The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

It seems obvious to me today that what has been discussed here, from this point of view, during these days, the harmony of the subjective and the objective, is now emerging as an introduction to my lecture, also based, so to speak, on a feeling. Yesterday morning, the reflections concluded with the speech of Professor Römer, which gave me great satisfaction – that is the subjective aspect – for the reason that it showed how a specialist, who is thoroughly and fully immersed in his field, can feel the need for the spiritual science to shed light on such a specific subject. It will also have become clear to you from what Professor Römer has already been able to cite from his field of expertise today, that above all, for this interweaving, strong, vigorous work must be developed on the part of the relevant spiritual science itself. For what has been given so far - and this should be fully recognized - are initially individual guidelines that require verification with reference to external science.

In all that has been brought to me through this lecture to a certain subjective satisfaction, there was a consideration of the teeth. So yesterday we concluded with the teeth – now I come to the objective. And allow me to start with the teeth again today, though not with something that I want to tell you about the teeth on my own initiative, but with a saying that emerged from the scholarship of the 11th century, as it was in Central Europe at the time. This saying goes:

When thy tongue catcheth the wind

and draweth it into thy mouth,

and with thy teeth thou choosest

the word that thou shalt speak.

This means: just as the tongue catches the wind from its surroundings and draws it into the mouth, so it draws the word it speaks out of the teeth.

Now, that is a product of 11th-century Central European scholarship. It means that the tongue draws the word out of the teeth just as it draws air into the mouth from the outside world.

Now a sample of 19th-century scholarship, from the last third of the century, a word pronounced by the philologist Wilhelm Scherer, who was revered by a large number of students as a modern idol, and which you will find in his “Deutsche Sprachgeschichte” (History of the German Language), where he also uses this word that I have just read to you. The word he uses in contrast to this is this: “We laugh at such a word in the present”.

That is the scientific confession from the 19th century about this word from the 11th century; it expresses the scientific attitude that still prevails today in the broadest sense and that the representatives of the corresponding field are still likely to express today in further references.

If we first consider this contrast from the point of view that has been adopted here more often, that a complete change has taken place in relation to the state of mind of people since the first third of the 15th century, then we have in the time that lies between the first quoted saying and the saying of Wilhelm Scherer, we have contained approximately just what has elapsed in time since the dawning of that state of mind that existed until the beginning of the 15th century, and the direction that has emerged since then and has so far undergone a certain development.

Wilhelm Scherer now continues the sentences that he began by saying that he had to laugh at such a word from the 19th He says that all efforts in the present must be directed, with regard to linguistics, to bringing together what physiologists have to say about speaking and word formation based on the physiological organization of the human body with what philologists have to say about the development of language from ancient times to the present. In other words, physiology and philology should join hands in this field of science. And Wilhelm Scherer adds that unfortunately he has to admit that the philologists are very, very far behind and that it cannot be hoped that they will meet the physiologists halfway in terms of what they have to say about the physical organization for the formation of speech. So that physiology and philology are two branches of science whose lack of mutual understanding a man regarded as a man of his time acknowledges in no uncertain terms.

This points to a phenomenon that is a dominant one in our time: that the individual sciences with their methods do not understand each other at all, that they talk alongside each other without the person who is placed in the midst of this scientific activity and hears what the physiologists on the one hand and the philologists on the other have to say, and who hears what they say, is able to do something with it – forgive the perhaps somewhat daring comparison – other than to be skewered from two sides in relation to his soul by the formations of concepts.

In a sense, although I do not want to say much more with this than something analogous, a certain contrast is already expressed in the word designation, which, I would like to say, is unconsciously taken seriously by the newer currents of science. The word 'physiology' expresses the fact that it wants to be a logos about the physical in man, so to speak, that which grasps the physical in a logical, intellectual way; the word 'philology' expresses: love of wisdom, love of the Logos, love of the word; so the word designation is taken from an emotional experience. In one case the word designation is taken from a rational experience, in the other from an emotional experience. And what the physiologist wants to produce as a kind of intellectual Logos about the human body, that - namely the Logos - the philologist actually wants to love. As I said, I am only trying to make an analogy here, but if we pursue it further, if we follow it historically, it will take on a certain significance. I would advise us to follow it more closely historically.

But we can point out something else that comes to us from prehistory, from the forerunner of that which has emerged in human consciousness since the beginning of the 15th century. We know that what is called logic and which, in a certain respect, has its image in language, at least essentially, is a creation of Aristotle. And if one were to claim that, just as a person today who has not studied logic nevertheless lives logic in his soul activity, logic also lived in people's soul activity before Aristotle, one overlooks the fact that the transformation of the unconscious into the conscious nevertheless has a deeper significance in the course of human events. The elevation of the logical into consciousness is also a real process, albeit an inwardly real process, in the development of the soul of humanity: in older times there was an intimate relationship between the concept and the word. Just as there was such an intimate relationship between the concept or idea and the perception, as you will find explained in my “Riddles of Philosophy”, there was also an intimate connection, an interlocking, I would say, of words and ideas.

The distinction that we have to make today, psychologically, between the word and the content of the idea – particularly when considering mathematization, this emerges with all clarity – was not made in older times. And it was precisely this distinction that Aristotle first arrived at. He singled out, within the life of the soul, that which is conception or concept from the fabric of language and made it into something that exists separately for knowledge. But in doing so, he pushed that which lives in language further down into the unconscious than it was before. In a sense, a gulf was created for knowledge between the concept or the conception and the word.

The further back we go in the consideration of human language, the more we find that the word and the concept or idea are experienced as one and the same thing, that man, so to speak, hears inwardly what he thinks, that he has a word-picture, not so much a thought-picture. The thought is linked externally to the sense perceptions and internally to the word. But in this way, even in these early times, a certain intuitive perception was present, which can be characterized as follows: as people expressed themselves in words, they felt as if what resounded in their words had entered their speech directly from a hidden, subconscious, instinctive aspect of things. They felt, as it were, that a real process takes place between what lives in things, and especially in facts, and what inwardly forms the impulse for the sounding of the word. They felt such a real connection as a person today still feels a real connection between the substances that are outside, say egg, veal, lettuce, and what then happens inside with the content of these substances when they are digested. He will see a real process in this process, which unfolds from the outside of the substances to what happens inside in the digestion. He experiences this real process subconsciously. What one experienced in language was subconscious — even if much more clearly, already permeated by a certain dim awareness. One had the feeling that something living in the things is related to the sounds, to the words. Just as the substances of the materials one eats are connected with what happens internally in the metabolism of the human being, one felt an inner connection between what takes place in the things and facts, which is similar to words, and what sounds internally as a word. And in that Aristotle raised to consciousness what was felt to be a real process, where concepts come into play, the same was achieved for language as a person achieves when he reflects on what the substances of the materials in his organism do. Thinking about digestion is, of course, somewhat further removed from the actual process of digestion than thinking about language. But we can gain an idea of the relationship by clarifying this idea by moving from the more immediate to the more distant, and by becoming clearer in the distance.

Now, for us, if we replace today's abstract view of history with a more concrete one, the fact that things that happened in Greece in the pre-Christian era, also in the pre-Aristotelian era, happened later for the Central European population - who still perceived the Greeks as barbaric, that is, at a lower level of culture - is clear. And we will be right, and spiritual science gives us the guidance to raise this feeling to certainty, if we imagine that the mental state from which we speak is spoken emotionally, “the tongue draws the outer air into the mouth just as it draws the word out of the teeth,” that this way of looking at things , this remarkably pictorially expressed view was roughly the same as that which prevailed in pre-Aristotelian times within Greece, and in the place of which there arose what was bound to arise through the separation of logic, of the logos, through the separation of the conceptual from that which is expressed in language.

You are aware that in that erudition which developed first in the 15th century and from which the various branches of the individual specialized sciences have emerged, that in this erudition as education much has contributed what has asserted itself as late Greek culture. The philologists, in other words, those who are supposed to love the logos, were thoroughly influenced by what emerged from late Greek culture. And just imagine such a late Greek as a Germanic scholar, like Wilhelm Scherer, confronted with early Greek, and it tells him: the tongue pulls the language out of the teeth – then he naturally rejects it, then he wants nothing to do with it from his point of view. One must consider such facts in a light that tries to shine a little deeper into the historical context than what is often available in the ordinary popular science of history today, both in the field of external political or cultural history and in the field of language history.

Now the question is what paths must be sought in order to scientifically penetrate into the structure of the language organism itself, if I may express it in this way.

Even in external appearances, it is expressed how the soul, which has gradually been elevated into the realm of abstract concepts, has moved away from what was felt about language in the pre-Aristotelian period. What, for example, has been produced, as an opinion about the origin of language, by this research, which is in the sign of Aristotelism? Well, it was elevated into the abstract, and thus alienated from its direct connection with the external world, through which one could experience what really corresponds to the formed word in things. It was alienated from this, but still sought to understand what such a connection might look like, and it then also translated this connection into all kinds of abstractions. What she felt inwardly, she placed in the realm where concepts are formed externally, based on sensory or other external observations. Because it was impossible to delve into things to search for the process of how the word works from things into the human organization, an abstract concept was used in place of such an understanding, for example in the so-called Wauwau theory or in the Bimbam theory. The wauwau theory says nothing more than that what appears externally in the organic as sound is imitated. It is a completely external consideration of an external fact with the help of abstract concepts. The Bim-Bim theory differs from the Bow-Wow theory only in that it takes into account the inorganic way in which sound is released from itself. This sound is then imitated in an external way by the human being who is confronted with and influenced by external nature. And the transformation of that which children call — though not everywhere, but only in a very limited area of the earth — when they hear the dog bark: woof-woof, or that which comes into their sense of language when they hear the bell ring: ding-dong-dong, this transformation is then followed by a curious method. Thus, what has then formed into the organism of language can be seen in the indicated 'theories', which, it is true, have not been replaced by much better ones to this day.

