The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today I wish, primarily, to bring before you some of the more comprehensive aspects in the development of karma, in order to be able gradually to go more and more into matters of detail. If we wish to gain insight into the course of karma, we must be able to imagine how the human being gathers his whole organization together as he descends out of the spiritual world into the physical. You will understand, my dear friends, that in the language of today there are no suitable expressions for certain processes which are practically unknown to modern civilization, and that, therefore, the expressions employed here for what takes place under certain conditions can only be approximate.

When we descend out of the spiritual into the physical world for an earth life, we have, to begin with, prepared our physical body by means of the stream of heredity. We shall see how this physical body is, nevertheless, connected in a certain sense with what the human being experiences between death and a new birth. Today, however, it will suffice if we are clear about the fact that the physical body is given to us from the earth; on the other hand, those members which we may describe as the higher members of the human being—the ether body, astral body, and ego—come down from the spiritual world.

The human being attracts, so to speak, the ether body out of the whole universal ether before he unites himself with the physical body which is given to him by heredity. The union of the soul-spirit man—i.e. ego, astral body, and ether body—with the physical human embryo can ensue only through the gradual withdrawal of the ether body of the maternal organism from the physical human embryo.

The human being, thus, unites himself with the physical germ after having attracted his ether body out of the common universal ether. The more precise descriptions of these events will occupy us later. At present we are to interest ourselves mainly in asking: Whence come the individual members of human nature which the human being possesses during earth life between birth and death?

The physical organism comes, as we have seen, from the stream of heredity, the etheric organism out of the universal ether from which it is attracted. The astral organism—of which the human being remains, we might say, in all respects unconscious or only sub-consciously aware during his earth life—this astral body contains all the results of the life between death and a new birth. And it is a fact that between death and a new birth, according to what the human being has become through his preceding earth lives, he comes, in the most manifold way, into relationship with other human souls who are also in the life between death and a new birth, or with other spiritual beings of a higher cosmic order who do not descend to earth in a human body, but have their existence in the spiritual world.

All that a man brings over from his former lives on earth according to what he was, according to what he has done, all this is met by the sympathy or antipathy of the beings whom he learns to know while he passes through the world between death and a new birth. What sympathies and antipathies he meets among the higher beings according to what he has done in his preceding earth life is of great significance for karma during this period; but, above all, it is of deep significance that he comes into relationship with those human souls with whom he was in relationship on earth, and that a peculiar reflection takes place between his own nature and the nature of the souls with whom he had this relationship. Let us assume that someone has had a good relationship with a soul whom he now encounters again between death and a new birth. All that the good relationship implies had lived in him during former earth lives. Then this good relationship is reflected in the soul, when this soul is encountered between death and a new birth. And it is really true that the human being during this passage through the life between death and a new birth sees himself reflected everywhere in the souls with whom he is now associated because he was associated with them on earth. If he did good to a human being, something is mirrored to him from the other soul; if he did him an evil turn, something is likewise mirrored to him from the other soul. And he has the feeling—if I may use the word “feeling” with the reservation made at the beginning of these observations—he has the feeling: “You have advanced this human soul. What you have experienced through advancing him, what you then felt for this soul, that impulse in your feelings which led to your attitude toward him, your own inner experiences in performing the deed that advanced this soul, come back to you from him. They are reflected to you from this soul. In another case you have injured a soul; what has lived in you during this injury is reflected to you.”

And the human being has actually spread out before him, as though in a mighty and wide-extending reflector, his previous earth lives, but chiefly the last one, mirrored from the souls with whom he was associated. And we gain the impression, just in regard to our life of action, that all that is departing from us. We lose the ego-feeling which we had on earth in the body, or we really lost it a long time ago between death and a new birth. Now, however, the ego-feeling arises in us from this whole reflection. With the mirroring of our deeds, we come to life in all the souls with whom we were associated during our earth life.

On earth, our I, our ego, was like a point. Here between death and a new birth, it is reflected to us everywhere from the periphery. This is an intimate association with other souls, but an association in accordance with the relations into which we have entered with them.

And in the spiritual world all this is a reality. If we go through a room hung with many mirrors, we see ourselves reflected in each one. But we also know that the reflections—according to ordinary human parlance—are “not there;” when we depart they do not remain; we are no longer reflected. But that which is reflected there in human souls remains as something present. And there comes a time in the last third of the life between death and a new birth when we form our astral body out of these mirrored images. We draw all this together to form our astral body, so that, in truth, when we descend from the spiritual world into the physical, we carry in our astral body what we have taken up again into ourselves, in accordance with the reflection to which our actions of the former earth life have given rise in other souls between death and a new birth. This gives us the impulses which impel us toward or away from the human souls with whom we are born again at the same time in the physical body.

In this way, between death and a new birth, the impulse for the karma of the new earth life is fashioned. I shall, very soon, have to describe the process more in detail by taking the ego into consideration also.

And now we can trace how an impulse from one life works on into other lives. Let us take, for example, the impulse of love. We can perform our deeds in relation to other human beings out of that impulse which we call love. There is a difference whether we perform our acts out of a mere sense of duty, of convention, of decency, or the like, or whether we perform them out of a greater or lesser degree of love.

Let us assume that during an earth life a human being is able to perform actions warmed through and through by love. This, indeed, remains as a real force in his soul. What he now takes with him as result of his deeds, what is mirrored there in the other souls, comes back to him as a reflection. And from this he forms his astral body with which he descends to the earth. There the love of the former earth life, the love which has streamed out of him and which now returns to him from other human beings, transforms itself into joy. So that, when the human being does something for his fellow-men that is sustained by love, something in connection with which love streams out of him and accompanies the deeds which advance his fellow-men, then the metamorphosis in the passage through life between death and a new birth is of such a character that what is outpouring love in one life on earth is, in the next earth life, transmuted, metamorphosed, into joy streaming toward him.

If you experience joy, my dear friends, through a human being in one earth life, you may be sure it is the outcome of the love which you have shown for him in a former life. This joy now flows back again into your soul during earth life. You know this inwardly warming feeling of joy. You know what meaning joy has in life, especially the joy which conies from human beings. It warms life, it sustains life, we may say that it gives wings to life. It is karmically the result of love bestowed.

In our joy, however, we again experience a relation to the other human being who gives us joy. So that in our former earth lives we have had something within us that made the love flow out from us; in our subsequent earth lives we already have, as a result, the inward experience of the warmth of joy. And that is again something that streams from us. A human being who is allowed to experience joy in life, is of importance to his fellow-men, has warming significance. A human being who has cause for going joylessly through life behaves differently toward his fellow-men from the one who is permitted to go through life joyfully.

But what is experienced in joy in the life between birth and death is reflected again in the souls of the most various kinds with whom we were associated on earth and who are now also in the life between death and a new birth. And this reflection, which in manifold ways then comes back to us from the souls of the human beings known to us on earth, this reflection works back in turn. We carry it again in our astral body when we descend into the next earth life—we are now dealing with the third earth life. Once more it is instilled, imprinted, in our astral body. And it now becomes in its result the underlying basis, the impulse for a quick and ready understanding of human beings and the world. It becomes the basis for that soul condition which sustains us by virtue of our having the ability to understand the world. If we find the conduct of human beings interesting and can take joy in it, if we understand their conduct and take interest in it in a given incarnation on earth, then that directs us back to the joy of our previous incarnation, to the love of our still earlier incarnation. Human beings who are able to go through the world with a free and open mind, so that the free and open mind permits the world to flow into them, so that they have an understanding for the world, these are human beings who have gained this attitude to the world through love and joy.

What we perform in our deeds out of love is altogether different from what we do out of a rigid and dry sense of duty. You know, indeed, that I have always emphasized in my books that the deeds springing from love are to be understood as the truly ethical, as the truly moral deeds. I have often been compelled to indicate the great contrast, in this regard, between Kant and Schiller. Kant, both in life and in knowledge, “kantified” [Kante in German means a hard edge or angle. (Note by translator)] everything. Through Kant, everything in knowledge became sharp and angular; and thus, also human conduct. “Duty, thou great and exalted name, thou who containest nothing of pleasure, nothing that curries favors ...” this passage I quoted in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity to the pretended vexation—not the sincere, but the pretended, hypocritical vexation—of many opponents, and I opposed to it what I must acknowledge to be my view: “Love, thou impulse that speaketh warmly to the soul. ...”

Over against the dry and rigid Kantian concept of duty, Schiller coined the expression: “Gladly I serve my friends; yet alas, I do it with pleasure, wherefore it oftentimes vexes me that I am not virtuous,” For, according to the Kantian ethics, that which we do out of inclination is not virtuous, but only that which we do out of the rigid concept of duty.

Now, there are human beings who, in the first place, do not attain to love. But, because they cannot tell their fellow-man the truth out of love (for if we love a human being we tell him the truth, and not lies), because they are unable to love, they tell the truth out of a sense of duty; since they cannot love, they refrain, merely out of a sense of duty, from thrashing their fellow-man, or boxing his ears, striking him, or doing something similar, when he does anything they do not like. There is, indeed, a difference between the deeds of love and acting out of a rigid sense of duty—which, to be sure, is absolutely necessary in social life, necessary for many things.

Now, the deeds that are done out of a rigid concept of duty, or out of convention or propriety, because it is “the proper thing to do,” will not call forth joy in the next earth life, but in that they pass in the same way through the reflection by the souls, as I have described it, they call forth in the next earth life something which we might describe as follows: We sense that we are an object of indifference to other human beings. Many a person carries through life the sense that he is an object of indifference to other human beings and suffers from it. And rightly he suffers from it, if he is of no concern to other human beings, for human beings are there for one another, and the human being is dependent upon not being a matter of indifference to his fellow-men. What the human being thus suffers here is simply the result of the lack of love in a former earth life where he behaved as a decent human being because of the rigid duty which hung over him like the sword of Damocles—I will not say, a sword of steel, for that would be disquieting for most dutiful people, but just like a wooden sword of Damocles.

We have now reached the second earth life. That which comes as joy from love becomes in the third life, as we have seen, a free and open heart, bringing the world near to us, giving us open-minded insight into all things beautiful and true and good. That which streams to us as indifference from other human beings, and what we experience thereby in one earth life, fashions us for the third, that is to say for the next earth life, into a human being who does not know what to do with himself. When such a person enters school, he is at a loss what to do with that which the teachers impart to him. When he grows a little older, he does not know whether to become a locksmith or Privy Councilor. He does not know what to do with himself in life. He actually drifts aimlessly through life without direction. In regard to his observation of the outer world, he is not exactly dull. Music, for instance, he understands well enough, but it gives him no pleasure. It is, after all, a matter of indifference to him whether the music is more or less good or more or less bad. To be sure, he feels the beauty of a painting or other work of art, but there is always something in his soul that irritates him: “What is the good of it, anyhow? To what purpose is all this?” These, in turn, are the things that make their appearance in karmic connection in the third earth life.

Now let us assume, however, that out of hate or an inclination to antipathy a human being does certain injuries to his fellow-men. Here we may imagine every conceivable degree. One individual with criminal feelings of hatred may harm his fellow-men. Or—I am omitting the intermediate stages—he may be a critic. To be a critic, one must always hate a little—unless one is a praising critic, and such critics are few nowadays, for it is not interesting to show recognition of other people's work; it becomes interesting only when one can make fun of things. Now, there are all manner of intermediate stages. But we have here to think of human deeds which proceed from a cold antipathy—antipathy about which we are often not at all clear—or, at the other extreme, from hatred. All that is brought about in this way by human beings against their fellow-men or even against sub-human creatures, all this vents itself in soul conditions which in turn also mirror themselves in the life between death and a new birth. And then, in the next earth life, out of the hatred is born that which streams to us from the world as sorrow, as unhappiness caused from without, as the opposite of joy.

You will reply: “But really, we experience so much sorrow; is that all due to hatred, greater or lesser hatred, in our preceding life? I cannot possibly imagine”—a man will be apt to say—“that I have been such a bad lot, so that I must experience so much sorrow, because I have hated so much.” Well, if we wish to think without prejudice on these things, we must become aware of how great is the illusion which gives us satisfaction and to which, therefore, we easily surrender if it is a question of our suggesting away from our conscious mind any feeling of antipathy against other human beings. People really go through the world with far more hatred than they think—at least, with far more antipathy. And it is a matter of fact that hatred, because it gives satisfaction to the soul, is not as a rule consciously experienced. It is eclipsed by the satisfaction it gives. But, when it returns as sorrow which streams to us from without, then we notice it, as sorrow.

But just consider for a moment, my dear friends—in order to represent in a quite trivial fashion what is present there as a possibility—think of an afternoon-tea chatter, a real, a genuine gossiping tea party where half a dozen (half a dozen is quite enough) “aunts” or “uncles”—it can be uncles, too—or “cousins,” if you will, are sitting together discussing their fellows. Just think how many antipathies are unloaded on human beings, say, in the course of an hour and a half—often it is longer. While this antipathy pours out, people do not notice it; but when it returns in the next earth life, then it will, indeed, be noticed. And it returns, inexorably.

Thus, in actual fact, a portion—not all; we shall still become acquainted with other karmic connections—a portion of what we experience in one earth life as sorrow caused from outside may very well be due to our feelings of antipathy in a former earth life.

In connection with all this we must, naturally, always realize that karma, that some sort of karmic stream, must begin at some time, somewhere. So that, if you have here, for example, a succession of earth lives:

a b c (d)

and this (d) is the present life; not all pain, naturally, that falls to our lot from without need be due to our former earth lives. It may also be an original sorrow, which will work itself out karmically only in the next earth life. I say, therefore, that a large part of that sorrow which streams to us from outside is a result of hate which was brought into being in former earth lives.

If we now proceed again to the third earth life, the result of what streams to us there as sorrow—but only the result of that sorrow which comes to us, so to speak, out of stored-up hate—the result of this sorrow which then unloads in our soul is, in the first place, a kind of mental dullness, a sort of dullness in the capacity of insight into the world. If you have a human being who confronts the world phlegmatically and with indifference, who does not confront the things of the world, or other human beings, with an open heart, the fact is, very often, that he has acquired this obtuseness of mind through the sorrow of a previous earth life, caused in his own karma. This sorrow, however, when it expresses itself in this way in obtuseness of soul must be retraced to the feelings of hatred which occurred at least in the second earth life prior to this one. We can be absolutely sure that stupidity in any one earth life is always the consequence of hatred in a certain former earth life.

Yet, my dear friends, the understanding of karma shall not rest only on the fact that we comprehend karma for the purpose of understanding life, but that we are also able to comprehend it as an impulse of life, that we are conscious that with life there is not merely an “a, b, c, d,” but also an “e, f, g, h,”

a, b, c, (d), e, f, g, h

that there are also earth lives still to come, and that what we develop as the content of our soul in a present earth life will have its effects, its results, in the next earth life. If any one wishes to be especially stupid in his second earth life after this one, he need, really, only hate a great deal in this present earth life. But, if someone wishes to have a free and open insight in the second earth life after this one, he need only love with special intensity in this earth life. And insight into karma, knowledge of karma, gains real value only through the fact that it flows into our will for the future, that it plays a role in this will for the future. And it is true in every respect that the moment is now at hand in the evolution of mankind when the unconscious can no longer continue to be effective in the same way it was effective previously, while our souls were passing through previous earth lives, for human beings are becoming constantly freer and more conscious.

Since the first third of the fifteenth century we have been in the age in which human beings are continually becoming freer and more conscious. Hence, those individuals who are human beings of the present time will have in a subsequent earth life a dim feeling of previous earth lives. And just as the modern man, if he notices that he is not very bright, does not ascribe this to himself, but to his natural lack of ability—the cause of which he usually seeks in his physical nature in accordance with the theories of modern materialism—so will the human beings who will be the re-incarnated human beings of the present time, have at least an obscure feeling which will worry them. If they are not very bright, they will feel that something must have taken place which was connected with feelings of hate and antipathy.

And, if we speak today of a Waldorf School pedagogy, we must naturally take into account the present earth civilization. We cannot yet educate in complete frankness in such a way that we consciously employ repeated earth lives in education, for modern human beings have not yet even a dim feeling for repeated earth lives. The beginnings, however, that have been made just in the Waldorf School pedagogy, if they are taken up, will continue to develop in the coming centuries with the result that the following will be included in ethical, moral education: If a child has little talent, it is due to former earth lives in which it has hated intensely, and we shall then, with the help of spiritual science, seek out whom it might have hated. For the human beings who were hated, and against whom deeds were committed out of hate, must be rediscovered somewhere in the child's environment. Gradually, in coming centuries, the education of a child will have to be related far more definitely to human life. We shall have to see, in regard to this dull child, whence that is reflected or has been reflected in the life between death and a new birth, which goes through a metamorphosis resulting in unintelligence in this earth life. We shall then be able to do something to the end that in childhood a special love is developed for those human beings for whom the child felt specific hatred in former earth lives. And we shall see that through such a specifically aroused and directed love, the child's intellect, nay, the child's whole soul state, will brighten.

It is not in general theories about karma that we shall find what can aid education, but in looking concretely into life in order to see what the karmic connections are. We shall soon notice that the fact that children are brought together in a school class by fate is, indeed, not something to be regarded with complete indifference. And when we shall have risen beyond the hideous carelessness that prevails in these things nowadays, when the “human material”—for so it is often called—which is thrown together in a school class is actually conceived as though it were thrown together by mere chance, not as though destiny had brought these human beings together,—if we shall have risen beyond this appalling indifference, we shall then gain a new outlook as educators, we shall then be able to perceive what strange karmic threads are spun from one child to the other as a result of former lives. And we shall then bring into the children's development that which can effect equalization.

In a certain respect, karma is under the domination of an inexorable necessity. Out of an inexorable necessity we are able definitely to establish the sequence:

These are unconditional connections. Although it is true that we are confronted by an absolute necessity when a river follows its course, yet we have frequently regulated rivers, have given them a different course. So in like manner is it also possible to regulate, if I may say so, the karmic stream, to affect its course. Indeed, this is possible.

Thus, if you notice that in childhood there is a tendency to idiocy, and if you then realize the necessity of guiding the child, especially of developing love in his heart, if you discover—and this should be possible even today for people with a fine observation of life,—if you discover to which other children the child is karmically related, and if you are able

to bring the child to the point of loving just these children, to perforin deeds of love for them, you will then see that you are able with love to give a counterweight to antipathy, and that you are able by means of it to correct this idiocy in the next incarnation, in the next earth life.

There are educators, trained, as it were, by their own instinct, who often do some such thing out of their instinct, who bring dull-witted children to the point where they are able to love, and thus educate them by degrees to become more intelligent human beings.

It is such things that make our insight into karmic connections of service to life.

Before we go further in considering the details of karma, yet another question will have to confront our souls. Just ask yourself: What is a human being really with whom—in general, at least—we may know ourselves to be karmically related? I must use an expression which is often used today rather ironically: such a man is a “contemporary”; he is on the earth at the same time that we are.

If you bear this in mind, you will say to yourself that, if you are associated with certain human beings in one earth life, you were associated with them in a previous earth life also (generally speaking, at least; matters may, of course, be somewhat shifted). And you were, likewise, associated with them in a still earlier life. (See Figure V)

Now, those individuals, who live fifty years later than you, were associated in turn with human beings in former earth lives. Generally speaking, the human beings of, let us say, the B series do not, in accordance with the thought we have developed here, come in contact with the human beings of the A series. This is an oppressive thought, but a true one.

I shall later speak about other debatable questions, such as arise, for instance, through the fact that people often say that humanity multiplies on the earth. Today, however, I should like to place the following thought before you; it is, perhaps, an oppressive thought, but it is none the less a true one. It is an actual fact that the continued life of men on earth takes place in rhythms. One shift of human beings—if I may put it so—proceeds, as a general rule, from one earth life to another; another shift of human beings does the same, and they are in a certain sense separated from one another; they do not come together during earth life. To be sure, in the long intervening life between death and a new birth they do come together; but for earth life it is, indeed, a fact that we descend to the earth with a limited circle of people. To be “contemporaries” has an inner meaning, an inner importance just for repeated earth lives.

Why is it so? I can assure you, this question which, in the first place, may occupy us intellectually, has caused me the greatest imaginable pain in the field of spiritual science, because it is necessary to discover the truth regarding this question, the inner nature of the facts. And thus, we may ask ourself—forgive my using an example which really concerns me only as a matter of research—we may ask ourself the question: “Why were you not a contemporary of Goethe's? By your not a contemporary of Goethe's you can, according to this truth, conclude on general principles that you have never lived with Goethe on the earth. Goethe belongs to another shift of human beings.”

What really lies behind this? Here we must reverse the question. But to do so we must have an open, liberal mind for human social relationships. We must be able to ask ourself a question—and I shall have very much to say in the near future about this question—we must be able to ask ourself the question: What is it really to be another man's contemporary? What is it, on the other hand, to be able to know of him only from history, so far as the earth life is concerned? What does this mean?

Well, my dear friends, we must have an open, liberal mind in order to answer the intimate question: “How do matters stand with regard to all the inner accompanying phenomena of the soul when a contemporary of yours speaks to you, performs actions which come near you? How do matters stand?” And, after having acquired the necessary knowledge, you must then be able to compare this with what the situation would be were you to come into contact with a personality who is not your contemporary, perhaps has never been such in any life on earth, and whom you may, nevertheless, revere to the highest degree, much more, perhaps, than any of your contemporaries—what would be the situation were you to encounter this personality as a contemporary? In a word—pardon the personal note—what would the situation be, had I been a contemporary of Goethe? If you are not an indifferent kind of person—naturally, if you are an indifferent person and have no comprehension of what a contemporary can be, you cannot very well answer such a question—then you can ask the question: “How would it be if I, walking down the Schillergasse in Weimar toward the Frauenplan, had seen the fat Privy Councilor approaching me, say in the year 1826, 1827?” Now, we know quite well, we could not have stood it. Our contemporary we can stand. If the one with whom we cannot be contemporary were, nevertheless, our contemporary, we should not be able to endure him; he would, in a certain sense, act like a poison on our soul life. We endure him as a historical character, because he is not our contemporary, but our successor or predecessor.

