The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the lecture yesterday I described the external aspect, as it were, of what I am going to speak about today.

I tried to show how man and the cosmos together form one whole, and how what is present in the individual human being is connected in manifold ways with processes and with beings of the cosmos. If what I shall be saying today is not to seem groundless and incomplete, you must bring it into relation with the two preceding lectures.

The individual human being can be viewed in his external aspect, as he appears to ordinary sight, or to anatomy and physiology. But he can also be viewed in his inner aspect, so that his qualities of soul, his spiritual forces, are revealed.

The “whole” that is composed of man together with the cosmos may also be contemplated in two aspects. But these aspects will be the reverse of those presented by the individual man. In his case we speak of an outer and an inner aspect. When we speak of the universe, the cosmos, and of man as a member of this universe, ordinary feeling will tell us that the words must be used in the reverse way. We are actually within this cosmic existence when we think of it as purely spatial; from our own point of vision we look outwards. When, therefore, we are speaking of the universe from the human standpoint, we are speaking from within the universe, for we are standing at some point within it. Seen from this point of view the universe presents to us its physical, material aspect.

The human being presents his physical aspect when we view him from outside, and his aspect of spirit-and-soul when we view him from within. The universe presents its aspect of spirit-and-soul when we view it from outside. The concepts that must be applied here will be difficult, for they have almost entirely dropped out of use in modern language. But modern language cannot penetrate directly into the realm of the spiritual. Words that are suitable have first to be coined. Any attempt to fathom the realities of the spirit-and-soul by using words with their ordinary meanings is an absurdity.

In order to picture what I have just tried to characterise, the following must be said. In the case of a human being we speak of his external aspect as that which presents itself to the senses. If we speak of him from the inner aspect, we speak of his nature of spirit-and-soul. In the case of the universe, the cosmos, we must picture the reverse: we are at some point within the universe and from there it presents its physical aspect to us. If we are able to view the universe from outside, the aspect of spirit-and-soul is revealed to us. The natural question is this: Is it possible to view the universe from outside?

As we know, man alternates between the conditions in which he lives from birth until death and those he experiences between death and a new birth, and it is the external aspect of the universe that reveals itself during his existence between death and a new birth. If you will read in my book, Theosophy, the description given of the conditions in which man lives between death and a new birth you will find it amply indicated there that words must be used in a different sense.

The world, the universe, in which we find ourselves between birth and death is manifold enough, but it becomes even more manifold, far richer, when contemplated during the life between death and a new birth. Naturally, in such descriptions, a few selected details only can be mentioned. And it has always been my endeavour to add more and more information about matters which, at the beginning, are presented in an elementary way. I want to speak today of the spirit-and-soul of what was described yesterday in its material-physical aspect—the aspect of the cosmos viewed from within. I want now to describe what reveals itself when the cosmos is viewed from outside, when it is contemplated from a vantage-point of spirit-and-soul on the path of the experiences stretching between death and a new birth. From the different studies pursued here you know that this kind of contemplation is necessary, and you know too that no ordinary, logical exposition of the subject could ever reach the reality. It can therefore only be a matter of describing the vista that reveals itself when the methods referred to in anthroposophical literature are applied.

A vantage-point of vision lying outside the physical-material cosmos is reached only by degrees. When a man has reached this vantage-point—it cannot be until some while after his death—then for the first time he finds the solution of those questions which cannot be solved by the intellectual methods we employ while in the body. Such questions have, of course, constantly formed part of philosophical discussions: Is the world of space, the spatial cosmos, finite or infinite? However much discussion there may be—Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is right in this respect—questions such as those of the spatial or temporal limits of the manifested universe will never be led to a conclusion by discussion carried on from within the physical body. Under these conditions it is equally possible to prove that the universe is finite or that it is infinite. The questions are resolved only when the vantage-point of vision can be shifted, when a man is able to contemplate the world from the other side—not, therefore, from a point within it, but from outside it. In the middle stages at least of the life between death and a new birth, man is on yonder side of the boundary of the material-physical cosmos. The boundary of the material-physical cosmos actually lies midway between what is seen from the earthly viewpoint and what is seen during the life between death and a new birth.

This too is wisdom: To know what questions can indeed be asked in earthly existence but not answered there, because thinking can take place only on the physical foundations of the bodily nature. Such questions can be answered only when, outside this physical existence, a man is able, either through initiation or through death, to change the vantage-point of his vision.

Now if this vantage-point is, in fact, changed, we experience it from within; we are not within it as we are between birth and death, but we experience it from outside, view it from outside. But the strange fact is that the manifoldness presented by human beings disappears when we pass into yonder world. And whereas we behold many structures, many configurations, of the cosmos—actually as many as there are human souls connected with the earth—when we are looking back upon the earth we see man once only, both in time and in space. Between death and a new birth we behold many worlds and only one “manhood,” one human nature.

Without pondering upon this in meditation from every angle—it is of tremendous importance although in human words no more than the merest indications can be given—it is really not possible to have a clear conception of the radical difference in the picture of the world when it is experienced between birth and death and when it is experienced between death and a new birth. Between birth and death we experience one world and many men; during the life between death and rebirth we experience many worlds—representing our unitary world—and only one human nature. When from our life between death and rebirth we look back upon earthly life, men are not seen in their manifoldness but all are embraced in one single human nature. Everything, therefore, is completely reversed and attention must be called to this radical reversal. For it is essential to realise once and for always how impossible it is to acquire adequate ideas of the spiritual world without concepts that have been completely re-cast. With the easy-going methods by which people usually want to gain ideas of the spiritual world, it is simply not possible to reach ideas that conform with the reality. Man must be willing to metamorphose his ideas, even to the point of complete reversal. That is what many people are not willing to do, hence the battle that is waged against a true science of the spirit.

I explained to you yesterday in greater detail how man is related to the Sun-nature on the one side and to the Moon-nature on the other, but also to the natures of the several planets. This was all considered from the standpoint of Earth-evolution. I explained the way in which man is related to the Venus-nature, to the Mercury-nature, and so on, saying that through modern spiritual science we are led again, by an entirely independent path, to knowledge that was cultivated in the ancient Mysteries, through an inspired, dreamlike wisdom. Everything I said yesterday was a presentation of the subject from one aspect. As long as we endeavour to acquire knowledge as the initiate in the ancient Mysteries sought to acquire it during the life between birth and death, we gain ideas about our planetary universe such as were presented yesterday. But the moment we reach a vantage-point outside the cosmos in which we live between birth and death and view its aspect of spirit-and-soul from without, at that moment all the detailed matters referred to yesterday also reveal to us their other aspects, their reversed aspects.

It was said that the Mercury-forces in the world—whether in their material or in their planetary aspect—help man as a being of spirit-and-soul to take hold of the solid constituents of his organism. The Venus-forces enable him to take hold of the fluids in his organism. The moment we reverse this whole conception, all these qualities, too, are revealed to us in a quite different guise. If, leaving Neptune and Uranus out of account, we begin with Saturn, the outermost planet of our system, it becomes possible—in contemplating the Saturn-existence as it were from the other side of existence—to understand, by means of all the faculties we possess between death and a new birth, the real nature of man's life of instinct.

The essential nature of the life of instinct which wells up in man from subconscious depths of his being cannot be fathomed and understood by means of the faculties acquired only on the Earth; it must be fathomed either between death and rebirth, or in the realm of higher, super-sensible knowledge, in Initiation-Science.

So we may say: If, with the eyes of spirit, we contemplate the Saturn-nature from the viewpoint of the Earth, we gain an idea of the forces which help man to feel himself as an independent being of spirit-and-soul in face of the chemical processes working in his organism. The Saturn-existence viewed from outside, in its aspect of spirit-and-soul, reveals to us those forces in the cosmos which implant instincts into man's nature.

The Jupiter-existence reveals those elements in man which are more definitely of the nature of soul than are his instincts, namely, his inclinations, his sympathies. For whereas instincts are still entirely of an animal nature, in inclinations an element of soul (animal-psychic) is already evident.

The Mars-existence reveals all those impulses which are not, indeed, the moral commandments a man imposes on himself, but moral impulses which spring as it were from his whole character and fundamental disposition. Whether a man is courageous in his moral conduct or whether he is slack in this respect depends upon the forces that come into our ken when we view the Mars order of existence from the other side.—I am speaking, not of the fully conscious moral impulses described in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity as rooted in pure thinking, but of moral impulses in which there is invariably a considerable degree of unconsciousness.

When, therefore, we are considering man's connection with these outer planets, we are led more to the qualities which in a sense are actually bound up with the human organism. What is born with a man, stems from the cosmos, the universe; what wells up in the form of instincts from the whole organism is of the nature of Saturn; what wells up in the form of inclinations, sympathies, is of the nature of Jupiter; what wells up in the form of active forces of initiative but is bound up with the organism, is of the nature of Mars.

We come now to those qualities which are a more integral part of man. They also reveal themselves to our vision, inasmuch as they proceed from forces in the cosmos. Leaving aside the Sun-nature for the present, there is, for example, Mercury. It will not generally be believed that man's cleverness, his sagacity, is also grounded in the universe. This is true, nevertheless. And if, entirely without any preconceived ideas, you look at the phenomena of the universe, you will say to yourselves: The activity which your intelligence finally discovers in itself is present in the phenomena of the universe. Intelligence is manifestly present in these phenomena. Now the forces which represent this element of intelligence in the cosmos, and are born with us as our intellectual gifts, our sagacity—these forces pertain to the Mercury-nature in the universe.

The Venus-nature has been amply described in traditions and manifests in everything that constitutes love. The Moon-nature comes to expression in the activities of imagination, of phantasy; also in those of memory—not the organic activity underlying acts of remembrance but the activity that is present in the forming and shaping of mental pictures, of ideas. The pictures of memory are really identical in nature with the pictures of imagination, only they arise as faithful reproductions of the corresponding experiences. Therefore we can say: Imagination or phantasy, and memory, the more inward qualities and capacities, are connected with the forces of the Moon, Venus and Mercury.

When we contemplate the material-physical aspect of Jupiter, for example, that is to say when we contemplate Jupiter from within the universe, it represents the concentration of those forces—in the sense indicated yesterday—which make it possible for man not to flow away in the light but to maintain himself as an independent being of spirit-and-soul within the light. If the Jupiter-forces are viewed in their aspect of spirit-and-soul, that is to say, from without, then Jupiter reveals those forces which man has within him in the form of inclinations, sympathies and the like. In its outermost aspect Jupiter enables the soul-life to maintain its own independent footing in face of the light. In its aspect of spirit-and-soul, Jupiter enables inclinations, sympathies, to arise, to take shape, to be engendered.

When man is passing through these stages after death, or also in the process of Initiation—as I have described them in the book Theosophy—there comes a certain point of time when he ceases to see the stars—whether planets or fixed stars—as they are seen from the earth by means of the senses. It is quite understandable that he should cease to see the stars; but he does not cease to know about them. He knows, firstly, what I described yesterday. And from a certain point of time onwards he comes to know the nature of the stars from the moral aspect. He is now looking back upon the cosmos. But he sees the cosmos as a moral reality, not as a physical reality. And after the intermediate condition during which he sees what I described yesterday, he then sees from outside, especially during the middle period between death and a new birth, not what could be called Saturn in our parlance, but the surging life of instinct in the cosmos which then becomes part of himself when he again passes into physical embodiment on the earth. He sees the weaving life of inclinations, sympathies, and so on.—Materialistic thought may, of course, deny all this, but to do so is about as sensible as to deny the reality of the spirit and soul of a man when confronting the physical body.

This vision of the cosmos, of the planetary world, in their moral aspects fills man's existence between death and a new birth. These perceptions are, however, dependent in a certain respect upon how he passes through the gate of death. He beholds the life of instinct, of inclinations, of moral impulses and so on in accordance with the unconscious understanding he acquired during his life on earth.

For example, a man who during his life has been on friendly terms with many individuals who are what is called “unconventional” in some respect, a man who is not a philistine in his attitude to others but has a certain kindly understanding of them, letting them be as they are instead of criticising—such a man acquires for himself, in addition to the understanding by which his consciousness is already enriched, an abundance of unconscious forces. A great deal is gained from letting other human beings be as the are, trying to understand them, not picking them to pieces with criticism; but as well as this understanding, in itself an asset to his consciousness, he acquires, as I say, a wealth of unconscious impulses. Equipped with these impulses, he will then be well able to observe the mysteries of the Saturn-existence from the other side of life, from the side of the life between death and a new birth.

The mysteries of planetary existence reveal themselves in many different aspects. According to a man's capacity for understanding them, he combines these forces into a whole and so incorporates them into his own nature when he returns into earthly existence.

And now you can surely feel that through this vision a man gains knowledge and experience, just as he does here on the earth. On the earth he gets to know one human being after another; thereby he acquires knowledge of man. He also gains experiences in accordance with what is revealed to him from the other side of life. But these latter experiences, which are acquired during the second half of the life between death and a new birth, become creative forces, and the man bears them into the organism he receives through heredity. You will realise that this is connected with the forming of karma, that something takes place here which may be called the technique of the forming of karma. Between death and a new birth man acquires the experiences that are necessary to enable him to implant his karma into his nature, through these visions that come to him from the other side of life.

I have had to describe these matters with a certain subtlety because they are subtle in themselves, and because it is necessary to stress that concepts must be radically transformed if the universe is to be understood. For in everything we see here on the earth, physically to begin with, but then also through deepened spiritual perception, the one side only of existence is revealed. Indeed when we look outwards, the cosmos too reveals only this one aspect of existence. The other aspect reveals itself only when we are able to contemplate the cosmos while we are outside the body, in an existence that is purely of the nature of spirit-and-soul. And then the cosmos is revealed in its aspect of spirit-and-soul, in its moral aspect.

In very ancient times of human evolution on the earth, men still brought many “cosmic remembrances” with them when they came into physical existence. Compared with the men of today these primeval men were more animal-like in outer appearance (although the whole crude theory of man's descent from animals is a fallacy)—but for all that, in earthly existence too, they knew something of the other side of life. They had brought this knowledge with them into bodies that were still incompletely developed. In the course of evolution, man has progressively lost his remembrance of the other side of existence in which he lives between death and rebirth; and so he is now obliged to rely upon the experiences offered by earthly existence. Only so can man incorporate into himself a power which can be incorporated into him nowhere else in the universe. For the power to act out of freedom must be, and is, acquired during earthly existence; it will then remain throughout man's earthly and cosmic future.

Because, to begin with, these things naturally come as a shock to people, it is still necessary in public lectures to speak in abstract concepts of the fact that while man is within an existence of spirit-and-soul, the universe reveals its reverse aspect. But, as you see, it is also possible to describe the detailed, concrete facts of planetary existence—and one could also go farther out into the world of stars—and in so doing show how man is connected with the whole cosmos.

Only with these data of knowledge as a foundation is it possible to speak of the fact that the cosmos as it reveals itself when contemplated from the earth is firstly the physical cosmos (including the earth), then the etheric cosmos. But in ordinary physical space there are, in reality, only the physical cosmos and the etheric cosmos. The moment when, passing through the gate of death or through initiation, man becomes able to experience himself purely as a being of spirit-and-soul—that is to say, to contemplate the universe from the other side—conceptions of space cease to have any meaning for him. As long as the words of human language have to be used, we can say: When we contemplate our spatial universe from outside, it still appears to us as if it were spatial, but it no longer is so. For in truth it must be said: Here we look outwards from a single point, but we must imagine the point dispersed. The point is no longer a point, it is dispersed.

We embrace space within ourselves as it were, and behold the non-spatial; just as here we look at space from one single point, when we are outside our body we look back from out of space upon the point. And with this is connected the experience of beholding as many worlds as there are human souls connected with the earth, and only one human nature, one “manhood.”

We are each and all of us a single human being when we look at ourselves from outside. That is why the science of Initiation speaks of the mystery of number, because even number itself has meaning only from this or that particular point of vision. What here on earth is a unity—the cosmos—is a plurality when seen from outside. What here on earth is a plurality—namely, human beings—is a unity when seen from outside. To regard something as a plurality or as a unity is also maya, is also illusion, for if viewed from an entirely different point of vision, a unity may reveal itself as a plurality and a plurality as a unity. This is something that has also formed part of mathematical science in the course of its evolution on earth. I have spoken of this before.

Today we count by adding one unit to another. We say: one, then two, then by adding another unit we have three, and so on. But in very ancient times men did not count like this. They counted in this way: the unit is one, in the unit there is two, then, still in the unit, three. They did not add one unit to another but the unit was that which embraced all numbers. In the unit all numbers were contained. In our time the unit is contained in all the numbers; in ancient mathematics all the numbers were contained in the unit. This conception sprang from the different modes of thinking, which were in turn connected with the remembrances of an extra-cosmic science still surviving in very early times of evolution.

What I have been telling you in recent lectures requires to be carried a little further. I have tried to give you a picture of the flow of spiritual knowledge through the centuries, and of the form it has taken in recent times, and I have been able to show how from the fifteenth until the end of the eighteenth or even the beginning of the nineteenth century, the spiritual knowledge that was present before that period as clear and concrete albeit instinctive knowledge, showed itself in this later age more in a devotion of heart and soul to the Spiritual, to all that is of the Spirit in the world.

We have seen how the knowledge man possessed of Nature and of how the spiritual world works in Nature, is still present in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In a personality like Agrippa of Nettesheim, whom I have described in my book Mysticism and Modern Thought, we have one who was still fully possessed of the knowledge, for example, that in the several planets of our system are spiritual Beings of quite definite character and kind.

In his writings, Agrippa of Nettesheim assigns to each single planet what he calls the Intelligence of the planet. This points to traditions which were still extant from olden times, and even in his day were something more than traditions. To look up to a planet in the way that became customary in later Astronomy and is still customary today, would have been utterly impossible to a man like Agrippa of Nettesheim. The external planet, nay, every external star was no more than a sign, an announcement, so to say, of the presence of spiritual Beings, to whom one could look up with the eye of the soul, when one looked in the direction of the star. And Agrippa of Nettesheim knew that the Beings who are united with the single stars are the Beings who rule the inner existence of the star or the planet, rule also the movements of the planet in the Universe, the whole activity of the particular star. And such Beings he called: the Intelligence of the star.

Agrippa knew also how, at the same time, hindering Beings work from the star, Beings who undermine the good deeds of the star. They too work from out of the star and also into it; and these Beings he called Demons of the star. And together with this knowledge went an understanding of the Earth, that saw in the Earth too a heavenly body having its Intelligence and its Demon. The understanding however for star Intelligence and star Demonology was little by little completely lost, with all that was involved in it. What was essentially involved in it may be expressed in the following way.

The Earth was of course looked upon as ruled in her inner activity, in her movement in the Cosmos, by Intelligences whom one could bring together under the name of the Intelligence of the Earth star. But what was the Intelligence of the Earth star, for the men of Agrippa's time? It is exceedingly difficult today even to speak of these things, because the ideas of men have travelled very far away from what was accepted as a matter of course in those times by men of insight and understanding. The Intelligence of the Earth star was Man himself, the human being as such. They saw in Man a being who had received a task from the Spirituality of the Worlds, not merely, as modern man imagines, to walk about on the Earth, or to travel about it in trains, to buy and sell, to write books, and so forth and so forth—no, they conceived Man as a being to whom the World-Spirit had given the task to rule and regulate the Earth, to bring law and order into all that has to do with the place of the Earth in the Cosmos. Their conception of Man was expressed by saying: Through what he is, through the forces and powers he bears within his being, Man gives to the Earth the impulse for her movement around the Sun, for her movement further in Universal Space.

There was in very truth still a feeling for this. It was known that the task had once been allotted to Man, that Man had really been made the Lord of the Earth by the World-Spirituality, but in the course of his evolution had not shown himself equal to the task, had fallen from his high estate. When men are speaking of knowledge nowadays it is very seldom that one hears even a last echo of this view. What we find in religious belief concerning the Fall really goes back ultimately to this idea; for there the point is that originally Man had quite another position on the Earth and in the Universe from the position he takes today; he has fallen from his high estate. Setting aside however this religious conception and considering the realm of thought, where men think they have knowledge that they have attained by definite and correct methods, it is only here and there that we can still find today an echo of the ancient knowledge that once proceeded from instinctive clairvoyance, and that was well aware of Man's task and of his Fall into his present narrow limitations.

It may still happen, for example, that one may have a conversation with a person—I am here relating facts—who has thought very deeply, who has also acquired very deep knowledge concerning this or that matter in the spiritual realm. The conversation turns on whether Man, as he stands on Earth today, is really a creature who is self-contained, who carries his whole being and nature within him. And such a personality as I have described will say to you, that this cannot be. Man must really in his nature be a far more comprehensive being—otherwise he could not have the striving he has now, he could not develop the great idealism of which we can see such fine and lofty examples; in his true nature Man must be a great and comprehensive being, who has somehow or other committed a cosmic sin, as a consequence of which he has been banished within the limits of this present earthly existence, so that today he is really sitting imprisoned as it were in a cage. You may still meet with this view here and there as a late straggler, as it were. But speaking generally, where shall we find one who accounts himself a scientist, who seriously occupies himself with these great and far-reaching questions? And yet it is only by facing them that man can ever find his way to an existence worthy of him as man.

It was, then, really so that Man was regarded as the bearer of the Intelligence of the Earth. But now, a person like Agrippa of Nettesheim ascribed to the Earth also a Demon. When we go back to the twelfth or thirteenth century, we find this Demon of the Earth to be a Being who could only become what he became on the Earth, because he found in Man the tool for his activity.

In order to understand this, we must acquaint ourselves with the way men thought about the relationship of the Earth to the Sun, or of Earthly man to the Sun, in those days. And if I am now to describe to you how they understood this relationship, then I must again speak in Imaginations: for these things will not suffer themselves to be confined in abstract concepts. Abstract concepts came later, and they are very far from being able to span the truth; we have therefore to speak in pictures, in Imaginations.

Although, as I have described in my Outline of Occult Science, the Sun separated itself from the Earth, or rather separated the Earth off from itself, it is nevertheless the original abode of Man. For ever since the beginning of the Saturn existence Man was united with the whole planetary system including the Sun. Man has not his home on Earth, he has on Earth only a temporary resting place. He is in truth, according to the view that prevailed in those olden times, a Sun-being. He is united in his whole being and existence with the Sun. And since this is so, he ought as a being of the Sun to stand quite differently on the Earth than he actually does. He ought to stand on the Earth in such a way that it should suffice for the Earth to have the impulse to bring forth the seed of Man in etheric form from out of the mineral and plant kingdoms, and the Sun then to fructify the seed brought forth from the Earth. Thence should arise the etheric human form, which should itself establish its own relationship to the physical substances of the Earth, and itself take on Earth substantiality. The contemporaries of Agrippa of Nettesheim—Agrippa's own knowledge was, unfortunately, somewhat clouded, but better contemporaries of his did really hold the view that Man ought not to be born in the earthly way he now is, but Man ought really to come to being in his etheric body through the interworking of Sun and Earth, and only afterwards, going about the Earth as an etheric being, give himself earthly form. The seeds of Man should grow up out of the Earth with the purity of plant-life, appearing here and there as ethereal fruits of the Earth, darkly shining; these should then in a certain season of the year be overshone, as it were, by the light of the Sun, and thereby assume human form, but etheric still; then Man should draw to himself physical substance—not from the body of the mother, but from the Earth and all that is thereon, incorporating it into himself from the kingdoms of the Earth. Thus—they thought—should have been the manner of Man's appearance on the Earth, in accordance with the purposes of the Spirit of the Worlds.

And the development that came later was due to the fact that Man had allowed to awaken within him too deep an urge, too intense a desire for the earthly and material. Thereby he forfeited his connection with the Sun and the Cosmos, and could only find his existence on Earth in the form of the stream of inheritance. Thereby, however, the Demon of the Earth began his work; for the Demon of the Earth would not have been able to do anything with men who were Sun-born. When Sun-born man came to dwell on the Earth, he would have been in very truth the Fourth Hierarchy. And one would have had to speak of Man in the following manner. One would have had to say: First Hierarchy: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; Second Hierarchy: Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes; Third Hierarchy: Angels, Archangels, Archai; Fourth Hierarchy: Man—three different shades or gradations of the human, but none the less making the Fourth Hierarchy.

But because Man gave rein to his strong impulses in the direction of the physical, he became, not the being on the lowest branch, as it were, of the Hierarchies, but instead the being at the summit of the highest branch of the earthly kingdoms: mineral kingdom, plant kingdom, animal kingdom, human kingdom. This was the picture of how Man stood in the world.

Moreover, because Man does not find his proper task on the Earth, the Earth herself has not her right and worthy position in the Cosmos. For since Man has fallen, the true Lord of the Earth is not there. What has happened? The true Lord of the Earth is not there, and it became necessary for the Earth, not being governed from herself in her place in the Cosmos, to be ruled from the Sun; so that the tasks that should really be carried out on Earth fell to the Sun. The man of mediaeval times looked up to the Sun and said: In the Sun are certain Intelligences. They determine the movement of the Earth in the Cosmos; they govern what happens on the Earth. Man ought, in reality, to do this; the Sun-forces ought to work on Earth through Man for the existence of the Earth. Hence that significant mediaeval conception that was expressed in the words: The Sun, the unlawful Prince of this world.

And now reflect, my dear friends, how infinitely the Christ Impulse was deepened through such conceptions. The Christ became, for these mediaeval men, the Spirit Who was not willing to find His further task on the Sun, Who would not remain among those who directed the Earth in unlawful manner from without. He wanted to take His path from the Sun to the Earth, to enter into the destiny of Man and the destiny of Earth, to experience Earth events and pass along the ways of Earth evolution, sharing the lot of Man and of Earth.

Therewith, for mediaeval man, the Christ is the one Being Who in the Cosmos saved the task of Man on the Earth. Now you have the connection. Now you can see why, in Rosicrucian times, it was again and again impressed upon the pupil: “O Man, thou art not what thou art; the Christ had to come, to take from thee thy task, in order that He might perform it for thee.”

A great deal in Goethe's Faust has come down from mediaeval conceptions, although Goethe himself did not understand this. Recall, my dear friends, how Faust conjures up the Earth Spirit. With these mediaeval conceptions in mind, we can enter with feeling and understanding into how this Earth Spirit speaks.—

In the tides of Life,
In Action's storm,
A fluctuant wave,
A shuttle free,
Birth and the Grave,
An eternal Sea,
A weaving, flowing
Life, all glowing:
Thus at Time's humming loom ‘tis my hand prepares
The garment of Life which the Deity wears.

Who is it that Faust is really conjuring up? Goethe himself, when he was writing Faust, most assuredly did not fully know. But if we go back from Goethe to the mediaeval Faust and listen to this mediaeval Faust in whom Rosicrucian wisdom was living, then we learn how he too wanted to conjure up a spirit. But whom did he want to conjure up in the Earth Spirit? He did not ever speak of the Earth Spirit, he spoke of Man. The deep longing and striving of mediaeval man was: to be Man. For he felt and knew that as Earth man he is not truly Man. How can manhood be found again? The way Faust is rebuffed, pushed on one side by the Earth Spirit is a picture of how man in his earthly form is rebuffed by his own being. And this is why many accounts of conversion to Christianity in the Middle Ages show such extraordinary depth of feeling. They are filled with the sense that men have striven to attain the manhood that is lost, and have had to give up in despair, have rightly despaired of being able to find in themselves, within earthly physical life, this true and genuine manhood; and so they have arrived at the point where they must say: Human striving for true manhood must be abandoned, earthly man must leave it to the Christ to fulfil the task of the Earth.

In this time, when man's relation to true manhood as well as his relation to the Christ was still understood in what I would call a superpersonal-personal manner—in this time Spirit-knowledge, Spirit-vision was still a real thing, it was still a content of experience. It ceased to be so with the fifteenth century. Then came the tremendous change, which no one really understood. But those who know of such things know how in the fifteenth, in the sixteenth centuries, and even later, there was a Rosicrucian school, isolated, scarcely known to the world, where over and over again a few pupils were educated, and where above all, care was taken that one thing should not be forgotten but be preserved as a holy tradition. And this was the following.—I will give it to you in narrative form.

Let us say, a new pupil arrived at this lonely spot to receive preparation. The so-called Ptolemaic system was first set before him, in its true form, as it had been handed down from olden times, not in the trivial way it is explained nowadays as something that has been long ago supplanted, but in an altogether different way. The pupil was shown how the Earth really and truly bears within herself the forces that are needed to determine her path through the Universe. So that to have a correct picture of the World, it must be drawn in the old Ptolemaic sense: the Earth must be for Man in the centre of the Universe, and the other stars in their corresponding revolutions be controlled and directed by the Earth. And the pupil was told: If one really studies what are the best forces in the Earth, then one can arrive at no other conception of the World than this. In actual fact, however, it is not so. It is not so on account of man's sin. Through man's sin, the Earth—so to speak, in an unauthorised, wrongful way—has gone over into the kingdom of the Sun; the Sun has become the regent and ruler of earthly activities. Thus, in contradistinction to a World-System given by the Gods to men with the Earth in the centre, could now be set another World-System, that has the Sun in the centre, and the Earth revolving round the Sun—it is the system of Copernicus.

And the pupil was taught that here is a mistake in the Cosmos, a mistake in the Universe brought about by human sin. This knowledge was entrusted to the pupil and he had to engrave it deeply in his heart and soul.—Men have overthrown the old World-System (so did the teacher speak) and set another in its place; and they do not know that this other, which they take to be correct, is the outcome of their own human guilt. It is really nothing else than the expression, the revelation of human guilt, and yet men take it to be the right and correct view. What has happened in recent times? (The teacher is speaking to the pupil.) Science has suffered a downfall through the guilt of man. Science has become a science of the Demon.

About the end of the eighteenth century such communications became impossible, but until that time there were always pupils here and there of some lonely Rosicrucian School, who received their spiritual nourishment imbued as it were with this feeling, with this deep understanding.

Even such a man as Leibnitz, the great philosopher, was led by his own thought and deliberation to try and find somewhere a place of learning where the relation between the Copernican and Ptolemaic Systems could be correctly formulated. But he was not able to find any such place.

Things like this need to be known if one is to understand aright, in all its shades of meaning, the great change that has come about in the last centuries in the way man looks on himself and on the Universe. And with this weakening of man's living connection with himself, with this estrangement of man from himself came afterwards the tendency to cling to the external intellect that today rules all. Is this external intellect verily human experience? No, for were it human experience, it could not live so externally in mankind as it does. The intellect has really no sort of connection with what is individual and personal, with the single individual man; it is well nigh a convention. It does not flow out of inner human experience; rather it approaches man as something outside him.

You may feel how the intellect became external by comparing the way in which Aristotle himself imparted his Logic to his pupils with the way in which it was taught much later, say in the seventeenth century.—You will remember how Kant says that Aristotle's Logic has not advanced since his time.—In the time of Aristotle, Logic was still thoroughly human. When a man was taught to think logically, he had a feeling as though—if again I may be allowed to express myself in imaginative terms—as though he were thrusting his head into cold water and thereby became estranged from himself for a moment; or else he had a feeling such as Alexander expressed when Aristotle wanted to impart Logic to him: You are pressing together all the bones of my head! It is the feeling of something external. But in the seventeenth century this externality was taken as a matter of course. Men learned how from the major and minor premise the consequent must be deduced. They learned what we find treated so ironically in Goethe's Faust:

“The first was so, the second so.
Therefore the third and fourth are so:
Were not the first and second, then
The third and fourth had never been!
There will your mind be drilled and braced,
As if in Spanish boots ‘twere laced!”

Whether, like Alexander, one feels the bones of one's head all pressed together, or whether one is laced up in Spanish boots with all this First, Second, Third, Fourth—we have in either case a true picture of what one feels.

