The Rudolf Steiner Archive

At the opening of this conference, I want to extend my warmest greetings to you all. Had you come some four or five months earlier, I would have welcomed you in the building we called the Goetheanum, which stood over there. The artistic forms of its architecture and its interior design would have been a constant reminder of what was intended to go out into the world from this Goetheanum. However, the misfortune that befell us on New Year's night and inflicted such grievous pain on all who loved this building, has robbed us of the Goetheanum. And so, for the time being, we shall have to nurture the spirit—without its proper earthly home—that would have reigned within this material, artistic sheath.

It gives me great joy to welcome those of you who have come from Switzerland, and who have displayed, through your coming, real evidence of your interest in our educational goals, even though they have been received recently in Switzerland with enmity. With equal joy and gratification I want to welcome the many friends of Waldorf Education—or those wishing to become its friends—who have come from Czechoslovakia. Your presence confirms to me that education involves one of the most crucial questions of our time, and that it will receive the impetus it needs and deserves only if it is seen in this light by the various members of the teaching profession.

Furthermore, I welcome those of you who have come from other countries, and who show, through your presence, that what is being worked toward here in Dornach is not just a matter of cosmopolitan interest, but is also a matter of concern for all of humanity.

And finally I want to greet our friends, the teachers of the Waldorf School. Their primary goal in coming here is to contribute to this conference from their own personal experience. They are deeply connected with our cause, and expressed the wish to support this conference. This is greatly appreciated.

Today, as an introduction, I want to prepare the ground for what will concern us during the next few days. Education is very much in the news today, and many people connected with educating the young are discussing the need for reform. Many different views are expressed—often with considerable enthusiasm—about how education should go through a change, a renewal. And yet, when hearing the various ideas on the subject, one cannot help feeling a certain trepidation, because it is difficult to see how such different views could ever lead to any kind of unity and common purpose, especially since each viewpoint claims to be the only valid one.

But there is another reason for concern. New ideas for education do not cause undue concern in themselves, for the necessities of life usually blunt the sharp edges, causing their own compensations. When one hears nearly everyone call for a renewal in education, yet another problem comes to mind—that is, where does this praiseworthy enthusiasm for better education spring from?

Isn't it prompted by people's memories of unhappy childhood days, of their own deep-seated memories of an unsatisfactory education? But as long as the call for educational reform comes only from these or similar feelings, it merely serves to emphasize personal discontent with one's own schooling. Even if certain educational reformers would not admit this to themselves or to others, by the very nuance of their words they imply dissatisfaction with their own education. And how many people today share this dissatisfaction! It is little wonder if the call for a change in education grows stronger every day.

This educational dilemma, however, raises two questions, neither of which is comforting. First, if one's education was bad, and if as a child one was exposed to its many harmful effects, how can one know what constitutes proper educational reform? Where can better ways of educating the young be found? The second question arises from listening to what certain people say about their own education. And here I want to give you a practical example because, rather than presenting theories during this conference, I want to approach our theme in practical terms.

A few days ago a book appeared on the market that, in itself, did not draw my particular interest. Nevertheless it is interesting because in the first few chapters the author, an outstanding person who has become world-famous, speaks very much about his early school days. I am referring to the memoirs of Rabindranath Tagore,¹ which have just been published. Although I do not have the same interest in this person that many Europeans do, in regard to educational matters his memoirs do contain some noteworthy and pertinent details.

I am sure that you would agree that the most beautiful memories of one's early school days—however wonderful these may have been—will hardly consist of fragmentary details of what happened in certain lessons. Indeed, it would be sad if this were so, because what affects children during lessons should become transformed into life habits and skills. In later life we should not be plagued by the details of what we once learned at school, for these must flow together into the great stream of life. Couldn't we say that our most beautiful recollections of school are concerned with the different teachers we had? It is a blessing if, in later years, one can look back with deep, inner satisfaction at having been taught by one or another admired teacher. Such an education is of value for the whole of one's life. It is important that teachers call forth such feelings in their pupils; this also belongs to the art of education.

If we look at some of the passages in Tagore's memoirs from this perspective, we find that he does not talk of his teachers with much reverence and admiration. To quote an example, he says, “One of our teachers in the elementary school also gave us private lessons at home. His body was emaciated, his face desiccated, and his voice sharp. He looked like a veritable cane.” One might easily imagine—especially here in our Western civilization, often criticized strongly in the East—that the wrongs of education would hardly be so vehemently emphasized by an Asian. But here you have an example of how an Eastern personality, now world-famous, looks back at his school days in India. And so I shall use a word that Tagore also mentions in his book—that is, “miserable school.” The meaning of this expression is not confined to European countries, but seems to express a worldwide cultural problem. Later on we shall have to say much more about what teachers must do to kindle genuine interest for what they bring to their pupils.

But now I shall give you another example from Tagore's memoirs of how his English teacher approached this task. Tagore writes, “When I think back on his lessons, I cannot really say that Aghor Babu was a hard taskmaster. He did not rule us with the cane.” To us, such a remark would point to times long past, long superseded. The fact that Tagore speaks so much in his book about the cane indicates something we would consider culturally primitive. I believe that such a comment is justified when reading Tagore's description, not just about one of his teachers “looking like a veritable cane,” but also when he points out that another teacher actually did not use the cane. Speaking of this other teacher, Tagore continues, “Even when reprimanding us he did not shout at us. But, whatever his positive sides may have been, his lessons were given in the evening, and his subject was English. I am sure that even an angel would have appeared to a Bengali boy like a true messenger of Mamas (The God of Death), had he come to him in the evening after the `miserable school' of the day, kindling a comfortless, dim lamp, in order to teach English.”

Well, here you have an example of how a famous Indian speaks about his education. But Tagore also writes about how each child brings certain needs to education. He points out in a very practical way how such needs should be met, and how this did not happen in his case. I will leave it to you to interpret this situation in Western terms. To me it seems very good to look at such matters from a global perspective, matters that—if quoted in a European context—could very well arouse strong criticism. Tagore continues:

From time to time Aghor Babu tried to introduce a refreshing scientific breeze into the dry routine of the class room. One day he pulled from his pocket a little parcel wrapped in paper, saying, “Today I want to show you one of the Creator's wonderful works of art.” Unwrapping the paper, he showed a human larynx, which he used to explain to us the wonders of its mechanism.

I still remember the shock this gave me, for I had always thought that speech came from the entire human being. I did not have the slightest inkling that the activity of speaking could thus be isolated from the whole human organism. However perfect the mechanism of each single part might be, surely it would always amount to less than the complete human being. Not that I consciously realized this, but at the bottom of my feelings it was distasteful. The fact that the teacher had lost sight of such a truth must have been the reason why his pupil could not share in his enthusiasm for this kind of demonstration.

Well, this was the first shock when the nature of the human being was introduced to the boy. But another one, worse still, was to follow. Tagore continues:

On another occasion he took us into the dissecting room of the local medical school.² The corpse of an old woman was lying on a table. This in itself did not particularly disturb me. But an amputated leg, which was lying on the floor, completely threw me off my balance. The sight of a human being in such a state of fragmentation seemed so dreadful, so utterly lacking in sense to me, that I could not shake off the impression of this dark and expressionless leg for many days to come.

This example illustrates the reaction of a young person introduced to anatomy. Fundamentally speaking, this procedure is adopted in education only because it is in line with the orthodox scientific approach. And since the teacher has indeed gone through scientific training, it is naturally assumed to be a wonderful idea to demonstrate the mechanics of human speech with a model of the larynx, or to explain physiological anatomy with the aid of an amputated leg, for contemporary scientific thinking does not consider it necessary to look at the human being as a whole.

However, these are not yet the primary reasons for selecting certain passages from Tagore's memoirs—of which we will say more later on, not because of their connection with Tagore, but because they belong to the theme of our conference. First, I want to make another point.

Anyone judging Tagore's literary merits will correctly recognize in him an outstanding individual. In the autobiography of this distinguished author we read about his dreadful education. Doesn't this encourage a strange thought—that his poor education did not seem to harm his further development? Couldn't one conclude that a thoroughly bad education doesn't necessarily inflict permanent or serious harm? For did Tagore not demonstrate that despite this, he was able to grow into a good, even a famous person? (Examples like this could be multiplied by the hundreds, though they may be less spectacular.)

Considering the myriad impulses for educational reform, one could easily be pulled in two directions. On the one hand, how can anyone possibly be in a position to improve education if one has had the misfortune of suffering from a bad one? On the other hand, if “miserable school” has not prevented someone from becoming, not just a good, but even a great and famous person, then a bad education cannot do permanent harm. Is there any point in lavishing so much care on attempts to improve education? From a superficial perspective, one might conclude that it would be better to occupy oneself with matters that are more useful than educational reform.

If anthroposophy, which has been much maligned, were merely to offer even more ideas for educational reform, as is generally done, I would not even consider it worthwhile to attempt these in practice. But in reality, anthroposophy is something very different from what most people imagine it to be, for it springs from the deepest needs of our present culture.

Anthroposophy does not proceed, as so many of its enemies do, by shamefully denigrating everything that does not agree with its own principles. Anthroposophy is more than prepared to recognize and acknowledge what is good, wherever it is found. More of this later, for, as I have said already, today's content is intended only as an introduction.

Anthroposophy points to the importance of the scientific achievements of the last three to four centuries and, above all, to those of the nineteenth century, all of which it fully recognizes. At the same time, however, anthroposophy also has the task of observing how these great scientific successes affect the human soul. It would be foolish to think that the ideas of a relatively few scientifically trained experts have little consequence for society as a whole; for even people who know little or nothing about science are influenced by contemporary science in their soul mood and in their life's orientation. Even people of a strictly orthodox religious faith, born of tradition and habit, nevertheless owe their world orientation to the results of orthodox science. The attitude of modern people is colored increasingly by the scientific view with all its tremendous achievements, which cannot be praised highly enough.

Yet the constitution of the human soul has been strangely affected by modern science. Having revealed more and more of outer nature, science has, at the same time, alienated human beings from themselves. What happens when the human being is observed from a scientific perspective? Our attention is drawn first to what has already been discovered very thoroughly in the inert, lifeless world. Then the human being is analyzed according to physiological and chemical components and what was established in the laboratories is then applied to the living human being.

Or else our attention is directed to other realms of nature, to the plant and animal kingdoms. Here scientists are fully aware that they have not been able to establish laws as convincing as those applied to inorganic nature. Nevertheless—at least in the animal realm—what has been discovered is then also related to the human being. This is the reason why “the man in the street” sees the human being as the final evolutionary stage of animals. The evolutionary ladder of the animal species ends with the emergence of the human being. The animals are understood up to a certain point. Their bony structures or muscular configurations are then simply transferred to the human being who, as a result, is considered to represent the most developed animal.

As yet, no true picture of the human being has arisen from these methods, and this will become poignantly clear to us when we focus on education. One could say that whereas in earlier times human beings occupied a central position within the existing world order, they have been displaced, crushed by the weight of geological data, and eliminated from their own sphere by the theory of animal evolution. Merely to trace back one of the ossicles of the human middle ear to the square-bone (Quadratbein) of a lower animal is praised as real progress. This is only one small example, but the way human physical nature reflects the soul and spiritual nature seems to have been entirely disregarded by modern research.

This kind of thing easily escapes notice, because the orthodox approach is simply taken for granted. It is a by-product of our modern culture, and properly so. Indeed, it would have been a sad situation if this change had not occurred, for, with the soul attitude that prevailed before the age of science, humanity could not have progressed properly. Yet today a new insight into human nature is called for, insight based on a scientific mode of thinking, and one that will also shed light on the nature of the entire universe.

I have often tried to show how the general scientific viewpoint—which in itself, can be highly praised—nevertheless can lead to great illusions, simply because of its innate claims of infallibility. If one can prove science wrong on any specific point, the whole thing is relatively simple. But a far more difficult situation arises when, within its own bounds, a scientific claim is correct.

Let me indicate what I mean. What led to a theory such as that of Kant-Laplace?³ Using this theory—which has been modified recently, and is known to practically every educated person—scientists attempt to explain the origin of our Earth and planetary system. In their calculations, some of these scientists went back over long periods of time. When one scientist spoke of some twenty million years, soon enough he was considered naïve by others who spoke in terms of two hundred million years. Then other scientists began to calculate the length of time of certain processes taking place on Earth today. This is a perfectly correct thing to do, because from a strictly material point of view there is nothing else one can do. Sedimentation or metamorphosis of rocks was observed and, from the data gained, a picture was built up that explained certain changes, and the length of time involved was then calculated. For example, if the waters of Niagara Falls have been falling on the rocks below for such and such a period of time, one can calculate the degree of erosion of these rocks. If one now transfers this calculation to another spot somewhere else where considerably more erosion has been found, one can calculate the time this must have required through simple multiplication. Using this method, one might arrive at, let's say, twenty million years, which is quite correct as far as the calculation is concerned.

Similarly, one may start with the present time and, according to another well-known theory, calculate the time it will take for the Earth to become subject to heat death, and so on.

Yet, such a procedure might equally well be applied to a very different situation. Observe, for example, how the human heart changes from year to year. Noting the differences, one could investigate—following the same method applied in the case of Niagara Falls—how this heart must have looked some three hundred years ago, and what it would look like some three hundred years from now. Technically speaking, this method would be analogous to that of determining the times of geological changes and in this sense it would be correct. Observing the heart of a person aged about thirty-five, one would be basing one's calculations on an organ that has been functioning for a considerable length of time. However, one obvious detail has been overlooked—that this particular heart did not exist three hundred years ago, nor will it be there three hundred years from now. Though mathematically speaking the calculation is correct, it has no relationship to reality.

In our current intellectual age we are too preoccupied with whether or not something is correct, whether or not it is logically correct; but we have lost the habit of asking whether it conforms to actual real-life situations. We will confront this problem again and again this week. But it can happen sometimes that, when we follow apparently correct theories, even fundamental issues are simply overlooked. For example, you may have witnessed—I am not implying that as teachers you have actually carried out this experiment yourselves, for present company is always excluded when negative assertions are being made—you may have witnessed how the rotation of the planets around the Sun was graphically illustrated even to a class of young children. A piece of cardboard is cut into a disc and its center is pierced with a pin. A drip of oil is then put onto its surface before the disc is floated on water. When the pin is twirled around to rotate the floating disc, little droplets of oil will shoot off at a tangent, making “little planets”—little oil planets—and in this way a most convincing model of a planetary system has been fabricated. Needless to say, this experiment is supposed to prove the accuracy of the Kant-Laplace theory. Well, as far as one's own morality is concerned, it is virtuous enough to be self-effacing, but in a scientific experiment of this sort, the first requirement is certainly not to omit any essential detail—however small—and to include all existing criteria. And isn't the teacher spinning the disc the most important factor involved? Therefore, this hypothesis would make sense only if it were assumed that, long, long ago, a gigantic schoolmaster once twirled round an immense world-pin, thus spinning our entire planetary system! Otherwise one should not use such a hypothetical experiment.

And so, many elements of an unrealistic soul attitude can be detected where science appears to be most correct, where its findings cannot be contested. Consequently these elements of error easily creep into education. For those who teach are inevitably a product of their own time, and this is as it should be. When they come across such geological calculations or astronomical analogies, everything seems to fit together very nicely. Sometimes one cannot help but feel amazed at the incredible ingenuity of scientific interpretations that, despite their apparent power of conviction, nevertheless, can lead us away from reality. However, as educators we must never deviate from actual reality. In teaching, we face reality all the time, and this must spur us on to greater knowledge of human nature as it really is. In a certain sense this failure to penetrate human nature has already crept into modern-day educational thinking and practice.

I would like to illustrate this point with an example. Whenever you are dealing with children in the classroom, you will find that some are more gifted in one or another subject than others. Most of you will be familiar with the current thoughts and methods regarding this problem. I am referring to them here only to establish mutual understanding. There are different degrees of abilities in children. And how are these dealt with, especially in today's most progressive centers for educational science? From your study of educational literature you probably know about the so-called correlation coefficients recently introduced in schools. According to this method, the correlation coefficient one is written down if a pupil shows an equal aptitude for two different subjects. (Such a thing actually never occurs, but hypothetically it is simply assumed.) If, on the other hand, a natural gift exists for two subjects that are mutually incompatible, the correlation coefficient zero is given. The idea of this method is to test and measure the pupils' various gifts. For example, you may find that drawing and writing carry the correlation coefficient of, let us say, .7. This means that more than half the children who are gifted in drawing also have a natural skill for writing. One also looks for correlation coefficients in other combinations of talents. For example, writing is linked to a pupil's ability to deal with the mother tongue and, in this case, the correlation coefficient is .54. Arithmetic and writing carry the correlation coefficient of .2, arithmetic and drawing .19, and so on. From this it can be seen that arithmetic and drawing are the least compatible partners, whereas writing and drawing are matched most frequently. A natural gift for both the mother tongue and for drawing is found to be equally present in approximately fifty percent of the pupils.

Please note that, on principle, I do not object to this kind of scientific research. It would be wrong to declare that such things should not be investigated. As a matter of fact, I find these things extraordinarily interesting. I am not in the least against such experimental or statistical methods of psychology.

But if their results are directly implemented in education, it is as if you were to ask someone to become a painter without mentioning the importance of having to deal with color. It is as if one were to say instead to such a person, “Look, here is a good book on esthetics. Read the chapter about painting and, in itself, that will make you into a good painter.”

A well-known painter in Munich once told me a story that I have quoted several times. While he was a student at the local arts school, Carriere, [Moritz Carriere (1817–1895) German thinker; published Aesthetics in 1815.] the famous professor of esthetics, was lecturing in Munich. One day the painter and some of his fellow students decided to go and see this famous expert who also lectured on painting. But one visit was enough for them, because, as they put it, all he did was “crow with esthetic delight.”

This is how it strikes me if people think they can benefit their educational practice with the kind of thing mentioned above. Though these experiments may be interesting from a scientific perspective, something very different is needed for the practical classroom situation. It is necessary, for example, that teachers can penetrate human nature so deeply that they can recognize the origin of the skills for drawing and writing within the inner functions, or recognize what enables a pupil to speak the mother tongue well. To achieve such a faculty, a living observation of the human being is required, which eventually may lead one to discover how specific capacities flow out of some children for, let us say, drawing or the skill for their native language. Here, statistics are of little use. One must take a cue from what children reveal of themselves. At most, such statistical evidence may serve as an interesting confirmation afterward. Statistics do have their value, but to believe that they are tools for educational practice only shows the degree of one's alienation from real human nature.

Today, many people look at statistics as a key to understanding human beings. In certain areas of life this is justified. It is possible to build a statistical picture of the human being, but such a picture will not allow us to understand the human being in depth. Think, for instance, of how useful statistics are in their appropriate sphere, such as in insurance. If I want to take out a life insurance policy, I will be asked how old I am, and I must give evidence for the state of my health, and so on. From such data the level of my premium can be worked out very neatly, depending on whether I happen to be a youngster or an old fogy. My life expectancy is then calculated and these details meet exactly the needs of the insurance business. But what if, in my thirty-seventh year, I had taken out a life insurance policy for, let us say, twenty years? Would this make me feel obliged to die at the age of fifty-seven, simply because of what was calculated on paper? To enter fully into the stream of life is something very different from following certain established criteria, however logically correct they may be, or however beneficial they may be in their proper sphere.

When considering the question of aptitude for writing and drawing in children who have recently entered school, one must remember that they have reached the stage of their second dentition. In the coming lectures you will hear more about the different stages of children's development, and about how their ages can be divided into three groups: the period from birth to the change of teeth; from the second dentition to puberty; and the time following puberty. Later we shall go into more detail about what happens in children during these three periods.

For now let us consider this question of writing and drawing. Science, having scrutinized so minutely the three kingdoms of nature that surround us, now transfers the knowledge gained to the human being. Knowledge of the outer world and the mode of thinking about outer nature now becomes the key to understanding the human individual. And yet, if one observes the human being within the human sphere, one will come to recognize the true situation. One only needs the courage to do so with the same accuracy and objectivity used to study outer nature. Current research shows such courage only when observing external nature, but shrinks from applying the same methods in the study of the human being.

Let's look at how the child develops from birth to the change of teeth. This change of teeth is a unique event in life, inasmuch as it occurs only once in life. Now, if you can experience something similar to the feelings Tagore expressed when he saw the amputated leg, you will realize that what is revealed in the change of teeth does not just happen in the jaws, but encompasses the entire human being. You will feel that something must be pervading the whole child until around the age of seven, and that some activity must reach a climax in the change of teeth. This activity is there in its original form until the seventh year, and then it is no longer present in its original state.

When studying physics, for example, scientists have the courage to speak of latent heat as distinct from the various forms of liberated heat. According to this concept, there must be some form of heat that cannot be determined with a thermometer, but can be measured after it has been released. When characterizing these phenomena that occur in nature, scientists have shown courage in their interpretations. However, when the human being becomes the object of study, this courage is no longer there. Otherwise they would not hesitate to state: What has been working until the seventh year in the child, working toward liberation during the change of teeth, must have been connected with the physical organism before becoming freed and reappearing in a different guise as the child's inner soul properties. This same process can also be recognized in other areas of the child's bone formation. One would realize that these newly emerging powers must be the same, although transformed, as what had been active previously in the child's physical organism.

Only courage is needed to look at the human being with the same cognitive powers used to study outer nature, but modern science will not do this. However, if we do this, our attention is drawn toward all that belongs to the bony system, to everything that hardens the human form to give it structure and support. Orthodox physiology might eventually go this far—if not today, then certainly in due time. The most important branches of science are going through considerable changes just now, and the time will come when they will follow the course indicated.

But something else must also be considered. In later years, the child will be introduced to many different subjects, such as geometry. In today's intellectual age, one has an abstract concept of three-dimensional space, to choose a very simple example. One imagines: three lines at right angles to one another hovering about in space and extending to infinity. It is possible to form such a concept abstractly, but in such a case it is not inwardly experienced. And yet, three-dimensional space wants to be experienced as reality. This does happen in a young child, although unconsciously, at the crawling stage when, losing its balance time and again, it will eventually learn to acquire the upright position and achieve equilibrium in the world. Here we have a case of actual experience of three-dimensional space. This is not merely a question of drawing three lines in space, because one of these three dimensions is identical with the human upright position (which we can test by no longer assuming it—that is, by lying horizontally or sleeping). This upright position signals the most fundamental difference between the human being and the animal, because, unlike the human backbone, the animal's spinal column runs parallel to Earth's surface. We experience the second dimension unconsciously every time we stretch our arms sideways. The third dimension moves from our front toward the back.

In reality these three dimensions are experienced concretely as above and below, right and left, forward and backward. What is done in geometry is merely an abstraction. Human beings do experience with their bodies what is shown in geometrical constructions, but only during the age when they are still largely unconscious and dreamy. Later on, these experiences rise into consciousness and assume abstract forms.

With the change of teeth, the forces that cause an inner firmness, an inner consolidation and support, have reached a certain climax. From the moment when the child can stand upright until the inner hardening processes manifest in the change of teeth, the child inwardly tries, although unconsciously, “body geometry” as an activity akin to drawing. When the teeth change, this becomes a soul activity—that is, it enters the realm of the child's soul. We might understand this transformation better through an analogy; just as a sediment falls to the bottom when a chemical solution cools, and leaves the upper part clearer, so there is also a physiological aspect to the hardening process—the sediment, as well as its counterpart: the clear solution within the child's soul realm, which manifests as a faculty for geometrizing, for drawing, and so on.

After this period, we can see the child's soul qualities streaming outward. Just think about how such a discovery engenders real interest in the human being. We shall observe this streaming out in greater detail, and how it is reflected back again, later on.

In this respect everything in life is linked together. What we do to the child not only has an immediate effect, but influences the whole lifetime. Only a few people are prepared to observe a human life as a whole, but most focus their attention on present circumstances only. This is the case, for example, when one creates an experiment concerned only with the present. On the other hand, have you ever observed how the mere presence of some old people can be like a blessing for the others present? They need not even say a word. Goodness radiates from their presence simply through what they have become. And if you now search the biography of such old people, you may find that when they were children they learned to feel reverence quite naturally, without any outer compulsion. I could say equally that they learned how to pray, by which I mean praying in its widest sense, which includes a deep respect and admiration for another human being. I would like to express this thought in the form of a picture. Those who have not learned to fold their hands in prayer during childhood, cannot spread them in blessing in old age.

The different phases of life are all interconnected and it is of great importance in education to take this into full account. We learn a great deal about the child when we recognize how soul forces well forth after they have completed their task of working in the physical body up to the end of the first seven-year period.

Psychologists have made the strangest hypotheses about the interplay of soul and body, whereas one period of life actually sheds light on another. What we can see in the child between the change of teeth and puberty will tell us something about the soul forces previously engaged in working within the child's physical realm. Facts speak for themselves and shed light on one another. Think of how such things will stimulate interest in education! And genuine interest in the human being is needed in education today. Far too many people think about the relationship of body and soul—or of soul and body—only in abstract terms. And because so little of real value has emerged, a rather amusing theory has been formulated—that is, the theory of the so-called psycho-physical parallelism. According to this theory, processes of soul and body run side by side on a parallel course. There is no need to bother about points of intersection, no need to bother about the relationship between body and soul at all, because they supposedly meet at infinity! That is why this theory sounds like a joke.

However, if one allows the guidance of practical experience, one can discover the actual interrelationship between body and soul. One only needs to look over a person's whole life-span. Let us take the example of someone who develops diabetes or rheumatism at a certain age. When trying to find a remedy for such an illness, usually only the present conditions are considered; this, in itself, is quite justified. It is certainly proper to make every effort to heal a sickness whenever it occurs. But if one surveys the whole life of the patient, one may discover that many times diabetes is due to a memory that was overtaxed or developed in the wrong way between the change of teeth and puberty. Health during later years is largely conditioned by the way a person's soul life was developed during childhood. The way a child's memory is trained will affect the metabolism after a certain period of time. For example, if undigested vestiges of memory remain in the soul of a child between seven and fourteen, they will be released approximately between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five as physical residues, which can then lead to rheumatism or diabetes.

It is not an understatement to suggest that teachers should have at least a modicum of medical knowledge at their disposal. It is not right for them to leave everything concerning the child's health to the school doctor, who usually doesn't even know the children. If any profession in our time requires a wider background, education needs it most of all.

This is what I wanted to tell you as an introduction to our conference theme, so that you can judge for yourselves when you hear people say that anthroposophy now dabbles also in education, whereas others believe that it has something valid to say on the subject. Those who are ready to listen will not be swayed by those who have the opinion that there is no real need for education, or that there is no point in discussing it simply because their own experiences in this area have been so frustrating. Anthroposophy begins with an entirely different attitude. It does not simply want to correct old ideas, but begins with a true picture and knowledge of the human being, because, in keeping with human progress, these things have become necessary today.

If you go back to the earlier forms of education, you will discover that they have all arisen from the general culture of their time, from the universal nature of human feelings and experiences. We must rediscover a universal approach, flowing from human nature itself. If I had my way, I would give anthroposophy a new name every day to prevent people from hanging on to its literal meaning, from translating it from the Greek, so they can form judgments accordingly. It is immaterial what name we attach to what is being done here. The only thing that matters is that everything we do here is focused on life's realities and that we never lose sight of them. We must never be tempted to implement sectarian ideas.

And so, looking at education in general, we encounter the opinion that there are already plenty of well-considered educational systems; but since we are all suffering so much from the intellectualism of our times, it would be best if the intellect were banished from education. This is very correct, but then it is concluded that, instead of developing a science of education, again we should appeal to our inherent pedagogical instincts. However desirable this may sound, it is no longer possible today because humankind has moved to a further stage of development. The healthy instincts of the past are no longer with us today. A new and unbiased look at education has to be backed by fully conscious cognition, and this is possible only if our understanding can penetrate the very nature of the human being. This is what anthroposophy is all about.

One more point: intellectualism and abstractions are rampant today to the degree where there is a general feeling that children should be protected from an education that is too intellectual, that their hearts and feelings should also be educated. This is entirely correct, but when looking into educational literature and current practice, one cannot help noticing that such good intentions are not likely to go very far because, once again, they are formulated in a theoretical and abstract way. It is even less clear that this request should be made, not just on behalf of the child, but should be addressed also to the teachers and, most of all, to the pedagogical principles themselves. To do this is my goal. We must not give mere lip service when stating how we wish to educate the heart of the child and not just the intellect, but we should ask ourselves how we can best meet this challenge.

What do we have to do so that education can have a heart again?

• 1. Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Indian Bengali poet and novelist; won Nobel prize for literature in 1913; knighted by England, but resigned knighthood (1919) in protest against English repression in Punjab.
• 2. There can be no doubt that Aghor Babu wanted to give his boys a special treat.
• 3. Pierre Simon Marquis de Laplace (1749–1827) French astronomer and mathematician. Immanuel Kant (1724–1895) German philosopher.

In our time, outside the circles of the anthroposophical movement, there is little understanding of how to arrive at a true view of the soul. I am saying something that may sound incomprehensible to some people, because it is often assumed that one knows what soul is, what one is dealing with when one speaks of the soul, and so on. And on the other hand, such a statement can in many cases be taken for granted in the sense that centuries- and even millennia-old views of the human soul have finally run their course and that a view of the human soul must wait until scientific research is so advanced that it is able to provide information about the soul.