Of course, if we have no feeling for such things, they remain in the unconscious. We can well imagine that a certain man has a fine feeling for the spiritual and knows that, had he walked down the Schillergasse in Weimar toward the Frauenplan, and had he, as a contemporary, encountered the fat Privy Councilor Goethe with the double chin, he would then have felt himself in an inwardly impossible state. The one, however, who has no feeling for such things—well, he would, perhaps, have taken off his hat!

These things, my dear friends, do not derive from the earth life, be- cause the reasons why we cannot be the contemporary of some particular man are not to be found within earth life, because here we must penetrate with our preception into the spiritual relationships. This is why, for earth life, such things appear at times paradoxical. Nevertheless, they are facts, most certainly facts.

I can assure you that I wrote with genuine love an Introduction to Jean Paul's works, published in the Cotta'sche Bibliothek der Weltliteratur. Yet, if I had ever had to sit side by side with Jean Paul at Bayreuth—without doubt, I should have had a stomach ache. That does not hinder us from having the highest reverence. But such an experience comes to every human being, only, with most people it remains in the subconscious, in the astral or in the ether body; it does not take hold of the physical body. For the soul experience which must seize upon the physical body must, indeed, become conscious. But the following must also be clear to you, my dear friends: If you wish to gain knowledge of the spiritual world, you cannot escape hearing things which seem grotesque and paradoxical, because the spiritual world is different from the physical.

It is, of course, easy enough for anyone to ridicule the statement that if I had been a contemporary of Jean Paul's, it would have given me a stomach ache to sit in his company. It goes without saying that for the everyday, banal, philistine world of earthly life ridicule is to be expected. But the laws of the banal, philistine world do not hold good for spiritual relationships. If we wish to understand the spiritual world we must accustom ourselves to think with other thought forms; we must be prepared to experience many quite surprising things. When, in our everyday consciousness, we read about Goethe, we may naturally feel impelled to say: “How I should like to have known him personally, to have shaken hands with him!” and so on. That is thoughtlessness, for there are laws according to which we are predestined for a certain epoch of the earth in which we can live. Just as we are preconditioned to stand a certain pressure of the air in our physical body, and therefore cannot rise above the earth beyond a certain height where the pressure is not agreeable, so is a man who is predestined for the twentieth century unable to live at the time of Goethe.

These were the things which, at the outset, I wished to bring forward about karma.

Yesterday, in closing, I called attention to the fact that, since that time, according to the spiritual-scientific point of view, we have to reckon the evolution of mankind on earth as having made a circuit from Pisces to Pisces. When I have spoken in this connection of the evolution of mankind on earth, it must naturally be correctly understood. We speak of the overall evolution of mankind in such a way that we let it begin in the old Saturn time, and therefore it can naturally only be a partial evolution of mankind when we speak here of the evolution of mankind on earth. But one can imagine it this way: During the time of Saturn, the Sun and the Moon, man quite naturally took on a very different form, one that cannot be compared to the present form of man. And when we speak here of the formation of humanity on earth, it means that the preparations for this physical human formation began at the end of the Lemurian age, that it developed in the way I have described in my writings, in the Atlantean time, thus precisely in the time that represents such a full cycle of the spring equinox of the sun.

Now let us discuss the conditions to which man was subject during this time, when he had, so to speak, returned to his starting point. I would like to present something schematically so that you have the complete picture of what I actually mean with these explanations. We cannot say that human evolution has taken place in such a way since the last Lemurian period, when the spring point of the sun was also in Pisces, that we can depict this evolution as a cycle that simply returns to itself. That would be wrong. We have to think of this cycle, because of course I am only giving a picture of the development, we have to think of it as a spiral. We must therefore imagine that, if the starting point of evolution lies in the ancient Lemurian period here, this evolution returns in such a way that man has naturally risen to a higher level of his being, but at this higher level, in relation to his relationship to the cosmos, has in a sense returned to his starting point in the present age. And how he had to live in these circumstances, let us bring that to mind today.

Some time ago, I gave a lecture to a small group in Stuttgart about a possible astronomical world view. I pointed out how, for a long time, the so-called Ptolemaic world view was regarded as correct by mankind. This Ptolemaic conception of the world is thoroughly ingenious, it is so, I might say, in certain line forms geometrically summarizes that which must be summarized if we want to express the view we have of the stars, their positions and their orbits, by pictorial representations. Then, for certain reasons, which I have often described, this Ptolemaic system was replaced by the Copernican system, which, with some important modifications, is still regarded today as essentially correct. In Stuttgart, I showed that this Copernican system is nothing more than a linear representation of what we see when we look into the cosmos with our eyes, telescopes or other instruments. I also showed that it cannot be said that this Copernican system is any more correct than the Ptolemaic system; it is only a different way of summarizing the phenomena. And I have then tried to summarize these phenomena myself, linking them to what man – who, after all, if, for example, the earth has a movement, must go along with this movement – can experience within himself. Today I want to present only the result to you; the other is not important for us today.

If we begin to summarize these phenomena not in a one-sided way, as is the case with both the Ptolemaic and Copernican world systems, but if we take into account everything that is available to us, then we come to the conclusion that this summary will ultimately become so complicated that we can no longer get by with a simple world system, which we can represent with a pencil or a planiglobe. It is not at all possible, basically, to summarize things in as simple a way as one would usually like to summarize them. And one can indeed arrive at something very strange in this way, which I would like to present to you quite simply, because, however paradoxical they may appear to people of the present day, these things must be discussed.

People believe that the science of the present is the most intelligent thing that has ever existed, and that basically nothing more intelligent could possibly be invented. And because of this belief, humanity is indeed heading for a terrible cultural fate. But the right thing must also be presented in a certain way. If you take into account more and more circumstances, you will end up in such a state of mind regarding the complexity of the world system that this state of mind is very similar to the one you have when you have just woken up and experience the chaotic images of the soul, which I said yesterday and the day before yesterday sit in us as an undercurrent. I have schematically drawn the human organism for you according to etheric body and physical body and said: These chaotic images emerge from it, which are actually always there even during the day. They can be found very effectively in dreamy natures, but everyone notices them at the bottom of their soul. And they can be particularly strongly noticed when a person submerges with his ego and astral body into his physical and etheric bodies in the morning. Now I do not mean these images themselves – these images are, of course, very poetic and imaginative for the people concerned, depending on their level of perfection or imperfection, or they are very chaotic, the latter being the more common case. But I am talking about the state of mind that a reasonably logical person experiences when they are accustomed to thinking logically and then find themselves immersed in this world of images. What is meant is the state of mind that comes to those who do not approach it with all the prejudices and simplifications that prevail when constructing world systems, but who approach it without prejudice. Then, in relation to what one ultimately achieves, in relation to the complexity, in relation to the interweaving, one enters into a similar state of mind.

Of course, our time has brought it about – and that is even a great boon compared to the mental disposition of most people – that every schoolboy knows exactly: at the focus of an ellipse is the sun, the planets revolve around it, the fixed stars stand still, and so on. – Every schoolboy knows this, and it is tremendously simple. But if you approach these things without prejudice and without theoretical fuss, you do not find this simplicity. Instead, things become enormously complicated, and in the end you arrive at the kind of frame of mind I have described, in which you say to yourself: you have to move into something that transitions from the definite to the indefinite, from the definitely drawn lines into problematically drawn lines. You enter into a frame of mind that tells you: What you are taking into your head is basically an image, an image that is woven and that you can simplify, as when you, say, make a diagram of Raphael's Madonna. But just as you would not have the whole of Raphael's Madonna from that, you have just as little in the Copernican system what is actually in front of us in space in the form of an image that includes an infinity of details and particulars. Just when you are considering such a consideration, you will understand: If we have to say something like that to ourselves when we contemplate the phenomena of the universe, then we cannot actually stand face to face with reality as such; for we stand before what presents itself to us in a state of soul like the world of images that we encounter when we enter our body from the cosmos in the morning. So there can be no question of standing face to face with reality.

These are the kinds of considerations that must be made if one wants to have an understanding in the full sense of the word of what it actually means: we live with our consciousness in the world of illusion, of maya. We also live in Maya with regard to the image we have of the universe and its phenomena. And finally, we can also observe the phenomena that the sensory world weaves around us, and we come to something similar. We do not, however, come to what a, I would say, clumsy theory of knowledge has come to at the end of the 18th and in the course of the 19th century, which always repeats: Yes, out there the phenomena are, for example, through mechanical and dynamic laws, or as one says recently, electrons, and they exert an impression on our senses, and that which is then perceived by us, that is only an effect of that which is out there; but that is just only the appearance for us. To speak of appearances to us in this sense is, after all, a clumsy theory of knowledge. With such a view, one can indeed have some strange experiences.

One need only turn against this theory of knowledge with a few lines here or there today, and someone will come along and say, “But Kant said...” People have become so wrapped up in Kantianism that they consider it a kind of Bible; at least many do. They change this or that, but on the whole they consider it a kind of Bible. One can have the strangest experiences there. I once held courses on such questions in Berlin, it was in the winter of 1900 to 1901, the same winter about which Herr von Gleich has proclaimed that a certain Winter taught me about Theosophy – he has confused the winter of 1900 to 1901 with a Mr. Winter who is supposed to have taught me about Theosophy! I don't know whether he read it or was told that I once gave these lectures in winter, which were then printed, they were given in Berlin in the winter of 1900 to 1901, and so the word “winter” was taken for the name of Mr. Winter. Yes, this argument is no more intelligent than the other stupid and dishonest arguments of General von Gleich. But you see, at these lectures in Berlin there was also a dyed-in-the-wool Kantian. I can't say he was listening, because he was usually asleep, and I don't know how many people can listen while sleeping, but I could tell at the time that he only woke up when he could somehow apply Kant. And once it happened that I repeated an argument – it wasn't even mine – in which it was said: If one really speaks of the thing in itself as being completely unknown, as Kant did, then it could consist of pins, so that behind the sensory phenomena there could only be pins. But when I said this, the person in question jumped up as if stung by an adder and said: Behind the phenomena is not space and time. There are pins in space, so the thing in itself cannot consist of pins! — It is just one of the examples that one so often encounters when people believe that their Bible, their Kantian Bible, is somehow being touched.

Now, it is not the case that any “things in themselves” throw effects into us, so to speak, which then merely trigger sensory qualities, so that we are actually only wrapped up in our sensory qualities; it is not like that. But something else is true. Please just take the following: Stand outside at, say, 11 o'clock in the morning and look at the surrounding area, but look at it carefully, not as some people draw it, because what they draw is nonsense, of course it doesn't reflect the appearance of the senses. Instead, look at it at 11 o'clock, at 12 o'clock with all its lighting effects. The whole sensory tapestry has changed completely by noon, by five o'clock, by eight o'clock. The picture around you is constantly changing. You are never dealing with anything but interwoven effects and impressions. A tree – what do you see of the tree? You see the reflected light, you may see the leaves moving in the wind, and so on. In short, you never see anything permanent. You simply see an objective appearance. While the clumsy theory of knowledge speaks of a subjective appearance, you see an objective appearance, and this objective appearance naturally also communicates itself to the eye. Just as the tree intercepts the light rays in a certain way, reflects them and so on, so the eye also has a certain relationship to the light rays, and we can say: the phenomenal, the apparent, the illusory , the Maja nature, which is spread out in the sense world around us, is of course also present in our subjective picture; but because it is objectively changeable, it is also changeable in the subjective picture.

This is what I wanted to substantiate, for example, in the first section of my “Philosophy of Freedom” or in my booklet “Truth and Science” and so on. So even when we face the world, we are not dealing with a lasting, permanent reality; we are dealing with something that, one might say, is coming and going in the moment. We are dealing with appearances. And if we wanted to construct this image theoretically, we would come up with nothing more than the few lines in the Sistine Madonna. And so it is in everything we are immersed in. We are immersed in the world of phenomena, of Maja, but even though we are immersed in this world of Maja with all our perception, we are not dependent on this world. For it is quite clear to us when we emerge from the cosmos with our I and our astral body in the morning and submerge into our etheric body and our physical body, that what we are submerging into contains an objective, a truth. Certainly, what swirls towards us as chaotic images is only an appearance; but what we submerge ourselves in contains a truth. And in the moment when we submerge ourselves, whether we do so through: I want to move my limbs, or through: I want to bring my ideas into fantasy forms, or let's say through: I want to bring my ideas into logical thought connections – in what becomes us when we immerse ourselves in our body, in that, we know, we have something that does not depend on us, that we receive, that receives us. And the moment we wake up is the one that communicates our sense of being to us.

This sense of being is, in a sense, something that permeates and runs through our entire thinking. But our thinking itself moves more in the world of phenomena, of appearance, of maya. And let us expand what I am presenting from ordinary experiences to include the whole person.

Those who, with the help of such insights, as can be gained on the basis of my descriptions in “How to Know Higher Worlds”, can look at the whole person, will soon know how the human being, as a soul-spiritual being, goes through the state between death and a new birth, how it penetrates into the physical world, becomes embodied, in order to go through the state between birth and death, and then again a state between death and a new birth. I have developed some important details about these processes in the last lectures here. When the moment comes when one can look back into the world that lies before birth or before conception, one realizes that we have gone through the world that actually makes up our sense of being, the world from which our sense of being comes, between death and a new birth. One only acquires the right feeling for being, the feeling for being that is not subject to doubting or skepticism, when one looks back into this world of existence that lies before conception.

But now something significant appears, as you can already gather from my Viennese lectures from the spring of 1914. I will now present it to the soul in a different form, namely, something appears that confronts us before the human being descends from the state between death and a new birth to his physical embodiment. During this time, the desire to be, the desire to exist, fades more and more from the human being. As he develops between death and a new birth, I would say that the human being passes through an absolute satiation with the feeling of being. That is one of the achievements that man acquires between death and a new birth, that after going through the first stages after death, he comes more and more, through the relationship to the world into which he then enters, to a strongly penetrating feeling of being, to a — if I may use the expression — being anchored in the being of the world. And this becomes stronger and stronger until a kind of supersaturation with the feeling of being occurs, and then, towards the end of the time between death and a new birth, I would say that a true supersaturation with the feeling of being occurs. I could also call it something else. I could say that a true hunger for non-being occurs in the human being. Those spiritual-soul entities that come down to earth as human beings actually show, before they come down to earth, a strong hunger for non-being. And from this state of mind or spirit, we could say: Because man hungers for non-being, he plunges into Maja in this state, into the world that we have before us both in relation to the world of stars and in relation to the earthly phenomenal world. There is a longing for this non-existent world, for this world, which one is in soul moods towards, as one is towards the chaotic images when one goes to their bottom, this world, which actually presents us with a different aspect in every moment. We are, after all, completely immersed in an illusory world, in a Maya world, as we immerse ourselves in this world. The soul and spirit want to submerge themselves in this Maya world, and that is what we are actually dealing with. The others are more or less side effects. This is the strongest impulse that lives in the spiritual-soul human being when he approaches earthly existence: this longing for Maya, this longing to live in the soft, permeable phenomenon, not in the saturated, intense being. And what then envelops the human being as an etheric body and as a physical body has been born out of the cosmos and is used to clothe the human being. In the last few days, I have described how the embryo in the mother's body is formed out of the cosmos.

We must therefore imagine that the human being basically comes from a completely different world. There he acquires this hunger for existence, for life in the Maja, by approaching the physical earthly existence, and he is received by plunging into the Maja with his I and with his astral (see drawing, red, blue), of which the etheric body and the physical body (yellow, red) are formed in the maternal body through fertilization as its covering from the cosmos. The human being comes from a world that is not spatial-temporal, that cannot be found in space, but he is clothed in space with what is formed in the mother's body. He then emerges into this every time he wakes up. When falling asleep, he emerges from it. A rhythm of submerging into the physicality and of being drawn out of it is formed.

Today's ideas are actually such that one has great difficulty in dealing with them in relation to reality. This convergence, for example, of a completely different current that a person goes through before he comes to his embodiment, and the external that then envelops him, which of course has nothing essential to do with him before - as it really becomes, I have described on other occasions - this interaction, that can hardly be described by today's science in an appropriate way because it lacks the concepts for it.

The same thing can be seen in another area. When a physiologist talks about light or color today, his main concern is to describe something that the eye does, to find out what it is. But in reality it is actually just as if someone wanted to describe any of the personalities sitting here and, above all, describe this carpentry workshop here because you walked in here. Basically, the light that enters the eye and takes effect in the eye has no more to do with the eye than you have with the carpentry workshop when you walked in and the carpentry workshop now also envelops you. If someone describes the carpentry workshop and you, they naturally describe it as a whole. But that is not the case. It is difficult to find the truth in the face of today's complicated ideas.

And so we can say: that which is spiritual and soul in man comes into this world of the earthly primarily out of an urge for non-being. And every waking state, that is, every state that is experienced from waking up to falling asleep, is a new education for being, a re-impregnation of consciousness with being.

The human being is in the state in which he is last between death and a new birth, I would like to say, so glad when he can arrive at his physical embodiment, he is so glad. I have often described to you how the brain floats in the cerebral fluid. If the whole weight, one thousand three hundred and fifty grams or something like that, were to press on the veins under the brain, the veins would be crushed, they could not exist; but the brain only presses with about twenty grams. Why? Because the brain floats in the cerebral fluid. And you know Archimedes' principle. Right, it was Archimedes who found it. He was once in a tub bathing and felt how he was getting lighter and lighter in the bath, and he was so pleased about this discovery that he immediately ran naked through the streets shouting: I've got it, I've got it!” — namely, that every body in a liquid loses as much of its weight as the weight of the water body that it displaces. So if you have a container of water and you put a solid object in it, it becomes lighter than it actually is outside the water, and it becomes lighter by the amount that the displaced water weighs, that is, by its own weight, if you think of it as being made out of water. So if, for example, there were a cube here and you thought of it as a water cube and weighed it, the actual cube would become lighter by the weight of the water cube. And so the brain becomes lighter, except for twenty grams, weighs only twenty grams because it floats in brain water. So the brain does not follow its full gravity. It is pushed upwards. This force that pushes upwards is also called buoyancy. Man looks forward to this, to coming into something that actually pulls him upwards, that really pulls him upwards. And he learns to be heavy again at twenty grams, and through heaviness we learn the feeling of being. Man is again imbued with the feeling of being between birth and death. And this is then developed and increased in the evolution after death.

This is what, I would say, has so disappeared from the consciousness of modern humanity that the greatest philosopher at the beginning of this newer time, Cartesius or Descartes, coined the formula: Cogito ergo sum - I think, therefore I am. - It is the most nonsensical formula one can think of, because precisely by thinking, one is not. One is precisely outside of being. Cogito ergo non sum – is the real truth. Today we are so far removed from the real truth that the greatest modern philosopher has put the opposite in the place of truth. We acquire the feeling of being precisely when thinking feels itself in the organism, when thinking feels itself embedded in what is heavy. This is not just a popular image, it is reality in the face of appearances.

But this can teach us how the human being, as he initially knows himself, goes down to earth in knowledge, actually submerges himself in the Maja and, within the Maja, learns what he needs again after death: the feeling of being.

Now, when one describes what I have described to you now, then one has something that is specifically human in human development. This, I would like to say, rhythmic movement between the feeling of being and the feeling of not being can be visualized for meditation in the following way. You can say, when you live in mere thoughts: I am not. When one lives with reference to the will, which physically rests in the metabolic-limb-human being, then one says: I am. And between the two, between the metabolic-human being and the pure brain-human being, who says: I am not, when he understands himself, because that which lives in the brain are merely images; that which lies in between is the rhythmic alternation between: I am and I am not. For this, the external physical is breathing. The exhalation fulfills the breathing process with what comes from the metabolism, with carbon dioxide. I am – is exhalation. I am not – is inhalation. I am not

I am not
I am – I am not exhalation – inhalation
I am

The inhalation is related to: I am not - of thought. Inhalation happens in such a way that we take in air into our ribs, pushing the water of the arachnoid space upwards and thereby pushing the cerebral fluid upwards. We bring the vibration of the breathing process into the brain. This is the organ of thought. The inhalation process transmitted to the brain: I am not. Again, exhalation, the cerebral fluid – through the arachnoid space – presses on the diaphragm, exhalation, the air impregnated with carbon, turned into carbonic acid: I am – out of the will. Exhalation: out of the will.

