The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today I would like to connect and amplify individual observations that we have made in the course of our studies with this or that detail. If you follow the times attentively, you will have been able to notice here and there that, in the thoughts, experiences, and impulses that in the past man felt had “brought him so wonderfully far,” he can no longer find what can help him reach into the future. Yesterday, one of our members pressed into my hands last week's issue of the Frankfurter Zeitung, dated November 21, 1917. In that journal is an article by a very learned gentleman—it must have been a very learned gentleman, because he had in front of his name not only the title Doctor of Philosophy but also the title Doctor of Theology, and in addition there is also Professor. He is thus Professor, Doctor of Theology, and Doctor of Philosophy. He is therefore, of course, a very clever man! He has written an article that deals with all sorts of contemporary spiritual needs. In the course of this article there is a section that is expressed in the following way: “The experience of being that lies behind things has no need of pious consecration or religious estimation, because it is in itself religion. Here it is not a matter of the feeling and comprehension of one's own individual values but of the great Irrational that is hidden behind all existence. He who touches it so that the divine spark leaps across undergoes an experience that has primary character, the ‘primeval experience.’ To experience this, along with all that is moved by the same stream of life, endows him with, to use a word beloved in modern times, a cosmic feeling for life.”

Forgive me, dear friends. I am not reading this to arouse within you some particularly lofty mental pictures to correspond with these washed-out sentences but rather to lead before you a symbol of our time. “A cosmic religiosity is in the process of growing among us, and the extent of the longing for it is shown by the perceptible growth of the theosophical movement that undertakes to discover and unveil the circulation of life behind the senses.” It is indeed difficult to stagger over all these washed-out concepts, but is it not nevertheless true that as a symbol of our time this is quite peculiar? Further on he says, “In this cosmic piety, it is not a question of mysticism that begins with rejection of the world . . .” etc.

One cannot conceive of anything clever in these sentences! Since the Professor, Doctor of Theology, and Doctor of Philosophy represents it, however, one must naturally consider it as something clever. Otherwise one would perceive it as something that is brought falteringly to expression in an unclear tirade, reminding one of the learned gentleman who can no longer continue on the path on which he has traveled and who feels obliged to point to something that is there, something that apparently seems to him not completely hopeless. One should not be at all delighted with these utterances; such things must not lull us into slumber just because we notice that from some direction someone has again observed that something lies behind the spiritual scientific movement. That would indeed be very harmful, because those who make these remarks are often the same ones who feel satisfied with such utterances, who do not go further. They even point with these washed-out things to an event that will enter the world, and this would thereby belong precisely to those who are altogether too comfortable to become involved in something that requires earnest study of spiritual science. This event must really break in and take hold of human feeling (Gemuet) if what is bound up with reality is to flow into the time-stream of evolution so that healing forces are able to rise from it. It is naturally easier to speak of the “surging waves” and of “cosmic feelings” than to enter seriously into the things that are demanded by the signs of the time and that must be made known to humanity. For this reason it seems to me necessary to say things here that have been stated previously in public lectures but that will be spoken of further, now with a strong emphasis on the difference between what is worn out, what is no longer capable of life, which has led to these catastrophic times, and what must really take hold of the human soul if any progress is to be made.

With the old wisdom by which human beings have reached the present, thousands of congresses can be held—world congresses and national congresses, and whatever—thousands of societies can be founded, but one must be clear that these thousands of congresses, thousands of societies, will not be effective unless the spiritual life-blood of the science of the spirit flows through them. What man is lacking today is the courage to enter into the real exploration of the spiritual world. It sounds strange, but it must be said that all that is needed to begin with is to circulate to a broad public, for example, the small brochure, Human Life in the Light of Spiritual Science. Something new would be achieved through this in calling forth knowledge of man's connection with the cosmic order. Attention is drawn precisely to such knowledge in this brochure. Concrete attention is drawn to the way in which the earth annually alters its conditions of consciousness and the like. What is said in this lecture and in this brochure is said with particularly full consideration of the needs of our time. To receive this would be of greater significance than all the wishy-washy talk of “cosmic feeling” and of entering some sort of “surging waves,” or what have you. I have only quoted these things to you, because to reword them is impossible for me, as they are too senseless in their formulation.

One is not hindered, of course, by being attentive to these things, because they are important and essential. What I wish to draw to your attention is that we must not “mystify” ourselves, that we must be clear. Utter clarity is necessary if we wish to work for an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

I wish to point out once again that what is essential for humanity in this fifth post-Atlantean period is to enter into a special treatment of great issues of life that have been obscured in a certain way through the wisdom of the past. I have already pointed this out to you. One great issue of life can be characterized in the following way: an attempt will have to be made to place the spiritual etheric in the service of outer practical life. I have brought to your attention that the fifth post-Atlantean period will have to solve the problem of how human moods, the motions of human moods, allow themselves to be translated into wave motions on machines, how man must be brought into connection with what must become more and more mechanical. For that reason I called your attention a week ago to how superficially this mechanizing will be accepted by a certain portion of the surface of the earth. I presented an example to show how, following the American way of thinking, an attempt was made to extend the mechanical over human life itself. I presented the example of the pauses that were to be exploited so that, instead of far fewer tons, up to fifty tons could be loaded by a number of workmen. For this one need only carry the Darwinian principle of selection actually into life.

In such situations the will is there to harness human energy to mechanical energy. These things should not be treated by fighting against them. That is a completely false view. These things will not fail to appear; they will come. What we are concerned with is whether, in the course of world history, they are entrusted to people who are familiar in a selfless way with the great aims of earthly evolution and who structure these things for the health of human beings or whether they are enacted by groups of human beings who exploit these things in an egotistical or in a group-egotistical sense. That is what matters. It is not a question of the what in this case; the what is sure to come. It is a question of the how, how one tackles these situations. The what lies simply in the meaning of earthly evolution. The welding together of the human nature with the mechanical nature will be a problem of great significance for the remainder of earthly evolution.

I have deliberately drawn attention often, even in public lectures, to the fact that the consciousness of the human being is connected with the forces of disintegration. On two occasions I have said in public lectures in Basel that within our nervous system we are dying. These forces, these forces of dying away, will become more and more powerful. The bond will be established between these forces dying within man, which are related to the electric, magnetic forces, and the outer mechanical forces. Man will to a certain extent become his intentions, he will be able to direct his thoughts into the mechanical forces. Hitherto undiscovered forces within human nature will be discovered, forces that will work on outer electric and magnetic forces. The first problem is to bring together human beings with the mechanical, which will have to prevail increasingly in the future. The second problem consists in calling upon the help of the spiritual circumstances. This can only be done, however, when the time is ripe and when a sufficient number of people are prepared for it in the right way. The time must come, however, when the spiritual forces are made mobile enough to master life in relation to illness and death. Medicine will become spiritualized, intensely spiritualized. Of all these things, caricatures are being made from certain directions, but these caricatures show only what really must come.

Again it is a question of whether this problem is attacked from the same direction to which I pointed regarding the other problem, in an outer egotistical or group-egotistical way.

The third problem is to introduce human thoughts into the actual evolution of the human species, in birth and education. I have pointed out that conferences have already been held on how in the future a materialistic science would be founded regarding conception and the relationships between man and woman. All these things indicate to us that something most significant is in the process of evolving. It is still easy today to say, “Why is it that people who know about these things in the right sense do not apply them?” In the future it will become clear just what is involved in this application and which forces are still actively hindering the foundation of large-scale spiritualized medicine or spiritualized national economy. No more can be accomplished today than to talk about these things, until people have enough understanding of them, people who are inclined to accept them in a selfless way. Today many people believe that they are able to do this, but many circumstances of life hinder what they are able to do. These life circumstances can be overcome in the right way only when a deeper and deeper understanding gains ground and when there is willingness to renounce, at least for a time, the immediate, practical application of these things on a larger scale.

These things have all developed in such a way that one can say that little has been retained of what was once hidden behind the ancient, atavistic strivings until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. There is much talk today about the ancient alchemy. The proceedings of the procreation of Homunculus are also recalled at times, and so on, but what is spoken of here is for the most part groundless. If one once understood what can be said in connection with the Homunculus scene in Goethe's Faust, one would be better informed about these things, because what is essential is that, from the sixteenth century on, a fog has been spread over these things; they have receded in human consciousness.

The law that governs these things is the same as the law that regulates within the human being the rhythmical alternation of waking and sleeping. Just as man cannot rise above sleep, so, in regard to spiritual evolution, he cannot disregard the sleeping of spiritual science that has marked the centuries since the sixteenth century. It was necessary for humanity to sleep through the spiritual for a time in order that it could appear again in another form. One must comprehend such necessities, but one must also not allow oneself to be depressed by them. For this reason one must be very clear that the time of awakening has come and that one must take an active part in this awakening, that events often hurry ahead of knowledge and one will not understand the events that take place around us unless one accustoms oneself to knowledge.

I have repeatedly pointed out to you that certain egotistical groups are striving esoterically, and their influence is active in the ways that I have often indicated in these studies. First of all, it was necessary that a certain knowledge should recede within humanity, a knowledge that is designated today with such misunderstood words as alchemy, astrology, and so on. This knowledge had to recede, fall into a sleep, so that man would no longer have the possibility of drawing what pertains to the soul out of observation of nature but would have to become more dependent on himself. Through this he would awaken the forces within him, for it was necessary that certain things appear first in abstract form and later take on again concrete, spiritual form.

Three ideas have gradually arisen in the course of evolving during the last centuries, ideas which, in the way they have entered human life, are essentially abstract. Kant has named them falsely, while Goethe has named them correctly. These three ideas Kant called God, freedom, and immortality; Goethe called them correctly God, virtue, and immortality. When one sees the things that are hidden behind these three words, it is clear that they are exactly the same as what modern man views more abstractly but that were viewed more concretely until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the ancient atavistic sense they were also viewed more materially. They experimented in the ancient way, indeed, they sought at that time with alchemical experiments to observe the processes that showed the working of God in process. They tried to produce the Philosopher's Stone.

Behind all these things is hidden something concrete. This Philosopher's Stone was to present human beings with the possibility of becoming virtuous, but it was thought of more materially. It was to lead human beings to experience immortality, to put them into a certain relationship to the universe, through which they would experience within themselves what goes beyond birth and death. All these washed out ideas with which one seeks today to grasp the ancient things no longer coincide with what was intended at that time. These things have become simply abstract, and modern humanity speaks from abstract ideas. They have wished to understand God through abstract theology; virtue is also regarded as something purely abstract. The more abstract the idea, the better modern humanity likes to use it in speaking about these things, even immortality. One speculates about what could be immortal in man. I spoke about this in my first Basel lecture, saying that the science that occupies itself today philosophically with questions about immortality is a starved science, an undernourished science. This is only another form of expression for abstract thinking in which such matters are pursued.

Certain brotherhoods in the West, however, have still preserved a relationship to the old traditions and have tried to apply them in a corresponding way, to place them in the service of a certain group egoism. It is really necessary for these things to be pointed out. Naturally, when these things are spoken of in public, from this comer of the West, in exoteric literature, then God, virtue or freedom, and immortality are also talked about in an abstract way. It is only in the circle of the initiates that it is known that all of this is only speculation, that these are all abstractions. For themselves, they seek what is being striven for in the abstract formulas of God, virtue, and immortality in something much more concrete, and for this reason, these words are translated for the initiates in their respective schools. God is translated as gold, and one seeks behind the mystery to come to what can be described as the mystery of gold. Gold, representing what is sun-like within the earth's crust, is indeed something within which is imbedded a most significant mystery. In fact, gold stands materially in the same relationship to other substances as within thinking the thought of God stands to other thoughts. It only matters in which way this mystery is understood.

This relates to the egotistical group exploitation of the mystery of birth. One is striving to wrestle here with real cosmic understanding. Modern man has completely replaced this cosmic understanding with a terrestrial understanding. When man today wishes to examine, for example, how the embryo in animals and man develops, he examines with a microscope what exists precisely in the place on earth onto which he has cast his microscopic eye; he regards this as what is to be examined. It cannot be a matter only of this, however. It will be discovered—and certain circles are coming close to this in their discoveries—that the active forces are not in what one meets with the microscopic eye but are rather within what streams in from the cosmos, from the constellations in the cosmos. When an embryo arises, it arises because into the living being in which the embryo is being formed are working forces from all directions of the cosmos, cosmic forces. When a fertilization takes place, what will develop out of the fertilization is dependent upon which cosmic forces are active.

Diagram 9 Click image for large view

There is one thing that will come to be understood today that is not yet understood. Today one looks at some living being, let us say a chicken. When in this living being a new embryo arises, the biologist examines how, so to speak, out of this chicken the egg grows. He examines the forces that are supposed to allow the egg to grow out of the chicken. This is a piece of nonsense. The egg does not at all grow out of the hen; the hen is only the foundation; the forces work out of the cosmos, forces that produce the egg on the ground that has been prepared within the hen. When the biologist today works with his microscope, he believes that what he sees in the microscopic field also includes the forces on which what he sees depends. What he sees there, however, is subject to the forces of the stars that work together in a certain constellation, and when one discovers the cosmic here, one will discover the truth, the reality: it is the universe that conjures the egg from the hen.

All of this, however, is connected above all with the mystery of the sun and, observed from the earth, with the mystery of gold. Today I am offering a kind of programmatic indication; in the course of time these things will become clearer.

In the same schools about which we are speaking, virtue is not called virtue but is simply called health, and one endeavors to acquaint oneself with those cosmic constellations that have a connection with the health and illness of human beings. Through acquainting oneself with the cosmic constellations, however, one learns to know the individual substances that lie on the surface of the earth, the juices and so on, that are connected with health and illness. From certain directions, a more material form of the science of health is increasingly being developed, one that rests, however, on a spiritual foundation.

The notion will also spread from this direction that man becomes good not by learning all sorts of ethical principles, through which man can become good, but rather by, let us say, taking copper under a certain constellation of stars or arsenic under another. You can imagine how these things could be exploited for power by groups of egotistically inclined people. It is only necessary to withhold this knowledge from others who are then unable to participate, and one has the best method of ruling over great masses of people. One does not need to speak about these things at all; one need only introduce, for example, some new delicacy. Then one can seek a market for this new delicacy, which has been tinged appropriately, and thus bring about what is necessary, if these things are comprehended materialistically. One must be clear that in all matter there are hidden spiritual workings. Only one who knows in the true sense that there is nothing really material but only the spiritual will penetrate beyond the mysteries of life.

Likewise, the attempt will be made from this direction to bring the problem of immortality into materialistic channels. This problem of immortality can be led into materialistic channels in the same way, by exploitation of cosmic constellations. One does not, of course, attain through this what is often speculated as being immortality, but one attains a different immortality. One prepares oneself—so long as it is impossible to influence the physical body to prolong life artificially—to undergo soul experiences that will enable one to remain in the lodge of a brotherhood even after death, to help there with the forces that one has at one's disposal. Immortality is simply called prolonging life in these circles.

You can see outer signs of all these things. I do not know whether some of you have noticed the book that for a time provoked a sensation, a book that also came from the West bearing the title, The Disturbance of Dying (Der Unfug des Sterbens). These things all move in this direction. They are only the beginning. What has gone further than the beginning is carefully preserved for the group egotism, is kept very esoteric. These things are actually possible, however, if one brings them into materialistic channels, if one makes the abstract ideas of God, virtue, and immortality into concrete ideas of gold, health, and prolonging life, if one exploits in a group-egotistical sense what I presented to you as the great problems of the fifth post-Atlantean times. What is called in a washed-out way “cosmic feeling” by Professor, Doctor of Theology, Doctor of Philosophy, is presented by many—and unfortunately by many in an egotistical sense—as cosmic knowledge. While science for centuries has beheld only processes occurring on earth, has rejected all study of what is approaching as the most important extraterrestrial occurrence, it will be precisely in the fifth post-Atlantean time that exploitation will be considered of the forces penetrating in from the cosmos. Just as it is now of special importance for the regular professor of biology possibly to have a much-enlarged microscope, possibly to use much more exact laboratory methods, so in the future, when science has become spiritualized, what will matter will be whether one carries out a certain process in the morning, evening, or at noon, or whether one allows what one did in the morning to be somehow further influenced by active factors of the evening, or whether the cosmic influence from morning until evening is excluded, paralyzed. In the future such processes will prove themselves to be necessary; they also will take place. Naturally much water will run over the dam until the materialistically oriented university chairs, laboratories, and so on, are handed over to the spiritual scientists, but this exchange must take place if humanity is not to come completely into decadence. This laboratory work will have to be replaced by work in which, for example—when it is a matter of the good that is to be attained in the future—certain processes take place in the morning and are interrupted during the day; the cosmic stream passes through them again in the evening, and this is preserved rhythmically until it is morning again. The processes are conducted in such a manner that certain cosmic workings are always interrupted during the day, and the cosmic processes of morning and evening are studied. To achieve this, manifold arrangements will be necessary.

You can gather from this that when one is not in a position to participate publicly in what happens, one can only talk about these things. From the same direction that wishes to put gold, health, and prolonging life in place of God, virtue, and immortality, the effort is made not to work with the processes of morning and evening but with something totally different. I called to your attention last time that the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha was to be eliminated from the world by introducing another impulse from the West, a kind of Antichrist; from the direction of the East, the Christ impulse, as it appears in the twentieth century, is to be paralyzed by directing the attention, the interest, away from Christ appearing in the etheric.

Those concerned with introducing the Antichrist instead of the Christ have endeavored to exploit what could work especially through the most materialistic forces, yet working spiritually with these materialistic forces. Above all they strive to exploit electricity and especially the earth's magnetism to have influence over the entire earth. I have shown you how, in what I have called the human double, earthly forces arise. This mystery will be penetrated. It will be an American mystery to make use of the magnetism of the earth in its “doubleness,” to make use of the magnetism in North and South to send guiding forces that work spiritually across the earth. Look at the magnetic map of the earth and compare it with what I am now saying. Observe the course of the line where the magnetic needle swings to East and West and where it does not swing at all. (I can only give indications at this time.) From a certain celestial direction, spiritual beings are constantly at work. One need only put these spiritual beings at the service of earthly existence and, because these spiritual beings working in from the cosmos are able to transmit the mystery of the earth's magnetism, one can penetrate the mystery of the earth's magnetism and can bring about something very significant of a group-egotistical nature in relation to the three things, gold, health, and prolonging life. It will simply be a matter of mustering the doubtful courage for these things. This will certainly be done within certain circles!

From the direction of the East, it is a matter of strengthening what I have already explained: the in-streaming and actively working beings from the opposing sides of the cosmos are placed at the service of earthly existence. A great struggle will arise in the future. Human science will move toward the cosmic. Human science will attempt to move toward the cosmic but in different ways. It will be the task of the good, healing science to find certain cosmic forces that, through the working together of two cosmic streams, are able to arise on the earth. These two cosmic streams will be those of Pisces and Virgo. It will be most important to discover the mystery of how what works out of the cosmos in the direction of Pisces as a force of the sun combines with what works in the direction of Virgo. The good will be that one will discover how, from the two directions of the cosmos, morning and evening forces can be placed at the service of humanity: on the one side from the direction of Pisces and on the other side from the direction of Virgo.

Diagram 10 Click image for large view

Those who seek to achieve everything through the dualism of polarity, through positive and negative forces, will not concern themselves with these forces. The spiritual mysteries that allow the spirituality to stream forth from the cosmos—with help from the twofold forces of magnetism, from the positive and negative—emerge in the universe from Gemini; these are the forces of midday. It was known already in antiquity that this had something to do with the cosmos, and it is known even today by exoteric scientists that, behind Gemini in the Zodiac, positive and negative magnetism are hidden in some way. An attempt will be made to paralyze what is to be won through the revelation of the duality in the cosmos, to paralyze it in a materialistic, egotistical way through the forces that stream toward humanity especially from Gemini and can be put completely at the service of the double. With other brotherhoods, which above all wish to bypass the Mystery of Golgotha, it is a matter of exploiting the twofold nature of the human being. This twofold nature of the human being, which has entered the fifth post-Atlantean period just as man did, contains the human being but also, within the human being, the lower animal nature. Man is to a certain extent really a centaur; he contains this lower, bestial, astral nature. His humanity is somehow mounted upon this astral beast. Through this cooperation of the twofold nature within the human being there is also a dualism of forces. It is this dualism of forces that will be used more by the egotistical brotherhoods of the Eastern, Indian stream in order also to mislead Eastern Europe, which has the task of preparing the sixth post-Atlantean period. For this, forces from Sagittarius are put to use.

The question standing before humanity is whether to master for itself the forces of the cosmos in a doubly wrong way or simply to master them in the right way. This will give a real renewal to astrology, which was atavistic in its ancient form and would not be able to continue in this form. There will be a struggle among the knowledgeable ones in the cosmos. Some will bring about the use of the morning and evening processes, as I indicated; in the West, the midday process will be preferable, excluding the morning and evening processes; and in the East the midnight processes will be used. Substances will no longer be prepared according to forces of chemical attraction and repulsion; it will be known that different substances will be produced depending upon whether they are prepared with morning and evening processes or with midday or midnight processes. It will be known that such substances work in a totally different way upon the three-foldness of God, virtue, and immortality—gold, health, and prolonging life. From the cooperation of what comes from Pisces and Virgo one will not be able to bring about anything harmful. Through this one will achieve what in a certain sense loosens the mechanism of life from the human being but will in no way found any form of rulership and power of one group over another. The cosmic forces that are called forth from this direction will beget strange machines but only ones that will relieve the human being from work, because they will have within them a certain force of intelligence. A cosmically oriented spiritual science will have to concern itself so that all the great temptations that will emanate from these mechanized beasts, which man creates himself, will not exert a harmful influence upon the human being.

To all of this the following must be added: it is necessary for human beings to prepare themselves by not taking realities for illusions, really entering into a spiritual conception of the world, into a spiritual comprehension of the world. What is important is to see things as they are. One can only see things as they are, however, when one is in the position of applying to reality the concepts, the ideas, that emerge from an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. The dead will actively participate for the remainder of earthly existence. How they will participate is what matters. Here, above all, the great distinction will appear. Through man's conduct on earth, the participation of the dead will be guided from a good direction in such a way that the impulses of the dead to work will be able to originate from themselves, impulses taken from the spiritual world that the dead are experiencing after death.

Opposing this will be many endeavors to lead the dead in an artificial way into human existence. By the circuitous route through Gemini, the dead will be led into human life in such a way that human vibrations will reverberate in a definite way, will continue to vibrate within the mechanical performance of the machine. The cosmos will bring motion to the machines through the circuitous route that I have just indicated.

For that reason, it is important that nothing inappropriate be applied when these problems appear; only elementary forces that are part of nature should be applied. One will have to renounce introducing inappropriate forces into mechanical life. From the occult sphere one must refuse to harness human beings themselves into mechanical factory work, a practice through which the Darwinian theory of selection is used for the determination of the work force, as I presented to you as an example last time.

I make all these suggestions, which naturally cannot exhaust the subject in such a short time, because I think that you will meditate further upon these things, that you will seek to build a bridge between your own life experiences and these things, above all those life experiences that can be won today in these difficult times. You will see how many things will become clear to you when you observe them in the light that can come to you through such ideas. In our time, we are not really concerned with forces and constellations of forces confronting one another, the sorts of things about which one is constantly speaking in outer, exoteric life, but with entirely different things. Some intend actually to cast a kind of veil over the true impulses that are involved. There are bound to be certain human forces at work to save something for themselves. What is there to be saved? Certain human forces are at work to defend impulses that were justified until the French Revolution and were even defended by certain esoteric schools; they are being defended now in the form of an Ahrimanic/Luciferic retardation, being defended so as to maintain a social order that humanity believes has been overcome since the end of the eighteenth century.

There are mainly two powers that stand in opposition to each other: the representatives of the principle that was overcome at the end of the eighteenth century and the representatives of the new age. It is quite clear that a large number of people instinctively are representatives of the impulses of the new era. The representatives of the old impulses—still of the eighteenth, seventeenth, sixteenth centuries—must therefore be harnessed to these forces by artificial means, to forces emanating from certain group-egotistical brotherhoods. The most effective principle in the new age to extend power over as many people as one needs is the economic principle, the principle of economic dependency. That is only the tool, however. What is involved here is something entirely different. What is involved is something that you can deduce from all my suggestions. The economic principle is bound up with all that is involved in making a large number of human beings from all over the earth into an army for these principles.

These are the things that oppose each other. The one points essentially to what is fighting at present in the world: in the West, a rigid, ironclad principle of the eighteenth, seventeenth, sixteenth centuries, which makes itself noticeable by clothing itself in the phrases of revolution, the phrases of democracy, a principle that assumes a mask and has the urge to gain in this way as much power as possible. It helps this endeavor when as few people as possible exert themselves to see things as they are, when they allow themselves to be lulled to sleep again and again in this realm by maya, by the maya that one can express with these words: there is a war today between the Entente and the Central Powers. There is nothing at all like this in reality. We are concerned here with entirely different things that exist behind this maya as the true realities. The struggle between the Entente and the Central Powers is only maya, is only illusion. One can see what stands side by side in the struggle if one looks behind these things, illuminating them in the way that I, for certain reasons, have only suggested. One must at least endeavor not to accept illusions for realities, because then the illusion will gradually dissolve, in so far as it must be dissolved. One must endeavor today above all to consider the things as they present themselves to truly unprejudiced thinking.

If you consider in a coherent way all that I have developed here, then a seemingly incidental remark that I made in the course of these lectures will not seem to you to be merely incidental. When I quoted a certain remark that Mephistopheles made in confronting Faust, “I see that you know the devil”—he would definitely not have said this about Woodrow Wilson—it was no incidental remark. It is something that should illuminate the situation! One must really study these things without antipathy and sympathy; one must be able to study them objectively. One must be able above all to reflect today about the significance of constellations in something that is at work and the significance of individual strength, because behind individual strength often lies something completely different from what lies behind the mere constellation. Think for a moment upon the problem, “How much would Woodrow Wilson's brain be worth if this brain were not sitting in the Presidential chair of the United States?” Assume that this brain were in a different constellation: there it would show its individual strength! It all depends upon the constellation.

I will now speak abstractly and radically—I will not, of course, characterize the aforementioned case; it would never occur to me to do that in such a neutral country—but independent of that there is a very important insight in relation to the question, for example, about the brain. Does it have value because it is actually illuminated and made active by a particular spiritual soul force—does it thereby have a spiritual weight in the sense that I have spoken in these studies of spiritual weight—or does this brain actually have no more value than would show if one laid it on a scale and on the other side placed a weight? In the moment in which one penetrates beyond the mysteries I presented to you last time concerning the double, one arrives at the point (and I am not speaking of something unreal) of bringing value to the brain, which before had value only as a mass on the scale, because one is capable, if the brain is to be revived, of allowing it to be revived merely by the double.

All these things strike human beings today as being grotesque. What seems to them grotesque, however, must come to be something self-evident if these things are to flow into a healthy stream from an unhealthy one. And what use is it if one only chatters about them constantly? You must accept the idea that all this wishy-washy talk about “cosmic religiosity” or “the extent of the longing for it” or “the movement that undertakes to discover and unveil the circulation of life behind the senses,” and so on, does nothing but spread a fog over things that must come into the world only in clarity. They can be effective only in clarity, and they must be carried in clarity above all as practical, moral-ethical impulses in humanity.

I can only make single suggestions. I leave it to your own meditation to build on these realms further. These things are in many respects aphoristic, but you will have the possibility of gathering a great deal from such a summary as this picture of the Zodiac if you truly use it as the substance of meditation.

Today I would like to approach the subject from a different angle and consider the connections that exist between the human being as a microcosmic entity and the whole macrocosm of the world, of which the human being is a part, a member, an organ, as it were. These things can be considered from the most diverse points of view, and in doing so, the most diverse relationships will come to light, which sometimes seem to contradict each other; but the contradictions consist in the fact that the matter must always be viewed from different sides.

From certain considerations that we have been making in these days, you have seen that actually man, as he relates to the world around him, mixes something of himself into his view of the world, that he actually does not take the world of sense as it is; that, as I have tried to express it drastically, he mixes into his view of the world something that rises from within, that is formed from within and that is actually a kind of transformation of the sense of smell. It is what man combines about the world in the most diverse ways, what comes out when he applies his ordinary acumen, as it is called, which comes to him through his body; one could also call it a sense of intuition. What else would be given to man if he could easily make the attempt at all - he can't even do it easily, because he can't easily switch off his intuition - if man would simply take the sensory world as it presents itself to him, without his mind, his combining mind immediately interfering in all sorts of ways.

This touches on a subject that may perhaps present some difficulties for understanding. But you can get an idea of what is actually meant if you consider how nature, the essence of a sense, comes to you. It is the same with the other senses, but the matter does not become apparent with the same clarity to the external observer, not as clearly as when you consider what is actually meant here for the sense of sight, for the eye. Consider that this eye as a physical apparatus is actually located as a fairly independent organ in the human skull and is actually only extended backwards into the human body by the appendages, the appendages of the blood vessels, the appendages of the nerves. One can say: this is the human eye, here is the extension (see drawing); but as an eye it lies here in the bony skull cavity with a great deal of independence, insofar as it is a physical apparatus. Here the lens, the incidence of the light rays, the vitreous body, so everything that is a physical apparatus is actually very independent. Only through the optic nerve, the choroid, which extends into the body, does the eye itself extend into the body, so that one can say that this eye, as a physical apparatus, insofar as it perceives the external sensory world in its visibility, is an independent organism, at least to a certain extent.

It is actually the same for every sense, it is just not so obvious for the other senses. Each sense as a sense is basically something independent, so that one can already speak of a sensory zone. It is actually surprising that the study of the senses is not enough to drive the scholars concerned to some spirituality. Because it is precisely this independence of the senses that could drive the scholars to some spirituality. Why? You see, what is experienced through the optic nerve, through the choroid, that would – and this could easily be proven with ordinary science – that would not be enough to make a person aware of what he experiences in his senses. The remarkable thing about the senses is that the etheric body projects into this purely physical apparatus, and it is a purely physical apparatus. In all our senses we are dealing with something that is outside the organism and is only experienced by the etheric body. You would not be able to unite what is caused in your eye by the incidence of light with your consciousness if you did not permeate the sense of the eye, and thus the other senses too, with your etheric body.

A ray of light falls into the eye. This ray of light has exactly the same physical effect in the eye as the ray of light in a camera obscura, in a photographic apparatus. And you only become aware of what is happening in this natural camera of the eye because your etheric body lines the eye and captures what is not captured in the mere physical apparatus by an etheric body. In the mere physical apparatus, in the mere photographic apparatus, only the physical process takes place; so that man, in the totality of his senses, really has a kind of continuation of the external world. As physical apparatus, the receiving senses, at least the majority of the receiving senses, belong more to the external world than to man. Your eye belongs much more to the external world than to your own body.

In animals, the eye belongs much more to the body than it does to humans. The fact that humans, as sensory beings, have senses that are less connected to the body than the senses of animals, makes them superior to animals. In certain lower animals, this can be demonstrated anatomically. There are all kinds of organic extensions; for example, the fan is inside in lower animals. These are very complicated formations, partly of the nerve, partly of the blood corpuscles, which the lower animals have more completely than the higher animals and especially than man.

The fact that in man the physical body takes so little part in his senses and leaves the part very much to the etheric body, that is what makes man a relatively so perfect being. So that we can say: Man is, first of all, this inner bodily man, considered physically, and the senses are inserted everywhere in him, but they are actually - as I once said in a public lecture in Zurich - like gulfs that extend into the outside world. It would be much more correct to draw it schematically like this. Instead of drawing: there is a sense, and there is a sense, and there is a sense (see drawing), it would be much more correct to draw it like this: there is the human body, and that is where the human world is built, for example the eye or the organ of smell, their continuation into the outside world, and their gulfs through the sense organs. The outer world intrudes through the senses, the eye and so on, and from the inside we only encounter it with the etheric body and permeate what the outer world sends in with our etheric body. It thereby takes part in the outer world. As a result, we are dependent on our etheric body to somehow grasp what the outer world sends in.

The fact that what I have just said is not known has meant that for more than a hundred years philosophy has been talking about nothing more fantastic than the way in which man perceives the outside world through his senses. You can get an overview of all this basically fantastic stuff by reading the chapter “The World as Illusion” in my “Riddles of Philosophy”. Because of the belief that the senses can only be understood from the inside out, from the body out, people do not understand how man can actually know something about the world through his senses. They always talk about it in this way: the world makes an impression on the senses, but then what is caused in the senses must be grasped by the soul. The truth is that the external world itself builds into us, that we therefore grasp the external world at the tip, with our etheric body grasp the external world at the tip, when we perceive the external world as human beings with our senses. Everything that Locke, Hume, Kant, the neo-Kantian philosophers of the 19th century, Schopenhauer, Helmholtz, Wundt and all the rest, everything that people have said about sensory perception, has been said to the exclusion of knowledge of the true conditions. As I said, you can read about it in the chapter 'The World as Illusion' in my book 'Riddles of Philosophy'. There you will see, in philosophical terms, the calamity that has been caused by the fact that, with the exclusion of spiritual knowledge of the matter, a giant cabbage as sense physiology actually took hold in the 19th century.

Now it is important to really understand what I just said. If you want to check to some extent the truth of what I just called a giant cabbage, it is interesting that in a certain sense what Locke, Hume, Kant, Helmholtz, Wundt and so on said about the senses is true; but curiously enough it is true for animals. Nineteenth-century man, in his quest to understand the human being through science, cannot go beyond understanding the conditions in the animal world. It is no wonder that he also stops at the animal world when it comes to the origin of man! But this is connected to much more complicated conditions. For, as I said, the etheric body touches what is called the external world of the senses at one corner. But what is the ether body in the last analysis? The ether body is ultimately that which the human being now receives from the cosmos, from the macrocosm. So that, by cutting off its ether body from the macrocosmic relationship, the macrocosm takes hold of itself in the human being through the senses. We can feel ourselves as a son of the macrocosm, in that we are an etheric body, and grasp the earthly sense world with our macrocosmic part.

The fact that this only became the case relatively late can, in turn, be proven with external science, I would like to say, with pinpoint accuracy, only that this external science cannot see the real conditions if it is not oriented by spiritual science. I have already pointed out that the Greek language does not actually have the expression that we have when we say: I see a man coming to meet us. We say: I see a man coming. The corresponding Greek expression would be: I see a coming man. In the Greco-Latin era there was still a much stronger sense that one is actually doing something when one sees or hears something, that one is grasping something with one's etheric body when one is in the sensory world. This active element is lacking in the drowsy humanity of modern times. This drowsy humanity of modern times would actually prefer to sleep through world events altogether, that is, to let them approach it as dreams. It does not want to develop the consciousness to participate when sensory perceptions occur. That is why it is so difficult to understand the Greek way of thinking today, because the Greeks had a much more active concept of the human being. They felt much more active even in what we today call the passivity of sensory perception. The Greeks would not have invented the incomplete, one-sided theory that man sleeps because he is tired; but they knew that man becomes tired when he wants to sleep, that sleeping is brought about by essentially different impulses, and that tiredness then arises from the impulse to want to sleep.

But it is not only this theory of sleep that was actually invented out of the laziness of modern man. Modern man wants to be as passive as possible, to be an active being as little as possible. He can do that, and in a sense, modern man has trained himself to be a passive being. And it is with this passivity that I presented yesterday, perhaps somewhat abruptly, the superstition, the idolatry of modern times.

So the outermost post of the external world enters into us, I would say, the outermost post of this external world. Let us draw this again schematically. Let us assume that we draw the human body here (see drawing), the outermost post of the external world enters into our body; we reach over it with our etheric body (red and blue).

You know that we actually have twelve senses; these twelve senses are therefore twelve different ways in which the external world penetrates into our body. What is it that actually penetrates into our body? That is the big question. What actually penetrates into our body?

We actually see only one side of what is penetrating; without clairvoyance we cannot turn around and look at it from the other side. With his etheric body, the human being receives the incoming ray of light or the incoming sound vibration. But it does not run from the outside into the ear according to the tone; it does not run from the outside into the eye according to the light ray. If it did, the human being would run with the sound wave, with the light beam, with the heat evolution from the outside into his sensory apparatus, as far as the senses extend from the outside. And this area is the realm of the exusiai, the spirits of form.

So if you could turn around so that you could follow what is entering here through the senses (arrows), you would be in the realm of the exusiai, the spirits of form. You can see how the beings of the world are intimately intertwined. We walk through the world as human beings, opening our senses and actually carrying the exusiai, the spirits of form, within us, which reveal themselves to us as we open our senses to the external world. This world of exusiai, the spiritual world, is thus hidden behind the veil of the sensory world. But this world of the Exusiai, which is hidden behind the veil of the sensory world, the world that reveals itself in man, also has a universal cosmic side, because it permeates the cosmos. That which enters our senses vibrates and undulates throughout the cosmos. So that we can say, this area that projects into our senses is not only there in the senses, but also has its manifestation out in the world. What is it there? There are the planets that belong to our solar system.

Truly, the connection of the planets of our solar system forms a body that belongs to a spiritual being, and this spiritual being includes the exusiai, which are manifested in the revelations of our senses and which have their objective side out in the universe, in the planets. And embedded in all that is, embedded in this whole stream of exusiai activity, are other beings. They lie behind these Exusiai. I would like to say that other beings do not penetrate as far as the Exusiai do. They are out there in the same area, but they do not come close to us (see drawing): these are the beings of the hierarchy of the Archai, the Archangeloi, the Angeloi.

