The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees! For many years I have had the privilege of speaking here in this place about anthroposophical spiritual science, its essence and significance for the present spiritual life of humanity. Since I last had the opportunity to do so, the School of Spiritual Science courses have taken place at the Goetheanum in Dornach in September and October of this year. These School of Spiritual Science courses were also intended to demonstrate in practical terms the task that the anthroposophical spiritual science in question seeks to fulfill in relation to the other sciences and to practical life. About thirty personalities from the various branches of science, artistic creation, and also practical life, industrial and commercial life, contributed to this; through them it should be shown how spiritual science can have a fruitful effect not only on the individual branches of science and on artistic creation, but also, and above all, on practical life. Spiritual science should not be limited to theoretical discussions and sentimental descriptions, but should show how it has the means to do precisely that which, in many respects, cannot be done by other sides in the present and in the near future, but which can be undertaken by spiritual science.

Those who are more familiar with the course of intellectual life in the present day know that the opinion and feeling is widespread throughout the individual branches of science that the individual sciences are coming up against certain limits that it is impossible for them to cross. Often it is even thought that it is impossible for humans to go beyond such limits.

But on the other hand, there is also practical life in relation to science. Science should and wants to intervene in practical life. And anyone who is involved in the life of science will not be able to deny that the limits that the various sciences find themselves up against — I need only draw attention to medicine —, that these limits can be settled by philosophical-theoretical arguments that are intended to justify these boundaries, but rather that life often demands human action precisely where science is confronted with such boundaries. The fact that it is indeed possible, through the special method of spiritual science, to enter precisely those areas that modern science points to as boundaries, should be shown on the one hand in the Dornach School of Spiritual Science. It should be shown, not by individual personalities who are merely familiar with spiritual science, but precisely by all people, by personalities who have thoroughly mastered their individual subject just as others have and who are immersed in it, who are the only ones who are able to show how this subject can be stimulated and fertilized by spiritual science. It was also of very special importance that personalities in practical life showed that this special way of thinking, which is based on reality, on full, total reality, to which the spiritual forces of the world certainly belong, that this way of looking at things is capable of accomplishing in practical life what has often had to remain unaccomplished in modern times, and which has indeed been outwardly documented as unaccomplished by the social and other necessities of life in our present time.

Of course, at this point we cannot yet say how successful this anthroposophical spiritual science has been in demonstrating its legitimacy in the spiritual life of the present day through such practical measures. On the other hand, however, it can be said that despite the attacks, of which you have been informed in the preparatory remarks, that despite these attacks, it has been recognized in recent times, even by serious parties, that what is believed by many is not true at all, that one has to deal with anthroposophy [as] with the activity of some obscure sect or the like.

I would like to give just one example to show you how, despite all the opposition, which is not always well-intentioned and, above all, not always well-meaning; how, despite all the opposition, spiritual science is slowly coming to what it must come to, at least to recognition of its earnest striving and its open eye for the cultural needs of the present.

I would like to cite just this one example. The opposing writings are gradually growing into books, and a book has been published in recent weeks called “Modern Theosophy”. For a reason that is, of course, strange, the author states that he is concerned with nothing but spiritual science. He says in the following remarks: Wherever the talk is of theosophy and theosophists, this is always the mode of expression that is more familiar than the expressions anthroposophy and anthroposophists.

Now, one cannot say – and this is addressed to those present – that the author of this writing, Kurt Leese, who has a licentiate in theology, is appreciative of anthroposophy. On the contrary, the whole book is written as a refutation. Nor can it be said that the author of the book understands an enormous amount about anthroposophy. But what he presents on the very first page and repeats many times in the book is something that shows that even from the position of an opponent, it is gradually no longer possible to deny the seriousness of anthroposophy's intentions. Here is what an opponent says:

“If Theosophy were only the random ideas of a small sect fishing in troubled waters, it would not be worth the effort to pay it any attention.”

And then he says that one is dealing with something that shows the foundations of a comprehensively designed world view, powerfully interwoven with an ethical spirit. The fact that this ethical spirit remains even if one negates everything else in anthroposophy is something that the author of this book openly admits:

"Its most active contemporary promoter, Rudolf Steiner, with the tools of great reading and undeniable acumen, has compiled a great wealth of religious-historical, scientific and philosophical material in detail, in order to lay the foundations of a comprehensively designed world view, powerfully imbued with an ethical spirit.

Nevertheless – and now I come to the positive part of my argument – this opponent, who strives to be objective, wants to look for the reasons for refuting anthroposophy from within anthroposophy itself. He wants to take up what the anthroposophist says and prove contradictions and the like, namely, to demonstrate an unscientific character. But at one point he betrays himself in a very strange way. He says, at a particularly characteristic point, that Anthroposophy has an inflammatory effect and is “ill-tempered”.

Such feats of tricky distinctions, which from the outset are in the service of an ideational preconceived scheme, make reading Steiner's writings not only difficult, where multiple misunderstandings of the uninitiated could occasionally occur, but also annoying and unpleasant.

So not only challenging logical judgment, challenging scientific judgment, but challenging feelings and emotions, that is how one views anthroposophy! And why is this so? This is certainly connected with the very special way in which anthroposophy, precisely because it wants to be as scientific as any other science, relates to the paths of knowledge of mankind.

Anthroposophy – of course, as I have said here very often – Anthroposophy would certainly not be taken seriously if it were somehow foolishly dismissive of the great, the significant achievements of the scientific method in modern times. Nor would it be taken seriously if it were to behave in some dilettantish way towards the spirit, the whole inner attitude of scientific research. It starts out from an acknowledgement of modern scientific endeavor. It does this by seeking to deepen its understanding of the scientific method, but at the same time it seeks a path from the comprehension of the external sense world into the comprehension of the spiritual world. And she would like to answer the questions that matter, the questions about the path of knowledge, in such a way that the spiritual realm is given its due, just as the sensory realm is given its due through scientific research. In doing so, she sees herself compelled — not by the scientific method as it is commonly practiced, in which one believes one is limited if one only works in the sensory world — she feels compelled by this scientific method, as it is commonly practiced, not to stop. It devotes itself more to the education, the inner discipline of research than to scientific methods, and for this reason cannot accept what is often dogmatically stated today as to the necessity of remaining in the world of sense and in the world of appearances through understanding.

And from this point of view, spiritual science seems provocative, as this critic says, and “unpleasant”. For on the whole, today's man is not inclined to accept any method of knowledge that does not arise from the ordinary characteristics of human nature, that one has in the world, that one has been educated to, or that follow from the course of ordinary life. The great and most wonderful achievements of modern natural science are based on the fact that one remains at a certain point of view of sense observation, of experiment and of combining through the intellect, that one carries out this kind of research further and further, conscientiously, but that one wants to remain with the point of view that one has once adopted in this way.

Spiritual science, as it is meant here, cannot remain at this point of view, but it must, it feels compelled, precisely because of the strict scientific education that the spiritual scientist has to undergo. It feels compelled – not only to knowledge applied in natural science, to expand it, to make it more precise through all kinds of aids — but she feels compelled to develop a completely different kind of knowledge in the soul, a different way of knowing than the one used in natural science today. She therefore feels compelled to continue the work of the scientist into the spiritual realm, so that the development of this spiritual scientific method can be characterized more as a natural outgrowth of the scientific method than as a mere extension of it. And so one arrives at what has been expressed by me from the most diverse points of view over the years.

One comes to the conclusion that in the life of the human soul there are certain forces that are hidden, just as they are hidden from ordinary perception and from ordinary scientific perception, just as those soul forces that only emerge after five or ten years are hidden in a ten-year-old child. What must be borne in mind is a real growth of the human being, a sprouting forth of that which is not yet there in the tenth year but continues into the fifteenth or twentieth year. And this is discovered by the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here, that even if one has developed to the point of having the methods by which one can conduct scientific research in the most conscientious way, it is still possible – so that it can be compared with a real growth of the human being – to soul forces, that it is possible to extract soul forces from the human soul, which the world can now not only see, I would like to say, more precisely with a microscope or more closely with a telescope, but which see the world quite differently, namely spiritually and soulfully, in contrast to the merely sensory view.

And it is not attempted – esteemed attendees – to somehow explore the spiritual through external measures or external experiments. How could one recognize the supernatural through laboratory experiments! That is what those who are inclined towards spiritualism want, that is what those people who gather around Schrenck-Notzing or others want. The anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here takes precisely this view, that what can be observed externally through measures that are modeled on the external scientific experiment - however astonishing they may be - that by world in some way, be it by deepening or refining it, or by allowing it to work more into the etheric in some way —, that by remaining in the sensory world, one can by no means gain knowledge of the supersensible world. But modern man often finds this unacceptable, that he should now do something with his soul forces, that he should develop these soul forces himself before he can research in the spiritual world.

It is, however, necessary to develop a certain intellectual modesty, which consists in saying to oneself: the powers that are so well suited for the sensory world, such as those applied by modern science, cannot be used to enter the spiritual world. Man must first awaken his own supersensible when he wants to explore the supersensible in the external environment, to which he belongs as a spiritual-soul being just as he belongs to the physical world through his sense of being, when he wants to explore this spiritual-soul entity in the environment.

It is certainly not everyone's cup of tea, dear attendees, to become a spiritual researcher; but if one does not want to become a spiritual researcher, it is nevertheless not acceptable to say that spiritual science is idle because it opens up a field that only those who, in a certain sense, develop their soul powers can see into.

Modern humanity as a whole does not follow the path into the scientific method itself; but modern life is permeated by the ideas that we bring into it through science. We are simply compelled by common sense to accept what radiates from the natural sciences, to incorporate it into life, and to apply it in other ways to the human condition. Just as the researcher in the laboratories carries out his experiments, which then go out into the world, so too will there be a new spiritual research. But humanity in general wants to be able to relate to the results of spiritual research in the same way as it can relate to those of natural science, without having to face the reproach that something has been accepted on mere faith or on authority.

What is indicated as this special inner, intimate soul method is to be sought in a straightforward development of human soul forces that already exist in ordinary life and in ordinary science. I would like to say that it comes to mind that there must be something like this when one brings to mind the actual meaning of knowledge in modern scientific life.

I am certainly no Kantian, dear attendees. Everything that arises for me from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is basically anti-Kantian. But I may refer to one of Kant's sayings here, because what lies in this saying has basically been verified by the whole of more recent scientific development, insofar as this whole more recent scientific development really strives to be knowledge of the world, comprehensible knowledge of the world. There is Kant's dictum: In every science, there is actually only as much real science to be found as there is mathematics present in it.

Now, my dear attendees, this is not something that we need merely believe about Kant; rather, we see it as true everywhere in the scientific development of modern times, especially in the development that most clearly and most directly leads to a world view, in the physical sciences. Mathematical thinking is applied, experiments are carried out, and not only observed, but the observations are permeated with mathematics. What does that actually mean?

Yes, it means that one only has the feeling of bringing intellectual light into what can be observed in the external world when one has verified the observations in a mathematical way. And how is that? Yes, it is because one comprehends mathematical insights through oneself, and does not become acquainted with mathematical insights through external observation. The one who once knows through inner contemplation that the three angles of a triangle are 180°, who can grasp this for himself through his own contemplation, in ordinary Euclidean geometry, he knows it. He knows it clearly through his own intuition, even if millions of people were to contradict him, he knows it. He can affirm it as a truth for his inner contemplation. It is therefore the inner work of contemplation through which one comes to mathematical truths, through which one, so to speak, inwardly experiences mathematical truths. And external observation becomes scientific in that one carries what one has observed inwardly into these external observations and connects it with them.

Especially when one has experienced this urge of the modern scientific direction in oneself through mathematics, that is, through an inwardly clear, light-filled pursuit of certain ideas in order to arrive at scientific paths that also satisfy the human need for knowledge, then one is pushed further. And then something else arises. I would say that it arises from the depths of life. From the depths of our soul, all kinds of needs for knowledge arise in the face of the great riddles of existence.

At first, in a very vague way, the human being wants to know something about what his or her essential core is. He wants to know something, or at least, one can say, he assumes that there is something to know about that which lies beyond birth and death. He also assumes that, however dark his path may be with regard to what he calls his fate, there may be a path of knowledge that allows him to somehow see through the seemingly so confused threads of human destiny. In the very act of experiencing such surging up from the soul, the human being will, I would say, become more and more aware through inner soul practice of how he is prompted when he wants to observe his inner soul , this thinking, feeling and willing that is in him, when he wants to observe it in a similar transparent way to how he already manages to a certain extent today to penetrate the outer world with mathematical concepts. And from what one experiences there as a driving force for knowledge, the spiritual researcher starts from there, he comes to the conclusion that one can further develop certain soul powers than are present in ordinary life, that one can further develop certain soul powers that are absolutely necessary for a healthy human existence in ordinary life.

Now, one of these ordinary soul abilities, without whose normal functioning we cannot be mentally healthy, is the ability to remember. My dear attendees! We all know this ability to remember; but we also know how necessary it is for a healthy, normal soul life. We know of pathological cases in which the thread of memory is interrupted up to the point of childhood, which is the furthest we can remember in life, where we cannot look back at the life we have gone through since our birth. When a person's thread of memory, his stream of memory, is interrupted in this way, then he feels, as it were, hollowed out inside. His soul life is not healthy and he cannot find his way healthily into the outer life, neither into social life nor into natural life. So the ability to remember is something that is, so to speak, absolutely intertwined with normal human life. Memory is connected to what we experience through our senses, what we go through in our interaction with the outer world. How does this memory present itself to us?

We can summon it quite well in our being if we do so through an image. In a sense, our life lies behind us at every moment like an indeterminate stream. But we live in our soul in such a way that from this state indefinite currents can emerge, the images of individual experiences, that we can bring up these images through more or less arbitrary inner actions, that they also come to us involuntarily and the like. It is as if a stream of our being were there and from this stream these images of our memory could emerge like waves.

Those who do not think with prejudice but truly from the spirit of modern science know how closely this ability to remember is connected with the human body, with the physical nature of the human being. We can, we need only point to what physiology and biology can tell us in this regard: how the ability to remember is somehow connected with the destruction of the body. And we will see how all this points to the fact that a truly inwardly healthy body is necessary for the human being to have the ability to remember in a healthy state.

This ability to remember is such that, in the right way, I would say the vividness of the external sensory perceptions that we experience in our connection with the external world, that this vividness of external sensory perception must [fade] in a certain way. We may recall the images of our experiences only in a faded state, and we must recall these images in such a way that we can participate with our will in an appropriate manner in this recall. These images must emerge in our inner soul life in a pale and somewhat arbitrary manner. And it is well known that when these images of memory emerge with a certain vividness and intensity, and when the human will, when the structure of the ego, must recede before these images, when a person cannot firmly persist in his ego in the face of these images, then hallucinations, visions, everything arises through which the human being is actually deeper in his body than he is connected when he is in the ordinary life of perception and memory.

This must be assumed in order to avoid misunderstanding spiritual science, especially with regard to its method, that spiritual science is quite clear about it in the moment when what is called a vision, what is called a hallucination, what you can call more intense images of fantasy, that in that moment the person is not freer from his physical life, but that he is more dependent on the physical life through some pathological condition than he is in ordinary external existence. The belief that spiritual science has anything to do with such pathological conditions of the soul must be fought against. On the contrary, it emphasizes more sharply than the external life that those who believe that one can look into the spiritual world by indulging in such abnormal soul phenomena, caused only by pathological bodily conditions, as they are, for example, those that occur in mediumship, that occur as hallucinations, as visions and the like, are quite on the wrong track.

What the spiritual researcher does as an inner activity of the soul is much more – my dear audience – than that. This is brought into a state of mind that is entirely modeled on the way this soul proceeds when it devotes itself to mathematical thinking. Just as mathematical thinking is completely permeated by the ego, which is constantly in control of itself. And just as every transition is made in such a way that one is, as it were, everywhere inside and knows how one thing passes into another, so too must the spiritual researcher's method in the inner life of the soul proceed in such a state of mind. Starting from the ability to remember, he draws on the most important quality of this ability to remember. It consists in the fact that memory makes permanent that which we otherwise experience only in the moment. What we have experienced in the moment remains with us for our lifetime. But how does it remain permanent for us?

If we take what I have already said, the dependence of normal human mental life on the body, then we have to realize that we maintain our memory normally when it is based on our body helping us to have this ability to remember. It is based on the fact that we do not have to work with just our soul when we want to remember. We know, after all, that what later comes up as a memory has descended into the indeterminate depths of bodily life. And again, it also comes up from the indeterminate depths of life. These depths, so to speak, pass on to our bodily life what is brought about in us through sensory impressions and through the intellectual processing of these impressions. We then bring it up again by lifting that which is experienced bodily in the time between the bodily life and the memory, by lifting it up into the imagination. We thus borrow our ideas, by becoming memories, the clear perception, to which we devote ourselves in mathematical thinking.

The spiritual researcher nevertheless ties in with precisely this lasting of the ideas in the memory. And that then leads him to what I have called the appropriate meditation in my writings, especially in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in my “Occult Science: An Outline”. There it shows itself, I have characterized it many times, and you will find it discussed in more detail in the books mentioned. You bring into your consciousness an individual set of ideas or a complex of ideas and hand over — as I said — so that any reminiscences that emerge from the subconscious do not enter what you are to do only through human will, just as you do mathematical connecting and analyzing through human will. So you place certain ideas, which you have guessed or somehow obtained, at the center of your consciousness for a long time – and with the same completely clear, mathematically clear day consciousness – such ideas that you, so to speak, perform the activity, perform it mentally: to rest on ideas, as can otherwise only be achieved with the help of the physical body.

And then we see that this resting on certain ideas does indeed have a success. Then we see that we become aware of forces resting within our soul that have nothing to do with the physical body, that do not at all lead into the realm of hallucination or vision, that remain entirely within the realm in which the soul moves when it develops mathematics. But it is also an inner development of ideas, it is a spiritual experience of ideas. It is only necessary to bring other ideas than mathematical ones to the center of the soul's life, then a different ability than that of mathematical thinking will develop.

And one should not imagine that this is particularly easy and comfortable. Such exercises must be continued for years by those who want to become genuine spiritual researchers. But then it also turns out that forces were previously latent in the soul, hidden, which are now brought out. He then feels he has certain powers. Above all, the soul's ability to perceive, to perceive spiritually and mentally, is added to the ability to perceive sensually and intellectually that he had before. The human being becomes capable, as it were, of developing in real terms from within what Goethe more symbolically called the 'eye of the mind' and the 'ear of the mind'. The human being becomes capable of seeing differently than before, and above all, he first sees his own soul life differently.

I have pointed out that we have experienced this soul life since birth in an initially indeterminate stream, which we actually only have in mind in a very vague way, and from which the memory images then emerge. But it must be added that we ourselves are actually this stream. Just try to apply the “know thyself” correctly. You will see that in ordinary life you are actually nothing other than this stream, this stream that is so indeterminate, but from which all kinds of things we have experienced can emerge again and again. One is the Self. But one ceases to be the Self in a certain sense when one meditates in the way I have just indicated. I just called meditation this resting on certain ideas, although in practice it is necessary to develop the previously hidden soul powers within the human being. And the first success of this is that what we are otherwise always immersed in, what we are otherwise always, the context of our memories – because otherwise, in our ordinary state of consciousness, we are basically nothing but the stream of our memories – that this becomes more objective for us, that it becomes something external for us, that we learn to look at it.

That we have thus lifted ourselves out of it in full mathematical clarity and that we look at it. That is the first experience we have. In a certain moment of our consciousness, as a result of meditation, we have our life in front of us like a memory tableau, at least almost back to birth, like a unified whole, like a totality, like a panorama. It is not exactly what we have before us as memory images, but what we have before us is actually our inner self, inasmuch as we experience what existence has made of us, as in a totality. I would like to say that the whole stream, which we are otherwise ourselves, lies before us. We have lifted ourselves out of this stream.

This is the first experience that we have of ourselves in time, in the duration of the overview, that we actually do not merely remain in the moment through practical inner soul-making, but that we overview life as such.

But we learn something else through this as well. By making our soul life objective in this way, we learn to educate ourselves about processes that we actually go through every day, that we also observe externally, but that we certainly cannot observe from within in everyday life. This is the process of falling asleep, the process of waking up in ordinary life. One would indeed succumb to a bitter contradiction if one wanted to believe that what the soul contains dies every time one falls asleep and is reborn every time one wakes up. This soul content is there from falling asleep to waking up. But since in ordinary life a person can only have consciousness through the interaction of his soul with his body, but in the state of sleep the soul has detached itself from the body, so from falling asleep to waking up, within the ordinary consciousness, the person cannot know anything about himself.

But by having ascended to such a realization, as I have just characterized it, by having one's life as a continuous presence beside one, one can also enlighten oneself about the process of falling asleep and waking up. Because the human being is, by moving out of his ordinary experience, by learning to look at himself, he is in the same state – he learns to recognize that he is in the same state from direct experience, that he is in the state – in which he is otherwise, unconsciously, when he is between falling asleep and waking up. In this way, one learns to recognize the process of falling asleep and waking up. In this way, one learns to recognize that one knows: Now you have placed yourself in a state where you can see your life. But this is only a brief state of realization. Then you go back to ordinary life. So you have the state of the soul outside of ordinary experience and the ordinary state in which you are otherwise, where you are within your experiences. This re-entry into the state of ordinary life is exactly the same as waking up. And going out of oneself is learned by direct observation; going out and objectivizing of life is exactly the same as, when seen inwardly, falling asleep. So you learn to look at these two processes inwardly. But through that you get the elements to look at something else.

However, then there must be a certain expansion of what I have mentioned. I have said that today I can only point out – my dear audience – how the spiritual researcher puts certain ideas at the center of his consciousness. But he must actually attach very special importance to not just being able to rest with his consciousness on such ideas, but he must also be able to arbitrarily — and that must happen through completely different exercises, you can read about them in the books mentioned — he must be able to arbitrarily suppress these ideas again, to embrace them with his consciousness. He must thus inwardly become master — if I may repeatedly use the expression — over these ideas, which are essentially like pictures, viewed pictures, colored viewed pictures. No matter how people laugh at what Goethe called and what I also described in my “Theosophy” as “viewing images in the imagination,” what Goethe called “sensual-supersensory viewing.” Just as one can speak of a colored looking, just as one can speak of a colored looking towards the outside world, so one can speak of a colored looking at the inner images. It arises from the fact that something becomes objective. And the soul life becomes objective, as I have described it, through meditation.

But the person must also be able to remove all of this again. As you know, he is not capable of this in the case of a pathological state of mind. With mathematical clarity, the person must move in this bringing up of the ideas and in this removing of the ideas again. In that the human being, in this way, swings back and forth in his consciousness between ideas that he brings into his consciousness at will and then removes again, he practices a kind of systole and diastole, a kind of exhaling and inhaling. The spiritual-soul inner mobility comes about through this.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the method of entering the spiritual worlds that is entirely appropriate for our age. It is appropriate to enter the spiritual worlds consciously. In the old days, when people instinctively plunged into the spiritual worlds, especially through the Oriental method, they tried to consciously elevate the breathing process, thus also trying to perform an inner activity by striving to inwardly oversee the breathing process, and then to see in the breathing process that which is present as the inner being of the human being. This process does not lead people into the spiritual world in an appropriate way in the present time. Those who want to bring it back, to bring back old institutions, are actually acting against the development of humanity. Today it is appropriate for humanity to replace this method of physical breathing with a different systole and diastole – with that which I have just characterized as a sitting down of the images brought about by the will and then again arbitrarily bringing these images out of consciousness.

On the one hand, by coming to imagination and thereby describing the reverse path – and by moving further and further away from what I have described here as a conscious back and forth in meditative life – man then learns to recognize how to expand what one grasps elementarily in inhaling and exhaling. And one gets to know this as a soul process that is essentially based on a kind of longing for the body after being outside of the body for a period of time. And you learn to recognize what you experience with your soul from birth to death, how that brings the soul into the inner state in which you feel compelled to devote yourself to an [antipathy] towards life again for a while.

You then expand these ideas, but not through philosophical speculation, but by expanding your inner capacity for knowledge. And in this way one arrives at — just as one otherwise advances from a simpler species to a more complicated one — one arrives at inwardly beholding, from the inward beholding comprehension of [awakening], the complicated process that is present when the permanent part of a person, through birth or conception from the spiritual world into the physical body, when it develops the greater desire not only to return to the existing body as in waking up, but to embody itself in a new body, having been in the spiritual world for a while, having now embodied itself again.

And one learns to recognize from falling asleep, by getting to know the moment of dying in an embodiment, one learns to recognize: Through the gate of death, the soul that outlasts the course of a person's life goes to continue living in the spiritual world. One does not learn through a logical or elementary force, for example, but by falling asleep and waking up, the processes of being born and dying, or by becoming familiar with these processes in nature, but rather by moving from element to element of inner experience with mathematical clarity.

But this, dear attendees, is how one arrives at the second stage of a higher consciousness, which I have always called – please don't take offense at the term, it is just a terminology that one has to use – inspiration – through which one looks back at the lasting in ordinary physical life as at a flowing panorama. Through inner contemplation and spiritual science, it is possible to grasp the eternal in the human being. And it is possible to grasp this eternal in man. It is possible for man to recognize his connection with the supersensible-eternal just as man recognizes his connection with the sense world when he awakens the consciousness in himself through which man beholds his connection in the physical world.

These things, they certainly enter into present consciousness, my dear audience, in the same way as the Copernican worldview, for example, once entered, contradicting everything that came before, the Copernican worldview or similar. But even if what I have just mentioned still seems paradoxical to so many people today, we must remember that the Copernican worldview also seemed quite paradoxical to people at the time of its emergence.

And then, my dear audience, you also learn how to develop another human soul power, that of memory, which is trained in a way that I have just described. One learns not only to recognize this, but also another human soul power, which now also leads into ordinary normal life, only, I would say, leads into it, nevertheless, its origin is a physical one, in a more moral way into the higher life. One learns to recognize how this soul power is capable of a different development than that which it has in ordinary life. One learns to recognize how love can become a power of knowledge.

I am well aware, esteemed attendees, of how contradiction must arise from today's world view when one says: Love will be made into a power of knowledge. After all, love is seen as subjective, as that which must be excluded from all science. Nevertheless, anyone who experiences such things in their soul, as I have described to you, by developing into a spiritual researcher, knows that what develops in ordinary life as love is a human ability that is connected with the human being, and that this love cannot only be experienced by the human being when he is confronted with some beloved external object, but that it can also be experienced inwardly by the human being as a general human characteristic. It can be heightened spiritually, and I might say quite intimately, by developing that which one also applies in ordinary life. Precisely when we extend the ability to remember, to concentrate on any single content of consciousness, any object, just as in the past one repeatedly and repeatedly raised images arbitrarily in duration [by concentrating on the object, initially arbitrarily], by being in a certain interaction with the external world. By developing our will into concentration, we learn to recognize how that which otherwise expresses itself through the physical body of man as love can be grasped by the soul, how it can be detached from the body by the soul, just as in the ability characterized earlier.

But through this – my dear attendees – by learning to recognize how a person is inwardly constituted as a loving being, which otherwise only ignites in interaction with external beings, by absorbing these inner qualities, this inner impulsivity of the human being into the soul — the individual exercises for this you can also find in the books mentioned —, in this way one arrives at what I characterized earlier, this being born and dying as a physical waking up and falling asleep, not only to look at this inwardly, but also to see through it inwardly. But through this, human life is moved into a completely different sphere.

Let us take a look at this human life as it touches us by fate. We face this human life, meet hundreds and hundreds of people. In a place where life has brought us, something ignites in this or that being that brings us into a meaningful connection with fate. The one who only looks at life with an ordinary consciousness speaks of coincidence, speaks of the one that has just happened to him from the inexplicable depths of life. But the one who has brought the soul forces, which are otherwise hidden, out of his soul to the degree that I have characterized it so far, he certainly sees how, in the subconscious depths, not illuminated by ideas for the ordinary consciousness, but in the subconscious depths, in man, there rests that which is akin to desire, which drives one in life.

When you have prepared yourself to survey your life like a panorama, when you have become aware of the permanent, the eternal, that goes through birth and death, when you have developed the abilities to can see this, then – my dear attendees – then these abilities, when they are still warmed by a special training of the ability to love, then abilities in life develop in such a way that we learn how we have shaped our lives, in order to bring it – let us say – in individual cases, to the point where we have been affected by this or that stroke of fate.

We learn to recognize how life is connected in relation to what otherwise lies in the subconscious. And from there, the realization goes, how what now underlies this fateful connection of life points to repeated earthly lives. How that which we can follow with the developed soul powers, in the course of our destiny, warmed by the power of knowledge of the ability to love, how that brings us the awareness that we have gone through many earth lives and will still go through many earth lives. And that between the lives on earth there are always stays in the purely spiritual-soul world, in which the soul experiences what is conceptual from previous lives on earth, that which we have raised up into thinking above all, how this is transformed into an inner soul metamorphosis, into desire, which then pushes towards a new life on earth. This new life on earth is shaped in this way. What is the fateful connection of life becomes transparent.

Now, my dear attendees, I have only been able to sketch out the results that spiritual science, which is based on scientific education but which also develops this scientific education further, comes to. That this spiritual science is not a theory, not a collection of mere thoughts and ideas, is obvious when one considers its value for human life. At the same time, however, one must point out what this spiritual science can be, especially for people of the present and the near future and for humanity in various times.

It is very remarkable how the critic I spoke to you about earlier, who only speaks from the consciousness of the present and criticizes spiritual science to no end, nevertheless recognizes the value of which I spoke to you earlier, how this man speaks of the evaluation of life. This man is full of ideas about what he imagines to be the scientific nature of the present. He wants to evaluate spiritual science, but he has hardly got to know it, he has read everything that has been published, he claims. But then he can ask the following question:

What is all the talk of service [of knowledge, of the riddles of life and their solutions, what is all the momentum if, despite all the momentum, it leads to primeval depths and remoteness, if the theosophist]

— as I said, he means anthroposophist —

[cannot say] why it is better to be an I than a non-I.

Now, my dear attendees, imagine a person who states: What is all this talk about spiritual worlds for, if one cannot come to know why it is better to be a 'I than a non-I'? The answer to this question cannot be given theoretically. And the science that the man is talking about can actually only satisfy theorists. What does the science that the man is talking about actually have to say about everything? As I said, it is precisely from the humanities that the full value of the modern scientific method for the external sense practice should be fully recognized. It would certainly be foolish not to recognize what the X-ray method, what microscopy, what the telescope and numerous other [methods and instruments] have achieved in recent times for the knowledge of the external sense world. And it would be foolish, and above all amateurish, not to recognize the value of scientifically conscientious methods for disciplining the human capacity for knowledge. But everything that works in external experimentation, in external observation and in the mathematical processing of external observations, is basically only something that works on the human intellect. And however paradoxical it may sound, anyone who does not go through these things, I would even say not just professionally but in their whole way of life, comes to ask themselves: What can the ordinary scientific method, when it develops a world view, give us about human life? One sees it in such results. People with such a method then ask: Why is it more valuable to be “I than not-I”? Why not live as an unconscious [atom] in the universe? Why live as a conscious I?

Spiritual science, by looking more deeply, must say: What is it that gives you life, the science that has indeed achieved such great triumphs for the inner life of the soul? Does this science give us more than knowledge of the digestive processes, of the nutritional content of food for hunger? It gives us the intellectual, it gives us what can be described. It also provides clues as to how what is done instinctively can be done rationally in a certain way. But science as such can say how hunger should be satisfied, what is in the foods that satisfy hunger. But it could never satisfy hunger itself with its descriptions.

We must, however, translate this from the physical into the spiritual-soul realm. And here it must be said that spiritual-scientific knowledge, even if it has to be expressed in ideas and concepts, can be grasped by immersing oneself in these concepts and in what spiritual researchers are able to say about them from the spiritual worlds. By learning to recognize the enduring, the eternal, and the repeated earthly lives in the physical life of a person, the eternal, repeated earth-lives, the connection with destiny and thus also a world picture in connection, as it is presented in my “Occult Science in Outline”, in a spiritual-scientific way. He who lives into all this does not bring forth concepts that merely describe something about the human being, as the various scientific concepts do. Rather, they bring forth real images that, when experienced, have the power to affect the whole human being, to take hold of the feelings and will impulses of this whole human being and, so to speak, are simply soul food, spiritual-soul food — it is not just spoken of the thing — and which therefore also work into the spiritual-soul. So that the I does not have to answer the question theoretically, why it would be better to be an 'I than a non-I', but by giving itself to what radiates out of this spiritual science with all the warmth, with all the light of the spiritual, it does not merely have the possibility of giving a description from outside, but it lives in the concept the essence of the matter itself. The concepts are only the bearers of the matter itself.

