The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] Goethe's world-conception reached its highest state of maturity when there dawned within it the perception of Nature's two great motive forces: the meaning of the concepts of polarity and intensification (Steigerung) (Compare the Essay, Erläuterung zu dem Aufsatz ‘Die Natur’). Polarity inheres in the phenomena of Nature in so far as we think of them in a material sense. It consists in this:( everything of a material nature expresses itself in two opposites, like the magnet, in a north and a south pole. These states of matter are either apparent to the eye, or they lie latent within the material and can be roused into activity by appropriate means. Intensification presents itself when we think of the phenomena in a spiritual sense. It can be observed in Nature processes which fall within the scope of the idea of development. At the different stages of development these processes manifest the idea underlying them with greater or less distinctness in their external appearance. In the fruit, the idea of the plant, the vegetable law, is only indistinctly expressed in outer appearance. The idea cognised by the mind and the perception do not resemble each other. “The vegetable law appears in its highest manifestation in the blossom and the rose becomes once again the summit of the phenomenon.” What Goethe calls “intensification” consists in the emergence of the spiritual from out of the material as a result of the creative activity of Nature. Nature being engaged “in an ever-striving ascent” means that her endeavour is to create forms which, in ascending order, bring the ideas of the objects ever more and more to manifestation in outer appearance also. Goethe holds that “Nature has no secret that is not somewhere revealed to the eye of the attentive observer.” Nature can produce phenomena wherein the ideas proper to a wide sphere of allied processes may be discerned. They are the phenomena wherein the “intensification” has reached its goal, wherein the idea becomes immediate truth. The creative spirit of Nature here appears on the surface of the objects; what can only be apprehended by thought in the coarse material phenomena—what can be perceived only by spiritual vision—becomes visible to bodily eyes in “intensified” phenomena. Here all that is sensible is also spiritual, all that is spiritual, sensible. Goethe thinks of the whole of Nature as permeated with spirit. Her forms are different because the spirit becomes in them outwardly visible to a lesser or greater degree. Goethe knows no dead, spiritless matter. Those things appear as such in which the spirit of Nature assumes an external form that does not resemble her ideal essence. Because one and the same spirit is working in Nature and in his own inner being man can rise to a participation in the products of Nature. “From the tile that falls from the roof, to the shining flash of spirit that arises in thee and which thou impartest”—everything in the universe is to Goethe the activity, the manifestation of One Creative Spirit. “All effects of which we are conscious in experience, of whatever kind they be, are in continuous interdependence; they merge into each other; they undulate from the first to the last.” “A tile is loosed from the roof and in the ordinary sense we call this chance; it falls on the shoulders of a passer-by, in a mechanical sense certainly; yet not only mechanically, for it follows the laws of gravity and so works physically. The ruptured life veins give up their functioning forthwith; instantaneously the fluids work chemically, the rudimentary qualities make their appearance. But the deranged organic life offers opposition with equal rapidity and tries to restore itself; the human being as a whole is, meanwhile, more or less unconscious and psychically disturbed. The person coming to himself again feels himself deeply wounded in an ethical sense; he bewails his disturbed activity of whatever kind it may be, but man does not willingly resign himself in patience. In a religious sense, on the other hand, it is easy to ascribe this accident to a higher destiny, to view it as a preservation from a greater evil, as a preliminary to a higher good. This is sufficient for the sufferer; the convalescent, however, rises up with the buoyancy of genius, with trust in God and himself, and feels himself saved; he takes hold even of what is accidental and turns it to his advantage in order to begin an eternally fresh orbit of life.” All effects in the world appear to Goethe modifications of the spirit, and the man who penetrates into their depths, and studies them from the level of the fortuitous to that of genius, experiences the metamorphosis of the spirit from the form wherein it expresses itself in an external manifestation unlike itself, right up to the stage where it appears in its own most appropriate form. In the sense of the Goethean world-conception all creative forces operate uniformly. They are one Whole manifesting itself in a gradation of related multiplicities. Goethe, however, had no inclination to present to himself the unity of the universe as homogeneous. Adherents of the idea of unity often fall into the error of extending the law that may be observed in one region of phenomena to cover the whole of Nature. The mechanistic view of the world, for example, has fallen into this error. It has a special eye and understanding for what can be explained mechanically. Therefore the mechanical alone appears to it to be in accordance with Nature, and. it tries to trace the phenomena of organic Nature as well back to mechanical laws. Life is only a complicated form of the co-operation of mechanical processes. Goethe found such a world-conception expressed, in a singularly repulsive form, in Holbach's “Système de la Nature” that fell into his hands in Strasburg. Matter was supposed to have existed and to have been in motion from all eternity, and to this motion to right and left in every direction, were attributed the infinite phenomena of existence. “We might have allowed even so much to pass if the author, out of his matter in motion, had built up the world before our eyes. But he seemed to know as little of Nature as we did, for, after simply propounding some general ideas, he forthwith disregards them in order to change what seems above Nature, or a higher Nature within Nature, into matter with weight and motion but without aim or shape,—and by this he fancies he has gained much.” (Poetry and Truth, Book II.). Goethe would have expressed himself in similar words if he could have heard Du-Bois Reymond's phrase (Grenzen des Naturerkennens, S.13.): “Natural knowledge is a tracing back of the variations in the corporeal world to movements of atoms generated by their central forces which are independent of time, or it is the conversion of natural processes into the mechanics of atoms.” Goethe thought that the modes of natural operations were interrelated, the one passing over into the other; but he never wanted to trace them back to one single mode. He did not aspire after one abstract principle to which all natural phenomena should be traced back, but for observation of the characteristic mode in which creative Nature, in each single one of her regions of phenomena, manifests her universal laws through specific forms. He did not want to force one particular form of thought on all natural phenomena, but by living experience in different forms of thought, his aim was to keep the spirit within him as vital and pliable as Nature herself. When the feeling of the mighty unity of all Nature's activity was strong within him he was a Pantheist. “With the many and varied tendencies of my being, I for myself can never be satisfied with one mode of thinking; as poet and artist I am a Polytheist, as Nature investigator, a Pantheist, and such as decisively as the other. If I need a God for my personality as a moral being, that also is provided for” (To Jacobi, 6th January, 1813.). As Artist, Goethe turned to those natural phenomena where the idea is present in direct perception. Here the particular seemed immediately divine, the world a multiplicity of divine entities. As Nature investigator Goethe had perforce also to follow up the forces of Nature in those phenomena where the idea in its individual existence was not visible. As Poet, he could rest content with the multiplicity of the Divine; as Nature investigator he had to seek for the uniformly active ideas of Nature. “The law that manifests in the most absolute freedom, according to its own conditions, produces the objectively beautiful, and this must indeed find worthy subjects by whom it can be understood.” As Artist, Goethe's aim is to perceive this element of objective beauty in the single creation, but as Nature investigator his aim is “to cognise the laws according to which universal Nature wills to act.” Polytheism is the mode of thought that sees and venerates a spiritual element in the particular; Pantheism is the mode that apprehends the Spirit of the Whole. The two modes of thought can exist side by side; the one or the other asserts itself according to whether the gaze is directed to Nature as one Whole, that is, life and progression from one central point; or to those entities wherein Nature unites in one form all that she usually extends over a whole kingdom. Such forms arise when, for instance, the creative powers of Nature “after producing manifold plant forms, produce one wherein all the rest are contained;” or “after manifold animal forms, a being who contains them all: Man.”

[ 2 ] Goethe has made this remark: “Whoever has learnt to understand my writings and my real nature will have to admit that he has attained a certain inner freedom” (Conversations with Chancellor F. von Müller, January 5th, 1813.). Goethe was referring here to the active force which asserts itself in all man's striving for knowledge. So long as man remains stationary at the point where he perceives all the antitheses around him, regarding their laws as principles which have been implanted in them and by which they are governed, he has the feeling that they confront him as unknown powers working upon him, forcing upon him the thoughts of their laws. He feels no freedom in face of the objects; he experiences the Law of Nature as inflexible necessity to which he has to submit. Only when man becomes aware that the forces of Nature are only forms of the same spirit that works also in himself does the intuition dawn in him that he partakes of freedom. Nature's Law is perceived as compulsion only so long as man looks upon it as an alien power. If he penetrates its true being it is experienced as a force which he himself uses in his inner being; he feels himself to be an element co-operating productively in the “being and becoming” of things. He is on intimate terms with all power of “becoming;” he has absorbed into his own action what he otherwise only experiences as external instigation. This is the liberating process brought about by the cognitional act in the sense of the Goethean world-conception. Clearly did Goethe perceive the ideas of Nature's activity as they faced him in the Italian works of Art. He also realised clearly the liberating effect which the mastery of these ideas has on man. A consequence of this is his description of the mode of cognition which he speaks of as that of comprehensive minds. “Comprehensive minds, which we can proudly speak of as creative, are productive in the highest degree; in that they take their start from ideas, they already express the unity of the Whole, and it is really thereafter the concern of Nature to submit herself to these ideas.” Goethe, however, never attained to direct perception of the act of liberation. This perception can only be attained by one who observes himself in the act of cognition. Goethe did indeed practise the highest mode of cognition, but he did not observe this mode of cognition in himself. Does he not himself admit: “I have been clever, for I have never thought about thought.”

[ 3 ] But just as the creative powers of Nature after manifold plant forms bring forth one wherein “all the others are contained,” so, after manifold ideas, do these creative powers of Nature produce one wherein is contained the whole of ideas. And man apprehends this idea when to the perception (Anschauung) of other objects and processes, he adds the perception (Anschauung) of thinking. For the very reason that Goethe's thinking was entirely filled with the objects perceived, because his thinking was a perception, his perception a thinking, he could not come to the point of making thought itself into an object of thought. But the idea of freedom is only attained through the perception of thought. Goethe did not make the distinction between thinking about thought and the perception of thought. Otherwise he would have attained the insight that although in the sense of his world-conception one may indeed refrain from thinking about thought, it is nevertheless possible to attain to perception of the world of thought. Man has no participation in the coming-into-existence of all other perceptions. The ideas of these perceptions come to life within him. The ideas, however, would not be there if the productive power to bring them to manifestation did not exist within him. The ideas may be in truth the content of what is working in the objects, but they come to evident existence as a result of the activity of man. Therefore man can only cognise the essential nature of the world of ideas when he perceives his own activity. In every other perception he does nothing more than penetrate the idea in operation; the object in which it is operating remains, as perception, outside his mind. In the perception of the idea the operative activity and what it has brought about are contained within his inner being. He has the whole process completely present within him. The perception no longer seems to have been generated by the idea; for the perception is now itself idea. This perception of what brings forth its self, is, however, the perception of freedom (free spiritual activity). When he observes thought, man penetrates the world-process. Here he has not to search for an idea of this process, for the process is the idea itself. The previously experienced unity of perception and idea is here experience of the spirituality of the world of ideas which has become perceptible. The man who perceives this self-grounded activity has the feeling of freedom. Goethe indeed experienced this feeling but did not express it in its highest form. He practised a free activity in his observation of Nature, but this activity was never objective to him. He never gazed behind the veils of human cognition and therefore never assimilated into his consciousness the idea of the world-process in its essential form, in its highest metamorphosis. As soon as man attains to the perception of this highest metamorphosis he moves with certainty within the realm of things. At the central point of his personality he has attained the true point of departure for all observation of the world. He will no longer search for unknown principles, for causes that he outside himself; he knows that the highest experience of which he is capable consists in the self-contemplation of his own being. Those who are wholly permeated by the feelings which this experience evokes will attain the truest relationship to things. Where this is not the case men will seek for the highest form of existence elsewhere and since it is not to be discovered in experience, they will conjecture that it lies in an unknown region of reality. An element of uncertainty will make its appearance in their observation; in answering the questions which Nature puts to them they will perpetually plead the unfathomable. Because of his life in the world of ideas Goethe had a feeling of the firm central point within the personality, and so he succeeded within certain limits in acquiring sure concepts in his observation of Nature. Because, however, the direct perception of the most inward experience eluded him, he groped around insecurely outside these limits. For this reason he says that man is not born “to solve the problems of the universe but to seek where the problem commences, and then to keep within the boundary of the comprehensible.” He says: “Unquestionably the greatest service rendered by Kant is that he sets up limits to which the human mind is capable of advancing, and that he leaves the insoluble problems alone.” If the perception of the highest experience had yielded him certainty in the observation of things Goethe would have attained more along his path than “a kind of qualified reliability by means of ordered experience.” Instead of penetrating right through experience in the consciousness that the true has only meaning to the extent to which it is demanded by the nature of man, he came to the conviction that “a higher influence favours the constant, the active, the rational, the ordered and the ordering, the human and the pious” and that “the moral World Order” manifests in the greatest beauty where it “comes indirectly to the assistance of the good, of the valiant sufferer.”

[ 4 ] Because Goethe did not know the most inward human experience it was impossible for him to attain to the ultimate thoughts concerning the moral World Order which essentially belong to his conception of Nature. The ideas of things are the content of the active creative elements within them. Man experiences moral ideas directly in the form of ideas. A man who is able to experience how in perception of the world of ideas, the ideal itself becomes self-contained, filled with itself, is also able to experience how the moral element is produced within the nature of man. A man who knows the ideas of Nature only in their relationship to the world of perception will want to relate moral concepts also to something external to them. He will seek a reality for these concepts similar to the reality that exists for concepts that have been acquired from experience. A man, however, who is able to perceive ideas in their own proper essence will be aware that in the case of moral ideas nothing external corresponds to them, that they are produced directly in spiritual experience as ideas. It is clear to him that neither an externally working Divine Will nor an externally working moral World Order is active in producing these ideas. For no trace of relationship to such powers can be observed in them. All that they express is also included in their pure, ideal form which is experienced spiritually. They work upon man as moral powers by virtue of their own content only. No categorical imperative stands behind them with a whip and forces man to follow them. Man feels that he himself has brought them forth and he loves them as he loves his child. Love is the motive power of action. Spiritual delight in one's own production is the source of the moral.

[ 5 ] There are men who are incapable of giving birth to any moral ideas. They assimilate those of other men through tradition. And if they have no perceptual faculty for ideas per se they do not recognise the source of the Moral that can be experienced in the mind. They seek this source in a superhuman Will that lies outside them. Or they believe that outside that spiritual world which is experienced by man there exists an objective, moral World Order whence the moral ideas are derived. The speech organ of this World Order is frequently thought to lie in the human conscience. Goethe is uncertain in his thoughts about the source of the Moral, just as he is about certain matters pertaining to the rest of his world-conception. Here too, his feeling for what is in conformity with ideas drives him to principles that accord with the demands of his nature: “Duty—where man loves the commands he gives to himself.” Only a man who perceives the basis of the Moral wholly in the content of moral ideas could have said: “Lessing, who reluctantly was aware of various limitations, puts these words into the mouth of one of his characters: Nobody is compelled to be compelled (Niemand muss müssen). A spiritually-minded, happily disposed man said: He who wants to—must. A third, a man of culture to be sure, added: He who has insight, he also wants to. And so it was believed that the whole range of knowledge, will and necessity had been defined. But on the average, man's knowledge of whatever kind it be, determines his actions and missions; therefore nothing is more terrible to see than ignorance in action.” The following utterance proves that a sense of the true nature of the moral held sway in Goethe but never became a clear perception: “In order to become perfect the will must submit itself in the moral sphere, to the conscience that does not err. ... The conscience needs no ancestry, everything exists within it, it is concerned with the inner world alone.” “Conscience needs no ancestry” can only mean that originally there exists no moral content in man; he supplies it himself. In contradistinction to these sayings we find others where the origin of conscience is relegated to a region outside man: “However strongly the earth with its thousands upon thousands of phenomena attracts man, he still raises his gaze with longing to the heavens, because he feels deeply and vividly within himself that he is a citizen of that spiritual realm the belief in which we can neither reject nor surrender.” “That which defies solution we leave with God as the All-determinant, All-liberating Being.”

[ 6 ] Goethe has no faculty for observation of the innermost nature of man, for self-contemplation. “I acknowledge in this connection that the mighty command which sounds so significant—‘Know thyself!’—has always roused the suspicion in me that it was a ruse of a secret confederacy of the priesthood whose aim it was to confuse men by unattainable demands and to lead them away from activity in the external world to a false inward contemplation. Man knows himself only to the extent to which he knows the world. He becomes aware of the world only in himself, and of himself, only in the world. Every fresh object, contemplated with deliberation, opens up a new faculty within us.” The truth is exactly the reverse: man knows the world only to the extent to which he knows himself. For what is present as perception in external objects in reflection, example, symbol, only reveals itself in his inner being in its own essential form. That which man can otherwise only speak of as unfathomable, impenetrable, divine, appears before him in its true form in self-perception. Because in self-perception he sees the ideal in direct form he acquires the power and faculty to seek for and recognise this ideal element in all outer phenomena also, in the whole of Nature. A man who has experienced the flash of self-perception does not any longer set out in quest of a “hidden” God behind the phenomena; he apprehends the Divine in its different metamorphoses within Nature. Goethe remarked in reference to Schelling: “I would see him more frequently if I were not still living in the hope of poetic moments; philosophy ruins poetry so far as I am concerned, probably because it forces me into the object, and since I can never remain purely speculative but am compelled to seek a perception for every principle I take flight at once out into Nature.” The highest perception, the perception of the world of ideas, however, was just what he could not discover. That perception cannot ruin poetry, for it alone frees the spirit from all conjectures as to the existence in Nature of an unknown, an unfathomable element. It makes the spirit able to surrender itself wholly and freely to the objects, for it imparts the conviction that all that the spirit may desire from Nature may be gleaned from her.

[ 7 ] The highest perception, however, also frees the human spirit from any one-sided sense of dependence. In possessing it the spirit of man feels itself master in the realm of the moral World Order. The spirit of man knows that in its inner being there works, as in its own will, the motive power that brings forth all things, and that the highest moral decisions lie within itself. For these highest decisions flow from the world of moral ideas, and the soul of man has been present at the production of this world. Man may be conscious of limitation in regard to a particular thing, may be dependent on a thousand others, but on the whole he himself sets his own moral goal and moral direction. The operative element of all other things is manifested in man as idea; the operative element in man is the idea which he himself brings forth. The process that takes place in Nature as a Whole is accomplished in each single human individuality: it is the creation of an actuality from out of the idea, man himself being the creator. For at the basis of his personality there lives the idea which imparts content to itself. Going beyond Goethe, we must expand his phrase that Nature “in her creation is so bounteous that after multifarious plant forms she makes one wherein all the others are contained, and after multifarious animals one being who contains them all—Man.” Nature is so mighty in her creation that she repeats in each individual human being the process by means of which she brings forth all creatures directly out of the idea, inasmuch as moral acts spring from the ideal basis of the personality. That which man feels to be the objective basis of his acts is only the result of “paraphrasing” and misunderstanding of his own being. Man realises himself in his moral acts. In concise phrases Max Stirner has described this knowledge in his work: “The Individual and his Rights.” “I am the owner of my power; I am this when I know myself as a unique individual. In the individual the owner returns to his creative void out of which he was born. Every higher being above me, be he God, be he Man, weakens the sense of my individuality and pales before the sunlight of this consciousness. If I cast my lot upon myself, the individual, it rests on its own perishable, mortal creator who consumes himself, and I am able to say: ‘I have cast my lot on Nothingness.’” But one may reply to Stirner in the words of Faust to Mephistopheles: “In thy Nothingness I hope to find the All,” for in my inner being dwells, in its individual form, the active power whereby Nature creates the All. So long as man has not perceived this active power in himself he will appear, in face of it, as Faust appeared to the Earth Spirit. It will always cry to him in the words: “Thou'rt like the Spirit whom thou comprehendest, not me!” Only the perception of the deepest inner life can conjure forth this Spirit which says of itself:

“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 weaves.”

[ 8 ] In my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity¹ I have tried to show how the knowledge that in his actions man is dependent upon himself is derived from the most inward of all experiences, from the perception of his own being. In 1844 Stirner advocated the view that if man truly understands himself he can only see the basis of his activity in himself. In the case of Stirner, however, this knowledge did not proceed from perception of the most inward experience but from the feeling of being free and untrammelled by all-constraining world powers. Stirner does not go further than to demand freedom; in this region he is led to lay the sharpest possible emphasis on the fact that human nature is based upon itself. I have tried to describe life in freedom on a broader basis by showing what man discovers when he beholds the foundation of his soul. Goethe did not attain to the perception of freedom because he had an aversion to self-knowledge. If this had not been the case the knowledge of man as a free personality based on itself must have constituted the summit of his world-conception. We find the germs of this knowledge everywhere in Goethe, and they are at the same time the germs of his view of Nature.

[ 9 ] In his real studies of Nature Goethe never speaks of impenetrable courses or of hidden motive forces of phenomena. He is content with observing the phenomena in their sequence and explaining them by the help of those elements which in the act of observation are revealed to the senses and the mind. On May 5th, 1786, he writes in this sense to Jacobi; he says that he had the courage “to devote his whole life to the observation of objects accessible to him” and of whose essential being he “can hope to form an adequate idea,” without worrying in the least about how far he will advance or about what is suitable for him. A man who believes that he draws near to Divinity in the single object of Nature does not any longer need to build up for himself a separate conception of a God existing exterior to and alongside of the objects. It is only when Goethe leaves the realm of Nature that his sense for the essential being of objects no longer asserts itself. His lack of human self-knowledge leads him then to make statements that cannot be reconciled either with his innate mode of thought or with the trend of his Nature studies. Those who are prone to refer to statements of this kind may assume that Goethe believed in an anthropomorphous God and in an individual continuation of that form of the soul's life that is bound up with the conditions of the physical, bodily organisation. Such a belief is contradictory to Goethe's Nature studies. The trend of these studies could never have become what it is if Goethe had allowed himself to be guided by this belief. In accordance with the whole character of his Nature studies is the conception that the true being of the human soul lives in a supersensible form of existence after the body has been laid aside. This form of existence necessitates that by reason of the changed life conditions it will also assume a mode of consciousness different from that which it possessed through the physical body. And so the Goethean teaching of metamorphoses leads also to the perception of metamorphoses of soul life. But we shall only be able to apprehend this Goethean idea of Immortality aright if we realise that Goethe's view of the world could not lead him to conceive of an unmetamorphosed continuation of that form of spiritual life that is conditioned by the physical body. Because Goethe did not attempt a perception of the life of thought in the sense indicated here he was not induced in the course of his life to develop in any special degree that idea of Immortality which would have been the continuation of his thoughts on Metamorphosis. This is, however, the idea that would really in truth have followed from his world-conception in reference to this sphere of knowledge. What Goethe gave as the expression of a personal feeling in reference to the view of life of one or another of his contemporaries, or from some other motive, without thinking of its connection with the view of the world won from its Nature studies must not be quoted as characteristic of his idea of Immortality.

[ 10 ] When it is a question of a true estimation of some particular utterance of Goethe within the collective picture of his world-conception, we must also take into consideration the fact that the attitude of his soul in the different periods of his life gives special colouring to such utterances. He was fully conscious of this variation in the forms in which his ideas were expressed. When Forster gave it as his view that the solution of the Faust problem is given in the words:

“A good man through obscurest aspirations
Has still an instinct of the one, true way,”

Goethe's reply was: “That would be an explanation. Faust ends as an old man, and in old age we become Mystics.” And in the Prose Aphorisms we read: “There is a specific philosophy answering to every period of life. The child is a Realist, for it finds itself as convinced about the existence of the pears and apples as it is about its own. The youth, assailed by inner passions, must reckon with himself, must feel his way, and he is transformed into an idealist. On the other hand, the grown man has every cause to become a sceptic; he does well to doubt as to whether the means which he has chosen for his ends are the right ones. Before acting and in action he has every cause to keep his intellect mobile in order that he may not later have to regret a wrong choice. The old man, however, will always embrace Mysticism; he realises that so much seems to be dependent on chance; the unreasonable succeeds, the reasonable strikes amiss, fortune and misfortune alike balance unexpectedly; thus it is, thus it was, and old age rests in Him Who is, Who was and Who will be.”

[ 11 ] In this book I have been concerned with Goethe's world-conception out of which his insight into the life of Nature has developed, and was the driving force in him, from the discovery of the intermaxillary bone in man up to the completion of his Doctrine of Colours. And I think I have shown that this world-conception corresponds more fully to his personality as a whole than any compilation of utterances where it is necessary above all to take into consideration the colouring given to the thoughts by the mood of youth or mature age. It is my belief that in his Nature studies Goethe was guided by a true feeling, although not by a clear self-knowledge in conformity with ideas, and that he maintained a free and independent mode of procedure, derived from the true relationship of human nature to the external world. Goethe himself realises that there is something unfinished in his mode of thought. “I was conscious of great and noble aims, yet I could never understand the conditions under which I worked; I noted what was lacking in me, and equally what was exaggerated; therefore I did not abstain from developing myself from without and from within. And yet it remained as before. I pursued each aim with earnestness, intensity and fidelity. I often succeeded in a complete mastery of refractory conditions, but I was often frustrated by them because I could not learn how to yield and to evade. And so my life passed amid action and enjoyment, suffering and opposition, amid love, contentment, enmity and displeasure of others. Let those who share the same destiny behold themselves mirrored here!”

• 1. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, Anthroposophical Publishing Company, 46 Gloucester Place, London, W.1. Price 12/-

The anthroposophic spiritual science that is represented here—of course, always only piecemeal—is regarded by a lot of people who do not know or do not want to know it as a field of daydreamers and of such human beings who, as one says so easily, are not in the real, in the practical life. Indeed, someone who wants to inform himself cursorily with this or that brochure or with a single talk about the contents and the goal of spiritual science can easily get to such a judgment. That applies, in particular if he—like many others—is less willing on penetrating into the real spiritual fields or if he has all prejudices and suggestions which arise from our civilisation so numerously against such a field of research. Moreover, it is not so seldom today that the bad will is added, no matter whether consciously or unconsciously, then the judgement is ready: oh, this spiritual science deals with matters which the practical human being who wants to stand firmly with both feet on the ground of life should not care about!

However, spiritual science feels intimately related with the most practical fields of life, and where it is appropriately pursued, it places the greatest value on the fact that thinking, the most certain guide, experiences a practical development with the real practical life. Because firstly spiritual science should not be anything that hovers unworldly and otherworldly anywhere in the cloud-cuckoo-land and wants to deduct the human being from the usual everyday life. However, it should be something that can serve our life with all that we think, act, and feel at every moment. Secondly, spiritual science is in a certain sense a preparation of our soul for those levels of knowledge, by which the human being himself penetrates into the higher worlds. One often stresses that spiritual science has a value not only for the human being who already has open eyes to penetrate in the spiritual world, but that the healthy human mind, the unclouded reason and power of judgement are able to understand what the spiritual researcher knows about the higher worlds. For the acceptance of his communications has an infinite value for the human being, long before he himself can penetrate into the spiritual fields. One can say, spiritual science is for everybody a preparation to develop the higher organs of knowledge bit by bit slumbering in the soul by which the spiritual worlds become discernible to us.

We have already spoken partly; we will have still to speak partly about the different methods and performances, which the human being has to carry out in order to penetrate into the spiritual worlds. However, there is always an unconditional requirement: who wants to penetrate into the spiritual world, who wants to apply the methods exactly given by spiritual research, so that the spiritual senses are opened to him, that should never ever venture this way to the higher fields of life without standing on the ground of a healthy, a practically qualified thinking. This healthy thinking is the guide, the true leitmotif, in order to reach the spiritual worlds. Someone reaches them best of all using the methods of spiritual science who does not disdain to educate himself strictly to a thinking bound to reality and its principles. Indeed, if one speaks about the real practical thinking, one easily is contrary to practice, and probably practice of thinking in our world. One has only to remind of something that I have already often suggested here in order to characterise this. Many a person attributes practice to himself in our world. What is, however, practice about which today the so-called practical human beings talk? There is somebody apprenticed to a master. There he learns all those performances and measures which were carried out for decades, maybe since centuries and which are strictly compulsory. He appropriates that all, and the less he thinks, the less he forms an independent, free judgement, the more he goes beaten tracks, the more the world considers him as practical, in particular those consider him who are active in this field. One calls this often impractical what differs only in the least sense from anything that one practises since long time. Maintaining such a practice is mostly not bound to reason, but only to force. Someone who has any position in life and has to carry out things in a way, which appears to be correct for him, insists that every other who is active in this field must do this just as he does it. If he has the power, he pushes everybody out who wants to go forward differently.

Life praxis consists of such conditions in many cases. Then the right also results, as for example in the case where a big progress should be implemented: The first German railway should be built from Fürth to Nuremberg. One consulted an eminently practical board, the Bavarian Medical Council, whether generally this railway should be built. One can read this judgement, even today. It reads, one should build no railway because the driving would ruin the nerves. However, if one wanted to build railways, one should fence them on the left and on the right with high wooden walls, so that passing persons would not get concussions. This is a judgement of practitioners. Whether one would consider these practitioners as practitioners even today, this is the question. Probably not.