Now, however, I would like to counter these two objections today with nothing more than the assertion of the recently deceased linguist Fritz Mauthner, whom I have mentioned several times: that people in the present day often believe that they have an insight into this or that, whereas in fact they only have words. And it is for this reason that Mauthner wrote a “critique of language”. He wanted to show that today's civilized humanity in particular has an inherited language. We have expressions for all sorts of things. But if you look more closely at what is behind the words, there is actually nothing there. We have the word, we think we are designating something with the word, but in reality we are not designating anything.

Now, of course, it is nonsense to apply this criticism of language to scientific knowledge. For no one will be of the opinion that, whether one knows much or little, let us say, about a horse, one could be misled about the thing horse by the expression “horse” in some language. Everyone knows perfectly well that you cannot ride on the word horse, but you can ride on the real horse. And that makes it clear from the outset that, with regard to things that exist in nature, a critique of language is rather inconsequential, because one will always know the difference between the word and the thing with regard to external observation. I do not believe that someone who wants to ride out will sit on the word 'white horse' instead of the real white horse.

But it is really different with everything in our present civilization that, on the one hand, refers to the soul, to the life of the soul, to the facts of the life of the soul, and, on the other hand, refers to the ethical, to the moral demands of humanity. Here one must indeed say: there is actually only a belief that realities lie behind the words. Therefore, one can also understand that Mauthner thought deeply: Should one even still use the word “soul”? There is nothing real behind it, as when a person speaks of a horse with the word horse. People no longer have any insights into the life of the soul. Therefore, one should not only omit the soul from the science of the soul, as a 19th-century psychology of the soul did, one should completely eradicate the word soul, and speak of “spiritual phenomena” in such a way as to refer to something indeterminate. If one wants to say that there are three entities, Karl, Fritz, Hans, who are sons of the same father and the same mother, and wants to refer to them superficially and sweepingly, then one says: siblings. Why should one, Mauthner asks, say soul when one only knows so little about mental phenomena? The word soul designates nothing; one should say “Geseel”. If this view were really to gain currency, the delusion would be done away with that in speaking of the soul one had something more or other behind it. For in the future one would no longer say that man has an immortal soul. During his life on earth man has a soul within him, I am touched in my deepest soul, and so on.

Things are indeed extremely serious for those people who are seriously seeking a view of the spirit, much more serious than one usually thinks. In any case, they prove how much people should listen up in the present when it is asserted somewhere that the right means should be sought again to reach the reality of the soul.

Today we say that the soul abilities are mainly thinking, feeling and willing. But people should just honestly realize what they mean by these terms thinking, feeling and willing. It would soon dispel their belief that they are looking at something real. Today I would just like to speak about how anthroposophy can clarify that with ordinary consciousness one is not at all able to look at something fully real in this respect. And what I would like to hint at today in this regard, I will then explain in more detail in the next lecture, because today it is still my duty to point out another aspect.

If a person looks honestly into themselves today, they must admit that what they carry within them in terms of thoughts is mostly taken from the outside world. These thoughts are more or less only mirror images of what makes an impression on the human senses in the external physical-sensual reality. Just try to do the self-observation experiment clearly and ask yourself: How many thoughts are there in this human consciousness that point to something other than the words we have: thinking, feeling, willing, God, immortality and so on, that point to something in the spiritual life of ordinary civilization that is not mirrored from the outside world? People only strive to understand everything in terms of how it can be mirrored by the external world. And if you want to explain the spiritual to many people today, they actually demand visual aids for the spiritual as well, perhaps a film or something similar, because they say: if it is not illustrated to us, if we are not presented with sensory images, then we do not understand anything about the spiritual!

In such moments, when people demand that the spiritual be clothed in sensual images, they are more honest than when they speak as experts on the soul. If we take together much of what I have often discussed here in this house, then we will be able to realize that when we look back on our thinking, we have only one side of this thinking. In this sense one can even speak of a reality — but one can speak of a reality in this way, as when one gets to know a person only from behind. Imagine the grotesque thing: you only know a person from the back! Then you know him, but you do not know his nature. At most, you can sometimes grasp something of his nature. But then cases like that of the student who once came to Heidelberg as a young badger, registered with the famous Professor Kuno Fischer, and now, in his great joy, before going to the lecture hall, rushed to the barber's, had himself dressed up, and because he is so full of the fact that he is going to hear the famous man, also talks to the barber about it. The barber says, “Yes, today Kuno Fischer is writing something on the blackboard!” The student asks him, “How do you know that Kuno Fischer is writing something on the blackboard today?” Yes, when he writes something on the blackboard, he has his hair parted at the back before the lecture; that's when he turns around!

Well, when there are such clear signs that the character is expressed in the parting of the occiput, then one can indeed learn something about the inner personality, even if one only gets to know it from behind. But firstly, it is perhaps not particularly significant, and secondly, it is the case with most people that one does not learn very much.

With regard to our thinking, the most important part of our soul for life on earth, we only perceive, if I may put it this way, the back side. The front side escapes ordinary observation. For when one approaches the observation of human beings with anthroposophy and asks oneself: Is it all about thinking, that one forms abstract ideas about the external things grasped by the senses? — then one comes to the conclusion that this is not all about thinking, but thinking, apart from representing this sum of abstract thoughts, is also still another sum of forces. Thoughts cannot actually do anything, and one actually thinks best when one does nothing, when one sits quietly, when one cultivates calm. Thoughts are powerless, like mirror images are powerless. But if you now follow the human being, from infancy until he has grown taller, and if you later follow the growth processes that are still present in the human being - even if the human being is no longer growing taller, growth processes are still there - if you look at what the forces of growth are in the human being, then these are the same forces, now seen from the other side, that show themselves backwards in abstract thought. Man sends abstract thoughts outwards; inwards they are the forces that shape his brain. In the early childhood years, the brain is formed plastically. The forces that otherwise work as growth forces are the forces of thinking. And just as you have to imagine the front side if you see a person from behind – if you are allowed to imagine that they are a complete person – you have to imagine the concrete, real power of thought that goes into the human being and works on the human being in addition to abstract thinking.

That is the essence of a pedagogy based on healthy anthroposophy: the teacher knows that it is not enough for the child to receive this or that abstract idea from this or that person. There is a big difference between whether the child receives a living, pictorial, active idea or a dead idea. The dead idea has a retarding effect on the growth processes, the living idea has a promoting effect on the growth processes. And so we come to the fact that thinking shows one side, which, powerless, only reflects the outer world, and, when we look inward, we see a living side that permeates the whole organism of the human being and that is only the other side of his growth, the spiritual counter-image of his growth. And if one continues to research, one finds that what is represented by the other side - in relation to the human being it is the rear side, but in relation to thinking it is the front side - is not brought down by dead thinking, which only appears to us from the front, but by living thinking from its pre-earthly existence.

In fact, the transition from the pre-earthly existence to the earthly existence is such that, in the pre-earthly existence, the human being freely develops a system of forces that works in all directions in the spiritual world. Then he descends into the earthly existence. There this thinking, which is active and ruling in the spiritual world, transforms itself into the inner organizing forces of the body, and outwardly it sends, as it were, the reflecting surface onto which the earth projects its images. That is the fact. But now it is indeed the case that after a person has completed the time between death and a new birth in a satisfactory manner, he then has no task for this living thinking in the spiritual world. This living thinking has its great task in the time between death and a new birth. When this task is completed, the phenomenon occurs over there, which I have often described to you: the soul turns to earth life. But then this thinking has a new task: the task of forming the human body. And that is the significance of man's earthly thinking, of man's thinking that comes from the spiritual, that it is directed towards the human body in a formative way. Thus, in our true, in our real thinking, we have an heirloom from the spiritual world, but one that is only something on earth, because in the spiritual world it has lost its purpose. We have to thank this for the fact that our thinking can become so clear on earth. If this thinking still had a task as it had in the spiritual world, it could not become so clear on earth.

But let us turn to the other faculty of the human soul, to feeling. You will all notice - quite apart from what I myself have said about it here in this room: feeling is not as clear as thinking. Feeling is something that occurs in a different form, but in the same way as dreaming. The state of mind during feeling is basically the same as during dreaming, except that feeling occurs in a completely different form. Why is that so? Well, in feeling, just as in thinking, we only have the back side for this earthly life. But the front side is not only directed towards the human body, but, as man descends to earth from the pre-earthly existence, from the existence between death and a new birth, he also retains what lies behind feeling as an heirloom. But that still remains turned towards the spiritual, it does not just have an earthly task. Therefore, every night when a person falls asleep, he does not take his thinking with him into sleep, but he does take his feeling with him. And if you look at dreams in the right way, they are images because logical thoughts do not live on; but feelings live on. With every sleep, a person delves into the whole spiritual world. Man does not take his thoughts with him, but he does take his feelings, and even more so his volitions.

Understandably, during the day there is nothing to be done with the will. I have often said that a person can make a plan, he has a thought. But how the thought slides down into the body, how the will to move the hand continues to work, remains as dark as the state remains dark in sleep. But for that, a person retains the most from the eternal for his will. And again, one can see from the activity of the human being, for if the human being does not move, there is not a will present, but only a desire. Seen from the other side, the will represents something completely eternal. Thinking also represents something eternal, but it has been transformed into an earthly activity. The will, however, remains in the Eternal and is active in man's destiny through repeated earthly lives, in Karma.

I just wanted to give you an introduction to how one penetrates to a real teaching of the soul, so that behind the words thinking, feeling and willing there are realities, so that one points to reality. Just as the word horse refers to the outer physical horse, so when one penetrates anthroposophically into the life of the soul in this way, one can come to reality, to realities. That is the way, and on this way will come at the same time what I emphasized at the end of the last lecture here: that Anthroposophy will never will be understood when it is theory, but only when, in acquiring the anthroposophical, the human being becomes a different being, the human being is truly transformed; when he becomes a different being altogether in ethical and human relationships.

What is being striven for in this way is now confronted with something else. And now I come to what I am obliged to tell you, because Anthroposophy is already in the world and one must be alert to what is happening. We must not always have closed windows, but must also look out, and so it is a spiritual and intellectual duty to speak about these things. For everywhere today, where people believe that they have obtained clear concepts only from science, anthroposophy is dismissed with the assertion: that is fantasy, speculation, that is fantasy. And those people say that they alone have clear thinking. Apart from the fact that when one approaches anthroposophy, one naturally gains inner certainty from the truth by pursuing the anthroposophical, one must sometimes also look at how clear today's thinking actually is! I would like to discuss this with you first of all using an example, for the reason that the anthroposophist should be aware of what is today's culture or civilization. I will take an example that says something. If, let us say, one examines the logic of a person who writes in the newspapers, not much is said by that. But I take a prominent naturalist of the present day and say explicitly that I do not want to say anything malicious or disparaging, because I fully recognize that we are dealing with an important naturalist and with a serious matter that he discusses. And in this regard, I would like to draw your attention to the clarity that prevails in this regard.

In October 1910, the well-known naturalist Max Rubner gave the rector's speech at the University of Berlin, entitled: “Our Goals for the Future”. He talks about the spiritual goals of the future, and it is not just anyone who speaks, but someone who is immersed in research and who must be seen as a serious and diligent researcher from the point of view of today's civilization. At the end of his speech, he also addresses the students and tries – well, in a way that is beautiful in his own way – to make it clear that they should study. But he does this with the “clear” concepts — I mean “clear” in quotation marks — that are possible for such a researcher today, based on today's thinking. I would like to draw attention to a few points. First of all, he says, addressing the students: “We all have to learn; we come into the world with nothing but our instrument for intellectual work, a blank page, the brain, differently predisposed, differently capable of development; we receive everything from the outside world...”

So, an often-encountered view today, which says: Look, if you want to talk about the soul life, look at your brain, which is a blank slate that has to get everything from the impressions of the outside world. So when we are born, we have our brain as a blank slate, we have to expose ourselves to the impressions of the world, then they go into us, then the slate is written on. So, he says to his students, just expose yourselves to the impressions of the world with freshness, courage and vigor, and then the page you brought with you will be written on.

In the next sentence, he tells them how to do it. He says: “No brain wants to grasp everything that its ancestors have experienced and learned, what billions of brains have considered and matured in the course of human history, what our spiritual heroes have helped create...”

So the students should only pay attention to what the spiritual heroes have created. But now the spiritual heroes are suddenly creating, so now the unwritten brains have to oppose the written brains of the spiritual heroes! You see, as soon as you put two sentences together, one on page 23 and the other on page 24, they are no longer correct! For if the heroes of the mind were also blank brains, it would not be possible to speak of their impressions on the blank brains in such a way as to suggest that these brains have created anything, for that is precisely what is being denied: everything must be received from the outside world. But now the outside world is also considered to include what human brains create. One must indeed go into such things.

But then it goes on to say: “What has been learned provides the basic material for productive thinking.” Now, put the two sentences together: “We receive everything from the outside world,” and the second: “What has been learned provides the basic material for productive thinking.” This is not the speech of an ordinary newspaper writer, this is the speech of a truly meritorious researcher of the modern age. You see, it is basically irrelevant if you now want to point out the way in which such a personality characterizes how the brain works. “[...] there is always something refreshing about working in a new, previously untilled field of the brain.” That is why he tells his students to sometimes look around for other subjects that they have not yet looked at: “[...] some areas of the brain only yield results when they are repeatedly plowed, but ultimately bear the same good fruit as others that open up more effortlessly.”

Well, after all, the soil that is plowed does not produce the plow. If you want to dwell on these thoughts, you can no longer grasp any thought at all. But now Rubner finds that this thinking is quite natural.

In order to show you the significance of what he is saying, I would like to say something in advance. When someone does sports, we see him in various movements. If you are particularly interested, you can even take a snapshot of these movements. But if we take an unbiased view of things, we have to admit that if we follow the internal organic processes that take place while someone is doing sports, what happens inside between nerve and muscle as a kind of process of destruction and restoration is, firstly, much more important for what it means to be human, but also infinitely more interesting than what can be captured in a snapshot. I am not saying anything against sport as an external physical exercise. But what the athlete is inwardly is truly much more interesting than what he is outwardly. It is only in what he achieves within the organism that it begins to become interesting.

Now it so happens that the opposite is the case with the movement of the human limbs as it is with thinking. In thinking, what is done, what happens, what the fact is, is the essential, and what lies in the organization is the unessential. In sports, what takes place externally in the facts is the less interesting part; what the organism does internally is the more interesting part. In thinking, what is interesting is what thinking presents itself as, what thinking really is; what the organism does in the process is something more or less simple. Therefore, when you understand things, you can no longer speak of thinking in the same way as of muscle movement.

But if all this becomes superficial, external, what do you say? Then you explain things like this: “Thinking strengthens the brain, and the latter (the brain) increases in performance through exercise, just like another organ, like our muscle strength, through work and sport. Studying is brain sport.

You see, our civilization is caught out in its most important element, in thinking about things, if you grasp it in such a place. You don't wake up to what is actually happening in the present through something else.

Now I would like to introduce you to a personality who, through her way of thinking, which can truly be called ingenious within certain limits, has some excellent negative thoughts about our present civilization, and who understands how to characterize it well: how it is ultimately an impossible formation and shaping of thought that has brought our civilization to decay and ruin. And I must say: the man who wrote the book about the “decay and reconstruction of culture”, Albert Schweitzer, is in a position to judge such things. Anyone who is familiar with Albert Schweitzer's book “The History of the Life-Jesu Research,” published in 1906, for example, and the way in which Schweitzer knows how to address even the most apocalyptic of subjects, so that he is already well ahead of the other theologians, must admit that Schweitzer can have a sound judgment of what contemporary intellectual life is actually worth. Now he has written this book, the first part of which has just been published. The first chapter is entitled: “The Fault of Philosophy in the Decline of Culture.” And truly razor-sharp are the sentences that are intended to characterize our present intellectual life, our life of civilization. The very first sentence is: “We are living in the era of the decline of culture. The war did not create this situation. It itself is only one manifestation of it. What was spiritual has been translated into facts, which in turn react on the spiritual in every respect in a deteriorating way.” A person who has insights into the worthlessness of present-day culture! And further: ”We lost our way in culture because there was no reflection on culture among us... So we crossed the threshold of the century with unshakable illusions about ourselves.” And now he asks himself: Why is this symptom of the decline of culture there? Why are we living in a cultural decline? And he says to himself: If we look back just a short time, to the time when intellectualism was in its first stage of flowering, people still had a “total worldview.” They still spoke of ethical and moral goals in such a way that they lay in the same sources as the laws of nature. They contemplated the laws of nature and then ascended to the sources of morality with the same views, thus having a “total worldview” that encompassed both the moral and the natural.

You will remember how often I have pointed out that the decline of our culture has been caused by the fact that we have a one-sided view of nature, which posits the Kant-Laplace theory or something similar at the beginning of our existence on earth, where everything has formed out of a primeval nebula. Man also formed out of this primeval nebula, then what is called moral ideals arose - illusions - and when the heat death occurs one day, which must occur according to purely physical laws, there will be a large field of corpses, but what emerged as cultural ideals or moral ideals will be buried with them. Thus, our morality is no longer part of the world view. It is no longer part of it; it has become something that can only be captured in abstract thoughts. Schweitzer also knows that basically this has become the case around the middle of the 19th century. He is quite clear about it: “Now it is obvious to everyone that the self-destruction of culture is underway... The Age of Enlightenment” - by this he means the period when intellectualism first flourished - ”and rationalism had established ethical and rational ideals about the development of the individual into true humanity, about his position in society, about its material and spiritual tasks, about the behavior of nations towards each other and their absorption into a humanity united by the highest spiritual goals... But around the middle of the nineteenth century, this engagement of ethical rational ideals with reality began to decline. In the course of the following decades, it came more and more to a standstill. The abdication of culture took place without a fight and without a sound. Its thoughts lagged behind the times, as if they were too exhausted to keep pace with it."

And now Albert Schweitzer wants to make it clear that if people no longer have effective thoughts, culture must perish. Since effective thoughts seem to be contained in philosophy, he attributes the reason for the decline of culture to philosophy. He knows, and expresses it in this book, that although Flege and Kant are read by only a few, their ideas dominate the ideas of thousands, because they pass unnoticed through all possible into the broadest masses of humanity, and one does not exaggerate when one says today: If only the most popular books have begun to be read by the simplest mountain farmers, then Kant is already in them. One only believes that philosophy works on those who read the philosophers. That is just outer Maja.

That is why Schweitzer says: “The decisive factor was the failure of philosophy.” But now he treats this philosophy with some compassion and says to himself: Philosophy should have thought, but since thinking had gone astray, since thinking had been forgotten, one need not be surprised that philosophy could no longer think either. So he treats philosophy a little more mildly. “It did not become clear to philosophy that the energy of the cultural ideas entrusted to it was beginning to be questioned. At the end of one of the most outstanding works on the history of philosophy published at the end of the nineteenth century - the same one that I once discussed here - “this is defined as the process in which ‘step by step, with ever clearer and more certain awareness, reflection on cultural values has taken place, the universal validity of which is the subject of philosophy itself’. In doing so, the author forgot the essential: that in the past, philosophy not only reflected on cultural values, but also allowed them to be transmitted as active ideas in public opinion, while from the second half of the nineteenth century they increasingly became a guarded, unproductive capital for it.

But now he becomes mild. After all, what can the philosopher do if he no longer thinks because everyone else does not think: “That thinking did not manage to create a world view of optimistic-ethical character and to base the ideals that make up culture in such a view was not the fault of philosophy, but a fact that arose in the development of thought. But philosophy was guilty of our world because it did not admit this fact to itself and remained in the illusion that it really maintained a progress of culture."

Schweitzer no longer blames the philosophers for no longer being able to think, since it has become a general habit of people not to think anymore. But he does blame the philosophers for not having noticed this at all. They should have noticed it at least.

"According to its ultimate purpose, philosophy is the leader and guardian of general reason. It would have been its duty to admit to our world that the ethical ideals of reason no longer found support in a total worldview, as they used to, but were for the time being left to their own devices and had to assert themselves in the world through their inner strength alone... Philosophy philosophized so little about culture that it did not even notice how it itself, and the times with it, became more and more cultureless. In the hour of danger, the guard who was supposed to keep us awake slept. So it happened that we did not struggle for our culture.

Well, I think I have already told you many things about this sleeping from a variety of points of view.

In the next chapter, Schweitzer discusses the elements in us that inhibit culture. He comes to some very interesting conclusions. He finds, for example, that man has become unfree as a result of what he has absorbed as culture in recent times. Well, one can sympathize with him on that point, because people have gradually come to really only follow certain bellwethers, to swear by the authority of science, and so on. But now Schweitzer claims that the human being is not collected in his thinking. I don't think we need discuss this much either; Schweitzer is probably right that the power to collect has really declined a lot in our civilization. But then he calls the human being incomplete. Now, people will say, if he already finds us unfree and so unsettled; that we are not even supposed to be whole people, we cannot concede that to him! But he means it this way: What a person learns today, that is a specialty, be he a scholar or be he somehow a different person, so that only certain sides of his abilities are developed, not the total human being. Therefore, we go around as incomplete, not at all as complete people. And then he finds, as a fourth, that humanity has decreased to the highest degree. He cites beautiful examples. But he is generally of the opinion that unfree, uncollected and incomplete people do not develop humanity in their ethical lives either. He also finds a culture-inhibiting element in over-organization, in the eradication of human individuality. How much does the individual still depend on today? It depends only on what is prescribed by any organization. Schweitzer rightly accuses our time of over-organization as a particular tendency.

But now he also wants to move on to answering the question of how to achieve culture again. What must be done to achieve culture again? He then asks: What must the culture we achieve be like? — And he says: It must be ethical and optimistic. Now, imagine you want to build a house for yourself. You go to a builder who says: You have to describe to me what the house should be like so that I can make the plans for you. — So you tell him: The house should be solid, weatherproof, beautiful, and so that you can live comfortably in it. — Well, you can't make plans with that, but you think you have said something when you say: The house must be solid, weatherproof, beautiful and so that you can live comfortably in it. But you can't do anything with these statements. Nor can you do anything with the statement: A worldview must be ethical and optimistic. It's the same, exactly the same.

Once, when I was a little boy, there was a court case in a village where I lived. Some chickens had been stolen from a prominent member of the community. The judge wanted to know what the sentence should be and needed a description of the chickens. So he asked the man concerned what the chickens were like. “Well, they were beautiful chickens.” Yes, that's not enough. You have to tell us something so that we can get an idea of what the chickens might have been worth. Well, they were really quite beautiful chickens. Yes, but, you have to know whether the chickens were skinny or fat... – Well, they really were quite beautiful chickens. – And so it went on, nothing at all could be elicited from the man except that they were quite beautiful chickens. |

Now here we have a quite outstanding spirit who trenchantly characterizes the decline of culture in an extraordinarily fine and apt way, who even knows a great deal that people today do not even want to admit to themselves. For example, he knows the following – it is good that it is also said by someone other than just the anthroposophist: 'The summary of knowledge and the assertion of its consequences for the world view is not his concern. In the past every scientist was also a thinker who had a certain significance in the general spiritual life of his generation. Our time has arrived at the ability to distinguish between science and thinking. Therefore we still have freedom of science, but hardly any thinking science at all.” It is indeed good to hear it from someone else for a change. But you see, despite all this insight, he does not get any further than the beautiful chickens. Extremely characteristic! Something that reappears as a truly fruitful worldview must be ethical, optimistic, firm, weatherproof, beautiful, and such that one can comfortably live in it!

Yes, he gets very far in this negative characterization. He notices that there are people who have already felt that this thinking, this brain sport, does not lead to the sources of existence. Therefore they said: Well, let us give up all this thinking and arrive at the truth by way of feeling or belief, by a mystical path. He sees that, and being a keen thinker himself, to a certain extent, he asks a remarkable question. The question is: “Philosophical, historical and scientific questions, which he was not able to answer, overwhelmed his earlier rationalism like an avalanche and buried him on the way. The new thinking world view must work its way out of this chaos. Let everything that actually is take effect on itself, passing through all kinds of reflection and recognition” - yes, if only he went through a little recognition and reflection now: the house should be beautiful and weatherproof - ”it strives towards the ultimate meaning of being and life, whether some of it can be unraveled,

The final knowledge, in which man comprehends his own existence in universal existence, is said to be mystical in nature. By this is meant that it no longer comes about through ordinary reflection, but is somehow experienced.

But why assume, he says, that the path of thinking ends at mysticism? Reasoning, as practiced up to now, has always stopped when it came close to mysticism...

Now one asks oneself: What does Anthroposophy want? To start from clear, mathematically clear thinking, not to stop at mysticism, but to penetrate, thinking, into the regions that are to be opened up for the eternal. Even then people still say that the house should be solid, weatherproof and comfortable to live in – when it is already standing in front of their noses, but they cannot find their way into it. This can be said without any modesty, but these are not the worst, these are the best, these are the sharp thinkers! We must not close our eyes to such things. We must not keep beating about the bush, saying that we must make this or that person understand what anthroposophy is, when people talk like this.

But further: “Thought carried to its conclusion thus leads somewhere and somehow to a living mysticism that is necessary for all human beings to think...” Right building leads to the good house, the way I want it! Now, he finds that people are unfocused, and so he wants to make it clear what people should do to get beyond this terrible state that culture has fallen into: “In itself, reflecting on the meaning of life has a meaning. If such reflection arises again among us, the ideals of vanity and passion, which now proliferate like evil weeds in the convictions of the masses, will wither away without hope. How much would be gained for today's conditions if we all just spent three minutes each evening looking up thoughtfully at the infinite worlds of the starry sky...' It does not say in the footnote: 'The details can be found in “How to Know Higher Worlds”, oh no, but it says that somehow we have to get to the point that there are people who take three minutes to collect their thoughts - “..look up thoughtfully to the infinite worlds of the starry sky and, when attending a funeral, would devote themselves to the mystery of death and life instead of walking behind the coffin in thoughtless conversation...”

It then concludes with the following, after first drawing attention to the fact: But something, which is now a world view, should not actually be said to people; we do need such a world view - I just want to know what we need it for if we are not supposed to say it to people! “The great revision of the convictions and ideals in which and for which we live cannot take place by talking into the people of our time different, better thoughts than those they have..."

It is not right that one should speak better thoughts into the minds of people than they have, but rather one must leave them to themselves! Reflect, think of other things when you walk behind a coffin, reflect! - Yes, then people will just continue to do what they have been doing so far: they will not know what to reflect on in the three minutes and so on.

"Previous thinking sought to understand the meaning of life from the meaning of the world. It may be that we have to resign ourselves to leaving the meaning of the world open to question and to give our lives a meaning from the will to live, as it is in us... “It may be! - “Even if the paths by which we have to strive towards the goal still lie in darkness, the direction in which we must go is clear. Together we have to think about the meaning of life, to struggle to arrive at a world- and life-affirming worldview in which our drive, which we experience as necessary and valuable, finds justification, orientation, clarification, deepening, moralization and strengthening, and then becomes capable of setting up and realizing definitive cultural ideals inspired by the spirit of true humanity. — They'll be beautiful chickens!

No one will be able to say that I want to practice caustic, deliberately negative criticism. I chose the first example of Professor Rubner because I wanted to choose a personality whose scientific achievements would be recognized. I chose the second example so that I could say that I regard the person who wrote this book as one of the sharpest thinkers, as a personality who is most justified in speaking in this way. I do not want to criticize adversely, that is far from me. One must endeavor to point out characteristically what is. But when Albert Schweitzer says: Philosophy should have been on guard, but it was asleep, then we can't help but say: He continues to sleep.

Let's wait and see what the second part is like, but the first part promises that the second part will not be much different. He continues to sleep, only dreaming out of his sleep. They are desires, they are not realities. Our striving must be to go beyond mere illusions, beyond phrases, to arrive at realities. You see how the words of our language have been squeezed dry. So we have to proceed as we started this evening, by talking about the soul, then we will put content back into the words. Otherwise, as Schweitzer says: philosophy is not to blame for the decline of culture, but it is to blame for not having noticed it. Well, of course Albert Schweitzer is not to blame either for the fact that our words have been so squeezed out that they no longer contain any concepts or realities. But he is to blame for not noticing this at all. He does not notice that he is talking in completely squeezed-out words.

I felt obliged to draw attention to the cultural decline in such a cutting way in response to Albert Schweitzer's recently published cultural act – I don't mean this maliciously, I mean it quite seriously. I was obliged to point out what the situation must actually be like in order to gain a real judgment of what is not happening on the one hand and should be happening on the other. After we have gone through this episode, we want to continue talking about specific topics of anthroposophy.

In yesterday's lecture I already pointed out how, under the influence of the newer world view determined by natural science, a certain uncertainty had to come into humanity with regard to the question: How does the world event, which natural science presents as a natural necessity, relate to the validity and significance of moral human values?

The scientific world view has increasingly come to the conclusion that everything that happens in the world happens necessarily according to natural law. And it has increasingly come to include in this natural lawfulness only that which, in essence, has nothing to do with the moral being. And so we have seen the emergence, actually only quite clearly in the middle of the 19th century, of a scientific world view, put together from the various results of scientific thought, which initially says, roughly, for our Earth and what belongs to belongs to it: this Earth is a member of a general system, our solar system, and it emerged with it from a kind of primeval nebula state, clenched itself out of it, and separated itself over the course of time. Then the beings of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms emerged, and with the perfection of the animal form, man also emerged. It will be, as that natural law of the forces that has led the world to this point and to this present form continues, that which is now inhabited by humans as earth, will be deserted, deserted of animals, deserted of plants, and will again disappear into the general process of the world.

