessary to study man's passage through Devachan in order to understand fully how the experiences of one life become capacities in the next life.

When we pass through our life on earth, we daily experience many things, and all these experiences appear in the panorama-picture already described to you, which rises up before the soul's eye immediately after death. But the capacities which we have gained through all these experiences remain as an essence, and we take along with us into the spiritual world this essence,which endures for all times to come.

When the human being enters Devachan, he perceives the regions described to you yesterday; the continental region, consisting of the archetypes of all earthly forms; the oceanic region, consisting of everything which is life; the air-region, consisting of everything pertaining to the soul, pleasure and pain, joy and suffering, etc. In the continental region the human being first perceives the archetype of his own physical body, and in the air-region he of course perceives, to begin with, also that which took place within his own soul during his past life on earth in the form of joy, suffering, pleasure, pain and passions. In other words, he once more perceives all the experiences of his past life, but in an entirely different way than during his passage through the Kamaloka period, which I have already described to you. In Kamaloka he lived through them once more in order to lose the habit of being dependent on them. In the watery region of Devachan man experiences all the peculiarities of his bodily life, and in the air-region of the celestial world he passes through all his psychic experiences.

It is important and of great interest to realise that everything which we have experienced in the course of one life—our feelings concerning the world, pleasure, pain, etc.—that in the spiritual world all this surrounds us as an external world. We need not feel sad that there our sufferings lie spread out before us. This is not sad at all, for there, all our sufferings exist in the same way in which storms exist in the physical world and in the spiritual world all our joyful experiences appear to us like wonderful cloud-phenomena. In Devachan our own inner experiences do not exist within us, as here on earth, but they live in our environment in an external form, in the same way in which a picture of Nature lies spread out before us. Our inner experiences live round about us, as if they were images, sounds or atmospheric phenomena; they have become objectified, as heavenly forms.

I have told you that it is not sad if our sufferings come raying towards us; just as little sad as lightning or thunder in physical life. Those who perceive these connections know what they owe to their sufferings in particular. Just those who have passed through pain and suffering will always say that they gratefully accept joy and pleasure, but that they would never wish to do without suffering and pain. We owe all Our wisdom to our suffering and pain during past lives on earth. A man whose physiognomy bears upon it the mark of wisdom in this life, owes this to the fact that in former lives he experienced the world's connection as suffering.

I have already explained to you that everything which we have experienced during our earthly-life lies spread out before us in pictures, etc, , when we enter Devachan. What does this signify? It will be easier to understand this if we realise what influence the environment exercises upon us. You all know Goethe's words: “The eye has been formed through the light and for the light.” What does this mean? The eye must exist in order to perceive the light. If we did not possess our eyesight the world would be dark and gloomy. But what is the origin of the human eye? It has been formed by the light itself, and similarly the eye would degenerate if there were no light. It has, for instance, been possible to observe this fact directly, in the case of animals who immigrated into the caves of Kentucky.

Light is the origin of the power of sight. Once upon a time man was not endowed with sight, because he still lived under quite different conditions; in earlier times of the earth's development the sun was not visible to an external sensory eye. Let us remember in this connection what the legends relate in regard to “Niflheim”.

The:more man lived exposed to the sun, the further the eye developed by the light of the sun. All the other sense organs developed in the same way: sound formed the ear, heat the sense of heat. We would have no sense of touch if there were no hard objects. The external world moulds and forms our body.

This is most important in practical life; in fact, theosophy is always meant to be applied to practical life. It is also most important in education, for only an educator who can look deeply into man's nature educate in the right way.

The physical body develops until the child changes its teeth, the etheric body develops up to the 14th/15th year, and the astral body up to the 21st year. We must know all this if education is to be approached practically and not fantastically. Since the disposition of the physical body is what we must bear in mind up to the seventh year, physical impressions, that is to say, everything which the child perceives through his sense organs, must be considered deeply and thoroughly. Sins of omission in education in connection with the form and disposition of the physical organs in the child's body, are a loss for the whole of life.

An insight into this last sentence gives medicine in particular many guiding lines for a right treatment of illnesses, among others, for instance, rickets, How is it that rickets arise just in this period of life? Just because; the child is moulding its body, and that is why these symptoms manifest themselves in the form (deformed bones, bad teeth, wrong form of the skull, etc.) But for this very reason the child is still able, until dentition, to correct the wrong forms and lead them back to a normal condition. We can see that even the most crooked legs grow straight again if the child receives the right treatment, and that perfectly sound second teeth can develop even if the milk-teeth were quite defective, whereas crooked legs which were not healed up to the seventh year remain crooked for the whole of life.