Another example, which can show us whether progress originates from those who call themselves practitioners or from other people: you find it certainly very practical that one has no longer to go to the post office with any letter where the postage has then to be determined according to distance and weight. Only during the forties of the nineteenth century, the uniform letter postage was introduced in England. However, not a practitioner of the postal system invented it, but such a practitioner said when the matter should be decided in the parliament, firstly he did not believe that such an advantage arose, as Hill (Sir Rowland Hill, 1795–1879) calculated, and secondly the post-office building had to be extended. He could not imagine that the post-office building has to comply with the postal traffic and not vice versa the traffic with the post-office building. When the first railway should be built from Berlin to Potsdam, a practitioner said, namely that who let two stagecoaches go to Potsdam for many years: if people wanted to throw their money out of the window, one could build the railway. Because this practice of the so-called practitioners is so impractical, if the big issues of life are considered, one can become contrary to these practitioners if one speaks about the practical development of thinking. Something presents to the impartial observer in all fields of life that can show how it is with the real life praxis.

Once I experienced a quite vivid example, what practical thinking can prevent. A friend of my study time came once excitedly with red head to me. He said, he must immediately go to the professor and inform him that he has made a great invention. Then he came back and said, he could speak the expert only in one hour, and then he explained his invention to me. It was a device, which set a machine in motion expending a very small quantity of steam power only once supplied, and then this machine perpetually performed an immense work. My friend himself was surprised that he was so clever to make such an invention, which exceeded everything and made good economic sense. I said to him, he should trace back the matter to a simple thought. I said, “Imagine, you stand in a railroad carriage and you try to push against the walls of the carriage in order to move it. If you succeed in moving the carriage standing and pushing in it, your engine is good, because it is based on the same principle.”

At that time, I realised that a main obstacle of all practical thinking can be called with a technical term: one is a “carriage pusher from within!” This fits the thinking of many people; they are “carriage pushers from within.” What does that mean? That one is only able to survey a certain narrow field and to apply to this field what one has learned to this field. However, one is also forced to stop within this field and cannot see at all that everything changes substantially, as soon as one exits from the “carriage.”

This is one of the principles, which one has to follow above all with a practical development of thinking: that every human being who is active in any field must try to connect it with adjacent fields regardless of his own activity. Otherwise, it is impossible that he gets to a practical thinking. For this is a peculiarity which is connected with a certain internal sluggishness that the human thinking likes to be encapsulated and forgets what is outdoors, even if it is palpable.

I have recently stated in other connections that one wants to prove the Kant-Laplace theory: Once the universal nebula was there. This started rotating by any cause; the single planets of the solar system separated bit by bit and received the movement, which they have still today. One makes this very clear in a school experiment, the so-called Plateau (Joseph P., 1801–1883, Belgian physicist) experiment: one gives an oil drop in a vessel with water. Then one cuts out a disc of cardboard as the equator. One lays this under the oil globule. Then one pierces it with a needle, rotates the needle—and small oil globules separate in the equator area like planets, and they move around the big globule. One has committed something very impractical in intellectual respect: the experimenter has forgotten himself what is sometimes rather good; he has forgotten that he himself has turned the thing. For one is not allowed to forget the most important of the matter. If one wants to explain an experiment, one has to invoke all things in the field to which it comes down; these are the essentials.

The first that must exist with that who wants to experience a practical development of thinking is that he confides in reality, in the reality of thoughts. What does this mean? You cannot scoop water from a glass without water. You cannot take out thoughts from a world without thoughts. It is absurd if one believes that the whole sum of our thoughts and mental pictures exists only in us. If anybody disassembles a clock and reflects the principles of its construction, then he must suppose that the watchmaker has joined the parts of the clock first according to these principles. Nobody should believe that one could find any thought from a world, which is not created and formed according to thoughts. All that we learn about nature and its events is nothing else than what must be put first into this nature and its events. It is no thought in our soul, which has not been outdoors in the world first. Aristotle said more correctly than some modern people did: what the human being finds in his thinking last exists in the world outdoors first.

However, if anybody has this confidence in the thoughts, which are contained in the world, then he sees very easily that he has to educate himself at first to a thinking full of interest in the world. He has to educate himself to that great, beautiful ideal of thinking as it distinguished Goethe: the concrete thinking, that thinking which isolates itself as little as possible from the things, that sticks to the things as intensely as possible. Heinroth (Johann Christian August H., 1773–1843, physician, formed the term “psychosomatics”), the psychologist, used a sentence concerning Goethe that his thinking is a concrete one, where the thoughts express nothing else than what is included in the things themselves and that in the things nothing else is searched than the real creative thought. If anyone has this confidence, this faith in the reality of thoughts, he easily realises that he can educate himself in harmony with the environment, in harmony with reality to a practical, healthy thinking not receding from the things.

One has to take into consideration three ways if the human being really wants to take on an education to practical thinking: firstly, the human being must and should develop an interest in the surrounding reality, interest concerning facts and objects. Interest in the environment, this is the magic word for the education of thought. Secondly, desire and love of that which we do. Thirdly, the satisfaction of that which we reflect. Who understands these three things: interest in the environment, desire, and love in the activities and the satisfaction of contemplation soon finds that these are the main demands of a practical development of thinking. Indeed, the interest in our environment depends on matters that we discuss with the next talks when we speak about the invisible members of the human nature and about the temperaments.

The biggest enemy of thinking is often thinking itself. If anybody thinks that only he himself can think and the things would not have any thought in themselves, he is hostile, actually, to the practice of thinking. Imagine that a person would have formed some narrow mental pictures of the human being, would have made a few stereotyped schematic concepts of the human being. Now any human being faces him who has roughly the qualities, which fit his pattern. Then he is ready with his judgement and does not believe that this human being can tell him anything particular. If we approach anything that surrounds us with the feeling that any fact can tell us something particular, that we are not entitled at all to let judge something else about the things than the things themselves, then we soon notice which fruits such concrete sense bears. The confidence that the things can tell us much more than we are able to say about the things is again such a magic ideal of the practice of thinking. The things themselves should be the educators of our thinking, the facts themselves.

Imagine once that a person brings himself to use the following two important means of education for his practical development of thinking: he opposes himself with any fact, for example, that somebody has done a walk to this or that place just today. He experiences that at first. Now the person concerned wants to educate his thinking. There it is good if he says to himself, I have experienced this and that, now I want to contemplate how the today's event was caused yesterday, the day before yesterday and so on. I go back and try to form a view from that which goes forward to that which could have been. If I have selected such an event and the cause of it after my intellectual imagination, then I can investigate whether the real cause complies with my thoughts. I have something very important from such compliance or non-compliance. If my thoughts comply with that which I can know as the cause, then it is good. In most cases, this will not be the case. Then one investigates in what one was deceived and tries to compare the wrong thoughts with the right course of the events. If one does this repeatedly, one notices that one no longer makes mistakes after a shorter or longer time, but that one can liberate such a thought from a fact, which corresponds, to the objective course of the events.

Alternatively, one does the following: again, someone takes an event and tries to construct in thoughts what can result tomorrow or in some hours from this event. Now he waits quietly whether that happens which he has thought himself. In the beginning, he experiences that this is not right which he has thought. However, if he continues this, he sees thinking immersing itself in the facts that it does not form any mental pictures for itself, but that the thoughts proceed as the things proceed. This is the development of the factual sense. If he even forbids to himself to form abstractions, then he experiences that he grows gradually together with the things and that he obtains a sure judgement.

There are people who are directed by a certain sure instinct to such a thinking. This is because they are already born with special dispositions to develop such a thinking. Such a person was Goethe. He had grown together with the things so that his thinking did not proceed in the head, but in the things inside. Goethe, who was once a lawyer, had a healthy power of judgement and a sure instinct to tackle the things. There was no long referring to documents and reviewing of documents if a case had to be undertaken. Goethe did not allow that. It was a practitioner.

If once all documents of the Weimar minister Goethe are published—I have seen big parts of them—then the world will recognise Goethe as an eminently practical nature, not as a quixotic human being. One knows that he accompanied his Grand Duke with the training of recruits to Apolda (small town near Weimar). He observed everything that took action—and, besides, he wrote his Iphigenia. Compare to it what disturbs a modern poet at work. Moreover, Goethe was a much greater poet than anyone was who is not allowed to be disturbed today. Because of the eminently practical thinking, he could also say, for example, if he looked through the window: today we cannot go out, because it will be raining in three hours.—He had done cloud studies, but had put up no theory. It was in such a way that from his thinking developed what developed in nature outdoors. One calls this concrete thinking. One obtains such concrete thinking if one does such exercises in particular as I have just stated them. However, this is connected with a certain unselfishness, as strange as this sounds. However, there are principles also in the soul, and someone will not attain very much who thinks only of himself if he does such experiments. If he looks, for example, at a fact and says then immediately, ah, have I not said it? Therefore, this is the most certain obstacle of practical thinking. Thus, we could state many things to show how one can systematically develop the sympathetic adherence of the thoughts to the things, so that one learns to think in the things.

The second is desire and love of all we do. They really only exist if we can renounce success. Where it depends only on success desire and love are not undimmed. Hence, not anyone who is dependent on success can develop that rest in trying which is necessary, so that desire and love of activity can inspire us bit by bit. By nothing, we learn more than by lending a hand to everything possible and renouncing the so-called success. I knew somebody who had the habit to bind his schoolbooks himself (Steiner himself). It looked bad, but he thereby learnt enormously. If he had looked at the success, he would have maybe refrained from it. However, just in the activities we develop the qualities, the talents that enable us to become dexterous up to the movements. We never become dexterous if we look at the success of our activities in particular. If we are not able to say to ourselves, the failures in our activities are as dear to us as our results, we never reach the second level, which is necessary if one trains thinking.

Thirdly, we have to find satisfaction in thinking itself. This is something that appears so unambitious and is mostly combated today. How often does one hear saying, why have our children to learn this and that? They cannot need this in the practical life.—This principle to think only what one can need is the most impractical principle. There must be areas for a human being if he wants to think practically where the mere activity of thinking grants satisfaction to him.

If a human being does not find time, may it be only short, to do something that he does purely intellectually and that satisfies him intellectually, he can remain always only on beaten paths. If he finds, however, such a thing that he does only because of his inner interest, then he has something that has a big, strong effect on him, on his finer organisation, on the finer structure of his organism. Never work the things on us creatively, which captivate us to life, which enslave us; they wear out our talents, they take vitality from us. The things, however, which we do intellectually only to our satisfaction create vitality, new talents and they go into the subtlest organisation of our being and increase the subtle structures of our organism. Not by working for the benefit of the outside world, but by working to our satisfaction we create something by which we advance a developmental step. If we approach practice with this finer organisation again, this affects the practice, and everybody can see that it is right.

Take a painting, for example, the Sistine Madonna by Raphael, and put a human being and a dog before it. The painting makes a different impression on the human being and the dog. The same applies to the life praxis. If one remains captivated in life, the things always make the same impression on us, and one is not able to intervene creatively. If anyone develops a level higher in his activity of thinking, he faces the impressions as the same being in two different forms. He faces it once with that on which he has not yet worked, the other time with that on which he has worked. He becomes more and more practical because the impressions, which make the things on us, are raised more and more. Hence, there is loss of time, indeed, if one does such a thing that does not belong to life praxis directly, however, it promotes life praxis extraordinarily indirectly.

These are the three levels of any practical development of thinking: interest in the environment, desire, and love of all trying and working, and perpetually controlling oneself. You see, for example, such an astute man like Leonardo da Vinci already describing the way in which one can advance just while trying. He does not despise to say how one can appropriate the art of drawing bit by bit. He says, draw on tracing paper, put what you have drawn on the template, and look at that in which the drawn differs. Then make it once again and try—doing so—to do the right thing at the wrong places.—Thus, he shows how it depends on working with desire and love. The third is the satisfaction within contemplation that refrains from the external world and can quietly rest in itself. These are such things that can show us first that we grow into a real practice of thinking by the trust in the thoughts in nature, in the world building of thoughts. However, if we also believe that thinking itself is a creative force, we advance. Someone does much for the practical development of his thinking who does the following systematically: he thinks about something, for example, about what he has to do or about a question of the worldview, it may be anything usual or anything of the highest. If he is out now to find a solution quickly, then he develops no practical thinking as a rule. This rather means saying to himself: you are as little as possible allowed to interfere, actually, in your own thoughts.—Besides, most human beings can imagine nothing at all if one says this. This is a main requirement: that we open ourselves to the thoughts in ourselves that we get used to becoming the scene of the work of our thoughts. We could think, there would be only one single way to accomplish a certain thing, or only one single answer to a question. Nevertheless, we are no dogmatists to whom only one single answer is right.

If we want to learn practical thinking, we have to try to give ourselves also another answer, maybe also a third one, or a fourth. There are things to which one can think ten sorts of answers. One has to imagine them all carefully, of course, only such things where this is possible, not with such ones, which must be made quickly; one often makes them rather badly than too slowly. If one has ten possible solutions, one carries out each in thoughts with love. Then one says, I want to think no longer about it, I wait until tomorrow and open myself to the thoughts. These thoughts are forces that work in my soul, even if I am not at all involved with my consciousness. I wait until tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, and then I cause this thought again in myself.—Maybe I do this still a second or a third time, and each time I survey the single things much clearer and can then decide better than before. This is an incredible schooling of practical thinking presenting different possible solutions of a thing in thoughts to oneself, to allow them to rest and to take up them later again.

Who does this for a while notices that his thinking becomes versatile, that he develops presence of mind and repartee by a certain practice. Then he grows together with life until the most usual things and recognises what is clever and clumsy, what is wise, and what is foolish. It does not come into his mind to behave in such a way as often so-called practical persons behave. I already had to know many practical persons who can use the beaten paths of their occupation very well; if you see such persons in other situations, for instance, at travelling, their practice is often rather odd. The proof that the practical development of thinking can lead to real life praxis is founded in experience. This works up to the hands, up to the way to seize something. Much less, you drop plates and pots than other persons if you work in such way on your inside. Practical thinking works up to the limbs. If it is carried out actively and not in the abstract, it makes pliable and flexible.

However, impractical thinking is most obvious where the practice of thinking should work, for example, in science. I have stated the hypothetical astronomic experiment as an example. One often experiences, how frightfully impractical just the scientists of today are. I do not attack the real methodical work, the excellent activity of our science in the slightest. Nevertheless, the thoughts, which the modern human beings form, are often almost dreadful. Our microscopes and the photograph are very well developed. One can observe all possible mysterious facts in the various little beings. One observes plants and sees certain strange things in these plants, possibly faceted organs like the eyes of a fly, and one even sees a sort of lenses in some plants at this or that place.

One observes with other plants that certain insects are attracted, and then the plants close their leaves and catch the insects. One has excellently observed that all. How does the present impractical thinking explain these phenomena? One confuses the human soul, which reflects the outer processes internally, with that which one observes purely externally in the plants. One talks about the ensoulment of the plant, and one throws plant soul, animal soul and human soul in a mess. One throws this in a mess. Indeed, I object nothing to the marvellous observations of nature, which are popularised in the world. However, the thinking of our contemporaries is confused if anybody says, certain plants have their stomachs at the surface with which they draw in the food and devour it. This thought is approximate in such a way, as if anybody says: I know a being, this is organised artfully and has an organ in itself by which something like a magnetic force is exercised on little living beings, so that they are drawn in and are devoured; this being, which I have in mind, is the mousetrap! This thought is completely the same as that which assumes the ensoulment of the plant. You could speak in the same sense of an ensoulment of the mousetrap as you talk about the ensoulment of the plant if you really thought in this peculiar way.

The matter is that one is able to penetrate into the very own nature of thinking, and that one becomes no “carriage pusher from within” in such fields. Something else is important for the practical development of thinking and this is that one has confidence in the inner spiritual organ of thinking. With most human beings, the benevolent nature provides that this spiritual organ of thinking is not ruined too very much because the human being must sleep.

Because the spiritual does not stop then, because it is there always, this organ of thinking works for itself and the human being cannot ruin it perpetually. However, it is quite another matter if the human being allows nature to take care of thinking with important and serious facts of life only, or if he himself takes this in hand. It is a very important principle to let the organ of thinking work in yourselves. You are practicing this best of all if you try not to think for a while, howsoever short. A big, immense decision belongs to it to sit or to lie somewhere without letting thoughts go through the head. It is much easier to let your thoughts surge up and down in yourselves, until you are released from them by a good sleep than to tell yourselves: now you are awake and, nevertheless, you do not think, but you think nothing at all. If you are able to sit or to lie quietly and to think nothing with full consciousness, then the organ of thinking works in such a way that it gains strength in itself, accumulates strength. Who puts himself in the situation over and over again not to think with full consciousness notices that the clearness of his thinking increases, that in particular repartee grows because he does not only leave his apparatus of thinking to itself by sleep, but that he lets this apparatus of thinking itself work under his guidance.

Only somebody who has taken leave of his spiritual senses can believe that then it is not thought at all. Here the word applies that Goethe says about nature: “She has thought and thinks continuously.”

In addition, the innermost nature of the human being has thoughts, even if the human being is not present with his conscious thoughts. Nevertheless, in the case where he is not at all with his thinking, something thinks in him of which he is not aware. At these moments, if he lies there without his own personal thoughts, something higher really thinks in him, and this higher works tremendously educating on him. This is essential and important that the human being also lets the superconscious, the divine work in himself, which does not announce itself directly but in its effects. You become a clear and glib thinker gradually if you have dedicated yourselves to such exercises of thinking. A certain energy belongs to it to carry out such exercises of thinking.

You realise at the single examples, which I have given today, how one can develop this thinking with own strength. I could only give some examples of self-education of thinking, but these examples have shown that one is able to point to real remedies of thinking whose fruits life and experience can give only.

Who exercises his thinking that way experiences that—on the one side—he can go up to the highest fields of spiritual life, that he can use this thinking—on the other side—also in the everyday life. What one gains with the overview of the big spiritual facts one should apply to practical life. All fields of the everyday life, education in particular, could experience a tremendous fertilisation because of this, and another view of life praxis would make itself noticeable all around us. In addition, someone who wants to develop the qualities slumbering in him in order to penetrate to the spiritual fields would have a sure base and stand firmly in life. This is something that one has to demand absolutely, before anybody penetrates to the higher spiritual fields. In addition, the usual science would be able to attain tremendous knowledge if it is fertilised by spiritual science.

The carriage pushers of thinking who fancy themselves often as great practitioners do not have this practical thinking; they lack it. They are not able to lead back something to a simple, comprising thought. Spiritual science gives us this: it enables us to survey what is usually small and detailed in life, with big, comprising viewpoints. The human being thereby gets the survey because he is able to think from great viewpoints into the details; then he is led to real life praxis.

We can take Leonardo da Vinci as an example, who was a practitioner in many fields. He said, theory is the captain, and practice is the soldiers.—Who wants to be a practitioner without controlling the viewpoints of practical thinking is like someone who goes on board a ship without compass, he does not have the possibility to steer the ship correctly. Goethe showed repeatedly from his practical way of thinking how just scholarship gets by impractical thinking to infertile fantasising. There are people, who lead the outside world back to atoms, and others who lead them back to movements; others deny any movement. On the other hand, the most practical thinkers point to the fact that simplicity comes from the greatness of the worldview. Goethe's dictum is suitable, and we can put it before our eyes:

Some hostile may occur,
Keep quiet, remain silent;
And if they say
There is no movement,
Walk around right
Under their noses.

Ever since the early days of Christianity it has been the custom to draw a distinction between the festivals of Christmas and of Easter in that the Christmas festival has been made immovable, having been fixed at a point of time a few days after the 21st of December, the winter solstice, whereas the day of the Easter festival is determined by a particular constellation of the stars, a constellation of the stars which unites earth and man with the worlds beyond the earth. To-morrow will be the first full moon of spring and upon this full moon will fall the rays of the springtime sun, for since the 21st of March the sun has been in the sign of spring. When, therefore, men on earth celebrate a Sunday—a day, that is, which should remind them of their connection with the sun-forces—when the Sunday comes that is the first after the full moon of spring, then is the time to keep the Easter festival. Easter is thus a movable festival. In order to determine the time of the Easter festival, note must be taken each year of the constellations in the heavens.

Principles such as these were laid down at a time when traditions of wisdom were still current among mankind, traditions that originated from ancient atavistic clairvoyant faculties and gave man a knowledge far surpassing the knowledge that present-day science can offer. And such traditions were a means for bringing to expression man's connection with the worlds beyond the earth. They always point to something of supreme importance for the evolution [of] mankind.

The rigid point of time fixed for the Christmas festival indicates how closely that festival is bound up with the earthly, for its purpose is to remind us of the birth of the Man into whom the Christ Being afterwards entered. The Easter festival, on the other hand, is intended to remind us of an event whose significance lies, not merely within the course of earth-evolution, but within the whole world-order into which man has been placed. Therefore the time of the Easter festival must not be determined by ordinary earthly conditions; it is a time that can be ascertained only when man turns his thoughts to the worlds beyond the earth. And there is deeper meaning still in this plan of a movable time for the Easter festival. It indicates how through the Christ Impulse man is to be set free from the forces of earth-evolution pure and simple. For through knowledge of that which is beyond the earth, man is to become free of the evolution of the earth, and this truth is indicated in the manner of dating the Easter festival. It contains a call to man to lift himself up to the worlds beyond the earth; it contains a promise to man that in the course of world-history it shall be possible for him, through the working of the Christ Impulse, to become free of earthly conditions.

To understand all that is implied in this manner of dating the Easter festival, it will be helpful to turn our minds to early secrets of the beginnings of Christianity, to some of those early mysteries which during a certain period of earthly evolution have become more and more veiled and hidden from the materialistic view of the world which arose at the beginning of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch and must now be vanquished and superseded. In order to see the whole matter in a true light it will be necessary first of all to consider the part played by the figure of St. Paul in the evolution of the Christ Impulse within the whole history of mankind.

We should indeed remind ourselves again and again what a great event in the evolution of Christianity was the appearance of the figure of St. Paul. Paul had had abundant opportunity to inform himself, by external observation, of the events in Palestine that were associated with the personality of Jesus. All that came to his notice in this way in the physical world left Paul unconvinced; when these events in Palestine had come to an end in the physical sense, Paul [was] still an antagonist of Christianity. He became the Apostle of the Christians only after the event at Damascus, after he had experienced the very Being of the Christ in an extra-earthly, super-sensible manner. Thus Paul was a man who could not be persuaded of the meaning of the Christ Impulse by evidence of the physical senses, but who could be convinced only by a super-sensible experience. And the super-sensible experience that came to him cut deeply into his life—so deeply indeed, that from that moment he became another man. Nay, more: he became an Initiate.

Paul was well prepared for such an experience. He was thoroughly acquainted with the secrets of the religion of the Jews; he was familiar with their knowledge and their conception of the world. He was thus well equipped to judge of the nature of the event that befell him at Damascus and to have a right view and understanding of it. The writings of Paul, as we know them, convey only a weak reflection of all that he experienced inwardly. But even so, when he speaks of the event of Damascus we can discern that he speaks as one who through this event attained knowledge of cosmic happenings lying behind the veil of the world of sense. From the very manner in which he speaks it is plain that he is fully able to understand the difference between the super-sensible world and the world of sense.

When, even externally, we compare the life of Paul with the earthly experience of Christ Jesus, we discover a strange and astounding fact which becomes intelligible to us, only when with the help of spiritual science, we are able to survey the whole evolution of mankind in a particular aspect. [I] have often drawn attention to the great difference in the development of the human soul in the several epochs. I have shown you how man has changed in the course of evolution through the Indian, Persian, Egypto-Chaldean, Greco-Latin epochs, on to our own time. When we look back into the ancient past we find that man remained capable of organic physical development until an advanced age, The parallelism between the development of the soul and the development of the body continued until an advanced age of life; it is a parallelism that we can recognise now only in the three stages marked by the change of teeth, puberty and the beginning of the twenties. As far as out-ward appearance goes, mankind has lost the experience of such transitions in later life. In very ancient Indian times, however, men experienced a parallelism between the development of soul and of body up to the fiftieth year of life, in Persian and Egyptian times up to the fortieth year, and in Greco-Latin times up to the thirty-fifth year. In ordinary consciousness, we experience a like parallelism only up to the twenty-seventh year and it is not easy to detect even for so long as that. Now the Christ Impulse entered into the evolution of mankind at a time when men—especially those of the Greek and Latin races—experienced this parallelism as late as into the thirtieth year. And Christ Jesus lived His days of physical earthly life for just so long as the duration of the span of life which ran in a parallelism between the physical organisation and the organisation of soul and spirit. Then, in relation to earthly life, He passed through the gate of death. What this passage through the gate of death means can be understood only from the point of view of spiritual science; it can be understood only when we are able to look into super-sensible worlds. For the passage through the gate of death is not an event that can be grasped by any thinking concerned entirely with the world of sense.

As physical man, Paul was of about the same age as Christ Jesus Himself. The time that Christ Jesus spent in His work on earth, Paul spent as an anti-Christian. And the second half of his life was determined entirely by what came to him from super-sensible experiences. In this second half of his life he had super-sensible experience of what men at that time could no longer receive in the second half of life through sense-experience, because the parallelism between soul-and-spirit development and physical development was not experienced beyond the thirty-fifth year of life. And the Event of Golgotha came before Paul in such a way that he received, by direct illumination, the understanding once possessed by men in an atavistic way through primeval wisdom, and which they can now again acquire through spiritual science. This understanding came to Paul in order that he might be the one to arouse in men a realisation of what had happened for mankind through the working of the Christ Impulse.

For about the same length of time that Christ had walked the earth, did Paul continue to live upon earth—that is, until about his sixty-seventh or sixty-eighth year. This time was spent in carrying the teaching of Christianity into earth-evolution. The parallelism between the life of Christ Jesus and the life of Paul is a remarkable one. The life of Christ Jesus was completely filled with the presence and Being of the Christ. Paul had such a strong after-experience (acquired through Initiation) of this event, that he was able to be the one to bring to mankind true and fitting ideas about Christianity—and to do so for a period of time corresponding very nearly to that of the life of Christ Jesus on earth. There is a great deal to be learned from a study of the connection between the life lived by Christ Jesus for the sake of the earthly evolution of mankind, and the teaching given by Paul concerning the Christ Being. To see this connection aright would mean a very great deal for us; only it is necessary to realise that the connection is a direct result of the super-sensible experience undergone by Paul.

When modern theology goes so far as to explain the event at Damascus as a kind of illusion, as a kind of hallucination, then it is only a proof that in our day even theology has succumbed to materialism. Even theology has no longer any knowledge of the nature of the super-sensible world, and entirely fails to recognise man's need to understand the super-sensible world before he can have any true comprehension of Christianity.

It is good that we should confess to-day, in all sincerity, how difficult it is to find our way into the ideas presented in the Gospels and in the Epistles of Paul—ideas that are so totally different from those to which we are accustomed. For the most part we have ceased to concern ourselves at all with such ideas. But it is a fact that a man who is completely given up to the habits and ways of thought of the present day, is far from being able to form the right ideas when he reads the words of Paul. Many present-day theologians put a materialistic interpretation upon the event of Damascus, even trying to disprove and deny the actual Resurrection of Christ Jesus—while professing at the time to be true Christians. Such persons themselves bear testimony that they have no intention of applying knowledge of the super-sensible to the essence of Christianity or to the event of the appearance of Christ Jesus in earthly evolution. The very fact that the figure of Paul stands at the summit of Christian tradition, the figure, that is, of one who acquired an understanding of Christianity through super-sensible experience, is like a challenge to man to possess himself of super-sensible knowledge. It is like a declaration that Christianity cannot possibly be comprehended without having recourse to knowledge that has its source in the super-sensible. It is essential that we should see in Paul a man who had been initiated into super-sensible, cosmic happenings; it is essential to see in this light what he laboured so hard to bring to mankind. Let us try in the language of the present day to place before our minds one of the things that seemed to Paul, as an Initiate, to be of peculiar significance.

Paul regarded it of supreme importance to make clear to men how through the Christ Impulse an entirely new way of relating themselves to cosmic evolution had come to them. He felt it essential to declare: that that period of the evolution of the world which carried within it the experiences of the heathen of older times, had run its course; it was finished for man. New experiences were now here for the human soul; they needed only to be perceived.

When Paul spoke in this way, he was pointing to the mighty Event which made such a deep incision into the evolution of man on earth; and indeed if we would understand history as it truly is, we must come back again and again to this Event. If we look back into pre-Christian times, and especially into those times which possess to a striking degree the characteristic qualities of pre-Christian life, we can feel how different was the whole outlook of men in those days. Not that a complete change took place in a single moment; nevertheless the Event of Golgotha did bring about an absolute separation of one phase in the evolution of mankind from another. The Event of Golgotha came at the end of a period of evolution during which men beheld, together with the world of the senses, also the spiritual. Incredible as it may appear to modern man it is a fact that in pre-Christian times men saw, together with the sense-perceptible, a spiritual reality. They did not see merely trees, or merely plants, but together with the trees, and together with the plants they saw something spiritual. But as the time of the Event of Golgotha drew near, the civilisation that bore within it this power of vision was coming to an end. Something completely new was now to enter into the evolution of mankind. As long as man beholds the spiritual in the physical things all around him, he cannot have a consciousness which allows the impulse of freedom to quicken within it. The birth of the impulse of freedom is necessarily accompanied by a loss of this vision; man has to find himself deserted by the divine and spiritual when he looks out upon the external world. The impulse of freedom inevitably implies that, if man would again have vision of the spiritual, he must exert himself inwardly and draw it forth from the depths of his own soul.