This is the peculiar thing that is not at all seen in spiritual scientific literature, that it is spoken differently, not just words about something, but that the words are rooted in real experience, they are the carriers of the living experience. And that, indeed, anyone who listens carefully, if they have an ear for it, can feel all of this in the words, that they are not just descriptions of spiritual and mental processes, but these spiritual and mental processes themselves.

This, ladies and gentlemen, shows us that this spiritual science can indeed be of use in our practical lives. And it has indeed already tried to find practical application in a wide variety of fields, as I mentioned at the beginning. It has done so in a particularly important area. We have founded the Free Waldorf School in Stuttgart. It is based entirely on the idea of those schools that will one day be there when the threefold social order, as I have described it in my “Key Points of the Social Question” and as I have also presented it here and repeatedly presented it in Bern, will become a fact.

This Waldorf School is a truly independent school. That is to say, it is governed by its own teaching body, which is a direct consequence of the loophole in the Württemberg education laws. The teachers are completely sovereign as a teaching body. The school is administered by the teachers. And the administration of the school itself is just as much a consequence of the pedagogical-didactic impulses as what is taught is a consequence of the pedagogical-didactic impulses.

Of course, there is no longer time to describe to you in detail the principles of this Waldorf school. I will just say that an attempt was made not to found a school based on a particular worldview. Catholic priests teach Catholic religious education there, and Protestant priests teach Protestant religious education there. Those children who, through their own will or that of their parents, do not have such a religion, are instructed in a free religious education. But it is not at all intended to impose any kind of world view on the children. The Waldorf School is not a school of world view! What is to prevail from the roots of anthroposophical spiritual science is merely the art of pedagogy and didactics, the way in which one teaches. Anthroposophy does not want to be a theory; anthroposophy wants to be transferred into the practical handling of life. It has already proven itself in this way, although of course after one year one cannot say anything special, and especially in the pedagogical-didactic art of the Waldorf school.

I would like to mention just one thing from the end of the previous school year and the beginning of this school year. At the end of the last school year, we saw how it affects children when they are given the kind of report cards that we gave them at the Waldorf School, which was founded by Emil Molt in Stuttgart and established by me. There are sometimes classes at the Waldorf School with fifty children, or even more than fifty children in the last school year. Nevertheless, it was possible to depart from the usual way in which teachers assess their pupils. All these patterns of 'sufficient', 'almost sufficient', 'halfway, almost satisfactory' and so on and so forth, you can't find your way around at all, you don't know how to grade it, where to take it from. All these things were left out in the Waldorf school. Each child was described individually, how they had been received at the school, how they had behaved, so that the teacher could see from the report what the child had gone through in that one school year. And each child was given a saying that was individually tailored to their soul life. Despite the fifty pupils in each class, the way in which the teachers practised the art of pedagogy and didactics, based on the spirit of the anthroposophical worldview, meant that they were able to formulate a life verse, a life force verse, for each individual child, which was included in the report card and which the child would visualize in his or her soul. And we have seen – for we seek the art of education in a living psychology, in a living study of the soul – how it affected the child, in that it allowed him to see himself in the mirror, so to speak. And if I may mention something else: when the children came back from their vacations, it was really the case that they came back with a different state of mind than children are usually seen to have after vacations in schools. They longed to go back to school.

And there is something else I want to tell you. Every time I came to this school for an inspection – esteemed attendees – I did not fail to ask a question very systematically, again and again, among other things: Do you love your teachers? And one can distinguish, my dear attendees, whether something comes wholeheartedly from the human soul or whether it is just some conventional answer. When this “Yes!” resounded directly and fundamentally from the soul, then one could see how what had been attempted as a pedagogical-didactic art from anthroposophical spiritual science had indeed found validity.

We are not yet allowed to work unhindered in many areas of life. But where it is possible, it must also be done in such a way that, on the one hand, what can be brought from spiritual science, as it is meant here, and, on the other hand, what corresponds to the needs, longings and hardships of our time in the true sense of the word, is brought together. In this context, it is also important to point out how numerous personalities in history who devote themselves to artistic creation instinctively seek new paths.

Such a new artistic path, but now not at all out of some theory, not out of ideas, for example through symbolism or straw-like allegory, but through living feeling, such a path was also sought in Dornach itself through the construction of the Goetheanum. Spiritual science, as it is meant here, was not in a position to simply take a master builder and say: Build me a building here in such and such a style, and there we will practice spiritual science in this building. No, my dear audience, spiritual science is something that life works because it is life. And so spiritual science, as it is meant here, as I said, cannot be allegorized, cannot be symbolized, but by looking at the human being at the same time, by working on the whole human being, it can stimulate the forces of artistic creation and the forces of artistic enjoyment. In this way it can also point the way for the future in the same way as it points the way for the new needs of the present in intellectual life, and can increasingly point the way for the future in artistic matters.

We need not only – my dear audience – see how the artistic has developed in the course of human development, how this artistic, which in the course of human development has indeed come to light in such peaks as in Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, how this artistic presupposes, in that it has always been drawn from the supersensible, how it presupposes that the sensory, the outwardly sensory, really strives towards what one wants to experience in the idealized. And this idealization is what basically characterized the artistic epoch that artistic personalities in particular feel is over and that new paths must be sought in relation to it. When one stands before the Sistine Madonna, one is confronted with something that is thoroughly material. But at the same time, one is confronted with something in relation to which one must say: the artist experienced it in such a way that the spiritual emerged directly from the material. He rose up out of the material into the spiritual; he idealized the material.

Now we are entering a stage of human development in which, in the spiritual life, in the life of knowledge, we must really look — as I have indicated — at the spiritual as such, so that the spiritual can be seen directly. We are thus also faced with the path that is artistically most appropriate for humanity in the present and near future. If an old art idealized, a new art must realize.

Spiritual beholding also longs for realization, just as sensual beholding longs for idealization. And just as one does not arrive at a truthful or dominant artistic creation by only having artistic spirit through idealization, so too does one not arrive at an allegorical or symbolic artistic creation by realizing what has been spiritually beheld. Those who, I might say, theoretically defame what can be seen in Dornach find all kinds of symbols and allegories, but they see them themselves. There is not a single symbol or allegory in the whole of the Dornach building, the Goetheanum. What can be found there has been seen in the spiritual world and realized out of the spiritual world. The architectural and sculptural elements of the building are there as a result of what was seen in the spiritual world and realized in the material world. What was seen spiritually is not shaped into ideas or concepts, but is actually seen. It is seen in full, living concreteness. And it is only incorporated into the material in a living way. It is seen in full concreteness.

This shows, dear attendees, how spiritual science can indeed also have a fruitful effect on artistic creation and enjoyment. And by leading people through its results to a life together with the spirit from which they themselves come, and towards which they seek their path out of the sensual world, which they hope for after death, out of which they know they are born if they only look at existence correctly; by Spiritual science brings man together precisely with regard to that which wants to develop most clearly, brightly, and luminously in him through the life of imagination, which otherwise remains only in abstractions that are foreign to life. It deepens in man that feeling which is the actual religious feeling. And that should be seen in the right light. One should not strive to block the path of this spiritual science based on denominations. For one can show by the example of Christianity itself what spiritual science can be for religious feeling, for the whole religious life.

What then does Christianity depend on, my dear audience? Christianity depends on the Mystery of Golgotha being understood in the right way. If one does not understand how, through the Mystery of Golgotha, something we call the Christ united with earthly life from extraterrestrial worlds, if one does not understand that there is something in the Mystery of Golgotha that cannot be exhausted by observation from the sense world, but must be grasped through spiritual contemplation, then one cannot do justice to the Mystery of Golgotha. That is why even the most modern theology has come to omit from the Mystery of Golgotha that which can only be grasped spiritually, and to speak only – in a sense naturalistically – of the simple man from Nazareth. Modern theology speaks of a man, however outstanding he may be, who at most had the consciousness of God within him. While spiritual science will bring back the Christian consciousness to grasp the mystery of Golgotha as a supersensible event in itself, as an event through which not only a man stands in the course of human development, who developed the consciousness of God a certain way, but who was the bearer of an entity that came from extraterrestrial worlds at a certain point in the development of the earth in order to henceforth, renewing human life, continue to exist with this human life.

The Christ event, in turn, is grasped by spiritual science as an impact from the extraterrestrial, from the spiritual-supernatural into earthly life. And the whole of earthly development is understood in such a way that it is a preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha, a leaning towards the Mystery of Golgotha of everything that has gone before, and a streaming forth of the impulse of this Mystery of Golgotha through the events that follow.

But one also learns to understand the difference between the event of Golgotha, which stands for itself and can be grasped by everyone according to their abilities, and what is taught about this mystery of Golgotha in any given time.

The first Christian centuries took their concepts from the Oriental world view and made the mystery of Golgotha vivid and explainable from these concepts. Then, gradually, another world emerged in the spiritual life of Western humanity. The natural sciences arose. The human spirit has become accustomed to other ways of understanding. We see today how these ways of understanding have also taken hold of theology in the nineteenth century, where it has tried to become progressive, how they have made of the Christ-Jesus being the “simple man from Nazareth”. And however much power may be brought to bear against what comes from this side, this battle will not be won unless the mystery of Golgotha is again grasped from the spiritual-scientific side, unless it can be said anew from the spirit how an extraterrestrial spirit entered into earthly life through the man Jesus of Nazareth. The explanation must be a new one in relation to human progress; it must become a new experience.

Spiritual science does not want to found a new religion, it only wants to fuel consciousness in accordance with the knowledge of modern times. It wants to show that which once gave meaning to the development of the earth in the light that this humanity needs for the culture of the present and future. Thus spiritual science, as I can show from this Christian example, can deepen a person's religious life. It can give him that which, according to modern consciousness, cannot be given to him in any other way; it can give him that.

Oh, he is timid towards Christianity who believes that through spiritual science, Christianity can be destroyed. No, on the contrary, only he looks at Christianity in the right way who has the courage to confess that, as with the physical, so the spiritual discoveries are also made. What is the Christian impulse cannot thereby appear in some lesser, weaker light, but in an ever stronger and stronger light. He would prove to be truly Christian who, out of a deep yearning, would accept the affirmations that, precisely from spiritual science, can lead to the realization of the mystery of Golgotha.

But it seems that humanity in the present truly needs religious deepening, my dear audience. For we are indeed experiencing strange things today. And I would like to mention one more example to conclude.

In Dornach, at an outstanding location in the Goetheanum, an installation is to be created that is directly related to the Mystery of Golgotha. A nine-and-a-half-meter-high wooden group is to be installed. We have been working on this sculpture for several years. At the center of this sculpture stands a figure of Christ. It is finished at the top in the head and chest parts, but still a block of wood below. The head is thoroughly idealized. Those who have seen it will certainly testify that I said: From a spiritual-scientific perspective, this image of Christ arises in me, as he walked in Palestine. I do not impose it on anyone, but it is developed out of humanity, when one projects into a human being that which one projects when one seeks the soul in the whole human being, not only in individual human physiognomic features in the face, but seeks the soul in the whole human countenance. But things are said and seen without knowing what is actually being done in Dornach.

Now, among the many writings by opponents, there is a very remarkable one. In it you will find the following sentence – I won't detain you long – you will find the following sentence:

Anthroposophy starts with the human being and its goal is the ideal human being. This and God are apparently one and the same. A nine-and-a-half-meter-high... with animal features at the bottom is currently being built in Dornach.

Now, dear attendees, I have told you about people who were there and know what has been worked on this group so far. Anyone who wants to see something like this in a wooden figure, which has an idealized human head at the top and is just a block of wood at the bottom, not yet finished, and which sees Luciferic features at the top and animal features at the bottom, reminds me of the anecdote that is often mentioned about how you can tell in the evening whether you are sober or drunk. You put a top hat on the bed. If you can see it clearly, you are still sober; if you see two of them, you are drunk.

Now, dear readers, anyone who, when looking at the woodcarving group in Dornach, sees a human being with 'Luciferian features' at the top and 'bestial characteristics' at the bottom, should not, in his drunkenness, complain about the fantasies or illusions of the anthroposophists! For anyone who is truly devoted to anthroposophy will certainly not be taken in by the same illusion, the same fantasy, which are also objective untruths. But this is how someone works with the truth — my dear audience — who can write on the title page the capital <«D> in front of his name, who is a doctor of theology.

Yes, my dear audience, we need a deepening, a refinement of religious consciousness. Those who are appointed guardians treat the truth in this way. From this it can be seen that we need a deepening of the sense of truth. After all, what is the science of a person who has only enough scientific conscientiousness to present an objective untruth of this kind in a single case in just such a way?

Now, my dear audience, as I said, it requires precisely this internalization of the human being, which will also be connected with a refinement of religious feeling, with a deepening of religious feeling. Spiritual science will be able to radiate its impulses into the most diverse branches of life. It wants to be completely practical, but it also does not want to go beyond scientific education. It wants to be scientifically grounded in that it arises out of the attitude, out of methodical conscientiousness, as only some mathematical method, combined with external observation, can arise out of the human soul in full scientificness.

Now, in conclusion, just a few personal words. When it is pointed out today, as it has been by Christian luminaries, for example, that this anthroposophical spiritual science in Dornach is not addressed to scholars but to educated laypeople, then one thing may be said. To a certain extent, this is still its fate today. I myself – if I may make a personal comment – began in the 1880s to develop something that is entirely in line with the whole direction of anthroposophical spiritual science, although it is only present in the elements, and although it was only later developed into details. What was then the guiding force is already contained in it. I was not always as much of a heretic as I am today. I was not always treated as badly by the sciences as I am today by the sciences, or from the point of view of religious denominations, but those writings that I wrote about Goethe at the time have already become known to a certain extent.

People just think that I have become a fool and a fantasist since that time, since it has become clear to me that what flowed out of that time should flow into the well-founded anthroposophical spiritual science. But what I actually often called for in my Goethe writings, and was not achieved even then, such as “Goethe's World View”, “Truth and Science”, “Philosophy of Freedom”, namely contained in my “Introductions to Goethe's Scientific Writings”, whoever assumes this, will see that for me it was not just about Goethe having this or that world view, but about standing up for this world view itself, asserting it, bringing it to its right and also developing it further.

The aim was not to develop a Goetheanism that died with the year 1832 and is merely historical, but to show the living Goetheanism as it has remained capable of development up to the present day. That Goethe's ideas were to some extent met, some have admitted. But that is also what is done out of habit in our time. People liked to boast: Yes, Goethe, Kant and so on had this or that idea. But to stand up for an idea with the full power of one's personality and help it to victory is not what lives in the thinking habit, especially not in the mental habits of the present. And so I must say that although I have been proved right in many respects in the explanation of Goethe's world view, I wanted something else: to advocate what can arise from it as spiritual science, as anthroposophical spiritual science, through the further development of Goethe's world view.

And what I wrote at the time was written entirely in the forms of science. I also spoke in this way; on the contrary, it was found to be too remote from ordinary life. At that time, those who were involved in science would have had the opportunity to address the matter. They did not take this opportunity. Therefore, it became necessary to address the educated lay public and speak to the heart and intellect of the educated lay public. Because, my dear attendees, that which is to be incorporated as truth into the development of humanity must be incorporated into it. Therefore, spiritual science must not be reproached, as is often done by its critics today, for not initially presenting itself to science as such – which it has now sufficiently done in Dornach, by the way – but in a true way, for that is what it has done. And it only approached the educated lay public when scholarship did not want to. But something like that has to happen! Why? Well, anyone who is imbued with the impulse, with the truth impulse of spiritual science, who knows the needs of our time, who knows the longings of our time, or at least believes he knows them, will have to say to himself: the truth must go out into the world, and if it does not succeed in penetrating the world through the one path, which might perhaps be the outwardly correct one, then other paths must be sought. If scholars do not want to, they may want to, when spiritual science takes hold in the hearts of educated laymen out of a natural, elementary sense of truth, and then forces those who have lagged behind it, even if they are scholars, to follow suit. Truth must come into the world. And if it does not come through one way, then the other must be sought.

[ 1 ] For cognition the concept of a tree is conditioned by the perception of the tree. When confronted with a particular perception I can lift out only one definite concept from the general system of concepts. The connection between concept and perception is determined indirectly and objectively through thinking according to the perception. The connection of the perception with its concept is recognized after the act of perception; but that they belong to one another is already inherent in the object itself.

[ 2 ] The process is different when the relation of man to the world is considered, as it arises within knowledge. In the preceding explanation the attempt has been made to show that it is possible to throw light on this relation if one observes it without prejudice. A real understanding of such an observation leads to the insight that thinking can be directly experienced as a self-contained reality. In order to explain thinking as such, those who find it necessary to add something to it, such as physical brain-processes or unconscious spiritual processes lying behind the conscious thinking which is being observed, underestimate what can be seen when thinking is observed without prejudice. During his observation of thinking, the observer lives directly within a spiritual, self-sustaining activity of a living reality. Indeed one can say that he who wants to grasp the reality of spirit in the form in which it first presents itself to man, can do this in his own self-sustaining thinking.

[ 3 ] When thinking is observed, two things coincide which elsewhere must always appear apart: concept and perception. If this is not recognized, then in the concepts which have been worked out according to perceptions, one is unable to see anything but shadowy copies of the perceptions, and will take the perceptions to be the full reality. Further, one will build up a metaphysical sphere on the pattern of the perceived world, and each person, according to his views, will call this world a world of atoms, a world of will, a world of unconscious spirit, and so on. And he will not notice that with all this he merely hypothetically builds up a metaphysical world on the pattern of his world of perceptions. But if he realizes what he has before him in thinking, then he will also recognize that in the perception only a part of reality is present, and that the other part that belongs to it and first allows it to appear as full reality, is experienced in the act of permeating the perception with thinking. Then in what arises in consciousness as thinking, he will also see not a shadowy copy of some reality, but spiritual reality itself. And of this he can say that it becomes present in his consciousness through intuition. Intuition is a conscious experience of a purely spiritual content, taking place in the sphere of pure spirit. Only through an intuition can the reality of thinking be grasped.

[ 4 ] Only when, by observing thinking without prejudice, one has wrestled one's way through to recognizing the truth that the nature of thinking is intuitive, is it possible to gain a real understanding of the body-soul organization of man. Then one recognizes that this organization cannot affect the nature of thinking. Quite obvious facts seem to contradict this at first. For ordinary experience, human thinking only takes place connected with, and by means of, the organization. This comes so strongly to the fore that the true facts can only be seen when it has been recognized that nothing from the organization plays into thinking as such. And then it is impossible not to notice how extraordinary is the relation of the human organization to thinking. For this organization has no effect at all on thinking; rather it withdraws when the activity of thinking takes place; it suspends its own activity, it makes room, and in the space that has become free, thinking appears. The spiritual substance that acts in thinking has a twofold task: first it presses back the human organization in its activity, and next, it steps into the place of it. The first, the pressing back of the bodily organization, is also a consequence of the thinking activity, and indeed of that part of this activity which prepares the manifestation of thinking. This explains the sense in which thinking finds its counterpart in the bodily organization. And when this is recognized, one will no longer mistake this counterpart for thinking itself. If someone walks over soft ground, his feet leave impressions in the soil. But one is not tempted to say that the forces of the ground have formed these imprints from below. One will not ascribe to these forces any participation in the creating of the footprints. So too, one who, without prejudice, observes the nature of thinking will not ascribe to the imprints in the bodily organization any participation in the nature of thinking, for the imprints in the organization come about through the fact that thinking prepares its manifestation through the body. [The significance of the above view in relation to psychology, physiology, etc., in various directions has been set forth by the author in works published after this book. Here the aim is only to characterize what can be recognized by an unprejudiced observation of thinking.]

[ 5 ] Now a significant question arises. If the human organism does not partake in the spiritual substance of thinking, what significance has this organism within man's being as a whole? Now what happens in this organism through thinking has nothing to do with the nature of thinking, but indeed it has to do with the arising of the I-consciousness within thinking. The real “I” exists within the being of thinking, but not so the I-consciousness. This will be recognized if only thinking is observed without prejudice. The “I” is to be found within thinking; the “I-consciousness” arises through the fact that the imprints of the activity of thinking are engraved upon the general consciousness in the sense explained above. (The I-consciousness therefore arises through the bodily organism. But by this is not meant that the I-consciousness, once it has arisen, remains dependent on the bodily organism. Once arisen, it is taken up into thinking and henceforth shares its spiritual nature.)

[ 6 ] The human organism is the foundation of the “I-consciousness.” It is also the source of will-activity. It follows from the preceding explanation that an insight into the connection between thinking, conscious I, and will activity can only be obtained if we first observe how will-activity issues from the human organism.^44b

[ 7 ] The factors to be considered in a particular act of will are the motive and the driving force. The motive is either a concept or a representation; the driving force is the will element and is directly conditioned by the human organism. The conceptual factor, or motive, is the momentary source from which the will is determined; the driving force is the permanent source of determination in the individual. A motive of will may be a pure concept or a concept with a definite reference to what is perceived, i.e. a representation. General and individual concepts (representations) become motives of will by influencing the human individual and determine him to act in a particular direction. But one and the same concept, or one and the same representation, influences different individuals differently. It impels different people to different actions. Will, therefore, does not come about merely as a result of the concept, or representation, but also through the individual disposition of human beings. This individual disposition we will call—in this respect one can follow Eduard von Hartmann ⁴⁵—the characterological disposition. The way in which concepts and representations influence the characterological disposition of a person gives his life a definite moral or ethical stamp.

[ 8 ] The characterological disposition is formed through the more or less constant life-content of our subject, that is, through the content of our representations and feelings. Whether a present representation stimulates me to will or not, depends on how the representation is related to the content of the rest of my representations, and also to my particular feelings. The content of my representations is determined in turn by all those concepts which in the course of my individual life have come into contact with perceptions, that is, have become representations. This again depends on my greater or lesser capacity for intuition, and on the range of my observations, that is, on the subjective and the objective factors of experience,⁴⁶ on my inner determination and my place in life. The characterological disposition is more particularly determined by the life of feeling. Whether I make a definite representation or concept the motive of my action will depend on whether it gives me pleasure or pain.—These are the elements which come into consideration in an act of will. The immediately present representation or concept which becomes motive, determines the aim, the purpose of my will; my characterological disposition determines me to direct my activity toward this aim. The representation, to go for a walk in the next half-hour, determines the aim of my action. But this representation is elevated to a motive of will only if it meets with a suitable characterological disposition, that is, if during my life until now I have formed representations concerning the purpose of walking, its value for health, and further, if the representation of walking combines in me with a feeling of pleasure.

[ 9 ] We therefore must distinguish: 1) the possible subjective dispositions which are suitable for turning definite representations and concepts into motives; and 2) the possible representations and concepts which are capable of so influencing my characterological disposition that willing is the result. The first represents the driving force, the second, the aims of morality.

[ 10 ] We can find the driving force of morality by investigating the elements which comprise individual life.

[ 11 ] The first level of individual life is perceiving, more particularly, perceiving by means of the senses. Here we are concerned with that region of our individual life where perceiving, without a feeling or a concept coming between, is directly transformed into willing. The driving force in man, which comes into consideration here, we shall simply call instinct. The satisfaction of our lower, purely animal needs (hunger, sexual intercourse, etc.) takes place in this way. What is most characteristic of instinctive life is the immediacy with which a particular perception releases the will. This kind of determination of the will, which is characteristic only of lower sense-life to begin with, can also be extended to the perceptions of the higher senses. We let a deed follow upon the perception of some event or other in the outer world without further reflection and without linking any particular feeling to the perception, as in fact happens in conventional social life. The driving force of such conduct is what is called tact or moral etiquette. The more often such a direct release of activity by a perception takes place, the more the person concerned is able to act purely under the guidance of tact, that is: tact becomes his characterological disposition.

[ 12 ] The second level of human life is feeling. Definite feelings link themselves to the perceptions of the outer world. These feelings can become the driving forces of deeds. When I see a starving person, pity for him can become the driving force of my action. Such feelings, for example, are shame, pride, honor, humility, remorse, pity, revenge, gratitude, piety, loyalty, love and duty.^46a

[ 13 ] The third level of life is thinking and forming representations. A representation or a concept can become motive for an action through mere reflection. Representations become motives because in the course of life we continuously link certain aims of will with perceptions which keep returning in more or less modified form. This is why, when people not entirely without experience have certain perceptions, there always also enter into their consciousness representations of deeds which they themselves have carried out in a similar instance, or have seen carried out. These representations hover before them as determining models for all later decisions; they become united with their characterological disposition. We could call this driving force of the will, practical experience. Practical experience gradually merges into purely tactful conduct. This happens when definite typical pictures of actions have become so firmly connected in our consciousness with representations of certain situations in life that in any given case we skip over all deliberation based on experience and pass over directly from perception into willing.

[ 14 ] The highest level of individual life is that of conceptual thinking without reference to a definite perceptual content. We determine the content of a concept through pure intuition from the ideal sphere. Such a concept contains no reference to definite perceptions at first. If we pass over into willing under the influence of a concept pointing to a perception, that is, a representation, then it is this perception which determines us indirectly via the conceptual thinking. When we act under the influence of intuitions, then the driving force of our deed is pure thinking. Since in philosophy it is customary to call the faculty of pure thinking, reason, it would be justifiable to call the moral driving force characteristic of this level, practical reason. The clearest account of this driving force of the will has been given by Kreyenbühl.⁴⁷ (Philosophische Monatshefte, Vol. XVIII, No. 3). (Ethical-Spiritual Activity in Kant) I count his article on this subject among the most important contributions to present-day philosophy, particularly to ethics. Kreyenbühl characterizes this driving force as practical a priori, that is, an impulse to action springing directly from my intuition.

[ 15 ] It is clear that in the strictest sense of the word, such an impulse can no longer be considered as belonging to the characterological disposition. For here what acts as driving force is no longer something merely individual in me, but is the ideal and therefore the universal content of my intuition. As soon as I see the justification for making this content the foundation and starting-point of an action, I pass over into willing, irrespective of whether I had the concept already, or whether it enters my consciousness only immediately before acting, that is, irrespective of whether or not it was already present in me as disposition.

[ 16 ] An action is a real act of will only when a momentary impulse of action, in the form of a concept or representation, influences the characterological disposition. Such an impulse then becomes the motive of will.

[ 17 ] Motives of morality are representations and concepts. There are philosophers of ethics who also see in feeling a motive for morality; they maintain, for example, that the aim of moral conduct is the furtherance of the greatest possible quantity of pleasure in the individual who acts. But in itself a pleasure cannot be a motive; only a represented pleasure can. The representation of a future feeling, but not the feeling itself, can influence my characterological disposition. For in the moment of acting the feeling itself is not yet there; moreover it is to be produced by the action.

[ 18 ] The representation of one's own or someone else's welfare, however, is rightly regarded as a motive of will. The principle: through one's deed to bring about the greatest amount of pleasure for oneself, that is, to attain personal advantage, is egoism. It is striven for either by ruthlessly considering only one's own welfare, even at the cost of the happiness of others (pure egoism), or by furthering the welfare of others because indirectly one expects a favorable influence upon one's own self through the happiness of others, or because one fears to endanger one's own interest by injuring others (morality of prudence). The particular content of egoistical principles of morality will depend upon what representations a person has of his own or of another's happiness. A person will determine the content of his egoistical striving according to what he considers to be the good things in life (luxury, hope of happiness, deliverance from various misfortunes, etc.).

[ 19 ] Another motive is the purely conceptual content of actions. This content does not refer to a particular action only, as in the case of the representation of one's own pleasures, but to the reason for an action derived from a system of moral principles. In the form of abstract concepts these moral principles may govern moral life without the single individual troubling himself about the origin of the concepts. In that case, we simply feel the subjection to the moral concept which, like a command, overshadows our deeds as a moral necessity. The reason for this necessity we leave to those who demand our moral subjection, that is, to the moral authority we acknowledge (the head of the family, the state, social custom, the authority of the church, divine revelation). A particular instance of these moral principles is when the command announces itself to us, not through an external authority, but through our own inner being (moral autonomy). In this case, within ourselves we sense the voice to which we have to submit. This voice finds expression in conscience.

[ 20 ] It means moral progress when man does not simply take the command of an outer or inner authority as motive for his action, but strives to recognize the reason why a particular principle of conduct should act as motive in him. This is the advance from morality based on authority, to conduct based on moral insight. At this level of morality the person will consider the needs of moral life and will let this knowledge determine his actions. Such needs are: 1) the greatest possible welfare of humanity, purely for its own sake; 2) the progress of culture, or the moral development of mankind to ever greater perfection; 3) the realization of individual aims of morality, which are grasped purely intuitively.

[ 21 ] The greatest possible welfare of humanity will naturally be understood differently by different people. The above principle does not refer to a definite representation of this welfare, but to the fact that each person who acknowledges this principle strives to do what in his opinion best furthers the welfare of humanity.

[ 22 ] The progress of culture is seen as a special instance of the above-mentioned moral principle by those who connect feelings of pleasure with the advantages of culture, but they will have to accept into the bargain the decline and destruction of much that also contributes to the welfare of mankind. However, it is also possible that in the progress of culture someone sees a moral necessity, quite apart from the feeling of pleasure connected with it. Then for him, the progress of culture is a particular moral principle, distinct from the one mentioned previously.

[ 23 ] The principle of the general welfare, as well as that of the progress of culture, is based upon a representation, that is, upon how one relates the content of moral ideas to certain experiences (perceptions). But the highest thinkable principle of morality is one which contains no such relation from the start, but springs from the source of pure intuition and only afterward seeks the relation to perceptions (to life). Here the decision as to what is to be willed proceeds from a different sphere than that of the previous examples. In all his conduct, one in favor of the principle of the general welfare will first ask what his ideals will contribute to this general welfare. He who acknowledges the moral principle of the progress of culture, will do the same. But at this level he could do something even higher: if in a particular case he were not to proceed from one single definite aim of morality, but were to recognize a certain value in all principles of morality and were always to ask whether the one or the other would be more important here. It may happen that in certain circumstances one considers the progress of culture, in others, the general welfare, and in yet others, the furtherance of his own welfare, to be the right aim and motive of his actions. But when all such reasons take second place, then first and foremost the conceptual intuition itself comes into consideration. When this happens, then all other motives retreat from the leading position and the idea-content of the action alone is effective as its motive.

[ 24 ] Among the levels of characterological disposition, we have shown the one which acts as pure thinking, as practical reason, to be the highest. From the motives, we have now shown conceptual intuition to be the highest. On closer consideration, it will soon be seen that at this level of morality driving force and motive coincide, that is, neither a predetermined characterological disposition nor an external moral principle accepted on authority, influences our conduct. The deed therefore is neither a conventional one, carried out according to some rule or other, nor one automatically performed in response to an external impulse; rather it is one which is determined solely through its ideal content.

[ 25 ] Such conduct presupposes the capacity for moral intuition. Whoever lacks the ability to experience the moral principle that applies in a particular instance, will never achieve truly individual willing.

[ 26 ] The exact opposite to this moral principle is the Kantian: Act so that the principles of your actions can be valid for all men. This principle is death to all individual impulses of action. How all men would act cannot be a standard for me, but rather what is right for me to do in the particular instance.

[ 27 ] To this, a superficial judgment could perhaps object: How can an action be individually adapted to the particular instance and the particular situation, and yet at the same time be determined purely ideally by intuition? This objection is due to a confusion of the moral motive and the perceptible content of the action. The perceptible content could be a motive, and is one, for example, when an act is done for the progress of culture or out of pure egoism, etc., but it is not the motive when the reason for action is a pure moral intuition. My I naturally takes notice of this perceptual content, but is not determined by it. This content is used only to form a cognitive concept, but the moral concept that belongs to it, the I does not take from the object. The cognitive concept of a given situation confronting me is also a moral concept only if I base my view on a particular moral principle. If my viewpoint is limited to the general moral principle of the progress of culture, then I go through life along a fixed route. From every event I perceive which can occupy me, a moral duty also springs, namely, to do my best toward placing the particular event in the service of the progress of culture. In addition to the concept which reveals to me the natural law inherent in an event or object, there is also a moral label attached to it which contains for me, as a moral being, an ethical direction as to how I am to behave. This moral label is justified at a certain level, but at a higher level it coincides with the idea that arises in me when I face the concrete instance.

[ 28 ] Men differ greatly in their capacity for intuition. In one person ideas bubble up easily, while another person has to acquire them with much labor. The situation in which men live, which is the scene of their actions, is no less different. How a man acts will therefore depend on the way his capacity for intuition functions in the face of a given situation. The sum of ideas active within us, the actual content of our intuitions, is what, for all the universality of the idea-world, is individually constituted in each human being. Insofar as this intuitive content is directed toward action, it is the moral content of the individual. To let this content come to expression is the highest moral driving force and also the highest motive for the one who has recognized that ultimately all other moral principles unite in this content. This standpoint can be called ethical individualism.