We are therefore dealing with an inwardness of the observation of language. Above all, the aim of spiritual science, as it is meant here, is to make the study of language an inward one again, so that through what can be achieved in the ascent from sensory to supersensible knowledge, what was once thought about language through feeling and instinct can be found independently again, but now in a form appropriate to advanced humanity. And here I must point out (owing to the limited time I have only to indicate the directions in which the empirical facts can be followed) how spiritual science takes a strictly concrete path when it wants to understand how the human being develops from childhood to a certain age. You will find what I am trying to suggest here outlined, for example, in my booklet 'The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science'.

First of all, it must be pointed out how the entire soul-physical configuration of the human being in the period before the change of teeth is essentially different from what it becomes after the change of teeth. Anyone who has observed this fact knows how much is metamorphosed in the soul-physical life during the period when the second teeth replace the first. And anyone who does not seek the relationships between body, soul and spirit through abstractions such as the followers of psychophysical parallelism, but seeks them in concrete phenomena, seeks them according to a truly further developed scientific method, and is able to grasp the inner structure of the soul life in the concrete, will find just how what later, in a more soul-like way, in the peculiar configuration of conceptual life, in the implementation of that which is experienced conceptually, with will impulses, which then lead to the formation of the judgment, as something that has been working in the physical organization until the change of teeth. And he will not speculate about what can “work spiritually” in the physical organization from birth to the change of teeth. Rather, he will say to himself, what is then released during the change of teeth, released from a body in which it was previously latent, that has previously been active in a latent and bound state in the physical organization of the human being. And this particular type of physical organization, in which what can later be observed in the soul is active, comes to an end with the eruption of the second teeth, which you were also made aware of yesterday.

Now, the facts at hand must be considered not only from a physiological point of view, but also from the perspective of the human soul. Just as the physiologist, with his senses and the mind bound to them, penetrates into the physical processes of the human organism, so too does the soul, with its faculties of imagination and inspiration. If one really penetrates into these processes, then one must see in the real, which is first latent from birth to the change of teeth, and then becomes free, also in terms of imagination and knowledge. That is why my writing on “The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science”, in summarizing this process in a formulaic way, speaks of the fact that with the change of teeth, the etheric body of the human being, which previously worked in the physical body, is only born free to be active in the soul life. This “birth of the etheric body” is expressed in the change of teeth.

It is necessary to have such formulaic expressions at the starting point of anthroposophical spiritual scientific observation, such as “birth of the etheric body from the physical body”, which corresponds to an actual event. But when we seek to make the transition from spiritual science in the narrower sense — which is concerned with the observation of the human being's direct experience of the day — to the approach taken in the individual specialized sciences, then what is initially expressed in such a formulaic way becomes something similar to a mathematical formula: it becomes method, method for dealing with the facts. And that is why this spiritual science can have a fruitful effect on the individual sciences, without always merely continuing into the individual sciences that which, admittedly, must be clearly borne in mind at the starting point: that the human being is structured into a physical body, etheric body, and so on. At the beginning one can and must know such things; but if spiritual science is to bring about a fruitful influence, they must become active, they must become a method, a way of treating even the empirically given 'facts'. And in this respect spiritual science, because it rises from the inorganic, where it can do little, through the organic into the spiritual realm, I would like to say, not only in the way the individual sciences can fertilize can, but it will, as a result of its findings, have confirmations of facts to hand over to them, which will shed light on what is gained from the other side through sensory-physical observation and then seen through with the mind. Spiritual and sensory-physical research must meet. And it is one of the most important tasks for the future to ensure that this spiritual research and this sensory-physical research meet.

In the process that manifests itself externally during the change of teeth, it becomes clear that what is designated as the etheric body – but by taking a concrete view, not a word concept, into the eye of the soul – becomes freely active for the entire human organism, after previously having had an organizing effect in the physical body. Now it rises into the soul, becomes free and then consciously works back to the whole human being to a certain degree.

Something similar occurs again with what manifests externally as sexual maturity. There we see how, once again, something arises in human experience that expresses itself, on the one hand, in a certain metamorphosis of the physical organism and, on the other hand, in a metamorphosis of the spiritual. And an essential part of the spiritual researcher's work is to acquire a concrete way of looking at what occurs in the soul and spirit, just as someone who only wants to educate themselves through external observation acquires a concrete way of looking at what they can see with their eyes and combine with their mind. Soul cannot be looked at in this way, but can only be looked at in its reality through imagination. There is no true psychology that does not begin with imaginative observation, and there is no way to find the interrelationship of body and soul or physical body and spiritual soul other than to build a bridge between what is given to external physical sensory perception as the physical body, and what falls away from this perception, what can only be given as reality in the ascent to supersensible knowledge, the spiritual-soul.

If we now turn to what occurs during puberty, we must say: here we see, in a certain sense, the reverse process of what took place when the teeth changed. We see how what plays as the capacity for desire in man, what is the instinctive character of his will, takes hold of the organism in a way it did not take hold of it before. Summarizing the whole broad complex of facts that this involves in a formulaic way, it comes about that one says: the one in which the nature of desire slumbers, the astral body of the human being, becomes free when sexual maturity occurs. It is this body that now, if I may express it in this way, sinks freely into the physical organism, takes hold of it, permeates it, and thus materializes desire, which finds expression in sexual maturation.

Now, what does an appropriate comparison of these two processes show? We see, so to speak, when the change of teeth occurs, a liberation of the etheric body of the human being. How does what is happening actually express itself? It expresses itself in such a way that the human being becomes capable of further developing the formation of concepts, in general the movement in the life of ideas, which used to be more bound to his whole organism, bound to the organization of the head. To a certain extent we see, and spiritual science sees it not only to a certain extent but in its reality, that the etheric, which we ascribe to the human being as an etheric body, withdraws with the change of teeth to that which only lives in the rhythm of the human organism and in the metabolic limb-organism, and that it develops a free activity in the formation of the head, in the plastic formation of the head, in which the consciousness life of the human being participates in the imagination. In a sense, the organization of the head is uncovered during this time. And if I may express myself figuratively about a reality that certainly exists, I must say that what drives itself to the surface from the entire human organization in the second teeth is the soul-spiritual activity that previously permeates the entire bodily organization and then becomes free. Before, it permeated the whole human being right into the head. It gradually withdraws from the head; and it shows how it withdraws by revealing its no-longer-to-the-head activity in that it stops and produces the second teeth. You can visualize this almost schematically. If I indicate schematically what the human physical organization is with the white chalk, and what the etheric organization is with the red chalk, then the following would result schematically (see figure):

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In the figure on the left, you see the human being in his spiritual, soul and physical activity as he stands before you until his teeth change. In the second figure, which is to your right, you see how the etheric element has withdrawn from the immediate effect of the head organization, how it has become free in a certain respect, so that from there it can freely affect the human head organism. And the last thing that happens in the physical organism as a result of this activity of the soul-spiritual is the eruption of the second teeth. I would say that you can observe in its image what is being communicated to you here as a spiritual view if you take the skulls that Professor Römer showed you yesterday, because you can compare the insertion of the first teeth with the insertion of the second teeth. If you want to follow this logically, then you have to take as a basis what has been gained here from spiritual science. Then you have to say to yourself, the first teeth, with all that is expressed in them, are taken out of the whole human organization, including the head organization. What is expressed in the second teeth is taken out after the inner soul organization, insofar as it concerns the etheric body, has slowly withdrawn into the rhythmic and metabolic organism and become free for the main head organization. In a similar way, we can say — as I said, I can only give guidelines — that something is happening with sexual maturity. What we call the astral body is sunk into the physical body, so that it finally takes hold of it and brings about what constitutes sexual maturity.

But now what happens in the human being takes place in the most manifold metamorphoses. Once one has truly understood a process such as that which is expressed through sexual maturity, which brings about a certain new relationship in human development, in the development of the human being to the outer world, once one truly understands such a process inwardly, one then also recognizes it when it occurs in a certain metamorphosis. What occurs at puberty, in that it takes hold of the whole person, in that it, so to speak, forms a relationship between the whole person and their environment, is, I would say, anticipated in a different metamorphosis at the moment when language develops in the child. Only what takes place with sexual maturation in the child takes place in a different metamorphosis in the formation of speech. What takes hold of the whole human being at sexual maturation and pours into his relationship with the outside world takes place between the rhythmic and limb human being and the human being's head organization. To a certain extent, the same forces that take hold of the whole person during puberty and direct their relationship to the outside world assert themselves between the lower and upper human beings. And as the lower human being learns to feel the upper human being in the way that the human being later learns to feel the outside world, he learns to speak. A process that can be observed externally in a person at a later age must be followed in its metamorphosis until it appears as an internal process in the human organism, in the learning to speak: the process that otherwise occurs in the whole person at puberty.