Certainly, anyone who feels strongly about what natural science means to people today as an authority will hardly doubt that this world view has a certain exclusive significance. Indeed, there will be very many, especially among the present educated, who will strictly assert that anyone who refuses to recognize the significance of this world view will be disgraced.

However, those who make a fool of themselves include people whose voices carry a great deal of weight. I have already pointed out in earlier lectures how the brilliant art historian Herman Grimm points out in his book on Goethe how little this world view corresponds to man's original, elementary perception. He says: the sight of a bone around which a hungry dog circles is more appetizing than this world view. It will be somewhat difficult for a future historiography of humanity to explain the madness of the times that led to this Kant-Laplacean theory.

Of course, today such a thing is regarded as laymanship, dilettantism and so on. That which has been scientifically established is, so to speak, inflated into a whole world view as a worldview, and then it asserts itself in this way. And we are faced with the question: How does one relate to such a world view, which in certain respects claims its exclusivity, how does one relate to such a world view the voice of the moral ideal, of conscience, which can be heard within the human being, the voice that calls upon us to do this and not to do that, the voice that tells us that this is good and that is evil? How does the whole moral life fit into this world view?

I have met many people who see this moral life as a kind of ephemeral smoke that rises, actually the illusion of a smoke that rises from natural scientific events, that fills people with illusion for a while, only to disappear forever. And how should one think differently, if one is completely honest, than that what arises in the mind of man, after man has developed over the course of millions of years from lower animal forms, how should think otherwise than that what arises in the mind of man as ideals will also disappear without a trace when the earth falls back into the state into which it dissolves in the general course of the world. It would have been just an episode that men had set themselves moral ideals. Men would have acted under the influence of these moral ideals. All these moral ideals would have meant nothing more than that they were illusionary bubbles that had arisen, according to which men had arranged their lives, and which had no further consequences in the evolution of the world.

I know how much is still objected to today from the materialistic side against such a full consequence of this world view. But there is something that must also be touched upon in the face of the objections that materialists make today when they are told: Your world view, your world view based solely on natural science, actually reduces the moral value of man to nothing more than an illusionary bubble.

Let us take a look around us in the time when the scientific world view emerged in the civilized world with full freshness and fire. It was roughly in the middle of the 19th century, when, I would like to say, not as drowsily and inconsequentially as today, but out of full fire, the materialists hammered the nails to it, as one thoughts – everything is only ordered as physics, chemistry and biology want it – how one thought about moral values from this thought; I would like to give some examples of this, which are perhaps no longer sufficiently known today. You see, at the time when materialism, I might say in the bloom of its youth, was sweeping through European civilization, there was a historian named Hellwald; he wrote a cultural history from the point of view of the natural-scientific world view. He said to himself, drawing the real, true consequences of this natural-scientific world view: moral ideals, indeed moral ideas of man, are illusions. How can we think of any objective justification of moral ideas after the necessary event, as chemistry assumes, as physics assumes? But people have always had moral ideas. This must simply be explained scientifically, says the cultural historian Friedrich von Hellwald. But for the time being, he expresses himself about moral ideals from a purely scientific, that is, at that time, natural scientific point of view. I would like to demonstrate this way of expressing oneself in a sample. He says: “The task of science is to destroy all ideals, to prove their hollowness, their vanity, to show that belief in God and religion are deception, that morality, love, freedom and human rights are lies.”

You see, that is how people spoke when they believed that scientific causality could only be presented as a world view, at the time when it was just taking root in people's hearts, when people did not approach these things in an inconsistent and cold manner.

But, says the same historian, why did people then delude themselves with these moral ideals, which are vain? Science testifies to their vanity. Because people, he says, needed them; they needed them in the struggle for existence. If you have moral illusions, if you believe in the deception of moral ideals or ideals of truth, you will fare better in the struggle for existence than if you do not believe in these illusions. That is why these bubbles rose. That is why people seized on these moral ideals. They were the right means in the struggle for existence.

That was the consequence of the last third of the 19th century! This is something that still haunts the souls, but the souls are no longer as consistent as those of the people of that time were, and so today's souls do not admit to the consistency that consists of either either accept the Kant-Laplacean or a similar natural image, then I have to declare the moral ideals to be illusions and lies, or else I have to tear down what is merely a natural scientific world view.

Yes, people were more consistent. I would like to read you another example. A lady wrote to one of the leading scientific world-view designers of the time, Moleschott. This lady wrote the following about her view of moral human value: “The moral measure for every human being lies only in his own nature, and is therefore different for everyone. What are debauchery and passion in themselves? Nothing more than a greater or lesser extent of a fully justified urge.” And the lady continues: ‘I love humanity as it is, and even the thief and the murderer have their lesson’ - she means Moleschott's lesson - ”taught me to respect and recognize his human rights. Everything that makes the thief as well as the merchant is fully entitled in the circle of human abilities. In both cases, cunning and trickery, combined with the urge to acquire, are only one combination with other mental powers, the animating principle. Everything that enters life has also acquired its right to live with this entry. Therefore, I must say it again: Even man who has become a thief brought with him the right to fulfill his nature and to make it all-round, and in this way he can only be a powerful, moral nature. And like the thief, so every vicious person, even he who has become a murderer. He can only achieve the perfection of his humanity by satisfying his lust for murder.

Ladies and gentlemen, that was not a revolutionary, that was a very decent, bourgeois-minded lady who, only in the time of the virginity of that world view, which today is basically also represented, but only not taken seriously, taken seriously enough, who just knew: if you think the way most people still think today in terms of the scientific world view, then you have to think about the moral value of man the way she thinks. It was a deeply felt commitment that such a personality had to the confession that I quoted here, which basically leads to the dissolution of all striving for truth, to the dissolution of all ideals and has absolutely no point of reference, to think of moral human value as somehow anchored in the world.

I have read to you these examples, which could be multiplied, so that you may see how it has come about that what is happening in Europe today has taken root in human souls. Is it any wonder that the mood that is sweeping across Europe today is one with which you are sufficiently familiar, when this mood was born precisely in the consistently thinking and feeling people who held this world view in the mid-19th century and the beginning of the last third of the 19th century?

It is indeed the case that modern man, in the half-heartedness of his soul, does not admit to himself that he would actually have to think in this way about moral human value if he does not revise his world view, as presented to him by the scientifically minded creators of world views. This is the great seriousness of all those questions that arise when we seek to build a new world view. This is what weighs so heavily on the soul of those who see in spiritual science, of which I also spoke to you again yesterday, something that must necessarily be included in the present course of human development and that of the immediate future. Only from this can it be expected that the moral value of man will gain ground and truly gain ground, that the scientific world view itself will be fertilized by spiritual science, by the knowledge of the spirit.

Now we need only consider some of the things mentioned here yesterday to see clearly and in all their depth how the world cannot be known by man unless he can first enlighten himself. We will only recognize the processes going on in the world in their true essence if we can explore them from the soul's point of view. In this way we remember, as was asserted yesterday, how the spiritual science meant here seeks its methods and spiritual insights through the inner development of the soul. And once again I would like to briefly point out what is developed within the human soul, how this human soul being is brought further than in ordinary life and in ordinary science, in order to enter into the insights of the spiritual world. I have already pointed out how the head develops, how we see in the child, as it enters the world, how from day to day, from year to year, an inner soul-spiritual element pushes its way to the surface. We see how the features of the child's face become more and more soulful, more and more spiritual, how something is at work in there that is shaping the human being into the surface in a plastic way. We may only sense it, but an unbiased observation that delves deeper into things sees through it, that what is expressed, I might say, in the features of the face extends further into the child's organism. And yesterday I pointed out that the most intense expression of what is happening through this plastic shaping of the human body by the soul and spirit is the change of teeth, the eruption of the second teeth that take the place of the milk teeth. The formation of these second teeth shows most strikingly how, in the first seven years of life, the human organism rapidly hardens. Then, when the child has grown teeth, the images take shape, they can become lasting memories; they take on contours. At that moment in human life, when the forces that have been working within the organism until the seventh year have in a certain way fulfilled their task for the organism, the change of teeth occurs. Then those forces that have been working in the organism until the change of teeth come into their freedom. They show themselves in their spiritual and soul form; they then work in human memory and in human thinking. The same thing with which we think, with which we form our memory, has worked in our organism as the human plastic artist until the age of seven; it has brought it about that the dental substance has separated out of the wholeness of the human organic substance, if I may suggest it so aphoristically; otherwise, in order to explain the matter fully, one would have to give many lectures on this change of teeth.

You see, it is only a small sample, but a sample of how spiritual science does not want to indulge in some kind of cloud cuckoo land, how it does not rise into mystical fog, but how it points straight to the knowledge of reality, how it shows what works as spiritual-soul in the human organism during the first seven years. This spiritual science teaches us to recognize the human organism! It is the fate of materialism that it cannot recognize matter, that it tells us nothing about matter. Spiritual science tells us precisely about matter such things as I have now indicated in the work of that which later becomes thought movement, in the human organism up to the seventh year. If one could go into the details, one would see how the soul and spiritual work in the human organs, in the liver, lungs, kidneys, and so on. Spiritual science will bring real knowledge of material processes because it is able to explain these material processes from the spiritual.

When one goes further in the training of those methods by which one can enter the spiritual world, then one must further develop, through meditation, that which has been separated off in the seventh year as thinking activity, as imagination, as I indicated yesterday. Then one must work inwardly with one's thoughts as intensely as one works with thoughts during the first seven years of life, when one must not only conjure thoughts before one's consciousness, but when one's power of thought works so strongly in the organism that it ultimately causes the teeth to form out of the organism. But when one works one's way through meditation into such intensified activity of thought and imagination, then one also notices the difference between this thinking, which then brings one directly into the contemplation of the spiritual world, which allows one to recognize directly how man spiritual soul through birth into his physical existence, and can then compare what one has artificially attained, I might say, through meditation, with what ordinary human thinking is.

So you have seen what ordinary human thinking consists of, the thinking that people do in their daily lives and in ordinary science. People do this thinking, but they cannot know what this thinking actually consists of. One only learns to recognize what this thinking consists of when one can compare it with thinking that is free of the body, that is not bound to the brain, that takes place in the purely spiritual-mental, etheric, which one can only acquire through meditation. Only then is it possible to compare the ordinary thinking of a person with this completely free thinking. It is important to be able to do this, because only then can a real science of the whole significance of the human soul be established.

You see, it is an extraordinarily meaningful experience to grasp thinking in its body-free state, and to compare it with how thinking is when it is bound to the brain as ordinary thinking in life. One then sees in relation to thinking the difference that exists between man and animal. Much has been fabled about this difference between man and animal, especially by modern science. But to recognize what this difference consists of can only be done through such comparison as I have just indicated.

And if you ask yourself: Yes, how does ordinary thinking arise in contrast to body-free thinking, which is directly linked to the soul of the human being, in that it only takes place in the spiritual-soul realm, then what - you can now ask - is ordinary thinking like from the point of view of this body-free thinking? This ordinary thinking is completely bound to the brain. There must be something of an organic organization through which this ordinary thinking proceeds. The body-free thinking that is acquired through meditation does not need this nervous tool. Ordinary thinking needs this nervous tool. Man has this nervous tool only because his nervous organization is not as highly developed as that of animals. The animal, so to speak, advances to a certain point with its animal organization, hardens to a certain point. At the beginning of life, man does not go as far as animals in hardening, ossifying and sclerotizing his soul life. But during the course of life, the human being develops this hardening. For that which is expressed in the hardening of the organism, in that the second teeth appear as pure products of hardening, is also continued in ordinary everyday thinking; only they do not become teeth, they become much softer insertions, I would say, into the organism, which in turn dissolve. But this thinking, this ordinary thinking, consists precisely in the fact that man, in the continuous process, is constantly killing that which arises in him, sprouting, sprouting life. What comes to light is that in us, thought is continually shooting forth, temporarily, as reality earlier than the teeth, as deadened parts from the organism, and that this shooting dissolves again into sclerotization, ossification. Thinking consists precisely in the fact that, in relation to our head system, our nervous sense system, we continually carry death within us.

This is what I have already pointed out here in other contexts. Our thinking consists in the fact that, in the continuous process of time, we carry out through our own inner activity that which the animal is predisposed to from the beginning: the process of sclerotization, ossification, death, which we carry within our organism. One looks at this perpetual dying, without which man's ordinary thinking cannot take place, from the point of view of body-free thinking, which one has acquired through meditation. And this dying is only continually compensated for by the fact that, in turn, the invigorating forces shoot up from the rest of the organization, from the blood and heart organization, into the head, which tends towards continual dying. In man, precisely because he is a thinker, there is a continual struggle between dying and life. And what occurs at the end of physical life, the unique moment of dying, is just the synthetic summary of what always happens on a small scale. We continually die from our sensory-nervous organization; only this dying is continually suspended. Only when the rest of the organism, not just the head, no longer has the ability to suspend dying, only then do we really die. Death is not something that happens to man only once; death is an ongoing process. And it is to this death that we owe thinking. It is only because we integrate death into ourselves through thinking that, firstly, this thinking is present in us at all, but secondly, we learn to recognize what the dead actually is.

When one has trained one's mind, freed from the body and cultivated through meditation, one sees, firstly, other minds, and sees how they continually mineralize, ossify the human substance, and one gets to know the process of mineralization. By getting to know the mineral kingdom in man, as a purely mineral product of thinking, filling man, filling him with the dead, one gets to know the mineral kingdom in oneself. And by raising thinking in oneself above the degree of death, awakening it in oneself, by experiencing that something must die in us for thoughts to arise, by experiencing this, one also learns to recognize the secret of the universe. One comes to recognize the true significance of the mineral kingdom outside of us. We can only come to know the mineral kingdom of the non-human world by recognizing the mineral kingdom in the human being, which is bound up with thinking. True knowledge of the world comes only through intimate knowledge of the human being. And by seeing how something dies in man, one escapes the prejudice that crept into the nineteenth century as the sharpest, most intense prejudice and has remained until our days; I might say that man stared, caught in the grip of an infamous suggestion, at the mineral world with its causality. He knew of nothing within himself that could have taught him the essence of this mineral world. He could only say to himself: This world was once a cosmic mist, a Kant-Laplacean primeval nebula. From this emerged the planetary system, the earth; everything else developed from it, and it will continue in this way. This becoming, this causal event, is something eternal; within it, the moral values of man are bubbles that rise, and in addition, bubbles that consist only of illusions. If you learn to recognize this mineral realm by learning to recognize it within yourself, then you learn to see through its essence in the outer world. You see within yourself how the mineral realm is a continuous dying. And you no longer construct the outer world picture in the old way, but you now know how this outer world picture is actually constructed under the prejudice of science. It is very ingeniously constructed, as we have already pointed out: you could follow the change in the human heart over five years and you would find that the human heart is different today than it was five years ago. You could then follow it further to see what it is like after another five years, and then calculate what it will be like after three hundred years. It is just no longer there, but the calculation can be very accurate and correct. This is how geologists and astronomers calculate what the earth would look like after millions of years. This earth is just as little there as a human being is still there as a physical human being after three hundred years. And just as little as the human heart was there three hundred years ago, the earth was just as little there at that time, which geologists take into account!

This can be learned by getting to know the nature of the mineral kingdom in the human being itself, by the path I have indicated. But then, when you have got to know the nature of the mineral kingdom in this way, you know that the mineral kingdom disappears from the earth without the whole earth disappearing, just as, in the case of man, what is ossified in him ceases in death, without the whole human being ceasing in soul and spirit.

And further: just as one can advance thinking through meditation, one can also advance human feeling; just as one can make human thinking clairvoyant in a certain way, one can also make human feeling clairvoyant, so that one can also enter the spiritual world through human feeling. And just as one gets to know the mineral kingdom through thinking in the way I have just indicated, so one learns through feeling becoming free of the body, and being able to look back at everyday feeling is bound up with the human glandular system, one learns to recognize how this everyday feeling is bound up with a similar process in the organism, as the plant process is in the outer world.

And again, one gets to know the nature of the plant process in the outer world. And one learns to recognize - which seems very paradoxical to today's man - that the plant kingdom has a longer existence than the mineral kingdom, that the plant kingdom is also older than the mineral kingdom. Today's man cannot imagine anything other than that the plant kingdom grows out of the soil of the mineral kingdom. He would do better to observe how a distinctly mineral substance grows out of the plant kingdom in the form of coal! From this he would be able to see how all the minerals that exist today are a secretion, a result of an original plant, and how the plant kingdom will have a longer existence than the mineral kingdom.

Just as one can free thinking and feeling from the body, so too can one free the will. And when one attains this free will — I also spoke about this yesterday, how one attains this free will through a particularly suitable, intensive self-education, through a self-comprehension, through self-discipline — then one learns to recognize the special being in man that is now related to the animal kingdom. Then one also learns to recognize the nature of this animal kingdom. But also how the plant kingdom is in turn a separation of the animal kingdom, how the animal kingdom is older than the plant kingdom, which has separated out of itself, how it will exist longer, how the plant kingdom will disappear sooner than the animal kingdom. Not in the physical animal forms as they are today, of course, but in the animal entities that are embodied in this physical realm.

And then you get a real insight into the human world. Then you get such an insight into this human world that you say to yourself: It is man, after all, who has outgrown all these realms, because, in a sense, just as the plant kingdom has separated the mineral kingdom, the animal kingdom has separated the plant kingdom from itself; man, in turn, has separated the animal kingdom from himself; he is older than the animal kingdom and lasts longer than the animal kingdom. First the mineral perishes, then the plant, then the animal. Then that part of the human being that we have come to know by looking at what arose from the death of the mineral, what arose from the death of the plant, from the death of the animal, will be there when the other three realms have disappeared. —What will arise from our earth, from our earthly existence? He who studies man can already recognize this now. He sees how thinking, how thoughts arise from the grave of the ossified part of the organism within us. When what is in the mineral kingdom, what is in the plant kingdom, and what is in the animal kingdom has disappeared, what has been brought forth by man out of his conquest of the dead mineral kingdom, out of his conquest of the plant kingdom, and out of his conquest of the animal kingdom will emerge from all these things that have perished. And we are reminded that what we develop today as moral ideals will, in our germinal thoughts, shape the world when everything contained in today's mineral, plant and animal kingdoms has disappeared. We now place ourselves in the world as we must place ourselves when we look at the plant in the picture: it grows upwards, forming leaf after leaf; but the little germ is already there, which will then become a new plant. The old leaves flake off the plant; the petals, all this has no significance for the further development. We stand in the world as human beings. We see how that which will one day be an earthly process is already happening in us. We see how a mineral kingdom is forming in us because we think, how a plant kingdom is forming in us because we think, how an animal kingdom is forming in us because we think. Triumphing over all this is that which develops in us as thinking, feeling and willing. The germ is thus given. We must only have the possibility of knowing that that out of which this germ develops falls away, like the petals, the stem leaves fall away, that this just gives the germ of a new world.

The enemy of this recognition has developed in the 19th century, in that one could not imagine anything other than: The mineral event contains within itself a substantiality that is constant. One spoke of the constancy of matter, of force. In the moment in which one posits these dogmas, in this moment, this mineral is something; in this moment one does not see that this mineral is doomed to destruction, later the plant world is doomed to destruction , and later the animal element will be doomed to destruction. And on this common grave will arise not nothingness but that which we human beings carry within us today.

Yes, this earth with everything in the three realms on it will perish. But what we are already developing in ourselves today, and to which we ascribe moral human value, that is the germ of a new earth, the germ of a new world existence. We do not look at the moral value of a person by saying: That is an illusionary bubble that rises — because we see how everything around it, like the leaves of the plant, falls away, and everything else falls away from the earth, but what we carry as the moral value of a person develops as a germ. We only have to overcome such ideas as the prejudice of the constancy of matter, of the constancy of force, these terrible dogmas that natural science has implanted in the 19th century because it had no idea of what man can recognize when he rises to spiritual knowledge and then in itself, in the microcosmic, in the human being: the death of the mineral kingdom, over which triumphs the thought that can only develop by continually dying, just as the new plant germ can only develop by the old plant leaves dying and the germ triumphing over the old plant leaves. Our moral humanity, our moral human value, is the triumphant element in the other realms, in that which belongs to the other realms, in that which perishes in the other realms.

Here we see how moral worldviews burst into natural scientific worldviews. We see how the scientific world view is concerned with that which is dying in the world, while the moral world view is concerned with that which is now emerging as a germ in this dying as a new world. We become aware that by building a moral world with ideals, we are working on the germ of a future world. In this way, the moral value of man is placed on the same level as the natural process. But the natural process is rejected within its limits, this observation of nature, which indeed reaches its results in any case, by taking man into the clinics and doing the examinations on the cadaver. Natural science does the examinations on what is dying. It also only reaches knowledge about what is dying. But what the clinician cannot take to the morgue, what cannot be dissected, what triumphs over what is to be dissected, that is what already now, as a moral human value, is building a new world.

You see, the task of spiritual science is to break the presumptions, if I may say so, of the scientific world view. For spiritual science sees clearly and distinctly: Yes, it is so, either one rejects this natural scientific world view - not of course natural science with its proven results itself - but one rejects this natural scientific world view, or one must reject the moral value of man. It is only because people today are so inconsistent and so arrogant that they do not realize that in order to rescue the moral value of man they must decide to grasp a spiritual-scientific world-view. Humanity does not see it, because it wants to keep the world-view that today is based only on the study of nature. But then it would have to speak as Mathilde Reichardt once wrote to the materialistic naturalist Moleschott: “Therefore I must say it once more: even man, who has become a thief, brought with him the right to perfect his nature and make it all-round, and in this way he can only be a powerful, moral nature. And like the thief, so every vicious person, even the one who has become a murderer. He can only reach the perfection of his humanity by satisfying his lust for murder.” Either one speaks in this way, and thus gives science its right as a worldview, denies any moral human value, or one turns to spiritual science.

There is a third way. One says: I am indifferent to all world-views; I prefer to oversleep the existence of the world in an instinctive way. Certainly, this third way is also possible. Many people do it today. Those who seriously want to come to terms with themselves and their relationship to the world can only follow one of the paths described. That is the way things are today. This decision is there. Natural science has grown into a world view. One does not preach theoretically, as Mathilde Reichardt and the cultural historian Hellwald and others have done, that the thief, that the murderer can only become a full human being if he lives it up, because natural causality operates in him in exactly the same way as in the so-called honest man. One does not preach this theoretically. But that which lives in this spirit is going through Europe. It has produced the last five to six years. It will continue to work. Europe is being barbarized; or Europe must realize that it cannot build a world view on the basis of natural science alone.

This may sound fanatical today, it may sound radical today. Let each one look into his own heart and ask himself the question, but let him ask it earnestly enough, and I do not believe that the seriousness of the situation can produce any other answer. And then one looks at such a world view, which seeks to regain the moral value of the human being from the soul, and how it is compelled to seek the moral value of the human being from the spirit, and how it must break with the manifold prejudices of our time: the constancy of energy, the constancy of substance, and so on. Look at this spiritual science: it must acquire a completely different way of presenting itself to the world. It leads to looking at what appears to be only thought, what appears to be only a very rarefied thought that scurries away and disappears. It leads to holding this as the germ of a new reality after the whole earth has disappeared. This spiritual science will be felt by anyone who is serious about the matter as a necessity of our time. But it must also be felt as a necessity by the religious, by the truly religious of our time. Our time needs the possibility of being able to grasp how something spiritual can place itself in this physical world.

Now let us look at what a person steeped in today's education can say about the event of Golgotha. He cannot help but say about the event of Golgotha: Well, it must have been preparing itself in the events of the earth for the whole time leading up to this event of Golgotha, then it was there. Then it had its consequences again. It must be part of the series of causes and effects. For how should someone who is educated in today's world, which is based solely on natural science, see the possibility that with the event of Golgotha something completely new has entered the earth, in order to continue to shape itself with the further development of the earth! Only by grasping that something in the innermost life of man, in the actual world of thought, reaches beyond this earth and all its kingdoms, only by grasping this, that there is something in the earth that is not exhausted in the intellectual, in the sensory, , and triumphs over this earth, and whose substance goes beyond the earthly, one is also able to look at the essence, at the spirit being that has entered the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha and, as the Christ Jesus, gives further meaning to the earth.

Today it is necessary to approach spiritual science, which is kindled in man, through the Mystery of Golgotha, the secrets of Christianity. For today, Christianity must be understood spiritually. Let us look at the materialists: Just as they, if they are consistent, deny the moral value of man, so Christianity must be an absurdity to them. People cannot remain within the framework of the old traditional creeds, for if you look at the representatives, say of the Catholic Church, for example, you will see how they cultivate the most materialistic of all sciences when they become scientists! You can look at those who become scientists as Catholic priests: they do not want to bring the spirit into science. They want to keep science from being imbued with the spirit, because they want to preserve the old traditional forms in the spirit. They fear the new discovery of spiritual substantiality; they flee from it. There is nothing to be gained from it either. And if we look at the Protestant forms of interpreting Christianity, we see how powerfully the scientific world view weighs on this Protestant newer theology: They cannot fit the event of Golgotha into what is happening in the world! That is why they say that one must understand Christ Jesus only in terms of his moral qualities, in terms of what he has brought in as an ethos. But then again, this ethos is completely in the air if it is not anchored in a spiritual-scientific worldview.

Anyone who recognizes the dangers in which Christianity finds itself today will have to say to themselves: Christianity, in particular, depends on resorting to spiritual science in order to gain knowledge of its center, to gain knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha itself. For just as spiritual science points to where the germ of the future earth is to be found, so spiritual science also points to where the forces are that have united with the earth without being directly contained in the pre-Christian part of the earth. The spirituality of the Mystery of Golgotha can only be grasped by those who, through spiritual science, have first struggled to achieve spiritual understanding at all. Those who are serious about Christianity should appeal to spiritual science to save it. Those who are serious about Christianity, who take religion seriously, will also do so.

Why then do the people of the purely scientific age still have moral ideals? We can learn this from voices such as those of Hellwald and Mathilde Reichardt, which could, however, be augmented by numerous others. They teach us: the task of science is to destroy all ideals, to prove their hollowness, their vanity, to show that belief in God and religion are deception, that morality is a lie, and so on. - So one would actually have to say from a purely scientific world view, if one were not too cowardly to do so!

From such a standpoint, Christianity cannot be saved. The ground for Christianity will only be created again by the possibility, achieved through spiritual science, of looking into the spiritual itself, and of looking into it in such a way that this spiritual life is recognized as reality and not as illusory bubbles that one only devotes oneself to because one needs them in the struggle for existence. No, not because one needs the spiritual in the struggle for existence, but because it is produced out of our world with a necessity, just as the germ of the new plant is produced out of the old one with a necessity! But only if one realizes that the old is not subject to the constancy of energy, to the indestructibility of matter, but that all material substance decays like the leaves of a plant, and that the spiritual is the germ of what is to come, like the germ of a plant brings forth the new plant. Only when one realizes this spiritual necessity can one come to the sources of human value, where moral human value lives. What is left for people of the calibre of Mathilde Reichardt, the Hellwaid and others as moral ideals is the conventional adherence to inherited ideals. If such ideals had not been handed down from the views that brought us from the 19th into the 20th century, they would never have been won! Fertile soil for moral ideals will only be that which is provided by spiritual science as such soil.

For all these reasons, spiritual science truly believes that it is not working out of the mere subjective needs of its adherents, but out of the necessity of the time. — How it must work out of the necessity of the character of today's peoples, how these peoples are constituted today in relation to their souls, in relation to their external cultural conditions, is what I would like to speak about tomorrow: as it also I might say, this spiritual biography and history of the earth as a necessity — which I have tried to show today through the nature of the human soul in relation to moral human value —, to turn our gaze to the dawning of a new spiritual life. For only when we find this way to the spirit do we also find the sources of moral human value again, and we no longer need to despair that the whole earth will one day be a desolate grave, and not even a memory will remain of that which lived as moral human values in the soul being.

Spiritual science shows that moral human values rightly arise in the soul being because future worlds create their seeds precisely in the human soul through moral human values. Today's moral human values are the natural values of future worlds. Just as we look into natural values today and see the results of past worlds, so we see in what arises deep within our chests the dawning of new worlds. Spiritual science does not speak of eternity in abstract form. For that which lives in eternal becoming, in change, so that it emerges naturally from the moral and again bears the moral for future worlds in its bosom, that which lives in the change of the times, has the life of the eternities. And because the germ of the eternities rests in the human soul-being, the human soul has its true eternity.

I. Report in the “Weimarische Zeitung” of October 25, 1903

In the large hall of the “Erholung” last night, Dr. Steiner gave the first of the lectures announced for the winter semester on “The Nature of Man or Spiritual Chemistry”.