[ 29 ] The discovery of the quite individual intuition which corresponds to the situation, is the deciding factor in an intuitively determined action. At this level of morality one can speak only of general concepts of morality (norms, laws) insofar as these result from the generalization of individual impulses. General norms always presuppose concrete facts from which they can be derived. But facts must first be produced by human deeds.

[ 30 ] When we look for the laws (concepts) underlying the conduct of individuals, peoples and epochs, we obtain a system of ethics, not as a science of moral rules, but as a natural philosophy of morality. It is true that laws obtained in this way are related to human conduct, as the laws of nature are related to a particular phenomenon. But they are not at all identical with the impulses upon which we base our conduct. If one wants to grasp the means by which man's action springs from his moral will, then one must first consider the relation of this will to the action. One must first select actions where this relation is the determining factor. If I, or someone else, reflect on such an action later, then can be discovered upon what principle of morality the action is based. While I am acting I am moved to act by the moral principle insofar as it lives in me intuitively; the moral principle is united with my love for what I want to accomplish by my deed. I ask no man and no code, Shall I do this?—rather I do it the moment I have grasped the idea of it. This alone makes it my action. The deeds of a person who acts solely because he acknowledges a definite moral standard, come about as a result of a principle which is part of his moral code. He is merely the agent. He is a higher kind of automaton. If some impulse to action enters his consciousness, then at once the clockwork of his moral principle will be set in motion and run to rule, in order to bring about a deed which is Christian, or humane, or is deemed unselfish, or to further the progress of culture. Only when I follow my love for the object is it I myself who acts. At this level of morality I do not act because I acknowledge a ruler over me, an external authority, or a so-called inner voice. I do not acknowledge any external principle for my conduct, because I have found the source of my conduct within myself, namely, my love for the deed. I do not prove intellectually whether my deed is good or bad; I do it out of my love for it. My action will be “good” if my intuition, immersed in love, exists in the right way within the relationship between things; this can be experienced intuitively; the action will be “bad” if this is not the case. Nor do I ask myself: How would another person act in my place?—rather I act, as I, as this particular individuality, find my will motivated to act. I am not guided directly by what happens to be the usual thing, the general habit, some general human code or moral standard, but solely by my love for this deed. I feel no compulsion—neither the compulsion of nature which rules me through my instincts, nor the compulsion of moral commands. Rather, I simply carry out what lies within me.

[ 31 ] Those who defend general moral standards will perhaps object: If each person strives to express and do only what he pleases, then there is no difference between a good deed and a crime; every depraved impulse in me has the same right to express itself as has the intention to do my best. The fact that I have a deed in mind, according to an idea, cannot set my standard as a moral human being, but only the test as to whether it is a good or evil deed. Only if it is good should I carry it out.

[ 32 ] My reply to this obvious objection, which nonetheless is based on a misunderstanding of what is meant here, is this: One who wants to understand the nature of human will must differentiate between the path which brings this will to a certain degree of development, and the unique character which the will assumes as it approaches its goal. On the way toward this goal standards do play their justified part. The goal consists in the realization of aims of morality, grasped purely intuitively. Man attains such aims to the degree that he is at all able to raise himself to the intuitive idea-content of the world. In particular instances such aims are usually mixed with other elements, either as driving force or as motive. Nevertheless, in the human will intuition can be the determining factor, wholly or in part. A person does what he ought to do, he provides the stage upon which “ought” becomes deed; it is absolutely his own deed which he brings to expression. The impulse here can only be completely individual. And, in fact, only an act of will which springs from intuition can be individual. To call the acts of criminals and what is evil an expression of the individuality, in the same sense as the embodiment of pure intuition, is only possible if blind urges are reckoned as part of the human individuality. But the blind urge which drives a person to crime does not spring from intuition and does not belong to what is individual in man, but rather to what is most general in him, to what is equally valid in all men, and out of which man works his way by means of what is individual in him. What is individual in me is not my organism with its urges and feelings, but rather the universal world of ideas which lights up within this organism. My urges, instincts, passions confirm nothing more than that I belong to the general species, man; the fact that something ideal comes to expression in a particular way within these urges, passions and feelings, confirms my individuality. Through my instincts and urges I am a person of whom there are twelve to the dozen; through the particular form of the idea, by means of which I name myself “I” within the dozen, I am an individual. Only a being other than myself could distinguish me from others by the difference in my animal nature; through my thinking, that is, through the active grasp of what expresses itself as an ideal within my organism, do I distinguish myself from others. Therefore one definitely cannot say that the action of a criminal springs from the idea in him. Indeed, this is just what is characteristic of a criminal deed: it stems from elements in man which are external to the ideal-element in him.

[ 33 ] An action is felt to be free insofar as the reason for it springs from the ideal part of my individual being; any other part of an action, irrespective of whether it is carried out under the compulsion of nature or under the obligation of a moral code, is felt to be unfree.

[ 34 ] Man is free insofar as he is able, in every moment of his life, to follow himself. A moral deed is my deed only if it can be called free in this sense. What here have to be considered are the presuppositions necessary for a willed action to be felt as free; how this purely ethically grasped idea of freedom realizes itself in human nature, will be seen in what follows.

[ 35 ] A deed done out of freedom does not at all exclude, but includes moral laws, but it will be a deed done from a higher sphere compared with those dictated solely by such laws. Why should my deed serve the general welfare any less when it is done out of love, than when I do it solely for the reason that I feel that to serve the general welfare is a duty? The concept of mere duty excludes freedom because it does not include what is individual, but demands subjection of the individual to a general standard. Freedom of action is thinkable only from the standpoint of ethical individualism.

[ 36 ] But how is it possible for people to live in a community if each person strives to assert only his own individuality? This objection is characteristic of misunderstood moralism. A person holding this viewpoint believes that a community of people is possible only if all men are united by general fixed moral rules. He simply does not understand the oneness and harmony of the idea-world. He does not realize that the idea-world which is active in me is none other than the one active in my fellow-man. This unity of ideas is indeed nothing but a result of men's experience of life. Only this can it be. For if the unity of the idea-world could be recognized by any means other than by individual observation, then general rules and not personal experience would be valid in its sphere. Individuality is possible only when each individual is acquainted with others through individual observation alone. The difference between me and my fellow men is not at all because we live in two quite different spiritual worlds, but because from the world of ideas which we share, he receives different intuitions from mine. He wants to live out his intuitions, I mine. If we both really draw from the idea, and are not obeying any external impulses (physical or spiritual), then we cannot but meet in the same striving, in having the same intentions. A moral misunderstanding, a clash between men who are morally free, is out of the question. Only the morally unfree who follow natural instincts or some accepted command of duty, turn away from a fellow-man if he does not follow the same instinct and the same command as themselves. To live in love of the action and to let live, having understanding for the other person's will, is the fundamental principle of free human beings. They know no other “ought” than that with which their will is intuitively in accord; how they shall will in a particular instance, their power of ideation will tell them.

[ 37 ] If human nature were not fundamentally social, no external laws could make it so! Only because individual human beings are one in the spiritual part of their being, can they live out their lives side by side. The free man is confident that others who are free belong to the same spiritual world as he does, and that they will meet him in their intentions. The free man does not demand agreement from his fellow men, but he expects it, because it lies in human nature. This does not refer to the existing necessity for this or that external arrangement, but rather to the disposition, the attitude of soul through which man, in his experience of himself among fellow men for whom he cares, comes nearest to doing justice to human dignity.

[ 38 ] There are many who will say that the concept of a free human being outlined here is a chimera, is nowhere to be found as a reality, and that we have to deal with real people from whom one can hope for morality only when they obey some moral law, when they regard their moral mission as a duty, and do not freely follow their inclinations and preferences.—I certainly do not doubt this. Only a blind man could do so. But then, away with all hypocrisy of morality if this is to be the ultimate conclusion. Then simply say: Human nature must be compelled as long as it is not free. Whether the unfreedom is dealt with by physical means or through moral laws, whether man is unfree because he follows his immeasurable sexual instinct, or because he is hemmed in by the fetters of conventional morality, is quite immaterial from a certain point of view. But one should not maintain that such a man can rightly call his actions his own, for he is driven to them by external powers. But there are human beings who raise themselves above all these compelling rules, free spirits who find their own self in the jumble of habits, regulations, religious observance, etc. They are free insofar as they follow only themselves; unfree insofar as they submit themselves. Which of us can say that he is really free in all that he does? But in each of us exists a higher being in whom the free man comes to expression.

[ 39 ] Our life is composed of free and unfree deeds. But we cannot complete the concept of man without including the free spirit as the purest characteristic of human nature. After all, we are truly human only insofar as we are free.

[ 40 ] That is an ideal, many will say. Without doubt—but it is an ideal which works itself to the surface from within our nature as a reality. It is no “thought out” or imagined ideal, but one in which there is life, one which clearly announces its presence even in its least perfect form of existence. If man were merely a product of nature, the search for ideals, that is, for ideas which for the moment are inactive but whose realization we demand, would not be possible. In the case of external objects the idea is determined by the perception. We have done our share when we have recognized the connection between idea and perception. But with man this is not so. His content is not determined without him; his true concept as a moral being (free spirit) is not objectively united with the perceptual picture “man” from the start merely in order to be confirmed by knowledge later. By his own activity man must unite his concept with the perception, man. Concept and perception only coincide here if man himself brings it about. But he cannot do this till he has found the concept of the free spirit, that is, his own concept. In the objective world a line of division is drawn by our organization between perception and concept; cognition overcomes this division. In our subjective nature this division is no less present; man overcomes it in the course of his development by bringing his concept to expression in his outward existence. Both man's intellectual as well as his moral life point to his twofold nature: perceiving (direct experience) and thinking. In the intellectual life the two-foldness is overcome through knowledge; in the moral life through actually bringing the free spirit to realization. Every being has its inborn concept (the law of its existence and activity), but in external objects the concept is indivisibly connected with the perception and separated from it only within our spiritual organism. In man concept and perception are to begin with, actually apart, to be united by him just as actually. One could object: To our perception of a man a definite concept corresponds at every moment of his life, just as is the case with everything else. I can form a concept of a typical man, and I may also find such a man given to me as a perception. If to this I also bring the concept of the free spirit, then I have two concepts for the same object.

[ 41 ] This line of thought is one-sided. As perceptual object I am subjected to perpetual change. As a child I was one thing, another as a youth, yet another as a man. In fact, at every moment the perceptual picture of myself is different from what it was a moment ago. These changes may take place in such a way that either it is always the same (the typical) man who expresses himself in them, or they become the expression of the free spirit. The perceptual object of my action is subjected to these changes.

[ 42 ] In the perceptual object “man” the possibility of transformation is given, just as in the plant-seed there lies the possibility of becoming a fully developed plant. The plant transforms itself because of the objective laws which are inherent in it; man remains in his imperfect state unless he takes hold of the substance to be transformed within him and transforms it through his own power. Nature makes man merely into a product of nature; society makes him into a being who acts rationally, but he alone can make himself into a free being. At a definite stage in his development nature releases man from its fetters; society carries his development a stage further; the final polish he can only apply himself.

[ 43 ] Therefore, from the standpoint of free morality it is not asserted that as free spirit is the only form in which a man can exist. Free spirituality is the ultimate stage of man's development. And it is not denied that conduct according to rules has its justification as a stage of development. However, this cannot be acknowledged as the highest level of morality. But the free spirit in man overcomes rules in the sense that he does not accept only commands as motives, but also regulates his conduct in accordance with his impulses (intuitions).

[ 44 ] When Kant says of duty: ⁴⁸ “Duty! You sublime, you great name, you encompass nothing beloved or endearing, but you demand submission,” you “lay down a law ... before which all inclinations become silent, even if in secret they also go against it,” then man, conscious of the free spirit, answers: “Freedom! You friendly, humane name, you encompass all that is morally beloved, all that is most worthy of my humanity, you make me no one's servant, you do not merely lay down a law, but wait for what my moral love will of itself recognize as law, because it feels unfree when faced with any law simply forced upon it.”

[ 45 ] This is the contrast between mere law-abiding morality and morality born of freedom.

[ 46 ] The philistine who sees morality embodied in some external rule, may perhaps even regard the free spirit as a dangerous person. But this is simply because his view is limited to a certain period of time. If he were able to see beyond this, he would soon find that the free spirit need go beyond the laws of his state as seldom as the philistine himself, and is never in any real opposition to them. For all the laws of the state have sprung from the intuitions of free spirits, just as have all other objective laws of morality. No law is exercised through a family authority which was not at some time intuitively grasped and laid down by an ancestor. Similarly the conventional laws of morality were first laid down by definite people and so too the laws of the state first arise in the head of a statesman. These individualities have established laws over other people, and only he is unfree who forgets this origin and either looks upon these laws as extra-human commands, that is, as objective moral concepts of duty independent of man, or turns them into the commanding voice thought of—in a falsely mystical way—as compelling him in his own inner being. However, he who does not forget the origin of such laws, but looks for it in man, will reckon with them as belonging to the same idea-world as that from which he too draws his moral intuitions. If he believes his own intuitions to be better, then he will try to replace those in existence with his own; but if he finds the existing ones justified, he will act in accordance with them as if they were his own.

[ 47 ] The formula must not be coined: Man is meant to realize a moral world order which exists independent of him. Insofar as knowledge of man is concerned, one maintaining this stands at the point where natural science stood when it believed that the goat has horns in order to be able to butt. Fortunately natural scientists have rejected such a concept of purpose as a dead theory. It is more difficult to get rid of such theories in ethics. However, just as horns do not exist because of butting, but butting exists through horns, so man does not exist because of morality, but morality exists through man. The free human being acts morally because he has a moral idea, but he does not act in order that morality may come about. Human individuals, with the moral ideas belonging to their nature, are the presupposition for a moral world-order.

[ 48 ] The human individual is the source of all morality and the center of earthly life. State and society have come about only because they are the necessary results of life shared by individual human beings. That state and society should react in turn upon the life of the individual is understandable, just as it is understandable that butting, which exists through the horns, reacts in turn upon the further development of the goat's horns, which would waste away by prolonged disuse. Similarly, the individual would waste away if he led a separate existence outside a human community. This is just why the social order arises, so that it can react favorably upon the individual.

• 44b. Note by Rudolf Steiner: The passage from page 161 to this point was added, or rewritten for the Revised Edition, 1918.
• 45. Eduard von Hartmann, Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins, Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness, German ed. p. 451. Born 1842, von Hartmann was originally an officer in the Prussian army. Because of an illness, he retired from military service and took up an intensive study of philosophy. In 1869 his Philosophie des Unbewussten (Philosophy of the Unconscious) appeared, and made him famous almost overnight. Of the many other works he wrote, this book remained his most famous. Rudolf Steiner describes a personal impression of von Hartmann, whom he visited in Berlin in 1888 following a philosophical correspondence with him over some years. This account may be found in Chapter IX of Steiner's autobiography. Steiner's Wahrheit und Wissenschaft (Truth and Knowledge), published in this present volume, was dedicated to von Hartmann. The latter died in 1906.
• 46. .The German text here reads Faktor der Erfahrungen.—Tr.
• 46a. Note by Rudolf Steiner: A complete catalogue of the principles of morality (from the point of view of metaphysical realism) may be found in Eduard von Hartmann's Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins, Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness.
• 47. Ger. Welterfahrung.—Tr.
• 48. Immanuel Kant: Theory of Ethics, transl. by Abbott, p. 180. The Critique of Practical Reason, Ch. III.

Human life swings between work and idleness. The activity we are to discuss today, known as asceticism, is regarded either as work or as idleness according to the preconceptions of one person or another. An objective, unbiased study, such as Spiritual Science demands, is impossible unless we observe how what is called asceticism—in the highest sense excluding misuse of the word—influences human life, and either helps or harms it.

It is quite natural that most people today should have a somewhat false idea of what the word asceticism ought to mean. In its original Greek form it could apply as well to an athlete as to an ascetic. But in our time the word has acquired a particular colouring from the form taken by this way of life during the Middle Ages; and for many people the word has the flavour that Schopenhauer gave it in the 19th century.³⁵ Today the word is again acquiring a certain colouring through the manifold influences of oriental philosophy and religion, particularly through what the West usually calls Buddhism. Our task in this lecture is to find the true origin in human nature of asceticism; and Spiritual Science, as characterised in previous lectures, is called upon to bring clarity into this discussion, the more so because its own outlook is connected with the original meaning of the Greek word, askesis.

Spiritual Science and spiritual research, as they have been represented here for some years, take a quite definite attitude towards human nature. They start from the postulate that at no stage in the evolution of mankind is it justifiable to say that here or there are the limits of human knowledge. The usual way of putting the question, “What can man know, and what can he not know?”, is for Spiritual Science misdirected. It does not ask what man can know at a certain stage in his evolution; or what the boundaries of knowledge are at that stage; or what remains hidden because at that time human cognition cannot penetrate it. All these matters are not its immediate concern; for Spiritual Science takes its stand on the firm ground of evolution, in particular the evolution of human soul-forces. It says that the human soul can develop. As in the seed of a plant the future plant sleeps and is called forth by the forces within the seed and those which work on it from without, so are hidden forces and capacities always sleeping in the human soul. What we cannot know at one stage of development we may know later, when we have advanced a little in developing our spiritual faculties.

Which are the forces that we can develop in ourselves for a deeper understanding of the world and the attainment of an ever-wider horizon? That is the question asked by Spiritual Science. It does not ask where the boundaries of our knowledge are, but how man can surpass the bounds that exist at any given period by developing his capacities. Not through vague talk, but in a quite definite way, it shows how man can surpass the cognitive faculties that have been bestowed on him by an evolutionary process in which his own consciousness has not participated. In the first instance, these faculties are concerned only with the world perceived by our senses and grasped by our reason. But by means of the forces latent in the soul, man is able to penetrate into the worlds which are at first not open to the senses and cannot be reached by a reason bound up with the senses. In order that we may from the beginning avoid the charge of vagueness, I will describe quite briefly what you will find given fully in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds: How is it Achieved?

When we speak of passing beyond the ordinary bounds of knowledge, we must take care not to wander off into the blue, but rather find our way from the solid ground under our feet into a new world. How is it to be done?

In the normal human being of today, we have an alternation of the two conditions called “waking” and “sleeping”.³⁶ Without going into details, we may say that for ordinary knowledge the difference lies in this, that while man is awake, his senses and the sense-bound intellect are under constant stimulus. It is this stimulus which wakens his external cognition, and during waking hours he is given up to the external sense-world. In sleep we are removed from that world. A simple logical consideration shows that it is not irrational for Spiritual Science to maintain that there is something in human nature which separates itself during sleep from what we usually call the human body. We know that for Spiritual Science the physical body, which can be seen with the eyes and touched with the hand, is only part of man. He has a second part, the so-called etheric or life-body. When we are asleep, the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed, and we separate from them what we call the consciousness body or—don't be put off by the terminology—the astral body, the bearer of desire and pain, pleasure and sorrow, of impulse and passion. In addition we have a fourth part, one which makes man the crown of earthly creation: the ego. These last two parts split off during sleep from the physical and the etheric bodies. A simple consideration, as I said, can teach us that it is not irrational for Spiritual Science to declare that what we have as pleasure and pain, or as the ego's power of judgment, cannot vanish during the night and be reborn anew every morning, but must remain in existence. Think, if you will, of this withdrawal of the astral body and the ego as a mere picture; in any case it is undeniable that the ego and the astral body withdraw from what we call the physical and the etheric bodies.

Now the peculiar thing is that these inmost parts of the human being, the astral body and the ego, within which we live through what we call soul-experience, sink down during sleep into an indefinite obscurity. But this means simply that this inmost part of the human being needs the stimulus of the external world if it is to be conscious of itself and of the external world. Hence we can say that at the moment of falling asleep, when this stimulus ceases, man cannot develop consciousness in himself. But if, in the normal course of his existence, a human being were able so to stimulate the inner parts of his being, so to fill them with energy and inner life, that he had a consciousness of them even when there were no sense-impressions and the sense-bound intellect was inactive and free from the stimulus of the external world, he would then be able to perceive other things than those which come through the stimulus of the senses. However strange and paradoxical it may sound, it is true that if a man could reproduce a condition which on the one hand resembles sleep, and yet is essentially different from it on the other, he could reach super-sensible knowledge. His condition would resemble sleep in not depending on any external stimulus; the difference would be that he would not sink into unconsciousness but would unfold a vivid inner life.

As may be shown from spiritual-scientific experience, man can come to such a condition: a condition of clairvoyance, if the word is not misused, as it so often is today. I will give you briefly one example of the numerous inner exercises through which this condition can be attained.

If we wish to experience this condition safely, we must always start from the external world. The external world gives us mental images, and we call them true if we find that they correspond with external facts. But this kind of truth cannot raise us above external reality. Our task, therefore, is to bridge the gulf between external perception and a perception which is independent of the senses and yet can give us truth. One of the first stages towards this form of knowledge is concerned with pictorial or symbolic concepts. As an example, let us take a symbol which is of use for spiritual development, and expound it in the form of a conversation between a teacher and his pupil.

In order to make his pupil understand this kind of symbolic picture,³⁷ the teacher might speak as follows: “Think of the plant, how it is rooted in the earth and grows from it, sends forth green leaf after green leaf and develops to flower and fruit.” (We are not here concerned with ordinary scientific ideas, for, as we shall see, we are not discussing the essential difference between man and plant, but trying to get hold of a useful pictorial idea). The teacher may continue: “And now look at man. He certainly has a great deal that is not present in the plant. He can experience impulses, desires, emotions, a whole range of concepts which can lead him up the ladder from blind sensation and instinct to the highest moral ideals. Only a scientific fantasy could attribute similar consciousness to plants and to men; but on a lower level a plant has certain advantages. It has certainty of growth, without possibility of error, while man can deviate at any moment from his right place in the world. We can see how in his whole structure he is permeated with instincts, desires and passions which may bring him into error, delusion and falsehood. In contrast, the plant is in substance untouched by these things; it is a pure, chaste being. Only when man has purified his whole life of instinct and desire can he hope to be as pure on his higher level as the plant is in its certainty and security on the lower level.”

Then we can pass to a further picture. The plant is permeated with the green colouring matter, chlorophyll, which steeps the leaves in green colour. Man is permeated with the vehicle of instincts and emotions, his red blood. That is a sort of evolution upwards, and in its course man has had to accept characteristics not found in the plant. He must hold before his eyes the high ideal of one day attaining on his own level to the inner purity, certainty and self-control of which we have a picture at a lower level in the plant. So we may ask what we must do in order to rise to that level.

Man must become lord and master of the instincts, passions and cravings which surge around, unsought, within him. He must grow beyond himself, kill within him all that normally dominates him, and raise to a higher level all that is dominated by the lower. This is how man has developed from the plant, and all that has been added since the plant stage he must look on as something to be conquered, in order to derive from it a higher life. That is the proper direction of man's future, indicated by Goethe in the fine stanza:

Whoever cannot say
Die and renew thyself!
On our dark earth will be
A mournful guest!³⁸

This does not mean that man must kill his instincts and emotions, but that he cleanses and purifies them by removing their mastery over him. So, in looking at the plant, he can say: “Something in me is higher than the plant, but I have to conquer and destroy it.”

As a picture of what we have to overcome in ourselves, let us take that part of the plant which is no longer capable of life, the dry wood, and set it up in the form of a cross. The next task is to cleanse and purify the red blood, the vehicle of our instincts, impulses and cravings, so that it may be a pure, chaste expression of our higher being, of what Schiller meant when he spoke of “the higher man in man”. The blood will then be, as it were, a copy in man of the pure sap which flows through the plant.

“Now”—the teacher will resume—“let us look at a flower in which the sap, rising up continuously, stage by stage, through the leaves, finally merges into the colour of the flower, the red rose. Picture the red rose as an image of your blood when your blood has been cleansed and purified. The sap of the plant pulses through the red rose and leaves it without impulses or desires; but your impulses and desires must come to be the expression of your purified ego.” Thus we supplement our picture of the wood of the cross, which symbolises what we have to overcome, by hanging a garland of red roses upon the cross. Then we have a picture, a symbol, which does not appeal only to dry reasoning, but by stirring our feelings gives us an image of human life raised to the level of a higher ideal.

Someone may now say: Your picture is an invention which corresponds to nothing true. All that you conjure up, the black cross and the red rose is mere fancy. Yes, undoubtedly, this picture, as brought before the inner eye of anyone who wishes to rise into spiritual worlds, is an invention. That is just what it has to be! Its purpose is not to portray something that exists in the external world. If that were its function, we would not need it. We would be satisfied with the impressions of the outer world that come to us directly through our sense-perceptions. But the picture we create, though its elements are drawn from the external world, is based on certain feelings and ideas that belong to our own inner being. The essential thing is that we should be fully conscious of each step, so that we keep a firm hold on the threads of our inner processes; otherwise we should be lost in illusion.

Anyone who wants to rise to higher worlds through inner meditation and contemplation does not live only in abstract pictures, but in a world of concepts and feelings which flow from these pictures he creates. The pictures call forth a number of activities in his soul, and by excluding every external stimulus he concentrates all his powers on contemplating the pictures. They are not meant to reflect external circumstances, but to awaken forces that slumber within him. If he is patient and perseveres—for progress comes slowly—he will notice that quiet devotion to pictures of this kind will give him something that can be further developed. He will soon find that his inner life is changing: a condition emerges that is in some respects akin to sleep. But while sleep brings a submergence of conscious soul-life, the devotion I have mentioned, and meditation on the symbolic pictures, cause inner forces to awaken. Very soon he feels that a change is going on within him, although he has excluded all impressions of the outer world. So through these quite unrealistic symbols he awakens inner forces, and he soon realises that he can put them to good use.

Someone may object again by saying: “That is all very well, but even if we develop these forces and really penetrate into the spiritual world, how can we be sure that what we perceive is reality?” Nothing can prove this except experience, just as the external world can be proved to exist only by experience. Mere concepts can be very strictly distinguished from perceptions and the two categories will be confused only be someone who has lost touch with reality. Especially in philosophical circles today, a certain misunderstanding has been gaining ground. Schopenhauer,³⁹ for instance, in the first part of his philosophy starts with the assumption that the world of man is a concept. Now you can see the difference between a percept and a concept by looking at your watch. As long as you are in contact with your watch, that is percept; if you turn round, you have a picture of the watch in your mind; that is concept. In practical life we very soon learn to distinguish between percept and concept, or we should go badly astray. If you picture a red-hot iron, however hot it is, you will not be burnt, but if you touch it you will soon realise that a percept is something other than a concept.

It is the same with an example given by Kant;⁴⁰ from a certain point of view it is justified, but during the last century it has been the source of much error. Kant tried to upset a certain concept of God by showing that there is no difference in content between the idea of a hundred shillings and a hundred real shillings. It is wrong, however, to maintain that there is no difference in the content, for then it is easy to confuse a perception, which gives us direct contact with reality, with the content of a mere concept. Anyone who has to pay a debt of a hundred shillings will soon find out the difference.

It is the same with the spiritual world. When we awaken the forces and faculties which are latent within us, and when around us is a world we have not known before, a world which shines out as though from a dark spiritual depth, then someone who enters this realm uninitiated might well say that it is all illusion and auto-suggestion. But anyone who has had real experiences on this level will be well able to distinguish reality from fantasy, just as in ordinary life we can distinguish between an imaginary piece of hot steel and a real one.

Thus we can see that it is possible to call forth a different form of consciousness. I have given you only one brief example of how inner exercises can work on the sleeping faculties of the soul. Of course, while we are still practising the exercises, we do not see a spiritual world; we are occupied in awakening the faculties required. In some circumstances this may last not merely for years, but for a whole life or lives. In the end, however, the result of these exercises is that the sleeping forces of cognition are awakened and directed towards a spiritual world, just as we have learnt to adapt the eye with the help of unknown spiritual powers to observing the external world. This work on one's own soul, this development of the soul to the stage of perceiving a world in which we are not yet living but to which we gain access through what we bring to it—this training can be called asceticism in the true sense of the word. For in Greek the word means working on oneself, making oneself capable of accomplishing something, transforming sleeping forces into active ones. This original meaning of the word can still be its meaning today if we refuse to be led astray by the false use of the term which has become common down the centuries. We shall understand the true meaning of asceticism as described here, only if we remember that the purpose of this working on oneself is to develop faculties which will open up a new world.

Now, having discussed asceticism in relation to the spiritual world only, it will be helpful to see how the term applies to certain activities in the external world. There it can signify the training of certain forces and capabilities which are not going to be used immediately for their final purpose, but are first to be exercised and made ready for it. An example close at hand will illustrate this, and will also show how an incorrect use of the term can have harmful results. The term can be rightly applied to military manoeuvres; this is quite in keeping with the original Greek usage. The deployment and testing of military forces on these occasions, so that in real war they may be ready and available in the right numbers—that is asceticism exercise. Whenever forces are not used for their final purpose, but are tested in advance for efficiency and reliability, we have asceticism. Manoeuvres bear the same relation to warfare as asceticism does to life in general.

Human life, I said earlier, swings between work and idleness. But there are all sorts of intermediate stages: for example, play. Play, when it really is play, is the opposite of asceticism. And from its opposite one can see very well what asceticism is. Play is the active use of energies in the outer world for the sake of immediate gratification. The material of play is not, so to speak, the hard, unyielding substance of the external world that we encounter during hours of work. In relation to our energies it is malleable, amenable to our exertions. Play is play only when we do not knock up against the resistance of outer forces, as we do in work. Play is concerned with a direct release of energies which are transformed into achievement, and therein lies the satisfaction we get from it. Play does not prepare us for anything; it finds fulfillment in and through itself.

It is just the opposite with asceticism, if we take the term in its proper sense. In this case no gratification is gained from anything in the outer world. Whenever we combine things in asceticism, if only the cross and the red roses, the combination is not significant in itself, but only in so far as it calls our inner forces into activity, an activity which will find application only when it has ripened fully within ourselves. Renunciation comes in because we work inwardly on ourselves while knowing that at first we are not to be stimulated by the outer world. Our aim is to bring into activity our inner forces, so that they may be applied to the outer world later on. Play and asceticism, accordingly, are opposites.

How does asceticism, in our sense of the word, enter practically into human life? Let us keep to a sphere where asceticism can be practised both in a right and in a wrong way. We will take the case of someone who makes it his aim to ascend into spiritual worlds. If, then, a super-sensible world comes by some means or other to his attention, whether through another person or through some historical document, he may say: There are statements and communications concerning the super-sensible worlds, but at present they are beyond my comprehension; I lack the power to understand them. Then there are others who reject these communications, refuse to have anything to do with them. What is the source of this attitude? It arises because a person of this type rejects asceticism in the best sense of the word; he cannot find in his soul the strength to use the means I have described for developing higher faculties. He feels too weak for it.

I have repeatedly emphasised that clairvoyance is not necessary for understanding the findings of clairvoyant research. Clairvoyance is indeed necessary for gaining access to spiritual facts, but once the facts have been communicated, anyone can use unprejudiced reason to understand them. Impartial reason and healthy intellect are the best instruments for judging anything communicated from the spiritual worlds. A true spiritual scientist will always say that if he could be afraid of anything, he would be afraid of people who accept communications of this kind without testing them strictly by means of reason. He is never afraid of those who make use of unclouded intelligence, for that is what makes all these communications comprehensible.

However, a man may feel too weak to call forth in himself the forces necessary for understanding what he is told concerning the spiritual world. In that case he turns away from all this through an instinct for self-preservation which is right for him. He feels that to accept these communications would throw his mind into confusion. And in all cases where people reject what they hear through Spiritual Science, an instinct of self-preservation is at work; they know that they are incapable of doing the necessary exercises—that is, of practising asceticism in the true sense. A person prompted by the instinct for self-preservation will then say to himself: If these things were to permeate my spiritual life, they would confuse it; I could make nothing of them and therefore I reject them. So it is with a materialistic outlook which refuses to go a step beyond the doctrines of a science it believes to be firmly founded on facts. But there are other possibilities, and here we come to a dangerous side of asceticism. People may have a sort of avidity for information about the spiritual world while lacking the inner urge and conscience to test everything by reason and logic. They may indulge a liking for sensationalism in this field. Then they are not held back by an instinct for self-preservation, but are driven on by its very opposite, a sort of urge for self-annihilation. If anyone takes something into his soul without understanding it, and with no wish to apply his reason to it, he will be swamped by it. This happens in all cases of blind faith, or when communications from the spiritual worlds are accepted merely on authority. This acceptance corresponds to an asceticism which derives not from a healthy instinct for self-preservation, but from a morbid impulse to annihilate the self, to drown in a flood of revelations. This has a significant shadow-side in the human soul: it is a bad form of asceticism when someone gives up all effort and chooses to live in faith and in reliance on others.