But this externality of abstract thought was no longer felt in the time when Logic began to be taught in the schools. Today of course this has more or less ceased. Logic is no longer specifically taught in the schools. It is rather as if there had once been a time when hundreds and hundreds of people had put on the same uniform under direction, and done it with enthusiasm, and then afterwards there came a time when they did it of their own free will without giving it a thought.

During all the time however when the Logic of the abstract was gaining the upper hand, the old spiritual knowledge was incapable of going forward. Hence we see it in its turn becoming external, and assuming a form of which examples are to be found in the writings of Eliphas Levi or the publications of Saint-Martin. These are the last offshoots of the old Spirit-knowledge and Spirit-vision.

What do we find in a book such as Eliphas Levi's, The Dogma and Ritual of High Magic? In the first place there are all kinds of signs—Triangles, Pentagrams and so forth. We find words from languages in use in bygone ages, especially from the Hebrew. And we find that what in earlier times was life and at the same time knowledge that could pass over into man's action and into man's ideas—this we find has become bereft of ideas on the one hand, and on the other hand has degenerated into external magic. There is speculation as to the symbolic meaning of this or that sign, concerning all of which the modern man, if he is honest, would have to confess that he can find nothing particular in it. There are also practices connected with all manner of rites, while those who spoke of these rites and frequently practised them were far from having any clear notion at all of their spiritual connection. Such books are invariably pointers to what was once understood in olden times, was once an inward knowledge-experience, but when Eliphas Levi, for example, was writing his books, was no longer understood. As for Saint-Martin—of him I have already written in the Goetheanum Weekly.

Thus we see how what had once been interwoven into the soul-and-spirit of man's life, could not he held there but fell a victim to complete want of understanding. The common impulse and striving for the Divine that shows itself in the feeling of man from the fifteenth to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is genuine and true. Beautiful things are to be found in this impulse, things lovely and sublime. Much that has come from these times and that is far too little noticed today has about it as it were a magic breath—the genuine spell of the Spiritual.

Side by side, however, with all this, a seed is sprouting, the seed of the lack of understanding of old spiritual truths. We have therewith a hardening, ossifying process, and a growing impossibility to approach the Spiritual in a way that is in accord with the age. We come across men of the eighteenth century who speak of a downfall of all that is human, and of the rise of a terrible materialism. Often it seems as though what these men of the eighteenth century say applies just as well to our own time. And yet it is not so; what they say does not apply to the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century. For in the nineteenth century a further stage has been reached. What was still regarded in the eighteenth century with a certain abhorrence on account of its demoniacal character, has come to be taken quite as a matter of course. The men of the nineteenth century had not the power to say: Copernicus!—Yes; but such a conception of the Universe was only able to arise because man did not become on Earth that which he should have become, and so the Earth was left without a ruler, and the rulership passed over to the unrighteous lords of the world (the expression occurs again and again in mediaeval writings), these took over the leadership of the Earth—even as the Christ left the Sun and united Himself with the destiny of the Earth.

Only now, at the end of the nineteenth century, has it again become possible to look into these things with a clear vision such as man possessed in olden times; only now in the Michael Age has the possibility come again. We have spoken repeatedly of the dawn of the Michael Age, and of its character. But there are tasks that belong to this Michael Age, and it is possible now to point to these tasks, after all that we have been considering in the Christmas Meeting and since, about the evolution of Spirit-vision throughout the centuries.

[ 1 ] My object here is to present in outline certain conclusions I have reached concerning the relations between the psychic and the physical components of the human being. I may add that, in doing so, I place on record the results of a systematic spiritual investigation extending over a period of thirty years. It is only in the last few of those years that it has become practicable to formulate these results in concepts capable of verbal expression, and thus to bring the investigation to at least a temporary close. I must emphasise that it is the results and the results alone that I shall be presenting, or rather indicating, in what follows. Their foundation in fact can certainly be established on the basis of contemporary science. But to do this would require a substantial volume; and that my present circumstances do not permit of my writing.

[ 2 ] If we are seeking for the actual relation between psychic and physical, it will not do to take as our starting-point Brentano’s distribution of psychic experience into representation, judgment and the responses of love and hate. Partitioning in this way, we are led to shelve so many relevant considerations that we shall reach no reliable results. On the contrary we have to start from that very trichotomy of representation, feeling and will which Brentano rejected. If we survey the psychic experience of representation as a whole, and seek for the bodily processes with which that experience is related, we shall find the appropriate nexus by relying substantially on the findings of current physiological psychology. The somatic correlatives to the psychic element in representation are observable in the processes of the nervous system, extending into the sense organs in one direction and into the interior physical organism in the other. Here, however wide the divergence in many respects between the anthroposophical point of view and that of contemporary science, that very science provides an excellent foundation.

It is otherwise when we seek to determine the somatic correlatives for feeling and willing. There we have first to blaze the requisite trail through the findings of current physiology. And once we have succeeded in doing so, we shall find that, just as representation is necessarily related to nervous activity, so feeling must be seen as related to that vital rhythm which is centred in, and connected with, the respiratory system; bearing in mind that, for this purpose, the rhythm of breathing must be traced right into the outermost peripheral regions of the organism. To arrive at concrete results here, the findings of physiological research need to be pursued in a direction which is as yet decidedly unfamiliar. If we take the trouble to do this, preliminary objections to bracketing feeling with respiration, all disappear, and what at first looks like an objection turns out to be a proof. Take one simple example from the wide range available: musical experience is dependent on some feeling, but the content of musical form subsists in representations furnished by auditory perception. How does musical emotion arise? The representation of the tonal shape (which depends on organ of hearing and neural process) is not yet the actual musical experience. That arises in the measure that the rhythm of breathing, continuing further into the brain, confronts within that organ the effects produced there by ear and nervous system. The psyche now lives, not alone in what is heard and represented, or thought, but in the breathing rhythm. Something is released in the breathing rhythm through the fact that neural process impinges on rhythmic life. Once we have seen the physiology of respiration in its true light, we are led on all hands to the conclusion that the psyche, in experiencing emotion, is supported by the rhythmic process of breathing, in the same way that, in representation and ideation, it is supported by neural processes. And it will be found that willing is supported, in the same way, by the physical processes of metabolism. Here again one must include the innumerable offshoots and ramifications of these processes, which extend throughout the entire organism.

When something is “represented”, a neural process takes place, on the basis of which the psyche becomes conscious of its representation; when something is “felt”, a modification is effected in the breathing rhythm, through which a feeling comes to life; and in the same way, when something is “willed”, a metabolic process occurs that is the somatic foundation for what the psyche experiences as willing. It should be noted however that it is only in the first case (representation mediated by the nervous system) that the experience is a fully conscious, waking experience. What is mediated through the breathing-rhythm (including in this category everything in the nature of feelings, affects, passions and the like) subsists in normal consciousness with the force only of representations that are dreamed. Willing, with its metabolic succedaneum, is experienced in turn only with that third degree of consciousness, totally dulled, which also persists in sleep. If we look more closely at this series, we shall notice that the experience of willing is in fact wholly different from the experience of representation or ideation. The latter is something like looking at a coloured surface: whereas willing is like looking at a black area in the middle of a coloured field. We see nothing there in the uncoloured part of the surface precisely because—unlike the surrounding part, from which colour impressions are received—no such impressions are at hand from it. We “have the idea” of willing, because within the psyche’s field of ideational experience a patch of non-ideation inserts itself, very much as the interruptions of consciousness brought about by sleep insert themselves into the continuum of conscious life. It is to these differing types of conscious apprehension that the soul owes the manifold variety of its experience in ideation, feeling and willing.

There are some noteworthy observations on feeling and willing in Theodor Ziehen’s Manual of Physiological Psychology—in many ways a standard work within the tradition of current scientific notions concerning the relation between the physical and the psychic. He deals with the relation between the various forms of representation and ideation on the one hand and neural function on the other in a way that is quite in accord with the anthroposophical approach. But when it comes to feeling (see Lecture 9 in his book), he has this to say:

The older psychology, almost without exception, treats of affects as manifestations of a special, independent faculty. Kant placed the feeling of desire and aversion, as a separate faculty, between those of cognition and appetite, and he expressly emphasised that any further reduction of the three to a common source was impossible. But our previous discussions have shown that feelings of desire and aversion have in fact no such independent existence, they are not any sounding of the “note of feeling”, but simply attributes or signals of sensations and representations.

Here is a theoretical approach which concedes to feeling no independent existence in the life of the soul, seeing it as a mere attribute of ideation. And the result is, it assumes that not only ideation but feeling also is supported by neural processes. The nervous system is thus the somatic element to which the entire psyche is appropriated. Yet the whole basis of this approach amounts to an unnoticed presupposition of the conclusions at which it expects to arrive. It accepts as psychic only what is related to neural processes and then draws the inference that what is not proper to these processes, namely feeling, must be treated as having no independent existence—as a mere signal of ideation.

To abandon this blind alley and return instead to unprejudiced observation of the psyche is to be definitively convinced of the independence of the whole life of feeling. But it is also to appreciate without reserve the actual findings of physiology and at the same time to gain from them the insight that feeling is, as already indicated, peculiar to the breathing-rhythm.

The methodology of natural science denies any sort of existential independence to the will. Unlike feeling, willing is not even a signal of ideation. But this negative assumption, too, is simply based on a prior decision (cf. p. 15 of Physiological Psychology) to assign the whole of the psyche to neural process. Yet the plain fact is that what constitutes the peculiar quality of willing cannot really be related to neural process as such. Thus, precisely because of the exemplary clarity with which Ziehen develops the ideas from which he starts, he is forced (as anyone must be) to conclude that analysis of psychic processes in their relation to the life of the body “affords no support to the assumption of a specific faculty of will”.

The fact remains that unprejudiced contemplation of the psyche obliges us to recognise the existential independence of the will, and accurate insight into the findings of physiology compels the conclusion that the will, as such, must be linked not with neural but with metabolic processes. If a man wants to form clear concepts in this field, then he must look at the findings of physiology and psychology in the light of the facts themselves and not, as so often happens in the present day practice of those sciences, in the light of preconceived opinions and definitions—not to mention theoretical sympathies and antipathies.¹

Most important of all, he must be able to discern very clearly the mutual interrelation of neural function, breathing-rhythm and metabolic activity respectively. These three forms of activity subsist, not alongside of, but within one another. They interpenetrate and enter each other. Metabolic activity is present at all points in the organism; it permeates both the rhythmic organs and the neural ones. But within the rhythmic it is not the somatic foundation of feeling, and within the neural it is not that of ideation. On the contrary, in both of these fields it is the correlative of will-activity permeating rhythm and permeating the nerves respectively. Only materialistic presupposition can relate the element of metabolism in the nerves with the process of ideation. Observation with its roots in reality reports quite differently. It is compelled to recognise that metabolism is present in the nerve to the extent that will is permeating it. And it is the same with the somatic apparatus for rhythm. Everything within that organ that is of the nature of metabolism has to do with the element of will present in it. It is always willing that must be brought into connection with metabolic activity, always feeling that must be related to rhythmic occurrence, irrespective of the particular organ in which metabolism and rhythm are operating.

But in the nerves something else goes on that is quite distinct from metabolism and rhythm. The somatic processes in the nervous system which provide the foundation for representation and ideation are physiologically difficult to grasp. That is because, wherever there is neural function, it is accompanied by the ideation which is ordinary consciousness. But the converse of this is also true. Where there is no ideation, there it is never specifically neural function we discern, but only metabolic activity in the nerve; or rhythmic occurrence in it, as the case may be. Neurology will never arrive at concepts that measure up to the facts, so long as it fails to see that the specifically neural activity of the nerves cannot possibly be an object of physiologically empirical observation. Anatomy and Physiology must bring themselves to recognise that neural function can be located only by a method of exclusion. The activity of the nerves is precisely that in them which is not perceptible by the senses, though the fact that it must be there can be inferred from what is so perceptible, and so can the specific nature of their activity. The only way of representing neural function to ourselves is to see in it those material events, by means of which the purely psycho-spiritual reality of the living content of ideation is subdued and devitalised (herabgelähmt) to the lifeless representations and ideas we recognise as our ordinary consciousness. Unless this concept finds its way somehow into physiology, physiology can have no hope of explicating neural activity.

At present physiology has committed itself to methods which conceal rather than reveal this concept. And psychology, too, has shut the door in her own face. Look, for instance, at the effects of Herbartian psychology. It confines its attention exclusively to the process of representation, and regards feeling and willing merely as effects consequent on that process. But, for cognition, these “effects” gradually peter out, unless at the same time a candid eye is kept on actual feeling and willing; with the result that we are prevented from reaching any valid correlation of feeling and willing with somatic processes. The body as a whole, not merely the nervous activity impounded in it, is the physical basis of psychic life. And, just as, for ordinary consciousness, psychic life is naturally classifiable in terms of ideation, feeling and willing, so is physical life classifiable in terms of neural function, rhythmic occurrence and metabolic process.

The question at once arises: in what way do the following enter and inhabit the organism: on the one hand, sense-perception proper, in which neural function merely terminates, and on the other the faculty of motion, which is the effusion of will? Unbiased observation discloses that neither the one nor the other of these belongs to the organism in the same sense that neural function, rhythmic occurrence and metabolic process belong to it. What goes on in the senses does not belong immediately to the organism at all. The external world reaches out into the senses, as though they were bays or inlets leading into the organism’s own existence. Compassing the processes that take place in the senses, the psyche does not participate in inner organic events; it participates in the extension of outer events into the organism.² In the same way, when physical motion is brought about, what we have to do with is not something that is actually situated within the organism, but an outward working of the organism into the physical equilibrium (or other dynamic relation) between the organism itself and its environment. Within the organism it is only a metabolic process that can be assigned to willing; but the event that is liberated through this process is at the same time an actual happening within the equilibrium, or the dynamics, of the external world. Exerting volition, the life of the psyche overreaches the domain of the organism and combines its action with a happening in the outer world.

The study of the whole matter has been greatly confused by the separation of the nerves into sensory and motor. Securely anchored as this distinction appears to be in contemporary physiological ideas, it is not supported by unbiased observation. The findings of physiology based on neural sections, or on the pathological elimination of certain nerves, do not prove what the experiment or the case-history is said to show. They prove something quite different. They prove that the supposed distinction between sensory and motor nerves does not exist. On the contrary, both kinds of nerve are essentially alike. The so called motor nerve does not implement movement in the manner that the theory of two kinds of nerve assumes. What happens is that the nerve as carrier of the neural function implements an inner perception of the particular metabolic process that underlies the will—in exactly the same way that the sensory nerve implements perception of what is coming to pass within the sense-organ. Unless and until neurological theory begins to operate in this domain with clear concepts, no satisfactory co-ordination of psychic and somatic life can come about.³

[ 3 ] Just as it is possible, psycho-physiologically, to pursue the interrelations between psychic and somatic life which come about in ideation, feeling and willing, in a similar way it is possible, by anthroposophical method, to investigate that relation which the psychic element in ordinary consciousness bears to the spiritual. Applying these methods, the nature of which I have described here and elsewhere, we find that, while representation, or ideation, has a basis in the body in the shape of neural activity or function, it also has a basis in the spiritual. In the other direction—the direction away from the body—the soul stands in relation to a noetically real, which is the basis for the ideation that is characteristic of ordinary consciousness. But this noetic reality can only be experienced through imaginal cognition. And it is so experienced in so far as its content discloses itself to contemplation in the form of coherently linked (gegliederte) imaginations. Just as, in the direction of the body, representation rests on the activity of the nerves, so from the other direction does it issue from a noetic reality, which discloses itself in the form of imaginations.

It is this noetic, or spiritual, component of the organism which I have termed in my writings the etheric or life-body. And in doing so I invariably point out that the term “body” is no more vulnerable to objection than the other term “ether”; because my exposition clearly shows that neither of them is predicated materially. This life-body (elsewhere I have also sometimes used the expression “formative-forces body”) is that phase of the spiritual, whence the representational life of ordinary consciousness, beginning with birth—or, say, conception—and ending with death, continuously originates.

The feeling-component of ordinary consciousness rests, on the bodily side, on rhythmic occurrence. From the spiritual side it streams from a level of spiritual reality that is investigated, in anthroposophical research, by methods which I have, in my writings, designated as inspirational. (Here again it is emphasised that I employ this term solely with the meaning I have given it in my own descriptions; it is not to be equated with inspiration in the colloquial sense.) In the spiritual reality that lies at the base of the soul and is apprehensible though inspiration there is disclosed that phase of the spiritual, proper to the human being, which extends beyond birth and death. It is in this field that anthroposophy brings its spiritual investigations to bear on the problem of immortality. As the mortal part of the sentient human being manifests itself through rhythmic occurrences in the body, so does the immortal spirit kernel of the soul reveal itself in the inspiration-content of intuitive consciousness.

For such an intuitive consciousness the will, which depends, in the somatic direction, on metabolic processes, issues forth from the spirit through what in my writings I have termed authentic intuitions. What is, from one point of view, the “lowest” somatic activity (metabolism) is correlative to a spiritually highest one. Hence, ideation, which relies on neural activity, achieves something like a perfection of somatic manifestation; while the bodily processes associated with willing are only a feeble reflection of willing. The real representation is alive, but, as somatically conditioned, it is subdued and deadened. The content remains the same. Real willing, on the other hand, whether or no it finds an outcome in the physical world, takes its course in regions that are accessible only to intuitive vision; its somatic correlative has almost nothing to do with its content. It is at this level of spiritual reality, disclosed to intuition, that we find influences from previous terrestrial lives at work in later ones. And it is in this kind of context that anthroposophy approaches the problems of repeated lives and of destiny. As the body fulfils its life in neural function, rhythmic occurrence and metabolic process, so the human spirit discloses its life in all that becomes apparent in imaginations, inspirations and intuitions. The body, within its own field, affords participation in its external world in two directions, in sensuous happenings and in motor happenings; and so does the spirit—in so far as that experiences the representations of the psyche imaginally (even in ordinary consciousness) from the one direction, while in the other—in willing—it in-forms the intuitive impulses that are realising themselves through metabolic processes. Looking towards the body, we find neural activity that is taking the form of representation-experience, ideation; looking towards the spirit, we realise the spirit-content of the imagination that is flowing into precisely that ideation.

Brentano was primarily sensitive to the noetic side of the psyche’s experience in representation. That is why he characterises this experience as figurative, i.e. as an imaginal event. Yet when it is not only the private content of the soul that is being experienced, but also a somewhat that demands judgmental acknowledgment or repudiation, then there is added to the representation a soul experience deriving from spirit. The content of this experience remains “unconscious” in the ordinary sense, because it consists of imaginations of a spiritual that existentially underpins the physical object. These imaginations add nothing to the representation except that its content exists. Hence Brentano’s diremption of mere representation (which imaginally experiences merely an inwardly present) from judgment (which imaginally experiences an externally given; but which is aware of that experience only as existential acknowledgment or repudiation).

When it comes to feeling, Brentano has no eyes for its somatic basis in rhythmic occurrence; instead he limits his field of observation to love and hate; that is, to .vestiges, in the sphere of ordinary consciousness, of inspirations which themselves remain unconscious. Lastly the will is outside his purview altogether; because he is determined to direct his gaze only to phenomena within the psyche; and because there is something in the will that is not encapsulated in the soul, but of which the soul avails itself in order to participate in the outside world. Brentano’s divisive classification of psychological phenomena may therefore be characterised as follows: he takes his stand at a vantage-point which is truly illuminating, but is only so if the eye is focused on the spirit-kernel of the soul—and yet he insists on aiming from there at the phenomena of ordinary everyday consciousness.⁴

• 1. Compare p.79 FN.
• 2. For a critical treatment of this subject see my lecture to the Philosophical Congress at >Bologna, 1911.
• 3. In September 1954, forty-seven years after the above words were written, Dr. J. A. V. Bates of the neurological Research Unit (National Hospital) read his paper, Can Voluntary Movement be Localized in the Cerebral Cortex? to a meeting of the British Association at Oxford. He began by demonstrating, on a number of technical grounds, that the inferences drawn from certain well-known facts of observation are not valid inferences, since those facts do not prove that the so-called motor nerve implements movement in the manner that the theory of two kinds of nerve fibre assumes. We should, he suggested. “cease to regard the cerebro-spinal tract as an efferent tract from an area where movements are represented”; and he drew attention to the fact that a similar interpretation of the then observed facts had been brought forward by Francois Franck as long ago as 1886 but had been rejected in flavour of Ferrier’s hypothesis of efferent and afferent nerve fibres. See also Observations on the Excitable Cortex  in Man by J. A. V. Bates (“Lectures on the Scientific Basis of Medicine” Volume V:1955-56).
  
  While engaged on this translation, I ventured to write to the author to enquire after the subsequent fate of what was clearly an attempt (to quote from this selection) to “look at the findings of physiology and psychology in the light of the facts themselves, and not, as so often happens in the present-day practice of those sciences, in the light of preconceived opinions and definitions....” I gather from him that it has neither been answered on the one hand, nor accepted on the other. It appears in fact to have been, at least explicitly ignored—as (with the possible exception of pure physics) is evidently the normal practice with scientific interpretation or hypotheses, however well supported experimentally, that are radical enough to interfere with theories so long accepted as to have become embodied in definitions. In his obliging reply to my letter Dr. Bates put the present position as follows:
  
  “I would say that in the last fifteen years what I referred to as the classical hypothesis has come to be held with far less conviction by most of those who are researching in the field, but that it is still taught in text books, and will remain a seductive hypothesis for the beginner, I’m afraid for many years.”—Editor
• 4. The Section concludes with a remark that these observations are intended as supplementary to a passage in the memorial address on Brentano, which constitutes Chapter III of Von Seelenrätseln. The passage is on page 90.

Dear attendees, dear fellow students! We have come to the end of this event, and I too would like to express a wish that has already been expressed by the honored organizers: that some satisfying things may have sunk into the souls of our very welcome audience during these days, and that some satisfying things may also remain in their after-feelings. It is natural that in the course of such a short event one can only give a few samples of what anthroposophical spiritual science wants to be and what it wants to be in our time of science and life.

The fact that a number of personalities, especially from scientific circles, have come together to pursue anthroposophy out of youthful enthusiasm is one of the most satisfying things for someone who would like to devote his life to everything that lies within this anthroposophical spiritual science. Therefore, you will believe me when I express it from the bottom of my heart when I express my sincere thanks to the esteemed fellow students who have devoted their strength and effort and their good will to this event.

I am convinced that all those who have been involved here and who are active in one place or another in our anthroposophical movement also thank the organizers of these college courses most warmly and in the same spirit. These thanks are directed primarily to the working groups of the Federation for Anthroposophical School of Spiritual Science Work in Darmstadt, Frankfurt, Gießen, Marburg, Heidelberg and Würzburg, who have put so much effort into making this event a worthy one. But these thanks are also directed to all participants in this anthroposophical experiment.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, dear fellow students, if you would like me to say a few closing words, please do not ask me to say what I have to say, what I would like to say to you now at the end , but let me say a few things that seem necessary to me in part and that are very close to my heart in part, precisely in view of what I have been privileged to experience here among you during these days.

The fact that the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach, where it had to be shown during the war how German spiritual life can be presented to the world, has been called the Goetheanum, has been strongly contested from many quarters. I myself have often used the name, but the will to call this educational institution the Goetheanum came from others. But perhaps it may be said that there is something in this name that is connected with my own growth into the Anthroposophical Movement in this life. And so I may begin by clothing what I want to say to you in the images of some reminiscences of my life.

When I myself came to the university in Vienna, it was still in those days when what has now gained such immense world significance was only just being established at technical universities: electrical engineering. In Waltenhofen, the Viennese “Technik” had the first representative of electrical engineering, but he had grown out of general physics. And since then, one has been able to follow everything that has come from this particular direction and which, as we have seen, has become so effective that the treatment of light and many other natural phenomena has now led to a world view of a scientific nature, one might say that it is based entirely on the observation of electrical phenomena. The mere elastic atoms, with which we still had to deal with our complicated differential equations, have been replaced by the present-day picture of electrons. And in these decades, something significant in the development of modern humanity has been included. But it also includes what I tried to hint at in yesterday's public lecture: the striving to move beyond the increasingly pervasive materialistic view of the world, which actually celebrates its triumphs in the electron theory, and to return to a spiritual understanding of the world. Within what we can gain from the electron theory, we simply do not find the human being. But we must find the human being again. And perhaps it has become clear to you from the aspirations that underlie our lectures that, first and foremost, we are striving for knowledge of the human being, but such knowledge of the human being that is connected with all other scientific knowledge and with all striving for the world, down to the individual social level, is what is to be brought to life in anthroposophy.

For me personally, when I was still allowed to feel as many of you feel today, something came to me in the midst of what surrounded me in my youth from a scientific and technical way of thinking, soon after I entered the Technical University of Vienna. In addition to the other subjects I devoted myself to, I also became a student of my old teacher and friend, the late Karl Julius Schröer. And it is one of the most profound experiences that I felt at the time when Karl Julius Schröer, in the first lecture on German literature, spoke a word that so clearly showed how the renewal of the spiritual life of modern humanity can be born out of German, Germanic being. Perhaps this word no longer seems as significant to you today as it sounded to me at the time. Karl Julius Schröer wanted to characterize how Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Lessing, the German Romantics, the German philosophers, placed themselves in the context of the entire spiritual life of humanity. To this end, he wanted to show that art, that aesthetic experience, had become a sacred matter for humanity in that time for the German, not just a luxurious addition to life. Something that is fundamentally human should flow into art. And that is what Karl Julius Schröer expressed in his own way in the sentence he uttered in the first hour of his lecture: “The German has an aesthetic conscience”. This was also the basis for his treatment of Goethe's Faust, where he tried to present Faust as the hero of invincible idealism, which at that time had to emerge from the depths of German intellectual life into the development of the world and humanity.

Then I took part in what Karl Julius Schröer called “Deutsche Gesellschaft” (German Society), by recreating something that Uhland and Grimm had developed in their teaching. Young people gave lectures; they could express themselves as they wished. The first lecture I had to give within this German Society was concerned with rejecting Kant and Kantianism, in my then awkward, youthfully immature way, that barrier that had been erected against the essence of the world by the special interpretation that phenomena have found in modern science.

And then I had the good fortune to speak about Johann Gottlieb Fichte to a circle of Viennese students at the University of Vienna's “Deutsche Lesehalle”. I tried to include in what I wanted to say about Fichte everything that seemed to me, in an immature way at the time, to be necessary for a fertilization of intellectual life from a very particular angle.

And one of the essays I wrote when I was briefly editing the “Deutsche Wochenschrift” in Vienna had the same title as the second lecture I gave here, albeit in a different form: “The Spiritual Signature of the Present”. But this essay endeavored to point to the true sources of German intellectual life that could lead to a spiritualization of modern culture.

I am not saying this to boast in any way, but I would like to present such images so that perhaps one or the other may get a truer picture of what I personally have contributed to the spiritual-scientific-anthroposophical movement than the image that is now being widely spread by untruthful sides.

Now, my dear attendees, dear fellow students, I had plenty of opportunities to get to know the forces of decline in modern scientific life at the time. And so it was a great satisfaction for me that during my time in Weimar working at the Goethe-Schiller Archive, I was able to devote myself to Goetheanism, if I may say so, for years through my study of Goethe. One felt very much at the center of German intellectual life. Weimar in the 1980s was still very different from what it is today. There was still a breath over the whole of Weimar that is no longer there today, and from this breath one sensed precisely what is specifically Goethean. At that time I tried to point the way to what was to come by giving a lecture in Weimar on “The Imagination as a Cultural Creator”.

What I attempted to give from a scientific-philosophical basis shows you, even in its very first attempts, that it is a matter of drawing the spiritual current from that which was the basis of Goethe's thinking and feeling in all areas of knowledge and life. I certainly did not start from Haeckel; anyone who follows the chapter I wrote in the first introduction to Goethe's natural science writings at the beginning of the 1880s can see that. But anyone who wants to be part of spiritual scientific life must take everything seriously, and actually carry out what they advocate in their ideas. Therefore, those currents of contemporary spiritual life that have entered this life with all their might and strength must also be lovingly experienced; and this immersion in Nietzscheanism and Haeckelism has been perceived as a following [on my part]. But if one wanted to, one could find the sources of anthroposophical spiritual science in my writings that preceded these discussions with Haeckel or Nietzsche. In my Philosophy of Freedom, I first tried to indicate in a practical way how spiritual elements must flow into moral and social action.

And when it is emphasized today that my work has been incorporated into that of the Theosophical Society, then, my dear audience, I must always emphasize again that I have never, anywhere, advocated anything other than what I have gained from my own inner path of research. That I was wanted to be heard within the circle of this or that society, that I was invited to work within that society in order to be heard, is something that I consider to be quite possible, indeed necessary. And I will never allow it to be taken from me in the future, to speak wherever I am wanted.

Therefore, I must emphasize that I did not seek out the Theosophical Society, but that it came to me. And I must always emphasize that when I had written my first book, “Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life and its Relation to the Modern World Picture”, which was more derived from the natural sciences, I was told within the theosophical circles, to which I did not belong at the time, that this book contained everything that was actually sought in these theosophical circles. But this did not come from these circles; it was found by the path of research that I found compelled to take from the foundations of natural science up into the spiritual, to anthroposophy.

And so the transformation of the “Theosophical Society” into an “Anthroposophical Society” was also given by the facts. But what flowed through the work of these Societies was never different from what flows today. However, it is self-evident that this anthroposophical spiritual science, because it has been cultivated for decades in the most diverse fields, has slowly and gradually developed, and that what had to be said in a more abstract form at the beginning could be formulated in ever more concrete and specific terms. Therefore, when we speak today, we can draw much more from spiritual reality than we could in earlier decades. But spiritual science in the anthroposophical sense would not be alive if it were not so. And those who do not hold with the dead spiritual, but with the living spiritual, will understand this living development. They will understand that just as a mature person can no more be a child than can an anthroposophical spiritual science that has grown old speak in the same way as it spoke when it was still a child. Anyone who wants to look at these things properly will see that it must be exactly as it is, because the matter wants to be thoroughly alive.

Even the artistic and medical aspects, which were taken up relatively late, have been organically integrated because the need for them has basically come from the outer world of pure anthroposophy. I would say that we have given in to what had emerged from the necessities of the time, from the signs of the times, more in keeping with destiny. But understanding the signs of the times is what it is all about.

My esteemed audience, dear fellow students, I could use many other images to show how what has been incorporated into anthroposophy can be found in the original source of German intellectual life. I will not do so today for the sake of brevity. I have only given the individual examples for the reason that recently the fight against anthroposophical spiritual science has also been waged under the flag of hostility towards all things German. And in the face of what comes out of the most unobjective of motives and out of scientific inability, as for example with the Göttingen Professor Fuchs, and what is combined with all kinds of attacks by various other personalities who have never even sensed a whiff of what anthroposophical spiritual science and anthroposophical spiritual striving really are, and which are directed precisely at the German essence of anthroposophy, in the face of this it must be said: Whatever anyone wants to think or feel about Anthroposophy, we respect; Anthroposophy will face up to anyone who is an honest opponent. I have never opposed the harshest criticism when it has taken the form of judgment. But I will always oppose something else. The criticism of many circles that today approach anthroposophy with hostility is not based on judgment, for easily understandable reasons: because these circles lack this judgment, because they do not want to develop the diligence to really find their way into the anthroposophical and into the way in which this anthroposophical wants to flow into the outer social life; their criticism is based on something else. In the broadest circles today, the numerous attacks, which you have probably also heard about, are based on lies. The lies go as far as the forged letters. The lies go so far that at my April lecture, which was held in Stuttgart in self-defense, one of these attacks was made against me from the audience: it was claimed that I had said this or that in Cologne in the last few months. I had to reply that I had not been to Cologne for years. The person in question referred to a letter that had been written to him from Cologne, and he had the audacity to show me this letter. I had to reply: No matter what it says, it is a forgery, because it is a lie that I have been to Cologne in recent years. — This is typical of the attacks that come from certain quarters. They do not base their arguments on judgment and opinion, it is all a lie. Everyone is entitled to their own judgment and opinion according to their abilities and what they are capable of; I will only oppose these within the limits that they themselves have set. Because an honest opponent strives to get to the bottom of the matter; it would be a sin not to deal with these opponents in complete agreement. But anyone who resorts to dishonesty and even forges letters cannot be argued with in any other way than by calling attention to the fact that he is lying.