This is what Paul wanted to reveal to men. He told them how in ancient times, when men were only the race of Adam, they had no need to draw forth an active experience from the depths of their own being before they could behold the divine and spiritual. The divine and spiritual came to them in elemental form, with everything that lived in the air and on earth. But mankind had gradually to lose this living communion with the divine and spiritual in all the phenomena of the world of sense. A time had to come when man must perforce lift himself up to the divine and spiritual by an active strengthening of his own inner life. He had to learn to understand the words: “My kingdom is not of this world.” He was not to be allowed to go on receiving a divine and spiritual reality that came forth to meet him from all sense-phenomena. He had to find the way to a divine and spiritual kingdom that could be reached only by inward struggle and inward development.

People interpret Paul to-day in such a trivial manner! Again and again they show an inclination to translate what he said into the language of this materialistic age. So trivial is their interpretation of him that one is liable to be dubbed fantastic when one puts forward such a view as the following concerning the content of his message. And yet it is absolutely true.

Paul saw what a great crisis it was for the world that the ancient vision, which was at one and the same time a sense-vision and a spiritual vision, was fading away and disappearing, and that another vision of the spiritual was now to dawn for man in a new kingdom of light,¹ a vision which he must acquire for himself by his own inner initiative, and which is not immediately present for him in the vision of the senses. Paul knew from his own super-sensible experience in Initiation that ever since the Resurrection Christ Jesus has been united with earth-evolution. But he also knew that, although Christ Jesus is present, He can be found by man only through the awakening of an inner power of vision, not through any mere beholding with the senses. Should any man think he can reach the Christ with the mere vision of the senses, Paul knew that he must be giving himself up to delusions, he must be mistaking some demon for the Christ.

This was what Paul was continually emphasising to those of his hearers who were able to understand it: that the old spiritual vision brings no approach to Christ, that with this old vision one can only mistake some elemental being for the Christ. Therefore Paul exerted all his power to bring men out of the habit of looking to the spirits of air and of earth.² In earlier times men had been familiar with elemental spirits, and necessarily so, for in those times they still possessed atavistic faculties with which to behold them. But now these faculties could not rightly be possessed by man. On the other hand, Paul never wearied of exhorting men to develop within themselves a force whereby they might learn to understand what it was that had taken place, namely, an entirely new impulse, an entirely new Being had entered earth-evolution. “Christ will come again to you,” he said, “if you will only find the way out of your purely physical vision of the earth. Christ will come again to you, for He is there. Through the working of the Event of Golgotha, He is there. But you must find Him; He must come again for you.”

This is what Paul proclaimed, and in a language which at the time had quite another spiritual ring than has the mere echo left us in our translation. It sounded quite different then. Paul sought continually to awaken in man the conviction that if he would understand Christ, he must develop a new kind of vision; the vision that suffices for the world of sense is not enough. To-day, mankind has only come so far as to speak of the contrast between an external, sense-derived science, and faith. Modern theology is ready to admit of the former that it is complicated, that it is real and objective, that it requires to be learned; of faith it will allow no such thing. It is repeatedly emphasised that faith ought to make appeal to what is utterly childlike in man, to that in man which does not need to be learned.

Such is the attitude of mind which rejects the event of Damascus as unreal, preferring to regard it as a kind of hallucination that befell Paul. If, however, the event of Damascus was a mere hallucination—or I might just as well say, if the event of Damascus was what a great number of modern theologians would have it to be—then we ought also to have the courage to say: Away with Christianity! For Christianity has brought with it a belief that is absurd and senseless.

This would be the necessary outcome of the teaching of modern theology, if only people took it—first of all, seriously, and secondly, with courage. As a matter of fact they do neither. They shrink from having nothing but a merely external, sense-given science, and yet at the same time they deny the real, inner impulse of the event of Damascus, while still professing to hold fast to Christianity! It is precisely in such things that the soul-and-spirit sickness of our age comes to clearest expression; for a deep inner lack of truth is here laid bare. Truth would be obliged to confess: Either the event of Damascus was a reality, an event that can be placed in the realm of reality, then Christianity has meaning; or it was what it is asserted to be by modern theology, which wants always to associate itself with modern science; then Christianity has no meaning. It is important that people should face such conclusions, for there is no doubt we live in an age of severe testing. Through man's becoming inwardly untrue in regard to the very matters that are most sacred for him—for he ought no longer to call what he has, ‘Christianity’—through this, a tendency to untruth, often unconscious but no less destructive on that account, has taken hold of mankind. That is the real reason for the existence of this tendency. That is why this tendency to untruth is so closely interwoven with the events that will inevitably lead to decadence in the whole cultural life of Europe, unless men bethink themselves in time and turn to spiritual knowledge.

And if we would turn to spiritual knowledge, it is emphatically not enough in these days to rest content with looking at life in any superficial way; it is absolutely essential for us to take things in all their depth of meaning and to be ready to contemplate the necessity of mighty changes in our own time.

Again and again we must ask: What is a festival such as that of Easter for the greater part of mankind? It may be said of a very many people that when they are in the circle of their friends who still want to gather together to keep the festival, all their thinking about Easter runs along the lines of old habits of thought; they use the old words, they go on uttering them more or less automatically, they make the same renunciation in the same formula to which they have long been accustomed. But have we any right to-day to utter this renunciation, when we can observe on every hand a distinct unwillingness to take part in the great change that is so necessary in our own time? Are we justified in using the words of Paul: “Not I, but Christ in me!” when we show so little inclination to examine into what it is that has brought such great unhappiness to mankind in the modern age? Should it not go together with the Easter festival that we set out to gain a clear idea of the destiny that has befallen mankind and of what it is that alone can lead us out of the catastrophe—namely, super-sensible knowledge? If the Easter festival, whose whole significance depends upon super-sensible knowledge—for knowledge of the senses can never explain the Resurrection of Christ Jesus—if this Easter festival is to be taken seriously, is it not essential that men should bethink themselves how a super-sensible character can be brought again into the human faculty of knowledge? Should not this be the thought that rises up in men's minds to-day: All the lying and deception in modern culture is due to the fact that we ourselves are no longer in earnest about what we recognise as the sacred festivals of the year?

We keep Easter, the festival of Resurrection, but in our materialistic outlook we have long ago ceased caring whether or not we have a real understanding of the Resurrection. We set ourselves at enmity with the truth and we try to find all manner of ingenious ways of accepting the cosmic jest—for indeed it would be, or rather it is a jest that man should keep the festival of the Resurrection and at the same time put his whole faith in modern science which obviously can never make appeal to such a Resurrection. Materialism and the keeping of Easter—these are two things that cannot possibly belong together; they cannot possibly exist side by side. And the materialism of modern theology—that too is incompatible with the Easter festival. In our own time a book entitled “The Essence of Christianity” has been written by an eminent theologian of Central Europe, and is accounted of outstanding importance. Yet throughout this work we find evidence of a desire not to take seriously the fact of the Resurrection of Christ Jesus. There you have a true symptom of the times!

Men must learn to feel these things deeply in their hearts. We shall never find a way out of our present troubles unless we develop understanding of the enmity cherished by the modern materialistically minded man towards the truth, unless we learn to see through things like this, for they are of very great significance in life to-day.

During the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch a new tendency has been at work, a tendency towards a scientific knowledge that is adapted to the power of human reason and judgment; and now it is time that this should go further and develop into a knowledge of the super-sensible world. For the Event of Golgotha is an event that falls absolutely within the super-sensible world. And the event of Damascus, as Paul experienced it, is an event that can be understood only out of super-sensible ideas. On the understanding of this event depends whether one can in very truth feel something of the Christ Impulse, or whether one cannot. The man of the present day is faced with a severe test when he asks himself: In the time that has been christened ‘Easter,’ how do I stand to super-sensible knowledge? For Easter should remind man, by the very way its date is determined, to look up from the earthly to what is beyond the earth. The man of modern times has left himself no more outlook into what is beyond the earth than at most that which is given him in mathematics and mechanics, and now in spectro-analysis. These sciences are the groundwork upon which he tries to build up his knowledge concerning all that is beyond the earth. He no longer feels that he is himself united with those worlds, and that the Christ descended thence when He entered into the personality of Jesus.

Let me beg you to give these thoughts which are so pertinent to our present problems, your full and earnest attention. I have often pointed out what a fine spiritual nature such as Herman Grimm must needs think of the Kant-Laplace theory. It is true, the theory has undergone some modification in our day, nevertheless in all essentials it is still the prevailing theory of the universe. It is said that the solar system has come out of a primeval nebula, and in course of mighty changes undergone by the nebula and its densifications, plants, animals and also man have come into being. And carrying the theory further, a time will come when everything on the earth will have found its grave and when ideals and works of culture will no longer send their voice out into the universe, when the earth itself will fall like a bit of slag into the sun; and then, in a still later time, the sun will burn itself out and be scattered in the All, not merely burying, but annihilating everything that is now being made and done by man.

Such a view of the ordering of the world must inevitably arise in a time when man wants to grasp that which is beyond the earth with mathematical and mechanical knowledge alone. In a world in which he merely calculates or investigates qualities of the sun with the spectroscope—in such a world we shall never find the realm whence Christ came down to unite Himself with the life of the earth! There are people to-day who, because they cannot get clarity into their thoughts, prefer not to let themselves be troubled with thought at all, and go on repeating the words they have learned from the Gospels and from the Epistles of St. Paul, simply repeating by rote what they have learned, never stopping to think whether it is compatible with the view of the evolution of the earth and man that they acquire elsewhere. But that is the deep inward untruth of our time: men slink away into some comfortable dark corner instead of bringing together in their thought the things that essentially belong together. They want to raise a mist before their eyes so that they may not need to ‘think together’ the things that belong together. They raise a mist before their eyes when they keep a festival like Easter and are at the same time very far indeed from forming any true idea of the Resurrection of which they speak; for a true idea of it can only be formed with spiritual and super-sensible knowledge.

The only possible way in these days for man to unite a right feeling with Easter is for him to direct his thought in this connection to the world-catastrophe of his own time. For in very deed a world-catastrophe is upon us. I do not mean merely the catastrophe that happened in the recent years of the war, but I refer to that world-catastrophe which consists in the fact that men have lost all idea of the connection of the earthly with that which is beyond the earth. The time has come when man must realise with full and clear consciousness that super-sensible knowledge has now to arise out of the grave of the materialistic outlook. For together with super-sensible knowledge will arise the knowledge of Christ Jesus. In point of fact, man has no other symbol that fits the Easter festival than this—that mankind has brought upon itself the doom of being crucified upon the cross of its own materialism. But man must do something himself before there arises from the grave of human materialism all that can come from super-sensible knowledge.

The very striving after super-sensible knowledge is itself an Easter deed, it is something which gives man the right once more to keep Easter. Look up to the full moon and feel how the full moon is connected with man in its phenomena, and how the reflection of the sun is connected with the moon, and then meditate on the need to-day to go in search of a true self-knowledge which can show forth man as a reflection of the super-sensible. If man knows himself to be a reflection of the super-sensible, if he recognises how he is formed and constituted out of the super-sensible, then he will also find the way to come to the super-sensible. At bottom, it is arrogance and pride that find expression in the materialistic view of the world. It is human pride, manifesting in a strange way! Man does not want to be a reflection of the divine and spiritual, he wants to be merely the highest of the animals. There he is the highest. But the point is, among what sort of beings is he the highest? This pride leads man to recognise nothing beyond himself. If the natural scientific outlook on the world were to be true to itself, it would have the mission of impressing this fact again and again upon man: You are the highest of all the beings of which you can form an idea. The ultimate consequences of the point of view that sets out to be strictly scientific, are such as to make a man turn pale when they show him on what kind of moral groundwork they are based—all unconscious though he may be of it. The truth is, we are to-day living in a time when Christ Jesus is being crucified in a very special sense. He is being put to death in the field of knowledge. And until men come to see how the present way of knowledge, clinging as it does to the senses and to them alone, is nothing but a grave of knowledge out of which a resurrection must take place—until they see this, they will not be able to lift themselves up to experiences in thought and feeling that partake of a true Easter character.

This is the thought that we should carry in our hearts and minds to-day. We still have with us the tradition of an Easter festival that is supposed to be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring. The tradition we have, but the right to celebrate such a festival—that we have not, who live in present-day civilisation.

How can we acquire this right again? We must take the thought of Christ Jesus lying in the grave, of Christ Jesus Who at Easter time vanquishes the stone that has been rolled over His grave—we must take this thought and unite it with the other thought which I have indicated. For the soul of man should feel the purely external, mechanistic knowledge like a tombstone rolled upon him; and he must exert himself to overcome the pressure of this knowledge, he must find the possibility, not to make confession of his faith in the words: “Not I, but the fully developed animal in me,” but to have the right to say: “Not I, but Christ in me.”

It is related of a learned English scientist³ that he said he would rather believe that he had by his own force worked his way up little by little from the ape stage to his present height as man, than that he had descended from a once ‘divine’ height, as his opponent, who could not give credence to the ideas of natural science, appeared to have done.

Such things only serve to show how urgent it is to find the way from the confession of faith: “Not I, but the fully developed animal in me,” to that other confession of faith: “Not I, but Christ in me.” We must strive to understand this word of Paul. Not until then will it be possible for the true Easter message to rise up from the depths of our hearts and souls and enter into our consciousness.

• 1. See Epistle to the Romans, XIII, 12.
• 2. See Epistle to the Galatians, IV, 3, 9.
• 3. T. H. Huxley.

As an introduction, I should like to tell you two short stories. The first (I shall omit certain details) is as follows:—

Once upon a time there lived two boys who from earliest childhood had been close friends. One of them was outstandingly gifted, learned with extraordinary facility and as he grew older gave every promise of attaining high academic honours. The other boy was much less talented. His friend who was deeply attached to him, taught and helped him in every way, but he was incapable of learning very much. This, however, did not greatly affect his circumstances as a small inheritance provided for his living. The more gifted boy grew to adolescence but when he was on the point of getting a University Degree, he died. As in the country where these young men lived, it was customary to marry and start a family very early in life, it devolved upon the other, less gifted youth to provide for the family of the friend who had died. This he did, but before long his own means were exhausted. He said to himself: “As my friend's talents have proved so transient, my mundane possessions too, will probably soon have disappeared; I must set about making a livelihood.” This he did by becoming a travelling merchant. Once when he was sitting in front of a house in a strange neighbourhood, a gigantic man came and sat down beside him. He gave the impression of not having eaten anything for days and seemed to be famished with hunger. The other took compassion on him and ordered a meal to be brought. It was very quickly consumed, to the astonishment of the merchant, but as the one meal was not enough to appease the other's hunger, he ordered a second. The big man ate this just as ravenously and then said that to satisfy his hunger he must have a whole ham and a number of cakes. He devoured all these and, after his enormous meal, seemed satisfied. This incident led to friendship between the big man and the little man, and they set out together on their travels. Very soon, however, the little man found the big man something of a burden and told him that he could well dispense with his company. The big man, however, assured the little man of his friendship, saying that man now felt a wish to question the big man about his life, and the latter replied: “I have no house on the earth, no boat on the sea; by day I live in the village, by night in the town” To begin with, the little man had no notion of what this meant. Then it happened that they must cross a wide river. Their boat capsised and sank, and both fell into the water. The big man extricated himself very quickly, carried the little man to a safe spot, brought up the boat and put the little man into it then he dived again into the water and brought up all the goods, even the tiniest articles, which the little man was intending to trade. This naturally aroused in the little man the greatest respect for the other, and as friends they had many talks together, sometimes on profound subjects. Thus on one occasion the little man said to the big man: “Oh! if only one could rise consciously to heaven; if only it were possible to know what is going on up there!” Thereupon the big man answered him: “Maybe you would like to soar into the air” ... and when the little man had assented he very soon became aware of fatigue and fell asleep. When he woke up the stars were above him, like pollen in the cup of a lotus-flower in heaven; he was even able to pluck one of these flowers, hiding it in his sleeve. Then he saw a great ship approaching, drawn and steered by dragons In it was a great vessel of water, and the big man who was with the little man in the clouds, showed him how the water could be poured out and allowed to trickle down to the earth. Then the little man realised that he was able to act as do the Spirits of the Air, when they let the rain pour down upon the earth. He begged the big man to pour the water in the vessel on his native soil and to let him go down again to the earth by a rope. The big man said to him: “Now you have rescued me; I am a son of the Thunder-God, and my duty has been to bestow rain and other blessings upon the earth. Because for a time I did not perform my duty properly, I was obliged to lead on earth the life of which you know.” Then he let the little man go down again to the earth. The latter was now in his home once more, having with him the star he had gathered in the meadow of heaven This he placed upon the table and it filled the whole room with miraculous light, strong enough even to read by. During the day it looked like a simple meteor-stone, but at night it was radiant and luminous. This continued until one night the little man's wife, rather a vain woman, was combing her hair by its light. This displeased the star-stone and it shrank to a tiny size. One day the wife had a strange impulse to swallow the stone! Thereupon there came to the little man a vision of the big man whom he knew so intimately, and the latter said to him: ”Owing to what has happened now, I can reach a particular stage of development Now I shall be able to come to the earth for a time as a son of the Thunder-God. Your wife will bear me as your son.” And he was actually born as the son of the little man. A peculiarity of this child was that in the dark he shone like a star, so that people called him the “Star Child.” He lived on, and although as he grew older his radiance waned, it still revealed itself in the form of his great talents Very soon he became a man of high importance in life....

This is the one story. You will wonder why I am telling you these tales, but before answering I will tell you a second, very similar one.

Once upon a time there lived a man who, in our country, might rank as a “Councillor” or “Governor.” He and his family lived in a spacious, very beautiful house. But after a time, strange things began to happen there. By day, and especially by night, nobody in it could get any rest; they were always being knocked, pinched and dragged about in all directions; objects were hurled at them and the house swarmed with ghosts. Because of this the family left the house and went to another, leaving a servant behind as caretaker; but after a few days he died. They sent a second and then a third, both of whom also died They then decided to leave the house without any servant at all. A young sceptic now turned up, a youth who was preparing for an examination, and he wanted to take the house for his studies. The Councillor warned him that he would probably never come out alive, and that at any rate terrible things happened to everyone in the house. But the young man replied: “I have written a treatise on the very subject of the “Unreality of Spirits,” proving that they do not exist. I could write a great many more and nobody who has written about such matters is in the least afraid of what may happen in such a house!” So the Councillor was prevailed upon to let him have the house. The young man took with him masses of books to study and sat down to begin his work. It was not long, however, before one of his ears was pinched, then the other; then he was attacked somewhere else and molested in all sorts of ways. When he went to bed the trouble began in real earnest! He could get no rest the whole night long and, sceptic though he was, he began to be dreadfully frightened. Nevertheless, he refused to give way to terror and held out valiantly. On account of his power of endurance, the spectral figures who were wont to bend over his books and play pranks by closing his eyes when he wanted to read, and so on, revealed themselves to him. This heartened the brave young man considerably, but it was a really ghastly state of affairs. Things went on like this until his good-heartedness enabled him to set up a kind of friendship with two spirit-beings who were always annoying and molesting him. After a time he discovered that the spirit-beings could not read but would like to be able to do so. And so it came about that he established a kind of school for the spirits, teaching them how to copy out all sorts of things from his books. Not only were the spirits extremely grateful for this, but they had actually learnt something. Spirit-intercourse was now quite a pastime to the young man and the spirits who lived in the house had, moreover, profited greatly through him. The time came for his examination; as well as having had a great deal of amusement, he had imbibed so much knowledge that he was hopeful of passing, but the intrigues of an enemy caused the rumour that he had cheated in his written papers. As in that country the rules about such matters were extremely strict and because to begin with the rumor was believed, he was sent to prison and retained there for some time with nothing to eat. Finally, however, one of his spirit-friends brought food to him. She then began to bring the other spirits with her and they provided for all his needs. Thus there grew up between the young man and one of his spirit-friends a friendship much greater even than it had been before. And after his innocence had been established and he had been set free, although he had formerly “proved the unreality of spirits,” his spirit-friend was now such a reality to him that he resolved to marry her! She answered, however, that situated as she was, she could not marry, for she belonged to the spiritual worlds, but that if he would go to a certain priest-magician and ask his advice, there would be a way out of the dilemma. So he went to the priest-magician who gave him a charm, saying that if, when a funeral was passing, his spirit-friend would go to the coffin and swallow this charm, she could then become a human being and marry him. Not long afterwards a funeral was actually taking place. The spirit-friend approached the procession, swallowed the charm and then and there disappeared into the coffin. People were astounded in the highest degree when the figure they had seen disappeared into the coffin (for when she had swallowed the charm she became visible). They therefore put the coffin on the ground, opened it, and found that it contained no body at all! The burial could not, therefore, take place. But after a few days the spirit-friend came to the young man, told him that she had now become a human being—the one who had been in the coffin—and that they could now enter into wedlock. And so the two whose acquaintance had begun in the haunted house, now lived on in the companionship of marriage.

If you give some thought to these two stories, you will have to admit that however close a search you may make in the literature accessible to Europeans, right back to the time when there was universal belief in ghosts, no such stories will be found. You will find indications of how the spirit-world plays into the world of men—but stories of this kind, giving the feeling that there could be no more natural and spontaneous way of depicting the interplay between the spirit-world and the human world, simply do not exist in European literature. They are quite unique. A curious feature strikes us when we study their composition. In the first story we are told, for instance, that a star is born as the son of a human being and goes on living as a man upon the earth. To the kind of consciousness underlying the first story, it is a natural matter of course that beings exist in the stars, beings who are the primordial kith and kin of men, and that those who walk the earth as men may, in reality, be embodied Star-beings. This underlies the first story as a natural and accepted fact. In the second, a human being who enters into actual wedlock with another, first came to know her in the spiritual world; she then descends into the physical world and her life continues there. The trend of the two stories is identical. This sense of “togetherness” with the spiritual world—not in the form in which it is expressed in European sagas and legends, but on the totally different ground of which we shall presently speak—will nowhere be found, in the same peculiar form, in the literature of Europe—except it were to be imitated by some modern writer.

And now remind yourselves of something I said in one of the last public lectures.¹ In the way that is possible in such a lecture, I spoke about the beginnings of Earth-evolution and of the genesis of man in connection with Earth-evolution. I said that the process of the evolution of humanity began at a comparatively late stage. We ourselves speak of the evolution of man and of mankind in the following way. When a human being is to enter physical existence on the earth, the innermost kernel or core of his being works within a certain field of activity, moulding the finer organs, the brain, and the more delicate bodily tissues. Thus there is in man a kernel of spirit-and-soul which passes over from earlier incarnations, envelops itself in what comes from the forefathers and is carried through the generations by the process of physical heredity. In a human being who appears on the Earth, a union takes place between what comes from earlier incarnations and what is carried through the generations, enveloping the kernel of spirit-and-soul which passes from incarnation to incarnation. I said that this form of the evolutionary process began only during the Atlantean epoch, when conditions rendering such a development possible arose for the first time on the Earth. I indicated that this particular process of evolution had been preceded by another, in which the human being did not pass into earthly existence by way of union between man and woman and then the descent of the soul which passes through the several incarnations. In very early periods of Earth-evolution, the human being originated in an altogether different way. The reason for this is that not until the Post-Atlantean period did the Earth actually resemble its present configuration. In the latest Atlantean period the Earth did not really differ, in essentials, from what it is at present; but the early Atlantean epoch was fundamentally different from the later, and anyone who ignores the fact that at that time entirely other conditions prevailed, has a totally false conception of the configuration of the Earth. After having passed through the periods of Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon, the Earth was not only a living organism, but also a spiritual being, a great organism permeated by spirit-and-soul. We do not get back to an inanimate ball of gas as intimated by the Kant-Laplace theory, but to the Earth as a huge, living being. In that ancient time the evolutionary process of humanity was such that fecundation did not take place between man and woman, but between the “above” and the “below”—in this sense, that the Earth with its forces of life, provided the element of substance, the more material element—whereas the spiritual principle came from above like rain which fertilises the soil of meadows, and united with the more material principle. It was by this method of fecundation that the first human beings came into existence. This was indicated in the public lecture and can be established on logical grounds, in accordance with the principles of natural existence. Then the Earth separated out from itself a solid mass, like a kind of bony system, and it was impossible thereafter for it to provide, as before, the substance for fertilisation. The process had now to take place within the human organism. Instead of the fertilisation “from above,” fertilisation now came about by way of the two sexes, and the process which had formerly been set in train by interaction between the “above” and the “below,” now passed over into the operations of heredity and into those of reincarnation which are bound up with heredity. Thus what had taken place on the surface of the Earth in earlier times, had now passed into the being of man. Human beings came into existence and were able to inherit or carry over from one incarnation to the next, those qualities which had formerly been received directly from the spiritual world but were now transmitted by heredity. As was said in the public lecture, the very first human beings were bi-sexual, then there was differentiation into the male and the female, and then a gradual development into the conditions prevailing at present; what in earlier times had operated more from above—the female element—passed into the woman, and what had operated more in the earthly element, passed over in the stream of heredity into the male.

From intimations given through the course of years concerning the evolution of humanity, you will have realised that these conditions prevailed right on into the Atlantean epoch; it was not until the second half of the Atlantean epoch that the evolutionary process assumed, more or less, its present form. The Atlantean peoples on the Earth were really living in the aftermath of still earlier conditions, when the substantiality of the Earth was fertilised by the spirituality of the Heavens. The Atlantean peoples saw the birth of a human being as a direct embodiment of the Spiritual, a descent of the Spiritual into the Material. As we today see the rain falling from heaven and moistening the Earth, so did the people of Atlantis see human beings coming down from heavenly heights, uniting with substance provided by the Earth and then wandering over its surface. Conditions changed only by slow degrees; in certain regions the preparatory stages of conditions as they are at present, had long since been in existence, whereas in other regions where the old conditions had persisted, the Atlantean peoples knew that the human being exists, to begin with, in the spiritual world and then seeks bodily substance in order to become part of Earth-humanity. Thus when a man in Atlantean times saw his fellow-men moving about the Earth, he said to himself: “The form I see there derives from the Earth, but what is within it derives from the same world to which the stars belong: the human being has descended from the worlds of the Stars!” ... It sounds like a fairy-tale echoing from olden time ... Man comes down from heavenly heights, surrounds and clothes himself with earthly substance. The Atlantean peoples knew of the interaction between the Heavens and the Earth. They knew: To begin with, man is a Spirit; then he descends, clothes himself in matter and moves about the Earth. Man was seen as a heavenly being, a being from the spiritual world. For it was known that as he moved about, he differed from the Spirits only in that he was clothed in matter. The transition from the spiritual world to the physical world was a much gentler, more delicate process. Not that the Atlantean would in any sense have denied the existence of the spiritual world ... on the contrary, he saw clearly that there was no very essential difference between physical men and the spirit beings who belong to that other world. He knew: One can communicate with a human being through signs, by employing the early rudiments of human speech ... and with the Spirits, too, for the way in which man communicates with the Spirits does not differ from the way he communicates with other men.

Naturally, only very little of this direct knowledge of man's connection with the spiritual world survived the Atlantean catastrophe. The mission of the Post-Atlantean epoch was to develop in man an understanding of Earth-existence proper, of all that can be acquired by the development of the body as a physical instrument. And so the perfectly natural communion with the spiritual world very soon ceased in the course of the Post-Atlantean epoch. But what disappeared from the normal consciousness was preserved in those periods or moments of atavistic clairvoyance when the soul withdrew more into itself. What in earlier times had been actual experience when the soul turned its gaze into the spiritual world around, was born again later on ... in the form of Imagination, Phantasy. Let us assume that in some particular people belonging to the Post-Atlantean age, the characteristics and faculties of the Atlantean epoch still survived, more strongly than in all the others. It would not, of course, be possible for such a people, in the Post-Atlantean epoch, to have experiences in the form they had taken in Atlantis. But there would certainly be something in their phantasy distinguishing it from that of new races—races which cannot really be said to be survivals of Atlantean peoples. In the leading races of the Post-Atlantean epoch there will, obviously, be less evidence of this natural communion with the spiritual world.

In a people characterised by having carried over into the Post-Atlantean epoch a constitution of soul reminiscent of the Atlantean period, the after-effects of this communion will be quite different from those working in the typical Post-Atlantean races. In the case of a people who would be regarded from the point of view of occultism as belonging, not to the progressive races, but to the “laggard” races of ancient Atlantis, it is to be expected that their phantasy, when it speaks of the connection between the world of men and the world of spirits, will express itself in a form differing altogether from the phantasy of other peoples. We can understand that the imagination of such a people might well take the form of narrating how a Star-being suddenly resolves to incarnate as the son of a human being who had rendered service to the Star. Think of the first story, where a Star-being—a son of the Thunder-God—was born as the son of the friend with whom he had for a time wandered about the Earth. The second story suggests the gentler transition . . . a human being falls in love with a spirit-being from above; such a being does not descend to human existence in the ordinary way but chooses a dead body. It is as though an Atlantean soul, accustomed to seeing human beings descend and take on earthly substance, had gone astray by choosing a body which was suitable, not for the Post-Atlantean epoch, but for that of Atlantis, when human beings were not born as they now are, but merely assumed a mantle of earthly substance. In the light of this interpretation we can perceive in such stories the aftermath of earlier conditions. As the products of a race surviving from ancient Atlantis, their trend and content do not surprise us. It is interesting that a number of similar stories has been collected by Martin Huber and published by Rütten and Loening in Frankfurt-am-Main under the title of Chinese Ghost and Love Stories.