They are all already present in that which is revealed in our senses, but man cannot take this up into his consciousness. It has an effect on him, but he cannot take it up into his consciousness. So you can say: Through our senses we encounter a world - the realm of the exusiai with the planetary system (red, blue, orange, see drawing on p. 97), and embedded in this whole realm is also the hierarchy of the archai, the archangeloi, the angeloi. These are, so to speak, the ministers of the exusiai. But the human being perceives only the outer appearance of all this; he perceives only the sensory tapestry spread out before him.

This is how it is with what is outside of us. It is different again with what is inside us, now also physically inside us. After hearing what is adjacent to our senses, you can go and ask: What is located directly behind our senses inwards? — We have seen: the eye continues inwards in the optic nerve. All the senses continue inward in their corresponding nerve. When the senses continue inward in this way, you get a wonderful structure from the twelve senses inward. It is very complicated. You could simplify it by saying: twelve strands to the inside, twelve sensory spheres; so on the outside the sensory zone, connected to it what the senses now send inward.

This is a very complicated structure. How does it come about when we look at the human being as a macrocosmic being? That which lies behind the senses inwards comes from the Dynamis, from the Spirits of Movement. So that, going further inwards, the deeds of the Dynamis, the Spirits of Movement, join the senses here (see drawing on p. 97). You could not think if the spirits of movement did not work on the thinking apparatus, which is the continuation of the sense apparatus. If you look outward, you see the Exusiai making the natural order. You see these Exusiai approaching people with their servants, the Archai, the Archangeloi, the Angeloi. But when you think of your inner being, you must remember that you owe this inner being to the spirits of the movement, who prepare the thinking apparatus for you as a continuation of your sense apparatus inwards; not the combining apparatus, which is a mere transformation of the sense of smell, but the thinking apparatus, which man does not use at all in ordinary physical life. For man uses the sense of smell, the sense of smell merely transformed. He has already ceased to use the sense sphere; he would think quite differently if he could really use the twelve inward continuations of the sense sphere.

In the brain, for example, the visual sphere lies behind the frontal lobe, which is essentially a reworked organ of smell. Man hardly uses it, he only thinks habitually through the olfactory sphere. He uses it in a reworked form by combining. If he were to use it directly, he would switch off his forebrain, this forebrain that is only prepared for the external sensory world, and think with the direct, with the four-hill section, with the visual section, where it enters the brain. Then he would have imaginations.

It is the same with the other senses. Man also has imaginations in the physical world, because one world always extends into the other. But man does not recognize these imaginations in the physical world as real imaginations: they are in fact olfactory imaginations. What a person smells is actually the only imaginative realm in the ordinary sensory life. But a much nobler imaginative realm could, for example, come from the sphere of vision and from other sensory spheres.

Looking inwards, we find the Spirits of Movement. And going further inwards, we come to the regions which do not dominate thinking but feeling, the organs of feeling, which are mostly glandular organs in reality. These organs are the deeds of the Spirits that we call the Kyriotetes, the Spirits of Wisdom. We are sentient beings because the Spirits of Wisdom work in us. We are volitional beings because the Spirits of Will, the Thrones, work in us. Located even further inward, the Thrones, the Spirits of Will, work on the organs of our will (see diagram on p. 97).

Just as the exusiai, the spirits of form, have their macrocosmic body in the planets, which, as it were, present the outer visible side to us for ordinary consciousness, so the spirits of movement have their outer side, strangely enough, but it is so, in the fixed stars. Only the dead person between death and a new birth can see their inner side; this is the spiritual side, seen from the other side. In contrast, the Spirits of Wisdom and the Thrones no longer have external visibility at all; they are spiritual in nature. It can be said that they lie behind the planets and behind the fixed stars. And as the deceased looks down on what affects the person in human feeling and human will, the deceased constantly looks at the Kyriotetes, at the Thrones. What I have told you, that the dead person has a connection with the people with whom he is karmically connected, is conveyed to him by the Kyriotetes and by the thrones. The dead person looks into the sphere that invisibly works outside in the objective world and actually only becomes visible in its creature, in human feeling and in human will. What people feel and will here shines up to the dead, and the dead says: In the body of Dynamis, in the body of Kyriotetes, in the body of the thrones, the thinking, feeling and willing of people shines. Just as we look up at the stars, the dead look down into the earthly sphere, into the human sphere. Only, we look at the mineral aspect of the stars, the external physical; the dead do not see the external physical of the glands, the organs of movement, and thus also of the blood, but instead see the spiritual side, the Kyriotetes, the thrones. Just as we look up at the sky, seeing its visible meaning from the outside, the dead person looks down to see the firmament of humanity. The spiritual of this firmament appears to him. That is the dead person's secret.

You see what reciprocity reigns in the universe. When you recognize this reciprocity, the human being takes on a strange countenance! Strangely enough, it takes on the countenance that you say to yourself: We look up at the stars, seek the spirits of form in their exterior in the planets, the spirits of movement in the fixed stars; then that in the distant perspectives fades into the spirit. From this sphere the dead person looks down, looks at that which the human being dreamily oversleeps here. But in that he sees his beyond; there the spirit stars shine up into his world. And the human being is embedded in this being.

What is said in the first scenes of the mystery “The Testing of the Soul” is given a peculiar illumination. Read these first scenes of 'The Test of the Soul', the words of Capesius, and you will see that from the ethical point of view everything is said there that is now being said, so to speak, from the point of view of celestial knowledge. The way in which this celestial knowledge can work in the consciousness of man is pointed out in the first scenes of 'The Test of the Soul'.

And then come the higher worlds, if one wants to apply the word 'higher', that which lies beyond the human being and this universe. I will try to present this schematically, but I must appeal to your goodwill to understand. We can say that if there is a kind of boundary here (see also the drawing on p. 97, yellow), the world of the planets, the world of the fixed stars, loses itself here into the spiritual – and from the other side it comes again. So that here we have the sphere of human will, the sphere of feeling, there the Spirits of Wisdom appear. There we have this order.

But now you can think of an order that is common to both, where man and the universe are included, where we are embedded in such a way that on the one hand we, who shine up to the dead, and on the other hand the starry sky, which shines down to us, are embedded in it. Then we come to the hierarchies, which, if you want to use the word, are higher than the thrones: to the cherubim and seraphim. You can imagine that from this point of view, which has now been mentioned, one cannot speak of the physical exteriors of the cherubim and seraphim, because they are of course even higher spirits; but they are already so spiritual — here I really must appeal to your very good will to understand — they are already so spiritual, these cherubim and seraphim, that their effect comes from another, quite unknown side.

Is it not true that the exusiai, the spirits of form, can be perceived directly by the senses in the planets; that is simply the side they turn towards us. The spirits of movement are directly perceptible in the fixed stars; that is the side they turn towards us. But the cherubim and seraphim are not perceptible to the senses in such a way that they turn their other side towards us, so to speak. But they are so imperceptible that the imperceptibility itself becomes perceptible. So that which lives in the world through cherubim and seraphim is so imperceptible that imperceptibility itself is perceived. It withdraws so strongly from human consciousness that man notices this withdrawal from consciousness.

Thus we can say: the cherubim do in fact reappear, even if this is manifested in such a way that they are so deeply hidden that one perceives their hiddenness. The cherubim appear not only symbolically, but quite objectively in what takes place in the thundercloud, in what takes place when a planet is ruled by volcanic forces. And the seraphim truly appear in what flashes as lightning from the cloud, or in what manifests as fire in the volcanic eruptions, in such a way that their very imperceptibility in these gigantic effects of nature becomes perceptible.

Therefore, in ancient times, when people saw through such things, they looked up at the starry sky, which revealed the most diverse things to them: the secrets of the Exusiai, the secrets of Dynamis. Then they tried to reveal the higher secrets in what man today ridicules: from the interior of the human body - as one says trivially - from the bowels. But then they were aware that the greatest effects, which are really common to the solar system, announce themselves from a completely opposite side in the effects of fire and thunderstorms, in earthquakes and volcanic effects. The most creative aspect of the seraphim and cherubim is announced through its most destructive side, curiously enough. It is precisely the other side, it is the absolute negative, but the spiritual is so spiritually strong that even its imperceptibility, its non-existence, is perceived by the senses.

There you have placed man back into the macrocosm. And at the same time you can see that in this whole macrocosm there is something that begins with the cherubim and goes up to themselves, and that only, I would say, reflects, shadows itself in the gigantic effects that we have just mentioned. This gives you the perspective of a natural science that is at the same time a spiritual science; it gives you the perspective of a science that really sees the whole universe as spirit, that is not content with a vague pantheism and other “pantheisms”, but that really goes into what lies at the basis of the universe as spiritual.

These things will also make it clear to you that man must have a dual nature in a certain respect. Let us take man as he lives from waking to sleeping; he lives in his senses, in the sensual environment, if one perceives the outside as I have indicated. But the other part of a person lives between falling asleep and waking up. It is only so imperfect in the present human cycle that a person is not aware of what he experiences during sleep. But during sleep, a person experiences his being with the cosmos, with the extraterrestrial cosmos, just as he experiences his coexistence with the earthly cosmos with his senses while awake. The only difference is that he is unaware of the other coexistence, the coexistence with the extraterrestrial cosmos. The moment you fall asleep, you join in the movements of the cosmos spiritually, you enter into a completely different sphere. You make yourself ready when you wake up; you make yourself flexible in relation to the cosmos by falling asleep. You live the life of the cosmos by falling asleep; you tear yourself out of the cosmos by waking up. So that you can say: Man can recognize in his own nature, in his own being, a part that swims in the cosmos, that lives in the cosmos. If the ancient astrologer, in the sense in which it was meant in the last reflections, explored the cosmos with its secrets, he explored that in which man swims with that part of his being that sleeps. Man swims with that which the astrologer tries to explore, the real astrologer, not the merely calculating, mathematical one of modern times.

In the moment when the human being sees what he experiences with the part of his being that sleeps, in that moment he stands before what, roughly until the 15th century, was actually called nature. What the human being experiences there was called nature. The Greeks called the same thing that was called nature in the Middle Ages, Proserpina, Persephone. Of course, the mysteries of Persephone were described differently in Greece and in the Middle Ages. But you can see that the Middle Ages knew these things when you read descriptions of nature and its secrets as found in the works of Bernardus Silvestris. In the work 'De mundi universitate' by Bernardus Silvestris, the description begins of the experiences that man has when he awakens to the part that participates in the cosmos, which is otherwise overslept.

These things are particularly well described by Alanus ab Insulis, from the area we have mentioned several times; for in Alanus ab Insulis's 'Island', he means Ireland, Hybernia. In his work 'De planctu naturae' and in his 'Anticlaudianus', you will find parallels to the Proserpina myth and what he has to say about nature. And you will find that everything is resurrected in the great teacher of Dante, whom I once mentioned here, in Brunetto Latini. You will find the teachings of Brunetto Latini incorporated into Dante's own ideas. Read the parts of the Divine Comedy in which Dante describes the Matelda, the part that really resembles the Proserpina myth like two peas in a pod, which even the outer science has already noticed. You will acquire an awareness of it – from Bernardus Silvestris, Alanus ab Insulis, from Brunetto Latini and from Dante, you can acquire an awareness, from many others as well - as until the times when the new era dawned, people had an awareness of that other world of the coexistence of man as a microcosm with the macrocosm.

On the one hand, there was nature, the human being's experience of the cosmos, which the Middle Ages called Natura and which antiquity called Proserpina. This was personified and distinguished from Urania, who rules over the celestial sphere just as nature rules over what the human being experiences from falling asleep to waking up. And these medieval people believed they saw a deep secret when they spoke of the marriage of nature in man with the nus, with the mind, with the intellect in man. And in a right and wrong way, these people tried to experience in man the marriage of nature with the Nus, with the mind or intellect, as a mystical wedding, which was contrasted with the alchemical wedding, as I described in the essay that is the first about Christian Rosenkreutz.

These are things that are not so infinitely far behind us. And Dante's haunting work - which on the one hand describes the world and man, the human secrets, with as much sublimity as humor - is like the work that wanted to preserve what has been known for centuries and millennia about man's connection to the macrocosm. In Brunetto Latini we find the same thing that Dante describes in his own poetic way, from the point of view of initiation, also linked to an external event.

The consciousness of the connection between man and these spiritual secrets had to be hidden for a time, so to speak, so that what man can experience when it is separated out from the universe and, as it were, dependent on itself, could be kindled in man. We are now living in the age in which, on the one hand, man is exposed to the radiations that permeate him from Pisces, but on the other hand, he is exposed to the radiations of the differently acting, opposite constellation of Virgo. But this age must find the way out of spiritual infertility. Of course, we can no longer simply take over what humanity once knew, because that knowledge was in a form that was useful for ancient humanity. Dante's “Divine Comedy” is, although a great revelation, more a testament of a bygone era. A new era needs the revelations of the spiritual cosmos from a different source.

But one thing is possible. When one considers that, I might say, people knew spiritual secrets until a few centuries ago, this has such an effect on the human mind that it can inspire him to seek the way to these secrets in a new way. Therefore, we can also draw impulses from historical observation; only we must take this historical observation in such a way that we go back to what is really historical. Consider what all the external events related in history are worth – in this history, with which, lamentably, our schoolchildren up to the oldest are pampered – what these stories, which are recorded as history, are worth compared to the facts that people like Bernardus Silvestris, Alanus ab Insulis, Brunetto Latini, Dante and so on, Pico de Mirandola, Fludd , and even Jakob Böhme, Paracelsus, if we take a certain sphere of wisdom, and right up to the 18th century we could cite the disciple of Jakob Böhme, Saint-Martin — what are the usual events recorded in history compared to the facts that there were people who carried such cosmic knowledge within them and worked with such cosmic knowledge! Yes, the present is often proud of what it has achieved. This present-day intelligentsia – I mentioned it in connection with the Christmas plays today – has always been quite dismissive of the spiritual content; even when this intelligentsia, as in Oberufer, where the Christmas plays were performed until the middle of the 19th century, consisted of a single personality, the schoolmaster, who was also the village notary, and thus the legal personality and at the same time the mayor. He was the intellectual, he was the only enemy of all the Christmas plays. In his opinion, they were stupid, foolish. Schröer still experienced this, that the intelligentsia of Oberufer was hostile to what was in the Christmas plays. It is very often the intelligentsia that is hostile to what is actually fruitful in human evolution.

It is a matter of encouraging that which may be called the enthusiasm of history by looking at real history, by really immersing oneself in what history is. The spiritual part of the event also belongs to history, and it proceeds differently than the external physical-material part.

Especially in the harsh present, we must try again and again to stimulate the spiritual impulses by making ourselves aware of how spirit has ruled in the historical development of humanity. Whether you can count the details on the fingers of one hand: That is how the Dynamis work, that is how the Exusiai work — that is much less important than awakening this overall consciousness, how it wants to bring the individual human being together with the spirit of humanity. For in the awakening of this consciousness lies that which is to bring salvation into the evolution of mankind. Sometimes it is good to realize how far removed what passes as world opinion today is from what moves human souls, or at least seems to move them. As a result, there is often no sense of the weight of the individual facts. The spirit weighs the facts correctly.

More important than many other things for the assessment of the present – just think about it with the help of what you have heard here – more important than many other things is the news that came in the last few days that the American state administration has taken the railways into self-government. For this is one of a number of symptoms that clearly point to things that are being prepared in order to divert humanity as far as possible from the path along which it can only be preserved if it becomes fully aware that without spirit reality can only be a dying reality. One can indeed choose to die; then life must flee from the areas for which one chooses to die to other areas. The field of truth already carries the victory. But one looks at a field where, so to speak, those who look deeper into the world are also confronted with such powers of a left and a right, as Dante at the starting point of his description of his “Divine Comedy”, or as Brunetto Latini at the beginning of his initiation.

Oh, it would be so necessary for the world to grasp thoughts of spirituality in the broadest sense! Instead of this, it is true, we are only faced with the necessity of having to emphasize again and again that we must look towards the spirit. Again and again we are faced with the longing to be able to emphasize the seriousness of the matter sufficiently. People do not want to see where germs are, but they want to be passive, to let things happen to them if possible, to sleep through the course of the world if possible. If many people did not sleep as they do in the present, oversleeping events, then one would see that behind what is now buzzing through the world in such an untrue way, there is a strange tendency. It may well be said, since Woodrow Wilson, the universal idol of modern times, of the present time, of the present, has boasted of such things himself, that four-fifths of humanity is facing one-fifth. This idol of modern humanity, who has been raised to the altar much more than one might think, has indeed boasted of this himself.

It will have to be said that it would be a shame if humanity were to oversleep what lies in such an ideal as the ideal of this idol, whose slogans, even those that are not copied from the brave Don Pedro of 1864 like its last manifestation, but rather grew in its own hollow—pardon me, I mean head—go back to what is actually inherent in it as a tendency. What is it then? The aim is to be able to say one day on earth: centuries ago there was a legendary humanity in the middle of Europe; they managed to wipe it out. They had to be wiped out because they were terribly proud. They descended from the gods and even called the main poet Goethe to suggest that they had received a spirit directly from the gods. Although we shall not express ourselves in such spiritual terms, the germ or tendency of Wilsonianism will be recognizable in this. It will only be a matter of whether this can be the path of humanity, whether this can be the future path of the earth, or whether we should not rather reflect on how the earth can be saved from the so-called ideals of Wilsonianism and similar things. One need not fall into nationalism or anti-nationalism with such things. The phrases of nations and the freedom of nations can also be left to Wilsonianism in modern times. But one cannot point out seriously enough what is actually behind the idol that is meant.

I know that present-day humanity will not give much credence to such things, but I also know that in the future many a voice will be raised in agreement with what has been said here. May the voices of the future always be added to those of the past: Humanity allowed itself to be led in all sorts of ways by a strange idol; thank the world spirits that the goals of this strange leader of humanity were not fulfilled, who, after all, also to the world by theoretically proclaiming, in grand words, the republic as the only true form of government and by copying out his own republican manifestos from the Brazilian emperor of 1864. The fact that one is actually standing here before a grotesque phenomenon is something that can be said within closed walls. Outside, truth is not the highest value, but is weighed on the political scales. One must not say what is true or not true, but what is prescribed. Until March 15, one was not allowed to say anything against tsarism in the various countries; since March 15, one is of course allowed to say anything against it.

Unfortunately, truth is not the highest standard. But to speak out against it is the only way to touch the conditions that are necessary to write into the soul today. It makes sense to add to the great views into the cosmos the small thoughts that passive, sleepy humanity has today, but which unfortunately have great effects on deeds. For humanity must awaken, and the spirit must be the awakener.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My dear friends! We shall now continue our discussions of the various rituals. I would just like to start by adding a discussion of the so-called Credo, which is inserted between the Gospel and the Offertory in the Catholic Mass and which plays a certain role in the confessions. Before I discuss this Credo, however, I must explain something about how the point of view from which I must treat such a Credo is to be characterized. First of all, in view of the many discussions that take place about the Credo, it must be said to what extent such a Credo can play a role at all within a confessional community of Christianity. When the Credo is discussed today, the question is often whether one should include this or that sentence or not, and how the Credo should be formulated for this or that occasion, or rather, for this or that reason for using it, and so on.

Now it seems to me that a credo, that is, a confession of faith, could at most only make sense to those who are simultaneously willing to recognize that they have reasons of an inner, cognitive nature that compel them to utter such a credo or at least make it possible for them to utter such a credo. Of course, it is quite impossible to demand such a credo from a confirmand, for example, that is, to demand a credo from a confirmand at all. Is it even possible to have such discussions – as they have been held about the credo – whether a person who is perhaps 15 or 16 years old should profess one or the other, which basically cannot be understood in a lifetime? Nevertheless, the discussion proceeds from the standpoint of what can be signed by one or the other of these creeds? You have seen that the Jugendfeier ceremony that I showed you here, of course, contains nothing of such a creed. When I first treated the ritual of the Mass Sacrifice in its main parts, I pointed out that in the Catholic Church the Creed is inserted between the reading of the Gospel and the Offertory. But if one wants to either justify or refute the insertion of the Credo at this point in the Mass, then again various things must be taken into consideration. I am not here to justify or refute anything that concerns the Catholic Church, but to discuss the issues. What would have to be asserted in the face of the Creed at this point, what could be said in justification, is this: First the Gospel is read, and now the one who celebrates the Mass, who is thus the actual agent in the Mass, can give a kind of response in the Creed to what is heard as the inspired word in the Gospel. If the Mass sacrifice is now understood to mean that it is actually only the sacrifice celebrated by the ordained priest, then all the faithful who participate in this Mass sacrifice are naturally not at all connected with it – in principle – to recognize everything that the priest confesses during the act of celebration as that which lives in him. Besides, the priest also says silent masses where he is at most concerned with the others in the idea. What is expressed in the Credo of the Catholic Mass must not be understood as if it were a confession for those who participate in the sacrificial act of the Mass, sentence by sentence. It is a different matter as to what extent the Catholic Church demands confession of the Credo from its faithful. That is certainly the case to a certain extent. What is required here is actually all based on a somewhat liberal interpretation of church practice, but the idea is that the confession of the Credo is required, as I have read it to you. The Credo also forms the content of [Catholic] catechism lessons and is taught to children in the very form that I have read to you. The Credo also forms the content of a certain part of the ordination of a priest, which we shall have to discuss later. Here it takes on a completely different meaning and is undoubtedly justified in this context, since it contains what can really be advocated within the Church. Thus, it is quite impossible to demand a credo, to incline towards a credo that contains, as the usual credo does, I might say, a certain essence of world wisdom, of all world feeling and world will — for that is what is usually contained in a credo. In so far as the Catholic Credo contains this, one cannot help saying that it cannot, in the Christian sense, be taught to the faithful in the way it is. If it is to be discussed from an anthroposophical point of view, only the following can be said, because it really requires a great deal of knowledge to meaningfully accept what can be offered by a creed.

Anyone who professes to believe in a pedagogy that is truly based on knowledge of human nature will never advocate teaching children only things that they immediately understand. Anyone who did so would not take into account the whole of human life; for example, he would not take into account what it means in terms of rejuvenating strength, in terms of the real influx of inner life force when, let us say, in the fortieth year of one's life one remembers something that one authority in the tenth year, and now, in the fortieth year, you say to yourself: You have come through your life experience so far that you now understand from your own inner being what you learned by heart in the tenth year. Simply the fact that you understand things later on, which you can recall from memory, means that you are receiving real vitality. Another educational theory might advocate the following: the child should not be encouraged to do anything that it cannot immediately put into practice, or perhaps one should only teach the child what its hands naturally want to do.

Now, I have made this pedagogical digression so that you can see what kind of attitude can prevail in a pedagogy that is based on real human knowledge. But then, when it comes to something like the credo, the feeling must be evoked not to urge the child to believe these things, but the child must have the clear idea: the person who is dealing with him, believes in them. That is the most extreme idea that can be evoked: the person who is dealing with the child believes in it because he knows the things, and the child must also have the feeling that he can grow into an understanding of what the adult believes. Without this feeling, it is not possible to establish a community that is permeated by inner truth; but above all, this must be the case in a Christian community.

Having said that, my dear friends, I would like to present to you some of the elements of a credo that could arise out of anthroposophical knowledge. I ask you to listen to it as it is meant, namely that it arises out of anthroposophical knowledge, and that anyone who has a certain anthroposophical knowledge can , but that it is really extremely difficult to find even remotely adequate words in which to express what can only come about in the course of a wide-ranging anthroposophical realization. The words must be chosen in such a way that for someone who is not immersed in the whole process from which these words ultimately arise, they are in many respects merely a sound. I have tried by every possible means to express in concise words what, according to anthroposophical conviction, should be in such a credo, but do not think that I believe I have succeeded in doing so. What needs to be said is perfectly clear to me; but it is extraordinarily difficult to put into words, because our words have lost their values in all languages, because our words are often only external signs. So, even if some of it shocks you, I would ask you to accept what I am about to read as a possible anthroposophical credo, bearing this in mind.

An almighty spiritual-physical being of God is the reason for the existence of heaven and earth, fatherly preceding his creatures.

Christ, through whom people attain the revival of dying earthly existence, is to this divine being like the eternally born son.

In Jesus, the Christ entered the earthly world as a human being. Jesus' birth on earth is an effect of the Holy Spirit, who, in order to spiritually heal the “sickness of sin in the flesh of humanity,” prepared the son of Mary to be the vessel of the Christ.

Christ Jesus suffered death on the cross under Pontius Pilate and was buried in the grave of the earth.

In death, he became the helper of the deceased souls who had lost their divine being; then he overcame death after three days.

Since that time, he has been the Lord of the heavenly powers on earth and lives as the fulfiller of the paternal deeds of the foundation of the world.

In the progress of the world He will unite Himself with those whom He can snatch from the death of matter through their behavior.

Through Him the healing spirit can work.

Communities whose members feel the Christ within themselves may feel united in a church to which all who feel the saving power of Christ belong; they may hope for the overcoming of the disease of sin, for the continued existence of the human being and for the preservation of their life destined for eternity.

They naturally find in it essentially what is already contained in the traditional Creed. But I cannot help saying that in the traditional Creed, insofar as it is translated into newer languages, what is actually in it can no longer be found. That is why I tried to translate the Credo of the Catholic Mass in the way I have already read out, which I will now present again. But it is one thing to try to reconstruct what is available as tradition and quite another to try to express what can really be advocated today. In my opinion, the Credo would be translated as follows:

“I believe in the One God, the almighty Father, who made heaven and earth, and all things visible and invisible.”

The word “made” is already in it, although it contradicts the Gospel of John; no other text is possible in opposition to the Gospel of John than:

An almighty spiritual-physical being of God is the reason for the existence of heaven and earth, who fatherly precedes his creatures.

Christ, through whom men attain the revival of the dying earthly existence, is to this being of God as the son born in eternity.

But here it says further:

“And in the One Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God. Who also proceeded from the Father before all time. He is God from God. Light from Light, true God from true God.”

Well, my dear friends, it must be translated like that, but it is impossible to imprint in such words what can be experienced today originally from the spiritual worlds. The most striking fact that can prove this to you, for quite external reasons, is that in the dictionary [by Fritz Mauthner] the two most problematic articles are those about “spirit” and about “God”. This dictionary of philosophy has really emerged from the essence of more recent philological scholarship, and in this German dictionary the article “God” is treated in such a way that one must say: The deepest scholarship is no more capable of filling the word “God” with a living concept than anything else that can be found. In the very word that is most important to humanity, a word sound is pronounced that cannot be filled with a living concept if one wants to somehow arrive at the origin of the word “God” etymologically, philologically. Today's science cannot do it. Fritz Mauthner brings it together with the word “gießen” (to pour), that is, that which is poured out, which pours itself out into the world, and that would then lead back to an old word “Götze” (idol), which would be related to “Gott” (God). You see, that is the situation today with those who have spent a lot of time trying to find the origin of the word “God”.

What can be said from the spiritual scientific point of view is that the word 'God' points to something that expresses a relationship, and which still resonates in the common language in individual dialects that have the word 'God': the feminine 'Godel', which is also found in the name 'Goethe', which originally was 'Goede'. It is the godfather, it is the one to whom there is a spiritual kinship. The word is intimately connected with the fact that this kinship was felt in the monotheistic sense, that the one great godfather of the world, whom one felt like the father imagined in the spirit, was contrasted with some random godfather. So the word probably grew out of primitive, monotheistic stages of religion and probably once meant in North Asia the “Ongod”, the one great godfather, and this prefix “On” definitely points to the monotheistic origin of those ideas that correspond to the word of God.

So you see, anyone who chooses words with true inner conscientiousness is not in a position to utter them as lightly as is usually the case today. Empathizing with these words, living into them, must actually be a process of life. Today, when people believe that they can translate from one language into another by simply using a dictionary and then inserting the word that appears in the dictionary into the sentence, no one can have any sense of what is actually involved. This is because the word in the dictionary is usually the least useful one if you want to translate the real meaning. At best, the dictionary word can help us arrive at what is meant, and it is characteristic of this that even school dictionaries have become terribly poor in this regard over the course of fifty years. We are hardly familiar with all the dictionary blunders that have been made since then.

But now we find in this creed, in addition to “he who is God of God, true God of true God”, also “light from light”. Now, my dear friends, perhaps twenty or twenty-one years ago I once wrote an essay that contained something like the following. I wrote: In physics, light is spoken of as if it were given as a gift; but I ask: has light ever been seen? You can see colors; all colors, including white, are something that arises from light, but light is something that no one can see with their eyes. It is the mediator of seeing objects in color, but light itself remains invisible in the light-filled space. Just imagine standing in the middle of a room that contains no objects, only light. Would you see anything? You would be just as if in darkness, only you would feel differently, but you could not see the light. Everywhere one speaks as if one could see the light. Physics has — most terrible of horrors — instead of a color theory a light theory. They know, of course, what light is: wave motion. Now imagine that and compare it with the idea of light that you cannot have from external experience, then you will see what significance such a theory has. This is roughly how modern man must feel in his truth when he hears the words “light from light”.

Now there is a sentence in the Creed which, if it is a mere translation, cannot be translated differently than as it stands here:

“Descended, but not produced, of one essence with the Father: through whom all things were made.”

Christ... is to this divine being like the Son born in eternity.

which does not refer to a birth in time, but indicates that the Word is now born and must not now be taken in the sense in which it is usually taken.

"Who descended from the heavens for us men and for our healing. Who also came in the flesh by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and became man.

I cannot get any other text than this:

In Jesus, the Christ entered the earthly world as a human being. Jesus' birth on earth is an effect of the Holy Spirit, which, in order to spiritually heal the sin of the body of humanity, prepared the son of Mary to be the vessel of Christ.

If it is desired, we can also talk about the virgin birth in another context that does not belong to the ritual.

“Who was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, who died and was buried.”

Now, it is the case that one must express it in this way:

Christ Jesus suffered crucifixion under Pontius Pilate and was laid in the tomb of the earth.

Yes, now it continues:

“And who was resurrected on the third day in the sense of the scriptures. And who was raised up into heaven again.”

These are, of course, ideas that must be given correctly:

Since that time He has been Lord of the heavenly powers on earth and lives as the fulfiller of the Fatherly deeds in the foundation of the world.

[In the translation of the Credo]:

"And he who has been lifted up on high, who sits at the right hand of the Father, will reveal himself again to judge the living and the dead, whose kingdom is endless. And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. Who is worshiped and revealed together with the Father and the Son, who spoke through the prophets. And in the only holy catholic and apostolic church. I profess one baptism for the wiping out of wrongdoing. And I hope for the resurrection of the dead and for a life in future time circles. Yes, so be it.

So, as I said, I cannot say anything other than what I have shared here with regard to what can now, with all the difficulties, be summarized from anthroposophical foundations as a real credo. You can regard what is summarized here in such a way that it can truly be signed off in the sense of anthroposophical knowledge in every single word, if the word is now really taken with all its inner values. For it turns out that this anthroposophical insight, too, requires us to hold fast to the idea of resurrection, and to hold fast to what we encounter in the words that you also find in the Catholic Creed, at least in most versions, namely that Christ descended to the dead – or as it is also called, “into hell”. I had to express this by saying:

In death, he became the helper of the deceased souls who had lost their divine being; then, after three days, he overcame death.

It is indeed a fact that is perfectly recognizable to spiritual science that not only does the evolution of the living take place in all its differentiation in the successive epochs of earthly existence, as you know from anthroposophical descriptions, but that the life of the dead also evolves. And this life of the dead at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha was such that the ancient Greek saying, which was connected with the Mysteries of that time, was indeed true: better a beggar in the Upper World than a king in the realm of shadows – that is, the dead, for the dead in those days were in danger of losing the divine, the astral, that which was present in humanity, and they had to give up their divine existence altogether. The Christ came to them to save their lives.

This is truly not at all a reminiscence from Catholicism, as one might easily believe when spiritual science presents it. A very clever person of the present day, a philosophically educated person, as they are called today, would necessarily say that only someone who experiences it as a reminiscence would come up with something like that. Well, I can give you the assurance that I never had the opportunity to experience Catholic reminiscences, but I had to be forced by the knowledge of the facts of the supersensible world to each of these things.

If the formation of new communities in the Christian sense is at issue, then I do believe that this Credo could initially serve as a basis for the cohesion of the communities through the leading priestly figures. But I also believe something else: I believe that long theological studies on the exegesis or interpretation of what is contained in this Credo should be established, at least for those who want to prepare for the priesthood. I cannot believe otherwise, because these things can indeed only be achieved step by step, and because it seems to me that after a certain transitional period – if, as I hope, the revival of religious life, as it is being pursued by our friends, is successful – then indeed the theological study must be established afterwards. And then it seems to me that a few years of theological study will be necessary to understand the Credo. But if this will evoke a true sense of truth in the person, it will naturally prevent demanding a credo or the like from confirmands.

Christian Geyer asks Dr. Steiner to read the Credo again.

Rudolf Steiner:

An almighty spiritual-physical being of God is the reason for the existence of heaven and earth, and walks before his creatures as a father.

Christ, through whom human beings attain the revival of dying earthly existence, is to this divine being as the eternally born son.

In Jesus, the Christ entered the earth as a human being. Jesus' birth on earth is an effect of the Holy Spirit, who, in order to spiritually heal the disease of sin from the body of humanity, prepared the son of Mary to be the vessel of the Christ.

The Christ Jesus -

Please note that here the two words are combined: Earlier was “Christ”, and then was “Jesus”. Now the two words are combined here:

The Christ Jesus suffered crucifixion under Pontius Pilate and was buried in the tomb of the earth.

I can only express it this way.

In death, He became the support of the deceased souls who had lost their divine being; then He overcame death after three days.

Since that time, He has been the Lord of the heavenly powers on earth and lives as the fulfiller of the Fatherly deeds of the foundation of the world.

In the future He will unite with those whom He can snatch from the death of matter through their behavior for the progress of the world.

Through Him the healing spirit can work.

Communities whose members feel the Christ within themselves may feel united in one church, to which all who feel the saving power of Christ belong;

They may hope for the conquest of the disease of sin, for the continued existence of the human being,

And on the preservation of their life destined for eternity.

And now, before I go further in discussing the sacrifice of the Mass, which after all has already been discussed in its four main parts, I would like you to see how the things we are dealing with here can also lead to the living word of the gospel being incorporated into everything , talk about how a funeral ritual can come about, and specifically the funeral ritual that our friend, Pastor Schuster, used at funerals in my presence, so that for me the use is thoroughly tried and tested from direct observation.

This funeral rite, which can also be used for cremations, has the following content. First, the part that is performed at the house of the deceased. It is, as it seems to me, as befits a funeral rite, simple:

Into the peace of the soul's being
wanders the soul of our dear departed.
Into the light of the spiritual world
steps the spirit of our dear departed.
Eternal Spirit, who art with him,
Eternal Spirit, who art with us,
fill our souls.
Christ, who art in us,
Christ, who art in him,
Fill our thoughts.

The Lord's Prayer is now recited. After the Lord's Prayer:

Let him find, eternal Spirit,
The power of life in the light of the soul,
Let him weave in your world will.

— here the name is mentioned —

leaves
and goes into the realm of the infinite
of the timeless world existence,
into which he now enters,
to live in the power of the will,
which in Christ has been able to gain eternity for humanity,
Who has opened the soul's eye for humanity
To see the world of eternal being.
Into the calm of the soul's being
The soul of the dear... (name)
Into the light of the spiritual world,
The spirit of the dear... (name)

Now follows a sprinkling with holy water. This is the ceremony in the house.

The ceremony at the grave or at the cremation site:

The sign of the cross is made over the grave or the cremation site, then the following is spoken:

At the place where we unite

Your mortality with the transient nature of the elements, our thoughts rise to the place of your soul, in the revelation of the Father (sign of the cross), the Son (sign of the cross) and the Holy Spirit (sign of the cross). Amen.

Eternal Spirit,
In whose will the souls weave,
Grasp your servant's soul weaving
And let him experience the spirit of the spirits
Through the power of the Christ,
Who is in him
Who is in us.
I am the rebirth in death,
I am the life in dying,
Thus speaks Christ,
Who is in us.
Whoever feels me in himself,
He lives,
Even if he dies;
Whoever receives me in his thoughts,
He passes through time into the timeless.
Eternal Spirit,
Look upon us.
Christ in us.

And now follows the Lord's Prayer again. After:

Let him find, eternal Spirit,
The power of life in the light of the soul.
Let him weave in your world will.
Hear, eternal Spirit, your servant's thinking,
That rises to you.
May the spirit fill the hearts of those present.
Those present send their thoughts
From the realm of the earthly,
From the realm of the dear... (names) departs
Into the realm,
Into which he enters,
And where the love of the spirit weaves
The soul's eye to the blessed spirit
To see the world of spirits.
There he sees the existence of the spirit,
There he works in the realm
To which he is inclined
His thoughts,
Rather than the realm
That his soul
Called his home.
Through Christ, who is there in him.
therefore our thoughts follow him
where he works as a spirit among spirits.
Through Christ, who is in him. Amen.

The Weihwedels are dipped into the Weihwasserfaß and the corpse, or rather what it is in, is sprinkled with holy water:

With the Breath of Light

— so it is spoken further —

let this soul be imbued

with the triune Spirit,
the Father (sign of the cross), the Son (sign of the cross) and the Holy Spirit (sign of the cross). Amen.