All this, understood in this way, is a purely human process, because the person who wants to transfer it to the animal, because the animal also breathes, is just like a human being who takes a razor to cut his flesh because it is a knife. Of course animals also breathe, but animal breathing is something different from human breathing, just as a razor is something different from a table knife. Those who base their definitions on the outward appearance of things will never arrive at any kind of useful explanation of the world. Death is something different for humans, something different for animals, something different for plants. Anyone who starts from a definition of death will come to just as little of a useful explanation as someone who starts from the definition of a knife and says, for example, “A knife is something that is so fine on one side that it cuts through other objects.” Of course, that gives a nice general concept, but one cannot understand anything about what really is. So, these are specifically human processes that I have described to you. They are the human processes that man has gone through while the vernal point made the circuit from Pisces to Pisces. This is precisely the time in the evolution of the earth when man, in the leading parts of the nations, has gone through everything that I have described to you now, and which all tends to show how it actually happens, how man, human being, by descending into the physical world through birth, plunges into the maja, and with death is reborn out of the maja again, enriched by the feeling of being, which he needs for the further life after death. This is the most important fact: this being born through death with the feeling of being, while being born is the human being's spiritual-soul entity plunging into maya. It is precisely because we plunge into maya, that is, into a world of images, that we are free. We could never be free if we were in a world of facts with our consciousness between birth and death. We are only free because we are in a world of images. Images that are in the mirror do not determine us causally. A world of facts would determine us causally. What you bring to the image that hangs before you must come from you. The phenomena of the world do not determine us as human beings in what I called in my Philosophy of Freedom pure thinking, which does not come from the organism. What comes from the organism is, as you have seen, imbued with the sense of being, even if in the brain this sense of being is present in such a small percentage that it is about twenty to one thousand three hundred and fifty. One must look at this again and again, how man actually develops the longing for Maja by being born into earthly life, and how earthly life educates him to the feeling of being. That is what we have gone through during the time from the last Lemurian period into our period, where a sun cycle of 25,920 years, a great world cycle, has been gone through. Now, however, we are in the time in which development has returned to its starting point, but I have drawn it in such a way that I said: we have to indicate it schematically in a spiral (see drawing on page 170). The development of humanity has indeed returned to its starting point, but at a higher level. But what does this higher level mean? This higher stage means that we, as humanity, have always plunged into Maya with our birth and then, out of our physical existence, have gained the feeling of being. But the earth has also changed in the meantime; the earth today is no longer the same organism that it was in the Lemurian or Atlantean times. Today, as I have often stated, the Earth is already in a process of dissolution.

Geology also knows this. Read about it in the beautiful geological works of Eduard Sueß, 'The Face of the Earth': the Earth is in a crumbling process, the Earth is in a dissolution process. This means that we will no longer have every opportunity to acquire the feeling of being in a sufficient way. And now that a cycle has been completed, as I explained yesterday and today, humanity is facing the danger of going through deaths in which it has developed too little sense of being, simply because our earth no longer provides the necessary intensity of the feeling of being. With this new period, which I have now explained to you as a period of the whole cosmos, the prospect opens up for humanity to pass through death with a feeling of lightness that is, if I may express it so, too great. Humanity may become more and more materialistic, and the consequence of this, if it becomes more and more materialistic, will be that it carries an insufficient feeling of heaviness or being through the gate of death.

This is something that is already quite clear to those who are familiar with the conditions in the world today: souls today are carried through the gate of death by their own sense of non-being, so that they experience the opposite of what a person who falls into water and cannot swim experiences — they sink. These souls sink when they pass through the gate of death, due to the little weight they have. How the expression 'weight' is used in the spiritual world, that occurs at an important point in my Mysteries. They rise to the top and are lost. This can only be counteracted by people rising from concepts that can be easily acquired today and that figure in our entire lives, to that which must be achieved with a certain effort of physical life: that is, such concepts that are not produced by physical life alone, that are acquired through spiritual science.

What do people who absolutely want to remain in today's thinking say about spiritual science? They say: Yes, what is described, for example, in this Steinerian “occult science”, that is fantastic, that is arbitrary, that cannot be imagined! Why do people say that? People can see chalk, they can see tables, they can see legs, and they can only imagine what has once presented itself to them in this way; they do not want to imagine anything other than what they have appropriated from the bellwether of external physical reality. They do not want to develop any inner activity in imagining. Anyone who wants to study Occult Science: An Outline must make an effort themselves. If he gapes at an ox, he has a reality, to be sure; he needs not make any effort, but only gape at it and then form a so-called concept, which is no concept at all. What it is about is that the concepts that are hinted at by spiritual science, for example by my “Occult Science” or “Theosophy” or by the other books, demand this inner activity. A large part of humanity, which is now more materialistic than ever because it wants to educate the world of ideas in a materialistic way, the spiritualists, would really rather not get involved in thinking through and working through Occult Science; they prefer to let themselves be by Schrenck-Notzing or others, where such lumps, shaped like human beings or the like, appear to them in such a way that they can remain completely passive; they do not need to make any effort at all.

But in doing so, one becomes lighter and lighter and works against one's continued existence after death. However, by working one's way into the activity needed to penetrate spiritual science, one has to make a greater physical effort, connect more strongly with the physical than is the case today under so-called normal conditions. One must use stronger concepts. But in so doing, one also takes one's sense of being with one through death and is then equal to life after death.

That is something, is it not, that today's man likes so much: to add nothing to what he encounters in life. If he is to add something, to be active, it immediately becomes uncomfortable for him. Outwardly, in our social lives, we have always striven to learn as much as possible and to learn according to the templates prescribed by the state; so that when we have happily reached the age of twenty-five or twenty-six and are ready to start our legal clerkships, we are then pushed into some scheme and entitled to a pension after so many decades; now we are safe. We are only in our twenties, but we are insured for life. We let our body retire – that is guaranteed from the outset – then comes the church, the church confession, which also demands nothing more than that we passively surrender to what is offered to us. And the church then retires our soul when we are dead; it insures us against it without our doing anything, except at most living in faith, just as our body was retired before. This is something that must be broken with if civilization is not to arrive at its decline. Inner activity, inner active participation in what man makes of himself, even what he makes of himself as an immortal being, is necessary. Man must work on his immortality. That is the one thing that most people would like to be magically removed. They believe that knowledge can only teach one something of what is so anyway, can at most teach one that man is immortal. There are those who say:

Yes, I live here, as life exists here; what will be after death, I will see then.

He will see nothing, absolutely nothing! For the argument is about as ingenious as that of the Anzengruber personality: “As surely as there is a God in heaven, I am an atheist!” — These things are of the same logic. The fact of the matter is that, with regard to the spiritual and mental, by taking it into our knowledge, we make the spirit mature so that after death it does not go through the opposite state of someone sinking in confusion, that is, of someone rising without essence. We must work on our essence so that it can pass through death in the right way. And the assimilation of spiritual knowledge is not just the assimilation of abstract knowledge, it is the penetration of the spiritual and mental life of man with the forces that conquer death.

This is, after all, the essence of the Christian teaching. Therefore, a person should not merely believe in Christ, as a modern confession would have it, but should take to heart the words of St. Paul: “Not I, but Christ in me.” The power of Christ in me must develop and be cultivated! Faith as such cannot save the human being, but only the inner cooperation with Christ, the inner development of the power of Christ, which is always there if one wants to develop it, but which must be developed. Initiative and activity are what humanity will have to fill itself with. And it must realize that mere passive faith makes man too easy, so that in time immortality would die on earth. That is Ahriman's endeavor. And to what extent it is Ahriman's endeavor, we will then bring before our soul in a next lecture, because today we are in the midst of the battle between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic powers. And just as we have protected our unconsciousness to a certain extent, with the spring equinox marking a boundary, we will have to enter the next boundary in such a way that we place ourselves with full

1987 we place ourselves in that which interweaves the world's being: the battle of the Luciferic with the Ahrimanic spirits. Through spiritual science we are led into reality, not just into an abstract knowledge. More about this next time.

We will now continue with the interpretations that we have linked to the Wrangell brochure “Science and Theosophy”. We left off at the chapter “Essence of Jesus' Teaching”, according to which the essence of Jesus' teaching is said to consist of “the raw message that the creator and ruler of the universe, to the human being whom he created in his image, is a loving Father, that love for God and fellow man is the highest moral commandment, that the soul of man is immortal and that after death a fate is prepared for it which corresponds to the moral behavior of man during his life.

We had to point out that it is indeed possible to describe the teaching of Jesus in this way, but that the essence of Christianity in the spiritual-scientific sense is not captured if one does not become aware of the facts that are present in the appearance of the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth and in the Mystery of Golgotha, which must be understood by anyone who gradually wants to find their way into the essence of Christianity. These facts belong to the essence of Christianity. As I have often said, Christianity is not just a doctrine, but encompasses a reality. To understand this reality, which can be expressed as the “mystery of Golgotha”, is part of understanding the essence of Christianity.

Then attention is drawn to the fact that the various religions have caused a conflict between faith and science: “The obvious aberrations into which the organized Christian communities, the historical churches, have fallen, have brought their dogmas into opposition to some firmly established scientific achievements, thereby causing the conflict between faith and knowledge, religion and science, which has been corroding the spiritual life of European culture. This situation explains the interest that has turned to other religious systems that claim not only to be in harmony with science, but to expand it. Among these teachings, Theosophy deserves special attention. Since H.P. Blavatsky drew the attention of European culture to this teaching, which originated in India, it has found various representations.

From the spiritual scientific point of view, it must be pointed out in particular that what spiritual science is for modern humanity must not be described as a doctrine originating in India, but that it has formed purely out of itself, out of the impulses of the present cycle of development. And when outsiders repeatedly point out a relationship between our spiritual science and Indian teachings, it is only because the concept of repeated earthly lives is so foreign to the Occident that everyone who hears about repeated earthly lives immediately thinks of India, because there this teaching has become a dogma within religious beliefs. It is important to emphasize again and again that our spiritual-scientific content is built up out of the needs of the counterweight itself and is not a doctrine that comes from here or there, but is to be grasped and understood out of itself.

Finally, it must also be said with regard to Blavatsky that she was initially quite independent of any orientalizing cultural trend with her teachings, as expressed in the “Entschleierte Isis”, for example; that what she wrote in the early days belongs entirely to European intellectual culture. It was only through various complications that Blavatsky felt more and more drawn to the Indian. As a result, she imposed a kind of Indian vignette on the current that originated with her and swore by her, which in turn must be removed because it would be impossible to accomplish even the slightest thing in modern culture with any old religious system. This is extraordinarily important and remains so for our consideration of the particularly interesting chapter in our brochure in which the theosophical teachings are summarized. The chapter is entitled: “The Nature of the Theosophical Teachings.” Here Mr. von Wrangell does not describe what spiritual science is as such, but rather what he has found in the literature of the various world views that call themselves theosophical. I will read this chapter and then we will link our considerations to it. So:

The Nature of the Theosophical Teachings

The most essential assumptions common to the various presentations and conceptions of Theosophy can be expressed as follows.

1. There are other spiritual worlds besides the one perceptible to our five senses, with each higher world having an effect on the lower ones.

2. There are people who have other means of perception in addition to the usual five senses, so-called “occult senses”.

3. Thoughts, feelings, impulses of will, in short, what we call “spiritual phenomena” in human experience, are - even if they have not expressed themselves in the sense world as words or deeds - living entities capable of producing effects in the spiritual worlds and indirectly in the sense world.

4. The soul life of every human being leaves imperishable traces in the higher worlds, which in their totality are called the “Akasha Chronicle” by secret researchers and can be investigated by some qualified people (initiates).

5. The living human being is not a simple being consisting of the living body, but the physical body is only the tool by which the actual essence of the human being, his indestructible “I”, can enter into a relationship with the physical world. These relationships are mediated by intermediate links: firstly, the “etheric body”, which is the carrier of unconscious, vegetative life and forms the material substances of the body according to its own laws; secondly, the “astral body”, carrier of desires, passions, instincts.

6. The human “ego”, the seat of self-awareness, is endowed with freedom, i.e. it can guide its desires, impulses, thoughts, etc., setting them a goal and direction.

7. Depending on whether the ego utilizes the external possibilities offered to it in life in accordance with the eternal laws and the purpose of the world as a whole, or neglects to do so, it shapes its “karma,” i.e., the measure of satisfaction or torment due to it in the world as a whole.

8. After physical death, the immortal “I” of man passes through various spiritual worlds, carrying with it the sum of the eternal values that it has gained in earthly life. After a period of time that is different for each individual, the “ego” begins the return journey from the higher worlds to the lower ones, enriched by the insights gained in those worlds, and begins a new life on earth through re-embodiment, which takes shape according to its karma and the aspirations of its changed “ego”.

9. World affairs are regulated in accordance with the purpose of the whole by spiritual beings who intervene in events either favorably or unfavorably, according to their nature or volitional direction.

10. These beings are hierarchically structured according to their sphere of activity and power and, like everything in the world, are subject to evolution from lower to higher levels.

11. The supreme law of all world events is “free sacrifice out of love”. The Godhead, following this law, sacrificed Itself through manifestation in the outer world by endowing the spiritual beings that originated from It with the ability of free impulses of will. The Cosmos, brought into being through this act, is left to its own development.

12. This development leads through eons from unconscious to conscious comprehension of the supreme law of the world and through realization of it to the reunification of the individual with the whole.

We will now go through the individual points. In point 1, it says: “There are other spiritual worlds besides the one perceivable by our five senses, and each higher world has an effect on the lower ones.” We can agree with this. Under 2. it says: there are so-called occult senses. - I already said yesterday that it is necessary to emphasize that spiritual science stands on the standpoint that through special treatment of ordinary abilities, spiritual perceptual abilities can also be developed in man, and that in today's cycle of development, these methodically developed abilities are of primary importance. One can also find such abilities in man that still come from earlier times. They can be awakened, since they are present in almost every person, but they must be developed in the way described in “How to Know Higher Worlds”. It is therefore not good to say it as Mr. von Wrangell says, but one should say: It is possible that man, just as he develops his five senses through prenatal development and continues to develop them in extra-maternal existence, he also develops inner powers in the purely spiritual; develops abilities to see purely spiritual worlds. Such abilities are conscious transformations of older abilities, which were appropriate for earlier epochs on earth, and which awaken in every person already by themselves, either through external influence or during systematic training through the methods described in “How to Know Higher Worlds”. The expression “occult senses” should be avoided, because one cannot say that a person acquires occult senses, but rather that it is a completely different way of perceiving. What organizes what are called lotus flowers should not be called senses, but at most sensory faculty.

In point 3, it says: “Thoughts, feelings, volitional impulses, in short, what we call ‘spiritual phenomena’ in human experience, are - even if they have not expressed themselves in the sense world as words or deeds - living entities capable of effect in the spiritual worlds and indirectly in the sense world.” Now, this has often been described in great detail, especially recently, when I described the transition from the perception of thoughts to the experience of living thoughts. And it would be even better if one were to say: That which appears in man as thoughts, feelings and impulses of will is, as it appears to man in the soul, the image of entities of the higher worlds, the elemental world and the still higher worlds, so that we actually have the true reality in what we initially have as thoughts, feelings and impulses of will, in the same way that one has the true reality in sensory perceptions. It lies behind the one as well as behind the other.

The 4th point is: «The soul life of every human being leaves imperishable traces in the higher worlds, which in their totality are called the 'Akasha Chronicle' by secret researchers and can be explored by some qualified people (initiates).» This has often been described, and it is of particular importance to take into account the fact that when one enters the Akasha world, one enters a living world and not a world of dead images.

Then, in point 5, it is pointed out that a person consists of different aspects of his being. You know this much better than it is stated here.

Regarding point 6, about freedom, we have often said that people are led towards freedom on their path, that people become more and more free.

Point 7 is about karma, which you also know very well.

Point 8 is: “After physical death, the immortal ‘I’ of man passes through various spiritual worlds, carrying with it the sum of the eternal values that it has gained in earthly life. After a period of time that is different for each individual, the “I” begins the return journey from the higher worlds to the lower ones, enriched by the insights gained in those worlds, and, through re-embodiment, begins a new life on earth, which takes shape according to its karma and the aspirations of its changed “I”. — You can experience to a certain extent what is said about this in the lecture cycle “The Inner Nature of Man and Life between Death and a New Birth”.

Point 9: “World affairs are governed, in accordance with the purpose of the whole, by spiritual beings who intervene in events in a promoting or inhibiting way, depending on their nature and volitional direction.” — You are familiar with this too.

Point 10 reads: “These entities are hierarchically structured according to their sphere of activity and power and, like everything in the world, are subject to development from lower to higher levels.” — It is not good when everything is generalized again in this way. The idea of development also has a limited validity. I have often said that it is necessary to form new thoughts when ascending into the higher worlds. Thus, one can say that when ascending into the higher worlds, one first penetrates regions in which time still plays a role; but then one comes to regions that can be described as regions of duration. In these, time no longer plays a role. One can only speak of the fact that the law of development applies only as a symbolic, as I have done in my “Secret Science”.

Point 11 reads: “The highest law of all world happenings is ‘free sacrifice out of love’. The Godhead, following this law, has sacrificed Itself through manifestation in the outer world by endowing the spiritual entities that originated from It with the faculty of free will impulses. The Cosmos, brought into being through this act, is left to its own development.

Now Mr. von Wrangell tries to recapitulate and characterize the points mentioned, saying:

All secret researchers in European culture agree on these basic teachings: H.P. Blavatsky, Mrs. A. Besant, Leadbeater, Dr. Hartmann, Dr. R. Steiner, among others. The same teachings are also said to apply in the Indian secret schools from which H.P. Blavatsky took them.

But here we now know that spiritual science – as it presents itself in its purity to the world, little by little – must not be mixed with other things, for it can truly fulfill its mission only if it takes into account the essentials of Western culture and therefore also of Western science. But this cannot be said of such personalities as the late Dr. Franz Hartmann. Nor has the form which Theosophy has taken under the leadership of Mrs. Besant or even under Leadbeater anything to do with Western culture, as it is now making its self-evident cultural demands.

And here I may well refer those who, as seekers, are beginning to develop a certain interest in our spiritual science and attach great importance to our spiritual science breaking away from what otherwise often prevails in the world as Theosophy, to a very nice and dear article written by Dr. Rittelmeyer in the journal “Christianity and Contemporary Life”. The reason I mention this article is not that Dr. Rittelmeyer says a few things about me in it. Those who know me better are aware that I am not mentioning this for that reason, but because the article speaks of our work with a certain loving understanding and characterizes it with loving attention to one side or the other. It seems important to me to highlight one passage from this article, which I received this morning:

It is therefore important for those who, from within Western culture, are interested in what spiritual science seeks to be, that we do not want to reheat ancient Indian teachings, but that we want to create something out of the spiritual world that is suitable for our own time cycle.

Perhaps I may still refer you to the article. I can do so with reservation; because after the many things that are said about our movement and my writings, something can be said that does not complain, but responds with some understanding. The article is in issue 10 of the journal “Christianity and Contemporary Life” from October 1915, which is published in Nuremberg, Ebnergasse 10, bookstore of the Association for Inner Mission. As I said, do not misunderstand this reference when you read the article. But since I have said that it would be good to get to know the ideas that connect the outside spiritual life with us, it might interest you if something were to appear that does the opposite of what usually happens with our movement. The article is called: “Two Buildings of the German Future (Dornach and Elmau).” Elmau was founded by Dr. Müller. In this article, particular attention is paid to the differences between the Dornach and Elmau buildings. Perhaps I may read this passage. There is another passage I am not allowed to read because it mentions me too much; but perhaps I may read the following:

What Rittelmeyer is saying here is that those of us at Elmau want to keep the old ways alive, while we here want to create something new. We can be quite satisfied with that. It is very gratifying that there are some people who have an understanding of the spiritual science movement, while it is so denigrated in such an unpleasant way by those who do not want to educate themselves about it.

Now Mr. von Wrangell continues:

The occult abilities, similar to the sensory abilities in the earthly life of man, are said to be of very different degrees. The highest degree of initiation that can be attained at present enables a person, in an awakened state and in full possession of his mental faculties, to go with his ego at will into higher spiritual worlds, even into that world where the Akasha Chronicle provides information about the past of the whole world and of every single human being.

So on the whole, one can very much agree with the presentation. It is only necessary to know what our spiritual scientific movement wants in particular and to keep this clearly in mind. It is indeed necessary not to be confused with others who also deal with the spiritual worlds, but who mix everything together and speak of a deepening into the divine and so on. It is important to keep this clearly in mind.

This is followed by the chapter:

Secret teachings

The results of the knowledge gained by the secret researcher were previously only communicated in secret schools, but are now partially revealed in writings and lectures accessible to everyone. These communications naturally bear the stamp of the personality of the secret researcher in form and content. Since they are based on occult perceptions, their truth can only be independently verified by people who possess the same degree of occult gifts and the same power of judgment. For from the perceptions gained in the spiritual world, judgments must first be drawn and these conclusions must be translated into the language of the earthly sense world in order to be able to communicate them to fellow human beings.

On the other hand, it should be noted that although the content of the spiritual worlds can only be explored in the presence of the abilities that have been mentioned, anyone can actually check what has been explored. This is because the world that everyone can observe is, in a sense, a reflection of the spiritual world, which can be seen through the ability of spiritual perception. And if someone just looks at the world around them with truly open eyes and asks themselves: Does what the secret researcher has discovered in the world of spiritual reality correspond to what happens in life, then they can judge everything without developing occult abilities. It is not because one cannot judge when one says that one must “trust” the researcher of secrets, but because one does not want to engage in a test. What is said about spiritual science proves itself in life and in the world, and everyone can test it. He who says he cannot test is basically saying: I do not want to get involved in whether spiritual teachings can be tested in life and in the world; I do not want to get involved in this alert observation, I want to sleep with my intellect and my judgment. And because people like to sleep with their intellect and their judgment, that is why they say: You cannot test.