In the past, people were unable to exploit the forces of nature as comprehensively as we can today with our machines. Today, electrical power allows us to communicate with people across the earth, and in a short time we will probably be able to traverse the air as birds fly. But science has also been able to paint a bleak picture of the future of our material earthly life. It can calculate how long it will take for all life on our planet to have disappeared. Then all material culture will have passed away. Will everything that lives in our soul also disappear from the universe? What will become of the inner treasures we acquire? Will they also be buried in the general grave? The answer to these questions will come from the theosophical movement. The theosophical movement aims to bring about the brotherhood of man. And it will prove that what people have striven for in the field of spiritual life over thousands of years is not delusion and error. The theosophical movement is taking a path that corresponds to our time; but the theosophical works still contradict the thought habits of the present. And man allows himself to be ruled by his habits of thought. These habits have led us to a state where we trust only our senses. If our senses do not perceive it, it is not real. Theosophy, however, aims to offer the fruits of our material culture the nourishment of the spirit and soul, which our modern view of nature can only offer to a limited extent. The highest questions of the human soul are to be answered by theosophy. We must believe that we can penetrate into the essence of the soul just as the physicist and chemist penetrate into matter; the soul is a manifold being whose composition we must study more closely. There is a spiritual chemistry, just as there is a material chemistry. Through spiritual chemistry we get to know and solve the essence of the human being and his spiritual task. Truth and science are the two things we must combine in the realm of the inner human nature. The physical human being is not the whole human being. When the soul's abilities have left the physical body, it is impossible and disintegrates. The physical forces and substances of our body are constantly changing. Don't we have to ask ourselves: What is permanent about us? The universe is permeated by the power of life. The hypothesis that all life originated from a dead primeval nebula has been abandoned. This primeval nebula was a great organism, a living being. And from this great living being, the inanimate and the animate nature branched off in two directions.

Redner points out in the course of development the four basic parts that are mortal: The human body is mortal; the life force is mortal: it flows into the general world life force to be used again; our instincts are mortal; our astral body is mortal: it dissolves into a world of purely spiritual forces. What, the speaker asks, can we regard as immortal in the face of this? The causal body is immortal; it connects us with previous substances of existence. It is our true higher self and lies in turn in the bosom of a unified fundamental being. We reach this unified spiritual fundamental being when we seek out the still deeper forces in our soul life. And the seven fundamental parts mentioned — four mortal, three immortal — are the fundamental substances of the human being.

II. Report in «Germany» from October 25, 1903

Yesterday evening, Dr. Rudolf Steiner of Berlin opened the cycle of Theosophical lectures planned for this winter in the recreation hall with the topic: “The Essence of Man or Spiritual Chemistry”. The speaker based his introductory remarks on the following train of thought: the past century has allowed us to scale lofty heights in external culture, and our mastery of the forces of nature outside ourselves is so significant that earlier times would not have dreamt of it. At the same time, however, natural science presents us with a bleak picture for the future of our material life, a future that does not satisfy our inner selves. But it is a fact that for centuries and millennia people have been striving to solve the great mystery of the world, that the various religions intended to do so for their times. Based on the findings of modern science, theosophy now wants to strive to give humanity this innate satisfaction. Above all, we must delve into our own inner selves without prejudice and discard previous habits of thought. These are by no means decisive for the truth of our views, are often dependent on chance, change with the ages, and therefore it is not surprising if Theosophy encounters difficulties in this direction. Only gradually will the theosophical truths break new ground and then add themselves as glorious fruits to material culture. Just as present-day natural science demands full devotion and observation of nature, so it is necessary to delve into our inner nature and to explore our inner powers. Of course, one must believe that such an intimate science of the soul exists. Western science has only examined the physical human being, the physical entities, but has left the inner soul elements out of consideration. Our organism is in a state of constant change. Years ago, we consisted of completely different elements than we do today, and yet we are the same. The corpse is composed of the same atoms as the living body was an hour ago. Therefore, we are forced to assume that man, if he is merely physical, proves to be an impossible physical body. This would force us to the conclusion that we possess higher spiritual substances, for which the physical body is the carrier. This power is called “prana” in Sanskrit, the life force that flows through all living things and that we humans have in common with plants and animals. For a long time now, people have no longer held on to the Kant-Laplacean world theory, according to which life developed from a mere primeval nebula, and it is becoming increasingly clear that this primeval nebula must have been a living organism. This prana holds our inanimate substances together and, after death, returns to the general life of the world just as the physical components return to matter. The plant differs from animals and humans in that it lacks the great area that we call pleasure and pain. Why do we not observe passions in plants? It is because they lack the power. To trigger these feelings, we need a basic force of desire, of craving, which theosophy calls “kama”. It is illogical to see effects and not assume causes. Man differs from the animal in the power that allows him to control his instincts. The animal unconsciously follows its instincts, but man, by virtue of an inner power, is able to act according to his own judgment, and the power that makes this possible is called the lower soul intellect, the lower “Manas”. The kama-manasic powers are bound to our physical body, to the brain, and die with the brain for us. The next higher power is the higher “Manas”, that element within our spiritual and mental being that extends beyond all that is transitory. It lives in us from birth to death and beyond, in order to form new bodies again. Not once does a person live, but countless times. These changing durations, which make up our higher self, are called the causal or causative body in theosophy. When we consider this causal body, it provides the permanent element in the various incarnations. But even higher forces are included in the life of the soul, which can be recognized in the great cosmic love that flows through the whole world. Those who are imbued with these feelings cease to see themselves as individual beings and feel themselves to be a fundamental tone of the universe. The great founders of religions spoke from this element. The power that emanated from these men was able to continue to work, not because it took hold of the transitory, but because it flowed from the highest power of the soul. This is what Theosophy calls “Budhi”. When this power of the soul drives us, we feel what is laid down in the Indian books of wisdom. Every single being is only a drop in the eternal Atma, the basic substance of the human being, similar to the chemical substance of the elements. Just as we get to know a body when we break it down into its parts, so we can explain a person when we have recognized them in their parts. This is the doctrine of the basic components of the human being.

The rather large gathering received the lecture with approval.

Somebody who hears something about anthroposophy forms an opinion very often from this or that which he hears about the matter, that he has to deal with a sect or something similar. In particular since the building has been tackled in Dornach, one has considered this building and spiritual science stereotypically as a sectarian movement. It is hard to cope with such prejudices. I would almost like to say, the more one combats them, with the bigger fierceness they appear and the more they find belief.

Today I would only like to note that the bases of spiritual science do not have anything to do with a sectarian trend or purpose. This spiritual science has not developed from any religious impulse, but it takes the point of view that that which it intends is a necessary attempt of our time, just considering the great achievements of scientific thinking. If one proves the scientific thinking proves more precisely, it seems to be incapable to tackle the riddles of humanity concerning the area of the spirit. A historical necessity is that beside these natural sciences with the same seriousness spiritual-scientific research places itself in the recent time.

Well, I only wanted to point to the fact that someone who pursues the origin of the spiritual-scientific attempts detects that it has originated in straight development from demands that the really understood natural sciences themselves put. However, going more into such requirement, as we have discussed it the day before yesterday here, it becomes apparent that this scientific direction must be insufficient by that with which it has become great just for the questions of the moral-social life I want to treat today.

One often hears from this or that side: that what natural sciences have performed must be also made fruitful for the consideration of the moral ideas.

I would like to take my starting point from something that one hears very often. Today the judgement of the human beings is challenged by the tragic, catastrophic events that concern the whole humanity in manifold way. The one needs, because of his position and occupation, to form an opinion about this or that what the sad events bring; the other will do it out of the sympathy with the destiny of the whole humanity. Just from these drastic events, it became necessary to some people to form an opinion about the social life of humanity.

There one hears very often: what can one think about this and that? How has one to judge these or those things under the influence of the today's sad events? Then one hears as answer: history teaches this and that. History is, in the end, nothing but the enumeration of that what the human beings believe to know about the course of events of the social life up to now. History is understandably that for many people from which they want to form their opinion.

Someone who experiences the events of our time with heart and head has to say to himself that these events do not have that effect on many people that they have to learn something quite new that they need in many respects not to stop at the opinions which they had four, five years ago.

Someone who stands wholeheartedly in these events has to retrain. This is maybe just one of the saddest symptoms that most people have not yet realised that they must retrain, although these sad events take place for so long time that they believe that they can just still judge certain things as well as four or five years ago. Just the signs of the times could teach much in this respect.

I would like to bring in an example of our time and another of the past. Those who deal with contemporary history know that so-called experts believed to be able to forecast when this war broke out that it could last no longer than for four to six months on account of the general economic and social conditions.

In which way the events themselves have disproved such an apparently appropriate judgement! However, one is not yet inclined to say to himself, such appropriate judgements have been disproved, and one has to retrain. In such things, one has to retrain.—One must not simply stop at the prejudice that history teaches this and that. History has taught that the war could last no longer than for four to six months; but reality has taught how little history is applicable to reality!

Another example is: in 1789, Schiller (1759-1805) as professor of history held his inaugural speech What Is and to What Purpose Does One Study Universal History?. In this speech, he said the following: the European community of states seems to have changed into a big family; the housemates may be hostile to each other, but they do no longer tear each other to pieces as I hope.—Somebody pronounced that sentence who attempted to penetrate with ingenuity into that what history teaches. He said this, briefly before the French Revolution broke out with everything that it had as result.

Well, if one even envisages longer periods which followed—how does Schiller's quotation look? Something has to follow from that what today the signs of the times teach. This is that one learns something really from them.

What forms the basis of the sentence that history teaches this?—Above all, one has to be clear in his mind that one cannot judge life after outer symptoms. Spiritual science just wants this: penetrating away from the surface into the deeper undergrounds of life. The scientific way of thinking has originated from the habitual ways of thinking of the last centuries.

This is the expression of these impulses of thought. Not only the scientific thinking, but any thinking of humanity was involved in these habitual ways of thinking, so that these habitual ways of thinking work beneficially not only in natural sciences, but that they have also to work in other areas of life. One may say, one has taken great pains to bring also that what has made natural sciences great, as line of thought into other areas of the human life. Today the sociological moral impulses should mainly occupy us. Nevertheless, the impulses have worked different there. That who can pursue the contemporary history in deeper sense knows how intimately the effects of those impulses are associated with the catastrophic events in which we live today.

Excellent thinkers have attempted to transfer the scientific way of thinking to the sociological field. I would like to mention one example of many. The great English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1901) tried to apply biological concepts to the social living together. The concept of development has been applied to everything. Rightly, it has been applied also to the life of human beings.

Herbert Spencer said, one realises development in the life of the animals, of the human being; the single living being originates from the zygote and then forms the so-called ectoderm, mesoderm, and endoderm. The different organs develop from these three cell layers. Spencer now tries to apply this way of grasping a scientific process to the historical-social life, too. He transfers all those organic systems that belong to the ectoderm to the work of those human beings who belong to the military class; the human beings of the working class develop from the social endoderm, and those human beings who merchandise develop from the mesoderm. Then it is only logical if the great philosopher Spencer says, because from the ectoderm the nervous system and the brain develop, the best develops from the social ectoderm.—Of course, I will not defer to this hawkish view of the philosopher Spencer; if he says, the ruling circles of any state would have to arise necessarily from the military class because, otherwise, the state would have no nervous system, no head system.

This only as an example of directly transferring the scientific way of thinking to the social-historical life.

Someone who has a feeling for such things will realise that all these attempts show only that one cannot at all approach that which is effective in the social life with such scientific mental pictures. Why is that?

I have now to take my starting point from something that is far away and then to lead our considerations to the moral-social field. Spiritual science has just to fetch many a thing that is far away.

I would like to point out at first that people are little inclined to involve the whole life in their knowledge. What is involved in their knowledge is the wake day life. From the spiritual-scientific viewpoint one has to stress that the whole life consists of that which the human being experiences in the wake day life, and of that which positions itself in this life during sleep and dream, in which chaotic pictures surge up and down. One has formed the strangest views concerning the scientific images of sleeping and dreaming. It would be very interesting once to go into that, too. Nevertheless, I must be brief concerning these things that I would like to adduce briefly. Above all one has rather strange mental pictures of sleep. I have to bring this to your attention.

Today one is also convinced as a scientist that sleep originates from tiredness that the human being is just tired and then sleep has to come. Everybody can convince himself of the opposite if he observes a pensioner who anyhow visits a concert or a talk and falls asleep after few minutes that he does not at all fall asleep because of tiredness, but because there quite different reasons must exist.

Someone who more exactly investigates these things notices that tiredness originates more likely by sleep than sleep by tiredness. Sleeping and waking are a rhythm of life; they must alternate because one is as necessary as the other is.

I would not like to characterise this life rhythm further; but it is important that spiritual science has really to pursue this other side, the sleep with the dreams, and on the other side to note that sleep and dream extend more in the human life than one normally assumes.

Spiritual science does not at all want to take over old superstitious prejudices, for example, that dreams have any prophetic meaning for something future. However, in such old superstition a reasonable core is contained sometimes. However, one has to understand it not in such a way as one normally considers it. Recently I have pointed out in a cycle of talks how spiritual science has to envisage the problem of sleep, of dream. Against that, one has argued from psychoanalytic side that spiritual science speaks of a certain higher knowledge that one can probably compare concerning its strength with the dream images present in the consciousness that, however, psychoanalysis does the proper thing in this respect. Since it uses the dreams for investigating the human nature only in such a way that it regards the dreams, the so-called subconsciousness, only as symbolic; while , for example, I as a representative of spiritual science regard that what appears, otherwise, in the subconsciousness as real.

This is a big misunderstanding. Since it will occur to no spiritual scientist to regard the immediate contents of the dream even as symbolic. Spiritual science considers the contents of the dream not as reality, but it even shows that the contents of the dream do not have any real meaning. Against it, it says, what lives in the dream what is active in the dream, is associated with the everlasting essence of the human being.

If the human being works in the dream—if one may call it work—, a surplus of his usual consciousness works in the dream, that surplus which proves to be coherent with the everlasting essence of the human being that enters into the spiritual life after death. What lives in the dream is also that which works into our future. However, the images that the human being experiences in dream have nothing to do with that reality forming the basis of dreams.

Hence, the spiritual researcher never considers the dream in such a way that he disregards the following: if anybody dreams anything, a spiritual fact forms the basis of the dream, but the dream images may be quite different. A human being can experience the same as another in dream; but he can tell the dream quite different because his dream images have quite different meaning. What is important of the dream to the spiritual researcher? Not the dream images as those—whether one grasps them in their reality or in their symbolism—but the inner drama of the dream: how an image follows the other whether an image replaces the next, so that there is something relaxing or something frightening and the like. This inner subconscious drama makes known itself to the usual consciousness only while the subconscious experience dresses in the memories of the everyday life. That dresses in images what works there in his subconsciousness as the soul drama.

The same experience can appear in hundreds of different images. Hence, someone who gets to know a dream as a spiritual researcher knows that he does not see any contents, but the way in which the images surge up and down. In that are the essentials.

I mention this because I have to say in the context with it that—if with soul exercises the human being can behold his everlasting essence—he recognises what is real in sleep and dream. These things are processes of consciousness, and they have to be also recognised within the consciousness. The spiritual researcher who explores the consciousness in such a way, as I have given it the day before yesterday, understands that that which is so often misjudged in the recent time which no scientific way of thinking can understand is just confirmed by such psycho-physiologists like Ziehen (Theodor Z., 1862-1950) and others: the fact that the human being can have the ego-experience only because he is fixed in the life rhythm of waking and sleeping.

If one learns to recognise the soul, one also learns to recognise that the human being knows of his ego only because he is not always awake between birth and death. Imagine hypothetically the wake life extended to the whole human life between birth and death, that one could never sleep: then one would never have that abutment by which the ego becomes aware of itself in time. Because one can exchange the day consciousness with a consciousness between falling asleep and awakening that distinguishes nothing because it is vague, one has his ego-consciousness. The human being would not learn to say to himself “I” if he were not fixed in the rhythm of sleeping and waking.

It is strange how little one is inclined to go into such things. The great aesthetician Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807-1887) got involved with a consideration of dreams. He criticised the interesting book about dream imagination by Johannes Volkelt (1848-1930) and wrote a treatise about it. There one was inclined swiftly to call him a spiritist, although he did not get involved with such things in the wrongly mystic sense. Well, what does one not do if one wants to harm a human being? However, Vischer knew that people might say long, what expresses itself in the dreams is fantastic stuff.—Indeed, it is a fantastic stuff, but in it lives the everlasting essence of the human being. If the human being is not ready to develop mental pictures of such strength with his beholding consciousness as the dream has it only, then he cannot at all behold into the everlasting of the human soul. If anyone wants to do that, he must be able to raise that what works in the dream involuntarily into the free consciousness.

Nevertheless, Vischer brought something to our attention in very interesting way that casts intense light on the human life. He showed carefully that someone who cannot understand the dream properly does also not properly understand the human affects, passions and feelings generally. Why is that? Since Vischer completely found the proper thing! Just as the soul is active in the dream, save that it lives it up in images which are memories of life, the soul is during the wake day life active in the feelings, affects, and passions. We dream in them. Somebody who can really pursue the soul life knows: the same degree of intensity and the same quality of the soul life that expresses itself in the dream expresses itself during the wake day life in all human feelings. Spiritual research shows just because it really observes the soul with its methods that the human being has his wake day life only for the outer sensory observation and imagining.

Only concerning the sense perception and imagining, we are awake, while the dream penetrates into the wake day life, so that the emotional impulses are dreamt. We keep on dreaming while we are awake and, above all, we keep on sleeping while we are awake.

We dream in our feelings while being awake. We are not more aware of that which lives in our will in our wake day consciousness than the vague sleeping consciousness is. Just, therefore, philosophers have always argued whether the will can be free or not because they cannot look into the soul activities with the usual consciousness, even if they are ever so enlightened philosophers, if the soul expresses itself in the will just as little as they look into that what the soul experiences during the deep dreamless sleep. Since the will life is not only dreamt away, it is overslept in the usual consciousness.

We do not know more about any action that we commit than what reaches from the sense perception to imagining. You can convince yourselves of the fact that scientifically thoroughly thinking psycho-physiologists have already come on this thing. Study the very significant book about psychology by Theodor Ziehen: the fact that one has to stop at the mental picture with the will impulse, and that one cannot advance farther. Then only the ready action appears which enters into the imagining again. What is between the ready action and the mental picture is dived in darkness like that which the human being has experienced between falling asleep and awakening if no dream is there.

Thus, we dream and keep on sleeping during our wake day life. The emotional impulses arise from our dream life that penetrates the waking state, our will impulses arise from our sleeping life that penetrates the wake state. That which expresses itself in the social life, in history arises from our dream life and sleeping life.

However, if one investigates these things, one needs cognitive faculties which activate the soul quite different from the usual consciousness is able to do, and which enables someone to behold the soul life as such with the soul.

I would also like to insert something today that the consciousness has to do with itself to get to the view of these things. Since the misunderstanding emerges repeatedly that the spiritual researcher does not prove his things. He proves them by the fact that he shows what the soul accomplishes to get to the view of these things. However, one cannot get to the view of the things if one applies the usual consciousness only.

Nevertheless, I would like to emphasise one thing that can be essential just for this consideration: the way of imagining which is fully justified for the scientific thoughts must become different if the human being wants to envisage what I have said now and will still say. One cannot grasp that with such a formed thinking as one applies it rightly in the usual day life. There one does not reach down, for example, to the areas in which the impulses of the social, moral, juridical, ethical life are. One needs concepts there that are much more intensely related to reality than the scientific concepts are. These distinguish themselves just by the fact that they do not at all depend on immersing in the object, in the objectivity. With these concepts, one cannot penetrate into spiritual science.

For that, it is necessary that the concepts grow together with life that they immerse in life, so that they have such experience in themselves as it proceeds in the things inside. One can attain this only while one detaches himself from the way in which one is normally related with his mental pictures to the things. However, rightly this usual consciousness has extended over the whole view of nature because only thereby the great progress of natural sciences can be reached.

If the human being enters into the spiritual-scientific consideration, his mental pictures become something else. If one looks at a tree from four sides, takes a photo from four sides, these four sides are completely different from each other and, nevertheless, you will always have the same tree. From one photograph, you cannot see how the tree is real.

In the usual life, the human being is pleased if he has one concept as a copy of any process or any being if he can pronounce a physical law purely. In spiritual science, one has to apply concepts like these photographs from four sides. One can never get a mental picture of a being or a fact of the real spiritual world if one forms one concept only. You have to form your concepts in such a way that they envisage the thing from different sides if possible, although this word is meant only symbolically. In the outer life, the human beings are pantheists, monadists, or monists or some other “ists." One believes to investigate something of reality with such a mental picture so surely. The spiritual researcher knows that that is not possible. If it concerns the spiritual area, it is not possible that you do research pantheistically, that you look at the tree only from one side. You have to form your concepts internally versatile.

However, thereby you attain the possibility to immerse really in the full life. Thereby you become realistic in your concepts as I have shown in my book The Riddle of Man. You have to become more and more realistic in your concepts. The spiritual researcher aims at this. I would like to clarify this with an example.

The naturalist is completely right if he remains with his concepts in the sphere of the usual consciousness. He will just reach something significant in his field if he takes these concepts in such a way as the usual consciousness takes them. Since there they are appropriate to grasp the sense-perceptible facts. However, if then the naturalist wants to extend these concepts beyond the sense-perceptible facts, and then he must be aware that he does no longer remain in reality.

In this context, the following example is interesting. The physicist Dewar (James D., 1842-1923) has described from that what the researcher can observe today as processes, how the final state of the earth will be after millions of years. One can develop views even as a good physicist how in the course of short periods certain relations change and then he makes a projection how after millions of years the thing looks. There the professor describes in a very interesting way that then a time may come where, for example, the milk will be solid.—I do not know how the milk will originate; this is another thing!—He describes that one coats the walls of a room with the milk protein; the milk will be such solid. Indeed, then it will be colder many hundred degrees than now. All these things are thought with great scientific astuteness, and nothing at all is to be argued against such hypotheses on scientific basis.

The spiritual researcher conceives another idea straight away because he thinks vividly, really and not in the abstract. One can take the example of a human being of fourteen years as he has changed up to the eighteenth year, and then assemble these small changes after the method of Dewar and calculate how this human organism has to be after 300 years. It is completely the same method. However, the human being does no longer live after 300 years as a physical human being. Dewar's approach is quite right, makes use of all scientific-physical chicanes. One must not consider it as wrong, but it is not realistic, does not penetrate into the real. One could also start from the changes that the human organism experiences and then ask himself, how was this 300 years ago? One will get out something very nice—but the human being did not live 300 years ago. Nevertheless, that who forms theories forms his examples after this pattern.

The fundamental idea of the Kant-Laplace theory of the primeval nebula is a wrongful thought for the spiritual researcher because the earth did not exist in the time for which the Kant-Laplace theory was established; the solar system did not exist. I have brought in this only as an example that mental pictures may be quite right, may be derived from correct bases that, nevertheless, they are not be realistic.

The spiritual researcher reaches this just with his exercises to get to realistic mental pictures with which he grasps that what one can only grasp if one immerses in reality. By such immersing one learns to recognise how the ego would be in the usual consciousness if the human being could not sleep. Just the ego-consciousness would not exist at all if the human being did not live in the temporal rhythm of sleeping and waking. One also learns to recognise by immediate view that the emotional qualities are dreamt, actually, as the will qualities are slept, actually.

However, I would now still like to touch the other side of the human consciousness briefly. What happens, if with the mentioned inner processes the human being really raises that into his consciousness what remains, otherwise, always in his subconscious what is dreamt away what is overslept If he becomes aware of that, then the human being gets to know really, for example, that what he oversleeps otherwise in his will impulses. Nevertheless, as one learns to recognise that the ego-consciousness is dependent on the sleeping life, one learns to recognise, in another way, by raising the will life into the consciousness that one would have another consciousness if one did not oversleep the will life, it is that consciousness which really the spiritual researcher develops in a way. That which wills in us and in certain respect also that which corresponds to our feeling which lives in the emotional impulses, this would work if the human being faced it like his imagining life, on him like a second person whom he has in himself. The human being would walk around with a second human being.

One may say: the developmental plan full of wisdom has arranged that the uniform consciousness is enabled which the human being needs for his life between birth and death because the will life is pushed down into sleep, and the human being is not split into two because he has to face the other constantly who wills, actually, in him. On the other side, this other human being is connected with the everlasting essence of the human being.

Hence if the spiritual researcher is really successful in bringing up the will life and the emotional life into consciousness if he strengthens his inner activity so that he cannot only enliven the sensory life and the imagining life, but also the feeling life and willing life, the world is complemented with the other side, with the spiritual side;. Then the human being experiences as a reality that we are separated from those souls that have lost their bodies by death only by our sensory life and by our imagining life. When we consciously enter into our feeling life and willing life, we enter into the same region where the dead live.

Spiritual science builds a bridge between the living souls and the dead souls in quite exact way. However, the soul life must be transformed by a quite exact approach. If in this area into which the human being enters real percepts should be done—dreams appear involuntarily—if the human being wants to bring something into his consciousness that really comes from the area of the dead, then he must face the objects in the spiritual world with arbitrary but higher mental pictures than those of the wake day consciousness are as one faces, otherwise, the objects of the sense-perceptible world. In the usual dream one cannot distinguish that what induces us to imagine and ourselves. This distinction exists if the spiritual researcher approaches the realm of the dead.

Hence, dreams that arise involuntarily have always to be taken with a grain of salt, even if they apparently bring messages from any supersensible world. The spiritual researcher can only acknowledge that as his real observation, which he causes with full arbitrariness. Hence, if the researcher wants to contact any soul that is maybe dead long since, he can thereby contact it while he causes that with his will what he experiences with the concerning soul, but not in such involuntary way, as it happens by the dream.

You see, spiritual research induces us to acknowledge that another world projects in our world that has a deep meaning for our world because our emotional and our will life belong to this world. For the world at which natural sciences looks the abstract images of the usual consciousness are sufficient. For the world of the social-moral life one needs realistic mental pictures. Mental pictures, like the Kant-Laplace theory, like those of the final state of the earth can lead to error. They may be reasonable mental pictures if one remains in the area of theoretical discussions. When one adopts abstract but not realistic scientific mental pictures in the social life, in the political structure, one works destroying, one causes disasters within this reality. Now it becomes apparent—if one wants to look at that which impels the historical life further—that one cannot look at it with scientific imagination; since the human being with wake mental pictures does not stimulate the whole history, but it is dreamt. One has to envisage this important matter even if it sounds paradoxical.

The social life does not originate from such an impulse as we grasp it with natural sciences, but it is dreamt. The human being dreams the social life. It was always interesting when Herman Grimm repeatedly said in a conversation with me, if one applies the usual concepts, the scientific concepts to history, so that they should be suitable, one does not make any progress. If one wants to grasp it, if one wants to look into the impulses that work in it, then one can do this only with imagination. Herman Grimm was not yet a spiritual researcher, he rejected these things; but he meant, one could grasp this historical life only with imagination. However, with imagination one cannot grasp it, too. Nevertheless, Grimm was at least a person who knew that one could not enter the historical life with the usual concepts.

Nevertheless, just spiritual science can do it, while it adds the Imaginative consciousness, the Inspired consciousness, and the Intuitive consciousness, the beholding consciousness to the usual consciousness. Spiritual science generates awareness of that what is dreamt away, otherwise, what is overslept.

In former centuries and millennia, people had a certain instinctive consciousness of spiritual facts—I have mentioned this already the day before yesterday. However, this instinctive consciousness had to get lost. It got lost and will get lost more and more, the more the brilliant achievements of natural sciences prove themselves in their area.

From the other side that must come again what the instinctive consciousness has lost. Hence, one may say, during the human instinct life the moral-social ideas, the ethical ideas, the juridical ideas were able to flow into the historical and social life which are dreamt; and thus humanity can still wear that out what has originated from the instinctive consciousness. However, the age has entered in which humanity must attain the consciousness in which humanity has to attain full freedom. There the old instinctive consciousness will no longer be sufficient.

We live in that epoch in which one has to bring up those forces spiritual-scientifically which are effective in the social structuring of the society, in the ethical structuring of the society, in the political life. One can never grasp what lives in the social life with the concepts that are taken generally only from the usual consciousness.

Herman Grimm was completely right—but he knew half of the matter only—if he said, why is the English historian Gibbon so significant describing the first Christian centuries especially if he describes that what perished? Why does one find in his historical representation nothing of the significant growth and becoming which the Christian impulses caused in the human development? Because Gibbon just takes the usual concepts, too. However, they can even grasp that what perishes, they can grasp the corpse only.

That which becomes which grows is dreamt away and overslept. Only spiritual science can recognise this. Because the political impulses must become conscious because they can no longer be only instinctive, they must be understood spiritual-scientifically in future.

One has just to recognise that from the signs of the times in an area which is deeply associated with the human soul; even from outer things, one can recognise such things. We take an example very widespread today. While I speak of this example, one may not believe that spiritual science wants to be one-sided, wants to side with any direction, but it takes seriously that one lights up a matter only unilaterally with any concept and hence that one does something wrong if one wants to apply this concept directly to reality. I take, for example, the materialist, the historical-sociological view most evident to some people that Karl Marx and others have given about the social and historical life of humanity. If one pursues this social-democratic approach, one pursues with Marx how he really wants to show with a certain astuteness that everything that happens in history becomes manifest by certain class conflicts that material impulses determine the structure of the historical life. One can understand what Karl Marx says in this field only if one knows that he describes realities unilaterally. However, which realities does he describe? He describes the realities which were past at that time when he wrote his books!