Eternal Spirit, grant him

The peace of soulfulness,

And may the light of the spiritual world shine upon him.

Incense is poured over the corpse.

Remember, O man,

That you are indebted to the spirit

For everything you accomplish

In thought, word and deed.

May you find, eternal soul,

In death, rebirth through the power of Christ,

Who through his death has overcome

the death of the soul;

May you receive

His strength,

as you leave the earthly for the spiritual. Amen.

Eternal Spirit,

let him find the peace of the soul's being.

May the light of the spiritual world shine upon him.

This funeral ritual could basically be understood as an adaptation of common funeral rituals. As I said, it is a tried and tested funeral ritual. When this funeral ritual is spoken with the right attitude, it is actually the spiritual processes that are at work, those that best guide the soul of the dead person from the world of physical existence into the world of spiritual existence. When we speak of a ritual, it really is a matter of living in it to the full, according to one's ability and capacity, in the things that are at stake. There is much to be learned from what has been handed down. For example, there is a great deal to be learned from studying the ancient church constitutions regarding the performance of the sign of the cross by the faithful and by the priest. The faithful make the sign of the cross by saying: In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The sign of the cross is made on the forehead for the Father, on the chin for the Son, and on the chest for the Holy Spirit. The priest does not make the sign of the cross in this way, but rather makes the sign in one go over the whole upper body. This is meant to point to a profound mystery, I would say to that mystery that shows us how the one who is on the way to becoming immersed in life, which must be called the religious life, feels in a different way than the one who has reached the end of this path to a certain degree. These two different signs of the cross show that it requires a profound experience to gradually find the three in the one.

Of course, my dear friends, I have an understanding and perhaps I may even say a heart for all the criticisms that have been raised against the fact that three should be one and one three in the divine Trinity. I have an understanding and a heart for it, and I can understand it in the case of anyone, whether it be a person who today, let us say, is one of the very clever, or the youthful, high-spirited Goethe. But true understanding of these things lies so deep that critical discussion of them is usually nothing more than proof that one has no access to understanding. You see, it is easy to say that three is not one. Arithmetic certainly teaches that, and the outer sensory perception also teaches that. But this arithmetic, which we only carry into the outer sensory perception, is, after all, first shaped by ourselves on the basis of this outer sensory perception. And the arithmetic we have today does not go back very far in the history of humanity. Even Pythagoreanism, which lies only a few hundred years before the Mystery of Golgotha, cannot be understood from the present-day arithmetic. For how does present-day arithmetic count? One, two, three. Each is one, and all three are just three. That is how you count. If you just adjust your counting for the physical world, it is quite good. But this counting loses all meaning when you want to apply it to the supersensible world. There you have to count quite differently. Of course you can enter the supersensible world and, if you calculate that which is inspired there in much the same way as you calculate things on earth, then you can apply earthly arithmetic; of course you can apply it, but you won't gain anything from it. There is no need to count money there, and you would get nothing out of the other things if you were to treat them with arithmetic as in the physical world and count them in an earthly way. You have to count differently there, I can only sensualize it (it is drawn on the board):

Here you have everywhere \(1=1\), \(1=2\), \(1=3\), \(1=4\), and so on. Not the law of counting, but the law of analysis is the one that allows for real practical application in the world of the soul — not just in the intellectual world. While we can manage with counting here in the physical world, when we synthesize, the arithmetic of the supersensible is an analytical one. The point here is that all numbers are contained in the one. And it will only be possible to study psychology again when the dreadful doctrine of association, which is a subjective thing where one thought is added to another, which does not correspond to reality in the slightest, has finally been removed from the doctrine of the soul. For one is dealing [in the supersensible] with such processes that can only be grasped by such counting and calculating, where unity includes every number. Only when one begins to understand how that which is a unity in a higher world, which can be seen as a unity, actually appears as three in a lower world, does one gradually begin to understand the mystery of three in one and one in three, although it is by no means merely something arithmetic. The arithmetic is only the very least, the beginning of these things. When we enter into the qualitative, which is also contained in the God of the Trinity, then we must also come to count in this way (it is written on the board):

That is, one must proceed to qualitative counting, and qualitative counting is something that is connected with the inner nature of things. Qualitative counting always leads to concrete differentiations, while our synthetic counting leads more and more to abstractions. Try to use today's usual synthetic counting: 1 apple, 2 apples, 3 apples. Well, yes. But if there is an apple, a pear and a plum here, you can no longer remain in the concrete when you add them up: 1, 2, 3; you cannot say that there are 3 apples or 3 pears or 3 plums, but at most you can say that there are 3 pieces, which means that you are entering into the abstract. It is precisely the opposite path that quantitative arithmetic takes to qualitative arithmetic, which leads more and more into the concrete. It has a creative element in the concept of the number contained in the sentence: “For God has ordered the world according to measure, number and weight”. He certainly did not order it like a general orders his troops, but according to the creative, qualitative, analytical order of numbers.

If you say that such things are not necessary today, because we can develop a good religious life without knowing these things, then I say to you: certainly, all this may apply to the faithful, but the pastor must know these things because he must fulfill his task in harmony with the whole course of human development. He must know that these things have a very real significance.

Let me give you an example of where these things can have a very real meaning today. You see, today you learn the Copernican theory of the world at an early age. This Copernican theory of the world is traced back to two sentences of Copernicus, while his third sentence is always suppressed. What today's astronomers do is this: they add up the revolutions of the earth around itself. These rotations of the Earth around itself, around its axis, are now made each year in the path of an ellipse, progressively, over the course of 365 days to 24 hours. But while the Earth is turning around itself, astronomers say that it turns around itself yet another time. You can imagine it like this: When you turn around on your own axis, you make one revolution when you are back to where you started. But if you simultaneously turn around a central point or an interior, you have to turn a little further than one revolution each time. If you now add up 365 plus one, you do not realize that in the world things are different than when a person turns around like that. When the Earth or the world turns once, then the matter becomes concrete, then you have to say: 365 Earth days plus one world day; and if you add that up to 366, it is exactly the same as if you add up 4 pears and 1 apple gives 5 pears. And the error that underlies this has led to the fact that even today people believe that the earth revolves around the sun in the course of a year, which is not the case in reality. It follows behind the sun in a curve, the sun moves in a spiral – (during the following demonstration, it is demonstrated on the board) – the earth follows it in the same spiral. If you look at it this way, the sun is on the line when the sun has set and the earth is here, so look at it this way; this creates the illusion that the earth is moving around the sun. In reality, it follows it in a spiral.

I only mention this, of course I cannot explain it in the breadth in which it should be explained, but it is actually based essentially on a lack of insight into the way in which creating arithmetic and creating geometry work in relation to that which we use as arithmetic and geometry applicable to the sensory world. One must know how little it is right to simply take up the scientific concepts of today; the most important ones are not right. They can easily be taught to people; one can then move from this rolling [of the earth] around the sun to the circling of a nebula, as in the Kant-Laplacean theory and the splitting off [of the solar system] from it. This can even be done very vividly; the object lesson in the sense of today's pedagogy can achieve anything, can't it? You take water and alcohol and let a ball form out of a substance that floats on water, an oil ball, take a piece of a map that you stick with a pin exactly in the middle of the ball. Now you start turning: Tiny spheres separate out and the miniature world system is created. Why shouldn't it be the same outside? For the simple reason that it would be necessary for the great teacher to stand there and stick the giant pin through. When describing an observation, one must describe it very precisely. Otherwise, unselfishness is very good, but this omission of the teacher from an experiment is scientifically far too much unselfishness; because he is there and he must not be denied.

It is true that anyone approaching the renewal of religious life must deal very thoroughly with all those things that today confuse the concepts, that create such confused concepts. He must deal with the fact that they are held to with no less authority than the concepts that are church dogmas. For truly, the Trinity has never been more firmly believed in than modern people believe in such world theories, and they do the latter not with more reason than the others have done or do the former. Today, the belief in authority is only attracted to a different area. And people are truly white ravens when they talk like Herman Grimm – I think I have already told you – who, with reference to the Kant-Laplacean theory, said that a carrion bone around which a hungry dog circles is to be regarded as a more appetizing piece than this world theory, the madness of which later times would wonder at, and will wonder at the fact that this delusion in a time like ours could be adopted by wide circles. Understanding this will one day become a difficult problem for the cultural history of later times.

Let us resume our observations of yesterday. I showed how, in the main, through factors I have mentioned, the People of the Christ was diverted eastwards and how, as a consequence of other factors, the Peoples of the Church developed in the centre of Europe and spread from there in a westward direction. I then pointed out how the various conflicts which arose at the turning-point which marked the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch were connected with this basic fact. I also showed how, within that territory where the true People of the Church developed, through the fact that the Christ impulse to some extent no longer exercised a lasting influence, but was associated with a definite moment in time and had to be transmitted through tradition and written records, there arose the troubled relationship between Christianity and the politically organized church, subject to the Roman pontiff; and how then other individual churches submitted to Rome. These other churches, though manifesting considerable differences from the papal church have, however, many features in common with it—in any case certain things which are of interest to us in this context and which seem to indicate that the state church of the Protestants is closer to the Roman Catholic Church than to the Russian Orthodox Church, in which however the dependence of the church upon the state was never the essential factor. What was of paramount importance in the Russian church was the way in which the Christ impulse, in unbroken activity, expressed itself through the Russian people. I then showed how the radical consequence of this dragging down of the Christ impulse into purely worldly affairs was the establishment of Jesuitism, and how Goetheanism^T1 appeared as the antithesis of Jesuitism.

This Goetheanism endeavours to promote a countermovement, somewhat akin to Russian Christianity. It seeks to spiritualize that which exists here on the physical plane, so that, despite the circumstances on the physical plane, the soul unites with the impulses which sustain the spiritual world itself, impulses which are not brought down directly to the plane of sensible reality, as in Jesuitism, but are mediated by the soul. As was his custom, Goethe seldom expressed his most intimate thoughts on this subject. But if we wish to know them we must again refer to that passage in Wilhelm Meister to which I have already drawn attention in another context. It is the passage where Wilhelm Meister enters Jarno's castle and is shown a picture gallery depicting world history, and in the framework of this world history the religious evolution of mankind. Wilhelm Meister is led by the guide to a picture where history is portrayed as ending with the destruction of Jerusalem. He drew the attention of the guide to the absence of any representation of the Divine Being who had been active in Palestine immediately before the destruction of Jerusalem. Wilhelm was then led into a second gallery where he was shown what was missing in the first gallery—the life of Christ up to the Last Supper. And it was explained to him that all the different religions represented in the first gallery up to the time of the destruction of Jerusalem were related to the human being in so far as he was a member of an ethnic group. All these scenes represented an ethnic or folk religion. What he had seen in the second gallery, however, was related to the individual, was addressed to the individual; it was a personal and private matter. It could only be revealed to the individual, it could not be an ethnic religion for it was addressed to the human being, to the individual as such.

Wilhelm Meister then remarked that he still missed here, i.e. in the second gallery, the story of Christ Jesus from the time of the Last Supper until His Death and Ascension. He was then led to a third and highly secret gallery where these scenes were represented. But at the same time the guide pointed out to him that these representations were a matter of such intimacy that one had no right to portray them in the profane fashion in which they were usually presented to the public. They must appeal to the innermost being of man.

Now one can claim with good reason that what was still valid in Goethe's day, namely, that the representation of the Passion of Christ Jesus should be withheld from the public, no longer applies today. Since that time we have passed through many stages of development. But I should like to point out that Goethe's whole attitude to this question is revealed in this passage from Wilhelm Meister. Goethe shows quite clearly that he wishes the Christ impulse to penetrate into the inmost recesses of the soul; he wishes to dissociate it from the national impulse, from the national state. He wishes to establish a direct relationship between the individual soul and the Christ impulse. This is extremely important for an understanding not only of Goethe, but of Goetheanism. For, as I said recently, in relation to external culture, Goethe and the whole of Goetheanism are in reality isolated, but when one bears in mind the more inward religious development of civilized mankind one cannot say the same of the progress of evolution. Goethe, for his part, represents in a certain respect the continuation of something else. But in order to understand how Goethe is to some extent opposed to everything that is usually manifested in the Church of Central Europe, we must now consider a third impulse.

This third impulse is localized more to the West, and to a certain extent is the driving force behind the nations—one cannot say that it inspires them. That which emerged in its extreme form as Jesuitism, as the militia of the generalissimo Jesus Christ, is deeply rooted in the very nature of the civilized world. In order to understand this we must turn our attention to the controversy dating back to the fourth century which was felt long afterwards. From your knowledge of the history of religions you will recall that, in its triumphal march from East to West, Christianity assumed diverse forms and amongst them those of Arianism and Athanasianism. The peoples—Goths, Langobards and Franks—who took part in what is mistakenly called the migration of nations were originally Arians.

Now the doctrinal conflict between the Arians and Athanasians¹ is probably of little interest to you today, but it played a certain part and we must return to it. It arose from a conflict between Arius and Athanasius which began at Alexandria and was given new impetus in Antioch. Athanasius maintained that Christ is a God, like God the Father, that a Father-God therefore exists and that Christ is of the same nature and substance as the Father from all eternity. This doctrine passed over into Roman Catholicism which still professes today the faith of Athanasius. Thus at the root of Roman Catholicism is the belief that the Son is eternal and of the same nature and substance as the Father.

Arius opposed this view. He held that there was a supreme God, the Father, and that the Divine Son, i.e. Christ, was begotten of the Father before all ages. He was a separate being from the Father, different in substance and nature, the perfect creature who is nearer to man than the Father, the mediator between the Creator, who is beyond the reach of human understanding, and the creature.

Strange as it may seem this appears at first sight to be a doctrinal dispute. But it is a doctrinal dispute only in the eyes of modern man. In the first centuries of Christianity it had deeper implications, for Arian Christianity, based on the relationship between the Son and the Father, as I have just indicated, was something natural and self-evident to the Goths and Langobards—all those peoples who first took over from Rome after the fall of the empire. Instinctively they were Arians. Ulfilas's translation of the Bible shows quite clearly that he was an adherent of Arius. The Goths and Langobards who invaded Italy were also Arians, and only when Clovis was converted to Christianity did the Franks accept Christianity. They adopted somewhat superficially the doctrine of Athanasius which was foreign to their nature, for they had formerly been Arians at heart. And when Christianity hoisted its Banner under the leadership of Charles the Great² everyone was instructed in the creed of Athanasius. Thus the ground was prepared for the transition to the Church of Rome. A large part of the barbarian peoples, Goths, Langobards, etcetera, perished; the ethnic remnants who survived were driven out or annihilated by the Athanasians. Arianism lived on in the form of sects; but as a tribal religion it ceased to be an active force.

Two questions now arise: first, what distinguishes Arianism from Athanasianism? Secondly, why did Arianism disappear from the stage of European history, at least as far as any visible symptoms are concerned? Arianism is the last offshoot of those conceptions of the world which, when they aspired to the divine, still sought to find a relation between the sensible world and the divine-spiritual, and which still felt the need to unite the sense-perceptible with the divinespiritual. In Arianism we find in a somewhat more abstract form the same impulse that we find in the Christ impulse of Russia—but only as impulse, not in the form of sacramentalism and cultus. This form of the Christ impulse had to be abandoned because it was unsuited to the peoples of Europe. And it was also extirpated by the Athanasians for the same reason.

In order to have a clearer understanding of these questions we must consider what was the original constitution of soul of the different peoples of Europe. The original psychic make-up of the peoples who took over from the Roman Empire, who, it is said, invaded and settled in its territory (which is not strictly true, but I have not the time at present to rectify this misconception), the psychic disposition of the so-called Teutonic peoples was originally of a different nature. These peoples came from widely different directions and mingled with an autochthonous population of Europe which is rightly called the Celtic population. Vestiges of this Celtic population can still be found here and there amongst certain ethnic groups. Today when there is a wish to preserve national identity, people are intent upon preserving at all costs the Celtic element wherever they find it, or imagine they have found it. In order to form a true picture of the national or folk element in Europe we must imagine a proto-European culture, a Celtic culture, within which the other cultures developed—the Teutonic, the Romanic (i.e. of the Romance peoples), the Anglo-Saxons, etcetera.

The Celtic element has survived longest in its original form in the British Isles, especially in Wales. It is there that it has retained longest its original character. And just as a certain kind of religious sentiment had been diverted towards the East, with the result that the Russian people became the People of the Christ, so too, by virtue of certain facts which you can verify in any text-book of history a certain impulse emanated in the West from the British Isles. It is this impulse, an echo of the original Celtism, which ultimately determined the form of the religious life in the West, just as other influences determined that of the East and Central Europe.

Now in order to understand these events we must consider the question: what kind of people were the Celts? Though widely differentiated in many respects, they had one feature in common—they showed little interest in the relationship between nature and mankind. They imagined man as insulated from nature. They were interested in everything pertaining to man, but they had no interest in the way in which man is related to nature, how man is an integral part of nature. Whilst in the East, for example, in direct contrast to Celtism, one always feels profoundly the relation between man and nature, that man is to some extent a product of nature, as I showed in the case of Goethe, the Celt, on the other hand, had little understanding for the relationship between human nature and cosmic nature. He had a strong sense for a common way of life, for community life. But amongst the ancient Celts this corporate life was organized on the authoritarian principle of leaders and subordinates, those who commanded and those who obeyed. Essentially its structure was aristrocratic, anti-democratic, and in Europe this can be traced to Celtic antiquity. It was an organization based on aristocracy and this was its fundamental character.

Now there was a time when this aristocratic, Celtic, monarchical element flourished. The king as leader surrounded by his vassals, etcetera, this is a product of Celtism. And the last of such leaders who, in his own interests, still relied upon the original Celtic impulses was King Arthur with his Round Table in Wales. Arthur with his twelve Knights whose duty, so it is recorded—though this should not be taken literally—was to slay monsters and overcome demons. All this bears witness to the time of man's union with the spiritual world. The manner in which the Arthurian legend sprang up, the many legends associated with King Arthur, all this shows that the Celtic element lived on in the monarchical principle. Hence the readiness to accept commands, injunctions and direction from the King.

Now the Christ of Ulfilas, the Christ of the Goths was strongly impregnated with Arianism. He was a Christ for all men, for those who, in a certain sense, felt themselves as equals, who accepted no class differences, no claims to aristocracy. At the same time he was a last echo of that instinctive feeling in the East for the communion between man and the cosmos, between man and nature. Nature was to some extent excluded from the social structure of the Celtic monarchical system.

These two streams converged first of all in Europe (I cannot now enter into details, I can only discuss the main features). Then they were joined to a third stream. As a result of this confluence Arianism at first gained ground; but since it was a survival of a conception that linked nature and man, it was not understood by those who, as heirs of the Teutonic and Frankish peoples, were still influenced by purely Celtic impulses. They understood only a monarchical system such as their own. And therefore the need arose, still perceptible in the Old Saxon religious epic Heliand, to portray the Christ as a royal commander, a sovereign chief, as a feudal lord with his liege men. This reinterpretation of the Christ as a royal commander stemmed from the inability to understand what came over from the East and from the need to venerate Christ as both a spiritual and temporal King.

The third stream came from the South, from the Roman Empire. It had already been infected earlier with what one might perhaps call today the bureaucratic mentality. The Roman Empire—(it was not a state; it could best be described as a structure akin to a state) is very like—but different, in that the different territories are geographically remote from each other and different conditions determine the social structure—this Roman Empire is very like what emerged from the monarchical system though starting from different principles. Formerly a republic, it developed into an imperial organization, into an empire akin to what developed out of the various kingdoms of the Celtic civilization, but with a Teutonic flavouring.

Now the intellectual and emotional attitude towards social life which originated in the South, in the Roman Empire—because it envisaged an external structure on the physical plane—could never really find any common ground with Arianism which still survived as an old instinctive impulse from the East. This Roman impulse needed, paradoxically, something that was incomprehensible, something that had to be decreed. And as kings and emperors governed by decree, so too the Papacy. The doctrine of Athanasius could be brought home to mankind by appealing to certain feelings which were especially developed in the peoples I have mentioned; after all, these sentiments exist in everyone to some extent. The faith professed by Athanasius contains little that appeals to human feeling or understanding; if it is to be incorporated in the community it must be imposed by decree, it must have the sanction of law after the fashion of secular laws. And so it came to pass: the strange incomprehensible doctrine of the identity of the Father and the Son, who are co-equal and co-eternal, was later understood to imply that this doctrine transcended human logic; it must become an article of faith. It is something that can be decreed. The Athanasian faith can be imposed by decree. And since it was directly dependent upon authoritarian directives it could be introduced into an ecclesiastical organization with political leanings. Arianism, on the other hand, appealed to the individual; it could not be incorporated in an ecclesiastical organization, nor be imposed by decree. But authoritarian directives were important for the reasons I have mentioned.

Thus that which came from the south, from Athanasianism with its authoritarian tendency, merged with an instinctive need for an organization directed by a leader with twelve subordinates. In Central Europe these elements are interwoven. In Western Europe, in the British Isles and later also in America, there survived however a certain remnant of the old aristocratic outlook such as existed in the feudal nobility, in the old aristocracy, in that element which is responsible for the social structure and introduces the spiritual into the social life. That the spiritual element was regarded as an integral part of the social life is evident from the Arthurian legend which relates that it was the duty of the Knights of the Round Table to slay monsters and to wage war on demons. The spiritual therefore is operative here; it can only be cultivated if it is not imposed by decree, but is a spontaneous expression and is consciously directed. Thus, whilst the People of the Church developed in Central Europe there arose in the West, especially amongst the English-speaking peoples, what may be called the ‘People of the Lodges,’ to give a name to this third stream. In the West there had existed originally a tendency to form societies, to promote in these societies a spirit of organization. But in the final analysis an organization is only of value if it is created imperceptibly by spiritual means, otherwise it must be imposed by decree. And this is what happened in Central Europe; it was more in the society which later developed as a continuation of Celtism, in the English-speaking peoples, that attempts were made to rule in conformity with the lodges. Thus arose the ‘People or Peoples of the Lodges’ whose conspicuous feature is not the organization of mankind as a whole, but rather the division of mankind into separate groups and orders.

The division into orders stems from this continuation of the feudal element which is associated with the legend of King Arthur. In history things are interwoven. One can never understand a new development if one imagines that the effect follows directly from the cause. In the course of development things interpenetrate. And it is a strange fact that, in relation to its mode of representation and to everything that is active in the human soul, the principle of the lodges (of which freemasonry is a grotesque caricature) is inwardly related to Jesuitism. Though Jesuitism is bitterly hostile to the lodges, there is nevertheless great similarity in their mode of representation. And a Celtic streak in Ignatius Loyola certainly contributed to his consummate achievement.

In the East therefore the People of the Christ arose; they were the bearer of the continuous Christ impulse. For the man of the East accepts as a matter of course that throughout his life he receives the continuous influx of the Christ impulse. For the People of the Christ in Central Europe this impulse has become blunted or emasculated because it has been associated with a unique event at the beginning of our era and was later supplemented by the promulgation of decrees, state decrees, and by traditional transmission in conformity with Catholic doctrine. In the West, in the system of the Lodges, the Christ impulse was at first very much in question and so became still further emasculated. Thus the modes of thinking which really originate in this lodge impulse, which stems from Celtism and is a last echo of Celtism, gave birth to deism and what is called modern Aufklärung.³ It is extremely interesting to see the vast difference between the attitude of a member of the People of the Church in Central Europe to the Christ impulse and that of a citizen of the British Empire. But I must ask you not to judge this difference of attitude by the isolated individual, for obviously the impulse of the Church has spread also to England and one must accept things as they are in reality; one must take into account those people who are associated with what I have described as the lodge impulse which has invaded the state administration especially in the whole of the West.

The question is: What then is the relationship of the member of the People of the Christ to Christ? He knows that when he is really at one with himself he finds the Christ impulse—for this impulse is present in his soul and is continuously active in his soul. The member of the People of the Church speaks, perhaps, like Augustine who, at the age of maturity, in answer to the question, how do I find the Christ? replied: ‘The Church tells me who is the Christ. I can learn it from the Church, for the Church has preserved in its tradition the original teaching about the Christ.’—He who belongs to the People of the Lodges—I mean the true member of the Lodges—has a different approach to the Christ from the People of the Church and the People of the Christ. He says to himself: history speaks of a Christ who once existed. Is it reasonable to believe in such a Christ? How can the influence of Christ be justified historically before the bar of reason? This, fundamentally, is the Christology of the Aufklärung which demands that the Christ be vindicated by reason.

Now in order to understand what is involved here we must be quite clear that it is possible to know God without the inspiration of the Christ impulse. One need only be slightly mentally abnormal—just as the atheist is a person who is physically ill in some respect—to arrive at the idea of God or admit the existence of God by way of speculation or of mysticism. For deism is the fundamental belief of Aufklärung. One arrives directly at the belief of the Aufklärung that a God exists.

Now for those who are heirs of the People of the Lodges it is a question of finding a rational justification for the existence of Christ alongside the universal God. Amongst the various personalities characteristic of this rational approach I have selected Herbert of Cherbury⁴ who died in 1648, the year of the peace of Westphalia. He attempted to find a rational justification for the Christ impulse. A true member of the Russian people, for example, i.e. of the People of the Christ, would find a rational approach to the Christ impulse unthinkable. That would be tantamount to demanding of him to justify the presence of his head upon his shoulders. One possesses a head—and equally surely one possesses the Christ impulse. What people such as Cherbury want to know is something different: is it reasonable to accept alongside the God, to the idea of whom enlightened thinking leads, the existence of a Christ? One must first study man from a rational point of view in order to find a justification for this approach.

Not every member of the People of the Lodges of course responds in this way! The philosophers express their views in definite, clear-cut concepts; but others are not given to reflection; but all those who are in any way connected with the impulse of the Peoples of the Lodges, instinctively, emotionally and in the conclusions they unconsciously draw, adopt this rational approach. Cherbury started from an examination of the common factor in the different religions. Now this is a typical trick of the Aufklärung. Since they themselves cannot arrive at the spirit, at least as far as the Christ impulse is concerned, but only at the abstract notion of the god of deism, they ask: is it natural for man to discover this or that? Cherbury, who had travelled widely, endeavoured first of all to discover the common factor in the different religions. He found that they had a great deal in common and he tried to summarize these common factors in five propositions. These five propositions are most important and we must examine them closely.

The first proposition states: A God exists. Since the various peoples belonging to widely differing religions instinctively admit the existence of a God, he finds it natural therefore to admit that a God exists.

Secondly: The God demands veneration. Again a common feature of all religions.

Thirdly: This veneration must consist in virtue and piety.

Fourthly: There must be repentence and expiation of sins.

Fifthly: In the hereafter there is a justice that rewards and punishes.

As you see, there is no mention of the Christ impulse. But in these five propositions one finds the most one can know when one relies only upon the religious impulse emanating from the Lodges. Aufklärung is a further development of this way of looking at things. Hobbes, Locke⁵ and others constantly raised the question: since there is a tradition which speaks of Jesus Christ, is it reasonable to believe in His existence? And finally they are prepared to say: what is written in the Gospels, what is handed down by tradition on the subject of Christ Jesus agrees with the fundamental tenets common to all religions. It seems that the Christ wished to collate the common factors in all religions, that a divinely inspired personality (this can be envisaged more or less) had once existed who taught what is best in all religions. The Aufklärer found this to be reasonable. And Tindal who lived from 1647–1733 wrote a book entitled Christianity as Old as Creation. This book is very important for it gives us an insight into the nature of Aufklärung which was subsequently diluted by Voltaireism etcetera. Tindal wanted to show that in reality all men, the more enlightened men, have always been Christians, and that Christ simply embodied the best in all religions.

Thus the Christ is reduced to the status of a teacher: whether we call Him Messiah or Master, or what you will, He is nothing more than a teacher. It is not so much the fact of the Christ that is important, but that He exists and dwells amongst us, that He offers a religious teaching embodying the most precious element, the element which is common to the religions of the rest of mankind.

The idea I have just expressed may of course assume widely different forms, but the basic form persists—the Christ is teacher. When we consider the typical representatives of the People of the Christ, the People of the Church and the People of the Lodges, representatives who show wide variations, when we seek the reality behind the appearance, then we can say that for the People of the Christ: Christ is Spirit and therefore He is in no way concerned with any institutions on the physical plane. But the mystery of His incarnation remains. For the People of the Church: Christ is King, a conception which may assume various nuances. And this conception lives on also in the People of the Lodges, but in its further development it is modified and becomes: Christ is the Teacher.

We must bear in mind these different aspects of the European consciousness for they are deeply rooted not only in the individual, but also in what has developed spiritually in Europe in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch and also in many of the social forms. They are the principal nuances assumed by the Christ impulse. Much more could be said on this subject; I can only give a brief outline today since my time is short.

Let us now return to the three forms of evolution of which I spoke yesterday. In its present stage of development the whole of mankind is now living in the Sentient Soul, corresponding to the age of twenty-eight to twenty-one in man. Every single man, qua individual, develops the Consciousness Soul today in the course of the post-Atlantean epoch. Finally a third evolution unfolds within the folk-souls of which I spoke yesterday. We have, on the one hand, the historical facts and the influence they exert, and on the other hand the folk-souls with their different religious nuances. As a result of this interaction, for the People of the Christ: Christ is the Spirit; for the People of the Church: Christ is the King; for the People of the Lodges: Christ is the Teacher. These different responses are determined by the different folk characteristics. That is the third evolution.

In external reality things always interpenetrate—they work upon each other and through each other. If you ask who is representative of the People of the Lodges, of the deism of the Aufklärung then, strangely enough, a perfect example is Harnack⁶ in Berlin! He is a much more representative example than anyone on the other side of the Channel. In modern life things are much confused. If we wish to understand events and trace them back to their origin we must look beyond externalities. We must be quite clear that the third stream of evolution which is linked to the national element is connected with what I have described here. But because of the presence of the other evolutionary currents a reaction always follows, the assault of the Consciousness Soul upon this national element, and this assault manifests itself at diverse points. It starts from different centres. And one of these waves of assault is Goetheanism which, in reality, has nothing to do with what I have just described, and yet, when considered from a particular angle, is closely related to it. Parallel with the Arthurian current there developed early on the Grail current which is the antithesis of the Arthurian current. He who wishes to visit the Temple of the Grail must follow dangerous and almost inaccessible paths for sixty miles. The Temple lies remote and well concealed; one learns nothing there unless one asks. In brief, the purpose of this whole Grail impulse is to restore the link between the inmost core of the human soul (where the Consciousness Soul awakens) and the spiritual world. It is (if I may say so) an attempt artificially to lift up the sensible world to the spiritual world which is instinctive in the People of the Christ. The following diagram shows this strange interpenetration of the religious impulses of Europe. We have here an impulse which still exists today instinctively, in embryo and undeveloped, in the People of the Christ (red); philosophic spirits such as Solovieff come to accept this Christ impulse as something self-evident.

On account of its ethnographical and ethnic situation, Central Europe is not disposed to accept the Christ impulse as something self-evident; it had to be imposed artificially. And so we have an intervention of the current of the Grail radiating in the direction of Europe—a Grail current that is not limited therefore to the folk element. This Grail atmosphere was active in Goethe, in the depths of his subconscious. If you look for this Grail atmosphere you will find it everywhere. Goethe is not an isolated phenomenon in this respect and therefore he is linked with what preceded him in the West. He has nothing in common with Luther, German mysticism and its forerunners; this was in part a formative influence and helped to shape him as a man of culture. It is the Grail atmosphere which leads him to distinguish three stages in man's relation to religion: first the religion of the people; secondly, the religion of the philosophers portrayed in the second gallery, and finally the most intimate religion in the third gallery, the religion which touches the inmost depths of the soul and embraces the mysteries of death and resurrection. It is the Grail atmosphere which inspires him to exalt the religious impulse active in the sensible world and not to drag it down after the fashion of the Jesuits. And paradoxical as it may seem today the Grail atmosphere is found today in Russia. And the future role that the Russian soul will play in the sixth post-Atlantean epoch depends upon this unconquerable spirit of the Grail in the Russian people.

So much for the one side. Let us now consider the other side. Here we have those who regard the Christ impulse neither as an inspiration, as in the East, nor as a living force transmitted by tradition and the Scriptures, but as something rational. It is in this form that it spread within the Lodges and their ramifications. (In the diagram I indicate this by the colour green.) Later it became politicized in the West and is the last offshoot of the Arthurian current. And just as the Christ impulse in the Russian people is continued in the Grail quest and irradiates all men of good will in the West, so the other current penetrates into all members of the People of the Church and takes on the particular colouring of Jesuitism. That the Jesuits are the sworn enemy of that which emanates from the Lodges is not important: anyone and anything can be the declared enemy of the outlook of the Lodges. It is a historical fact that the Jesuits have not only infiltrated the Lodges, that high-ranking Jesuits are in contact with the high dignitaries of the Lodges, but that both, though active in different peoples, have a common root, though the one gave birth to the Papacy, the other to freedom, rationalism, to the Aufklärung. I have now given you a kind of picture of what may be called the working of the evolution of the Consciousness Soul. I described to you earlier the three stages of evolution proceeding from the East to the West which are based on the ethnic element. That they assumed the form of Aufklärung in the West, as a consequence of interaction, is due to the fact that every individual is involved in the evolution of the Consciousness Soul.

Then we have a third current of evolution in which the whole of mankind is involved and by virtue of which mankind ceases to develop physically at an ever earlier age. Today mankind as a whole is at the ‘age’ of the Sentient Soul, i.e. between the ages of twenty-eight and twenty-one. This applies to the whole of mankind.

In describing the first current, the ethnic current when folk or tribal religions arise within Christianity such as the religion of the Christ, the religion of the Church and the religion of the Lodges, we are speaking from the standpoint of the evolution of peoples (or nations) which I usually characterize as follows: the Italian peoples = the Sentient Soul; the French peoples = the Intellectual or Mind Soul, etcetera. We have described how the Consciousness Soul develops in every individual in the course of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. In this consciousness we have the element that streams into religion. But from that moment begins the interaction with the other current, with the evolution of the Sentient Soul (common to all men) which follows a parallel course and is a far more unconscious process than that of the evolution of the Consciousness Soul.

If you study how a man like Goethe—though the impulses are often subconscious—nevertheless determines consciously his religious orientation, you see the working of the Consciousness Soul. But at the same time another element is at work in modern mankind, an element which finds powerful expression in the instinctive life, in unconscious impulses, and is intimately associated with the evolution of the Sentient Soul. And this is the trend towards socialism which is now in its early stages and will end in the way I have described. The initial impetus, it is true, is always given by the Consciousness Soul (as I have already indicated); but the development of socialism is the mission of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch and will end in the fourth millennium when it will have fulfilled its purpose. This is owing to the fact that mankind collectively is at the age of the Sentient Soul, corresponding to the age of twenty-eight to twenty-one in man. Socialism is not a matter of party politics, although there are many parties within the community, within the body social. Socialism is not a party political question as such, but a movement which of necessity will gradually develop in the course of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. And when this epoch has run its course an instinctive feeling for socialism will be found in all men in the civilized world.

In addition to the interaction of these currents in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch there is also at work that which lies in the depths of the subconscious, the desire to find the right social structure for all mankind from now until the fourth millennium. From a deeper point of view it is not in the least surprising that socialism stirs up all sorts of ideas which could be highly dangerous when one recalls that they derive their impulses from the depths of the subconscious, that everything is in a state of ferment and that the time is still far distant before it will come into its own. But there are rumblings beneath the surface—not, it is true, in the souls of men at present, i.e. in the astral body—but in the etheric body, in the temperaments of men. And people invent theories to explain these stirrings in the temperaments of men particularly. If these theories do not explain, as does spiritual science, what lies behind maya, then these theories, whether they are the theories of Bakunin,⁷ Marx, Lassalle and the like, are simply masks, disguises, veils that conceal reality. One only becomes aware of the realities when one probes deeply into human evolution as we have attempted to do in this survey. All that is now taking place (i.e. in 1918) in the external world are simply tempestuous preparations for what after all is now smouldering, one may say, not in the souls of men, but in their temperaments. You are all socialists and you are often unaware how deeply impregnated you are with socialism because it is latent in your temperament, in the subconscious. But it is only when we are aware of this fact that we overcome that nebulous and ridiculous search for self-knowledge which looks inward and finds only a caput mortuum, a spiritual void, an abstraction. Man is a complex being and in order to understand him we must understand the whole world. It is important to bear this in mind.

Consider from this point of view the evolution of mankind in the course of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. First, the People of the Christ in the East with its fundamental impulse: Christ is Spirit. It is in the nature of this people to give to the world through Russianism, as if with elemental force and from historical necessity, that for which the West of Europe could only have prepared the ground. To the Russian people as such has been assigned the mission to develop the essential reality of the Grail as a religious system up to the time of the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, so that it may then become a cultural ferment for the whole world. Small wonder then that when this impulse encounters the other impulses the latter assume strange forms.

What are these other impulses? Christ is King and Christ is Teacher. One can scarcely call ‘Christ is Teacher’ an impulse, for, as I have already said, the Russian soul does not really understand what it means, does not understand that one can teach Christianity and not experience it in one's soul. But as for the conception ‘Christ is King’—it is inseparable from the Russian people. And we now see the clash between two things which never had the slightest affinity, the clash between the impulse ‘Christ is Spirit’ and Czarism, an oriental caricature of the principle which seeks to establish temporal sovereignty in the domain of religion. ‘Christ is King and the Czar is his representative’—here we have the association of the Western element manifested in Czarism with something that is completely alien to Czarism, something that, through the agency of the Russian folk soul, permeates the sentient life of the Russian people.