Up to the seventh year the brain is also engaged in the work of moulding its plastic forms, and the fine developments and forms of the brain's shape which could not be moulded up to that time are lost forever. Since the physical brain is the instrument through which the spirit manifests itself, it is of tremendous importance that this instrument should be moulded as finely as possible, that is to say, that it should be prepared during, the first seven years of life. For even the greatest individuality can do nothing with a defective brain, just as the greatest pianist cannot play well on a piano which is out of tune. Spiritual science, can give most important guidance to pedagogy, as well as to medicine, particularly in regard to the development of the brain.

In modern medicine one comes across a complete misunderstanding of facts particularly in this field. Rickets manifest themselves in a deformation of the bones, but very frequently they also appear in the shape of a defective glandular system and diseased mucous membranes; that is to say, children affected with rickets frequently have symptoms of swollen glands, adenoid growths, etc. A third pathological symptom in such children is that at school they frequently remain behind spiritually and that they become apathetic, indeed even slightly idiotic. In reality this is based on the defective development of the physical brain, particularly of its so-called corticose substance, which must above all be developed in its finest structure during these years. And in the same way the other symptoms are based on defective development.

Through the modern natural-scientific training and attitude, modern medicine is in such cases more than inclined to follow the example of modern natural science, namely to look upon the external symptoms as cause and effect, linking them up together like pearls on a chain and completely ignoring the deeper spiritual causes. What is the result? The facts are: rickety bones, adenoid growths, diminished attention and comprehension on the child's part. The conclusion to which modern doctors arrive is: Children with adenoid growths become mentally defective Owing to those growths; consequently it is necessary to remove them. The growths are consequently removed by operation. If this conclusion were right, every child who underwent such a treatment would respond to it by the disappearance of the impediments in the brain. But what is observed after such a treatment in the great majority of cases? The operation results in a sham success of brief duration, for the growths appear again after a very short time. But if the illness is to be attacked at its root—and this is quite possible, only now this would lead us too far away from our subject—the deformed bones, the swollen mucous membranes and glands disappear, as well as the impediments in the working of the brain.

After this digression, let us new return to our subject. The external world thus calls into being and moulds the right physical forms. Up to the seventh year, the child is in reality nothing but sense-organ. Everything which it takes in with its senses is elaborated ; above all, what it sees and hears in its immediate environment. Until dentition, the child is therefore an imitative being, and,this goes as far as its physical organisation. This is quite natural. Through its sense-organs, the child takes in its whole environment. And it is always practicing how to use it to limbs. It watches how its father or mother, etc. do this or that thing, and it simply imitates them. This goes as far as the movements of hands and legs. If the father or the mother are, for instance, fidgety people, then the child will also become fidgety in countless cases; if the mother is calm, then the child will of course, also become calm. We must try to produce the right counter-condition by placing the child in a right environment.

It is absolutely necessary to stimulate the child's fantasy, besides giving it sensory impressions, if it is to receive the influences needed for the development of the physical brain. It is consequently necessary to give a small child toys which are as simple as possible. A natural child will again and again turned to the “old doll”, made of a rag, no matter how beautiful the “new doll” which it receives. Only the spoiled children of our age are brought up on “beautiful”dolls. What is the reason for this? The child must exert its fantasy in order to transform the red-doll in its fancy into something resembling human shape, and this is a sound activity for the brain. Even as the arm grow stronger through gymnastic exercises, so the brain develops through this exercise.

Also the colours in, the child's surroundings are important. They exercise quite a different influence upon a small child than upon an adult. Many people think that green has a calming effect upon children. But this is quite wrong. A fidgety child should be surrounded with red and a calm child with green or blue-green. The effect of red upon the child is as follows: If you look upon a bright red and then turn your gaze away quickly to a piece of white paper you will see its complementary colour, which is green. ... By this I mean to, illustrate the tendency which the eye has to produce the opposite colour. The child also attempts to do this; inwardly he seeks to unfold the activity which calls forth the counter-colour. This is an example showing how the environment can influence a child.