That is what I would like to express here with these few words, for the reason that I am speaking to dedicated younger people who, out of the depths of their enthusiasm, have made it possible for this lecture course and this lecture event to take place despite the fact that anthroposophy is presented to the world in such a distorted form today.

Now, my dear fellow students, those who have already shown how they can find their way into this anthroposophy despite the difficulties that the anthroposophical path presents, how they make sacrifices for it, wherever untruthfulness arises without a judgment about the true form of anthroposophical striving, they may perhaps be expected to unmask the untruthfulness with full force. After all, dishonesty plays a widespread role in the present world in other ways as well, and a good part of how we move forward from forces of decline to forces of ascent will be in developing enthusiasm for truthfulness. Truthfulness is the highest, never the individual party line. The whole system of anthroposophy must be built on truthfulness. For how can anyone who does not understand how to stand up for truthfulness in the outer life penetrate to those regions where one must be guided by truthfulness only through the inner direction, because one cannot always be corrected for being untrue, as one can in the outer life? What could be presented to the world from the regions of supersensible worlds if enthusiasm for truthfulness were not the basis? This enthusiasm for truthfulness – we see it particularly in the discussions about the war guilt – this enthusiasm for truthfulness is also missing today in so many cases, even in those who call themselves the bearers of civilization. This enthusiasm for truthfulness is something we need, and anyone who is as closely connected with Germanness as I am — I mention this in all modesty — will, will be convinced, must be convinced that Germanness will suffer in no way at all if truthfulness is insisted upon, even in the most difficult of matters. All attacks on anthroposophy that come from this quarter bear the stamp of a lack of truthfulness of mind. Therefore, my dear fellow students, do understand how much it must fill me with the deepest satisfaction that you have undertaken this event here despite all that is being directed against anthroposophy in a well-organized manner today. And those of you here today who already feel how sincere these thanks are, will also feel that in the ways that are unfortunately only partially open to us, attempts will be made to work together in the fullest harmony in the further pursuit of the anthroposophical path. I have often had to take refuge in Goetheanism, because of the urge for renewal in modern scientific and technical life. Today some of you, my dear fellow students, are seeking this path through anthroposophy, no doubt from the bottom of your hearts. And it may be said, from an unprejudiced observation of the development of the times: you are seeking this path from the true signs of the times. May we therefore succeed, through our collaboration with those who are already working in one place or another in the anthroposophical movement, in particularly in the most fruitful way developing the work of youthful minds. Then youthful minds will have no reason to turn to Spengler's pessimism. Spengler has, however, recently denied that what he strives for is pessimism. But in any case, anyone who is fully imbued with an inner content of the rising forces of our age in the anthroposophical sense has no reason to turn to Spenglerism. On the other hand, what has made a great impression on all young people, insofar as they have turned to science, if they have ever studied it, can be revived in a new, more spiritualized form: what Fichte once said in his 'Discourses on the Essence and Destiny of the Scholar' at the end of the 18th century. These thoughts can be expressed again, albeit in a transformed form, precisely in order to make fruitful the rising forces in the first third of the twentieth century. In particular, however, one may recall the words that Fichte spoke at the very beginning of his speeches, addressing all those who wanted nothing to do with scooping out of spirituality for real, practical life. To them he said: if they believed that all reality was exhausted in the world of sense, that ideals represented only utopias, then they should be convinced that he who speaks as he does, Fichte, also knows quite clearly, perhaps better than they, that ideals cannot be realized in real life as directly as that to which they always point. But Fichte also added that perhaps such minds cannot be convinced, and that therefore, because the governance of the world did not actually count on them, God may give them food, sun and rain at the right time, and, if it can be, also some good thoughts.

Thus spoke Fichte, the idealist, at the end of the 18th century, and thus may we speak again today, from the innermost impulse of anthroposophical spiritual science. I hope that you feel something of this attitude as we part, and that it was this attitude that led you to organize these lectures, this entire event.

I speak to you out of the gratitude that arises from all the attention and commitment you have shown to what we have been able to offer you. I speak to you in such a way that I truly believe that it will be of particularly essential importance for the emergence of a new spiritual movement when youthful humanity, touched in its inmost heart, turns to this movement. It will be up to you, dear fellow students, how conditions develop in the coming decades. It will be up to you whether the languishing German nation will be able to rise again. To do this, humanity needs strength, not just words – strength! But strength can only come to present-day humanity from the spirit. In many respects, the young generation has made a start by forming these student groups. They have continued by leading the honored student groups from Darmstadt, Frankfurt, Gießen, Marburg, Heidelberg and Würzburg to this event. May this event be the starting point for fruitful further work, work that will lead to a true dawning of humanity in the coming generations, and in particular in Central Europe. For basically everything that has been achieved here during these days was directed towards this goal, towards this ideal. So, my dear fellow students, let us work together in the spirit of true anthroposophy, so that what humanity needs may flow into it: above all, the strength of youth, the enthusiasm of youth – and that it may also be imbued with the seriousness that young people experience through their engagement with science. We want to stand firmly on the ground of strict scientific observation. But we want to get out of the abstract, out of the merely theoretical, out of the dead webs of concepts. We want to move on to the living grasp of the full reality, which lives itself out not only in the outer world of the senses, but also in the soul and spiritual world.

And if I am speaking here in particular to those who, as prospective technicians, are involved in this movement, I may say that this involvement in technical activity seems to me to be particularly significant for a spiritual movement. In the world, things develop in polar fashion. The technician experiences the highest level of scientific thinking in construction, in building, and in the laboratory. By pouring the laws of nature into the outer world, by developing technology, we bring our soul above all to what initially does not contain the spirit, but the human heart approaches everything. The human soul and the human spirit enter into this sphere. It is precisely through our feeling for technology that we must direct our feeling, our thought, to the other pole, to that which, as spirituality, permeates and interweaves the world. Technology is particularly suited to pointing to the other side, to the side of spirituality, because it most deeply intervenes in the outer world of the senses. I therefore believe that especially the prospective engineer can be a source of strength that can contribute the most to the development of humanity by bringing a spiritual attitude, a spiritual worldview.

It is in this spirit that I wanted to address these final words of the present event to you all. May they once again end in heartfelt thanks to all those who have contributed to this event, in heartfelt thanks to all those who

have turned their attention to this event.

Before I start with today’s topic, I would like to make you aware that today’s discussions are the beginning of a whole series of such discussions, and that basically all subsequent topics this winter could have precisely the same title as today’s topic. The path a human being must take if he wants to attain knowledge of the spiritual world will be explored in the course of the next lectures in relation to the most diverse phenomena of human and scientific life in general and to various cultural personalities of mankind.

Allow me to start with something personal, although this topic, this contemplation, must head, so to speak, in the direction of the most impersonal, most objective Spiritual Science. Yet the path into the spiritual world is such that it must lead through the most personal to the impersonal. Thus in spite of the impersonal, the personal will often be a symbolic feature of this path, and one gains the opportunity to point out many important things just by starting, so to speak, from the more intimate immediate experience. To the observer of the spiritual world many things in life will be symbolically more important than they initially seem to be. Much that might otherwise pass by the human eye, without particularly attracting attention, can appear to be deeply important to someone who wants to study intensely an observation such as the one that forms the basis for today’s examinations. And I can say that the following—which may at first seem like a trifle of life to you—belongs for me to the many unforgettable things on my path of life that on the one hand marked the longing of today’s human beings to truly ascend to the spiritual world. Yet on the other hand, they marked a more or less admitted impossibility of somehow gaining access to the spiritual world by means, that were not only provided by the present, but were also available in the past centuries, insofar as they were externally accessible to man.

I once sat in the cosy home of Herman Grimm. Those of you who are somewhat familiar with German intellectual life will associate much with the name of Herman Grimm. Perhaps you will know the spirited, important biographer of Michaelangelo and Raffael, and might also know, as it were, that the sum of education of our time, or at least of Central Europe, or let’s say it even more narrowly, of Germany, was united in the soul of Herman Grimm. During a conversation with him about Goethe, who was so close to his heart, and about Goethe’s view of the world, a small thing happened that belongs to the most unforgettable things on my path of life. In response to a remark I made—and we will see later how exactly this remark can be of importance in relation to the ascent of man into the spiritual world—Herman Grimm answered with a dismissive movement of his left hand. What lay in that gesture is what I consider, as it were, to be one of the unforgettable experiences on the path of my life. It was supposed to be in relation to Goethe, how Goethe wanted to find the way into the spiritual world in his own way.

In the course of these lectures we will have another talk about Goethe’s path into the spiritual world. Herman Grimm willingly followed Goethe’s pathways into the spiritual world, but in his own manner.

It was far from his mind to enter into a conversation about Goethe, in which Goethe would be seen as the representative of a human being who had really brought down spiritual realities—also as an artist— from the spiritual world and then undertook to embody them in his works of art. For Herman Grimm, it was much more obvious to say to himself: Alas, with the means that we as human beings have nowadays, we can only ascend to this spiritual world by way of fantasy. Although fantasy offers things that are beautiful, great and magnificent and are able to fill the human heart with warmth; but Knowledge, well-founded knowledge was not something that Herman Grimm, the intimate observer of Goethe, wanted to find in Goethe either. And when I said that Goethe’s whole fundamental nature is based on his willingness to embody the true in the beautiful, in the art, and then attempted to show that there are ways outside of fantasy, ways into the spiritual world that will lead you on more solid and firmer ground than fantasy—then it was not the rejection by someone who would not have liked to follow such a path. Herman Grimm did not use this gesture to express his rejection of such a path, but—in a way only those who knew him better would understand—he laid in it roughly the following: There may well be such a path, but we human beings cannot feel a calling to find out anything about it!

As I said, I do not wish to present this here as a personal matter in an importune way, yet it seems to me that just in such a gesture the position of the best human beings of our age towards the spiritual world is epitomised. Because later I had a long conversation with the same Hermann Grimm on a journey that led us both from Weimar to Tiefurt. There he explained how he had freed himself entirely of a purely materialistic view on world events, from the opinion that the human spirit, in the successive epochs, would produce out of itself that which constitutes the real soul-wealth of man. At that earlier time Herman Grimm talked about a great plan that was part of a piece of work that was never realised. Those of you who have occupied themselves with Herman Grimm will know that he intended to write a ‘History of the German fantasy’. He had envisaged the forces of fantasy to be like those of a goddess in the spiritual world who brings forth out of herself that which human beings create for the benefit of world progress. I would like to say: In that lovely region between Weimar and Tiefurt, when I heard these words from a man, whom I, after all, acknowledge as one of the greatest minds of our time, I had a feeling that I would like to express in these words; ‘Today, many people say to themselves: One must be deeply dissatisfied with everything that external science is able to say about the sources of life, about the secret of existence, about world riddles—but the possibility to step powerfully into another world is missing.’

There is a lack of intensity of willingness to realise that this world of spiritual life is different from what man imagines in his fantasy. Many enjoy going into the realm of fantasy, because for them it is the only spiritual realm that exists. About 17 years ago, on the journey to Tiefurt, I met Herman Grimm, who already through his scriptures and many, many other things, had made an impression on me. Facing this personality I remembered just then that, 30 years ago, I had glanced at just the passage in one of Grimm’s Goethe lectures,¹ which he had held in the winter of 1874/75 in Berlin, and where, with reference to Goethe, he spoke of the kind of impression that a purely external study of nature, devoid of spirit, must make on a spirit like his own. Already 30 years earlier Herman Grimm appeared to me to be the kind of human being whom all feelings and emotions urge upwards into the spiritual world, but who, unable to find the spiritual world as a reality, can only perceive it in its weaving and workings as a fantasy. And on the other hand—just because he was like this—he did not want to acknowledge that Goethe himself searched for the sources and riddles of existence in a different realm, not just in the realm of fantasy, but in the realm of spiritual reality.

There is a passage where Herman Grimm speaks about something that must affect our souls today, at the beginning of our contemplations. This passage refers to something which, as I have already indicated, and although its importance cannot be denied by Spiritual Science, is regarded as an impossibility by natural science—or by a worldview that claims to stand on the firm ground of natural science. It is an impossibility not only for feeling and emotion but also for a realisation that truly understands itself. What I mean is the Kant-Laplace theory that explains our solar system as if it were made up only of lifeless, inorganic substances and forces, and as if it had clenched itself out of a giant gas ball. I would like to read to you the passage from Herman Grimm’s Goethe lectures that shows you what this world-view, which is so fascinating, so deeply impressive today, meant for a spirit like Herman Grimm’s:

As much as Goethe here prohibits reason to accept as truth more than one can indeed grasp with the five fingers of a hand, the more he grants license to the poet’s fantasy, to create out of an unconscious, dreaming force pictures of what the spirit wishes to behold. However, he sharply upholds the boundaries between both of these activities. A long time ago, already in his youth, the great Kant-Laplace fantasy about the origin and the future downfall of the globe, had gained ground. Out of the primeval, cosmic, in itself rotating world-nebula—the children learn this at school already—the central drop of gaseous matter forms itself, which later becomes the Earth and, as a solidifying ball in incomprehensible periods of time, goes through all phases including the episode of mankind’s habitation. This ball will finally crash back into the sun as burnt out slag: This is a long, but completely comprehensible process for the audience, that does not require any further external intervention for its implementation apart from the endeavour by some outside power to maintain a constant heating temperature on the Sun.

There cannot be imagined a more futile perspective for the future than the one that is being imposed on us today in this expectation as a scientific necessity. A carrion bone, around which a hungry dog made a detour, would be a more refreshing appetising piece in comparison to this latests excrement of creation—the form in which our Earth would finally pass to the Sun again. The inquisitiveness with which our generation embraces such things and thinks it believes them, is a sign of a sick imagination. Scientists of future epochs will use a lot of astuteness to explain it as a historical phenomenon of the time.

I felt it was necessary to point out such a quote, as basically it is rarely done these days. Today, when the concepts of these world-views have such a fascinating effect, and when they seem to be based so solidly on natural science, little reference is made to the fact that there are, after all, spirits who are deeply connected to the cultural life of our time, and yet relate in such a way out of their whole soul make-up to something about which countless people now say: It is obvious that things are like that, and anyone who does not concede that they are like that is really a simpleton! Yes, already today we see many people who feel the deepest longing to forge links between the soul of man and the spiritual world. But on the other side, we see only a few outside of those circles that are more deeply engaged with what we call Spiritual Science, who are busying themselves with means that could lead the human soul to what could after all be called the land of its longings.

Therefore, when we speak today about ways that are to lead man into the spiritual world, and speak so that what we say applies not only to a tight circle, but is addressed to all those who are equipped with a contemporary education, we still encounter strong resistance in a certain respect. Not only is it possible that what will be presented is regarded as daydreaming and fantasy, but it may also easily annoy many people of the present. It can actually be an annoyance to them because it deviates so much from those ideas that are currently considered valid in the widest circles, and which are the suggestive and fascinating imaginations of people who consider themselves to be the most educated.

In the first lecture it was already hinted at that the ascent into the spiritual world is basically an intimate affair of the soul and is in stark contrast to what is common for the imaginative and emotional life both in popular and scientific circles. Namely a scientist easily makes the demand that to be valid as science today, something has to be verifiable at any time and for anyone. And he will then also refer to his external experiment that can be proven anytime to anyone. It goes without saying that this demand can not be met by Spiritual Science. We are about to see why not. Spiritual Science here means a science that does not speak about the spirit as a sum of abstract terms and concepts, but as something real and of real entities. Spiritual Science therefore must contravene the methodical demands that are currently so easily established by science and world-views: to be verifiable anywhere and at all times by anyone. Spiritual Science very often encounters resistance in popular circles for the reason that in our time, even where there is an inner longing to ascend to the spiritual world, feelings and emotions are penetrated and permeated by a materialistic view.

Even with the best intentions, even if one yearns for the spiritual world, one cannot help but imagine the spirit as in some way material again, or at least imagine the ascent into the spiritual world as somehow connected to something material. That is why most people may prefer that you talk to them about purely external matters, like what they should eat or drink or shouldn’t eat and drink, or what else they should undertake purely externally in the material world. They would much rather do this than be asked to introduce intimate moments of development into their souls. But that is exactly what ascending into the spiritual world is all about.

We now want to try to map out—entirely in line with Spiritual Science’s own view—how this ascent of a human soul into the spiritual world can happen. The starting point must always be a person’s current life situation. A human being, as he is placed in our present world, lives completely and firmly in the external sensory world. Let’s try to become clear about how much would remain in a human soul, if one would disregard the concepts that the outer sense perceptions of the physical world have ignited within us, and that which has entered into us through the outer physical experiences, through eyes and ears and the other senses. And disregard that which is stimulated of sufferings and joys, of pleasure and pain within us through our eyes and ears, and what our rational mind has then combined from these impressions of the sensory world. Try to eliminate all of this from the soul, imagine it away, and then ponder what would be left behind. People who honestly undertake this simple self-observation will find that extremely little will remain, especially in the souls of people of the present time. And it is just so that initially the ascent into the spiritual world cannot proceed from something that is given to us by the external sensory world—it has to be undertaken so that a human being develops forces within his soul, which ordinarily lie dormant in it. It is, so to speak, a basic element for all possibilities of ascent into the Spiritual world, that a person becomes aware that he is capable of inner development, that there is something else in him than what he is initially able to survey with his consciousness.

Today, this is actually an annoying concept for many people. Let’s take a very special person with a contemporary education, for example, what does a philosopher nowadays do, when he wants to establish the full meaning and the nature of Knowledge? Someone like this will say: ‘I will try to establish how far in general we can get with our thinking, with our human soul forces, what we can comprehend of this world.’ He is attempting in his own way—depending on what is momentarily possible for him—to comprehend a world view and to place it before him, and usually he will then say, ‘We simply cannot know anything else, because it is beyond the limits of human knowledge.’ Really this is the most widespread phrase that can be found in today’s literature: ‘We cannot know this!’

However, there is a another standpoint that works in a completely different way from the one just described, by saying: ‘Certainly, with the forces I have now in my soul, which are now probably the normal human soul forces, I can recognise this or that, but here in this soul is a being capable of development. This soul may have forces within it that I first have to extrapolate. I first have to lead it along certain pathways, must lead it beyond its current point of view, and then I will see whether it could have been my fault when I said that this or that is beyond the limit of our knowledge. Perhaps I just need to go a little further in the development of my soul, and then the boundaries will expand and I will be able to penetrate more deeply into things.

In making judgments, one does not always take logic seriously, otherwise one would say: ‘What we can recognise depends on our organs.’ For this reason, someone who is born blind cannot judge colours. He would only be able to do so, if through a fortunate operation he were to become capable of seeing colours.

Likewise it may be possible—I do not wish to speak of a sixth sense here, but of something that can be brought forth from the soul in a purely spiritual way—that spirit eyes and spirit ears can be brought forth from our soul. Then the great event could happen for us—which occurs at a lower level when the one born blind is so lucky to be operated on—so that then for us the initial assumption could become a truth: Around us is a spiritual world, but to be able to look into it, we first have to awaken the organs within us. This would be the only logical thing to do. But, as I said, we do not always take logic very seriously, because people in our time have very different needs than finding their way into the spiritual world when they hear about it. I have already told you that once, when I had to give a lecture in a city in southern Germany, a courageous person, who wrote feature articles, opened his article with the words; ‘The most obvious thing about theosophy is its incomprehensibility.’ We like to believe this man that for him theosophy’s most outstanding characteristic is its incomprehensibility. But is this in any way a criterion? Let’s apply this example to mathematics about which someone would say: ‘What I notice most about mathematics is its incomprehensibility.’ Then everyone would say: ‘Quite certainly, this is possible, but then, if he wants to write feature articles, he should be so good and learn something first!’ Often it would be better to transfer what is valid for one particular subject and apply it correctly to another.

So people have nothing left to do than either to deny that there is a development of the soul—and they can only do this by speaking a word of power—namely, when they refuse to go through such a development, or, alternatively they can immerse themselves into the development of their soul. Then the spiritual world becomes for them an observation, reality, truth. But in order to ascend into the spiritual world, the soul must become capable—not for physical life, but for the realisation of the spiritual world—of completely transforming itself in a certain relation to the form it initially has, and in a certain way becoming a different being.

This could already make us aware of something that has been emphasised repeatedly here, namely, that someone who feels the urge to ascend into the spiritual world, must first and foremost make it clear for himself time and again whether he has gained a firm foothold in this world of physical reality and whether he is able to stand firm here. We have to maintain certainty, volition and sentience in all circumstances that take place in the physical world. We must not lose the ground beneath our feet if we want to ascend from this world into the spiritual one. Doing anything that can lead our character to stand firm in the physical world is a preliminary stage. Then it is a matter of bringing the soul to a different kind of feeling and willing for the spiritual world, than the feeling and willing in the soul normally are. The soul must become, as it were, inwardly a different feeling and willing organism than it is in normal life. This brings us to that which can, on the one hand, initially really place Spiritual Science in a kind of opposition to what is recognised as ‘science’ today. On the other hand, it places Spiritual Science yet again directly next to this science with the same validity that external science has. When it is said that everything that is supposed to be science, needs to be at any time and by anyone verifiable, then, what is meant by this is that what is deemed to be science must not be dependent on our subjectivity, on our subjective feelings, on any decisions of will, will impulses, feelings and emotions that we only carry individually within ourselves. Now, someone who wants to ascend into the spiritual world, must first take a detour through his innermost soul, must reorganise his soul; at first he must completely turn his gaze away from what is outside in the physical world. Normally, a human being only turns away from looking at what is within the physical world when he is asleep. Then he does not let anything enter into his soul through his eyes, his ears, nor through the entire organisation of his senses. But for that he also becomes unconscious and is not able to live consciously in a spiritual world.

It has now been said that it is one of the basic elements of spiritual realisation for a human being to find within oneself the possibility to go beyond oneself. However, this means nothing else than to first let the spirit become effective within oneself. In today’s ordinary human life we all know only one kind of turning away from the physical world, namely when we enter into the unconsciousness of sleep. The contemplation of The Nature of Sleep ² has shown us that a human being is in a real spiritual world during sleep, even if he knows nothing about it. For it would be absurd to believe that a person’s soul-centre and spirit-centre disappears in the evening and newly comes into being in the morning. No, in reality, it outlasts the stages from falling asleep to awakening. However, what for a normal person today is the inner strength to be conscious—even if there is no stimulation of consciousness through sense impressions or through the work of the rational mind —is missing in sleep. The soul life is so turned down during sleep, that the person is unable to kindle or awaken what allows the soul to experience itself inwardly. When the human being wakes up again, events from the outside enter. And because a soul content is gifted to the human being in this way, he becomes conscious of himself by means of this soul content. He is not able to become conscious of himself if he is not stimulated externally, because his human strength is too weak for this, when he is left to himself in his sleep.

Hence the ascent into the spiritual world means an arousal of such forces within our soul that enable it, as it were, to truly live consciously within itself, when it becomes, in relation to the external world like a human being who is asleep. Basically, the ascent into the spiritual worlds demands a spurring on of internal energies, an extraction of forces that are otherwise asleep, that are, as it were, paralysed within the soul, so that man cannot handle them at all. All those intimate experiences that a spiritual researcher must experience in his soul, ultimately aim at what has just been characterised. And today, I would like to summarise something for you about the path that leads upwards into the spiritual world. This has been presented in detail by element, so to speak, by their rudiments, in my book published under the title: How to attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? ³ But today, I do not want to repeat myself by just presenting you an excerpt from this book. Instead, I wish to approach the issue from a different side, that is what the soul must do with itself to rise up to the spiritual world. One who is interested in this more deeply, can read the details in the book mentioned above. However, no one should think that what was presented in detail there can be summarised here in the same words and sentences. Those who are familiar with the book will not find that it is a summary of what has been said there, but a description of the topic from a different angle.

For a spiritual researcher who wants to direct his steps into the spiritual world, it is extremely important that much of what would lead other people directly to a realisation and a goal becomes for him simply a means of education, an intimate means of education of the soul. Let me illustrate this with an example. Many years ago I wrote a book, The Philosophy of Freedom. As it is out of stock since years, it is currently not available, but hopefully a second edition will appear in the near future.⁴ This Philosophy of Freedom was conceived in such a way that it is quite different from other philosophical books of the present time, which more or less aim by what is written to share something about how things are in the world or how they must be according to the ideas of the authors. However, this is not the immediate aim of this book. Rather, it is intended to give someone who engages with the thoughts presented there a kind of workout for his thoughts, so that the kind of thinking, the special way to devoting oneself to these thoughts is one in which the emotions and feelings of the soul are set in motion—just as in gymnastics the limbs are exercised, if I may use this comparison. What is otherwise only a method of gaining insight, is in this book at the same time a means of spiritual-soul self-education. This is extraordinarily important. Of course this is annoying for many philosophers of the present time, who associate something quite different with philosophy than that which may help a human being to progress a little further—because, if possible, he should remain as he is, with his normal innate capacity to gain knowledge. Therefore, in regard to this book it is not so important to be able to argue about this or that, or if something can be understood one way or another, but what really matters is that the thoughts which are connected as one organism, are able to school our soul and help it to make a bit of progress.

This is also the case with my book Truth and Science. And so it is with many things that are initially supposed to be basic elements to train the soul to rise up into the spiritual world. Mathematics and geometry teach man knowledge of triangles, quadrangles and other figures. But why do they teach all this? So that man can gain knowledge about how things are within space, which laws they are subject to and so on. Essentially, the spiritual ascent to the higher worlds works with similar figures as symbols. For instance, it places the symbol of a triangle, a quadrangle or another symbolic figure before a student, but not so that he will win immediate insights through them, as he can acquire these also by other means. Instead, with the symbols he receives the opportunity to train his spiritual abilities so that the spirit, supported by the impression he gains from the symbolic pictures, ascends into a Higher World. Thus it is about mental training, or, do not misunderstand me, it is about mental gymnastics. Therefore, much of what is dry external science, dry external philosophy, what is mathematics or geometry, becomes a living symbol for the spiritual training that leads us upwards into the spiritual world. If we have let this affect our soul, then we will learn to understand what basically no external science understands, that the ancient Pythagoreans, under the influence of their great teacher Pythagoras, spoke of the universe being made up of numbers because they focussed on the inner laws of numbers. Now let us look at how we encounter numbers everywhere in the world. Nothing is easier than to refute Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy, because from a standpoint, imagined to be superior, one can easily say: There are these Spiritual Scientists again, coming out of their mystic ⁵ darkness with numerical symbolism and say that there is an inner regularity of numbers, and, for example, one has to consider the true foundation of human nature according to the number seven. But something similar was meant also by Pythagoras and his students, when they talked about the inner regularity of numbers. If we allow those marvellous connections, which lie in the relationships between numbers, to affect our spirit then we can train it in such a way that it wakes up when it would otherwise be asleep and develops stronger forces within itself to penetrate into the spiritual world.

Thus it is a schooling through another kind of science. It is also what is actually called the study of someone, who wants to enter deeply into the spiritual world. And for someone like this, gradually everything that for other people is a harsh reality, becomes more or less an external allegory, a symbol. If a human being is able to let these symbols have an effect on him, then he is not only freeing his spirit from the outer physical world, but also imbues his spirit with strong forces, so that the soul can be conscious of itself, even when there is no external stimulation. I have already mentioned that if someone lets a symbol like the Rosy Cross affect him, he can feel an impulse to ascend into the spiritual world. We imagine a Rosy Cross as a simple black cross with seven red roses attached in a circle at the crossing of the beams.

What should it tell us? One who allows it to have an effect on his soul in the right way will imagine: For example, I look at a plant; I say of this plant that it is an imperfect being. Next to it I place a human being, who in his nature is a more perfect being, but even only in his nature. For if I look at the plant, I have to say: In it I encounter a material being which is not permeated by passions, desires, instincts, that bring it down from the height where it otherwise could stand. The plant has its innate laws, which it follows from leaf to flower to fruit; it stands there without desires, chaste.

Beside him lives the human being, who certainly by his nature is a higher being, but who is permeated by desires, instincts, passions through which he can stray from his strict regularity. He first has to overcome something within himself, if he wants to follow his own inner laws as a plant follows its innate laws. Now the human being can say to himself; The expression of desires, of instincts in me is the red blood. In a certain way, I can compare it with chlorophyll, the chaste plant sap in the red rose, and can say: If man becomes so strong within himself that the red blood is no longer an expression of what pushes him down below himself, but of what lifts him above himself—when it becomes the expression of such a chaste being like the plant sap, which has turned into the red of a rose, or in other words; when the red of the rose expresses the pure inwardness, the purified nature of a human being in his blood, then I have before me the ideal of what man, by overcoming the outer nature, can achieve and which presents itself to me under the symbol of the black cross, the charred wood. And the red of the rose symbolises the higher life that awakens when the red blood has become the chaste expression of the purified, instinctive nature of man, which has overcome itself.

If one does not let what is depicted be an abstract concept, then it becomes a vividly felt evolutionary idea. Then a whole world of feelings and emotions comes to life within us; we will feel within ourselves a development from an imperfect to a more perfect state. We sense that development is something quite different from the abstract thing that external science provides us with in the sense of a purely external Darwinism. Here, development becomes something that cuts deep into our heart, that pervades us with warmth, with soul-warmth—it becomes a force within us that carries and holds us. It is only through such inner experiences that the soul becomes capable of developing strong forces within itself, so that it can illuminate itself with consciousness in its innermost being—in the being that otherwise becomes unconscious when it withdraws from the external world.

It is of course child’s play to say; ‘Then you recommend an idea of something completely imaginary, of something entirely made up. But only those concepts which are reproductions of external ideas are valuable, and an idea of the Rose Cross has no external counter-image.’ But the point is not that the concepts we use to school our souls are reflections of an external reality, instead it is about concepts that are strength-awakening for our soul and that draw out of the soul what lies hidden within it.

When the human soul is dedicated to such pictorial ideas, when, so to speak, everything that it normally values as reality now becomes a cause for pictures that are not arbitrarily retrieved from fantasy, but are inspired by reality, just like the symbol of the Rosy Cross, then we say: The human being makes an effort to move upwards to the first stage of knowledge of the spiritual world. This is the stage of ‘Imaginative Knowledge’ that leads us above and beyond what is immediately concerned with the physical world only.

Hence, a human being who wishes to ascend into the spiritual world works in his soul with very particular concepts in a precisely determined way, to let the otherwise external reality affect him. He works in this soul itself. When the human being has worked in this way for some time, then it will be so that the external scientists can tell him: This has only a subjective, only an individual value for you. But this external scientist does not know that when the soul undergoes such a serious, regular training, there exists a stage of inner development when the possibility for the soul to express subjective feelings and emotions ceases completely. Then the soul arrives at a point where it must tell itself: Now concepts arise within me that I encounter like I normally meet trees and rock, rivers and mountains, plants and animals of the outer world that are as real as otherwise only external physical things are, and to which my subjectivity can neither add anything to them nor can it take anything away from them.