A characteristic feature of external physical reality is that those things which inwardly are often least related to each other must rub off on each other externally. Czarism and Russianism have always been strangers to each other, they never had anything in common. Those who understand the Russian nature, especially its piety, must have found the attitude to the elimination of Czarism as something self-evident when the time was ripe. But remember that this conception ‘Christ is Spirit’ touches the deepest springs of our being, that it is related to the highest expression of the Consciousness Soul and that, whilst socialism is smouldering beneath the surface, it collides with that which dwells in the Sentient Soul. Small wonder then that the expansion of socialism in Eastern Europe assumes forms that are totally incomprehensible: a chaotic interplay of the culture of the Consciousness Soul and the culture of the Sentient Soul.

Much that occurs in the external world becomes clear and comprehensible if we bear in mind these inner relationships. And it is vital for mankind today and for its future evolution that it does not neglect, out of complacency or indolence, its essential task, namely, to comprehend the situation in which we now find ourselves. People have not understood this situation, nor have they attempted to understand it. Hence the chaos, the terrible catastrophe which has overtaken Europe and America. We shall not find a way out of the present catastrophic situation until men begin to see themselves as they are and to see themselves objectively in the context of present evolution and the present epoch. We cannot afford to ignore this.

That is why it is so important to me that people should realize that the Anthroposophical Movement, as I envisage it, must be associated with an awareness of the great evolutionary impulses of mankind, with the immediate demands of our time. It is tragic that the present age shows little inclination to understand and to consider the Anthroposophical Weltanschauung precisely from this point of view.

I should now like to round off what I said last week in connection with The Philosophy of Freedom by a consideration of more general points of view. From what I have said you will realize that the rise of socialism^T2 at the present time is a movement deeply rooted in human nature, a movement that is steadily gaining ground. For those endowed with insight the present negative reactions to the advance of socialism are simply appalling. Despite its ominous rumblings, despite its noisy claims to recognition, it is evident that socialism, this international movement which is spreading throughout the world, prefigures the future and that what we are now seeing, the creation of all kinds of national states and petty national states at the present time, is a retrograde step that inhibits the evolution of mankind. The dictum ‘to every nation its national state’ is a terrible obstacle to an understanding of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Where this will end nobody knows; but this is what people are saying! At the same time this outlook is entirely permeated with the backward forces of the Arthurian impulse, with the desire for external organization. The antithesis to this is the Grail quest which is intimately related to Goethean principles and aims at individualism, at autonomy in the domain of ethics and science; it concerns itself especially with the individual and his development and not with groups which have lost their significance today and which must be eliminated by means of international socialism because that is the trend of evolution.

And for this reason one must also say: in Goetheanism with its individualism—you will recall that I emphasized the individualism in Goethe's Weltanschauung in my early Goethe publications and also in my book Goethe's Weltanschauung when I showed that this individualism is a natural consequence of Goetheanism—in this individualism, which can only culminate in a philosophy of feedom, there lies that which of necessity must lead to the development of socialism. And so we can recognize the existence of two poles—individualism and socialism—towards which mankind tends in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. In order to develop a right understanding of these things we must ascertain what principle must be added to socialism if socialism is to follow the true course of human evolution. The socialists of today have no idea what, of necessity, socialism entails and must entail—the true socialism that will be achieved to some extent only in the fourth millennium if it develops in the right way. It is especially important that this socialism be developed in conjunction with a true feeling for the being of the whole man, for man as a tripartite being of body, soul and spirit. The religious impulses of the particular ethnic groups will contribute in their different ways to an understanding of this tripartite division of man. The East and the Russian people to the understanding of the spirit; the West to an understanding of the body; Central Europe to an understanding of the soul. But all these impulses are interwoven of course. They must not be systematized or classified, but within this tripartite division the real principle, the true impulse of socialism must first be developed.

The real impulse of socialism consists in the realization of fraternity in the widest sense of the term in the external structure of society. True fraternity of course has nothing to do with equality. Take the case of fraternity within the same family: where one child is seven years old and his brother is newly born there can be no question of equality. One must first understand what is meant by fraternity. On the physical plane the present state-systems must be replaced throughout the whole world by institutions or organizations which are imbued with fraternity. On the other hand, everything that is connected with the Church and religion must be independent of external organization, state organization and organizations akin to the state; it must become the province of the soul and be developed in a completely free community. The evolution of socialism must be accompanied by complete freedom of thought in matters of religion.

Present-day socialism in the form of social democracy has declared that ‘religion is a private matter’. But it observes this dictum about as much as a mad bull observes fraternity when it attacks someone. Socialism has not the slightest understanding of religious tolerance, for in its present form socialism itself is a religion; it is pursued in a sectarian spirit and displays extreme intolerance. Socialism therefore must be accompanied by a real flowering of the religious life which is founded upon the free communion of souls on earth.

Just think for a moment how radically the course of evolution has thereby been impeded. There must be opposition to evolution at first, so that one can then work for a period of time towards the furtherance of evolution; this, in its turn, will be followed by a reaction and so on. I spoke of this in discussing the general principles of history. I pointed out that nothing is permanent, everything that exists is doomed to perish. Think of the opposition to this parallel development of freedom of thought in the sphere of religion and in the sphere of external social life, a development that can only be realized within the state community! If socialism is to prevail the religious life must be completely independent of the state organization; it must inspire the hearts and souls of men who are living together in a community, completely independent of any kind of organization. What mistakes have been made in this domain! ‘Christ is the Spirit’—and alongside this, the terrible ecclesiastical organization of Czarism! ‘Christ is the King’—complete identification of Czarism and religious convictions!^T3 And not only has the Roman Catholic Church established itself as a political power, it has also managed, especially in the course of recent centuries, indirectly through Jesuitism, to infiltrate the other domains, to participate in their organization and to imbue them with the spirit of Catholicism. Or take the case of Lutheranism. How has it developed? It is true that Luther was the product of that impulse^T4 of which I have already spoken here on another occasion—he is a typical Janus who turns one face to the fourth post-Atlantean epoch and the other to the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, and in this respect he is animated by an impulse in conformity with our time. Luther appears on the stage of history—but what happens then? What Luther wanted to realize in the religious sphere is associated with the interests of the petty German princes and their Courts. A prince is appointed bishop, head of synod, etcetera. Thus we see harnessed together two realms which should be completely independent of each other. Or to take another example—the stateprinciple which permeates the external organization of the state is impregnated with the Catholic religious principle, as was the case in Austria, the Austria which is now disintegrating; and to this, fundamentally, Austria's downfall must be attributed. Under other leadership, especially that of Goetheanism, it would have been possible to restore order in Austria.

On the other hand, amongst the English-speaking population in the West the princes and the aristocracy have everywhere infiltrated the Lodges. It is a characteristic feature of the West that one cannot understand the state organization unless we bear in mind that it is permeated with the spirit of the Lodges—and France and Italy are thoroughly infected by it—any more than one can understand Central Europe unless one realizes that it is impregnated with Jesuitism. We must bear in mind therefore that grievous mistakes have been made in respect of freedom of thought and social equality that must necessarily accompany socialism.

The development of socialism must be accompanied by another element in the sphere of the spiritual life—the emancipation of all aspiration towards the spirit, which must be independent of the state organization, and the removal of all fetters from knowledge and everything connected with knowledge. Those ‘barracks’ of learning called universities, which are scattered throughout the world are the greatest impediment to the evolution of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Just as there must be freedom in the sphere of religion, so, too, in the sphere of knowledge all must be free and equal, everyone must be able to play his part in the further development of mankind. If the socialist movement is to develop along healthy lines, privileges, patents and monopolies must be abolished in every branch of knowledge. Since, at the present time, we are still very far from understanding what I really mean, there is no need for me to show you in any way how knowledge could be freed from its fetters, and how every man could thus be induced to participate in evolution. For that will depend upon the development of far reaching impulses in the sphere of education, and in the whole relationship between man and man. Ultimately all monopolies, privileges and patents which are related to the possession of intellectual knowledge will disappear; man will have no other choice but to affirm in every way and in all domains the spiritual life that dwells in him and to express it with all the vigour at his command. At a time when there is a growing tendency for the universities, for example, to claim exclusive rights in medicine, when in widely different spheres people wish to organize everything with maximum efficiency, at such a time there is no need to discuss spiritual equality in detail, for at present this is far beyond our reach and most people can safely wait until their next incarnation before they arrive at a complete understanding of what is to be said on the subject of this third point. But the first steps of course can be undertaken at all times.

Since we are involved in the modern world and the modern epoch, all we can do is to be aware of the impulses at work, especially socialism and what must accompany it—freedom of religious thought, equality in the sphere of knowledge. Knowledge must become equal for all, in the sense of the proverb which says that in death all men are equal, death is the great leveller; for knowledge, even as death, opens the door to the super-sensible world. One can no more acquire exclusive rights for death than one can acquire exclusive rights for knowledge. To do so nevertheless is to produce not men who are vehicles of knowledge, but those who have become the so-called vehicles of knowledge at the present time. These words in no way refer to the individual; they refer to what is important for our time, namely, the social configuration of our time. Our epoch especially which saw the gradual decline of the bourgeoisie has shown how all rebellion against that which runs counter to evolution is increasingly ineffective today. The Papacy firmly sets its face against evolution. When, in the seventies, the ‘Old Catholics’⁸ rejected the dogma of papal infallibility, this consummation of papal absolutism, life was made difficult for them (and is still made difficult for them today); meanwhile they could render valuable service by their resistance to papal absolutism.

If you recall what I have said you will find that, at the present time, there exists on the physical plane something which in reality belongs to the soul life and to the spiritual life of men whilst on the external physical plane fraternity seeks to manifest itself. That which does belong directly to the physical plane, i.e. freedom, has manifested itself on the physical plane and has organized it. Of course in so far as men live on the physical plane and freedom dwells in the souls of men, it belongs to the physical plane; but where people are subject to organizations on this plane there is no place for freedom. On the physical plane, for example, religions must be able to be exclusively communities of souls and must be free from external organization. Schools must be organized on a different basis, and above all, they must not become state-controlled schools. Everything must be determined by freedom of thought, by individual needs. Because in the world of reality things interpenetrate it may happen that today socialism, for example, often denies its fundamental principle. It shows itself to be tyrannical, avid for power and would dearly like to take everything into its own hands. Inwardly, it is, in reality, the adversary of the unlawful prince of this world who appears when one organizes externally the Christ impulse or the spiritual in accordance with state principles, when, in the external organization, fraternity alone does not suffice.

When we discuss vital and essential questions of the contemporary world we touch upon matters which mankind finds unpalatable today. But it is important that these problems should be thoroughly understood. It is only by gaining a clear understanding of these problems that we can hope to escape from the present calamitous situation. I must repeat again and again that we shall only be able to contribute to the true evolution of mankind by acquiring knowledge of the impulses which can be found in the way I have described.

When I discussed here a week ago my book The Philosophy of Freedom I tried to show how, as a result of my literary activities, I was rejected everywhere. You will recall no doubt that in many fields my work met with opposition. Even when I attempted in the recent fateful years to draw attention to Goetheanism I was ignored on all sides. Goetheanism does not mean that one writes or says something on the subject of Goethe, but it is also Goetheanism to search for an answer to the question: What is the best solution, anywhere in the world at the present time, when all nations are at each others throats? But here too I felt myself ignored on all sides. I do not say this out of pessimism, for I know the workings of Karma much too well for that. Nor do I say it because I would not do the same again tomorrow if the opportunity presented itself. I must say it because it is necessary to apprise mankind of many things, because only by insight into reality can mankind, for its part, find the impulses appropriate to the present age.

Must it then be that men will never succeed in finding the path to the ‘light’ by awakening that which dwells in their hearts and their inmost souls? Must they then come to the ‘light’ through external constraint? Must everything collapse about their ears before they begin to think? Should not this question be raised afresh every day? I do not ask that the individual shall do this or that—for I know only too well that little can be done at the present moment. But what is necessary is to have insight and understanding, to avoid false judgement and the passive attitude which refuses to see things as they really are.

A remark which I read in the Frankfurter zeitung this morning made a strange impression upon me. It was an observation of a man whom I knew intimately some eighteen or twenty years ago and with whom I have discussed many different questions. I read in the Frankfurter zeitung an article by this man; it was from the pen of Paul Ernst,⁹ poet and dramatist, whose plays have been performed on the public stage. I knew him intimately at that time. It was a short article on moral courage and in it I read a sentence—it is indeed very encouraging to find such a sentence today, but one must constantly raise the question: must we suffer the present catastrophe for such a sentence to be possible? A cultured German, a man who is German to the core writes: in Germany people have always maintained that we are universally hated. I should like to know (he writes) who on earth really hated the creative genius of Germany? And then he recalls that in recent years it is the Germans themselves who have shown the greatest antipathy to the creative genius of Germany.

And in particular they harbour a real inner antipathy to Goetheanism. I do not say this in order to criticize in any way, and certainly not—you would hardly expect this of me—to say something that would in any way imply making concessions to Wilsonism. It is tragic when things happen only under constraint, whereas they could be truly beneficial if they were the fruit of freedom. For today that which must be the object of freedom must stem from free thoughts. I must constantly reiterate that I say these things not in order to evoke pessimism, but in order to appeal to your hearts and souls so that you, in your turn, may appeal to the hearts and souls of others and so awaken insight—and therefore understanding! What has suffered most in recent years is judgement that has allowed itself to be clouded by submission to authority. How happy people are, the world over, that they have a schoolmaster for their idol (i.e. Wilson), that they no longer need to think for themselves! This must not be accounted a virtue or defect of any particular nation. It is something that is now widespread and must be resisted: we must endeavour to support our judgements with sound reasoning. One does not form judgements by getting up an one's hind legs and pronouncing judgements indiscriminately. Those who are often the leading personalities today—and I have already spoken of this in a different context—are the worst possible choice, the products of the particular circumstances of our time. We must be aware of this. It is not a question of clinging to slogans such as democracy, socialism etcetera; what is important is to perceive the realities behind the words.

That is what one feels, what comes to mind at the present time when one sees so clearly that the few who are shaken out of their complacency awaken only under constraint, when compelled to do so by constraint. That is why one says to oneself: what matters is judgement, insight and understanding. In order to gain insight into the evolution of nations we must bear in mind these deeper relationships. We must have the courage to say to ourselves: all our knowledge of ethnology and everything that is concerned with the social organization is valueless unless one is aware of these things. We must summon up the courage to say this and it is of this courage that I wanted to speak. I have spoken long enough, but I felt that it was important to show the direct connection between the deeper European impulses and those of the present time.

As you are aware one can never know from one day to the next how long one is permitted to remain in a particular place—one may be compulsorily directed at the behest of the authorities. Whatever happens—one never knows how long we may be together—in any case, though I may have to leave very soon, the present lecture will not be the last. I will see to it that I can speak to you again here in Dornach.

• T1. Goethestudien und Goetheanische Denkmethoden (in Bibl. Nr. 36).
• 1. Arianism and Athanasianism. The doctrinal conflict between Arius (250–336) and Athanasius (d. 373) arose over the question of the divine Sonship of Christ. Arius maintained the Son was not God, that He was not of divine substance and not eternal, but a creation ‘begotten of God’. Athanasius defended the Godhead of the Son. Christ was truly the Son and truly God. Arianism remained the official religion of the eastern halfof the Roman Empire down to 378. The Athanasian doctrine, accepted by the Western Church at first, rejected by the Council of Antioch 341, but later supported by emporers Constantine II and Constans. The victory of the Nicene doctrine assured by the support of the Church Fathers, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa. The second Council of Constantinople 381 confirmed the Nicene faith and in 383 Arianism was proscribed. See Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion.
• 2. Ulfilas, the Teutons and the Heliand. The migrations of the early Christian era led to tribal groupings. The Teutonic tribes (Germanic peoples or Germans) were composed of N. Teutons, E. Teutons (Goths, Vandals and Burgundians) and W. Teutons (Franks, Saxons, Langobards).
  
  The ‘Migration of the Peoples’ (375–568) led to attacks upon the frontiers of the Roman Empire.
  
  Ulfilas or Wulfila (310–383). A Visigothic bishop; translated part of the Bible into Gothic. (Codex Argenteus at Uppsala.) Major influence in conversion of Visigoths to Arian christianity.
  
  The Langobard Kingdom in Italy lasted from 568–772.
  
  Clovis d. 511 captured Gaul for the Arian Visigoths. Was baptized 496, established a Frankish national church and so won support for Roman Catholicism.
  
  Charles the Great overthrew the Langobards, Frisians and Saxons and united Germany under a single ruler. He was crowned in St. Peters 800 by Pope Leo III. The alliance of the Papacy and the Carolingians ensured the victory of Catholic Christianity.
  
  Other influences in the diffusion of Christianity were the monasteries, poetic works such as the Muspilli (830), the Heliand (circa 830) in which Christ is portrayed as King and warrior, his disciples as vassals. The purpose of the poem was frankly didactic. (This complicated period of history should be studied in some standard work.)
• 3. Aufklärung or Enlightenment. A rationalist movement originating in England and associated with the names of Locke, Hobbes, Hume and Newton; in France with Voltaire and the Encyclopedists; in Germany with Lessing, Wolff, Nicolai and Kant. ‘Sapere aude’ said Kant—dare to be wise, have the courage to use your reason. See Kant, Was ist Aufklärung?
• 4. Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648) was called the ‘father of deism’. The five propositions in De Veritate 1624 were tenets of ‘natural religion’. He wished to show that Christianity and its doctrines were reasonable.
• 5. John Locke (1632–1704). In philosophy an empiricist; forerunner of the Enlightenment. See An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690.
  
  Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). Philosopher: mathematicalmechanical conception of nature. Universe and man envisaged as complex machines. Politically, he looked to enlightened despotism; cf. Leviathan, 1651.
• 6. A. van Harnack (1851–1930). Protestant theologian and exegete; leading patristic scholar of the nineteenth century. Chief of the liberal Ritschl school of theology. Followed scientific-historical method, emphasis on ‘source study’. History of Dogma, 7 vols.; What is Christianity?
• 7. M. A. Bakunin (1814–76). Russian revolutionary and anarchist. Co-founder of the first International.
• T2. See Soziale und antisoziale Triebe im Menschen, [Social and Anti-Social Forces in the Human Being] Bern, 12th December, 1918 (in Bibl. Nr. 186).
• T3. Note—the stenogram is unclear.
• T4. See 17th and 18th September, 1917, Das Karma des Materialismus (in Bibl. Nr. 176).
• 8. The Old Catholics. Party of reform in the R. C. Church who rejected the doctrine of papal infallibility and of Immaculate Conception. Movement founded by Döllinger in Munich 1871.
• 9. Paul Ernst (1866–1933). Neo-classic poet, novelist and dramatist. Strove to unite classical form and modern thought; cf. Der Weg zur Form, 1906. Wrote books connected with the war and its aftermath, Der Zusammenbruch des deutschen Idealismus, 1920.

[ 1 ] There is much talk nowadays about the fruitful development of natural science in the nineteenth century. I believe that one can rightfully speak of significant natural-scientific experiences that one has had, and of a transformation of our practical life by these experiences. But with respect to the basic mental pictures by which the modern view of nature seeks to understand the world of experience, these I consider to be unhealthy and, to an energetic thinking, inadequate. I have already expressed myself on this subject on page 201 ff. of this book. Quite recently a well-known scientist of the present day, the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, has expressed the same view.⁷⁷ He says: “When asked how he thinks the world to be ‘inwardly’ constituted, every scientifically-thinking person, from the mathematician to the practical physician, will summarize his view in the direction that the things are composed of moving ‘atoms,’ and that these atoms, and the forces working between them, are the ultimate realities of which the individual phenomena consist. In hundreds of repetitions one can hear and read this statement, to the effect that no other understanding of the physical world can be found except by tracing it back to a ‘mechanics of atoms;’ matter and motion seem to be the ultimate concepts to which the manifoldness of the natural phenomena must be related. One can call this view scientific materialism.” On page 201 ff. of this book I have said that the basic views of modern physics are untenable. Ostwald (on page six of his lecture) says the same thing in the following words: “that this mechanistic world view does not fulfill the purpose for which it was developed; that it comes into contradiction with undoubted and universally known and recognized truths.” The agreement between Ostwald's expositions and my own goes still further. I say on page 214 of this book: “The sense-perceptible world picture is the sum total of metamorphosing perceptual contents without an underlying matter.” Ostwald says (p. 12 ff.): “But when we reflect upon the fact that everything we know about a particular substance is a knowledge of its characteristics, we then see that it is not very far from pure nonsense to assert that a particular substance is indeed present but no longer has any of its characteristics. In fact, this purely formal assumption serves only to unite the general facts of chemical processes, especially the stoichiometric laws of mass, with the arbitrary concept of a matter that in itself is unchanged.” And on page 199 of this book appears the statement: “It is these considerations that compelled me to reject as impossible any theory of nature that in a principle way goes beyond the realm of the perceived world, and to seek the sole object of natural science exclusively within the sense world.” I find the same thing expressed in Ostwald's lecture on page 25 and 22: “What do we experience then of the physical world? Obviously only that which our sense instruments allow to come to us from it.” “The task of science is to bring realities, demonstrable and measurable magnitudes, into a definite relationship to each other, in such a way that when certain realities are given the others can be deduced; and this task cannot be accomplished by basing things on some hypothetical picture or other, but only by demonstrating the reciprocal relationships of dependency between measurable magnitudes.” If one disregards the fact that Ostwald is speaking in the sense of a natural scientist of the present day and therefore sees in the sense world nothing other than demonstrable and measurable magnitudes, then his view corresponds entirely with mine, in the way I have expressed it, for example, in the statement p. 234): “Thinking consideration must encompass what is perceptible ... and must seek the interrelationships within this area.”

[ 2 ] In my discussion of Goethe's colour theory, I have carried on the same battle against the basic mental pictures of present-day natural science as Professor Ostwald does in his lecture “The Overcoming of Scientific Materialism.” What I have put in the place of these basic mental pictures does not, to be sure, agree with what Ostwald has set up. For, as I will show later on, he takes his start from the same superficial presuppositions as do his opponents, the adherents of scientific materialism. I have also shown that the basic mental pictures of the modern view of nature are the cause of the unhealthy judgments that were, and continue to be, passed on Goethe's colour theory.

[ 3 ] I would now like to deal somewhat more exactly with the modern view of nature. I will seek to know, from the goal that this modern view of nature sets itself, whether this view is a healthy one or not.

[ 4 ] It is not without justification that one has seen in the following words of Descartes the basic formula by which the modern view of nature judges the world of perceptions: “When I examine corporeal things more closely, I find that very little is contained in them that I can understand clearly and definitely, except: magnitude, or extension in length, depth, and breadth; shape, that results from the limits of this extension; location, that the variously shaped bodies have relative to each other; and motion, or change in this location; to which one may add substance, duration, and number. As for other things—such as light, colors, sounds, odors, sensations of taste, warmth, cold and the other qualities that the sense of touch experiences (smoothness, roughness)—they arise within my spirit in such an obscure and confused way that I do not know whether they are true or false, i.e., whether the ideas that I grasp of these objects are in fact the ideas of some real things or other, or whether they represent only chimerical entities that cannot exist.” The adherents of the modern view of nature have become so habituated to thinking along the lines of this statement of Descartes that they find every other way of thinking to be scarcely worthy of their attention. They say: What is perceived as light is caused by a process of motion that can be expressed in a mathematical formula. When a colour arises in the phenomenal world, they trace it back to an oscillating motion and calculate the number of oscillations in a specified time. They believe that the entire sense world will be explained when they have succeeded in tracing all perceptions back to relationships that can be expressed in such mathematical formulas. A mind that could give such an explanation would, according to the view of these natural scientists, have attained the utmost that is possible for man with respect to knowledge of natural phenomena. Du Bois-Reymond, a representative of these learned men, says of such a mind: for it, “the hairs of our heads would be numbered, and not a sparrow would fall to earth without its knowledge.” (Limits to Knowing Nature)⁷⁸ To make the world into a mathematical problem is the ideal of the modern view of nature.

[ 5 ] Since, without the presence of forces, the parts of their assumed matter would never come into motion, modern scholars of nature also include force among the elements by which they explain the world; and Du Bois-Reymond says: “Knowing nature is a tracing back of changes within the corporeal world to the motion of atoms that is caused by the atoms central forces that are independent of time; or, in other words, knowing nature is a breaking down of nature processes into the mechanics of atoms.” Through the introduction of the concept of force, mathematics passes over into mechanics.

Today's philosophers stand so much under the influence of nature scholars that they have lost all courage to think for themselves. They accept without reservation what nature scholars set up. One of the most respected German philosophers, W. Wundt, says in his Logic: “With reference to ... and in the employment of the basic proposition—that because of the qualitative changelessness of matter, all natural processes are, in the last analysis, motion—one regards the goal of physics to be its complete transference into ... applied mechanics.”

[ 6 ] Du Bois-Reymond finds that: “It is a psychological fact of experience that, where such a breaking down (of natural processes into a mechanics of the atoms) succeeds, our need for causality feels itself satisfied for the time being.” That may be a fact of experience for Du Bois-Reymond. But it must be stated that there are other human beings as well who absolutely do not feel themselves satisfied by a banal explanation of the corporeal world such as Du Bois-Reymond has in mind.

[ 7 ] Goethe belongs to these other human beings. Someone whose need for causality is satisfied when he has succeeded in tracing the processes of nature back to the mechanics of atoms lacks the organ by which to understand Goethe.

2.

[ 8 ] Magnitude, shape, location, motion, force, etc., are perceptions in exactly the same sense as light, colors, sounds, odors, sensations of taste, warmth, cold, etc. Someone who isolates the magnitude of a thing from its other characteristics and looks at it by itself no longer has to do with a real thing, but only with an abstraction of the intellect. It is the most nonsensical thing imaginable to ascribe a different degree of reality to an abstraction drawn from sense perception than to a thing of sense perception itself. Spatial and temporal relationships have no advantage over other sense perceptions save their greater simplicity and surveyability. It is upon this simplicity and surveyability that the certainty of the mathematical sciences rests. When the modern view of nature traces all the processes of the corporeal world back to something that can be expressed mathematically and mechanically, it does so because the mathematical and the mechanical are easy and comfortable for our thinking to deal with. And human thinking does have an inclination toward being comfortable. One can see that precisely in the above-mentioned lecture of Ostwald. This nature scholar wants to set energy in the place of matter and force. Note what he says: “What is the determining factor needed for one of our (sense) instruments to become active? No matter how we look at this, we find no common element except that the sense instruments react to differences in energy between themselves and their environment. In a world whose temperature were everywhere the same as our body's, we would in no way be able to experience any warmth, just as we have no sensation at all of the constant atmospheric pressure under which we live; only when we establish spaces with different pressures, do we arrive at any knowledge of this pressure.” (p. 25f. of his lecture) And furthermore (p. 29): “Imagine that you were struck by a stick! What would you feel then, the stick or its energy? There can be only one answer: its energy. For a stick is the most harmless thing in the world as long as it is not swung. But we can also hit against a motionless stick! Quite right; but as we have already emphasized, what we feel are differences in states of energy against our sense apparatus, and it therefore makes no difference whether the stick strikes us or we hit against the stick. But if we both have the same velocity and are moving in the same direction, then the stick no longer exists for our sensation, because it cannot come into contact with us and effect an exchange of energy.” These statements prove that Ostwald isolates energy from the realm of the world of perceptions, i.e., abstracts it from everything that is not energy. He traces everything perceptible back to one single characteristic of the perceptible, to the manifestation of energy—to an abstract concept, therefore. Ostwald's entanglement in the natural-scientific habits of the present day is clearly recognizable. If asked, he could also not offer anything more in justification of his procedure than that it is a psychological fact of experience, that his need for causality is satisfied when he has broken down the processes of nature into manifestations of energy. Essentially it makes no difference whether Du Bois Reymond breaks down the processes of nature into a mechanics of atoms or Ostwald breaks them down into manifestations of energy. Both spring from human thinking's inclination toward being comfortable.

[ 9 ] Ostwald says at the end of his lecture (p. 34): “Is energy, as necessary and useful as it might be for understanding nature, also sufficient for this purpose (of explaining the corporeal world, namely)? Or are there phenomena which cannot be completely described by the laws of energy we know so far? ... I believe that I cannot meet the responsibility I have assumed toward you today through my presentation, better than by emphasizing that the answer to this question is no. As immense as the advantages are that the energistic world view has over the mechanistic or materialistic one, still several points can already be indicated today, it seems to me, that are not covered by the known main principles of energistics and that therefore point to the existence of principles that transcend them. Energistics will continue side by side with these new principles. But in the future it will not, as we must still regard it today, be the most comprehensive principle for mastering natural phenomena, but presumably will appear as a particular case of still more general conditions, of whose form, to be sure, we hardly have an inkling today.”

3.

[ 10 ] If our nature scholars also read the books of people outside of their guild, Professor Ostwald would not have been able to make a statement like this. For in 1891, in the previously mentioned introduction to the Goethean colour theory, I have already expressed how we in fact do have an inkling and more than an inkling of such “forms,” and that the task of natural science in the future lies in the developing of Goethe's basic natural-scientific conceptions.

[ 11 ] Just as little as the processes of the corporeal world can be “broken down” into a mechanics of atoms, so just as little into states of energy. Nothing further is achieved by this approach than that attention is diverted from the content of the real sense world and directed toward an unreal abstraction, whose meager fund of characteristics, after all, is also only drawn from the same sense world. One cannot explain one group of characteristics of the sense world—light, colors, sounds, odors, tastes, warmth conditions, etc.—by “breaking them down” into another group of characteristics of the same sense world: magnitude, shape, location, number, energy, etc. The task of natural science cannot be to “break down” one kind of characteristics into another kind, but rather to seek out the relationships and connections between the perceptible characteristics of the sense world. We then discover certain determining factors according to which one sense perception necessarily follows from the other. We find that a more intimate relationship exists between certain phenomena than between others. We then no longer connect phenomena in the way they present themselves to chance observation. For we recognize that certain relationships of phenomena are necessary ones. Other relationships, in contrast to them, are coincidental. Goethe calls the necessary relationships between phenomena “archetypal phenomena.”

[ 12] The expression of an archetypal phenomenon consists in the statement about a particular sense perception that it necessarily calls forth another one. This expression is what one calls a law of nature. When one says, “through heating, a body is expanded,” one has given expression to a necessary relationship between phenomena of the sense world (warmth, expansion). One has recognized an archetypal phenomenon and expressed it in the form of a natural law. Archetypal phenomena are the forms Ostwald sought for the most general relationships of inorganic nature.

[ 13 ] The laws of mathematics and mechanics are also only expressions of archetypal phenomena like the laws that bring other sense-perceptible relationships into a formula. When G. Kirchhoff says that the task of mechanics is “to describe, completely and in the most simple way, the motions occurring in nature,” he is mistaken. Mechanics does not describe the motions occurring in nature merely in the simplest way and completely, but rather seeks certain necessary processes of motion that it lifts out of the sum total of the motions occurring in nature, and sets forth these necessary processes of motion as fundamental laws of mechanics. It must be regarded as the height of thoughtlessness that this statement of Kirchhoff is brought forward again and again as something quite significant, without any feeling for the fact that the statement of the simplest basic law of mechanics refutes it.

[ 14 ] The archetypal phenomenon represents a necessary relationship between the elements of the perceptual world. One could hardly say something wider of the mark than what H. Helmholtz presented in his address to the Weimar Goethe Conference on June 11, 1892: “It is a pity that Goethe, at that time, did not know the undulation theory of light that Huyghens had already presented; this would have provided him with a far more correct and surveyable ‘archetypal phenomenon’ than the scarcely adequate and very complicated process that he finally chose to this end in the colors of turbid mediums.”⁷⁹

[ 15 ] So, the unperceivable undulating motions that the adherents of the modern view of nature have thought up and added to the phenomena of light would supposedly have provided Goethe with a far more correct and surveyable “archetypal phenomenon” than the process—that is not at all complicated, but rather plays itself out before our very eyes—which consists in the fact that light, seen through a turbid medium, appears yellow and darkness, seen through an illuminated medium, appears blue. The “breaking down” of sense-perceptible processes into unperceivable mechanical motion has become so habitual to modern physicists that they seem to have no inkling at all of the fact that they are setting an abstraction in the place of reality. Statements like that of Helmholtz can be made only when all of Goethe's statements like the following have first been eliminated from the world: “The highest would be to grasp that everything factual is already theory. The blue of the heavens reveals to us the basic law of the science of colors. Only do not seek anything behind the phenomena; they are themselves the teaching.” Goethe remains within the phenomenal world; modern physicists gather up a few scraps from the phenomenal world and transfer them behind the phenomena, in order then to derive the phenomena of really perceptible experience from these hypothetical realities.

4.

[ 16 ] Individual younger physicists maintain that they do not attach to the concept of moving matter any significance transcending experience. One of these, Anton Lampa, Nights of the Seeker⁸⁰ who accomplishes the remarkable feat of being an adherent of mechanistic natural science and of Indian mysticism at the same time, states, in opposition to Ostwald's expositions, that the latter is “waging a battle with wind mills like the brave Don Quixote of yore. Where then is the giant of scientific (Ostwald means natural-scientific) materialism? There is no such thing. There was at one time a so-called natural-scientific materialism of Messieurs Büchner, Vogt, and Moleschott—in fact there still is—but this does not exist in natural science itself, and has also never been at home in natural science. Ostwald overlooked this fact, otherwise he would have taken the field merely against the mechanistic view, which because of this misunderstanding, he only does incidentally, but which, without this misunderstanding, he would probably not have done at all. Can one believe then that an investigation in nature following the paths opened by Kirchhoff can grasp the concept of matter in the sense that materialism has done so? That is impossible; that is a contradiction lying clearly open to view. The concept of matter, just like that of force, can only have a meaning precisely determined by the demand for a simplest possible description, i.e., expressed in the Kantian way; it can only have a merely empirical meaning. And if any natural scientist attaches to the word “matter” a meaning that goes beyond this, then he does so, not as a natural scientist, but rather as a materialistic philosopher.” (Die Zeit, Vienna, Nr. 61, Nov. 30, 1895).

[ 17 ] According to these words, Lampa must be characterized as typical of the normal natural scientist of the present day. He applies the mechanistic explanation of nature because it is comfortable to deal with. But he avoids thinking about the true character of this explanation of nature, because he fears getting tangled up in contradictions before which his thinking feels inadequate.

[ 18 ] How can someone who loves clear thinking attach any meaning to the concept of matter without going beyond the world of experience? Within the world of experience there are objects of certain magnitude and location; there are motion and forces; furthermore there are the phenomena of light, colour, warmth, electricity, life, etc. As to whether magnitude, warmth, colour, etc., are attached to some matter, experience says nothing. Matter is nowhere to be found within the world of experience. Whoever wants to think matter must think it up and add it to experience.

[ 19 ] This kind of a thinking up of matter and adding it to the phenomena of the world of experience is apparent in the physical and physiological reflections that have found a home in modern natural science under the influence of Kant and Johannes Müller. These reflections have led to the belief that the outer processes that allow sound to arise in the ear, light in the eye, warmth in the sense for warmth, etc., have nothing in common with the sensations of sound, of light, of warmth, etc. Rather, these outer processes, supposedly, are certain motions of matter. The researcher of nature then investigates what sort of outer processes of motion allow sound, light, colour, etc., to arise in the human soul. He comes to the conclusion that, outside of the human organism, red, yellow, or blue are nowhere to be found in all of world space, but rather that there is only a wave-like motion of a fine elastic matter, the ether, which, when it is sensed by the eye presents itself as red, yellow, or blue. The modern teacher about nature believes that if no sensitive eye were present, then there would also be no colour present, but rather only moving ether. The ether is supposedly what is objective, and the colour is merely something subjective, something created within the human body. The Leipzig professor Wundt, whom one sometimes hears acclaimed as one of the greatest philosophers of the present day, says therefore about matter that it is a substratum “which never becomes visible to us itself; but always only in its effects.” And he finds that “an explanation of phenomena that is free of contradictions will be achieved only” when one assumes such a substratum (Logic, Vol. 2, p. 445). The Cartesian delusion about definite and confused mental pictures has become physics' fundamental way of picturing things.

5.

[ 20 ] Someone whose ability to picture things has not been thoroughly ruined by Descartes, Locke, Kant, and modern physiology will never understand how one can regard light, colour, sound, warmth, etc., to be merely subjective states of the human organism and yet still assert that there is an objective world of processes outside of this organism. Someone who makes the human organism into the creator of the happenings of sound, warmth, colour, etc., must also make it the producer of extension, magnitude, location, motion, forces, etc. For, these mathematical and mechanistic qualities are, in reality, inseparably united with the rest of the content of the world of experience. The separating out of conditions of space, number, and motion, as well as manifestations of force, from the qualities of warmth, sound, colour, and the other sense qualities, is only a function of our abstractive thinking. The laws of mathematics and mechanics relate to abstract objects and processes that are drawn from the world of experience and that therefore can find an application only within the world of experience. But if the mathematical and mechanistic forms and relationships are also explained as merely subjective states, then nothing remains that could serve as content for the concept of objective things and events. And no phenomena can be derived from an empty concept.