In a similar way the child is influenced by everything which surrounds it, in addition to many, many things which I shall explain later, in another connection. All this contributes to a very great extent to the development of the child's physical body, from its birth to dentition; to the development of the etheric body, from the seventh to the fourteenth year; or to the development of the astral body, from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year, etc. Indeed, during the whole life the surrounding world exercises its influence upon the human being. The proverb, “Tell me with whom you go, and I will tell you who you are”, is based on this insight, for “with whom you go” means “what takes place in my environment”. This environment therefore has a strong influence upon us. This applies particularly to the time when the astral body develops, from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year, and it is an almost daily experience that a young person can easily be astrally corrupted by his environment during these years.

It is exactly the same in Devachan, as here in physical life. Even as here on earth the human being is constantly exposed to the influences of the atmosphere, so he is also exposed to them in Devachan—and there the atmosphere consists of all psychic life, our own and that of our fellow men. All this soul life continually influences the, human being, and gifts and talents develop through the fact that they attract the psychically kindred astral forces from the environment, allowing them to exercise their influence. Mozart was born with such a great musical memory because in a former life he had gathered experiences having this goal in view, and then allowed these experiences to exercise their influence for a long time, during his life in Devachan. Through our environment in Devachan we pass through an enhanced development of our innermost being—indirectly, through all our experiences during our preceding life on earth.

All our capacities are therefore the fruit of former lives, and in Devachan they have been further developed. This is the bliss-giving feeling in Devachan. In Devachan we hatch out what we are able to do in our present life, And in accordance with this is the feeling which we have during the whole intermediary time of our Devachan existence: This feeling, connected with everything productive, is bliss.

Here on earth we often feel pain, but in Devachan even pain is bliss, for there we realise, that we acquire wisdom through pain. Even a materialistic scientist has discovered this fact his book “Mimic of Thought” he writes: “Every wise countenance reveals the expression of crystallised suffering”. From the pains of his preceding life the human being in fact produces through his experiences in Devachan talents and wisdom for his next life on Earth. And the feeling of producing this is one of untold bliss.

You may see a pale reflection of this here on earth in a hatching hen. If you transfer this to the spiritual plane and enhance it immensely you obtain the feeling of incessant infinite bliss between the time of Kamaloka and a new birth,—for then the human being works out all his dispositions and capacities for the next life. Everything there becomes a source of blissful life.

We have therefore seen that one source of bliss in Devachan is all the ties formed here on earth are formed once more in Devachan, indeed we experience the spiritual part of those relationships in an immensely enhanced form. The other source of bliss is the productive, creative activity for our next life, as described above.

If the spiritual investigator now turns his gaze upon this activity of man in Devachan he perceives that this productive work has a meaning not only for the individual human being and for his future organisation, but that the human being must contribute and cooperate in a significant way in the progress of the whole evolution of the earth. It is an error to think that in Devachan we are only concerned with our own affairs. How must we work, as blissful spirits in the realm of spirits?

The activity of the dead is a cooperation in the development of our earth . . . We might easily ask: Why are we always born again, after having passed through the experiences of one earthly life? Is not reincarnation useless?

But this is not the case. It is never useless for a man to be born again. The single lives on earth are so far apart , that we always learn something new and pass through new experiences. Centuries elapse between two incarnations, and when we return, the earth has completely changed. Let us suppose that we lived on earth in the second century after Christ. What aspect did the earth present at that time? Even the descriptions of this region, of the Elbe and the Weser etc. of a much later period would be quite different from present descriptions, for here, in Nassau-Hessen, there were still virgin forests.

When the human being is born again, he experiences something quite different from his former life. During our various lives on earth we participate in the development of the earth itself, through the very fact that we incarnate again and again. In addition there is the change brought about by every civilisation. Think of what a Roman boy was able to do! Of the great difference in the education of a boy of the present time! As we have seen, all these experiences are immensely important. It therefore has a deep significance that the human being must always come back again.

Let us now ask: Who changes the face of the earth? The dead themselves, who live in the spirit-realm, do this, through the power which they there acquire, enabling them to work upon this transformation of the earth. Even as human beings are here active externally upon the earth, so the dead are active upon the spiritual prototype of the physical earth. It is they who send their forces into this physical earth, cooperating in its transformation. Of course, there are leaders in this work and higher beings who take over the guidance. In this spiritual realm—which is in our very midst—the dead work upon the transformation of the countenance of the earth.