And once we have grasped this, we are able to comprehend how the interaction of the lower human being — the rhythmic and the limb-based human being — in its reciprocity develops an inner experience of something that is also present externally in the nature around us. This inward experiencing of what is outwardly present leads to the fact that what remains outwardly mute in things as their own language begins to resound as the human language in the human inner being. Please proceed from this sentence as from a regulative principle. Proceed from this sentence that what is in things, as they become external, material, falls silent, that in dematerialization it becomes audible in the human being and comes to speak. Then you will find the way in which you do not develop a yap-yap or a bim-bim theory, but on which you see that which is external to things – and cannot be perceived by external observation because it is silent and only exists in a supersensible way – as language in the human interior.

What I am saying here is like drawing a line to indicate the direction in which one would most like to paint a wide-ranging picture. I can only present this rather abstract proposition regarding the relationship between the things and facts of the external world and the origin of human language in the inner life. And you will see everything you can sense about language in a new light when you follow the path from this abstractly assumed sentence, which initially sounds formulaic, to what the facts connect for you in terms of meaning. And if you then want to apply what has been philologically obtained in this way to physiology, you will be able to learn about the connection between external sexual metamorphosis and linguistic metamorphosis by studying facts that are still present as a linguistic remnant of the sexual maturation metamorphosis in the change of the voice, that is, of the larynx in boys, and in some other phenomena that occur in women. If you have the will to engage with the facts and to draw the threads from one series of facts to another, not to encapsulate yourself in barren specialized sciences, but to really illuminate what is present in one science as fact , through the facts that come to light through other sciences, then the individual special sciences will be able to become what man must seek in them if he is to make progress on the path of his knowledge as well as on the path of his will.

In a context that might seem unrelated, we will see tomorrow in a very natural way how we can go from the change of teeth to the appearance of speech and then further back to what is the third on this retrogressive path: we see, so to speak, in what is expressed in the change of teeth, an interaction between the physical body and the etheric body. We see, in turn, in what is expressed in language, an interaction between the astral body and the etheric body. And thirdly, we must seek an interrelationship between the I and that which lives in man as an astral body, and we will be led to that which is the third in this retrospective consideration: to the embodiment of the spiritual-soul, to that which is born in the spiritual-soul. If one seeks the path from the change of teeth through the emergence of speech, the third stage is the stage of uniting the pre-existing human soul with the physical.

By walling up the way out of his consideration of the change of teeth to the consideration of language through his abstraction, Aristotle was forced to resort to the dogma that a new spiritual soul is born with each new human being. Due to a lack of will to continue on a path of knowledge, knowledge of human preexistence has been lost, and with it knowledge of all that truly leads to the knowledge of the human soul.

We see a historical connection, which, however, comes to expression in the treatment of certain problems, and we can say in conclusion: Today, according to the dictum of a philologist who is quite significant in the contemporary sense, philology and physiology are so opposed that they cannot understand each other. Why is this so? Because physiology studies the human body and does not come back to the mind in this study. If one pursues true physiology, then one finds the spiritual and psychological in man through the bodily in physiological observation. What happens when one pursues true philology? If one pursues true philology, then one does not reduce the logos to an abstraction, for which one then seeks to see through after-images, after-images in a scientific method, but one seeks to penetrate into that which one supposedly loves as a “philo”-logist, through imaginative and other forms of observation. But then, when one penetrates into that which has become shadowy and nebulous for today's philology, namely the genius of language, the creative genius of language, when one penetrates into it, then one penetrates through the spirit to the external corporeality.

Physiology finds the spirit by way of the inner body. Philology, when viewed correctly, finds what speaks and has fallen silent in things on the way out through the genius of language. It does not find bark and bim-bam, but rather finds the reason why words and language arise in us in the things that physically surround us. Physiology has lost its way because it stops at the body and does not penetrate inwardly through the body to the spirit. Philology has lost its way because it stops at the genius of language, which it then only grasps in the abstract, and does not penetrate into the inner being of the outer things from which what lives in the word resounds. If philology does not speak as if the wauwau and bimbam are imitated in an externally abstract way by man, but speaks about the external physicality in such a way that it becomes clear to it in imaginations, how the word arises from this external physicality, which echoes internally, so that when physiology has found spirit and philology has found physicality, they will find each other.

In this way I have traced the path that spiritual science in the anthroposophical sense wants to lead in conscientious work. I have only given a few hints in this particular field of introductory linguistics.

Now, these things are discussed among us, these things are striven for by us. While we strive for these things, so that they may bear witness to what is being striven for on a path of knowledge that arises entirely out of the spirit of our time. And while you can see from what is being striven for that there is probably a certain seriousness that can be measured against the seriousness that exists in other areas of life, Stuttgart, a meeting raged that trampled on most of our speakers, that had no intention of listening to anything, that did not want to engage with what we had to say, but that, through trampling and similar things, sought to crush what is being seriously pursued. And, addressing my fellow students, I may say: yesterday evening in Stuttgart, your colleagues were absent – not from the other faculty, but from the other attitude – they were not absent, they were present in the trampling.

Dear attendees, my dear fellow students! It will become ever clearer and clearer that there are those who, because they cannot be refuted – because they do not want to be refuted – because they do not want to engage with the new at all by inertly continuing with the old that has outlived itself, they will want to trample down on that with external force. Well, I would just like to appeal to you here in the sense that I do have faith in you, that you may say to yourself: We still have a say in this trampling down procedure! – But may this word become action.

Third evening of disputations

The questions did not relate to the theme of the day, “Linguistics”, but drew on problems dealt with earlier.

Dr. Steiner. Here is the question: It has been said that the three dimensions of space are not equal in structure – what is the difference?

In any case, the sentence was never formulated in this way: the three dimensions of space are “not equal in structure”, but what is probably meant here is the following. First of all, we have mathematical space, the space that we imagine – if we have an exact idea of it at all – as three mutually perpendicular dimensional directions, which we can thus define by the three mutually perpendicular coordinate axes.

In the usual mathematical treatment of space, the three dimensions are treated absolutely equally. We make so little distinction between the dimensions up-down, right-left, front-back that we can even think of these three dimensions as interchangeable. In the case of mere mathematical space, it does not matter whether, when we have the X-axis and the Z-axis perpendicular to each other, and the Y-axis perpendicular to them, we call the plane on which the Y-axis stands “horizontal” or “vertical” or the like. Likewise, we do not concern ourselves with the limitations of this space, so to speak. Not that we imagine it to be limitless. One does not usually ascend to this notion, but one imagines it in such a way that one does not concern oneself with its limits, but rather tacitly assumes that one can start from any point – let us say, for example, the X-direction and adding another piece to what you have already measured in the X-direction, to that again a piece and so on, and you would never be led to come to an end anywhere. In the course of the 19th century, much has been said against this Euclidean-geometric conception of space from the standpoint of meta-geometry. I will only remind you of how, for example, Riemann distinguished between the “unboundedness” of space and the “infiniteness” of space. And initially, there is no necessity for the purely conceptual imagination to assume the concept of “unboundedness” and that of “infiniteness” as identical. Take, for example, a spherical surface. If you draw on a spherical surface, you will find that nowhere do you come up against a spatial boundary that could, as it were, prevent you from continuing your drawing. You will certainly enter into your last drawing if you continue drawing; but you will never be forced to stop drawing because of a boundary if you remain on the spherical surface. So you can say to yourself: the spherical surface is unlimited in terms of my ability to draw on it. But no one will claim that the spherical surface is infinite. So you can distinguish, purely conceptually, between unlimitedness and infinity.

Under certain mathematical conditions, this can also be extended to space, can be extended to space in such a way that one imagines: if I add a distance in the X or Y axis, and then another and so on, and am never prevented from adding further distances, then this property of space could indeed speak for its unlimitedness, but not for the infinity of space. Despite the fact that I can always add new pieces, space does not need to be infinite at all; it could be unlimited. So these two concepts must be kept separate. So one could assume that if space were unbounded but not infinite, it would have an inward curvature in the same way as space does now, that is, in some way it would likewise recede into itself, like the surface of a sphere recedes into itself.

Certain ideas of newer metageometry are based on such assumptions. Actually, no one can say that there is much to be said against such assumptions; because, as I said, there is no way to derive the infinity of space from what we experience in space. It could very well be curved in on itself and then be finite.

Of course, I cannot go into this line of thought in detail, because it is almost the only one followed by the whole of modern metageometry. However, you will find sufficient evidence in the works of Riemann, Gauss and so on, which are readily available, to explore if you value such mathematical ideas.

From the purely mathematical point of view, therefore, this is what has been introduced into the, I would say rigid, neutral space of Euclidean geometry, which was only derived from 'unboundedness'. But what is indicated in the question is rooted in something else. Namely, that space, with which we initially calculate and which is available to us in analytical geometry, for example, when we deal with the three coordinate axes that are perpendicular to one another, that space is initially an abstraction. And an abstraction – from what? That is the question that must first be raised.