All this indicates that what may be surmised from a study of occult science, is actual fact—although, of course, these things are now no more than tradition.

Light can be shed upon a great deal that comes our way in life, if only we have patience to study the more intimate connections of world-evolution. Men of the present day will often stand amazed at such things and will only begin to understand them when they realise that anyone who is cognisant of the more intimate connections of human evolution, accepts them as self-evident. Understanding of Spiritual Science is not furthered by pedantic demands for “logical proof”; proof, after all, is useful only to those who are willing to believe what is asserted; it is useful only to those who can believe that it is proof. Nobody need believe in it at all—and then they are spared from believing anything! Spiritual Science will be received into the souls of men because of increasing evidence that those laws of which knowledge can be acquired only along the occult path, can be applied even in the most hidden recesses of spiritual and material culture. The treasures of wisdom will come into their own when more and more people have patience enough to observe the harmony between all the facts of existence to which a spiritual conception of the world is applied, and to realise that only in this way can there be a true explanation of things which must otherwise remain incomprehensible.

Thinking of all these matters, we shall be able to say: Post-Atlantean civilisation has its particular mission. Human beings who rightly understand their times will unfold the knowledge, will-activity and qualities of heart to be acquired through the instrumentality of the body. In these domains there will be greater and greater progress—progress which, fundamentally, is connected with the phase of evolution stretching from the time of the Holy Rishis of India to the descent of the Christ-Impulse into humanity. But side by side with this there has existed much that is like “imprisoned” spiritual treasure. The people of Europe were astonished in the highest degree at the vistas of spiritual life opened up by the discoveries concerning the wisdom of India, of ancient Persia, concerning the Krishna- or Brahman-culture, or the ancient Zoroastrian culture. In the older civilisations there was, naturally, a deeper spirituality than in the products of later forms of knowledge. People in the West were dumbfounded by what German scholarship in the first half of the nineteenth century disclosed concerning these ancient civilisations, were astonished at the light shed upon the wisdom of India by Friedrich Schlegel, and, later on, upon the wisdom of Persia. These disclosures were so dumb-founding that the deep influence exercised by Oriental Philosophy upon the minds of thinkers like Schopenhauer or Eduard von Hartmann is readily understandable. There we have the first expressions of the wonder and astonishment of the West at what is contained in these ancient civilisations as a kind of “imprisoned” spirituality.

We are now confronting another epoch, in which imprisoned spirituality in a different form will be capable of throwing the West into amazement, namely, the spirituality that does not belong to the mission of Post-Atlantean humanity, but has remained as an heirloom from earlier times, concealed until our own time in the Chinese wisdom of which the West hitherto has known practically nothing. Very little will be sufficient to enable what will happen over there, to overwhelm the spiritual culture of the West—to such an extent indeed, that it might well forget its own mission, its own specific significance and task. As men live on into the future they will have to realise that from the Atlantean epoch there has survived upon our Earth, an imprisoned spiritual wisdom and knowledge greater than anything revealed by the disclosures concerning the old Brahman and Zoroastrian civilisations; this wisdom will be unleashed when the spiritual life of China emerges from its concealment. Two things will have to be realised by those who turn their eyes towards the future. From over yonder there will flow a mighty stream of spiritual life, containing, even in external details, most wonderful teachings ... although such teachings would in any case be available to those willing to penetrate into the spiritual life along the path revealed by Spiritual Science. If, however (to quote words used in a different connection by our friend M.B... . at our General Meeting) the great majority of human beings pull nightcaps over their eyes in regard to what Spiritual Science has to offer, then one day, in a form unsuited to Western mentality, spiritual treasures will pour from Chinese culture, and this portion of humanity, in their amazement, will realise that the products of such culture cannot be grasped by the pedantic thought common in the West, but only by deeper insight into the ancient Taoist culture which arose on the soil of the ancient Chinese civilisation. Spiritual Science often goes against the grain because, by its very nature, study of it will induce belief. Those who deliberately pull nightcaps over their eyes will be amazed, but on the other hand also rather relieved when, in Spiritual Science, they come across many things that have passed over into Chinese culture from Atlantean times. They will comfort themselves by saying: “There is no need to believe in that, for what history has preserved is studied simply because it is of interest!” This is the attitude of the philologists and archaeologists ... there is no need to believe in it; one can get hold of it by study and be exempt from having to “believe.” But when the wisdom casts off its fetters over yonder, it will have another effect as well: its obvious and intrinsic greatness will shock and amaze. It will pour over what mankind has acquired in Christian culture in such a way that it will have to be seen in its true perspective, studied from the right point of view. The proper approach will be to say: This spirituality existed; in bygone ages it constituted the spiritual culture of our Earth. But every epoch has its own mission, and that of Western culture is to drink at the well-springs of the spiritual reality behind world-existence, so that this spiritual reality is perceived behind the material world, behind what eyes can see and hands can grasp—as a revelation from the spiritual world. Men will have to understand that their mission now belongs to a different age and that they must stand firm on the ground prepared by Christianity!

That is the other picture. Men will joyfully receive what derives from olden times but will illumine it, vivify it with what the more recent, Post-Atlantean, Christian culture has imparted to the soul. Weaklings, however, will say: “We will accept spirituality from whatever source it may come, for all that interests us is a sensational vista of the spiritual worlds.” There may actually be neo-theosophists who will say: “The truth is not to be found through deep comprehension of the Christ-Principle; it lies in what has been preserved by the Chinese, coming to light again when they bring forth the Atlantean wisdom hidden in the deepest strata of their souls.” Europe might well be offered a new “Secret Doctrine” compiled from the truths of Chinese wisdom. This would imply that, after all, the proper model for modern theosophists is a much more ancient Theosophy which did not feel called upon to derive the founts of spiritual life from Christian Mysticism and Christian Love—nor, for the matter of that, to plagiarise—and even that very imperfectly—the wisdom of ancient India somewhat embellished by the wisdom of ancient Egypt! As for the weaklings, they will be just as eager for Chinese wisdom as for the spirituality which they think is opened up for them by the ancient or also by the “newly revealed” Indian wisdom. After all, to Europeans, India is almost as remote as China; and if people are told of revelations made possible in China owing to certain forces having been set free, this may well seem more credible to them than that anything of the kind should have transpired in Berlin.

If we ponder over these things, we shall find the true balance between joyful acceptance of what has been preserved from ancient epochs of culture and a firm footing on the soil resulting from evolution through the ages. That heed shall be paid to the importance of maintaining this balance, is and will remain the constant care of the Movement with which we identify ourselves. It is simply an untruth when here or there it is said that we are out to reject or ignore what is offered in the way of Indian spirituality, for example. It is an untruth, as every one who has taken part in our work well knows; and it would be grievous if such untruths were to take root in the world in connection with our Movement. Opinions that are at variance are easy to deal with; they soon balance themselves out. But inaccurate statements give rise to one misunderstanding after another ... for it is the peculiarity of misunderstanding that it constantly gives birth to fresh misunderstandings! With this in mind it must be our primary task to realise how far our own standpoint on the soil of Western spiritual life is justified in face of the other phases of human evolution. On the other hand, we must take care that everything we say about those other phases of evolution, about other forms of spirituality, is presented honestly and truthfully. Again and again it must be repeated and realised by Theosophists that even if much of the spiritual insight we have been able to gain, goes under, its influence will remain! No matter what transpires, our work must be full of sincerity, integrity and truthfulness. And if, in future times, all that people will be able to say of our particular work is that many a thing was improved, many another has not survived—nevertheless it was an example of the fact that occultism and earnest spiritual research can be entirely free from charlatanism or humbug, that the striving for occult knowledge can be true, genuine and sincere ... if that can be said of us, we shall really have done something to further the development of the occult life! And the fact that we would not admit anything of which in the future these things could not be said, may be accounted among our finest achievements.

• 1. 4th Jan. 1912. The Origin of Man in the Light of Spiritual Science. Not yet published in English.

From the previous lecture you will have been able to see that the very form of man's body is a result of the co-operation of Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers.

It is particularly important in the present age for man to recognize this co-operation between Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers; for only by such recognition can he gradually learn to understand the forces that are at work behind the external phantasmagoria of existence. We know very well that we have no occasion either to hate Ahriman or to fear Lucifer, since their powers are inimical only when they are working outside the realm where they belong. We spoke on this subject at some length in Munich last year [ see Secrets of the Threshold, by Rudolf Steiner. ]; and we have also given indications in this direction in lectures here in Dornach.

When we saw last time how the physical spatial body of man owes its form to the interaction of Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers, we were dealing with the most external element of human life in which Lucifer and Ahriman play a part. We come a little nearer to the inner nature of man when we pass from the physical to the etheric body. The etheric body may be regarded as the shaper of the physical body. At the foundation of our physical organism—and embedded at the same time in the whole etheric world—lies this etheric organism, in perpetual inner movement. Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers are active here too, as well as in the physical body. Man as etheric being—and it is important to recognize the fact—is also placed into the counterplay of these forces.

In order to give focus to our study of this question, let us now turn our attention to the three fundamental activities of the human being in so far as he is not physical human being. I refer to the activities of Willing, Feeling and Thinking.

So long as we regard man in respect of his physical body alone, we do not of course see this willing, feeling and thinking. Only in its physiognomy or in the performance of certain gestures or the like, does the physical body give us any indication of what is in man's inner nature. The etheric body, however, which is in perpetual movement, is continually giving expression to man's thinking, feeling and willing.

A purely external science finds itself in difficulties when it comes to consider these activities of the human soul. If you will study the various philosophies you will find that one gives pre-eminence to the will, another to thought; and there are again others which consider feeling as the most important force in man. But as to how thinking, feeling and willing unite in man to form a whole—to that problem none of the philosophies of modern times can offer a solution. This inability to form a correct idea of the relationship between thinking, feeling and willing in the life of the soul is not unlike the difficulty someone might experience who, in order to relate himself rightly to the world around him, set out to form a clear conception of man as he appears in the external world. We do not know—so say the philosophers—whether the human soul in its essential nature has more the character of willing or feeling or thinking. It is exactly as if someone were to say: “I have no idea what a ‘man’ really is. One person brings me a five-year-old child and says: There is a man for you! Then another person comes along and points me out a much taller being, who is what is called ‘middle-aged.’ Finally a third person comes and shows me an entirely different being, with wrinkled countenance and grey hair. And now I am really at a loss to know what the being called ‘man’ is, for I have been shown three totally different beings with this name.” Of course the true answer is that they are all of them “man.” The one is very young, the second somewhat older and the third quite old; they are very different in appearance. But by taking all three ages together we acquire a knowledge of “man.” It is the same with willing, feeling and thinking. The difference there too is one of age. Willing is the same soul-activity as thinking, but willing is still a child. When it grows a little older, it becomes feeling, and when it is quite old it is thinking. The matter is made difficult by the fact that the different ages live together in our soul in these three activities.

We have explained on other occasions (and you may read of it in my book The Threshold of the Spiritual World) that when we leave the physical world we come into a world where the law of change prevails instead of the law of persistence or fixity. There all is in constant change; what is old can suddenly grow young again and vice versa. Hence in that world the three activities can and actually do appear at one and the same time. Willing shows itself contemporaneously as young willing, as older willing (i.e., feeling) and at the same time also as quite old willing (i.e., thinking). The different ages are in that world intermingled, everything is mobile. This is how it is with the etheric body of man.

These changes cannot, however, simply come about of themselves. To begin with, a uniform and single action of the soul does not come to consciousness at all in ordinary life, we are quite incapable of bringing such a thing into consciousness. If we think of the etheric body in the likeness of a flowing stream—for it is in the etheric body that we have to make our observations—then we are obliged to say that this stream of soul-activity does not come to consciousness at all in our life; but into this stream, into this perpetual movement of the etheric body that flows in the current of time, Luciferic—and again Ahrimanic—activity enters. Luciferic activity has the result of making the will young. When the activity of our soul is streamed through by Luciferic activity the result is will. When the Luciferic influence predominates, when Lucifer makes his forces felt in the soul, then will is active in us. Lucifer has a juvenating influence on the whole stream of our soul-activity.

When, on the other hand, Ahriman brings his influence to bear on our soul-activity, he hardens it, it becomes old, and thinking is the result. Thinking, the having and holding of thoughts, is quite impossible in ordinary life unless Ahriman exerts his influence within our etheric body. We cannot get on in our life of soul, in so far as this comes to expression in the etheric body, without Ahriman and Lucifer. If Lucifer were to withdraw entirely from our etheric body, we would have nothing to fire our will. If Ahriman were to withdraw entirely from our etheric body, we would never be able to attain cool thinking. In between stands a region where Lucifer and Ahriman are in conflict. Here they interpenetrate; their activities play into one another. It is the region of feeling. The etheric body has actually this appearance; one can perceive in it Luciferic light and Ahrimanic hardness. If you could look at it, you would not of course see it as we might try to show it in a drawing; you would see it all in movement. But there are places where the etheric body seems to be quite untransparent, as if it had ice tracings in it. Forms and figures show themselves which resemble the patterns made by ice on a window pane. These are hardenings in the etheric body, and they are the result in it of the life of thought. This freezing of the etheric body at certain places is due to Ahriman; his forces have found entry there by means of thought. There are also places which seem to be full of light. Here the etheric body is transparent and gleams and glows with light. It is Lucifer who sends his rays into the etheric body of man and makes there centers of will. Then there are regions in between, where the etheric body is in perpetual movement and activity. Here you see at one moment hardness—and then suddenly the hardness is caught by a ray of light and melts right away. Hardening and dissolving, in perpetual alternation—such is the expression of the activity of feeling in the etheric body.

Not only, therefore, is the form of the physical body of man called into being by the interplay of Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces—now creating a balance, now disturbing it again—but in the whole etheric body too, Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces are continually active. When the Ahrimanic forces gain the upper hand, we have an expression of thinking; when the Luciferic forces are in ascendance, we have an expression of willing; and when they are in mutual conflict one with the other, we have an expression of feeling. Thus do Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces play into one another in the etheric body of man. We human beings are as it were ourselves the resultant of these forces, we are placed into their midst.

Now we must not imagine that we are present in this interplay with our full Ego. Our earthly Ego, the Ego that we have acquired in the course of earth evolution, can only come to its full consciousness in the physical body. Not until the time of Jupiter will the Ego be able to unfold itself completely within the etheric body. In all that takes place within the etheric body the real Ego of the human being has no immediate part. Had the progress of world evolution gone on without the intervention of Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces, then man would have been an altogether different being. He would, for example, have been able to have perceptions in his physical body, but he would not have been able to have thoughts. The capacity to have thoughts he owes to the fact that Ahriman can acquire influence over his etheric body. And he has impulses of will because Luciferic forces can acquire influence over his etheric body. These forces are therefore necessary for man, they must needs be present.

We have said that with our earthly consciousness we cannot descend fully into the etheric body. Only in the physical body can we experience our full Ego-consciousness. With the etheric body we enter a world with which we cannot fully identify ourselves. And it is so, that when Ahriman enters into our etheric body, something more enters in with him besides the thoughts he forms there. Nor is it only impulses of will that enter our etheric body with Lucifer. And the same must be said of the feelings, the realm where the two are in conflict. In so far as Ahriman lives in our etheric body we dive down with our etheric body into the sphere of the elementary Nature spirits—the Earth, Water, Air and Fire spirits. We are not cognizant of the fact because we are not able to descend fully into our etheric body with our Ego. Nevertheless it is always so. Within this etheric body not only does there live the power of the thoughts that we ourselves think, but the influences also of the Nature spirits; these enter in and make themselves felt. When a man has met with these Nature spirits he is able afterwards to tell of some experience he has had which he did not have in his ordinary Ego-consciousness. For it is when he, is in an abnormal condition that man meets the Nature spirits, namely, when the etheric body is to some extent loosened from the physical body.

How can such a thing happen? It can happen in the following way. The etheric body of man is in communion with the whole surrounding etheric world, therefore also with the whole sphere of the Nature spirits. Let us imagine, to take a simple case, that a man is walking along a road. When he is walking along a road in the daytime with his ordinary consciousness, his etheric body is properly in his physical body and he perceives with his Ego-consciousness what one is normally able to perceive with the Ego-consciousness. But now suppose that he is walking along a path by night. When we walk along a path by night, it is generally dark, and this fact will of itself produce in many persons a “creepy” feeling. And just because he gets into this condition, then the peculiar sensations that he experiences enable Lucifer to seize hold of him. His etheric body becomes loosened from the physical body, and then this emancipated etheric body can enter into relation with the surrounding etheric world.

Now let us suppose that the man comes into the vicinity of a churchyard where etheric bodies are still present over the graves of recently deceased persons. In the condition in which he is, with his etheric body loosened, he is perhaps able to perceive something of the thoughts which are still remaining in the etheric bodies of the dead persons. Suppose someone has died only a short time ago leaving debts behind him; he died with the thought that he has incurred debts. Then it can be that this thought is still present in the etheric body of the person after he has died. We do not of course ordinarily perceive the thoughts in the etheric body of a dead human being. But for a man who has come into the condition I have described it might well be possible. He could enter into relation with the etheric body of the other and perceive within it the thought: “I have incurred debts.” And then because this experience strengthens the Luciferic power in him, there arises in him the feeling: “I must pay the debt for him.” He experiences in this way in his etheric body something he would never experience in the physical body in normal life. Such an experience does not happen to us in ordinary human life, and when it comes it makes an extraordinary impression upon our consciousness. For it arouses the knowledge: “I have had a strange and singular experience. I have not had this experience within the body, nor can I ever have it within the body.” We have the feeling quite distinctly that we are somewhere else than in our body, and that is a strange, an unaccustomed feeling. We experience at the same time an overpowering desire to return once more into the body, we long for help to return again into the body.

This feeling of longing to return attracts to us certain elementary Nature spirits for whom this very feeling in us is food and nourishment. They come, because they are attracted by the feeling, “I want to be drawn into my physical body,” and they help us to find the way back to it. If one is asleep in the ordinary way, one finds the way back quite easily. But when one has undergone an experience such as I have described, it is difficult to find the way back. You must not of course imagine that we see the situation as we perceive things in the physical body; no, we see it imaginatively, in pictures. Someone comes to us—it is really a Nature spirit, appearing perhaps in the guise of a shepherd, and gives us the advice: “Go to a certain castle, I will take you there in my wagon,”—or some similar words. The situation may even be still further developed. The body which we have left and outside of which we have had the experience, may assume the appearance of an enchanted castle from which we have to release someone when we return into it. So do we “imaginate” in pictures the longing for the physical body and the help that the Nature spirits bring to us. And then we come back into the physical body—that is to say, we wake up.

People who have had such experiences will tell us that they feel they have in actual reality come into contact in this way with the thoughts of a dead man. They say to themselves: “That feeling I had was not something that was merely in myself, it was no mere dream that I dreamed, it was a feeling that communicated to me something that was taking place in the world outside. It is of course all expressed in pictures, but it does truly correspond to an event.” I will now read to you such a picture, where a man narrates what he has experienced. As you will see, it was an experience somewhat similar to the one of which I have spoken. He describes it as follows. “When I had taken leave of the soldiers I met three men. They wanted to exhume a dead person who owed them three marks. I was filled with compassion and at once absolved the debt, in order that the dead man might rest in peace and not be disturbed in his grave. I walked on a little further. A strange man with pale countenance accosted me, invited me to mount a leaden carriage, and persuaded me to go with him to a castle. In the castle, he said, dwelt a princess, who had declared she would marry only a man who came to her on a carriage of lead. He turned to the driver and said: ‘Drive in the direction of the sunrise.’ Then came a shepherd who said: ‘I am the Count of Ravensburg.’ He ordered the driver to drive faster. We came to a door and we could hear a tumult within. The door was opened. The princess asked the man whence he came and how it had been possible for him to drive in company with that old man—and behold, I saw that he who had led me thither was a spirit. Then I entered in at the door and took possession of the castle.”

That is to say, he came back into his body. There you have the description of just such an experience as I have been speaking of.

And what is such an event, when it happens to someone who then tells others of it? It is a Märchen (a fairy-tale [ see Goethe's Standard of the Soul, by Rudolf Steiner. ]).

You must not imagine that an experience of this nature is the only way in which man comes into relationship with the external etheric world through his etheric body. There is another. And that is, in an activity which is only half conscious, an activity in which the Ego only half participates—namely, the act of Speech. Our speaking is not so conscious as our thinking. It is not the case that speaking is something which belongs to us and which we have in our power. In speech live etheric Powers, and a good part of our speaking is unconscious. The Ego does not reach fully down into speech. When we speak we are in communication through our etheric body with the surrounding etheric world. We learn to think as individuals, but not to speak. We are taught to speak through the fact that our Karma places us into a particular set of circumstances in life. We have already seen how we may come into relation with the Nature spirits in abnormal conditions when the etheric body is loosened, and now we find that inasmuch as we speak and do not merely think silently, we come into relation with the Folk Spirits. The Folk Spirits enter our etheric body and live there—without our being aware of it. This life of the Folk Spirit within the human being really belongs just as little to his fully conscious Ego activity as does the “Märchen” of which I have told you. So much, then, for the activity of Lucifer and Ahriman in man's etheric body.

The Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces enter also into the astral body. When we come to study the astral body of man, we must turn our attention to what is the distinguishing mark of the astral human being as he is on earth—namely, consciousness. In the physical body form and force are the essentials, in the etheric body, movement and life: in the astral body, consciousness. Now in the body of man we have not only one consciousness, but two; the ordinary waking state and the state of sleep. But, strange to say, neither of these two states is entirely natural to us. Natural would be for us an intermediate state between the two, a state which, as a matter of fact, we never really consciously have.

If we were perpetually awake we would scarcely be able to develop in a proper, orderly manner through the various ages of life. Something is always present in us which is less awake than we are in our day-consciousness, and only by virtue of this are we in a position to evolve and develop. Ask yourselves, how much do you expect to be able to evolve through all that you experience and receive in ordinary life? For the most part, we merely satisfy thereby our desire, our curiosity, or our need of sensation. It is not often we act with deliberate intent to place what we experience in waking day life in the service of our development. The truth is, development takes place through the fact that something is continually sleeping in us, even in the daytime. I am not alluding to the habit of dropping off to sleep in the daytime! But when man is wide awake by day, something still remains fast asleep in him, and this it is which brings it about that he does not remain for ever a child, but evolves further.

The ordinary waking state is what comes to consciousness through our astral body. In this ordinary waking state we are, however, too strongly awake, we are too intensely given up to the external world; we are, in fact, quite lost in it. How does this come about?

The reason is that the waking consciousness lives under the influence of Ahriman. Ahriman has great power over our waking consciousness. It is quite different in the case of the sleep consciousness. In sleep consciousness we are too little awake. We are too engrossed in our own evolution; we are so completely and so powerfully within ourselves that all consciousness is obliterated. In sleep consciousness, Lucifer has the upper hand.

This is then how the matter stands with our astral body. When we are awake, Ahriman has the upper hand over Lucifer, and when we are asleep Lucifer has the upper hand over Ahriman. They are in equilibrium only when we dream; there they pull with equal force, they strike a balance between them. The ideas which are called forth by Ahriman in day consciousness and which he causes to harden and crystallize, are dissolved and made to disappear under the influence of Lucifer; everything becomes pictures when Ahriman is no longer busy fixing them in rigid ideas. They melt and become mobile in themselves. A state of equilibrium is induced in a pair of scales by having both scale-pans equally laden; we have, then, not a state of rest but a state of equilibrium. It is the same with the life of man. We have not in man a state of rest, but a state of equilibrium; and the two forces which hold the scales and each of which at certain times brings extra weight to bear, are Lucifer and Ahriman. In waking consciousness Ahriman's side sinks down, in sleep consciousness Lucifer's. Only in the intermediate state, where we dream, are the two scale-pans held in poise, not at rest, but delicately poised in equilibrium.

We can go on to carry our study into still higher regions of human life. Here too we shall find evidence of how Lucifer and Ahriman fill the world with their inter-working. Two ideas play a great part in human life. One is the idea of duty. We might also say, when we consider it from a religious point of view, the idea of commandment or behest. We speak sometimes, do we not, of the “behest of duty.” The other idea, which can be placed over against it, is the idea of right (or rights).

If you will reflect a little on the part played in human life by these two ideas of duty and of right—I mean, the “right” one has to do this or that—you will very soon realize that they are polar opposites, and that men's inclinations are turned now more in the direction of duty, and now again in the direction of right. We live certainly in an age when people are more ready to speak of right than duty. All possible spheres of life claim their rights. We have Workers' Rights, Women's Rights, and so on and so on.

Duty is the opposite idea of right. Our age will be followed by an age when duties will be more regarded than rights, and this will be directly attributable to the influence of the anthroposophical spiritual world-conception. In the future—certainly, in a rather distant future—we shall have movements where less and less emphasis will be laid on the demand for rights and people will inquire more and more as to their duty. The question will rather be: What is our duty as man, as woman, e.g., in this or that situation of life? The present epoch that demands rights will be succeeded by an epoch that asks after duties.

We said that right and duty play into life like two polar opposites. Whenever a man turns his thought and attention to duty, he looks right away from himself. Kant has given great and grand expression to this fact. He pictures duty as a lofty goddess, to whom man looks up: “Duty, thou great and exalted Name, thou has nought to do with fondness nor with favor; all that thou requirest is to submit thyself and serve.” Man beholds duty, so to say, raying down upon him from regions of the spiritual world. In a religious sense, he feels duty as an impulse laid upon him by the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. And when man surrenders himself to duty, he goes right out of himself. It is in this going-out-of-himself in the feeling of duty, that man can begin to learn how to get beyond his ordinary self.

There is, however, a danger to man in all such going-out-of his ordinary self, in all such endeavor after spiritualization. If man were to give himself up entirely to this, he would lose the ground from under his feet, he would lose his feeling of gravity. Therefore he must endeavor, when he surrenders himself to duty, to find within himself at the same time something that shall give him weight, so that he may keep his sense of gravity. Schiller expressed it very beautifully when he said that man has the best relation to duty when he learns to love duty.

This is really saying a great deal. When a man speaks of learning to love duty he no longer merely surrenders himself to duty; he rises out of himself, taking with him the love with which otherwise he loves himself. The love that lives in his body, in his egoism—this love he takes out of himself, and loves with it duty. So long as it is self-love, so long is it a Luciferic force. But when man takes this self-love out of himself and loves duty in the way that otherwise he loves only himself, he releases Lucifer. He takes Lucifer into the realm of duty and gives him, so to say, a justified existence in the impulse and feeling of duty.

If, on the other hand, a man cannot do this, if he cannot draw forth the love out of himself and offer it to duty, then he will continue to love only himself; and since he cannot love duty, he is obliged to subject himself to her, he becomes a slave to duty, he becomes, as we say, a man who “does his duty,”—hard and cold and uninspired. He hardens in an Ahrimanic sense, notwithstanding that he follows duty devotedly.

You see how duty stands, as it were, in a midway position. If we surrender ourselves to her, she annuls our freedom, we become her slaves, because Ahriman draws near on the one hand with his impulses. But if we bring ourselves—if we bring all our power of self-love—as an offering and offer it up to duty, bringing thus to duty the Luciferic warmth of love, then the result is that, through the state of balance induced in this way between Lucifer and Ahriman, we find a right relation to duty.

Thus we are truly, in a certain connection, redeemers of Lucifer. When we begin to be able to love our duty, then the moment has come when we can help towards the redemption and release of the Luciferic powers; we set free the Lucifer forces which are held in us as by a charm, and lead them forth to fight with Ahriman. We release the imprisoned Lucifer (imprisoned in self-love) when we learn to love our duty.

Schiller sets himself this very question in his “Aesthetic Letters”: How is it possible to rise above slavery to duty and attain to love of duty? Of course he does not use the expressions “Lucifer” and “Ahriman,” because he does not see the problem in its cosmic aspect. Nevertheless these wonderful letters of Schiller on the Aesthetic Education of Man are directly translatable into Spiritual Science.

Right, on the other hand, immediately shows that it is united with Lucifer. Man does not need to learn to love his right, he loves it already! It is perfectly natural that he should do so. It is natural for Lucifer to be connected with right in man's feeling—man feels that this or that is his right. Everywhere that right asserts itself, Lucifer is speaking there too. It is very often only too evident how Lucifer makes his voice heard in the demand of some right. Here it is a question of calling in something that can be set over against right. We have to call in Ahriman to create a polarity to Lucifer. And this we can do by cultivating the polar opposite of love.

Love is inner fire, its opposite is calmness—the quiet acceptance of what happens in the world. As soon as we approach our right with this quiet and calm interest we call in Ahriman. It is not easy to recognize him here, for we set him free from his merely external existence, we summon him into ourselves and warm him with the love that is already united with right. Calm and peace of mind have the coldness of Ahriman; in the quiet understanding of what is in the world, we unite our warmth and our understanding love with the coldness that is in the world outside. And then we release Ahriman, when we meet what has come about with understanding, when we do not merely demand our rights out of self-love but understand what has come about in the world. This is the eternal battle that is waged between Lucifer and Ahriman. On the one hand man learns in a conservative way to understand the conditions that are in the world, he learns to understand how they have come about from cosmic, karmic necessity. That is one aspect of the matter. The other aspect is that he feels in his heart the urge to make new conditions possible, continually to let the old give place to the new. This is the revolutionary current in human life. In the revolutionary stream lives Lucifer, in the conservative stream Ahriman, and man in his life of right lives in the midst between these two poles.