Why am I in this very place to-day? Why have I been born here? Because I myself have, so to speak, prepared my bed in the very place where I was born. The forces which have a transforming influence both upon the oceans and, upon the surface of the earth, are the forces of our dead. We know that the Atlantic Ocean of to-day was once upon a time a wide expanse of land; this transformation too has been brought about by our dead, and these forces are quite natural and in no way miraculous.

An insight into such things proves with absolute logic the importance and necessity of this work in the spirit realm. If we only know how to interpret the phenomena in the right way, we may even describe this work. Here on earth we breathe the air; we could not live without air. It is similar with the dead, except that there the light plays the same part which the air plays here on earth. The initiate perceives the dead in the midst of light, which is spread out everywhere. A clairvoyant seer, for instance, sees the plants surrounded by the spirits of the dead and these spirits of the dead make the plant grow through the light and change the plant. In the spiritual world we shall all soar above the earth and work upon the plants.

If we thus contemplate the world in connection with the spiritual beings, it becomes larger and more significant to us.

In conclusion, let me mention a few things which can help us to understand certain fine details in our civilisation.

At times, the seer finds that his own observations are confirmed by phenomena in the history of ancient peoples, which before were enigmas to him. It is, for instance, a well known fact that at first primitive nations possess a kind of clairvoyance enabling them to see things of which we have no idea. These primitive races often saw in the shadow, for example, something which is connected with the soul. The clairvoyant now returns to this through his own observations. For if you look in to the shadow which you yourself throw, you first learn to perceive your own spiritual emanations. If we retain the physical light, we perceive the spiritual in the shadow-space. This knowledge has been preserved in occult science, and many who had no inkling of this truth have used it, for example, Chamisso in his “Peter Schlemihl”. This is a man who lost his shadow and is very unhappy over this. But it is a spiritual fact that the soul is visible in the shadow, and the man without a shadow is therefore a man without a soul.

There are hundreds of examples of this kind. We really learn to know the world fully if we learn to know its spiritual foundations. Spiritual science therefore is not for brooding people, but for those who wish to be active in practical life. We do not wish to withdraw from the visible world, but rather to understand it better.

The higher facts are related to the visible world as magnetism is related to iron. We learn to know iron fully if we also learn to know magnetism. A few examples will show us that especially that which we learn to know in the spiritual world bears fruit in practical life.

It can be seen from what has been said about evolution and involution that it is possible to ask with every phenomenon: What has evolved? [What is in involution?]

Looking at the physical Earth we will find different states of aggregation—solid, fluid, gaseous and ether-like. Physical substances are only perceptible to human [senses] from the outside; they also have an inner aspect, and this is in involution. The outer one, which is evolved, is perceptible to the senses.

Taking fire, air and water, we can say that they are representative of the three levels of which we have spoken:

fire - level of existence air - level of life water - level of conscious awareness.

The way we put it is to say that water is in some way related to conscious awareness, since for the physical human being the astral is the principle in which he becomes aware of himself in sentience.

When we go to the Earth, we have reached the level of existence; when he [the human being] becomes earthly, he gains self-awareness. These four states of aggregation thus represent four states in the human being: existence, life, conscious awareness and then again existence.

Let us go back to the state in which the human being was the way which has been described so often: like jellyfish or gel, not yet having reached the stage then of using air as such in himself. He was a water human being. It is evident that the organ used to take in air would have served no purpose then. It did not [exist], in fact and [hence also] not the creatures of the air, the birds. We were in the process of preparing for the lung human being and the creatures which arose in consequence.

The human being was preparing to take in air, which could only be done by ... him preparing an outer form for himself in which the formless principle concerned would be able to live. The lung is nothing but the evolution of the principle which is in involution in the air. The lung is thus the evolution of life [air].

Let us remember: The human being evolved from a lungless animal to one with lungs, he created form for himself, and life was able to enter into the form. The concomitant was the bird world. The gel-like human being grew solid, taking chaotic matter, dust-like at the time, into himself, and parallel to this assimilation of matter went that of air. Two things happened: assimilation of earthly dust and absorption of the principle of life with the air. He became living from within, in the soul.

We must also note the following. The bird world is something which remains as an eternal symbol of the living human soul. Hence the phoenix forever rising from the ashes in renewal and perishing in the flames.

A process such as the creation of a form through a principle must be seen as something typical.

Earlier, the air as such was the outer vestment of the life principle contained in it, and now the lung [which] is the outer vestment for the life principle contained in the human being.