But again and again I would like to impress upon the world, so to speak, that it is important that spiritual science is not accepted on authority, but can be tested by what happens in the sensual world. Just because science still observes sensually, it does not engage in a spiritually alert contemplation of life. Therefore, one does not see the correctness of what the spiritual researcher says. And that is why I try not to rely on an authority, not to claim a belief, but I try again and again, through this or that in external science, in philosophical directions of striving, to show how people stand before the spiritual world and just do not want to admit to themselves that they should go further. One need not rely on authority, but only have open eyes, then the striving in spiritual science proves to be a genuine and necessary one in our time.

On the other hand, one must be clear about the fact that much of what is called spiritual science is likely to bar the mind of man from the real spiritual world. This is the case with world views that otherwise mean well, for example Eucken's. But it blinds people by speaking of spirit in words, words, words, that describe nothing other than what the physical soul reflection gives. Therefore, one need not be unjust. You will see that in my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” I have shown that what is said about people like Eucken cannot be called unjust. But one must also know that the wrong spiritual science obscures the view of the right one. It is infinitely more convenient to speak of the spiritual in Eucken's way than to concern oneself with the real spiritual that can be investigated.

The next chapter:

Difference between sense science and spiritual science

In this respect they differ essentially from the truths that can be gained by means of the ordinary senses, for here the testing of the facts can be undertaken by countless people and the logical chain of these is subject to the judgment of each one. In the case of occult knowledge, the most important criterion for the credibility of the communications of a secret researcher is the moral value of his personality.

— Not that is the important thing, but the important thing is that he stands on the ground of true spiritual striving, that he endeavors to lead people into the spiritual world in the right way. If one sees the paths that lead into ordinary science and can thus imagine the possibility of how it is to be passed on, then one gets a basis that is not met with the objection that one simply believes the spiritual researcher as a decent human being.

If there are reasons to doubt his truthfulness, then his occult communications are of course of little value.

- It would be as if, when someone has achieved something in ordinary science, we were to make our personal approval of his research dependent on his personality.

If you have no confidence in his judgment in ordinary life, it is highly unlikely that he should prove it under the infinitely difficult conditions, for example, of researching the Akasha Chronicle.

— One can indeed investigate whether what has been discovered from the Akasha Chronicle is in line with life.

But even with unusual occult gifts, with the highest development of the intellect, with the full impartiality of the researcher, it is not likely that people who are never infallible in earthly things should be so in unearthly ones.

- One should not speak of infallibility at all, but only of the fact that the spiritual researcher presents things from a certain point of view. But that has basically nothing to do with the way we relate to the secret researcher's messages.

One is therefore compelled to confront the secret investigator's communications with much sharper criticism than is required of any witness of earthly perceptions.

— So do not confront it with rejection or criticism. Most of what is achieved is rejection or criticism; if one were to reject 72:7 criticism, so much rejection would not come out.

A more or less reliable sense of probability must guide the inner agreement of the various messages, but above all, trust in the person of the secret researcher.

- So we must not have false ideas about this trust. On the other hand, what comes next is particularly important:

If his communications from those worlds, inaccessible to most people, contradict what has been proven by means of sensory perception, then no unbiased person will hesitate as to which communication deserves preference. If, for example, I really know all the facts that speak for the earth rotating freely in space, and a secret researcher tells me that he has learned from occult perceptions that the earth does not rotate, but that the fixed stars move around the earth, a person of sound mind will pay no attention to such occult research.

— Thus, occult science must agree with external science; and if it does not agree, it must indicate why and try to come into line with science.

Of course, such a contradiction can only refer to facts of the sensory world, and not to transcendental questions that lie beyond all sensory experience.

Nevertheless, even transcendental questions can be considered.

Thus, to cite another example, an astronomer who considers the Kant-Laplace hypothesis about the origin of the solar system to be probable cannot tell the secret researcher, who communicates a completely different cosmogony, as in the first case, that his assertion is erroneous, because the rotation of the Earth is considered proven by every healthy person, whereas the formation of the solar system from a nebula, according to the Kant-Laplace hypothesis, can be considered probable, but not proven.

— Mr. von Wrangell is quite right. I have always pointed out the inadequacy of the Kant-Laplace hypothesis that the world formed out of a primeval nebula, which is demonstrated to children in school by the well-known experiment. You pour a drop of oil on water, pierce it with a needle to which a piece of a map is attached, turn it, move this needle and then see how the individual drops split off. If you forget yourself, you have the process of the formation of a world system. But when you do this experiment, you have to point out that the teacher is there, turning the pin, because otherwise you also forget the teacher, the great one who turns the world system.

It is therefore, and this is my deepest conviction, in a dispute between really proven facts of the sensory world and the results of occult research, that victory will always remain on the side of science.

— There will be no victory, but when the facts of sensory science have been reliably researched and on the other hand the facts of spiritual science have been reliably researched, they will agree.

When some occultists express the view that there is nothing certain in earthly science, this is only possible for those who are only familiar with sciences at second hand, but not with the foundations in question.

However, the leading Theosophists in Europe at the time, Mrs. A. Besant, Dr. R. Steiner and others, claim that there is no contradiction between their occult research and the certain results of earthly science, and Dr. Steiner in particular is well qualified to judge about the methods of the exact sciences through his extensive and thorough knowledge of them. Whether the secret researcher is mistaken in detail may be left open, and in my opinion it is not of great importance, because if such a contradiction were proven, it seems to me that the question of whether the basic teachings of Theosophy correspond to the truth or not is not affected. All these teachings relate to spheres that lie beyond sense experience and can therefore be neither confirmed nor refuted by science, which is based exclusively on sense perceptions.

This is important because it shows that anyone who professes to be a scientist comes to the conclusion that a spiritual world view is necessary on the basis of his scientific convictions, and that one is necessarily led to it if one is a scientific person in our time.

The next chapter is headed:

Theosophy – a religion

The theosophical teachings claim to provide information about the purpose and goal of the world as a whole and of the individual human life, and thus to be a religious worldview.

My dear friends, it is necessary that we realize that the actual spiritual science, our spiritual scientific movement, really has nothing to do with religion, that it does not want to be a religious movement. Let us be clear about the fact that in relation to religious life, spiritual science can give nothing other than an inner relationship of the human soul with Christ. That is the religious moment, that is the religious element, but that is Christianity. The humanities recognize that Christianity is the fulfillment of the religious striving of humanity, that new religions will neither take place nor be able to take place. One should get to know the spiritual facts and for that, the humanities is a new instrument, but does not want to found a new religion. It does not want to set itself up as a new movement alongside Christianity, but only presents the research, just as Copernicus made his discovery.

But how was it in those days? In the 15th century, Copernicus came and gave what he had to give, but the Catholic Church did not allow people to believe in the Copernican doctrine until 1822. And Luther said: “The new astrologer, Copernicus, wants to prove that the earth moves and not the sky, the sun and the moon.” Now think how long it took before Copernicus was recognized. When people come along and say that it is a fantasy to teach repeated lives on earth, that is understandable, but it is not for us to teach people as if it were a matter of founding a new religion. Christianity is the synthesis, the confluence of world religions. Through spiritual science, we want to learn to understand Christian truths better than we can understand them without spiritual science. But we do not want to leave it in our heads that we are dealing with a new religion, with a new religious worldview, in theosophy. Spiritual science must defend itself against this. It wants to be science and thereby also deepen religious life. But religious life is also deepened by Copernicanism. In the nineties, the Catholic theologian Müllner, whom I mentioned when reciting Delle Grazie's poems, said about Galilei: “The one who is truly Christian and understands the religious relationship of the human soul to the divine worlds can only experience a deepening of religious life by exploring the world more closely, and not a threat.

It must be emphasized again and again that it is a weakness to resist what is brought by spiritual science in terms of deepening the religious. Imagine if someone had told Kolurmbus: not discover America, because there might be other people, other gods. Imagine what a weakness it would be not to stand so firmly on the ground of Christianity as to be able to say: Whatever will be discovered, the ground of Christianity is so strong that it will hold firm! Therefore, it is nothing but proof of the weakness of those who say that we must reject spiritual science. To them we must say: It is not Christianity if you believe that your teachings could be overthrown by spiritual science. Copernicus did not overthrow either, on the contrary, religious life was deepened by him. It is weak and timid cowardice that imposes the fight from the external, official, so-called Christian point of view, against what spiritual science wants.

This is the point of view we must take against those who come to us with their feeble, timid objections to Theosophy.

[The chapter “Theosophy - a Religion” is read to the end:] It seems doubtful whether any solution to the world riddle can fully satisfy the critically educated person of the present day in terms of its intellectual justification. It will always be a matter of how far the mind and soul of the person are satisfied by the solution to the great eternal questions that presents itself to him. Since it is not possible to prove this intellectually, the feeling for the greater or lesser probability of one or the other solution must also be taken into account.

We want to compare some of the world views as they present themselves to the educated person of European culture from this point of view.

In the following chapters, Wrangell compares materialism, agnosticism, and occultism with each other, and then has a chapter on re-embodiment and karma. He then comes to Lessing's view of reincarnation and a recapitulation of the whole train of thought. There is no longer enough time to discuss the final chapters. We will therefore continue the discussion tomorrow at seven o'clock, because we still have a few important things to say about the final chapters.

I have now brought together many and various matters which may help us to a perception of the structure of the Universe in its relation to Man. We have seen—and this must be emphasised again and again—that the Universe cannot be grasped without Man. That means that it is not possible to understand the Universe in itself, without keeping in mind Man and the relation of the Universe to him. If one wishes to form in a very simple way an idea of Man's connection with the Universe, one need only think of a theme in elementary astronomy—the so-called ‘obliquity of the ecliptic’—that is, the oblique position of the Earth's axis in relation to the line, the curve, which passes through the Zodiac. This obliquity of the ecliptic may be understood and even interpreted as you will; with such interpretations we are not for the moment concerned as to whether they accord with reality or not; we are concerned rather to bring a certain fact to your notice. If the Earth's axis—the axis on which the Earth turns daily—were perpendicular to the plane through the Zodiacal ecliptic, then day and night would be equal throughout the year over the whole Earth. If the Earth's axis lay in the ecliptic, then over the whole Earth one half of the year would be day and one half night. Both extremes do in a certain respect actually occur at the equator and at the poles. But in between lie regions where the length of day varies in the course of the year. We need only reflect a little on this matter to arrive at the tremendous significance for the whole evolution of earthly civilisation, of the position of the Earth's axis in cosmic space. Just reflect, we could all of us throughout the Earth be only Eskimos if the axis lay in the ecliptic; were it vertical to the ecliptic, the whole Earth would be filled with the kind of civilisation that prevails at the equator.

Thus as regards the position of the Earth's axis, no matter how it may be interpreted—of course an understanding of the truth depends upon what interpretation we give it, but any interpretation will serve to make one perceive the connection between Man, his culture and civilisation, and the structure of the Universe; and the fact behind the interpretation, whatever the latter may be, compels us to regard Man and the Earth as forming part of the Universe, and not, in respect of man's physical being, as though he could be considered independently. This cannot be done. As physical being, Man is not a reality in himself, but only when regarded as one with the whole Earth, just as a hand severed from the human organism cannot be regarded as in any true sense a reality: it dies, it is only thinkable in connection with the organism. A rose, when plucked, dies, and as a reality it is only conceivable in connection with the rose-tree which is rooted in the Earth; so too, to estimate Man in his entirety, in his totality, one cannot regard him as simply enclosed in the boundaries of his skin.

Thus what we experience on Earth must be considered in connection with the Earth's axis. It is important in a view of the Universe based on reality that what is a partial truth should not be interpreted as a whole truth. We come to comprehend in its reality the whole man as a being of soul and spirit by not considering him as a reality in his physical nature. He is a reality as a being of soul and spirit, a complete independent reality, a true individual. What he inhabits between birth and death—the physical and etheric bodies—are not realities in themselves, they are members of the whole Earth, and as we shall presently see, they are even part of another whole.

This brings us to something which must be observed still more closely. I must again and again point out one thing. The ideas we form of man almost always tend, unconsciously, to our regarding him as a solid body. True, we are aware that he is not precisely a hard body, that he is to some extent plastic, but we are very often unaware that he consists of far more than 75% fluid, of which only the residue can be regarded as solid mineral being. Man is really 75% a water being. Now I ask you, therefore, is it possible to describe the human organism, as is usually done, in sharp outlines—saying: ‘Here we have the lobes of the brain, here this organ’, and so forth, and then assume that the solidly circumscribed organs combine in their activity to bring about the activity of the whole organism? There is no sense whatever in that. It is a question of bearing in mind the fact that Man within the limits of his skin, is, as it were, surging water; that what is purely inwardly surging fluidity also has a meaning, and that we should not describe Man as if he were more or less a solid body. In Spiritual Science this has a very deep significance. For precisely when we consider the solid in Man, which is in a manner connected with the external minerals, we find that the solid in the human being has a certain relation to the Earth.

We have observed the various relations of Man to the world around him, we will now establish the relation of his solid substance to the Earth. This connection exists; the watery element in Man has, however, primarily no connection with the Earth but with the planetary Universe outside, and especially with the Moon. Precisely as the Moon, not directly but indirectly, has a relation to the ebb and flow of the tides, to certain configurations of the fluid part of the Earth, so too it has a connection with what takes place in the fluid part of the human organism. I described yesterday that we have on the one side the astronomy that applies to the Sun—and also to the Earth. We ourselves are part of that astronomy, for we are organised into it as organisms containing solid substances. Lunar astronomy however, is different. We are organised into lunar astronomy in so far as it is connected with our fluid constituents. Thus we see that the forces of the Cosmos work into the solid and fluid parts of our physical nature.

This has a still greater significance, which is, that what we call our Ego has primarily a direct influence on our solid man, and that what we call our astral body has an indirect influence on our fluid man—so that what works from the soul and spirit upon our organisation, comes, through our bodily nature, also into connection with all the forces of the Cosmos. These movements of the Cosmos have always been a subject of observation, from the most varied points of view. When we look back to the ancient Persian civilisation we find that even then researches were made into the movements of the Universe. These researches were also made by the Chaldeans and by the Egyptians, and it is not without interest to study the attitude of the Egyptians to movements of the Universe. They had, of course, for what were apparently quite material reasons, to study the connection of the Earth with the outer Cosmos, for their land depended upon the inundations of the Nile which took place precisely when the Sun was in a definite position in the Universe. This position could be determined by that of Sirius; so that the Egyptians had arrived at making observations as to the position of the Sun in relation to what we now call the Fixed Stars. Especially in the Egyptian sacerdotal colonies, in their Mysteries, extensive researches were made into the relation of the Sun to the other stars. As I have already said, the Egyptians knew perfectly well that each year the Sun appeared to have shifted its position in the heavens in regard to the other stars, and they calculated thereby that the stars—whether apparently or really is immaterial just now—as they daily moved round the heavens, had a certain velocity, and that the daily movement of the Sun had also a certain velocity, but not quite so great as that of the stars. The Sun always lagged somewhat behind. The Egyptians knew and recorded the fact that the Sun lagged behind about one day in 72 years, so that when a particular star which rose with the Sun in a definite year rises again 72 years later, the Sun does not rise with it but 24 hours later. A star belonging to the world of fixed stars, a star in the Zodiac, outstrips the Sun by one day, one full day, in every 72 years. Multiply 72 by 360 and we obtain 25,920 years. That is a number which we often meet with. It is the time needed by the Sun in its lagging behind to get back to its starting-point; having thus gone round the whole Zodiac. The Sun is therefore exactly one degree behind in 72 years, for a circle has, as we know, 360 degrees. According to this reckoning, the Egyptians divided the great year—which really comprises 25,920 years—into 360 days; but such a day was 72 years long. And 72 years, what is that? It is the average limit of duration of man's life. Certainly there are individuals who live to be older, others not so old, but in general it constitutes the farther limit for human life. Thus one can say: The whole connection in the Universe is so constructed that it sustains a man's whole life for a solar day, which is 72 years. True, man is emancipated from that. He can be born at any time; but his life here as physical man between birth and death is arranged according to the solar day. Referring to historical records, one generally finds that the ordinary year of the Egyptians was reckoned as 360 days (not 365.25 as it actually is), until later on it was found to accord so little with the course of the stars that the other 5 days had to be inserted. How came it that the Egyptians originally took 360 days for the year? In the cosmic year a degree—that is, a 360th part—is actually a cosmic day of 72 years. Thus in the Egyptian Mysteries it was taught that man is so connected with the Cosmos, that the duration of his life is one day of the cosmic year. He was thus organised into the Cosmos. His relation to the Cosmos was made clear to him through connections which belong to the decadence of the whole evolution of the Egyptian people.

The essential nature of man and his connection with the Cosmos was not then made known to the wide mass of the Egyptians—that is characteristic of the time. It was said that if all men knew the nature of their being, how it is organised into the Cosmos, and that the duration of their own life has its part in the duration of the Sun's revolution, then those who felt themselves organised into the Universe would not allow themselves to be ruled, for each would regard himself as a member of the Universe. Only those were allowed to know this who it was believed were called to be leaders. The rest were not to possess such knowledge of the Cosmos, but a knowledge of the day only. This is connected with the decadence of the Egyptian civilisation. It was certainly necessary in regard to many other things, that immature people should not be initiated into the Mysteries, but this was extended to such things as gave power to the leaders and rulers.

Now, very much of what permeates our human souls today is derived from oriental sources. Traditional Christianity too contains much which has come from oriental sources; and especially into Roman Christianity a strong impulse has descended from Egypt. Just as the Egyptians were kept in ignorance concerning their connection with the Cosmos, so in certain circles of Romanism the view prevails that people must be kept in ignorance of their connection with the Cosmos which comes about through the Mystery of Golgotha. Hence the fierce conflict which arises when, from an inner necessity of our age, we emphasise that the Event of Golgotha is not simply something which must be regarded as outside the rest of cosmic conception but rather as inserted into it, when we show how what took place on Golgotha is really connected with the whole Universe and its constitution. It is regarded as the worst heresy to describe Christ as the Sun-Spirit, as we have done.

It must not be supposed that the point at issue is not well-known; but just as the Egyptian priest knew quite well that the ordinary year has not 360 days but 365.25, so certain people are perfectly well aware that the matter with which the Christ Mystery deals is also connected with the Sun Mysteries. But present-day humanity is to be hindered from receiving this knowledge—the very knowledge that it needs; for as I have already said, the materialistic view of the Universe is much preferred by that side to Spiritual Science. Materialistic science also has its practical consequences, in which again the present time may be compared with ancient Egypt. I call attention to the fact that the Egyptians as such were thus dependent upon the course of the Sun, on the relation of the earthly to the heavenly, as regards their external civilisation. The withholding of the knowledge of the connection of cosmic phenomena and their effect on the cultivation of the land, represented a certain power in the hands of the declining priesthood, for thereby the Egyptian labourers had to submit to direction from the priests, who had the requisite knowledge.

Now if the European and American civilisations were to retain their present character, adhering only to the materialistic, Copernican view of the Universe—with its off-shoot, the Kant-Laplace theory—a materialistic cosmogony must necessarily arise concerning earthly phenomena, biological, physical and chemical. It would be impossible for a cosmogony of this kind to include the moral world order in its structure. It could not embrace the Christ-Event, for it is impossible to be a believer in the materialistic view of the world and at the same time a Christian; that is an inner lie, it is something that cannot be, if one is honest and upright. Hence it was inevitable that the practical consequences should be seen in Europe and American culture, of the split between materialism on the one hand and a moral cosmogony on the other, and along with the moral cosmogony, also the contents of the religious faiths. This result was evidenced in the fact that men who had no external reason for being inwardly dishonest, threw faith overboard, and established a materialistic cosmogony for human life also. Thereby the materialistic cosmogony became a social cosmogony. This would however have the further consequence for our European and American civilisation that man would have a materialistic cosmogony only and would know nothing of the Earth's connection with cosmic powers, in the sense that we have described it. Within a certain caste, however, the knowledge of the connection with the cosmogony would remain, just as the Egyptian priests kept the knowledge of the Platonic year, the great cosmic year and the great cosmic day; and such circles could hope then to rule the people who under materialism degenerate into barbarism.

Of course these things have been said today only from a sense of duty towards truth; but they must be said out of such a duty to truth. It is of importance that a certain number of people should realise how necessary it is to give the Mystery of Golgotha its cosmological significance. This significance must be recognised by a number of people, who must on their part, undertake a certain responsibility that the fact should not remain hidden from earthly humanity—the fact that humanity is connected with the non-earthly Spirit, who lived in Palestine in the Man Jesus, at the beginning of our era. It is necessary that the knowledge of the entrance of Christ from the non-earthly world into the Man Jesus of Nazareth, should not be withheld. To such penetration belongs the overcoming of that dishonesty which is so general today in questions of cosmic conceptions and of faith. For what is done today? We are told on the one hand that the Earth moves in an ellipse round the Sun and has evolved in the sense of the Kant-Laplace theory, and we subscribe to this; and on the other hand we are told that at the beginning of our era such and such events took place in Palestine. These two things are accepted, without being connected; people accept them and think it of no consequence. It is not without consequence however, for it is much less evil when a lie is consciously accepted, than when it takes shape unconsciously, and degrades Man and drags him down. For if we consider a lie as it appears in a man's consciousness, every time he falls asleep it leaves his physical and etheric bodies with his consciousness, and lives on in spaceless, timeless being, in the eternal being, while Man is in dreamless sleep. There is prepared all which can result from the lie in the future; that is, everything is made ready to correct it, if it is in the consciousness. But if it is in the unconscious, it remains with the physical and etheric bodies lying in bed. When Man is not occupying these bodies, it then belongs to the Cosmos, and not to the earthly Cosmos alone, but to the whole Cosmos; there it works for the destruction of the Cosmos; above all, for the destruction of the whole of humanity, for this destruction begins in humanity itself.