The question is whether we have to stop at this abstraction of “space” or whether that is not the case. Do we have to stop at this abstraction of space? Is this the only space that can be spoken of? Or rather, if this abstract concept of space is the only one that can legitimately be spoken of, then there is really only one objection that can be raised, and this is sufficiently addressed in Riemannian or any other metageometry. The fact of the matter is that, for example, Kant's definitions of space are based on the very abstract concept of space, in which one does not initially concern oneself with infinity or boundlessness, and that in the course of the 19th century, this concept of space was also shaken internally, in terms of its conceptual content, by mathematics. There can be no question of Kant's definitions still applying to a space that is not infinite but unlimited. In fact, much of the further development of the “Critique of Pure Reason” would be called into question, for example the doctrine of paralogisms, if one were obliged to move on to the concept of unlimited space curved in on itself.

I know that for the ordinary conception this concept of curved space causes difficulties. But from the purely mathematical-geometric point of view, nothing can be objected to what is assumed there, except that one is moving in a realm of pure abstraction that is initially quite far from reality. And if you look more closely, you will find that there is a strange circularity in the derivations of modern meta-geometry. It is this, that one starts out from the idea of Euclidean geometry, which is not concerned with the limitations of space. From this, one then gets certain derived ideas, let us say ideas that relate to something like a spherical surface. And then, in turn, by undertaking certain reconciliations or reinterpretations with the forms that arise, one can make interpretations of space from there. Actually, everything is said under the assumption of Euclidean coordinate geometry. Under this assumption, one arrives at a certain measure of curvature. One arrives at the derivations. All of this is done with the concepts of Euclidean geometry. But then one turns around, so to speak: one now uses these ideas, which can only arise with the help of Euclidean geometry, for example the measure of curvature, in order to arrive at a different idea that leads to a reorganization and can provide an interpretation for what has been gained from the curved forms. Basically, we are moving in an unrealistic area by extracting abstractions from abstractions. The matter would only be justified if empirical facts made it necessary to conform to the ideas of these facts according to what is obtained through such a thing.

The question, then, is: what is the experiential basis for the abstraction “space”? After all, space as such, as presented in Euclid, is an abstraction. What is the basis for what can be experienced, what can be perceived?

We must start from the human experience of space. Placed in the world, human beings, through their own activity of experience, actually perceive only one spatial dimension, and that is the dimension of depth. This perception, this acquired perception of the dimension of depth by the human being is based on a process of consciousness that is very often ignored. But this acquired perception is something quite different from the perception of the plane-like, the perception of extension in two dimensions. When we see with our two eyes, that is, with our total vision, we are never aware that these two dimensions come about through an activity of their own, through an activity of the soul. They are, so to speak, there as two dimensions. Whereas the third dimension comes about through a certain activity, even if this activity is not usually brought to consciousness. We actually have to first acquire the knowledge and understanding of how deep in space something lies, how far away from us any object is. We do not acquire the extent of the surface, it is given by observation. But we do acquire the sense of depth through our two eyes. The way in which we experience the sense of depth is indeed on the borderline between the conscious and the unconscious; but anyone who has learned to focus his attention on such things knows that the semi-unconscious or unconscious, never conscious, activity of judging the depth dimension is much more similar to an intellectual, or even a soul activity, an active soul activity than to everything that is only viewed on the plane.

Thus, the one dimension of three-dimensional space is already actively conquered for our objective consciousness. And we cannot say otherwise than: By observing the position of the upright human being, something is given in relation to this depth dimension — front-back — which is not interchangeable with any other dimension. Simply because a person stands in the world and experiences this dimension in a certain way, what he experiences there is not interchangeable with any other direction. For the individual, this depth dimension is something that cannot be exchanged for any other dimension. It is also the case that the grasping of two-dimensionality – that is, up-down, right-left, of course also when it is in front of us – is also tied to other parts of the brain, since it lies within the process of seeing, that is, within the sensory process of perception; while, with regard to localization in the brain, the emergence of the third dimension is quite close to those centers that are to be considered for intellectual activity. So here we can already see that in the realization of this third dimension, even in terms of experience, there is an essential difference compared to the other two dimensions.

But if we then move up to imagination, we get out of what we experience in the third dimension altogether: in imagination, we actually move on to two-dimensional representation. And now we have yet to work out the other imagination, the imagination of right and left, although this has been hinted at just as quietly as the development of the third dimension in objective imagining; so that there is again a specific experience in right and left. And finally, when we ascend to inspiration, the same applies to up and down.

For ordinary imagining, which is tied to our nervous sense system, we develop the third dimension. But when we turn directly to the rhythmic system by excluding the ordinary activity of the nervous sense system – which in a certain respect occurs when we ascend to the level of inspiration; it is not entirely precise to say this, but it does not matter for now – then we have the experience of the second dimension. And we have the experience of the first dimension when we ascend to inspiration, that is, when we advance to the third member of the human organization.

Thus that which we have before us in abstract space proves to be exact because everything we conquer in mathematics we extract from within ourselves. What arises in mathematics as three-dimensional space is actually something that we have within ourselves. But if we descend into ourselves through supersensible representations, it is not abstract space with its three equally valid dimensions that arises, but three different valences for the three different dimensions: front-back, right-left, up-down; they cannot be interchanged. From this follows yet another: if these three are not interchangeable, there is no need to imagine them with the same intensity. That is the essence of Euclidean space: that we imagine the X-, Y-, Z-axis with the same intensity – this is assumed for any geometric calculation.

If we hold the X-, Y-, Z-axis in front of us, then we must – if we want to stick with what our equations tell us in analytical geometry, but assume an inner intensity of the three axes – imagine this intensity as being of equal value. If we were to elastically enlarge the X-axis with a certain intensity, for example, the Y- and Z-axes would have to enlarge with the same intensity. That is to say, if I now grasp intensively that which I am expanding, the force of expansion, if I may say so, is the same for the X-, Y-, Z-axis, that is, for the three dimensions of Euclidean space. Therefore, applying the concept of space in this way, I would like to call this space rigid space.

Now, this is no longer the case when we take real space, of which this rigid space is an abstraction, when we take space as it is experienced by a human being. Then we can no longer speak of these three intensities of expansion being the same. Rather, the intensity is essentially dependent on what is found in the human being: the human proportions are entirely the result of the intensities of spatial expansion. And we must, for example, if we call the up-down the Y-axis, imagine this with a greater intensity of expansion than, for example, the X-axis, which would correspond to the right-left. If we were to look for a formulaic expression for this real space, if we were to express in formulaic terms what is meant by 'real' here, then again we would end up with a three-axis ellipsoid.

Now we also have the reason to imagine this three-axis space, in which supersensible thinking must live, in its three quite different possibilities of expansion, so that we can also recognize this space, through the real experience of the X-, Y- and Z-axis given to us with our physical body, as that which simultaneously expresses the relationship of the world bodies situated in this space.

When we imagine this, we must bear in mind that everything we think of out there in this three-dimensional cosmic space cannot be thought of as simply extending in different directions with the same intensity of expansion along the X-, Y- and Z-axes Z-axis, as is the case with Euclidean space, but we must think of space as having a configuration that could also be imagined by a triaxial ellipsoid. And the arrangement of certain stars certainly supports this. Our Milky Way system is usually called a lens and so on. It is not possible to imagine it as a spherical surface; we have to imagine it in a different way if we stick to a purely physical fact.

You can see from the treatment of space how little newer thinking is in line with nature. In ancient times, in older cultures, no one had such a conception as that of rigid space. One cannot even say that in Euclidean geometry there was already a clear conception of this rigid space with the three equal intensities of expansion, and also the three lines perpendicular to one another. It was only when people began to treat space in the manner of Euclidean geometry, in their calculations, that this abstract conception of space actually arose. In earlier times, quite similar insights had been gained, as I have now developed them again from the nature of supersensible knowledge. From this you can see that things on which people today rely so heavily, which are taken for granted, only have such significance because they operate in a sphere that is divorced from reality. The space that people use in their calculations today is an abstraction; it operates entirely in a sphere that is divorced from reality. It is abstracted from experiences that we can know through real experience. But today, people are often content with what abstractions are. In our time, when so much emphasis is placed on empiricism, abstractions are most often invoked. And people don't even notice it. They believe that they are dealing with things in reality. But you can see how much our ideas need to be rectified in this regard.

In every concept, the spiritual researcher does not merely ask whether it is logical. Although, in a certain sense, it is only a branch of Euclidean space, it is not really possible to grasp it conceptually, because one arrives at it through a completely abstract train of thought, in which one comes to a conclusion and, as it were, turns one's whole thinking upside down. When imagining, the spiritual researcher does not merely ask whether it is logical, but whether it is also in line with reality. That is the deciding factor for him in accepting or not accepting an idea. He only accepts an idea if this idea is in line with reality.

And this criterion of correspondence to reality will be given when one begins to deal with such ideas in an appropriate way, which is the justification for something like the theory of relativity, for example. It is logical in itself, I would like to say, because it only comprehends itself within the realm of logical abstraction, as logically as anything can be logical. Nothing can be more logical than the theory of relativity! But the other question is whether its ideas are realizable. And there you need only look at the ideas that are listed there as analogous, and you will find that they are actually quite unrealistic ideas that are just thrown around. It is only there for sensualization, they say beforehand. But it is not just there for symbolization. Otherwise the whole procedure would be in the air.

That is what I would like to say about the question. You see, it is not possible to answer questions that touch on such areas very easily. Now there is a question regarding the sentence: “The organism of an ancient Egyptian or Greek was quite different from that of modern man.