Indeed, from the sixteenth century on the European life begins in such a way that beside that what one tells as history class conflicts are there, material impulses are there. What appeared until the age where Karl Marx attempted to apply concepts of the usual consciousness to it, humanity had already ceased dreaming. What was reality at that time when humanity has dreamt is grasped with usual concepts. Now it becomes apparent: if the realistic method of spiritual science is not applied, one finds nothing applicable to live on from that what one wants to grasp with the usual consciousness. Karl Marx's portrayal is right for a certain one-sidedness of life, for the last centuries.

It is no longer applicable, after humanity has dreamt away, has overslept what he describes. It is actual in such a way: if one wants to attain realistic concepts, one cannot deduce them from outer experience, as natural sciences have to do. Someone who has to intervene in any position of life in the social structure must have realistic concepts. However, you cannot deduce them from life. One can deduce that only from life what the usual consciousness can grasp.

One has to live in the social life if one wants to be concerned with living concepts. One has to know the laws that prevail, otherwise, only in the subconscious, and must be able to implement them in life. All those concepts that can be effective in future in the social structure arise from the Imaginative knowledge. That is why the social attempts have remained so hopeless; they have evoked so many real mistakes because one believed to be able to understand the social concepts like the scientific ones. From Imagination, from immersing in that which is experienced, otherwise, only like in the dream those impulses can be only fetched which someone needs who has to pronounce social ideas.

Any time is a transition period. Of course, that is a trivial truth, it matters what does transition. In our time, the instinctive consciousness transitions into that consciousness in which freedom prevails. The old impulses of the instinctive consciousness—the Roman Law still belongs to it—have to be superseded by that which arises from Imagination for the social life, from Inspiration for the ethical-moral life, from Intuition for the legal life. That is not so comfortable as if one constructs legal concepts and knows because one is a clever person how the whole world should be designed. One knows this!

As a spiritual researcher, one cannot do this; everywhere one has to penetrate into reality. Today one knows very little how this happens. One does not know, that, for example, the western peoples of Europe—as peoples, not as single persons!—have certain soul characteristics, the peoples of Central Europe, of East Europe, of Asia have certain other soul characteristics that these soul characteristics are associated with that what these peoples are. Today in this catastrophic time, we see a sad event that one cannot understand with the outer consciousness. It takes place in the world in which humanity can only find its way if it looks for realistic concepts. Realistic concepts are not those, which are formed after the pattern of natural sciences or after the pattern of the wake day consciousness if it concerns the social, the moral, and the legal life.

Here in Switzerland somebody made a beginning concerning legal concepts, he tried to get out the concepts of the usual contractual relationships from the concrete reality. For the first time Roman Boos (1888-1952) attempted this in his excellent book The Whole Employment Contract According to Swiss Law.

This has to progress if we want to search the realistic concepts. There is a simple means—there would be a simple means—which would be very helpful if it were tried in its radical form to show somewhere how the concepts of the usual consciousness cannot intervene in the moral-social life. One had only to attempt to assemble a parliament whose members are just great in the area of philosophical reflection with the concepts of the usual consciousness. Such a parliament would be most suitable to delete the community in shortest time because it would see the impulses of decline only.

Those belong to the creative life who can realise what only dreams, otherwise, in the outer life and in history what has dwindled down in sleep. Hence, utopias are also so hopeless. Utopias are real in such a way, as if one wanted to apply a thoroughly thought out chess match, without considering the partner. Designing utopias means to grasp that what should live with abstract intellectual forms. Hence, a utopia must always delete a community. Since what can build up reality, works only in living Imaginations and is related to, but not the same—I asks this expressly to note—as artistic creating. One becomes aware of manifold if one just looks at this social, this moral life from the viewpoint of spiritual science.

Above all, if that what develops as social-moral ideas, as juridical ideas this way penetrates life, it can always culminate in the human freedom. You can never understand this human freedom scientifically because natural sciences do not consider the human being as a free being. However, spiritual science shows the everlasting essence of the human being about whom I have said that he is like another human being in the human being. Natural sciences show only the one, not the other human being; however, the other is the free human being and lives in the human being. However, the social-moral life, the political life, the ethical life get out the free human being. Modern approach drives out freedom, actually, everywhere already in theory.

At the end let me state the following. There have always been in the recent time such considerations of the social-moral and the state and political life that compare the state, for example, to an organism. By an excellent researcher (Rudolf Kjellén, 1864-1922, Swedish historian and politician), a sensational book has appeared, The State as Form of Life (1917). It is just an example of that what one has to overcome. Some people have attempted to compare the state with an organism. One can compare everything. Nevertheless, it matters that the comparison is a realistic one.

Well, because of the shortness of time I cannot explain the matter in detail. However, if one really compares the social-moral life to the organic life, then the comparison applies only in this respect that one must compare the single state, the single community to a cell. If one wants to compare an aggregation of cells, as it is the organism, one can only compare the whole life earth to the organism. However, one can compare if one compares properly the single state to the cell and the entire earthly life on earth possibly to an organism built up from single cells.

Then that is not at all included in this organism what develops as soul, as mind in it. However, it matters very much that spirit is added to the whole life on earth. Only such a social structure of the earth is properly thought out which considers the entire human being and not only his outer nature. As little one can enclose soul and spirit in the organism, as little one can enclose that, even if one extends the organic consideration to the whole earth, in the mere state life in which human freedom is rooted. Since human freedom overtowers the organisation.

This can produce evidence that even the reflection that brings the usual abstract consciousness in the consideration of the state life must exclude the freedom concept. Spiritual science, which envisages that life which is free of anything bodily that one cannot compare with an organism, will only be able to implement the concept of the free human soul in life.

I have made a start already in 1894 with my Philosophy of Freedom, while I tried to show how the human being really develops a free soul life that breaks away from the causal concept that thereby the human being can realise his freedom. As long as one does not realise that natural sciences completely rightly denies freedom in their area because they only deal with that where no freedom exists, one also does not realise that one cannot grasp that with natural sciences to which freedom refers. However, spiritual science reaches this, which shows that the human being has his spiritual beside his body that is an expression of his soul and his mind that one can be only grasp with the beholding consciousness.

It is still rather paradoxical today if one says that sleeping and dreaming impulses exist in history, in the social life, in the moral life, in the juridical life, in the freedom life and one can only find it with spiritual science. Nevertheless, I have to mention repeatedly that that which spiritual science has to bring as a paradox for our time one can just compare with the paradoxical view of Copernicus when people still believed that the earth is stationary, the sun, and the stars move round it. He replaced this view with the opposite.

Finally, in 1822 the Catholic Church already permitted to accept the Copernican view! Well, how long it will last, until the scholars and the so-called sophisticated people will permit or will no longer be ashamed to accept that spiritual science explains life, extends it with realistic concepts, one has to wait for that. However, the signs of the times speak so intensely that one wished it could soon happen.

Nevertheless, outstanding spirits have always beheld the truth, even if only in single flashes of inspiration. Spiritual science is nothing new. It summarises that only systematically and with realistic looking what the flashes of inspiration of the most excellent personalities have always lighted up.

Yesterday I have mentioned Goethe. He also dealt with history. He felt, although he did not yet know spiritual science at that time: in that what pulsates in the historical life is not included what can be brought into the usual concepts. He felt: what lives in history contains impulses that are different from the abstract mental pictures of the usual spiritual life.

That is why Goethe said: “The best what we have from history is the enthusiasm which it excites”, a feeling which it excites if one can immerse in the historical becoming and one brings out something that does not speak only to the imagination and sensory percipience, but speaks to that which is dreamt in the emotional impulses which is even overslept in the will impulses. Then one has that which lives in history and not the corpse of history.

With reference to the social-moral life, with reference to freedom and the juridical life, one would like to say, humanity has to realise that it has to get to such a conception of the reality of these things in which the whole human being engages, also that what sleeps, otherwise, in the wake consciousness because the area of the social and moral life remains generally unaware as a rule.

Thus, it will concern that just that is stimulated which is similar to enthusiasm that works like art. Thus, one will probably have to pronounce the words at the end of this consideration which summarise in a way what I could inspire with this short consideration, the summary of that about which one has to speak—as I believe—inevitably under the influence of the signs of times. It matters that the human being finds the whole human being in order to work in the social-moral life in an appropriate manner in order to play a part in the creation of the social-moral structure and the political life. It matters that the human being gets not only to abstract ideas, not only to physiological views, but also gets to enthusiastic forces, to realistic forces. This sad time of hardship waits for that!

Spiritual science wants only to give the answer from that viewpoint that wants to form the right basis of this enthusiasm, and spiritual science is convinced that if humanity finds the way again to its everlasting, to its immortal, to that part of the human life from which the impulse of freedom arises, then humanity will also find the right ways to come out of the chaos not only by make-believe.

I would like to finish the course of these winter talks today with a consideration about the significance of the spiritual science for the human life.

I have pointed many a time to the fact that spiritual science does not want to be only a theory of the world that one accepts or refuses like other theories. No, spiritual science hopes to be able to be a real new element of life, something that can penetrate into the whole human being, and that the human being thereby gets a real treasure for life. What I have suggested in this respect already at the suitable places of the single talks I do summarise not only today, but I will also explain it somewhat more in detail.

In the course of these talks, I have pointed repeatedly to the fact that spiritual research is based on something quite different from any other research in our time. I have mentioned that with any other research it matters, above all, that the human being unfolds his faculty of judgement, his willpower, as well as he has them, and that he applies them immediately. If we face life, we are forced to appeal to our judgement immediately to make a decision in this or that sense. On the other hand, we face life in such a way that our will should be used, we can only seek to apply that willpower which we have unfolded with our normal education.

Briefly, we are forced at any moment of the usual life, but also in the usual science, to accept ourselves as we are anyway.

On the other hand, the position of spiritual science is quite different, actually. Just this fact brings it adversaries and opponents in abundance. The spiritual researcher cannot take himself in such a way as he is. With the portrayal of the life between death and a new birth, I have especially emphasised this. What we apply, otherwise, in life directly to the outer world the spiritual researchers uses it first as preparation for the level of knowledge which he should attain only after this preparation. The maturity of judgment and willpower are not applied to the outside, not in such a way that we make decisions directly or put acts of volition in scene. Nevertheless, they are applied in a spiritual process so that the spiritual researcher uses the techniques, the inner handling of the faculty of judgement to further his soul to make it riper and riper. The will is practiced in such a way that a development of the soul from another viewpoint is possible than that he has already.

That is why one could say: what one applies usually directly to the world—one applies in spiritual research for the preparation of that what one should only attain after this preparation. That is the point that the soul transforms itself into another instrument of knowledge and willing than it is at first. Hence, that mood also comes which the spiritual researcher has compared with knowledge that he has, actually, always the feeling: what you have applied usually directly to judge the things—now you must withdraw it from the outer world to further yourself; now you must wait, until your soul has become ripe to let the knowledge of truth approach you. What flows out, otherwise, from our soul is used first to the work on the soul. However, thereby the human being experiences a mood of inner activity, not that mood of simply accepting the world.

Then we have realised that all outer sense perceptions or thoughts and mental pictures, bound to the brain, cannot supply any cognitive force to spiritual research, but that it must appeal to the stimulation of forces that are slumbering, otherwise, in the soul. I draw your attention to the fact that the real clairvoyant knowledge is based on the fact that at every moment the spiritual-scientific researcher must submerge in the processes and things which he wants to recognise, and that that which he wants to perceive and recognise is extinguished at once if he does not submerge with his whole active soul. We abandon ourselves to an outer colour or an outer tone passively; they have an effect on us. We have to be active if we want to recognise anything in the spiritual world. If we faced the things and beings passively in the spiritual world, the recognised would be extinguished or would change into hallucinations or illusions if it is still there. No moment the soul is allowed to rest in the spiritual world.

If we consider that the soul can ascend to the levels of Imaginative, Inspirative, and Intuitive knowledge only, while it is internally active continuously, then we realise that the spiritual-scientific research can deliver knowledge to the human beings only, which also necessitates a particular kind of understanding. I have pointed already repeatedly to the fact that one has not to be a spiritual researcher to understand what the spiritual researcher explores in the spiritual worlds. Since there is in every soul an immediate, secret language by which it can understand, what the spiritual researcher says, even if it cannot be active spiritual-scientifically, as one can understand a picture, even if one is not a painter. However, the human being of the present has also to fight for it; since nothing is more obvious to him to say: truth must get at me; I must behave passively to it, it has to be given to me! One feels insecure if one shall do anything if one shall first develop the soul to recognise truth. Hence, one can object to the spiritual researcher very easily: you put up concepts of truth which are not in such a way, as the concepts of truth of the outer life or the outer science; and these truth concepts say: I believe what is confirmed to me by facts what can be revealed, so to speak, by facts.

Many years ago, I called this attitude concerning knowledge and life facts fanaticism, on one side. On the other side, one dedicates himself to a certain dogmatism of facts. It signifies the same like any other dogmatism for the soul. One feels, so to speak, that one has no inner power to grasp truth if one is no longer kept to the apron strings of the outer facts or the outer science. However, spiritual science necessitates—because it has to speak about matters and processes which do not belong to the field of usual life—that you bring yourself to an understanding that is not kept tied to the apron strings of the outer facts and that also does not submit to any dogmatism of facts, but feels the light of truth shining in an inner, mental experience. The modern human being must get used only to the inner conception of the living truth. One can almost say, the modern soul is not able to bring itself to develop those strong inner forces that are necessary not to let dictate the truth, but to experience it immediately. However, this feeling is necessary if the human beings should check and understand the spiritual-scientific results. If one brings himself to experience truth in such a way, spiritual science is clear for any soul immediately. Since that does not speak against spiritual science what some people argue that anywhere in the field of the natural sciences or history anything would be that could persuade anybody that the so-called spiritual-scientific truths would be errors or pipe dreams.

Not a single scientific or historical truth contradicts the knowledge of spiritual science. I have often emphasised this in these talks. Nevertheless, those who get used to the scientific thinking at first absorb prejudice with it that one only must overcome. The opposition does not arise from the judgements of science, but from the prejudice against spiritual science. Spiritual science creates cognitive forces that have to become active if the soul wants to penetrate into the spiritual world. Therefore, one understands spiritual science only if the human beings get used gradually to bringing up the active forces from their soul depths that must be animated as free inner activities in the soul.

I have almost avoided out of this attitude using illustrations or photos for these talks. The modern human being is inclined very much to look at something passively. However, one has to grasp internally what spiritual science brings to light; one has to think, to feel, and often to want with it. While spiritual science appeals to this what exists, indeed, in any soul, but slumbers in the souls, it calls forces in the soul for the spiritual life which—if they are used for it—represent a high treasure for life which the human beings need more and more.

Only somebody who is short-sighted can deny that this human life becomes more and more complex, that our development runs in such a way that inner forces of orientation will be more and more necessary to cope with life in any direction. Except various other reasons that speak for the emergence of spiritual science in the present culture, it is also valid above all that the human souls must use these stronger forces to orientate themselves in the outer life, the more we settle in the future. Life itself requires these stronger forces from the human souls.

Of course, we cannot bring everything forward in a short talk that spiritual science—I do not say spiritual research now—has to offer as treasures for life by the living understanding of that what spiritual research brings to light. We can only characterise the single categories, overall. There I would like to start from that what is connected directly with the single human being.

I have repeatedly pointed in other contexts to the rhythmical change that happens in the human life in the course of 24 hours, waking and sleeping. I have partly mentioned in the various talks what is one can say about it from the spiritual-scientific point of view. I want only to suggest today that the human being has the sleep as a means of recovery of particular kind beside that what he has for his immediate mood from sleep and can feel immediately subjectively. Today you have only to listen to the outer medical science; it is of the opinion that the healthy sleep is a remedy. Since sleep unfolds such forces in the human being which compensate a certain daily consumption of forces. Whereas the awake life weakens the body in a way, we are mainly concerned with the development of the forces of recovery. In sleep, healthy forces have an effect on the human being. One of the best remedies for some illnesses is that one causes a healthy sleep. I cannot speak, of course, in this talk how one causes a healthy sleep. I explain on a separate occasion whether spiritual science has to say anything particular about that.

Now the human being can recover by that what develops in sleep only what we have consumed. In sleep the soul withdraws from the physical body; the spiritual-mental is in its own world, in the spiritual world. This different relation of the soul to the body when it is awake is connected with the stimulation of recovering forces. Now spiritual research appeals—as we have seen—the spiritual-mental of the human being to become free from the bodily, from the physical—for one cannot investigate the spiritual-mental in another way. Everything that the spiritual researcher investigates he investigates outside of his physical body. If he expresses the investigated in concepts and words, and if the human soul attains an understanding of this what he has to say, then that makes a particular influence on this human being who is no spiritual researcher, but only faces the communications with understanding. This soul takes care to develop understanding forces for the results of spiritual research. These forces are more or less independent of the physical body. While we understand that what the senses and the reason offer, we remain dependent with this understanding on our physical body, we wear out it, let our activity run in the whole sphere from which diseases come. If we put ourselves with our lively understanding in that what spiritual science offers, we live in the sphere of the healthy forces.

One can deny this easily, saying that one knows many people who deal with the results of spiritual science and do not at all make such an impression, as if they live in the field of the recovering forces. This may be completely entitled. However, if one deals with the results of spiritual science in the same way, as one deals with other sciences or the usual life, one does not penetrate into it. What I have called “Homunculism” in the last talk, one can unfold as well as in other sciences in spiritual science.

If one wants to understand spiritual science in the same way as one wants to understand the results of the usual sciences, then one is not correctly related to it. Spiritual science comes from spiritual research, from the spiritual life of the spiritual researcher, from a perpetual activity; and the understanding, which it gets, appeals at least to tiring the physical body, that means to what the common cognitive forces of the usual life appeal.

However, truth itself must thereby become something like a living being for the spiritual researcher as well as for the supporter of spiritual science. It will also become this. While one receives the truth, otherwise, like a sum of judgements, like something that one just thinks only, one receives spiritual science like something that pulsates through the soul like spiritual blood that animates it internally. One receives the truth like a sum of spiritual living beings; one feels penetrated with living existence by spiritual science if one meets it with understanding. Then, however, it has a recovering effect up into the physical body. As sleep, during which the soul is also beyond the physical body, is a remedy against some illnesses in the true sense of the word, spiritual science can also be such a remedy. However, only those can regard it as a remedy who want to understand the following important matter. It is comprehensible that one approaches spiritual science as one approaches the outer medicine or art because one maintains the same habitual ways of thinking. If one wants to penetrate into it, one often asks, which remedy do you have for this illness, which for that? The information of remedies is often demanded from spiritual science. Indeed, spiritual science will also give real concrete remedies; but one has to understand that it wants to give not only this or that remedy, but that it presents itself, above all. Nevertheless, one does not always accept it with understanding. Spiritual science can answer if one asks for a remedial method, take me, and then you feel my curative forces! However, this is uncomfortable for some people who often look for something completely different.

Of course, it is trivial to object that spiritual science could not help somebody who dealt with spiritual science and died early or fell ill by this or that disease. Since one would have to issue a rebuttal first whether somebody who has survived with the help of spiritual science up to his forty-fifth year had become without it maybe thirty-five or forty years old only. The methods of disproof are not often so simple.

Above all, I must draw your attention to the fact that sleep can compensate only what is used in the physical body, can take forces only from the spiritual worlds as far as the borders of the spiritual predisposition reach which the human being brings by birth in his existence. Spiritual science gets its forces from that world with which the human being is connected spiritually. Therefore, one can say that sleep is a remedy in this respect that it can compensate spent forces. Spiritual science supplies forces to the human being, which he has not yet in himself, either by what it is as such, or by what it can give. It opens a higher source of recovery for the human being as the usual life can also supply to him with the best sleep. One can compare what can work recovering from the soul by lively acceptance of spiritual science with that of which usual medical art is capable. Since also the usual medical art is able only to call those healing forces for the recovery of the human being that are already in him that are only suppressed by opposing forces. Spiritual science, however, brings new forces in the human being to effectiveness, which only develop, which are not innate. It appeals not only to the human being as a microcosm but also to the connection of the human being as a microcosm with the big spiritual world.

In order to make this clearer, I would like to point to something that already is on the border of physical and spiritual. Although it is correct that spiritual science gives the human being a treasure for life by which he can prevent illnesses in a certain respect, a much more important treasure for life strikes us for the life of the soul itself; I mean the memory. Who has not to complain of decline in memory when he becomes older? The forces with which we are equipped for our memory become exhausted. One could live ever so healthily, nevertheless, they become exhausted; even if with some outer means something may be improved, the innate forces become exhausted.

However, if one grasps spiritual science internally and if one appropriates habitual ways of thinking and imagining that are quite different from the usual ones, one notes that, indeed, the retentive power decreases that it is substituted, however, with something that is a much better memory. This appears gradually from the spiritual undergrounds of the soul what one can call retrospect of events. As we look, otherwise, at the things in space, we learn gradually to look at the things in time. The forces which memory does not develop, otherwise, because it has a reserve usually in the bodily which remain hidden, until this slumbering retentiveness is brought out of the soul and becomes retrospective forces of the past. With correctly settling in spiritual science, we instil something in the course of life that continues our usual, instilled memory by which a human being, who grasps spiritual science vividly, can survey the past much longer than someone who does not want to get involved with spiritual science. These forces become also forces directing to the future. Someone who goes into such things and their subtler differentiations notes that memory becomes something different, but something that works more reliably than that memory which is innate by the bodily forces.

This shows us with a careful observation of life how refreshing and strengthening the treasures for life are which spiritual science can give beside other things. Of course, spiritual science cannot heal spiritually what is destroyed physically in the body. Spiritual science never turns in a fanatical opposition against the outer scientific medicine as it happens with similar directions in these fields sometimes; it draws attention to the fact that that what one has to cure physically one has to cure physically. What the forces of a reinforced spiritual life can pour into us gives an inexhaustible treasure for life.

How has that become gradually mere dry knowledge with the materialistic attitude what is good for health or furthers life! Not in order to prove something, but only in order to explain something, I would like to show how we can observe the remedial instincts with animals. However, we can find the tendency with the human being to leave the healthy life more and more, and thereby he would want to change everything that is good for him into outer, dry knowledge. Today one already sees people who can no longer develop their instincts completely which say to them while eating: now you have enough. Beside their plate are scales and now they weigh how much the piece of meat weighs they eat. I expressed that only somewhat radically; but he who pursues the things realises that the sensations of life change slowly more and more into abstract knowledge. This also expresses itself in the fact that people cannot act out of their feeling concerning health or illness, but like to hand over the care for it to others.

In this respect spiritual science will be an exceptionally significant treasure for life, while it strives for penetrating a world from which the human being, indeed, only seems to be descended in which he stands, however, still inside. Since in truth his mental and physical being have arisen from the spirit. While someone goes away from the life instincts with that part of his being that is bound to the brain and nervous system, he approaches the active life again by understanding settling in spiritual science. Therefore, he does not return, indeed, to the animal desires. He will penetrate them from the mind in such a way that an abstract knowledge cannot dictate what he has to eat and to drink, how long he has to walk, to do gymnastics and so on. However, it will happen that he spiritualises his desires immediately that he lets the spiritual treasure he got from spiritual science flow into his desires and thereby knows: you should do this so and so in life. One could almost say, the human being has gone away from life by that knowledge which is bound to the brain and nervous system; however, he penetrates life again with new contents by spiritual science, and thereby he knows again immediately what is good for him, what is advantageous to him, what is not good for him. He will go with certainty through life; he will firmly stand in life because he builds a bridge between the deepest grounds of life and his existence. This will apply not only to health and illness, but also to the whole life.

It is necessary if we want to be healthy to appeal to spiritual forces that are active that ascend in lively direction. If we judge, otherwise, in life, it happens in the way that we make our judgement dependent on that what we have seen; we remain quite passive with our own soul. Just the usual science is proud if it should make judgements without taking the forces of judging from the own soul. This is the one treasure for life that spiritual science enlivens the forces of truth, of judgement. The soul has to get used more and more not to accepting judgements but to judging actively, to opening an inner source of judging. Thereby it attains skill of judging, inner freedom to handle the power of judgement, presence of mind that arises directly from the soul if it has to orientate itself in the world or to deal with the world. One could foresee a treasure for life of spiritual science that one can characterise in the following way.

Let us suppose that we have to educate, and we perform the development of the young human being spiritual-scientifically. The human being thereby grows up in such a way that he is inclined more and more to appeal to the power of inner judgement, to develop presence of mind, to experience truth. The human beings who were educated in the sense of spiritual science stand up in life quite different from those who have experienced another education. They feel instinctively because their thinking will not be an abstract one, but goes into the feelings that it is good to begin this or that. How some people stand there today within our materialistic civilisation with their lives, with their thinking and judgments and do not know what they are good for and what they should do. This will happen less and less if the souls known with spiritual science come in situations where they must decide. They will feel in such a way that their spiritualised instincts give pleasure to them. This pleasure will not deceive them; it will be the right one, and they properly familiarise themselves with life.

Somebody who represents spiritual science today relates to it in another way than one relates to another spiritual current. However, thereby one does not have the right attitude to it that one is inspired by the results of spiritual science subjectively, and that one feels the urge to inform these results to his fellow. There many a man would maybe restrain with this or that today, because it does not belong to the conveniences of life to represent spiritual science, if one arrived at the aims of spiritual science in such a way as one arrives at the aims of other sciences. However, one arrives at that what induces one to talk about the knowledge of spiritual science if one recognises that a civilisation which has become materialistic penetrates into the souls and makes them more and more passive and that spiritual science is necessary for the progressive life while the human being learns more and more to orient himself in life. If one recognises that those forces must die down, which put the human beings firmly in life in natural way, then one is urged to proclaim the spiritual-scientific knowledge. Then one would like to have more than the human language—unmanageable in certain respects—offers to show how necessary the treasure for life is in the further human progress which spiritual science can only give in our time.

If one notes less what it means to be completely subject to a dogmatism of facts, to the specialisation in science caused by fact fanaticism, one maybe understands why spiritual science can only induce that human being to become internally free and to get inner mobility who can put himself in life in such a way that he understands the basic source of life, because his soul is connected with the primordial forces of existence. More and more humanity will need to develop inner elasticity of the power of judgement in subtle activity. Spiritual science has to bring this as a treasure for life to humanity. A thinking that bears the force of truth in itself that the human being needs in the more complex future is a treasure for life which spiritual science can give humanity.

One will have to get used to developing understanding for what one can grasp only internally, because one allies with the internally living truth by spiritual science that cannot be forced to judging from the outside. As the organism is invigorated with the living force of blood and breathes in the right relation to the outside world, spiritual science invigorates us with the internally living truth. It is like a spiritual-mental heart that breathes in the surroundings where one has to inhale something spiritual to make the soul healthy so that it can oppose the inner breathing air what it makes a free inner organic force.

One would like to say that one cannot believe in this spiritual breathing today. In the future one will be able to believe in the inner heart of spiritual breathing. The soul thereby develops human freedom. As the human being can develop as a living being only because he can inhale not only the breathing air vividly, but transforms it vividly and develops a separate living physical organism in a subtle way, he will spiritually develop inner mental blood more and more which enlivens him and makes him a really free being, while he is active and transforms the outer knowledge.

If we go from knowledge to will, we have to remember that spiritual science brings the human beings mental pictures,, concepts, ideas, and results of spiritual research which live as it were so freely in the soul that they are independent of the mental, of the externally bodily, also of desires and outer impressions.

How does the human being act under usual circumstances? He acts based on outer impressions or impulses. Spiritual science is not concerned with that what is connected with the outer organism. It fulfils the human being with that what only lives in the organism what comes from the spiritual world and not directly from the organism. More and more the possibility is omitted for the human being to act from outer impulses and sensations; but what comes up to him from spiritual science supplies inner forces to him, so that he comes to action from the inside. This gives a significant impact for the human life.

Which force comes up to action if the outer world does not supply the impulses? Which impulses can work then?

One will realise by a simple consideration that it must be a comprehensive impulse, so that it fulfils the soul with a comprehensively working force. This is the impulse of love which pours out of the soul directly, but only if it is driven by inner impulses. Spiritual science supplies a treasure for life to the human being that is of unlimited value: a freer and freer incline to his action what can invigorate the power of action if the impulses are spiritual and with it to the power of love.

I have pronounced in these talks more often that spiritual science is the big school of love for life. That does not mean that spiritual science wants to talk about love at every opportunity. This talking of love reminds of a saying of Schopenhauer: “preaching morality is easy, founding morality is hard,” but still of something else. If one always hears talking love, love, love, then it is similar as with the good Gothamites who wanted to catch the light in bags and to empty them in their houses. One cannot empty love in the soul that way. It is with the human soul similar as with an oven that one has not to persuade to make the room warm, because this is its task as an oven. It does it by itself if we put wood into it and kindle it. Somebody maybe could say that the wood does not look at all that it delivers warmth. Nevertheless, there is warmth! While we put the quite different looking wood into the oven and kindle it, we bring warmth in our house. While we get used to the spiritual-scientific concepts, we get used to a free judgement, to a free orientation in the world. While we thereby fertilise our memory, we bring the impulses of the human ability of love in our souls and we get used to them. As certain it is that warmth originates in a house if the wood is properly used, it is as certain that active love that can really help is kindled by those impulses, which enter with spiritual science in the souls. Spiritual-scientific concepts are the heating material of the soul for love.