Man can escape what threatens humanity in this way, by no other means than by striving after inner truth as regards such supreme questions of existence. Thus there is a kind of appeal to humanity today from out of the impulses of our time to realise that a materialistic astronomy knowing nothing of how at a definite point of time the Event of Golgotha took shape, should no longer exist. Every astronomy which includes the Moon in the structure of the Universe just the same as the Sun and Earth, instead of allowing the two streams to run in with one another, but still as separate streams—every such astronomy is no Christian astronomy but a heathen astronomy. Therefore every theory of evolution which describes the Universe homogeneously must from the Christian stand-point be rejected. If you follow my book, Occult Science, you will see how, in the description of the Saturn and Sun periods, the stream divides into two, which then intermingle and work together. Here we have two streams. In the descriptions usually given, however, the ideas are in accordance with the continuation of the pagan development. And you will find this true down to the very details. You know that Darwinian theorists describing the evolution of the organic form, would say: First there were simple organic forms, then more complicated forms, then more and more complicated forms, and so forth, up to Man. But this is not so. If we take Man as three-membered, his head alone is the development from the lower animal form. What is added to it has arisen later. Thus we cannot say that in our vertebral column we have something which transforms itself into head, we must say: Our head certainly arose from earlier structures which were spine-like; but the present spine has nothing to do with that development, it is a later appendage. What is now our head-organisation has arisen from a differently formed spine.

This I say for those who are interested in the theory of descent. I mention it so that you may see that a straight line leads from cosmic considerations to consideration of what lies in human evolution, and so that you may see the necessity for an enlightened Spiritual Science in all different realms of knowledge and of life. For science must not simply continue to develop, as did the science of the last century, under the influence of the materialistic view of the Universe, which is itself a child of the materialistic comprehension of Christianity. We owe materialism to the materialisation of the Christian view of the Universe. The teaching of the cosmic Christ must be re-established in opposition to the materialised form of Christianity we have today. This is the most important task of our time; and until its importance is realised, man will not be able to see clearly in any domain.

I have wanted to tell you these things, because they will enable you to understand better why ill-willed opponents fight so strenuously against what we are bringing before the world today. I was obliged to connect this whole study with a kind of cosmology, with the consideration of which we will continue in the next lecture.

Yesterday I mentioned the four principal parts of the present socialistic programme. As you will remember, these four parts 1) The socialisation of industrial concerns. 2) The production is to be governed by the demand. 3) The conditions of work and of pay are to be regulated democratically. 4) Profits of any kind go to the commnity.

Attention has already been drawn to a few things showing that the currents of feeling and opinion which called into life this fourfold programme contain certain facts which are not entirely out/off from the human being, as is the case with the materialistic conceptien of history and the theory of an economic struggle among the different social classes, for these aro conclusions arrived at by the social-democratic mentality. Spiritual impulses, spiritual potentialities, now influence the development of things contained above all in the views and aspirations of the proletariat. It will indeed be fatal if we fail to acquire the required insight into the strength of the impulses which influence the development of modern socialistic thinking and of modern socialistic aims. We might say: What most strikes us in socialistic thought and in socialistic aims is the absolute lack of confidence in any sort of help or cooperation to b e gained from man's moral, ethical impulses: when socialists set about to organise the social structure, they show an absolute distrust in the power o f ethical impulses. This distrust is a sediment, as it were, or proletarian thinking and willing; the proletariat simply does not believe that the ruling classes can in any way contribute moral impulses, or even spiritual impulses, towards the solution of the social problem.

We should not allow ourselves to be deceived by such things, particularly not by the phrases which socialists sometimes use. Particularly when socialists criticize the mistakes of the ruling classes, they like to condemn their moral shortcomings. But whenever the socialistic proletariat considers in a fully conscious way the source of its hopes for the future, it merely says: Even if the ruling classes were guided by moral impulses when striving to improve the social conditions of the proletariat, they could not succeed. A real improvement can only, result from a class struggle, from a struggle between different economic interests and the economic forces as such. It is most important to realise this. For even the last remnant of trust in the moral forces of the ruling classes still extant to-day, will disappear.

We should bear in mind that the capitalistic foundation, of which I have spoken to you yesterday, will gradually lead the so-called intelligentsia, the intellectual loaders of modern humanity, to an ever growing lack of confidence in the power of moral or spiritual impulses. This will spread more and more. For in the depths of their hearts, even the middle classes do not attribute much importance to the real power of moral impulses. They do, of course, talk a lot of such moral impulses, but the way in which things manifest themselves, shows that their words often contain a more or less conscious untruthfulness. Do not let us forget one of the most fatal facts in the development of modern humanity, a fact which we have already considered from various aspects. It may be characterized as follows: On the one hand, there is a certain confidence inthe science dealing with the external phenomena of Nature, a science which is, as it were, devoid of morality, devoid of spirituality. Our contemporaries wish to develolp natartal science in such a way that there is no connection between the ideas relating to Nature and those relating to the moral order of the world.

A characteristic fact is, for instance, the following one: The Roman Catholic Church, some of whose priests are really very learned men, emphasizes that the scientists in its ranks should concentrate their attention exclusively upon physical facts, and that they should in no way attempt to mingle spiritual or moral things with the so-called causal science dealing with external phenomena.

Take, on the other hand, all the books dealing with moral, ethical or spiritual questions, written by men who are looked upon as authorities. These books undoubtedly contain many unctious or not unctious, pathetic or not pathetic impulses and ideals which seek to arouse compassion or abhorrence. But try to form an opinion by consulting one of these books and asking ourselves: What can be gained to-day from these modern books on ethics and other spiritual subjects, in regard to the burning problems of the present, which we designate as the social questions, the social riddles?—Nothing, truly nothing, can be gained from such books! That which constitutes ethical thought has, in a certain way, withdrawn from the impulses which influence social life in ordinary everyday existence. Again and again you may find in books on ethical life ideas relating to benevolence, tolerance, love… love is a very favourite subject and similar things. But the way in which they are dealt with, do not enable them to exercise any influence upon human beings. The moral concepts which are advanced in such an abstract way have no moral force and contain no moral impulses.

We therefore have, on the one hand, a rhetoric dallying with,ethical subjeats, so that no moral impulse can take hold of men. The economic order which thus results, cannot exercise any ethical influence, but works upon the foundation of the causality which can be found in Nature, and it aims to bring into the economic structure of human life nothing but this causality of Nature. Do you find in the words or writings of modern men, belonging to the so-called intellectual circles, anything which can influence humanity in such a way that ethical requirements become at the same time social-economic requirements?—The most essential point which should be borne in mind to-day, is that a straight path must lead from the field of ethics, religion and spirituality, to the most common, daily questions of economic life, of national-economic and social life.

This path must not be ignored, if greater misfortune than that of the past years is not to befall humanity. In regard to such things, the modern proletarian' party, from the extreme, right to the extreme left, has taken over the inheritanoe of the capitalistic bourgeoisie, in the way in which it, has,developed during the past centuries. The characteristic trait of the bourgeoisie is that it has completely severed man's personal aspirations from the economic structure of life, from the development of capital, and quite independenly of any traditional religion or sectarian. movement of modern times, it cultivates at the same time a soul-life which is entirely separated from the interests of daily life; the middle classes think that it is a superior attitude to separate soul-life from the concerns of daily life, and so they completely lose that survey of life which is so badly needed to-day.

I have, for instance, come across members of the Anthroposophical Society, who said: Can we admit into our Society a man who works in a brewery, for such person contributes to the fact that people drink beer!—Now I am not speaking either for or against the drinking of beer, but the point from which these members set out, was that they were against beer drinking. In similar cases one can only say: You do not see further than your own nose, and this “nose-judgment” induces you to see, or not to see, that person who has a comparatively unimportant situation in a brewery. But let us consider real facts. You are the owner of shares, including all kinds of bank shares. Do you realise how much beer you brew with your shares and bank papers? But this does nut trouble you, for you do not see further than your own nose!

But, I do not intend to blame anyone for his opinions; the essential point is to draw attention to the lack of consistency and insight contained in such a manner of thinking. The greatest misfortune of our time is that love of ease leads people into this disconnected, incoherent way of thinking and they remain in it, because they do not wish to throw a bridge which leads from ethics religion and spirituality to the other side, constituting real life in its immediate form—the social and economic dethands, the social riddles as such, which now face us.

Indeed, many things have to be learned in this direction. You will remember that I have emphasized again and again that when we deal with social matters, the most essential thing to be borne in mind to-day is the spiritual aspect. Education, schools, spiritual life in general—these are the most important questions.

If we look more deeply into things, we may even say: So long as spiritual life continues to be dependent upon the political community (you already know that in future the social organism will consist of three communities, or parts), so long as the spiritual community, or spiritual life, is obliged to depend upon a merely political.structure which absorbs it, no solution can be reached and people will continue meddling about with social questions! Schools must be quite independent, spiritual matters must be dealt wits quite independently of economic or political life: this is :the essential point.

There is really not much time to reflect over those things and to set them right, and very soon it may be too late. Something can only be achieved if man's innermost being can still be reached, if the wild instincts which have become unfettered can still be controlled. But try to preach to-day to those men whose wild instincts have become unfettered in the social chaos of the present time—try to preach to them, and you will find that they will only laugh at you!

It is our earnest endeavour again and again to appeal to the hearts and souls of men, that they may listen to that which is so sorely needed. Even as the development in the direction of capitalism has in the past centuries utterly confused the activities connected with spiritual interests, and consequently with the world as such, so the spiritual science of Anthroposophy seeks to bring light and order into these things.

Let us consider the first point in the four-fold socialistic ideal: Industrial concerns, production, is to become common property, communal property.—But the essential point here, depends above all upon spiritual questions, upon a clear insight into certain answers to spiritual questions. What can spiritual science offer to human souls, if it is not only taken as an abstract, dry theory? Spiritual science can offer human souls three things:—In the first place, not a mere faith in a divine-spiritual element, but a conception of it, though it may perhaps only be one transmitted through thoughts, but it is a conception of the spiritual worlds which is accessible to sound common sense. Instead of a confused, often pantheistic and unclear manner of speaking of the spiritual world, the spiritual science of Anthropesophy transmits a real conception of the spiritual world, speaks of definite structures of spiritual Beings, of a hierarchical order within the spiritualal world; it transmits ideas of the spiritual world which are just as concrete as the ideas relating to the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms of the physical world. In the course of development during the past centuries, these spiritual ideas were completely pushed aside. Consider how much importance is attributed to-day to faith without any concepts. The spiritual science of Anthroposophy is characterised by the fact that it transmits a conception of the spiritual world.

A second thing which spiritual science offers to those who do not only take it as a dry and lifeless theory but who allow their heart and soul to be touched by it, a second thing which spiritual science can give is the following: people really learn to respect and prize the human being, they acquire a boundless feeling of respect and appreciation of man: if a spiritual conception of life, as set forth, for instance, in my Occult Science, is not only grasped theoretically through the intellect, but with the whole soul, can it then it lead to anything but a genuine respect and appreciation of the human being. Consider that the whole cosmos is contemplated from the standpoint that man has his place within it. After all, it is man whom we consider, when we speak not only of the evolution of the Earth, but of the Moon, Sun and Saturn stages of development.

Compare in this respect, anthroposophical spiritual science with the ordinary natural science of modern times. The latter leads to hypotheses such as that of Kant-Laplace. Compared with spiritual science, which goes back to the Moon, Sun and Saturn stages of development, natural science does not go far back; it only reaches back to a certain stage of earthly development. Man has been lost long ago in that philosophical-scientific madness-designated as the Kant-Laplace theory! He is no longer contained in this theory; there we have a grey nebula, and this insane theory, which is now looked upon as science, speaks of this fog, of this nebula.

Against this fact, that even in the earthly sphere natural science can no longer find the human being, stands the conception of Spiritual science, which goes in search of the human being in the whole cosmos. This is possible, even if we pursue such things with intellectual thoughts, even if we study such things in a purely theoretical way. But those who do not only study spiritual science theoretically, but to whom such studies are an earnest amd deeply human concern, will obtain through such a contemplation of the world a boundless feeling of respect and of appreciation for the human being as such.

The modern scientific conception which turns its attention merely towards physical things, cannot appreciate the human being as such. Spititual science remains within reality, and it considers the external physical things as semblance. For if we remain standing by the external reality, we do not have the corrective of which spiritual science disposes, by contemplating the cosmic human being and thus arriving at a feeling of respect for man, in contrast to the statements concerning man which are sometimes advanced by the upholders of a physical-sensory conception. This materialistic conception cannot lead us to respect and appreciate man, for in that case it would have to deny its own theories. It would have to appreciate and respect the single empirical human being, the everyday man, that is to say, the facts which, it known about him… but this would not do!

In the first place, spiritual science is therefore the path loading to a spiritual conception, in contrast to mere faith; it is the path leading to a genuine appreciation of man, in contrast to that indifference towards man which necessarily results from a purely materialistic conception.

Then there is a third thing: In the cosmos there are of course objects and processes which are outside the human being. How does spiritual science observe these objects and processes outside man? It observes them all in relation to man. Spiritual science considers the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms in relation tb man. This enables one to appreciate that which exists besides, or
one might say, beneath the human being in the physical world outside. Take a feeling which is a truly spiritual-scientific one, a feeling which Christian Morgenstern drew out of spiritual science and to which he gave poetic expression: The human being feels himself at the top of the physical kingdoms of the earth: Below him is the anjmal kingdom, then the vegetable kingdom and the mineral kingdom. But if the vegetable kingdom were able to have feelings and thoughts in regard to the mineral kingdom, what would it say? “I bow down reverently before thee, o stone, for to thee I owe my existence. Although thou art below me in the hierarchical order of Nature, I could not exist without the soil which thou givest me.” Similarly the animal would have to bow down reverently before the plant and say: “I owe my existence to thee". And so on, throughout the higher kingdoms. Each higher kingdom bows down reverently before the lower kingdom.

Spiritual science thus renders it possible to consider also the remaining world in relation to man. It can look upon it in the right relationship to the human being. Whenever spiritual science can influence spiritual life, it exercises its influence in three directions:—

1) Through spiritual contemplation;

2) throdgh a Sense of respect and appreciation for man;

3) through a right appreciation of everything in the world by considering it in relation to man.

Unless the above-mentioned three conditions arise, any demand) as for instance the socialisation of industrial concerns, must remain an empty unsubstantial requirement. Unless the three above-mentioned conditions arise, which determine man's position in relation to the world, to his fellow-men. and to spirituality, no true impulse can penetrate into the social life of men and it will be impossible to arrange, anything within it.

In the same way it will be impossible to materialise the second point of the socialistic programme: That the demand should govern production. Demands, or the market-requirements, do not constitute anything which can be noted down statistically, it is nothing stable which can govern other processes. In real life, the demand continually fluctuates and changes. Can anyone, for instance, determine the demand for electric railways in 1840? This is a demand which was conjured up by the cultural process. itself. If production is to be ruled by some existing demand, if no initiative is to be left-to-it it will stagnate. A true relationship between production and demand can only be established if the social organism has a threefold structure. In that case, a living cooperation will regulate of its own accord, as it were, the relation betweea demand and production, and this also applies to the other impulses within the social organism.

Let us take the third; point, that conditions of work and pay be settled democratically. Here it is essential to beqr in mind that a democracy is useless unless it is based upon true respect of the human being, and this feeling of reverence for man can only be impressed upon the soul by spiritual science. Democracy contains the seed of its own decay, if it does not contain at the same time a genuine feeling of respect and reverence for the human being.

Then the fourth point, that any excess value should be handed over to the community. My dear friends, one can say that there one detects the absolutely impossible way of thinking in such a direction. What is surplus value? In the eyes of the marxistic proletariat, surplus values, or profits, are something impossible which must be eliminated. To abolish profits, they wish to establish a socialistic order. An essential point within such socialistic order, is the abolition of surplus values, of profits. But one of its ideals is that these profits should be handed over to the community. This represents, in fact, one of its ideals. Why? Because surplus values will be there, and this very fact throws its shadow upon the socialistic programme. It is the shadow which unquestionably darkens tbe programme. And this throws its whole darkness upon the whole theory.

Modern humanity thus sways in a fearful darkness; light can fall upon it only if men overcome their love of ease, and pass over from faith to a spiritual conception, from man's purely empirical position in the world to that other position which calls forth a real feeling of reverence and. respect for the human being; from a mere devouring of things, etc. to that true appreciation of the things which exist in the universe in addition to man, which can only arise if one can place everything in relation to man, through Anthroposophy.

My dear friends, you can therefore realise how closely the fate of spiritual-scientific aims is connected with the social problems of the present time. An earnest need arises in the souls of those who take spiritual science seriously, a need even greater than that of spreading spiritual science: it is that of calling up in the hearts of mon the feeling how necessary it is, particularly for the most important and justified requirements of the present, to spread the ideas, feelings and will impulses which can only arise out of spiritual science. But we shall continuo to speak of these things.

VERSES BY RUDOLF STEINER

(Discovered among his papers)
Original Text in German

Du selbst, orkennender, fühlender, wollender Mensch,
Du bist das Rätsel der Welt.
Was sie verbirgt,
In dir wird es offenbar, es wird
In deinem Geiste Licht,
In definer Seele Wärme,
Und deines Atoms Kraft
Sie bindet dir die Leibeswesenheit
An Seelenwelten,
An Geistesreiche.
Sie führt dich in den Stoff,
Dass du, dich menschlich findest,
Sie führt dich in den Geist,
Pass du dich geistig nicht verlierest.

(TRANSLATION OF ABOVE)

Thou, o cognising, feeling and, willing man
T hou art the riddle of the world!
What it conceals,
Reveals itself in thee, and becomes
Light in thy spirit,
Warmth in thy soul,
And the power of thy breath
Binds thy bodily being
To soul-worlds
And spirit-realms.
It loads thee into substance,
That thou mightst find thyself
As man,
It leads thee into spirit,
That thou mightst never lose
Thyself as spirit.

[ 1 ] This is the proper point at which to refer to a preconception, persisting since the time of Kant, which has been so absorbed into the very life of certain circles as to pass for an axiom. Whoever should presume to question it would be considered a dilettante, a person not yet advanced beyond the most rudimentary concepts of modern philosophy. I refer to the opinion, held as if it were establisheda priori, that the whole perceptual world, this endless multiplicity of colors and forms, of tones and degrees of heat, were nothing more than our subjective world of representations,⁹ possessing existence only so long as we keep our senses receptive to the influences from a world quite unknown to us. The whole phenomenal world is interpreted on the basis of this opinion, as a representation (Vorstellung) inside our individual consciousness; and, on the basis of this hypothesis, are constructed further assertions regarding the nature of cognition. Volkelt also has adopted this opinion and bases upon it his theory of knowledge, a masterly production in its scientific process of development. Yet this is no basic truth, and least of all is it appropriate to form the very culmination of the science of knowledge.

[ 2 ] We would not be misunderstood. We have no desire to utter a protest—which would certainly be futile—against the contemporary achievements in physiology. But what is wholly justified as physiology is by no means for that reason appropriate to be set up before the very gateway leading to a theory of knowledge. It may pass as an unassailable physiological truth that the complex of sensations and percepts which we call experience first comes into existence through the cooperation of our organism. Yet it remains quite certain that such an item of knowledge as this can result only from much reflection and research. This characterization—that our phenomenal world is, in a physiological sense, of a subjective character—is itself a characterization of that world reached by thinking, and has, therefore, nothing whatever to do with its first manifestation. It presupposes the application of thinking to experience. It must, therefore, be preceded by an inquiry as to the interrelationship between the two factors in the act of cognition.

[ 3 ] It is supposed that this opinion raises one above the pre-Kantian naïveté, which considered the things in space and in time as constituting reality, as is still done by the “naïve” person who has no scientific training.

[ 4 ] Volkelt makes the assertion: “All acts that call themselves objective cognitions are inseparably bound up with the individual cognizing consciousness; they take their course at first and immediately nowhere else than in the consciousness of the individual; and they are utterly incapable of reaching beyond the sphere of the individual and laying hold of the sphere of the real lying outside, or of entering it.”¹⁰

[ 5] But it is quite impossible for unprejudiced thought to discover what that form of reality which touches us directly (experience) bears within itself that could in any way justify us in designating it as mere representation.

[ 6 ] Even the simple reflection that the “naïve” person observes in things nothing which could lead him to this opinion teaches us that no compelling reason for this assumption exists in things themselves. What does a tree, a table, bear within itself that could lead me to look upon it as a mere mental image? This should not, then, be asserted—least of all as a self-evident truth.

[ 7 ] Just because Volkelt does this, he entangles himself in a contradiction of his fundamental principles. According to our conviction, he could maintain the subjective nature of experience only by being disloyal to the truth recognized by him, that experience consists of nothing but an unrelated chaos of images without any thinkable definition. Otherwise he would have been forced to see that the cognizing subject, the observer, is just as unrelated within the world of experience as is any other object belonging to it. But, if one predicates subjectivity of the world of experience, this is at once a thought-characterization, just as if one looks upon a falling stone as the cause of an impression made in the ground. Yet Volkelt himself will not admit any sort of interrelationships among the things of experience. Here lies the inconsistency in his conception; here he becomes disloyal to the principle he has expressed regarding pure experience. Through this he shuts himself up within his individuality, and is no longer capable of emerging. Indeed, he admits this without reservation. Everything that lies beyond the disconnected images of perception remains for him in uncertainty. Our thinking, to be sure, endeavors according to his view to reach out from this world of mental images and infer an objective reality, but our going out beyond this world cannot lead to really known truths. All knowledge that we win by means of thinking is, according to Volkelt, not protected against doubt. It does not by any means attain to a certitude like that of immediate experience. This alone affords an indubitable knowledge. We have seen how defective is this knowledge.