So there actually exists an intermediate state for everyone who wants to ascend into the spiritual world, where man is subject to the danger of carrying his subjectivity, which is only valid for himself, into the spiritual world. But man must pass through this intermediate state, for then he reaches a stage where what the soul is experiencing becomes as objectively verifiable—to anyone with the ability to do so—as all things in the outer physical reality. Because, after all, the principle that applies to external science—for something to be regarded as scientifically valid it must be verifiable at any time by anyone—also applies only to one who is sufficiently prepared for this. Or do you believe that you would be able to teach ‘the law of corresponding boiling temperatures’ to an eight-year-old child? I doubt it. You will not even be able to teach him the theorem of Pythagoras. Thus it is already bound to the basic principle that the human soul must be appropriately prepared if one wants to prove something to it.

And just as one must be prepared to understand the theorem of Pythagoras—even though it is possible for everyone to understand it—one must be prepared through a certain soul exercise if one wants to experience or realise this or that in the spiritual world. However, what can be realised, can then be experienced and observed in the same way by anyone who is appropriately prepared. Or, when messages are conveyed from observations of Spiritual Science by those who have prepared their soul for this, such as, that a particular man is able to look back on repeated Earth lives so that these become a fact for him, then it is likely that people will come and say; ‘There he brings us some dogmas again and demands that we should believe in these!’ Yet a spiritual researcher does not approach his contemporaries with his realisations so that people should believe them.

People who believe that we speak about dogmas, should ask themselves, is the fact that a whale exists a dogma for someone who has never seen one? Certainly, it is explainable in this way: A whale is a dogma for someone who has never seen one. Yet spiritual research does not approach the world with messages alone. Neither does it do so when it understands itself; instead it clothes what it brings down from the higher worlds in logical forms. These are exactly the same logical forms with which the other sciences are permeated. Then anyone will be able to verify, by applying a healthy sense of truth and unbiased logic, whether what the spiritual researcher has said is right. It has always been said that a schooling of the soul is necessary for someone wanting to explore spiritual facts by self-searching, whereby the soul must have gone through what is now being described here. But to understand what is being communicated, all you need is a healthy sense of truth and unbiased logic.

Now, if the spiritual researcher has allowed such symbolic terms and pictures to affect his soul for a while, he will notice that his feeling and emotional life becomes completely different from what it was before.

What is the feeling and emotional life of man in the ordinary world like? Nowadays it actually has become somewhat trivial to use the expression ‘egoistic’ everywhere, and to say that people in their normal life are egoistic. I do not want to express it in this way, but prefer to say: In their normal lives people are at first closely tied to their human personality, for example, when something pleases us, yes, especially in relation to things which we enjoy of the noblest spiritual creations, things of art and beauty. The saying, there is no accounting for taste, already expresses that much is connected to our personality and depends upon our subjective stance towards things. Check how everything that can please you is related to your upbringing, in which place in the world, in which profession your personality is placed, and so on, in order to see how feelings and emotions are closely connected to our personality. But when one does exercises of the soul, like the ones described, one notices how feelings and emotions will become completely impersonal. It is a great and tremendous experience when the moment arrives in which our feeling and our emotional life becomes, so to speak, impersonal. This moment comes, it certainly comes, when a human being on his spiritual path, inspired by those who undertake his spiritual guidance, allows the following things to really affect his soul. I will now list some of these things that will affect our whole feeling and emotional life in an educational way if someone allows them to work on his soul for weeks, or months.

The following can be considered. We focus our attention on what we find at the centre of philosophical observations, on the spiritual centre of the human being, the Ego—if we have learned to rise to the concept of Ego—which accompanies all our ideas, the mysterious centre of all experience. And if we continue to further the respect, this reverence and this devotion, which can connect to the fact, that for many is certainly not a fact but a figment of the imagination,—that there is an Ego living within us!—if this becomes the greatest, the most momentous experience to keep telling yourself that this ‘I am’ is the most essential of the human soul, then mighty, strong feelings develop in relation to the ‘I am’, which are impersonal. These lead directly to an insight into how all of the world’s secrets and mysteries that float around us are concentrated, as it were, in a single point—the Ego-point— to comprehend the human being from this Ego-point. For example, the poet Jean Paul ⁶ talks about becoming conscious of the Ego in his biography:

“I will never forget what manifested in me, which I have never told anyone about, whereby I stood at the birth of my self-consciousness, and of which I can tell at which place and at what time it happened. One morning, when I was a very young child, I stood under the front entrance and looked left at the woodshed, when suddenly the inner vision—I am an I—flashed before me like a bolt of lightning from the sky and since then has remained shining; there my Ego had seen itself for the first time and forever. Memory errors are hardly imaginable here, and since there was no extraneous retelling, nothing could be added and mixed into the narrative about an occurrence which took place only within the veiled inner sanctum of a human being—only the novelty lent permanence to these everyday, incidental circumstances.

It is already quite a lot to feel the devotion for the concentrated crowdedness of the world-being at one point, with all the shivers of awe and with all the feelings for the greatness of this fact. Yet, when a human being feels this time after time and allows it to affect him—although it will not enlighten him in regard to all the riddles of the world—it can give him a direction entirely focussed on the impersonal and the innermost human nature.

Thus we educate our emotional and our feeling life by relating it to our Ego-beingness. And when we have done this for a while, then we can focus our feelings and emotions in a different direction and can tell ourselves; this Ego within us is connected to everything we think, feel and perceive, with our entire soul life, it glows and shines through our soul life. We can then study human nature with the Ego as the centre point of thinking, feeling and willing, without taking ourselves into consideration or getting personal. The human being becomes a mystery to us, not we to ourselves, and our feelings expand from the Ego across to the soul. We can then transition to a different kind of feeling. In particular, we can acquire this beautiful feeling without which we are not able to lead our soul further into spiritual knowledge—this is what one would like to call it: The feeling that in each thing we encounter, as it were, an access to something infinite opens up for us. If we let this appear before our soul again and again, then it is the most wonderful feeling. It can be there when we go outside and look at a wonderful nature spectacle: cloud-covered mountains with thunder and lightning. This works greatly and forcefully on our soul. But then we must learn not only to see what is great and powerful there, but we may take a single leaf, look at it carefully with all its ribs and all the wonderful things that are part of it, and we will be able to perceive the greatness and might that reveals itself as something infinite in the smallest leaf, and we will hear and feel as if we were at the greatest spectacle of nature. It may appear to be strange, yet there is something to it, and afterwards one must express oneself grotesquely; it may make a great impression when a human being witnesses a glowing lava flow ejected from the Earth. But then, let us imagine someone looks at warm milk or the most ordinary coffee, and sees there how small crater-like structures form and a similar scenario unfolds on a small scale. Everywhere, in the smallest and in the greatest is access to an infinity.

And if we steadily keep researching, even if so much has been revealed to us, there is still something more under the cover, which perhaps we may have explored on the surface. So right now we are sensing what may result in a revelation of something intensely infinite at any point in the universe.

This imbues our soul with feelings and emotions that are necessary for us, if we want to attain what Goethe has called ‘spirit eyes’ and ‘spirit ears’.⁷ In short, it is a realisation of our feeling life, which is usually the most subjective to the point where we feel ourselves as if we were merely a setting where something is happening—where we no longer consider our feelings to be part of us. Our personality has been silenced. It is almost as if we were painters and stretching a canvas and painting a picture on it. Hence, when we train ourselves in this way, we stretch our soul and allow the spiritual world to paint on it. One feels this from a certain point in time onwards. Then it is only necessary to understand oneself, and in order to recognise what the world essentially is, it is necessary to consider a particular stage in the life of the soul as solely and only decisive.

So indeed what a human being acquires in ardent soul striving becomes the deciding of truth. It is in the soul itself where the decision must be made if something is true or not. Nothing external can decide, but the human being, by going beyond himself, must find within himself the authority to behold or discover the truth. Yes, basically we can say; in this regard we cannot be entirely different from all other human beings. Other people search for objective criteria, for something that provides us with a confirmation of truth from the outside. Yet a spiritual researcher searches within for confirmation of the truth. Thus he does the opposite. If this were the case, one could say in pretence; ‘Things are not looking too good when Spiritual Scientists in their confusion want to turn the world on its head.’ Yet in reality natural scientists and philosophers don’t do anything different from what spiritual researchers are doing, they only do not know that they are doing it. I will provide you with proof of this, taken from the immediate present.

At the last conference of natural scientists, Oswald Külpe ⁸ gave a talk about the relationship of natural science to philosophy. There he came up with the idea that the human being, by looking into the sensory world and perceiving it as sound, colour, warmth and so forth, only has subjective qualities. This is only a slightly different slant from what Schopenhauer said; ‘The world is our conception.’ But Oswald Külpe points out that what we perceive with our external senses, in short, everything that appears to be pictorial is subjective. And in contrast to this, what physics and chemistry say—pressure, the forces of attraction and repulsion, resistance and so on—must be characterised as objective. So in this way we partly have to deal with something purely subjective in our world-views, and partly with something that is objective such as pressure, forces of attraction and repulsion.

I do not want to go further into the criticism that has been voiced, but only want to address the mindset. It seems so terribly easy for a contemporary epistemologist to prove that because we cannot see without our eyes, light could only be something produced by our eyes. But what happens in the external world, it is said, when one ball hits another, those forces which cause resistance, pressure and so on, must be shifted into the outer world, into space. Why do people think that? At a particular point Oswald Külpe gives this away very clearly when he speaks about sensory perceptions—because he regards these as pictures, he says; ‘They cannot push or attract each other, neither can they pressure nor warm each other. They cannot have such and such large distance in space that would allow them to send light through space at such and such speed, nor can they be arranged as a chemist would arrange elements. Why does he say this of sensory perceptions? Because he sees sensory perceptions as pictures that are brought about solely by our senses.

Now I want to present a simple thought to you, to illustrate that the pictorial nature does not change anything. Things do push against or attract one another. When Mr Külpe now observes the sensory perceptions, this world—which supposedly could neither attract nor repel—simply does not face Mr Oswald Külpe as reality, but as a mirror image. Then he really has pictures in front of him. But push, pressure, resistance and anything that is placed into this world as different from sensory perceptions, will in no other way be objectively explained than through the pictorial nature of the sense perceptions. Why is this so? Because when the human being perceives pressure, push and so on, he turns what lives within the things, into sensations of the things. Man should study, for example, that when he says that one billiard ball hits another, what he experiences as the impact force is what he himself puts into these things! And someone who is standing on the ground of Spiritual Science, is not doing anything else. He makes what lives in the soul the criterion for expressing the world. There is no other principle of knowledge than that which can be found through the development of the soul itself. So the others do the same as the spiritual research. But only spiritual research is aware of this. The others do it unconsciously, they have no idea that they do the same at an elementary level. They just remain standing on the very first level and deny what they themselves are doing. Therefore we are allowed to say, Spiritual Science is in no way contrary to other research on the truth: the other researchers do the same, yet they take the first step without knowing about it, while spiritual research consciously takes the steps as far as a particular human soul can take according to its level of development.

Once it has been achieved that our feelings have, in a certain way, become objective, then, what I have already indicated will even more certainly come about, as it is a necessary pre-requisite for progress into the spiritual worlds. This is that man learns to comprehend how to live in the world in such a way that the weaving and living of an all-encompassing spiritual regularity within the spiritual world is presupposed. In daily life man is far removed from such a way of thinking. He gets angry when something happens to him that he doesn’t like. This is quite understandable as a different standpoint must be hard won. This other standpoint consists in saying; we have come from a former life, we have placed ourselves into the situation in which we are now, and have led ourselves to what is now facing us out of the lap of the future. What approaches us there corresponds to a strictly objective spiritual regularity. We accept it, because it would be an absurdity not to accept it. What approaches us from the lap of the spiritual worlds, whether the world admonishes us or praises us, whether joyful or tragic things happen to us, we will accept it as wisdom-filled experience and interweaving of the world. This is something that slowly and gradually must become once more the whole basic principle of our being. When it does, our will begins to be schooled. Whereas prior to this our feelings needed to be reorganised, now our will is transformed, becomes independent of our personality and thereby turns into an organ of perception of spiritual facts.

After the stage of ‘Imaginative Knowledge’, there occurs for man what can genuinely and truly be called inspiration, the fulfilment through spiritual facts. We must always be clear that man can attain the training of his will at a particular stage only, when his feelings are in a certain way already purified. Then his will can connect with the lawfulness of the world and he will exist as a human being only so that those facts and entities which want to appear to him, can erect a wall before him in his will, on which they can depict themselves for him, so that they can exist for him.

I could only describe for you some of what the soul must go through in silent, patient devotion, if it wants to ascend into the higher worlds. In the following lectures I will have much to describe of the evolution of the world history that the soul must experience to rise up into the spiritual worlds. So consider what has been said today as an introduction only, so that through such schooling our feeling and willing life and our complete imaginative life will develop to become bearers of new worlds, so that we will actually step into a world that we recognise as reality, just as we recognise the physical world as a reality of its own kind.

At a different occasion I have already mentioned that when people say,‘You only imagine what you believe to see,’ then it must be replied, that only the experience, the observation can yield the difference between reality and appearance, between reality and fantasy, just as this is also the case in the physical world. You must win the difference by relating to reality. For example, someone who approaches reality with a healthy thinking can distinguish a red-hot iron in reality from one that only exists in imagination—and no matter how many ‘Schopenhauerians’ may come—he will be able to tell both apart, he will know what is truth and what is imagination. Hence, man can orientate himself on reality. Even about the spiritual world he can only orientate himself on reality. Someone once said that if a person only thought about drinking a lemonade, he could also perceive the lemon taste on his tongue. I answered him, ‘imagination can be so strong that someone who has no lemonade in front of him, could perhaps feel the taste on his tongue through the lively imagination of a lemonade. But I would like to see, if someone has ever quenched his thirst with an imaginary lemonade only. Then the criterion begins to become more real. Thus it is also with the inner development of a human being. Not only does he learn to know a new soul-life, new concepts, but in his soul he collides with another world and knows: you are now facing a world that you can describe just as you can describe the outside world. This is not mere speculation, which could be compared with a thought development only, instead it is about the forming of new organs of perception and the unlocking of new worlds that truly stand before us just as real as our external, physical world.

What has been hinted at today is that contemporary circumstances made it necessary to point out that spiritual research is possible. This is not to say that everyone should immediately become a spiritual researcher. For it must always be emphasised that when a human being with a healthy sense of truth and unprejudiced logic allows the information from Spiritual Science to approach him—even if he himself is not able to look into the spiritual worlds—yet all that which arises from such messages can turn into energy and feelings of strength for his soul, even if he at first believes in Haeckelianism or Darwinism. What the spiritual researcher has to say, is suitable to speak more and more to man’s healthy sense of truth, all the more so, as it is connected to the deepest interests of every human being. There may be people who do not consider it necessary for their salvation to know how amphibians and mammals relate to each other, or something like this. But all people must warm up to what can be said on the sure basis of spiritual research: that the soul belongs to the sphere of eternity—insofar as it belongs to the spiritual world, descends at birth into the sensory existence and enters again into the spiritual realm through the gate of death. It has to be for all human beings of profound interest, that the strength, which sinks more and more into the soul, is of a quality that the soul can gain certainty from it to stand in its place in life. A soul that does not know what it is and what it wants, what the essence of its nature is, can become hopeless, can ultimately despair and feel dreary and desolate. Yet a soul that allows itself to be filled by the spiritual achievements of Spiritual Science cannot remain empty and desolate if only it does not accept the messages of Spiritual Science as dogmas, but as a living life that streams through our soul and warms it. This provides comfort for all the suffering in life, when we are being led upwards from all temporal suffering to that which can become comfort for the soul from the share of the temporal in the eternal. In short: Spiritual Science can give man what he needs today in the loneliest and most work-intensive hours of his life due to the intensified circumstances of our time —or, if the strength would want to leave him, Spiritual Science can give him what he needs to look into the future and go energetically towards it.

Hence, Spiritual Science—as it arises from spiritual research, from those who want to undertake steps into the spiritual world—can forever confirm what we want to summarise in a few words that express with sensitivity the characteristics of the path into the spiritual world and its significance for the people of the present. What we want to summarise in this way is not supposed to be a contemplation on the theories of life, but one on remedies, means of strengths, tonics for life:

The Spirit World remains shut to you
Unaware of the spirit in yourself
That shines in your soul
And can uphold light for you
In world depths, on world heights! ⁹

• 1. Herman Grimm: Goethe-Lectures, Berlin 1877, 23rd Lecture, Pages 215 et seq.
• 2. Lecture GA 60 #5, The Nature of Sleep, Berlin, 24 November 1910
• 3. Now published under the title - How to Know Higher Worlds, GA 10.
• 4. The Second Edition of the The Philosophy of Freedom was published not until 1918. At this occasion Rudolf Steiner gave a lecture about the genesis of this book, which is featuring as the sixth lecture of the cycle Historical Symptomatology, Dornach 1942. Newly published in Rudolf Steiner's Letters, Volume 2, Dornach 1953
• 5. This was mentioned in the earlier lecture What is Mysticism?, given on 10 February 1910, as part of The Architect House Lecture Series, 1909/1910, and was printed as part of Paths of Soul Experiences, GA59
• 6. The Works of Jean Paul, Berlin 1865, Volume 16, Page 26 et seq.
• 7. For example in Goethe’s Colour Theory, Goethean Science, edited by Rudolf Steiner, Volume 1, Bern 1947, Pages 107 and 262.
• 8. Oswald Külpe, 1862-1915, Philosopher and Psychologist, Epistemology and Natural Sciences, Lecture given on 19 September 1910 at the 82nd Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Medical Doctors, Leipzig 1910.
• 9. Poem translated by Norbert Mulholland.

[ 1 ] The rise of natural science in modern times had as its fundamental cause the same search as the mysticism of Jakob Boehme. This becomes apparent in a thinker who grew directly out of the spiritual movement, which in Copernicus (1473–1543), Kepler (1571–1630), Galileo (1564–1642), and others, led to the first great accomplishments of natural science in modern times. This thinker is Giordano Bruno (1548–1600). When one sees how his world consists of infinitely small, animated, psychically self-aware, fundamental beings, the monads, which are uncreated and indestructible, producing in their combined activity the phenomena of nature, one could be tempted to group him with Anaxagoras, for whom the world consists of the “homoiomeries.”

Yet, there is a significant difference between these two thinkers. For Anaxagoras, the thought of the homoiomeries unfolds while he is engaged in the contemplation of the world; the world suggests these thoughts to him. Giordano Bruno feels that what lies behind the phenomena of nature must be thought of as a world picture in such a way that the entity of the ego is possible in this world picture. The ego must be a monad; otherwise, it could not be real. Thus, the assumption of the monads becomes necessary. As only the monad can be real, therefore, the truly real entities are monads with different inner qualities.

In the depths of the soul of a personality like Giordano Bruno, something happens that is not raised into full consciousness; the effect of this inner process is then the formation of the world picture. What goes on in the depths is an unconscious soul process. The ego feels that it must form such a conception of itself that its reality is assured, and it must conceive the world in such a way that the ego can be real in it. Giordano Bruno has to form the conception of the monad in order to render possible the realization of both demands. In his thought the ego struggles for its existence in the world conception of the modern age, and the expression of this struggle is the view: I am a monad; such an entity is uncreated and indestructible.

[ 2 ] A comparison shows how different the ways are in which Aristotle and Giordano Bruno arrive at the conception of God. Aristotle contemplates the world; he sees the evidence of reason in natural processes; he surrenders to the contemplation of this evidence; at the same time, the processes of nature are for him evidence of the thought of the “first mover” of these processes. Giordano Bruno fights his way through to the conception of the monads. The processes of nature are, as it were, extinguished in the picture in which innumerable monads are presented as acting on each other; God becomes the power entity that lives actively in all monads behind the processes of the perceptible world. In Giordano Bruno's passionate antagonism against Aristotle, the contrast between the thinker of ancient Greece and of the philosopher of modern times becomes manifest.

[ 3 ] It becomes apparent in the modern philosophical development in a great variety of ways how the ego searches for means to experience its own reality in itself. What Francis Bacon of Verulam (1561–1626) represents in his writings has the same general character even if this does not at first sight become apparent in his endeavors in the field of philosophy. Bacon of Verulam demands that the investigation of world phenomena should begin with unbiased observation. One should then try to separate the essential from the nonessential in a phenomenon in order to arrive at a conception of whatever lies at the bottom of a thing or event. He is of the opinion that up to his time the fundamental thoughts, which were to explain the world phenomena, had been conceived first, and only thereafter were the description of the individual things and events arranged to fit these thoughts. He presupposed that the thoughts had not been taken out of the things themselves. Bacon wanted to combat this (deductive) method with his (inductive) method. The concepts are to be formed in direct contact with the things. One sees, so Bacon reasons, how an object is consumed by fire; one observes how a second object behaves with relation to fire and then observes the same process with many objects. In this fashion one arrives eventually at a conception of how things behave with respect to fire. The fact that the investigation in former times had not proceeded in this way had, according to Bacon's opinion, caused human conception to be dominated by so many idols instead of the true ideas about the things.

[ 4 ] Goethe gives a significant description of this method of thought of Bacon of Verulam.

Bacon is like a man who is well-aware of the irregularity, insufficiency and dilapidated condition of an old building, and knows how to make this clear to the inhabitants. He advises them to abandon it, to give up the land, the materials and all appurtenances, to look for another plot, and to erect a new building. He is an excellent and persuasive speaker. He shakes a few walls. They break down and some of the inhabitants are forced to move out. He points out new building grounds; people begin to level it off, and yet it is everywhere too narrow. He submits new plans; they are not clear, not inviting. Mainly, he speaks of new unknown materials and now the world seems to be well-served. The crowd disperses in all directions and brings back an infinite variety of single items while at home, new plans, new activities and settlements occupy the citizens and absorb their attention.

[ 5 ] Goethe says this in his history of the theory of color where he speaks about Bacon. In a later part of the book dealing with Galileo, he says:

If through Verulam's method of dispersion, natural science seemed to be forever broken up into fragments, it was soon brought to unity again by Galileo. He led natural philosophy back into the human being. When he developed the law of the pendulum and of falling bodies from the observation of swinging church lamps, he showed even in his early youth that, for the genius, one case stands for a thousand cases. In science, everything depends on what is called, an aperçu, that is, on the ability of becoming aware of what is really fundamental in the world of phenomena. The development of such an awareness is infinitely fruitful.

With these words Goethe indicated distinctly the point that is characteristic of Bacon. Bacon wants to find a secure path for science because he hopes that in this way man will find a dependable relationship to the world. The approach of Aristotle, so Bacon feels, can no longer be used in the modern age. He does not know that in different ages different energies of the soul are predominantly active in man. He is only aware of the fact that he must reject Aristotle. This he does passionately. He does it in such a way that Goethe is lead to say, “How can one listen to him with equanimity when he compares the works of Aristotle and of Plato with weightless tablets, which, just because they did not consist of a good solid substance, could so easily float down to us on the stream of time.”

Bacon does not understand that he is aiming at the same objective that has been reached by Plato and Aristotle, and that he must use different means for the same aim because the means of antiquity can no longer be those of the modern age. He points toward a method that could appear fruitful for the investigation in the field of external nature, but as Goethe shows in the case of Galileo, even in this field something more is necessary than what Bacon demands.

The method of Bacon proves completely useless, however, when the soul searches not only for an access to the investigation of individual facts, but also to a world conception. What good is a groping search for isolated phenomena and a derivation of general ideas from them, if these general ideas do not, like strokes of lightning, flash up out of the ground of being in the soul of man, rendering account of their truth through themselves. In antiquity, thought appeared like a perception to the soul. This mode of appearance has been dampened through the brightness of the new ego-consciousness. What can lead to thoughts capable of forming a world conception in the soul must be so formed as if it were the soul's own invention, and the soul must search for the possibility of justifying the validity of its own creation. Bacon has no feeling for all this. He, therefore, points to the materials of the building for the construction of the new world conception, namely, the individual natural phenomena. It is, however, no more possible that one can ever build a house by merely observing the form of the building stones that are to be used, than that a fruitful world conception could ever arise in a soul that is exclusively concerned with the individual processes of nature.

[ 6 ] Contrary to Bacon of Verulam, who pointed toward the bricks of the building, Descartes (Cartesius) and Spinoza turned their attention toward its plan. Descartes was born in 1596 and died in 1650. The starting point of his philosophical endeavor is significant with him. With an unbiased questioning mind he approaches the world, which offers him much of its riddles partly through revealed religion, partly through the observation of the senses. He now contemplates both sources in such a way that he does not simply accept and recognize as truth what either of them offers to him. Instead, he sets against the suggestions of both sources the “ego,” which answers out of its own initiative with its doubt against all revelation and against all perception. In the development of modern philosophical life, this move is a fact of the most telling significance. Amidst the world the thinker allows nothing to make an impression on his soul, but sets himself against everything with a doubt that can derive its support only from the soul itself. Now the soul apprehends itself in its own action: I doubt, that is to say, I think. Therefore, no matter how things stand with the entire world, in my doubt-exerting thinking I come to the clear awareness that I am. In this manner, Cartesius arrives at his Cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am. The ego in him conquers the right to recognize its own being through the radical doubt directed against the entire world.

Descartes derives the further development of his world conception out of this root. In the “ego” he had attempted to seize existence. Whatever can justify its existence together with the ego may be considered truth. The ego finds in itself, innate to it, the idea of God. This idea presents itself to the ego as true, as distinct as the ego itself, but it is so sublime, so powerful, that the ego cannot have it through its own power. Therefore, it comes from transcendent reality to which it corresponds. Descartes believes in the reality of the external world, not because this external world presents itself as real, but because the ego must believe in itself and then subsequently in God, and because God must be thought as truthful. For it would be untrue of God to suggest a real external world to man if the latter did not exist.

[ 7 ] It is only possible to arrive at the recognition of the reality of the ego as Descartes does through a thinking that in the most direct manner aims at the ego in order to find a point of support for the act of cognition. That is to say, this possibility can be fulfilled only through an inner activity but never through a perception from without. Any perception that comes from without gives only the qualities of extension. In this manner, Descartes arrives at the recognition of two substances in the world: One to which extension, and the other to which thinking, is to be attributed and that has its roots in the human soul. The animals, which in Descartes's sense cannot apprehend themselves in inner self-supporting activity, are accordingly mere beings of extension, automata, machines. The human body, too, is nothing but a machine. The soul is linked up with this machine. When the body becomes useless through being worn out or destroyed in some way, the soul abandons it to continue to live in its own element.

[ 8 ] Descartes lives in a time in which a new impulse in the philosophical life is already discernible. The period from the beginning of the Christian era until about the time of Scotus Erigena develops in such a way that the inner experience of thought is enlivened by a force that enters the spiritual evolution as a powerful impulse. The energy of thought as it awakened in Greece is outshone by this power. Outwardly, the progress in the life of the human soul is expressed in the religious movements and by the fact that the forces of the youthful nations of Western and Central Europe become the recipients of the effects of the older forms of thought experience. They penetrate this experience with the younger, more elementary impulses and thereby transform it. In this process one forward step in the progress in human evolution becomes evident that is caused by the fact that older and subtle traces of spiritual currents that have exhausted their vitality, but not their spiritual possibilities, are continued by youthful energies emerging from the natural spring of mankind. In such processes one will be justified in recognizing the essential laws of the evolution of mankind. They are based on rejuvenating tendencies of the spiritual life. The acquired forces of the spirit can only then continue to unfold if they are transplanted into young, natural energies of mankind.

The first eight centuries of the Christian era present a continuation of the thought experience in the human soul in such a way that the new forces about to emerge are still dormant in hidden depths, but they tend to exert their formative effect on the evolution of world conception. In Descartes, these forces already show themselves at work in a high degree. In the age between Scotus Erigena and approximately the fifteenth century, thought, which in the preceding period did not openly unfold, comes again to the fore in its own force. Now, however, it emerges from a direction quite different from that of the Greek age. With the Greek thinkers, thought is experienced as a perception. From the eighth to the fifteenth centuries it comes from out of the depth of the soul so that man has the feeling: Thought generates itself within me. In the Greek thinkers, a relation between thought and the processes of nature was still immediately established; in the age just referred to, thought stands out as the product of self-consciousness. The thinker has the feeling that he must prove thought as justified. This is the feeling of the nominalists and the realists. This is also the feeling of Thomas Aquinas, who anchors the experience of thought in religious revelation.

[ 9 ] The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries introduce a new impulse to the souls. This is slowly prepared and slowly absorbed in the life of the soul. A transformation takes place in the organization of the human soul. In the field of philosophical life, this transformation becomes manifest through the fact that thought cannot now be felt as a perception, but as a product of self-consciousness. This transformation in the organization of the human soul can be observed in all fields of the development of humanity. It becomes apparent in the renaissance of art and science, and of European life, as well as in the reformatory religious movements. One will be able to discover it if one investigates the art of Dante and Shakespeare with respect to their foundations in the human soul development. Here these possibilities can only be indicated, since this sketch is intended to deal only with the development of the intellectual world conception.

[ 10 ] The advent of the mode of thought of modern natural science appears as another symptom of this transformation of the human soul organization. Just compare the state of the form of thinking about nature as it develops in Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler with what has preceded them, This natural scientific conception corresponds to the mood of the human soul at the beginning of the modern age in the sixteenth century. Nature is now looked at in such a way that the sense observation is to be the only witness of it. Bacon is one, Galileo another personality in whom this becomes apparent. The picture of nature is no longer drawn in a manner that allows thought to be felt in it as a power revealed by nature. Out of this picture of nature, every trait that could be felt as only a product of self-consciousness gradually vanishes. Thus, the creations of self-consciousness and the observation of nature are more and more abruptly contrasted, separated by a gulf, From Descartes on a transformation of the soul organization becomes discernible that tends to separate the picture of nature from the creations of the self-consciousness. With the sixteenth century a new tendency in the philosophical life begins to make itself felt. While in the preceding centuries thought had played the part of an element, which, as a product of self-consciousness, demanded its justification through the world picture, since the sixteenth century it proves to be clearly and distinctly resting solely on its own ground in the self-consciousness. Previously, thought had been felt in such a manner that the picture of nature could be considered a support for its justification; now it becomes the task of this element of thought to uphold the claim of its validity through its own strength. The thinkers of the time that now follows feel that in the thought experience itself something must be found that proves this experience to be the justified creator of a world conception.

[ 11 ] The significance of the transformation of the soul life can be realized if one considers the way in which philosophers of nature, like H. Cardanus (1501–1576) and Bernardinus Telesius (1508–1588), still spoke of natural processes. In them a picture of nature still continued to show its effect and was to lose its power through the emergence of the mode of conception of natural science of Copernicus, Galileo and others. Something still lives in the mind of Cardanus of the processes of nature, which he conceives as similar to those of the human soul. Such an assertion would also have been possible to Greek thinking. Galileo is already compelled to say that what man has as the sensation of warmth within himself, for instance, exists no more in external nature than the sensation of tickling that a man feels when the sole of his foot is touched by a feather. Telesius still feels justified to say that warmth and coldness are the driving forces of the world processes, and Galileo must already make the statement that man knows warmth only as an inner experience. In the picture of nature he allows as thinkable only what contains nothing of this inner experience. Thus, the conceptions of mathematics and mechanics become the only ones that are allowed to form the picture of nature. In a personality like Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), who was just as great as a thinker as he was an artist, we can recognize the striving for a new law-determined picture of nature. Such spirits feel it necessary to find an access to nature not yet given to the Greek way of thinking and its after effects in the Middle Ages. Man now has to rid himself of whatever experiences he has about his own inner being if he is to find access to nature. He is permitted to depict nature only in conceptions that contain nothing of what he experiences as the effects of nature in himself.

[ 12 ] Thus, the human soul dissociates itself from nature; it takes its stand on its own ground. As long as one could think that the stream of nature contained something that was the same as what was immediately experienced in man, one could, without hesitation, feel justified to have thought bear witness to the events of nature. The picture of nature of modern times forces the human consciousness to feel itself outside nature with its thought. This consciousness further establishes a validity for its thought, which is gained through its own power.