Thus we see how right and duty show each of them a state of equilibrium between Lucifer and Ahriman. We only learn to understand how the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body manifest in life, or how duty and right come to expression in the life of duty and the life of right, when we learn to recognize the interplay of great spiritual Powers, above all of those spiritual Powers who bring about the state of equilibrium.

For just as what is in the external world stands under the influence of the spiritual forces that bring about balance, so does our moral life too belong in a world of polar opposites. The whole morale of human conduct, the whole ethical life of man with its poles of right and duty, only become comprehensible when we take into account the instreaming forces of Lucifer and Ahriman. And when we look at the life of man in history, that takes its course in an alternation between, on the one hand, revolutionary and warlike—that is to say, Luciferic—movements, and on the other hand, conservative—that is, Ahrimanic—movements, there too we find a condition of balance between Lucifer and Ahriman. In no other way is the world to be understood than by recognizing in it these opposite forces and influences.

What we behold in the world outside is dualistic, it shows itself to us in opposites. And in this connection Manichaeism, correctly understood, has its complete justification. How Manichaeism is fully justified even within a spiritual monism—of that we shall have more to say in the future. The object I have had in view in these lectures is to show you how the whole world is a result of the working of balance.

Particularly evident is the result of the working of balance in the life of art. With this as our starting-point we will go on in later lectures to consider the arts and their evolution in the world, and the part that has been taken by different spiritual Powers in the evolution of the life of art among mankind.

In the preceding lectures I have repeatedly spoken of how important it is that teachers turn their attention in particular toward the drastic changes, or metamorphoses, that occur during a child’s life—for example, the change of teeth and puberty. We have not fully developed our observation of such changes, because we are used to noticing only the more obvious outer expressions of human nature according to so-called natural laws. What concerns the teacher, however, arises in reality from the innermost center of a child’s being, and what a teacher can do for the child affects a child’s very inner nature. Consequently, we must pay particular attention to the fact that, for example, at this significant change of teeth, the soul itself goes through a transformation.

Memory Prior to the Change of Teeth

Let us examine a single aspect of this soul-life—the memory, or capacity for remembering. A child’s memory is very different before and after the change of teeth. The transitions and developments in human life occur slowly and gradually, so to speak of the change of teeth as a single fixed event in time is only approximate. Nevertheless, this point in time manifests in the middle of the child’s development, and we must consider very intensively what takes place at that time.

When we observe a very young child, we find that the capacity to remember has the quality of a soul habit. When a child recalls something during that first period of life until the change of teeth, such remembering is a kind of habit or skill. We might say that when, as a child, I acquire a certain accomplishment—let us say, writing—it arises largely from a certain suppleness of my physical constitution, a suppleness that I have gradually acquired. When you watch a small child taking hold something, you have found a good illustration of the concept of habit. A child gradually discovers how to move the limbs this way or that way, and this becomes habit and skill. Out of a child’s imitative actions, the soul develops skillfulness, which permeates the child’s finer and more delicate organizations. A child will imitate something one day, then do the same thing again the next day and the next; this activity is performed outwardly, but also—and importantly—within the innermost parts of the physical body. This forms the basis for memory in the early years.

After the change of teeth, the memory is very different, because by then, as I have said, spirit and soul are freed from the body, and picture content can arise that relates to what was experienced in the soul—a formation of images unrelated to bodily nature. Every time we meet the same thing or process, whether due to something outer or inner, the same picture is recalled. The small child does not yet produce these inward pictures. No image emerges for that child when remembering something. When an older child has a thought or idea about some past experience, it arises again as a remembered thought, a thought “made inward.” Prior to the age of seven, children live in their habits, which are not inwardly visualized in this way. This is significant for all of human life after the change of teeth.

When we observe human development through the kind of inner vision I have mentioned—with the soul’s eyes and ears—we will see that human beings do not consist of only a physical body that can be seen with the eyes and touched with the hands. There are also supersensible members of this being. I have already pointed out the first so-called supersensible human being living within the physical body—the etheric human being. There is also a third member of human nature. Do not be put off by names; after all, we do need to have some terminology. This third member is the astral body, which develops the capacity of feeling.

Plants have an etheric body; animals have an astral body in common with humans, and they have feeling and sensation. The human being, who exists uniquely as the crown of earthly creation, has yet a fourth member—the I-being. These four members are entirely different from one another, but since they interact with one another they are not generally distinguished by ordinary observation; the ordinary observer never goes far enough to recognize the manifestations of human nature in the etheric body, the astral body, or I-being. We cannot really aspire to teach and educate, however, without knowing these things. One hesitates to say this, because it may be regarded as fantastic and absurd within the broader arena of modern society. It is nevertheless the truth, and an unbiased knowledge of the human being will not disagree.

The way that the human being works through the etheric body, astral body, and I-being is unique and is significant for educators. As you know, we are used to learning about the physical body by observing it—living or dead—and by using the intellect connected with the brain to elucidate what we have thus perceived with the senses. This type of observation alone, however, will never reveal anything of the higher members of human nature. They are inaccessible to methods of observation based only on sense-perception and intellectual activity. If we think only in terms of natural laws, we will never understand the etheric body, for example. Therefore, new methods should be introduced into colleges and universities. Observation through the senses and working in the intellect of the brain enable us to observe only the physical body. A very different training is needed to enable a person to perceive, for example, how the etheric body manifests in the human being. This is really necessary, not just for teachers of every subject, but even more so for doctors.

The Etheric Body and the Art of Sculpting

First, we should learn to sculpt and work with clay, as a sculptor works, modeling forms from within outward, creating forms out of their own inner principles, and guided by the unfolding of our own human nature. The form of a muscle or bone can never be comprehended by the methods of contemporary anatomy and physiology. Only a genuine sense of form reveals the true forms of the human body. But when we say such things we will immediately be considered somewhat crazy. But Copernicus was considered a bit mad in his time; even as late as 1828 some leaders of the Church considered Copernican theories insane and denied the faithful any belief in them!

Now let’s look at the physical body; it is heavy with mass and subject to the laws of gravity. The etheric body is not subject to gravity—on the contrary, it is always trying to get away. Its tendency is to disperse and scatter into far cosmic spaces. This is in fact what happens right after death. Our first experience after death is the dispersal of the etheric body. The dead physical body follows the laws of Earth when lowered into the grave; or when cremated, it burns according to physical laws just like any other physical body. This is not true of the etheric body, which works away from Earth, just as the physical body strives toward Earth. The etheric body, however, does not necessarily extend equally in all directions, nor does it strive away from Earth in a uniform way. Now we arrive at something that might seem very strange to you; but it can in fact be perceived by the kind of observation I have mentioned.

When you look up into the heavens, you see that the stars are clustered into definite groups, and that these groups are all different from one another. Those groups of stars attract the etheric human body, drawing it out into the far spaces. Let’s imagine someone here in the center.

The different groups of stars are drawing out the etheric body in varying degrees; there is a much stronger attraction from one group of stars than from another, thus the etheric body is not drawn out equally on all sides but to varying degrees in the different directions of space. Consequently, the etheric body is not spherical, but, through this dispersion of the etheric, certain definite forms may arise in the human being through the cosmic forces that work down from the stars. These forms remain in us as long as we live on Earth and have an etheric body within us.

If, for example, we take the upper part of the thigh, we see that both the form of the muscle and the form of the bone are shaped by influences from the stars. We need to discover how these very different forms can arise from different directions of cosmic space. We must try to model these varying forms in clay, and we will find that, in one particular form, cosmic forces act to produce length; in another the form is rounded off more quickly. Examples of the latter are the round bones, and the former are the more tubular bones.

Like sculptors, therefore, we must develop a feeling for the world—the kind of feeling that, in ancient humankind, was present as a kind of instinctive consciousness. It was clearly expressed in the Eastern cultures of prehistory, thousands of years before our era; but we still find it in Greek culture. Just consider how contemporary, materialistic artists are often baffled by the forms of the Greek sculptors. They are baffled, because they believe the Greeks worked from models, which they examined from all sides. But the Greeks still had a feeling that the human being is born from the cosmos, and that the cosmos itself forms the human being. When the Greeks created their Venus de Milo (which causes contemporary sculptors to despair), they took what flowed from the cosmos; and although this could reveal itself only imperfectly in any earthly work, they tried to express it in the human form they were creating as much as possible. The point is that, if you really attempt to mold the human form according to nature, you cannot possibly do it by slavishly following a model, which is the contemporary studio method. One must be able to turn to the great “cosmic sculptor,” who forms the human being from a feeling for space, which a person can also acquire.

This then is the first thing we must develop. People think they can gauge the human form by drawing a line going through vertically, another through the outstretched arms and another front to back; there you have the three dimensions. But in doing this, they are slaves to the three dimensions of space, and this is pure abstraction. If you draw even a single line through a person in the right way, you can see that it is subject to manifold forces of attraction—this way or that, in every direction of space. This “space” of geometry, about which Kant produced such unhappy definitions and spun out such abstract theories—this space itself is in fact an organism, producing varied forces in all directions.

Human beings are likely to develop only the grosser physical senses, and do not inwardly unfold this fine delicate feeling for space experienced in all directions. If we could only allow this feeling for space to take over, the true image of the human being would arise. Out of an active inner feeling, you will see the plastic form of the human being emerge. If we develop a feeling for handling soft clay, we have the proper conditions for understanding the etheric body, just as the activity of human intellect connected with the brain provides the appropriate conditions for understanding the physical body.

We must first create a new method of acquiring knowledge—a kind of plastic perception together with an inner plastic activity. Without this, knowledge stops short at the physical body, since we can know the etheric body only through images, not through ideas. We can really understand these etheric images only when we are able to reshape them ourselves in some way, in imitation of the cosmic shaping.

The Astral Body in Relation to Music

Now we can move on to the next member of the human being. Where do things stand today in regard to this? On the one hand, in modern life the advocates of natural science have become the authorities on the human being; on the other hand we find isolated, eccentric anthroposophists, who insist that there are also etheric and astral bodies, and when they describe the etheric and astral bodies, people try to understand those descriptions with the kind of thinking applied to understanding the physical body, which doesn’t work. True, the astral body expresses itself in the physical body, and its physical expression can be comprehended according to the laws of natural science.

However, the astral body itself, in its true inner being and function, cannot be understood by those laws. It can be understood only by understanding music—not just externally, but inwardly. Such understanding existed in the ancient East and still existed in a modified form in Greek culture. In modern times it has disappeared altogether. Just as the etheric body acts through cosmic shaping, the astral body acts through cosmic music, or cosmic melodies. The only earthly thing about the astral body is the beat, or musical measure. Rhythm and melody come directly from the cosmos, and the astral body consists of rhythm and melody.

It does no good to approach the astral body with what we understand as the laws of natural science. We must approach it with what we have acquired as an inner understanding of music. For example, you will find that when the interval of a third is played, it can be felt and experienced within our inner nature. You may have a major and minor third, and this division of the scale can arouse considerable variations in the feeling life of a person; this interval is still something inward in us. When we come to the fifth interval, we experience it at the surface, on our boundary; in hearing the fifth, it is as though we were only just inside ourselves. We feel the sixth and seventh intervals to be finding their way outside us. With the fifth we are passing beyond ourselves; and as we enter the sixth and the seventh, we experience them as external, whereas the third is completely internal. This is the work of the astral body—the musician in every human being—which echoes the music of the cosmos. All this is at work in the human being and finds expression in the physical human form. If we can really get close to such a thought in trying to comprehend the world, it can be an astonishing experience for us.

You see, we are speaking now of something that can be studied very objectively—something that flows from the astral body into the human form. In this case, it is not something that arises from cosmic shaping, but from the musical impulse streaming into the human being through the astral body. Again, we must begin with an understanding of music, just as a sculptural understanding is necessary in understanding the etheric body’s activities. If you take the part of the human being that goes from the shoulder blades to the arms, that is the work of the tonic, the keynote, living in the human being. In the upper arm, we find the interval of the second. (You can experience all this in eurythmy.) And in the lower arm the third—major and minor. When you come to the third, you find two bones in the lower arm, and so on, right down into the fingers.

This may sound like mere words and phrases, but through genuine observation of the human being, based on spiritual science, we can see these things with the same precision that a mathematician uses in approaching mathematical problems. We cannot arrive at this through any kind of mystical nonsense: it must be investigated with precision. In order that students of medicine and education really comprehend these things, their college training must be based on an inner understanding of music. Such understanding, permeated with clear, conscious thinking, leads back to the musical understanding of the ancient East, even before Greek culture began. Eastern architecture can be understood only when we understand it as religious perception descended into form.

Just as music is expressed only though the phenomenon of time, architecture is expressed in space. The human astral and etheric bodies must be understood in the same contrasting way. We can never explain the life of feeling and passion with natural laws and so-called psychological methods. We can understand it only when we consider the human being as a whole in terms of music. A time will come when psychologists will not describe a diseased condition of the soul life as they do today, but will speak of it in terms of music, as one would speak, for example, of a piano that is out of tune.

Please do not think that anthroposophy is unaware of how difficult it is to present such a view in our time. I understand very well that many people will consider what I have presented as pure fantasy, if not somewhat crazy. But, unfortunately, a socalled “reasonable” way of thinking can never portray the human being in actuality. We must develop a new and expanded rationality for these matters. In this connection, it is extraordinary how people view anthroposophy today. They cannot imagine that anything exists that transcends their powers of comprehension, but that those same powers can in fact eventually reach.

Recently, I read a very interesting book by Maeterlinck translated into German. There was a chapter about me, and it ended in an extraordinary and very amusing way. He says: “If you read Steiner’s books you will find that the early chapters are logically correct, intelligently thought-out and presented in a perfectly scientific form. But as you read on, you get the impression that the author has gone mad.” Maeterlinck, of course, has a perfect right to his opinions. Why should he not have the impression that the writer was a clever man when he wrote the first part of the book, but went mad when he wrote the later part? But simply consider the actual situation. Maeterlinck believes that in the first chapters of these books the author was clever, but in the last chapters he had gone mad. So we get the extraordinary fact that this man writes several books, one after the other. Consequently, in each of these books the first few chapters make him seem very smart, but in later chapters he seems mad, then clever again, then mad, and so on. You see how ridiculous it is when one has such a false picture. When writers—otherwise deservedly famous—write in such a way, people fail to notice what nonsense it is. This shows how hard it is, even for such an enlightened person as Maeterlinck, to reach reality. On the firm basis of anthroposophy we have to speak of a reality that is considered unreal today.

I-being and the Genius of Language

Now we come to the I-being. Just as the astral body can be investigated through music, the true nature of the I-being can be studied through the word. It may be assumed that everyone, even doctors and teachers, accepts today’s form of language as a finished product. If this is their standpoint, they can never understand the inner structure of language. This can be understood only when you consider language, not as the product of our modern mechanism, but as the result of the genius of language, working vitally and spiritually. You can do this when you attempt to understand the way a word is formed.

There is untold wisdom in words, way beyond human understanding. All human characteristics are expressed in the way various cultures form their words, and the peculiarities of any nation may be recognized in their language. For example, consider the German word Kopf (“head”). This was originally connected with the rounded form of the head, which you also find in the word Kohl (“cabbage”), and in the expression Kohlkopf (“head of cabbage”). This particular word arises from a feeling for the form of the head. You see, here the I has a very different concept of the head from what we find in testa, for example, the word for “head” in the Romance languages, which comes from testifying, or “to bear witness.” Consequently, in these two instances, the feelings from which the words are formed come from very different sources.

If you understand language in this inward way, then you will see how the I-organization works. There are some districts where lightning is not called Blitz but Himmlitzer. This is because the people there do not think of the single flashes of lightning so much as the snakelike form. People who say Blitz picture the single flash and those who say Himmlitzer picture the zig-zag form. This then is how humans really live in language as far as their I is concerned, although in the current civilization, they have lost connection with their language, which has consequently become something abstract. I do not mean to say that if you have this understanding of language you will already have attained inward clairvoyant consciousness, whereby you will be able to behold beings like the human I. But you will be on the way to such a perception if you accompany your speaking with inner understanding.

Thus, education in medical and teacher training colleges should be advanced as indicated, so that the students’ training may arouse in them an inner feeling for space, an inner relationship to music, and an inner understanding of language. Now you may argue that the lecture halls are already becoming empty and, ultimately, teacher training colleges will be just as empty if we establish what we’ve been speaking of. Where would all this lead to? Medical training keeps getting longer and longer. If we continue with our current methods, people will be sixty by the time they are qualified!

The situation we are speaking of is not due in any way to inner necessity but is related to the fact that inner conditions are not being fulfilled. If we fail to go from abstractions to plastic and musical concepts and to an understanding of the cosmic word—if we stop short at abstract ideas—our horizon will be endless; we will continue on and on and never come to a boundary, to a point where we can survey the whole. The understanding that will come from understanding sculpting and music will make human beings more rational—and, believe me, their training will actually be accelerated rather than delayed. Consequently, this inner course of development will be the correct method of training educators, and not only teachers, but those others who have so much to contribute to educational work—the doctors.

The Therapeutic Nature of Teaching

Given what I spoke of in the introductory lectures concerning the relationship between educational methods and the physical health of children, it should be clear to you that real education cannot be developed without considering medicine. Teachers should be able to assess various conditions of health or disease among their children. Otherwise, a situation will arise that is already being felt—that is, a need for doctors in the schools. The doctor is brought in from outside, which is the worst possible method we could adopt. How do such doctors stand in relation to the children? They do not know the children, nor do they know, for example, what mistakes the teachers have made with them, and so on. The only way is to cultivate an art of education that contains so much therapy that the teacher can continually see whether the methods are having a good or bad influence on the children’s health. Reform is not accomplished by bringing doctors into the schools from outside, no matter how necessary this may seem to be. In any case, the kind of training doctors get these days does not prepare them for what they must do when they are sent into the schools.

In aiming at an art of education we must provide a training based on knowledge of the human being. I hesitate to say these things because they are so difficult to comprehend. But it is an error to believe that the ideas of natural science can give us full understanding of the human being, and an awareness of that error is vital to the progress of the art of education. Only when we view children from this perspective do we see, for example, the radical and far-reaching changes that occur with the coming of the second teeth, when the memory becomes a pictorial memory, no longer related to the physical body but to the etheric body. In actuality, what is it that causes the second teeth? It is the fact that, until this time, the etheric is almost completely connected with the physical body; and when the first teeth are forced out, something separates from the physical body. If this were not the case, we would get new teeth every seven years. (Since people’s teeth decay so quickly nowadays, this might seem to be a good thing, and dentists would have to find another job!) When the etheric body is separated, what formerly worked in the physical body now works in the soul realm.

If you can perceive these things and can examine the children’s mouths without their knowledge, you will see for yourself that this is true. It is always better when children do not know they are being observed. Experimental psychology so often fails because children are aware of what is being done.

You can examine a child’s second teeth and find that they have been formed by the etheric body into a modeled image of the memory; and the shape of the teeth created by the etheric will indicate how the memory of the child will develop. Except for slight alterations in position here or there, you cannot physically change the second teeth once they are through—unless you are able to go so far as, for example, the dentist Professor Romer. He has written a book on dentistry—a new art of medicine based on anthroposophic principles—where he speaks of certain changes that can be effected even after the second teeth are established. But this need not concern us further.

When the etheric body is loosened and exists on its own after the change of teeth, the building of memory leaves the physical realm and remains almost entirely in the element of soul; indeed, this fact can put teachers on the right track. Before this change, the soul and spirit formed a unity with the physical and etheric. After this, the physical—previously acting in conjunction with the soul—is expressed as the second teeth, and what collaborated with the physical in this process separates and manifests as an increased power to form ideas and as the formation and reliability of memory.

Once you have acquired such insight into human nature, you will discover much that will help in your teaching. You must permeate yourselves with this spiritual knowledge of the human being and enliven it in yourselves; your observations of children will then inspire you with ideas and methods for teaching, and this inner inspiration and enthusiasm will penetrate your practical work. The rules established in introductory texts on education produce only abstract activity in the soul. But what arises from anthroposophic knowledge penetrates the will and the efforts of teachers; it becomes the impulse for everything done in the classroom.

A living knowledge of the human being brings life and order to the soul of a teacher. But if teachers study only teaching methods that arise from natural science, they may get some clever ideas of what to do with the children, but they will be unable to carry them out. A teacher’s skill and practical handling of children must arise from the living spirit within, and this is where purely scientific ideas have no place. If teachers can acquire a true knowledge of the human being, they will become aware of how, when the etheric body is freed at the change of teeth, the child has an inner urge to receive everything in the form of images. The child’s own inner being wants to become “image.” During the first stage of life, impressions lack this picture-forming tendency; they are transformed instead into habits and skills in the child; memory itself is habit and skill.

Children want to imitate, through the movement of the limbs, everything they see happening around them; they have no desire to form any inner images. But after the change of teeth, you will notice how children come to know things very differently. Now they want to experience pictures arising in the soul; consequently, teachers must bring everything into a pictorial element in their lessons. Creating images is the most important thing for teachers to understand.

Teaching Writing and Reading

When we begin to view the facts, however, we are immediately faced with certain contradictions. Children must learn to read and write, and when they come to school we assume they will first learn to read, and after that they will learn to write in connection with their reading. Let’s consider, however, the reality of letters—what it means when we take a pen to paper and try to express through writing what is in the mind. What is the relationship between the printed letters of today and the original picture-language of ancient times? How were we taught these things? We show children a capital A and a lowercase a, but what in the world do these letters have to do with the sound “ah”? There is no relationship at all between the form of the letter A and the sound “ah.”

When the art of writing arose, things were different. In certain areas, pictorial signs were used, and a kind of pictorial painting was employed. Later, this was standardized; but originally those drawings copied the process and feeling of the sounds; thus, what appeared on paper was, to some extent, a reproduction of what lived in the soul. Modern characters, however, are alien to a small child’s nature, and it is little wonder that when certain early peoples first saw printed letters, it had a peculiar effect on them. When the people of Europe came among the Native Americans and showed them how they expressed their thoughts on paper, the Native Americans were alarmed and considered it the work of the devil; they were afraid of the little demons lurking behind those written letters. They immediately concluded that the Europeans engaged in black magic, since people have a habit of attributing to black magic whatever they cannot understand.

But what is the truth of the matter? We know that when we utter the sound “ah,” we express wonder and admiration. Now, it is very natural to try to reproduce this sound with the whole body and express it in a gesture of the arms. If you copy this gesture (stretching the arms obliquely above the head) you get the capital A. When you teach writing, you can, for example, begin with a feeling of wonder, and proceed with the children to some kind of painting and drawing, and in this way you can bring their inner and outer experiences into that painting and drawing.

Consider another example. I tell a girl to think of a fish and ask her to paint it (awkward though this may be). It must be done in a particular way, not simply as she might prefer, but with the head of the fish in front, like this, and the rest of the fish here. The child paints the fish, and thus, through a kind of painting and drawing, she produces a written character. You then tell her to pronounce the word fish—“fish.” Now take away the ish, and from fish you have arrived at her first written letter, f.

In this way a child will come to understand how pictorial writing arose, and how it developed into contemporary writing. The forms were copied, but the pictures were abandoned. This is how drawing the various sounds arose. You do not need to make a special study of how such things evolved. This is not really necessary for teachers, since they can develop them out of their own intuition and power to think. Have a boy, for example, paint the upper lip of a mouth, and then pronounce the word mouth. Leave out the outh, and you get the m. In this way you can relate all the written characters to some reality, and the child will constantly develop a living, inner activity.

Thus, you should teach the children writing first, and let today’s abstract letters arise from tangible reality; when a child learns to write in this way, the whole being is engaged in the process. Whereas, if you begin with reading, then only the head organization participates in an abstract way. In writing, the hand must participate as well, and in this way the whole human being is aroused to activity. When you begin with writing—writing developed through the formation of images and drawing forms—your teaching will approach the child’s whole being. Then you can move on to teaching reading; and what was developed out of the child’s whole being through drawing can be understood by the head. This method of teaching writing and reading will naturally take longer, but it will have a far healthier effect on the whole earthly life from birth to death. These things can be done when the practical work of the school flows out of a real spiritual knowledge of the human being. Such knowledge can, through its own inner force, become the teaching method in our schools. The desires of those who earnestly seek a new art of education live in this; but its essence can be truly found only when we are unafraid to look for a full knowledge of the human being in body, soul, and spirit.

My dear friends,

I would have liked to carry out for you today some experiments to round out the series of facts that lead us to our goal. It is not possible to do so, however, and I must accordingly arrange my lecture somewhat differently from the way I intended. The reason for this is partly that the apparatus is not in working order and partly because we lack alcohol today, just as we lacked ice yesterday.

We will therefore take up in more detail the things that were begun yesterday. I will ask you to consider all these facts that were placed before you for the purpose of obtaining a survey of the relationships of various bodies to the being of heat. You will realize that certain typical phenomena meet us. We can say: These phenomena carry the impress of certain relations involving the being of heat, at first unknown to us. Heat and pressure exerted on a body or the state of aggregation that a body assumes according to its temperature, also the extent of space occupied, the volume, are examples. We are able on the one side, to see how a solid body melts, and can establish the fact that during the melting of the solid, no rise in temperature is measurable by the thermometer or any other temperature-measuring instrument. The temperature increase stands still, as it were, during the melting. On the other hand, we can see the change from a liquid to a gas, and there again we find the disappearance of the temperature increase and its reappearance when the whole body has passed into the gaseous condition. These facts make up a series that you can demonstrate for yourselves, and that you can follow with your eyes, your senses and with instruments. Yesterday, also, we called attention to certain inner experiences of the human being himself which he has under the influence of warmth and also under the influence of other sense qualities such as light and tone. But we saw that magnetism and electricity were not really sense impressions, at least not immediate sense impressions, because as ordinary physics says, there is no sense organ for these entities. We say, indeed, that so far as electrical and magnetic properties are concerned we come to know them through determining their effects, the attraction of bodies for instance, and the many other effects of electrical processes. But we have no immediate sense perception of electricity and magnetism as we have for tone and light.

We then noted particularly, and this must be emphasized, that our own passive concepts, by which we represent the world, are really a kind of distillation of the higher sense impressions. Wherever you make an examination you will find these higher concepts and will be able to convince yourselves that they are the distilled essence of the sense impressions. I illustrated this yesterday in the case of the concept of being. You can get echoes of tone in the picture of the conceptual realm, and you can everywhere see showing through how these concepts have borrowed from light . But there is one kind of concept where you cannot do this, as you will soon see. You cannot do it in the realm of the mathematical concepts. In so far as they are purely mathematical, there is no trace of the tonal or the visible. Now we must deceive ourselves here. Man is thinking of tone when he speaks of the wave number of sound vibrations. Naturally I do not refer to this sort of thing. I mean all that is obtained from pure mathematics. Such things, for instance, as the content of the proposition of Pythagoras, that the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180°, or that the whole is greater than the part, etc. The basis of our mathematical concepts does not relate itself to the seen or the heard, but it relates itself in the last analysis to our will impulse. Strange as it may seem to you at first, you will always find this fact when you look at these things from the psychological point of view, as it were. The human being who draws a triangle (the drawn triangle is only an externalization) is attaining in concept to an unfolding of the will around the three angles. There is an unfolding of action around three angles as shown by the motion of the hand or by walking, by turning of the body. The thing that you have within you as a will-concept, that in reality you carry into the pure mathematical concept. That is the essential distinction between mathematical concepts and other concepts. This is the distinction about which Kant and other philosophers waged such controversy. You can distinguish the inner determination of mathematical concepts. This distinction arises from the fact that mathematical concepts are so rigidly bound up with our own selves, that we carry our will nature into them. Only what subsists in the sphere of the will is brought into mathematical operations. This is what makes them seem so certain to us. What is not felt to be so intimately bound up with us, but is simply felt through an organ placed in a certain part of our make-up, that appears uncertain and empirical. This is the real distinction. Now, I wish to call your attention to a certain fact. When we dip down into the sphere of will, whence came, in a vague and glimmering way, the abstractions which make up the sum of our pure arithmetical and geometrical concepts, we enter the unknown region where the will rules, a region as completely unknown to us in the inner sense, as electricity and magnetism are in the outer sense. Yesterday I endeavored to illustrate this by asking you to imagine yourselves living, thinking rainbows with your consciousness in the green, in consequence of which you did not perceive the green but perceived the colors on each side of it, fading into the unknown. I compared the red to the dipping down inwardly into the unknown sphere of the will and the blue-violet to the outward extension into the spheres of electricity and magnetism and the like.