This attitude has existed in many forms in many epochs. But we must not assume that everything which looks like blind faith is so. For example, we are told that in the old Pythagorean Mystery Schools⁴¹there was a familiar phrase: The Master has said. But this never meant: The Master has said, therefore we believe it! For his students it meant something like this: The Master has said; therefore it demands that we should reflect on it and see how far we can get with it if we bring all our forces to bear upon it. To “believe” need not always imply a blind belief springing from a desire for self-annihilation. It need not be blind belief if you accept communications springing from spiritual research because you trust the researcher. You may have learnt that his statements are in strictly logical form, and that in other realms, where his utterances can be tested, he is logical and does not talk nonsense. On this verifiable ground the student can hold a well-founded belief that the speaker, when he is talking about things not yet known to the student, has an equally sure basis for his statements. Hence the student can say: I will work! I have confidence in what I have been told, and this can be a guiding star for my endeavours to raise myself to the level of the faculties which will make themselves intelligible of their own accord, when I have worked my way up to them.

If this healthy foundation of trust is lacking and a person allows himself to be stirred by communications from the invisible worlds without understanding them, he will drift into a very wretched condition that is not compatible with asceticism. Whenever a person accepts something in blind faith without resolving to work his way to an understanding of it, and if therefore he accepts another person's will instead of his own, he will gradually lose those healthy soul-forces which provide the inner life with a sure centre and endow us with a true feeling for what is right. Lies and a proneness to error will beset a person who is unwilling to test inwardly, with his reason, what he is told; he will tend to drown and to lose himself in it. Anyone who does not allow himself to be guided by a healthy sense of truth will soon find how prone he is to lies and deceptions even in the outer world. When we approach the spiritual world we need to reflect very seriously that through this surrender of our judgment we can very easily fall into a life which no longer has any real feeling for truth and reality. If we seriously practise the exercises and wish to train our inner powers, we must never give up bringing before our souls the kind of knowledge I have been describing.

We can now penetrate further into what may be called the ascetic training of the soul in a deeper sense. So far we have considered only people who are not capable of developing these inner forces in a healthy way. In one case a sound instinct of self-preservation made a person refuse to develop these forces because he did not want to develop them; in the other case a person did not absolutely refuse to develop them, but he refused to bring his judgment and intelligence to bear on them. In all such cases the impulse is always to remain on the old level, at the old standpoint. But let us suppose a case where a person really does try to develop these inner faculties, and makes use of such forms of training as those we have described. Again there may be a dual result. It may be the result we always aim at, where Spiritual Science is taken seriously and worthily. A person will then be guided to develop his inner forces only in so far as he is capable of using them in a right and orderly way. Here, then, we are concerned with how a person has to work on himself—as is described in greater detail in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds: How is it Achieved?—in order to awaken the faculties which will open the spiritual world to his inner sight. But at the same time he must be competent to discipline his faculties and to establish the right balance between his work on himself and his dealings with the outer world. The necessity of this has been proved by spiritual researchers down the ages.

If a person fails to apply his inner forces properly to his handling of the outer world and gives way to an almost uncontrollable urge to develop his soul-powers more and more to bring about all possible movement in his soul, so that he may thereby open his spirit-eyes and spirit-ears; and if he is too indolent to absorb slowly and in the right way the available facts of Spiritual Science and to work on them with his reason, then his asceticism may do him great harm. A person can develop all sorts of faculties and powers and yet not know what to do with them or how to apply them to the outer world. This, indeed, is the outcome of many forms of training and it applies to those who fail to pursue energetically the methods we have described, whereby the student is continually strengthening himself.

There are other methods with a different aim: they may be more comfortable but they can easily cause harm. Such methods aim at doing away with the hindrances imposed on the soul by the bodily nature, in order to enhance the inner life. This was in fact the sole endeavour of mediaeval ascetics, and it survives in part today. Instead of true asceticism, which sets out to give the soul an ever-richer content, false asceticism leaves the soul as it is and sets out to weaken the body and to reduce the activity of its forces. There are indeed ways of damping down these forces, so that the functioning of the body gradually weakens, and the result may then be that the soul, though itself remaining weak, gets the upper hand over the weakened body. A correct asceticism leaves the body as it is and enables the soul to master it; the other asceticism leaves the soul as it is, while all sorts of procedures, fasting, mortifications and so on, are used to weaken the body. The soul is then relatively the stronger and can achieve a kind of consciousness, although its own powers have not increased. That is the way of many ascetics in the Middle Ages: they kill the vigour of the body, lower its activities, leave the soul as it is, and then live in the expectation that the content of the spiritual world will be revealed to them with no contribution on their part.

That is the easier method, but it is not a truly strengthening one. The true method requires a person to cleanse and purify his thinking, feeling and willing, so that these faculties will be strengthened and able to prevail over the body. The other method lowers the tone of the body, and the soul is then supposed to wait, without having acquired any new capacities, until the divine world flows into it.

You will find plenty of references to this method under the heading of “asceticism” in the Middle Ages. It leads to estrangement from the world and is bound to do so. For at the present stage of human evolution there is a certain relationship between our capabilities of perception and the outer world, and if we are to rise above this stage we can do so only by heightening our capabilities and using them to understand the outer world in its deeper significance. But if we weaken our normal forces, we make ourselves incapable of maintaining a normal relationship with the outer world; and especially if we tone down our thinking, feeling and willing and give our souls over to passive expectation, something will then flow into our souls which has no connection with our present-day world, makes us strangers there, and is useless for working in the world. While the true asceticism makes us more and more capable in our dealings with the world, for we see more and more deeply into it, the other asceticism, associated with the suppression of bodily functions, draws a person out of the world, tends to make him a hermit, a mere settler there. In this isolation he may see all sorts of psychic and spiritual things—this must not be denied—but an asceticism of this kind is of no use for the world. True asceticism is work, training for the world, not a withdrawal of oneself into remoteness from the world.

This does not imply that we have to go to the opposite extreme; there can be accommodation on both sides. Even though it is true in general that for our period in human evolution a certain normal relationship exists between the external world and the forces of the soul, yet every period tends to drive the normal to extremes as it were, and if we want to develop higher faculties we need pay no attention to opposition that comes from abnormal trends. And because we find the opposition in ourselves, we can under certain circumstances go rather further than would be necessary if the times were not also at fault.

I say this because you have perhaps heard that many followers of Spiritual Science lay great stress on a certain diet. This does not at all imply that such a mode of life can do anything for the attainment or even the understanding of higher worlds and higher relationships. It can be no more than an external aid, and should be seen only in relation to the fact that anyone wishing to gain understanding of the higher worlds may find a certain obstacle in the customs and conventions he has to live with at the present day. Because these conventions have drawn us down too deeply into the material world, we must go beyond the normal in order to make the exercises easier. But it would be quite mistaken to regard this as a form of asceticism which can be a means of leading us to higher worlds. Vegetarianism will never lead anyone to higher worlds; it can be no more than a support for someone who thinks to himself: I wish to open for myself certain ways of understanding the spiritual worlds; I am hindered by the heaviness of my body, which prevents the exercises from having an immediate effect. Hence I will make things easier by lightening my body. Vegetarianism is one way of producing this result, but it should never be presented as a dogma; it is only a means which can help some people to gain understanding of the spiritual worlds. No-one should suppose that a vegetarian way of life will enable him to develop spiritual powers. For it leaves the soul as it is and serves only to weaken the body. But if the soul is strengthened, it will be able though the effects of vegetarianism to strengthen the weakened body from the centre of its own forces. Anyone who develops spiritually with the aid of vegetarianism will be stronger, more efficient and more resistant in daily life; he will be not merely a match for any meat-eater but will be superior in working capacity. That is the very opposite of what is believed by many people when they say of vegetarians within a spiritual movement: How sad for these poor folk who can never enjoy a little bit of meat!

So long as a person has this feeling about vegetarianism, it will not bring him the slightest benefit. So long as a desire for meat persists, vegetarianism is useless. It is helpful only when it results from an attitude that I will illustrate with a little story.

Not very long ago, someone was asked: “Why don't you eat meat?” He replied with a counter-question: “Why don't you eat dogs or cats?” “One just can't”, was the answer. “Why can't you?” “Because I would find it disgusting.” “Well, that is just what I feel about all meat.”

That is the point. When pleasure in eating meat has gone, then to abstain from meat may be of some use in relation to the spiritual worlds.

Until then, breaking the meat-eating habit can be helpful only for getting rid of the desire for meat. If the desire persists, it may be better to start eating meat again, for to go on tormenting oneself about it is certainly not the right way to reach an understanding of Spiritual Science.

From all this you can see the difference between true and false asceticism. False asceticism often attracts people whose sole desire is to develop the inner forces and faculties of the soul; they are indifferent towards gaining real knowledge of the outer world. Their aim is simply to develop their inner faculties and then to wait and see what comes of it. The best way of doing this is to mortify the body as far as possible, for this weakens it, and then the soul, though itself remaining weak, can see into some kind of spiritual world, however incapable it may be of understanding the real spiritual world. This, however, is a path of deception, for directly a person closes off his means of return to the physical world, he encounters no true spiritual world, but only delusive pictures of his own self. And these are what he is bound to encounter as long as he leaves his soul as it is. Because his ego keeps to its accustomed standpoint, it does not rise to higher powers, and he puts up a barrier between himself and the world by suppressing the functions which relate him to the world. It is not only that this kind of asceticism estranges him from the world; he sees pictures which can deceive him as to the stage his soul has reached, and in place of a true spiritual world he sees a picture clouded over by his own self.

There is a further consequence which leads into the realm of morality. Anyone who believes that humility and surrender to the spiritual world will set him on the right course of life fails to see that he is involving himself most strongly in his own self and becoming an egoist in the worst sense, for it means that he is content with himself as he is and has no wish to progress any further. This egoism, which can degenerate into unrestrained ambition and vanity, is the more dangerous because the victim of it cannot see it for himself. Generally he looks on himself as a man who sinks down in deepest humility at the feet of his God, while really he is being played on by the devil of megalomania. A genuine humility would tell him something he refuses to recognise, for it would lead him to say to himself: The powers of the spiritual world are not to be found at the stage where I am standing now: I must climb up to them; I must not rest content with the powers I already have.

So we see the results of the false asceticism which relies primarily on killing off external things instead of strengthening the inner life: it conduces to deception, error, vanity and egotism. In our time, especially, it would be a great evil if this course were followed as a means of entering the spiritual world. It serves merely to engross man in himself. Today the only true asceticism must be sought in modern Spiritual Science, founded on the firm ground of reality. Through it a person can develop his own faculties and forces and thus rise to a comprehension of a spiritual world which is itself a real world, not one that a man spins round himself.

This false asceticism has yet another shadow-side. If you look at the realms of nature around us, leading up from plants through animals to man, you will find the vital functions changing in character stage by stage. For example, the diseases of plants come only from some external cause, from abnormal conditions of wind and weather, light and sunshine. These external circumstances can produce illness in plants. If we go on to consider animals, we find that they also, if left to themselves are greatly superior to human beings in their fund of natural health. A human being may fall ill not only through the life he leads or through external circumstances, but also as a result of his inner life. If his soul is not well suited to his body, if the spiritual heritage he brings from earlier incarnations cannot adapt itself completely to his bodily constitution, these inner causes may bring about illnesses which are very often wrongly diagnosed. They can be symptoms of a maladjustment between soul and body.

We often find that people with these symptoms are inclined to rise to higher worlds by killing off their bodily nature. This is because the illness itself induces them to separate their souls from bodies which the soul has not fully permeated. In such people the body hardens itself in the most varied ways and closes in on itself; and since they have not strengthened the soul, but have used its weakness in order to escape from the influence of the bodily nature, and have thus drawn away from the body the health-giving strengthening forces of the soul, the body is made susceptible to all sorts of ailments. While a true asceticism strengthens the soul, which then works back on the body and makes it resistant to illness coming from outside, a false asceticism makes a person vulnerable to any illness of that kind.

That is the dangerous connection between false asceticism and the illnesses of our time. And it is this that gives rise in wide circles, where such things are easily misunderstood, to manifold errors as to the influence a spiritual-scientific outlook can have on those who adopt it. For people who seek to come to a sight of the spiritual world by way of a false asceticism are a fearful spectacle for onlookers. Their false asceticism opens up a wide field of action for harmful influences from the outer world. For these people, far from being strengthened to resist the errors of our time, are well and truly exposed to them.

Examples of this can be seen in many theosophical tendencies today. Merely calling oneself a “Theosophist” does not automatically guarantee the ability to act as a spiritual impulse against the adverse currents of the present time. When materialism prevails in the world, it is to some extent in tune with the concepts which are formed in observing the sense-world. Hence we can say that the materialism which applies to the external world and knows nothing of a spiritual world is in a certain sense justified. But in the case of an outlook which sets out to impart something about the spiritual world and takes into itself a caricature of the materialistic prejudices of our day because it is not founded on a real strengthening of spiritual forces, the result is much worse. A theosophical outlook permeated by contemporary errors may in some circumstances be much more harmful than a materialistic outlook; and it should be remarked that thoroughly materialistic concepts have spread widely in theosophical circles. So we hear the spiritual spoken of not as Spirit, but as though the spirit were only an infinitely refined form of nebulous matter. In speaking of the etheric body, these people picture only the physical refined beyond a certain point, and then they speak of etheric “vibrations”. On the astral level the vibrations are still finer; on the mental level they are finer still, and so on. “Vibrations” everywhere! Anyone who relies on these concepts will never attain to the spiritual world; he will remain embedded in the physical world to which these concepts ought to be confined.

In this way a materialistic haze can be thrown over the most ordinary occasions in daily life. For instance, if we are at a social gathering which has a pleasant atmosphere, with people in harmony, and someone remarks on it in those terms, that may be a humdrum way of putting it; but it is a true way and leads to a better understanding than if at a gathering of theosophists one of them says how good the vibrations are. To say that, one has to be a theosophical materialist with crude ideas. And for anyone with a feeling for such things, the whole atmosphere goes out of tune when these vibrations are said to be dancing around. In these cases one can see how the introduction of materialistic ideas into a spiritual outlook produces a horrifying impression on outsiders, who may then say: These people talk about a spiritual world, but they are really no different from us. With us, the light waves dance; with them the spiritual waves dance. It is all the same materialism.

All this needs to be seen in its true light. Then we shall not get a wrong idea of what the spiritual-scientific movement has to offer in our time. We shall see that asceticism, by strengthening the soul, can itself lead to the spiritual world and so bring new forces into our material existence. These are forces that make for health, not for illness; they carry healthy life-forces into our bodily organism. Of course it is not easy to determine how far a given outlook brings healthy or unhealthy forces with it, for the latter are strongly evident, as a rule, while healthy forces are usually not noticed. However, a close observer will see how persons who stand in the stream of true Spiritual Science are fertilised by it and draw from it health-giving forces which work right down into the physical. He will see also that signs of illness appear only if something alien to a spiritual stream is introduced into it. Then the result can be worse than when the alien influence takes its course in the outer world, where people are shielded by conventions from carrying certain errors to an extreme.

If we see things in this light, we shall understand true asceticism as a preparatory training for a higher life, a way of developing our inner forces; and we shall then be taking the good old Greek word in its right sense. For to practise asceticism means training oneself, making oneself strong, even “adorning” oneself (sich schmucken), so that the world can see what it means to be human. But if asceticism leads you to leave the soul as it is and to weaken the bodily organism, the effect is that the soul is sundered from the body; the body is then exposed to all sorts of harmful influences and the asceticism is actually the source of all manner of ailments.

The good and bad sides of egoism will emerge when we come to consider its nature. Today I have shown how true asceticism can never be an end in itself, but only a means of reaching a higher human goal, the conscious experiencing of higher worlds. Anyone wishing to practise this asceticism must therefore keep his feet firmly planted on solid ground. He must not be a stranger to the world in which he lives, but must always be extending his knowledge of the world. Whatever he can bring back from higher worlds must always be measured and assessed in relation to his work in the world; otherwise those who say that asceticism is not work but idleness could well be right. And idleness can easily give occasion for false asceticism, especially in our time. Anyone, however, who keeps a firm foothold on the earth, will regard asceticism as his highest ideal in relation to so serious a subject as our human faculties. Our ideas can indeed rise high if we have before us an ideal picture of how our faculties should work in the world.

Let us look for a moment at the opening of the Old Testament: “And God said, Let there be light.” Then we hear how God caused the physical sense-world to arise day by day from the spiritual, and how at the end of each day God looked at his creation and “saw that it was good.”

Similarly we must maintain our healthy thinking, our reliable character, our unerring feelings on the firm ground of reality, in order that we may rise to higher worlds and discover there the facts which give birth to the entire physical world. Then, when as searchers we come to know the spirit, and when we apply to the world around us the forces we have developed and see how well adapted to it they are, we can see that this is good. If we test the forces we have acquired through true asceticism by putting them to work in the world, then we have the right to say: Yes, they are good.

• 35. For his concept of asceticism see The World as Will and Representation, Book IV. Particularly from par. 68.
• 36. Cf. also the chapter “Sleep and Death” in Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science, An Outline.
• 37. Cf. also the chapter “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds” in Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science, An Outline.
• 38. Last verse of the poem “Selige Sehnsucht” from the Westöstliche Divan.
• 39. See note 20.
• 40. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Second Division, Book 11, Chapter III, Section 4: “The impossibility of an Ontological Proof of the Existence of God”.
• 41. Pythagoras of Samos, c. 580–495 B.C. Cf. also Rudolf Steiner, Christianity as Mystical Fact and The Riddles of Philosophy.

I would well understand if anybody considered the whole idea of this talk as an aberration. I would also understand if anybody said how one can abuse Goethe's name while making a relationship to spiritual science, because it is sufficiently known that Goethe's view is typical just because it is directed to the outer nature, and it regarded it as rather dubious to raise the lawfulness of the world to ideal heights, as Schiller did it. Then one can say how Goethe would have behaved negatively if one had related his mental pictures to that which accepts a concrete real spirit from particular inner experiences that places itself beside the natural world. I know very well that to the production of such relation such a rich spirit can be abused like Goethe. Since if one still brings in so many remarks of Goethe to confirm this or that own view, it is always possible of course to bring in other remarks of Goethe to confirm the opposite opinion. However, compared with all that I am allowed to mention from the start that I never wanted in case of my really long-standing occupation with Goethe and the Goethean worldview to state these or those contents of a Goethean sentence to confirm the worldview meant here. I always wanted to characterise the whole way, the inner structure of Goethe's soul life in its relation to the natural phenomena. Since it seems to me if one goes into the inner structure of Goethe's nature that one will also gain an understanding of the fact that such a spirit like Goethe expressed apparently opposite views about the same. One can always easily argue something can from the most different sides against the intention to connect Goethe with the investigation of spiritual life.

At first the philosophers feel called because of their ability of thinking if it concerns the investigation of the supersensible compared with the sensory. One has always reminded that Goethe characterised the whole way of his position to the world repeatedly while he said, he owes everything that he got as knowledge about the world to the fact that he never thought about thinking. With it, the whole philosophical attitude of Goethe seems to be condemned to many philosophically thinking people.

It seems necessary to reject Goethe's nature for the investigation of the world as far as one has to exceed with such an investigation what it presents immediately to the senses. On the other side, religious people who want to direct the soul to a world that is beyond the sensory, of course, are irked by such a concise sentence as he did. He always felt it unpleasant to the highest degree to speak of things of another world. He expresses himself even once about the fact in such a way that he says, as a spot is in the eye, which sees, actually, nothing, a cavity is in the human brain. If this hollow place, which actually sees nothing, dreams all kinds of stuff in the world, so one speaks of such nullities like of the things of another world. When Goethe said this, he also pointed to the fact, that such a person inclined to the spiritual like Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788) was worried if one spoke only of the things of another world. Goethe agrees with Hamann in this respect completely. In the most vigorous way, Goethe refused to speak of the things of another world. Yes, the naturalists themselves, although on them the influence of Goethe has worked strongly, can refer if they stand quite sincerely on the ground of modern natural sciences to the fact that Goethe showed, for example, in his theory of colours that he never could penetrate into the strictly scientific way of research that this never was adequate to him, and that he came just thereby to a view deviating from the ruling theory of colours.

Now here it cannot be my task to justify the Goethean natural sciences. I have done this in a number of writings. Today it should be only my task to attach some connections from spiritual science to the Goethean natural sciences. Above all, I would like to go back to something that is exceptionally typical with this spirit for someone who approaches Goethe: the refusal of thinking about thinking. One has the sensation with the Goethean worldview where one only wants to recognise it, that Goethe himself was afraid instinctively of submitting the thinking itself to a consideration. He shrank from it as from something that constitutes, otherwise, the strength of his worldview. At such a place where Goethe characterises himself, you have to stop, because you can rather deeply look from here into the structure of the Goethean mind. If one considers just philosophically disposed people who have struggled with that which the thinking means for the human soul, you can realise if you make the thinking an object of observation like other objects of our world experience that you always evoke something in the soul that appears like an insurmountable obstacle. While you direct the thinking to the thinking itself, you cause a sum of uncertainties in the human being. Although you have always to ask yourself if you want to investigate the supersensible seriously: is this human thinking able to penetrate into the spiritual world?—You still face doubt, indecision.

As a single factual proof of it which could be increased a hundred times I would like to quote the sentence of a thinker who is less famous, indeed, who, however, is counted by those who know him among the deepest ones, among the most impressive thinkers of our time, Professor Gideon Spicker (1840-1912), the philosopher with the strange destiny who has worked his way out of a confessional ecclesiastical worldview to a free philosophical viewpoint. You can pursue how there once a thinking really soared by own power from a traditional viewpoint to a free one if you read his book At the Turning Point of the Christian World Period. The Philosophical Confession of a Former Capuchin that appeared in 1910 as a kind of philosophical autobiography. You find the following sentence there that describes a self-experience with the thinking:

“To whichever philosophy you confess—whether to a dogmatic or skeptical one, to an empiric or transcendental one, to a critical or eclectic one—any without exception takes an unproven and unprovable sentence as starting point, namely the necessity of the thinking. No investigation figures this necessity out one day, as deeply as it may prospect. One must accept it and one can reason it with nothing; every attempt to prove its correctness already requires it. Beneath it a bottomless abyss yawns, a spooky darkness illuminated by no beam of light. We do not know where from it comes nor where to it leads. It is uncertain whether a merciful god or a bad demon put it in the reason.”

This is a self-experience of a thinking which tried to bring to mind what is, actually, a thinking which has struggled to grasp the human being in the point where it thinks to find that in this point where the temporal, the transient of the human being is connected with the everlasting. To this point everybody must come who wants to approach the everlasting nature of the human being. However, what does Gideon Spicker find? He finds if one has arrived at the place where one can consider the thinking, indeed, the necessity of the thinking appears, but there also a bottomless abyss appears. Since beyond this thinking—what is there? Is it a merciful god or a bad demon who put the thinking in the reason? An abyss, a desolate darkness is that what Gideon Spicker sees. One can find out immediately that those who cannot get further with the pursuit of thinking than up to the thinking cannot still satisfy themselves within this thinking.

All that is like a spiritually instinctive experience in Goethe's healthy worldview. One cannot say that he was prepared in his inside one day to bring the bottomless abyss home to himself of which Gideon Spicker speaks. However, Goethe felt that such a thing could happen if one wants to solve the world riddles only with the mere thinking. Hence, he did not approach at all this point. We will see immediately which deeper impulses formed the basis of this Goethean instinct. For the time being I only wanted to point out that Goethe was very well at that point where the philosophers are if they want to investigate the everlasting in the human being and in the world that he avoided, however, this point, did not approach it.

You can understand Goethe's character immediately if he does not defer to things of another world. There just the oppose impulse appears with him who argued from immediate spiritual instinctiveness that one does not need to go out of the world which presents itself immediately to the senses to find the spirit. Goethe was clear in his mind that someone who is able to find the spirit does not need to search it in another world, and vice versa, that someone who feels nature as little filled with spirit so that he needs to reflect on another world can only find fantastic, dreamy things in another world but never really the spirit. Goethe searched the spirit so much within the things of this world that he had to refuse to search it in any other world. He already regarded the feeling that one must leave this world to get to the spirit as something brainless.

In particular, you get an impression of the kind of the Goethean world observation if you look at how Goethe behaved to the phenomena of nature how he searched the spirit and the spiritual life really in nature. You know that Goethe did not study the various fields of natural sciences during his school years but approached them only later in his life and that he had to manage the phenomena of nature with mental pictures that he had compiled in his life. Herman Grimm emphasised rightly as a significant characteristic feature in the life of Goethe that, while others are introduced by teachers gradually methodically in this or that scientific approach, Goethe approached scientific attempts as a ripe man by life praxis, so that he had to form own mental pictures of these or those natural phenomena with a certain maturity.

As a rule, he got to mental pictures, which deviated significantly from that what about the same things just the authoritative scientists of his time meant. One can say that the Goethean viewpoint is diametrically opposed not only to the natural sciences of his time but also to the natural sciences of the present in a certain respect.

It is inadmissible if from some side single remarks of Goethe are picked out repeatedly to prove the views of Haeckel or also of his opponents one-sidedly. One can prove and confirm everything with Goethe if one wants it. Goethe got to botany because he wanted to care about the agriculture in the Grand Duchy of Weimar, so out of life praxis. He got to geology by the Ilmenau (little town in Thuringia) mining, to physics because the scientific collections of the University of Jena had been assigned to him. Therefore, from necessity of life he tried to get mental pictures by which he could penetrate into the secrets of nature. You know that he formed views this way that found their confirmation partly in the course of the nineteenth century, as far as they point to outer scientific facts. However, Goethe did not get these views like other naturalists, but rather he was urged by his enclosing way of thinking to think in a way about certain natural processes and essentialities. You can say that immediately with his first, epoch-making discovery this is the case.

When Goethe became acquainted with zoology and human biology by observing the anatomical and physiological collections in Jena, he also familiarised himself with all kinds of teachings which were usual in natural sciences at that time about the human being as sensory being. One looked in those days still for outer differences of the human being and the animals. One looked in a way that the modern natural sciences do no longer understand.

One linked, for example, the difference to a detail, while one stated that in the upper jaw of the human being no intermaxillary existed, while all higher animals would have this bone. Goethe disliked this, simply because he could not imagine at first that the remaining skeleton of the human being would differ in such an unimportant detail. Now Goethe looked, while he himself became an anatomical researcher, while he investigated skeleton after skeleton and compared the human construction to the animals in relation to the upper jaw whether that had an inner significance what the anatomists said. Then Goethe could show really that there is no difference between the human and the animal skeletons in this respect. He already consulted the embryological research that became especially important later and showed that with the human being relatively early during the embryonic development the other parts of the upper jaw grow together with the intermaxillary so that it does not seem to exist with the human being. Goethe had become clear in his mind that it was right what he had felt first that the human being is different from the animals not by such an anatomical detail, but only by his whole posture. Of course, Goethe thereby did not become a materialistic thinker. However, he could get closer to the ideas that immediately suggested themselves to him, above all, by his acquaintance with Herder (Johann Gottfried H., 1744-1803) who wanted to extend an enclosing way of thinking to all world phenomena, so that the evolution of the world shows an inner necessity that finally generates the human being at its summit.

How can one imagine, Goethe thought in harmony with Herder, that in the evolution a big harmony, an inner lawful necessity prevails, and that then suddenly somewhere a line is drawn so that on this side of the line the complete animal development is and beyond this line the human development which should be different by such an unimportant detail? One can realise from how Goethe speaks, what was near and dear to him, actually. Not to make a single scientific discovery, but to behold a harmonious order in the whole enclosing nature, so that the details put themselves everywhere in a whole so that jumps are nowhere to be found in the evolution of the world. You can notice in a letter to Herder in which he informed his discovery joyfully with the words: “It is there too, the small bone!” that Goethe found something like a confirmation of his worldview in this single fact.

He continued this view just in relation on the animal forms. There he got also to single facts that were important, however, for him not as those, but confirmed his worldview only. He himself tells that he found an animal skull at his stay in Venice on a cemetery that showed him clearly that the cranial bones are nothing but transformed vertebrae. He thought that the ring-shaped vertebrae contain concealed possibilities of growth, can be transformed into the cranial bones that surround the brain. Goethe thereby got to the idea that the human being and the animal, the different beings of organic life generally, are built from relatively simple entities that develop in living metamorphosis into each other or diverge.

One can immediately receive the sensation with the research intentions of Goethe that he wanted to apply this idea of metamorphosis not only to the skeleton, but also to all other parts of the human being. He could carry out his research only on a special field because one human being cannot do everything, and because he worked with limited research means. Someone who knows Goethe's scientific writings knows that Goethe carefully indicated the cranial bones as transformed dorsal vertebrae. However, one can just have the feeling that Goethe's ideas advanced farther in this field. He would generally have had to carry the view in his mind that the complete human brain is only a transformed part of the spinal cord as a physical-sensory organ that the human formative forces are able to transform what is only a part of the spinal cord on a low level into the complex human brain.

I had this feeling when I received the task in the end of 1889 to incorporate the handwritten notes in the Weimar Goethe and Schiller Archive into Goethe's scientific writings published until then. It was especially interesting to me to pursue whether such ideas have really lived in Goethe from which one could have the feeling that they must have been there, actually, with him. In particular, it interested me whether Goethe really had the idea to regard the brain as a transformed part of the spinal cord. Lo and behold, with the examination of the manuscripts it really resulted that Goethe had written the following sentence in a notebook with pencil like an intuition: “The brain is only a transformed cerebral ganglion.” Then the anatomist Bardeleben (Karl von B., 1849-1919) revised this part of Goethe's scientific writings.

Then Goethe applied the same way of thinking to the plant realm. There his views concerning the outer facts have found just as little contradiction as in anatomy. Goethe interprets, actually, the whole plant as composed of a single organ. This organ is the leaf. Backward and forward, the plant is always leaf. The coloured petal is the transformed green leaf, also the stamens and the pistil are to him only transformed leaves, and everything of the plant is leaf. That what lives in the plant leaf as formative force can accept all possible outer forms. Goethe explained this so nicely in his writing Metamorphosis of Plants (1790).

Howsoever one may behave now to the details with Goethe, the way is important how he generally did research. This was and is to many people something strange. Goethe himself was clear about that. Imagine how the human soul that looks at the organic world in Goethe's sense sees such an organ like the plant leaf changing into the petal, then into the filamentous stamen, even into the root. Imagine a simple ring-shaped dorsal vertebra fluffed and flattened by laws of growth, so that it is qualified for enclosing not only the spinal cord, but also the brain which itself is transformed from a part of the spinal cord, and that the inner mobility of his thinking is necessary. He probably felt what prevents us from looking at the world phenomena this way. Someone who has a rigid thinking who wants to develop sharply outlined concepts only forms the firm concept of the green leaf, of the petal and so on; however, he cannot go over from one concept to the other. In doing so, nature breaks into nothing but details. He does not have the possibility because his concepts have no inner mobility to penetrate into the inner mobility of nature.

However, thereby you become able to settle down in Goethe's soul and to convince yourself of the fact that with him cognition is generally something else than with many other people. While with many other people, cognition is joining of concepts which they form apart, cognition is with Goethe immersing in the world of the beings, pursuing that what grows and becomes and transforms perpetually, so that his thinking changes perpetually. Briefly, Goethe sets that in inner motion, which is mere thinking, otherwise. Then it is no longer a mere thinking. About that, I will speak in detail in the next talks. It matters that the human being arouses the only inferring thinking to the inner living thinking. Then thinking is a life in thoughts. Then one can also no longer think about the thinking, but then it generally changes into something else.

Then the thinking about the thinking changes into a spiritual view of thinking, then one faces the thinking as usual outer sensory objects, save that one perceives these with eyes and ears, while one faces the thinking mentally. Goethe wanted to go over everywhere from the mere thinking to the inner spiritual views, to the beholding consciousness as I have called it in my book The Riddle of Man. Hence, Goethe is dissatisfied because Kant said that the human being cannot approach the so-called “things in themselves” or generally the secret of existence, and that Kant called it an “adventure of reason” if the human being wants to ascend from the usual faculty of judgement up to the “beholding faculty of judgement.”

Goethe said, if one accepts that the human being can ascend by virtue and immortality—the so-called postulates of practical reason with Kant—to a higher region, why one should not stand the “adventure of reason” courageously while beholding nature? Goethe demands from the human being this beholding faculty of judgement. From this point, one can understand why Goethe avoided the thinking about the thinking. Goethe knew that if one wants to think about the thinking one is, actually, in the same position, as if one wanted to paint the painting. One could imagine that anybody wants to paint the painting even that he does it. However, then he exceeds the real painting.