[ 13 ] From the beginning of the Christian Era to Scotus Erigena, the experience of thought continues to be effective in such a way that its form is determined by the presupposition of a spiritual world, namely, the world of religious revelation. From the eighth to the sixteenth century, thought experience wrests itself free from the inner self-consciousness but allows, besides its own germinating power, the other power of consciousness, revelation, to continue in its existence. From the sixteenth century on, it is the picture of nature that eliminates the experience of thought itself; henceforth, the self-consciousness attempts to produce, out of its own energies, the resources through which it is possible to form a world conception with the help of thought. It is with this task that Descartes finds himself confronted. It is the task of the thinkers of the new period of world conception.

[ 14 ] Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677) asks himself, “What must be assumed as a starting point from which the creation of a true world picture may proceed? This beginning is caused by the feeling that innumerable thoughts may present themselves in my soul as true; I can admit as the corner stone for a world conception only an element whose properties I must first determine.” Spinoza finds that one can only begin with something that is in need of nothing else for its being. He gives the name, substance, to this being. He finds that there can be only one such substance, and that this substance is God. If one observes the method by which Spinoza arrives at this beginning of his philosophy, one finds that he has modeled it after the method of mathematics. Just as the mathematician takes his start from general truths, which the human ego forms itself in free creation, so Spinoza demands that philosophy should start from such spontaneously created conceptions. The one substance is as the ego must think it to be. Thought in this way, it does not tolerate anything existing outside itself as a peer, for then it would not be everything. It would need something other than itself for its existence. Everything else is, therefore, only of the substance, as one of its attributes, as Spinoza says. Two such attributes are recognizable to man. He sees the first when he looks at the outer world; the second, when he turns his attention inward. The first attribute is extension; the second, thinking. Man contains both attributes in his being. In his body he has extension; in his soul, thinking. When he thinks, it is the divine substance that thinks; when he acts, it is this substance that acts. Spinoza obtains the existence (Dasein) for the ego in anchoring it in the general all-embracing divine substance. Under such circumstances there can be no question of an absolute freedom of man, for man is no more to be credited with the initiative of his actions and thought than a stone with that of its motion; the agent in everything is the one substance. We can speak of a relative freedom in man only when he considers himself not as an individual entity, but knows himself as one with the one substance.

Spinoza's world conception, if consistently developed to its perfection, leads a person to the consciousness: I think of myself in the right way if I no longer consider myself, but know myself in my experience as one with the divine whole. This consciousness then, to follow Spinoza, endows the whole human personality with the impulse to do what is right, that is to say, god-filled action. This results as a matter of course for the one for whom the right world conception is realized as the full truth. For this reason Spinoza calls the book in which he presents his world conception, Ethics. For him, ethics, that is to say, moral behavior, is in the highest sense the result of the true knowledge of man's dwelling in the one substance. One feels inclined to say that the private life of Spinoza, of the man who was first persecuted by fanatics and then, out of his own free will give away his fortune and sought his subsistence in poverty as a craftsman, was in the rarest fashion the outer expression of his philosophical soul, which knew its ego in the divine whole and felt its inner experience, indeed, all experience, illumined by this consciousness.

[ 15 ] Spinoza constructs a total world conception out of thoughts. These thoughts have to satisfy the requirement that they derive their justification for the construction of the picture out of the self-consciousness. In it their certainty must be rooted. Thoughts that are conceived by human consciousness in the same way as the self-supporting mathematical ideas are capable of shaping a world picture that is the expression of what, in truth, exists behind the phenomena of the world.

[ 16 ] In a direction that is entirely different from that of Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716) seeks the justification of the ego-consciousness in the actual world. His point of departure is like that of Giordano Bruno insofar as he thinks of the soul or the “ego” as a monad. Leibniz finds the self-consciousness in the soul, that is, the knowledge of the soul of itself, a manifestation, therefore, of the ego. There cannot be anything else in the soul that thinks and feels except the soul itself, for how should the soul know of itself if the subject of the act of knowing were something other than itself? Furthermore, it can only be a simple entity, not a composite being, for the parts in it could and would have to know of each other. Thus, the soul is a simple entity, enclosed in itself and aware of its being, a monad. Nothing can come into this monad that is external to it, for nothing but itself can be active in it. All its experience, cognitive imagination, sensation, etc., is the result of its own activity. It could only perceive any other activity in itself through its defense against this activity, that is to say, it would at any rate perceive only itself in its defense. Thus, nothing external can enter this monad. Leibniz expresses this by saying that the monad has no windows. According to him, all real beings are monads, and only monads truly exist. These different monads are, however, differentiated with respect to the intensity of their inner life. There are monads of an extremely dull inner life that are as if in a continual state of sleep; there are monads that are, as it were, dreaming; there are, furthermore, the human monads in wake-consciousness, etc., up to the highest degree of intensity of the inner life of the divine principal monad. That man does not see monads in his sense perception is caused by the circumstance that the monads are perceived by him like the appearance of fog, for example, that is not really fog but a swarm of gnats. What is seen by the senses of man is like the appearance of a fog formed by the accumulated monads.

[ 17 ] Thus, for Leibniz the world in reality is a sum of monads, which do not affect each other but constitute self-conscious beings, leading their lives independently of each other, that is, egos. Nevertheless, if the individual monad contains an after image of the general life of the world in its inner life, it would be wrong to assume that this is caused by an effect that the individual monads exert on each other. It is caused by the circumstance that in a given case one monad experiences inwardly by itself what is also independently experienced by another monad. The inner lives of the monads agree like clocks that indicate the same hours in spite of the fact that they do not affect each other. Just as the clocks agree because they have been originally matched, so the monads are attuned to each other through the pre-established harmony that issues from the divine principal monad.

[ 18 ] This is the world picture to which Leibniz is driven because he has to form the picture in such a way that in it the self-conscious life of the soul, the ego, can be maintained as a reality. It is a world picture completely formed out of the “ego” itself. In Leibniz's view, this can, indeed, not be otherwise. In Leibniz, the struggle for a world conception leads to a point where, in order to find the truth, it does not accept anything as truth that is revealed in the outer world.

[ 19 ] According to Leibniz, the life of man's senses is caused in such a way that the monad of the soul is brought into connection with other monads with a somnolent, sleeping and less acute self-consciousness. The body is a sum of such monads. The one waking soul monad is connected with it. This central monad parts from the others in death and continues its existence by itself.

[ 20 ] Just as the world picture of Leibniz is one that is wholly formed out of the inner energy of the self-conscious soul, so the world picture of his contemporary John Locke (1632–1704), rests entirely on the feeling that such a productive construction out of the soul is not admissible. Locke recognizes only those parts of a world conception as justified that can be observed (experienced) and what can, on the basis of the observation, be thought about the observed objects. The soul for him is not a being that develops real experiences out of itself, but an empty slate on which the outer world writes its entries. Thus, for Locke, the human self-consciousness is a result of the experience; it is not an ego that is the cause of an experience. When a thing of the external world makes an impression on the soul, it can be said that the thing contains only extension, shape, motion in reality; through the contact with the senses, sounds, colors, warmth, etc., are produced. What thus comes into being through contact with the senses is only there as long as the senses are in touch with the things. Outside the perception there are only substances that are differently shaped and in various states of motion. Locke feels compelled to assume that, except shape and motion, nothing of what the senses perceive has anything to do with things themselves. With this assumption he makes the beginnings of a current of world conception that is unwilling to recognize the impressions of the external world experienced inwardly by man in his act of cognition, as belonging to the world “in itself.”

[ 21 ] It is a strange spectacle that Locke presents to the contemplative soul. Man is supposed to be capable of cognition only through the fact that he perceives, and that he thinks about the content of the perception, but what he perceives has only the least part to do with the properties pertaining to the world itself. Leibniz withdraws from what the world reveals and creates a world picture from within the soul; Locke insists on a world picture that is created by the soul in conjunction with the world, but no real picture of a world is accomplished through such a creation. As Locke cannot, like Leibniz, consider the ego itself as the fulcrum of a world conception, he arrives at conceptions that appear to be inappropriate to support a world conception because they do not allow the possession of the human ego to be counted as belonging to the center of existence. A world view like that of Locke loses the connection with every realm in which the ego, the self-conscious soul, could be rooted because it rejects from the outset any approaches to the world ground except those that disappear in the darkness of the senses.

[ 22 ] In Locke, the evolution of philosophy produces a form of world conception in which the self-conscious soul struggles for its existence in the world picture but loses this fight because it believes that it gains its experiences exclusively in the intercourse with the external world represented in the picture of nature. The self-conscious soul must, therefore, renounce all knowledge concerning anything that could belong to the nature of the soul apart from this intercourse with the outside world.

[ 23 ] Stimulated by Locke, George Berkeley (1685–1753) arrived at results that were entirely different from his. Berkeley finds that the impressions that the things and events of the world appear to produce on the human soul take place in reality within this soul itself. When I see “red,” I must bring this “redness” into being within myself; when I feel “warm,” the “warmth” lives within me. Thus it is with all things that I apparently receive from without. Except for those elements I produce within myself, I know nothing whatsoever about the external things. Thus, it is senseless to speak about things that consist of material substance, for I know only what appears in my mind as something spiritual. What I call a rose, for instance, is wholly spiritual, that is to say, a conception (an idea) experienced by my mind. There is, therefore, according to Berkeley, nothing to be perceived except what is spiritual, and when I notice that something is effected in me from without, then this effect can only be caused by spiritual entities, for obviously bodies cannot cause spiritual effects and my perceptions are entirely spiritual. There are, therefore, only spirits in the world that influence each other. This is Berkeley's view. It turns the conceptions of Locke into their contrary by construing everything as spiritual reality that had been considered as impression of the material things. Thus, Berkeley believes he recognizes himself with his self-consciousness immediately in a spiritual world.

[ 24 ] Others have been led to different results by the thoughts of Locke. Condillac (1715–1780) is an example. He believes, like Locke, that all knowledge of the world must and, indeed, can only depend on the observation of the senses and on thinking. He develops this view to the extreme conclusion that thinking has in itself no self-dependent reality; it is nothing but a sublimated, transformed external sensation. Thus, only sense perceptions must be accepted in a world picture that is to correspond to the truth. His explanation in this direction is indeed telling. Imagine a human body that is still completely unawakened mentally, and then suppose one sense after another to be opened. What more do we have in the sentient body than we had before in the insensate organism? A body on which the surrounding world has made impressions. These impressions made by the environment have by no means produced what believes itself to be an “ego.” This world conception does not arrive at the possibility of conceiving the “ego” as self-conscious “soul” and it does not accomplish a world picture in which this “ego” could occur. It is the world conception that tries to deliver itself of the task of dealing with the self-conscious soul by proving its nonexistence. Charles Bonnet (1720–1793), Claude Adrien Helvetius (1715–1771), Julien de la Mettrie (1709–1751) and the system of nature (systeme de la nature) of Holbach that appeared in 1770 follow similar paths. In Holbach's work all traces of spiritual reality have been driven out of the world picture. Only matter and its forces operate in the world, and for this spirit-deprived picture of nature, Holbach finds the words, “0 nature, mistress of all being, and you, her daughters, Virtue, Reason, and Truth, may you be forever our only divinities.”

[ 25 ] In de la Mettrie's Man, a Machine, a world conception appears that is so overwhelmed by the picture of nature that it can admit only nature as valid. What occurs in the self-consciousness must, therefore, be thought of in about the same way as a mirror picture that we compare with the mirror. The physical organism would be compared with the mirror, the self-consciousness with the picture. The latter has, apart from the former, no independent significance. In Man, a Machine, we read:

If, however, all qualities of the soul depend so much on the specific organization of the brain and the body as a whole that they obviously are only this organization itself, then, in this case, we have to deal with a very enlightened machine. . . . ‘Soul,’ therefore, is only a meaningless expression of which one has no idea (thought picture), and that a clear head may only use in order to indicate by it the part in us that thinks. Just assume the simplest principle of motion and the animated bodies have everything they need in order to move, feel, repeat, in short, everything necessary to find their way in the physical and moral world. . . . If whatever thinks in my brain is not a part of this inner organ, why should my blood become heated when I make the plan for my works or pursue an abstract line of thought, calmly resting on my bed? (Compare de la Mettrie, Man, a Machine, Philosophische Bibliothek, Vol. 68.)

Voltaire (1694–1778) introduced the doctrines of Locke into the circles in which these thinkers had their effect (Diderot, Cabanis and others also belonged to them). Voltaire himself probably never went so far as to draw the last consequences of these philosophers. He allowed himself, however, to be stimulated by the thoughts of Locke and his sparkling and dazzling writings. Much can be felt of these influences, but he could not become a materialist in the sense of these thinkers. He lived in too comprehensive a thought horizon to deny the spirit. He awakened the need for philosophical questions in the widest circles because he linked these questions to the interest of them. Much would have to be said about him in an account that intended to trace philosophical investigation of current events, but that is not the purpose of this presentation. Only the higher problems of world conception in its specific sense are to be considered. For this reason, Voltaire, as well as Rousseau, the antagonist of the school of enlightenment, are not to be dealt with here.

[ 26 ] Just as Locke loses his path in the darkness of the senses, so does David Hume (1711–1776) in the inward realm of the self-conscious soul, the experience of which appears to him to be ruled not by the forces of a world order, but by the power of human habit. Why does one say that one event in nature is a cause and another an effect? This is a question Hume asks. Man sees how the sun shines on a stone; he then notices that the stone has become warm. He observes that the first event often follows the second. Therefore, he becomes accustomed to think of them as belonging together. He makes the cause out of the sunshine, and the heating of the stone he turns into the effect. Thought habits tie our perceptions together, but there is nothing outside in a real world that manifests itself in such a connection. Man sees a thought in his mind followed by a motion of his body. He becomes accustomed to think of this thought as the cause and of the motion as the effect. Thought habits, nothing more, are, according to Hume, responsible for man's statements about the world processes. The self-conscious soul can arrive at a guiding direction for life through thought habits, but it cannot find anything in these habits out of which it could shape a world picture that would have any significance for the world event apart from the soul. Thus, for the philosophical view of Hume, every conception that man forms beyond the more external and internal observation remains only an object of belief; it can never become knowledge. Concerning the fate of the self-conscious human soul, there can be no reliable knowledge about its relation to any other world but that of the senses, only belief.

[ 27 ] The picture of Leibniz's world conception underwent a drawn-out rationalistic elaboration through Christian Wolff (born in Breslau, 1679, professor in Halle). Wolff is of the opinion that a science could be founded that obtains a knowledge of what is possible through pure thinking, a knowledge of what has the potentiality for existence because it appears free from contradiction to our thinking and can be proven in this way. Thus, Wolff becomes the founder of a science of the world, the soul and God. This world conception rests on the presupposition that the self-conscious soul can produce thoughts in itself that are valid for what lies entirely and completely outside its own realm. This is the riddle with which Kant later feels himself confronted; how is knowledge that is produced in the soul and nevertheless supposed to have validity for world entities lying outside the soul, possible?

[ 28 ] In the philosophical development since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the tendency becomes manifest to rest the self-conscious soul on itself so that it feels justified to form valid conceptions about the riddles of the world. In the consciousness of the second half of the eighteenth century, Lessing (1729–1781) feels this tendency as the deepest impulse of human longing. As we listen to him, we hear many individuals who reveal the fundamental character of that age in this aspiration.

Lessing strives for the transformation of the religious truths of revelation into truths of reason. This aim is distinctly discernible in the various turns and aspects that his thinking has to take. Lessing feels himself with his self-conscious ego in a period of the evolution of mankind that is destined to acquire through the power of self-consciousness, what it had previously received from without through revelation. What has preceded this phase of history becomes for Lessing a process of preparation for the moment in which man's self-consciousness becomes autonomous. Thus, for Lessing, history becomes an “Education of the Human Race.” This is also the title of his essay, written at the height of his life, in which he refuses to restrict the human soul to a single terrestrial life, but assumes repeated earth lives for it. The soul lives its lives separated by time intervals in the various periods of the evolution of mankind, absorbs from each period what such a time can yield and incarnates itself in a later period to continue its development. Thus, the soul carries the fruits of one age of humanity into the later ages and is “educated” by history. In Lessing's conception, the “ego” is, therefore, extended far beyond the individual life; it becomes rooted in a spiritually effective world that lies behind the world of the senses.

[ 29 ] With this view Lessing stands on the ground of a world conception that means to stimulate the self-conscious ego to realize through its very nature how the active agent within itself is not completely manifested in the sense-perceptible individual life. [ 30 ] In a different way, yet following the same impulse, Herder (1744–1803) attempts to arrive at a world picture. His attention turns toward the entire physical and spiritual universe. He searches, as it were, for the plan of this universe. The connection and harmony of the phenomena of nature, the first dawning and sunrise of language and poetry, the progress of historical evolution—with all this Herder allows his soul to be deeply impressed, and often penetrates it with inspired thought in order to reach a certain aim. According to Herder, something is striving for existence in the entire external world that finally appears in its manifested form in the human soul. The self-conscious soul, by feeling itself grounded in the universe, reveals to itself only the course its own forces took before it reached self-consciousness. The soul may, according to Herder's view, feel itself rooted in the cosmos, for it recognizes a process in the whole natural and spiritual connection that had to lead to the soul itself, just as childhood must lead to mature adulthood in man's personal existence. It is a comprehensive picture of this world thought of Herder that is expressed in his Ideas Toward a Philosophy of the History of Mankind. It represents an attempt to think the picture of nature in harmony with that of the spirit in such a way that there is in this nature picture a place also for the self-conscious human soul. We must not forget that Herder's world conception reflects his struggle to come to terms simultaneously with the conceptions of modern natural science and the needs of the self-conscious soul. Herder was confronted with the demands of modern world conception as was Aristotle with those of the Greek age. Their conceptions receive their characteristic coloring from the different way in which both thinkers had to take into account the pictures of nature provided by their respective ages.

[ 31 ] Herder's attitude toward Spinoza, contrary to that of other contemporary thinkers, casts a light on his position in the evolution of world conception. This position becomes particularly distinct if one compares it to the attitude of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743 – 1819). Jacobi finds in Spinoza's world picture the elements that the human understanding must arrive at if it follows the paths predestined for it by its own forces. This picture of the world marks the limit of what man can know about the world. This knowledge, however, cannot decide anything about the nature of the soul, about the divine ground of the world or about the connection of the soul with the latter for this knowledge. These realms are disclosed to man only if he surrenders to an insight of belief that depends on a special ability of the soul. Knowledge in itself must, therefore, according to Jacobi, necessarily be atheistic. It can adhere strictly to logical order, but it cannot contain within itself divine world order. Thus, Spinozism becomes, for Jacobi, the only possible scientific mode of conception but, at the same time, he sees in it a proof of the fact that this mode of thinking cannot find the connection with the spiritual world. In 1787 Herder defends Spinoza against the accusation of atheism. He is in a position to do so, for he is not afraid to feel, in his own way but similar to that of Spinoza, man's experience with the divine being. Spinoza erects a pure thought structure; Herder tries to gain a world conception not merely through thinking but through the whole of the human soul life. For him, no abrupt contrast exists between belief and knowledge if the soul becomes clearly aware of the manner in which it experiences itself. We express Herder's intention if we describe the experience of the soul in the following way. When belief becomes aware of the reasons that move the soul, it arrives at conceptions that are no less certain than those obtained by mere thinking. Herder accepts everything that the soul can find within itself in a purified form as forces that can produce a world picture. Thus, his conception of the divine ground of the world is richer, more saturated, than that of Spinoza, but this conception allows the human ego to assume a relationship to the world ground, which in Spinoza appears merely as a result of thought.

[ 32 ] We take our stand at a point where the various threads of the development of modern world conceptions intertwine, as it were, when we observe how the current of Spinoza's thought enters into it in the eighties of the eighteenth century. In 1785 F. H. Jacobi published his “Spinoza-Booklet.” In it he relates a conversation between himself and Lessing that took place shortly before Lessing's death. According to this conversation, Lessing had confessed his adherence to Spinozism. For Jacobi, this also establishes Lessing's atheism. If one recognizes the “Conversation with Jacobi” as decisive for the intimate thoughts of Lessing, one must regard him as a person who acknowledges that man can only acquire a world conception adequate to his nature if he takes as his point of support the firm conviction with which the soul endows the thought living through its own strength. With such an idea Lessing appears as a person whose feeling prophetically anticipates the impulses of the world conceptions of the nineteenth century. That he expresses this idea only in a conversation shortly before his death, and that it is still scarcely noticeable in his writings, shows how hard, even for the freest minds, the struggle with the enigmatic questions that the modern age raised for the development of world conceptions became.

A world conception has to be expressed in thoughts. But the convincing strength of thought, which had found its climax in Platonism and which in Aristotelianism unfolded in an unquestioned way, had vanished from the impulses of man's soul. Only the spiritually bold nature of Spinoza was capable of deriving the energy from the mathematical mode of thinking to elaborate thought into a world conception that should point as far as the ground of the world. The thinkers of the eighteenth century could not yet feel the life-energy of thought that allows them to experience themselves as human beings securely placed into a spiritually real world. Lessing stands among them as a prophet in feeling the force of the self-conscious ego in such a way that he attributes to the soul the transition through repeated terrestrial lives.

The fact that thought no longer entered the field of consciousness as it did for Plato was unconsciously felt like a nightmare in questions of world conceptions. For Plato, it manifested itself with its supporting energy and its saturated content as an active entity of the world. Now, thought was felt as emerging from the substrata of self-consciousness. One was aware of the necessity to supply it with supporting strength through whatever powers one could summon. Time and again this supporting energy was looked for in the truth of belief or in the depth of the heart, forces that were considered to be stronger than thought, which was felt to be pale and abstract. This is what many souls continually experience with respect to thought. They feel it as a mere soul content out of which they are incapable of deriving the energy that could grant them the necessary security to be found in the knowledge that man may know himself rooted with his being in the spiritual ground of the world. Such souls are impressed with the logical nature of thought; they recognize such thought as a force that would be needed to construct a scientific world view, but they demand a force that has a stronger effect on them when they look for a world conception embracing the highest knowledge. Such souls lack the spiritual boldness of Spinoza needed to feel thought as the source of world creation, and thus to know themselves with thought at the world's foundation. As a result of this soul constitution, man often scorns thought while he constructs a world conception; he therefore feels his self-consciousness more securely supported in the darkness of the forces of feeling and emotion. There are people to whom a conception appears the less valuable for its relation to the riddles of the world, the more this conception tends to leave the darkness of the emotional sphere and enter into the light of thought. We find such a mood of soul in I. G. Hamann (died 1788). He was, like many a personality of this kind, a great stimulator, but with a genius like Hamann, ideas brought up from the dark depths of the soul have a more intense effect on others than thoughts expressed in rational form. In the tone of the oracles Hamann expressed himself on questions that fill the philosophical life of his time. He had a stimulating effect on Herder as on others. A mystic feeling, often of a poetistic coloring, pervades his oracular sayings. The urge of the time is manifested chaotically in them for an experience of a force of the self-conscious soul that can serve as supporting nucleus for everything that man means to lift into awareness about world and life.

[ 33 ] It is characteristic of this age for its representative spirits to feel that one must submerge into the depth of the soul to find the point in which the soul is linked up with the eternal ground of the world; out of the insight into this connection, out of the source of self-consciousness, one must gain a world picture. A considerable gap exists, however, between what man actually was able to embrace with his spiritual energies and this inner root of the self-consciousness. In their spiritual exertion, the representative spirits do not penetrate to the point from which they dimly feel their task originates. They go in circles, as it were, around the cause of their world riddle without coming nearer to it. This is the feeling of many thinkers who are confronted with the question of world conception when, toward the end of the eighteenth century, Spinoza begins to have an effect. Ideas of Locke and Leibniz, also those of Leibniz in the attenuated form of Wolff, pervade their minds. Besides the striving for clarity of thought, the anxious mistrust against it is at work at the same time, with the result that conceptions derived from the depth of the heart are time and again inserted into the world picture for its completion. Such a picture is found reflected in Lessing's friend, Mendelssohn, who was hurt by the publication of Jacobi's conversation with Lessing. He was unwilling to admit that this conversation really had had the content that Jacobi reported. In that case, Mendelssohn argues, his friend would actually have confessed his adherence to a world conception that means to reach the root of the spiritual world by mere thoughts, but one could not arrive at a conception of the life of this root in this way. The world spirit would have to be approached differently to be felt in the soul as a life-endowed entity. This, Mendelssohn was sure, Lessing must have meant. Therefore, he could only have confessed to a “purified Spinozism,” a Spinozism that would want to go beyond mere thinking while striving for the divine origin of existence. To feel the link with this origin in the manner it was made possible by Spinozism was a step Mendelssohn was reluctant to take.

[ 34 ] Herder did not shy away from this step because he enriched the thought contours in the world picture of Spinoza with colorful, content-saturated conceptions that he derived from the contemplation of the panorama of nature and the world of the spirit. He could not have been satisfied with Spinoza's thoughts as they were. As given by their originator, they would have appeared to him as all painted gray on gray. He observed what went on in nature and in history and placed the human being into the world of his contemplation. What was revealed to him in this way showed him a connection between the human being and the origin of the world as well as the world itself, through the conception of which he felt himself in agreement with Spinoza's frame of mind. Herder was deeply and innately convinced that the contemplation of nature and of historical evolution should lead to a world picture through which man can feel his position in the world as a whole as satisfactory. Spinoza was of the opinion that he could arrive at such a world picture only in the light-flooded realm of a thought activity that was developed after the model of mathematics. If one compares Herder with Spinoza, remembering that Herder acknowledged the conviction of the latter, one is forced to recognize that in the evolution of modern world conception an impulse is at work that remains hidden behind the visible world pictures themselves. This impulse consists in the effort to experience in the soul what binds the self-consciousness to the totality of the world processes. It is the effort to gain a world picture in which the world appears in such a way that man can recognize himself in it as he must recognize himself when he allows the inner voice of his self-conscious soul to speak to him. Spinoza means to satisfy the desire for this kind of experience by having the power of thought enfold its own certainty. Leibniz fastens his attention on the soul and aims at a conception of the world as it must be thought if the soul, correctly conceived of, is to appear rightly placed in the world picture. Herder observes the world processes and is convinced from the outset that the right world picture will emerge in the soul if this soul approaches these processes in a healthy way and in its full strength. Herder is absolutely convinced of the later statement of Goethe that “every element of fact is already theory.” He has also been stimulated by the thought world of Leibniz, but he would never have been capable of searching theoretically for an idea of the self-consciousness in the form of the monad first, and then constructing a world picture with this idea. The soul evolution of mankind presents itself in Herder in a way that enables him to point with special clarity and distinctiveness to the impulse underlying it in the modern age. What in Greece has been treated as thought (idea) as if it were a perception is now felt as an inner experience of the soul, and the thinker is confronted with the question: How must I penetrate into the depths of my soul to be able to reach the connection of the soul with the ground of the world in such a way that my thought will at the same time be the expression of the forces of world creation? The age of enlightenment as it appears in the eighteenth century is still convinced of finding its justification in thought itself. Herder develops beyond this viewpoint. He searches, not for the point of the soul where it reveals itself as thinking, but for the living source where the thought emerges out of the creative principle inherent in the soul. With this tendency Herder comes close to what one can call the mysterious experience of the soul with thought. A world conception must express itself in thoughts, but thought only then endows the soul with the power for which it searches by means of a world conception in the modern age, when it experiences this thought in its process of its birth in the soul. When thought is born, when it has turned into a philosophical system, it has already lost its magical power over the soul. For this reason, the power of thought and the philosophical world picture are so often underestimated. This is done by all those who know only the thought that is suggested to them from without, a thought that they are supposed to believe, to which they are supposed to pledge allegiance. The real power of thought is known only to one who experiences it in the process of its formation.

[ 35 ] How this impulse lives in souls in the modern age becomes prominently apparent in a most significant figure in the history of philosophy—Shaftesbury (1671–1713). According to him, an “inner sense” lives in the soul; through this inner sense ideas enter into man that become the content of a world conception just as the external perceptions enter through the outer senses. Thus, Shaftesbury does not seek the justification of thought in thought itself, but by pointing toward a fact of the soul life that enables thought to enter from the foundation of the world into the interior of the soul. Thus, for Shaftesbury, man is confronted by a twofold outer world: The “external,” material one, which enters the soul through the “outer” senses, and the spiritual outer world, which reveals itself to man through his “inner sense.”

[ 36 ] In this age a strong tendency can be felt toward a knowledge of the soul, for man strives to know how the essence of a world view is anchored in the soul's nature. We see such an effort in Johann Nicolaus Tetens (1736–1807). In his investigations of the soul he arrived at a distinction of the soul faculties that has been adopted into general usage at the present time: Thinking, feeling and willing. It was customary before him to distinguish just between the faculties of thinking and the appetitive faculty.

[ 37 ] How the spirits of the eighteenth century attempt to watch the soul in the process of creatively forming its world picture can be observed in Hemsterhuis (1721–1790). In this philosopher, whom Herder considered to be one of the greatest thinkers since Plato, the struggle of the eighteenth century with the soul impulse of the modern age becomes demonstrably apparent. The thoughts of Hemsterhuis can be expressed approximately in the following way. If the human soul could, through its own power and without external senses, contemplate the world, the panorama of the world would lie displayed before it in a single moment. The soul would then be infinite in the infinite. If the soul, however, had no possibility to live in itself but depended entirely on the outer senses, then it would be confronted with a never ending temporal diffusion of the world. The soul would then live, unconscious of itself, in an ocean of sensual boundlessness. Between these two poles, which are never reached in reality but which mark the limits of the inner life as two possibilities, the soul lives its actual life; it permeates its own infinity with the boundlessness of the world.

[ 38 ] In this chapter the attempt has been made to demonstrate, through the example of a few thinkers, how the soul impulse of the modern age flows through the evolution of world conception in the eighteenth century. In this current live the seeds from which the thought development of the “Age of Kant and Goethe” grew.

Dear attendees, for a number of years now I have taken the liberty of speaking from this place about the subject of spiritual science, as it will also be meant in tonight's reflection. May I be allowed to present the foundations of this spiritual science in a certain way, I would like to say, in a clear way, and then to speak in more detail about some special subjects of this spiritual science in the next reflection the day after tomorrow.

It is - and this has been mentioned frequently over the years - fully understandable to anyone who stands on the ground of this spiritual science, as it is meant here, that in our time, from the most diverse sides, not only the most manifold objections, but, one might even say, hostilities against this spiritual science are asserting themselves. Not only does this spiritual science present itself to the rest of contemporary spiritual life as something still foreign to this spiritual life today - it has that in common with everything that has been incorporated into it as a new acquisition of human spiritual culture in a certain respect - but precisely in relation to the spiritual goals of our time, this spiritual science must appear on the one hand as something quite incomprehensible, fantastic, dreamy, although on the other hand it represents something that arises from the deepest longings and, one may say, from the most urgent needs of the soul life of the present day. With this I would like to have defined, so to speak, the theme of this evening.

Spiritual science, as it is meant here, differs from the outset precisely from that in a fundamental way, the continuation of which it wants to be, and it is only too understandable that it experiences hostility after hostility from that side. I am referring to the scientific school of thought of our time, because basically, spiritual science, as it is meant here, wants to be a continuation in the truest, most genuine sense of scientific thinking for the spirit and its secrets, its laws - a continuation of the scientific way of thinking that has left its mark on the spiritual life of the West for three to four centuries.

Nevertheless, although precisely because of this characteristic spiritual science is in no way obliged to confront the justified claims of natural science, it nevertheless differs in a certain respect from what is actually called science today from the point of view of the natural scientific way of thinking. It is just as much a science as natural research, but because it considers the objects, entities and processes of spiritual life, it must necessarily develop the scientific methods in a different way than natural science, which is limited to the senses and to the intellect (which has the senses as its basis), must do today. And so, let our attention be drawn to this fundamental difference between spiritual-scientific research and natural-scientific research.