Dear attendees, I certainly did not say that! And at this point I must definitely draw attention to something that I often draw attention to, and really not out of immodesty: I am in the habit of expressing myself as precisely as I possibly can. And it is actually an extremely painful fact, not just for me personally, since it is tolerable, but from the point of view of the anthroposophical spiritual movement, that in the face of many things, for the formulation of which I have used all possible precautions to formulate the facts as adequately as possible, then everything possible is done, everything possible is said, and then these assertions are sent out into the world as “genuine anthroposophical teachings”. One of these assertions is that I am supposed to have said, “The organism of an ancient Egyptian or Greek was quite different from that of a modern man”.

It can be reduced to the following. I said: the modern way of thinking imagines too strongly that man, as a whole being, has basically always been as he is today, right down to a certain historical time. I usually only speak of “completely different,” of metamorphoses of man as such, where there are great differences, where man becomes “completely different” in a certain respect: in prehistoric times. But anyone who is able to penetrate to the subtleties of the structure and the innermost fabric – as a human being can in spiritual science – will find that a metamorphosis of the human being is constantly taking place, that, for example, the modern human being differs from the Egyptian or the Greek. Of course not in terms of external, striking characteristics, which are as striking as external physiognomy and the like. That is probably what is meant in the question, but that is not my opinion, because in terms of striking characteristics, modern man is of course not “completely different” from the Egyptian. But in terms of finer internal structural relationships, spiritual science comes to the following conclusion, for example. It has to be said that since the first third of the 15th century, humanity has become particularly adept at abstract thought, at moving more and more towards abstract trains of thought. This is also essentially based on a different structure of the brain. And through the method of spiritual science, the spiritual researcher can recognize the matter. Then it turns out that it is really the case that the brain has indeed changed in its finest structures since Egyptian times. The brain of the Egyptian was such that, to take one example, he also belonged to those of whom Dr. Husemann spoke, that the ancient Egyptian also had no sense for the blue color nuance and so on. In any case, we can see that the sense of abstraction occurs to the same extent as the nuances of blue emerge from mere darkness. What occurs in the life of the soul corresponds entirely to a physical metamorphosis. It is extremely important that we do not stop at the coarser aspects of human nature, as they are presented when we go back, for my sake, to the long periods of time that lie before history. Rather, if we want to consider human beings as humanity, we must also consider the finer structural changes during their historical existence.

Question: It would be interesting to hear, in a more intimate way, how this fact behaves.

Well, quite a lot has actually been said in these days, let us say, also through the things that Dr. Husemann has presented, about how this fact behaves. And if we were to go into other fields of fact, there would certainly be much that could be said about these other, very fine, intimate structural relationships of the human being.

Question: How do you explain the phenomenon of the well-known horse that solved all arithmetic and mathematical problems without difficulty, to the amazement of all scholars, and only then failed completely when the problems were written on pieces of paper in front of the examiner? If it is the case with the horse that none of those present in the room could see the problem, is this based on a strong suggestiveness on the part of the animal? And how does that come about?

I never want to talk about anything other than what I have investigated myself. And so, in answering this question, I would only like to share what I have experienced myself. For example, I don't know the famous Elberfeld horses. I also don't know the dog Rolf, I never had the honor of meeting him. Now, with regard to such things, I could always state that the story is all the more wonderful the less one is embarrassed by not really being able to see through it, to really get to know it. But I once saw Mr. von Osten's horse in Berlin. I can't say that the calculations that Mr. von Osten presented to the horse were extraordinarily complicated. But I was able to get an instant idea of what it was all about from what was going on there – although you had to look very closely.

I could only marvel at the strange theories that had been advanced about these things. There was a lecturer, I think his name was Fox or something like that, who was supposed to examine this whole story with the horse; and he now put forward the theory that every time the gentleman from the east gave some task, terribly small movements would occur in the eye or something like that. Another small movement would occur when Mr. von Osten says “three” like that, or when he says it like that; another movement would occur when he says “two”. So that a certain fine series of movements would come about if Mr. von Osten said, “three times two”; then the same sign of this movement would come again, six! And Mr. von Osten's horse should now be particularly predisposed to guess these fine movements, which the lecturer in question said he did not perceive in any way, but only assumed hypothetically. After all, the whole “theory” was based on the fact that Mr. von Osten's horse was much more perceptive, to a much greater extent in reality, than the lecturer who put forward this theory.

If you stick to the flashy blue thinking in hypothesizing, you can set up hypotheses in the most diverse ways. For those who have some insight into such matters, certain circumstances were of extraordinary value. During the entire time that Mr. von Osten presented his experiments to the amazed public with his horse, he gave the horse nothing but sweets – he had huge pockets in the back of his coat. And the horse just kept licking, and that's how it solved these tasks.

Now imagine that this has created a completely different relationship between the horse and Mr. von Osten himself. When Mr. von Osten continually gives the horse sugar, a very special relationship of love and intimacy develops between them. Now the animal nature is so extraordinarily variable due to the intimacy of the relationship that develops, both from 'animal to human and from human to animal'. And then effects come about that are actually wrongly described when they are called “mind reading” in the sense in which the word is often understood, but they are mediators for that which is not “subtle twitchings” that a private lecturer hypothetically posits, but which he himself says he does not see! No subtle twitches are needed to convey the solutions. It can be traced back to the following: imagine what went through the mind of Herr von Osten, who of course was vain enough to realize that the tension in the audience, made up of sensation-hungry people, was going through the most incredible twists and turns as he noticed it, and when he was then standing in front of the solution to the task, he gave the horse a piece of sugar. And add to that the effect on the horse of the mental relationship. It was truly not a command given by words or twitching, but an intimately given command that always went from Mr. von Osten to the horse when he gave him sweets to eat. Suggestion is probably not the right word. Relationships that take place between people cannot be transferred to every living being.

I have tried to show these things in concrete terms by highlighting a circumstance that many will consider trivial: the constant giving of sugar as something extraordinarily essential.

Question: Is there a possibility for pointing out a point of view that is just as stimulating for systematics in the field of mineralogy and crystallography as the idea of the primal plant is for botany or a new understanding of the periodic system of elements is for chemistry?

When we speak of crystal forms, we are dealing with forms that are actually different in their overall relationship to the cosmos, in their entire position in the world, than the forms that one can imagine in the Primordial Plant and, again, in the plant forms derived from the Primordial Plant, that is to say, in the possibility of real existence. For example, the principle applied to the design of the primeval plant could not be applied to the field of mineralogy or crystallogy. For there one is dealing with something that must be approached from a completely different angle. And one must first approach it by actually approaching the field of polyhedral crystal forms. And this approach, I can only hint at now. I have explained it in more detail in its individual representations in a lecture course that I gave for a smaller group. This approach is taken when one starts from the consideration, an internal dynamic consideration of the state of aggregation, let us say first of all from the gaseous state downwards to the solid. I can only draw the lines now; it would take too long if I were to explain it in detail, but I will hint at it. If one descends – if I may express it this way – from the gaseous state to the liquid state, then one must say: the liquid state of aggregation shows itself in that, as the one in the whole coherence of nature, a level-limiting surface, which is a spherical surface, and the degree of curvature of which can be obtained from any point on the surface by means of the transition to the tangent at that point. What you get there includes the shape that has its outer circumference in the spherical surface, and a point in the interior that is the same distance from this spherical surface everywhere.

If we now imagine the drop in an unlimited way, I do not say in an infinite way, but enlarged in an unlimited way, we get a level surface approaching the horizontal, and we have certain relationships in mind that are perpendicular to this level surface.

But we arrive at the same idea by observing the connections that arise when we simply regard our earth as a force field that can attract surrounding objects that are not firmly attached to it. If we regard the earth not as a center of gravity but as a spherical surface of gravity, then we arrive at the same result for this, I would say, gravitational figure as we need in another respect for the material constitution of the drop. So for a pure force context, we get something that corresponds to a material context. And in this way we arrive at a possibility for studying the formal relationships in the inorganic.

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So that we can say that in this context of forces, which is present in the whole body of the earth, we are always dealing with the horizontal plane. If we now move from this state of forces to one in which, let us say, there is not a point in the center to which the level surface refers as in the 'drop to the one center point', but rather several points, we would find a strangely composed surface. These relationships of the line to these 'centers' I would have to draw in the diagram in something like the following way: But if we now proceed—and now I am taking a great leap, which is well-founded, but in the short time available I can only hint at the true content—if we now proceed to assume these points not inside, within the system we are dealing with, but outside, then perhaps we would get a diagram that can be made diagrammatically in the following way: If we transfer the points into immeasurable distances, not into infinite distances, but into very great distances, then these curved surfaces, which are indicated here by curved lines, by curves, pass over into planes, and we would get a polyhedral form, which approximates to what we have before us in the known crystal forms.

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And indeed, spiritual scientific observation leads us to look at the crystal in such a way that we do not merely derive it from certain inner figurative forces in some material substance, but we relate it to the exterior of the cosmos, and we seek in the cosmos the directions that then, through the distribution of their starting points, result in what the individual crystal form is. In the individual crystal form, we actually get, so to speak, impressions of large cosmic relationships. All of this needs to be studied in detail. I fear that what I have been able to hint at, albeit only in a few very sparse lines, may already seem to you to be something very daring. But it must be said that today people have encapsulated themselves in their world of ideas in a very narrow area, and that is why they feel so uncomfortable when one does not stick to the conceptual world that is usually taken as a basis today, I would say is taken as a basis in all sciences. Spiritual science demands an - as experience makes necessary - immeasurable expansion of concepts compared to the present situation. And that is precisely what makes some people uneasy. They cannot see the shore, so to speak, and believe they are losing their way. But they would realize that what is lost through the expanse is gained again as a certain inner firmness and security, so that there is no need to be so afraid of what appears to be an expansion into the boundless.