In the same way, you have to exceed the thinking if it should become concrete. Goethe knew from a spiritual instinct that the human being can wake concealed forces and abilities in himself and get to the beholding consciousness, so that the spiritual world is around him, just as, otherwise, the sensory world is around his senses. Then you leave as it were not only your usual sensory life but also your usual thinking. Then you look at the thinking as a reality. You cannot think the thinking; you can behold it. Hence, Goethe always understood if philosophers approached him who believed to have the ability to look at the thinking spiritually. He could never understood if people stated, they could think about the thinking. Only a higher ability lets the thinking appear before the human being. Goethe had this ability. This simply shows the kind of his view of nature. Since the ability to put the thinking in living motion to pursue the metamorphosis of the things is on a lower level the same as the beholding consciousness on a higher level. Goethe felt thinking while looking. However, Goethe had a special peculiarity.

There are certain persons who have a kind of naive clairvoyance, a kind of naive beholding consciousness. Now it is far from my mind to state that Goethe had a kind of naive beholding consciousness only, but Goethe had a special disposition by which he differs from someone who only is able to get to the beholding consciousness by the conscious development of the deeper abilities of his soul. Goethe had this beholding consciousness not from the start as the naive clairvoyants have it, but he could put his thinking, the whole structure of his soul in such a motion that he could do research really not only externally and got thereby to physical laws grasped in thoughts, but he could pursue the inner life of the natural phenomena in their metamorphoses.

It is peculiar that this predisposition, if one wants to develop the ability of the spiritual beholding consciously, is impaired at first, it is even extinguished. Goethe had this natural predisposition in himself to develop a certain beholding consciousness gradually in himself with natural phenomena. He did not want such rules, as I have described them in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. Goethe did not have the beholding consciousness from the start, but in the course of his development it was to him a self-evident fact to develop certain abilities unlike other people do. This naive talent would have been extinguished at first. If the talent does not exist, one does not want to extinguish it, and then one can quietly develop these abilities consciously. Because it existed with Goethe as an inner spiritual desire, he did not want to disturb it; he wanted that it was left to itself. Hence, his shyness to look at the thinking, which he only wanted to behold, with the thinking. Otherwise, one has to try to go to the point of thinking to grasp the thoughts themselves and to transform them gradually into forces of beholding.

This is a special peculiarity of Goethe that he felt those forces growing up which can be also developed artificially. He did not want to destroy this naive while he spread, I would like to say, too much consciousness about it. However, this shows that it is not unjustified to observe not only how his soul forces work internally, but also how his soul forces immerse in nature. Then without fail Goethe is a model of the development of the beholding consciousness, of those spiritual forces, which really lead into the spiritual world, into the everlasting.

If you settle in Goethe's natural sciences in such a way that you observe them not only externally, but that you try to observe how you yourself become, actually, if you activate such forces in yourself, you can also transfer that what Goethe pursued with his view of nature to the human soul itself. Then comes to light what Goethe omitted because his senses were directed outward at first, to nature which he considered spiritually in her spirituality, namely that one has to look at the human soul life also under the viewpoint of metamorphosis. Goethe became aware of nature due to his special predisposition, and because this predisposition was especially strong, he looked less after the soul life.

However, you can apply his way of looking at the world to the soul life. Then you are led beyond the mere thinking. Most people who deal with these things simply do not believe this. They believe that one can think about the soul exactly the same way as one can think about something else. However, one can direct thoughts only to that what can be perceived outwardly. If you want to look back at the soul itself, on that what activates the human thinking, then you cannot do it with the thoughts. You need the beholding consciousness that exceeds the mere thinking; you get to the Imaginative knowledge, as I called it in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? and in other books. One cannot apply the same abstract, pale thoughts with which one grasps nature to the human soul life. One simply does not grasp it with them. Such thoughts are like a sieve, through which you pass the human soul life.

This occurred once in a great historical moment when Goethe and Schiller (1759-1805, German poet) met. Just in this point, you can realise what happens if you want to enter from Goethe's view of nature into a soul view. Schiller had written an important treatise, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (1794). I want to indicate only briefly, which soul riddle Schiller had in mind. Schiller wanted to solve the problem of the artistic. He wanted to answer the question to himself: what happens, actually, in the human soul if the human being creates or feels artistically if he puts himself in the world of beauty? Schiller found, if the human being is only given away to his sensory drives, he is subject to the physical necessity.

As far as the human being is subject to the physical necessity, he cannot approach beauty and art. Also, not if he dedicates himself only to the thinking if he follows the logical necessity only. However, there is a middle state, Schiller thinks. If the human being impregnates everything that the sensory gives him with his being so that it becomes like the pure spirituality, if he raises the sensory to spirituality and presses the spirituality down into the sensory, so that the sensory becomes spiritual and the spiritual becomes sensory, then he is in beauty, then he is in the artistic. The necessity seems to be reduced by the desire, and the desire seems to be improved by the spirit. Schiller spoke a lot about his intention to Goethe to invigorate the human soul forces so that in the harmony of the single soul forces this middle state appears which enables the human being to create or feel the artistic. In the nineties, from the deeper acquaintance of Goethe and Schiller on, this important life riddle played a big role in the correspondence and in the conversations of Schiller and Goethe. In the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man Schiller tried to solve this problem philosophically. Goethe also dealt with this problem because this problem occupied Schiller so much. But Goethe had the beholding consciousness which Schiller did not have; this enabled him to submerge with his thoughts in the world of the things themselves, but also to grasp the soul life more intimately.

He could realise that the human soul life is much more extensive, is much more immense than that what one can grasp with abstract thoughts, as Schiller did in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.

Goethe did not want simply to put such dashes, such contours of thoughts to characterise this richly structured human soul life. Thus, a little work of quite different nature originated about the same problem.

It is very interesting to consider more closely this point of the acquaintance of Goethe and Schiller. What did Schiller want, actually? Schiller wanted to show that in every human being a higher human being lives, as compared with what the usual consciousness encloses is a lower one. Schiller wanted to announce this higher human being who carries his desires up to the spirit and brings the spirit down to the desires, so that the human being, while he connects the spiritual and sensory necessities, grasps himself in a new way and appears as a higher human being in the human being. Goethe did not want to be so abstract. However, Goethe also wanted to strive for what lives as a higher human being within the human being. This higher being in the human being appeared to him so rich in its single member that he could not grasp it with mere thinking, so he put it in mighty, important pictures. Thus, The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily (1795) originated from forms at the end of Conversations of German Emigrants.

Someone who symbolises a lot in this fairy tale does not come close to its deeper sense. The different figures of this fairy tale, they are about twenty, are the soul forces, personified in their living cooperation which lift the human being beyond themselves and to the higher human being. This lives in the composition of The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. Only in pictures, Goethe could grasp the problem that Schiller grasped in thoughts philosophically; but in pictures which are an entire world.

You do not need to grasp the soul life pedantically only in Goethean way, so, actually, only in poetic pictures, but one realises—just if one goes into the inner structure of the Goethean worldview if one applies this to the soul life in same way, as Goethe applied his ramble spirituality in the metamorphosis—that the metamorphosis of the soul forces grasps the human being vividly and leads him from the transient that he experiences in the body to the imperishable that he experiences as that which is in his inside and goes through births and deaths. The usual psychology deals a lot with the question: should one take the one or the other soul force as starting point? Is the will original, is the imagination, or is the thinking original? How should one imagine the mutual relation of imagination, thinking, feeling, and percipience? One applied a lot of astuteness to grasp the cooperation of the different soul forces in such a way as the outer natural sciences grasp the interaction of green leaf and petal or the interaction of cranial bones and cerebral ones without considering the inner transformation.

Somebody who can turn his view from the outside inwards with Goethean sense can behold the soul life; however, he has to do it even more vividly than to the outer life of nature because one can rest in the outer life as it were with the spiritual view. The outer life gives you the material; you can go from creation to creation. The inner life seems to disappear perpetually if you want to look at it. However, if you turn the ramble thinking inwards, which just becomes a beholding one, then that becomes what appears as thinking, feeling, willing, and as perceiving, nothing but something intrinsic that changes into each other. The will becomes a metamorphosis of the feeling, the feeling a metamorphosis of imagining, the imagining a metamorphosis of the perceiving and vice versa.

The development of the forces and abilities slumbering in the human being, of the meditative thinking, which leads into the spiritual world, is based on nothing but on the living pursuit of the inner metamorphoses of the soul forces. On one side that tries who wants to become a spiritual researcher to develop his imagination, his percipience in such a way that he leads the will which only slumbers, otherwise, in percipience and imagination, into this percipience and imagination repeatedly in such a way that he brings that consciously to mind what, otherwise, appears as an involuntary mental picture. Thereby the usually pale thinking or forced percipience changes into the pictorial beholding. Since one can behold the spiritual only in pictures. The will and the feeling that one can imagine only, otherwise, but not in their real nature are recognised, are transformed by the meditative life, so that they become an imagining life, a perceiving life.

Leading the imagination into the will, leading the will into the imagining, changing the will into imagination and vice versa, the transformation of the imagining into the will in inner liveliness, the transformation of the single soul forces into each other, this is meditative life. If this is pursued, that announces itself for the inner observation what cannot announce itself if one looks only at thinking, at feeling and willing side by side. If one looks at them side by side, only the temporal of the human being appears. If one learns to recognise how imagining changes into feeling and the will changes into imagining and perceiving, one gets to know the metamorphosis of the inner soul life, as vividly as Goethe pursued the metamorphoses in the outer nature. Then the everlasting of the human soul announces itself that goes through births and deaths. The human being thereby enters the everlasting.

What did Goethe want while he removed such a prejudice that the human being differs by a detail like the intermaxillary bone in the upper jaw from the animal? He did not want that the human being faces as an isolated being the remaining world, he wanted, completely in harmony with Herder, to survey nature as a big whole and to look at the human being arising from the whole nature. When Schiller had got rid of some prejudices towards Goethe and had reached a pure free recognition of his greatness, he wrote to Goethe, how he had to think about Goethe's way of looking at nature. Among the rest, he wrote the nice words: “You take together the whole nature to get light for the single; in the entirety of her phenomena you look for the explanation of the individual ... A great and really heroic idea which shows only too well, how much your mind holds together the rich whole of its mental pictures in a nice unity.”

It attracts Schiller's attention that Goethe wanted to understand the human being while he assembled him from that which is separated, otherwise, in the different beings of nature but which can change by inner formative forces so that the human being appears like a summary of the outer natural phenomena in his outer figure, the crown of the outer nature.

One has to form a correct mental picture of that which there Goethe wanted, actually, if one envisages the other side now that arises for the soul life. If one envisages the metamorphosis of the inner soul forces as Goethe envisaged the metamorphosis of the outer forms of the human being, that arises what appears in the human being as a summary of the metamorphosing soul forces from the underlying world of spiritual beings and spiritual processes, as on the other side if one looks at the human being as a physical being in the Goethean way, this human physical being arises as a summary of the physical world. As Goethe's natural sciences connect the outer human figure to the whole remaining physical world, a Goethean psychology connects the human soul to the everlasting, concrete, enclosing spiritual world and allows it to concentrate in the human being. Not while you take this or that sentence of Goethe to confirm your own view you can build a bridge between spiritual science and the Goethean world consideration, but while you try to solve the problem internally—vividly, not in the abstract—logically how does one come close to such a kind to delve into nature?

Goethe himself possessed this ability to delve into nature naively. If you search it by deepening in his way to look at the world, to bring it back to life in yourself, then you get to the necessity to extend that which Goethe had as disposition for the view of nature also to the world of the mental. Then you get by the human soul life to the everlasting spiritual world as Goethe got by the human natural life to his consideration of the outer physical world. You have to approach Goethe internally; you have to try to want that in love what he wanted concerning nature. Then you get around to wanting the same concerning the spiritual world whose image is the human soul world. You get around to looking from the human soul into the spirit as Goethe looked from the human nature into the remaining nature. In this sense, one can already say that one understands Goethe little if one takes him only in such a way as he behaved at first. Goethe himself did not want to be taken in such a way. Since Goethe was very close to the whole way that must appear again with spiritual research, he was close to it also in the non-scientific areas, in the area of art.

If you yourself try to settle in the beholding consciousness, you realise that it is necessary above all that this settling does not perpetually disturb itself by all kinds of prejudices which are transferred from the sensory world or from the abstract, only logical thinking to the spiritual world. An important viewpoint of the investigation of the spiritual world is that you are able to wait. The soul can exert itself ever so much to investigate something in the spiritual world, it wants to investigate it absolutely, but it will fail, it will fool itself. It can exert itself ever so much unless in it those abilities have still matured which are necessary to the view of certain beings or certain facts, it will not yet be able to recognise them. Maturing, waiting is necessary until in the soul that has grown up which faces you in a certain area of the spiritual world. This is something that is necessary in a particular way for penetrating into the spiritual world. The spiritual researcher must have patience and energy to a high degree. I characterise other rules in later talks. Goethe was minded by his whole nature to be also as an artist in such a way that he waited everywhere.

Nothing is more interesting than to pursue those poetries of Goethe that he could not finish if one pursues how he got stuck with the Pandora, how he got stuck with the Natural Daughter which should have become a trilogy and became only one part. If you compare it to that which he finished brilliantly, like the second part of Faust or the Elective Affinities, one recognises his innermost nature. Goethe could not “do” anything, he had always to form that only to which he had advanced by the maturity of his being, and if he did not attain this maturity, he left it, and then he was not able to work on. Someone who creates artistically only combining can work on. Someone who lets the spirit create in himself like Goethe cannot advance sometimes just if he is great as Goethe was. Where Goethe had to stop, he was of particular interest for that who wants to penetrate into his inner being. If one pursues something like the Elective Affinities, one realises that that which lives in it existed already in relatively early time, but not the possibility to develop figures really that could embody this riddle of nature and human being. Goethe left them, and thus he handed over the Elective Affinities to a time when the persons did no longer live who could still have understood it because they had experienced the first youth impulses together with him.

Thus, Goethe was close to spiritual science by this real experience of the mental as it were, he was close to it by the desire not to stop at the abstract thinking but to advance from the thinking to reality, indeed, as a naturalist, but as a naturalist who searched the spirit. Therefore, he was so glad when during the twenties the psychologist Heinroth (Johann Christian H., 1773-1843, German anthropologist) said that Goethe had a concrete thinking. Goethe understood this straight away that he did not have a thinking that keeps on spinning a thread but that submerges in the things.

However, the thinking submerges in the things, it does not find abstract material atoms in them, but the spirit, as well as by the beholding consideration of the soul life the everlasting spirit of the human being is recognised. Therefore, Goethe's view envisaged what reveals itself within the world of the sensory as something spiritual. You can understand from those indications that Goethe did not want to think about the thinking because he only knew too well that one could only look at the thinking. One can also understand well that Goethe did not at all mean anything irreligious when he said that it is antipathetic to him to speak of the things of another world. Since he knew that these things of another world are in this world, penetrate it perpetually, and that someone who does not search these spiritual things and beings in nature who denies them in nature does not want to recognise the spirit in the phenomena of nature. Hence, Goethe did not want to look behind the natural phenomena, but he wanted to search everywhere in the natural phenomena. Hence, it was unpleasant to him to speak of an “inside of nature.”

So about many philosophical minded people look for the “thing in itself.” They face the world of the outer sensory perceptions; they recognise that they are only sensory perceptions, reflections of reality. There they look for the “things in themselves,” but not, while they withdraw from the mirror and search in that which the spirit can grasp as spirit, but while they smash the mirror to reach for the world of the dead atoms from which one can never grasp anything living.

This inside of nature was for Goethe completely beyond his imagination. Hence, with his review on all efforts which he had to do to penetrate into the spirituality of the natural phenomena, that severe quotation which he did about the great naturalist Haller who had become unpleasant to him because he had said once: “No created mind penetrates into the being of nature. Blissful is that to whom she shows her appearance only!” Goethe did not at all want to speak about nature this way. He answered to it:

“No created mind penetrates
Into the being of nature.”
O you Philistine!
Do not remind me
And my brothers and sisters
Of such a word.
We think: everywhere we are inside.
“Blissful is that to whom she shows
Her appearance only!”
I hear that repeatedly for sixty years,
I grumble about it, but covertly,
I say to myself thousand and thousand times:
She gives everything plenty and with pleasure;
Nature has neither kernel nor shell,
She is everything at the same time.
Examine yourself above all,
Whether you are kernel or shell.

Goethe believes that someone who looks at nature as something that is an outside of the spirit cannot penetrate into the spirit of nature. While she shows her shell in her different metamorphoses to the human being, it reveals the spirit to him at the same time with her kernel. Spiritual science wants nothing to be in this respect but a child of Goethe, I would like to say. It wants to extend that which Goethe applied in such fertile way to the world of the outer natural phenomena also to the soul phenomena by which they immediately receive active life and reveal the internal spiritual, that spiritual which lives in the human being as his everlasting immortal essence. We look closer at this in the following talks.

I wanted to show this today. Not because one grasps Goethe in his single statements, one can call him a father of spiritual science—since in this way one could make him the father of all possible worldviews—, but while one tries to settle affectionately in that what appeared to him so fertile. Then one does not repeat what he already said, but then spiritual science appears rightly as a continuation of the Goethean worldview. It seems to me that it is in its sense if one ascends from the physical life to the spiritual life.

Goethe himself showed when he wanted to summarise his worldview in his essay about Winckelmann (Johann Joachim W., 1717-1768, German art historian and archaeologist) the living together of the human being with the whole universe as an interaction of spirits, while he said: “If the healthy nature of the human being works as a whole if he feels in the world as in a big nice and worthy whole if the harmonious ease grants a pure, free delight to him, then the universe would shout out and admire the summit of its own being and becoming if it could feel itself because it has attained its goal.” Thus, Goethe lively imagined the essence of the human being together with the essence of nature in interaction: nature, the world perceiving itself in the human being, the human being recognising himself as everlasting, but expressing his eternity in the temporality of the outer world. Between world and human being, the world spirit lives, grasping itself, knowing itself, even confirming itself in the sense of Goethe.

Hence, those who have thought in the sense of Goethe were never tempted to deny the spirit and to apply the Goethean worldview to confirm a more or less materialistic worldview. No, those who have understood Goethe have always thought that the human being, while he faces the things of nature and lives among them, lives at the same time in the spirituality into which he enters if he dies. These human beings have thought in such a way as for example Novalis (1772-1801) did.

Novalis, the miraculous genius, who wanted to submerge in nature in certain phases of his life in quite Goethean way, knew himself immersed in the spiritual world. His many remarks about the immediate present of the spirit in the sensory world go back to the Goethean worldview. Hence, I am allowed, while Goethe is put as it were as a father of a spiritual worldview, to close with a remark, which Novalis did completely in the Goethean sense that summarises that which I briefly outlined today as Goethean worldview in a way:

“The spiritual world is also not closed to us here. It is always manifest to us. If we can make our souls as elastic as it is necessary, we are like spirits among spirits!”

My dear friends, yesterday we were able to show how the intellect, all that is connected with the forming of our ideas and concepts, is in a certain way—especially in the case of Western thinking—set free from the inner upstreaming, the inner creating, and activity. We saw how through this fact man comes to the point of merely seeing images of something external in what he receives as concepts and ideas, and how he does not notice that at the same time as he is conceiving and thinking, something is also happening in him himself. An inner becoming is accomplished, an inner happening takes place. And I also referred yesterday to the polar opposite of this, namely, how the impulses of feeling and will are bewitched in the inner being of man, so that when he feels, when he brings his will into activity, he has the consciousness that he is then entirely and solely within himself, that he is concerned only with himself, and that what takes place in the impulses of feeling and will has nothing to do with anything in the outside world, in the cosmos. We believe that in our feelings we only bring to expression our inner life, we believe we are experiencing something which is connected only with this inner nature.

I have pointed out that this originates from the fact that certain spiritual beings of the hierarchy of the Archangeloi, at the time of the separation of the Old Moon from the Sun-evolution, did not take the step of separation, but remained, as it were, with the progressing Sun-evolution. What entered their destiny through their not having made this step of sharing in the Moon existence, they are now going through, in as much as they take part in our earthly existence. They interpenetrate us, interweave in us and shut off our feeling and our willing from the outer cosmic existence. They confine this feeling and willing of ours to our inner nature.

But now there arises through this, as you can readily imagine, a kind of pronounced separation between something in us that wishes to be confined to us ourselves, to live only within us as our impulses of feeling and willing, and something else which pays little heed to what is in us, and which are, far more turns outwards and tries to take a direction towards the external.

If we want to make a sketch of what this denotes we could perhaps say:

If this is the human being drawn schematically, we should first be concerned with our intellectual life (Diagram 1 yellow) which turns to the outer world and wishes to receive it and pays no attention to the fact that here within, it is raying out and continually calling forth our form. On the other hand we have an element of will and feeling here in the interior (violet), they radiate only within us and we are not aware that they now also go out into the cosmos, that they really bear something in them which is just as much derived from the cosmos as is the content of our thoughts.

There is, however, in us human beings a connection between these two centres within us. It is a connecting link (light red) but in ordinary life and existence it remains unknown, does not enter the consciousness. Man, in fact, experiences as his inner world, his feeling-and willing, and as his outer world his thinking, which leads over to perceptions, to the sense impressions. Thus, in ordinary life, the link between these two centres in us does not actually come to our consciousness. As a consequence of this, man can easily acquire the notion that truth is imparted to him from two sides, that he attains truth, or something like truth by observing the outer world through his senses, and then combining the observation with his intellect and so on.

Kant has examined this process of observation of the outer world and of the production of certain spheres of ideation on the basis of those observations. In his researches he found nothing to which one could come if one extended what tries to go out in the cosmos from the one centre. He came to a point where he asserted: ‘Yes, that (Drawing 1, yellow) must certainly go out to a ‘thing in itself,’ but one cannot find it.’ On the other hand he felt how from the inner being of man something thrusts up which lives in willing and feeling. But since the connection remained unknown to him there were two worlds for him; the world of the existing order and the world of the moral order. He only felt one thing to be clear. ‘Here, one does not come to anything at all. The thing in itself is nebulous, is unknown; but that which thrusts up as it were against man gives a certain inner compulsion.’ This Kant called the ‘categorical imperative,’ from which he derived all truths related to the inner nature—as he calls them: all higher truths of belief in contrast to the external truths, which, however, can tell nothing of the actual world.

We must, however, give our chief attention to this: that as a matter of fact, not merely through his own disposition, but because of his whole evolution during the Saturn, Sun, and Moon conditions, man thus shared in the separation which occurred in the Moon-evolution, and has therefore come to this dual partition and must experience it as a natural condition.

Now when we consider these matters still more closely, we come to an important and significant truth which is given us by Spiritual Science, on the ground of what has here been characterised. We can say; this state of our thinking, our intellect and conceptual life, is connected with the former separation of the Moon from the progressing Sun. The way in which we, as human beings, apprehend our thinking and conceiving is connected with the fact that certain Luciferic beings of the hierarchy of the Angels who, through what they had become, did not share in the return of the Moon to the Sun—that those are now living in our intellect, so that something Luciferic lives in our intellect and shuts us off from looking into the inner moving and forming. Thus Lucifer, as it were, dwells in our thinking.

What now is the essential character of this Luciferic influence? The essential is that we do not perceive what was established in us and developed by the normally progressive divine-spiritual beings but we perceive instead what has been made out of this normal evolution by Lucifer. And what is it for Lucifer himself, that what he should have experienced during the Moon-evolution, but did not, he now carries into the Earth-evolution, and in this evolution experiences for his own part what in that earlier time he did not share? What will be the nature of that which he must undergo during the Earth-evolution? I beg you to pay great attention to this, for it is full of importance, even if difficult. So what does Lucifer want? What do these Luciferic angels that are in our intellect want?

At that time they did not want to take the step of the union of the moon with the sun. Had they done so, they would, as it were, have united conceiving and thinking in the right way with human nature. This they did not do, so now they contribute nothing to it.

Now, however, during Earth-existence, they wish to do what they did not do formerly; they now wish to bind the intellect with the human being; they wish to do during the Earth-evolution what they ought actually to have done during the Moon-evolution. When you consider this earnestly you will understand that something of immense significance follows from it.

Had we not been misled by Luciferic beings in the way referred to, we should not relate thinking to ourselves as we do now, but we should look back to the Moon-evolution and say: ‘Long ages ago our thinking wished to unite with our inner being, wanted to belong to us.’ This we do not say, but instead: ‘We appropriate the thoughts of the world and now receive them within us.’ But that is sheer Luciferic temptation in the sense of the divine spiritual beings we should think: out there is extended the world of the senses as we see it; the moment we now pass over to thinking, we look back to the Old Moon-existence and attribute the whole earthly sense world to it.

The following is what we should experience: If we call that (see diagram) e earthly-perceived-sense world, we should then have the in us, i.e., the earth- contents, and we should not, as we do now, form concepts of the Earth-content, but we should say instead; All that we have in this way as earth-content, we relate to the ancient Moon,—and while we have sense-perceptions and the surroundings of earth appear to the senses there lights up in us the realisation that everything that lives and weaves upon earth, everything that exists and works and grows, appears upon the foundation of the old Moon existence.

There would light up something like a connection with a star apparently belonging to the past, but which was still there, living in our world of thought. We should feel in connection with the past existing in the present, and should see through the Luciferic deceptive picture which consists in this—that Lucifer holds before the shining Moon-existence a curtain, a veil, because at that time he omitted to unite himself with the Sun-existence. And he deceives us and makes us believe that what we ought to look upon as lighting up in us from the Old Moon-existence—that is from the eternally new Moon-existence is our thought-content, which is firmly established in us through our brain and rests within us as earthly men.

So through what has happened we have been shut off from that wonderful and mighty memory of the Old Moon. We do not see continually in the background, shining, as it were, into the nape of our neck, the explanation of all that the senses conjure up before us. We ought to go through the world, our senses turned outwards to sense-existence, and ought to feel as though our neck and the back of our head were shone upon by the ancient Sun and Moon-existence. And this would proffer the explanation of real, living concepts, concepts which are cosmic, and do not work into us from the external earthly objects.

Thus two world-pictures are projected through one another; the Earth-picture and the Moon-Picture. We ought to be able to hold them apart; the one, inasmuch as we turn our senses outwards, the other, inasmuch as we receive the shining from behind, and we ought to prevent their weaving into each other in our intellect. We cannot do this. Lucifer confuses the one with the other. Ideas, concepts, sense impressions, he mixes together, and philosophers have for a long time endeavoured to crack open a beautiful problem, which they call ‘antimony.’

You can refer to Kant: There on the one page you always have proofs brought forward, for instance, that the world is infinite as regards space; on the other page you have just as strict proofs advanced, that the world is not spatially infinite but is limited. For both there are equally conclusive proofs. They must be there, because the one point of view is just as true as the other, only one is the earth -view and the other the moon-view. To one who cannot hold them apart, they become insoluble contradictions, contradictions which cannot be solved in any case with earthly understanding. But we have seen that a still older kind of deviation from the forward course of evolution was that brought about by the spirits from the hierarchy of Archangeloi who live in our impulses of feeling and will. Therefore we can say: Lucifer through his existence shuts us off from the cosmos; he only allows us to feel the impulses of feeling and will which live in our inner nature. If he were not to shut us off like this, then, instead of feeling that will impulses and feeling arise as though from the subconscious inner being, man would be aware of all that shines into him, illumines him from the cosmos through the Sun-evolution. As man ought to be aware in his intellect of the Old Moon behind the ordinary sense-existence, so he ought to see behind his impulses of feeling and willing the radiating cosmic sun arise. In feeling and willing he should see—as the kernel in the fruit-the essence of the Sun shining through.

But we are shut off from this through Lucifer. We think that feeling and will are only something within us, we do not realise that they contain within them living sun-forces, sun-forces that are actually within them. If we were to feel these sun-forces, were we really to feel the spirit-light shining within feeling and will; then we should have an insight into the cosmos precisely through this lighting up of the spirit-light of the world. We should have a direct vision of the external through our inner nature. That has been destroyed for us through those Luciferic spirits who have an archangel nature and who did not share in the step of the separation of the Moon from the Sun. It had to be brought to us again through the coming of this cosmic sun-nature into the evolution of mankind. This cosmic Sun-nature came into earthly evolution through the Mystery of Golgotha, that Mystery, the entire reality of which man must first of all accept in himself, must inwardly experience :Not I, but Christ in me.

And proceeding thence, more and more that inwardly shining, shaping force is formed in him. Cosmic light penetrates feeling and willing like the sunlight and unites itself with the intellectual life so that we attain a uniform cosmic picture by learning to allow the Christ-impulse to live, not only in feeling and willing, but to let it flow into the world of our concepts and understanding. Thus, instead of merely looking to Christ Jesus, a whole cosmology is really born for us, a Christened cosmology. We come to learn what the cosmos was before the Mystery of Golgotha, when the Christ was united with the Sun-nature outside the earth realm, and what the cosmos is after the Mystery of Golgotha, when the Christ is now no longer separated from the earthly aura, but lives on further within the aura of the earth. Only through first feeling ourselves to be identified with the Christ-impulse, regarding, as it were, this Christ-impulse as the centre from which, as shown yesterday, we can receive the continuous, the eternal, ever-enduring revelation,—only through this do we press forward increasingly to the possibility of attaining to a concrete Christianity, full of content, which will then be completely one with the content of spiritual science, even as regards cosmology.

Take the whole nerve- let me say -of Christology,—take what a man must really understand to comprehend Christology. Why do so many people not understand it? Why do they connect no right ideas with the Mystery of Golgotha? Because it is asking too much of them to describe as reality something which they are not otherwise accustomed to call real.

A sentence is to be found in a book of Haeckel's which reads something like this: ‘The Immaculate Conception is an impudent mockery of human reason.’ But why of human reason? Well, the next sentence reads: because in all other cases, in the animal and human kingdoms, it is not possible to observe such a birth. That is obviously a logical contradiction in itself.. For one ought to bring forward ground based not on observation but on reason. But just here again we encounter a fact of such a nature that it is incompatible with the ideas which man receives from external reality. All that man otherwise calls ‘real’ is incompatible, with the reality of this fact, with the whole fact of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Thus a man must grasp something that contradicts his ideas of reality. Now to those who approach more closely to Spiritual Science a way should open to ideas which permit an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. You see, in ordinary life and also in modern science what one observes with the outer senses is called real, or at least, something that is founded on reality. Real science rests upon what one observes by means of the senses. People endeavour, however, to make use of the senses for other purposes, they try to grasp everything after the manner of sense observation of external things. Biologists try to grasp the living being, the living organism as though it were only a complicated cooperation of purely mechanical forces, a complicated machine, since it is only a complicated machine that they can actually regard as a reality.

What actually lies behind this? What lies behind it is the fact that men call something real,—and indeed nowadays, throughout the whole of their life—which is not real at all, which is not in the least what it is said to be. Consider a corpse. Can you say that this corpse is the man? No, this disintegrating corpse is not the man, it is the form of man which is breaking in pieces. And so it is with the whole of outer nature. People investigate the inanimate, and have no idea that everything which is inanimate has once been alive. Men must find the transition from the concept of ‘inanimate nature’ to the concept of ‘Nature that has died,’ men must really grasp the fact that all inanimate things were once living and have died, that what we can find today as stone and rock was alive during the Moon age and has died, has become lifeless stone through a process such as that passed through by the human corpse.

If we were to grasp this actively, and look upon Nature as a corpse, then we should know that what we call existence is not something that contains existence, but rather something out of which existence has already fled. This is of infinite importance. Men do not realise that they cling to the inanimate, not realising that it is something that has died, and that they are trying to learn to understand the living through what has died.

When men look at the living organism that has not yet died, but lives before their eyes, and reduce it to a mechanism which is only an image of the dead, they are trying to understand and explain the living from the dead. That is the ideal and goal of the whole modern world concepts: to grasp the living out of what has died. Spiritual Science must take pains, always take pains to replace an understanding through the dead by an understanding through the living. The whole trend of modern science must disappear, since its only aim is to grasp the living through that which has died, not merely through the inanimate, the inorganic, but through what has died. This whole science must disappear. In its place must arise an understanding of the world out of the living. And of all the non-living, the inorganic at the present time, it must be realised that in the past it too was a living being. Had we not been luciferically hindered, from perceiving behind the sense impressions what has been characterised as the Moon existence, which stands behind them,—then we should realises there lies the corpse of what still appears to us from the Old. Moon. Just as on seeing a human corpse we remember how the man appeared as he was in life, how he went about and spoke with us, so, on looking at the earth we should look back on what it was when it was still alive during the Old-Moon existence.

It must be the earnest endeavour of Spiritual Science that we should be led out of the dead into the living; that must be an active, true goal although it may be difficult to attain; for all that is contained in our modern science touching a conception of the world is thoroughly foreign and hostile to such an aim. We must not deceive ourselves about this, but be quite clear that the world conception of modern science is absolutely opposed to it.