[ 21 ] As long as modern scholars of nature and their train bearers, the modern philosophers, hold fast to the view that sense perceptions are only subjective states that are called forth by objective processes, a healthy thinking will always point out to them in reply that they are either playing with empty concepts, or are ascribing to what is objective a content that they are borrowing from that world of experience which they have declared to be subjective. In a number of books, I have demonstrated the absurdity of the assertion that our sense impressions are subjective.⁸¹

[ 22 ] Still, let us turn from the question as to whether or not a different form of reality is ascribed to the processes of motion and to the forces that bring them forth—from which recent physics derives all the phenomena of nature—than to sense perceptions. Let me now merely ask what the mathematical-mechanistic view of nature can accomplish. Anton Lampa maintains (Nights of the Seeker, p. 92): “Mathematical methods and mathematics are not identical, for the mathematical method is applicable without the use of mathematics. The experimental research on electricity by Faraday, who hardly knew how to square a binomial, offers us a classic proof of this fact in physics. Mathematics, in fact, is nothing more than a means of abbreviating logical operations and therefore of proceeding in very complicated cases where ordinary logical thinking would let us down. But at the same time it accomplishes far more still: through the fact that every formula implicitly expresses its processes of development, it builds a living bridge back to the elementary phenomena that served as the starting point for the investigation. A method, however, that cannot make use of mathematics—which is always the case when the magnitudes that apply in an investigation are not measurable—must therefore, in order to match the mathematical method, not only be strictly logical, but also must be particularly careful in the business of tracing things back to the basic phenomena, since, lacking mathematical supports, it can precisely here make a false step; but if a method does achieve this, it can quite rightly lay claim to the title “mathematical,” insofar as this is meant to express the degree of exactitude.”

[ 23 ] I would not concern myself with Anton Lampa at such length if he were not, in one respect, a particularly suitable example of a natural scientist of the present day. He satisfies his philosophical needs by Indian mysticism and therefore does not taint the mechanistic view of nature like others do with all kinds of supplementary philosophical conceptions. The theory of nature that he has in mind is, so to speak, the chemically pure view of nature of the present day. I find that Lampa left one main characteristic of mathematics completely out of consideration. Every mathematical formula does indeed build a “living bridge” back to the elementary phenomena that served as the starting point for the investigations. But those elementary phenomena are of the same kind as the non-elementary ones from which the bridge is built. The mathematician traces the characteristics of complicated numerical and spatial configurations, as well as their reciprocal relationships, back to the characteristics and relationships of the simplest numerical and spatial configurations. The mechanical engineer does the same thing in his field. He traces composite processes of motion and force-effects back to simple, easily distinguishable motions and force-effects. In doing so, he makes use of mathematical laws, to the extent that motion and manifestations of force are expressible through spatial configurations and numbers. In a mathematical formula that brings a mechanical law to expression, the individual parts no longer represent purely mathematical configurations, but rather forces and motion. The relationships in which these parts stand to one another are not determined by a purely mathematical lawfulness, but rather by characteristics of force and motion. As soon as one disregards this particular content of the mechanical formulae, one no longer has to do with a mechanical lawfulness, but solely with a mathematical one. Physics relates to mechanics in the same way that mechanics relates to pure mathematics. The task of the physicist is to trace complicated processes in the realm of colour, sound, and warmth phenomena, of electricity, of magnetism, etc., back to simple happenings within the same sphere. He has, for example, to trace complicated colour occurrences back to the simplest colour occurrences. In doing so, he has to make use of mathematical and mechanical lawfulness, to the extent that the colour processes occur in forms that can be determined spatially and numerically. What corresponds to the mathematical method in the realm of physics is not the tracing back of processes of colour, sound, etc., to phenomena of motion and to relationships of force within a colorless and soundless matter, but rather the seeking out of relationships within the phenomena of colour, sound, etc.

[ 24 ] Modern physics skips over the phenomena of sound, colour, etc., as such and considers only unchangeable attracting and repelling forces and motion in space. Under the influence of this way of picturing things, physics today has already become applied mathematics and mechanics, and the other fields of natural science are on the way to becoming the same thing.

[ 25 ] It is impossible to build a “living bridge” from the one fact—that a particular process of motion of colorless matter is occurring at this location in space—and the other fact—that the human being sees red at this spot. From motion only other motion can be derived. And from the fact that a motion acts upon a sense organ and through it upon the brain, it follows only—according to the mathematical and mechanical method—that the brain is stimulated by the outer world into certain processes of motion, but not that the brain perceives the concrete phenomena of sounds, colors, warmth, etc. Du Bois-Reymond also recognized this. You can read on page 35f. of his book Limits to Knowing Nature: “What conceivable connection can exist between certain motions of certain atoms in my brain on the one hand, and the immediate, undefinable, and undeniable fact for me, on the other hand, that I feel pain, feel pleasure, taste something sweet, smell the fragrance of a rose, hear organ music, see red ...” And, on page 34: “Motion can only produce motion.” Du Bois-Reymond is therefore of the opinion that one must designate this as a limit to our ability to know nature.

[ 26 ] The reason why the fact that I see red cannot be derived from a particular process of motion is, in my view, easy to indicate. The quality “red” and a particular process of motion are in reality an inseparable unity. The separation of the two occurrences can only be a conceptual one, carried out within the intellect. The process of motion that corresponds to the “red” has no reality in itself; it is an abstraction. To want to derive the fact that I see red from a process of motion, is just as absurd as deriving the real characteristics of rock salt, in its crystallized cube form, from the mathematical cube. It is not because a limit of knowledge hinders us, that we cannot derive any other sense qualities from motion, but rather because the demand that we do so makes no sense.

6.

[ 27 ] The endeavor to skip over colors, sounds, warmth phenomena, etc., as such, and to consider only the mechanical processes corresponding to them can spring only from the belief that a higher degree of comprehensibility is attributable to the simple laws of mathematics and mechanics than to the characteristics and reciprocal relationships of the rest of the configurations of the perceptual world. But this is absolutely not the case. The simplest characteristics and relationships of spatial and numerical configurations are stated to be immediately comprehensible because they can be easily and completely surveyed. All mathematical and mechanical understanding is a tracing back to simple factual situations that are obvious the moment one becomes aware of them. The principle that two magnitudes which are equal to a third must also be equal to each other, is known the moment one becomes aware of the factual situation that this principle expresses. In the same sense, the simple occurrences of the world of sound and colour and of the other sense perceptions are known the moment one looks upon them.

[ 28 ] Only because modern physicists are led astray by the preconception that a simple mathematical or mechanical fact is more comprehensible than an elementary occurrence of a sound or colour phenomenon as such, do they eliminate what is specifically sound or colour from the phenomena, and consider only the processes of motion that correspond to the sense perceptions. And since they cannot conceive of motion without something that moves, they take matter, that has been stripped of all sense-perceptible characteristics, to be the bearer of these movements. Whoever is not caught up in this preconception of the physicists must see that the processes of motion are states that are bound up with the sense-perceptible qualities. The content of the wave-like movements that correspond to the occurrence of sound are the qualities of sound themselves. The same holds true for all the other sense qualities. We know the content of the oscillating movements of the phenomenal world through immediate awareness of this content and not by thinking up some abstract matter and adding it to the phenomena.

7.

[ 29 ] I know that I am expressing something with these views that sounds completely impossible to physicists' ears of the present day. But I cannot take the standpoint of Wundt, who in his Logic (Vol. 2, Part 1) presents the thought-habits of modern natural scientists as binding logical norms. The thoughtlessness of which he is guilty there becomes particularly clear in the passage where he is discussing Ostwald's attempt to replace moving matter with energy in oscillating movement. Wundt presents the following: “From the existence of phenomena of interference there arises the necessity of presupposing some sort of oscillating movement. But since a movement is unthinkable without a substratum that moves, the unavoidable demand is therefore also made that one trace light phenomena back to a mechanical process. Ostwald, to be sure, has tried to get around this latter assumption by not tracing ‘radiant energy’ back to the vibrations of a material medium, but rather by defining it as energy existing in a state of oscillating movement. But precisely this double concept, which is composed of an observable component and of a purely conceptual one, seems to me to be striking proof that the concept of energy itself demands a division that leads back to elements of observation. A real movement can be defined only as the changing in location of a real substratum given in space. This real substratum can reveal itself to us merely through the force-effects that go forth from it, or through functions of force whose bearer we consider this substratum to be. But the demand that such merely conceptually established functions of force themselves move, seems to me something that cannot be fulfilled without thinking up some sort of substratum and adding it.”

[ 30 ] Ostwald's energy-concept stands much nearer to reality than the supposedly “real” substratum of Wundt. The phenomena of the perceptual world—light, warmth, electricity, magnetism, etc.—can be brought under the general concept of force-output, i.e., of energy. When light, warmth, etc., call forth a change in an object, an energy-output has thereby taken place. When one designates light, warmth, etc., as energy, one has disregarded what is specifically characteristic of the individual sense qualities, and is considering one general characteristic that they share in common.

[ 31 ] This characteristic does not, indeed, include everything that is present in the things of reality; but it is a real characteristic of these things. The concept of the characteristics, on the other hand, that physicists and their philosophical defenders suppose their hypothetically assumed matter to have, includes something nonsensical. These characteristics are borrowed from the sense world and yet are supposed to belong to a substratum that does not belong to the sense world.

[ 32 ] It is incomprehensible how Wundt can assert that the concept of “radiant energy,” because it contains an observable and a conceptual component, is therefore an impossible one. The philosopher Wundt does not understand, therefore, that every concept that relates to something in sense-perceptible reality, must necessarily contain an observable and a conceptual component. The concept “rock salt cube” has, after all, the observable component of the sense-perceptible rock salt and the other purely conceptual component that solid geometry establishes.

8.

[ 33 ] The development of natural science in the last few centuries has led to the destruction of any mental pictures by which this science could be a part of a world conception that satisfies higher human needs. This development has led to the fact that “modern” scientific heads call it absurd for anyone to speak as though concepts and ideas belong just as much to reality as the forces working in space and the matter filling space. Concepts and ideas, to such minds, are a product of the human brain and nothing more. The scholastics still knew how matters stand in this respect. But scholasticism is held in contempt by modern science. It is held in contempt but one does not know scholasticism. One especially does not know what is healthy and what is sick about it. What is healthy about it is a feeling for the fact that concepts and ideas are not only a chimera of the brain that the human mind thinks up in order to understand real things, but rather that they have something to do with the things themselves, more, in fact, than substance and force do. This healthy feeling that the scholastics had is our inheritance from the great world view perspectives of Plato and Aristotle. The sick aspect of scholasticism is the mixing up of this feeling with mental pictures that entered into the medieval development of Christianity. This development finds the source of everything spiritual, including therefore also concepts and ideas, to lie in an unknowable, because otherworldly, God. It needs to believe in something that is not of this world. A healthy human thinking, however, keeps to this world. It does not bother about any other. But at the same time, it spiritualizes this world. It sees in concepts and ideas realities of this world just as much as in the things and events perceptible through the senses. Greek philosophy is an outflow of this healthy thinking. Scholasticism still took up into itself an inkling of this healthy thinking. But it sought to reinterpret this inkling in accordance with the belief in the beyond that is considered Christian. It was not concepts and ideas that were supposed to be the deepest thing that man beholds within the processes of this world, but rather God, the beyond. Whoever has grasped the idea of something is not compelled by anything to seek yet some further “origin” of that something. He has attained that which satisfies the human need for knowledge. But what did the scholastics care about the human need for knowledge? They wanted to rescue what they regarded as the Christian picture of God. They wanted to find the origin of the world in that God in the beyond, although their seeking for the inner life of things provided them only with concepts and ideas.

9.

[ 34 ] In the course of centuries, the Christian picture took effect more than the dim feelings inherited from Greek antiquity. One lost the feeling for the reality of concepts and ideas. But one also lost therefore one's belief in the spirit itself. There began the worship of the purely material: the era of Newton began in natural science. Now it was no longer a question of the unity that underlies the manifoldness of the world. Now all unity was denied. Unity was degraded into a “human” mental picture. In nature, one saw only the multiplicity, the manifoldness. The general basic picture was what misled Newton to see in light not a primal unity, but rather something composite. In his Data for the History of Colour Theory,⁸² Goethe has presented a part of the development of natural scientific mental pictures. One can see from his presentation that recent natural science has arrived at unhealthy views in colour theory through the general mental picture that it uses in grasping nature. This science has lost its understanding for what light is within the series of nature's qualities. Therefore, it also does not know how, under certain conditions, light appears colored, how colour arises in the realm of light.

• 77. “The Overcoming of Scientific Materialism” (“Die Überwindung des Wissenschaftlichen Materialismus”); a lecture held in the third general session of the meeting of the Society of German Scientists and Physicians in Lübeck on September 20, 1895. (Leipzig 1895)
• 78. Über die Grenzen des Naturerkennens, p. 13.
• 79. H.L.F. v. Helmholtz, Goethe's Pre-inklings of Future Scientific Ideas (Goethes Vorahnungen kommender wissenschaftlicher Ideen usw.), p. 34. (Berlin 1892)
• 80. Nächte des Suchenden (Braunschweig 1893)
• 81. The Science of Knowing: Outline of an Epistemology Implicit in the Goethean World View with Particular Reference to Schiller (1886) (Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Schiller); Truth and Science, Prelude to a Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1892) (Wahrheit und Wissenschaft, Vorspiel einer ‘Philosophie der Freiheit’); Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, Basic Features of a Modern World View (1894) (Philosophie der Freiheit, Grundzüge einer modernen Weltanschauung).
• 82. Materialien zur Geschichte der Farbenlehre

Rudolf Steiner was born in 1861 and died in 1925. In his autobiography, The Course of My Life,¹ he makes quite clear that the problems dealt with in The Philosophy of Freedom played a leading part in his life.

His childhood was spent in the Austrian countryside, where his father was a stationmaster. At the age of eight Steiner was already aware of things and beings that are not seen as well as those that are. Writing about his experiences at this age, he said, “... the reality of the spiritual world was as certain to me as that of the physical. I felt the need, however, for a sort of justification for this assumption.”

Recognizing the boy's ability, his father sent him to the Realschule at Wiener Neustadt, and later to the Technical University in Vienna. Here Steiner had to support himself, by means of scholarships and tutoring. Studying and mastering many more subjects than were in his curriculum, he always came back to the problem of knowledge itself. He was very much aware: that in the experience of oneself as an ego, one is in the world of the spirit. Although he took part in all the social activities going on around him—in the arts, the sciences, even in politics—he wrote that “much more vital at that time was the need to find an answer to the question: How far is it possible to prove that in human thinking real spirit is the agent?”

He made a deep study of philosophy, particularly the writings of Kant, but nowhere did he find a way of thinking that could be carried as far as a perception of the spiritual world. Thus Steiner was led to develop a theory of knowledge out of his own striving after truth, one which took its start from a direct experience of the spiritual nature of thinking.

As a student, Steiner's scientific ability was acknowledged when he was asked to edit Goethe's writings on nature. In Goethe he recognized one who had been able to perceive the spiritual in nature, even though he had not carried this as far as a direct perception of the spirit. Steiner was able to bring a new understanding to Goethe's scientific work through this insight into his perception of nature. Since no existing philosophical theory could take this kind of vision into account, and since Goethe had never stated explicitly what his philosophy of life was, Steiner filled this need by publishing, in 1886, an introductory book called The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception. His introductions to the several volumes and sections of Goethe's scientific writings (1883–97) have been collected into the book Goethe the Scientist. These are valuable contributions to the philosophy of science.

During this time his thoughts about his own philosophy were gradually coming to maturity. In the year 1888 he met Eduard von Hartmann, with whom he had already had a long correspondence. He describes the chilling effect on him of the way this philosopher of pessimism denied that thinking could ever reach reality, but must forever deal with illusions. Steiner was already clear in his mind how such obstacles were to be overcome. He did not stop at the problem of knowledge, but carried his ideas from this realm into the field of ethics, to help him deal with the problem of human freedom. He wanted to show that morality could be given a sure foundation without basing it upon imposed rules of conduct.

Meanwhile his work of editing had taken him away from his beloved Vienna to Weimar. Here Steiner wrestled with the task of presenting his ideas to the world. His observations of the spiritual had all the exactness of a science, and yet his experience of the reality of ideas was in some ways akin to the mystic's experience. Mysticism presents the intensity of immediate knowledge with conviction, but deals only with subjective impressions; it fails to deal with the reality outside man. Science, on the other hand, consists of ideas about the world, even if the ideas are mainly materialistic. By starting from the spiritual nature of thinking, Steiner was able to form ideas that bear upon the spiritual world in the same way that the ideas of natural science bear upon the physical. Thus he could describe his philosophy as the result of “introspective observation following the methods of Natural Science.” He first presented an outline of his ideas in his doctoral dissertation, Truth and Knowledge, which bore the sub-title “Prelude to a ‘Philosophy of Freedom’.”

In 1894 The Philosophy of Freedom was published, and the content which had formed the centre of his life's striving was placed before the world. Steiner was deeply disappointed at the lack of understanding it received. Hartmann's reaction was typical; instead of accepting the discovery that thinking can lead to the reality of the spirit in the world, he continued to think that “spirit” was merely a concept existing in the human mind, and freedom an illusion based on ignorance. Such was fundamentally the view of the age to which Steiner introduced his philosophy. But however it seemed to others, Steiner had in fact established a firm foundation for knowledge of the spirit, and now he felt able to pursue his researches in this field without restraint. The Philosophy of Freedom summed up the ideas he had formed to deal with the riddles of existence that had so far dominated his life. “The further way,” he wrote, “could now be nothing else but a struggle to find the right form of ideas to express the spiritual world itself.”

While still at Weimar, Steiner wrote two more books, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom (1895), inspired by a visit to the aged philosopher, and Goethe's Conception of the World (1897), which completed his work in this field. He then moved to Berlin to take over the editing of a literary magazine; here he wrote Riddles of Philosophy (1901) and Mysticism and Modern Thought (1901). He also embarked on an ever-increasing activity of lecturing. But his real task lay in deepening his knowledge of the spiritual world until he could reach the point of publishing the results of this research.

The rest of his life was devoted to building up a complete science of the spirit, to which he gave the name Anthroposophy. Foremost amongst his discoveries was his direct experience of the reality of the Christ, which soon took a central place in his whole teaching. The many books and lectures which he published set forth the magnificent scope of his vision.² From 1911 he turned also to the arts—drama, painting, architecture, eurythmy—showing the creative forming powers that can be drawn from spiritual vision. As a response to the disaster of the 1914-18 war, he showed how the social sphere could be given new life through an insight into the nature of man, his initiative bearing practical fruit in the fields of education, agriculture, therapy and medicine. After a few more years of intense activity, now as the leader of a world-wide movement, he died, leaving behind him an achievement that must allow his recognition as the first Initiate of the age of science.³ Anthroposophy is itself a science, firmly based on the results of observation, and open to investigation by anyone who is prepared to follow the path of development he pioneered—a path that takes its start from the struggle for inner freedom set forth in this book.

The Philosophy of Freedom can be seen as the crowning achievement of nineteenth-century philosophy. It answers all the problems of knowledge and morality that philosophers had raised, argued over, and eventually left unsolved with the conclusion that “we can never know”. Yet this great achievement received no recognition, and only when Steiner had acquired a large following of people thankful for all that he had given them of his spiritual revelation, did there arise the desire to read also his earlier work, upon which he always insisted his whole research was firmly based. Perhaps if Steiner had spent the rest of his life expounding his philosophy, he would today be recognized throughout the world as a major philosopher; yet his achievement in going forward himself to develop the science of the spirit is much the greater, and this will surely be recognized in time. Indeed, philosophy has got itself a bad name, perhaps from its too-frequent negative results, and it might even be better to consider the Philosophy of Freedom not just as a chapter of philosophy, but as the key to a whole way of life.

Considered just as a piece of philosophy, it might in any case be thought out of date, having only historical interest. For instance, a modern scientist may well believe that any philosopher who spoke up against atomism has been proved wrong by the success of atomic physics. But this would be to misunderstand the nature of philosophy. Steiner deals in turn with each possible point of view, illustrating each one with an example from the literature, and then showing the fallacies or shortcomings that have to be overcome. Atomism is justified only so long as it is taken as an aid to the intellect in dealing with the forces of nature; it is wrong if it postulates qualities of a kind that belong to perceived phenomena, but attributes them to a realm that by definition can never be perceived. This mistaken view of the atom may have been abandoned by science, but it still persists in many quarters. Similarly, many of the old philosophical points of view, dating back to Kant, survive among scientists who are very advanced in the experimental or theoretical fields, so that Steiner's treatment of the problem of knowledge is still relevant. Confusion concerning the nature of perception is widespread, because of the reluctance to consider the central part played by thinking. Thinking is all too often dismissed as “subjective” and hence unreliable, without any realization that it is thinking itself that has made this decision. The belief that science can deal only with the “objective” world has led to the position where many scientists are quite unable to say whether the real world is the familiar world of their surroundings, as experienced through the senses and pictured in the imagination, or the theoretical world of spinning particles, imperceptible forces and statistical probabilities that is inferred from their experimental results.⁴ Here Steiner's path of knowledge can give a firmer basis for natural science than it has ever had before, as well as providing a sure foundation for the development of spiritual science. Although there are many people who find all that they need in contemplating the wonders of the spiritual world, the Philosophy of Freedom does not exist mainly to provide a philosophical justification for their belief; its main value lies in the sound basis it can give to those who cannot bring themselves to accept anything that is not clearly scientific—a basis for knowledge, for self-knowledge, for moral action, for life itself. It does not “tell us what to do”, but it opens a way to the spirit for all those for whom the scientific path to truth, rather than the mystical, is the only possibility.

Today we hear about the “free world” and the “value of the individual”, and yet the current scientific view of man seems to lend little support to these concepts, but seems rather to lead to a kind of morality in which every type of behavior is excused on the plea that “I cannot help being what I am!” If we would really value the individual, and support our feeling of freedom with knowledge, we must find a point of view which will lead the ego to help itself become what it wants to be—a free being. This cannot mean that we must abandon the scientific path; only that the scope of science must be widened to take into account the ego that experiences itself as spirit, which it does in the act of thinking. Thus the Philosophy of Freedom takes its start by examining the process of thinking, and shows that there need be no fear of unknown causes in unknown worlds forever beyond the reach of our knowledge, since limits to knowledge exist only in so far as we fail to awaken our thinking to the point where it becomes an organ of direct perception. Having established the possibility of knowing, the book goes on to show that we can also know the causes of our actions, and if our motive for acting comes from pure intuition, from thinking alone, without any promptings from the appearances and illusions of the sense-world, then we can indeed act in freedom, out of pure love for the deed.

Man ultimately has his fate in his own hands, though the path to this condition of freedom is a long and a hard one, in the course of which he must develop merciless knowledge of himself and selfless understanding of others. He must, through his own labors, give birth to what St. Paul called “the second Adam that was made a quickening spirit”. Indeed Steiner himself has referred to his philosophy of freedom as a Pauline theory of knowledge.

Notes on the translation:

This book was first translated into English by Professor and Mrs. R. F. Alfred Hoernle, in 1916, and was edited by Mr. Harry Collison, who wrote that he was fortunate to have been able to secure them as translators, “their thorough knowledge of philosophy and their complete command of the German and English languages enabling them to overcome the difficulty of finding adequate English equivalents for the terms of German Philosophy.”

Following the publication of the revised German edition in 1918, Professor Hoernle translated the new passages and other incidental changes that Dr. Steiner had made. For this 1922 edition the title was changed, at the author's request, to The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, with the added remark that “throughout the entire work ‘freedom’ should be taken to mean ‘spiritual activity’.” The reasons for this change and also for the present decision to change back to the original title are given below (see Freedom, below).

The translation was revised in 1939 by Dr. Hermann Poppelbaum, whose object was to “check certain words and phrases from the strictly Steiner point of view”. He wrote in his preface as follows:

The readers of the German original of this book will know that the author's argument is largely based upon a distinction between the different elements making up the act of Knowledge. English philosophical terms are rarely exact equivalents of German philosophical terms, and the translator's standing problem is to avoid, or at least to minimize, the ambiguities resulting therefrom. The aim of the present revision of the original translation has been to help the reader to understand the analysis of the act of Knowledge and to enable him to follow the subsequent chapters without being troubled by ambiguous terms.

In spite of Dr. Poppelbaum's removal of certain ambiguities, readers were still troubled by difficulties that did not derive from the original German. When I was asked by the publishers to prepare this new edition, it soon became clear to me that further alterations to words and phrases would not be sufficient to remove these difficulties. It may therefore be helpful to state briefly what my guiding principles have been in making this translation.

Steiner did not write his book as a thesis for students of philosophy, but in order to give a sound philosophical basis to the experience of oneself as a free spirit—an experience that is open to everybody. The book is written in such a way that the very reading of it is a help towards participating in this experience. For this reason all the terms used must convey a real meaning to the reader, and any explanations required must be in words that are self-evident. Indeed, Steiner states clearly that the terms he uses do not always have the precise meanings given in current scientific writings, but that his intention is to record the facts of everyday experience (see Chapter 2). I have tried throughout to convey the essential meaning of Steiner's original words, and to follow closely his train of thought, so that the English reader may have as nearly as possible the same experience that a German reader has from the original text. Thus the structure of the original has been preserved, sentence by sentence. It might be argued that a “free” translation, making full use of English idiom and style, would be far more appropriate for an English reader; this could cut out the wordy repetitions and lengthy phrases typical of German philosophical writing and make for a more readable text. But it would also have to be written out of the English philosophical tradition, and would require a complete reconstruction of Steiner's arguments from the point of view of an Englishman's philosophy. This might be an excellent thing to do, but would constitute a new work, not a translation. Even if it were attempted, there would still be the need for a close translation making Steiner's path of knowledge available in detail for the English reader.

The method I have followed was to make a fresh translation of each passage and then compare it with the existing one, choosing the better version of the two. Where there was no advantage in making a change, I have left the earlier version, so that many passages appear unaltered from the previous edition. This is therefore a thoroughly revised, rather than an entirely new, translation. It is my hope that it will prove straightforward reading for anyone prepared to follow the author along the path of experience he has described. The following notes explaining certain of the terms used are intended for those who want to compare this edition with the German original, or who are making a special study of philosophy.

FREEDOM is not an exact equivalent of the German word Freiheit, although among its wide spectrum of meanings there are some that do correspond. In certain circumstances, however, the differences are important. Steiner himself drew attention to this, for instance, in a lecture he gave at Oxford in 1922, where he said with reference to this book,

“Therefore today we need above all a view of the world based on Freiheit—one can use this word in German, but here in England one must put it differently because the word ‘freedom’ has a different meaning—one must say a view of the world based on spiritual activity, on action, on thinking and feeling that arise from the individual human spirit.” (Translated from the German.)

Steiner also drew attention to the different endings of the words; Freiheit could be rendered literally as “freehood” if such a word existed. The German ending -heit implied an inner condition or degree, while -tum, corresponding to our “-dom”, implied something granted or imposed from outside. This is only partly true in English, as a consideration of the words “manhood”, “knighthood”, “serfdom”, “earldom”, and “wisdom” will show. In any case, meanings change with time, and current usage rather than etymology is the best guide.

When describing any kind of creative activity we speak of a “freedom of style” or “freedom of expression” in a way that indicates an inner conquest of outer restraints. This inner conquest is the theme of the book, and it is in this sense that I believe the title The Philosophy of Freedom would be understood today. When Steiner questioned the aptness of this title, he expressed the view that English people believed that they already possessed freedom, and that they needed to be shocked out of their complacency and made to realize that the freedom he meant had to be attained by hard work. While this may still be true today, the alternative he suggested is now less likely to achieve this shock than is the original. I have not found that the title “The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity” gives the newcomer any indication that the goal of the book is the attainment of inner freedom. Today it is just as likely to suggest a justification of religious practices. Throughout the book it has proved quite impossible to translate Freiheit as “spiritual activity” wherever it occurs. The word appears in the titles of the parts of the book and of some of the chapters; the book opens with the question of freedom or necessity, and the final sentence (see Consequences of Monism) is “He is free.” Undoubtedly “freedom” is the proper English word to express the main theme of the book, and should also appear in the book's title. Times have changed, and what may well have been good reasons for changing the title in 1922 are not necessarily still valid. After much thought, and taking everything into account, I have decided that the content of the book is better represented today by the title The Philosophy of Freedom. Moreover, with this title the book may be instantly identified with Die Philosophie der Freiheit, and I have already remarked that this edition is intended as a close translation of the German, rather than a new book specially written for the English.

SPIRIT, SOUL and MIND are not precise equivalents in English of the German Geist and Seele. Perhaps because we use the concept of mind to include all our experiences through thinking, the concepts of spirit and soul have practically dropped out of everyday use, whereas in German there is no distinct equivalent for “mind” and the concepts “spirit” (Geist) and “soul” (Seele) are consequently broader in scope. Any work describing Steiner's point of view in terms of English philosophy would have to deal with the mind as a central theme,⁵ but here our task is to introduce readers to Steiner's concepts of spirit and soul. For Steiner, the spirit is experienced directly in the act of intuitive thinking. The human spirit is that part of us that thinks, but the spiritual world is not limited to the personal field of the individual human being; it opens out to embrace the eternal truths of existence. The English word “spirit” gives the sense of something more universal, less personal, than “mind”, and since Steiner's philosophical path leads to an experience of the reality of the spiritual world, I have kept the word wherever possible, using “mind” or “mental” in a few places where it seemed more appropriate. The “spiritual activity” here meant is thus more than mental activity, although it starts at a level we would call mental; it leads the human being, aware of himself as a spirit, into the ultimate experience of truth.

The soul, too, is directly experienced; it is not a vague metaphysical entity, but is that region in us where we experience our likes and dislikes, our feelings of pleasure and pain. It contains those characteristics of thought and feeling that make us individual, different from each other. In many common phrases we use the word “mind” where German has the word Seele, but since Steiner recognizes a distinction between soul and spirit, it is important to keep these different words. Even in modern English usage something of this difference remains, and it is not too late to hope that Steiner's exact observations in this realm may help to prevent the terms “soul” and “spirit” becoming mere synonyms. Therefore I have kept these words wherever the distinction was important, though in a few places an alternative rendering seemed to fit better; for instance, the “introspective observation” quoted in the motto on the title-page could have been rendered literally as “observation of the soul”—this observation involves a critical examination of our habits of thought and feeling, not studied from outside in the manner of a psychological survey of human behavior, but from inside where each person meets himself face to face.

The whole book can be considered as a study of the mind, but using an exactness of observation and clarity of thinking never before achieved. Nevertheless, the stream of materialism still flows so strongly that there is a real danger that the mind, and indeed the whole realm of the soul and the spirit, will be dismissed as a metaphysical construction. Only by adopting a philosophy such as is developed in this book will it be possible to retain an experience of soul and of spirit which will be strong enough to stand up to the overwhelming desire to accept nothing as real unless it is supported by science. For in this philosophy Steiner opens the door to a science of the spirit every bit as exact and precise as our current science of nature would be.

CONCEPT and PERCEPT are the direct equivalents of Begriff and Wahrnehmung. The concept is something grasped by thinking, an element of the world of ideas. Steiner describes what it is at the beginning of Chapter 4 (see Chapter 4).

In describing the percept (see Chapter 4), Steiner mentions the ambiguity of current speech. The German word Wahrnehmung, like the English “perception”, can mean either the process of perceiving or the object perceived as an element of observation. Steiner uses the word in the latter sense, and the word “percept”, though not perhaps in common use, does avoid the ambiguity. The word does not refer to an actual concrete object that is being observed, for this would only be recognized as such after the appropriate concept had been attached to it, but to the content of observation devoid of any conceptual element. This includes not only sensations of color, sound, pressure, warmth, taste, smell, and so on, but feelings of pleasure and pain and even thoughts, once the thinking is done. Modern science has come to the conclusion that one cannot deal with a sensation devoid of any conceptual element, and uses the term “perception” to include the whole response to a stimulus, in other words, to mean the result of perceiving. But even if one cannot communicate the nature of an experience of pure percept to another person, one must still be able to deal with it as an essential part of the analysis of the process of knowledge. Using the word “percept” for this element of the analysis, we are free to keep the word “perception” for the process of perceiving.

IDEA and MENTAL PICTURE, as used here, correspond to the German words Idee and Vorstellung respectively. Normally these would both be rendered as “idea”, and this practice led to an ambiguity that obscured a distinction central to Steiner's argument. This was the main cause of Dr. Poppelbaum's concern, and his solution was to render Vorstellung as “representation” and Idee as “Idea” with a capital “I”. Though this usage may have philosophical justification, it has been my experience in group studies of this book over many years that it has never been fully accepted in practice; “representation” remains a specialist term with a sense rather different from its usual meaning in English, and it certainly does not have the same obvious meaning for the English reader that Vorstellung has for the German.

In explaining his use of the word “representation”, Dr. Poppelbaum wrote in his preface as follows:

The mental picture which the thinker forms to represent the concept in an individual way is here called a “representation” ...

Since “mental picture” is here used to explain the term “representation”, it seems simpler to use “mental picture” throughout. It fits Steiner's treatment very well, since it conveys to the reader both the sense of something conceptual, in that it is mental, and the sense of something perceptual, in that it is a picture. In fact, Steiner gives two definitions of the mental picture, one as a “percept in my self” (see Chapter 4) and another as an “individualized concept” (see Chapter 6), and it is this intermediate position between percept and concept that gives the mental picture its importance in the process of knowledge.

Another advantage of the term “mental picture” is that the verb “to picture” corresponds well with the German vorstellen, implying a mental creation of a scene rather than a physical representation with pencil, paints or camera, which would be “to depict”. Of course the visual term “picture” must be understood to cover also the content of other senses, for instance, a remembered tune or a recollection of tranquillity, but this broadening of meaning through analogy is inherent in English usage.

Although mental pictures are commonly regarded as a special class of ideas, here the term “idea” is used only for the German Idee, without ambiguity. Ideas are not individualized, but are “fuller, more saturated, more comprehensive concepts” (see Chapter 4). In the later part of the book, when discussing the nature of a conscious motive, Steiner uses the word to include all concepts in the most general way, individualized or not, which comes very close to the English use of the word “idea”.

IMAGINATION means the faculty and process of creating mental pictures. The word is the same as the German Imagination, but I have also used it for the German Phantasie, because the word “fantasy” suggests something altogether too far from reality, whereas “imagination” can mean something not only the product of our own consciousness, but also a step towards the realization of something new. Thus the title given to Chapter 12, Moral Imagination (for Moralische Phantasie), seemed to me to be correct, and I have kept it. It describes the process of taking an abstract idea, or concept, and creating a vivid mental picture of how it can be applied in a particular circumstance, so that it may become the motive for a moral deed.

In later writings Steiner describes how this ordinary faculty of imagining, or making mental pictures, can be developed to the point where it becomes the faculty of actually perceiving the creative ideas behind the phenomena of nature. In these later writings “Imagination” becomes a special term to indicate this level of perception, but in this book the meaning remains near to the ordinary usage. However, the gateway to such higher levels of perception is opened through the path of experience here set forth.

INTUITION is again the same as the German word, and means the faculty and process of grasping concepts, in particular the immediate apprehension of a thought without reasoning. This is the normal English usage, though Steiner uses the term in an exact way, as follows (see Chapter 5):

In contrast to the content of the percept which is given to us from without, the content of thinking appears inwardly. The form in which this first makes its appearance we will call intuition. Intuition is for thinking what observation is for the percept.

Later in the book he gives another definition (see Chapter 9):

Intuition is the conscious experience—in pure spirit—of a purely spiritual content. Only through an intuition can the essence of thinking be grasped.

From this it is not difficult to see how again, in later writings, Steiner could describe a stage of perception still higher than that called “Imagination”, the stage of “Intuition” in which one immediately apprehends the reality of other spiritual beings. Although this book deals only with the spiritual content of pure thinking, intuition at this level is also a step towards a higher level of perceiving reality.

EXPERIENCE has two meanings, which correspond to different words in German. “Actual observation of facts or events” corresponds to the German Erlebnis and to the verb erleben, while “the knowledge resulting from this observation” corresponds to Erfahrung. Thus the accumulation of knowledge can be described as “past experience” or “total sum of experience”, if the single word is ambiguous (see, for instance, Chapter 6). When speaking of human behavior that is based on past experience, Steiner calls it praktische Erfahrung, which is rendered as “practical experience” (see Chapter 9).

On the other hand, having direct experience as an activity of observation is expressed by the verb erleben, which means literally “to live through”. Thus, in the latter part of the book, particularly in those passages which were added in 1918 (see Chapter 7 and Consequences of Monism), Steiner speaks repeatedly of the “thinking which can be experienced”. This experience is to be understood as every bit as real and concrete as the “actual observation of facts and events” described above.

MOTIVE and DRIVING FORCE are two elements in any act of will that have to be recognized as distinct (see Chapter 9). They correspond to the German words Motiv and Triebfeder, respectively.