What we usually call science today starts from that state, from that mood of the human soul, which is present in normal life, in everyday human life. We speak of what man can do by virtue of his soul, by virtue of his body, by virtue of his mind applied to the observations of the senses and to experiment, what man can do by virtue of all this, where the limits of knowledge for what has been indicated; in short, it is perfectly right to say that this scientific direction takes the human soul as it is, observes the environment of this soul and from this gains the laws of sensual-physical existence. The most important work for this science is therefore done in research, always within the activity of working itself, and what comes out of this activity is science, is a scientific result.

Spiritual research is different. Spiritual research, as it is meant here: Although, as we shall see in a moment, it is the same processes in the life of the soul that spiritual research has to undertake, which also govern external science, external scientific knowledge, but these activities of the spiritual researcher are for him preparations for his research, are for him there to prepare the soul for it, so that it can arrive at what can be called seeing. Of course, everything is meant spiritually, but if one assumes this spiritual meaning, then one can say: outer science presupposes the human soul, and these observations are based on the observation of the senses, on what the intellect has to say about the laws of existence.

Spiritual research uses all human soul powers, whether they are powers of understanding, will or feeling, to prepare what could be called the senses – in a figurative sense, of course – which then lead to direct perception , to prepare for the spiritual researcher to devote his work and efforts to preparing himself, so that he can then, as it were, access the impressions of perceptions from the spiritual world through himself.

Now I do not want to speak, not in this reflection, of abstractions, of concepts, of speculations, of a philosophy of ideas, but I want to lead directly into the facts of the soul life, which is suitable for spiritual research. All spiritual research is based on the fact that the human soul can apply to itself what is always on everyone's lips today as a scientific buzzword, that the human soul can apply to itself what lies in the word 'development'. Spiritual research starts from the premise that the human soul can undergo an inner development that brings about a transformation, a change in these soul forces, so that these soul forces become different in a certain sense. So everything that is the result of this spiritual research is not gained by simply accepting the soul in its abilities, but only comes about when, through careful preparation, the soul has transformed itself in such a way that it no longer has the sensual world around it in its direct spiritual perception the sensual world around it, but that it has another, a higher, a spiritual world around it, just as it has the sensual-physical world around it in ordinary life, which is viewed through the senses.

Now one could easily believe that some very special preparations are needed to transform the soul in this way. That is not the case, basically. What the soul has to undertake is based on things that are actually always present in everyday soul life, that belong to the most essential powers of this soul life, but which, in order to become suitable for spiritual research, must be developed into the infinite, one might say.

I will now show from a different angle, than I have often done in the past years, how the human soul, as it were, goes beyond itself, beyond its everyday point of view, in order to become an observer of the spiritual world. What it has to undertake in the intimate inner life has, as its elements, as its starting point, precisely the forces that are necessary in the most everyday life. One of these forces can be touched upon by using an easily understandable term that refers to something that is absolutely necessary in everyday life. It is what we call in this everyday life attention, interest in the things of the environment. This attention – I have already spoken about it from a different perspective in these lectures – consists in our focusing on some object in our environment, so that through this focusing it remains, as it were, in our soul life, living on in memory.

How necessary this attention is for everyday life can be seen from a very ordinary way of looking at things, which focuses on the connection between this attention and memory. Many a person will complain that their memory is either weakening or that it is in some way faulty or deficient. If one were to study – to the extent that such study is necessary for ordinary life – the connection between attention and memory, one would get over many of the things that one so often notices as defects in oneself.

I will start with a very trivial matter. Many a person cannot find an object in the morning that they still had in the evening. They have put it down with half-consciousness, not with attention. A cufflink that we put down in the evening in such a way that we harbor the arbitrary thought: You are now putting this button in this place - maybe we even think about the surroundings - in this environment. You will see, if you let these thoughts pass through your mind in the evening, that you will go directly to the place of the button in the morning, and it turns out that there is a connection between our ability to remember and what can be called attention. To a certain extent, the memory problem is an attention problem, and if we could get used to arbitrarily paying attention to things that we know need to be remembered, we would contribute an infinite amount, not only to the memory of the things in question, but we would also see that our memory is really strengthened by frequently practicing such activity, which means that the forces behind our memory would also become strong. Just as it is true that, to a certain extent, a good memory is part of an outwardly healthy mental life, it is equally true that observing what we call attention is very necessary in everyday life.

But there is another way to convince oneself of the connections between the human mental life and attention. Everyone knows – and especially those who are a little familiar with the literature on contemporary psychology – how a healthy psyche must be a coherent psyche, so that when we look back to the point of childhood that we usually remember, we must recognize the events that have occurred to us as our own. It would be unhealthy if the memory were so full of holes that we see our own experiences as those of a foreign being, when we would not recognize them as our own. In the case of diseased souls, these experiences emerge as if they were another ego.

Much could be done if, through spiritual science, one had trained oneself to be attentive to these things – one can recognize them – to be attentive to souls that show a tendency towards such holes in, let us say, their ego, their continuous memories, and one would then intervene in such a way as to strengthen and systematically strengthen interest. Much of the harm done to such souls could be averted by a certain education if one considered the connection between the life of memory, the life of the soul as a whole, and what we call attention.

What we might call attention is not attention to this or that, but the activity of attention, the activity that unfolds in the soul life while we are paying attention. For the purposes of spiritual research, this must be strengthened, increased, in intensity and without limit. This happens in what we might call the concentration of human thinking, feeling and willing, or, in general, the concentration of the entire soul life.

In our outer, everyday life, we develop attention by being stimulated by impressions from outside, by what, I might say, has a more brilliant, outstanding effect on our soul than anything else. This challenges our attention. We very rarely succeed in producing this attention through pure arbitrariness; but spiritual research must prepare for this: increasing attention to an unlimited degree through inner arbitrariness, through training of the soul, through intimate practice - one may say - into the unlimited.

An increase in attention is brought about in this way: If we have stimulated certain ideas, perhaps ideas that do not correspond to an external fact, but symbolic ideas that we can survey precisely, so that we know that no supernaturally conscious ideas are involved; that we take the same , quite arbitrarily, without any process forcing us, into the center of our consciousness, and then bring about such a life of consciousness as only develops in normal human existence during sleep.

During sleep, all external senses fall silent, all movement ceases, and the human being lies still in relation to his corporeality. Even the worries and concerns of life fall silent in sleep; only in normal life during sleep does unconsciousness occur. Again, I can only describe the principles here, not everything. You can find more details in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in my “Occult Science”. But the soul can, through training, through years of exercises, produce such a mood in itself that its inner self arbitrarily silences everything in itself that otherwise only remains silent during sleep. The soul is, so to speak, in the same state in relation to outer activity and perception as in sleep, except that it is awake and thus detached from all outer life. The soul focuses solely and exclusively on the self-chosen idea with the most intense attention of all its activity. As a result, everything that the soul would otherwise use up of its energy to absorb and process the manifold impressions of the day, everything that the soul expends in energy, is now used to push itself towards this one goal of the idea. The soul life is concentrated, and something is now being created with that which even the most significant minds of human development have always regarded as the most worthy apparatus for all world exploration. What is needed now is what can be compared with the apparatus of the human soul, but I do not attach any particular importance to the comparison, with something like spiritual chemistry.

To understand why a person carries out an experiment on the soul, which is not just an inner process of imagination but a real process in the soul that actually brings about something in reality, I will use the comparison with chemistry to help us understand each other. Something is done with the soul that could be called spiritual chemistry. When we have water in front of us, its components are not necessarily recognizable externally. The chemist breaks this water down into hydrogen and oxygen. He separates the hydrogen from the water. Hydrogen has very different properties than water, properties that cannot be suspected in water as such. Just as one can only assume the properties of hydrogen in water, so too can one only assume the properties of the soul and spirit in the human being standing before us in everyday life; for just as hydrogen is bound to water, so too are soul and spirit bound to the physical body in everyday life. What I have characterized as an unlimited increase in attention to an arbitrary idea or sensation or concept concentrates the soul's powers so that this soul stands out from the physical body. Now it must be said, though, that when the soul wants to prepare itself, it must do so with patience and energy and often for years – that varies from person to person – but then the one who prepares his soul really does achieve connecting a meaning with something that can justifiably appear nonsensical to many people in the present. The spiritual researcher attains to connect a meaning in direct inner experience with the word: I now experience, I now feel in the pure spiritual-soul realm and know that in what I experience and feel, nothing lives that is connected to the physical-sensual. The spiritual researcher now knows the meaning of this word, which in ordinary life seems nonsensical, because he experiences this meaning through the direct power of the reality of what it means to have emerged from the physical body with his spiritual soul. The soul and spirit are as independent and endowed with other properties as hydrogen is endowed with other properties when it is removed from water. It is not an external process that can be compared experimentally with any external process, but it is a process that leads to the soul and spirit being drawn out. Only then does it prove its true independence, only then does it show itself in what it is in its true, own nature and what connects it to the physical-sensory for everyday life, which it uses to perceive the external world and to carry out the tasks of the external world.

The first thing that a person can experience from their physical senses is thinking and imagining. Since I do not want to speak in abstractions, but rather in the concrete facts of the inner experience of the , I do not wish to shy away from pointing out this experience, even at the risk, which I fully understand, of not being taken seriously by some people who believe they are standing on the firm ground of science. When the spiritual researcher, after years of hard work and sacrifice, has come to the point where he associates a meaning with the words: You experience and perceive things outside of your body, then at first he experiences this only in relation to thinking, which, as one can already suspect in ordinary life, one knows through spiritual science. That one must use the brain for thinking, that stops. One feels that one is inside the imagination, and one does not feel with this inner experience of the brain and nervous system, but one feels - as I said, I say this at the risk of not being taken seriously by some - that one what one is experiencing now, one feels oneself like an external object, like an inner self circling around a body located outside of oneself, if one has given it independence, and one experiences oneself circling around one's own body, one's own brain, and an important experience then occurs. One learns to recognize how ordinary thinking occurs, because in order to make progress in real spiritual research, one has to advance in stages. At first it is often a dull experience. But when you have progressed to the point where you can connect a full meaning with the word: You now live in a thinking that happens outside of your brain, human life is indeed between birth and death – so you have to return at a certain time.

You can only develop the thoughts you have outside the body with your brain when you return. This gives a very different feeling than the usual one, because you perceive the process with your brain. You start to use your brain as an instrument, you know that you have something in your brain that offers resistance, that you have to forcefully push into. A strange feeling arises when the imagination moves outside the brain and the brain begins to imagine, a feeling that can only be compared to a certain fear of now having to think again through the instrument of the brain, because one is now facing life outside oneself. You have, so to speak, got to know yourself from the outside for the first time, have learned to look back at your physical body from the outside, and the immersion imposes the necessity of working with heavy matter, plastic, so to speak, so that those experiences that you first undertook outside of this brain can now be expressed within.

In this way, a kind of emancipation of intellectual life from physical life can occur, so to speak. When this emancipation occurs, one no longer has the physical-sensory world around one. This physical-sensory world disappears at the same moment as the emergence from the physical body occurs. One has a new world around oneself, a world that can be described as the world of spiritual states. Only now can one see through what spiritual states are through direct contemplation. Something occurs that I would like to mention at this point, because I always want to progress from the abstract to the concrete in these considerations; one imagines this entering into the spiritual world wrongly if one imagines it according to the pattern of external perceptions. Here the observer stands there and the object stands there. When a spiritual researcher begins to perceive spiritual states, after having prepared himself, he must, in a certain sense, immerse his entire being in the object or being he is perceiving. Just as, in everyday life, when we experience something in our own soul, we experience this or that mood, this or that inner [affect ], how one expresses this in what is called the development of one's outlook, so one can only experience what states of mind are by imitating, as it were, with the spirit freed from the body, immersing oneself in what one perceives, really imitating in an inner play of expression the states of the spiritual outer world.

It is therefore an inner play of expression that one lives into, and one cannot say, when speaking correctly, “I have perceived an object or being of the spiritual world as if it were a being of the sensory world.” Rather, one can only say, “I have experienced in this being that which, in me, causes me to express myself with my soul and spirit in such and such a way.” In my inner expression, I emulate the peculiarity of the being in question. One becomes acquainted with an inner play of expression, in the reception of cipher-like ideas, and in a certain sense one becomes one with the being of the spiritual world. But it requires the spirit to be so sensitive within itself that the spirit expresses its own states as one otherwise expresses the states of one's own soul. An experience, in contrast to mere perception, is the beholding of the spiritual world, a becoming one with its states. This is precisely how this living into the spiritual world differs from the experience of everyday reality, which is ultimately something passive, something that one stands by, as it were, while that which allows itself to be led upwards by the will, to live into the spiritual phenomena, must certainly be in action, in activity - this inner activity, which in itself creates expression, forms. The soul must transform itself for the conditions of the spiritual world if it wants to penetrate into the spiritual world.

In this way, one experiences the conditions of the spiritual world, as one experiences forms in the physical-sensual world. But one can experience not only the conditions of the spiritual world, but also the processes, the events of the spiritual world. This happens when one leads other powers of the soul upwards from the physical body. Not only the power of imagination can be led upwards, but also another power. But then another everyday activity of the soul must be increased to infinity, and that is what can be described with a word that is a necessity in everyday life, the word “devotion”. If one succeeds in consciously developing this devotion, as it were, in the general world process, which we otherwise only develop unconsciously in sleep, when one is, so to speak, completely devoted, without doing anything oneself, to the general happening, as in sleep, when one so learns to be devoted, fully consciously while awake, to the spiritual world, then one comes to tear out, as it were, yet another soul activity of our inner life, out of the physical-sensual. This activity is the one through which we - as strange as it may sound, but it is true - experience the fruit in the outer physical: speaking, the power of speech. This power of speech, as is well known, is rooted in the activity of the brain, in the activity of the organs that ultimately lead to the larynx and so forth. This power of speech plays a completely different role than is usually believed. Most human thinking is expressed in words, so that the words run through the mind, so that, as modern science admits, for those who look more closely at things, all speechless thinking in humans also runs in such a way that they vibrate inwardly in a subtle way. The body is actually in a state of perpetual inner activity when it thinks. This activity silently repeats, so to speak, what would otherwise be expressed more robustly in the movements of the speech organs and the nervous system.

If, through careful practice, increased attention, that is, through concentration, increased devotion, that is, meditation, one arrives at the activity that the soul must expend when it speaks in everyday life, if one arrives at this activity without living it out in external speech, then one has raised a second soul power from the physical body. This elevation is somewhat more difficult than the other, but it can be attained through robust, energetic practice.

When I speak to you, my soul is spontaneously active, and that which is carried out in this activity is expressed in the outer word. If we now succeed in holding back the activity that would otherwise fade away in the word, so that it is carried out without a word and without that vibration, purely inwardly, in the soul, if, so to speak, the word “strength” is experienced inwardly in the soul, then the soul life is strengthened and invigorated the soul life inwardly strengthens itself far more than in the mere operation [separation?] of the thought from the physical-sensual, and then, through a similar spiritual chemistry, so to speak, one draws the ability to speak, the power of speech, out of the physical body, experiences it only in the soul. Once again, you know what it means to be outside of your physical body in your spiritual and mental experience and to now experience, where you cannot use your larynx to speak, where you develop these activities outside of your body, as you usually do when speaking, you now experience the ability to speak inwardly. You now experience the inner word. You experience the inner word purely spiritually.

This experience of the inner word is very closely related to the experience of the power of memory. Of course, when I say the experience of the power of memory, I do not mean what is expressed in the ability to remember, but rather what stands behind this ability to remember, what does not consciously live in everyday life, what works and remains half unconscious. When we incorporate a thought into memory, we are exercising soul activity, and this is related to speech power. This is therefore something we call the lower-soul power of memory, just as we can say the lower-soul power of speech, which we draw from ordinary speech and in which we then live as spiritual researchers. We live purely in the spirit and soul in the word, in the power of remembrance, when in ordinary daily life the memory is transformed so that we remember the everyday experiences, those where all memory is silent, as in sleep. What is left, so to speak, is what is otherwise used for memory. In everyday life, something is always used for remembering; inner strength is used to make what is happening take root in the soul life. Now that we have brought about a soul life that erases ordinary memory, this strength, which is otherwise used for remembering, is used purely spiritually, it pulses in the inner purely spiritual, recognizing literally.

So when we raise the power of speech from the physical-bodily, we not only experience states, but we can immerse ourselves in the essences of the spiritual world so that we experience what happens in them. We now develop not only a play of facial expressions, but what could be called an inner spiritual power of the gesture, [an inner gesture]. This must always be emphasized - that on which activity as a spiritual experience is based. If you want to experience a spiritual being, you have to immerse yourself in it and experience its processes, just as we accompany our own inner experiences with gestures, expressing in the gesture what is going on in our soul itself. Many people - myself included - use far too many gestures to express what is inner soul life. Just as the soul life, flowing out, branches out, so it must lead to inner gestures of spiritual and soul experience. Then one experiences processes, not just states; these are experienced through the thoughts that are raised up, the processes through the ability to speak and remember that is raised up. Then, when one experiences conditions of the spiritual world, one also experiences one's own inner conditions, and this leads deep into the nature of the human soul.

As the spiritual researcher begins to experience inner states, he connects the following with a meaningful concept: He knows why the materialistic view of the present is so difficult to refute from a purely idealistic point of view. This is because, as the materialistic way of thinking correctly asserts, everyday thinking does indeed arise from the nervous system, from the brain. For what one has in ordinary consciousness as content, as something experienced by the soul, is basically only an image of the soul.

There is not enough time to go into the arguments regarding pictoriality in detail. I will merely suggest that it is quite clear to the spiritual researcher who has come this far what ordinary feeling, will and imaginative life want. They take the form of images that emerge from the body. They emerge like the reflections of our own self when we stand in front of a mirror. The body forms what could be called a mirror for spiritual and psychological experience. However, like every image, the image is not actually complete. The image would only be complete if, when we step in front of a mirror in our ordinary lives, we had to send out forces from ourselves to shape the mirror in such a way that its material composition becomes such that it sends the images back to us. For we actually accomplish this in our body, that we first place this body with our deeper spiritual-soul in the ability to reflect back to us what we call our everyday life. We first make it a mirror in truth, it must be said, and that is the secret of the human soul life.

The spiritual researcher is led to a spiritual-soul experience that stands outside and behind the physical body, and he observes how the truly true spiritual-soul aspect first works on the body so that the contents of everyday soul experience then emerge from the body. It is as impossible for the spiritual researcher who sees through it to think that the spiritual-soul experience is only a function of the brain as it would be to think that the image we have in front of us rises up out of the mirror as a reality. With the same right one could claim: When one sees oneself in the mirror, what looks out comes out of the mirror – so that the spiritual-soul comes out of the nervous system. The reality of the soul and spirit lies behind the physical, and in truth the body is between the truly spiritual, which is its active agent, its plastic creator, and the everyday, limited to sensory experiences that in reality only take place in images. In this way one arrives at what is truly spiritual and soulful and stands behind the physical. When one arrives at this, then what one experiences as a state is quite different from what one would like to describe as the spiritual-soul through external speculation, because one is confronted with direct vision, with what the I is spiritually and soulfully in human nature. Then the doctrine of repeated earthly lives ceases to be mere theoretical knowledge. Then an expansion begins, one might say, of memory, which can then extend beyond repeated earthly lives. The complete human experience is seen through, how it unfolds not only between birth and death, but through many earthly lives and through the spiritual experiences between death and birth. That which can be called repeated earthly lives becomes an immediate experience. By developing the memory and power of speech, by transforming them into a power of knowledge and experience, past earthly lives emerge from the floods of spiritual life as reality, and the certainty emerges that the present one is also the cause of the following ones, and that between death and a new birth there is a much longer life than earthly life.

By pushing back the ordinary power of memory, the higher power of memory is awakened. When the power of memory, which otherwise only allows us to look back to birth, is eradicated, it awakens to an increased power that now extends to an understanding of repeated earth lives! This realization does not need to take on a modern spiritual truth from old religious systems. People who know nothing about the methods of spiritual research and who have superficially absorbed something of it, that this spiritual science must speak of repeated earthly lives, can very easily come to believe that some old Buddhist truth is being recycled. Such a claim is no more useful than if one wanted to claim that today only one person could prove the Pythagorean theorem by going to the [gap in the transcript].

Spiritual science has nothing to do with anything historically handed down, but only with what the mind can explore within itself at any time through the stated means. Just as one arrives at the results of science through external experimentation, so one arrives at the results of spiritual research through inner experimentation. That the results of spiritual science may appear fanciful today is hardly surprising to anyone who knows the nature of this spiritual science and how it can be applied to the spiritual life of the present time. In this sense, it must be emphasized time and again: Just as the Copernican view seemed strange, so the results of spiritual science may seem paradoxical to the modern mind. But just as the Copernican world view has become part of modern culture, so will the results of spiritual research. Certainly, the way people today approach this spiritual research is the same way they approached the Copernican worldview; and if someone back then had planned to give a lecture to present something like the Copernican worldview, which at the time also had to appear as something quite fantastic , one would perhaps have announced such a lecture back then: the Copernican world view as a surrogate for Christianity; especially because one could have believed that the Copernican world view endangered Christianity. It took a long time before people began to realize that the matter is different, and in our time one can actually have a different experience from the genuine aims of the present.

Compared to the experiences I have here, one must be touched in a pleasant way, as one could hear a Catholic theologian, who is a deeply feeling philosopher, said: Certainly a prejudiced world once opposed the Copernican worldview as if it could endanger religious life; today - and it is not I who says this, but this Catholic theologian - today the true Catholic will even know that what is being explored in the secrets of existence, what is being of the greatness of the world, can never contribute to the satisfaction of religious life, but only to the greater admiration for the greatness of the divine Creator, the more one gets to know his deeds in the development of the world. - The time will also come when one will recognize in repeated lives on earth a promotion of the Christian point of view, as today in the Copernican worldview a promotion of the Christian view. Thus I have spoken to you, as it were, of two soul powers that can be led upwards from the experience with the physical body.

There is still a third soul power that must be spontaneously led upwards on the path to spiritual research, and through this third soul power one now attains not only to the states and processes, but to the entities of the spiritual world itself, so that this spiritual world becomes, on another level, something like the natural world — not something that is spoken of in generalities, but rather as one speaks not in generalities about nature, but about individual animals, plants, stones, individual clouds, mountains, rivers, and so on.

Where the spirit does not appear before the eyes as a sum of real spiritual beings, something else must indeed be brought up from this human truth as it stands before us in everyday life. We must remember how we entered life as human beings. What distinguishes us as human beings from the other sensual phenomena on earth is that we must, in the early days, make of ourselves that which most beautifully characterizes our destiny. We enter the world as quadrupeds, so to speak; we first acquire the ability to stand upright and walk. I want to make it clear from the outset, to avoid any misunderstanding, as I have done elsewhere, that I am aware that other creatures also walk on two legs, such as chickens, for example, but the difference is that they are designed to do so from the outset, whereas humans overcome gravity by the application of an inner force that acts purely in the material world. In the first years of his physical existence, the human being makes himself into an upright being, into that being of whom those who are more deeply attuned have always known what it means to stand upright, to be able to direct one's gaze out into the universe. But the human being makes himself into this. An inner strength is applied, through which the human being actually becomes what he is destined to be.

This power does not come to our consciousness again in the course of life. In a time when our consciousness is still in the realm of dreams, we experience what, so to speak, gave us our position, our equilibrium in the world, whereby we are human beings. But we can rediscover them, and the spiritual researcher must rediscover them, these powers. These powers remain in the soul. In normal life they are only used to maintain the upright position of the human being, but then they rest. They are again brought up, and this inner soul power, when it is experienced, is something that is revealed by a will that is also being led upwards, permeated by that will, which allows our spiritual and mental experience outside of the physical body to bring us into different situations regarding the various truths of the universe. In this way one attains the following: Just as man in the physical world makes himself what he is only through his upright balance, as he, so to speak, grasps his I-being in his inner activity and power of preparation for the earth, so he grasps, when he grasps this inner activity through which he human being, when he grasps this activity in its organization, he grasps the inner truth of other spirit beings, grasps the inner essence of real spirits, experiences how other beings make themselves into their essence, as he makes himself into an essence on earth through what has been stated.

However, all these things can only be attained through a certain resignation, through a certain inner tragic mood. Much has to be overcome, and in a sense these surmountings are a kind of suffering. But if the spiritual researcher courageously goes through this suffering, then he will succeed in detaching from this suffering the inner activity that is now able not only to educate us, that gives man on earth his true outer purpose, that makes man can turn his gaze out into the universe, but also to delve into other beings, to grasp their destiny by living it, and to experience how they become what they are in their worlds in a different way from human beings on earth. Now one experiences not only conditions and processes, but the inner life of the spirit beings themselves. One enters into it by becoming one with these truths through inner mobility, through the right inner strength. Now it is a certain, but inwardly mobile physiognomy. Just as a person acquires his overall physiognomy on earth, so he emerges into the physiognomies of the other truths on this third level.

In this way one ascends to the spiritual co-experience of the spirit beings through inner play of features, through inner gestures and postures, then through inner physiognomy, through knowing the inner being of other spirit beings. In this way the spiritual world gradually becomes a true reality, and it always shows that this becoming of the spiritual world a true reality differs from the experience of the outer physical world. This is experienced in passivity. A spiritual world can only be experienced in activity, and this brings us to the point that really shows us how this spiritual science must be introduced into the spiritual cultural life of the present.

As I said, I wanted to show today how the spiritual researcher comes to his experiences. I will develop special experiences the day after tomorrow. But what can emerge from today's is that the spiritual researcher appeals to the activity of the soul, to that which the soul can only lead up from the physical-bodily in un- [gap in the transcript] activity, can experience purely spiritual-soul activity. In the immersion, which is purely spiritual-soul, in the other truths, the states, processes and the essence of these truths themselves are experienced.

All these things cannot be experienced without extending to the entire soul what is otherwise only experienced in the moral. When a person experiences inwardly in the moral sense: 'You want to do this, that is good', then the experience of one's inner duty, which must become an outer deed, is indeed the experience of the highest morality. This experience is an inner one, and it is such that the person must disregard himself, because basically all immorality comes from selfishness. Morality, however, comes from disregarding the narrow-mindedness that man places in the foreground. Just as man, through his feelings, becomes free in the moral, at least from that which he otherwise uses in everyday life, so in the life of the soul as a whole he becomes free in the experience of the higher worlds. In a certain respect, the moral life is the dark model for the higher life of knowledge.

I did not want to show by words, but by describing soul processes, what spiritual science consists of and what the relationship between spiritual life and spiritual science is. If, on the other hand, we look at contemporary life, we can truly say that this experience is not geared towards the inner life of the soul. In particular, when a person is supposed to recognize the world, he is passive today. One could substantiate with almost grotesque examples how much man likes to be passive today. It is very gratifying that you have appeared today in such large numbers, even though [gap in transcript] are connected with light images. But you will all admit that the presentations that are linked to light images are preferred to those where such promises are not made. The spiritual researcher appeals to the supersensible, the invisible, and if he also makes use of the light pictures, it is only to make something extraordinarily sensible. But humanity today is to a great extent not disposed to be won over to the spirit or to something that can be explored by appealing to the activity of the soul, but to contemplation.

Of course, in the spiritual fields that have produced the most admirable achievements, this beholding is necessary; but the spirit cannot be grasped in external contemplation. What is sensual is not spiritual. This is trivial, but it is not understood. I am not telling fairy tales. It could happen that an otherwise very meritorious contemporary philosopher recently said or presented a [monistic] idea. In an introduction in which he wanted to write about an evolution in philosophy, he said that if you read Kant and so on, you read into concepts, but that could be remedied, because today – and again, it should be noted that nothing should be said against the technical achievements of the present time , these technical achievements have their significance, their justification; but what has been said is characteristic – the philosopher says that if you want to immerse yourself in Spinoza's Ethics, it is difficult to live into the intangible concepts. So you use the movie to help! You depict how Spinoza sits there spontaneously when a thought occurs to him, how the thought expansion then occurs to the same. Then you depict the force on the one hand, which represents the expansion, then you depict the remaining orderly concept, as concepts are generally formed.

The person in question has set out to do nothing less than present Spinozian ethics through film. Thus, one might hope to see a complete cinematographic adaptation of Spinoza's Ethics, or Kant's “Pure Reason”. As I said, I am not criticizing the arts, although it seems strange when the editor says that in this way ancient metaphysical longings of the human soul can be satisfied by an art that the superficial mind usually regards as something playful. Thus, ancient metaphysical longings could be satisfied by the application of this cinematic art.

I wanted to mention this because it shows how man today has the need not to put his soul into action, not to appeal to what, out of all passivity, must go into the fullest activity, as well as what man today wants to be offered everything, that is, how he does not boldly want to achieve existence in his own activity, does not want to prove existence to himself by leading this activity in his own activity to a proof of existence, but wants to have existence proved to him from outside. The reasons why one assumes something to be must be forthcoming. This is there for the thought habits of the whole of philosophy: increasingly imaginable from the standpoint that all thinking that cannot prove that it is based on foundations of something, to which nothing has been added, that all this thinking is understood as mere fantasy.

Gradually, the goals of the present tend to declare all thinking to be fantasy that cannot prove that it has been sucked out of the material existence that presents itself from the outside. I have indicated this basic character in the goals of the present. This basic character was necessary, because only through the fact that man has enjoyed an education through the natural sciences have the great, powerful explorations of natural science come about, which has commercially and technically transformed the globe, and has also greatly increased knowledge. For this to happen, it was necessary for man to be passively confronted with the outside world. The boldness that man must develop for his inner experience is, so to speak, incorporated today into outer activity.

It is a law of human life that whatever grows on the one hand must, in a sense, wither on the other. The last three to four centuries have brought it to the point that humanity has been able to undertake such tremendously bold things as the achievements up to aeronautics. The fact that boldness was developed for the external achievements has resulted in an education in humanity that has provided inner boldness for a certain period of time, where it is necessary to grasp a spiritual that cannot be grasped if one surrenders positively, but only if one is able to surrender to this spiritual with its activity, so that one stands on the point of view: What you experience in yourself is not reality. One can never come to a real knowledge of the spirit, because the spirit only lets us actively enter into its spheres.

So, what is the basic requirement for the recognition of spiritual science is, of course, spontaneously opposed to the goals of the present. However, this too turns out to be the case for the process of becoming as a whole: just as an elastic body, when sufficiently compressed, exerts its counter-force, so too, when something is pushed to a certain point, the opposing force, the reaction, asserts itself. Anyone who can observe our age knows how in our time, already quite thoroughly in souls, without them knowing it themselves deeply, that opposite longing is present - after education in external natural science has brought it to a certain high point - the soul, as I said, longs, without often knowing it itself today, for a knowledge of that which is present behind the senses as the actual basis of all human life. To use the same comparison again: spiritual science today is at the same point in relation to the aims of our time as natural science was at the time of Giordano Bruno, who, in his insights, broke through what had been thought of as a blue celestial sphere, as a blue vault. What was significant was that Bruno said: What is up there is not a real boundary, it is only caused by the boundary that man sets for himself. What the human being recognizes must set as a boundary, that extends there. In those days, the limited world was broken through, the view was expanded into the unlimited distances of space.

But such a firmament – now a temporal firmament – is there for mere natural science, and when it asserts it from its standpoint, it is justified; only it should recognize its limitations. Such a temporal moment is what asserts itself for the external world in birth and death. Just as the physical firmament is only set in space by man himself and knowledge could be newly expanded in relation to spatial infinity, so spiritual science will do the same for the spirit, [as] what was once the temporal firmament [has been broken through] for birth and death, and teaches us to look into a temporal infinity, that is, into the eternity, into the immortality of the human soul. The opponents will still have to find the newly expanded view of the spirit today.