Now I am inserting at this point in our course this psychological-physiological point of view, as it might be called, because it is very essential for the future that people should be led back again to the relation of the human being to physical observations. Unless this relationship is established, the confusion that reigns at present cannot be eliminated. We will see this as we follow further the phenomena of heat. But it is not so easy to establish this relationship in the thinking of today. The reason is just this, that modern man cannot easily bridge the gap between what he perceives as outer space phenomena in the world, or better, as outer sense phenomena and what he experiences within. In these modern times there is such a pronounced dualism between all which we experience as knowledge of the outer world and what we experience inwardly, that it is extraordinarily difficult to bridge this gap, But the gap must be bridged if physics is to advance. To this end we must use the intuitive faculties rather than the rational when we relate something external to what goes on within man himself. Thus we can begin to grasp how we must orient ourselves, in observing phenomena so difficult as those arising from heat. Let me call your attention to the following:

Suppose you learn a poem by heart. You will, as you learn it, first find it necessary to become acquainted with the ideas that underlie the poem. At first you will always have the tendency, when you recite the poem, to let those ideas unroll in your mind. But you know that the more frequently you recite the poem, especially when there is a lapse of time between the recitations, the less intensely you are obliged to think of the ideas. There may come a time when it is not necessary to think at all, but simply to reel off the recitation mechanically. We never actually reach this point; do not wish to, in fact, but we approach the condition asymptotically as it were. Our feelings as human beings prevent us from reaching this stage of purely mechanical repetition, but it is thinkable that we would get to the point where we needed to think not at all, but when we spoke the first line the rest of the poem would follow without any thinking about it. You recognize the similarity between such a condition and the approach of the hyperbola to its asymptotes. But this leads us to the conception that when we speak a poem we are dealing with two different activities working simultaneously in our organism. We are dealing with a mechanical reeling-off of certain processes, and along with this go the processes included in our soul concepts. On the one hand, we have what we can properly speak of as playing itself out mechanically in space, and on the other hand, we have a soul process which is entirely non-spatial in nature.

When now, you fasten your attention simply on that which reels itself off mechanically, and you do this in thought, for instance, if you imagine you recited a poem in an unknown language, then you have simply the mechanical process. The instant you accompany this mechanical process with thinking, then you have an inner soul activity that cannot be brought out into space. You cannot express in space the thinking with which a man accompanies the recitation, as you can the mechanical processes of actual speaking, of the pronouncing of words.

Let me give you an analogy. When we follow the heating of a solid body up to the time it arrives at its melting point, the temperature becomes higher. We can see this on the thermometer. When the body begins to melt, the thermometer stands still until the melting is complete. There is an analogy between what we can follow with the thermometer, the outer physical process, and what we can follow physically in the spoken word. And there is an analogy also between what escapes us, and lies in the concepts of the reciter and what happens to the heat while the melting goes on. Here you see, we have an example where we can, by analogy, at least bridge the gap between an outer observation and something in the human being. In other realms than that of speech we do not have such ready examples to bridge the gap. This is because in speech there is, on the one hand, the possibility imaginable, at least, that a person could mechanically speak out something learned by heart. Or on the other hand, that the person would not speak at all but simply think about it and thus remove it entirely from the realm of space. In other spheres we do not have the opportunity to make this cleavage and see precisely how one activity passes over into another. Especially is this difficult when we wish to follow the nature of heat. In this case we have to set out to investigate physiologically and psychologically how heat behaves when we have taken it up into ourselves.

Yesterday, by way of illustration, I said to you: “I go into a room that is comfortably warmed, I sit down and write.” I cannot so directly find the inter-relationships between what I experience or feel when I go into the warm room. What goes on within me parallels the outer warmth, when I write my thoughts down. But I cannot determine the relationship so readily as I can between speaking something and thinking about it. Thus it is difficult to find the something within that corresponds to the outer sensation of warmth. It is a question of gradually approaching the concepts that will lead us further in this direction and in this connection I want to call your attention to something you know from your anthroposophy.

You know, when we make the attempt to extend our thinking by meditation, to increase its inner intensity, and so to work with our thoughts that we come again and again into the condition where we know we are using soul-forces without the help of the body, we notice a certain thing. We notice that in order to do this, our entire inner soul life has to change. With ordinary abstract thoughts man cannot enter the higher region of human soul life. There thoughts become picture-like and they have to be translated out of the imaginative element in order to get them into abstract form, if they are to be brought into the outer world which is not grasped by the imaginative element. But you need to understand a method of looking at these things, such as is presented, for instance, in my Occult Science. In this book the endeavor is to be as true to the facts as possible, and it is this which has so disturbed the people who are only able to think abstractly. For the attempt must be made to get things over into picture form, as I have done to some extent in the description of the Saturn and Sun states. There you will find purely picture concepts mixed in with the others. It is very hard for people to go over into the pictures, because these things cannot be put into the abstract form. The reason for this is that when we think abstractly, when we move within the narrow confines of concepts, in which people today are so much at home, and especially so in the realm of natural science, when we do this we are using ideas completely dependent on our bodies. We cannot, for instance, do without our bodies when we set out to think through the things set forth as laws in the physics books. There we must think in such a way that we use our bodies as instruments. When we rise to the sphere of the imagination, then the abstract ideas must be completely altered, because our inner soul life no longer uses the physical body.

Now you can take what I might call a comprehensive view of the realm of imaginative thought. This realm of imaginative thought has in us nothing to do with what is tied up in our outer corporeality. We rise to a region where we live as beings of soul and spirit without dependence on our corporeality. In other words, the instant we enter the realm of the imaginative, we leave space. We are then no longer in space.

Note now, this has an extremely important bearing. I have in the previous course, made a very definite differentiation between mere kinematics and what enters into our consideration as mechanical, such as mass, for instance. As long as I consider only kinematics, I need only think of things. I can write them down on a blackboard or a sheet of paper and complete the survey of motion and space so far as my thinking takes me. But in that case I must remain within what can be surveyed in terms of time and space. Why is this? This is so for a very definite reason. You must make the following clear to yourselves: All human beings, as they exist on earth, are as you yourselves, within time and space. They are bounded by a definite space and are related as space objects to other space objects. Therefore, when you speak of space, you are not able, considering the matter in an unprejudiced way, to take seriously the Kantian ideas. For if space were inside of us, then we could not ourselves be within space. We only think space is inside of us. We can free ourselves of this fancy, of this notion, if we consider the fact that this being-within space has a very real meaning for us. If space were inside of us, it would have no meaning for a person whether he were born in Moscow or Vienna. But where we are born has a very real significance. As a terrestrial-empirical person, I am quite completely a product of space facts. That is, as a human being, I belong to relations that form themselves in space. Likewise, with time, you would all be different persons if you had been born 20 years earlier. That is to say, your life does not have time inside of it, but time has your life within it. Thus as experiencing persons, you stand within time and space. And when we talk of time and space, or when we make a picture of will impulses, as I have explained we do in geometry, this is because we ourselves live inside of spatial and temporal relations, and are therefore quite definitely conditioned by them, and so are able, a priori, to speak of them as we do in mathematics. When you go over to the concept of mass, this is not so. The matter must then be put otherwise. In respect to mass, you are dealing with something quite special. You cannot say that you cut out a portion of time or space, but rather that you live in the general space mass and make it into your own mass. This mass then, is within you. It cannot be gainsaid that this mass with all its activities, all of its potentialities, is active inside of you; at this moment it falls into a different category from time and space so far as its relations to you are concerned. It is precisely because you yourself take part, as it were, with your inner being in the properties of the mass, because you take it up into your being, that it does not allow itself to be brought into consciousness like time and space. In the realm where the world gives us our own substance, we thus enter an unknown region. This is related to the fact that our will is, for instance, closely connected with the phenomena of mass inside us. But we are unconscious of these phenomena; we are asleep to them. And we are related to the will activity and accompany mass phenomena within us in no other way than we are to the world in general between going to sleep and waking up. We are not conscious of either one. Both these things are hidden from human consciousness, and in this respect, there is no immediate distinction between them.

Thus we gradually bring these things nearer to the human being. It is this that the physicists shy away from, the bringing of such things near to man. But in no other way can we obtain real concepts except by developing relationship between the human being and the world, a relationship that does not exist at the start, as in the case of time and space. We speak of time and space, let us say, out of our rational faculties, whence comes the remoteness of the mathematical and kinematical sciences. Of the things experienced merely through the senses, in an external fashion, things related to mass, we can at first speak only in an empirical fashion. But we can analyze the relation between the activity of a portion of mass within us and outer mass activity. As soon as we do this we can begin to deal with mass in the same way that we deal with the obvious relation between ourselves and time or ourselves and space. That is, we must grow inwardly into such relation with the world in our physical concepts, as we have for the mathematical or kinematical concepts.

It is a peculiar thing that, as we loosen ourselves from our own bodies in which all those things take place to which we are asleep, as we raise ourselves to imaginative concepts, we really take a step nearer the world. We approach always nearer to that which otherwise reigns in us unconsciously. There is no other way to enter into the objectivity of the facts than to push forward with our own developed inner soul forces. At the same time that we detach ourselves from our own materiality, we approach more and more closely to what is going on in the outside world.

However, it is not so easy to obtain even the most elementary experiences in this region, since a person must so transform himself that he pays attention to things that are not noticed at all under ordinary circumstances. But now, I will tell you something that will probably greatly astonish you. Let us suppose you have advanced further on the path of imaginative thinking. Suppose you have really begun to think imaginatively. You will then experience something that will astonish you. It will be much easier than it formerly was for you to recite in a merely mechanical way a poem that you have learned by heart. It will not be more difficult for you, but less so. If you examine your soul organism without prejudice and with care, you will at once find that you are more prone to recite a poem mechanically without thinking about it, if you have undergone an occult training than if you have not undergone such a training. You do not dislike this going over into the mechanical so strongly as you did before the occult development. It is such things as this that are not usually stated but are meant when it is said over and over again: The experiences you have in occult training are really opposed to the concepts that are ordinarily had before you enter occult training and thus it is, when the more advanced stage is reached, that one comes to look more lightly on the ideas of ordinary life. And therefore, anyone who advances in occultism is exposed to the danger of afterwards becoming a greater mechanist than before. An orderly occult training guards against this, but the tendency to become materialistic is quite marked in the very people who have undergone occult development. I will, by example, tell you why.

You see, in ordinary life, it is really, as the theorists say it is, the brain thinks. But ordinarily, a man does not actually experience this fact. It is quite possible in this ordinary life to carry out such a dialogue as I did in my childhood with a youthful friend who as a crass materialist and became more and more so. He would say, “When I think my brain does the thinking.” I would say to that: “ Yes, but when you are with me you always say, I will do this, I think. Why do you not say, my brain will do this, my brain thinks? You are always speaking an untruth.” The reason is that for the theoretical materialist, quite naturally, there does not exist the possibility of observing the processes in the brain. He cannot observe these physical processes. Therefore, materialism remains for him merely a theory.

The moment a person advances somewhat from imaginative to inspirational ideas, he becomes able really to observe the parallel processes in the brain. Then what goes on in the material part of the brain becomes really visible. Aside from the fact that it is extremely seductive, the things a person can observe in his own activity appear to him more and more wonderful to a high degree. For this activity of the brain is observable as something more wonderful than all that the theoretical materialists can describe about it. Therefore, the temperature comes to grow materialistic for the very reason that the activity of the human brain has become observable. Only one is, as has been said, protected from this.

But as I have explained to you these steps in occult development, I have at the same time showed you how this development creates the possibility of a deeper penetration into material processes. This is the extraordinary thing. He who functions in the spirit simply as an abstract thing, will be relatively powerless in the face of nature. He grows into contact with other natural phenomena as he has already grown into contact with time and space.

We must now set up on the one side, all the things we have just tried to place before our minds, and on the other side, those things that have met us from the realm of heat.

What has come to us from the realm of heat? Well, we followed the rise of temperature as we warmed a solid body to melting point. We showed how the temperature rise disappeared for a time, and then re-appeared until the body began to boil, to evaporate. When we extended our observations, another thing appeared. We could see that the gas produced passed over in all directions on its surroundings. (Fig. 1a), seeking to distribute itself in all directions, and could only be made to take on form if its own pressure were opposed by an equal and opposite pressure brought to bear from the outside. These things have been brought out by experiment and will be further cleared up by other experiments. The moment the temperature is lowered to the point where the body can solidify, it can give itself a form (Fig. 1b). When we experience temperature rise and fall, we experience what corresponds externally to form. We are experiencing the dissolution of form and the re-establishment of it. The gas shows us the dissolution, the solid pictures for us the establishment of form. We experience the transition between these two, also, and we experience it in an extremely interesting fashion. For, imagine to yourselves the solid and the gas and the liquid, the fluid body standing between. This liquid need not be enclosed by a vessel surrounding it completely, but only on the bottom and sides. On the upper side, the liquid forms its own surface perpendicular to the line between itself and the center of the earth. Thus we can say that we have here a transition form between the gas and the solid (Fig. 1c). In a gas we never have such a surface. In a liquid such as water, we have one surface formed. In the case of a solid, we have that all around the body which occurs in the liquid only on the upper surfaces.

Now this is an extremely interesting and significant relation. For it directs our attention to the fact that a solid body has over its entire surface something corresponding to the upper surface of a liquid, but that it determines the establishment of the surface on a body of water. It is at right angles to the line joining it to the center of the earth. The whole earth conditions the establishment of the surface. We can therefore say: In the case of water, each point within it has the same relation to the entire earth that the points in a solid have to something within the solid. The solid therefore includes something which in the case of water resides in the relation of the latter to the earth. The gas diffuses. The relation to the earth does not take part at all. It is out of the picture. Gases have no surface at all.

You will see from this that we are obliged to go back to an old conception. I called your attention in a previous lecture to the fact that the old Greek physicists called solid bodies Earth. They did this, not account of some superficial reason such as has been ascribed to them by people today, but they did it because they were conscious of the fact that the solid, of itself, takes care of that which is the case of water is taken care of by the earth as a whole. The solid takes into itself the role of the earthly. It is entirely justified to put the matter in this way: The earthly resides within a solid. In water it does not reside within, but the whole earth takes up the role of forming a surface on the liquid.

Thus you see, when we proceed from solid bodies to water, we are obliged to extend our considerations not only to what actually lies before us but in order to get an intelligent idea of the nature of water, we must extend them to include the water of the whole earth and to think of this as a unity in relation with the central point of the earth. To observe a “fragment” of water as a physical entity is absurd, just as much so as to consider a cut-off garment of my little finger as an organism. It would die at once. It only has meaning as an organism if it is considered in its relation to the whole organism. The meaning that the solid has in itself, can only be attached to water if we consider it in relation to the whole earth. And so it is with all liquids on earth.

And again, when we pass on from the fluid to the gaseous, we come to understand that the gaseous removes itself from the influence of the earth. It does not form surfaces. It partakes of everything which is not terrestrial. In other words, we must not merely look on the earth for the activities of a gas, we must bring in the environment of the earth to help us out, we must go out into space and seek there the forces involved. When we wish to learn the laws of the gaseous state, we become involved in nothing less than astronomical considerations.

Thus you see how these things are related to the whole terrestrial scheme when we examine the phenomena that we have up to this time simply gathered together. And when we come to such a point as the melting or boiling point, then there enter in things that must now appear to us as very significant. For, if we consider the melting point we pass from the terrestrial condition of the solid body where it determines its own form and relations, to something which includes the whole earth. The earth takes the sold captive when the latter goes over into the fluid state. From its own kingdom, the solid body enters the terrestrial kingdom as a whole when we reach the melting point. It ceases to have individuality. And when we carry the fluid body over into the gaseous condition, then we come to the point where the connection with the earth as shown by the formation of a liquid surface is loosened. The instant we go from a liquid to a gas, the body loosens itself from the earth, as it were, and enters the realm of the extra-terrestrial. When we consider a gas, the forces active in it are to be thought of as having escaped from the earth. Therefore, when we study these phenomena we cannot avoid passing from the ordinary physical-terrestrial into the cosmic. For we no longer are in contact with reality if our attention is not turned to what is actually working in the things themselves.

But now another phenomena meets us. Consider such a thing as the one you know very well and to which I have called your attention, namely that water behaves so remarkably, in that ice floats on water, or, stated otherwise, is less dense than water. When it goes over into the fluid condition its temperature rises, and it contracts and becomes denser. Only by virtue of this fact can ice float on the surface of the water. Here we have between zero and four degrees, water showing an exception to the general rule that we find when temperature increases, namely that bodies become less and less dense as they are warmed up. This range of four degrees, where water expands as the temperature is lowered, is very instructive. What do we learn from this range? We learn that the water sets up an opposition. As ice it is a solid body with a kind of individuality, but opposes the transition to an entirely different sphere. It is very necessary to consider such things. For then we begin to get an understanding as to why, under certain conditions, the temperature as determined by a thermometer disappears, say at the melting or boiling points. It disappears just as our bodily reality disappears when we rise to the realm of imagination. We will go into the matter a little more deeply, and it will not appear so paradoxical when we try to clear up further the following: What happens then, when a heat condition obliges us to raise the temperature to the third power, or in this case to go into the fourth dimension, thus passing out of space altogether? Let us at this time, put this proposition before our souls and tomorrow we ill speak further about it. Just as it is possible for our bodily activity to pass over into the spiritual when we enter the imaginative realm, so we can find a path leading from the external and visible in the realm of heat tot he phenomena that are pointed to by our thermometer when the temperature rise we are measuring with it disappears before our eyes. What process goes on behind this disappearance? That is the question which we are asking ourselves today. Tomorrow we will speak of it further.

The teacher of the present day should have a comprehensive view of the laws of the universe as a background to all he undertakes in his school work. And clearly, it is particularly in the lower classes, in the lower school grades, that education demands a connection in the teacher's soul with the highest ideas of humanity. A real canker in school constitution of recent years has been the habit of keeping the teacher of younger classes in a kind of dependent position, in a position which has made his existence seem of less value than that of teachers in the upper school. Naturally this is not the place for me to speak in general of the spiritual branch of the social organism. But I must point out that in future everything in the sphere of teaching must be on an equal footing; and public opinion will have to recognise that the teacher of the lower grades, both spiritually and in other ways, has the same intrinsic value as the teacher of the upper grades. It will not surprise you, therefore, if we point out to-day in the background of all teaching—with younger children as with older—there must be something that one cannot of course use directly in one's work with the children, but which it is essential that the teacher should know if his teaching is to be fruitful.

In our teaching we bring to the child the world of nature on the one hand and the world of the spirit on the other. In so far as we are human beings on the earth, on the physical plane, fulfilling our existence between birth and death, we are intimately connected with the natural world on the one hand and the spiritual world on the other hand. Now the psychological science of our time is a very weak growth. It is still suffering from the after-effects of that dogmatic Church pronouncement of A.D. 869—to which I have often alluded—a decree which obscured an earlier vision resting on instinctive knowledge: the insight that man is divided into body, soul and spirit. When you hear psychologists speak to-day you will nearly always find that they speak only of the twofold nature of man. You will hear it said that man consists of matter and soul, or of body and spirit, however it may be put. Thus matter and body, and equally soul and spirit, are regarded as meaning much the same thing.¹ Nearly all psychologies are built up on this erroneous conception of the twofold division of the human being. It is impossible to come to a real insight into human nature if one adopts this twofold division alone. It is for this fundamental reason that nearly everything that is put forward to-day as psychology is only dilettantism, a mere playing with words.

This is chiefly due to that error, which reached its full magnitude only in the second half of the nineteenth century, and which arose from a misconception of a really great achievement of physical science. You know that the good people of Heilbronn have erected a memorial in the middle of their city to the man they shut up in an asylum during his life: Julius Robert Mayer. And you know that this personality, of whom the Heilbronn people are to-day naturally extremely proud, is associated with what is called the law of the Conservation of Energy or Force.

This law states that the sum of all energies or forces present in the universe is constant, only that these forces undergo certain changes, and appear, now as heat, now as mechanical force, or the like. This is the form in which the law of Julius Robert Mayer is presented, because it is completely misunderstood. For he was really concerned with the discovery of the metamorphosis of forces, and not with the exposition of such an abstract law as that of the conservation of energy.

Now, considered broadly and from the point of view of the history of civilisation, what is this law of the conservation of energy or force? It is the great stumbling-block to any understanding of man. For as soon as people think that forces can never be created afresh, it becomes impossible to arrive at a knowledge of the true being of man. For the true nature of man rests on the fact that through him new forces are continually coming into existence. It is certainly true that, under the conditions in which we are living in the world, man is the only being in whom new forces and even—as we shall hear later—new matter is being formed. But as modern philosophy will have nothing to do with the elements through which alone the human being can be fully comprehended, it produces this law of the conservation of energy; a law which, in a sense, does no harm when applied to the other kingdoms of nature, to the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms—but which applied to man destroys all possibility of a true understanding and knowledge.

As teachers it will be necessary for you on the one hand to give your pupils an understanding of nature, and on the other hand to lead them to a certain comprehension of spiritual life. Without a knowledge of nature in some degree, and without some relation to spiritual life, man cannot take his place in social life. Let us therefore first of all turn our attention to external nature.

Outer nature presents itself to us in two ways. On the one side, we confront nature in our thought life which as you know is of an image character and is a kind of reflection of our pre-natal life. On the other side we come into touch with that nature which may be called will-nature, which, as germ, points to our life after death. In this way we are continuously involved with nature. This might of course appear to be a two fold relationship between man and the world, and it has in point of fact given rise to the error of the twofold nature of man. We shall return to this subject later. When we confront the world from the side of thinking and of the mental picture, then we can really only comprehend that part of the world which is perpetually dying. This is a law of extraordinary importance. You must be very clear on this point: you may come across the most marvellous natural laws, but if they have been discovered by means of the intellect and the powers of the mental picture, then they will always refer to what is in process of dying in external nature.

When, however, the living will, present in man as germ, is turned to the external world, it experiences laws very different from those connected with death. Hence those of you, who still retain conceptions which have sprung from the modern age and the errors of present-day science, will find something difficult to understand. What brings us into contact with the external world through the senses—including the whole range of the twelve senses—has not the nature of cognition, but rather of will. A man of to-day has lost all perception of this. He therefore considers it childish when he reads in Plato that actually sight comes about by the stretching forth of a kind of prehensile pair of arms from the eyes to the objects. These prehensile arms cannot of course be perceived by means of the senses; but that Plato was conscious of them is proof that he had penetrated into the super-sensible world. Actually, looking at things involves the same process as taking hold of things, only it is more delicate. For example, when you take hold of a piece of chalk this is a physical process exactly like the spiritual process that takes place when you send the etheric forces from your eyes to grasp an object in the act of sight. If people of the present day had any power of observation, they would be able to deduce these facts from observing natural phenomena. If, for example, you look at a horse's eyes, which are directed outwards, you will get the feeling that the horse, simply through the position of his eyes, has a different attitude to his environment from the human being. I can show you the causes of this most clearly by the following hypothesis: imagine that your two arms were so constituted that it was quite impossible for you to bring them together in front, so that you could never take hold of yourself. Suppose you had to remain in the position of “Ah” in Eurythmy and could never come to “0,” that, through some resisting force, it were impossible for you by stretching your arms forward to bring them together in front. Now the horse is in this situation with respect to the super-sensible arms of his eyes: the arm of his right eye can never touch the arm of his left eye. But the position of man's eyes is such that he can continually make these two super-sensible arms of his eyes touch one another. This is the basis of our sensation of the Ego, the I—a super-sensible sensation. If we had no possibility at all of bringing left and right into contact; or if the touching of left and right meant as little as it does with animals, who never rightly join their fore-feet, in prayer for instance, or in any similar spiritual exercise—if this were the case we should not be able to attain this spiritualised sensation of our own self.

What is of paramount importance in the sensations of eye and ear is not so much the passive element, it is the activity, i.e. how we meet the outside world in our will. Modern philosophy has often had an inkling of some truth, and has then invented all kinds of words, which, however, usually show how far one is from a real comprehension of the matter. For example, the Localzeichen of Lotze's philosophy exhibit a trace of this knowledge that the will is active in the senses. But our lower sense organism, which clearly shows its connection with the metabolic system in the senses of touch, taste and smell, is indeed closely bound up with the metabolic system right into the higher senses—and the metabolic system is of a will nature.

You can therefore say: man confronts nature with his intellectual faculties and through their means he grasps all that is dead in Nature, and he acquires laws concerning what is dead. But what rises in Nature from the womb of death to become the future of the world, this is comprehended by man's will—that will which is seemingly so indeterminate, but which extends right into the senses themselves.

Think how living your relationship to Nature will become if you keep clearly in view what I have just said. For then you will say to yourselves: when I go out into Nature I have the play of light and colour continually before me; in assimilating the light and its colours I am uniting myself with that part of Nature which is being carried on into the future; and when I return to my room and think over what I have seen in Nature, and spin laws about it, then I am concerning myself with that element in the world which is perpetually dying. In Nature dying and becoming are continuously flowing into one another. We are able to comprehend the dying element because we bear within us the reflection of our prenatal life, the world of intellect, the world of thought, whereby we can see in our mind's eye the elements of death at the basis of Nature. And we are able to grasp what will come of Nature in the future because we confront Nature, not only with our intellect and thought, but with that which is of a will-nature within ourselves.

Were it not that, during his earthly life, man could preserve some part of what before his birth became purely thought life, he would never be able to achieve freedom. For, in that case, man would be bound up with what is dead, and the moment he wanted to call into free activity what in himself is related to the dead element in Nature, he would be wanting to call into free activity a dying thing. And if he wished to make use of what unites him with Nature as a being of will, his consciousness would be deadened, for what unites him as a will being with Nature is still in germ. He would be a Nature being, but not a free being.

Over and above these two elements—the comprehension of what is dead through the intellect, and the comprehension of what is living and becoming through the will—there dwells something in man which he alone and no other earthly being bears within him from birth to death, and that is pure thinking; that kind of thinking which is not directed to external nature, but is solely directed to the super-sensible nature in man himself, to that which makes him an autonomous being, something over and above what lives in the “less than death” and “more than life.” When speaking of human freedom therefore, one has to pay attention to this autonomous thing in man, this pure sense-free thinking in which the will too is always present.

Now when you turn to consider Nature itself from this point of view you will say: I am looking out upon the world, the stream of dying is in me, and also the stream of renewing: dying—being born again. Modern science understands but little of this process; for it regards the external world as more or less of a unity, and continually muddles up dying and becoming. So that the many statements about Nature and its essence which are common to-day are entirely confused, because dying and becoming are mixed up and confounded with one another. In order clearly to differentiate between these two streams in Nature the question must be asked: how would it be with the world if man himself were not within it?

This question presents a great dilemma for the philosophy of modern science. For, suppose you were to ask a truly modern research scientist: what would Nature be like if man were not within it? Of course he might at first be rather shocked, for the question would seem to be to him a strange one. Then, however, he would consider what grounds his science gives for answering such a question, and he would say: in this case, minerals, plants and animals would be on the earth, only man would not be there; and the course of the earth right through from the beginning, when it was still in the nebulous condition described by Kant and Laplace, would have been the same as it has been, only that man would not have been present in this progress. Practically speaking this is the only answer that could result. He might perhaps add: man tills the ground and so alters the surface of the earth, or he constructs machines and thereby also brings about certain alterations; but these are immaterial in comparison with the changes that are caused by Nature itself. In any case the gist of the scientist's answer would be that minerals, plants and animals would develop without man being present on the earth.

This is not correct. For if man were not present in the earth's evolution then the animals, for the most part, would not be there either; for a great many animals, and particularly the higher animals, have only arisen in the earth's evolution because man was obliged—figuratively speaking, of course—to use his elbows. The nature of man formerly contained many things which are not there now, and at a certain stage of his earthly development he had to separate out from himself the higher animals, to throw them off, as it were, so that he himself could progress. I will make a comparison to describe this throwing out: imagine a solution where something is being dissolved, and then imagine that this dissolved substance is separated out and falls to the bottom as sediment. In the same way man was united with the animal world in earlier conditions of his development and later he separated out the animal world like a precipitate, or sediment. The animals would not have become what they are to-day if man had not had to develop as he has done. Thus without man in the earth evolution the animal forms as well as the earth itself would have looked quite other than they do to-day.

But let us pass on to consider the mineral and plant world. Here we must be clear that not only the lower animal forms but also the plant and mineral kingdoms would long ago have dried up and ceased to develop if man were not upon the earth. And, again, present-day philosophy, based as it is on a one-sided view of the natural world, is bound to say: certainly men die, and their bodies are burned or buried, and thereby are given over to the earth, but this is of no significance for the development of the earth; for if the earth did not receive human bodies into itself it would take its course in precisely the same way as now, when it does receive these bodies. But this means that men are quite unaware that the continuous giving over of human corpses to the earth—whether by cremation or burial—is a real process which works on in the earth.

Peasant women in the country know much better than town women that yeast plays an important part in bread making, although only a little is added to the bread; they know that the bread could not rise unless yeast were added to the dough. In the same way the earth would long ago have reached the final stage of its development if there had not been continuously added to it the forces of the human corpse, which is separated in death from what is of soul and spirit. Through the forces present in human corpses which are thus received by the earth, the evolution of the earth itself is maintained. It is owing to this that the minerals can still go on producing their powers of crystallisation, a thing they would otherwise long ago have ceased to do; without these forces they would long ago have crumbled away or dissolved. Plants, also, which would long ago have ceased to grow are enabled, thanks to these forces, to go on growing to-day. And it is the same with the lower animals forms. In giving his body over to the earth the human being is giving the ferment, the yeast for future—development.