[ 8 ] But all this grows out of the fact that Volkelt attributes to sense-reality (experience) a characteristic which can by no means pertain thereto, and on this presupposition bases his further assumptions.

[ 9 ] It has been necessary to give special attention to this writing of Volkelt's because it is the most important contemporary work in this field, and also for the reason that it may serve as a typical specimen of all endeavors after a theory of knowledge which are in basic opposition to the direction of thinking that we represent, founded upon Goethe's world-conception.

• 9. Vorstellungswelt
• 10. Cf. Volkelt: Erfahrung und Denken, p. 4.

The more one moves up to the present in the consideration of evolution, one must take into account that time is an element of deception and the source of numerous errors in history. One must distinguish between what always goes through evolution, what is always there, is a total dying or death: and that is the development of the levels of consciousness of the Pitris. All that matters in the end is this development. No matter how much may have happened on the first planet: the moment the Pitris had the first state of consciousness, everything the Pitris had within them was dissolved. Only the result was transferred. All the work that was used is concentrated in one point. Everything winds around it like a spiral around the node, in which the Pitri has contracted like the snake around the Hermes staff. This is how we do it in earthly evolution. We discard the detail. Pitri has hereby achieved an elevation of consciousness. The stages are determined, the snake remains subject to a certain arbitrariness, its coils are what the illusions bring about in time.

We can predict the stages of consciousness of a Pitri. The paths of the snake are manifold and can be seen by the seer in their outcome – not in the future. So one can say for the future: it will be so and so, but not whether in two hundred or three hundred years. We do not know how much the stages of evolution will be drawn out. A can be reached in five years, C in a hundred years, or vice versa. Therefore, it is possible to determine the path, but not the length of time. Hence the deception, and one cannot say in advance in terms of time, because time belongs to macrocosmic development, the microcosmic is timeless.

This must be considered when following events in relation to the present and the future, because the microcosmic development is correct, but the macrocosmic development is subject to freedom, in that it can use external circumstances in different ways.

From this follows an occult sentence: the arbitrariness or freedom of the human microcosm expresses itself in its inclination towards the snake.

The rod is he himself, and therefore the snake symbol as the symbol of freedom. So, although the path is strictly prescribed, it would be futile to want to try to foresee what freedom of man, of external events, can be foreseen. Although external events can be foreseen, but the leaders and leaders use the external events at their discretion.

The Pitri has not yet awakened to freedom, and his future actions are mostly prescribed for him by the macrocosm.

Let us take this into account when considering the present, the Latin races. What the Pitris do can only be perceived through inner vision; what takes place in the macrocosm from the outside.

Therefore, the consideration of world history falls into events that we see from the outside and into the essential stages of development that we have to consider from the inside. We call the former noumenon and the latter all external phenomena.

All phenomena also have an inner side, and are phenomena insofar as we do not yet see their noumenon. Now, the Teutonic race has the task, the noumenal, of applying intelligence, the manasic, to external processes. Therefore, for centuries all science was transferred to the external physical plane. In his poem, Dante describes the three-tiered world. He did not, of course, believe that these were locas in space, but took them as symbols for spiritual processes. At that time, little importance was attached to the description of external events, but rather to the essence of spiritual matters.

In the Heliand saga, Christ is made the German military leader; the poet said to himself: It does not matter whether it is described through Palestinian or Saxon events, but rather it is used arbitrarily for inner events, because the temporal is Maya.

The actual mission of the Germanic race was to take the external and the temporal really seriously. In the past, the world system was used from a different point of view. From Copernicus onwards, the aim was to describe the world independently of man and according to material processes. The external is taken so seriously that the human will becomes the decisive factor. In the past, intentions for the social life of man were still taken from above, and the leaders were mediators. Now personal freedom becomes the decisive factor. Reason and self-will of the individual, freedom, equality and fraternity will [gap in the transcript]

Therefore, the French Revolution could only have been staged under the leadership of masters [gap in the transcript]

Voltaire, Rousseau, d'Alembert did not simply have an external historical [gap in the transcript] but were masters [gap in the transcript] and therefore executed it as a noumenon.

Everything that is snake is the abomination..., everything that is progress is the rod. The externally leading masters had to relinquish the leadership to the snake. In particular, Rosicrucianism withdrew.

Materialism at its highest in the forty years; it blossoms in the will.

Limitation to the external phenomenal principle of knowledge; we can only [gap in the transcript]

Kant introduced and Spencer expressed.

Ignorabimus.

The will had to be directed in such a way that it is forced down completely onto the physical plane, compressed, concentrated into a personality. To state what impression it makes, what the ultimate consequence / gap in the transcript]

Infallibility of the Pope. One does not have to investigate the counsel of God, but on the physical plane, [gap in the transcript]

The authority wants to be concentrated in one personality.

Agnosticism from one side, infallibility from the other.

Unity on the physical plane would only be possible if one ruled over all; on higher planes, unity is self-evident.

The task of the next race will be to create a culture with elementary force, renouncing the entire culture of the fifth race and starting from the original human nature.

The blessings of Western civilization will be used by the Slavic race to bring about a renewal of civilization; it will become the sixth sub-race. It will give its content to the American race, which will play a similar role to the Mongols for the future main race.

[Gap in transcript].

The creations of Goethe and Schiller during their time as friends are among the most beautiful blossoms of human intellectual life. However, this friendship only came about because both men overcame serious inner obstacles that kept their souls apart. These obstacles can be seen in the conversation reported by Goethe, which the two had when they had once come from a lecture on the plant world that had taken place at the Naturalists' Society in Jena. Schiller found that the lecture was unsatisfactory because the individual plant forms were juxtaposed without the context becoming apparent in the consideration. Goethe replied that he had such a context in mind in his Urpflanze (primordial plant), which contains what lives as the essence in all individual plants. This “Urpflanze” does not resemble a single plant; but it makes every plant understandable from this primordial form that underlies the entire plant kingdom. Goethe sketched this primal form with a few characteristic strokes in front of Schiller's eyes. Schiller replied: but that is not an experience, that is an idea. Goethe, however, insisted that for him such an idea was at the same time an experience (observation), and that if one called such an idea an idea, he perceived his ideas with his eyes. From Goethe's description of the conversation, it is clear that the two of them had not yet been able to reconcile their opinions.

Goethe felt justified in addressing what formed itself in his mind about the things of nature in the form of ideas, as a result of observation, as he did, for example, about the red color of the rose. For him, science was spirit-filled and yet at the same time the objective result of observation. Schiller could not come to terms with such a view. For him, it was clear that man must first form the ideas out of himself if he wanted to combine the results of observation, which were only given as details. Goethe felt at home in nature with his spiritual content, while Schiller felt out of touch with nature with the same content.

Anyone who follows the course of their friendship from their correspondence will see how it deepened as Schiller came to understand Goethe's way of looking at things. He came to accept the objective rule of the spirit in the creations of nature, which was something that Goethe took for granted. It may be said that Schiller was the first to separate from Goethe the view that man stands outside nature and that when he speaks about nature, he adds something to it. Goethe was never unclear about the fact that in man nature expresses its essence as spiritual content itself, if man only puts himself in the right relationship to it.

For Goethe, the essence of nature lives in man as knowledge. And human knowledge is for him a revelation of the essence of nature. For Goethe, the process of knowledge is not merely a formal reflection of a hidden essence in nature, but the real manifestation of that which would not exist in nature at all without the human spirit. Nevertheless, for him, the spirit is the true content of nature itself, because he conceives of knowledge as the human soul immersing itself in nature. Schiller initially found it difficult to reconcile this with his Kantianism. And he had adopted this Kantianism; Goethe never found anything in Kant's view that could come close to his way of thinking.

In the feeling of Goethe's artistic creations, Schiller found himself in his way of thinking and approached Goethe more and more. In the “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man” one sees Schiller's striving to bring Goethe's artistic experience to full understanding. After he had reformed himself in this direction, he came to recognize in the artistic experience of the world the only human state of mind in which one could be a true human being in the full sense of the word. And so, for him, science became a way of experiencing the world in which man could not reveal himself in his entirety.

Goethe, on the other hand, wanted a science that, in its own way, would bring out the whole person just as art does in its own. Schiller first had to work his way towards such a view. He did so, and in doing so, his spiritual community with Goethe was placed on the right footing. Goethe, in turn, approached Schiller in that Schiller provided him with the intellectual justification for his way of thinking. He himself could not have arrived at this, for he lived in this way before the bond of friendship, as in something self-evident, which had not even occurred to him as a problem. Schiller was able to enrich Goethe's soul by showing him how it could become a self-aware mystery and search for the solution to it.

Schiller gave Goethe the incentive to continue his Faust. The “Prologue in Heaven” was created directly from this stimulus. If you compare this with one of the oldest Faust scenes, where Faust turns away from the spirit of the great world and towards the spirit of the earth, you can see the turnaround in Goethe. Before, the turning away from the intellectual content of the great world; after, the pictorial representation of the same. In the stimulus of thought that Schiller had given, lay for Goethe the germ of the artistic image of man's life in the world-spirit before the eye of the soul. Before, he was unable to do this because he accepted this life as something only felt as a matter of course, without forming it inwardly.

For posterity, it will always be significant to be able to learn to see Goethe's essence with the eye of the soul through Schiller; to see Goethe's essence fully unfold in a certain period of his life in the stimuli that emanate from Schiller.

The sense of the obstacles that both had to overcome in order to come together, and the other of the way in which they ultimately complemented each other, provides an impulse for the deepest soul observations. In doing so, however, he also penetrates to one of the most important points in the workings of the spirit in the development of humanity.

Dear attendees! After yesterday's lecture, which I was allowed to give here, some of the listeners may perhaps be astonished that one can speak of spiritual science or theosophy as a way of life. For what I tried to explain yesterday, as the fundamental, the basic principle of the study of the spiritual worlds, presupposes a vigorous, patient, long-lasting exercise of the human soul. Only through this can what was spoken of yesterday be achieved: that the soul becomes so strong and powerful within itself that it can feel itself to be a spiritual being and actually leave the physical body, thus living in such a way that, in the true sense of the word, the soul itself becomes a spiritual being among other spiritual beings in its experience, that it enters a new world in this spiritual world.

That was the purpose of yesterday's paths. If we allow ourselves to be guided very briefly once more by the soul, what has emerged is that the human soul is capable of doing spiritual chemistry; that it is capable of extracting itself as a spiritual-soul being from the context in which it stands in everyday life with the body, just as one is capable of extracting hydrogen from water. And we have seen that by vigorously continuing the exercises we characterized yesterday, the soul really does come to know its physical body first as something external, like the other things, but to know itself as being lifted out and transferred into a spiritual world. And in the further progress of the soul's practice, it turns out that the soul also leaves what it experiences in a soul-like way in everyday life – which only brings back the memory of its life to the point where our ordinary memory, as at a point in our childhood, emerged before our self-awareness – but that then this inner content of the soul changes and that what comes out can be called the spiritual core of the human being , which, when it is experienced, contains the eternal part of the human being, which passes through the gate of death and of which one can then know from real knowledge that he [the human being] goes through repeated earthly lives, that he leads a life alternating between a life on earth that runs between birth and death, and a life in the spiritual world that runs between death and a new birth.

Now it could be said: Is it not in the nature of things that this leaving of the physical body, this experiencing oneself as a spiritual-soul being in a completely different world, which can only be achieved after great efforts, that it is perhaps suitable for few people in the present, [that] therefore not everyone can become a soul researcher? Is it therefore not unnecessary to make that which only a few can really do, that which only a few can know, into common knowledge? One could object: How can someone who does not become a spiritual researcher themselves have any understanding of the messages that are given to them by the spiritual researcher about processes, conditions and entities in the spiritual world? For individuals, for a few people, one might say, the attainment of spiritual science may be a life asset; but for those who do not want to go this way, who do not reach a certain point on the path described yesterday, for them spiritual science cannot be a life asset. And yet! Even to the abstract thought it must appear as if that which can be attained in the indicated way must be a real inner good.

In today's lecture, the term “theosophy” is used. One could say that spiritual science is a theosophical world view. For this has always been understood to mean a world view that gives the human soul certainty and knowledge that the deepest, innermost core of our being can be reached, and thus it turns out that in its essence we experience that as the root of our existence, is connected with the root of all existence in the world, with the divine-spiritual existence of the world. Through our essential core, we ourselves are rooted in the divine-spiritual. This is what is meant by the term theosophy. And a theosophical world view does not just want to say that one can sense and believe that the human being is connected in his nature to the divine spiritual world, but it wants to say that the human being can also recognize this connection, that he can penetrate to this point within himself where he is connected to the divine spiritual that permeates and interweaves the world. And from the consciousness of this cognizable connection, a theosophical world view wants to create strength and hope for life.

Thus, a theosophical world view should actually be a true asset in life. But even if someone has gained the conviction through the path of the soul described yesterday that one can recognize how our soul is connected to its source, it might still seem as if only those who are able to undertake such research of the soul themselves can have a real awareness, a consciousness of this connection. But it is not so. This must be emphasized again and again: the conditions, processes and beings of the spiritual world can only be investigated by the method described yesterday. Only by going out of our physical body ourselves through the application of the described method and being among spirits, can we recognize the spiritual foundations of the world. But once they have been recognized by the spiritual researcher, the person to whom they are communicated need not be a spiritual researcher himself to find them understandable and comprehensible, to apply them in the fullest sense in life, to permeate life with them.

To be able to research something in the spiritual world, one must be a spiritual researcher, just as one must be a painter to be able to paint a picture. But once the picture is there, it would be sad if only the painter could understand it. And so it is with what can be found through spiritual research. If it is presented in the right way, then the human soul is attuned to truth and not to error. And just as we can understand the picture that the painter, who can paint, has painted, so we can understand and grasp everything that the spiritual researcher has to say and put it at the service of life, without being a spiritual researcher ourselves.

However, in our present time, it is still a long way before this can be achieved for a wider circle of people. For there is much that stands in the way of the modern soul if it wants to understand what the spiritual researcher has to say to the world. Today, people come from an admirable scientific culture. It has equipped him with habits of thought directed towards the external. Today, man is not accustomed to living in the very different concepts that the spiritual researcher brings out of the realm of the spiritual world.

But this will change when people's habits of thought have recognized that what stands in the way of spiritual research is prejudice. Then people will find that the descriptions of spiritual science can be understood by everyone. Just as chemistry, physics and any other science cannot be used to benefit life, even though not everyone can become a chemist, physicist or whatever, and people use what comes from chemistry and physics without being chemists and physicists, it is certainly true that what the spiritual researcher has to say can be put into the service of life, can become part of our soul, can penetrate the soul.

But then the concepts and ideas that the spiritual researcher has to give directly from the spiritual world have a different effect on the soul than the external concepts and ideas. And only when one has considered what spiritual research can be as a theosophical world view does one come to realize what a valuable asset this spiritual science is. Of course, one might say: When the spiritual researcher speaks of a vital good, this spiritual science cannot give bread and external goods at first. But what it has, it gives; and what it gives is food for the soul, but such food for the soul as it gives is more and more needed by souls due to the particular configuration that our life has taken on in our time.

Now, in order to understand the essence of spiritual science, we must first think of one thing. That is, spiritual research differs from ordinary research in the sensory world in that the human being allows himself to be passively impressed by the truth through the other sciences; that the human being must devote himself and the world transmits the truth to him from the outside. In spiritual research, however, the soul must be active from the very beginning, developing inner energy.

We have seen how the soul must ascend in three ways to the purely supersensible states, processes and entities. By placing itself in these states, it develops an inner facial expression, a purely spiritual mimicry. One cannot merely let what the states of the spiritual world are shine in from the outside. One must unite with it; one must become so one with it that one expresses it in oneself, but expresses it in one's soul, emancipated from the body. Thus, as a spiritual researcher, one enters the spiritual world. As long as one remains passive, it says nothing. Only when one expresses what it has to communicate, when the inner spiritual expression is an expression of what one experiences, only then does it speak. And the gesture, the movement of the soul, it enters into the spiritual world, but again actively, not by living into it as in the outer science, by speculating, but by letting thoughts live within you, you grasp the processes of the spiritual world. Only by imitating them with your own spiritual being can you become aware of them. And the third way was that the human being penetrates through spiritual physiognomy by immersing himself in the spiritual being and raising up the forces in himself from his depths that make him similar in his spiritual and mental state to the moments when he wants to immerse himself in a spiritual being, this spiritual being.

Thus the spiritual researcher enters the spiritual world in three ways: through spiritual facial expressions, through spiritual gestures and postures, and through spiritual physiognomy, but always actively, always in activity. And what he brings forth from the spiritual world must be formulated in concepts. And here we arrive at the point where it turns out that it is actually more difficult to communicate the insights of the spiritual world than it is to communicate the insights of the physical world. A person in our time claims that spiritual science also expresses itself externally in exactly the same way as external science expresses itself. Now, external science expresses itself in such a way that it presupposes the object it wants to recognize. And only afterwards does it want to give the concepts about it. And it does right from its point of view. The spiritual researcher actively immerses himself in the spiritual world and he must himself become an expression of what he experiences in the threefold way as described; and his concepts are formed in such a way that they arise within him vividly, and testify to their truth not as an image, but through their content and their power. The external researcher communicates what he has seen, what he has observed. The spiritual researcher is different: He gives conceptual expression to that which he has experienced, that which has become a part of himself, that which he has struggled to understand; these concepts must be fluid and must illuminate each other so that the concepts are like living beings. But they are such that they arise out of what the deepest essence itself is.

When the spiritual researcher forms his concepts and presents them to the public, these concepts contain information that he can only experience by bringing together the depths of the human soul with the foundations of the world, insofar as they are accessible to us, with the spiritual foundations of the world, so that his concepts are drawn from the depths of the soul. And these depths of the soul are present in every human soul. The spiritual researcher speaks of something that is present in every human soul. When he has researched it and expresses it, he expresses it in such a way that he lets a sound ring out with which the strings of the soul can resonate, to which it can bring full understanding because it is precisely the sound of one's own being.

But these concepts, these ideas, these feelings, in which the spiritual researcher must clothe what he experiences, have the effect of impressing the innermost part of our soul so that it feels drawn to them, because the concepts are active and lead to activity. One cannot understand spiritual science with a casual mind that does not want to be alive within itself. It can only be understood by trying to follow it with the living life and activity of the concepts. Thus spiritual research arises from the activity of the soul and at the same time challenges it to be understood, the activity of the soul.

From this we see that when we respond to spiritual research, we awaken the active power of the soul. It appeals to everything in our soul that wants to be active. The centuries-old scientific education of people has, however, pushed this active power of the soul into the background. But when a force is stretched to its highest degree, the counterforce asserts itself. And anyone who can look into the depths of today's souls knows that the souls long to get out of mere looking and observing, to do what calls for the innermost activity. In this way, the human being learns to feel and experience that he is in the midst of the spiritual world, but not as an understanding being that participates in its life.

Thus, the concepts and ideas and feelings of spiritual science are themselves the educators of the soul, which they seek to guide to participate in the reasons for existence in which we are rooted. First of all, this is realized in the fact that our thinking is oriented – and we can truly speak of an inner soul-good that permeates us through the understanding we bring to the ideas of spiritual research – that our thinking habits, our way of understanding, our soul mood is seized. And while it is otherwise possible to experience that in our presence, especially with well-meaning thinkers, there is something about the orientation of thinking that leaves much to be desired, spiritual science, the messages of spiritual research, can really bring people to orient his thinking in such a way that he imbues this thinking with habits that have a certain natural tendency towards truthfulness; that have a tendency not to get involved in the contradictions of life; to notice how thinking must penetrate into external things. The education of our thinking, the sharpening of our thinking, is what will emerge first when spiritual science enters into our cultural life.

I would like to give an example that can really show what the sharpness of thinking is like in our time. Let us assume that a very important thinker of the present day, who is regarded in the broadest circles today as an astute mind, has done many things that are noticed by those who have trained their thinking in what thinking must not do. There is a recent book by a thinker in which two assertions are found, separated by thirty or forty pages. The thinker in question wants to explain in what sense people today can still be Christians. And one approaches the soul of today's free-thinking people in a pleasing way when one says – and he says it –: Today we must go beyond the demon stories told in the Bible. All right, he may be of that opinion. Thirty pages later, however, one reads the remarkable sentence in the same book: When the spiritual and the physical touch in the soul, then demonic powers arise. You tell that to someone, and he can say: Well, the second time he didn't mean it like that, then he meant it figuratively. Yes, my dear audience, that is precisely the point: people are allowed to use such phrases and are not aware of the grotesque way in which they contradict all orderly thinking.

But people do not notice this today. And we are only on the way to our thinking being corrupted by mere passivity in this direction. This is how it is for those who can see through and observe things. In another famous book, you can read today - there is talk of combating a certain philosophical school of thought - that an author uses the image: This philosophy moves like a clown who pulls up the ladder he has climbed up to him and falls down. The book is quite witty, but I would like to ask you how the clown is supposed to pull the ladder up to him. You only think and write something like that when your thinking is disoriented. But today we are only at the beginning; such books are full of impossible thinking.