Of course, it is much easier to make up some model or other — as was also mentioned today in a certain question — than to advance to such ideas. It is easier to say: the truth must be simple! — The reason why one says that the truth must be simple is not, in fact, that the truth really must be simple, because the human organism, for example, is incredibly complicated. Rather, the reason why it is said that the true must be simple is that the simple is convenient in thinking. That is the whole point. And it is necessary, above all, to advance to the fuller content if one really wants to understand reality bit by bit.

The question that was raised here still required that one should present three hours of theory. One cannot speak about the sun through “a brief answer to the question,” because one would be completely misunderstood. And I do not want that. — So, first of all, the answerable questions are answered provisionally.

Question: Does spiritual science find a transformation of the material earth with the entry of the Christ-Spirit into the earth? Is the effect of the power of Christ perhaps particularly expressed in one of the elements found in modern times?

What is the question? — Not true, one must only consider from which point of view such a question can be asked. The question is posed: Is the effect of the power of Christ expressed in the material earth? — You must only bear in mind that spiritual science, based on its research, has a very definite idea about the earth that does not coincide with what one imagines about the earth when one speaks of the “material earth” in the sense of the word “material” in today's language. So the question is actually without real content. If one speaks of something like an “influence of the power of Christ on the earth”, then, since this idea is in turn borrowed from spiritual science, one must also have the idea of the earth that applies to anthroposophy, to spiritual science. And how the power of Christ stands in a certain relationship to the whole metamorphosis of the earth can only be presented in the overall context that I have given in Occult Science. And there one also finds what is necessary to answer the question, if it is formulated correctly.

In response to requests from many course participants, a gentleman from Stuttgart will give a brief report on the lecture given the previous evening by the Pan-German General v. Gleich at a mass meeting in Stuttgart on “Rudolf Steiner as the prophet of a questionable teaching” (see Rudolf Steiner's reference to this at the end of the morning lecture, $. 139/140).

I would just like to add that the aforementioned General v. Gleich, quite a long time before, for weeks before, he proceeded to his lecture and to the writing of his pamphlet, wrote a letter to our friend Mr. Molt, as a concerned father, concerned about the misfortune that he, as the owner of a forty-year-old nobility, not only “handed over” his son to anthroposophy, but also to a completely un-noble lady who is an anthroposophist! As a concerned father, he wrote to our friend Molt, asking him to visit him. Mr. Molt did so, but said that he did not know what to do with him. This was clear to him from the fact that Mr. v. Gleich demanded that we “of the threefold social order movement” should henceforth pay the son of General v. Gleich, who was employed by us, so little that the young man would not be able to marry, and that we should at least protect General v. Gleich from this marriage of his son by paying him so little. After these events, it was understandable that one could not expect the best from General von Gleich's lecture. We then actually saw even the worst expectations exceeded! It was the case with this lecture that Gleich essentially presented the content of a brochure – somewhat more fully developed, we might say – that appeared in Ludwigsburg at the same time. It had already been arranged that this brochure should appear at the same time as the lecture. In this brochure, he makes various accusations against anthroposophy in the most uninformed way, without providing any evidence for what he says – anyone who reads this brochure can see that for themselves – by actually only using the opponents of anthroposophy. This is clear from the brochure's table of contents: a few references to literature where one can find out about anthroposophy. One would think that these would be the anthroposophical books, but no, there are about twenty opponents, with the most shameless one right at the front: Max Seiling! Von Gleich essentially brings nothing new to the table that cannot be found in Seiling's brochure, only in the way General von Gleich used to give his lecture. And it was the case that this lecture was announced “without discussion”. There were numerous followers of the anthroposophical movement in the audience. After he had finished the lecture, which was full of the harshest expressions and included some of the most crude slander, he simply left the hall without entering into any discussion. And when someone tried to get a word in edgewise, and when Mr. Molt, who was there and was also personally attacked several times in the lecture, shouted: “He hereby publicly declares – he shouted this into the hall, in which there was a raging was a raging crowd of Mr. v. Gleich's supporters, he did not consider it worth replying to anything. He had already left the hall. On the other hand, the supporters, who were equipped with whistles and other noisy instruments, tried to shout down the anthroposophists who wanted to object. And it was quite close to a brawl. It was very difficult to protest against the most serious defamations, since the whole meeting immediately took on a threatening character, and it was clear that it would come to a brawl.

There followed some reports about the previous lecture by v. Gleich in Ludwigsburg. Finally, a letter from General v. Gleich to his son was read out.

I would just like to say a few words. Can I have this letter again? I would just like to make a formal comment, a comment that does not concern the matter itself. So, in the letter from Mr. v. Gleich to his son, it says: “[...] If only God had willed that you, a decent Christian nobleman, had fallen for your fatherland, then I could at least mourn you with pride [...] I pray to God to take the blindness from you again, so that you may awaken from it again [...].” (space in the postscript).

As you can see, a lot has been said about Mr. von Gleich's own Christianity; I would like to emphasize this: his own Christianity, in comparison with the unreasonable demand that we have been made to pay our son so badly that he cannot marry. That seems to me a very Christian act! And I do not want to be distracted by these “little piquant matters”, which are also on this program, and talk about the seriousness of the situation. Because I know very well that what happened yesterday in Stuttgart is not an end, but a beginning, that behind it stands a strong organization. And it is precisely out of this feeling that I may thank such a personality as the one who has just spoken - out of a real inner feeling for what Anthroposophy at least wants to be. But I would like to point out the seriousness of the situation and the necessity to act in the spirit of this serious situation.

What I want to say must, of course, be distinguished from a certain understanding that one can also have of such Christians as General von Gleich, for example, who is a Christian! I do not want to make a comparison, not even a formal one, but I just want to say something that I had to remember with this kind of Christianity. There are, in fact, very different kinds of Christianity, even of Orthodox Christianity. When the criminal anthropologist Moritz Benedikt started working and writing in criminal anthropology, he initially found little understanding in Vienna. He then found extraordinary understanding in a director of a home for dangerous criminals in Hungary. He was given the opportunity to examine the skulls of criminals, including the skulls of the most dangerous Hungarian criminals. Among them were the strangest people, including a very devout Orthodox Christian, who, of course, could not behave towards Professor Benedikt in accordance with his Christian intentions. He was very angry with him because he was allowed to examine his skull. And he was especially angry about it because he had heard that the prison director had agreed that Professor Benedikt would get to study particularly characteristic criminal skulls after death. And since he was not released to the professor Benedikt in this institution, he wanted to be at least presented to this Benedikt in chains. During this presentation, he said that he could not admit that, given his Christian beliefs, he should allow his skull to be sent to the professor Benedikt in Vienna after his death; he would then be buried here, and his skull would lie around in Vienna! And he wanted to know how his body and his skull would be brought together at the resurrection. He believed so much in his bodily resurrection – he was a real criminal, I think even a murderer.

We have often studied the period of evolution following the Atlantean catastrophe and the epochs of post-Atlantean civilisation: the Old Indian, Old Persian, Egypto-Chaldean, Graeco-Roman, and now the fifth, in which we ourselves are living. There will be two more epochs, making seven in all, before there is another great catastrophe.

The accounts given have naturally been of different aspects of these culture-epochs, for an idea of the future can be formed only by knowing how we are related to each of them. I have often said that there is a correspondence between the individual human being as a ‘Microcosm’, a ‘little world’, and the ‘Macrocosm’, the ‘great world’. Man, the ‘little world’, is in every respect a replica, a copy, of the ‘great world’. This is literally true, but stated in this form it is a very abstract truth and does not lead us very far. It becomes significant only if we can go on and show in detail how the individual human being is to be conceived as a Microcosm compared with the Macrocosm.

The man of to-day belongs to all the seven post-Atlantean epochs for he has been, or will be, incarnated in each of them. In every incarnation we receive what that particular epoch can give us. Thus we bear within ourselves the fruits of past phases of evolution. Our intrinsic qualities and talents are those we have acquired during the several post-Atlantean epochs and they lie more or less within the range of human consciousness as it is to-day. On the other hand, during our Atlantean incarnations there were very different states of consciousness and what we then acquired has, generally speaking, been pressed down into the subconscious. It does not therefore reverberate within us as strongly as what was acquired in later incarnations during the post-Atlantean epoch. In the much earlier Atlantean epoch human consciousness was by no means as wideawake as it became later on and men were not then able to the same extent to injure their own development. Consequently the fruits of Atlantean evolution within us are more in harmony with the World-Order than has been the case since we have been able ourselves to create disorder in our own being. Ahrimanic and Luciferic influences were active during the Atlantean epoch too, but the effect of them upon man was altogether different. Nor was man then in a position to protect himself against them.