The relationship between macrocosmic life and air is like the relationship between microcosmic human life and lung.

Once again the Bible can be taken literally: putting together earth dust and the living human being.

If we consider the whole of evolution, every mineral state of life is preceded by three earlier states, and there are three to follow. Let us ask ourselves, what is the relationship between these seven states? In the middle one we have a particular relationship between existence, life and conscious awareness. It is more or less in balance. If we think of them being evenly distributed, we get the middle planet, balance:

existence of body \(a\), life or soul \(b\), spirit or conscious mind \(c\). The planet is in its middle state:

Other relationships are possible (\(=\) equal, \(>\) predominant):

No others are possible.

When existence is grossly preponderant over the other states, so that life and conscious awareness are seed-like, we have the arupa state. If we let life be such that it contains existence, we have form, rupa. If conscious awareness preponderates ... [gap], we have the astral. When they are equal [we have] the physical.

In the arupa state we have existence in evolution, life and conscious awareness in involution. Rupa state: existence and life evolved, conscious awareness in involution. Astral state: all three evolved, but existence and life greater than conscious awareness. In the physical, approximate equality of proportions.

We have now tried to approach these things from different points of view, keeping our concepts fluid as we attach them to these things.

An important occult maxim is to see any form of understanding merely as a vestment for the essential nature. This must live in us. We must all the time make garments and vestments of the nature of the thing in us, but be aware that the nature of the thing is not in those vestments and garments. The moment we have found a form that expresses the inner nature of the thing we have made the esoteric exoteric. The esoteric can thus never be told in any but an exoteric form.

Create forms of understanding all the time, but also always overcome the forms of understanding you have created for yourself. First it is you, secondly are the forms of understanding you have created, thirdly it is you again, having made those forms your own and overcome them. This means that you are existence first, then life in the forms you have created, and thirdly conscious awareness in the life forms which you have assimilated. Or: you are you and need to evolve in your forms, so that you may then let the evolved forms go through involution in you.

Human understanding is thus also existence, life and conscious awareness.

It is impossible to see the all and everything of a truth in a dogma or teaching; the dogma is only the second element. We need to overcome it; then we have seen the truth of things for ourselves. Hence the important maxim:

Human beings have to be dogmatic in order to perceive the truth, but they must never consider the dogma to be the truth. And this gives us the life of someone seeking the truth; he can recast the dogma in the fire of concept.

Occultists therefore work with dogma in the freest possible way.

This insight, this stroke in the world of concept and then again counter stroke, is called ‘dialectics’, whilst holding fast to concepts is called ‘logic’. Dialectics is therefore the life of logic, and someone who understands the spirit of dialectics will transform dead, rigid concepts into living ones when he comes to the higher regions of perceptive insight, that is, he will assign them to particular persons. He will transform logic into dialogue. Thus Plato made logic into dialectics, transforming it into dialogue.

Goethe's green serpent⁹³

God - wisdom
Light - form in which wisdom comes into its own

What is more glorious than light? Dialogue!

Conclusion of Rudolf Steiner’s Eleven European Mystics, Angelus Silesius:⁹⁴

My friend, it is good so. In case you want to read more Go and be yourself the script, yourself the essence.

• 93. Refers to Goethe’s Tale of the Green Snake and the Fair Lily. See Rudolf Steiner’s Goethe’s Standard of the Soul GA 22, tr. D. S. Osmond, London: Anthr. Publ. Co. 1925.
• 94. Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modem Age GA 7, tr. K. E. Zimmer, Blauvelt: Steinerbooks 1980.

Dear children, dear teachers, and dear parents who are here today! Each year when Easter comes, it is a very special festival for the school, a special festival for children to experience and a special festival for all of human existence. This festival is anticipated in the beautiful language that nature now begins to speak to us.

Of course nature is always beautiful, and anyone who is sensitive to it can find beauty in it even in winter, when the snow makes its way up the mountains and covers the ground and the trees in a way that is almost sad. It is beautiful then, too, but it is cold outside, and that makes our souls cold and reminds us of how often life chills our hearts and souls.

But then in spring, as Easter approaches, the seeds sprout and the flowers spring up out of the ground. The March violets are a greeting from the sunlight and the world-spirit itself. And the green reminds us of our hopes in life, of what we wish to have from life. The color of hope, of wishing, and of joy in life is there in the green.