But just when you are considering the goals of the present, you see that on the one hand there are people for whom it seems completely outrageous and nonsensical that such things can be said as they are said in spiritual science. On the other hand, however, it can be perceived how the soul always thirsts to really get to know the world as spiritual science recognizes it as its task to explore. Much of what later emerges clearly in the soul is first present as a dark urge. The spiritual researcher sees it and knows that the very near future will find souls who will come to recognize spiritual research as the path to spiritual science.

So superficially everything speaks against spiritual science. But if one considers what is taking place in the depths of the soul, then there is a guarantee that spiritual science will truly win the hearts and souls of people. Today, people only draw from what they often say is based on the true goals of science; they do not draw the right conclusions, otherwise they could come to something that is to be said now for our understanding through a kind of metaphor.

I do not want to deal with the meaning of the great significant word that stands at the beginning of the Bible. To what extent it corresponds to a fact in human life on earth can be dealt with on another occasion. But with a tremendous view of the development of human experience, this Bible word stands before us, this Bible word, which is put into the mouth of the adversary of humanity, so to speak:

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

And this indicates to both the religious person and the scientifically discerning person, when the matter is only considered in its depths, how man has been tempted in certain respects to go beyond the measure allotted to him in primeval times. Here too, it has already been discussed how this word, or rather what lies behind it, is connected with the possibility of evil and the fact of human freedom.

Thus one could say that a world view that is hallowed by tradition, which spiritual science certainly recognizes as much as anyone, that such a world view sets the word at the beginning of human development of the temptation to want to go beyond human beings in inner experience. One can say of every time that it is a transitional time. It is often said in a trivial way, but it is important, even if every time is a transitional time, that one characterizes the transitional moments in the right way, and that he who tries to penetrate into the goals of the time recognizes them even where they still remain unconscious to the souls. But whoever reveals them, whoever penetrates them, notices that today, in fact – if nothing superstitious is meant – something like an evil spirit lurks at man's side. Allow me to say what I want to say with a strong expression. [Gap in the transcript.]

The saying may seem paradoxical to some; but it is intended to express as clearly as possible, by means of an apparent [paradox], what is to be said. If we consider the transitional moments of our time, it becomes clear that much of what is believed today is a kind of seducer, not meant in the superstitious sense. But when you say something like that, using extrasensory words, you have to remember the word:

The little people never feel the devil,
And if he had them by the collar.

Again, there is something like a tempter, and it is difficult to become aware of him because one does not draw the consequences from what lies dormant in the goals of the world. Because one does not draw this conclusion, it seems paradoxical when [one] shows you the conclusion. If it were true what some materialistically minded people draw from current science, then one would have to say: Man is placed in the mere animal kingdom by what is today understood as the theory of evolution. Today, one only feels quite clever, and one thinks that one can consider the lower classes stupid when one can say: what man experiences in terms of morality and intellect is only a higher education of what appears in the animal kingdom, and the more one can associate man with the animal kingdom, the more one believes today to be scientific.

Even if a philosophy today makes the somewhat weak attempt to come up with a value system alongside it, this itself is something imperfect, because it must be said that if the consequences were really drawn from what is regarded today as a genuine scientific way of thinking, then it would consist in the fact that distinguishing between good and evil would amount to the same thing that we feel towards the laws of nature. Good and evil would arise from the human soul with the necessity of natural law. Since, if one wants to base oneself on the ground of science, as one often does, one wants to base oneself on the narrowly defined science, it is inconsistent not to draw the conclusion that man should actually be understood merely as an animal transformation, and that the moral should be classified in what is recognized as natural laws, as natural necessity. But then it follows that, just as there is no distinction between good and evil in the law of nature, there is no distinction between good and evil.

As I said, it sounds paradoxical, but it is true nevertheless; the tempter is standing there again, only due to inconsistency we do not see him, the tempter who now says the opposite of the tempter who is put at the top by the Bible. Now he says: You will be like the animals and no longer distinguish good from evil. This may seem ridiculous to some people today; it only seems ridiculous to those who do not understand the consequences that lie in some purely materialistic views of the present. So one could say that today the tempter speaks the opposite of what he did then. Back then he said:

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

Man was to be elevated above himself. As a result, he stands there today, saying: You will be like the animals, you will also recognize as animals and no longer distinguish good from evil. - Just as that was a tempter's word, so is this a tempter's word, even if it is not spoken out of inconsistency. The more one will recognize – it rests in the goals of the present – how the soul, when it becomes aware of this temptress word, that the soul will then develop the longing to recognize the spirit again in its immediate form, which lifts it out of what the [gap in the transcript].

On the one hand, it [spiritual science] may be perceived as a dreamer, as something nonsensical. One can understand that. But on the other hand, it can also be seen as being called for by the deepest goals of our time, which rest in the souls. Because it is so intimately connected with all the goals of the human soul, when one stands on its ground one feels how one is in harmony with what spiritual science wants to express with clarity, how one is in harmony with the intuitions of the spirits who have always worked for spiritual science. These spirits of the past, because spiritual science is something that is only to be bestowed upon our time, have not yet tried to express in a clear way what spiritual science has to say today. But as what can be clearly expressed in a time [gap in the transcript], so the leading spirits have always felt what spiritual science is.

I had to express clearly some things that had to follow today from what is often called science, which is not followed because people are not consistent enough; the soul, familiar with the spirit and its development, has always felt this. Even if development is fully recognized as the continuous pole of our lives, something enters into this human experience with the human soul that goes beyond everything that can be observed externally as external development. And spiritual research only shows, one might say – if I may use the may use the word, which sounds dry and pedantic in the face of these things, only shows through spiritual experiment that what we call the immortal, the eternal, the truly spiritual human soul can really be experienced in detachment from the physical.

Thus, through spiritual science, man will always look at what man's dignity and man's destiny in earthly life really is. We feel when the tempter approaches, however unconsciously, however unacknowledged, and wants to tell us: Development shows man only as the last link in animal development - when he says: You will be like the animals and no longer distinguish evil from good. In the face of this temptation, spiritual science will stand united in the good with the personalities of all times who are striving towards the spiritual light. It will hold up as knowledge to this tempter what Schiller said out of deep poetic intuitions and in which what has been considered is to be summarized. When Schiller became aware of how the similar idea emerged through Herder and Goethe, that man [is] placed at the pinnacle of the animal organization, it was clear to Schiller that such a teaching could only be properly grasped if at the same time the spirit is fully recognized in its independent significance, separate from the physical. That is why Schiller does not say what so many say today, and which, when taken to its logical conclusion, gives the tempter language, but rather, Schiller said the following – and at the same time saw humanity's true destiny – he said the following about the incarnation of man on earth, at the moment when man comes into existence:

Now dullness has lifted from animality
and humanity steps forward with a clear brow
and the lofty stranger, thought,
leaps from the wondering brain.

(From the opening pages of the last chapter of Rudolf Steiner's Riddles of Philosophy, 1914)

Whoever studies the development of philosophical world views up to the present day can discover in the seeking and striving of some thinkers undercurrents that in a certain way do not break through into consciousness but rather live on instinctively. Powers are at work in these undercurrents that determine the direction—and often the form as well—of the ideas of these thinkers; these thinkers do not want to turn their searching spiritual gaze directly upon these powers, however. What they say often seems motivated by hidden forces, which they do not want to investigate, and from which they even recoil in fear. Such forces live in the thought-worlds of Dilthey, of Eucken, and of Cohen. The beliefs presented in these thought-worlds are the expression of cognitive powers that govern these philosophers unconsciously, but that are not consciously elaborated in their thought-systems.

Sureness and certainty in knowing are sought in many systems of thought. The direction followed takes its point of departure more or less from Kant's way of picturing things. The natural-scientific mode of thinking has a definitive influence, consciously or unconsciously, upon the way one shapes one's thoughts. But many people sense that it is within the “soul that is conscious of itself” that the source is to be sought from which knowledge must draw in order also to gain enlightenment about the world outside the human soul. And almost all of them are dominated by the question: How does the self-conscious soul arrive at the point of seeing what it experiences within itself as being the manifestation of a true reality? The everyday sensory world has become an “illusion” because, in the course of philosophical development, the self-conscious “I” has more and more found itself in its inner experience to be isolated within itself. It has arrived at the point of regarding even sense perceptions as mere inner experiences that reveal no power within themselves able to guarantee their existence and permanence within reality. One feels how much depends upon finding, in the self-conscious “I,” a point of support for knowledge. In the course of investigations motivated by this feeling, however, one arrives at views that do not afford a means of penetrating with the “I” into a world that can carry existence in a satisfactory way.

Whoever seeks the explanation for this state of affairs can find it in the position toward outer reality taken by man's soul being, which has been detached from this outer reality of the world by the development philosophy has undergone. Man's soul being feels itself surrounded by a world that reveals itself to him first of all through the senses. But the soul has become attentive also to its own activity, to its inner, creative experiencing. The soul feels it to be an irrefutable truth that no light, no color can be revealed without an eye sensitive to light and color. Thus it feels something creative already in the activity of the eye. But if the eye itself creatively brings forth the color—which is what one must think according to this philosophy—where can I then find something that exists in itself, that does not owe its existence merely to my own creative power? If now even the revelations of the senses are only expressions of the soul's own power, must it not then to an even greater extent be thinking that wants to gain a picture of true reality? Is this thinking, however, not condemned to create pictures that are rooted in the character of man's soul life but that can never bear within themselves anything able to provide certainty in pressing forward to the sources of existence? Such questions are surfacing everywhere in the recent development of philosophy.

As long as one cherishes the belief that the world revealed to our senses represents something complete and self-sustaining, which one must investigate in order to know its inner being, one will not be able to escape the confusion caused by the above question. The human soul can produce its knowledge within itself only through its own creativity. That is a conviction which justifiably grows out of the presuppositions described in the chapter of this book on “The World as Illusion” and in the presentation of Hamerling's thoughts. But then, having arrived at this conviction, one will not surmount a certain obstacle to knowledge as long as one still has the following picture: that the world of the senses contains the true foundations of its existence within itself; and that, with what man himself creates within his soul, he must somehow copy something that lies outside the soul.

Only that knowledge will be able to surmount this obstacle which grasps with the spiritual eye the fact that everything perceived by the senses does not represent, through its own being, a finished, self-contained reality, but rather something incomplete, a half reality, as it were.

As soon as one assumes that the perceptions of the sense world present us with a complete reality, one will never arrive at an answer to the question: What do the soul's own creative productions have to add to this reality in the act of knowing? One will have to remain at the Kantian belief that the human being must regard his knowledge as the product of his own soul organization and not as something that reveals itself to him as a true reality. If reality, in its actual form and nature, lies outside the soul, then the soul cannot bring forth what corresponds to this reality, but only something that flows out of the soul's own organization.

Everything changes as soon as one recognizes that the organization of the human soul—with what it produces creatively itself in the activity of knowledge—does not move away from reality; rather, in the life it unfolds before all knowing activity, it conjures up a world that is not the real one. The human soul is placed into the world in such a way that, because of the soul's own nature, it makes things different than they really are. In a certain sense what Hamerling expresses in the following passage is justified: “Certain stimuli produce odors in our sense of smell. The rose, therefore, has no fragrance if no one smells it ... If that is not obvious to you, dear reader, and if your understanding shys away from this fact like a skittish horse, then read no further; leave this and every other book on philosophical matters unread; for you lack the necessary ability to grasp a fact without bias and to retain it in thought.” The way the sense world appears when man confronts it immediately does depend, without any doubt, upon the being and nature of his soul. But does it not follow from this that his soul in fact causes the world to appear as it does? Now an unbiased study shows how the unreal character of the sense-perceptible outer world stems from the fact that man, in his immediate confrontation with things, suppresses something in himself which in truth belongs to them. If then, out of his own creativity, he unfolds his inner life, if he allows what slumbers in the depths of his soul to rise up out of these depths, then, to what he beheld with his senses, he adds something more that makes the half reality into a full reality in the act of knowledge. It lies in the nature of the soul to extinguish, with its first look at things, something that belongs to their reality. Thus, for the senses, things are not as they are in reality but rather as the soul has made them. But their semblance (or their mere appearance) is due to the fact that the soul has first taken away from them something that belongs to them. By not stopping short at his first look at things, man, in his activity of knowing, then adds to them that which first reveals their full reality. In its activity of knowing, the soul does not add something to things that is an unreal element with respect to them; rather, before its activity of knowing, the soul has taken something from things that belongs to their true reality. It will be philosophy's task to realize that the world revealed to man is an “illusion” until he confronts it in knowing activity, but that the path of knowledge indicates the direction toward full reality. What man produces out of his own creativity in knowing appears to be an inner revelation of the soul only because man, before he has the cognitive experience, must close himself off from the essential being of things. He cannot yet see this essential being in things when he at first only confronts them. In knowing, he discovers for himself, through his own activity, what at first was hidden. Now if man regards as a reality what he has only perceived, then what is produced in the activity of knowing will appear to him as something he has added onto this reality. When he realizes that what he had only seemingly produced himself must be sought in the things, and that he had only kept this at a distance when he first looked at the things, then he will sense how his activity of knowing is a process of reality by which the soul progressively grows into world existence and broadens its inner, isolated experience into world-experience.

In a little book, Truth and Science, published in 1892, the author of the present book attempted to give a philosophical foundation to what has just been briefly indicated. He speaks there about perspectives that modern philosophy must open up if it is to surmount the obstacle that has resulted quite naturally from its own recent development. A certain philosophical viewpoint is presented in that book in the following words: “It is not the first form in which reality approaches the ‘I’ that is its true one; its true form is the final one, which the ‘I’ makes out of the first. That first form has no significance at all for the objective world and has that form only as a basis for the cognitive process. Therefore, it is not the form of the world given it by knowledge that is subjective; but rather the first form ‘given’ to the ‘I’ that is so.” The author's later philosophical attempt, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,¹ published in 1894, is a further elaboration of this viewpoint. His effort there is to establish a philosophical basis for a view indicated in that book in the following way: “It is not due to the objects that they are given to us at first without their corresponding concepts, but rather it is due to our spiritual organization. Our total being functions in such a way that, for each thing within reality, the pertinent elements flow to us from two sides: from the sides of perceiving and of thinking. How I am organized to grasp things has nothing to do with their nature. The split between perceiving and thinking is first present the moment I, the observer, approach the things.” And in the last chapter of the book: “The perception is the part of reality that is given objectively; the concept is the part given subjectively (through intuition). Our spiritual organization tears reality apart into these two factors. The one factor appears to perception; the other to intuition. Only the union of both, the perception incorporating itself lawfully into the universe, is full reality. If we look at mere perception by itself, we then have no reality, but rather a disconnected chaos; if we look at the lawfulness of our perceptions by itself, we then have to do merely with abstract concepts. The abstract concept does not contain reality; but the thinking observation does indeed do so that considers neither concept nor perception one-sidedly by itself, but rather the union of both.”

For someone who can make this point of view his own it is then possible to regard fruitful reality as being united with his soul life within the self-conscious “I.” This is the view toward which the evolution of philosophy has been striving since Greek times and which has revealed its first clearly recognizable traces in Goethe's world view.

It is becoming recognized that this self-conscious “I” does not experience itself as isolated within itself nor as being outside of the objective world; rather, the “I’s” separation from this world is only a phenomenon of human consciousness and can be overcome by the insight that, as a human being in a certain stage of development, man has assumed a temporary form for the “I” by expelling from consciousness the forces that unite the soul with the world. If these forces worked continuously in human consciousness, one would not then attain a powerful, self-contained consciousness of oneself. One could not experience oneself as an “I” conscious of itself. The development of self-consciousness therefore depends precisely upon the soul's being given the possibility of perceiving the world without that part of reality which the self-conscious “I” extinguishes at a certain stage—at the stage that precedes knowledge.

Thus, the cosmic forces in this part of reality work upon the being of the soul in such a way that they withdraw and conceal themselves in order to allow the self-conscious “I” to shine forth powerfully. The “I,” accordingly, must recognize that it owes its knowledge of itself to a factor that casts a veil over its knowledge of the world. It follows necessarily from this that everything which brings the soul to a powerful, energetic experience of the “I” renders invisible the deeper ground in which this “I” has its roots. But now all the knowledge that our ordinary consciousness has is of the kind that makes the self-conscious “I” powerful. The human being feels himself to be a self-conscious “I” through the fact that he perceives an outer world with his senses, through the fact that he experiences himself as outside of this outer world, and through the fact that he stands in a kind of relationship to this outer world that, at a certain stage of scientific investigation, makes the “world seem like an illusion.” If all this were not the case, the self-conscious “I” would not come to manifestation. If, therefore, in one's activity of knowing, one strives only to make a copy of what was already observed before one's knowing activity, then one gains no true experience of full reality, but only a copy of “half reality.”

If one acknowledges that this is how matters stand, one cannot then seek the answer to the riddles of philosophy within the experiences of the soul that present themselves to ordinary consciousness. This consciousness is called upon to strengthen the self-conscious “I”; striving to this end, it must veil our vision of the relationship between the “I” and the objective world; it cannot therefore show how the soul relates to the true world.

This explains why a cognitive striving that wishes to progress philosophically by using the approach of natural science or something similar must always arrive at a point where what it is striving for in the activity of knowing falls apart. This book has had to point to this falling apart in the case of many modern thinkers, for, basically, all scientific endeavor of modern times works with those scientific, cognitive means that serve to detach the self-conscious “I” from true reality. And the strength and greatness of modern science, especially of natural science, are founded upon the unrestrained application of these cognitive means.

Individual philosophers like Dilthey, Eucken, and others direct their philosophical studies toward the soul's observation of itself. But what they study are those experiences of the soul which provide the basis for the self-conscious “I.” Therefore they do not penetrate into those wellsprings of the world where the soul's experiences well forth from true reality. These wellsprings cannot lie where the soul at first confronts and observes itself with its ordinary consciousness. If the soul wants to arrive at these wellsprings, it must get out of this ordinary consciousness. It must experience something in itself that this consciousness cannot give it. To our ordinary knowledge such an experience seems at first sheer nonsense. The soul is supposed to experience itself knowingly in some element without bringing its consciousness along with it into this element?! One is supposed to skip over consciousness and still remain conscious at the same time?! And yet: in philosophical endeavors one will either continue to arrive at impossibilities, or one will have to entertain the prospect that the “sheer nonsense” just indicated only seems to be so, and that precisely it points the way to where help must be sought in solving the riddles of philosophy.

One will have to acknowledge that the path “into the inner being of the soul” must be a completely different one than that chosen by many a recent world view. As long as one takes soul experiences the way they are presented to ordinary consciousness, one will not enter into the depths of the soul. One will be limited to what these depths send up. Eucken's world view is in this situation. One must strive downward, below the surface of the soul. But one cannot do this with the means of ordinary soul experience. Their strength lies precisely in the fact that they maintain the soul in this ordinary consciousness.

Means of penetrating more deeply into the soul present themselves when one directs one's gaze upon something that is, to be sure, also at work in ordinary consciousness, but which, in its work, does not enter this consciousness at all. When a person thinks, his consciousness is directed toward his thoughts. He wants to picture something through his thoughts; he wants to think correctly in the ordinary sense. But one can also focus one's attention on something else. One can fix one's spiritual gaze upon the activity of thinking as such. For example, one can place in the center of one's consciousness a thought that does not relate to anything external, that is thought as a kind of» symbol without any regard at all for the fact that it might represent something external. One can now continue to hold onto such a thought for a time. While one perseveres in this way, one can live entirely into what the soul itself is doing inwardly. The important thing here is not that one live in thoughts, but rather that one experience the activity of thinking. In this way the soul breaks away from what it accomplishes in its ordinary thinking. When the soul has continued this inner practice long enough, it will recognize after a time that it has become involved with experiences which detach it from that thinking and picturing which are bound to the bodily organs. One can accomplish something similar with the soul's activities of feeling and willing; yes, even with its sensing and perceiving of outer things. One will achieve something along this path only if one does not shrink from acknowledging that one cannot undertake self-knowledge of the soul simply by looking at the inner life that is usually present, but rather by looking at what must first be disclosed by inner, soul work—by soul work which, through practice, arrives at such concentration upon the inner activity of thinking, feeling, and willing that these experiences become in a certain way spiritually “densified” within themselves (sich geistig in sich “verdichten”). In this “densified state” they then reveal their inner being, which cannot be perceived in ordinary consciousness. Through such soul work one discovers that in order for ordinary consciousness to arise, one's soul forces must become “rarefied” (sich “verdünnen”) in this way and that in this rarefied state they become unperceivable. The soul work meant here consists in the unlimited enhancement of soul capacities known also to ordinary consciousness but which this consciousness does not employ in their enhanced state. These are the capacities for attentiveness (Aufmerksamkeit) and for loving devotion² to what is experienced by the soul. In order to achieve the spiritual densification indicated here, one must enhance these capacities to such a degree that they work as entirely new powers of the soul.

By proceeding in this way, one grasps within the soul a real experience whose actual being proves to be independent of the restrictions of the bodily organs. This is a spiritual life that must not be confused conceptually with what Dilthey and Eucken call the spiritual world, for their spiritual world is experienced by the human being only when he is connected with his bodily organs. What we mean here by spiritual life is not present for the soul that is bound up with the body.

And a true knowledge of our ordinary soul life does present itself as one of our first experiences when this new spiritual life has been attained. In reality, even our ordinary spiritual life is not produced by the body, but rather runs its course outside the body. When I see a color, when I hear a sound, I do not experience the color or sound as resulting from my body; rather, as a self-conscious “I,” I am connected outside of my body with the color or sound. The task of the body is to function as a kind of mirror. If, in my ordinary consciousness, I am connected with a color only with my soul, then, because of the nature of this consciousness, I can perceive nothing of the color. Similarly, I cannot see my own face when I look forward, but if a mirror is in front of me, I perceive my face as an objective body. If I do not stand in front of a mirror, I am this body and experience myself as such. Standing in front of a mirror, I perceive this body as a reflection. It is like this also with sense perception (one must of course recognize the insufficiency of any analogy). I live with the color outside of my body; through the activity of my body (of my eye, of my nervous system) the color becomes a conscious perception for me. The human body is not a producer of perceptions—nor of any soul life; rather, it is an apparatus for reflecting what takes place in a soul-spiritual way outside of the body.

Such a view places epistemology upon a promising basis. “One will ... arrive epistemologically at a ... picture of the ‘I’ not when one pictures it (the ‘I’) as being within the bodily organization and as receiving impressions ‘from outside,’ but rather when one regards this ‘I’ as located within the lawfulness of the things themselves and when one sees the bodily organization only as a kind of mirror; by means of the organic processes of the body, the weaving of the ‘I’ within the true being of the world outside the body is reflected back to the ‘I.’” Thus—in a lecture entitled “The Psychological Basis and Epistemological Position of Spiritual Science” prepared for the Philosophical Congress in Bologna in 1911—did the author of this book seek to characterize the perspective hovering before him of an epistemology.

During sleep the mirror-like relationship of the body to the soul is interrupted; the “I” lives only within the weaving of what is soul-spiritual. For ordinary consciousness, however, no experience of the soul is present if the body does not mirror these experiences. Therefore sleep runs its course unconsciously. The result of the soul exercises indicated above and of others like them is that the soul unfolds a different consciousness than its ordinary one. The soul attains thereby the capacity not only for experiencing in a soul-spiritual way, but also for strengthening in itself what is experienced, so that what is experienced reflects itself in a certain way within itself—without the help of the body—and thus arrives at spiritual perception. And only in what is thus experienced can the soul first truly know itself and consciously experience itself in its essential being.

Just as memory conjures up out of the depths of the soul physically experienced facts from the past, so—for a soul that has prepared itself for this by the means indicated above—there arise from the soul's inner depths substantial experiences that do not belong to the world of sense existence but rather to a world in which the soul has its fundamental being.

It is only too obvious that the adherents of many modern points of view will consign the world revealed here to the realm of mental aberration, of illusion, of hallucination, of auto-suggestion, and the like. One can only answer them that an earnest striving of the soul—working in the way just indicated—finds, in the inner, spiritual state which it has developed, the means to distinguish between illusion and spiritual reality; and these means are just as sure as those used in ordinary life, in a healthy state of soul, to distinguish between something imaginary and something actually perceived. One will search in vain for theoretical proof that the spiritual world characterized above is real; but such proof of the reality of the perceptual world does not exist either. In both cases it is the experience itself that determines how one is to judge.

What keeps many people from taking the step which, according to our presentation, alone offers a prospect of solving the riddles of philosophy is that they believe such a step will land them in a realm of nebulous mysticism. But anyone who has no soul predisposition toward such nebulous mysticism will, along the path just described, gain access to a world of soul experience that is just as crystal clear in itself as the structures of mathematical ideas. To be sure, if someone is inclined to seek the spiritual in some “dark unknown,” in something “that cannot be explained,” then he will not find his way on this path either as knowledgeable adherent or as opponent.

It is also easy to understand that what is indicated here will be strongly resisted by those who want to regard the natural-scientific approach to knowing the sense world as the only true scientific way. Nevertheless, whoever casts off such one-sidedness will be able to recognize that it is precisely the genuine natural-scientific attitude that provides the basis for undertaking what has been described here. The ideas described in this book as constituting the modern natural-scientific approach provide the best practice thoughts to which the soul can devote itself and upon which it can dwell in order to free itself in its inner experiences from its connectedness to the body. Whoever uses these natural-scientific ideas and proceeds with them in the way described here will discover that, through inner spiritual practice, thoughts that originally seem meant only to portray natural processes, really free the soul from the body, and that therefore the spiritual science referred to here must be seen as a continuation of a natural-scientific way of thinking that is rightly experienced by the soul.

• 1. Anthroposophic Press, 1986
• 2. Hingabe: literally, “a giving oneself over to” something. -Ed.

We have established that the elements for the explanation of reality are to be taken from the two spheres of perception and thought. It is due, as we have seen, to our organization that the full totality of reality, including our own selves as subjects, appears at first as a duality. Knowledge transcends this duality by fusing the two elements of reality, the percept and the concept, into the complete thing. Let us call the manner in which the world presents itself to us, before by means of knowledge it has taken on its true nature, “the world of appearance,” in distinction from the unified whole composed of percept and concept. We can then say, the world is given to us as a duality (Dualism), and knowledge transforms it into a unity (Monism). A philosophy which starts from this basal principle may be called a Monistic philosophy, or Monism. Opposed to this is the theory of two worlds, or Dualism. The latter does not, by any means, assume merely that there are two sides of a single reality, which are kept apart by our organization, but that there are two worlds totally distinct from one another. It then tries to find in one of these two worlds the principle of explanation for the other.

Dualism rests on a false conception of what we call knowledge. It divides the whole of reality into two spheres, each of which has its own laws, and it leaves these two worlds standing outside one another.

It is from a Dualism such as this that there arises the distinction between the object of perception and the thing-in-itself, which Kant introduced into philosophy, and which, to the present day, we have not succeeded in expelling. According to our interpretation, it is due to the nature of our organization that a particular object can be given to us only as a percept. Thought transcends this particularity by assigning to each percept its proper place in the world as a whole. As long as we determine the separate parts of the cosmos as percepts, we are simply following, in this sorting out, a law of our subjective constitution. If, however, we regard all percepts, taken together, merely as one part, and contrast with this a second part, viz., the things-in-themselves, then our philosophy is building castles-in-the-air. We are then engaged in mere playing with concepts. We construct an artificial opposition, but we can find no content for the second of these opposites, seeing that no content for a particular thing can be found except in perception.

>Every kind of reality which is assumed to exist outside the sphere of perception and conception must be relegated to the limbo of unverified hypotheses. To this category belongs the “thing-in-itself.” It is, of course, quite natural that a Dualistic thinker should be unable to find the connection between the world-principle which he hypothetically assumes and the facts that are given in experience. For the hypothetical world-principle itself a content can be found only by borrowing it from experience and shutting one's eyes to the fact of the borrowing. Otherwise it remains an empty and meaningless concept, a mere form without content. In this case the Dualistic thinker generally asserts that the content of this concept is inaccessible to our knowledge. We can know only that such a content exists, but not what it is. In either case it is impossible to transcend Dualism. Even though one were to import a few abstract elements from the world of experience into the content of the thing-in-itself, it would still remain impossible to reduce the rich concrete life of experience to these few elements, which are, after all, themselves taken from experience. Du Bois-Reymond lays it down that the imperceptible atoms of matter produce sensation and feeling by means of their position and motion, and then infers from this premise that we can never find a satisfactory explanation of how matter and motion produce sensation and feeling, for “it is absolutely and for ever unintelligible that it should be other than indifferent to a number of atoms of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen, etc., how they lie and move, how they lay or moved, or how they will lie and will move. It is in no way intelligible how consciousness might come into existence through their interaction.” This conclusion is characteristic of the whole tendency of this school of thought. Position and motion are abstracted from the rich world of percepts. They are then transferred to the fictitious world of atoms. And then we are astonished that we fail to evolve concrete life out of this principle of our own making, which we have borrowed from the world of percepts.

That the Dualist, working as he does with a completely empty concept of the thing-in-itself, can reach no explanation of the world, follows even from the definition of his principle which has been given above.

In any case, the Dualist finds it necessary to set impassable barriers to our faculty of knowledge. A follower of the Monistic theory of the world knows that all he needs to explain any given phenomenon in the world is to be found within this world itself. What prevents him from finding it can be only chance limitations in space and time, or defects of his organization, i.e., not of human organization in general, but only of his own.

It follows from the concept of knowledge, as defined by us, that there can be no talk of any limits of knowledge. Knowledge is not a concern of the universe in general, but one which men must settle for themselves. External things demand no explanation. They exist and act on one another according to laws which thought can discover. They exist in indivisible unity with these laws. But we, in our self-hood, confront them, grasping at first only what we have called percepts. However, within ourselves we find the power to discover also the other part of reality. Only when the Self has combined for itself the two elements of reality which are indivisibly bound up with one another in the world, is our thirst for knowledge stilled. The Self is then again in contact with reality.

The presuppositions for the development of knowledge thus exist through and for the Self. It is the Self which sets itself the problems of knowledge. It takes them from thought, an element which in itself is absolutely clear and transparent. If we set ourselves questions which we cannot answer, it must be because the content of the questions is not in all respects clear and distinct. It is not the world which sets questions to us, but we who set them to ourselves.

I can imagine that it would be quite impossible for me to answer a question which I happened to find written down somewhere, without knowing the universe of discourse from which the content of the question is taken.

In knowledge we are concerned with questions which arise for us through the fact that a world of percepts, conditioned by time, space, and our subjective organization, stands over against a world of concepts expressing the totality of the universe. Our task consists in the assimilation to one another of these two spheres, with both of which we are familiar. There is no room here for talking about limits of knowledge. It may be that, at a particular moment, this or that remains unexplained because, through chance obstacles, we are prevented from perceiving the things involved. What is not found today, however, may easily be found tomorrow. The limits due to these causes are only contingent, and must be overcome by the progress of perception and thought.

Dualism makes the mistake of transferring the opposition of subject and object, which has meaning only within the perceptual world, to pure conceptual entities outside this world. Now the distinct and separate things in the perceptual world remain separated only so long as the perceiver refrains from thinking. For thought cancels all separation and reveals it as due to purely subjective conditions. The Dualist, therefore, transfers to entities transcending the perceptual world abstract determinations which, even in the perceptual world, have no absolute, but only relative, validity. He thus divides the two factors concerned in the process of knowledge, viz., percept and concept, into four: (1) the object in itself; (2) the percept which the subject has of the object; (3) the subject; (4) the concept which relates the percept to the object in itself. The relation between subject and object is “real”; the subject is really (dynamically) influenced by the object. This real process does not appear in consciousness. But it evokes in the subject a response to the stimulation from the object. The result of this response is the percept. This, at length, appears in consciousness. The object has an objective (independent of the subject) reality, the percept a subjective reality. This subjective reality is referred by the subject to the object. This reference is an ideal one. Dualism thus divides the process of knowledge into two parts. The one part, viz., the production of the perceptual object by the thing-in-itself, he conceives of as taking place outside consciousness, whereas the other, the combination of percept with concept and the latter's reference to the thing-in-itself, takes place, according to him, in consciousness.