“Motive”, as used by Steiner, corresponds exactly to the common English usage, meaning the reason that a person has for his action. It has to be a conscious motive, in the form of a concept or mental picture, or else we cannot speak of an act of will, let alone a moral deed. An “unconscious motive” is really a contradiction in terms, and should properly be described as a driving force—it implies that some other person has been able to grasp the concept which was the reason for the action, though the person acting was not himself aware of it; he acted as an automaton, or, as we properly say, “without motive”. Nevertheless, modern psychology has contrived to define the “motive” as something no different from the driving force, which precludes the recognition of a motive grasped out of pure intuition, and therefore of the essential difference between a moral deed where a man knows why he acts and an amoral one where his knowledge is a matter of indifference. By making the distinction between motive and driving force, Steiner has been able to characterize all possible levels of action from the purely instinctive to the completely free deed.

The literal meaning of Triebfeder is the mainspring that drives a piece of clockwork. In previous editions, this was rendered as “spring of action”. While this is legitimate philosophical usage, I found that it was often misunderstood by the ordinary reader, being taken to mean a spring like a fountain or river-source, as in the phrase “springs of life”. This immediately causes confusion with the origin or source of the action, which is the motive. Of course, at the higher levels of action there is no other driving force than the idea which stands as the motive, but in order to follow the development from lower levels one must distinguish the idea, which is the motive, from whatever it is in us that throws us into action whenever a suitable motive presents itself. “Mainspring” does not always fit well in the text, and after trying various words and phrases I have chosen “driving force” as best expressing the dynamic nature of this part of our constitution. The driving force differs from the motive in that we may well remain unconscious of it. But if we are not conscious of the driving force behind our actions, we cannot be acting in freedom, even though we are aware of our motives. Only if we make our own ideals the driving force of our will can we act in freedom, because then nothing apart from ourselves determines our action. Thus the final triumph of Steiner's path of development depends on making this clear distinction between motive and driving force. A view that treats all motives as driving forces will not be able to recognize the possibility of freedom, while a view that regards all driving forces as ideal elements will not see the need for overcoming our unconscious urges and habits if freedom is to be attained.

WILL and WANT are two distinct words in English where the German has only one verb wollen and its derivatives. Here the task of translating runs into a considerable difficulty, for in any discussion of free will it is important to be clear what willing is. The noun forms are fairly straightforward: ein Wollen means “an act of will”, das Wollen means “willing” in general, and der Wille means “the will”. But the English verb “to will” has a restricted range of meaning, and to use it all the time to render the German wollen can be quite misleading. An example is the quotation from Hamerling in the first chapter (see Chapter 1):

Der Mensch kann allerdings tun, was er will—aber er kann nicht wollen, was er will, weil sein Wille durch Motive bestimmt ist.

The previous edition rendered this:

Man can, it is true, do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills, because his will is determined by motives.

If this means anything at all in English, it means that man cannot direct his will as he chooses. The archaic sense of “willing” as “desiring” is kept in the phrase “what he wills”, in keeping with current usage, for instance, in the remark “Come when you will.” But the active sense of “willing” as contrasted with “doing” implies a metaphysical power of compulsion quite out of keeping with Steiner's whole method of treating the subject. This metaphysical attitude to the will is clearly expressed in a sentence such as “I willed him to go”, which implies something more than mere desire but less than overt action. It is less obvious when dealing with the genesis of one's own actions, but the tendency to attribute a metaphysical quality to the will is developed in Schopenhauer's philosophy, and this may well be a tendency inherent in the German language. Steiner has no such intention, and he leaves us in no doubt that his use of wollen implies a definite element of desire (see Chapter 13); indeed, the highest expression of man's will is when it becomes the faculty of spiritual desire or craving (geistige Begehrungsvermögen). Therefore, whenever the archaic sense of the verb “to will” is not appropriate, I have decided that it is better to render the German verb wollen with the English “want” and its variants, “wanting”, “to want to ...” and so on. This makes immediate good sense of many passages, and moreover if one would translate this back into German one would have to use the word wollen. Hamerling's sentence now becomes:

Man can certainly do as he wills, but he cannot want as he wills, because his wanting is determined by motives.

Although Steiner has to show that this view is mistaken, one can at least understand how it could come to be written. That it can be a genuine human experience is shown by the similar remark attributed to T. E. Lawrence, “I can do what I want, but I cannot want what I want.” In other words, “I can carry out any desires for action that I may have, but I cannot choose how these desires come to me.” Both Lawrence and Hamerling leave out of account just those cases where man can want as he wills, because he has freely chosen his own motive. Steiner's treatment of the will overcomes any necessity for metaphysical thinking; for instance, it now makes sense to say that to want without motive would make the will an “empty faculty” (see Chapter 1), because to want without wanting something would be meaningless.

I have dealt with this at some length because it has been my experience that the message of the entire book springs to life in a new and vivid way when it is realized that the original motive power of the will is in fact desire, and that desire can be transformed by knowledge into its most noble form, which is love.

It was the late Friedrich Geuter who showed me, together with many others, the importance of this book as a basis for the social as well as the intellectual life of today. My debt to the previous translators and editors will already be clear. I also owe much to the many friends who have taken part in joint studies of this book over the past thirty years and to those who have helped and advised me with suggestions for the translation, especially the late George Adams, Owen Barfield, and Rita Stebbing. Finally I must mention my colleague Ralph Brocklebank, who has shared much of the work, and, with Dorothy Osmond, prepared it for the Press.

Michael Wilson,
Clent, 1964.

• 1. Published in parts from 1923–5, and never completed. The titles given for Dr. Steiner's books are those of the English translations.
• 2. The list of titles is long, but the more important books include: Christianity as Mystical Fact (1902), Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment (1904), Theosophy, a description of the nature of man and his relation to the spiritual world (1904), and Occult Science—an Outline, an account of the evolution of man and the universe in terms of spiritual realities (1910).
• 3. For an account of the life and work of Rudolf Steiner, see A Scientist of The Invisible, by A. P. Shepherd (1954). The range of his contribution to modern thought can be seen in The Faithful Thinker, edited by A. C. Harwood (1961).
• 4. See the discussion by Owen Barfield in “Saving the Appearances”, (1957).
• 5. See “Rudolf Steiner's Concept of Mind” by Owen Barfield, in The Faithful Thinker, pp. 11–21.

As Anthroposophy spreads to fields where men usually seek their religious and, maybe, their moral impulses also, it encounters many persons who feel drawn towards such a spiritual stream. The modern spirit, which yesterday I allowed myself to call “the scientific spirit”, has, in many respects, shaken old, traditional beliefs, and although many people approach the anthroposophical line of research somewhat sceptically, there are, nevertheless, very many to-day whose souls have at least an inclination towards it. But it is correct to say that, in one respect, Anthroposophy encounters difficulties when it would enter the fields of the various sciences. That is the particular aim of this course, and it will be my task to present here, in the main, the general, more comprehensive principles and results of our research, while the other lecturers will deal with special scientific fields.

But precisely such an arrangement must arouse all the antipathies—I use this word more in a theoretical than in a moral sense—which Anthroposophy encounters from scientific quarters. I can only assure you that one who is engaged in anthroposophical research fully understands how difficult it is for a man involved in scientific work to-day to pass from the scientific attitude into Anthroposophy. Although Anthroposophy has certainly much to correct in present-day science, and, at the same time, when organic and spiritual fields are included, very much to add to the present material for research, it does not of itself come into conflict with current science. It accepts the justified results of science and deals with them in the way I have just described. The reverse, however, does not occur; at least, not yet—as one may well understand. Anthroposophy is rejected; its results are not regarded as satisfying the strictly scientific criteria that one feels entitled to impose to-day.

In a short lecture I shall not, of course, be able to go into all that Anthroposophy can itself bring forward to serve as an effective foundation for its results. But I should like in to-day's lecture to attempt to characterise the position of Anthroposophy among the sciences, and to do this in a way that will enable you to understand that Anthroposophy, in laying its foundations, is as conscientious as any science with its own precise technique. For this, however, I shall have to inflict upon you somewhat remote discussions—things which in ordinary life may be called difficult but which are necessary in order to provide a certain basis for what I shall have to offer in an easier and, perhaps, more agreeable form in the next few days.

*

Many people to-day imagine that Anthroposophy starts somehow from the nebulous attitude of soul to be found in present-day movements that are really “mystical” or “occult”. But to ascribe to Anthroposophy such a very questionable foundation is a complete mistake. Only one who knows Anthroposophy only superficially, or, indeed, through its opponents, can do that.

The fundamental attitude of consciousness in Anthroposophy has been drawn from that branch of present-day science which is least of all attacked in respect to its scientific character and importance. I admit, however, that many of our adherents—and opponents too—fail to perceive correctly what I have now to characterise by way of introduction.

The position of mathematics among the sciences has already been mentioned. Kant's pronouncement, that in every science there is only as much real knowledge—real cognition—as there is mathematics, is widely known. Now I have not to deal here with mathematics itself, with its value for the other sciences and in human life, but rather with the mental attitude a man assumes when “mathematicising”—if I may use this word; that is, when actively engaged in mathematical thinking. His attitude of soul is then, indeed, quite distinctive. Perhaps we may best characterise it by speaking, first, of that branch of mathematics which is usually called geometry and, at least in those parts of it known to the majority of people, has to do with space, is the science of space.

We are accustomed to speak of three-dimensional space; we picture it so constituted that its three dimensions, as they are called, stand at right angles to one another. What we have before our mind's eye as space is, in the first place, quite independent of man and the rest of the world. And because man as an individual being orientates himself in accordance with spatial laws, he pictures space before his eyes, independent of himself. He can certainly say that he is at this or that distance from any selected point; thus he inserts himself into space, as a part of space. And by regarding himself as an earthly being and assigning to himself certain distances from this and that star, he inserts himself into cosmic space. In a word, man regards space as something objective, independent of his own being. It was this that led Kant to call space an a priori intuition (eine Anschauung a priori), a mode of intuition given to man prior to experience. He cannot ask how he comes to have space; he must simply accept it as something given; he must fit himself into it when he has attained full earthly consciousness.

But it is not so in reality. We human beings do actually build space out of our own being. More correctly: we build our idea (Vorstellung), our mental perception (Anschauung), of space from out of ourselves. Only, we do not do this consciously, because we do it at a time of life when we do not think about our own activities in the way that would be necessary if we were to come to a clear understanding of the nature of space in relation to our own being. Indeed, we should not have our intuition of space (Raumanschauung) if, in our earthly life, we did not first experience its three dimensions.

We do experience them. We experience one of them when, from out of our inability to walk upright from birth, we raise ourselves into the vertical position. We learn this dimension from the way in which we build it. And what we learn to know is not just any dimension, set at right angles to the other two. We learn to know this quite definite dimension of space—standing vertically, so to speak, upon the earth's surface—from the fact that we human beings are not born upright, but, in accord with the formative laws of our earthly life, must first raise ourselves into the vertical position.

We learn to know the second dimension of space in an equally unconscious manner. You will be well aware that man—to mention what pertains more to his inner than to his outer being—in developing the capacities which serve him in later life, learns to orientate himself from left to right, from right to left. One need only recall that we have our organised speech centre in a certain area of the brain, the so-called Broca convolutions, while the other side of the brain has no such organisation. One also knows to-day—and from accepted science—that the development of the speech centre on the left side of the human body is connected with the mobility, spontaneous at first, of the right hand. One knows, too, that an orientation from right to left develops, that this activity excited on the left by an activity on the right, or vice-versa, is experienced by us within the laws that form us—just as we experience our achievement of the upright position. It is in this co-ordinated orientation of right with left, or left with right, that we human beings experience the second dimension of space.

The third dimension of space is never really experienced by us completely. We first focus this so-called “depth-dimension” as we try to gauge it. We are constantly doing this, though deep down in the unconscious. When we make the lines of vision of our eyes intersect at a point and focus both eyes on this point, we expand space, which would otherwise have only two dimensions for us, into the third dimension. And with every estimate of spatial depth we build the third dimension unconsciously out of our own being and the laws that form us.

Thus one might say: we place, in a certain way, the three dimensions of space outside us. And what we conceive as space, the space we use in geometry—Euclidean geometry, at first—is nothing more than an abstraction from what we learn to know concretely, with our own organism, as the three dimensions linked to our own subjective being. In this abstraction the quite definite configuration of space is ignored; the definite directions—vertical, horizontal and depth—have equal value. (This is always done when we make abstractions.) And then, when we have constructed, by abstracting from the three-dimensional space experienced within, the external space we speak of in geometry, we extend our consciousness through this external space alone.

We now come to the important thing. What we have won from out of ourselves is now applicable to external nature; in the first place, to inorganic, lifeless forms, though it can also be applied to the spatial and kinetic relations between organic structures. Briefly, this fact largely determines the character of our external world. Having accomplished this transition (this metamorphosis of space) from one domain, which really lives in us, to space commonly so called, we now stand with our spatial concepts and spatial experiences within the outer world and are able to determine our position and motion by spatial measurements. We actually go out of ourselves when we construct space in this way. We lift out of our body what we have first experienced within ourselves, placing ourselves at a point of view from which we look back upon ourselves as filled with space. In thus objectifying space we are able to study the external movements and relative positions of objects with the help of ideas formed geometrically within space; we feel thereby that we are on firm scientific ground when we enter into objects with what we have formed so earnestly from out of ourselves. In these circumstances we cannot doubt that we can live within things with what has come from us in this way. When we judge the distance, or the changing distance, between two bodies in the outer world according to spatial relations, we believe we are determining something completely objective and independent of ourselves. It does not occur to us that this could be otherwise.

Now, however, a fundamental and important problem confronts us here. What we have experienced subjectively in ourselves, transforming it, in the case of space; simply by making from it a kind of abstraction, now becomes something permeating—to a certain extent—the outer world and appearing to belong there.

Anyone who considers impartially what confronts us here must say: In his subjective experience of space in its three dimensions and in his subsequent objectifying of this experience, man stands within the external world with his own experiences. Our subjective experiences, being experiences of space, are at the same time objective. After all, it is not at all difficult, but trivial and elementary, to see that this is so. For when we move ourselves through space, we accomplish something subjective, but at the same time an objective event occurs in the world. To put it another way, whether we see an automaton or a man move forwards, subjectivity does not come into consideration. What occurs when a human being lives spatially is, for the external disposition of the world, quite objective.

If we now focus attention on the human being as, in this way, he objectifies something of his subjective experience, moving himself in an objective domain by himself traversing space—for, in objectifying space, he really bears this space within himself also—we are led to say: If man could do with other experiences what he does when “mathematicising”, he would be able to transfer, to some extent, the mathematical attitude of soul to other experiences. Suppose we could shape other experiences—our mode of perceiving the qualities of colours and tones, for example—in the same way that we create and shape our experience of space from out of ourselves! When we look at a cube of salt we bring the cubical shape with us from our geometry, knowing that its shape is identical with the spatial concept we have formed. If we could create from out of ourselves, let us say, the world of colour, and then confront external coloured objects, we should then, in the same way, project (as it were) into the outer world what we first build up in ourselves. We should thus place ourselves outside our body and even look back upon ourselves. This has been accomplished in mathematics, although it remains unnoticed. (I have given a geometrical illustration; I could give others also.) Neither mathematicians nor philosophers have paid attention to this peculiar relationship that I have just put before you.

In regard to sense perceptions, however, science has become really confused. In the nineteenth century physiologists joined hands here even with epistemologists and philosophers, and many people think with them as follows:

When we see red, for example, the external event is some vibration which spreads itself out until it reaches our organ of vision, and then our brain. The specific sensation of red is then released. Or the tone C sharp is evoked by an external wave motion in the same way.

This confusion has arisen because we can no longer distinguish what lives in us—within the confines of our body—from what is outside. All sense qualities (colours, tones, qualities of warmth) are said to be actually only subjective, while what is external, objective is said to be something quite different.

If now, in the same way in which we build the three dimensions of space from out of ourselves and find them again in things (and things in them)—if we could, in the same way, draw from ourselves what appears in us as sensation, and then set it before us, we should likewise find in things what we had first found in ourselves. Indeed, looking back upon ourselves we should find it again—just as we find in the outer world what we have experienced within us as space, and, looking back at ourselves, find that we are a part of this space. As we have the space world around us, so we should have around us a world of intermingling colours and tones. We should speak of an objectified world of flowing colours and singing tones, as we speak of the space around us.

Man can certainly attain to this and learn to know as his own construction the world which otherwise only confronts him as the world of effects (Wirkungen). As we, albeit unconsciously, construct for ourselves the form of space out of our human constitution and then, having transformed it, find it again in the world, so we can train ourselves, this time by conscious effort, to draw from out of ourselves the whole gamut of qualities contained in the world, so as to find them again in things, and then again in looking back upon ourselves.

What I am here describing is the ascent to so-called “imaginative perception” (imaginative Anschauung). Every human being to-day has the same space-world—unless he be abnormally mathematical or unmathematical. What can live in us in like manner, and in such a way that we experience with it the world as well, can be acquired by exercises. “Imaginative perception”—a technical term that does not denote “fancy” or “imagination” in the usual sense—can be added to the ordinary objective perception of objects (in which mathematics is our sure guide), and will open up a new region of the world.

I said yesterday that I would have to expound to you a special method of training and research. I must describe what one has to do in order to attain to such “imaginative perception”. In this we come to perceive as a whole the qualitative element in the world—just as, in a sense, we come to perceive space (which has, at first, no reality that engages our higher interests) as a whole. When we are able to confront the world in this way, we are already at the first stage of super-sensible perception. Sense-perception may be compared to that perception of things in which we do not distinguish between triangular and rectangular shapes, do not see geometrical structures in things, but simply stare at them and only take in their forms externally. But the perception that is developed in “Imagination” is as much involved with the inner essence of things as mathematical perception is with mathematical relationships.

If we approach mathematics in the right frame of mind, we come to see precisely in the mathematician's attitude when “mathematicising” the pattern for all that one requires for super-sensible perception. For mathematics is simply the first stage of super-sensible perception. The mathematical structures we “perceive” in space are super-sensible perceptions—though we, accustomed to “perceive” them, do not admit this. But one who knows the intrinsic nature of “mathematicising” knows that although the structure of space has no special interest at first for our eternal human nature, mathematical thinking has all the characteristics that one can ask of clairvoyance in the anthroposophical sense: freedom from nebulous mysticism and confused occultism, and the sole aim of attaining to the super-sensible worlds in an exact, scientific way.

Everyone can learn from a study of “mathematicising” what clairvoyance is on a higher level. The most astonishing thing is that mathematicians, who of all people ought to know what takes place when a man is “mathematicising”, do not show a deeper understanding of what must be presented as a higher, qualitative “mathematicising”—if I may use this word—in clairvoyant research. For “imaginative” cognition, the first stage in this research, is only a perception that penetrates other domains of existence than those accessible to “mathematicising”; and it has been gained by exercises. In respect to human perception, however, much is understood differently once one is able to survey, in genuine self-knowledge, the whole inner nature of “mathematicising”. For example, one arrives at the following:

On looking back to the way in which we came to know in early childhood the structure of space—by walking and standing upright, by orientating ourselves to right and left, by learning to gauge the depth-dimension, by connecting all this with the abstractly perceived space of geometry (which the child learns to know from inner experience)—we realise the serious and important consequences that follow if we cannot look back to the living origin, within our own being, of space—of our conception and perception of space—but simply accept it in its already transformed shape, independent of ourselves. For example, in recent times we have come to regard this space (with its three dimensions) in such a way that we have gone on to postulate a fourth and higher dimensions. These spaces and their geometries are widely known to-day. Anyone who has once learnt to know the living structure of space finds it most interesting to follow such an extension of mathematical operations (applicable to three dimensions) and to arrive at a fourth dimension that cannot be visualised, and so on. These operations are logical (in the mathematical sense) and quite correct. But anyone who knows the genesis of our idea of space, as I have described it, will detect something quite special here. We could take a pendulum, for example, and watch it oscillate. Watching it purely externally, we might expect it to swing further and further out. But it does not. When it has reached a definite point, it swings back again to the opposite side. If we know the relation between the forces involved, we know that the pendulum oscillates and cannot go further because of the relation between the forces.

In respect to space, one learns to know (to some extent) such an interplay of forces in the constitution of our soul. Then one views these things differently. From the logical, mathematical standpoint one can certainly keep step with those who extend their calculations from three-dimensional to four-dimensional space. But there one must make a halt. One cannot pass on into an indefinite fourth dimension; one must turn back at a certain point, and the fourth dimension becomes simply the third with a minus sign before it. One returns through the third dimension. The mistake made in these geometrics of more than three dimensions is in going on abstractly from the second to the third, from the third to the fourth dimension, and so on. But what we have here, if I may express it in a comparison, is not simple progression but oscillation. Our perception of space must return into itself. By taking the third dimension negatively, we really annihilate it. The fourth dimension is the negative third and annihilates the third, making space two-dimensional. And in like manner we can find a quite real progression, even though, logically, mathematically, algebraically, these things can be carried further and further. When we think in accordance with reality, we must turn back at the fourth, fifth and sixth dimensions to the space that is simply given us. With the sixth dimension, we have abolished space and reach the point.

What really confronts us in the culture of our age? This—that its thinking has become abstract; that one simply continues along the line of thought that takes us from planimetry, stereometry, etc., whereas reality leads us back at the fourth dimension into space. But, in turning back then, we are by no means where we were when we found our way into the third dimension by gauging distances. We return spiritually enriched. If we can think of the fourth dimension (the negative third) in such a way that we return with it into space, then space becomes filled with spirit, whereas three-dimensional space is filled with matter. And we find space filled with ever loftier spiritual configurations when we pass along the negative third and second and first dimension and reach the point where we no longer have spatial extension but stand within the unextended—the spiritual.

What I am now describing is not formal mathematics, but the reality of spiritual perception. It is a path in real conformity with the spiritual and in contrast to the path that has adapted itself so closely to material appearances alone. This latter path, even though keeping close to mathematics—which does not, of course, work in a material way in the soul—leads nevertheless to an imperceptible world in which one can, at most, only calculate and construct imaginary mathematical spaces.

You see here that, by penetrating the mathematical domain completely, we are led to apprehend the inner nature of the spiritual present everywhere in the world. To understand the mathematical attitude of soul is to be led directly to the concept of clairvoyant experience. And then we raise ourselves to “Imagination” and, in the way I have still to describe, come thereby to a comprehensive survey of the spiritual that can be perceived, not in the ordinary way, but in the way I have put it here—that is: by going out of the third and into the fourth dimension, and so on, and coming to the domain of no-dimensions—that is, the point. This leads us spiritually to the highest if we apprehend it, not as an empty point, but as a “filled” point.

I was once—it made a great impression on me—regarded with astonishment by an elderly author who had written much on spiritual matters. Seeing me for the first time, he asked: “How did you first become aware of this difference between perceiving the sense-world and perceiving the super-sensible world?” Because I always like to express myself about these things with radical honesty, I replied: “In the moment when I learnt to know the inner meaning of what is called modern or synthetic geometry.” You see, when one passes from analytic to synthetic geometry—which enables us, not only to approach forms externally, but to grasp them in their mutual relationships—one starts from forms, not from external co-ordinates. When we work with spatial coordinates, we do not apprehend forms but only the ends of the co-ordinates; we join up these ends and obtain the curves. In analytical geometry we do not lay hold of the forms, whereas in synthetic geometry we live within them. This induces us to study the attitude of soul which, developed further, leads us to press on into the super-sensible world.

*

I have now described the extent to which Anthroposophy can be sure that it proceeds from “mathematicising” as strictly as the natural science of to-day—though from another point of view. Natural science applies mathematics as it has been elaborated to date. But anyone who wishes to understand clairvoyant activity must seek it where it is present in its most primitive form: in the construction of mathematical forms. If he can then raise this activity to higher domains, he will be developing something related to elementary, primitive “mathematicising” as the more developed branches of mathematics are related to their axioms. The primary axioms of clairvoyance are living ones. And if we succeed in developing our “mathematicising” by exercises, we shall not only see spatial relationships in the world around us, but learn to know spiritual beings revealing themselves to us, even with spiritual inwardness—as we learn to know the “cubicity” of a salt crystal. We learn to know spiritual beings when, in this way, we raise to higher domains what we develop by “mathematicising”.

This is what I wished to say, at the outset, about the basis of what must receive recognition as “clairvoyant research” in Anthroposophy. We shall go on to see how, with such clairvoyant research, one can enter different fields of knowledge—the natural sciences as well as therapy, medicine, history, etc. We shall see that the sciences are not to be attacked; they are to be enriched by the introduction of what can be known by super-sensible perception.

A consideration of the course of human evolution over a certain period—how it developed and led at last to the elaboration of our present scientific thinking—can help to a right understanding of what our aims here are.

Let us focus our attention upon scientific thinking to-day. It is able to see clearly the formalism of mathematics, while it nevertheless learns from mathematics inner certainty and exact observation, regarding natural laws as valid only if they can be formulated mathematically. This is, at least, a kind of ideal for scientific method to-day. But it was not always so. The scientific spirit, as acknowledged to-day, has been elaborated in the course of human evolution. I should like to draw your attention to three stages only—of which the present is the third—in this development, and I shall do so in a more narrative form. I shall also touch on some of the things that can be said in support of what I shall relate.

*

As we look back on human evolution, we do not, in fact, always find the same disposition of soul that man has to-day. He cultivates the scientific spirit as, in a sense, a most lofty thing. If we look back at the ancient Orient—not necessarily so far back as the most ancient Indian times, but to times more recent—we found much of what had been handed down as cognitive principles still retained. The path to knowledge was named quite differently then. In those ancient times—even the history of language can support this—man did not think of himself as he does to-day. Modern man has, on the one hand, his consciousness of self firmly established within him, and, on the other hand, a grasp, through observation, of what is mechanistic. But the man of the Orient, for example, could not have this feeling of himself. (As I have said, the history of language can prove this.) He felt himself, in the first place, as a breathing human being. To him, man was a breather. In self-contemplation he focussed his attention chiefly upon the respiratory process. He even related immortality to the respiratory process: death came to him as a kind of expiration of his soul.

Man a breather! Why did man in this former disposition of soul feel the human being as a breathing being? Because he did actually feel life in the respiratory process (which did not proceed so unconsciously as it does to-day). He felt the vibrations of life, life's rhythm, in his breathing; he felt breathing as one feels hunger and thirst to-day. But this was a continuous feeling in the waking state. When he looked with his eyes, he knew: the process of breathing now enters right into my head and into my eyes. He felt his perceptions permeated by the flow of the breath. It was just the same when the will stirred. He stretched out his hand and felt this movement as if it were something linked up with the respiratory movements. An expansion of the breath through the whole body was felt as an inner life-process. He even felt the more theoretical perception of the outer world through the senses to be ensouled with breath, just as he felt the breath ensouling the movements of the will.

Man felt himself a breathing being, and because he could have said: “My breath is modified in this and that way when I see through my eyes, hear through my ears and receive through the effects of heat”—because in his sensations of all kinds he “saw” differentiated, modified, refined respiratory processes—because of all this the path of knowledge was for him a systematic training of the respiratory process. And this systematic training was for those earlier epochs in the evolution of man's cognition what university study is for us to-day.

We study in a different way now. But in those times, when one sought religious satisfaction or wished to acquire knowledge, one “studied” by systematically modifying the respiratory process; in other words, by developing what was later called Yoga Breathing, Yoga Training. And what did one develop? If we investigate what was attained by one who practised Yoga Breathing in order to reach higher stages of cognition, we find something striking. Those who came to be “savants” through Yoga exercises—the word “savant” is not quite appropriate to these earlier conditions, but perhaps one can use it—required as long for this as we do for a university course. In the knowledge so acquired they had grasped in the disposition of their souls what, in a later age—the Graeco-Roman, for example—was regarded as a world of ideas and present of itself in the soul, thus making Yoga unnecessary.

*

This is really a very interesting thing—that what men had to strive for in earlier epochs through all kinds of exercises is present of itself in later epochs of evolution. It has then no longer the same significance as before. When Socrates, when Plato were alive, their philosophies had no longer the same significance as they would have had for the ancient pupils or teachers of Yoga, had they reached Socratic or Platonic truths. By this Yoga-breathing the pupil did not acquire exactly the same inner organisation as Plato, Aristotle or Scotus Erigena, but he came to the same disposition of soul [Seelenverfassung]. Thus we find systematic breathing exercises practised in ancient times, and we see that this cognitive path led to a certain vivid world of ideas.

One really gains a correct idea of what lived later in Parmenides and Anaxagoras if one says to oneself: What was given to men in this age as something self-understood, had been achieved in still earlier times through Yoga. It was always through exercises that men strove for the higher knowledge required by their own age. Thus in the perception of the world in later epochs, men were no longer aware of their breathing in self-contemplation, but they perceived as the Greeks perceived (I have given more details of this in my Riddles of Philosophy). At that time one did not construct for oneself isolated thoughts about the world, for ideas and sense-experiences were one. One saw one's thoughts outside, as one saw red or blue and heard C sharp, G or B natural. Thoughts were in the world outside. Without knowing this, nobody understands the Greek view of the world. But the Greeks perceived only spirit permeated with sense-perceptions, or sense-perceptions permeated by spirit, and no longer differentiations in the process of breathing.

*

Then once again men sought to attain a higher stage of cognition in all domains in which they were seeking higher knowledge. This stage was also gained through exercises. To-day we have rather vague ideas about the early Middle Ages and their spiritual life. A mediæval student did not learn so abstractedly as we do to-day. He, too, had to do exercises, and ordinary study was also combined with the doing of exercises. Inward exercises had to be carried out, though not so strenuously as with Yoga breathing; they were more inward, but still a set of exercises.

From this there remains a kind of deposit, little understood now, in what were called then the Seven Liberal Arts. They had to have been mastered by everyone who claimed to have received a higher education. Grammar meant the practical use of language. Rhetoric meant more: the artistic use of language. Dialectic was the use of language as a tool of thought. And when the student had practised these inwardly, as exercises, Arithmetic followed; but this, again, was not our abstract arithmetic, but an arithmetic which entered into things and was clearly aware that man shapes all things inwardly. In this way the student learnt Geometry through inward exercises, and this geometry, as something involving the human being, was the pupil's possession—a tool he could use.

All this then passed over into what was called Astronomy: the student integrated his being with the cosmos, learnt to know how his head was related to the cosmos, and how his lungs and heart resulted from the cosmos. It was not an astronomy abstracted from man, but an astronomy in which man had his place. And then, at the seventh stage, the pupil learnt to know how the Divine Being weaves and rules throughout the world. This was called Music; it was not our present music but a higher, living elaboration of what had been elaborated in thought-forms in Astronomy.

It was in this way that men of a later epoch trained themselves inwardly. The breathing exercises of earlier times had been replaced by a more inward training of the soul.

And what did one attain? In the course of the history of civilisation men came gradually to have thoughts apart from sense-perceptions. This was something that had to be acquired. The Greeks still saw thought in the world, as we see colours and perceive tones. We grasp thought as something we produce, not located within things. The fact that men came to feel this in the constitution of their souls, that we can feel this to-day—that is the result of the training in Grammar, Rhetoric and so on to Music. Thought was thereby released. Men learnt to move freely in thoughts. In this way was achieved what we take for granted to-day, possessing it without these exercises—what we find when we go to school, what is offered in the separate sciences (as described yesterday). And precisely as man in different epochs had to advance by means of exercises—in ancient times by breathing exercises (Yoga) which gave him the Graeco-Latin conception of the world as something he took for granted; in later times by exercises that went from Grammar to Music and gave him the scientific standpoint we have to-day—so to-day he can again advance. He can best advance by setting out from what is most certain: namely, mathematics, recognised as certain to-day.

My reply to that author was true, although it so astonished him. It was mainly through synthetic geometry that I became clear about the clairvoyant's procedure. Naturally, not everyone who has studied synthetic geometry is a clairvoyant, but the procedure can be clearly presented in this way. Though that author was so astonished at not being told the sort of thing that people who “prophesy” are wont to relate, it is nevertheless true that Anthroposophy, setting out from the firm base on which science stands to-day, seeks to extend this base; and from this base, which science itself has laid, to carry further, into super-sensible domains, what reliable science brings before us.

From here we must proceed more inwardly. And a still more inward procedure is the path to clairvoyant research which I had to describe in my books Geheimwissenschaft (“Occult Science”) and Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der Höheren Welten (“How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds”). But precisely such an historical survey as I have given can show you that anyone who stands to-day with full consciousness within Anthroposophy derives this consciousness from standing within the course of human evolution. My historical survey can also show you that I do not speak from personal predilection or subjective partiality when I assert that we need to undertake exercises in order to carry further the historical movement that has brought humanity to its present standpoint. Anyone who knows the course of history up to the present, and knows how it must continue, stands consciously within the whole historical process, and to this consciousness he adds the insight acquired by taking—inwardly, not outwardly—the spirit of modern science into the constitution of his soul.

Thus one may well say: Anthroposophy knows its position in respect to the science of to-day. It knows this in an absolute sense, because it knows the special character of contemporary science and rejects all that is dilettantish and amateurish. It builds further on genuine science. On the other hand, Anthroposophy knows the historical necessities; knows that man's path must go beyond present achievements—if we do not wish to stand still, unlike all our forerunners, who wanted to advance beyond the stage of civilisation in which they shared. We, too, must go forward. And we must know what steps to take from the present standpoint of the scientific spirit.

In the next few days I shall have to depict what this actually involves. The foundations I have laid to-day will then appear, perhaps, in a more understandable form. But I may have been able to show that Anthroposophy knows from its scientific attitude—from an attitude as scientific as that of science—what its aims are in face of the contemporary world, of human evolution as a whole, and of the separate sciences. It will get to work because it knows how it has to work. Perhaps its path will be very long. If, on the other hand, one sees, in the subconscious depths of human souls, the deep longings for the heights that Anthroposophy would climb, one may surmise that it is necessary for the welfare of humanity that the path Anthroposophy has to take should not be too slow. But whether the pace be slow or fast may be less important for Anthroposophy than for human progress. In many domains we speak of being caught up in the “rapid tempo” of our time. May all that mankind is intended to attain by cognition of the super-sensible be attained as rapidly as the welfare of mankind requires.

Translated by V. C. Bennie.

If you put together what I told you yesterday with the other lectures (Dornach 23, 24, 29 May 1915) which I gave here, a week ago, you will obtain an important key, as it were, to many things in Spiritual Science. I will now give you only the chief ideas needed for the further course of our considerations, in order to enable you to find your bearings. About a week ago I pointed out the significance of the processes which are called, from the aspect of the physical world, destructive processes I pointed out that, from the aspect of the physical world, reality is attributed generally only to what arises and forms itself, as it were, out of nothing and attains a perceptible existence. Thus people speak of reality when they see the plant shoot up from the root and develop from leaf to leaf toward the blossom, and so on. But they do not speak of reality in the same sense when they look upon the gradual withering and dying, upon the last streaming out, one might say, towards nothingness.

But for one who wishes to understand the world, it is necessary in the strictest sense of the word to look also at so-called destruction, at processes of dissolution, at what finally arises, as far as the physical world is concerned, as a streaming-out toward nothingness.

For in the physical world consciousness can never arise where sprouting, germinating processes alone take place; consciousness begins only where what has sprouted in the physical world is in its turn eliminated, destroyed. I have shown that those processes which life brings forth in us must be destroyed by the soul-spiritual if consciousness is to arise in the physical world. Indeed, the truth of the matter is that when we perceive something external, our soul-spiritual has to bring about destructive processes in our nervous system, and these destructive processes mediate consciousness. Whenever we become conscious of something, these processes of consciousness must come from destructive processes. And I have shown that the most important process of destruction for the life of the human being, the process of death, creates the consciousness which we possess during the time after death. Through the fact that our soul-spiritual experiences the complete dissolving and separation of the physical and etheric bodies, the merging of the physical and etheric bodies with the general physical and the general etheric world, through this, and out of the process of death, our soul-spiritual creates the power to be able to have processes of perception between death and a new birth. The saying of Jacob Böhme “Thus death is the root of all life” takes on thereby a higher significance for the whole interrelation of world phenomena.¹No doubt the following question has often arisen before your souls: ‘What happens during the time through which the human soul passes between death and a new birth?’ It has often been pointed out that this period of time is a long one for the normal human life, compared to the time which we pass here in the physical body between birth and death. The period of time between death and a new birth is short only in the case of human beings who have applied their life in a manner inimical to the world, and have done only what may be called, in a true sense of the word, criminal. In this case there is a short lapse of time between death and a new birth. But, in the case of people who have not given themselves up to egoism alone, but who have spent their life between birth and death in a normal way, the period passed between death and a new birth is usually relatively long.

But the following question should burn, as it were, in our souls: ‘By what is the return of a human soul to a new physical incarnation regulated?’ The reply to this question is connected intimately with everything which can be learned with regard to the significance of the destructive processes which I have mentioned. Picture to yourselves that when we enter physical existence we are born with our souls into quite specific conditions. We are born into a particular age and impelled towards particular people. So we are born into quite specific conditions. You should consider deeply that our life between birth and death is, in reality, filled with everything into which we are born. What we think, what we feel, in short the whole content of our life, depends on the time into which we are born.

Now you will readily understand that what thus surrounds us when we are born into physical existence is dependent on preceding causes, on what took place previously. Suppose that we are born at a certain moment and go through life between birth and death. But if you also take into consideration what surrounds you, this does not stand there by itself but is the result of what went before. I would say, you are brought together with what went before, with people. These people are children of other people, who are in turn children of still others, and so on. If we consider only these physical conditions of the succession of the generations, you will say: ‘When I enter physical existence, and during my education, I receive much from the people who surround me.’ But these, in their turn, have received a great deal from their ancestors, and from their ancestors' friends and relations, and so on. Human beings must go further and further back in order to find the causes of what they really are.