Hence it is by no means a matter of indifference whether man is living on the earth or not. It is simply untrue that the evolution of the earth with respect to its mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, would continue if man himself were not there. The process of Nature is a unified whole to which man belongs. We only get a true picture of man if we think of him as standing even in death in the midst of the cosmic process.

If you will bear this in mind then you will hardly wonder at what I am now going to say: when man descends from the spiritual into the physical world he receives his physical body as a garment. But naturally the body received as a child differs from the body as we lay it aside in death, at whatever age. Something has happened to the physical body. And what has happened could only come about because this body is permeated with forces of spirit and soul. For, after all, we eat what animals also eat. That is to say, we transform external matter just as the animals do; but we transform it with the help of something which animals have not got; something that came down from the spiritual world in order to unite itself with the physical body of man. Because of this we affect the substances in a different way than do animals or plants. And the substances given over to the earth in the human corpse are transformed substances, something different from what man received when he was born. We can therefore say: man receives certain substances and forces at birth; he renews them during his life and gives them up again to the earth process in a different form. The substances and forces which he gives up to the earth process at death are not the same as those which he received at birth. In giving them up he is bestowing upon the earth process something which continuously streams through him from the super-sensible world into the physical, sense-perceptible, earth process. At birth he brings down something from the super-sensible world; this he incorporates with the substances and forces which make up his body during his earthly life, and then at death the earth receives it. Man is thus the medium for a constant be-dewing of the physical sense world by the super-sensible. You can imagine, as it were, a fine rain falling continuously from the super-sensible on to the sense world; but these drops would remain quite unfruitful for the earth if man did not absorb them and pass them over to the earth through his own body. These drops which man receives at birth and gives up again at death, bring about a continual fructification of the earth by super-sensible forces; and through these fructifying super-sensible forces the evolutionary process of the earth is maintained. Without human corpses therefore, the earth would long ago have become dead.

With this presupposition we can now ask: what do the death forces do to human nature? The death-bringing forces which predominate in outer nature work into the nature of man; for if man were not continually bringing life to outer nature it would perish. Now how do these death-bringing forces work in the nature of man? They produce in man all those organisations which range from the bone system to the nerve system. What builds up the bones and everything related to them is of quite a different nature from what builds up the other systems. The death-bringing forces play into us. We leave them as they are, and thereby we become bone men. But the death-bringing forces play further into us and we tone them down, and thereby we become nerve men. What is a nerve? A nerve is something which is continually wanting to become bone, and is only prevented from becoming bone by being in a certain relationship to the non-bony, or non-nervous elements of human nature. Nerve has a constant tendency to ossify, it is constantly compelled towards decay; while bone in man is dead to a very large extent. With animal bones the conditions are different—animal bone is far more living than human bone. Thus you can picture one side of human nature by saying: the death-bringing stream works in the bone and nerve system. That is the one pole.

The other stream, that of forces continuously giving life, works in the muscle and blood system and in all that is connected with it. The only reason why nerves are not bones is that their connection with the blood and muscle system is such that the impulse in them to become bone is directly opposed by the forces working in the blood and muscle. The nerve does not become bone solely because the blood and muscle system stands over against it and hinders it from becoming bone. If during the process of growth bone develops a wrong relationship to blood and muscle, then the condition of rickets will result, which is due to the muscle and blood nature hindering a proper deadening of the bone. It is therefore of the utmost importance that the right alternation should come about in man between the muscle and blood system on the one hand and the bone and nerve system on the other. The bone nerve system extends into the eye, but in the outer covering the bone system withdraws, and sends into the eye only its weakened form, the nerve; this enables the eye to unite the will nature, which lives in muscles and blood, with the activity of mental picturing. Here again we come upon something which played an important role in ancient science, but which is scorned as a childish conception by the science of to-day. But modern science will come back to it again, only in another form.

In the knowledge of ancient times men always felt a relationship between the nerve marrow, the nerve substance, and the bone marrow, the bone substance. And they were of the opinion that man thinks with his bone nature just as much as with his nerve nature. And this is true. All that we have in abstract science we owe to the faculty of our bone system. How is it, for instance, that man can do geometry? The higher animals have no geometry; that can be seen from their way of life. It is pure nonsense when people say: “Perhaps the higher animals have a geometry, only we do not notice it.” Now, man can form a geometry. But how, for example, does he form the conception of a triangle? If one truly reflects on this matter, that man can form the conception of a triangle, it will seem a marvellous thing that man forms a triangle, an abstract triangle—nowhere to be found in concrete life—purely out of his geometrical, mathematical imagination. There is much that is hidden and unknown behind the manifest events of the world. Now imagine, for example, that you are standing at a definite place in this room. As a super-sensible human being you will, at certain times, perform strange movements about which as a rule you know nothing; like this, for example: you go a little way to one side, then you go a little way backwards, then you come back to your place again. You are describing unawares in space a line which actually performs a triangular movement. Such movements are actually there, only you do not perceive them.

But since your backbone is in a vertical position, you are in the plane in which these movements take place. The animal is not in this plane, his backbone lies otherwise, i.e. horizontally; thus these movements are not carried out. Because man's backbone is vertical, he is in the plane where this movement is produced. He does not bring it to consciousness so that he could say: “I am always dancing in a triangle.” But he draws a triangle and says: “That is a triangle.” In reality this is a movement carried out unconsciously which he accomplishes in the cosmos.

These movements to which you give fixed forms in geometry—when you draw geometrical figures, you perform in conjunction with the earth. The earth has not only the movement which belongs to the Copernican system; it has also quite—different, artistic movements, which are constantly being performed; as are also still more complicated movements, such as those, for example, which belong to the lines of geometrical solids: the cube, the octahedron, the dodecahedron, the icosatetrahedron and so forth. These bodies are not invented, they are reality, but unconscious reality. In these and other geometrical solids lies a remarkable harmony with the subconscious knowledge which man has. This is due to the fact that our bone system has an essential knowledge; but your consciousness does not reach down into the bone system. The consciousness of it dies, and it is only reflected back in the geometrical images which man carries out in figures. Man is an intrinsic part of the universe. In evolving geometry he is copying something that he himself does in the cosmos.

Thus on the one hand we look into a world which encompasses ourselves and which is in a continuous process of dying. On the other hand we look into all that enters into the forces of our blood and muscle system; this is continuously in movement, in fluctuation, in becoming and arising: it is entirely seedlike, and has nothing dead within it. We arrest the death process within ourselves, and it is only we as human beings who can arrest it, and bring into this dying element a process of life, of becoming. If men were not here on the earth, death would long ago have spread over the whole earth process, and the earth as a whole would have been given over to crystallisation, though single crystals could not have maintained themselves. We draw the single crystals away from the general crystallisation process and preserve them, as long as we need them for our human evolution. And it is by doing so that we keep alive the being of the earth. Thus we human beings cannot be excluded from the life of the earth for it is we who keep the earth alive. Theodore Eduard von Hartmann hit on a true thought when, in his pessimism, he declared that one day mankind would be so mature that everybody would commit suicide; but what he further expected—viewing things as he did from the confines of natural science—would indeed be superfluous: for Hartmann it was not enough that all men should one day commit suicide, he expected in addition that an ingenious invention would blow the earth sky-high. Of this he would have no need. He need only have arranged the day for the general suicide and the earth would of itself have disintegrated slowly into the air. For without the force which is implanted into it by man, the evolution of the earth cannot endure. We must now permeate ourselves with this knowledge once again in a feeling way. It is necessary that these things be understood at the present time.

Perhaps you remember that in my earliest writings there constantly recurs a thought through which I wanted to place knowledge on a different footing from that on which it stands to-day. In the external philosophy, which is derived from Anglo-American thought, man is reduced to being a mere spectator of the world. In his inner soul process he is a mere spectator of the world. If man were not here on earth—it is held—if he did not experience in his soul a reflection of what is going on in the world outside, everything would be just as it is. This holds good of natural science where it is a question of the development of events, such as I have described, but it also holds good for philosophy. The philosopher of to-day is quite content to be a spectator, that is, to be merely in the purely destructive element of cognition. I wished to rescue knowledge out of this destructive element. Therefore I have said again and again: man is not merely a spectator of the world: he is rather the world's stage upon which great cosmic events continuously play themselves out. I have repeatedly said that man, and the soul of man, is the stage upon which world events are played. This thought can also be expressed in a philosophic abstract form. And in particular, if you read the final chapter about spiritual activity in my book Truth and Science. you will find this thought strongly emphasised, namely: what takes place in man is not a matter of indifference to the rest of nature, but rather the rest of nature reaches into man and what takes place in man is simultaneously a cosmic process; so that the human soul is a stage upon which not merely a human process but a cosmic process is enacted. Of course certain circles of people to-day would find it exceedingly hard to understand such a thought. But unless we permeate ourselves with such conceptions we cannot possibly become true educators.

Now what is it that actually happens within man's being? On the one hand we have the bone-nerve nature, on the other hand the blood-muscle nature. Through the co-operation of these two, substances and forces are constantly being formed anew. And it is because of this, because in man himself substances and forces are recreated, that the earth is preserved from death. What I have just said of the blood, namely that through its contact with the nerves it brings about re-creation of substances and forces—this you can now connect with what I said yesterday: that blood is perpetually on the way to becoming spiritual but is arrested on its way. To-morrow we shall link up the thoughts we have acquired in these two lectures and develop them further. But you can see already how erroneous the thought of the conservation of energy and matter really is, in the form in which it is usually put forward; for it is contradicted by what happens within human nature, and it is only an obstacle to the real comprehension of the human being. Only when we grasp the synthesizing thought, not indeed that something can proceed out of nothing, but that a thing can in reality be so transformed that it will pass away and another thing will arise, only when we substitute this thought for that of the conservation of energy and matter, will we attain something really fruitful for science.

You see what the tendency is which leads so much of our thinking astray. We put forward something, as for example, the law of the conservation of force and matter, and we proclaim it a universal law. This is due to a certain tendency of our thought life, and especially of our soul life, to describe things in a one-sided way; whereas we should only set up postulates on the results of our mental picturing. For instance, in our books on physics you will find the law of the mutual impenetrability of bodies set up as an axiom: at that place in space where there is one body no other body can be at the same time. This is laid down as a universal quality of bodies. But one ought only to say: bodies and beings of such a nature that in the place where they are in space no other similar object can be at the same time are “impenetrable” bodies. You ought only to apply your concepts to differentiate one province from another. You ought only to set up postulates, and not to give definitions which claim to be universal. And so we should not lay down a “law” of the conservation of force and substance, but we should find out what beings this law applies to. It was a tendency of the nineteenth century to lay down laws and say: this holds good in every case. Instead of this we should devote our soul powers to acquainting ourselves with things, and observing our experiences in connection with them.

• 1. The words here translated as matter and body are Körper and Leib, for which we have no precise equivalent in English. Körper is equivalent to physical body. Leib denotes a living body, i.e. an organism penetrated with life.

Originally published in Anthroposophical Quarterly, Volume 21, Number 4, Winter 1976.

In a public lecture such as the one given yesterday on Spiritual Science and the Future of Man, account must always be taken of the very limited receptive capacity of the world today. In our time, data of knowledge that are essential for humanity do indeed flow down from the spiritual worlds but can be accepted open mindedly only by very few people. To most individuals who have not prepared themselves adequately for the reception of such knowledge, the deeper aspects of our Spiritual Science prove to be something of a shock, something that seems fantastic or dreamlike.

All the more it behoves us to deepen our feeling for the most significant questions that arise in the course of fairly lengthy study in a Group. And now I want to speak of the need for a closer study of the great truth of the implanting of the Ego, the ‘I’, in man and to indicate that the subject is more complicated than it is usually thought to be at the present time.

We have heard that during the period of Old Saturn man was endowed with the rudiments of the physical body, during the period of Old Sun with that of the etheric body, during the period of Old Moon with that of the astral body, and that the essential task of our Earth evolution is the incorporation of the Ego into the other members of man’s constitution. Not until the end of Earth’s evolution will the human being be completely permeated—as is possible—by the Ego. If we study the man of Earth as such, we can say that the actual centre of his being is the Ego, the ‘I’ But then it must occur to us that in each of the different periods of our present life this Ego is connected with us differently, by no means always in the same Way. We must realise above all that the different members of our being are not understood when we simply enumerate them as physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. Now let us consider in what different ways the members can be connected with each other both during the various epochs of mankind’s evolution and during the single life of the human being.

Let us think, to begin with, of a child. We know that it is not until a comparatively late period that he learns to say ‘I’ of himself. This is very indicative. Although modern psychology, in its endeavours to be a bona tide science, does not grasp the fact, it is deeply significant that the inner experience, the mental conception of the ‘I’ wakens in the child comparatively late. In the very earliest years, until the age of 3 or 3½, although now and then the child babbles the sound ‘I’, he has no real experience of Egohood. You may come across a book by Heinrich Lhotzky entitled Die Seele deines Kindes (Your Child’s Soul) which contains the curious statement that the child learns to think before he learns to speak. This is nonsense, because it is by speaking that the child learns to think. Those who strive to grasp Spiritual Science must be cautious of what purports to be Science today. It is approximately) after the third year of life that a child learns for the first time to experience and be cognisant of the ‘I’.

This is connected with another fact, namely that in normal consciousness—not in higher, clairvoyant consciousness—we have no remembrance of our life before a certain point of time. If you think back over the past, you will realise that remembrance ceases at a certain point and does not extend as far as birth. What others have told us can often be confused with what we ourselves have experienced, but the thread breaks at approximately the point when the ‘I’ is experienced for the first time. A very young child has no such experience; it arises later on and it is then that a very dim kind of remembrance begins.

We now ask ourselves: if the experience of ‘I’ was not present during the first three years of life, was the ‘I’, the Ego, itself also not there in the child? The question to put to ourselves is this. Are we cognisant of something that is actually within us or is it within us without our knowledge? The Ego is indeed within the child only he is unaware of it, just as during sleep a person is connected with the Ego but is not cognisant of it. The fact is that we know of something, but that can be no criterion for us. We must say: the ‘I’ is present in the child but the child is not conscious of it.

What, then, is there to be said about the Ego? It has its own task to perform. If you were to investigate the human brain purely physically, you would find that just after birth it looks very imperfect compared with its later structure. Many of the finer convolutions have to be elaborated and moulded later on, during the subsequent years. This is what the ‘I’ achieves in the human being and because this is its task it cannot itself become conscious of it. The Ego has to elaborate the brain into a more delicately complicated structure, in order that later on the human being will be able to think. During the first years of life the Ego is very active.

When the Ego becomes conscious of itself, we could ask in vain: how have you managed to construct this brain with such artistry?—you will admit that during the whole span of life between birth and death the Ego does not develop consciousness on a par with that by which the brain is elaborated. Nevertheless we can ask ourselves the question. And the answer is that in its activity the Ego is under the guidance of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. When we observe a child clairvoyantly, his Ego—as Ego-aura—is certainly there, but streams go out from this aura to the higher Hierarchies, to the Angels, Archangels, and so on; the forces of the Hierarchies stream in. Therefore when naive consciousness speaks of a child having a Guardian Angel, this is a very real truth. Later on this closer connection ceases; the ‘I’ experiences itself more in the nerves and can therefore become conscious of its own existence. A kind of detachment takes place. In the child a sort of ‘telephonic connection’ exists, inasmuch as the ‘I’ extends into the divine-spiritual Hierarchies. The statements of Spiritual Science must be taken seriously. I once said that the very wisest person can learn a great deal from a child. He can also learn a great deal because he need not look only at the child himself but also through him into the spiritual world, because in the child there is the ‘telephonic connection’ with the spiritual world—the connection that is ultimately severed.

Hence during the first three years of life we have before us a being quite different from the one who is there later on. Under the guidance of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies a childhood Ego works at the development of man’s instrument of thinking. This ‘I’, this Ego, then passes into the instruments themselves and can no longer work at them. Man’s instruments of thinking must then already have developed. Certainly they can develop to further stages, but the ‘I’ can no longer be working at this development.

The human being may therefore be thought of as twofold: the one we see during the first three and a half years, and the one which represents the rest of his life. In the language of esotericism, the first being is called the divine man, or the Son of God, because he is connected with the higher Hierarchies; the other is called the Son of Man. In the latter the Ego is present, moves the limbs and works—as far as it is possible to work—from within outwards. A distinction must therefore be made between the Son of God and the Son of Man.

The Son of God who is preeminently active for the first three and a half years of life embraces all the vitalising forces, stimulates the human being to pour these life giving forces in greater and ever greater measure into his organism. In comparison with those in an older person these forces are also health giving, strengthening factors. If we are not content in later life to be human beings who have to rely entirely on the senses and on the instrument of the physical body for our connection with the surrounding world but determine in our later years to strive upwards to the spiritual world, then we must contrive by some means to awaken these forces within ourselves; we must evoke the forces that are within us in earliest childhood, but with the difference that now we awaken them consciously, whereas a child awakens them unconsciously. In this respect too, therefore, it is obvious that man is a twofold being.

What is it, in reality, that is brought to light by these forces during the first three and a half years of life? In these forces—which are active under the direction of the higher Hierarchies—what is working over from earlier incarnations is asserting itself. You can easily convince yourselves of this by handling the human skull, where you find individual mounds and depressions. No skull is exactly similar to another, hence there is no universally valid Phrenology. Each case must be studied individually. The forces working in the formation of the human skull come over from earlier incarnations and their impetus ceases after the first three and a half years of life. During these years everything is still pliable and the spirit is still able to work in it. Later on, everything has become solid and the spirit can no longer come into play.

What, then, is responsible for the fact that in later life we are no longer able to work with these forces? To what is this due? It is due to the essential character of our Earth evolution. When the ‘I’ has become conscious of itself in the body, this presupposes that the body is very firmly knit and can no longer be elaborated by the forces just described. There are also forces which essentially belong to man as a generic being, which mould him in accordance with the architectural principles of the human form. Were we to work in the physical body with the forces of early childhood for more than the three and a half years which are the appropriate period, the physical body could not .survive. It would be rent asunder, shattered, for now the forces by which the physical body is attached to the line of physical heredity become operative. If the action of the other forces did not cease, the body would break up, disintegrate. The Son of Man within us brings about our destruction; the Son of God within us cannot offer resistance to the Son of Man after a period of three years. For all that, we bear this Son of God within us. These forces work within the physical body throughout life but they cannot participate directly in the up-building process. If we look within our own inmost being, however, we can nevertheless find the continuation of the Ego with the ‘telephonic connection’. It is only that the physical body has become too coarse, too solid, too wooden to enable the Son of God to mould it any further.

Thus the best forces are present in us during the first three to three and a half years of childhood. The whole of life is nourished by them but they are obscured. In an entirely different form they are nevertheless present in the later years of life. We are permeated by these forces but cannot allow them to come to direct expression. When through Spiritual Science we endeavour to acquire ideas and conceptions of the higher worlds, this will be all the easier, the more forces have remained in us of those that were within us during the first three years when our ‘I’, our Ego, was within us but without self-consciousness. The fresher, the more flexible these forces have remained, the less time-worn they have become in advanced age, the more easily we can bring about transformation in ourselves through these spiritual forces.

It is the very best part of manhood that we have within us during these early years, only the solid physical body prevents us from using these forces then to the fullest extent. Even if someone in his later years succeeds in developing them to a special extent, he cannot transform his physical body which is by no means as pliable as wax. But if through esoteric wisdom he is able to use these forces to the full, their power streams through the tips of his fingers, and he acquires the gift of healing, of health-bestowal, through the laying on of hands—if, that is to say, these spiritual forces are still active. They can no longer transform his body but when they stream out from him they bring about healing.

The goal of Earth evolution is to enable these forces—the best that are within us—to take effect. When the evolution of the Earth is at an end and we have lived through our many incarnations, we must consciously have permeated our whole being with the forces that are within us unconsciously during the first years of childhood. There is a difference between bearing these forces unconsciously and bearing them consciously. At the end of Earth evolution human beings must be completely permeated by this childhood consciousness. And then, because the process of expansion will be slow, the body will not burst asunder.

In world-evolution a prototype of penetration of the forces of childhood into mankind was necessary. Needless to say, this prototype could not be a child. It was necessary that an individual of a certain age should be permeated in full consciousness by the same forces by which all human beings are permeated unconsciously in earliest childhood. Suppose we were to remove his Ego from a human being, empty his Ego and pour into him the forces that are active in a child during the first years of life, he would become conscious of these forces with his developed brain. What had been active within him during the first years of childhood would become a conscious experience in him. For how long is a human life on Earth able to endure this? For no longer than three years, for then the body would be shattered. If there can be no transformation—in the case of man this takes place in the process of ordinary evolution—the human body can endure this state of things for no longer than three years. Were it possible for any being to bear the forces of early childhood consciously within himself, the karma of that being must be so adjusted that the physical body involved is shattered.

It is conceivable that what man attains through all the incarnations leading to the goal of Earth evolution can be brought to the notice of the world by a prototype, by an individual whose bodily nature makes it possible for his Ego to depart and be replaced by another Being. In such a case the human body would not tolerate the presence of the other Being for longer than three years. It would be the karma of the body to be shattered. And this actually happened. At the baptising by John in the Jordan we see this human body which made it possible for the Ego, the Zarathustra-Ego, to depart. A Being, the Christ Being, came down into this body, indwelt it for three years but could remain in it no longer. After three years the body broke up when the Mystery of Golgotha took place.

What was able to live for three years in a human body at that time must be tended and cherished by man and gradually, in the course of incarnations, made a living reality in his soul, in order that at the end of the incarnations it may be present in full strength.

A remarkable connection is apparent between the Son of God in man and the Christ Event. Everything to be found in the domain of occultism can be illuminated from different sides. Proofs such as are demanded by conventional science cannot satisfy occultism. Proofs must convince by virtue of truths being gathered together from all sides, truths which sustain and support each other. We can study the Christ Event from still another side by deriving it, as has been done today, from the very nature of man. We realise that the best way to understand the Christ is to develop the attitude of soul arising from such a truth. We must realise too that in a fully evolved human body, there was present in Jesus of Nazareth through the Baptism in Jordan a Being who is present in every human body, but unconsciously only, during the first three years of life. And then we must contemplate the three years when this child has become conscious. That is how understanding of the Christ can best be acquired.

Ancient utterances have different meanings. One such meaning is disclosed by the words: Unless you become as a little child you cannot enter into the Kingdoms of Heaven. There we have a glimpse of the deeper meaning often contained in single sentences of the religious texts.

Let us contemplate this life of childhood especially in the period when it is actually developing. Science today does not know much about what can contribute to the study of the true nature of man. In the first place we must realise clearly that from the very beginning man differs quite radically from all other beings. Take an example near at hand, let us say, an ape. Its gait is determined from the very outset because the characteristic equilibrium is established by the arrangement of its limbs. The human being cannot, to begin with, walk at all, for he must first bring about equilibrium in his body. Through the work of his Ego his limbs must be brought into the positions which enable him to stand upright and walk. Thus in the first years of childhood the Ego must work not only at moulding the brain but must also bring about the equilibrium that is not, from the beginning, established in the human being as it is in the animal. The bones of the human being must first be arranged in the angles necessary for the main-tenance of his centre of gravity, in order that he may be able to walk and make his way about. This capacity is implanted from the beginning in every animal, up to those of the highest species, whereas in the human being it must be acquired gradually though the work of the Ego. Before then he crawls about or falls down. He would be fettered to the same spot on the ground if his Ego was not at work during the first three years of his life.

We have already heard that the Ego works at man’s brain, sculps and moulds it into a form that enables him later on to become a being possessed of intelligence. Thus it can be said that we acquire the capacity to recognise the truth in life as a result of the Ego having moulded its instrument. It must become obvious to us that there can be no further life unless we bring it about by work and activity.

What further distinguishes man so radically from all other things is his speech. That capacity too must be acquired through the work of his Ego. Man is not, from the beginning, organised for speech. Cows utter the sound ‘moo’ but that is not speech. The acquisition of speech depends upon the Ego sojourning among other human Egos. If a human being were transported to a remote island he would not learn to speak. The coming of the second teeth is due to heredity; so too is the fact that we grow. The teeth would come even if we were on a lonely island. But it is through the Ego that we acquire the faculty of speech. These differences are important. Thus in human life, speech is the third faculty acquired through the Ego.

Through the activity of these forces the human beings finds his way on Earth, he recognises the truth and lives his life in common with the surrounding world. If a child were able to express what he thus acquires, he could say: the Ego within me transforms me in such a way that I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. Think of this translated into a higher, spiritual reality, and let us ask: what will be said to man by a Being who with fully conscious forces of childhood lives for three years in a human body? Such a Being will say: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” In very fact, when the forces of childhood rise to a higher, fully conscious stage, there we have the great prototype of what is revealed at a lower stage in the child. Through Christ Jesus it becomes a basic, fundamental truth. Not only is the utterance “Except ye become as little children, ye cannot enter into the kingdoms of Heaven” incomprehensible without a knowledge of what Spiritual Science has to say about the connection with the life-giving forces of early childhood, but it is also true that we can best understand the radical utterance, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life” when we recognise its prototype in what the Ego achieves by its activity in the body of early childhood.

Such truths make it possible for us to generate—if not for the body at least for the soul—some measures of the life-giving forces we need on the Earth. The man of today who does not acknowledge the reality of the spiritual world has no genuine feeling for such facts. If you go to a number of individuals in outer life and tell them something of what has been said here today: ‘Unless you become as a little child you cannot enter into the kingdoms of Heaven’—you will find that these people say: “Well, yes, these are quite clever analogies, but what use can be made of them?” They consider it more advantageous to go to some blood-curdling drama, if not anything worse! Those who have no feelings that these facts are significant will regard them as unjustifiable because it is in the feeling for such things that there lies the power to instil the gift of childhood into life. If we lack enthusiasm for the idea of Christ being compared with the activity of the human Ego during the first years of life, if we reject such a comparison as unjustifiable, then we have no faculty for kindling to life the forces of earliest childhood. Wizened scholars have so little power to awaken these forces and thereby to approach the reality of the spiritual world! But if we have the enthusiasm to concern ourselves with such truths, we can permeate our whole being with these forces.

Thereby something is given to an individual which enables him to uphold the principle of universality in his Christianity. Have I not often said that we are only at the beginning of a true conception of Christ? Until the twelfth or thirteenth century there was no possibility of hearing the Bible read. Christians were obliged to rely upon preaching and the proclamations of evangelists. Then came the Christianity which adhered strictly to the Bible, deriving its knowledge from that one source. We are not mindful of Christ’s power if we ignore His words: “I am with you until the end of the ages.” We are Christians when we realise that after Christ had once revealed Himself He will do so again, for anyone who has eyes to see Him. The content of the Gospels by no means represents all that Christ has to say. We should not constantly be quoting the words: “You could not bear it now”. Humanity must become mature enough to understand Christ’s declaration.

It also follows that we ought to be able to adopt the right attitude to what is revealed through the Baptism by John, namely, the manifestation of the health-giving, fertile forces of early childhood. That in itself would be a fruitful conception. Even if there were no human being who knew anything about the name of Christ or about the Gospels—we do not overstress the importance of names—what is all-important is the Being Himself. We leave it to others to say that an individual who does not swear allegiance to Buddha is no true adherent. What matters to us is the reality, not the name. This is the principle we follow when, for example, we recognise that during the first years of life there are within the human being forces which once streamed down into the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

Think of a remote, lonely island to which no single record of the Mystery of Golgotha has ever found its way. If human beings there through their spiritual life consciously draw the powers of earliest childhood into themselves until they reach old age, then they are Christians in the true sense of the word. In such circumstances there is no need for them to search in the Gospels, for Christianity in itself is a living power and will evolve to further and further stages.

There is a difference here that must be strictly remembered. We shall realise ever more clearly how intimately Christ’s mission is connected with the very being of the Earth. We shall be able to say that the mission of Christ is something that can be understood by contemplating man as he is today. The need to be filled with the power of Christ, to make a reality of Paul’s affirmation “Christ in me”, is confirmed when we say that the whole of our life must be dedicated to the transformation of what is present within us during the first years of childhood. Then the Christ is in us in very truth.

This realisation makes it possible to have a wide understanding of Christianity and reveals the prospect that it will take quite different forms. Times will come when Christ will be referred to in an entirely different way, when sources of an essentially different character will be in existence, when there will be no reference to the external history of the existence of such a Being, but when this fact will be revealed by the actual consciousness of mankind.

These matters are brought forward because they show how deeply Spiritual Science can influence man’s life of feeling and must become actual practice. It is only then that what we find in original sources becomes really intelligible to us. For many human beings, however, these original sources are verily a book with seven seals. At the end of the Earth’s existence, a man of today will have reached the stage where his soul is inwardly Christian in the truest sense. Today he is only at the beginning of this development. Nevertheless Christ lives within him and will do so in an ever wider sense through all the following incarnations.

What was the state of things before Christ came to the Earth, before He revealed Himself on the Earth? The Ego was then only in the preparatory stage, for it is by Christ that the Ego is given its very purpose and meaning. When the mission of a Being is in the preparatory stage, his predecessors must help him. Until the Mystery of Golgotha, man’s Ego was still at the stage of preparation. Until then it was necessary for other Beings to help man, Beings who had reached the human stage previously, namely, during the

Old Moon embodiment of the Earth. We know that these are the Beings of the Hierarchy immediately above us—the Angels. Their evolution has reached a stage higher than that reached by man. It was chiefly these Beings who took over the guidance of humanity before man was in a position to say: Christ gives my Ego purport and meaning. Man could not lead himself to Christ but had perforce to be led to Him by the Beings who are his elder Brothers.