It will be intensely difficult to gain a living grasp of the cosmos in place of ther dead one. But when we hold living ideas, then we shall no longer be wanting in an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. For we shall know that what, in general, is subject to death, is derived from the Moon-existence, but that the Christ is from the Sun-existence. He held back in order to bring to us the Sun-element again. He has nothing to do with all the concepts that are lifeless, but will replace them by living ones. Therefore it is necessary to unite with Him in a living way, not through a dead science. Therefore it is necessary to recognise that only under specially abnormal conditions, could that which cannot die, cannot become dead, enter into the earthly course.

When one studies the special connection which the Christ Being had during the three years with the body of Jesus of Nazareth, one comes to realise that Actually, in the different members which were united through the inter-connection of the two Jesus boys, through the fact that Zarathustra lived in the Nathan Jesus, something entirely special was created (I have already referred to this in other lectures), something which, during those three years made this whole body different from an ordinary human body. An ordinary human body is actually not the same as this body was already—and through the particular kind of union throughout the three years with the Zarathustra-being still- remained different from other earthly bodies. As the earth began to recapitulate the Moon-existence, there remained behind, as I have explained, that essential substance which then appeared in the Luke Jesus, the Nathan Jesus boy; something which had not entered into death, or passed through the illusion of earthly death, which in the course of earthly phenomena was reserved for Christ Jesus, this held back. This was in Christ Jesus, and guided him through these three years and through death,—through the Maya of death, in a different way from other human beings.

This extraordinarily central phenomenon of earthly evolution must, however be understood, must be really grasped, as standing outside everything that is derived solely from the Moon-existence, it must be understood as being inwardly connected with the regularly progressive Sun-existence. Nor, therefore, after the Mystery of Golgotha had been accomplished, could this Christ-Being be dependent on anything which is derived, only from the Moon-existence, derived, that is, from a Moon which had separated from the Sun, when during this separation Luciferic beings had taken part in the splitting off, but not in the reunion.

The Christ-Being remains completely untouched by all that is in the earth through this aberration from Luciferic spirits. He would immediately have been affected by it had He been incorporated in an ordinary human body. Hence He could only appear physically upon earth through these special and abnormal occurrences, not covered by earthly laws. And since this Being had taken possession of an earthly body through the Mystery of Golgotha, He is now upon earth spiritually and not subject to those laws which came into earth-existence through the Moon evolution. These are the laws of Space and Time.

Space and Time ... I have already indicated in Occult Science (as you will find in the passages there) that it is difficult to form a picture of the ancient Saturn and Sun conditions, because one must leave out the concepts of space and time. What one pictures as space and time in regard to this ancient existence, is only an analogy, only an image, does not as yet correspond with reality. The concepts of space and time have no reality if applied earlier than the Moon-existence. One cannot use this concept for the previous conditions of evolution. But that which comes through the Christ into the spatial-temporal is likewise not bound up with the laws of space and time. Therefore a genuine Spiritual Science recognises it as the greatest imaginable error to suppose that the Christ, as He is united now with earth-existence, could appear before mankind spatially limited in one single human being. It would be the gravest misapprehension of the Christ to assert that there could be a re-embodiment of Christ at the present day, and that if He perhaps wished to speak in the future to—let us say—a person in Europe and then to someone in America, He would have to take train and steamer and thus travel from Europe to America. That will never happen. He will always be raised above the laws of space and time. And we must conceive of His appearance in the 20th century as being raised above these laws. Never could the Christ, rightly understood, be embodied in a single human beings.

It would therefore be or rather it is a blow in the face of genuine Spiritual Science, wherever it is asserted that there could ever be a human re-embodiment of Christ Jesus.¹ But with this, it is also shown that Christology, that which the Christ really is, has nothing to do with any divisions of man and mankind.

We see there, my dear friends, a way open: how the cosmic, the sun-nature comes again into our whole human race, how again the sun-nature, lost through Lucifer, rises in our feeling and willing, how it rises again through the Christ in our feeling and will how from there it can take hold of our intellect. That is the way which all spiritual understanding of the world must take in the future. But for a long time there will be errors and mistaken paths; for—I have often stressed it—only slowly and gradually can the Mystery of Golgotha in its depths find its way into the whole course of humanity's evolution. Only quite slowly and gradually can that come about. And inasmuch as it is gradually accomplished, more and more, it will create an accord between man's, intellectuality and his feeling and willing. That will increasingly fill out the human being with an inner Man, with a second man.

In man as he is without this filling out through the Christ Impulse, the head&'s inner nature, one might say, is hidden. If a man feels his head, he has headache; the inner quality is physically completely veiled as regards the head. Man carries the head about with him in normal life without actually feeling it, he makes use of it for registering external impressions.

The other part of man, which is at the same time the seat of the world of lower desires, this is within us; this to begin with, takes up nothing from outside, lives in itself. And the Jahve-God has concealed in a world of law not entering human consciousness, all that lives down below, as the sum total of man's desire world, so that the Luciferic rumblings or egotism, do not become too great. Through Lucifer we should really only be organised as Earthly men, to use our lower nature—disregarding the intellect -solely and only for ourselves. We should develop not a single altruistic instinct but purely egoistic instincts. There would be in the world no natural foundation for love. The human being would merely use the instincts that live in his lower nature, for manifesting himself in the world, for putting himself into the picture. Hence this lower nature has been rendered dim and dulled by the Jahve Godhead.

The Jahve Godhead himself lives in this lower nature and implants the instinct of love and altruism, but of a kind more or less unconscious for ordinary human life. These instincts and impulses have to become conscious again through the Impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha. But in this whole unconsciousness of the desire world something of a twofold nature lies concealed. In the first place, the connection of the intellect, of the conceptual with the desire world remains in the subconscious. But nevertheless it works upwards, works definitely upwards and it works upwards through the fact that something enters which I have already often explained.

This whole desire world, which is actually an egotistic world belonging only to the human being, can, as it were emancipate itself from the Jahve Godhead living in it. Then it works upward, but—unconsciously and without man's knowledge—it presses through and interpenetrates the conceptual world with its imaginations. Then man becomes clairvoyant, that is to say, he his visions. He experiences as Imaginations all that lives in his desire world. In reality he only experiences his desire world; it shows itself to him as the Imaginative world. But since in this whole desire world of ours only the cosmos lives—though veiled from man—the Imaginations which rise up from his desire world like a mirage conjure up for him a complete cosmos. He can now experience a whole Cosmos, which Consists of nothing but that down below where the fire of the lower desires burns. This fire of the lower instincts then shoots upwards, and now a cosmos arises, here above in the intellectual system. This is essentially the process of self- mediumship. The medium who becomes a medium through his own desires and instincts succumbs to these processes. Such mediums are usually very proud of their Imaginations. They look down with arrogance upon those people who have no Imagination, whereas those in their turn can often very well see that such Imaginations, as are from time to time described as marvellous pictures are nothing more than what boils and bubbles in the instincts and in the digestive processes and loses its way upwards as cosmic images. It rises as a mist into the world of concepts and takes on the form of false cosmic pictures, expressing itself through these.

But the effect of this duality of human nature can appear in yet another way. For let us suppose that a second man meets the first man, a second who is naturally, as human being so constituted that his inner nature of willing and feeling hides the cosmos, and his intellectuality hides his own inner self. (Diagram II. Man) (Pg. 17)

Now let us suppose that such a second man, by means of various processes of which we have still to speak, came to the point of having more or less consciousness. Thus here would be man #1 and man # 2 (Pg 17) had reached a consciousness of this relation (Diagram II, Light red).

Now let us suppose that this man (II) was not disposed to employ all that came to him through such a consciousness in the pure sense of a universal and Christianized spiritual science, but that he had his own particular aims in the world. Let us suppose that this man belonged to a region which had framed a special world-concept in the course of historical development, and he had grown up within this region with such a world conception; and let us suppose that he had special, egoistic grounds to impose it upon the world quite intensively. The true occultist as we know has no other desire than to make valid that which can benefit all men; he has no lust of domination; but let us suppose that such a man II had a desire of power, and wished to make the world-conception of a limited territory dominate in other territories. Now if he simply goes ahead and represents in his own way the world concept that he wished to make dominant the following will happen: Some will believe him others will not believe him. Those who are of different opinion will not believe him, will repulse him- we know from experience how European missionaries are often repulsed by other races if they say things that these people do not understand or have no intention of understanding—another way. Since this whole process is a conscious one, he has the power of working upon another person e.g., upon Man #1 (Diagram Pg 2) and if he does not work merely through his intellect, but through his whole personality, he can act upon the intellect of the other.

Now if the other man is so organized that he has mediumistic tendencies—i.e., can receive something in an abnormal way—and so simply accepts it as truth because it is advanced by the second then there streams from the second into the first man the world concept held by the second, and the first allows it to pass through his unspoiled intellect if then the former appears before mankind, what is now presented comes out in quite a different way. People would notice in the case of man # 2 that acts purely on his own behalf in the world, and he has the power of clothing in an intellectual system what arises out of his inner being, for what he gives out is his own position. The ego of man #1 has not got it as its own possession but takes it from the other as something objective and advocates it with his intellect in such a way—since it is not his own personally—as to give it a more universal character. It seems to come from the unspoiled intellect of man #1 as if it were a universal truth. Here you have the facts as to how, from a certain grey or black direction, one-sided information is carried into the world. The particular one-sided grey or black spiritual-scientists do not bring it to the world by standing up and presenting their views, but they pour them into a mediumistic person. This person takes them over, passes them on and lets them work upon other people through their intellect. Hence such grey or black spiritual scientists often remain in the background as Mahatmas, and those who stand before the world speak of the Mahatma standing behind them, and what they proclaim is given out as a communication of the Mahatma.

This phenomenon leads up to much that has happened in a terribly psychologically-tragic way, one night call it, in the case of poor H.P. Blavatsky, who in the most eminent sense of the word, was a mediumistic personality. Her intellect was, however, never adequate to examine what was passed over to her by people who were not always honourable, but who could work precisely through Madame-Blavatsky. These persons concocted things which were not always irreproachable; in an egoistic sense and through the mediumistic intellect of Blavatsky they made this into something which then worked on people in a suggestive way. To those, however, who wish to take their stand honourably on the ground of spiritual science, quite definite rules and regulations of conduct are inseparable from it.

You see, from all that has now been expounded, that under all circumstances, when it is a question of spreading spiritual science, one sentence must hold good. It is obvious that anything coming from some kind of mediumism is interesting and significant, for it comes, of course, out of another world, but it must never be taken just as it stands. Otherwise it will fare with humanity as it did in the whole development of spiritism in the second half of the 19th century.

The whole development of the movement in the second half of the 19th century was really undertaken from a certain side in order to test men and ascertain how ripe they were to recognize not only the material sense world which men perceive with their senses lives around them, but also a spiritual world; for the modern material world concept of the 19th century had, under Ahrimanic suggestion, brought wide-spread belief in the sense word as the only existence. Already in the middle of the 19th century, it was a great question among occultists as to whether they should oppose this whole spiritistic movement. It was decided at the time not to not to oppose it, for it was assumed—though this was short-sighted—that when men saw how all sorts of things came from the spiritual world through the medium, they would most certainly bethink themselves that there were actually things and forces in the world which worked from one to another in a spiritual way. Instead of this the whole spiritistic movement plunged into a very egoistic materialistic channel. The majority of mediums everywhere said that they were in contact with this or that deceased person. They brought to light all sorts of things inasmuch as they said: this or that soul who died here or there communicated one thing or another through the medium. To be sure they brought to light very many things. But in far the greater number of cases a colossal error lay at the root of their claims. For if we imagine here the medium as Man 1, we have to imagine the experimenter or hypnotizer, i.e., the one who arranged everything, as Man 2.

Now in every man whilst he is alive here, all that is his dead part is already in him. But that reverberates below; during the waking day life it reverberates below in the sense perceptions. The dead part of man rumbles below in the sense perceptions. Now imagine the following: The medium is there, the experimenter also is there; he passes over to the medium or to whatever else may be manifesting in the arrangements, that which is actually pulsating in his own sense impressions, and often in his lower instincts and will reappear one day when he himself dies. Truths may be contained in all this, but one must understand the whole nature of what arises; one must not listen to the medium when he asserts that what comes to him by revelation is a communication from the departed.

The people who did not immediately offer resistance to spiritism, said to themselves: what it is will soon be evident. They wanted to know whether the working upon the medium of the living, of what lives in the embodied person, was really furthered. The mediums completely misunderstood this, always believing that they stood in connection with the departed. So we see how mediumism certainly formed a connection with the other world, though a deceptive one. Lucifer is not somehow driven away from the path of normality to mediumism but he is drawn in still more, the deception becomes still greater. What is in the inner being is not set free and distributed in the cosmos, but what is within spreads out like a mist in the conceptual world and becomes an imaginative world. What is in man's inner being can proceed from himself or rise up within him through the influence of another person.

But out of this will follow an infinitely significant and important law for the spread of spiritually scientific truth and for work in the stream of spiritual science. One should take care that all direct belief in a man's authority must be the less, the more this person shows marks and traces of mediumship. The more such a person comes and says; ‘I have received this or that as an impression somewhere or other,’ yet is not fully conscious of this and cannot furnish proof, all the less is there authority in his mediumship.

Therefore when H.P. Blavatsky brought certain teachings into the world, one had of necessity to say: This personality shows strong evidences of mediumship, and so it is impossible to credit her with authority, or at least only in a very slight degree. Authority must dwindle in proportion as the person shows traces of mediumship.

In the same way, it is an axiom, so to speak, in the spreading of the truths of spiritual science, that in this spreading there must never be any kind of appeal, when the truths are made public, to unnamed Masters or Mahatmas. No matter how many unnamed Beings and personalities stand behind such a movement, that which has significance as proceeding from such Beings is only significant for the one who directly confronts them; it is his affair whether he believes in them or not, and whether he can prove that they are worthy of trust. But it can never be his business when he is making public statements to claim that he has had it from unnamed Masters or Mahatmas, (in a small circle, if someone simply says... ‘This or that was said to me and I believe it,’ that is different, those are things that pass from one personality to another). The moment, however, that it becomes a question of presenting a teaching to the world, then the one who represents it must himself accept the responsibility for it. And only he who makes it clear though the type of man he is, that he does not appeal to unreal or unknown Mahatmas when he wishes to substantiate what he is propagating but who rather makes it intelligible and obvious that he, as personality, standing there on the physical plane, takes complete responsibility for his teaching, only he is living up to his full duty. And one who cannot do this, can refer to someone to be found by name on the physical plane, or who, if he is dead, can be found among the dead by historical paths.

It is therefore most important for the transmission of teachings that the one who communicates them with his own personality, as he stands there in the physical world, should accept full responsibility for the teachings, and must not appeal to unknown Masters. And those who spread the teachings further, may also only appeal to living personalities, who as physical persons are prepared to take full responsibility for their teachings. This gives a sure and certain way for dissemination of the teaching to a wider circle, but gate and door are barred against all persons unnamed and to all hints and allusions. Whoever asserts that he has received this or that from here or there, from unknown masters or from the dead (through which one can so regale oneself on one's own arrogance) against him is door and gate locked. For in spreading spiritual science the question is to know the path taken by the threads of confidence which lead to its original sources.

Hence, it was wrong when, in the so-called Theosophical Society one began to found certain society procedures on the utterances of unknown Mahatmas. That ought never to have been done. For anything that takes place and is propagated on the physical plane, a physical personality is answerable, as much as when teachings are circulated. He who spreads the teachings of another, has equally to show that he appeals, not to some unknown powers or impulses found along mediumistic paths, but to historical or living personalities. This means that he appeals to those who show the whole method of entry of spiritual truth into the physical world, who moreover, take full responsibility for their teachings and also show through their conduct that they take that responsibility. That is it above all! It is this latter above all!

These are two very important rules. The first is that we must possess the feeling that authority vanishes, if mediumism arises in the communication of the statements of personalities, and the second is that responsibility is never laid upon beings who are introduced to the world as unknown. One can, of course, speak of such unknown beings, but one must not appeal to them as authorities. That is a very different matter.

I only wished to place these indications before you today, since it is important to have the right feeling as to how the whole spirit and nature of the strivings of spiritual science should live in us. We must stand within this movement in the right way, otherwise the spiritual science movement will be immeasurably injured by being mixed up with unclear, mediumistic things, with appeals and references to all sorts of Mahatmas and beings who stand behind it. Everything that those standing in the movement so much enjoy shrouding in the magic breath of mystery (although it really proceeds from sense-instincts)—all this must be gradually ejected, otherwise we shall really not make progress in the sphere of spiritual science.

If every impact of a disordered gastric juice with the walls of the stomach causes an impetus that arises as a mist into the intellect and manifests there in the form of an Angel-Imagination, and the person in question then tells his fellow-men about this angel, that can of course make a very fine story! But what is instigated through this sort of thing only causes injury to the spiritual-scientific movement, endless injury. For the important part about these things is that they not only cause injury through what is said, but also through what they are—for they are, in fact, realities. The moment that one puts a false garment on them, one makes them appear before the world in a false form.

Obviously no one would make a special impression if he were to say: ‘I have had something going wrong in the stomach. The action of my gastric juices upon the stomach walls has appeared to me as an Angel.’ Anyone speaking thus would make no particular impression on his fellow-men; if, however, he were to leave out the first part, he would make a strong impression. It is extraordinarily important for people to have a thorough knowledge that this can happen. Naturally one cannot distinguish straight away between a true Imagination and a false one; but neither is it necessary to bring one's Imaginations immediately to people's notice. All that must be taken thoroughly into account. It is necessary, really earnestly necessary, to consider how the spreading of the spiritual science outlook can best take place in the world. We have had, up to now the instrument of the Society, no doubt too, in the future of our Anthroposophical Society we shall have it. But we must really so conceive of this Anthroposophical Society—or speaking more loosely—of our standing within the movement of Spiritual Science, that we shall consider in what way it is an instrument for something that is to take place spiritually in the whole earthly evolution.

You see, my dear friends, it happens all too often that one may become a member of the Anthroposophical Society, and yet carry into that Society all the various habits, inclinations, sympathies and antipathies that one had before becoming a member, and continue to exercise them. It is necessary to think this over. I have therefore today made the subject of our studies something that closely concerns us and that is real—and that is: how it is possible for imposters to appear who want to make propaganda for some one-sided world concept and make use of a mediumistic personality in order to introduce this one-sided world concept to the world. Just as the one who appeared in the place of the Master Kut-Humi stood there as an imposter and implanted a one-sided world concept in Blavatsky, so also was it possible for people not to see that behind her stood a grey magician who was in the pay of a narrowly circumscribed human society, and wished to promulgate a definite human world conception.

This is something very, very real, and shows us how keenly we must be on the watch when it is a matter of fostering and cultivating this sublime treasure of spiritual science, so necessary to mankind. One must strive for honesty—really into the inmost fibres of feeling; naturally faults may arise—but one must strive for the purest integrity. One must not, through laziness, be quickly satisfied that one can believe in anyone who gives one something of value, but must test every step, prove whatever comes to light. That is absolutely essential. It is a reality, not a mere theory, that steams into mankind in this spiritual science. Human evolution receives something actual and real through what steams into mankind through the world concept of Spiritual Science.

We must therefore become conscious that we must take a different stand on earth from that otherwise taken when we do not ally ourselves to such a Spiritual-Science stream.

• 1. This had to be especially emphasised in view of the propaganda of ‘The Star in the East.’

Dear attendees! After having repeatedly spoken about various individual areas of spiritual science in this city over the past few years, allow me this evening to present some fundamental principles from the field of spiritual science to you, and then, in tomorrow's lecture, to present some of the consequences and benefits of spiritual science for practical and spiritual life.

Spiritual science, as it is meant here, is by no means something that can be said to be popular or even recognized in wider circles in our present time. On the contrary, from the most diverse sides and points of view, one will have to hear again and again the most diverse objections of the opposition to this spiritual science. Wherever one wishes to advocate it, one must be prepared for the most diverse misunderstandings that are brought against it.

As on previous occasions, I would like to take this opportunity to emphasize right at the outset that anyone who is grounded in this spiritual science will not be surprised, but will consider it quite natural, that the points of view from which we are starting here will meet with opponents and be misunderstood. Indeed, anyone who is familiar with this subject will be quite clear about the fact that, according to the habits of thought and imagination of the present time, according to the general, one might say generally recognized or believed, aims of our present time, this spiritual science must still find opponents for the time being. In this respect, it is no different from the one whose continuation for our time it seeks to be. However strange it may seem to some, it must be said that this spiritual science is the continuation of, or at least seeks to be, what has emerged with regard to nature through the newer natural science at the dawn of modern spiritual life.

Just as in those days, by elevating and rising above traditional views and received ideas, one went directly to nature itself, so in our time spiritual science wants to go directly to the world of the spiritual, to the processes of the spiritual. And one can say: Nothing is more unfounded than when it is asserted from any quarter that spiritual science, as it is meant here, wants to be opposed to natural science. On the contrary, anyone who has a clear insight into spiritual science will fully recognize and correctly assess the significant advances and the great blessings that the scientific view and way of thinking have brought.

Spiritual science cannot, as it were, follow the example of natural science in the realm of the spiritual, and apply the methods and way of thinking that are common in natural science, for the reason that a correct adherence to the natural scientific attitude requires something different for the study of the spiritual.

But before I proceed to our actual consideration, I would like to explain how this spiritual science is the continuation of scientific thinking by means of a kind of parable. This parable is not intended to say anything in particular, but only to express the relationship between scientific progress and what spiritual science seeks to be.

If we cast our soul's eye on the activity of the farmer who sows his grain at the appropriate time of year, we find that this grain rises, that by far the largest part of this grain is used for human nutrition. Only a small part of the sown seed is used to be returned to the element of the earth and to become grain again. So let me look at what scientific thinking has brought us over the centuries in the light of the demands of spiritual research. Science has brought us, one might say, a complete transformation of the face of our earth. It has intervened in all of human life, right down to our everyday lives. For all around us we can see the fruits of modern science. But in addition to all this, we also owe it an insight into the connections between world phenomena, into the realm of the senses, which mankind would hardly have dreamed of before. But we also owe it something else: a sum of ideas, concepts and perceptions has emerged; they have become established over the last three, especially the last century. People's minds had to come to terms with these ideas. They had to answer the often puzzling question: How can the soul come to a state of harmony within itself when it has to come to terms with the ideas and concepts that scientific thinking has brought forth, and with the feelings that follow from this scientific thinking?

I would compare the new ideas, concepts and notions that have been instilled into our souls in just a few centuries with the relatively few seeds that are sown to bear fruit the following year; compared to what is used from the harvested fruits for human food. In the realm of scientific thinking, we can compare what is used for human nutrition with what is spread into our external cultural life, what is used for human benefit and for the knowledge of the connections in the sensory world. But what has been raised in new ideas, concepts and perceptions sinks into our soul, and is entrusted again to the element from which it emerged. We should live with this, and try to bring our innermost soul powers and soul harmony into connection with it. In contrast to this, we should ask: How is it possible to have security, hope and joy in our work in life?

Not only what is given to us theoretically through scientific ideas and concepts should be considered, but also what the soul experiences through them. For it is precisely these scientific ideas, when used as indicated in the following consideration, that give the soul the most beautiful direction to the spirit through themselves. They lead the life of the soul directly into the realm of the spirit. Although this is a result of life for all those who have studied spiritual science as it is meant here, it must seem strange to those who have not done so when it is said that this spiritual science wants to be a true successor to natural science. For precisely because it enters the spiritual realm, the scientific method must take on a different form in order to remain true to the scientific spirit.

And to bring this form to mind, I would like to compare spiritual science with spiritual chemistry, to make myself understood, with reference to the way it gains its results. Not that I want to say anything special with this comparison, but the comparison can lead us to understand what will be meant by the following remarks. If we have water in front of us, we cannot see what components it has in the sense of today's chemistry; that it consists of hydrogen and oxygen cannot be seen from the outside. With the means of chemistry, we can come to know: water has a completely different property, a completely different characteristic; it is liquid, it extinguishes fire. The hydrogen can burn itself, is gaseous. That this water contains something like hydrogen can only be known by separating this hydrogen from the water.

In a very similar way, but with the help of spiritual methods, something must be done with the human being himself for the purpose of spiritual science. Just as he appears to us in the outer world, he cannot be recognized in his components, just as water cannot be recognized in its components. What the human being is in spirit and soul, what every soul longs to know, is bound to the body in ordinary life as hydrogen is bound to water, and cannot be recognized in its very nature within the body, just as hydrogen cannot be recognized in water.

Now the methods by which we separate the spiritual and mental from the physical are not as robust, not directed towards handling in the sensory world as the chemical method by which hydrogen is separated from water. But that does not make them any less to be taken in a strictly scientific sense. These are methods that take place entirely within the life of the soul itself. They are delicate, subtle processes of the soul's life. It is not by external manipulations that one can arrive at the riddles of the spiritual life. The only instrument available to man to penetrate into the spiritual world is man himself, and that is his spiritual-soul life.

How is it that we, hypothetically speaking, separate this spiritual-soul life from the physical life with which it is connected in everyday life? The methods used are not ones that resort to anything particularly miraculous; they are extensions of mental activities that every person is familiar with in their daily life; only these mental activities have to be extended into the realm of unlimited strength. But this requires a resignation, a devotion in the soul life, for which one must first prepare oneself. You can find a more detailed description of the method by which the soul can penetrate into the spiritual world in my books “The Secret Science in Outline” and “How to Know Higher Worlds?” To begin with, there is an activity of the soul that is familiar to everyone, that is needed in everyday life, that is needed for the health of the soul, and that is therefore applied by the soul in ordinary life. For the purposes of spiritual science, however, it must be intensified to an unlimited degree. It is what can be called: turning one's attention, one's interest, to something. We all know that in order to get along in life, in order to find our way in the world, we cannot just go along indifferently, but we have to turn our attention to the most diverse things. And the more we do this, the more it becomes, in our minds, our own, the more we carry a sign of it through our further life and have connected with it.

And attention is intimately connected with another soul ability, the significance of which for life everyone must recognize, namely with what we call memory. And one can even say: in a sense, the question of a good memory in the human soul is the same question as that of the activity of attention. An object to which we only fleetingly turn our attention fades from our memory. An object to which we turn our attention, and repeatedly at that – repetition is often important – becomes our mental property.

Everyone can see for themselves the importance of attention for memory in the most mundane of everyday life. Let me give you a trivial example: Who hasn't woken up in the morning and not found things that they put down the night before? If you practice it, let's say, not just putting your cufflinks down, but paying attention to the act of putting them down, linking the thought to it: Now I'm putting this object down - then tomorrow you will go straight to the place where you put the object down. That is, the power that inscribes in our memory what is to be inscribed, that is attention.

And anyone who has taken a little look at the inner life of humanity will often notice at least echoes of that unhealthiness of the inner life, or have heard of it, which consists in the human soul not being able to remember what it has experienced as if the experiences were its own experiences. We then speak of a split in the ego in the face of such an unhealthy inner life. It may happen to such a soul that things it has experienced itself, so to speak, belong to another self. This radical case is less common, but it does occur.

However, the ego's full context, its continuity, is disturbed with regard to a clear insight into one's own past, and this happens more often. This could be prevented if the good pedagogical principle were more introduced into life, to awaken attention, interest in what is going on as important in our environment, as in general the connection between attention and a healthy spiritual life should play the very greatest role in pedagogy.

Thus we see that attention is something we need for our ordinary lives. The spiritual researcher must develop this attention, that is, the activity that is exercised by directing the soul power to a specific object, by drawing it away from other objects at that moment and concentrating it on a specific object. The soul researcher must develop this activity of the soul life, which and slight in everyday attention, to an unlimited strength; that is, he must take it upon himself to do such soul exercises again and again, which are an unlimited intensification of what would otherwise be active in the soul life as attention and interest. This is called, in a technical expression of spiritual science, the concentration of thinking or feeling. All soul forces can be concentrated again and again, drawn together to one point. This must be repeated again and again, because it often takes many, many years to make the soul a true instrument of spiritual research. To achieve this, one must repeatedly and repeatedly concentrate the soul forces on an idea or a feeling that one has moved into the center of one's soul life only through one's own will. It is best to draw into the soul life an image that one has really put together, for example, a symbolic image, a symbol; what one has borrowed from the outer life, to that one is too accustomed used to; a greater effort is required if one contracts one's mental life, all the forces that one otherwise disperses, to the mental processes, to an arbitrary compilation that one always returns to the center of one's mental life. In this way, a state gradually becomes possible for the human being, which allows his spiritual-soul, which is otherwise poured out into the physical-bodily, to be grasped by the same power that is concentrated there, and finally set free from the physical-bodily. There is no other way to be convinced in practice that there is really a second person in us, a spiritual-soul person, just as hydrogen is in water, if you do not grasp this soul-spiritual person by he is permeated by what is the unlimited amplification of the activity of ordinary attention, and in doing so, he is so strengthened in himself, this soul-spiritual human being, that he stands out from the physical-bodily. He is lifted out of the physical-bodily in this way, as hydrogen is lifted out of water through chemical processes.

If everything that has now been discussed in principle is undertaken by the soul, as indicated in the books mentioned earlier, we can extract the spiritual-soul from the physical-bodily through purely soul-related activities.

If this is really successful, then a great change occurs in the inner life of the person. One receives completely new inner concepts of life. One is seized, so to speak, by something within oneself, of which one had not even had a correct idea before. Above all, in this way one is brought to a certain concept, to an idea, with which one can now connect a sense of what it means to be outside one's body and yet still lead a fully conscious life; to be able to grasp oneself inwardly, to take hold of oneself inwardly, without doing so through the tools of the senses, through the physical tools of the brain.

The next thing to happen to the spiritual researcher on the indicated path, when he has come far enough, is that a state comes over him that can only be compared in ordinary life to something that occurs involuntarily. The human being reaches a state in which, just as the external sensory world fades away when falling asleep, so too does this sensory world now, as it were, lift itself away from the human being, as it does when falling asleep. But the human being also experiences this: he feels his physical body passing over in complete calm, in complete inner serenity, and now fully consciously, as it otherwise happens unconsciously in sleep. Nothing of what can otherwise stir in the body through everyday activity then stirs. The human being, with his soul-spiritual, has emerged from the physical-bodily.

For the first time, the human being now has an idea of what it means to face my body as I would otherwise face an external object. In ordinary life, one only has an idea of what it means to experience oneself when one is, as it were, inside one's body; in this way the body is connected to oneself; one relates to it quite differently than to other things. But now one's own body becomes an external object, which one faces as one used to face other external objects. But one does not face it as it appears to us physically as long as we use the tools of the physical world. How it appears to us, how we face this body, turns out to be a harrowing event that man can undergo on the way to spiritual research.

What I am about to describe can be experienced in many different forms and in many different ways. In a small book, 'A Path to Self-Knowledge of Man', I have attempted to describe a typical form in which it can occur. From this description, one can get an idea of what the spiritual researcher has to experience at a certain stage. But, as I said, it is only a typical form, it can always be different. Let us say that a person is directly involved in their outer life, or even asleep during sleep. This event can occur during sleep or during wakefulness; it will never disturb the healthy life of the soul in any way if it happens correctly. In the midst of waking, in the midst of sleep while sleeping, in such a way that it is more than even the most vivid dream – it can overtake us, this event, so that we feel something like what [I] would like to express in the following words – one can only stammer what is experienced by the soul: What is happening to me? It is as if lightning, as if fire, were flashing through the air; as if the room in which I am were illuminated by lightning; as if my own body were being struck by lightning and destroyed by the elements. It is not just a matter of what I can describe in words, but of what kind of inner experience one has at this point in one's soul development. What matters is that one knows from now on: one has experienced in one's mind what it means to live in one's soul and spirit in such a way that one is lifted out of the physical body; that the image of the physical body presents itself to one. But it is an image that cannot help but represent the physical body in a state of destruction.

And then you realize what you are actually experiencing when you can really immerse yourself in what you have felt. You come to realize: yes, when you are in the midst of life, your spiritual and soul self is indeed an independent being. But the way you experience everyday life is bound to your physical body. Throughout life - even science admits this - the spiritual and soul destroys the physical and bodily. From the moment we wake up in the morning until we fall asleep at night, we use our physical body as a tool for what arises in our soul, in our ideas and feelings. Fatigue expresses the destruction of the soul life. Sleep is the compensation. The fact that we experience the soul life depends on the fact that, basically, we carry out a continuous work of destruction on our body, which ends with death. This is evident from the image that shows us: the moment you become aware that your soul and spirit are independent and can emancipate themselves from the body, you experience your body as if it were destroying itself before you.