If we then allow our thoughts to continue, we may say that we are also able to pursue a certain current which goes beyond our birth. This current hp brought with it, as it were, everything that constitutes our environment during the life between birth and death; and if we pursue it still further back, we come to a point where our preceding incarnation can be found. Thus, when retracing the time before our birth, we would have a long period during which we dwelt in the spiritual world. Many things happened on Earth during this time. But these things brought about the conditions in which we live, into which we are born. And then at last we come in the spiritual world to the time when we were on the Earth in an earlier incarnation. When we speak of these conditions we mean of course average conditions. Exceptions are naturally very numerous, but they all lie in the direction which I indicated before for types who come more quickly to earthly incarnation.

On what does it depend that, after a time has passed, we are born again just here? If we look back to our former incarnations, we were surrounded during our time on Earth by conditions; these conditions had their effects. We were surrounded by people; these people had children and passed on to the children their feelings and ideas. The children in turn did the same with their own descendants, and so on. But if you study historical life you will say that there comes a time in historical evolution when we are no longer able to trace in the descendants anything identical with or even similar to the ancestors. Everything is passed on; yet the fundamental character which is there in a particular time appears diminished in the children and yet more so in the grandchildren and so on until a time comes when nothing more can be found of the fundamental character of the environment in which one lived during the preceding incarnation. Thus the stream of time works at the destruction of what was once the fundamental character of the environment.

We observe this destruction in the time between death and a new birth; and, when the character of the earlier period has been extinguished, when nothing more of it is there, when the things which, as it were, mattered to us in previous incarnations have been destroyed, the moment comes when we re-enter earthly existence. Just as, in the second half of our life, our life is a kind of erosion of our physical existence, so there must occur, between death and a new birth, a wearing-away of earthly conditions, an annihilation, a destruction. And new conditions, a new surrounding must be there, into which we are born.

So we are born anew when everything for the sake of which we were born before has been destroyed and annihilated. Consequently this idea of the destructive process is connected with the successive return of our incarnation on Earth. And what creates our consciousness at the moment of death, when we see the body fall away from our soul-spiritual, is intensified in this moment of death, at this beholding of destruction; this beholding of the process of annihilation must take place in earthly conditions between our death and a new birth.

Now you will understand that someone who takes no interest at all in what surrounds him on Earth, who is really not interested in anyone or any being but only in what suits him and who simply lives for the moment, is not strongly connected with the conditions and things on the Earth. He also has no interest in following their gradual erosion, but returns very soon in order to make amends, in order now really to live with the conditions with which he must live in order to learn to understand their gradual destruction. Someone who has not lived with earthly conditions does not understand their destruction and disintegration. Those people, however, who have lived quite intensely and in the fundamental character of any one period have the tendency above all, if nothing interferes with this, to bring about the destruction of what they were born into and to appear again when something quite new has emerged. Of course, there are exceptions in an upward direction, and it is important for us to consider these in particular. Let us suppose that we become familiar with a movement such as the present spiritual-scientific movement, at this time when it is not in harmony with what surrounds it, when it is completely alien to its environment. The spiritual-scientific movement is in this case not something which we are born into, but something which we have to work at, of which we will that it should enter the spiritual development of earthly culture. Above all, it is a question of living with conditions which are in opposition to Spiritual Science and of appearing again when the Earth is changed to such an extent that spiritual-scientific conditions can really take hold of the life of culture.

Here we have an exception trending upward. There are exceptions in an upward and in a downward direction. Certainly the most earnest co-workers of Spiritual Science prepare themselves to appear in earthly existence again as soon as possible, in that they work at the same time to the end that the conditions into which they are born disappear. If you can grasp this last thought, you will realise that, to a certain extent, you help the spiritual beings to guide the world by devoting yourselves to what lies in their intentions. When we look upon our present time, we must say that on the one hand we have eminently what goes into decadence and downfall. Those who have a heart and a soul for Spiritual Science were placed into this period in order to see how it is ripe for downfall. Here on Earth you are made acquainted with things which one can get to know only on Earth. But you bear that up into the spiritual world, you behold the downfall of the epoch and you will return again when that calls forth a new epoch, which lies in the innermost impulses of spiritual-scientific striving. Thus to a certain extent the plans of the spiritual leaders and guides of earthly evolution are furthered through what people take up into themselves who concern themselves with something which is not, so to speak, the culture of our time.

Perhaps you will be acquainted with the reproaches which are levelled at the adherents of Spiritual Science by people of the present time; that they concern themselves with something which often appears outwardly unfruitful, which does not intervene in the conditions of our time. It is really necessary that people in Earth-existence busy, themselves with something which has a significance for subsequent evolution, but not directly for our time. When objections are raised, the following should be born in mind. Imagine that these are the successive years, 1915, 1914, 1913, 1912, and that these are the cereal grains (centre) of the successive years. What I draw here (right) are the mouths which consume the grains.

Now someone could come along and say that the only important thing is the arrow which goes from the grain into the mouths (→), for that is what supports the people of the successive years. He might say that whoever thinks realistically would look only at these arrows, which go from the grains to the mouths. But the grains of cereal care little for that, for this arrow. They do not bother about that at all. Rather they have only the tendency to develop each grain on into the next year. The grains of cereal are interested only in this arrow (↑), they do not concern themselves with the fact that they will also be eaten; that does not bother them at all. That is a side effect, something that arises by the by. Each grain of cereal, if I may put it like this, has the will, the impulse, to pass over into the next year, in order to become there a grain of cereal once more. It is a good thing for the mouths that the grains follow the direction of these arrows (↑); for if all the grains were to follow the direction of these arrows (→), then the mouths here in the next year would have nothing left to eat. If the grains of 1913 had all followed this arrow (→), then the mouths of the year 1914 would have had nothing left to eat.

If someone wanted to apply materialistic thinking consistently, he would examine the grains to see how they are composed chemically so that they yield the best possible nutritional products. But such a study would not be worthwhile, for this tendency does not lie in the grains of cereal; rather they have the tendency to care for their further development and to develop over into the grain of the following year.

It is similar also with the development of the world. Those people truly follow the course of the world who care for it that evolution proceeds, while those who become materialists follow the mouths that only look at this arrow (→). But those who care for it that the course of the world continues need not be led astray in this striving of theirs to prepare the immediately following times, just as little as the cereal grains let themselves be distracted from preparing those of the next year, even though the mouths demand the arrows which point in a quite different direction.

Towards the end of my book Riddles of Philosophy I referred to this thinking and pointed out that what is generally called materialistic cognition can be compared with the consumption of the cereal grains and that what really takes place in the world can be compared with what happens through propagation from one grain of cereal to that of the following year. Consequently what one calls scientific cognition is of just as little significance for the inner nature of things as eating is for the continuing growth of the grains of cereal. And today's science, which concerns itself only with the way in which one gets into the human mind what one can know from the things, does exactly the same as the man who utilises the grains of cereal for food; for what the grains are when they are eaten has nothing at all to do with their inner nature. Just as little does external cognition have anything to do with what develops within things.

In this way I have tried to toss a thought into the philosophical hustle and bustle and it will be interesting to see whether it will be understood or whether even such a very plausible thought will be met again and again with the foolish rejoinder: ‘Yes, but Kant has already proved that cognition cannot reach things.’ However, he proved it only for a cognition which can be compared with the consumption of the grains and not for a cognition which arises with the progressive development which is in things. But we have to realise that we must repeat in all possible forms to our age and to the age which is coming—but not rashly, fanatically or by agitation—what the principles and essence of Spiritual Science are, until it has sunk in. It is just the characteristic trait of our time, that Ahriman has made skulls very hard and dense and that they may be softened again only slowly. So no one, I would say, must draw back in fear and trembling from the necessity to emphasise in all possible forms what is the being and the impulse of Spiritual Science.

• 1. Jacob Böhme: Six Theosophical Points (1620).

Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees! First of all, allow me to express my heartfelt thanks to the Federation for Anthroposophical School of Spiritual Science for giving me the opportunity to speak about the relationship between certain scientific peculiarities of the present day and anthroposophy in an introductory lecture. Furthermore, I must ask you today to bear in mind that there is a certain difficulty in such a first, orienting lecture. This is because, of course, much of what needs to be said about a comprehensive topic can only be hinted at and therefore, necessarily, only suggestions can be made that will require further elaboration later on and that, by their very nature, must leave out some of the questions that inevitably arise.

But there are also certain difficulties in a factual sense with today's topic. The first is that in the broadest circles today, especially when the topic is discussed – the relationship between science and anthroposophy in any respect – a widespread prejudice immediately arises, namely that the anthroposophy meant here wants to take up an opposing position to science – to the kind of science that has developed in the course of human history in recent centuries, and which reached its zenith in the last third of the 19th century, at least in terms of its way of thinking and methodology. But it is not the case that there is such an oppositional position, because this anthroposophy, as I mean it here, is precisely concerned with bringing to bear the best fundamental principles of the scientific will of modern times. And it endeavors to further develop precisely that human outlook and scientific human attitude that is needed in order to truly validate the recognition of conventional science.

And in this further development, one finds that precisely from the secure foundations of the scientific way of thinking, if these are only correctly understood and pursued not only in their logical but also in their living consequences, then the path is also found to those supersensible regions of world existence with which the human being must feel connected precisely in their eternal foundations. In a certain respect, simply by continuing the fundamental principles of science, the path to the supersensible realms through anthroposophy is to be found.

Of course, when I speak to you about the relationship between anthroposophy and science, I will speak in such a way that you will not deviate from what you are accustomed to recognize as scientific conscientiousness and thinking. But I will not have to speak about individual fields, but rather, to a certain extent, about the entire structure of the scientific edifice of the present day. And since I have to assume that among you, dear fellow students, there are members of the most diverse fields of science, I will naturally not be able to do justice to the individual needs, and some things will have to be said in a way that is not meant to be abstract, but which is looking in an abstract way, so that perhaps the individual will have to draw the consequences from what I have to say for the individual fields. Agnosticism is a word that is not often used today, but it denotes something that is indeed related to the foundations of our scientific way of thinking. This agnosticism was established, I would say, as a justifiable scientific way of thinking, or perhaps better said, a philosophical way of thinking, by personalities such as Herbert Spencer. It was he who preferred to use this term, and if we want to find a definition of agnosticism, we will have to look for it in his work. But as a basis, as a fundamental note of scientific thought, agnosticism exists in the broadest fields of knowledge in the present day. If we are to say in the most abstract terms what is meant by agnosticism, we could say something like the following: we recognize the scientific methods that have emerged as certain in recent centuries, we use them to pursue appropriate science, as we must pursue it today in certain fields - through observation, through experiment, and through the process of thinking about both experiment and observation.

By pursuing science in this way – and I am well aware that this is absolutely justified for certain fields today – one comes to say to oneself: Of course, with this science one achieves a great deal in terms of knowledge of the laws that underlie the world. And then efforts are made to extend these laws, which have been assimilated, to man himself, in order to gain that which everyone who has healthy thinking within him ultimately wants to gain through knowledge: an insight into man's place in the universe, into man's destiny in the universe.

When one pursues science in this way, one comes, in the course of science itself, to say: Yes, these laws can be found, but these laws actually only refer to the sum of external phenomena as they are given to the senses or, if they are not given to the senses, as they can be inferred on the basis of the material that results from sensory observation. But what is discovered in this way about nature and man can never extend to those regions that are regarded in older forms of human knowledge as the supersensible foundation of the world, with which the deepest nature of man, his eternal nature, if it may be called that, must still have a certain connection.

Thus, it is precisely through the scientific approach that one comes to an acknowledgment of the scientifically unknowable - one comes to certain limits of scientific research. At most, one comes to say to oneself: the human soul, the inner spiritual being of man, must be connected with something that cannot be attained by this science alone. What is connected with it in this way cannot be investigated scientifically; it belongs to the realm of the unknowable. Here we are not faced with Gnosticism, but with an agnosticism, and in this respect contemporary spiritual life, precisely because of its scientific nature, has placed itself in a certain opposition to what still existed at the time when Gnosticism was the attitude of knowledge and was called Gnosis.

Now, what is advocated here as Anthroposophy is not, as some believe, a revival of the old Gnosticism, which cannot be resurrected. That was born out of the thinking of its time, out of the whole science of its time, so to speak. Today we are in an age in which, if we want to found a science on supersensible foundations, we have to take into account what has been brought forth in human development through the work of such minds as Copernicus, Galileo and many others whom I will not name now. And in saying this, one implicitly declares that it is impossible to take the standpoint of Gnosticism, which of course had nothing of modern science. But it may be pointed out that this Gnostic point of view was in a certain respect the opposite of what is often regarded today as the basic note of science. This Gnostic point of view was that it is very well possible for man to penetrate to the supersensible regions and to find there that which, though not religion, can be the basis of knowledge for religious life as well, if he turns to his inner powers of knowledge not applied in ordinary life.

Now, we will most easily come to an understanding of what I actually have to say today in this introductory lecture if I first remind you of something well known that can point to the transformation that the human cognitive process has undergone in the course of human development.

You all know, of course, what a transformation philosophy has undergone in terms of external scientific life. It encompasses – even in this day and age – the full range of scientific knowledge. As a human activity, philosophy was simply something that, as the name itself suggests, has a certain right to exist. Philosophy was something that did not merely flow from the human intellect, from observation and experiment, although philosophy also extended to the results that intellect, observation and even primitive experiment could arrive at. Philosophy was really that which emerged from the whole human being to a much greater extent than our present-day science, and again in a justified way. Philosophy emerged from a certain relationship of the human being's mind and feelings to the world, and in the age that also gave the name to philosophy, there was no doubt that the human being can also arrive at a certain objectivity in knowledge when he seeks his knowledge not only through experiment, observation and intellect, but when he applies other forces - forces that can be expressed with the same word that we use to describe the “loving” of something - when he therefore makes use of these forces.

And philosophy in the age of the Greeks also included everything that we today summarize in the knowledge of nature. Over the course of the centuries, philosophical endeavor has developed into what we know today as knowledge of nature. In recent times, however, this knowledge of nature has undergone an enormous transformation – a transformation that has made it the basis for practical life in the field of technology to the extent that we experience it in our lives today. If we take an unprejudiced survey of the scientific life of the present day, we cannot but say that what science has done especially well in recent times is to provide a basis for practical life in the field of technology. Our natural science has finally become what corresponds to a word of Kant - I quote Kant when he has said something that I can acknowledge, although I admit that I am an opponent of Kant in many fields. Kant said that there is only as much real science in science as there is mathematics in it. In scientific practice, especially in natural scientific practice, this has been more and more recognized.

Today we do natural science while being aware that we connect what we explore in space and time through observation and experiment with what mathematics reveals to us through pure inner vision. And it is precisely because of this that we feel scientifically certain that we are able to interweave something that is so very much human inner knowledge, human inner experience, as is mathematical, with what observation and experiment give us. By encompassing that which comes to us from outside through the mathematical certainty given to us in pure inner experience, we feel that we are connected to this outside in the process of knowledge in a way that is enough for us to experience scientific certainty. And so we have come more and more to see the exactness of the scientific in precisely the scientific prerequisites, to mathematically justify what we do in scientific work.

Why do we do this? My dear fellow students, why we do it is actually already contained in what I have just said. It lies in the fact that, by doing mathematics, we are merely active within our own mental experience, that we remain entirely within ourselves. I believe that those who have devoted themselves specifically to mathematical studies will agree with me when I say: in terms of inner experience, the mathematical, the process of mathematization, is something that, for those who do it out of inner ability and I would say, can do it out of inner enthusiasm, can give much more satisfaction than any other kind of knowledge of the external world, simply because, step by step, one is directly connected with the scientific result. And when you are then able to connect what is coming from outside with what you know in its entirety, whose entire structure you have created yourself, then you feel something in what is scientifically derived from the interweaving of external data and mathematical work that can be seen as based on a secure foundation. Therefore, because our science allows us to connect the external with an inner experience through mathematics, we recognize this as scientific in the Kantian sense, insofar as mathematics is in it.

Now, however, this simultaneously opens the way for a very specific conception of the scientific world view, and this conception of the scientific world view is precisely what anthroposophical research pursues in its consequences. For what does it actually mean that we have come to such a view of our scientific knowledge? It means that we want to develop our thinking inwardly and, by developing it inwardly, arrive at a certainty and then use it to follow external phenomena, to follow external facts in a lawful way. This principle is now applied to anthroposophy in the appropriate way, in that it is applied to what I would call pure phenomenalism in relation to certain areas of external natural science, in relation to mechanics, physics, chemistry, in relation to everything that does not immediately reach up to life. In the most extreme sense, we hold fast to this phenomenalism for the domains that lie above the inanimate. But we shall see in what way it must be supplemented there by something essentially different.

By visualizing the mathematical relationship to the external world, one gradually comes to realize that in inorganic sciences, thinking can only have a serving character at first, that nowhere are we entitled to bring anything of our own thoughts into the world if we want to have pure science. But this leads to what is called phenomenalism, and which, though it may be criticized in many details, has, in its purest form, been followed by Goethe.

What is this phenomenalism? It consists in regarding phenomena purely, whether through observation or through experiment, just as they present themselves to the senses, and in using thinking only to see the phenomena in a certain context, to line up the phenomena so that the phenomena explain themselves. But in so doing, everything is initially excluded from pure natural science that regards hypotheses not merely as auxiliary constructions, but as if they could provide something about reality. If one stops at pure phenomenalism, then one is indeed justified in assuming an atomistic structure from observation and experiment – be it in the material world or in the world of forces – but this tendency towards an atomistic structure can only be accepted to the extent that one can pursue it phenomenologically, that one can describe it on the basis of phenomena.

The scientific world view that constructs an atomism that postulates something actual behind the phenomena that can be perceived with the senses, but that cannot fall into the world of phenomena itself, sins against this principle.

But anthroposophy draws the final conclusion, to which everything in modern natural science actually tends. Even in this modern natural science, we have recently come to a high degree of development of this phenomenalism, which is still little admitted in theory but is applied in practice, by simply not concerning ourselves with the hypothetical atomic worlds and the like and remaining within the phenomena. But if we stop at the phenomena, we arrive at a very definite conclusion. We arrive at the conclusion that we really come to agnosticism. If we merely string together phenomena by thinking, if we bring order into phenomena, we never come to man himself through this ordering, through this tracing of laws. And that is the peculiar thing, that we must simply admit to ourselves: If you draw the final, fully justified conclusion of modern science, if you go as far as pure phenomenalism, if you put unjustified hypotheses of thought behind the veil of the sensory world, you cannot help but arrive at agnosticism. But this agnosticism is something quite different for knowledge than what humanity has actually hoped for and sought through knowledge within its course of development, within its history.

I do not wish to lead you into remote supersensible regions, although I will also hint at this, but I would like to point out something that should show how knowledge has nevertheless been understood as something quite different, for example in ancient times, from what knowledge can become today if we conscientiously build on our scientific foundations. And here I may again point to that Greek period in which all the sciences were still united within philosophy. I may point out that each of us has the deepest reverence for Greek art, to take just one example, for example for what lives in Greek tragedy.

Now, with regard to Greek tragedy, the catharsis that occurs in it has been spoken of as the most important component of it - the crisis, the decisive element that lives in tragedy. And an important question, which at the same time is a question that can lead us deep into the essence of the process of knowledge, arises when we tie in with what the Greek experienced in tragedy. If we define catharsis in such abstract terms, then it is said, following Aristotle, that tragedy should evoke fear and compassion in the spectator, so that the human soul, by evoking such or similar passions in it, is cleansed of this kind of passion. Now, however, it can be seen – I can only mention this here, the evidence for it can certainly also be found through ordinary science – from everything that is present in Greek tragedy, that thinking about this catharsis, about this artistic crisis, was very closely connected in the Greek mind, for example, with medical thinking.

What was present in the human soul through the effect of tragedy was thought of only as a healing process for something pathological in man, which was elevated into the scenic. From this artistic point of view, one can see how the Greeks understood therapy, the healing process. He understood it to mean that he assumed that something pathological was forming in the diseased organism. What is forming there - I must, of course, speak in very abstract terms in an introductory lecture - the organism takes up its fight against that. The human organism overcomes the disease within itself by overcoming the disease process through excretion. This is how one thought in the field of pathological therapy. Exactly the same, only raised to a higher level, was the thinking in relation to the artistic process. It was simply thought that what tragedy does is a kind of healing process for the soul. Just as the remnants of a cold come out of the organism, so the soul, through the contemplation of tragedy, should develop fear and compassion, then take up the fight against these products of elimination and experience the healing process in their suppression.

However, one can only understand the fundamentals of this way of thinking if one knows that even in Greek culture – in this Greek culture, which was healthy in some respects – there was the view that if a person merely abandons himself to his nature with regard to his psychological development, it will always lead to a kind of illness, and that the spiritual life in man must be a continuous process of recovery. Anyone who is more familiar with Greek culture in this respect will not hesitate for a moment to admit that the Greeks conceived of their highest spiritual life in such a way that they said to themselves: This is a remedy against the constant tendency of the soul to wither away; it is a way of counteracting death. For the Greeks, the spiritual life was a revival of the soul in the direction of its essence. The Greeks did not see only abstract knowledge in their science; they saw in their science something that stimulated a healing process in them. And that was also the special way of thinking, with a somewhat different coloring, in those world views that are based more on Judaism, where there is talk of the Fall of Man, of original sin. The Greeks also had this view - only in a different way - that it is necessary for the human soul to devote itself to an ongoing process of healing in life. Within this Greek spiritual life, it was generally the case that man did not juxtapose the activities to which he devoted himself and the ways of thinking that he held. They were rather combined in him, and so, for example, the art of healing was just an art to him - only an art that remained within nature. And the Greeks, who were eminently artistic people, did not regard art as something that could be profaned or dragged down into a lower realm when compared to that which is a healing process for the human being.

And so we see how, in those older times, knowledge was not actually separated from all of human nature, how it encompassed all human activity. Just as philosophy encompasses knowledge of nature and everything that should now arise from science, by developing it further and further, it also encompasses the artistic life. And finally, religious life was seen as the comprehensive, great process of recovery of humanity, so that, in understanding knowledge in the old way, we must actually say: there knowledge is understood as something that comes from the whole human being. Thought was already there, but humanity could not stop at this phase of the development of knowledge. What was necessarily connected with this phase of the development of knowledge? This can be seen quite clearly if one, equipped with today's scientific spirit, delves a little into some work, let us say in the 13th or 14th century, that was considered scientific in the natural sciences, for example. If you want to understand such a work, you not only have to familiarize yourself with the terminology, but you also have to immerse yourself in the whole spirit.

I do not hesitate to say that if you are steeped in today's scientific spirit and have not first done intimate, honest historical studies, you will inevitably misunderstand a scientific work from a period such as the 13th and 14th centuries AD, for the simple reason that even in those days – and the further back we go in human development, the more this is the case – man not only brought mathematics into the external world, but also a whole wealth of inner experiences in which he believed just as we believe in our mathematics. Thus we address nature quite differently today when we chemists speak of sulfur, phosphorus or salt than when people of that time spoke of sulfur or salt. If we apply today's concepts, we do not in the least touch the meaning that was then in a book, even one meant to be scientific, because at that time more and something other than the mathematical or the similar to mathematics was carried into the results of observation of the external world. Man brought a whole wealth of inner experience – qualitatively and not merely quantitatively – into the outside world.

And just as we express a scientific result with a mathematical formula, just as we seemingly connect subject with object, so in those days subject was connected with object even more, but the subject was filled with a wealth that we no longer have any idea of today and that we dare not allow ourselves to carry back into nature in the same way. Man at that time saw much in the external world that he himself put into it, just as we today put mathematics into nature. He did not think about nature in the same way as we do today, but he projected a great deal into it. In doing so, however, he also projected the moral into nature. Man projected the moral into nature in such a way that in four millennia the moral laws arose in the same way as the laws of nature arose in his knowledge. Man, who projected into nature what in ancient times was thought of as salt, sulphur, phosphorus, etc., was also allowed to project into nature what he experienced as moral impulses, because inwardly he was not doing anything different.

Now, however, we have rightly separated from such a view of the external world, through which we carry all that has been suggested into it. We only carry the mathematical into the external world, and our science therefore becomes a very good basis for technical practice. But by only bringing the mathematical into the external world, we no longer have the right to transfer the moral into objectivity through our science. And we must of necessity – precisely when we are very scientific in the sense that has emerged in recent centuries – fall prey to a moral agnosticism, because we have no other choice than to see only the subjective in moral principles, to see something that we cannot claim comes from nature in the same objective way as the course of a natural process itself.

And so we are obliged to ask ourselves: How do we found moral science and with it the basis of all spiritual science, including all social science? How do we found moral science in an age in which we must justifiably recognize phenomenalism for external nature? That was the big question for me at the time I wrote my “Philosophy of Freedom.” I stood on the ground - completely on the ground! on the ground of modern natural science, yes, on the ground of a phenomenalism regarding what can be fathomed by the process of knowledge from the external world of the senses. But then, if one follows the consequences with all honesty to the end, one must say: If morality is to be justified objectively, then another knowledge must be able to stand alongside this knowledge, which leads to phenomenalism and thus to agnosticism - a knowledge that does not thinking to devise hypothetical worlds behind the phenomena of the senses, but a knowledge must be established that can grasp the spiritual directly in intuition, after it - except for the mathematical - is no longer carried out into the world in the old way. It is precisely agnosticism that, on the one hand, compels us to fully recognize it in its own field, but at the same time also compels us to rouse our minds to activity in order to grasp a spiritual world from which we can, in the first instance, if we do not want to remain merely in the subjective, find moral principles through objective spiritual observation.

My Philosophy of Freedom has been called, with some justification, ethical individualism, but that only captures one side of it. We must, of course, arrive at ethical individualism because what is now seen as a moral principle must be seen by each individual in freedom. But just as in the inner, active process of the mind, mathematics is worked out in pure knowledge and yet proves to be well-founded within objectivity, so too can that which is the content of moral impulses be grasped in pure spiritual insight - not merely in faith, but in pure spiritual insight. And that is why one is compelled, as I was in my “Philosophy of Freedom,” to say: Moral science must be based on moral intuition. And I said at the time that we can only arrive at a real moral view in the modern style if we realize that Just as we extract individual natural phenomena from the whole of nature, we must extract the moral principles, which are only intuitively grasped spiritually but nevertheless objectively grasped quite independently of us, from a contemplated spiritual world, from a supersensible spiritual world.

I spoke first of moral intuition. This brings the process of knowledge into a certain line. Through the process of knowledge — especially if it is to remain genuinely scientific — the soul is driven to muster its innermost powers and to push this mustering so far that the intuition of a spiritual world really becomes possible. Now the question arises: Is only that which can be grasped as moral impulses to be seen in the spiritual world, or is perhaps that which leads us to our moral intuitions merely one area among many? The answer to this, however, arises when one grasps what has been experienced inwardly in the soul as moral intuitions and then continues this in an appropriate way.

Exactly the same thing that the soul experiences when it rises to the purely spiritual grasp of the moral – it has only become necessary in modern times through natural science – exactly the same thing that is lived through there can now also be lived through for further areas. Thus it may be said that anyone who has once practiced self-observation of this inner experience that leads to moral intuition can indeed develop this inner experience more and more. And the exercises presented in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” serve to develop this inner experience. And these exercises then lead to the fact that one does not stop at thinking and forming hypotheses with it, but that one regards this thinking in its liveliness and develops it further - to what I will now explain in the second part of my lecture and what can be called an exact looking at the supersensible world. What is meant is not the lost mystical vision of earlier times, but an exact vision of the supersensible world, in accordance with science, which can be called exact clairvoyance. And in this way we gradually arrive at those forms of knowledge which I characterized only recently here in a public lecture: imagination, inspiration and the higher intuition — forms of knowledge that illuminate the inner human being.

If we now ask ourselves how we can still have an objectively based moral science and thus also a social science, precisely when we are firmly grounded in natural science, then in these introductory words I wanted to show you first of all how, by honestly place oneself on the ground of today's science, but still wants to turn to life - to life as it simply must be for the person who is to achieve an inner wholeness - how one is thereby rubbed into spiritual research. This now differs from ordinary research in that ordinary research simply makes use of those soul powers that are already there, in order then to spread over the wide field of observation and experiment. In contrast to this, anthroposophical research first turns to the human being so that he may develop higher soul forces, which, when they are precisely developed, lead to a higher vision, which in the supersensible provides the complement to what we find in the sensual through our exact scientific methods.

How this exact higher vision is developed, how one can now penetrate from the sensual into the supersensible outside the moral realm, that will be the subject of my discussions after the break.

Short break

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! The first step in attaining supersensible knowledge is achieved through what we may call meditation, combined with a certain concentration of our thinking. In my last public lecture here in Leipzig, I described the essential point of this from one perspective. Today I would like to characterize it from a different perspective, one that also leads us to a scientific understanding of the world. The essence of this meditation, combined with concentration of thought, consists precisely in the fact that the human being does not remain, for example, with that inner handling of thinking that has been formed once through inheritance, through ordinary education and so on, but that at a certain point in his mature life he regards this thinking, which he has acquired, only as a starting point for further inner development.

Now you know that there are mystical natures in the present day who speak somewhat contemptuously of thinking and who resort to all kinds of other powers of cognition that are more tinged with the subconscious in order to gain a kind of view of the world that is supposed to encompass what ordinary thinking cannot grasp. This dream-like, fantastic immersion in an inner soul life, which crosses over into the pathological realm, has nothing to do with what is meant by anthroposophy. It moves in precisely the opposite direction: every single step that is taken to further develop thinking, to reeducate it to a higher ability, can be pursued with such an inner free and deliberate vividness that can otherwise only be applied to the inner experiences of the soul, which we develop through such a deliberate cognitive activity as that practiced by mathematicians.

Thus one can say: precisely that for which modern man has been educated through his scientific education – mathematical thinking – is taken as a model, not only for seeking out some external connections, but for developing a higher thinking process itself. What mathematics undertakes in the horizontal plane, if I may express myself figuratively, is undertaken in the vertical plane, I would say, by carrying out an inner soul activity, a soul exercise itself, in such a way that you give an account of yourself inwardly with every single step, just as you give an account of yourself with mathematical steps, by placing a certain content of ideas at the center of your consciousness when you control your thoughts, which should simply be a content of thoughts. It does not depend on the content; it depends on what you do with it. You should not suggest something to yourself in any way. Of all these more unconscious soul activities, anthroposophical practice is the opposite.

But if you further develop what you have already acquired as a certain form of thinking by resting with all your soul activity on a manageable content, and if you this resting on a certain soul activity, this attentiveness to this soul activity with the exclusion of everything else that can otherwise penetrate into the soul, is undertaken again and again, the thinking process becomes stronger. And only then do you notice what was, so to speak, the good side of materialism, of the materialistic world view. Because you now realize that all the thinking that you do in ordinary life, especially the thinking that continues in memory, leads us to the fact that what we have experienced in thought can later be brought up again through memory. One notices that all this can only be accomplished by man between birth and death by using his body as a basis - I do not want to say as an instrument, but as a basis. And it is precisely by developing thinking through inner development that we realize that ordinary thinking is entirely bound to the human body and its organs, and that the process of memory in particular cannot be explained without recourse to a more subtle physiology. Only now do we realize that thinking is freeing itself from the body, becoming ever freer and freer from the body.

Only now do we ascend from thinking that takes place with the help of the body to thinking that takes place in the inner processes of the soul; only now do we notice that we are gradually moving into such inner experience, which does not occur, but - I would like to say - is preparing itself. When we pass from the waking state of ordinary consciousness into the state of sleep, our organism simply becomes such that it no longer performs those functions that live out in imagining and in the perceiving associated with imagining.

But because in our ordinary life we are only able to think with the help of our body, thinking ceases the moment it can no longer be done with the help of the body – that is when we fall asleep. The last remnants remain in the pictorial thinking of dreaming, but if one again and again and again pushes thinking further and further through an inner, an exact inner exercise - that is why I speak of exact clairvoyance in contrast to dark, mystical clairvoyance -, through an exact exercise, one learns to recognize the possibility of thinking that is independent of the body. It is precisely because of this that the anthroposophical researcher can point to his developed thinking with such inner certainty, because he knows - better even than the materialist - the dependence of ordinary thinking on the bodily organization, and because he experiences how, in meditation, in practice, the actual soul is lifted out of its bondage to the body. One learns to think free of the body, one learns to step out of the body with one's I-being, one gets to know the body as an object, whereas before it was thoroughly connected with the subjectivity.

This is precisely what is difficult for contemporary education to recognize, because on the one hand, through anthroposophical knowledge, the bondage of the imagination to bodily functions has been understood in modern science, and this is actually becoming more and more apparent through anthroposophical knowledge. But we must be clear about the fact that, despite this insight, we cannot stop at this thinking, but that this thinking can be detached from the body by strengthening it inwardly through meditation. But then this thinking is transformed.

At first, when this body-free thinking flashes, when the experience flashes: you are now in a soul activity that you carry out as if you had simply withdrawn from your body - when this inner experience flashes, then the thinking becomes inwardly more intense. It acquires the same inner satiety that one otherwise has only when perceiving a sensual object. Thinking acquires pictorial quality. Thinking remains in the sphere of composure, just like any other thinking that is bound to the body, but in the body-free state it now acquires pictorial quality. One thinks in images. And this thinking in images was also present in its beginning in what Goethe had developed in his morphology. That is why he claims that he can see his ideas with his eyes. Of course, he did not mean the physical eyes, but what arose in him, so to speak, from an elementary natural process, but which can also be developed through meditation. By this he meant that he saw with the “spiritual” eye what was just as pictorial as otherwise only the physical perceptions, but which was thoroughly mental in its inner quality. I say “thought-like,” not thought, because it is a thought that has been further developed, a metamorphosed thought - it is thought-like.

In this way, however, one rises to the realization of what one is as a human being in one's life on earth - at least initially to the moment in which one is currently living. In ordinary consciousness, we have before us the present moment with all the experiences that are in the environment. Even in ordinary science, we have before us what comes as a supplement to this - there are the thoughts that arise in our minds, which we connect with the experiences of the present moment. This body-free, pictorial thinking, to which we rise and of which I have just spoken and which I call imaginative thinking - not because it is an imagination, but because it proceeds in images and not in abstractions - this thinking encompasses our past life on earth as a unity, as in a single tableau that stands before us. And we now recognize that in us, alongside the spatial organism, there lives a temporal organism - an organism in which the before and after stand in just as organic a connection as the side by side in the outer, physical spatial organism that we carry on us. This organism is recognized as a supersensible organism - in my books I have called it the “etheric body”; one can also call it the life body.

What it comprises is not at all identical with the unwarranted assumption of a “vital force” by an earlier science, which arrived at this vital force only by hypothetical means, whereas this life body comes to the developed imaginative thinking as a real intuition. In this way, one arrives at the fact that what is past for ordinary consciousness in the inner being of man - as something that I experienced ten years ago, for example, and that now emerges in my memory - that this does not now appear as something past, but one experiences it as something directly present, one looks at it with the intensity with which one looks at something present. But as a result, what would otherwise have been lost in the passage of time is suddenly revealed to you in its entirety; your whole life is a single image, one whose individual parts belong together. And one realizes that in reality the past is a present thing, that it only appears as past because we, with our knowledge attuned to present observation, have it only as a memory at this moment. But in objectivity it is an immediate present, a reality.

Thus one comes to the recognition of what is the first supersensible in man. But it also leads to the recognition of something that is present in the entire living world, which inorganic science cannot provide up to the level of chemistry: we come to the insight that is the further development of Goethean morphology; we come to the insight that the individual plant form is only a particular manifestation of that form, which also exists in other plants; we come to what Goethe calls the primordial plant, which is not a cell, but a concretely formed, supersensible form that can be grasped only by imaginative cognition, but which can live in every single plant form — can live in a changed, metamorphosed way. We come to an appreciation of what we find in the vegetable world when we want to understand it fully. And we must realize that if we do not develop this imaginative knowledge, which shows a supersensible, dynamic element in everything vegetable, we learn to recognize only the mechanical, physical, chemical processes that take place in the plant form.

It is to the credit of modern natural science, insofar as it is botany, that it has carefully studied what takes place in the plant form, or rather, in the part of space enclosed by the plant form, what takes place in the mechanical, physical, and chemical processes. These processes are no different from those that are also out there, but they are grasped by something that cannot be grasped by the same methods as the physical and chemical ones. They are grasped by that which lives as a real supersensible and can only be recognized in imagination – in that imagination in which we also find ourselves at the same time as human totality in our experience since birth as if standing before us in a single moment.

We learn, on the one hand, to recognize why we, especially when we apply the modern, exact scientific methods as they have developed, must come to a certain agnosticism with regard to the understanding of the vegetable. And so we can see why there must be a certain field of agnosticism; and so we can also see how anthroposophy adds precisely that which must remain unknown to this agnosticism. We see how anthroposophy leads beyond agnosticism while allowing it full validity in its own realm. That, ladies and gentlemen, is one thing.