The ever-increasing development of human consciousness is the essential feature of post-Atlantean civilisation. The evolution of mankind in the period between the catastrophe which overwhelmed Atlantis and the one that will bring the post-Atlantean epoch to an end may be thought of as a macrocosmic process; humanity as a whole evolves as one great being through the seven post-Atlantean epochs. And the most important phases in the evolution of consciousness during these seven epochs resemble what the individual himself undergoes in the seven ‘ages’ or periods of his own life.

In my book Occult Science, and elsewhere, these different life-periods have often been described. The first period covers the seven years from birth to the change of teeth. During this period the physical body of the human being acquires its basic forms and with the coming of the second teeth these forms are to all intents and purposes established. Naturally, the child continues to grow; but speaking generally, the lines of the bodily structures have already been established. What is accomplished in the first seven years is the construction of the bodily form. We must be prepared to find these rhythms manifesting in us in a wide variety of ways. For instance, there is a difference between the first teeth, which appear during the earliest years of life and then fall out, to be replaced by the second teeth. The two sets of teeth are the result of essentially different conditions. The first teeth are the inherited product of the organisms of the child's forefathers. The second teeth are the product of the child's own physical constitution. This must be kept firmly in mind. Only by being attentive to such details can the distinction be fully understood. Our first teeth, together with our whole organism, are passed on to us by our forefathers; our second teeth are the product of our own physical organism. In the first case the teeth are a direct inheritance: in the second it is the physical organism that is inherited and this in its turn produces the second teeth.

The second life-period is from the time of the change of teeth to puberty, at about the fourteenth or fifteenth year. The important process now is the development of the etheric body. The third period, to about the twenty-first year, covers the development of the astral body. Then follows the development of the Ego, with the progressive development of the Sentient Soul, the Intellectual or Mind-Soul and the Spiritual Soul (Consciousness-Soul).

These are the different periods in man's life: but as you certainly know, the first period of seven years alone follows a completely regular pattern, and this is as it should be for man of the present age. The regularity apparent in the first three life-periods is not found in the later ones, nor can their length be defined with exactitude. If we ask why this is so, the answer is that in world-evolution which proceeds in rhythms of seven periods, the fourth plays a middle part. Thus in the post-Atlantean era we already have within us the fruits of the first four epochs; we are now living in the fifth and moving towards the sixth.

There is undoubtedly a certain correspondence between the evolution of the post-Atlantean epochs and that of the individual human being. Here again there is evidence of correspondence between the macrocosmic and the microcosmic.

Let us consider what was particularly characteristic of the first post-Atlantean epoch. We call it the Old Indian epoch because the character of post-Atlantean evolution in general was especially marked in the people of India. In this epoch there existed a sublime, all-embracing wisdom, with wide ramifications. In principle, the teachings given by the seven holy Rishis were identical with what was actually seen in the spiritual world by natural clairvoyants and also by very many of the people of that time. This ancient knowledge was present in the Old Indian epoch as a heritage from still earlier times. In the Atlantean epoch it had been experienced clairvoyantly, but it had now become more of an inherited, primal wisdom, preserved and made known by those who, like the Rishis, had risen through Initiation to the spiritual worlds. Basically, all the wisdom that penetrated into human consciousness was inherited and therefore essentially different from our modern knowledge.

It would be quite wrong to attempt to express the sublime truths proclaimed by the holy Rishis in the first post-Atlantean epoch in terms such as those used in modern scholarship; moreover it would hardly be possible to do so, because the forms assumed by scholarship as it is to-day appeared only in the course of post-Atlantean culture. The knowledge possessed by the ancient Rishis was of a very different character. Anyone capable of proclaiming it felt it working and seething within him, rising up spontaneously. To understand what knowledge was in those days we must realise above all that it did not in any way rely upon memory. Please keep this very specially in mind. Memory is the most important factor when knowledge is being transmitted to-day. A professor or a public speaker must take care that he knows beforehand what he is going to say from the rostrum, and then draw it out of his memory. True, there are people who deny that they do any such thing, insisting that they simply follow their own genius. But they don't affect the argument. The communication of knowledge to-day depends almost entirely upon memory.

Things were very different in the Old Indian epoch. It would be true to say that knowledge arose at the actual moment of speaking. In those early times knowledge was not prepared beforehand as it so often is to-day. The ancient Rishi did not prepare what he had to say and then memorise it. The preparation he made was to induce in himself a mood of piety, of reverence. It was his mood and his feelings that he prepared, not the content of what he was about to communicate. And then, while it was being communicated it was as if he were reading from an invisible script. It would have been unthinkable in those days for listeners to take down in writing what was being said; anything recorded in this way would have been considered quite worthless. Value was attached only to what a man preserved in his soul and might later reproduce for others. It would have been regarded as desecration to write anything down. The view rightly held at that time was that what is transcribed is not, and cannot be, the same as the oral communication.

This way of thinking persisted for a very long time. Such matters are retained in the feelings much longer than in the intellect and when, in the Middle Ages, the art of printing was added to that of writing, it was at first regarded as black magic. Old feelings were still astir in men and they felt that what is meant to pass directly from soul to soul should not be preserved in the grotesque form of letters and words printed on sheets of white paper. People were convinced that this transformed the knowledge to be communicated into something lifeless which might, moreover, subsequently be revived with anything but beneficial results. The direct streaming of knowledge from soul to soul was characteristic of the times we are considering. It was a prominent feature in the cultural life of the first post-Atlantean epoch and must be recognised if we are to understand, for instance, how it came about that Greek and even old Germanic rhapsodists could go from place to place reciting their very lengthy poems. This would never have been possible if they had been obliged to rely upon memory. It was a power and a quality of soul much more alive than memory that lay behind their recitations. Nowadays if we are to recite a poem we must have learnt it beforehand; but what those men were reciting was an actual experience in them, a kind of new creation. Moreover a direct expression of the life of soul was then more clearly in evidence than it is now, when—with some justification in view of prevailing conditions—it is apt to be suppressed. What is considered of main importance nowadays in recitation is the actual meaning of the words. It was not so, even in the Middle Ages, when a minstrel was reciting the Niebelungenlied, for instance. He still had a feeling for the inner rhythm and would stamp his feet to mark the rise and fall of the verse as he strode forward and back. But this was only an aftermath of what had been customary in more ancient times. You would have an erroneous idea of the Rishis and their pupils if you were to think that they had not faithfully communicated the old Atlantean knowledge. Even if the pupils in our schools were to fill their exercise books from cover to cover, they would not have reproduced what had been said as faithfully as the Indian Rishis reproduced the ancient wisdom.

The characteristic feature of the epochs which followed was that the flow of Atlantean knowledge came to a standstill. Until the decline of the Old Indian culture-epoch, knowledge received by men in the form of an inheritance continually increased. In essentials, however, the increase ceased with the close of this epoch: thereafter, hardly anything new could be produced from existing knowledge. An increase of knowledge was therefore possible only in the first epoch; thereafter it ceased. In the Old Persian epoch, among men influenced by Zoroastrianism, something began in connection with knowledge of the external world which can be compared with the second period in human life and is, in fact, best understood through such a comparison. In a spiritual respect the Old Indian culture-epoch is comparable with the first period in human life, from birth to the seventh year. During this period the basic forms are developed; whatever comes later is merely expansion within these established forms. What followed in the Old Persian epoch can similarly be compared with a kind of school-learning, the kind of learning connected with the second life-period. Only we must be clear who were the pupils and who were the teachers. At this point there is something I want to interpolate.

You must have been struck by the difference between the figure of Zarathustra, the Leader of the second post-Atlantean epoch, and the Indian Rishis. Whereas the Rishis seem to be consecrated individuals stemming from a primordial past, to be vessels into whom old Atlantean wisdom has poured, Zarathustra appears as the first historical personality to be initiated into a genuinely post-Atlantean Mystery-knowledge, that is to say, knowledge presented in such a way that it could be understood only by the intelligence of post-Atlantean humanity. Something new has therefore made its appearance. True, during the early period it was preeminently supersensible knowledge that was acquired in the Zoroastrian schools. Nevertheless it was there that knowledge began for the first time to take the form of concepts. The ancient knowledge possessed by the Rishis cannot be reproduced in the forms of modern scholarship but to some extent this is possible with the Zoroastrian knowledge. This is knowledge of an altogether supersensible character and concerned entirely with the supersensible world but it is clothed in concepts comparable with those current during the post-Atlantean epoch in general. Among the followers of Zarathustra a systematic development of concepts took place. To sum up: The treasure-store of ancient wisdom which had evolved until the end of the Old Indian epoch and continued from generation to generation, was accepted. Nothing new was added but the old was elaborated. A comparison, for example, with the production nowadays of a book on occultism will help us to picture the task of the Mysteries of the second post-Atlantean epoch. The contents of any book resulting from genuine investigations into the higher worlds could of course be presented as an entirely logical exposition in the physical world. This might be done. But in that case my book Occult Science, for example, would have to consist of fifty volumes at least, each of them as bulky as the present one. There is, however, another way of doing things, namely to leave something to the reader, to induce the reader to think things out for himself. That is what must be attempted nowadays, for otherwise no progress in occultism could be made. To-day, in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, with the intellectual concepts developed by humanity, it is possible to approach and also to assimilate occult knowledge. But in Zarathustra's time the concepts in which to clothe occult facts had first to be discovered and gradually elaborated. There were then no branches of knowledge such as exist to-day. Something capable of being clothed in human concepts had survived from the time of the ancient Rishis, but the concepts as such had to be formulated before the supersensible facts could be clothed in them. It was then, for the first time, that man-made concepts were used to grasp supersensible realities. The Rishis had spoken in the only way in which, in their day, supersensible knowledge could be communicated. They poured their knowledge from soul to soul in an unceasing flow of pictures. They were unconcerned with cause and effect, with concepts and categories such as are familiar to us to-day. This was a much later development. In the field of supersensible knowledge a beginning was made in the second post-Atlantean epoch. It was then that man first became aware of the opposition offered by material existence and therewith the need to express supersensible facts in forms of thought employed on the physical plane. This was the basic task of the second post-Atlantean epoch.