Spiritual science – not as it should be considered in our time according to the scientific education that humanity has enjoyed for centuries, but as it has gone through the various epochs – spiritual science has always existed, only very few people have known about it. But those who knew about it also knew the harrowing moment in the spiritual researcher's life that I have just described, and they called it by saying the words: I have come to the gates of death. — That is, one has come to know in the image what death is; one has come to know how, in death, the spiritual-soul triumphs in its independence from the physical-bodily. From the point where one has experienced this, one knows what it means to live independently in one's spiritual-soul. One knows that this spiritual-soul life, in its separation from the bodily, is something that has completely different qualities from the bodily.

But it is true in a certain way that what gives progress towards the spirit is linked to difficulties of the inner life; it can even become a kind of inner martyrdom. Above all, patience is needed to concentrate the soul's power in such a way that the soul-spiritual, emancipated from the physical, can grasp itself in its independence. I wanted to describe this to you as it happened because I do not want to speak in general terms, but because I want to tell of the living experiences of the spiritual researcher himself.

From that moment on, you know what it means to live outside your body, especially in terms of thinking. You now associate a certain sense, a sense full of reality, with it when you say: I now know that I think, that I can form ideas not as in everyday life; I now know that I can form ideas with the soul that has left the brain, purely in a spiritual and mental way. And because I don't want to speak in general terms, I don't want to shy away from something that, when viewed superficially, can appear very vulnerable: in the moment when you have the described experience, you experience yourself in your thinking, which, for the moments when you leave your own body, is no longer tied to the brain; you feel as if you are living outside the brain, in the environment of the brain. And you know: if you want to think again as you do in everyday life, you have to submerge yourself in your brain again. You begin to see it as something external that you have to submerge into.

One thing is necessary if you have progressed to this point. And what I will mention here as necessary can also refute the objections of those who do not know spiritual science and, from the point of view of today's science, would like to push what the spiritual researcher experiences into the category of hallucinations. They are talking about something they have no idea about. For it is precisely the spiritual researcher who knows how to distinguish at every moment what the difference is between a hallucination, an illusion and what he really experiences as something spiritual. In ordinary everyday life, too, it is no different than learning to distinguish reality from mere imagination through life itself. In ordinary life, one can easily distinguish the idea of a hot iron and the actual perception of a hot iron when one touches it. It is the same when you really immerse yourself in the spiritual world in the way described.

But what is necessary is that you feel what you are experiencing now so inwardly, imbued with this inner strength, that you are immersed in it with your will. For let us not mistake: what one experiences as a world of ideas that is outside of the body must arise as an experience in such a way that one does not feel it at first as an external being, but one must feel it as one feels one's hand, one's foot, one's eye; one must feel it as a spiritual sense organ. You must first know exactly: what you have developed within you is a part of your spiritual-soul being; it is something within you that you must use in the same way as you would use your hand to grasp something or your eye to see by looking into it.

In this way, one first develops the organs. One does something within oneself that is as subtle as a web of dreams in relation to external reality, but whose reality one experiences. One does something with one's spiritual-soul being; one is involved with one's will. One must experience something in the new being that one has drawn out of one's body, which one can describe as an inner play of facial expressions. Just as one is able to express one's thinking and feeling with the muscles of one's face, and to express one's soul experiences in one's gaze, so one must now develop the ability to have a clearly conscious inner handling of the spiritual-soul being that has been raised out of the body. One must be able to express oneself through this being. In short, one must have the feeling: In what you have made out of yourself, you are involved with the will. Not like in dreams; the dream presents images to us, but these images occur without our will. It is different when we bring ourselves, through genuine spiritual development, to experience something outside of our body. There we ourselves are the actors who make an image, which arises to the highest intensity, disappear, and bring it from one place to another. We are so immersed in this world of images that we can control it, that we can whirl it around.

In the same way that we have become familiar with this through the exercises we have performed, which, after all, are basically only the training of our external attention to an unlimited degree of mental and spiritual concentration, we initially only manage to make ourselves mentally and spiritually independent beings. We do not yet perceive other spiritual processes and spiritual entities that are around us. In order to do that, we have to add other categories of exercises to those that fall under attention, so to speak, that are completely opposed to attention.

But spiritual progress depends on not just practicing one-sidedly, but on alternately exerting our soul in practicing in one direction or the other. We have to do the most intense exercises in increasing our attention. But at the same time, we have to do inner exercises that are exactly the opposite. We must also do the opposite of what happens in ordinary life. For example, when a being loves another so devotedly that he feels absorbed in that being, or when any being is completely devoted to something that concerns him in prayer or in other religious sentiments. Devotion, which we also have in ordinary life, as we have attention, but again increased to infinity. We must really, quite arbitrarily, through a strong volition, bring about the suppression of all external sensory perception, as it otherwise only happens in sleep. One gradually acquires the ability to suppress, so to speak, everything that is necessary for everyday sensory life, right down to the involuntary muscles and other organic tools; completely, with the exclusion of what is ordinary sensory life, to devote himself with his soul to that which is most immediately presented by us as the Divine-Spiritual, which stands beyond all concepts, permeating and flowing through the world. In particular, we must try to suppress everything that otherwise occupies us in our judgment. We must accept the arbitrary faculty of everyday activity and, in the innermost serenity and devotion, live consciously of nothing but the expectation: What comes to you when you suppress everything arbitrary that otherwise made an impression on you, and when you are devoted to what you will come to know? This devotion must be increased to the point of infinity, then the moment will come when we can use what we have developed in terms of spiritual and mental being, emancipated from our self.

Then the images that we have placed within us will become us in such a way that we connect spiritually with a spiritual world; but in such a way that we now connect with this world not passively, as in everyday life, but actively. In the everyday world, we are outside of an object that we look at. If we want to penetrate the spiritual world, we have to immerse ourselves in the object and merge with it, become one with it, as one as we were before only with our own soul.

And just as we express through our facial expressions what lives in our soul, so it is when, after sufficient devotion, we immerse ourselves in a real, a spiritual world, that we recognize in it, that we live in the activity of our spiritual soul, that we express states of the spiritual world within us. We experience them through inner facial expressions, by immersing ourselves in the spiritual world, which we can only grasp by actively immersing ourselves in it. We have to acquire a spiritual facial expression in the spiritual world; we have to acquire the ability to express ourselves.

Then we know that a spiritual world is always around us, just as, for example, the world of a language is also around a deaf-mute child, but he knows nothing about it; he does not get to this world of language, even though his speech organs are quite healthy. He is unable to imitate in speech what he does not hear, to express it in facial expressions. Just as the world of words is also around the deaf-mute child, so the world of spiritual entities and spiritual processes is always around every human being.

And just as the human being only has to open up to the outside world and imitate the words in language, so the human being, as a spiritual and soul being, has to open up to the spiritual world through devotion in order to express through mimicry what he experiences, through the means he has cultivated within himself. For the spiritual world is only received through active engagement and not passively. What we do not experience in ourselves through the spiritual world, as if through an inner mimicry, cannot reveal itself to us. We must become one with the spiritual world so that we can develop the spiritual mimicry in what we are revealed, by immersing ourselves in the spiritual world. This mimicry then brings us to the awareness through our own experience: You are now experiencing conditions of the spiritual world. What I have described can be experienced by detaching the power of thought from the physical tool, from the brain.

But there is another power in us that can be released from the physical tool, namely what is called the human power of speech, and, related to this, the power of memory. Both belong to the same kind of soul activity. Just as we have drawn our thinking out of the bodily tool, so we arrive, by continuing our exercises, at being able to grasp the spiritual-soul power by which we otherwise speak. When you think about me as I speak to you now, my spiritual-soul life is active. But this activity is first transmitted to the brain, then to the speech organs, and then to the air. First, it is a spiritual-soul force that then flows outwards. If, by continuing our intensified devotion, we succeed in excluding everything that is connected with speech in the body, but in developing in the soul and spirit that which is otherwise poured out into speech, if we succeed in doing so without speaking, even without making that inner, fine vibration, which even in ordinary thinking sounds like a soft, inaudible speaking, and which is also admitted by modern science, if we succeed in doing so, we exclude everything that is connected with speech in the body, but in the soul and spirit we develop that which is otherwise poured out into speech, if we thus leave the power of speech inwardly, if we inwardly leave that which is expressed in speech, then we can, through the power of our soul and spirit, make ourselves heard in the air. body is bound to speech, but in the spiritual and soul life, develop that which is otherwise poured into speech, so if one leaves the power of speech inwardly, if one is silent with regard to what is expressed in speech, but still applies the power inwardly, then one reaches a further stage in spiritual research. One reaches the point where one experiences not only that as

something external, which one can call one's body; one now comes to recognize: You are an independent entity that can lift itself out of its inner soul life of everyday life. One separates oneself, just as one used to separate from the body, from what is ordinary thinking, feeling and imagining. And the same thing that you develop in speech, you also develop in memory, as you accumulate external stimuli and impressions in the course of your life. The soul power that inspires speech is active in memory.

But now, when you experience yourself outside of your everyday mental life, you have another harrowing event. For now one experiences, as in a review, the whole past life up to the point where one can normally remember back, a point in childhood. What one has lived through comes to mind in distinct images, in ever clearer and clearer images, but not as one's ordinary memory is, but quite differently.

I would like to explain this with an example. Let's assume we have done something morally objectionable. You look back on it. It appears in the picture and it shows you: By doing this, you have strayed from the true image of a human being that you are supposed to represent. That is how far you have fallen in becoming human. — It stands before you as a warning, so that you cannot say otherwise than: Until I have overcome, through a further life, through corresponding good actions, what I am overlooking here, I must always look at it when I experience myself outside of my own soul life.

This is the case with good and bad, with all experiences that one has gone through. One's past life trails behind one like a comet's tail; but now so changed that it shows one what one has to do in order to balance out what should not have been done, and so that one can make appropriate use of what one has done in the world. The experiences of one's own life are grouped together in such a way that they become an externally complicated overall experience. It is permeated, as it were, by an inner power that one perceives, of which one is now aware: it was always in you, you just did not perceive it, the power to extinguish a deficiency; a real power, something that you have achieved as an ability to apply fruitfully. Now you get a full idea with inner reality: a plant develops from the soil. It unfolds leaf by leaf, draws its life together in a narrow germ. But in this germ, life is so concentrated that it contains the possibility of a new plant developing. Just as there is physical force in this seed, so we realize that, owing to what we have lived through and which we only recognize in its true form when we survey it, we have within us a force like a germinating power that must continue to work on the basis of what we have experienced. From now on you know: When death comes upon you, there is a spiritual-soul germ in you that passes through the gate of death and lives on, as surely as the germ of the plant lives on. An ever-victorious spiritual germ springs from your inner being. From that moment on you know: When your body falls away, your soul and spirit will pass through death into the spiritual world.

When one studies a life that enters the world, a child's life, which basically represents the greatest mystery for the spiritual researcher, when one studies a child's life with this knowledge, or one's own childhood – because from now on one can look back further into one's life – or when one child, then it becomes clear to you how ability after ability unfolds in development, how the child's features become more and more defined, more and more certain, how talents emerge. It becomes clear to you: just as the plant grows from the germ, so what sprouts from the spiritual world comes out of it. It is the same thing that we recognized earlier as conquering death. It comes back into the world, and our spiritual and soul life develops out of what we have carried through death. Now we know what it means to repeat life on earth. We know that we live alternately; that we live between birth and death in a physical body, that we then pass through death and live in a spiritual world. We know that every birth means: something from the spiritual world descends and connects with what comes from the father and mother. It works through the fruits of a previous life, which project into this life in one's destiny.

By emancipating the power of speech within us, by developing that which we waste in life, so to speak, in language, in special moments of practice within, so that it remains in the soul, we thus become immersed in the spiritual world in which we find ourselves, going from life to life, because we now experience not states but processes of the spiritual world. In this way we ascend from conditions to processes.

In practice, the spiritual researcher first reaches out like a spiritual tentacle to grasp what is outside of him, where he had previously only perceived conditions. But now the spiritual researcher experiences that he, with his emancipated soul life, which has also taken in the power of speech, emerges completely from himself and immerses himself in the other beings in such a way that he knows: you are now moving from being to being in the spiritual world; you are immersing yourself in the spiritual world. Most of the time it will be like this: Until one has a complete skill in coming to an experience of conditions, one must try to give oneself so far; then one feels as if awakened to another state.

In this way, one experiences events by really living them inwardly, by emerging and submerging with them. One could say that one now experiences events in the spiritual world not through inner facial expressions but through inner gestures. Just as one experiences events in the outer world through movement, so in the spiritual world one must take part in the movement; one must go along with the events. So you move up from inner facial expressions to inner gestures, and gradually you perceive not only conditions but also processes in the spiritual world.

And finally, if you practice this more and more, if you really develop it systematically, as described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, if you continue with the two categories of inner practice, what falls under the category of attention and what falls under the category of devotion, we also call it concentration and meditation, then, my dear audience, then one finally arrives at a third, at a third, which I must hint at in the following way.

Something is reserved for man – I know that this is open to criticism from the point of view of superficial external science, but it is nevertheless true; I just lack the time to prove it now, but it can be proved – man has an advantage over the other creatures on earth in that he actually only becomes himself in the course of life, compared to the beings that stand in the world as he does. For when we come into the world, we have to crawl on all fours. Other creatures, the animals, are not dependent on the outset, but they are different from the human being, they have incorporated forces that give them the position they should take in life. Man must rise in the course of life to that of which one can say: it actually makes him a human being in the physical sense. Again and again, great thinkers have pointed out what man is by rising from the ground and directing his face outwards. But man only makes himself into that by directing his willpower. He has an inner directing power through which he brings himself into alignment with the cosmos, through which he is human in the physical sense. This is what inner spiritual-soul forces are for. But in ordinary life they are poured entirely into the physical.

Now, dear attendees, just as one can emancipate the power of thought from the physical body, so too can one emancipate the powers through which we first make ourselves human in the world in the physical sense. And just as one can allow what would otherwise pour out through speech to remain in the inner life of the soul, and thus arrive at an inner gesture, so one can inwardly emancipate the powers of uprightness through practice. Then, through the use of these inner forces, one comes to understand beings in the spiritual world that are different from human beings. The fact that we only know human beings in the physical world comes from the fact that we have used the forces that are the directing forces to make human beings what they are. If we practice emancipating these forces inwardly, we get to know beings that are somewhat different from human beings. This leads to an inner study of physiognomy. One imitates the forms of the other beings with which one then comes into contact. In short, one now enters into a living relationship with the spiritual world. One takes on the physiognomy of the beings with which one comes into contact. I would like to repeat what has been said: through inner mimicry one comes to states; through inner gesture one comes to processes; through inner physiognomy one comes to really get to know the spiritual world as such.

I have tried to show you in real terms how true spiritual research becomes immersed in the spiritual world, how man really comes to grasp a spiritual world. Spiritual science is just as much a science as chemistry, physics and so on. What can be presented to humanity through this spiritual science needs to be accepted just as little on authority as the results of other sciences. Tomorrow I will describe how this spiritual science can become part of a person's life.

When we consider the aims of our time, we may say to ourselves: precisely the great, the admirable progress of natural science has accustomed people to accepting what is to be accepted as true only when the truth is presented to them in such a way that they can remain passive. Every step in spiritual research, however, shows us that we have to actively familiarize ourselves with the spiritual world; that we first have to create the expression for what we want to perceive. Spiritual science is to natural science as activity is to passivity. One need only glance around at our contemporary circumstances to see that people are inclined to say: “That's fantasy!” if something does not confront them in such a way that they can remain passive. In this way, spiritual science is fundamentally opposed to the currents of the time.

But on the other hand, it happens in life that where something has soared to the highest power, its opposite is done. For anyone who can search the souls of the present, it is quite clear that in the depths of the souls of people today there lives a longing to experience something of that activity through which man can also cognitively grasp his eternal, his immortal, his connection with the divine. It is only natural that on the one hand opposition after opposition is directed against spiritual science, because education in natural science has led to passivity. But in the depths of the soul there is a yearning, a yearning that awaits fulfillment. Many souls live in the present, unaware that their insecurity, their not knowing what to do with themselves, simply comes from the fact that they have the longing to come together with the spiritual, and that they cannot do so. They long for spiritual science.

Therefore, one can say: No matter how much what appears on the surface to be approaching the souls is opposed to the aims of our time, in truth the souls long for the aims that spiritual science sets itself. One could show from many things that confront us in the present how man at the present time wants to be completely passively devoted to the outside world; how he wants to receive everything that he is to accept as true from outside. People are happy to go to a lecture that is advertised as including “slides”. No claim is made other than to surrender passively, to look, to receive sensations that are at most supported by words. It is different where a lecture without slides demands that one work in one's soul.

And so it is basically in the broadest scope of our lives. After all, one thing has been able to take hold in our time: A very popular magazine recently published an essay that contains the following: the author has a respected name as a philosopher; he is also rightly admired for many things. I would also like to take this opportunity to mention that I always make it a point to only quote opponents that I can also respect; and I would like to mention a respected man to you now. But this man has come to a strange idea. He says: When you read Kant or Spinoza, it is difficult to read; the concepts are all over the place. But couldn't it be made easier? Today we have slides, film, and the cinema. You could show people Spinoza sitting there grinding lenses. That would be the first image. It transforms itself. The thought “substance” appears in his mind. The thought of substance appears. In the next image, “Thought and Expansion” and so on. Spinoza's “Ethics” - that is the name of the work I have just mentioned - it will be a nice future prospect to be able to walk past a movie theater and read on the posters: “Spinoza's Ethics” or “Kant's Critique of Pure Reason”.

Dear attendees! I only mention such things because they grotesquely show you where the goals of our time are heading and how they are opposed to the goals of spiritual science, in which everything is activity in order to strengthen activity in the human being, to make the human being more and more independent and independent. The person who reprinted the aforementioned essay in his newspaper said that one would have to have great hopes if something like this could be realized; it would fulfill the metaphysical yearning of human beings. The spiritual researcher, however, cannot hope for this fulfillment. He must therefore accept being scolded for being “superficial” because he cannot hope for much from Spinoza's “Ethics” and Kant's “Critique of Pure Reason” in film.

I need not go into the individual goals of our time any further; I need only present the general character of passivity that was bound to arise from it, because through the wonderful deepening of external life, man has become accustomed to being active in that to which he can add nothing. But the more people of the present time wrap themselves in such passivity, the more the longing will awaken for that activity of the soul through which man can feel himself as an eternal, as an independent, as a being independent of the body beings that conquers death because it has powers within itself that have nothing to do with birth and death, but that point back to earlier lives on earth and point forward to a later and eternal existence.

I only wanted to characterize; I did not want to hint at the details of what I would like to call a glimpse into the future of human development.

What is the purpose of this activity? We will look at tomorrow at what spiritual science is intended to be as a way of life. But what can it lead to?

Now, let us take a look at the basic character of our time, at the world view that seeks to create a world picture only from materialistic-sensory facts. This is not very consistent, otherwise one would have to say: according to this world view, as it is beginning to emerge in the sense of a misunderstood Darwinism, the human being is said to have arisen purely, without any spiritual-soul element connecting to his physical body, which has arisen out of animality, man is supposed to have arisen out of animality; and the qualities of thinking, feeling and willing, the quality of religious deepening and so on, are supposed to be only an intensification of what appears at a lower level in animals.

It is superficial to speak of living in a transitional period with regard to certain things. Every time is a transitional period. But one may say, and that is what matters: with regard to such things, this time is a transitional period. And I would like to ask your permission to suggest, perhaps somewhat grotesquely, but thereby particularly clearly, how spiritual science wants to relate to the goals of our time. We have only not been consistent enough, otherwise we could say the following, precisely from the materialistic way of thinking: Whatever is meant by what is stated in the Bible at the beginning of human development with the appearance of the spirit, which is symbolized by the serpent; what word resounds from this symbol?

You will be like the gods, knowing good and evil.

However you may feel about this symbol, it is a significant saying, a saying that is connected with everything we call “freedom” in human beings. A great saying that goes deep into human nature: “You will be like the gods, knowing good and evil.” If one were as consistent as the snake was consistent, if one is a materialist or a monist, then one would not, inconsistently, veil what one would actually have to say with this composition: everything that man can immerse himself in is an intensification of what comes to light in the animal's instinctual life. It is as if the tempter were standing before us and calling out to us: “You will be like the animals, no longer distinguishing good from evil.” For when everything is harnessed to the objective-physical law of nature, then everything proceeds as animal life proceeds. Thus, the tempter's words stand before us as the goal of our time: “You will be like the animals, no longer distinguishing good from evil.”

Between these two extremes lies the true progress of the human being. Spiritual science is intended to lift humanity above what it can only gain from the contemplation of sensual reality, to which it may only passively surrender. Instead, spiritual science is intended to intervene in the cultural world and give it goals that lie in the activity of the soul, which places man in the world in such a way that he can better find his progress in the development of freedom and all that is human in the right middle between divinity and animality.

With these true goals of spiritual science, one is certainly in harmony with all those personalities who, in the course of human development, have tried to gain a feeling and a sense of the true essence of man through deep soul contemplation. Even in ancient times, spiritual science was able to express clearly what it can express today, although it could not be expressed as clearly as it is possible in our time because we have the model of natural science before us. It was felt and sensed by all those spirits, all those personalities who took genuine human progress seriously. They were far, far from allowing the direction of their thinking to be confined to a goal that must be characterized as follows: You will be like animals and no longer distinguish good from evil; your thoughts will be no more than the highest activity of your brain, just as magnetism is the highest activity of that which can take place in the material processes of iron.

How many great minds from centuries past could resound in our poetry and thought! Let us mention just one, in whose words I would like to summarize what I wanted to present here today. Let me quote a saying of Schiller, who also wanted to realize how it is with the relationship of man to the developing animal world; how it was in the formation of the earth, when man appeared, in addition to the other beings. Truly, even deeper than he could feel, we would like to express Schiller's words from a spiritual scientific point of view, as a feeling summary of their most important result, knowing that the correct position of man in the universe is expressed in such a word:

Now the dull barrier of animality fell,
And humanity stepped out of the cloudy brow,
And the lofty stranger, Thought,
Leaped from the wondering brain.

Leipzig 1890

A few weeks ago, German philosophy was enriched by a valuable book written in Weimar. The fact that the author of the work is the archdeacon Dr. Eduard Grimm, and the scholarly importance attached to it, justify it sufficiently if we express at this point the deep satisfaction that reading it has given us. We found one of the most interesting epochs in the development of science discussed in a truly exemplary manner. The book sets itself the task of explaining the teachings of the five English philosophers: Francis Bacon (1561 to 1626), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1709), George Berkeley (1685-1753), David Hume (1711-1776) for epistemology, that is for that science which is concerned with answering the question: to what extent is man capable of solving the riddles of the world and investigating the laws of nature and life through his thinking?

The scientific period to which these five thinkers belong is so extraordinarily significant because it marks one of the most important turning points in scientific life. The wisdom of the Middle Ages had contented itself with continuing along the paths trodden by Aristotle, the great teacher of Alexander the Great. The way in which he approached the tasks of the sciences, the goals he set, were still considered incontestable even when new observations and experiences could no longer be properly reconciled with them. This, however, hindered all progress and made the free development of the free and independent thinking demanded by discoveries in the field of science impossible. Then Francis Bacon appeared on the scene. His aim was to purify science of all traditional prejudices and to completely rebuild it on the basis of the new achievements of the time. Grimm is a master at capturing Bacon precisely at the point where his great significance for the development of European thought is most evident. By clinging to principles that belonged to a time long past and could only have validity and value for the life of that time, science had become alienated from the life of the immediate present, indeed had become completely useless for it. But "all science has emerged from life and takes from it the right and the basis of its existence. If it departs too far from its origin, life itself cannot fail to oppose it with its own direct force and urge a new formation of science. Francis Bacon of Verulam confronts the science of his time in this way. He reproaches it with resembling a plant which, torn from its stem, no longer has any connection with the body of nature and therefore no longer receives any nourishment from it." (Cf. Grimm, Zur Geschichte des Erkenntnisproblems, pp. 5-6.) Grimm explains with as much thoroughness as truly philosophical superiority how Bacon, by establishing an infallible method of observation and experimentation, wants to put science on the right track, how he, by ruthlessly combating all prejudices and errors among scholars as well as all other educated people, wants to provide access only to absolutely certain knowledge. To this, as to the whole book in general, we must praise the only historically correct method, which does full justice to the thinkers under consideration by letting them speak for themselves wherever it seems necessary. The beneficial effect produced by the book is due in no small part to the fact that the author does not, as so many recent historians of science do, emphasize his own scientific views in assessing the thought of others, but places his personal ability, which is visible to the discerning reader everywhere, at the service of an all-round objective development of the systems of thought dealt with.

The Baconian school of thought, for all its great importance, was guilty of a one-sided overestimation of the mere observation of things at the expense of independent thinking that draws from man's own breast. This deficiency became even greater with Thomas Hobbes, who saw thinking as nothing more than a faculty mediated by language. "Understanding is the understanding of words." (Grimm, p.87.) Hobbes denies that thinking can come to knowledge by itself and through itself. "Sensual perception, imagination, and the succession of our ideas, which we call experience, is what is given to us by nature." (Grimm,.85-86.) "Hobbes calls reason that activity by which we compose ideas and words." (Grimm, p. 87.) Thus, according to Hobbes, science is not based on a thinking comprehension of the world, but merely on the rational use and correct understanding of words. The fact that words convey ideas and that our knowledge is based on them is a proposition that does not exist for Hobbes. It is understandable that under such circumstances knowledge can no longer have an independent purpose. Therefore Hobbes finds: "Knowledge is there for the sake of skill, mathematics for the sake of mechanics, all speculation for the sake of some work, some action." (Grimm,. 99.) Certainly, knowledge that consists only of words can have no independent value. However, Hobbes believed that he could only achieve what he wanted by giving science this twist. What we observe and experience in individual cases has only a limited truth. We can never know whether it is true in all the cases we have not observed. Words, on the other hand, we determine arbitrarily, so we know exactly how far what they claim is valid. This view proved fatal to Hobbes in his foundation of the doctrine of morals and the state. For if everything that has objective validity is based only on the arbitrariness of words, then any real distinction between "good" and "evil" ceases to exist. These concepts, too, become arbitrary creations of man. "There is no general rule about good and evil taken from the nature of things themselves." (Grimm,. 135-136.) And in the state, order cannot be maintained by people controlling their instincts through reason, through free insight, but only by a despotic ruler enforcing the observation of arbitrarily established moral laws.

John Locke is at the center of Grimm's work. After all, he is "the first philosopher to place the question of knowledge at the center of research as a completely independent and independent task". (Grimm, 5.173.) On the continent, Ren& Descartes (Cartesius 1596-1650) is the founder of a new philosophy that frees itself from the bonds of Aristotle. He sees the reason why we can arrive at unconditional and unquestionable knowledge in the fact that certain ideas are innate to us. We need only raise them from the hidden depths of our soul and place them in the full light of consciousness. Locke now opposed this view with the proposition that we have no innate, but only acquired knowledge. According to Locke, we do not bring any knowledge into the world with us, but only the ability to acquire it. Starting from this insight, he seeks to investigate the sources and validity of our knowledge. In doing so, he arrives at a proposition that is now a part of modern consciousness, namely that only mass, shape, number and motion are properties that really exist in bodies, while color, sound, heat, taste and so on are only effects of the bodies on our senses, but not something in the bodies themselves.

George Berkeley now claims that the first-mentioned qualities also have no existence independent of our imagination, but that they only exist insofar as we imagine them. There are no things at all that correspond to our ideas. Berkeley denies the existence of a corporeal world and allows only spirits to exist in which the divine being, through its all-dominant power, evokes the ideas. "What I perceive, I must also imagine; something of which I have no conception at all cannot be the object of my perception or experience, it does not exist for me at all." "Therefore, there is no perception, no existence, no experience beyond the limit of imagination." (Grimm, p. 385.)

Finally, David Hume takes up Locke's view that we can only gain all our knowledge through observation. But as we can only ever obtain information about individual cases by observation, we have only such knowledge as relates to particulars and no generally valid knowledge. When I see that one thing always follows another, I call the latter cause, the former effect. I expect that in similar cases the same cause will produce the same effect. That this must be so, I can never know. All our conviction rests on the habit of always presupposing what we have often found to be true. Thus Hume arrives at a complete doubt of all actual knowledge.

This doubt, by his own admission, roused Kant from his scientific slumber and inspired him to write his great work, the Critique of Pure Reason, which stirred the scientific world in all its depths. As a result, Hume, and insofar as he was based on his predecessors, also exerted a decisive influence on German science.

Knowing the development of thought and the significance of the scholars treated by Grimm is an absolute necessity for understanding modern philosophy. The author has therefore earned a lasting merit through his book. With penetrating clarity, he shows us the threads that link the five men together, and with admirable acuity he always points to the aspect in which each of them has developed one and the same basic idea. It is actually a question that they all deal with, but the different light they shed on it always leads to different conclusions. They are all inspired by the striving for satisfactory knowledge, and they are likewise imbued with the conviction that only observation and experience provide us with true knowledge. No less excellent than the presentation of the interdependence of the individual explanations is Grimm's illumination of the course of development they have undergone. This is particularly characteristic of Berkeley and Hume. In clarifying these relationships, Grimm also proves himself to be a master of psychological analysis.

We do not think we are saying too much when we culminate our judgment of Grimm's book in these words: For the specialist, it is a work that he must not pass by if he wants to approach the epoch in question; for the educated, it is an interesting lectern that will orient him on countless questions.

[ 1 ] This study of the theory of knowledge implicit in Goethe's world-conception was written in the middle of the decade 1880–90. My mind was then vitally engaged in two activities of thought. One was directed toward the creative work of Goethe, and strove to formulate the view of life and of the world which revealed itself as the impelling force in this creative work. The completely and purely human seemed to me to be dominant in everything that Goethe gave to the world in creative work, in reflection, and in his life. Nowhere in the modern age did that inner assurance, harmonious completeness, and sense of reality in relation to the world seem to me to be as fully represented as in Goethe. From this thought there necessarily arose the recognition of the fact that the manner, likewise, in which Goethe comported himself in the act of cognition is that which issues out of the very nature of man and of the world.

In another direction my thought was vitally absorbed in the philosophical conceptions prevalent at that time regarding the essential nature of knowledge. In these conceptions, knowledge threatened to become sealed up within the being of man himself. The brilliant philosopher Otto Liebmann had asserted that human consciousness cannot pass beyond itself; that it must remain within itself. Whatever exists, as the true reality, beyond that world which consciousness forms within itself—of this it can know nothing. In brilliant writings Otto Liebmann elaborated this thought with respect to the most varied aspects of the realm of human experience. Johannes Volkelt had written his thoughtful books dealing with Kant's theory of knowledge and with Experience and Thought. He saw in the world as given to man only a combination of representations¹ based upon the relationship of man to a world in itself unknown. He admitted, to be sure, that an inevitability manifests itself in our inner experience of thinking when this lays hold in the realm of representations. When engaged in the activity of thinking, we have the sense, in a manner, of forcing our way through the world of representations into the world of reality. But what is gained thereby? We might for this reason feel justified, during the process of thinking, in forming judgments concerning the world of reality; but in such judgments we remain wholly within man himself; nothing of the nature of the world penetrates therein.

[ 2 ] Eduard von Hartmann, whose philosophy had been of great service to me, in spite of the fact that I could not admit its fundamental presuppositions or conclusions, occupied exactly the same point of view in regard to the theory of knowledge set forth exhaustively by Volkelt.

[ 3 ] There was everywhere manifest the confession that human knowledge arrives at certain barriers beyond which it cannot pass into the realm of genuine reality.

[ 4 ] In opposition to all this stood in my case the fact, inwardly experienced and known in experience, that human thinking, when it reaches a sufficient depth, lives within the reality of the world as a spiritual reality. I believed that I possessed this knowledge in a form which can exist in consciousness with the same clarity that characterizes mathematical knowledge.

[ 5 ] In the presence of this knowledge, it is impossible to sustain the opinion that there are such boundaries of cognition as were supposed to be established by the course of reasoning to which I have referred.

[ 6 ] In reference to all this, I was somewhat inclined toward the theory of evolution then in its flower. In Haeckel this theory had assumed forms in which no consideration whatever could be given to the self-existent being and action of the spiritual. The later and more perfect was supposed to arise in the course of time out of the earlier, the undeveloped. This was evident to me as regards the external reality of the senses, but I was too well aware of the self-existent spiritual, resting upon its own foundation, independent of the sensible, to yield the argument to the external world of the senses. But the problem was how to lay a bridge from this world to the world of the spirit.