Indeed, one can also object much. Above all, it one could object that some do not find enough love with those who deal with spiritual science. However, the human being has to finally manage to regard something that seems to be unloving there or there is perhaps rather loving. For example, if anybody causes this or that less nice thing from a wrong instinct or from pure egoism, and one bawls him out of a healthy instinct, that can be a better activity of love than some words which could be quite “loving” at such moment, but would aggravate the condition from which the person concerned made this or that mistake.—The right, true experience will show that nobody who penetrates himself with spiritual science remains without its influence concerning the development of love.

Spiritual science will work as a strange treasure for life just in moral fields. It will not work like outer means, which should deter from doing this or that. It will work quietly in the soul of any human being, so that he finds the right ways of the activity of love. Spiritual science works as the inner voice of conscience which does not punish outwardly but is a more certain leader of the soul. Someone who settles in the spiritual-scientific concepts experiences that where he does wrong spiritual science has put a force in him which works like a strengthening of conscience, like correcting, giving life a direction. Thus, spiritual science will not work best by programs and outer associations in moral fields; but it will work, while it incorporates itself in the civilisation, as the moral conscience developing in humanity. With the increase of moral conscientiousness, a treasure for life is given to the modern civilisation if spiritual science finds understanding.

If one considers it in such a way, one can get a concept of that what it can be for the physical and moral healthy stimulation of the human soul. One will no longer deny that it can be an unlimited treasure for life in physical and moral respect. It can be a treasure for life which one needs very much in the future which can invigorate the human being because it wants to be recognised because it does not approach the human being from without but unites internally with his soul. Internally,one realises this: spiritual science arouses hostility much less. Today one can still understand if people come with their materialistically coloured knowledge and say that one attains knowledge which invigorates the human being also if one looks at the outside world; there one attains right knowledge. This is indeed right. However, we look once, now not only in theory, but lively, and we realise that spiritual science just gives lively knowledge everywhere; and we compare that with what a materialistically coloured worldview gives the human being.

Those persons who still build up such materialistic atomistic world edifice who are still, so to speak, at its origin are still active with theirsouls. Haeckel (Ernst H., 1834-1919, German naturalist) himself, Ostwald (Wilhelm O., 1854-1932, chemist, philosopher), his next pupils and others, they are still involved actively; they can still develop inner forces, and one could still compare that what they work with their science internally with that what spiritual science attains appealing to the inner soul forces.

With those, however, who are not in the first row with the realisation of the materialistic worldviews, or where one absorbs such a worldview passively the materialistic worldview corresponds to a food that one does not digest which cannot develop the forces for what the soul really starve. One can expel hunger, without eating really. It is possible. However, what the hunger indicates cannot be expelled for the outer organism without food. Thus, one can also suppress the hunger of the soul for the spiritual treasure for life, while one ruins the appetite for the spiritual life by a materialistic worldview. Nevertheless, the human does not stand that in the long run.

I would not like to speak here about truth and error of spiritualism. Indeed, it contains some grains of truth, not only error or fraud and the like. I would only like to point out that those who stand on the ground of a materialistic worldview do not approve spiritualism apparently. If one thinks about it with a thinking that does not invigorate itself internally, one can only say that the materialistic worldview is the same far away from spiritualism as from spiritual science. However, if one really looks into the becoming of the world, one knows something quite different. Then one knows that the hunger of the soul for a spiritual treasure for life cannot be suppressed, and that the materialists themselves produce spiritualism! One fights from materialistic side against spiritual science. However, one will realise that everywhere where spiritual science does not succeed spiritualistic associations and circles form. The representatives of a materialist worldview are the fathers of spiritualism. With an abstract thinking, one does not figure this connection out. There one makes the same error in reasoning as that who says, I plan to build up a rather good son from the child that has been born now; I prepare everything for it. However, the son does not always turn out as the father has supposed; he may become possibly a rather bad brat. That has nothing to do with lively life which ideas the materialists have of the world connections. Thus, it can happen that they produce the “son,” the brat, which they do not recognise as their son. For spiritualism is the son of materialism. Why that? Because the appetite of the soul cannot satisfy the hunger for spiritual life, and it finally happens as the physicist or chemist does that the outer events of life are demonstrated where the “spirit” is presented without inner cooperation. This is more comfortable than to have to exert oneself internally at every moment when one should climb up to the spirit. Nevertheless, this is also nothing but searching for the same worldview which materialism produces.

I want to bring in this only as an example how an abstract thinking positions itself in life. Such thinking will regard it as natural that materialism cannot produce spiritualism. How should it do it! However, a thinking that has inner power in the sphere of truth will figure the world out in quite different sense, and with such thinking the human being can position himself quite different than with an abstract, dead thinking which is “Homunculism” too.

Thus, we can regard spiritual science as a sum of life goods. Indeed, someone does not regard the said as especially valuable who thinks that life consists of outer goods only. Indeed, someone who knows that even the outer goods are dependent on the inner sense of direction in the world and on the recovering forces of the soul does not regard the idea as bold—with reference to all social conditions and what is today an occasion for so many “cures”—that such conditions can be seen correctly and that one can find the right remedies only if the human beings soar up towards spiritual science. One must really say that something is included in all that what pushes the words onto the lips of someone speaking about spiritual science.

Spiritual science finds much opposition still today. I have repeatedly pointed in the course of this winter to the fact that there must be such opponents. Their reasons are apparently striking because one can find them so easily, and because they are so extremely evident. One can understand any opponent of spiritual science very well, and, besides, he does not say something wrong; he may even say something completely right. Let me mention finally that he may say something right.

Suppose that a quite clever human being says, a spiritual researcher comes here and talks about all kinds of wrong stuff that Kant disproved for a long time, because Kant proved that the faculty of the human being is not sufficient to penetrate into the spiritual world. If this spiritual researcher had studied Kant, he would soon be quiet about that.

It is not quite wrong what the clever man says. It can be quite right. If anybody said in the time when there was not yet a microscope so that one could find macroscopic things only because the human eye cannot look into smaller things, this was quite astute. Nevertheless, what does it benefit the further progress of human thinking and life? Although it is right that the human eye cannot see down into the cells of organisms because the eyesight is limited, the human beings constructed the microscope, and the telescope and see now where the eyesight of the human eye does not reach.

As it can be very astute that somebody proves that the human eye can see no cells and the like, it can be very right what those human beings argue who speak of the limitations of the human cognitive faculties. However, does it matter whether it is right or not? As it is right that the human eye can see no cells, but that civilisation led to sharpening the eye, there are spiritual methods that strengthen the soul life, so that the human being can behold into the spiritual world. One has to understand this and other things that somebody states as an opponent of spiritual.

Actually not to boast but to inform something, I would like to mention that, nevertheless, more and more human beings note the fertile impulse of spiritual science also in the present. One can prove this by the fact that we are able to build a college of spiritual science in Dornach near Basel. One does not intend to concentrate spiritual science upon one place; I would like to stress this. However, we want to prove that we can show how spiritual science can be creative in the fields of architecture, sculpture, and painting. With this building, only a model should be given that spiritual science is able to deal with life directly. The fact that friends of spiritual science were found who donated the relatively big means that were necessary to create this college building is already a proof that this spiritual science is partly rooted in the souls of the present.

Only by the way, I would like to mention that about this building for spiritual science in Dornach all possible fairy tales are put in the world. For example, in the newest fairy tale that was put to me on the table you can read that the college that should be once built, indeed, in Munich, could not be built because we would have been rejected there. In truth, we were not rejected but certain circles in Munich, which must be asked, could not cope with their expert judgement. They let us wait for ten years; however, we could not wait with the building for ten years!

Another fairy tale tells that because of the building among various cities a kind of competition had originated, and that these would have triumphed over Munich. I would not like to say anything against the artistic Munich. Even if the inhabitants of Munich regret that the college of spiritual science is built now somewhere else, nevertheless, not so many cities scrambled to get it! Besides, the concerning newspaper is not informed especially well if it writes that Basel seems to emerge as the most favourable city from this competition.

I want to mention this only because now also more opponents appear due to this building. For it can be an outer sign that spiritual science finds already understanding that the building can be started, that such an artistic landmark can show the significance of spiritual science in the world. The opponents always ask, who are these supporters of spiritual science? They must be people without judgement, people who easily listen in good faith! However, usually those who talk in such a way would prefer that one listens to their authority or to that what they regard as authority. Those people are opponents because the supporters of spiritual science do not do this and have advanced to be unbiased in a way. However, being unbiased of a materialistically coloured or any dogmatic worldview is necessary if one wants to understand spiritual science. With this understanding one calls the life goods in the soul—as I have suggested it today—with those who get involved with spiritual science more intimately.

Someone who notes and understands their lively life, realises more and more, that this spiritual science is connected with that what must give the necessary new spiritual life blood to the future of humanity. Even if that what is connected with spiritual science may cause some childhood diseases, not everything should be justified that appears where one believes that it works correctly. I allow myself to express something just today at the end. Something that could entice us from the outside that could induce us internally in the same way to present spiritual science does not exist. But it is solely the knowledge that with spiritual science the true and fertile life goods for which any soul must be hungry enter in this human soul, and that this soul, even if it does not know it today, craves these life goods if it should not become empty. This sensation forces itself on the representative of spiritual science that lives in him, while he represents it. With this confession, I would like to close these winter talks:

This science faces the representative of spiritual science as if the real of a fertile future culture demands from him that he represents it. What gives him hope and confidence for life and for the salutary of spiritual science in future crowds together in a sensation of something real. He must develop the confidence that comes from true knowledge, which also knows in a certain respect that spiritual science has to work, even if so many opponents arise; it must be victorious. As it appears to the supporter who has a real attitude, it is the real of the future development of humanity.

I finish these winter talks expressing confidence in spiritual science.

One spring day in 1860, an autocratic Hungarian magnate, a certain Count Hoyos, who owned several large estates in Austria, dismissed his game-keeper, because this game-keeper, Johannes Steiner wanted to marry Franziska Blie, one of the Count's innumerable housemaids. Perhaps the old Count had a foreboding as to what a great spiritual revolution would be born of this marriage. (The baroque palace of Hom, where it happened, is still in the possession of the Hoyos family, and stands today just as it was one hundred years ago.) So Johannes Steiner had to look for another occupation, and got himself accepted as a trainee telegraphist and signalman by the recently opened Austrian Southern Railway. He was given his first job in an out-of-the-way request stop called Kraljevic (today in Yugoslavia), and there his first child, Rudolf, arrived on February 27, 1861. On the same day the child was taken for an emergency baptism to the parish Church of St. Michael in the neighboring village of Draskovec. The baptismal register was written in Serbo-Croat and Latin, and the entry still can be read today as of one Rudolfus Josephus Laurentius Steiner. “Thus it happened,” Rudolf Steiner writes in his autobiography, “that the place of my birth is far removed from the region where I come from.”

In later life, particularly in his lectures on education, Steiner frequently made the point that the most prodigious feat any man achieves at any time is accomplished by him in the first two or three years of his life, when he lifts his body into the upright position and learns to move it in perfect balance through space, when he forms a vital part of his organism into an instrument of speech and when he begins to handle and indeed to fashion his brain as a vehicle for thought. In other words, when the child asserts his human qualities which set him dramatically apart from the animals.

This initial achievement the boy Rudolf performed in Kraljevic. Kraljevic (meaning King's Village) is situated in the western outskirts of the vast Hungarian plain, the Puszta. Even today endless fields of maize and potatoes extend in every direction, and the solemn monotony of the country is more enhanced than relieved by the lines of tall poplars flanking the primitive, dead straight roads. It is basic three-dimensional space at its severest, domed over by the sky, which local people say is nowhere else so high nor so blue as over the Puszta. One might almost say that nature provided laboratory conditions in which the boy learned to stand, to walk, to speak and to think. One could justifiably say of Rudolf Steiner what the biographer, Hermann Grimm, said of Goethe: “It seems as if Providence had placed him in the simplest circumstances in order that nothing should impede his perfect unfolding.”

From the severity of the Puszta the family moved, when the boy was two years old, into one of the most idyllic parts of Austria, called “the Burgenland” since 1921. Comprising the foothills of the eastern Alps, it is of great natural beauty, very fertile, and drenched in history. It takes its name from the many Burgen, i.e. castles which at different times of history were erected on nearly every hill. During recent excavations coins bearing the head of Philip of Macedonia, the father of Alexander the Great, have been found near Neudörfl, where the Steiners now settled, and where a daughter and a younger son were added to the family.

The management of the Austrian Southern Railway seems to have taken a sympathetic view toward the promising boy, and agreed to move father Steiner as stationmaster to several small stations south of Vienna, so that the eldest son was able to attend good schools as a day student, and finally in 1879 could matriculate at the Technical University of Vienna, then one of the most advanced scientific institutions of the world. Until then Rudolf Steiner's school life had been fairly uneventful, except that some of his masters were rather disturbed by the fact that this teen-ager was a voracious reader of Kant and other philosophers, and privately was engrossed in advanced mathematics.

In his first year at the University Rudolf Steiner studied chemistry and physics, mathematics, geometry, theoretical mechanics, geology, biology, botany, and zoology; and while still an undergraduate two events occurred which were of far-reaching consequence for his further development.

In the train in which the young student travelled daily to Vienna he frequently met a curious personality, an herb-gatherer, who turned out to be a latter-day Jacob Boehme. He was filled with the most profound nature lore to which he had first-hand access. He understood the language of plants, which told him what sicknesses they could heal; he was able to listen to the speech of the minerals, which told him of the natural history of our planet and of the Universe. In the last winter of his public life, in December 1923, Steiner provided something of a historic background for this wisdom, notably in his lectures on the Mysteries of Eleusis. Steiner immortalized the herb-gatherer in his Mystery Dramas, in the figure of “Father Felix.” But “Father Felix” was instrumental in bringing Steiner together with a still more important and mysterious personality.

“Felix was only the intermediary for another personality,” Steiner tells us in his autobiography, “who used means to stimulate in the soul of the young man the regular systematic things with which one has to be familiar in the spiritual world. This personality used the works of Fichte in order to develop certain observations from which results ensued which provided the seeds for my (later) work ... This excellent man was as undistinguished in his daily job as was Felix.”

While these fateful meetings occurred on the inward field of life, a very consequential relationship developed on the outward field. The Technical University of Vienna provided a chair for German literature, which was held by Karl Julius Schröer, a great Goethe enthusiast and one of the most congenial interpreters of Goethe. Schröer recognized Steiner's unusual gifts, and anticipated that he might be capable of doing some original research in the most puzzling part of Goethe's works, i.e. his scientific writings.

Only two years ago, Dr. Emil Bock, of Stuttgart, Germany, one of the most eminent Steiner scholars, discovered the correspondence between Professor Schröer, Steiner, and the German Professor Joseph Kürschner, who was engaged in producing a monumental edition of representative works of German literature from the 7th to the 19th century. In the first letter of this correspondence, dated June 4, 1882, Schröer refers to Steiner as an “undergraduate of several terms standing.” He says that he has asked him to write an essay on Goethe and Newton, and if this essay is a success, as he thinks it will be, “we have found the editor of Goethe's scientific works.” Steiner was then twenty-one years of age. Schröer's letter is reminiscent of the letter Robert Schumann wrote to the great violinist Joachim, after he had received the first visit of the then twenty-one year old Brahms: “It is he who was to come.”

The introductions and explanatory notes to the many volumes of Goethe's scientific works which Steiner was now commissioned to write were much ahead of their time. They blazed a trail into the less familiar regions of Goethe's universal genius which only today begins to be followed up by other scholars.

The young Steiner wrote these, his first works, in outward conditions of great poverty. The family lived in two rooms, which are still shown today. The larger one of the two was kitchen, dining, sitting and bedroom for the parents and his younger brother and sister, and off this larger room a few steps led into a narrow, white-washed, unheated cubicle where the young Steiner worked as in a monk's cell. No wonder that a Viennese celebrity of the time refers to him in his memoirs as one “who looked like a half-starved student of theology.”

However, this first literary success led to Steiner's call to the central Goethe Archives at Weimar, where despite his youth he now became one of the editors of the great Standard Edition (Sophien Ausgabe) of Goethe's Complete Works. This concentrated occupation with Goethe, continued for seven years in Weimar, from 1889 to 1896, had a profound effect upon the unfolding of Steiner's own mind and philosophical consciousness. Goethe was the catalyst which released new mental and spiritual energies in Steiner s own personality. It was during these years that Steiner's fundamental philosophical works were conceived and written.

In 1886 he published An Epistemology of Goethe's World Conception. In 1891 his small concentrated thesis on Truth and Science earned him his Ph.D. In 1896 his comprehensive Philosophy of Spiritual Activity opened a completely new approach to the understanding of the human mind and the nature of thought. It represents the first really fresh step in philosophic thought and in the philosophic interpretation of the human consciousness since Kant. It is no wonder that in those years Steiner began to be looked upon in Germany as “the coming philosopher” upon whom before long the mantle of the dying Nietzsche would fall. But his genius led him a different way.

In his thirty-sixth year—“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,” as Dante calls it, Steiner moved to Berlin, and the next seven years were perhaps the most dramatic period in his life. His new position in Berlin was that of editor of the weekly, Das Magazin für Litteratur, founded in 1832 (something equivalent to the London Saturday Review). He wrote the leading article and the dramatic reviews, occupying in Berlin a position somewhat similar to that of Bernard Shaw (who was five years his senior), with his weekly dramatic criticism in the Saturday Review. This assignment brought Steiner into close social contact with the intellectual and artistic élite of Berlin at the time, and for some years he pitched his tent among them. In the last years of his life, during rare moments of relaxation, he would at times tell stories of this exciting and often amusing period.

Side by side with these literary circles, or perhaps in polarity to them, Steiner was also drawn by objective interest and personal attraction into the camp of Haeckel and the militant monists. To move in this manner abreast of the spirit of the time would be a most interesting experience for anyone. For Steiner it was more. And I must now touch upon that side of his life about which I shall have to speak presently in greater detail. From childhood while for others such “being involved in this or that fashion of thought would be no more than an ideology,” for anyone standing in the spiritual world it means, as Steiner says in his autobiography, that “he is brought close to the spirit-beings who desire to invest a particular ideology with a totalitarian claim.” Steiner refers to his experience as a “Soul's Probation” which he had to undergo. (He later chose The Soul's Probation as the title of one of his Mystery Dramas.) He speaks of the “tempests” which during those years in Berlin raged in his soul, a rare expression in the otherwise very even and dispassionate style of his autobiography. At the end of those “forty days in the wilderness”—which were in fact four years—the thunderclouds lifted, the mist cleared, and he stood, to use his own phrase. “in solemn festival of knowledge before the Mystery of Golgotha.” He had come to a first-hand experience of Christ and His active presence in the evolution of the world.

We have now reached the point where we must venture into the great unknown: Steiner the seer, the Initiate.

It is a plain fact that in some form or other spiritual knowledge has existed throughout the ages. Secret wisdom has never been absent from human history. But in Steiner it assumed a totally new form. In order to appreciate this revolutionary novelty, we must first have a picture of the old form.

The faculty of spiritual perception and secret wisdom is obtained through certain organs in the “subtle body” of man, to borrow a convenient term from Eastern Indian medicine. In Sanscrit these organs are called “chakrams,” generally translated into English as “lotus flowers.” They fulfill a function in the “subtle body” similar to our senses in the physical body. They are usually dormant today, but can be awakened. We can disregard for the moment the rites of Initiation which were employed in the Mystery Temples of the ancient world, and confine ourselves to the survival of more general methods which today are still practiced in many parts of the world. They all have one thing in common: they operate through the vegetative system in man, through bodily posture, through the control of breathing, through physical or mental exercises which work upon the solar plexus and the sympathetic nervous system. I realize that I am presenting a somewhat crude simplification. But nevertheless I am giving the essentials.

Steiner broke with all this. He began to operate from the opposite pole of the human organism, from pure thought. Thought, ordinary human thought, even if it is brilliant and positive, is at first something very weak. It does not possess the life, say, of our breathing, let alone the powerful life of our pulsating blood. It is, shall we say, flat, without substance; it is really lifeless. It is “pale thought,” as Shakespeare called it.

This relative lifelessness of our thoughts is providential, however. If the living thoughts filling the Universe were to enter our consciousness just as they are, we would faint. If the living idea in every created thing simply jumped into our consciousness with all its native force, it would blot us out. Fortunately, our cerebro-spinal system exerts a kind of resistance in the process; it functions like a resistor in an electric circuit; it is a sort of transformer, reducing the violence of reality to such a degree that our mind can tolerate it and register it. However, as a result, we see only the shadows of reality on the back wall of our Platonic cave, not reality itself.

Now one of the magic words in Steiner's philosophy with which he attempts to break this spell, is “Erkraftung des Denkens.” It means putting force, life into thinking, through thinking, within thinking. All his basic philosophic works, notably the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, and many of his exercises, are directed to this purpose. If they are followed, sooner or later the moment arrives when thinking becomes leibfrei, i.e. independent of the bodily instrument, when it works itself free from the cerebrospinal system.

This is at first a most disturbing experience. One feels like a man who has pushed off from the shore and who must now strive with might and main to maintain himself in the raging sea. The sheer power of cosmic thought is such that at first one loses one's identity. And perhaps one would lose it for good, if it were not for a fact which now emerges from the hidden mysteries of Christianity. One does not finally lose one's identity because He Himself has walked the waves and extended a helping hand to Peter who ventured out prematurely. Gradually the waves seem to calm down, and a condition ensues which Steiner expresses in a wonderful phrase: “Thinking itself becomes a body which draws into itself as its soul the Spirit of the Universe.”

This is a stage which, broadly speaking, Steiner had attained at the point of his biography which we have reached. Now he made a discovery which was not known to him before. He discovered that this “living thinking” could awaken the chakrams from “above,” just as in the old way they could be stimulated from “below.” Thought which at first in the normal and natural psychosomatic process “died” on the place of the skull, but which through systematic exercises had risen again to the level of cosmic reality, could now impart life to the dormant organs of spiritual perception which have been implanted into man by Him who created him in His image. From about the turn of the century Steiner began to pursue this path with ever greater determination, and gradually developed the three forms of Higher Knowledge which he called Imagination: a higher seeing of the spiritual world in revealing images; Inspiration: a higher hearing of the spiritual world, through which it reveals its creative forces and its creative order; Intuition: the stage at which an intuitive penetration into the sphere of Spiritual Beings becomes possible.

With these unfolding powers Steiner now developed up to his death in 1925, in twenty-five momentous years, that truly vast and awe-inspiring body of spiritual and practical knowledge to which he gave the name “Anthroposophy.” (Incidentally, this word was first coined by Thomas Vaughan, a brother of the English mystical poet, Henry Vaughan, in the 17th century.) Anthroposophy literally means wisdom of man or the wisdom concerning man, but in his later years Steiner himself interpreted it on occasion as “an adequate consciousness of being human.” In this interpretation the moral achievement of Steiner's work, his mission, his message to a bewildered humanity which has lost “an adequate consciousness of being human,” to which Man has become “the Unknown,” is summed up. This monumental work lies before us today and is waiting to be fully discovered by our Age—in some 170 books and in the published transcripts of nearly 6,000 lectures.

Three characteristic stages can be observed in Steiner's anthroposophical period. In a lecture given at the headquarters of the German Anthroposophical Society at Stuttgart (on February 6, 1923) he himself described these stages. Stage one (approximately 1901-1909): to lay the foundation for a Science of the Spirit within Western Civilization, with its center in the Mystery of Golgotha, as opposed to the purely traditional handing down of ancient oriental wisdom which is common to other organizations such as the Theosophical Society. Stage two (approximately 1910-1917): the application of the anthroposophical Science of the Spirit to various branches of Science, Art and practical life. As one of the milestones for the beginning of this second stage Steiner mentions the building of the Goetheanum, that architectural wonder (since destroyed by fire) in which his work as an artist had found its culmination. Stage three (approximately 1917-1925): first-hand descriptions of the spiritual world. During these twenty-five years of anthroposophical activity, Steiner's biography is identical with the history of the Anthroposophical Movement. His personal life is entirely dedicated to and absorbed in the life of his work.

It was during the last of the three phases that Steiner's prodigious achievements in so many fields of life began to inspire a number of his students and followers to practical foundations. Best known today are perhaps the Rudolf Steiner Schools for boys and girls, which have been founded in many countries and in which his concept of the true human being is the well-spring of all educational methods and activities. There are some seventy Steiner schools in existence with well over 30,000 pupils. A separate branch are the Institutes for Curative Education which have sprung up both in Europe and Overseas, and whose activities have been immensely beneficial to the ever increasing number of physically and mentally handicapped children and adults. Steiner's contributions to medical research and to medicine in general are used by a steadily growing number of doctors all over the world, and his indications are tested and followed up in a number of research centers and clinics. Another blessing for humanity flowed from his method of Biodynamic Agriculture, by which he was able to add to the basic principles of organic husbandry just those extras which, if rightly used, can greatly increase both fertility and quality without those chemical stimulants which in the long run poison both the soil and its products.

In the field of Art there is hardly an area he did not touch with the magic wand of creative originality. The second Goetheanum which replaced the first one destroyed by fire shows the massive use of reinforced concrete as a plastic material for architecture a generation before this use was attempted by others. Steiner's direct and indirect influence on modern painting with the symphonic use of color, on sculpture, on glass-engraving, on metal work and other visual arts is too far-reaching for anyone even to attempt to describe in condensed form. Students and graduates of the Steiner schools for Eurythmy and for Dramatic Art have performed before enthusiastic audiences in the cultural centers of the world, ably directed by Marie Steiner, his wife.

To those who have been attracted to this present publication by its title and its reference to Christianity, it will be of particular interest to hear that among those foundations which came into being during the last phase of Steiner's anthroposophical work was a Movement for Religious Renewal, formed by a body of Christian ministers, students and other young pioneers who had found in Rudolf Steiner “a man sent from God,” able to show the way to a true reconciliation of faith and knowledge, of religion and science. This Movement is known today as “The Christian Community” and has centers in many cities in the Old and New World. Apart from the inestimable help this Movement received from him in theological and pastoral matters, Rudolf Steiner was instrumental in mediating for this Movement a complete spiritual rebirth of the Christian Sacraments for the modern age and a renewal of the Christian priestly office.

Christianity as Mystical Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity holds a special place in the story of his remarkable and dedicated life. The book contains the substance of a series of lectures Rudolf Steiner gave in the winter of 1901–1902 in the “Theosophical Library” of Berlin at the invitation of the President, Count Brockdorff. This series had been preceded by another on the German mystics from Master Eckhardt to Jacob Boehme (published in the Centennial Edition of the Written Works of Rudolf Steiner under the title Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age) in which Steiner had ventured for the first time to present publicly some measure of his spiritual knowledge.

After these lectures on the mystics which was something of a prelude, Christianity as Mystical Fact now ushered in a new period in the understanding of the basic facts of Christianity as well as in Steiner's own life.

Compared with the free flow of spiritual teaching on Christianity offered by Steiner in his later works, the book may appear somewhat tentative and even reticent in its style. But it contains as in a nutshell all the essential new elements he was able to develop and unfold so masterfully in his later years.

Steiner considered the phrase “Mystical Fact” in the title to be very important. “I did not intend simply to describe the mystical content of Christianity,” he says in his autobiography. “I attempted to show that in the ancient Mysteries cult-images were given of cosmic events, which occurred later on the field of actual history in the Mystery of Golgotha as a Fact transplanted from the cosmos into the earth.”

It will not be out of place to round off this biographical sketch with a few personal reminiscences of the last four years of his life when I met Steiner as man and Initiate among his friends and students, and saw quite a good deal of him.

What was Rudolf Steiner like?—In the first place there was nothing in the least pompous about him. He never made one feel that he was in any sense extraordinary. There was an astonishing matter-of-factness about him, whether he spoke at a business meeting of the Anthroposophical Society, presided over faculty meetings of the Waldorf School^*, lectured on his ever increasing discoveries in the spiritual field, or spoke in public discussions on controversial subjects of the day.

I attended small lecture courses of less than fifty people, heard him lecture in the large hall of the first Goetheanum, was present at large public meetings when he expounded his “Threefold Commonwealth” ideas in the electric atmosphere of the Germany of 1923, during the occupation of the Ruhr and the total collapse of the German Mark. He was always the same: clear, considerate, helpful, unruffled. In those days he could fill the largest halls in Germany, and his quiet voice was strong enough to be heard without artificial amplification in the last rows of the gallery.

His hair remained jet black to the end; I cannot remember a strand of grey in it. His brown eyes, they sometimes had a shimmer of gold in them, looked with sympathy upon everything. And he possessed a wonderful buoyancy of carriage.

From 1913 Steiner lived permanently at Dornach, near Basel, Switzerland, in a house known locally as “Villa Hansi.” However, he spent most of his time in his studio, which was really nothing but a simple wooden building adjoining the large carpentry-shop where much of the woodwork of the first Goetheanum was prefabricated. In this studio he received an unending stream of callers. One would, perhaps, be shown into the room by a helping friend, but at the end he would always conduct one to the door himself. He put one at ease with such courtesy that one was in danger of forgetting who he was. And he gave the impression that he had no other care nor interest in the world than to listen to one's immature questions.

He would sit on a simple wicker chair, his legs crossed, perhaps occasionally moving one foot up and down. On the lapel of his black coat one might see a slight trace of snuff, because he indulged in the Old-World pleasure of taking snuff, but he neither drank nor smoked. I have never met anyone, and I am sure I shall never meet anyone who seemed so constantly at rest and in action simultaneously, all the time perfectly relaxed and absolutely alert.