But since external culture is, as it were, the imprint of what people think, our culture must gradually be permeated by disordered thinking, unless this thinking is educated in such a way that it can respond with a fine feeling for what can and cannot be said. What can be said must be felt as connected with the essence and weaving of reality. Through orientated thinking, we can become familiar with reality, and this will be the fruit of spiritual science. Everyone will notice that this fruit of spiritual science harmonizes our lives; that it pours something into the soul that is able to bring this life into harmony with reality. In this way, spiritual science already has an educational and training effect on our thinking, making it inwardly active and alive.

And something else results from this. Those who gradually absorb what educated thinking in spiritual science can form in them will feel within themselves the independence of their inner being, the wisdom, the spirituality of their actual core. And there would be no materialism and no monism if one were to really engage in truly trained, energetic, inwardly self-gathering thinking. The strengthening and invigoration of our soul is the fruit of what we have for our thinking from spiritual science.

But spiritual science also brings forth as a second fruit of life that which belongs to the field of self-knowledge. Just as a diseased organism sometimes cannot endure the freshest air, but it can be seen from this that the organism is not healthy, so it can also be seen by some people in relation to spiritual science that they cannot tolerate it, that it makes an impression on them, this spiritual science, that it is fantasy, illusion. One will gradually come to realize that this is a form of self-knowledge; that from it one can see how one should struggle upwards in the soul in order to be able to understand what the spiritual researcher can obtain from the depths of the world.

How far you are from self-knowledge can be recognized by measuring yourself against the demands that the spiritual researcher places on the soul. Therefore, no one should be deterred if they notice that, through spiritual science, their thinking is at first somewhat numbed, disturbed, or their memory no longer seems as coherent to them as it used to. All these are transitional phenomena. We must recognize ourselves in this and say to ourselves: We must struggle to bear the stronger demands in the soul. But then this spiritual science will communicate its healthy spiritual life to us all the more.

And if we go further, we may find that perhaps even today spiritual science is not universally respected as a valuable possession because its value is not so immediately apparent. Nowadays, material goods are of course valued much more than spiritual goods because people do not really understand how material goods depend on spiritual goods. But if many a person could really ask himself out of a certain realization of things – and we can hear this question in our time from many souls who do not quite know how to begin with this or that, who lack a healthy direction in life, who lack the ability to give themselves direction and strength out of a powerful inner being – if many a person could ask himself: Where does all this come from?

These things affect even our physical well-being. Today more than ever, we have to speak of the nervousness of our age, of how unbalanced people are, how they lack balance. Where does this lack of balance come from? Ultimately, it is rooted in the soul. An example of this: that which can most lead to an external feeling of unease, to all possible symptoms of nervousness, to everything else that makes our social life so difficult, what can lead to this is spiritual barrenness, emptiness of the soul, a non-connection of the soul with what spiritual research wants to give, what spiritual research wants to fill the soul with.

Of course, there are some people today who say they have no need for the concepts of spiritual science. That is certainly true. But that is only in their conscious mind. In the depths of the soul there is always a longing for the sources of existence. And what we do not give to the soul asserts itself in it as emptiness, desolation, doubt. And, not overnight, but over decades, what is missing in the soul, what is present as chaos in the soul, pours out into the physical organization. We are no longer up to life. We can no longer pour the soul's strength into the physical because the soul is empty. Because people have become accustomed to paying attention to outward appearances in a natural way over the centuries, they have become estranged from that which can permeate the soul with spiritual content. A great many unhealthy symptoms, which go as far as the physical body and make people unable to cope with life, stem from this. And it will get worse and worse if spiritual science does not intervene and give the soul what it craves without knowing it with the higher consciousness.

Have we not seen that in our time – I do not want to say that there is pessimism in general, but that it has been examined in a peculiar way? If one speaks of pessimism in general, one would have to mention all sorts of misunderstandings. One could mention that some older religions also contain pessimism. But that is not the point, but rather the way in which one tries to support pessimism in our time. This support shows something very peculiar. Perhaps some of you will see what I am about to say as a curiosity. In our time, Kant has found followers. And one of these followers has written Studies in a Psychology of Pessimism. He undertook a strange investigation that takes a completely objective, passive scientific approach to the human being and seeks to examine whether life contains more suffering, more unpleasantness than pleasure, happiness, etc. This professor [Kowalewski] first tried to determine whether this is really the case by asking schoolchildren. He had the children write down what they call happiness in life and what they call suffering in life. They wrote down the following as suffering: illness, death, flooding. As for pleasure, they wrote down: ice cream, playing, gifts. We should not be surprised at the quality of this zest for life. But for the positive researcher, it depends on numerical relationships, and Kowalewski did indeed not just come up with ordinary numbers, but difficult integral terms. His reasoning about pessimism is therefore not easy to read. He was able to determine that in 39 cases suffering was emphasized, in 25 to 27 cases pleasure. So one can conclude from the children's minds that life offers more of the painful than of the pleasurable. And he thought: That doesn't quite go into the positive, you have to do it differently. He also used the diary of a well-known contemporary philosopher. He always wrote down when he felt pleasure and when he felt suffering. And when Professor Kowalewski looked through this diary, he found that suffering outweighed pleasure. So he had the second piece of evidence. But he went further, he was looking for something more certain. He observed people who walk quickly and people who walk slowly. When you are sad, he says, you walk slowly; when you are happy, you walk quickly. That is the professor's premise. And lo and behold, it turns out that there is a far greater number of sad, slow walkers. And so a book has been written in which these numerical relationships have been expressed in mathematical integral forms, and one can say, so to speak, equipped with these: Well, if you examine the external life, the pessimistic world view turns out to be justified, because the external life contains much more of the fatal, the sorrowful, than of the beneficial, the pleasurable. Science has now proved that!

Now there is no need to smile at such ideas. I am not going to talk about the value of such research, in what way it characterizes certain sciences. I just want to ask: What is actually being looked at here? Well, it is what touches man from the external world, what makes an impression on man, for nothing else can be investigated with such methods. No attention is paid to what man is capable of opposing to the impressions from outside, in the way of the unity and self-contained nature of his inner being.

I would like to quote something else that Mechnikov said in his 'Contributions to Optimism'. He talks about someone who was a friend of his, a person who was very nervous, who experienced the disinclination of life in the deepest sense. He could no longer hear a carriage rattle. He could not hear that someone was ringing his bell. He could not see that many people were coming to meet him. And many other things as well. You can imagine what was unbearable for this person. In the end, he knew of no other way to save himself than through morphine, in order to have a sense of stability within himself. Often he was close to taking such a large morphine dose that he could find death. He was also close to death more often, but was saved again and again. Then Mechnikov continued: So that was the man, but it got better and better with his pessimism. And actually Mechnikov says quite rightly why this is so: his external perception, so to speak, became more and more dulled; the outside world no longer made such a strong impression on him as it had done before.

Now we ask ourselves: What led to a greater balance of the soul in this person? That he became duller to the impressions of the outside world, that he was able to close himself off to these impressions. But throughout his life, his inner being was weak. But it can never be a matter of weakening us for everything beautiful and sublime that may come from the world, not to become nervous, but only for what I would like to express as follows: Could not man have had the same earlier, if a strong inner being, permeated with soul substance, had opposed the perceptions of the outer world? But that is precisely what spiritual science strives for: to make man strong within himself against the changing impressions of the outside world; so that we need not become dull to the world, and yet stand securely in the world.

Then it will no longer be necessary to examine the questions of a better or worse life according to purely external things. Kowalewski has done an even more precise experiment and a careful analysis has shown that we have every reason to approach the outside world when we are confronted with it as being much richer in suffering than in pleasure. He did the following. He says: Let us assume that we are examining the sense of taste. Now he has established – in external science you need concepts; where the spirit is absent, you need concepts and words – he called what makes a taste impression in us in the smallest amount of any substance the 'gustie'; and so he established what the gustie is of quinine, which makes an unpleasant impression; sugar makes a pleasant impression. And so he had a number of people take quinine and sugar together to see how much of each was needed to balance it out. And lo and behold, he found that almost twice as much sugar gusti had to be used than quinine gusti if the sugar gusti was to balance the quinine gusti. That means that, in terms of taste, we have to double the pleasant if we want to eliminate the unpleasant.

What I am reflecting on is that we cannot measure something that has an impact on our lives. And the mistake is that one does not take into account that one is actually not at all suited to assess the sugar level in the right way in relation to one's outer life. We take it for granted, but we estimate the quinine level quite strongly. As is well known, we are very much affected by the disease, but we rarely feel the full extent of our desire for health. And this is connected with the mistakes that are made in such investigations.

But we can also fill our health, which must gradually become boring to us when the soul emptiness remains, with what comes to us from the spiritual world, and we can hold out, so to speak, what flows in from the spiritual world to us, which can always hold and carry us, against the obviousness of the disaffection of the outer world. One should not treat a pessimistic mood by asking: Is the world good or bad? but in such a way that one says to oneself: The person who does not find the strength to stand securely in the world has not drawn enough from the spiritual world. What the person of whom Mechnikov speaks acquires through the deadening of his outer organization flows into our soul as a true asset of life when we take up spiritual-scientific concepts and ideas. Just as the most important things for the development of the soul of the spiritual researcher himself flow from the soul's harmony, so the soul's harmony and balance flow out again as a vital asset from the communications of spiritual research.

And we can cite another thing. We have now spoken of the influences of spiritual science on our thinking and imagining, on our minds. We can also speak of an influence on our will, on the initiative of our actions. The fact that we receive such concepts from the spiritual researcher, which are brought down from the spiritual worlds, means that these concepts also penetrate into our soul in such a way that they are suitable for pointing our soul to what is independent in it from the external sense world.

But now, how much arises in our will as a result of external stimulation? I see something that stimulates me. Perhaps I see a flower, I pick it; I am stimulated by it. I do something in life in one way or another. Once the educators taught me something; as a result, the skill arose in me for this or that. If we examine our will, we find external stimuli everywhere. This is precisely what characterizes the will in everyday life: it is stimulated from the outside to a greater extent than is usually believed. Even people who believe themselves to be the freest are dependent on this or that stimulus. They believe they act freely, but they only act according to what has been exerted as a stimulus from the outside world. In particular, we can often see that when people resist this or that in the name of the freedom of their soul, they are in fact resisting because of their stubbornness, their lack of freedom, and not because of the freedom of their mind. In short, the will is rooted everywhere, so to speak, in the external world.

When we take in spiritual science, what flows from its insights has a strengthening and invigorating effect on this will in particular. It works in such a way that this will in the soul becomes independent. But when it does that, we feel it as a force in the soul, as something that can only receive stimulation from within. We are enriched in our soul when we strengthen our will in this way. The external causes no longer affect that part of our inner being that we have acquired through our own will. We withdraw from external causes with our will. When someone becomes more and more deeply involved in spiritual science, they feel their will growing stronger. They can say: “I can now want more than I could before.” But this can only be achieved through devotion to spiritual science.

But if there is no external stimulus for the will, where must impulses come from? Again, what arises as new will not remain in rest, in inactivity, if it receives impetus from within. There is only one thing that no longer compels: what we call love in the broadest sense. This means that the motives of our will must be warmed through by love through the influence of spiritual science. We learn to recognize more and more the deep meaning of the word:

[duty]: where one loves what one commands oneself,

where that which leads us to action leads us entirely through our love for the task at hand, and we strive to accomplish it with the strength of soul with which we strive to accomplish everything that arises from love. With this, we have gained a beautiful fruit of spiritual science as a treasure for life. We have achieved the transformation of our will into the will to love. The treasure of the will to love grows ever greater when spiritual science becomes our life's treasure. Again, it is not something that provides us with material goods. But this will to love is a strengthening, valuable good for our external security in life, which we will see grow and grow as we properly penetrate into spiritual science through the concepts and ideas of spiritual science.

And again, a piece of self-knowledge can be linked to it. We often hear that people think highly of themselves when it comes to their will to love. But this is not the case. For when people, in wise self-observation, become aware of how the ideas and concepts of spiritual science make them aware of the selfishness and lack of love that still exists in them, spiritual science is once again the beautiful corrective, the genuine guide to self-knowledge. On the one hand, it gives us the will to love; on the other hand, it makes us aware of how much we still lack of this will to love. Thus, spiritual science is also the highest form of life, which can be described by the word self-education.

And further, spiritual science leads us beyond what the concepts borrowed from the external world can give us. It leads us to what the spiritual researcher finds by going out of his body with his soul and connecting with the roots of the world from which he, spirit from spirit, is taken. It thus leads us to what is deepest in our soul.

More and more one will see, as I also tried to explain yesterday - through the parable at the end - that science, which is built according to the pattern of external science, must stop at a certain point if it wants to become a worldview. I could explain this for many ideas that are important life ideas. I will explain it for only one idea now. Let us suppose that some philosopher, who at first wants nothing to do with spiritual science, Lotze, a man of spirit - I will stick to my habit of quoting those whom I consider worthy of opposition, those whom I regard as authorities - Lotze, who has written a book, 'Microcosm', which contains many significant works on philosophy, has also tried to present a philosophy of religion. But he arrives only at a conception of truth, at a recognition of such a conception of truth, which is won according to the pattern of those conceptions and ideas that are far removed from outer reality, that are won passively. Lotze therefore attempts to win a philosophy of religion by building it up in the sense of outer science. And, lo and behold, Lotze goes as far as is humanly possible. From his presuppositions he arrives at the assumption of a spiritual being, a divine being, that permeates and pervades the world, that is creatively active. He arrives at being able to conceive of the laws of nature as shaped and spiritualized by a unified divine essence. But every time a religious philosophy of this kind seeks to show how that which is shaped according to the pattern of external truth, like a natural law, is connected with the moral commandments, with that which, as inner impulses, inspires us in life, then it must come up against a duality for which it knows no connection. On the one hand, there are laws that operate with rigid, cold necessity. Where, in this whole system of natural laws, does that which lives in us as our moral impulses arise, as that which drives us to be noble in our human existence, that which permeates us with morality? Where does it spring from out there? If philosophy is to become a way of looking at life, then this question becomes relevant. It takes on significance. If philosophy is to become a regulator of our view of life, pointing out that on the one hand there is the world of necessity, and on the other the world of moral commandments, which, however, lives in us as if cut off from the world - how is it rooted in the world? As long as we remain with the passive concept of truth, we will never be able to bridge this gap, because there is a relationship between necessary truth and its legitimacy and moral truth and its legitimacy that cannot be seen in the external world, that cannot be passively grasped. The relationship between the natural order and the moral order cannot be grasped any more than the relationship between a mother and her child can be grasped through natural laws alone. The father could be there without the child being there. If the child is there, the child emerges from the father, but the father could be without a child. There is no necessity in the father, yet the father leads to the child. Perhaps one of the most significant conceptions and ideas of Christianity is that the relationship of the one God to the God who is to permeate our innermost being is presented in our morality as the relationship of the Father to the Son, the Christ. Theosophy or spiritual science shows us that there is a relationship between the moral world order and the natural-law necessity and world order, such as that of the Son to the Father.

But this relationship can only be understood by going beyond what can be given in passive terms to what can be grasped in the spiritual world; which stands before us in such a way that Goethe can coin the words - he looked to Kant, who tried to set limits to human knowledge, who wanted to regard as mere belief that which is moral world order ; he called it an “adventure of reason” that should not be undertaken. Goethe, who had to reject the kind of world view that Kant represents; he said that if one could truly rise to the upper regions through virtue and faith in the moral order, then one should bravely endure the adventure of reason and also go up with the whole soul to a higher world.

Then, at the same time, something is poured into the natural order as well as into the moral order that is as communal as that which exists between father and son, because nature, if we look at it as it is, could exist without morality, like the father without a son. Only when we look at what has really happened do we find the right relationship between father and son.

So we have to go to what has really happened in the world, and there we come to the very core of Christianity.

I wanted to give you an example of how religious concepts, which the human mind needs to feel its connection with what pulses through the world as divine-spiritual, how the human being can be strengthened in his religious life through spiritual science. For spiritual science shows him that one can really still grasp and understand that which, according to a great philosopher such as Kant, one should only assume and only be able to believe.

Our time, however, is living into an epoch in which it is once again quite clear to the spiritual researcher how souls are increasingly longing not only to accept religious deepening based on the authority of faith, but also to be able to recognize as we recognize nature, that which binds people together with the Divine-Spiritual in the cosmos outside.

Another asset for life will be that the newly awakening religious needs - for they will awaken, the religious needs appropriate to our time - will give these spiritual scientific concepts of inner support, of being set within, again.

The spiritual researcher himself is familiar with all the objections that can be made. If someone wants to say, for example: Now you have presented spiritual science as a special bringer of love. Doesn't Christianity do that for itself? — Yes, of course. The person who says that is fully convinced of it, and perhaps from his point of view he is quite right. But one could give him an answer, which I once had to give to a clergyman who said to me: Yes, what spiritual science says about Christianity, at least in many respects one can certainly go along with that. But one thing strikes me. The way you speak, you only speak to a few educated people who fulfill certain conditions. But we speak to all people. And that must be a true teaching that speaks to all people. I replied, “Pastor, have you found that all people go to church with you?” He could not say that. You see, I said, I want to speak to those who do not go to church with you, because they also have a living yearning for an understanding of Christianity. The fact shows that you are not speaking for them. So you are not speaking correctly for all people. And we do not have the right to say: something is right because we like it; we have to observe the facts. You may think you can dress your teaching in words that will appeal to everyone, but what we think is not always right, the facts must speak. For those who do not go to church but still long for an understanding of Christianity, we must also speak.

Of course, Christianity also speaks of love, but the point is not just to talk about the way to love; the point is to find the way that is the right way for a particular time. You must not be so selfish as to say: I want nothing to do with such a way to love, because the old way is good enough for me. That is egoism, which does not want to pay attention to the longings and tendencies of the souls that are touched by what will touch more and more souls in the future. But it is these souls that need the new paths, and the number of these souls will grow. The spiritual-scientific worldview wants to inspire them. It wants to give life goods of the kind that have been discussed here.

I could speak about many other life goods that can flow from spiritual science, but the principle is how spiritual science creates life goods, how spiritual science brings forth that which is immortal in us. But through this, what consciousness evokes in us is awakened and activated: You are an independent being; within you is a source through which spiritual life can bubble, which empowers you, which can give you strength, which can give you everything you need for your life.

Spiritual science is indeed gradually transformed into feelings and sensations. We not only experience immortality theoretically. From the whole structure of my lecture, you could see that the concepts of spiritual science bring to life and resonate within us what the spiritual researcher explores. This is particularly the case with one of the most important questions in life, the question of immortality.

If you delve deeper into spiritual science, you will receive a spiritual doctrine of immortality, a teaching about the core of the human being that can be clothed in concepts and ideas so that we not only know about immortality, but feel within us what is immortal in us. We become like a plant that could feel how the germ grows within it into a new plant. We feel what passes through the gate of death; we learn to experience it. And the time will come when principles such as those set forth in my book 'The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science' will be applied to the education of the child, when the soul will be so stimulated that it will live on in us, that we will have acquired a feeling through the concepts we have absorbed, that we will know: by living towards death, you develop more and more what your eternal part is. In the second half of life, when we see wrinkles forming on our skin and our hair turning gray, we will feel how all this is like the fading blossoms of plants, but how there is something in us that is emerging ever stronger, overcoming what fades away in us. And as we live towards a new life, we will feel that life. Old age will not be filled with an empty hope, but with the experience of what is felt within as a reality, which will be carried through death into the realm of the spiritual. This, however, will give certainty in life. It will dispel all superficiality, all incoherence of the spirit, all chaos in life. Thus, in addition to the other possessions of life, there will be a particularly intimate possession for our soul.

Just as I have pointed out that with the insights of spiritual science from the depths of human inner and outer perception, one can feel in harmony with all those who, in the right sense, have sensed the significance of human soul life and its relationship to the whole spiritual world through the whole development of humanity, so I would like to conclude by speaking of a thinker who is often forgotten today; a sincere, courageous thinker who, in a small booklet, which is really what is written on its title page, a “Dietetics of the Soul” - I would like to remind you of this dear connoisseur of the human soul, of Feuchtersleben.

The human soul cannot deny that ultimately its happiness consists only in the expansion of its innermost being and possessions.

Yes, the soul's true happiness and, we may add, the soul's true spiritual possessions consist in the expansion of the soul's inner being and possessions. And if spiritual science is what I tried to present yesterday and today, then it is indeed entirely that which, with all its impulses, strives for the expansion of the soul's inner being and possessions. And truly, with what spiritual science gives, one feels oneself standing within what the best minds of humanity have longed and thirsted for, because the soul needs it for its inner spiritual nourishment. Therefore, one is in harmony with such a fine, delicate soul as Feuchtersleben, one that nevertheless thinks and feels on a grand scale. And to sum up, if one wants to collect together in a general feeling what spiritual science can give as its best, one may say: spiritual science gives life's goods; it promotes the genuine, true happiness of the soul. It is held in the sense in which Feuchtersleben's saying is meant:

The human soul cannot hide the fact that its happiness ultimately consists only in the expansion of its innermost being and possession.

Question & Answer: Question: Can you slap children on the hand?

Rudolf Steiner: That is not so easy to answer. Such questions take on a new significance and importance in our time. There is not always a simple answer to a simple question. Simplicity is convenient, but even a clock is not simple. The universe is even less simple, with less power in it than in a clock. Spiritual science does not make things more comfortable, but through it one sees into areas that are indispensable for shaping life. Then one finds that simple things are complicated. Spiritual science gets one used to taking things more precisely, taking things more seriously. Farm children are quite properly tapped on the knuckles, with proper taps, decorated with an iron ring, but they have not become nervous. City children, who have never been tapped on the knuckles, are often nervous. Life is complicated. What is achieved in one nature through something is not always achieved in the other nature through it.