[ 7 ] In the time sequence, as thought out on the basis of the senses, the spiritual in man appears to have evolved out of the antecedent non-spiritual. But the sensible, when rightly conceived, manifests itself everywhere as a revelation of the spiritual. In the light of this true knowledge of the sensible, I saw clearly that “boundaries of knowledge,” as then defined, could be admitted only by one who, when brought into contact with this sensible, deals with it like a man who should look at a printed page and, fixing his attention upon the forms of the letters alone without any idea of reading, should declare that it is impossible to know what lies behind these forms.

[ 8 ] Thus my look was guided along the path from sense-observation to the spiritual, which was firmly established in my inner experiential knowledge. Behind the sensible phenomena, I sought, not for a non-spiritual world of atoms, but for the spiritual, which appears to reveal itself within man himself, but which in reality inheres in the objects and processes of the sense-world itself. Because of man's attitude in the act of knowing, it appears as if the thoughts of things were within man, whereas in reality they hold sway within the things themselves. It is necessary for man, in experiencing the apparent,² to separate thoughts from things; but, in a true experience of knowledge, he restores them again to things.

[ 9 ] The evolution of the world is thus to be understood in such fashion that the antecedent non-spiritual, out of which the succeeding spirituality of man unfolds, possesses also a spiritual beside itself and outside itself. The later spirit-permeated sensible, amid which man appears, comes to pass by reason of the fact that the spiritual progenitor of man unites with imperfect, non-spiritual forms, and, having transformed these, then appears in sensible forms.

[ 10 ] This course of thought led me beyond the contemporary theorists of knowledge, even though I fully recognized their acumen and their sense of scientific responsibility. It led me to Goethe.

[ 11 ] I am impelled to look back from the present to my inner struggle at that time. It was no easy matter for me to advance beyond the course of reasoning characterizing contemporary philosophies. But my guiding star was always the self-substantiating recognition of the fact that it is possible for man to behold himself inwardly as spirit, independent of the body and dwelling in a world of spirit.

[ 12 ] Prior to my work dealing with Goethe's scientific writings and before the preparation of this theory of knowledge, I had written a brief paper on atomism, which was never printed. This was conceived in the direction here indicated. I cannot but recall what pleasure I experienced when Friedrich Theodor Vischer, to whom I sent that paper, wrote me some words of approval.

[ 13 ] But in my Goethe studies it became clear to me that my way of thinking led to a perception of the character of the knowledge which is manifest everywhere in Goethe's creative work and in his attitude toward the world. I perceived that my point of view afforded me a theory of knowledge which was that belonging to Goethe's world-conception.

[ 14 ] During the 'eighties of the last century I was invited through the influence of Karl Julius Schröer, my teacher and fatherly friend, to whom I am deeply indebted, to prepare the introductions to Goethe's scientific writings for the Kürschner National-Literatur, and to edit these writings. During the progress of this work, I traced the course of Goethe's intellectual life in all the fields with which he was occupied. It became constantly clearer to me in detail that my own perception placed me within that theory of knowledge belonging to Goethe's world-conception. Thus it was that I wrote this theory of knowledge in the course of the work I have mentioned.

[ 15 ] Now that I again turn my attention to it, it seems to me to be also the foundation and justification, as a theory of knowledge, for all that I have since asserted orally or in print. It speaks of an essential nature of knowledge which opens the way from the sense world to a world of spirit.

[ 16 ] It may seem strange that this youthful production, written nearly forty years ago, should now be published again, unaltered and expanded only by means of notes. In the manner of its presentation, it bears the marks of a kind of thinking which had entered vitally into the philosophy of that time, forty years ago. Were I writing the book now, I should express many things differently. But the essential nature of knowledge I could not set forth in any different light. Moreover, what I might write now could not convey so truly within itself the germ of the spiritual world-conception for which I stand. In such germinal fashion one can write only at the beginning of one's intellectual life. For this reason, it may be well that this youthful production should again appear in unaltered form. The theories of knowledge existing at the time of its composition have found their sequel in later theories of knowledge. What I have to say in regard to these I have said in my book Die Rätsel der Philosophie.³ This also will be issued in a new edition at the same time by the same publishers. That which I outlined many years ago as the theory of knowledge implicit in Goethe's world-conception seems to me just as necessary to be said now as it was forty years ago.

Rudolf Steiner
Dornach, November 1923

• 1. Vorstellungen, single concepts corresponding to single percepts.
• 2. in einem Schein-Erleben
• 3. The Riddles of Philosophy—not yet translated into English

[ 1 ] Let us now take a look at pure experience. What does it contain, as it sweeps across our consciousness, without our working upon it in thinking? It is mere juxtaposition in space and succession in time; an aggregate of utterly disconnected particulars. None of the objects that come and go there has anything to do with any other. At this stage, the facts that we perceive, that we experience inwardly, are of no consequence to each other.

[ 2 ] This world is a manifoldness of things of equal value. No thing or event can claim to play a greater role in the functioning of the world than any other part of the world of experience. If it is to become clear to us that this or that fact has greater significance than another one, we must then not merely observe the things, but must already bring them into thought-relationships. The rudimentary organ of an animal, which perhaps does not have the least importance for its organic functioning, is for experience of exactly the same value as the most essential organ of the animal's body. This greater or lesser importance will in fact become clear to us only when we begin to reflect upon the relationships of the individual parts of observation, that is, when we work upon experience.

[ 3 ] For experience, the snail, which stands at a low level of organization, is the equal of the most highly developed animal. The difference in the perfection of organization appears to us only when we grasp the given manifoldness conceptually and work it through. The culture of the Eskimo, in this respect, is also equal to that of the educated European; Caesar's significance for the historical development of humanity appears to mere experience as being no greater than that of one of his soldiers. In the history of literature, Goethe does not stand out above Gottsched, if it is a matter of merely experienceable factuality.

[ 4 ] At this level of contemplation, the world is a completely smooth surface for us with respect to thought. No part of this surface rises above another; none manifests any kind of conceptual difference from another. It is only when the spark of thought strikes into this surface that heights and depths appear, that one thing appears to stand out more or less than another, that everything takes form in a definite way, that threads weave from one configuration to another, that everything becomes a harmony complete within itself.

[ 5 ] We believe that these examples suffice to show what we mean by the greater or lesser significance of the objects of perception (here considered to be synonymous with the things of experience), and what we mean by that knowing activity which first arises when we contemplate these objects in their interconnection. At the same time, we believe that in this we are safe from the objection that our world of experience in fact shows endless differences in its objects even before thinking approaches it. After all, a red surface differs from a green one even if we do not exercise any thinking. This is correct. If someone wanted to refute us by this, however, he would have misunderstood our argument totally. This is precisely our argument, that an endless number of particulars is what experience offers us. These particulars must of course differ from one another; otherwise they would not in fact confront us as an endless, disconnected manifoldness. It is not at all a question of perceived things being undifferentiated, but rather of their complete unrelatedness, and of the absolute insignificance of the individual sense-perceptible facts for the totality of our picture of reality. It is precisely because we recognize this endless qualitative differentiation that we are driven to our conclusions.

[ 6 ] If we were confronted by a self-contained, harmoniously organized unity, we could not then say, in fact, that the individual parts of this unity are of no significance to one another.

[ 7 ] If, for this reason, someone does not find the comparison we used above to be apt, he has not grasped it at the actual point of comparison. It would be incorrect, of course, for us to want to compare the world of perception, in all its in finitely diverse configuration, to the uniform regularity of a plane. But our plane is definitely not meant to represent the diverse world of phenomena, but rather the homogeneous total picture we have of this world as long as thinking has not approached it. After the activation of our thinking, each particular of this total picture no longer appears in the way our senses alone communicate it, but al ready with the significance it has for the whole of reality. It appears then with characteristics totally lacking to it in the form of experience.

[ 8 ] In our estimation, Johannes Volkelt has succeeded admirably in sketching the clear outlines of what we are justified in calling pure experience. He already gave a fine characterization of it five years ago in his book on Kant's Epistemology, and has then carried the subject further in his most recent work, Experience and Thinking. Now he did this, to be sure, in support of a view that is utterly different from our own, and for an essentially different purpose than ours is at the moment. But this need not prevent us from introducing here his excellent characterization of pure experience. He presents us, simply, with the pictures which, in a limited period of time, pass before our consciousness in a completely unconnected way. Volkelt says: “Now, for example, my consciousness has as its content the mental picture of having worked hard today; immediately joining itself to this is the content of a mental picture of being able, with good conscience, to take a walk; but suddenly there appears the perceptual picture of the door opening and of the mailman entering; the mailman appears, now sticking out his hand, now opening his mouth, now doing the reverse; at the same time, there join in with this content of perception of the mouth opening, all kinds of auditory impressions, among which comes the impression that it is starting to rain outside. The mailman disappears from my consciousness, and the mental pictures that now arise have as their content the sequence: picking up scissors, opening the letter, criticism of illegible writing, visible images of the most diverse written figures, diverse imaginings and thoughts connected with them; scarcely is this sequence at an end than again there appears the mental picture of having worked hard and the perception, accompanied by ill humor, of the rain continuing; but both disappear from my consciousness, and there arises a mental picture with the content that a difficulty believed to have been resolved in the course of today's work was not resolved; entering at the same time are the mental pictures: freedom of will, empirical necessity, responsibility, value of virtue, absolute chance, incomprehensibility, etc.; these all join together with each other in the most varied and complicated way; and so it continues.”

[ 9 ] Here we have depicted, within a certain limited period of time, what we really experience, the form of reality in which thinking plays no part at all.

[ 10 ] Now one definitely should not believe that one would have arrived at a different result if, instead of this everyday experience, one had depicted, say, the experience we have of a scientific experiment or of a particular phenomenon of nature. Here, as there, it is individual unconnected pictures that pass before our consciousness. Thinking first establishes the connections.

[ 11 ] We must also recognize the service rendered by Dr. Richard Wahle's little book, Brain and Consciousness (Vienna, 1884), in showing us in clear contours what is actually given by experience divested of everything of a thought-nature, with only one reservation: that what Wahle presents as the characteristics applying absolutely to the phenomena of the outer and inner world actually applies only to the first stage of the world contemplation we have characterized. According to Wahle we know only a juxtaposition in space and a succession in time. For him there can be absolutely no question of a relationship between the things that exist in this juxtaposition and succession. For example, there may after all be an inner connection somewhere between the warm rays of the sun and the warming up of a stone; but we know nothing of any causal connection; all that becomes clear to us is that a second fact follows upon the first. There may also be somewhere, in a world unaccessible to us, an inner connection between our brain mechanism and our spiritual activity; we only know that both are events running their courses parallel to each other; we are absolutely not justified, for example, in assuming a causal connection between these two phenomena.

[ 12 ] Of course, when Wahle also presents this assertion as an ultimate truth of science, we must dispute this broader application; his assertion is completely valid, however, with respect to the first form in which we become aware of reality.

[ 13 ] It is not only the things of the outer world and the processes of the inner world that stand there, at this stage of our knowing, without interconnection; our own personality is also an isolated entity with respect to the rest of the world. We find ourselves as one of innumerable perceptions without connection to the objects that surround us.

We will turn our thoughts to-day to the Festival which every year revives remembrance of the Mystery of Golgotha.

There are three such main Festivals in Christendom: at Christmas, Easter and Whitsuntide. Each of these Festivals brings man's life of soul into a different relation with the great events from which the whole of earth-evolution receives purpose and meaning.

The Christmas Festival is connected more directly with man's life of feeling. In a certain sense it has the most popular appeal of all the Festivals, because when rightly understood it deepens the life of feeling and is always dear to the human heart.

The Easter Festival makes great demands upon man's powers of understanding, because here some measure of insight is essential into the Mystery of Golgotha itself, into how a super-sensible Being entered the stream of earthly evolution. Easter is a Festival which carries the faculty of human understanding to the highest level, a level which is, of course, ultimately accessible to everyone; but the appeal of the Easter Festival can never be as widespread as that of Christmas.

Through the Whitsuntide Festival, relationship is established between the will and the super-sensible world to which the Christ Being belongs. It is of the impulses of will which then take effect in the world that the Whitsuntide Festival makes men conscious when its meaning is rightly understood.

And so the great Christian Mystery is illustrated in a threefold way by these Festivals. There are many aspects of the Christmas Mystery and in the course of years we have studied them from different points of view at the time of the Festival. To-day we will think of an aspect brought graphically before us in the Gospels.

The Gospels tell of two proclamations of the birth of Christ Jesus. The one proclamation is made to the simple shepherds in the fields, to whom—in dream or in some kindred way—an Angel announces the birth. In this case, knowledge of the event was brought by inner soul-forces which were of a particular character in the shepherds living near the birthplace of Christ Jesus. And the Gospels tell of another proclamation made to the Three Kings, the Three Magi from the East who follow the voice of a star announcing to them that Christ Jesus has come into the world.

Here we have an indication of two ways in which higher knowledge came to men in earlier times. This is again a matter of which the modern mind has no understanding. The idea prevailing nowadays is that man's faculties of apprehension and thinking—that is to say, inner powers of the soul—have for thousands and thousands of years been fundamentally the same as they are to-day, except that in earlier times they were more primitive. But we know from spiritual science that the tenor and mood of the human soul has undergone great changes in the course of the ages. In times of antiquity, let us say about six or seven thousand years ago, man had a quite different conception not only of his own life but also of the universe around him. His attitude of soul underwent continual change until, in the modern world, it amounts simply to intellectual analysis and a purely physical conception of things in the outer world. This development proceeds from an instinctive clairvoyance in ancient times, through the phase of our present mood-of-soul, in order, in the future, to return to a form of clairvoyant vision of the world pervaded by full, clear consciousness.

At the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place on the earth, the old instinctive clairvoyance had already become dim. Although men's attitude of soul differed widely from that of to-day, they no longer possessed the powers of that ancient clairvoyance; neither were they able to apply the old forms of wisdom in seeking for intimate and exact knowledge of the world. The teachings of the ancient wisdom, as well as the faculties of instinctive clairvoyance, had lost their power when the Mystery of Golgotha took place. Nevertheless, echoes still survived, as the Gospels clearly indicate if we understand them aright. Echoes of the ancient wisdom survived here and there in certain exceptional individuals. These individuals might well have been the simple shepherds in the fields who with their great purity of heart possessed a certain power of clairvoyance which came over them like a dream. And there might also well have been individuals who had reached the heights of learning, like the Three Magi from the East, in whom the ancient faculty to gaze into the how of cosmic happenings had been preserved.

In a kind of dream-condition, the simple shepherds in the fields were able inwardly to realise what was drawing near in the event of the birth of Christ Jesus. On the other hand, the knowledge possessed by the three Magi from the East enabled them, by contemplating the phenomena of the heavens, to discern that an event of a significance far transcending that of the ordinary course of life was taking place on the earth.

Our attention is therefore directed to two definite but quite distinct forms of knowledge. We will think, first, of the knowledge possessed by the three Magi as a last remnant of an ancient wisdom. It is clearly indicated that these Magi were able to read the secrets of the movements of the stars. The story of the three Kings or Magi points to the existence of an ancient lore of the stars, an ancient knowledge of the secrets of the worlds of stars in which the secrets of happenings in the world of men were also revealed. This ancient lore of the stars was very different from our modern astronomical science—although in a certain respect it too is prophetic in that eclipses of the sun, of the moon, and the like, can be predicted. But it is a purely mathematical science, speaking only of conditions and relationships in space and time in so far as they can be expressed in terms of mathematics. What plays with a higher significance into man's inner life from beyond space and time, but into the world of space and time, was read by an ancient star-lore from the courses and movements of the stars, and it was this star-wisdom that formed the essential content of the science belonging to an earlier epoch. Men sought in the stars for explanations of what was happening on the earth. But to such men the world of stars was not the machinelike abstraction it has now come to be. Every planet was felt to have reality of being. In a kind of inner speech of the soul, these men of old conversed, as it were, with each planet, just as to-day we converse with one another in ordinary speech. They realised that what the movements of the stars bring about in the universe is reflected in man's inmost soul. This was a living, spirit-inwoven conception of the universe. And man felt that as a being of soul and spirit he himself had his place within this universe. The wisdom relating to cosmic happenings was also cultivated in Schools of the Mysteries where the pupils were prepared, carefully and intimately, to understand the movements of the stars in such a way that human life on earth became intelligible to them.

What form did these preparations take? These preparations for knowledge of the stars and their workings consisted in training the pupils, even in the times of instinctive clairvoyance, to unfold a more wide-awake consciousness than that prevailing in normal life. The masses of the people possessed faculties of instinctive clairvoyance which were natural in a life of soul less awake than our own. In ancient times the wide-awake thinking of to-day would not have been possible. Nor could mathematics or geometry be grasped in the way they are grasped by the modern mind. Man's whole life between birth and death was a kind of dreamlike existence, but on that very account he had a far more living awareness of the world around him than is possible in our fully wide-awake consciousness. And strange as it seems, in the age which lasted into the second millennium or even as late as the beginning of the first millennium B.C. (—it was to the last surviving remains of this age that men like the three Magi belonged—) individual pupils in the Mysteries were initiated into a kind of knowledge resembling our geometrical or mathematical sciences. It was Euclid¹ who first gave geometry to the world at large. The geometry presented to mankind by Euclid had already been cultivated for thousands of years in the Mysteries, but there it was communicated to chosen pupils only. Moreover it did not work in them in the same way as in men of later time. Paradoxical as it seems, it is nevertheless a fact that the geometry and arithmetic learnt by children to-day was taught in the Mysteries to individuals specially chosen from the masses on account of their particular gifts who were then received into the Mysteries.

One often hears it said to-day that the teachings given in the Mysteries were secret and veiled. In their abstract content however, these so-called ‘secret’ teachings were no different from what is now taught to children at school. The mystery does not lie in the fact that these things are unknown to-day but that they were imparted to human beings in a different way. For to teach the principles of geometry to children by calling upon the intellect in an age when from the moment of waking until that of falling asleep the human being has clear day-consciousness, is a very different matter from imparting them to pupils specially chosen because of their greater maturity of soul in the age of instinctive clairvoyance and dreamlike consciousness. A true conception of these things is rarely in evidence to-day.

In Eastern literature there is a Hymn to the God Varuna which says that Varuna is revealed in the air and in the winds blowing through the forests, in the thunder rolling from the clouds, in the human heart when it is kindled to acts of will, in the heavens when the sun passes across the sky, and is present on the hills in the soma juice. You will generally find it stated in books today that nobody knows what this soma-juice really is. Modern scholars assert that nobody knows what soma-juice is, although, as a matter of fact, there are people who drink it by the litre and from a certain point of view are quite familiar with it. But to know things from the vantage-point of the Mysteries is quite different from knowing them as a layman from the standpoint of the experiences of ordinary waking consciousness. You may read to-day about the ‘Philosopher's Stone’ for which men sought in an epoch when understanding of the nature of substances was very different from what it is today. And again, those who write about alchemy assert that nothing is known about the Philosopher's Stone. Here and there in my lectures I have said that this Philosopher's Stone is quite familiar to most people, only they do not know what it really is nor why it is so called. It is quite well known, because as a matter of fact it is used by the ton.

The modern mind with its tendency to abstraction and theory and its alienation from reality, is incapable of grasping these things. Nor is there any understanding of what is meant by saying that our geometrical and arithmetical sciences were once imparted to mature souls quite different in character from the souls of modern men, In my book Christianity as Mystical Fact I have indicated the special nature of the Mystery-teachings but these significant matters are not as a rule correctly understood; they are taken far too superficially. The way in which the subject-matter of the Mystery-teachings in ancient times was imparted—that is what needs to be understood.

Novalis was still aware of the human element, the element of feeling in mathematics which, in utter contrast to the vast majority to-day, he regarded as being akin to a great and wonderful Hymn.² It was to an understanding of the world imbued with feeling but expressed in mathematical forms that the pupil of the ancient Mysteries was led. And when this mathematical understanding of the universe had developed in such a pupil, he became one whose vision resembled that of the men described as the three Magi from the East. The mathematics of the universe which to us has become pure abstraction, then revealed reality of Being, because this knowledge was supplemented and enriched by something that came to meet it. And so the science and knowledge of the outer universe belonging to an ancient culture which in its last echoes survived in the Magi, was the origin of the one proclamation—the proclamation made by way of wisdom pertaining to the outer universe.

On the other side, inner feeling of the secrets of the evolution of humanity could arise in men of a disposition specially fitted for such experiences. Such men are represented by the shepherds in the fields. These inner forces must have reached a certain stage of development and then instinctive-imaginative perception became direct vision. And so, through their faculty of inner vision, the simple shepherds in the fields were made aware of the proclamation: ‘The God is revealing Himself in the heavenly Heights and through Him there can be peace among all men who are of good-will.’

Secrets of the cosmos were thus revealed to the hearts of the simple shepherds in the fields and to those who were the representatives of the highest wisdom attainable by the human mind at that time. This is the revelation made to the three Magi from the East. The great mystery of earth-existence was proclaimed from two sides.

What was it that came to the knowledge of the Magi? What kind of faculties developed in specially prepared pupils of the Mysteries through the mathematics imparted to them?

The philosopher Kant says of the truths of mathematical science that they are a priori. By this he means that they are determined before the acquisition of external, empirical knowledge.³ This is so much lip-wisdom. Kant's a priori really says nothing. The expression has meaning only when we realise from spiritual-scientific knowledge that mathematics comes from within ourselves, rises into consciousness from within our own being. And where does it originate? In the experiences through which we passed in the spiritual world before conception, before birth. We were living then in the great universe, experiencing what it was possible to experience before we possessed bodily eyes and bodily ears. Our experiences then were a priori—a form of cognition independent of earthly life. And this is the kind of experience that rises up, unconsciously to-day, from our inmost being. Man does not know—unless, like Novalis, he glimpses it intuitively—that the experiences of the life before birth or conception well up when he is engrossed in mathematical thought. For one who can truly apprehend these things, mathematical cognition is in itself a proof that before conception and birth he existed in a spiritual world. Of those to whom this is no proof of a life before birth, it must be said that they do not think deeply and fundamentally enough about the phenomena and manifestations of life and have not the faintest inkling of the real origin of mathematics.

The pupils of the ancient Mysteries who had absorbed the kind of wisdom which in its last echoes had survived in the three Magi from the East, had this clear impression: If as we contemplate the stars we see in them the expressions of mathematical, arithmetical progression, we spread over universal space the experiences through which we lived before birth. A pupil of the Mysteries said to himself: Living here on the earth, I gaze out into the universe, beholding all that is around me in space. Before my birth I lived within these manifestations of cosmic realities, lived with the mysteries of number connected with the stars, with all that I can now only mentally picture in terms of mathematics. In that other existence my own inner forces led me from star to star; I had my very life in what is now only a mental activity. Such contemplation made vividly real to these men what they had lived through before birth, and these experiences were sacred to them. They knew that this other world was a spiritual world—their home before they came down to the earth. The last echoing remains of this knowledge had survived in the Magi from the East and through it they recognised the signs of the coming of Christ.

Whence came the Christ Being? He came from the world in which we ourselves live between death and a new birth, and united Himself with the life that extends from birth to death. Knowledge of the world in which our existence is spent from death to a new birth can therefore shed light upon an event like the Mystery of Golgotha. And it was through this knowledge that the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christmas Mystery too, was announced to the Magi.

While man is living on the earth and unfolding the forces which bring knowledge of the world around him, while he is unfolding the impulses for his actions and social life, he is unconsciously experiencing something else as well. He has no knowledge of it, but just as he experiences the aftereffects of his life before birth, so does he also experience what finally passes through the gate of death to become the content of the life after death. These forces are already present in germ between birth and death but come to fruition only in the life after death. They worked with intense strength in the old, instinctive clairvoyance, and in their last echoes they were still working in the simple shepherds in the fields because of their purity of heart. We live within the play of these forces above all during sleep, when the soul is outside the body, within the outer universe. The soul is then living in the form of existence in which it will live consciously after death, when the physical body has been laid aside.

These forces from the world of sleep and dream which in certain conditions can penetrate into waking life, were very active in the old, instinctive clairvoyance, and they were working in the simple shepherds to whom the Mystery of Golgotha was proclaimed in a way other than to the three Magi.

What kind of knowledge is brought by the forces that are paramountly active between death and a new birth, if, as was the case with the Magi, they have been kindled during life between birth and death? It is a knowledge of happenings in the world beyond the earth. The human being is transported from the earth into the world of the stars in which he lives between death and a new birth. This was the world into which the three Magi from the East were transported—away from the earth into the heavens.

And what kind of knowledge is brought by the forces that well up from the inmost being of man, above all in the world of dream? These forces bring knowledge of what is coming to pass within the earth itself. In this kind of knowledge it is earthly forces that are most strongly at work, the forces we have through the body, through existence in the body. These are the forces which are particularly active between sleeping and waking. Then too we are within the outer universe, but the outer universe that is especially connected with the earth.

You will say: this contradicts the statement that during sleep we are outside the body. But in reality there is no contradiction. We perceive only what is outside us; we do not perceive that within which we actually live. Only those who lack real knowledge and are satisfied with phrases speak of such things in glib words to the effect that it is meaningless to base spiritual science upon knowledge acquired outside the human being, for what really matters is that knowledge of outer nature shall be gained through the forces within man. ‘Schools of Wisdom’ like the one in Darmstadt⁴ may be based on high-sounding principles of this kind, but a man can remain a phrasemonger in spite of being the founder of such a ‘School of Wisdom.’ We must understand the inner nature of the world before we can acquire super-sensible knowledge, and it is only then that we can penetrate into the nature of our own inmost being. Men like Keyserling speak of the need to view things from the vantage-point of the soul, but they do not penetrate into the inmost being of man; they simply pour out phrases.

The truth is that between sleeping and waking we look back, feel back, as it were, into our body. We become aware of how our body is connected with the earth—for the body is given by the earth. The revelation to the shepherds in the fields was the revelation given by the earth, proceeding from their bodily nature. In a state of dream the voice of the Angel made known to them what had come to pass.

And so the contrast is complete:

To the Magi: revelation through heavenly lore.
To the Shepherds: revelation given by the earth.

That the revelation should have been from two sides is entirely in keeping with the Mystery of Golgotha. For a heavenly Being, a Being Who until then had not belonged to the earth, was drawing near. And the coming of such a Being must be recognised through wisdom pertaining to the heavens, through wisdom that is able to reveal the descent of a Being from the heavens. The wisdom of the shepherds is knowledge proceeding from the earth; the weaving life of the earth becomes aware of the coming of the Being from heaven. It is the same proclamation, only from another side—a wonderful, twofold proclamation to mankind of a single Event.

The attitude with which the Event of Golgotha was received by mankind is to be explained by the fact that only vestiges of the ancient wisdom remained. In the first centuries of our era, certain Gnostic teachings were able to shed light upon the Mystery of Golgotha, but as time went on, men strove more and more to understand it through purely intellectual analysis and reason. And in the nineteenth century, naturalism invaded this domain of belief. There was no longer any understanding of the super-sensible reality of the Event of Golgotha. Christ became the ‘wise man of Nazareth’—in the naturalistic sense. What is necessary is a new, spiritual conception of the Mystery of Golgotha. The Mystery of Golgotha as such must never be confused with the attitude adopted to it by the human mind.

The mood-of-soul prevailing in the shepherds and in the Magi was in its final phase at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Everything in the evolution of humanity undergoes constant change and metamorphosis. What has the wisdom possessed by the Magi from the East now become? It has become our mathematical astronomy. The Magi possessed super-earthly knowledge which was actually a glorious remembrance of life before birth. This knowledge has shrivelled away into our mathematical-mechanistic conception of the heavens, to the phenomena of which we apply only mathematical laws. What wells up from within us in our mathematical astronomy is the modern metamorphosis of the knowledge once possessed by the Magi.

Our outer, sense-given knowledge, conveyed as it is merely through eyes and ears, is the externalised form of the inner knowledge once possessed by men like the shepherds in the fields. The mood-of-soul in which the secrets of earth-existence were once revealed to the shepherds now induces us to look at the world with the cold detachment of scientific observation. This kind of observation is the child of the Shepherd-wisdom—but the child is very unlike the parent! And our mathematical astronomy is the child of the Magi-wisdom. It was necessary that humanity should pass through this phase. When our scientists are making their cold, dispassionate researches in laboratories and clinics, they have very little in common with the shepherds of old, but this attitude of soul is nevertheless a metamorphosis leading back directly to the wisdom of the shepherds. And our mathematicians are the successors of the Magi from the East. The outer has become inward—the inner, outward. In the process, understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha has been lost, and we must be fully conscious of this fact. Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha has vanished most completely of all, perhaps, in many of those who claim to be official ministers of Christianity to-day.

With the forces of knowledge, feeling and belief possessed by modern men, the true reality of the Event of Golgotha can no longer be grasped. It must be discovered anew. The Magi-wisdom has become inward; it has become our abstract, mathematical science by which alone the heavens are studied. What has become inward in this way must again be filled with life, re-cast, re-shaped from within.

And now, from this point of view, try to understand what is contained in a book like my Outline of Occult Science.

The Magi gazed at the worlds of the stars; therein they beheld the Spiritual, for they could behold man's experiences in his life before birth. In our mathematics this has become pure abstraction. But the same forces that are unfolded in our mathematical thinking can again be filled with life, enriched and intensified in Imaginative perception. Then, from our own inner forces there will be born a world which, although we create it from within, can be seen as the outer universe, embracing Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. We then behold the heavens through inner perception, inner vision, as the Magi discerned the secrets of the Mystery of Golgotha through outer perception. The outer has become inward, has become mathematical abstraction. Therefore what is now inward must be expanded into perception of the outer universe; inward perception must lead to a new astronomy, to an astronomy inwardly experienced.

It is only by striving for a new understanding of Christ that we can truly celebrate the Christmas Festival to-day. Can it be said that this Festival still has any real meaning for the majority of people? It has become a beautiful custom to take the Christmas Tree as the symbol of the Festival, although as a matter of fact this custom is hardly a century old. The Christmas Tree was not adopted as a symbol of the Festival until the nineteenth century. What is the Christmas Tree, in reality? When we endeavour to discover its meaning and know of the legend telling that it grew from the tiny branch carried in the arms of the boy Ruprecht on the 6th of December, when we follow its history, it dawns upon us that the Christmas Tree is directly connected with the Tree of Paradise. The mind turns to the Tree of Paradise, to Adam and Eve. This is one aspect of the way in which the Mystery of Golgotha can again be proclaimed in our time. The mind turns from the Mystery of Golgotha, back to the world's beginning. The meaning of world-redemption is not understood and the mind turns again to the Divine creation of the world. This comes to expression in the fact that the real symbol of Christmas—the Crib—so beautifully presented in the Christmas Plays of earlier centuries, is gradually being superseded by the Christmas Tree which is, in reality, the Tree of Paradise. The old Jahve religion usurped the place of Christianity and the Christmas Tree is the symbol of its recrudescence. But in its reappearance the Jahve religion has been split into multiple divisions. Jahve was worshipped, and rightly worshipped, as the one, undivided Godhead in an age when his people felt themselves to be a single, self-contained unity not looking beyond their own boundaries and full of the expectation that one day they would fill the whole earth. But in our time, although people speak of Christ Jesus, in reality they worship Jahve. In the various nations (this was all too evident in the war), men spoke of Christ but were really venerating the original Godhead who holds sway in heredity and in the world of nature—Jahve. Thus we have the Christmas Tree on the one side, and on the other, national Gods at a level inferior to that of the Christian reality. These were the principles by which men's comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha was diverted back again to the conceptions belonging to a much earlier epoch. The assertion of the principle of nationality, the claiming of national Gods, denotes a step backward into the old Jahve religion. Those who see fit to worship Christ as a national God—it is they who deny Him most deeply.

What must never be forgotten is that the proclamations to the Shepherds and to the Kings contained a message for all mankind—for the earth is common to all. In that the revelation to the shepherds was from the earth, it was a revelation that may not be differentiated according to nationality. And in that the Magi received the proclamation of the sun and the heavens, this too was a revelation destined for all mankind. For when the sun has shone upon the territory of one people, it shines upon the territory of another. The heavens are common to all; the earth is common to all. The impulse of the ‘human universal’ is in very truth quickened by Christianity. Such is the aspect of Christmas revealed by the twofold proclamation.

When we think of the Christmas Mystery, our minds must turn to a birth, to something that must be born anew in our time. For true Christianity must verily be born anew. We need a World-Christmas-Festival, and spiritual science would fain be a preparation for this World-Christmas-Festival among men.

• 1. About 300 B.C.
• 2. None really comprehend mathematics who do not undertake the study with reverence and devotion as a revelation from God." (From Thoughts on Physics).
• 3. "Mathematics and physics are the two theoretical sciences of reason which have to determine their objects a priori." (From the Preface to the 2nd ed. of The Critique of Pure Reason, 1787).
• 4. Founded in 1920 by Count Hermann Keyserling (1880-1946).