The last summer of his life, in 1924, was the most prolific of all. He gave specialized courses on agriculture, on curative education, on Eurythmy. Then followed a summer school in August at Torquay in England; and when he returned to Dornach in early September, he increased his activities still further and gave as many as five, sometimes six different lectures each day. There was a daily course on the New Testament Book of Revelation for the priests of the Christian Community, another on pastoral medicine for priests and doctors combined, another on dramatic art, where I remember him one morning acting singlehanded the whole of Dantons Tod, a drama of the French Revolution by the German writer, Buchner. On another morning he acted the Faust fragment by Lessing. And in addition to all this, he also held lectures for the workmen of the Goetheanum.

Besides these specialized courses, the general lectures and other central activities of the Goetheanum School for the Science of the Spirit continued without interruption.

But the inevitable moment approached when even his resilient body showed the strain of his immense work. Sometimes for the period of a whole week he would hardly sleep more than two hours each night. I believe that he knew what he was doing. He well knew why he burned the candle not only at both ends but also in the middle.

My last memory of him is of the night when I was privileged, together with another friend, to keep vigil at the foot of his bed on which his body was laid out. It was the night before his funeral. The bed stood in his simple studio where he had been confined during the last six months of his life. Looking down on him was the great wooden statue of Christ which he had carved and nearly finished. Even in the literal sense of the word he had laid down his life at the feet of Christ.

The dignity of his features was enhanced by the marble whiteness of death. In the stillness of the night, with only a few candles burning, it was as if ages of human history converged to do homage. With a deep sense of reverence I wondered who he was. I am wondering still.

ALFRED HEIDENREICH

London, England
August 1961

• *. The first Rudolf Steiner School was called the “Waldorf School” because it was sponsored hy the Waldorf Astoria Cigarette Factory in Stuttgart, Germany, and its managing director, Dr. Emil Molt.

[ 1 ] We have now defined the idea of knowledge. In the act of cognition this idea is directly given in human consciousness. Both outer and inner perceptions, as well as its own presence are given directly to the “I,” which is the center of consciousness. (It is hardly necessary to say that here “center” is not meant to denote a particular theory of consciousness, but is used merely for the sake of brevity in order to designate consciousness as a whole.) The I feels a need to discover more in the given than is directly contained in it. In contrast to the given world, a second world—the world of thinking—rises up to meet the I and the I unites the two through its own free decision, producing what we have defined as the idea of knowledge. Here we see the fundamental difference between the way the concept and the directly given are united within human consciousness to form full reality, and the way they are found united in the remainder of the world-content. In the entire remainder of the world picture we must conceive an original union which is an inherent necessity; an artificial separation occurs only in relation to knowledge at the point where cognition begins; cognition then cancels out this separation once more, in accordance with the original nature of the objective world. But in human consciousness the situation is different. Here the union of the two factors of reality depends upon the activity of consciousness In all other objects, the separation has no significance for the objects themselves, but only for knowledge. Their union is original and their separation is derived from the union. Cognition separates them only because its nature is such that it cannot grasp their union without having first separated them. But the concept and the given reality of consciousness are originally separated, and their union is derived from their original separation; this is why cognition has the character described here. Just because, in consciousness, idea and given are necessarily separated, for consciousness the whole of reality divides into these two factors; and again, just because consciousness can unite them only by its own activity, it can arrive at full reality only by performing the act of cognition. All other categories (ideas), whether or not they are grasped in cognition, are necessarily united with their corresponding forms of the given. But the idea of knowledge can be united with its corresponding given only by the activity of consciousness. Consciousness as a reality exists only if it produces itself. I believe that I have now cleared the ground sufficiently to enable us to understand Fichte's Science of Knowledge through recognition of the fundamental mistake contained in it. Of all Kant's successors, Fichte is the one who felt most keenly that only a theory of consciousness could provide the foundation for knowledge in any form, yet he never came to recognize why this is so. He felt that what I have called the second step in the theory of knowledge, and which I formulated as a postulate, must be actively performed by the I. This can be seen, for example, from these words:

“The science of knowledge, insofar as it is to be a systematic science, is built up in the same manner in which all possible sciences, insofar as they are systematic, are built up, that is, through a determination of freedom; which freedom, in the science of knowledge, is particularly determined: to become conscious of the general manner of acting of the intelligence. ... By means of this free act, something which is in itself already form, namely, the necessary act of the intelligence, is taken up as content and put into a new form, that is, the form of knowledge or of consciousness. ...”¹

What does Fichte here mean by the “acting of intelligence” if we express in clear concepts what he dimly felt? Nothing other than the production of the idea of knowledge, taking place in consciousness. Had Fichte become clear about this, then he would have formulated the above principle as follows: A science of knowledge has the task of bringing to consciousness the act of cognition, insofar as it is still an unconscious activity of the I; it must show that to objectify the idea of knowledge is a necessary deed of the I.

[ 2 ] In his attempt to define the activity of the I, Fichte comes to the conclusion: “The I as absolute subject is something, the being (essence) of which consists merely in postulating its own existence.”² For Fichte, this postulation of the I is the primal unconditioned deed, “it is the basis of all consciousness.”³ Therefore, in Fichte's sense too, the I can begin to be active only through an absolute original decision. But for Fichte it is impossible to find the actual content for this original activity postulated by the I. He had nothing toward which this activity could be directed or by which it could be determined. The I is to do something, but what is it to do? Fichte did not formulate the concept of knowledge which the I must produce, and in consequence he strove in vain to define any further activity of the I beyond its original deed. In fact, he finally stated that to investigate any such further activity does not lie within the scope of theory. In his deduction of representation, he does not begin from any absolute activity of the I or of the not-I, but he starts from a state of determination which, at the same time, itself determines, because in his view nothing else is, or can be contained directly in consciousness. What in turn determines the state of determination is left completely undecided in his theory; and because of this uncertainty, one is forced beyond theory into practical application of the science of knowledge.⁴ However, through this statement Fichte completely abolishes all cognition. For the practical activity of the I belongs to a different sphere altogether. The postulate which I put forward above can clearly be produced by the I only in an act which is free, which is not first determined; but when the I cognizes, the important point is that the decision to do so is directed toward producing the idea of cognition. No doubt the I can do much else through free decision. But if epistemology is to be the foundation of all knowledge, the decisive point is not to have a definition of an I that is “free,” but of an I that “cognizes.” Fichte has allowed himself to be too much influenced by his subjective inclinations to present the freedom of the human personality in the clearest possible light. Harms, in his address, On the Philosophy of Fichte, (p. 15) rightly says: “His world-view is predominantly and exclusively ethical, and his theory of knowledge has no other feature.” Cognition would have no task to fulfill whatever if all spheres of reality were given in their totality. But the I, so long as it has not been inserted by thinking into the systematic whole of the world-picture, also exists as something merely directly given, so that it does not suffice to point to its activity. Yet Fichte is of the opinion that where the I is concerned, all that is necessary is to seek and find it. “We have to search for the absolute, first, and unconditioned fundamental principle of human knowledge. It cannot be proven nor determined if it is to be absolute first principle.”⁵ We have seen that the only instance where proof and definitions are not required is in regard to the content of pure logic. The I, however, belongs to reality, where it is necessary to establish the presence of this or that category within the given. This Fichte does not do. And this is why he gave his science of knowledge a mistaken form. Zeller⁶ remarks that the logical formulas by which Fichte attempts to arrive at the concept of the I only lightly hide his predetermined purpose to reach his goal at any cost, so that the I could become his starting point. These words refer to the first form in which Fichte presented his science of knowledge in 1794. When it is realized that, owing to the whole trend of his philosophy, Fichte could not be content with any starting point for knowledge other than an absolute decree, it becomes clear that he has only two possibilities for making this beginning appear intelligible. One possibility is to focus the attention on one or another of the empirical activities of consciousness, and then crystallize out the pure concept of the I by gradually stripping away everything that did not originally belong to consciousness. The other possibility is to start directly with the original activity of the I, and then to bring its nature to light through self-contemplation and self-observation. Fichte chose the first possibility at the beginning of his philosophical path, but gradually went over to the second.

[ 3 ] On the basis of Kant's synthesis of “transcendental apperception”⁷ Fichte came to the conclusion that the activity of the I consists entirely in combining the material of experience into the form of judgment. To judge means to combine predicate with subject. This is stated purely formally in the expression: a == a. This proposition could not be made if the unknown factor x which unites the two a's did not rest on an absolute ability of the I, to postulate. For the proposition does not mean a exists, but rather: if a exists, then so does a. In other words there is no question of postulating a absolutely. In order, therefore, to arrive at something which is valid in a quite straightforward way, the only possibility is to declare the act of postulating as such to be absolute. Therefore, while a is conditional the postulation of a is itself unconditional. This postulation, however, is a deed of the I. To the I is ascribed the absolute and unconditional ability to postulate. In the proposition a == a, one a is postulated only because the other a is already postulated, and indeed is postulated by the I. “If a is postulated in the I, then it is postulated, or then it is.”⁸ This connection is possible only on condition that there exists in the I something which is always constant, something that leads over from one a to the other. The above mentioned x is based on this constant element. The I which postulates the one a is the same as the I which postulates the other a. This means that I == I. This proposition expressed in the form of a judgment: If the I exists, then the I exists, is meaningless. The I is not postulated by presupposing another I; it presupposes itself. This means: the I simply is, absolutely and unconditionally. The hypothetical form of a judgment, which is the form of all judgments, when an absolute I is not presupposed, here is transformed into a principle of absolute existence: I simply am. Fichte also expresses this as follows: “The I originally and absolutely postulates its own being.”⁹ This whole deduction of Fichte's is clearly nothing but a kind of pedagogical discussion, the aim of which is to guide his reader to the point where knowledge of the unconditional activity of the I dawns in him. His aim is to bring the activity of the I emphatically home to the reader, for without this activity there is no I.

[ 4 ] Let us now survey Fichte's line of thought once more. On closer inspection one sees that there is a break in its sequence; a break, indeed, of a kind that casts doubt upon the correctness of his view of the original deed of the I. What is essentially absolute when the I postulates? The judgment is made: If a exists, then so does a. The a is postulated by the I. There can, therefore, be no doubt about the postulation as such. But even if the I is unconditioned insofar as its own activity is concerned, nevertheless the I cannot but postulate something. It cannot postulate the “activity, as such, by itself,” but only a definite activity. In short: the postulation must have a content. However, the I cannot derive this content from itself, for by itself it can do no more than eternally postulate its own postulation. Therefore there must be something which is produced by this postulation, by this absolute activity of the I. Unless the I sets to work on something given which it postulates, it can do “nothing” and hence cannot postulate either. Fichte's own principle actually shows this: The I postulates its existence. This existence is a category. This means we have arrived at our principle: The activity of the I is to postulate, as a free decision, the concepts and ideas of the given. Fichte arrives at his conclusion only because he unconsciously sets out to prove that the I “exists.” Had he worked out the concept of cognition, he would then have arrived at the true starting point of a theory of knowledge, namely: The I postulates cognition. Because Fichte is not clear as to what it is that determines the activity of the I, he simply characterizes this activity as the postulation of being, of existence. In doing so, he also limits the absolute activity of the I. If the I is only unconditioned in its “postulation of existence.” everything else the I does must be conditioned. But then, all possible ways to pass from what is unconditioned to the conditioned are blocked. If the I is unconditioned only in the one direction described, it immediately ceases to be possible for the I to postulate, through an absolute act, anything but its own being. This makes it necessary to indicate the basis on which all the other activities of the I depend. Fichte sought for this in vain, as we have already seen.

[ 5 ] This is why he turned to the other of the two possibilities indicated for deducing the I. As early as 1797, in his First Introduction to the Science of Knowledge, he recommends self-observation as the right method for attaining knowledge of the essential being of the I:

“Be aware of yourself, withdraw your attention from all that surrounds you and turn it toward your inner being—this is the first demand that philosophy makes on the pupil. What is essential is not outside of you, but solely within yourself.¹⁰

To introduce the science of knowledge in this way is indeed a great advance on his earlier introduction. In self-observation, the activity of the I is actually seen, not one-sidedly turned in a particular direction, not as merely postulating existence, but revealing many aspects of itself as it strives to grasp the directly given world-content in thinking. Self-observation reveals the I engaged in the activity of building up the world-picture by combining the given with concepts. However, someone who has not elaborated the above considerations for himself—and who therefore does not know that the I only arrives at the full content of reality when it approaches the given with its thought-forms—for him, the process of knowledge appears to consist in spinning the world out of the I itself. This is why Fichte sees the world-picture more and more as a construction of the I. He emphasizes ever more strongly that for the science of knowledge it is essential to awaken the faculty for watching the I while it constructs the world. He who is able to do this appears to Fichte to be at a higher stage of knowledge than someone who is able to see only the construction, the finished product. He who considers only the world of objects does not recognize that they have first been created by the I. He who observes the I while it constructs, sees the foundation of the finished world-picture; he knows the means by which it has come into being, and it appears to him as the result of presuppositions which for him are given. Ordinary consciousness sees only what is postulated, what is in some way or other determined; it does not provide insight into the premises, into the reasons why something is postulated in just the way it is, and not otherwise. For Fichte it is the task of a completely new sense organ to mediate knowledge of these premises. This he expresses most clearly in his Introductory Lecture to the Science of Knowledge, delivered at Berlin University in the autumn of 1813:

“This science presupposes a completely new inner sense organ, through which a new world is revealed which does not exist for the ordinary man at all.” “The world revealed by this new sense, and therefore also the sense itself, is so far clearly defined: it consists in seeing the premises on which is based the judgment that ‘something is’; that is, seeing the foundation of existence which, just because it is the foundation, is in itself nothing else and cannot be defined.”¹¹

[ 6 ] Here too, Fichte lacks clear insight into the content of the activity carried out by the I. And he never attained this insight. That is why his science of knowledge could never become what he intended it to be: a philosophical foundation for science in general in the form of a theory of knowledge. Had he once recognized that the activity of the I can only be postulated by the I itself, this insight would also have led him to see that the activity must likewise be determined by the I itself. This, however, can occur only by a content being given to the otherwise purely formal activity of the I. As this content must be introduced by the I itself into its otherwise quite undetermined activity, the activity as such must also be determined by the I itself in accordance with the I's own nature. Otherwise its activity could not be postulated by the I, but at most by a “thing-in-itself” within the I, whose instrument the I would be. Had Fichte attempted to discover how the I determines its own activity, he would have arrived at the concept of knowledge which is to be produced by the I. Fichte's science of knowledge proves that even the acutest thinker cannot successfully contribute to any field of knowledge if he is unable to come to the right thought-form (category, idea) which, when supplemented by the given, constitutes reality. Such a thinker is like a person to whom wonderful melodies are played, but he does not hear them because he lacks an ear for music. Consciousness, as given, can be described only by someone who knows how to take possession of the “idea of consciousness.”

[ 7 ] Fichte once came very near the truth. In his Introduction to the Science of Knowledge (1797), he says that there are two theoretical systems: dogmatism—in which the I is determined by the objects; and idealism—in which the objects are determined by the I. In his opinion both are possible world-views. Both are capable of being built up into a consistent system. But the adherents of dogmatism must renounce the independence of the I and make it dependent on the “thing-in-itself.” For the adherents of idealism, the opposite is the case. Which of the two systems a philosopher is to choose, Fichte leaves completely to the preference of the individual. But if one wishes the I to retain its independence, then one will cease to believe in external things and devote oneself to idealism.

[ 8 ] This line of thought fails to consider one thing, namely that the I cannot reach any choice or decision which has some real foundation if it does not presuppose something which enables it to do so. Everything determined by the I remains empty and without content if the I does not find something that is full of content and determined through and through, which then makes it possible for the I to determine the given and, in doing so, also enables it to choose between idealism and dogmatism. This something which is permeated with content through and through is, however, the world of thinking. And to determine the given by means of thinking is to cognize. No matter from what aspect Fichte is considered, we shall find that his line of thought gains power and life when we think of the activity of the I, which he presents as grey and empty of content, as filled and organized by what we have called the process of cognition.

[ 19 ] The I is freely able to become active of itself, and therefore it can also produce the category of cognition through self-determination; in the rest of the world, by objective necessity the categories are connected with the given corresponding to them. It must be the task of ethics and metaphysics to investigate the nature of this free self-determination, on the basis of our theory of knowledge. These sciences will also have to discuss whether the I is able to objectify ideas other than those of cognition. The present discussion shows that the I is free when it cognizes, when it objectifies the ideas of cognition. For when the directly given and the thought-form belonging to it are united by the I in the process of cognition, then the union of these two elements of reality—which otherwise would forever remain separated in consciousness—can only take place through a free act.

[ 10 ] Our discussion sheds a completely new light on critical idealism. Anyone who has acquainted himself intimately with Fichte's system will know that it was a point of vital importance for this philosopher to uphold the principle that nothing from the external world can enter the I, that nothing takes place in the I which is not originally postulated by the I itself. Yet it is beyond all doubt that no idealism can derive from the I that form of the world-content which is here described as the directly given. This form of the world-content can only be given; it can never be constructed out of thinking. One need only consider that if all the colors were given us with the exception of one single shade, even then we could not begin to provide that shade out of the I alone. We can form a picture of distant regions that we have never seen, provided we have once personally experienced, as given, the various elements needed to form the picture. Then, out of the single facts given us, we combine the picture according to given information. We should strive in vain to invent for ourselves even a single perceptual element that has never appeared within our sphere of the given. It is, however, one thing merely to be aware of the given world: it is quite another to recognize its essential nature. This latter, though intimately connected with the world-content, does not become clear to us unless we ourselves build up reality out of the given and the activity of thinking. The essential What of the given is postulated for the I only through the I itself. Yet the I would have no occasion to postulate within itself the nature of something given if it did not first find itself confronted by a completely undetermined given. Therefore, what is postulated by the I as the nature and being of the world is not postulated without the I, but through it.

[ 11 ] The true shape is not the first in which reality comes before the I, but the shape the I gives it. That first shape, in fact, has no significance for the objective world; it is significant only as a basis for the process of cognition. Thus it is not that shape which the theory of knowledge gives to the world which is subjective; the subjective shape is that in which the I at first encounters it. If, like Volkelt and others, one wishes to call this given world “experience,” then one will have to say: The world-picture which, owing to the constitution of our consciousness, appears to us in a subjective form as experience, is completed through knowledge to become what it really is.

[ 12 ] Our theory of knowledge supplies the foundation for true idealism in the real sense of the word. It establishes the conviction that in thinking the essence of the world is mediated. Through thinking alone the relationship between the details of the world-content become manifest, be it the relation of the sun to the stone it warms, or the relation of the I to the external world. In thinking alone the element is given which determines all things in their relations to one another.

[ 13 ] An objection which Kantianism could still bring forward would be that the definition of the given described above holds good in the end only for the I. To this I must reply that according to the view of the world outlined here, the division between I and external world, like all other divisions, is valid only within the given and from this it follows that the term “for the I” has no significance when things have been understood by thinking, because thinking unites all opposites. The I ceases to be seen as something separated from the external world when the world is permeated by thinking; it therefore no longer makes sense to speak of definitions as being valid for the I only.

• 1. Fichte, Sämtliche Werke, Collected Works, Berlin, 1845, Vol. I, P. 71.
• 2. For fundamentals of the scientific teaching of Fichte, see his Collected Works, Berlin, 1845, Vol. I, p. 97.
• 3. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 91.
• 4. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 178.
• 5. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 91.
• 6. Eduard Zeller (1814–1908), Geschichte der deutschen Philosophie seit Leibnitz, History of German Philosophy Since Leibnitz, Munich, 1871–75, p. 605. Eduard Zeller studied and taught at Tübingen, later (1847) becoming professor of Theology at Bern, later (1849) professor of Theology, afterward of Philosophy at Marburg. In 1862 he was made professor of Philosophy at Heidelberg, afterward at Berlin to his retirement in 1895. His masterwork is the Philosophie der Greichen, Philosophy of the Greeks, 1844–52. He was recognized throughout the academic world for his learning and contributions to scholarship, and received many distinctions and honors. His Philosophie der Greichen has been transl. into English by S. F. Alleyne, 2 vols. 1881. In addition, an abridged version prepared by Zeller (1883) also appeared in English in 1896, as did a number of his other writings.
• 7. The perception of an object involving the consciousness of the pure self as subject. (Translator)
• 8. Fichte, Sämtliche Werke, Collected Works, Berlin, 1845, Vol. I, p. 94.
• 9. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 98.
• 10. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 422.
• 11. J. G. Fichtes nachgelassene Werke, J. G. Fichte's Posthumous Works, Edited by J. H. Fichte, Vol. I, Bonn, 1834, p. 4 and 16. (Einleitungsvorlesungen in die Wissenschaftslehre, Introductory Studies in the Scientific Teachings.)

[ 1 ] With what has been presented so far, we have clarified the idea of knowing. This idea is now given in human awareness without any mediation, insofar as it is limited to knowing itself. The ego (without mediation the center of awareness) is given external perception, internal perception, and perception of its own self-existence (sein eigenes Dasein). (It hardly needs to be said that we do not want the term "center" to be associated with a theoretical view of the nature of consciousness, but rather that we are only using it as a stylistic shorthand for the overall characteristic features of awareness.) The ego feels the urge to find more in what is given than what is immediately given. It goes beyond the given world to the second world of thinking, and it combines the two through a free decision (about possible reality) which we have settled on as the idea of knowing.

Herein lies a fundamental difference between (firstly) the way, in objective human awareness, in which concept and immediately-given show themselves bound together in total reality, and (secondly) that which has value regarding the remaining world-content. With every other part of the world picture, we must imagine that the connection is original and necessary from the outset. Only at the beginning of knowing does an artificial separation occur for knowing, which ultimately will again be uplifted (aufgehoben), by means of the appropriate recognition of the original nature of what is objective.

Things are different with human awareness. Here the connection is only present if it is carried out consciously in actual activity. With any other object, the separation has no meaning for the object, only for knowing does it have meaning. The connection is the first thing here, the separation is the derivative. The act of knowing only carries out the separation, because in its own way, it cannot take possession of the connection unless it has separated first. But the concept and the given reality of awareness are originally separate. The connection is what is derived, and that is why knowing is described here in this way.

Because in consciousness the idea and the given necessarily appear separately, the whole of reality is split into these two parts, and because consciousness can only bring about the combination of the two elements mentioned through its own activity, in this way it arrives at full reality through bringing to reality the act of knowing. The remaining categories (ideas) would necessarily be linked to the corresponding forms of the given, if they were not included in knowing; the idea of knowing can be united with the given related to it only through the activity of awareness. A real consciousness exists only when it realizes itself, when it brings itself to reality (sich selbst verwirklicht). I believe that I am sufficiently prepared to expose the fundamental error of Fichte's Principles of Science (Wissenschaftlehre) and at the same time to provide the key to understanding it.

Fichte is the philosopher who felt most vividly (among Kant's successors) that the foundation of all scientific thinking (Wissenschaft),⁶⁵ could only stand within a theory of consciousness, but he never realized why that was so. He felt that what we call the second step of epistemology, and to which we give the form of a postulate, must really be carried out by the ego. We see this for example, in his following words. “The Principles of Science (Wissenschaftslehre), insofar as it is intended to be a systematic science (just like all possible sciences insofar as they are intended to be systematic), arises through a stipulation of freedom, which here in particular stipulates the art of handling intelligence in raising it to consciousness at all.— Through this free handling (Handlung), the necessary action of intelligence, already itself a form, will now be taken up substantially as the new form of perception of experience (des Wissens) or aware existence (Bewußtseins)..." ⁶⁶ What is here understood by the art of handling of intelligence, expressing what is darkly felt in clear terms, is nothing other than fully bringing into awareness the idea of knowing. If Fichte had been fully aware of this, he would simply have had to formulate the above sentence like this: The Principles of Science (Wissenschaftslehre) must raise knowing, insofar as it is still an unconscious activity of the ego, into awareness-existence (Bewußtsein). It must show that the objectification of the idea of knowing is carried out in the ego as a necessary action.

[ 2 ] In his attempt to define the activity of the ego, Fichte concludes, "Whoever’s existence (essential being) consists solely in the fact that it assumes itself as being, that is the ego, as an absolute subject.” ⁶⁷ For Fichte, this positioning of the ego is the first unencumbered active handling that “lies at the basis of all other awareness of existence.” ⁶⁸ In Fichte's sense, the ego can only begin all its activity through an absolute decision. But for Fichte it is impossible to help this activity (which is absolutely done by the ego) to find any content for its actions. For it has nothing upon which to direct this activity, and by which it should determine itself. His ego is supposed to carry out an act, but what should it do? Because Fichte did not establish the concept of knowing that the ego should realize, he struggled in vain to find any progression from his absolute act to a further determination of the ego. Yes, he finally declares regarding such a progression, that the investigation into this lies outside the limits of theory. In deducing what the mental picture is, he assumes neither an absolute activity of the ego nor of the “non-ego”, but takes his start rather from something determined and at the same time determining, because nothing else is or can be contained directly in consciousness.

What determines this determination remains completely undecided in theory, and through this indeterminacy we are driven beyond theory into the practical part of scientific theory.⁶⁹ With this clarification, Fichte destroys knowing altogether. For the practical activity of the ego belongs to a completely different arena. Clearly, the postulate I made above can only be realized through a free action of the ego, but if the ego is to behave in a way of knowing, then it is important that the determination of the ego is to realize the idea of knowing. It is certainly true that the ego can do many other things of its own free will. But the epistemological foundation of all sciences is not based on a characteristic of the free ego, but rather on a characteristic of the knowing ego. However, Fichte allowed himself to be influenced too much by his subjective tendency to place the freedom of the human personality in the brightest light. Harms rightly remarks in his speech on Fichte's philosophy S.15, "His world view is predominantly and exclusively ethical, and his epistemology has no other character." Cognition would have absolutely no task if all areas of reality were given in their totality. But since the ego, so long as it is not integrated by thinking into the systematic whole of the world picture, is nothing other than something directly given, simply showing what it does is not sufficient. Fichte, however, is of the opinion that everything is already done for the ego by simply looking for it. “We must seek out the first principle (absolutely without presuppositions) of all human knowing. It cannot be proven or determined if it is to be the absolute first principle.” ⁷⁰

We have seen that in proving and defining, only the content of pure logic is out of place, not required. The ego, however, belongs to reality, where it is necessary to determine the presence of this or that category in the given. Fichte didn't do that. And this is the reason why he gave his scientific theory such a wrong shape. Zeller notes ⁷¹ that the logical formulas through which Fichte wants to arrive at the concept of the ego only poorly disguise the fact that Fichte wants to achieve the already preconceived purpose of getting to this starting point at all costs. These words refer to the first form that Fichte gave to his scientific theory in 1794. If we hold on to the fact that Fichte, based on the whole nature of his philosophizing, could have wanted nothing other than to have science begin through an absolute power decree, then there are only two ways in which this beginning appears understandable. One was to touch consciousness in some of its empirical activities and to crystallize the pure concept of the ego by gradually peeling away everything that does not originally follow from it. The other way, however, was to start with the original activity of the ego and to reveal its nature through self-reflection and self-observation. Fichte took the first path at the beginning of his philosophizing, but as his philosophizing coursed along, he gradually moved on to the second.

[ 3 ] Building on Kant's synthesis of “transcendental apperception”, Fichte found that all activity of the ego consisted in the assembly of the material of experience according to the forms of judgment. Judging consists in linking the predicate with the subject, which is expressed in a purely formal way by the sentence “a” = “a”. This proposition would be impossible if the unknown factor “x” that connects the first and second “a” were not based on an absolute ability to posit. Because the sentence does not mean: “a” is, but rather: if “a” is, then “a” is. There can be no question of postulating “a” absolutely. There is nothing left to arrive at something totally valid, other than to declare the positing itself to be absolute. While the “a” is conditional, the positing of the “a” is unconditional. But this setting is an act of the ego. The ego therefore can posit absolutely and unconditionally. In the sentence “a” = “a”, one “a” is only posited by presupposing the other; namely it is set by the ego. Fichte states, “If ‘a’ is posited in the ego, then it is posited.” ⁷² This connection is only possible under the condition that there is something in the ego that is always the same, something that moves from one “a” to the other. And the “x” mentioned above is based on this constant. The ego that posits one “a” is the same as that which posits the other. And that means “I” “I” This sentence expressed in the form of the proposition: “If I am, then so it is”, but this proposition has no meaning. The ego is not placed under the presupposition of another, but rather it presupposes itself. But that means it is absolute and unconditional.

The hypothetical form of the judgment, which belongs to all judgments without the presupposition of the absolute ego, is transformed here into the form of the absolute existential sentence: “I simply am”. Fichte also expresses this as follows: “The ego originally posits its own being.” ⁷³ We see that Fichte's entire derivation is nothing but a kind of pedagogical discussion to lead his readers to the point where the knowledge of the unconditioned activity of the ego dawns on them. The purpose is to make clear to his readers, that without this activity of the ego, there is no ego at all.