The Bible records this with wonderful accuracy. Let us think of John, the forerunner of Christ Jesus. The true forerunner could not have been the Being who is presented in external history, for as we now know man had as yet no Ego. Therefore it cannot be strictly true to say that John the Baptist himself was Christ’s forerunner. Remarkably, the Gospel of St. Mark begins at once with the words: “I send my Angel before thee, who shall prepare thy way.” We must pay attention to something that theologians have, it is true, noticed in a very abstract form but ignored as a concrete reality. The external world is primarily maya. We must learn to see it in the right way and then it is no longer maya. The narration of the external events connected with John the Baptist on the physical plane, is maya. We do not understand them. The biblical picture of John the Baptist is maya. The truth is that an Angel lives in John, takes possession of his soul, and it is this Being who leads men to Christ. John is the sheath in which the Angel is revealed. The reborn Elijah was able and ready to receive into himself the Angel who entered into and spoke out of him, using him—John—simply as an instrument. The story given in the Bible is accurate in every detail.

It can therefore be said that it was only because the Beings who had reached the human stage on the Old Moon embodiment of the Earth became the leaders of man in the pre-Christian era that he could be prepared to receive the Ego. In point of fact, all the leaders of humanity in the pre-Christian era could be leaders because Angels were working through them. What would happen in the case of a man of the modern age? In pre-Christian times the Angel could work in a man because he had no Ego of his own. Since the Christ has come, man can turn to Him and a power enters into him instead of the Angel, as formerly. Man today must take the Christ into himself through devotion and reverence. John could still say: Not I but the Angel in me has been sent and uses me as the instrument for preparing the way. Man must say as did St. Paul: ‘Not I, but Christ in me.’ Man must learn to understand Christ in the light of the teaching of Spiritual Science.

What has been said today about the first three years of childhood can, for example, usefully be emphasised. Man is ‘christianised’ when the truth is brought home to him that the forces at work during the age of earliest childhood shed their sunlike radiance over the whole of life. Modern science, on the other hand, is ultimately responsible for the onset of senility, for resistance to the sunlike forces in early childhood, for ossification of parts of the brain, and a great deal else besides.

From such truths we realise that it is possible to understand the living truth of Christianity even when original records are left out of account and we simply study the nature and being of man. If our understanding of Spiritual Science is such that we do not simply say, ‘now I know that man consists of four members—physical, etheric, astral bodies and Ego’ but realise that what matters is to know how these single members are interconnected in his constitution—then we can become aware that the Ego working in early childhood is related to another entity, that the first Ego is like a sheath and that after about three years its connection with all the members of the rest of man’s nature changes entirely.

This knowledge acquires genuine value when it becomes a power within us and when we say to ourselves that because in the future many incarnations lie ahead of us we can develop what is in us to further and further stages of consciousness, that we can enable the forces of the higher man, The Son of God within us, to be victorious over the Son of Man, thereby rising higher in each succeeding incarnation until the Earth reaches its goal. The Earth then becomes a corpse just as the individual human being becomes a physical corpse; the corpse sinks into the Earth and the soul rises into the spiritual world. This is what will also happen to the Earth as a whole.

If we think of the Earth as the body of all humanity, we can say: the Earth dies as a corpse, dissolves into the substance of the Universe, is pulverised in order to be used in a new material form. But man rises into spiritual worlds in order to pass over into the next planetary existence. It behoves us to remember that these are no abstract words.

Strange to say, there are people who believe that our Earth, together with the Sun and the other planets, was once a great nebula and nothing else, that then Sun, Earth and man himself, through the consolidation of matter, came into existence, that he will evolve to further and further stages and will eventually be entombed in the Earth the whole process being an aimless episode!

In future histories of civilization great efforts will have to be made to understand this patho-logical fantasy, to grasp how it could have been possible for man’s imagination to become sickly enough to accept this as a serious conception. To uphold the Kant-Laplace theory is exactly the same as to think that man can be explained by studying the dust produced by his cremation. Such science is pernicious, incapable of engendering living power in the soul.

The aim of Spiritual Science is to kindle the power to develop our stature as human beings to higher and higher stages, no longer connecting ourselves with the dust of the Earth but evolving towards a new planetary existence.

The lectures given so far have led essentially to two questions. One relates to the objective event connected with the name, Christ Jesus; to the nature of that impulse which as the Christ-Impulse entered into human evolution. The other question is: how can an individual establish his connection with the Christ-Impulse? In other words, how can the Christ-Impulse become effective for the individual? The answers to these two questions are of course interrelated. For we have seen that the Christ-Event is an objective fact of human Earth-evolution, and that something real, something actual, comes forth to meet us in the Resurrection. With Christ there rose out of the grave a kind of seed-kernel for the reconstruction of our human Phantom. And it is possible for this seed-kernel to incorporate itself in those individuals who find a connection with the Christ-Impulse.

That is the objective side of the relationship of the individual to the Christ-Impulse. Today we wish to add the subjective side. We will try to find an answer to the question: ‘How does the individual now find it possible gradually to take into himself that which comes forth through the Resurrection of Christ?’

To answer this question, we must first distinguish between two things. When Christianity entered into the world as a religion, it was not merely a religion for those who wished to approach Christ by one or other of the spiritual paths. It was to be a religion which all men could accept and make their own. A special occult or esoteric development was not necessary for finding the way to Christ. We must therefore fix our attention first on that path to Christ, the exoteric path, which every soul, every heart, can find in the course of time. We must then distinguish this path from the esoteric path which right up to our own time has revealed itself to the soul who desired to seek the Christ by gaining access to occult powers. We must distinguish between the path of the physical plane and the path of the super-sensible worlds.

In hardly any other century has there been such obscurity concerning the outward, exoteric way to Christ as in the nineteenth. And this obscurity increased during the second half of the century. More and more men came to lose the knowledge of the way to Christ. Those imbued with the thought of today no longer form the right concepts, such concepts for example as souls even in the eighteenth century formed on their way to the Christ-Impulse. Even the first half of the nineteenth century was illumined by a certain possibility of finding the Christ-Impulse as something real. But for the most part in the nineteenth century this path to Christ was lost to men. And we can understand this when we realise that we are standing at the beginning of a new path to Christ. We have often spoken of the new way now opening for souls through a renewal of the Christ-Event. In human evolution it always happens that a kind of low point must be reached in any trend before a new light comes in once more. The turning away from the spiritual worlds during the nineteenth century was only natural in face of the fact that in the twentieth century a quite new epoch for the spiritual life of men must begin, in the special sense we have often mentioned.

To those who have come to know something of Spiritual Science, our Movement often appears to be something quite new. If, however, we look away from the enrichment that spiritual endeavours in the West have experienced recently through the inflow of the concepts of reincarnation and karma, bound up with the whole teaching of repeated earth lives and its significance for human evolution, we must say that, in other respects, ways into the spiritual world, similar to our theosophical way, are by no means new in Western history. Anyone, however, who tries to rise into the spiritual world along the present path of Theosophy will find himself somewhat estranged from the manner in which Theosophy was cultivated in the eighteenth century. At that time in this neighbourhood (Baden), and especially in Württemberg, much Theosophy was studied, but everywhere an illuminated view of the teaching concerning repeated earth lives was lacking, and thereby a cloud was cast over the whole field of theosophical work. For those who could look deeply into occult connections, and particularly into the connection of the world with the Christ-Impulse, what they saw was over-shadowed for this reason. But within the whole horizon of Christian philosophy and Christian life, something like theosophical endeavours arose continually. This striving towards Theosophy was active everywhere, even in the outward, exoteric paths of men who could go no further than sharing externally in the life of some congregation, Christian or otherwise.

How theosophical endeavours penetrated Christian endeavours is shown by figures such as Bengel and Oetinger, who worked in Württemberg, men who in their whole way of thinking—if we remember that they lacked the idea of reincarnation—reached all that man can reach of higher views concerning evolution, in so far as they had made the Christ-Impulse their own. The ground-roots of theosophical life have always existed. Hence there is much that is correct in a treatise on theosophical subjects written by Oetinger in the eighteenth century. In the preface to a book on Oetinger's work, published in 1847, Rothe, who taught in Heidelberg University, wrote:

What Theosophy really wants is often difficult to recognise in the case of the older theosophists ... but it is none the less clear that Theosophy, as far as it has gone today, can claim no scientific status and therefore cannot extend its influence more widely. It would be very hasty to conclude that Theosophy is only an ephemeral phenomenon, and entirely unjustifiable from a scientific standpoint. History already testifies loudly enough to the contrary. It tells us how this enigmatic phenomenon has never been able to accomplish anything, and yet, unnoticed, it is continually breaking through afresh, held together in its most varied forms by the chain of a never-dying tradition.

Now we must remember that the man who wrote this learnt about Theosophy only in the forties of the nineteenth century, as it had come over from many theosophists of the eighteenth. What came over was certainly not clothed in the forms of our scientific thought. It was therefore difficult to believe that the Theosophy of that time could affect wider circles. Apart from this, such a voice, coming to us out of the forties of the nineteenth century, must appear significant when it says:

The main thing is that once Theosophy has become a real science, and has thus clearly yielded definite results, these will gradually become matters of general and even popular conviction, and will be regarded as accepted truths by people who could not follow the paths by which they were discovered and by which alone they could be discovered.

After this, certainly, comes a pessimistic paragraph with which, in its bearing on Theosophy, we cannot now agree. For anyone familiar with the present form of spiritual-scientific endeavours will be convinced that this Theosophy, in the form in which it desires to work, can become popular in the widest circles. Even such a paragraph may therefore inspire us with courage when we read further:

Still, this rests in the lap of the future, and there we will not encroach: for the present we will gratefully rejoice in what our valued Oetinger has so beautifully set forth, and which may certainly count upon a sympathetic reception in a wide circle.

Thus we see that Theosophy was a pious hope of those who came to know something of the old Theosophy that was handed down from the eighteenth century.

After that time the stream of theosophical life was buried under the materialistic trends of the nineteenth century. Only through what we may now accept as the dawn of a new age do we again approach the true spiritual life, and now in a form which can be so scientific that in principle every heart and every soul can understand it. During the nineteenth century there was a complete loss of understanding for something that the theosophists of the eighteenth century still fully possessed; they called it Zentralsinn (inner light). Oetinger, who worked in Murrhard, near Karlsruhe, was for a time the pupil of a quite simple man in Thuringia, named Voelker, whose pupils knew that he possessed what was called ‘inner light’. What in those days was this ‘inner light’? It was none other than that which now arises in every man when earnestly and with iron energy he works through the content of my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. It was fundamentally nothing else that this simple man of Thuringia possessed. What he brought into existence—for his time a very interesting Theosophy—was the teaching which influenced Oetinger. It is difficult for a man of the present day to reconcile himself to the knowledge that a deepening of Theosophy occurred so recently, and gave rise to a rich literature, buried though this is in libraries and among antiquarians.

Something else is equally difficult for a man of today: to accept the Christ-Event as first of all an objective fact. How much discussion of this matter there was in the nineteenth century! It is impossible in a short course to indicate even in outline how many and diverse are the views of the nineteenth century concerning Christ Jesus. And anyone who takes the trouble to inquire further into opinions concerning Christ Jesus, whether those of theologians or of laymen, will encounter some very real difficulties, if the views of the nineteenth century on this question are considered in relation to the times in which better traditions still prevailed. In the nineteenth century it even became possible for persons to be regarded as great theologians when they were far removed from any acceptance of an objective Christ who entered into and worked in the history of the world. And here we come to the question: What relationship to the Christ can be found by an individual who takes no esoteric path, but remains entirely in the field of the exoteric?

So long as we keep to the standpoint of those nineteenth-century theologians who held that human evolution can take its course purely in the inner being of man, and has nothing to do with the external world of the Macrocosm, we cannot reach an objective appreciation of Christ Jesus; we come to all kinds of grotesque ideas, but never to a relationship with the Christ-Event. For anyone who believes that he can reach the highest human ideal compatible with Earth-evolution merely by an inner soul-path, through a kind of self-redemption, a relationship with the objective Christ is impossible. We may also say that wherever the redemption of man is thought of as a matter for psychology to deal with, there is no relationship to the Christ. Anyone who penetrates further into cosmic mysteries soon finds that when a man believes that he can attain his highest ideal of Earth-existence solely through himself, only through his own inner development, he cuts off altogether his connection with the Macrocosm. Such a person believes that he has the Macrocosm before him as a kind of Nature, and that his inner soul-development, side by side with the Macrocosm, is something running parallel with it. But a connection between the two he cannot find. This is just what is so terribly grotesque in the evolution of the nineteenth century. The connection that should exist between Microcosm and Macrocosm, has been torn asunder. If this had not happened, we should not have seen all those misunderstandings that have arisen over the terms ‘theoretical materialism’ on the one hand and ‘abstract idealism’ on the other. Just consider—the sundering of Microcosm and Macrocosm has led men who care little for the inner life of the soul to assign it, as well as the external life of the body, to the Macrocosm, thus making everything subject to material processes. Others, aware that there is nevertheless an inner life, have fallen gradually into abstractions concerning everything of significance to the human soul.

To be clear regarding this difficult matter, let us recall something very significant that was learnt in the Mysteries. How many people today believe in their innermost consciousness: ‘If I think something—for instance, if I entertain a bad thought about my neighbour—it has no significance for the outer world; the thought is only in myself. It has a quite different significance if I give him a box on the ears. This is something that happens on the physical plane; the other is a mere feeling or a mere thought.’ Or again, how many people there are who, when they fall into a sin or a lie or an error, say: ‘This is something that happens in the human soul.’ And, by contrast, if a stone falls from the roof: ‘This is something that takes place externally.’ And they will readily explain, using crude sense-concepts, that when a stone falls, perhaps accidentally, into water, it sets up ripples which spread out far and wide, so that everything produces effects which continue unobserved; but anything that has occurred in the soul is shut off from the world outside. People could therefore come to believe that to sin, to err, and then to put it right again, is entirely a concern of the individual soul. To anyone with an outlook of this kind, something many of us have witnessed in the last two years must seem grotesque.

Let me recall to you the scene in the Rosicrucian drama, The Portal of Initiation, where Capesius and Strader enter the astral world, and it is shown that what they think, speak, and feel is not without significance for the objective world, the Macrocosm, but actually releases storms in the elements. For modern man it is absurd to suppose that destructive forces can strike at the Macrocosm through somebody having had wrong thoughts. In the Mysteries it was made very clear to the pupil that when, for example anyone tells a lie or falls into error, this is a real process which does not concern himself only. The Germans say ‘Thoughts are duty free’, because they see no Customs barrier when the thoughts arise. Thoughts belong to the objective world; they are not merely experiences of the soul. The pupil of the Mystery saw: ‘When you tell a lie, it signifies in the super-sensible world the darkening of a certain light; when you perpetrate a loveless action, something in the spiritual world is burnt up in the fire of lovelessness; with errors you extinguish light in the Macrocosm.’ The effect was shown to the pupil through objective experience: how, through an error, something is extinguished on the astral plane, and darkness follows; or how through a loveless action something acts like a burning and destroying fire.

In exoteric life man does not know what is going on around him. He is like an ostrich with its head in the sand; he does not see effects which nevertheless are there. The effects of feeling are there, and they would be visible to super-sensible sight if the man were led into the Mysteries. It was not until the nineteenth century that anyone could say: ‘Everything in which a man has sinned, everything in which he is weak, is his personal affair only. Redemption must come about through an experience in the soul, and so Christ also can be only an experience in the soul.’ What is necessary, in order that man may not only find his way to Christ, but that he may not sunder his connection with the Macrocosm, is the knowledge: ‘If you incur error and sin, these are objective, not subjective events, and because of them something happens outside in the Cosmos.’ And in the moment when a man becomes conscious that with his sin, with his error, something objective happens; when he knows that what he has done, what he has given out from himself, is not connected merely with himself but with the whole objective course of cosmic development, then he will no longer be able to say to himself that compensation for what he has brought about is only an inner concern of the soul. There is indeed a good and significant possibility that a man who sees that thoughts and feelings are objective may also see that what has brought and brings people into mistakes through successive earth-lives is not an inward affair related to a single life, but is the consequence of karma.

Now an event which was outside history and outside human responsibility, as was the Luciferic influence in the old Lemurian period, could not possibly be expunged from the world by a human event. Through the Luciferic event man gained a great benefit: he became a free being. But he also incurred a liability: the propensity to deviate from the path of the good and the right, and from the path of the true. What has happened in the course of incarnations is a matter of karma. But all that has crept down from the Macrocosm into the Microcosm, all that the Luciferic forces have given to man, is something that man cannot deal with by himself. To compensate for the objective Luciferic event, another objective act was needed. In short, man must feel that what he incurs as error and sin is not merely subjective, and that an experience in the soul which is merely subjective is not sufficient to bring about Redemption.

Anyone who is convinced of the objectivity of error will thus understand also the objectivity of the act of Redemption. One cannot by any means treat the Luciferic influence as an objective act without treating in the same manner the compensating act, the Event of Golgotha. A theosophist can only choose between two things. Everything may be set on the foundation of karma; of course that is quite right as regards everything that man himself has brought about. But then we come to the necessity of stretching out the repeated lives forward and backward as far as we like, with no end to it in either direction. It always goes round and round like a wheel. The other thing—the alternative choice—is the concrete idea of evolution we must hold: that there was a Saturn, a Sun, and a Moon existence which were quite different from the Earth existence; that in the Earth existence the kind of repeated earth-life as we know it first occurred; that the Luciferic event was a single unrepeated event—all this alone gives real content to our theosophical outlook. All this, however, is inconceivable without the objectivity of the Event of Golgotha.

In pre-Christian times men were—as you know—different in various ways. One particular difference was that when they came down from spiritual worlds into earthly incarnations they brought with them, as substance, some of the Divine element. For this reason, when a man reflected on his own weakness, he always felt that the best part of him had originated in the Divine sphere from which he had descended. But the Divine element gradually became exhausted in the course of further incarnations, and it was quite exhausted when the Events of Palestine drew near. The last after-effects of it continued to be felt, but none of it was left when John the Baptist declared: ‘Change your conception of the world, for the times have changed. Now you will no longer be able to rise up into the spiritual as in the past, for the vision that could see into the old spirituality is lost. Change your thinking, and accept the Divine Being who is to give anew to men what they have had to lose through their descent to earth!’ Consequently—you may deny this if you think in the abstract, but not if you look at history in concrete terms—the feelings and perceptions of men changed altogether at the turning-point of the old and new epochs, a point marked by the Events of Palestine.

After these events, men began to feel forsaken. They felt forsaken when they approached the hardest questions, those which concerned most directly the innermost part of the soul; when, for example, they asked themselves: ‘What will become of me when I go through the gate of death with a number of deeds that have not been made good?’ Then there came to meet them a thought which certainly might be born from the longing of the soul, but could be allayed only when the soul could say to itself: ‘Yes, a Being has lived who entered into the evolution of mankind and to whom you can hold fast. He is working in the outer Cosmos, where you cannot go. He is working to bring about compensation for your deeds. He will help you to make good the evil results of the Luciferic influence!’ Through this feeling oneself forsaken, and then feeling oneself rescued by an objective power, there enters into humanity an intuitive feeling that sin is a real power, an objective fact, and that the Act of Redemption is also objective, an act that cannot be accomplished by an individual, for he has not invoked the Luciferic influence, but only by One who works in the worlds where Lucifer is consciously active.

All that I have thus set before you, in words drawn from Spiritual Science, was not grasped intellectually, as knowledge. It resided in feelings and intuitive perceptions, and from this source came the need to turn to Christ. For those who felt this need there was of course the possibility of finding in Christian communities ways by which they could deepen all such perceptions and feelings.

After man had lost his primal connection with the Gods, what did he find when he looked out at the material world? Through his descent into the material realm, his perception of the spiritual, of the physical manifestation of the Divine in the cosmos, steadily declined. The remnants of the old clairvoyance faded by degrees, and nature, for him, was in a certain sense deprived of the Divine. A merely material world was spread out before him. And in face of this material universe he could in no way maintain a belief that the Christ-Principle was at work there. The nineteenth-century Kant-Laplace theory, whereby our solar system developed out of a cosmic nebula, and eventually life arose on individual planets, has led finally to the universe being regarded as a collaboration of atoms. If we try to think of Christ in this setting, as conceived by materialistic scientists, it makes no sense. There is no place for the Christ-Being in this cosmogony, no place for anything spiritual. You remember someone saying—I read you the passage—that he would have to tear up his whole conception of the universe if he had to believe in the Resurrection. This shows that in contemplating Nature, or in thinking about Nature, all possibility of penetrating into the living essence of natural facts has disappeared.

When I speak like this, it is not by way of disapproval. The time had to come when Nature would be deprived of the Divine, deprived of the Spirit, so that man could formulate the totality of abstract thoughts required to comprehend external nature, as the outlook of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo enabled him to do. The web of thoughts which has led to our age of machinery had to take hold of humanity. On the other hand, it was necessary that this age should have a compensation for the fact that it had become impossible in exoteric life to find a direct path from the Earth to the spiritual. For if man had been able to find this path, he would have been able to find the path to Christ, as he will find it in the coming centuries. There had to be a compensation.

The question now is: What had become necessary as an exoteric path for man to Christ during the centuries in which an atomistic conception of the universe became gradually accepted, a conception which alienated Nature more and more from the Divine and in the nineteenth century grew into the study of nature deprived of the Divine?

A two-fold remedy was required. A spiritual vision of the Christ could be found exoterically in two ways. One way was to show that all matter is completely foreign to man's inner spiritual being. He could be shown that it is untrue to say that everywhere in space where matter appears, only matter is present. How could this come about? In no other way than by something being given to man which is at one and the same time spirit and matter; something which he knows is spirit and yet sees to be matter. Therefore the transformation, the eternally valid transformation, of spirit into matter, of matter into spirit, had to continue as a vital fact. And this came to pass because the Holy Communion has been celebrated, has been maintained through the centuries as a Christian ritual. And the further we go back in the centuries towards the institution of the Holy Communion, the more can we trace how in the older times, not yet so materialistic, it was better understood.

In regard to higher things, when people begin to discuss something, it is a proof, as a rule, that they no longer understand it. Even simple matters, as long as they are understood, are not much discussed. Discussions are a proof that the point at issue is not understood by a majority of the people involved. Thus it was with the Holy Communion. As long as it was known that the Holy Communion furnished a living proof that matter is not merely matter, but that there are ceremonial acts through which the spirit can be united with matter—as long as people knew that this interpenetration of matter with spirit, as it finds expression in the Holy Communion, is a union with the Being of Christ, so long was the Holy Communion accepted without argument. But then came the time when Materialism arose, when people no longer understood what lies at the foundation of the Holy Communion. Then they disputed whether the bread and wine are merely symbols of the Divine, or whether Divine power actually flows into them. For anyone who can see more deeply, all the disputes which arose on this account at the beginning of the new epoch signify that the original understanding of the ritual had been lost. For those who desired to come to Christ, the Holy Communion was a complete equivalent of the esoteric path, if they could not take that path, and thus in the Holy Communion they could find a real union with Christ. For all things have their time. Certainly, just as it is true in regard to the spiritual life that a quite new age is dawning, so is it true that the way to Christ which for centuries was the right one for many people will remain for centuries more the right one for many. Things pass over gradually into one another, and what was formerly right will gradually pass over into something else when people are ready for it.

The aim of Theosophy is to work in such a way that we shall grasp in the spirit itself something concrete, something real. By means of meditation, concentration and all that we learn as the knowledge of higher worlds, men become ripe in their inner being not merely to experience thought-worlds, or worlds of abstract feelings and perceptions, but to permeate themselves inwardly with the element of the Spirit; thereby they will experience the Communion in the Spirit; thereby thoughts, meditative thoughts, will be able to live in man; they will even be the very same, only from within outwards, as the symbol of the Holy Communion, the consecrated Bread, has been from without inwards. And as the undeveloped Christian can seek his way to Christ through the Holy Communion, so the developed Christian who, through progressive knowledge of the Spirit has learnt to know the Form of the Christ, can raise himself in spirit to what will indeed be in the future an exoteric path for men. That will be the force which is to bring to men a widening of the Christ-Impulse. But then all ceremonies will change, and that which formerly came to pass through the attributes of bread and wine will come about in the future through a spiritual Communion. The thought of the Sacrament, the Holy Communion, will remain. Only it must be made possible that certain thoughts which flow to us through what is imparted within our Movement, certain inner thoughts and feelings, shall permeate and spiritualise our inner being—thoughts and feelings as fully consecrated as in the best sense of inner Christian development the Holy Communion has spiritualised the human soul and filled it with the Christ.

When this becomes possible—and it will be possible—we shall have progressed a stage further in evolution. And then we shall see the real proof that Christianity is greater than its external form. For a poor opinion of Christianity is held by anyone who thinks it will be obliterated when the external forms of the Christianity of a certain period are swept away. A true opinion will be permeated with the conviction that all Churches which have cherished the Christ-Thought, all external thoughts, all external forms, are temporal and therefore transitory, while the Christ-Thought will live in ever-new forms in the hearts and souls of men in the future, little as these new forms are evident today. Thus we are first taught by Spiritual Science how, along one exoteric path, the Holy Communion had its significance in earlier times.

The other exoteric path was through the Gospels. And here again we must realise what in earlier times the Gospels still were for men. It is not very long since the Gospels were not read as they were in the nineteenth century. In those days they were read as a life-giving fountain whence something substantial passed over into the soul. They were not read in the way described in the first lecture of this course, when we were speaking of a false path, but so that a person saw approaching from outside something for which his soul was panting with thirst; they were so read that his soul found pictured therein the real Redeemer, of whom the soul knew that He must be there, in the wide universe.

Those who understood how to read the Gospels in this way never thought of asking the endless questions which first became questions for the intelligent, clever people of the nineteenth century. You need only recall how many times in speaking of these questions, in one form or another, we have had to say that for quite clever people, who have all science and learning at their finger tips, the thought of Christ Jesus and the Events of Palestine are truly not compatible with the modern conception of the universe. In an apparently enlightened way they say that when men were not aware that the earth is a quite small heavenly body, they could believe that with the Cross of Golgotha a special new event took place on earth. But since Copernicus taught that the earth is a planet like others, can one still believe that Christ came to us from another planet? Why should we believe that the earth is so exceptionally situated as was formerly thought? A simile is then brought in: ‘Since our conception of the universe has been so much enlarged, it seems as though one of the most important artistic presentations had taken place, not on the great stage of a capital city, but on the small stage of some provincial theatre.’ So that is how it looks to these people: the earth is such an insignificant little cosmic body that the Events of Palestine appear like the performance of a great cosmic drama on the stage of a small provincial theatre. We can no longer imagine such a thing, because the earth is so small in comparison with the great universe!

It seems so clever when something like that is said, but after all there is not much cleverness in it, for Christianity never asserted what is here apparently contradicted. Christianity has never placed the beginning of the Christ-Impulse in the magnificent places of the earth. It has always seen a certain deep seriousness in the fact that the bearer of the Christ was born in a stable among poor shepherds. Not only the little earth, but a very obscure place on earth, was sought out in Christian tradition to place the Christ therein. Christianity from the very first answered the questions of the clever people. But they have not understood the answers which Christianity itself has given, because they could no longer let the living force of the great majestic pictures work upon the soul.

Nevertheless, through the Gospel pictures alone, without the Holy Communion and all that is connected with it—for the Holy Communion stands at the centre of all Christian cults—an exoteric path to Christ could not have been found. For the Gospels could not then have been widely enough popularised for a finding of the way to Christ to depend on them alone. And when the Gospels were popularised, we can see that it was not an unmixed blessing. For at the same time arose the great misunderstanding of the Gospels: they were taken superficially, and then all that the nineteenth century made of them came about; and indeed—speaking quite objectively—it was bad enough. I think anthroposophists will understand what is meant here by ‘bad enough’. No censure is intended, for we cannot but acknowledge the diligence which the nineteenth century brought to the task of scientific investigation, including all the work in natural science. The tragedy is that this very science—and anyone familiar with it will grant this—owing to its deep seriousness and its tremendous, devoted industry, which one can only admire, has led to a complete splitting up and destruction of what it wished to teach. When in the future course of evolution people look back at our time, they will feel it to be particularly tragic that men sought to conquer the Bible by means of a science worthy of endless admiration—and succeeded only in losing the Bible.

Thus we can see that as regards these two aspects of the exoteric we are living in a transitional period, and in so far as we have grasped the spirit of Theosophy, the old paths must lead over into others. And having now considered the exoteric paths of the past to the Christ-Impulse, we shall see tomorrow how this relationship to Christ takes form in the realm of the esoteric. We will then conclude our study by showing how we can come to grasp the Christ-Event not only for the whole evolution of humanity, but for each individual man. We shall be able to review the esoteric path more briefly, because we have assembled building-stones for it during past years. We will crown our endeavours by fixing our gaze upon the relationship of the Christ-Impulse to every individual human soul.