Goethe is right when he says, “One thing is not suitable for all”; we must take people as individuals and not judge abstractions. We cannot say that one thing or another is generally harmful or useful. Spiritual science will lead us from the abstract to the concrete, to an immediate understanding of immediate, concrete life. Then one will find that the question of nervousness will not have much to do with it; but much more important is the question of education from the spiritual-scientific point of view. Then one can completely dispense with what is indicated here. But this education requires much more of the activity of the soul of the educator, who is able to find his way into every soul.

Beating is usually required by the nature of the educator, not the person being educated. In general, it can be said that corporal punishment is not particularly recommended as a means of education, regardless of whether it is on the fingers or elsewhere.

Question: Is clairvoyance possible while awake? [...]

Rudolf Steiner: As a rule, one cannot see the physical-sensory world and the spiritual world at the same time. The physical world is then like a sinking, and simultaneous seeing is usually caused by bringing something like a having [raising?] of the soul into the spiritual vision. What matters is not the state, but the fact that one is so present in the spiritual vision with one's ego, with one's consciousness, that one does not experience it as if in a trance, but consciously. Only then can one seek the connection between the two worlds. It is said that matter does not appear to be present when this state occurs. Yes, it was said yesterday that one has a picture in front of oneself and that one must first learn to read these pictures. You cannot relate them to reality as in the physical world, but must first learn to read them.

Question: Is the concept of God actually set aside in Theosophy, or at least not emphasized as it is in the Christian religion?

Rudolf Steiner: That is a strange question, because theosophy is named after the concept of “God” or “Theos”. It is as if one speaks of Selters water, from which the watery, liquid part has been completely removed. Such objections can only be made if one has not studied the subject. We do not have the immodesty to constrict God into a limited concept; in him we live and move and have our being, and so do our concepts. One can only gradually become familiar with the divine. Most of the time, such a question only wants to say: I do not want any other Christianity than I have always understood. Question: Should flawlessness be achieved?

Rudolf Steiner: That is an abstraction. Questions are often asked about the beginning and end of the world and so on, but the human being can only gradually ascend to understanding. The concepts that are usually brought up are usually as unsuitable as possible. Spiritual science places us in life and keeps us from abstract speculation. Through theosophy, morality is also led into the concrete.

Question: Is there not a danger for the theosophist of being withdrawn from his fellow human beings by the cult of the ego?

Rudolf Steiner: Where there is strong light, there is also strong shadow. There must be a transformation into the will to love, so that the ego is sought much more outside than inside.

Question: Christ's suffering and death is only an archetype for us, since we have to atone for our mistakes later anyway.

Rudolf Steiner: I first have to familiarize myself with this question. It is based on a misunderstanding of the idea of karma. One then says: Why should I help a person who is in need and misery? One should help him first, that is written on his karmic account and has a further effect. How I can help one person, I can help two, three, five, fifty, a hundred, a thousand, and a mighty being like the Christ can help all people in karma.

Question: How can I be released from a sin of thought that I cannot make amends for because the person concerned has since died?

Rudolf Steiner: This must be balanced out in the further course of life. One must not judge this from a merely earthly point of view. We are not dissatisfied with our fate from a higher point of view. Between death and birth, we would be very dissatisfied if we did not have the suffering that flows from our deeds; we do not feel it as suffering at all, but as a relief to be able to balance it out; we strive to balance it out. There is a completely different state between birth and death than between death and a new birth.

Question: What influence does anesthesia have on the finer bodies?

Rudolf Steiner: Wherever it is possible to avoid anesthesia, it should be avoided. Normally, the soul and spirit leave the body during sleep; with anesthesia, they are forced out, that is, they are subjected to force. If it is necessary, it should be used, of course. Question: Does a stillborn child have an ego?

Rudolf Steiner: No more than a corpse. It may have been an attempt at incarnation of the ego before it died in the mother's body.

Question: We have often heard about the effects of karma. What about the cruel punishments in the Middle Ages?

Rudolf Steiner: It is like an account book. The punishment is, so to speak, on the debit side and balances with the other side. There is no need for an absolute balance to be there immediately when a punishment occurs. The soul would not even be satisfied with that after death, because it wants to balance.

Question: Some of the Theosophists look unusual in their hairstyles and clothing. A stranger can feel uncomfortably touched!

Rudolf Steiner: This is certainly not a result of the spiritual current! One must be tolerant of the tastes of others; this is perhaps one of the assets of Theosophy. If you want to wear what you like, why shouldn't others be allowed to do the same? Hopefully it doesn't happen too often that Theosophists become Theosophists through hairstyles and clothing. And, ladies, wearing what you like is something that other women do too, and the Theosophists don't say anything, even if they don't always like it.

Question: [Is there a] sense of self after death?

Rudolf Steiner: Self-awareness is rooted in what remains after death. Only after death we have other tools for perception. Eyes and ears fall off. The soul produces other tools. [The] sense of self is preserved, indeed with a much more intense character. Other theosophists are said to have stated that after death there is only consciousness but no self-awareness? This may be stated in some books, but it has nothing to do with the spiritual science referred to here.

Question: On the other hand, the seer of Prevorst: the people she speaks of still show remorse.

Rudolf Steiner: This does not exclude self-awareness.

The other questions are not of a nature that would be suitable for answering here.

Before I close the lecture cycle of this winter with a picture of the human future and human ideals, I would like to talk of the present cultural life as it expresses itself in one of the most significant and most typical spiritual heroes of our time.

Not from the literary, not from the aesthetic point of view, but from the world view I might speak of Ibsen's attitude; for really everything expresses itself just in Ibsen that the deepest and best spirits of the modern time feel and think.

One has often said that every poet is the expression of his time. Indeed, this sentence holds good, but only if one gives it the quite special contents, it can be understood. Just as Homer, Sophocles, and Goethe were expressions of their time, it is undoubtedly Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906, Norwegian playwright and poet) for the present, and nevertheless how differently our time does leave its stamp on him as once on those personalities.

In order to recognise how completely different the time was around the turn of the 18-th century, the time of Goethe, Schiller and Herder, and how differently our time expresses itself, one needs to put two things next to each other only. Goethe still rounds off the second part of his Faust, seals it and leaves it behind as a big will of his life. After his death he leaves a legacy behind to the human beings, shining into the future, full of forces in the confidence: “the traces of my days will survive into eternity” (Faust II, 11583-11584). A human being who is basically the representative of the whole humanity stands before us in Faust. We cling to him; he fulfils us with purpose in life, with life-force. Beyond his death Goethe points out that to us. Faust cannot become outdated; we find deeper and deeper truths in it. We feel it as something living on, something that we have not exhausted: this is an end of his life pointing to the future.

Henrik Ibsen consciously finished his life work long before his death with his drama When We Dead Awaken (1899). What has fulfilled human beings for half a century, what existed in revolutionary and other ideas penetrated Henrik Ibsen's soul. He described what the hearts moves what separates them, fighting the struggle for existence in a way never seen before. This drama appears as a big review and stands there like a symbol of the artist himself. He was a hermit in the human life, a hermit in his own life. For half a century he looked for human happiness and truth, did not save any forces to get to light and truth, to the solution of the big riddles of life. Now he himself awakes, feels what lies behind him as something dead, and he decides to write nothing more. It is a review that points only to the transitory; what he longed for appears to him as something mysterious, something unreal the ideals collapse behind him. Because he awoke, he is at his wits' end. This is the poet who is the representative of our time, the poetically greatest one. This life balance is a criticism of everything that we have a give-up and at the same time an awakening from and at the criticism of our time. An immense overview of the modern life expresses itself in this drama; if we realise it, we understand the tragic in the personality of the poet. For Henrik Ibsen is a tragic personality.

If one wants to understand him completely, one has to understand him as representative of our time. Hence, do not consider it as academic sophistry if I try at first to conceive the nerve of our time; for Henrik Ibsen is an expression of it. A word characterises our time and also the whole Ibsen, this is the word “personality.” Goethe also probably said: “personality is the highest happiness of the earth children only.” But, nevertheless, it happens with Ibsen quite differently. Ibsen is completely a child of our time, and from here we understand him best of all.

Remember how differently the personality stands there in ancient Greece. How does Oedipus stand there? What moves the destiny of Oedipus goes far beyond his whole house. We have to make connections with quite different regions: his destiny extends beyond his individual personality, it is lifted out above personality however, the personal is not yet lifted out from the moral connection with the whole world. This is different from today: we have now to search for the centre in the personality that destiny relocated in the personality. Bit by bit we can pursue this. With the emergence of Christianity it happens that the urge of individuality wants to satisfy itself. The personality wants to be free, free before the highest, before the divine. The connections are torn, the personality shifts for itself. During the Middle Ages, personality tries to understand itself.

How deeply the whole environment is yet connected with the personality in Greece! How the human being grows out of his surroundings! He is born out of the whole universe. The external configuration of the Greek life, however, is like a piece of art: Plato creates a state idea in which the single human being should adapt himself like a limb to the whole body. Christianity brings another ideal; but this new one is purchased by the price of the relationship with nature, one seeks above nature. The Christian searches what should release his personality in something that reaches beyond personality. Even the individual Roman felt as a member of the whole state: he is a citizen first, and then he is a human being. In mediaeval times, a tendency prevails that looks out over the environment, looks up to a yonder world which one clings to. This makes a big difference for the whole human thinking, feeling and willing. This continues that way up to modern times.

The Greek, the Roman citizen lived and died for what surrounded him what lived in his outside world. In mediaeval times, something of a divine world order still lived, indeed, not in the environment, but in the “Gospel of the Good News,” and expressed it like in a mirror. In the best as in the simplest souls, in the mystic as in the people this divine world order was alive. It is something that is given from without, indeed, but that lives as something emerging in the soul. What happens in the world of stars as God's will fulfils the soul substantially: one knows what is beyond birth and death.

Let us take the new time and look from the artistic point of view at Shakespeare. What finds expression in Shakespeare's dramas and lives in these dramas is the character first of all. Something like that does not exist in Greece and in mediaeval times. Shakespeare's dramas are character dramas; the main interest is directed to the human being, to that what happens in the depth of his soul, as he is put into the world.

The Middle Ages had no real drama; the human beings were occupied with other interests. Now the personality emerges but with it all the uncertain, all the incomprehensible of personality emerges at the same time. Take Hamlet: one can hear so many different interpretations about that from so many scholars. About no work so many books were probably written. This is due to the fact that this character itself has something uncertain. It is no longer a mirror image of the outside world, also no longer a mirror of the Good News.

The whole point of view of the modern times takes on this character. Have a look at the figure of Kant (1724-1804, German philosopher) how everything is put into the personality. What he says would be possible neither in mediaeval times, nor in antiquity. It is something quite uncertain that he represents: act in such a way that your action could become the guideline of the community. But this ideal remains something quite uncertain. He says: we cannot recognise, we have limits that we cannot overcome with our reason; it only feels something dark that urges and drives. Kant calls it the categorical imperative.

The Greek, the medieval human being had sharply outlined ideals. He knew not only that he should live like the other human beings in their sense: they lived in his blood. This had changed: a categorical imperative which has no right contents positioned itself before the reason; nothing fills this soul with particular ideals. Thus it was in the 18th century.

Something that asks for certain ideals awoke in our classical authors. It is interesting that Schiller who was a not less harsh critic of his time like Ibsen we take the Robbers: Karl Moor wants something certain, he wants to create human beings who change their time, do not practise only criticism , it is interesting that Schiller trusts in the ideal and says: whatever the world may be, I put human beings into it who set this world on fire.

Even more significantly this comes to the fore with Goethe in his Faust. Goethe appears here as a spirit who looks into the new aurora.

But now there came the 19th century with its demand for freedom, for personality. What is freedom? In which respect should the human being be free? One must want something certain. But it was freedom in itself, which one wanted. In addition to that, the 19-th century had become the most rationalistic one. The human beings see their surroundings; but no ideal pours out of them; the human beings are no longer borne by ideals. The human being stands on the peak of his personality, and the personality has become self purpose. Hence, humanity can no longer distinguish two concepts today: individuality and personality; it does no longer distinguish what must be separated.

What is individuality? Individuality is that what appears full of contents in the world. If I have a future thought, full of contents, and imagine what I insert into the world, my personality may be powerful or weak, but it is the support of these ideals, the cover of my individuality. The sum of all these ideals is the individuality which shines from the personality. The 19th century does not make this differentiation; it considers the mere powerful personality, which should be, actually, a vessel, a self purpose. That is why the personality becomes something nebulous, and with it also that becomes nebulous which was as clear as ether once. Mysticism was called mathesis once because it was clear like two times two. The human being lived in such spiritual contents, he took stock of himself and found something that was higher than personality: he recognised his individuality. The 19-th century cannot understand mysticism, one talks of it as something unclear, something incomprehensible. This was necessary: the personality had to be felt once like a hollow skin. One speaks mostly of personality, however, the real personality exists least of all. Where the personality is fulfilled with individuality, one speaks of it least of all because it is a matter of course. One talks mostly of that what is not there. If, hence, the 19th century talks of mysticism, it speaks of something unclear. We understand why this happened that way.

As a son of his time Henrik Ibsen deeply looked down into this personality and this time. Like an honest truth seeker he strives for the true contents of the personality, but as somebody who is completely born out of his time. “Oh my eye is dazzled by the light to which it turns.”

How would have an old Roman spoken of the right? It was a matter of course to him; as little as he denied the light, he would have denied the law. With Ibsen one reads: “Right? Where is it valid as right?” Everything is determined by power to a greater or lesser degree. Thus we see Henrik Ibsen as a thoroughly revolutionary spirit. He looked into the human breast, and he found nothing there, everything that the 19th century offered was nothing to him. He expresses it: oh how have these old ideals of the French revolution lost their strength; we need a revolution of the whole human spirit today! This is the mood expressing itself in Ibsen's dramas.

Once again let us consider the ancient times. The Greek felt well in his polis, the Roman in his state, the medieval human being felt as a child of God. How does the son of the modern time feel? He finds nothing around himself that can support him. The Greek and the medieval human being did not feel as lonesome human beings, with Ibsen the strongest man is the most lonesome one. This feeling of loneliness is something absolutely modern, and Ibsen's art arises from it. This concept, nevertheless, which speaks from Ibsen's dramas: we must appeal to the human personality, is nothing clear. These forces in the human being which must be uncovered are something uncertain, but we have to turn to them. Ibsen tries to understand the human beings around him in such a way. However, what else can one see in such a time than the struggle of the personality which is torn out from all social connections? Yes, there is the second possibility: if the human being is still connected with the state, with his surroundings, his personality bows to that, denies itself. However, what can these connections mean to the human being even today? They were true once, now the human being shifts only for himself and disharmonies originate between the personality and the surroundings.

Ibsen has a decided sense of the untruth of these connections between the human being and his surroundings. The seeker of truth becomes the rigorous critic of the lie. Hence, his heroes become uprooted personalities, and those who want to produce the connection with their surroundings must become enslaved by the lie, can do it only by deception of their self-consciousness. In the dramas of the middle time this attitude can be found. We see this if we let pass by Brand (1866), Peer Gynt (1867), and Emperor and Galilean (1873) before our eyes. We find a tip to three ages in the latter drama. The first is that which we have characterised before, that of the past when the external form held good so much. Emperor Julian looks into the second, that of the Galilean, which shows an internalisation of the soul. But a third age is said to come when the human being has ideals again and coins them from within to the outside. Destiny once came from without. What must be longed for is the internal ideals which the strong human being can impress to the world; he should be an emissary not reproduce, but shape, create. The third world age in which the ideal comes into its own is not yet attained. In the loneliness, the human being finds it in his soul, but not in such a way that it had force and power to fashion the world. This unification of Christianity with the antique ideal is the reverse way. But Ibsen put this ideal on a weak soul which collapses; Julian is still the human being of the past.

On the other hand, we have to do it with the human being who rests on the only formal, on the hollowed out personality. Nothing is more typical for Ibsen than the way he put the hard gnarled figure of his “Brand” into our time. He is not despotic and autocratic, but he is torn out of the connection with the environment. He stands there as a clergyman, surrounded by people to whom the connection with the divine had become a lie. Beside him a clergyman stands who only believes what he believes because he generally has no strong religious feeling.

An ideal which is a higher one must be able to work on all human beings. The theosophical ideal of brotherliness immerses the human acting in mildness and benevolence and regards every human being as a human brother. As long as this ideal is not yet born and the human being must rest on the fragments and leftovers of the old ideals which mix personality and individuality, he appears as hard and sturdy. Who puts up the personality ideal in such a way becomes hard and sturdy like Brand, and it must be that way. Individuality connects, personality separates. Nevertheless, this passage through the personality uncovered forces which had to be developed and would not have emerged, otherwise. We had to lose the old ideals, to regain them once on a higher level. A poet like Ibsen had to reach into this personality and to describe it as a hollow one as he does it brilliantly in the League of Youth (1869).

He explained what works on the personality, what it should only present in his later dramas in which he becomes the positive critic of the time like in the Pillars of Society (1877).

He shows us the personality in conflict with its surroundings in the Ghosts (1881). During the conflict with her surroundings Mrs. Alving must lie where she seeks for truth to bring her son in a clean atmosphere. Thus fate befalls her like the ancient Greeks. Ibsen lives in the sign of Darwin, and this Oswald stands not in a spiritual, ethical connection with the past, but in that of heredity. The personality, as far as it is soul, can only be torn out from its surroundings; the corporeality is connected with the physical heredity, and thus a fate befalls Oswald Alving pouring out only from the physical laws like a moral, spiritual-divine fate befalls the antique hero.

With it Ibsen is completely a son of his time. However, he also shows that way what of this personality is justified of the personality which should again become an individuality maybe later.

In an especially typical way this problem faces us in the woman. Nora lives as it were at A Doll's House (1879) and grows out of it, seeking for the way to individuality. All old world views have stated an individual, natural difference between man and woman, and this reproduced till our time. The passage had just to be found by the personality to remove this. Only as personalities man and woman are opposing each other on the same level; not until they find the same in the personality, they are able to develop the same individual, so that they go once as companions toward future. As long as one got the ideals from without, they were connected with the natural, and the natural was rooted in the difference between man and woman which can be compensated only in the soul. From nature this contrast was brought into religion still in mediaeval times, while it yet had an echo of the natural in the divine.

You find the male and female principles in the old religions side by side as something that flashes through the whole being, lives and works in nature. We find it in Osiris and Isis, in God Father and Mary. Only when one had cast off the nature basis, when one got to the soul and emancipated this soul, the personal in the human being finally managed to get to freedom by that which is not connected with the differentiation of man and woman. So only the contrast of male and female was overcome. And the poet of personality also had to find the typical word for it. Thus that differentiation grows up as a problem in him in such dramas like A Doll's House, Rosmersholm (1886) and The Lady from the Sea (1887).

We see how Ibsen is connected with everything that constitutes the greatness, even if the emptiness of our time. The more Ibsen looked into the future, the more he felt how the emptiness must happen if the personality is emancipated, is detached from its divine-spiritual connections. Thus Ibsen himself faces the problem of personality in The Master Builder (1892) with the big question to the future: we have freed the personality to what end? Something uncertain remains with this search for the essential. As a real truth seeker he represents this unknown like in an allegory in The Lady from the Sea. She gets free for the old duties. However, one has to continue asking: to what end? This is shown in the drama symbolically in a marvellous way.

When he tries to look even farther into the riddles of life in Little Eyolf (1894), in When We Dead Awaken, something deep disappears to him in the human heart in which he believed before. Desperation seizes the sculptor in When We Dead Awaken who tried to catch the ideal. He cannot yet form the free human being: animal grimaces rise before him. He tries to form something creatively that lifts him out of them, a resurrection however, always the grimaces push themselves to the fore, position themselves before the picture. When he realises that he cannot overcome them, he awakes and sees what is missing for our time, what it does not have. A tremendously tragic moment is put before us in When We Dead Awaken.

Thus Henrik Ibsen is an intrepid prophet of our time: he still feels in the deepest heart, assured of a good future, that there must be something that reaches beyond personality; but he is quiet, and this silence has that tremendously tragic in itself. Who familiarised himself with what stands out in the personality beyond birth and death who made himself familiar with the big law of karma finds new contents also in the personal. He establishes a new ideal; he overcomes personality and makes himself the confessor and lord of this big law of retribution.

The antique human being trusted in the reality around himself; he built up the supports of his soul on it. The Middle Ages experienced the ideal in the innermost soul. The modern human being has descended to isolation in the personality, to egotism. He still feels the categorical imperative but as something uncertain, dark. He strives for personal freedom, but the question imposes itself on him: to what end should the personality be freed?

The old ideals say nothing more to our time; something new must arise.

It is the purpose of the theosophical world view to bring freedom about which does no longer depend on personal arbitrariness, which combines again with divine ideals. It is the spiritual, theosophical life and world view to contribute to it, to build up this future.

Only if the best of our time point to this theosophical, spiritual-scientific world view being rooted in the cosmic reality, it gets the significance which it must have. If a great man is quiet in tragic modesty, one like Henrik Ibsen who has aroused the minds, this is such a suggestion.

In the days of the 19-th century drawing to an end he wrote his When We Dead Awaken. Now then, the time has come that to us dead human beings Goethe's saying comes true:

As long as you don't have
This dying and growing,
You are any dull guest
On the dark earth only. (From West-Eastern Divan)

The time has come that we live again, that we become personalities again but emancipated personalities: individualities.