Turning from nature to our school of life, because we must say that a school of life is what the Waldorf School intends to be—and now I am speaking to you, dear children—the fact that life is now beginning to unfold outside makes Easter a festival that has a great effect on the school, on the children and on the teachers and on the parents, who are the most important thing standing behind the school’s children and faculty. At Easter-time, the new children enter our school.

This is when the teachers see the life task they face in educating these new children. This is when a wonderful soul-relationship has to come about between the teachers and the parents who are entrusting their children to them. At Easter-time, for a number of children and teachers, something begins that will continue for years as these teachers grow close to these children whom they love so dearly.

But at the same time, there is something different associated with Easter. It is also the time for graduation from school, as is now the case with us for many of the eighth graders and all of the twelfth graders. This is the time when their teachers are heavy-hearted, because they have grown close to these children in soul and in spirit. It is also the time when we can see the heavy hearts of the children who must now leave this school, which was a preparatory school for life, a school where everything possible was meant to be done to show the hopeful side of life. They must now leave this bright, beautiful summertime of their lives and go out into an existence that is often raw and hard, where there is so much pain and so many joys to experience. Life has a lot to give us—joy and sadness and problems—and we must cope with it. And when the festival of Easter is approaching, as it is now, when we turn our gaze to the coming of Easter, we are reminded of how this festival is a very incisive one in the hearts and minds of students and teachers.

In welcoming their new students, teachers look toward everything that is to come. They feel their tasks as teachers especially strongly now, as they turn to the parents of these children and realize that these men and women are showing their confidence in them by bringing them their nearest and dearest. This is something meaningful that should enter the teachers’ hearts and be very deeply felt. The children come in, joyfully looking forward to what they will be graced with through their teachers love and through everything that human beings have brought forth.

Then we must also be aware of the departures, for one or the other student will have to leave this school. That is when we get the other feeling, a feeling of mixed wistfulness and sorrow in many respects. Especially for teachers, this engenders a very wistful sorrow in their hearts and minds, because they must now send the children they have grown to love out into life. These children must now seek for themselves what they and their teachers had sought together in school. But to this is added the satisfaction of being able to say as a teacher, “If you have succeeded, then they will take with them the strengths that you wanted to give them.” This thought is what makes graduation beautiful for the teachers and makes their Easter a happy one.

It is one of the nicest things about being a teacher to hear from the children when they have been out there in life for a while, sometimes years later, and to find out what has become of them—how they have found their place in life, what good fortune they have experienced, how they learned to bear sorrow. When these messages from the students make their way back into the school when the students are practically grown up, perhaps, and are firmly rooted in life, these are experiences that really give the teachers strength and reanimate them, even if they have been teaching for a long time.

If we make ourselves aware of everything that is working into the school at Easter-time, we get a feeling—and this is a feeling that you too should get, dear boys and girls—for what this time in school signifies in a whole human life between birth and death. It is a real summertime, life’s sun time, and Easter in particular, as it is now starting to happen in nature, reminds us of it.

Then the teachers realize how happy they are to have the confidence of people like the parents who entrust their children to them. Because of all the effort they have made, the teachers are then really able to experience this: For years and years the parents have entrusted what is dearest to them to us in full confidence, and the school is fortunate in having been able to not only uphold this confidence but also to justify it, so that the parents can see their children leaving school, full of hope on entering life, with the same satisfaction that they had in trustingly sending them off to school for the first time.

All this is present in our hearts and souls at this time of year. I merely wanted to say a few words to impress it on the hearts and souls of the students and teachers.

All this will come about if something that must be present becomes a general practice among the students, namely love and devotion toward the faculty and devotion toward what you are learning through this school. If the right love prevails in the Waldorf School among parents, teachers, and students, then in what love can do when people are to be led through life by all that is beautiful and grand, this life will be able to prevail and to give people the forces they need.

This is why I have always asked you if you have succeeded in learning to really love your teachers. If you can learn to love them even more, it will be possible for everything to well up out of this love as if from a spring of fresh water. Then you will learn everything, and the Easter season will give you all it can. I would like to ask you, “Do you love your teachers?” [They all shout, “Yes!”] That is nice of you. Now, in this love that has developed between you, look at the ones who are now leaving school and resolve to follow them through life with your loving glances, and a wonderful relationship of love and friendship will be able to develop. And then the Waldorf School will be like a sun, able to ray out beautifully into life.