With such presuppositions, it is clear why the Dualist regards his concepts merely as subjective representations of what is really external to his consciousness. The objectively real process in the subject by means of which the percept is produced, and still more the objective relations between things-in-themselves, remain for the Dualist inaccessible to direct knowledge. According to him, man can get only conceptual representations of the objectively real. The bond of unity which connects things-in-themselves with one another, and also objectively with the individual minds (as things-in-themselves) of each of us, exists beyond our consciousness in a Divine Being of whom, once more, we have merely a conceptual representation.

The Dualist believes that the whole world would be dissolved into a mere abstract scheme of concepts, did he not posit the existence of real connections beside the conceptual ones. In other words, the ideal principles which thinking discovers are too airy for the Dualist, and he seeks, in addition, real principles with which to support them.

Let us examine these real principles a little more closely. The naïve man (Naïve Realist) regards the objects of sense-experience as realities. The fact that his hands can grasp, and his eyes see, these objects is for him sufficient guarantee of their reality. “Nothing exists that cannot be perceived” is, in fact, the first axiom of the naïve man; and it is held to be equally valid in its converse: “Everything which is perceived exists.” The best proof for this assertion is the naïve man's belief in immortality and in ghosts. He thinks of the soul as a fine kind of matter perceptible by the senses which, in special circumstances, may actually become visible to the ordinary man (belief in ghosts).

In contrast with this, his real, world, the Naïve Realist regards everything else, especially the world of ideas, as unreal, or “merely ideal.” What we add to objects by thinking is merely thoughts about the objects. Thought adds nothing real to the percept.

But it is not only with reference to the existence of things that the naïve man regards perception as the sole guarantee of reality, but also with reference to the existence of processes. A thing, according to him, can act on another only when a force actually present to perception issues from the one and acts upon the other. The ancient Greek philosophers, who were Naïve Realists in the best sense of the word, held a theory of vision according to which the eye sends out feelers which touch the objects. The older physicists thought that very fine kinds of substances emanate from the objects and penetrate through the sense-organs into the soul. The actual perception of these substances is impossible only because of the coarseness of our sense-organs relatively to the fineness of these substances. In principle the reason for attributing reality to these substances was the same as that for attributing it to the objects of the sensible world, viz., their kind of existence, which was conceived to be analogous to that of perceptual reality.

The self-contained being of ideas is not thought of by the naïve mind as real in the same sense. An object conceived “merely in idea” is regarded as a chimera until sense-perception can furnish proof of its reality. In short, the naïve man demands, in addition to the ideal evidence of his thinking, the real evidence of his senses. In this need of the naïve man lies the ground for the origin of the belief in revelation. The God whom we apprehend by thought remains always merely our idea of God. The naïve consciousness demands that God should manifest Himself in ways accessible to the senses. God must appear in the flesh, and must attest his Godhead to our senses by the changing of water into wine.

Even knowledge itself is conceived by the naïve mind as a process analogous to sense-perception. Things, it is thought, make an impression on the mind, or send out copies of themselves which enter through our senses, etc.

What the naïve man can perceive with his senses he regards as real, and what he cannot perceive (God, soul, knowledge, etc.) he regards as analogous to what he can perceive.

On the basis of Naïve Realism, science can consist only in an exact description of the content of perception. Concepts are only means to this end. They exist to provide ideal counterparts of percepts. With the things themselves they have nothing to do. For the Naïve Realist only the individual tulips, which we can see, are real. The universal idea of tulip is to him an abstraction, the unreal thought-picture which the mind constructs for itself out of the characteristics common to all tulips.

Naïve Realism, with its fundamental principle of the reality of all percepts, contradicts experience, which teaches us that the content of percepts is of a transitory nature. The tulip I see is real today; in a year it will have vanished into nothingness. What persists is the species “tulip.” This species is, however, for the Naïve Realist merely an idea, not a reality. Thus this theory of the world finds itself in the paradoxical position of seeing its realities arise and perish, while that which, by contrast with its realities, it regards as unreal endures. Hence Naïve Realism is compelled to acknowledge the existence of something ideal by the side of percepts. It must include within itself entities which cannot be perceived by the senses. In admitting them it escapes contradicting itself by conceiving their existence as analogous to that of objects of sense. Such hypothetical realities are the invisible forces by means of which the objects of sense-perception act on one another. Another such reality is heredity, the effects of which survive the individual, and which is the reason why from the individual a new being develops which is similar to it, and by means of which the species is maintained. The soul, the life-principle permeating the organic body, is another such reality which the naïve mind is always found conceiving in analogy to realities of sense-perception. And, lastly, the Divine Being, as conceived by the naïve mind, is such a hypothetical entity. The Deity is thought of as acting in a manner exactly corresponding to that which we can perceive in man himself, i.e., the Deity is conceived anthropomorphically.

Modern Physics traces sensations back to the movements of the smallest particles of bodies and of an infinitely fine substance called ether. What we experience, e.g., as warmth is a movement of the parts of a body which causes the warmth in the space occupied by that body. Here again something imperceptible is conceived on the analogy of what is perceptible. Thus, in terms of perception, the analogon to the concept “body” is, say, the interior of a room, shut in on all sides, in which elastic balls are moving in all directions, impinging one on another, bouncing on and off the walls, etc.

Without such assumptions the world of the Naïve Realist would collapse into a disconnected chaos of percepts, without mutual relations, and having no unity within itself. It is clear, however, that Naïve Realism can make these assumptions only by contradicting itself. If it would remain true to its fundamental principle, that only what is perceived is real, then it ought not to assume a reality where it perceives nothing. The imperceptible forces of which perceptible things are the bearers are, in fact, illegitimate hypotheses from the standpoint of Naïve Realism. But because Naïve Realism knows no other realities, it invests its hypothetical forces with perceptual content. It thus transfers a form of existence (the existence of percepts) to a sphere where the only means of making any assertion concerning such existence, viz., sense-perception, is lacking.

This self-contradictory theory leads to Metaphysical Realism. The latter constructs, beside the perceptible reality, an imperceptible one which it conceives on the analogy of the former. Metaphysical Realism is, therefore, of necessity Dualistic.

Wherever the Metaphysical Realist observes a relation between perceptible things (mutual approach through movement, the entrance of an object into consciousness, etc.), there he posits a reality. However, the relation of which he becomes aware cannot be perceived but only expressed by means of thought. The ideal relation is thereupon arbitrarily assimilated to something perceptible. Thus, according to this theory the world is composed of the objects of perception which are in ceaseless flux, arising and disappearing, and of imperceptible forces by which the perceptible objects are produced, and which are permanent.

Metaphysical Realism is a self-contradictory mixture of Naïve Realism and Idealism. Its forces are imperceptible entities endowed with the qualities proper to percepts. The Metaphysical Realist has made up his mind to acknowledge, in addition to the sphere for the existence of which he has an instrument of knowledge in sense-perception, the existence of another sphere for which this instrument fails, and which can be known only by means of thought. But he cannot make up his mind at the same time to acknowledge that the mode of existence which thought reveals, viz., the concept (or idea), has equal rights with percepts. If we are to avoid the contradiction of imperceptible percepts, we must admit that, for us, the relations which thought traces between percepts can have no other mode of existence than that of concepts. If one rejects the untenable part of Metaphysical Realism, there remains the concept of the world as the aggregate of percepts and their conceptual (ideal) relations. Metaphysical Realism, then, merges itself in a view of the world according to which the principle of perceptibility holds for percepts, and that of conceivability for the relations between the percepts. This view of the world has no room, in addition to the perceptual and conceptual worlds, for a third sphere in which both principles, the so-called “real” principle and the “ideal” principle, are simultaneously valid.

When the Metaphysical Realist asserts that, besides the ideal relation between the perceived object and the perceiving subject, there must be a real relation between the percept as “thing-in-itself” and the subject as “thing-in-itself” (the so-called individual mind), he is basing his assertion on the false assumption of a real process, imperceptible but analogous to processes in the world of percepts. Further, when the Metaphysical Realist asserts that we stand in a conscious ideal relation to our world of percepts, but that to the real world we can have only a dynamic (force) relation, he repeats the mistake we have already criticized. We can talk of a dynamic relation only within the world of percepts (in the sphere of the sense of touch), but not outside that world.

Let us call the view which we have just characterized, and into which Metaphysical Realism merges when it discards its contradictory elements, Monism, because it combines one-sided Realism and Idealism into a higher unity.

For Naïve Realism the real world is an aggregate of percepts; for Metaphysical Realism, reality belongs not only to percepts but also to imperceptible forces; Monism replaces forces by ideal relations which are supplied by thought. These relations are the laws of nature. A law of nature is nothing but the conceptual expression for the connection of certain percepts.

Monism is never called upon to ask whether there are any principles of explanation for reality other than percepts and concepts. The Monist knows that in the whole realm of the real there is no occasion for this question. In the perceptual world, as immediately apprehended, he sees one-half of reality; in the union of this world with the world of concepts he finds full reality. The Metaphysical Realist might object that, relatively to our organization, our knowledge may be complete in itself, that no part may be lacking, but that we do not know how the world appears to a mind organized differently from our own. To this the Monist will reply: Maybe there are intelligences other than human; and maybe also that their percepts are different from ours, if they have perception at all. But this is irrelevant to me for the following reasons. Through my perceptions, i.e., through this specifically human mode of perception, I, as subject, am confronted with the object. The nexus of things is thereby broken. The subject reconstructs the nexus by means of thought. In doing so it re-inserts itself into the context of the world as a whole. As it is only through the Self, as subject, that the whole appears rent in two between percept and concept, the reunion of those two factors will give us complete knowledge. For beings with a different perceptual world (e.g., if they had twice our number of sense-organs) the nexus would appear broken in another place, and the reconstruction would accordingly have to take a form specifically adapted to such beings. The question concerning the limits of knowledge troubles only Naïve and Metaphysical Realism, both of which see in the contents of mind only ideal representations of the real world. For to these theories whatever falls outside the subject is something absolute, a self-contained whole, and the subject's mental content is a copy which is wholly external to this absolute. The completeness of knowledge depends on the greater or lesser degree of resemblance between the representation and the absolute object. A being with fewer senses than man will perceive less of the world, one with more senses will perceive more. The former's knowledge will, therefore, be less complete than the latter's.

For Monism the matter is different. The point where the unity of the world appears to be rent asunder into subject and object depends on the organization of the percipient. The object is not absolute but merely relative to the nature of the subject. The bridging of the gap, therefore, can take place only in the quite specific way which is characteristic of the human subject. As soon as the Self, which in perception is set over against the world, is again re-inserted into the world-nexus by constructive thought all further questioning ceases, having been but a result of the separation.

A differently constituted being would have a differently constituted knowledge. Our own knowledge suffices to answer the questions which result from our own mental constitution.

Metaphysical Realism must ask, What is it that gives us our percepts? What is it that stimulates the subject?

Monism holds that percepts are determined by the subject. But in thought the subject has, at the same time, the instrument for transcending this determination of which it is itself the author.

The Metaphysical Realist is faced by a further difficulty when he seeks to explain the similarity of the world-views of different human individuals. He has to ask himself, How is it that my theory of the world, built up out of subjectively determined percepts and out of concepts, turns out to be the same as that which another individual is also building up out of these same two subjective factors? How, in any case, is it possible for me to argue from my own subjective view of the world to that of another human being? The Metaphysical Realist thinks he can infer the similarity of the subjective world-views of different human beings from their ability to get on with one another in practical life. From this similarity of world-views he infers further the likeness to one another of individual minds, meaning by “individual mind” the “I-in-itself” underlying each subject.

We have here an inference from a number of effects to the character of the underlying causes. We believe that after we have observed a sufficiently large number of instances, we know the connection sufficiently to know how the inferred causes will act in other instances. Such an inference is called an inductive inference. We shall be obliged to modify its results, if further observation yields some unexpected fact, because the character of our conclusion is, after all, determined only by the particular details of our actual observations. The Metaphysical Realist asserts that this knowledge of causes, though restricted by these conditions, is quite sufficient for practical life.

Inductive inference is the fundamental method of modern Metaphysical Realism. At one time it was thought that out of concepts we could evolve something that would no longer be a concept. It was thought that the metaphysical reals, which Metaphysical Realism after all requires, could be known by means of concepts. This method of philosophizing is now out of date. Instead it is thought that from a sufficiently large number of perceptual facts we can infer the character of the thing-in-itself which lies behind these facts. Formerly it was from concepts, now it is from percepts that the Realist seeks to evolve the metaphysically real. Because concepts are before the mind in transparent clearness, it was thought that we might deduce from them the metaphysically real with absolute certainty. Percepts are not given with the same transparent clearness. Each fresh one is a little different from others of the same kind which preceded it. In principle, therefore, anything inferred from past experience is somewhat modified by each subsequent experience. The character of the metaphysically real thus obtained can therefore be only relatively true, for it is open to correction by further instances. The character of Von Hartmann's Metaphysics depends on this methodological principle. The motto on the title-page of his first important book is, “Speculative results gained by the inductive method of Science.”

The form which the Metaphysical Realist at the present day gives to his things-in-themselves is obtained by inductive inferences. Consideration of the process of knowledge has convinced him of the existence of an objectively-real world-nexus, over and above the subjective world which we know by means of percepts and concepts. The nature of this reality he thinks he can determine by inductive inferences from his percepts.

Yesterday we referred to the important turning point in human evolution at the beginning of the third mystery epoch, when man's participation in the cosmic things in transubstantiation and in the act of consecration of man began to occur in the astral body. This is that member of the human being which leaves the physical body as far as ordinary consciousness is concerned, and which is unreceptive for percepts from the environment during the time of the separation.

Let's try to get a clear idea of how this astral body functions in present-day man. It is the member which transmits the thoughts which enable us to understand the world. For thoughts about one's environment disappear as soon as one's astral body leaves the physical and etheric bodies.

We can round out this idea if we realize that the ego-organization—the actual ego in man as he is today—is the receiver of sense impressions. However, the latter are obliterated when the ego-organization leaves the physical and etheric bodies.

So that we can say: here are the physical and etheric bodies of the human being, and during sleep the astral body and ego-organization are outside. The ego-organization gives us our sense percepts and sensations when we are awake. There is no sense perception during sleep, because the ego-organization is not in the physical and etheric bodies and because the ego is not receptive for impressions from the environment during that time. Likewise, the astral body gives us thoughts when it is in the physical and etheric bodies, but when it is outside it is not sensitive to things in the world and it gives us no impressions.

However, it was this astral body which became receptive for what I described to you, during the third mystery epoch when man was to connect himself with divine, spiritual beings through cultic words and through everything the priest did in the way of preparatory exercises. It became receptive for the elaboration of the transubstantiation in itself during communion, and after the transubstantiation was elaborated it became receptive for apocalyptic things.

The same kind of thing has to happen in the ego-organizations of people from the present epoch on. Even though this ego-organization can only experience sense impressions in ordinary consciousness, it must be constituted in such a way that it experiences transubstantiations and in such a way that it can participate in apocalyptic things through the latter.

People can really become receptive for these things today, that is, someone can really become a priest if he takes in ideas which are true spiritual copies of the supersensible world. Therewith we have described the esoteric or inner connection between the esotericism which rightfully exists today and what must live in a priest's soul. We have described what can make the Christian Community a bearer of an important part of the new mysteries. We must only consider how the Anthroposophy which is approaching human beings today is really constituted.

I have often used an analogy. I said that people are inclined to accept things which are supported by outer perceptions and experiments today, but they don't want to accept things which are not supported in this way. However, anyone who has this attitude is like a person who says: every rock on earth must be supported so that it won't fall down and therefore the planets in the universe must also be supported so that they won't fall down. Of course, since it's taught in a traditional and authoritative way, people believe that the planets in the universe mutually carry each other without supports. However, many people doubt that Anthroposophical truths support and carry each other, and that they don't have to be supported by outer observations and experiments.

As soon as one sees that Anthroposophical truths are valid because they all support each other, so that the truths mutually support each other, in that moment one will stop saying: I can't see anything in the spiritual world yet and therefore I can't understand the content of Anthroposophy. Instead one will begin to understand Anthroposophy through the fact that its truths mutually support each other, and one will then work one's way further into it.

The main thing which can and must put this body of priests on its inner path today is the task of penetrating what is given about the spiritual world. If it does tread this path, we should make it clear to ourselves that the attitude of soul which someone gets into if he takes possession of Anthroposophy in an honest way enables him to approach the Apocalypse. It enables one to approach it in such a way that one can say: It's true that the Apocalypse exists, but if I let it work upon me, each one of its images or Imaginations becomes united with my own ego. And then comes the moment where this Apocalypse can be a creation of the human ego and not just a personal experience. However, we must try to approach the Apocalypse in an Anthroposophical way. There's no other context which leads to it today.

We will now try to grasp a few of the main points in the Apocalypse in a spiritual way, if I may put it that way. “I am Alpha and Omega.” Expressed in an ancient form: one only understands alpha or A if one knows that a sound or letter as a component of a word was not the abstract, separate and meaningless thing back then, that we experience today. A sound was something which deserved to have a name. Mankind has treated The sounds of language which really enclose a great mystery in a peculiar way.

Mankind has treated the sounds of language in the way that a policeman treats a criminal. A long time ago it numbered the letters in the way that we give numbers to criminals when they are put into their cells, so that they lose their names and get numbers. Sounds have lost their identity through the numbering process. This is a pictorial way of putting it, but a true one nevertheless.

For if we go back before the late Hebraic period when they first gave numbers to the sounds, we find that mankind was fully aware that it is quite right for a sound to have a name, and that one can say alpha to it because it is a divine, supersensible being. If we want to find out what this first letter alpha of the so-called alphabet really is, we will have to go through a kind of spiritual development or conceptual development.

You know that Anthroposophy goes back in earth evolution through Moon, Sun to Saturn. It tries to dig up things in the world which are connected with the evolution of man. We find the first cosmic human germ on Saturn, which became the present human body after manifold transformations during Sun, Moon and earth. Man was present on Saturn in his first, germinal form.

For anyone who honestly and seriously wants to see the true state of affairs in this area, it's no doubt quite important to ask what men really experienced on old Saturn. Man experienced successive conditions of warmth. Man absorbed various states of warmth and cold. He existed in states which really only told him something about warmth conditions in the cosmos, for although they also told him many spiritual things, they only disclosed a limited region of the spirit through differentiated warmth and cold.

If we go on from Saturn to Sun, we find that man's organism has become differentiated. During Sun existence man lives in a physical body which is differentiated into warmth ether and air. Differentiation also occurs within as man becomes filled with a richer content. He not only perceives the differentiated warmth like on old Saturn, but something like an inner life emerges. Man perceives the warmth on the Sun with his old perception and he also perceives an inner breathing rhythm in himself which in turn is an expression and a reflection of cosmic secrets.

Just look at how the human being becomes richer as he evolves from Saturn to Sun. He also gets richer as he evolves from Sun to Moon and from Moon to Earth. And he will continue to get richer as he develops on Jupiter and up to Vulcan.

Let's ask ourselves what the relation of man to the world is on ancient Saturn. On old Saturn man's relation to the world is such that he perceives a very large number of different warmths, but qualitatively he perceives very little. Not much of the world is in man. Man is present as man and he is just a man, as it were; not much of the world is in him yet. As he moves forward through Sun, Moon, earth and on to Jupiter his inner life becomes filled with the world more and more, and therefore it is richer. We already have a large part of the world in us here on earth. And when the earth gets to the stage where it will pass away again, man will have elaborated a large part of the macrocosm and he will bear it in him as earthly copies.

We bear it within us already, but people are not usually aware of this. When a human being moves upwards through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition to a knowledge of the spirit, his inner soul life becomes ever more magnificent. Look at how little man knows about the human eye in his ordinary consciousness. But this eye is a whole cosmos, and like the macrocosm all of its details are marvelous and great. Every single organ in man becomes unveiled in a wonderful way in his physical body already. So that when an initiate looks around him he sees a world with the elements down below and its sun, moon and stars up above. If he looks into himself he sees that the eye, ear, lung, liver and every other organ is a world in itself, and that man's physical body is a marvelous interaction of worlds. Some of these worlds are finished, others are just beginning, some are sensory, others are half supersensible or entirely supersensible. Man really bears ever more worlds in himself as he works his way through one evolution after another.

Thus we can distinguish man at the start of old Saturn evolution, where he is just beginning, where he is man, although he doesn't bear the world in himself yet. The first thing which man acquired during old Saturn evolution was a perception of the circumference of the warmth body which he felt that he was. So that in a schematic way we can say that man feels that he is warmth on old Saturn, but after he has felt that he is a warmth mollusk he gradually feels something like an accumulation of warmth, like an outer skin, a warmth skin, a somewhat cooler sheath than the warmth which is in him. He feels manifold degrees or intensities of warmth within him, and the warmth skin is the coolest.

We express this in our present language, but this language is abstract and it doesn't conjure up the greatness of such a mental image before our soul, if we look into the course of time and we want to go back to old Saturn. However, people who are moved by a perception of these things at all are also moved by the awe with which such things were looked upon in the ancient mysteries. In the ancient Greek chthonic mysteries, they still spoke of Saturn men who didn't have a warmth skin yet, and then of men who had taken the first part of the world into their warmth skins; for the latter had a certain structure and form which imitated the world. This was the first thing from the world.

What do man's experiences which he had while he was still a warmth man look like from a subjective, psychic viewpoint? They are like absolute amazement about the world. If one wants to describe them, one has to call them complete amazement. For one cannot grasp warmth in any other way than as sheer amazement. Outwardly it is warmth and inwardly it is complete astonishment. It's only because people have become as blockheaded as old Kant was, that they speak of a thing in itself which can't be explained. The thing in itself of warmth is astonishment;' and Saturn man is astonishment just as much as he is warmth. He lived in amazement or astonishment about his own existence, for he was just entering into this existence. This is alpha; the Saturn warmth man who is living in amazement. And the first thing which man experiences as the housing of the world, namely his skin, is beta,—building, this building or house. Man was a man in his house, and the house or temple or skin was the first thing from the world: beta.

If we go through the alphabet like this, we go through the whole world. When man gradually absorbs everything which the world was and unites it with his being, until by Vulcan he will become united with the whole wide world to which he belongs, he will be the one he was at the beginning of Saturn evolution plus the whole world. He will be alpha and everything else too. But everything else amounts to the whole world. This is omega—man and everything in him which is the world. The “I am alpha and omega” describes what man will be at the end of the Vulcan period. At the end of Vulcan evolution, man will be able to say: I am alpha and omega. Let's look at the Mystery of Golgotha from the vantage point of what we have placed before ourselves as the beginning, middle and end of human evolution. At the Mystery of Golgotha or approximately the halfway point in world evolution, we have the being who dwelt in Jesus' body at the stage of development that man will be in at the end of Vulcan evolution. We have a being as god which man will be at the end of Vulcan evolution.

What is the difference between God's existence and man's existence? The difference between a god's existence and a man's existence is that the god already is what the human being will be later on in time. Don't say that this brings the god down to the human level and makes him into a human being. It doesn't. Because for supersensible perception, time is a simultaneous reality, if you'll permit me to use this paradoxical expression. The difference between man and God is the one which existed at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. One shouldn't relate different times or beings from different times when one looks at these things.

A great deal of what is in writings like the Apocalypse is expressed in the language which was used in the mysteries, and it can only be understood if it is deciphered. On the other hand, one shouldn't blame the author of the Apocalypse for speaking in mystery language, for it was customary for people to do this at that time. People still knew that sounds are supersensible beings and that alpha is the supersensible human being when he was first created, and that when one goes from alpha to beta one is turning away from man and towards the world, including the divine world, and that if one goes through all the sounds to omega one has the entire divine world in omega.

It's rather shocking that we're surrounded by experiences today which we consider to be trivialities. For instance, all the sounds are basically trivialities for us. Someone who only knows the alphabet doesn't know very much. The ABCs are trivialities. However, these trivialities point to divine, spiritual beings at the starting point, and our trivial letters are the descendents of what were once divine, spiritual beings for mankind. The whole alphabet was a number of such divine spiritual beings. Sounds were gods who assailed men from all sides with their din. The sounds AB were man in his house, and so on. Man with the whole world was alpha to omega. When someone uttered a sound he felt that it permeated him with spirituality.

A last remnant of this life of a divine, spiritual element in sounds still existed in the intonation of cultic language during the third mystery epoch. They still understood this completely in very ancient times. When someone successively intoned what has now become our abstract, traditional alphabet, he was intoning the cosmic word. He intoned everything which exists and he connected himself with all the gods: In the beginning was the word. And when Christ says “I am alpha and omega,” he could say “I am the word” and mean the same thing.

You can see that the Apocalypse is written in a mystery language, and it uses terms which remind us of the long period during which man felt that the macrocosm was a speaking universe. We have obscured the sounds of our language and made them trivial, whereas men used to know that they were something very spiritual. We must be able to feel what happened there. What happened? The sounds exist, but the gods are no longer in them as far as men are concerned. The gods have left the sounds. Our sounds contain Ahrimanic beings in a demonic way. The popular idea that the fixed sounds of our language are connected with black magic is not entirely unfounded. This idea of the people is a healthy one. For our sounds are now Ahrimanic gods. The gods who were once in them left, and Ahrimanic beings moved in. People will permeate language with more and more Ahrimanic powers if they don't find their way back to the gods in this sphere.

We must approach the Apocalypse with such feelings about, language. This is the only way that the real greatness and power of what is placed, before our souls in the Apocalypse can become manifest to us. For what does the author of the Apocalypse want to do? He wants to do the same thing that all those who speak out of a true knowledge of the Christ want to do. He wants to place the Christ before mankind. He draws attention to the fact that he is there. He begins by saying that he exists. For if one takes the first words of the Apocalypse and translates them into our language in accordance with their real meaning, they read: Look at the manifestation of Christ Jesus: Look over there; I want to show you the vision of Jesus Christ which God has given.

Thus the first thing which is pointed out is that the author of the Apocalypse wants to let Christ appear to humanity in an apocalyptic way. But he also points out that he doesn't just want to report about the appearance or the Imagination of Jesus Christ, which presupposes vision, but he also wants to indicate that the divine world power which placed this phenomenon into the world and made it visible also expressed it in words.

God has sent these words by his angel unto his servant John, and they are like an interpretation of the vision of Jesus Christ. This is how we must read the beginning of the Apocalypse.

Two things are really being said here. An Imaginative element in Christ is mentioned, and something is said about what Christ's tidings are. And what John affirms and testifies to in his second sentence is the vision of Christ and the interpretation of this vision. The Christ in a picture and the Christ in words. The author of the Apocalypse wants to place the Christ before human beings in a picture and in words.

Therewith we are also made aware of something which was quite obvious to people at that time, although most people today have lost sight of it completely. Our impoverished psychologists speak of sense percepts and ideas. To make the thing as poor as possible, people let the sense percepts arise through the senses and they say that ideas are created within. Everything is subjective and there is nothing cosmic there at all; they make a Kantian world out of a rich one, and they completely forget that man is standing in the whole world.

The intuitive element in our words has shriveled into impoverished ideas: the second thing or so-called supersensible percept which John affirms, testifies to and tells us about is what the Apocalypticer places there as the manifestation of Christ. So that we have to say “Behold the manifestation of Jesus Christ which is given by God, for this is how God must be shown to you (I will interpret this later). He has put it into words and has sent it to his servant John via his angel. John has affirmed God's words and the manifestation of Jesus Christ in the way that he saw it. He wants to give mankind what he has seen and a letter he received from God.”

We must approach Christian writings in this concrete way again. If you really want to become priests out of the deepest and most honest impulses in your heart you will have to see to it that these writings become concrete. For the fact is that people are basically dishonest when they say they understand the gospels the way they are translated today. The Apocalypse begins in the way that I said. One translation of the beginning of the Apocalypse reads, “This is the revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him to show his servants, and he has interpreted it and sent it to his servant John by his angel;” this is how it reads. And then the whole world is told that this is what the Apocalypse says. But no one can really make any sense out of these words. The same goes for most of the gospels, because one wants to explain things to people with wording which doesn't tell one what's really there anymore. This is why the idea gradually arose that one shouldn't penetrate very deeply into the gospels. For how can one really do that? No matter what modern language one reads the gospels in, one can't really read them if one is honest about it. For the modern versions tell one nothing.

One has to go back to what is really there, just as we did this for the first two sentences and as we will continue to do it. Or some people might say that one has to go back to the Greek for certain parts of the gospels. Now, with all due respect to our contemporaries, who take great pains to understand Greek, the fact is that no one understands Greek any more today, because we don't have the same things in us which the Greeks had when they spoke or listened.

We're basically like sacks of flour when we listen to someone or when we speak ourselves. We remain just as quiet inwardly as flour in a sack should, if it is packed properly. This was not the case with the Greeks. The consciousness of a Greek vibrated when he listened to someone. He became alive inwardly and he spoke out of this vitality. The words which he heard and spoke were alive; they were still living bodies. Not to speak of oriental people. The latter are decadent today but unlike European people they can still perceive and understand things inwardly in a vital way when they speak or hear.

Just listen to an ordinary oriental like Rabindranath Tagore and watch how he presents the inner weaving and life which can exist in language.

Today one has language in such a way that one even thinks one has it if one takes a dictionary and a German word stands on one side and the English word on the other. People very calmly place the English words where the German words are. They are blissfully unaware that one steps over an abyss here and that one comes into an entirely different world, and that one really has to treat what lives in language as something which is divine.

People have to become aware of this again. Then they will decide to go back to what vibrates out of writings like the Apocalypse, which conjures up a vision of Jesus Christ before our soul. If we can see this mighty vision it's as if the clouds, which could give us wonderful things, suddenly became concentrated and took on human and angelic forms, and the past, present and future welled out of the clouds' substances as they go past and revealed the world's content of spiritual substances, which includes human beings. This is how the manifestation of Jesus Christ is presented.

The vision is there and we fall silent before it, so that we become united with the world and are no longer conscious of ourselves, and so that we confront the vision until nothing but the vision remains, while we become insignificant.

Then when we perceive the Father God who has given the vision we find that he holds back the inspiring words behind the vision. The words are the interpretation of the vision and they are his secret; but the time is at hand and God gives the secret to an angel, and he brings it down to men as an epistolary message from God on the path on which Inspirations from God generally come down.

As soon as a man becomes quiet and disappears and becomes immersed in the vision and begins to be not in himself, and he takes in God's letter, which he first has to open, which is sealed with seven seals, which he takes in as a letter with seven seals which has been sent to him by the godhead—as soon as he does this he becomes the letter, because he gets to the point where he looks upon the contents of the letter as his own ego-being. Then he stands before the vision with God's ideas and concepts and with spiritual mental images.

If you imagine John the priest in this way, with the vision of Jesus Christ before him, disappearing selflessly, if you see him receiving the letter of God that is sealed with seven seals from the angels there, and if you see the resolve arising in him to unseal God's letter and to communicate its contents to mankind—you have the picture or Imagination which stands at the beginning of the Apocalypse. For we must interpret the words which stand there in what we receive in such a way that it is like the Imagination I described. This is what the author of the Apocalypse wants to say. That is why he says, “Blessed is he that reads and hears the words in the macrocosm and who takes in and preserves what is written in the book, when he understands it. For the time for this has come.”

It has come. It is not just chance that we're discussing the Apocalypse in this context; it lies in the karma of the community for Christian renewal.