[ 4 ] We now want to look back at Fichte's train of thought. If you look more closely, it turns out that there is a crack in it, and one that calls into question the correctness of the view of the original act. What really is absolute in the positing of the I? The judgment is made: If “a” is, then “a” is. The “a” is placed by the ego. There can be no doubt about this setting. But even if it is unconditional as an activity, the ego can only set something. It cannot posit “activity in and of itself”, but only a specific activity. In short: the setting must have a content. But it cannot take this from itself, otherwise it could do nothing but set forever. There must therefore be something for the positing, for the absolute activity of the ego, which is realized through it. Without the ego taking hold of something given and positing it, it can posit nothing, and therefore cannot posit. This is therefore shown by a Fichte-like sentence that the ego posits its existence, this existence is a category. We are back to our statement: The activity of the ego is based on the ego positing the concepts and ideas of the given out of its own free decision. Only because Fichte unconsciously sets out to establish the ego as something that has existence does he reach his conclusion. If he had developed the concept of knowing, he would have arrived at the true starting point of the theory of knowing (epistemology), that the ego posits knowing. Since Fichte did not make it clear to himself what determines the activity of the ego, he simply described the positing of existence as the character of this activity. But in doing so he also limited the absolute activity of the ego. For if only the “existence-positing” of the ego is unconditional, then everything else that emanates from the ego is conditional. But every path to get from the unconditional to the conditional is also cut off. If the ego is unconditioned only in the direction indicated, then the possibility for it to posit something other than its own being through an original act immediately ceases. The need therefore arises to give the reason for all other activity of the ego. Fichte searched for one in vain, as we have already seen above.

[ 5 ] Therefore, he turned to the other path described above to derive the ego. As early as 1797 in his First Introduction to the Doctrine of Scientific Awareness he recommended self-observation as the right thing to do to recognize the ego by its very own character. “Pay attention to yourself, turn your gaze away from everything that surrounds you and peer into your inner self. This is the first demand that philosophy makes to its apprentices. There is no talk of anything outside of you, but only of yourself.” ⁷⁴ This way of introducing the Principles of Science (Wissenschaftslehre), however, has a great advantage over the other. For self-observation does not in fact deliver the activity of the ego one-sidedly in a certain direction, it does not merely show it as positing existence, but rather it shows it in its all-round development, how it tries to think and understand the immediately given content of the world. Introspection shows the ego how it builds its worldview from the combination of the given and the concept. But for anyone who has not gone through the consideration above, who does not know that the ego only comes to the full content of reality when it approaches the given with thinking, for him the process of knowing appears as the world spinning out of the ego. For Fichte, the worldview becomes more and more a construction of the ego. He increasingly emphasizes that what is important in scientific teaching is to awaken the sense that can overhear the ego constructing the world. Anyone who can do this appears to Fichte to be at a higher level of knowing than someone who only sees the constructed, the finished existence. Anyone who only looks at the world of objects, does not recognize that they are created by the ego. But whoever looks at the ego in its construing sees the basis of the finished world picture, and knows how it came about, for it appears to him due to certain given prerequisites. Someone with ordinary consciousness only sees what is posited, what is determined in this or that way. He lacks insight into the antecedents, into the reasons why it is set this way and not otherwise. According to Fichte, the conscious experience of perceiving with logic and clarity (das Wissen) is the task of a completely new sense. I find this most clearly expressed in his Introductory lectures on his Principles of Science (Wissenschaftslehre) that he read aloud in the fall of 1813 at the University of Berlin: “This doctrine presupposes a completely new inner sensory tool through which a new world is created that does not exist at all for the ordinary person." ⁷⁵ Also: “The world of the new sense (and thereby itself) is for the moment clearly determined. It is seeing the antecedents on which judgment is based. It is something that itself grounds the grounds of existence, which is exactly why, because it is this, is not itself again and is an existence.” ⁷⁶

[ 6 ] Here too, Fichte lacks a clear insight into the content of the activity carried out by the ego. He never got through to it. That is why his Wissenschaftslehre could not become what it otherwise would have had to become given its entire structure, which is a theory of knowing as basic philosophical science. Once it was recognized that the activity of the ego must be determined by the ego itself, it was obvious to think that it also receives its determination from the ego. But how can this happen other than by giving content to the purely formal actions of the ego. But if this is really to be introduced by the ego into its otherwise completely undetermined activity, then it must also be determined according to its nature. Otherwise, it could at most be realized by a “thing in itself” lying in the ego, whose tool is the ego, but not by the latter itself. If Fichte had attempted this definition, then he would have arrived at the concept of knowing, which is to be realized by the ego. Fichte's teaching of science is proof that even the most astute thinker will not succeed in having a fruitful impact in any field if one does not arrive at the correct thought form (category, idea), which when supplemented with what is given, gives reality. Such a thinker is the same as a person who listens to the most wonderful melodies, but doesn't hear them at all, due to having no feeling for melody. Consciousness, as a given, can only be characterized by someone who knows how to put himself in possession of the “idea of consciousness”.

[ 7 ] Fichte came quite close to the correct insight. In 1797 he found in his Introduction to the Principles of Science that there were two theoretical systems, dogmatism,⁷⁷ in which the ego is determined by things, and idealism, in which things are determined by the ego. In his view, both stand as possible worldviews. Both allow consistent implementation. But if we give in to dogmatism, then we must give up the independence of the ego and make it dependent on the thing-in-itself. We are in the opposite situation when we pay homage to idealism. Which of the systems one or the other philosopher wants to choose, Fichte simply leaves it up to the discretion of the ego. But if it wants to preserve its independence, it would suspend belief in things outside of us and surrender to idealism.

[ 8 ] All that Fichte had needed was to have considered that the ego cannot come to any real, well-founded decision and determination if it does not presuppose something that helps it to make one. All determination from the ego would remain empty and contentless if the ego does not find something full of content and thoroughly determined that makes it possible for it to determine what is given and thus also allows the choice to be made between idealism and dogmatism. But this thoroughly full-of-content world is the world of thinking. And determining what is given through thinking means knowing. We may linger on Fichte’s work wherever we want, but everywhere we will find that his train of thought immediately takes root when we think of the completely gray, empty activity of the ego as being filled and regulated by what we have called the process of knowing.

[ 9 ] The ego can put itself into activity through freedom, which makes it possible for it to make real the category of knowing through self-determination. In the rest of the world, the categories are linked to the given that corresponds to them through objective necessity. Investigating the nature of free self-determination will be the task of ethics and metaphysics based on our epistemology. This task will also have to discuss the question of whether the ego is also able to realize ideas other than knowing. it is already clear from the comments made above, however, that the realization of knowing occurs through freedom. For if what is immediately given and the associated form of thinking are united by the ego in the process of knowing, then the unification of the two elements of reality that otherwise always remain separate in consciousness can occur only through an act of freedom.

[ 10 ] Through the preceding discussion, light will be thrown on critical idealism in a completely different way. To anyone who has studied Fichte's system in detail, it appears to be a matter close to the heart of this philosopher to maintain the principle that nothing can enter the ego from outside, nothing that is not originally posited by the ego itself. But this entails that no idealism will ever be able to derive from the ego that form of world content that we have described as the immediately given. This form can only be given, never construed from thinking. Just consider that even if we were given the rest of the color gamut, we would not be able to add even one shade of color purely from the ego. We can form a picture of the most distant areas of the country, areas that we have never seen, if we have experienced similar elements individually as given. We then combine these individual elements we have experienced into a picture based on the descriptions given to us. But we will strive in vain to spin out of ourselves even a single element of perception that never lay in the realm of the “given”. It is quite different to simply to become acquainted (kennen) with something in the given world. it is also different to recognize (erkennen) the essential nature of something or someone. The latter, although it is intimately linked to the content of the world, is not clear to us unless we build reality ourselves from what is given and from thinking. The actual “what” of the given is posited for the ego only by the ego itself. But the ego has absolutely no reason to put the essential nature of a “given” inside itself, for it sees the matter first in a totally unencumbered way. Therefore, what is posited by the ego as the essential nature of the world is not posited without the ego, but through it.

[ 11 ] It is not the first form in which reality confronts the ego that is its true form, but the last form that the ego makes out of it. That first form has no meaning at all for the objective world, and only has such a meaning as a basis for the cognitive process. Therefore, the shape of the world that theory gives to it is not the subjective one, but rather that which is first given to the ego. If one wants to continue along with Volkelt’s followers, who call this given world experience, one must say that scientific knowing completes the organization of our awareness that appears in subjective form as experience, as emerging world-picture as what it essentially is.

[ 12 ] Our epistemology provides the basis for an idealism that understands itself in the true sense of the word. It establishes the belief that the essence of the world is conveyed in thinking. The relationship between the parts of the world's content can be shown by nothing other than thinking, whether it is the relationship of the heat of the sun to the heated stone, or of the ego to the outside world. Thinking alone is the element that determines all things in their relationships to one another.

[ 13 ] The objection that Kantianism could still make would be that the essential determination of the given as characterized above is only one for the ego. In the spirit of our basic conception, we must reply to this that the split between the ego and the external world only exists within the given, and therefore that “for the ego” has no meaning when compared to the thinking observation that unites all opposites. The ego as something separated from the outside world is completely lost in the thinking world view, so it no longer makes any sense to speak of determinations solely for the ego.

• 65. t/n In this sense science is consciously thinking about experiences with clarity and logic
• 66. Fichte, Über den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre oder der sogenannten Philosophie, Collected Works, Berlin, 1845, Vol. I, p. 71.
• 67. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 97.
• 68. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 91.
• 69. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 178.
• 70. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 91.
• 71. Eduard Zeller (1814–1908), Geschichte der deutschen Philosophie seit Leibnitz, History of German Philosophy Since Leibnitz, Munich, 1871–75, p. 605.
• 72. Fichte, Sämtliche Werke, Collected Works, Berlin, 1845, Vol. I, p. 94.
• 73. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 98.
• 74. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 422.
• 75. Ibid. Vol. I, p. 422.
• 76. J. G. Fichtes Nachgelassene Werke. Herausgegeben von J. H. Fichte, Bd. 1, Bonn 1834, S.4 und S.16.
• 77. t/n The meaning of dogmatism here is unclear. Here it sounds like materialism, but with the recent growing acceptance of materialism, dogmatism has come to be seen as something like Bishop Berkeley’s spiritism. In the modern view (see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article on idealism), idealism is often paired with its opposite realism, and materialism with its opposite spiritism. Anyone holding a specific world-view usually accuses those holding different views of being dogmatic, that is, holding beliefs that are unquestioned, undefended, and unsubstantiated.

Ladies and gentlemen present!

In the last two lectures I took the liberty of presenting Heraclitus as the representative of the deepest knowledge, the deepest wisdom, as it was at home in ancient Greece up to the fifth and sixth centuries. And I tried to present what has been handed down to us from him, that wisdom which Aristotle says is not something to be absorbed intellectually, and that within the circle in which this wisdom was cultivated, people allowed themselves to be initiated, that they participated in this experience with their own personal involvement. The purpose of this contemplation of Heraclitus was to show how far a single personality, such as Heraclitus, can come, and how, on the other hand, the teachings of such a personality lead into the deepest spiritual life, against the background of which Heraclitus also had his views.

Now I would like to add, as it were to supplement and confirm what I have said, some sayings, some doctrines of Heraclitus which show us quite clearly how directly from these views - as I took the liberty of developing last time - the whole essence of Heraclitus' world view flowed from the relationships of the external world to human consciousness itself.

I have shown that the essence of the Mysteries consisted first of all in the fact that all the views which the great masses had of the origin and nature of the external world are submerged in that view of man which the man of everyday life takes of his ego; that everything appears in a higher light, that man no longer seeks the light outside in space,

but within himself, that therefore the highest knowledge is no longer external knowledge of the world, but his own self-knowledge, that this "know thyself", which runs through Greek wisdom, is not something secondary, but the foundation stone of all Greek wisdom. Knowledge of God can be found in self-knowledge: That, after all, is the essence of the mystery teachings. If we are ultimately led back to our own self, to the soul as that which we find when we look within ourselves; if it is true that - as in the image of Sais - we find nothing but the human self, then this human self, which [man] believes to be enclosed in his bodily life between birth and death, is not a finite self, but this seemingly finite self, this enclosed self expands into the whole universe, so that it ultimately becomes nothing other than the self.

This is the deeper meaning underlying the mysteries. The cosmologies, the doctrines of the origin of the world, represent nothing other than the human being who is able to develop to the highest rungs of consciousness. If the self really is the ultimate being of the world, then one must say that this self has actually been present in what is called world creation, world development. That which constitutes the human being is not merely a reflection of the real, as is assumed in the theory of knowledge. It is assumed that the being of the world is complete and that the human being is nothing other than a mere mirror image. This [mirror image] ceases immediately when this self no longer appears as an individual being, but as a primordial being that has always been present in the whole process. It [is] therefore what man himself is.

Any external fact appears to the senses in a very specific way. Man's belief clings to sense knowledge. This [splits into individual events, into the individual beings] in space and in time. Now man takes this whole event out of time and immerses it in the fire of his consciousness. Only then does it become what it is in its

nature, so that the process of cognition is not merely something that runs alongside the world process, but something that is within it, that is there before it. Cognition is therefore not a repetition of the world process, but a deepening back into the primordial being of the world, into that which actually underlies the world. So whoever is convinced that he is not merely absorbing, but rather pouring out his own essence, connecting with the essence outside, recognizes himself in the world [...]. But man can only achieve this if he climbs up the various rungs [of spiritual development]. That Heraclitus saw in knowledge nothing other than the highest flowering that the world can bring forth, that he did not regard it as something that could also remain absent, emerges from what has come down to us from him. Knowledge appears to us [normally] as something that has been added to the whole world process by chance. That is not how it appears to Heraclitus. For him, the cognizing human being was the truly existing human being; and when we understand this, Heraclitus' worldview will become completely clear to us.

Until Pfleiderer, his worldview was not clearly recognized because man himself is in a constant state of flux. Pfleiderer could not think otherwise than that Heraclitus was caught up in a contradiction. He regarded the rising and falling, the coming and going, which Heraclitus imagined under the image of fire, as the eternal flow of things. The human ego, the human soul, is woven into the cosmic world process. And yet, says Pfleiderer, it is as if Heraclitus assumed an eternal soul. On the one hand we have the highest world principle, the primordial being, which completely excludes individuality, and on the other hand we have the human being, who nevertheless has a certain immortality. On the one hand we have the great world process in the continuous coming and going, and on the other hand the individual self, which is enclosed between birth and death, but can expand into the divine. The mystic, the initiate, differed from the ordinary person precisely in that the

observation of the world and the observation of one's own self was a contradiction for the latter and not for him. The essence of the Mysteries consisted precisely in the fact that through life within the Mystery world this contradiction ceased to be a contradiction. People were supposed to experience something that made the deep disharmony of the world disappear. The initiation, the participation in the Mysteries, was precisely the way to make the contradiction that clings to the ordinary view of things disappear. Thus for the mystics, for those who allowed themselves to be initiated, the ultimate goal was this: to no longer view in this way that which brings the greatest fear to ordinary people, because it apparently makes the physical sense world, the up and down world, the eternally coming events and deeds disappear as if into nothingness, this phenomenon of death. That was the goal of the mystic. The myst should be brought to the point of learning to understand this most terrible event not as that terrible event, but as a symbol of the deepest realization. So what was the most terrible, the most horrible thing for the ordinary person, he should see as an experience. That is why the god of death, Hades, was also the god of life, Dionysus. Death as a symbol, not as a fact, should be presented to the mystics. This is what hovers over all of Heraclitus' sayings, and they can only be understood from this point of view.

When Heraclitus says: corpses are to be regarded as ordinary things, nothing is to be given to the corpse - this takes you much deeper into the Heraclitean view. In Greek there is a certain temptation to compare the human body with the burial mound, because such a comparison can be brought about by a simple play on words. Som" means "body" and "sema" means "burial mound". This play on words was not only used by Heraclitus, but by all those who had anything to do with Greek wisdom. This word leads us much deeper into the matter. Heraclitus is thoroughly imbued with the view, which runs through the whole of Greek mysticism, that what the wise man calls "soul" rests in the body like the body in the burial mound. With an almost sublime word he says that the gods live that which for the ordinary being is death. The immortals live the death of mortals.

Here, in a saying of Heraclitus, we have another form of ordinary understanding, of ordinary Greek wisdom, which consists in seeing death as a symbol, not as a fact, because all the individual things of the external world lose the meaning they have for the everyday man, submerge into the spiritual world and become something completely different there. The things in their ordinary meaning are killed, die under the hand of the recognizing human being. They appear in their infinite, eternal meaning. That which the ordinary man calls life, that which for him is the most fruitful, the real, ceases to be the real. Thus that which the ordinary man calls life, that which the man calls sensuous reality, can be nothing other than that which first gains life and first causes the sensuous to die. That is why death becomes a symbol for this higher view. Now for Heraclitus another view is connected with this, with which he, I would like to say, at the same time also shows in himself what is the basic conviction of all mysticism, namely that of the infinity of knowledge. Those who cling to the ordinary wisdom of the day usually come to the conclusion that we cannot go beyond the sensual. We cannot penetrate into the fundamental being, into the "thing in itself", says [Kant]. Only a single real look into Heraclitus' basic view can show us that Heraclitus was much further along on this point than the followers of Kant's philosophy around the year 1900. Heraclitus is convinced that he who is really able to walk the path will achieve a deep inner experience as a result, which we also find again in the German mystics and especially in Tauler, that if we penetrate into the very essence of the soul, if we immerse ourselves completely in it, we will come to no limits. There are no limits to knowledge. The external things are closed.

We can only penetrate them according to our senses. However, at a certain depth of our self-knowledge, we can step out to even greater depths. There are no limits to knowledge, because self-knowledge cannot stand still. A God who knew everything, who knew everything, would be an obstacle for the mystic. Therefore, there cannot be an all-knowing and all-wise God. For the mystics, there must be something unfinished, there must be the possibility of becoming even more divine and ever more divine, of ascending to ever higher levels of perfection, of deepening more and more.

In this way, Heraclitus expands the world in the direction of self-knowledge to an infinite depth. This saves Heraclitus from any accusation that he said: "I know everything." - For he was also convinced of the impossibility of ever reaching a limit. This shows that Heraclitus also had the true, great, genuine humility that is the consequence of true, genuine self-knowledge, which can never be something perfect and complete. Thus we see that [there is] never despair of knowledge on the path that constitutes the fundamental nature of all mystical contemplation, but the true, genuine confidence that ever new, ever deeper knowledge can be achieved through continuous deepening. This is what underlies Heraclitus' worldview. And this conviction that comes over a person when he realizes this through continuous deepening into his inner being is what Heraclitus describes by saying that the soul strives more and more to come out of the wet into the dry. The wiser a soul is, the more it moves away from the wet, the drier it is. Wisdom passes through it like lightning.

This shows that Heraclitus had arrived at the point where all external views of the world are remelted in the fire of knowledge, where they begin a higher life. Now what initially appears to us as a contradiction dissolves into a higher harmony. The contradiction that exists [on the one hand] between the cosmological worldview, which sees the world before us in

steady coming and going, in a great world harmony, and [on the other hand] the [individual] human being, which is clamped between birth and death, and which then forms an encroachment into the world of man, is resolved by the fact that the [individual] being is only a truth for the lower levels of cognition and that this ceases for the higher [cognition]. [It also ceases] within the temporal life between birth and death, [when] the light of the eternal [shines] into the temporal life, so that it appears as one and the same with the temporal. When [in this way] individual human life appears as equivalent, as synonymous [with the eternal], then the contradiction ceases. This happens because Heraclitus, on the one hand, has a great harmony and, on the other, dissolves the individual entities as if into an immortal entity, as if into an eternal entity. To recognize is to live, and to live is to overcome a contradiction that exists from the beginning. Whoever believes that he can resolve a contradiction by spintizing the intellect will not get beyond the contradiction, will not be able to grasp the essence of mystical views. The mystic knows that there must first be a contradiction and that life consists in overcoming the contradiction in one's own life. This is what Heraclitus wanted to say with his various scattered sayings. But if we have a background in the Mysteries, we can combine these sayings and then get a coherent world view that shows us how this personality shines far into modern times, and that we can gain a great deal if we immerse ourselves in the philosophy of this wonderful personality, if we raise ourselves up by it.

Now a few words about the Greek mystery teaching after we have gone through Heraclitus, because I have to deal with the Orphic teaching together with the Pythagorean school, which spread at about the same time as the Orphic teaching had reached its height. This Orphic teaching also developed a mysticism, and this appears to us next to the

mysticism of the Pythagoreans like a light next to another light. [We have the Orphics on the one side and the Pythagoreans on the other. We get to know the confluence of these two currents about two hundred years later in the Platonic world views. In this, the two currents flow together.

There suddenly appears to us a higher balance between Pythagorean and Orphic mysticism. Greek mysticism had the goal of transforming the most terrible event, death as a fact [into a] symbol for knowledge that continues to deepen. This was only possible if the mystics were introduced step by step, on the higher levels of knowledge. They were led very slowly. The Pythagoreans also practiced slow guidance. It had to be this way because it was not a matter of logical penetration, but of a lively passage through the individual stages of knowledge.

When we look at the content of [their] worldview, the Orphics appear to us to be on a higher level of scientific development than what is contained in the Greek belief in the gods. When we consider the cosmogony of the Orphics, it initially appears to us as a description of external processes. It appears to us as nothing more than mythology translated into scientific language.

So in the profound Orphic world view we have given a world view which first of all regards time as that which existed in the beginning. So it was time from which everything has its origin. From time sprang the ether and chaos. The ether is roughly what we know from Heraclitus as fire. Chaos is the entire abundance and diversity of the material world.

From the connection of chaos with the ether, i.e. the most unlimited and [the] most solid, becoming thus arises with chaos. Becoming presented under an image is the direct outflow of the most rigid. It presents itself as giving birth, as bringing forth. It arises from the fluid. Becoming from the

limited and unlimited. From the egg, Chaos first gave birth to a male-female being. This brought forth from itself a mere female. And from these two emerged the first of what we encounter in Greek mythology as Uranos and Gaea. Uranos and Gaea are swallowed up by [Kronos], so that Zeus in turn absorbs all the earlier world entities that I have just mentioned, [...] and revives them through himself.

We can only translate this world-creation process into inner processes of consciousness. Thus, with this description of external facts, we have what should initially be held against the mystic. We must realize that for the mystic, time, Kronos, [...] has become a vivid experience as an existing emptiness, as that which is not yet, but which can produce everything from itself.

Unfulfilled time appears as the most congruent image of becoming. For consciousness, this can be translated into a state of consciousness with nothing other than memory, so that under Kronos we have to imagine nothing other than the eternal world memory. If we now translate the individual beings, not the state of consciousness of the individual beings, but if we imagine the humanly overcome being, then we attain a state of consciousness that exists only in memory, that things are behind and next to each other and can only be held in [coming] and going within time by connecting the individual with the other individual to the eternal world memory.

From this eternal world memory arises an eternal separation into the most solid and the most rigid.

Within the memory, no distinction can be made between the ether and chaos. This only happens when it becomes possible to distinguish between the material and the spiritual from the eternal. These two stand opposite each other in such a way that the spirit creates its own dualism. It is a matter of allowing consciousness to separate for itself. This creates the material and the spiritual, and

Through this, man first gains the possibility of recognizing something of the very lowest level of the world. The world is in an eternal becoming, and this is nothing other than the eternal transition from coming into being to passing away, from being to non-being. This eternal emergence of that which is not perceptible to the senses into a sensuous existence is the interplay between spirit and matter.

The highest spirits have made this interplay an integral part of the basic teachings. Let us stop here for a moment with Goethe. He is known to have written something about the metamorphosis of plants and animals. He was of the opinion that the beings of the animal and plant kingdoms come into being through the fact that everything is in a state of eternal transformation. Goethe came to this conclusion because he believed that there is a constant interplay between spirit and matter.

Goethe looks at a seed, a small material grain, it seems, a piece of formless matter, which is nothing more than matter, enclosed between certain boundaries. But is that the truth? The same thing that we have before us today as a small material particle will be before us in a very short time as a fully developed plant, with leaves and flowers. The fully developed plant and the small seed are in reality the same thing, one and the same at two different times. They are different in substance, but one and the same.

What is one and the same? The small seed is the same as the large plant. The whole plant is contained in spiritual form in the seed. The spirit has withdrawn into seclusion. This same spirit, which is sensualized in the plant, was already present. The spirit reveals itself in sensual existence and is later present in the plant.

In our world of the senses there is a continuous multiplicity of the spirit, which hides itself, withdraws into a point of matter and then spreads out again and becomes visible, so that what it previously kept invisible, it presents visibly before us. But only by distinguishing between the two entities of spirit

and matter are we able to penetrate this interplay. Seed and plant would fall apart. We would never be able to say that they are one and the same. We would not understand this. The one who cannot perceive soulfully will say: They have nothing to do with each other. The other will say: The whole plant already lies within the seed as the multiplying spirit, which is once in sensual existence and then withdraws again. Only by peeling apart the whole of reality into spirit and matter and following the interplay are we able to understand the interplay.

Then we have arrived at the state that presents itself to the physicians as a state of becoming and giving birth. This is nothing other than the mystery of the presence of the spirit in the real world. We can imagine this under the symbol of the egg, the thing that can bring forth another thing that is spiritually completely equal to it, but sensually different. Thus the whole manifold world no longer presents itself as it appears to the sensual imagination, but as it appears to the spiritual eye before the soul.

Now we have seen that what penetrates upwards is in the seed, then rises upwards, becomes a plant and has thus assumed sensual existence. If we have a plant before us, then the plant is still something that conceals the spirit, that has more spirit than it shows. A higher being, an animal, shows still more spirit; and even in man a great variety of spirit comes to a directly sensuous existence. But the whole essence of the spirit can only be perceived through spiritual work in self-knowledge, so that that which rests in the seed ultimately stands before self-knowledge in its true unveiled form as its own spiritual entity, and the consciousness that contemplates itself, the soul that faces itself, recognizes nothing other than in a revelatory way that which is generally hidden. The spirit that is in the seed is the same spirit that self-consciously confronts the other being, the male-female being that emerges in the multiplicity of the world.

Comprehending this being is a goal of the mystical worldview. It is to be grasped in such a way that the entire consciousness of the person stepping before it becomes spiritualized, that it becomes spirit, will, that it does not merely enter into the person, but presents itself to us illuminated in the outside world. This is what presents itself to the mystic, who now gives birth to the whole world of his own accord. So it is like Zeus, who represents the highest state of consciousness, who has devoured everything and himself.

So the whole cosmogony was nothing more for the mystic than a point of support for understanding the progress and deepening of man. Yes, but the concept is nothing but its own realization. Yes, there was the conviction that knowledge is not something that is added to the world, but that it is precisely the essence itself. The mystical experiences were to be brought to a higher level, for the mystic says that the spirit is present but not yet sensually present, like the spiritual in the seed, which has not yet spread into the plant, but has already been present as such. This is why all the Greek mystics say that the primordial being should not be sought in the past.

The cosmogony is not constructed in such a way that the primordial being stands there as creator, but appears as something in Greek mysticism that is finally climbed as a stage of cognition, so that the process of cognition within Greek mysticism is not a kind of communion, not a connection of man with the eternal world being, but an actual bringing forth. I emphasize: an actual bringing forth, so that for the Greek mystic the most perfect indeed appears as a sensual creation of the world. Sensual creation and spiritual perfection could coincide for the mystic.

The other side of the mystical world view, which did not seek to penetrate to the primordial being, but endeavored to recognize the world by delving into our inner world, emerges in the Pythagorean. One school endeavored to plant the seed in moist soil. The Pythagoreans did

not plant the seed in the soil, but invented a method of discovering the spiritual plant in the seed itself, without sinking the seed into the soil before bringing it to development. In what way? By bringing the seed [spiritually] to development. In what way they [...] wanted to discover the spirit in the seed, we will look at that next time.

Answer to the question:

The question of "where from" is an inherited question for humans. We ask because we see becoming in the process of becoming. We see the thing becoming more perfect. There can be no doubt that the sensual plant is more perfect than the seed. The later is contained in the earlier, only not in reality, but in a spiritual way. The word "beginning" is something future in the doctrines of the origin of the world. A final reflection of the approach of a perfect kingdom is present in early Christianity. It is the same as the kingdom of Zeus. There can be no cause without a corresponding effect. If we ask: Is the one there earlier than the other, it is only because we consider the one earlier. I add the force that is needed to write with a pencil because I feel it; and this expenditure of force is projected out into the world. I also find forces in the outside world. You humanize the outside world. I really put myself into things, I am really in them. The act that you carry out in your head is the initial force of the world. The "before and after" loses its meaning. The seed can look back to the plant that brought it into existence. Its own cause is already present as its own cause, but not in a sensual but in a spiritual way. Every thing is its own cause and does not have a cause. The effect produces itself. We call it force because it is sensual, dull striving. If we want

to imagine the power in the seed, that is already the plant.

If God were to divide his work into time, he would also have to strive for perfection. Only when he is elevated above time and space is everything there at the same time, then he is perfect. All opposites have a point where they meet. "To whom time is like eternity and eternity like time, he is freed from all conflict" [according to Jakob Böhme]. Eternity broken down into individual moments is time. Time summarized is eternity. The circle is limited, the straight line is unlimited, infinite. The Orphics did not arrive at the concept of numbers like the Pythagoreans.

Why did Plato give his views in conversations? He could not have presented it any other way. If you take Plato's "Phaidon" and follow it properly, you will find that it is a conversation between a Socratic initiate and a Pythagorean. The method of the Mysteries led to expression through conversation.