The other thing, however, is that at this stage we are acquiring a more detailed understanding of the interaction between the human being and the external world. Physics, mechanics, chemistry are rightly being developed in the present day in such a way that we carry as little of the human as possible into this external world, in that we say: only that has objectivity in which we contain all subjectivity. - Certainly, anthroposophy will not fight the justification of this method in a certain field, but will recognize it. But when we use what we also recognize in the imagination to grasp and behold what lives in the vegetable kingdom, we attain on the one hand an intimate knowledge of our own supersensible being — at least as it is between birth and death — but we also thereby gain a vision of the fluctuating, metamorphosing processes in the world of living forms. In this way we connect ourselves as human beings with the outer world, initially at a first level, in imagination. We incorporate the human element into our world view.

The next level of supersensible knowledge is inspiration. It is attained by developing more and more, I would say, the opposite pole of meditation and concentration. Anyone who has acquired a certain practice in meditation and concentration knows that when you energize thinking, you also get the inner inclination to dwell on what arises as a part of the soul as energized thinking. One must exert oneself more when leaving these energized imaginative thoughts than when leaving any other thought. But if one can now really throw these energized thoughts out of consciousness again - this whole imaginative world that one has first appropriated -, if one can empty consciousness, not cannot be emptied from the ordinary point of view, but can be emptied after one has first inwardly strengthened it, then this emptiness of consciousness becomes something quite different from what the emptiness of consciousness is in ordinary life. There the emptiness of consciousness is sleeping.

The emptiness of consciousness, however, which occurs after one has first strengthened this consciousness, is very soon filled by the phenomena of an environment that is now completely different from all that one has previously known. Now one gets to know a world to which our ordinary ideas of space and time can no longer be applied. Now we get to know a world that is a real external world of soul and spirit. It is just as concrete as our real world of the senses. But it can only flow into us if we have emptied our consciousness at a higher level. After one has first come to imagination, by concentrating on a spiritual content and now being able to perceive outside one's body because one has activity within oneself - not the passivity that is present in ordinary consciousness - and by having gone through the appropriate preparations, the spiritual outer world now penetrates through the developed activity of the freed consciousness, just as the appearances of the world of colors or the world of sounds otherwise penetrate through the senses.

On the one hand, through this spiritual outer world, we arrive at an understanding of what we were as human beings before we descended from a spiritual and soul world into the physical world, before we united with what had been prepared in the mother's womb through conception as the physical human germ. One gains an insight into what first lived in a spiritual-soul world and then united with the physical human being. So one gets to know that which, between birth and death, is basically quite ineffective, which is, so to speak, excluded from our sensory perception, but which was effective in us and which worked in its purity before we descended into a physical body. That is one thing: we gain a deeper knowledge of human nature by ascending to this second stage of supersensible vision, which is developed just as precisely as the other, the imaginative stage. And this knowledge, through which a spiritual world flows into us, just as pure air flows from outside into our lungs and is then further processed, this knowledge, which we process in the subconscious for ordinary consciousness, but in the subconscious for the developed consciousness, fully consciously, I have allowed myself to call this influx “inspirative knowledge”.

This is the second step. Through it, we first come to recognize our eternal as pre-existing. But with this we also have the possibility to penetrate into what now not only lives in the external world, but what lives and feels, what thus lives out in the living formation of the inner life in such a way that this inner life becomes present to itself in feeling. Only through this do we learn to recognize what lives around us as animalistic. We supplement our knowledge with what we can never attain through an ordinary view, as we have developed it in physics and chemistry. We come to look at what lives in the sentient being as a higher, supersensible reality. We now learn through observation, not through philosophical hypotheses in the modern sense, to actually follow a new, higher world: the world of the spiritual and soul in the sentient physical. But in doing so, we move a step further away from agnosticism. This must exist if we only follow the chemical processes in the sentient living. We must follow these, and it is the great merit of modern natural science that these can be followed, but with that, this natural science must become agnostic. This must find its completion in the fact that precisely now, in free spirituality, one experiences through inspiration that which must be added in order to arrive at the full reality of sentient life. But in this way one achieves something else, of which I would like to give you an example. In this way one comes to recognize that the process that takes place in the human being, for example - it is similar for the animal - that this process is not only an ascending one, but at the same time also a descending one. Only now are we really learning to look at ourselves properly from within; we learn, by ascending to this inspired realization, to know more precisely what is actually going on in our ordinary consciousness. Above all, one learns to recognize that it is not a process of building up, but of breaking down, that our nervous life is essentially a life of breakdown. If our nerves could not be broken down - and of course rebuilt from time to time - we could not develop ordinary thinking. Vital life, when it appears in abundance, is basically a numbing of thought, as it occurs in every sleep. The kind of life that is interspersed with feeling and thinking must, at the same time, carry within it a process of decomposition, I would say a differential dying process.

This process of disintegration is first encountered in healthy life, that is, in the life in which it occurs in order for human thinking in the ordinary sense of the word to come about at all. Once one has acquired an understanding of the nature of these processes, one also becomes familiar with the abnormal occurrence of these processes. There are simply certain organs or organ systems in the human organism in which parallel processes to ordinary thinking occur. But if the catabolic processes, which are otherwise the physical basis of thinking, extend to organs to which they are not otherwise assigned, so to speak, through an internal infection – the word is not quite used in the actual sense – then disease states arise in these organs.

It is absolutely necessary that we develop pathology in such a way that we can also find the processes that we recognize in physiology in pathology. However, this is only possible if we can see the essence of these processes in our human organization; it is similar in the animal organization, but still somewhat different - I say this again so that I am not misunderstood. By observing the processes in our human organism in such a way that we recognize one polarity as an organization that is designed for breakdown and the other polarity as one that cannot be affected by this breakdown in a healthy state, we learn to see through these two aspects in inspired knowledge.

If we learn to see through this and can we then connect this seeing through of our own organism with an inspired recognition of the outer world, of the processes in the plant kingdom, if we learn to see through this mineral kingdom and also the animal kingdom through inspired knowledge, then we learn to recognize a relationship between human inner processes and the outer world that is even more intimate than that which already existed at the earlier stage of human history. I have shown how, at this earlier stage, man felt related to external nature by seeing in all that appears in the most diverse metamorphoses in the vegetable world something that he found in the soul, in his own life between birth and death.

But if, through inspired knowledge, he now learns to see that which he was in his pre-existent life, then at the same time he sees through that in the outer realm which not only lives in feeling, but which has a certain relation, a certain connection, to that which lives in the human organization, which is oriented towards feeling, towards thinking. And one learns to recognize the connections between the processes outside and the processes inside, and also the connections with the life of feeling. One learns to recognize what is brought forth in man when the organs are seized by the breakdown, which actually should not be seized by it, because the breakdown in this sense must only be the basis for the thinking and feeling process. When, as it were, the organic activity for thinking and feeling seizes members of the human organism that should not be seized, then what we have to grasp in pathology arises. But when we grasp the outer world with the same kind of knowledge, then we find what must be grasped by therapy. Then we find the corresponding process of polar counteraction, which - I would express it this way - normal internal breakdown. In short, through an inner vision we find the connection between pathology and therapy, between the disease process and the remedy. In this way we go beyond medical agnosticism – not by denying present-day medicine but by recognizing what it can be – and at the same time we find the way to add to it what it cannot find by itself.

If anyone now believes that anthroposophy wants to develop some kind of dilettantism in the most diverse fields of science, then I have to say: that is not the case! It consciously wants to be the continuation of what it fully recognizes as the result of today's science, but it wants to supplement it with higher methods of knowledge. She wants to go beyond the deficiencies of mere trial and error therapy, which basically everyone who is also active in practice has already sensed, to a therapy gained from observation that has an inner, organic connection with pathology, which is, so to speak, only the other side of pathology. If one succeeds in finding pathology simply as a continuation of physiology in the way described, then one also succeeds – by getting to know the relationship between man and his natural environment – in extending pathology into therapy in a completely rational way, so that in the future these two need not stand side by side as they do today in a more agnostic science.

These are only suggestions that I would like to make in the sense that they could show a little – I know how incomplete one has to be in such an orienting lecture – how far it is from anthroposophy to ant opposition to recognized science, but rather that it is precisely important for it to draw the final consequence from the agnostic form of science and thereby arrive at the view of what must be added to this science. This is already being sensed, and basically there are many, especially members of the younger generation, who are learning to feel that science as it exists now is not enough, who feel: we need something else, because it is not enough for us. Precisely when we are otherwise honest about it, then we have to come to something else through it. And it is precisely for those who get to know science not just as an answer but, in a higher sense, as a question that anthroposophy wants to be there — not to drive them into dilettantism, but to progress in exactly the right, exact way from science to what science itself demands if it is pursued consistently.

But then there is a third higher stage of knowledge. This is attained when we extend the exercises to include exercises of the will. Through the will, we initially accomplish mainly what a person can do in the external world. But when we apply the same energy of the will to our own inner processes, then a third stage of supersensible knowledge arises on the basis of imagination and inspiration. If we are completely honest with ourselves, we will have to admit at every moment of our lives: We are something completely different today than we were ten or twenty years ago. The content of our soul has changed, but in changing it, we were actually quite passively surrendered to the outside world. It is precisely in relation to our inner transformation that a certain passivity reigns in us.

But if we take this transformation into our own hands, if we bring ourselves to radically change what is habitual in us, for example, in a certain relationship - where a change seems possible - if we behave inwardly towards ourselves in such a way that we make ourselves into a different person in a certain direction through our own will, then we have to actively intensify our inner experience over years, often decades, because such exercises of will take time. You make up your mind: you will develop a certain quality or the form of a quality in yourself. After months you notice how little you succeed in doing this, in this way, what otherwise the body makes out of you. But if you make more and more effort, then you not only see your inner, supersensible human being, but you also manage to make this inner human being, so to speak, completely transparent. A sense organ such as our eye would not be able to serve us as a visual organ if it did not selflessly - if I may use the term - withdraw its own substantiality. As a result, it is transparent, physically transparent. Thus, through exercises of will, we become, so to speak, inwardly transparent to the soul.

I have only hinted at a few things here. You will find a very detailed account in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds.” We really do enter a state in which we see the world without ourselves being an obstacle to fully penetrating into the supersensible. For, in fact, we are the obstacle to entering fully into the supersensible world because, in our ordinary consciousness, we always live in our body. The body only imparts to us what is earthly, not what is soul-spiritual. We now look, by being able to disregard our body, into a stage of the spiritual world through which that appears to us before the spiritual gaze, which becomes of our soul, when it has once passed through the gate of death. Just as we get to know our pre-existent life through the other way I described earlier, so now we get to know our life in the state after death. Once we have learned to see the organism no longer, we now learn, as it figuratively presents itself to us, the process by which we find ourselves when we discard this physical organism altogether and enter the spiritual-soul world with our spiritual-soul organism. The demise of our physical existence, the awakening of a spiritual-soul existence: this is what we experience in the third stage of supersensible knowledge, in the stage that I have called higher intuitive knowledge.

By having this experience, by being able to place ourselves in a spiritual world without being biased by our subjectivity, we are able to recognize this spiritual world in its full inwardness. In inspiration, it is still as it flows into us; but now, in higher intuition, we get to know it in its full inwardness. And now let us look back at what first presented itself to us as a necessity: moral intuition. This moral intuition is the only one for ordinary consciousness that arises out of the spiritual world during proper self-contemplation of pure thinking - I have presented this in my “Philosophy of Freedom”. But if we now go through imagination and inspiration, we do exercises that teach us to completely detach ourselves from ourselves, to develop the highest activity of the spiritual and soul, and yet not to be subjective, but to be objective, by living in objectivity itself. Only when we have achieved this standing in objectivity is it possible to do spiritual science.

Only then is it possible to see what is already living as spiritual in the physical world; only then does one gain a real understanding of history. History as a series of external facts is only the preparation. What lives as spiritual driving forces and driving entities in the historical can only be seen through intuitive knowledge. And it is only at this level of intuitive knowledge that we truly see what our own ego is. At first, our own ego appears to us as something we cannot see through. Just as a dark space within a brightness appears to us in such a way that we see the brightness from the darkness with our eyes, so we look back at our soul, see its thoughts, feel further inner processes, live in our will impulses. But the actual I-being is, so to speak, like a dark space within it. This is now being illuminated. We are getting to know our eternal being. But with that, we are only getting to know the human being in such a way that we can also fully understand him as a social being. Now we are at the point where the complement to social agnosticism occurs.

This is where things start to get really serious. What is social agnosticism? It arises from the fact that we apply the observation that we have learned to apply correctly to external, natural phenomena, and that we now also want to apply this trained observation to social phenomena. This is where the various compromise theories in social science and sociology come from – in fact, all the theories about the conception of social life that we have seen arise. This is where the approach to the conception of social life that starts from the natural sciences comes from, but which must therefore disregard everything cognizable, everything that is alienated from thought and only present in the life of instincts. The extreme case of this occurred in Marxism, which regards everything that is spiritual as an ideology and only wants to see the impulses of social life realized if these impulses develop out of the instinctive, which belongs to agnosticism. Class consciousness is actually nothing more than the sum of all that is not rooted in a knowledge of man, but that comes from the instincts - only it must be recognized by those who develop such instincts in certain life circumstances.

If you look at our social life with an unbiased eye, you will find that we have come to agnosticism precisely in the social sphere. However grotesque and paradoxical it may still appear to modern man, in this field of spiritual science we can only go beyond this kind of knowledge, insofar as it is agnostic, if we rise to truly intuitive knowledge and thus to the experience of the human being. We humans today actually pass each other by. We judge each other in the most superficial way. Social demands arise as we develop precisely the old social instincts most strongly. But an inner, social soul mood will only come about if the intuitions from a spiritual world permeate us with life. In the age of agnosticism, we have necessarily come to see everything spiritual more or less only in ideas. However, ideas, insofar as they are in ordinary consciousness, are not alive. Today's philosophers speak to us of logical ideas, of aesthetic ideas, of ethical ideas. We can observe them all, we can experience them all inwardly and theoretically, but they have no impulsive power for life. The ideas only become a reality of life when they are wrung out in intuitive experience of the spiritual. We cannot achieve social redemption and liberation, nor can we imbue our lives with a religiosity that is appropriate for us, if we do not come to an intuitive, vitalized grasp of the spiritual.

This life-filled comprehension of the spiritual will differ significantly from what we call spiritual life today. Today, we actually call the ideational life spiritual life; in other words, life in abstract ideas that are not impulses. But what intuition provides us with will give us as humanity a living spirit that lives with us. We have only thoughts, and because they are only thoughts, we have lost the spirit altogether. We have thoughts as abstractions. We must regain the life of thoughts. But the life of thought is the spirit that lives among us - and not the spirit that we merely know. We will only develop a social life if, in turn, spirit lives in us, if we do not try to shape society out of the spiritless - out of what lives in social agnosticism - but if we shape it out of that attitude that understands through intuition to achieve the living spirit.

We may look back today on earlier ages - certainly, we have overcome them, and especially those of us who stand on anthroposophical ground are least likely to wish them back in their old form. But what these earlier ages had, despite all the mistakes we can easily criticize today, is that in certain epochs they brought the living spirit - not just the spirit of thought - among people. This allowed the existing basis of knowledge to expand to include artistic perception of the world, religious penetration of the innermost self, and social organization of the world. We will only achieve a new social organization of the world, a new religious life, and new artistic works on the basis of knowledge, on which they have always fundamentally stood, when we in turn gain a living knowledge, so that not only the thoughts of the spirit, but the spirit itself lives in humanity. It is this living spirit that Anthroposophy seeks. Anthroposophy does not want to be a theory or a theoretical world view; Anthroposophy wants to be that which can stir the spirit in its liveliness in the life of the human being, that which can permeate the human being not only with knowledge of the spirit, but with the spirit itself.

In this way we shall go beyond the age that has brought phenomenalism to its highest flowering. Of course, one can only wish that it will continue to flourish in this way, one can only wish that the scientific way of thinking will continue to flourish in the conscientiousness in which it has become established. But the life of the spirit must not be allowed to exist merely by continuing to live in the old traditions. Fundamentally, all spiritual experiences are built on traditions, on what earlier humanity has achieved in the way of spirit.

In principle, our art today is also built on traditions, on the basis of what an earlier humanity has achieved. Today, we cannot arrive at new architectural styles unless we reshape consciousness itself, because otherwise we will continue to build in Renaissance, Gothic, and antique styles. We will not arrive at creative production. We will arrive at creative production when we first inwardly vitalize knowledge itself, so that we do not merely shape concepts but inner life, which fills us and can form the bridge between what we grasp in thought and what we must create in full life.

This, dear attendees, dear fellow students, is what anthroposophy seeks to achieve. It seeks to bring life into the human soul, into the human spirit, not by opposing what it recognizes as fully justified in the modern scientific spirit, as it is often said to do. It seeks to carry this spirit of science further, so that it can penetrate from the external, material and naturalistic into the spiritual and soul realms. And anyone who can see through people's needs in this way today is convinced that in many people today there is already an inner, unconscious urge for such a continuation of the spirit of science in the present day. Anthroposophy seeks only to consciously shape what lives in many as a dark urge. And only those who get to know it in its true light, not in the distortions that are sometimes created of it today, will see it in its true light and in its relationship to science.

Pronunciation

Walter Birkigt, Chairman: I would like to thank Dr. Steiner for the lecture he has given here, and I would now like to point out that the discussion is about to begin. Please submit requests and questions in writing.

Dr. Dobrina: Dear attendees! After such a powerful picture of the present and past intellectual history of humanity has been presented, it is not easy to give a sharp summary in a few words. But I think that before proceeding to a critique, one must first appreciate the depth of the whole presentation. One must appreciate and admit that a synthesis is sought between natural science with its exact trains of thought and spiritual science with its partly antiquated forms.

In the last few centuries, natural science has indeed managed to rise to the throne and even to push philosophy down from the throne as antiquated. Now, however, those who cannot be satisfied with the philosophy that has been overthrown and deified are again looking for an impetus to bring philosophy back to the old podium on which it stood in Greece. And I believe that anthroposophy, as developed for us by Dr. Rudolf Steiner, is an attempt to shape the synthesis in such a way that, although it only recognizes natural science in the preliminary stages and makes every effort not to object to its exactness, it then goes beyond it to penetrate into the supersensible realm. However, the step into the supersensible world seems to me to be based on very weak foundations, especially since Dr. Rudolf Steiner works with concepts such as preexistence. Those who have more time could ask more pointed questions about what he means by this preexistence or what he has to say about the “post-mortem” life, about life after death.

Applause.

In any case, I believe that from this point of view we can and must immediately enter into a sharp discussion with him, and it will probably show that basically the whole conceptualization of Dr. Rudolf Steiner breaks down into two quite separate areas. On the one hand, he makes an effort to plunge into therapy and to consider Greek thinking from the point of view of therapeutic analysis, while on the other hand he works with concepts that come from the old tools of theosophy and are very reminiscent of antiquated forms of spiritual life.

Applause

For this reason, I would like to say very briefly that the whole picture that Dr. Rudolf Steiner has developed here, as well as in the previous public lecture, seems to me to be quite inadequate and that on this basis one can in fact arrive at no criticism of modern life, nor of modern economic struggles, nor of the position that is taken today against the spiritual powers that have fallen into decline.

Applause.

Perhaps Dr. Rudolf Steiner would be kind enough to

respond to this shortly.

Walter Birkigt: Does the assembly understand the statement as a question, that Dr. Steiner should respond immediately? I would therefore ask Dr. Steiner to respond.

Applause.

Rudolf Steiner: Well, dear attendees, I said in my lecture that it should be an orienting one. And I said that an orienting lecture faces the difficulty of being able to only hint at certain things that would require further elaboration, so that a whole flood of unsatisfactory things naturally arise in the soul of the listener, which of course cannot be cleared away in the first lecture either. The point of the comments – I cannot say objections – made by the esteemed previous speaker is that he found that I had used words that he considers old terms.

Now, my dear audience, we can put all our words – even the most ordinary ones – into this category. We must, after all, use words when we want to express ourselves. If you were to try to see what is already available today in contemporary literature, which often seems outrageous to me – I mean outrageous in terms of its abundance – if you were to read everything that I myself have written, for example, ...

Heiterkeit

... when faced with this abundance, it is quite natural that in a first, introductory lecture, only some aspects can be touched upon. So let us take a closer look at what the esteemed previous speaker has just said. He said that pre-existence reminds him of old concepts. But now, he is only reminded of old terms because I have used words that were there before. Of course, when I say that by elevating imaginative knowledge, which I have characterized, to inspired knowledge, which I have also characterized, I arrive at the concept of preexistence. If I merely describe how one comes to the vision of the pre-existent life, then it does not depend on the term “preexistence,” but only on the fact that I describe how a precise practice takes place to arrive at an insight into what was there in the human being before this human being — if I may put it this way — united with a physical body, with what was being prepared in the mother's body through the conception. So, I only used the word pre-existence to point to something that can only be seen when supersensible knowledge has been attained in the way I have described. In Gnosticism one finds a certain attitude towards knowledge. As such, Gnosticism has nothing to do with the aims of modern anthroposophy, but this attitude towards knowledge, as it was present in ancient Gnosticism and which aims at recognizing the supersensible, is reviving in our age - in the post-Galilean, post-Copernican age - but in a different form.

And now I will describe to you in more detail what should follow – I will describe it in a few sentences. You see, if we look from a knowledge that is sought on the basis of the methods I have spoken of, if we look from this kind of knowledge to an older one that is very different from it, we come to an oriental form of knowledge that could in fact be called “theosophical”. Only after this had developed in older times could a philosophy arise out of a theosophy, and only then could anthroposophy arise out of a philosophy. Of course, if you take the concepts in such a way that you only hold them in their abstractness, not in what matters, then you will mix everything up, and the new will only appear to you as a rehash of the old. This theosophy was achieved by completely different methods of knowledge than those I have described.

What were the essentials of this method of knowledge? I do not mean everything, but just a certain phase of it. For example, the ancient Indian yoga process, which should truly not be experienced as a warm-up in anthroposophy. We can see this from the fact that what I am describing initially seems very similar to this yoga process, doesn't it? But if you don't put it there yourself, you won't find that what I am describing is similar to the yoga process. This consisted in the fact that at a stage of human development in which the whole human life was less differentiated than it is today, it was felt that the rhythmic breathing process was connected with the thinking process. Today we look at the matter physiologically. Today we know: When we breathe, when we inhale, we simultaneously press the respiratory force through the spinal canal into the brain. In the brain, the breathing process continues in a metamorphosed way, so that, physiologically speaking, we have a synthesis of the breathing process and the thinking process.

Yoga is based on this process, transforming ordinary breathing into a differently regulated breathing. Through the modified breathing process – that is, through a more physical process – thinking was transformed. It was made into what a certain view in the old, instinctive sense yielded. Today, we live in a differentiated human organization; today we have to go straight to the thought process, but today we also arrive at something completely different as a result. So when you go into the specifics, you will be able to clearly define each individual phase of cognition as it has occurred in succession in human development. And then you will no longer think that what is now available in the form of anthroposophy, as a suitable way of acquiring higher knowledge in the present day, can somehow be lumped together with what was available in older times. Of course, we cannot discuss what I have not talked about at all on the basis of what I have told you in an introductory lecture. I would now, of course, have to continue with what pre-existent life is like. I could say nothing else in my introductory lecture except that the realization of pre-existent life is attained through the processes described, which are indeed different from anything that has ever emerged in history as inner development.

And now I would really like to ask what justification there is for criticism when I use the word pre-existence in the sense in which everyone can understand it. It means nothing other than what it says through the wording. If I understand existence as that which is experienced through the senses, and then speak of pre-existence, then it is simply existence in the spiritual and soul life before sensual existence. This does not point to some old theosophy, but a word is used that would have to be further explained if one goes beyond an orienting lecture. You will find that if you take what may be called Theosophy and what I have described in my book, which I have also entitled “Theosophy” - if you take that, then it leads back to its beginnings in ancient forms - just as our chemistry leads back to alchemy.

But what I have described today as a process of knowledge is not at all similar to any process of knowledge in ancient times. It is therefore quite impossible to make what will follow from my lecture today and what has not yet been said the subject of a discussion by saying: Yes, preexistence, that leads back to old tools. If you have followed it, it does not lead back to old tools, but it does continue certain attitudes of knowledge that were present at the time when the old tools were needed, and which today only exist in their remnants and project into our present as beliefs, whereas in the past they were reached in processes of knowledge. Now, through processes of knowledge that are organized in the same way as our scientific knowledge, we must again come to insights that can fill the whole human being, not just the intellectually oriented one.

Dear attendees, if you want to criticize something, you have to criticize what has been said directly, not what could not be discussed in the lecture and of which you then say that it is not justified or the like. How can something that is just a simple description not be justified? I have done nothing but describe, and that is precisely what I do in the introductory lectures. Only someone who knew what happens when one really does these things could say that something is not explained. If one really does these things, that is, if one no longer merely speaks about them from the outside, then one will see that they are much more deeply grounded than any mathematical science, for they go much more closely to the soul than mathematical processes do. And so such a criticism is an extraordinarily superficial one. And the fact that anthroposophy is always understood only in this external way makes its appearance so extraordinarily difficult. In no other science is one required to give everything when a lecture is given. Only in anthroposophy is one required to give everything in a lecture. I have said from the beginning that I cannot do that.

Applause

But it is not a matter of my describing what is available as old tools of the trade, for example how gnosis has come to such knowledge in inner soul processes or how, for example, the oriental yoga school comes to knowledge. If one knows these tools, if one does not just talk about them, ...

Applause

... then people will no longer claim that anthroposophy reminds them of the old days. This is only maintained as long as one allows reminiscences to come in the form of abstract concepts that arise only from the fact that they are not compared with the concrete, with the real. Of course, I could go on for a very long time, but this may suffice as an answer.

Lively applause

Mr. H. Schmidt: Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to criticize something, or rather put a question mark over it: Dr. Steiner said this evening that every scientific world view is dualistic in the sense that it must add to what is immediate and certain something uncertain. It is clear that in anthroposophy this other is the supersensible world. But the scientific value of a philosophy is shown to us in how far it succeeds in presenting the inner relationship between the supersensible and the sensible - I say “scientific” value on purpose, not cultural or psychological. Platonism, for example, which in this respect has not so often succeeded in constructing the relationship between idea and reality, had an enormous cultural significance.

Now, in anthroposophy, Dr. Steiner attempts to describe the relationship between the supersensible and the sensible, that is, he attempts to prove the necessary transition from the immediate sensory world to the supersensible world, or - seen subjectively - from empirical and rational knowledge, from scientific knowledge, to what I would call super-scientific knowledge. He used anthroposophy for this. I am only relying on Dr. Steiner's lecture, and more specifically on the first part – frankly, I didn't have enough strength for the second.

Applause

Anthroposophy is based on the analogy of mathematics. Dr. Steiner explained how we project mathematics into nature. This has already been established in Greek science, and in fact the ideal of mathematical science is at least to mathematize nature, as they said in ancient times. But in what sense can we even talk about this? That is precisely the problem.

Dr. Steiner explained with what affect, with what passion, with what sympathy the individual mathematician imposes his ideas of conceptual things in empirical reality. But what are the structures that the mathematician deals with? They are not his representations at all. The circle, for example, that a mathematician draws on the blackboard to demonstrate his geometric theorems is not his representation. He has nothing to do with the circle as a human being – rather, he has nothing to do with it as a mathematician, but he does have something to do with it as a human being, in that he uses his two eyes to perceive the circle. Restlessness

The concept of a circle, which the mathematician does deal with, cannot be represented in reality at all; it is never perceived by the senses. The concept of a circle is much more general.

Now anthroposophy needs something personally real that it wants to project into nature. The general, which I have in my mathematical head, so to speak, does not exist in reality. If the supersensible world is to be founded on the sensory world in such a way that conclusions can be drawn from the subject to the object, then this can never be done by projecting subjective ideas into nature in the manner of mathematics. In my opinion, the analogy of mathematics is not appropriate for this, because mathematics deals with conceptual things that never occur as such in reality. In my opinion, this is an objection to anthroposophy in general. On the other hand, today's lecture emphasizes the reality of supersensible things.

So, what matters to me: I cannot see how mathematics is supposed to serve here to explain the bridge from the sensory to the supersensible. The main value of the lecture now obviously lay in the fact that personal experience, personal excitement, the totality of personal experience, is to be active in thinking. But that must immediately raise a concern for everyone. The personal, the individual, is precisely what is unnecessary. Yes, anyone can tell me: “That is your imagination, that is your idea, I have nothing to do with it.” In my opinion, this is an objection to anthroposophy in general.

Applause

Then, what Dr. Steiner was particularly concerned about, in the inner participation that his lecture had at this point and that was actually moving for the opponent: the starting point for higher knowledge for Dr. Steiner is moral intuition. Anthroposophy requires a supersensible to derive moral principles from it, and it gains this derivation by looking at the supersensible. To be honest, that doesn't make any sense to me at all. Let's assume that there is a supersensible faculty of knowledge, or rather, such faculties of knowledge that we ordinary mortals do not yet have, and that it would also be possible to actually see the supersensible with this higher faculty of knowledge - the supersensible as an existing thing: how can I see from that what I should do? We can never deduce what we should do from what is. We can never build a bridge from the sphere of being to the sphere of ought.

Walter Birkigt: Since there are no further requests for the floor for the time being, I would like to ask Dr. Steiner to respond. Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees, I would like to say the following first: The very nature of the remarks I made this evening prevented me from speaking of analogy where I spoke of mathematics, and I ask you to reflect carefully on the fact that I did not use the word analogy. This is no accident, but a thoroughly conscious decision. I could not use the word 'analogy' because there was no question of an analogy with mathematics, but mathematical thinking was used to arrive at a characteristic of the inner experience of certainty. And by trying to explain how one can arrive at an inner experience of certainty in mathematics, I wanted to show how one can acquire this same degree of certainty in a completely different field, where one tries to arrive at certainty in the same way. It is therefore not about an analogy with mathematics, but about citing two real experiences of the soul that are to be compared with each other in no other way than by pointing to the attainment of inner certainty. Dear attendees, what the previous speaker said is not a reference to my lecture, because then he could not have used the word analogy. I avoided it because it does not belong.

Furthermore, it was said that I spoke of the passion of the individual mathematician. I could not do that either, because I simply referred to the nature of mathematical experience as it is known to those who are initiated into and trained in mathematics. How anyone can even think of speaking of some kind of personal involvement in mathematics is beyond me. On the other hand, I would like to make the following comment: It sounds very nice to say that the inner concept of the circle has absolutely nothing to do with the circle that I draw on the blackboard. I am not going to claim that it has anything to do with it, because it would never occur to me to say that the inner concept of the circle is made of chalk. I don't think that's a very profound truth that is being expressed.

But when we pass from abstract thinking to thinking in terms of reality, we must say the following. Let us take something that we construct mathematically within ourselves, for example, the sentence: If we draw a diameter in a circle and from one end of the diameter a line to any point on the circumference and from this point a further line to the other end of the diameter, then this angle is always a right angle. I do not need to draw this on the board at all. What I recognize there, namely that in a circle every angle through the diameter with the vertex on the periphery is a right angle, that is a purely internal experience. I have no need to use the circle here on the board.

Interjection: That is not true! Only when you have also looked at it, can you construct it afterwards!

But there is no doubt that what I draw on the board is only an external aid.

For anyone who can think mathematically, it is out of the question that they cannot also construct such mathematical truths purely through inner experience, even if they are the most complicated mathematical truths. There is no question of that. Even if I had to draw them with chalk, that would still have no significance for the simple reason that what constitutes the substantial validity of the proposition is to be illustrated in the drawing, but does not have to be concluded in it. If I use the drawing on the board to visualize that the angle is a right angle, then this visualization does not establish anything specific for the inner validity of the sentence. And that is what ultimately matters. There can be absolutely no question of my first needing the drawing on the board. But even if I needed it, that would be completely irrelevant to what I have said about the nature of mathematization – not about solving individual problems, but about mathematization in general. What is important here lies in a completely different area than what has been mentioned here, because when we look at mathematization, we are simply led to say that we experience inner truths.

I did not say that we already experience realities in mathematics. Therefore, it is completely irrelevant to object that mathematics as such does not contain any reality. But in the formal it contains truths, and these can also be experienced. The way in which one comes to truth and knowledge is important, even if these do not initially have any reality within mathematics itself. But when this mathematical experience is transferred to a completely different area, namely to the area where the exactness of mathematics is applied to the real life of the soul, the character of exactness, which is initially experienced in the mathematical-formal, is carried into the real. And only through this am I entitled to carry over into reality what applies to mathematics as merely formal.

I have first shown how to arrive from within at truths which we — of course only in an external way — apparently transfer as unrealities to observation, to experiment, or with which experiment is interwoven. And then I also showed how this formal character is transformed into a real one. But then, what is apparently so plausible still does not apply: what is mathematical only lives in me; the concept only lives in me, it does not live outside in reality. What has been mathematically explored and mathematically worked out would have nothing to do with reality as such. Well, does the concept of a circle really only live in me?

Imagine – I don't draw a circle on the board, but I have my two fingers here. I hold a string with them and make the object move in a circular motion, so that this lead ball moves in a circle. The laws that I now recognize for the movement by mathematically recognizing them – do they have nothing to do with reality? I proceed continually in such a way that I determine behavior in the real precisely through mathematics. I proceed in such a way when I go from induction to deduction that I bring in what I have first determined by induction and then process it further with mathematics. If I introduce the end term of an empirical induction into a mathematical formula and then simply continue calculating, then I am counting on the fact that what I develop mathematically through deduction corresponds to reality. It is only through this that the mathematical is fruitful for reality, not through such philosophical arguments as have been presented.

Let us look at the fruitfulness of the mathematical for reality. One can see the fruitfulness simply when, for example, someone says: I see the irregularities that exist in relation to what has been calculated, and therefore I use other variables in the calculation. And so he initially comes to assume a reality by purely mathematical means; reality arises afterwards – it is there. Thus I have, by continuing my empirical path purely through mathematics, also shown the applicability of the inner experience to the outer world. At least I expect it. And if one could not expect that the real event, which one has followed in sensory-descriptive reality to a certain point, continues in the calculation, then what I just meant would not be possible at all: that one feels satisfied in mathematics. The point is to take the concepts seriously, as they have been dealt with.

Now to what I said about moral intuition. You may remember that I said in my lecture that the intuition that I established as the third stage of supersensible knowledge occurs last. But moral intuition also occurs for ordinary consciousness. It is the only one that initially arises for a consciousness that has advanced to our level from the supersensible world. Moral intuition is simply an intuition projected down from a higher level to our level of knowledge. I illustrated this clearly in the lecture. That is why I spoke of this moral intuition first, not afterwards. I have described it as the starting point. One learns to recognize it; and when one has grasped it correctly, then one has a certain subjective precondition for also understanding what comes afterwards. For in experiencing moral intuition, one experiences something that, when compared with what is otherwise real, has a different kind of reality, and that is the reality of ought. If you go into what I have said, then the difference between being and ought is explained simply by the fact that moral intuition projects into our ordinary sphere of consciousness, while the other intuition is not a projection, but must first be attained. It was not at all implied that moral intuition is only a special case for the process of knowledge of general intuition, but it is simply the first case where something occurs to us intuitively in our ordinary consciousness, in today's state of consciousness.

So, it is important to understand exactly the concepts that are developed here for anthroposophy. I wanted to give suggestions. I fully understand that objections are possible because, of course, one cannot explain everything in such detail, and so I assume that there are still many doubts and so on in the souls of those present. But imagine how long my lecture would have been if I had already dispelled in the lecture all the doubts that I am now trying to dispel in my answer. That is what one has to reckon with in a first exploratory lecture, not only in anthroposophy but in all fields. That is what it was about today. I did not want to give anything conclusive, and I must say that some people do not want to go into anthroposophy at all. But I have found that the best recognizers of what anthroposophy is were often not those who fell for it right from the start, but that the best workers in anthroposophy became those who had gone through bitter doubts.

Therefore, please do not take what I said with a certain sharpness in the reply as if it were meant with hatred. Rather, I am basically pleased about everything that is objected to, because it is only by overcoming these obstacles of objection that one actually enters into anthroposophy. And I have always had more satisfaction from those who have come to anthroposophy via the reefs of rejection and doubt than from those who have entered with full sails at the first attempt.

Lively applause.

Mr. Wilhelm: I do not wish to criticize, but only to ask a question to which I would find Dr. Steiner's answer very interesting. Dr. Steiner replied to the criticism of the first speaker, who compared Theosophy with Anthroposophy, by saying that the method of knowledge of Anthroposophy is quite different from that of Theosophy, especially the old one, and that in the whole history of Theosophy there is no trace, not a single reference, to the method of knowledge presented by Dr. Steiner this evening. I would just like to ask whether Dr. Steiner is familiar with the passages in 'The Green Face' – a book that has a very strong Theosophical slant and where this method of knowledge actually forms the basis of the whole work. I would be very interested to hear Dr. Steiner's position on this.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! I would first like to point out that it would be possible, if there were indeed echoes in the “Green Face”, which appeared a few years ago, of what I have said this evening, to be fundamentally traced back to anthroposophy. Shout: Never!

I only said in general that it would not contradict itself, but since someone here shouted “Never!”, I completely agree with that, because I find nothing anthroposophical in “The Green Face”, but I find that what is said about anthroposophy in “The Green Face” is based on methods of knowledge that I would not want to have anything to do with. That is what I have to say about it.