By the third epoch, that of Egypto-Chaldean culture, concepts of supersensible realities were actually in existence. This again is difficult for the modern mind to grasp. There was no physical science but there were concepts of supersensible facts and happenings which had been acquired in a supersensible way, and these concepts could be expressed in forms of thought applicable to the physical plane. In the third post-Atlantean epoch men began to apply to the physical world itself what they had learnt from the supersensible world. This again can be compared with the third period in the life of a human being. In the second period he learns without proceeding to apply what he has learnt. In the third life-period most human beings have to apply their knowledge to the physical plane. The pupils of Zarathustra in the second culture-epoch were pupils of heavenly knowledge; now men began to apply to the physical plane what they had learnt. It may help us to picture this if we say that through their visions men learnt that the supersensible can be expressed by a triangle—a triangle taken as an image of the supersensible; that the supersensible nature of man, permeating the physical, can be conceived as threefold. Other concepts too were mastered, enabling physical things to be related to supersensible facts. Geometry, for instance, was first mastered in the form of symbolic concepts. In short, concepts were now available and were applied by the Egyptians to the art of land-surveying, also to agriculture, and by the Chaldeans in their study of the stars and in the founding of Astrology and Astronomy. What had previously been regarded as purely supersensible was now applied to things physically seen. In the third culture-epoch, then, men began for the first time to apply supersensible knowledge to the phenomena of the world of sense.

In the fourth epoch, the Graeco-Latin, it was especially important that men should come to see that what they were doing was to apply to the physical plane knowledge derived from supersensible sources. Hitherto they had acted without questioning whether this was actually the case. The ancient Rishis had no need for such questioning because the knowledge streamed into them directly from the spiritual world. In the epoch of Zarathustra men assimilated the supersensible knowledge and were fully aware how it originated. In the Egypto-Chaldean epoch men invested the concepts derived from the supersensible world with knowledge they had acquired in the physical world. And in the fourth epoch (the Graeco-Latin) they began to ask whether it is right to apply to the physical world what has come from the spiritual world. Is what has been spiritually acquired in fact applicable to physical things?—Men could not put this to themselves as a definite question until the fourth culture-epoch, after they had for some time been applying supersensible knowledge in all naivety to physical experiences and observations. Now they became conscientious in regard to their own doings and began to ask whether it is justifiable to apply supersensible concepts to physical facts.

Now when any epoch has an important task to perform, it always happens that some individual is particularly alive to its nature and responsible for fulfilling it. In this case, such an individual would have been struck by the thought as to whether one has the right to apply supersensible concepts to physical facts. Can anyone really predict how things will develop? It is obvious that Plato, for example, had a living connection with the ancient world and still applied concepts in their old form to the physical world. It was his pupil Aristotle who asked whether it is right to do this.—And so Aristotle became the founder of Logic.

People who reject Spiritual Science should just ask themselves why man had managed to get on without any system of Logic. Had they never before the fourth epoch felt any need for it?—To a clear-sighted view of evolution, important periods occur at definite points of time. One such period lies between Plato and Aristotle. Here we have before us a situation that is related in a certain way to the connection with the spiritual world existing in the Atlantean epoch. True, the living spiritual knowledge died out with the Old Indian culture-epoch, but something new had nevertheless been brought down to the physical plane. Now, in this later age, man had begun to develop a critical faculty, and to ask how ideas about supersensible reality may be applied to physical things. This is a sign that man only now became conscious that he himself achieves something when he is observing the external world, that he is actually bringing something down into the sense-world. This was a significant state of things.

We can still feel that concepts and ideas are in essence supersensible when we regard their very character as being a guarantee for the existence of the supersensible world. But only few feel this. What concepts and ideas contain is for most people extremely tenuous. And although there is something in them which can provide complete proof of man's immortality, it would be impossible to convince him, because compared with the solid, material reality for which he longs, concepts and ideas are as unsubstantial as a cobweb. They are, in fact, the last and slenderest thread spun by man out of the spiritual world since his descent into the physical world. And at the very time when he had left the spiritual world altogether and remained linked to it by this last, slender thread only—a thread in which he no longer had any faith—there came the mightiest incision from the supersensible world: the Christ Impulse. The greatest of all spiritual realities appeared in our post-Atlantean epoch at a time when man was least able to recognise the supersensible, because the only spiritual quality remaining to him was his feeling for concepts and ideas.

For anyone studying the evolution of humanity as a whole it would be interesting in a strictly scientific sense—apart from the tornado-like effect it may have on the soul—to set side by side the infinite spirituality of the Christ Being who entered into humanity and the fact that shortly before His coming man had been wondering how far the last thread of spirituality within him was connected with the supersensible world—in other words, to contrast the Christ Principle with Aristotelian Logic, that web of wholly abstract concepts and ideas. No greater disparity can be imagined than that between the spirituality which came down to the physical plane in the Being of Christ and the spirituality which man had preserved for himself. You will therefore understand that with the web of concepts available in Aristotelianism it was simply not possible in the first centuries of Christendom to comprehend the spiritual nature of Christ. And then, gradually, efforts were made to grasp the facts of world-history and the evolution of humanity in such a way that Aristotelian Logic could be applied. This was the task facing medieval philosophy.

It is significant that the fourth post-Atlantean epoch may be compared with the period of Ego-development in man's life. It was in this epoch that the ‘I’ of humanity itself streamed into evolution, at the time when man was further removed from the spiritual world than he had ever been and was therefore at first quite incapable of accepting Christ except through faith. Christianity was bound at first to be a matter of faith and is only now beginning, very gradually, to be a matter of knowledge. We have only just begun to bring the light of spiritual knowledge to bear upon the Gospels. For hundreds upon hundreds of years Christianity could only be a matter of faith, because man had reached the lowest point of his descent from the spiritual worlds.

This was the situation in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. But after the lowest point the re-ascent must begin. Although in a certain respect this epoch brought man to the lowest point of descent, it also gave him the strongest spiritual impulse upwards. Naturally, this was beyond his comprehension then and will be understood only in the epochs still to come. We can, however, recognise the task before us: it is to permeate our concepts and ideas with spirituality.

World-evolution is not a simple, straightforward process. When a ball begins to roll in a certain direction, inertia will keep it rolling unless its course is changed by some other impact. Similarly, pre-Christian culture tended to preserve and maintain the downward plunge into the physical world until our own time. The upward urge is only just beginning and periodically needs a new impetus.

The downward tendency is particularly evident in the way men think, even in a great deal of what is called Philosophy to-day. Aristotle still recognised that spiritual reality is within the grasp of human concepts. But a few centuries after him men were no longer able to understand how the activity of the human mind can make contact with reality. The most arid, most barren element in the development of the old mode of thinking is represented by Kantianism and everything related to it. For Kant's philosophy severs all connection between the concepts a man evolves, between ideas as inner experiences, and what concepts and ideas are in reality. Kantianism is in the process of withering away and has no living impulse to give to the future. It will now no longer surprise you that the conclusion of my lectures on Psychosophy had a theosophical background. I have made it clear that in all our activities, and especially in connection with knowledge of the soul, our task is to take the knowledge bestowed by the gods on men in earlier days and brought down as a stimulus to our thought, and offer it up again at the altars of the gods. But the ideas and concepts we make our own must have their origin in spirituality.

Psychology as a science must be cultivated in such a way that it can emerge from the decadence into which it has fallen. This is not said out of arrogance but because it is what the times demand. There have been and there still are many psychologists: but they all work with concepts totally devoid of spirituality. It is significant that in 1874 a man like Franz Brentano published only the first volume of his Psychology, which in spite of certain distortions, is generally sound. He had announced the second volume for publication in the same year; but he came to a standstill and could not finish it. He was able to give an outline of what the content was to have been but to get beyond that a spiritual impulse would have been needed.

Modern psychologies, for example those written by Wundt and Lipps, do not really deserve the name because they work only with ideas previously evolved and it was obvious from the outset that nothing would come of them. Brentano's Psychology might have led to something but he came to a standstill—which is the fate of all dying sciences. It will not happen so quickly in the case of the natural sciences, where cut-and-dried concepts can be applied because facts are being collected and may be allowed to speak for themselves. With Psychology—the science of the soul—this is much less practicable, for the whole foundation disappears if any attempt is made to work with the ordinary, rigid concepts. You don't immediately lose touch with a heart-muscle even if you analyse it as if it were a mineral product and have no knowledge of its real nature. But you cannot analyse the soul in the same way.

The sciences are as it were dying from above downwards. And it will gradually dawn on men that while they are certainly able to turn the laws of nature to account, this is something quite independent of science itself. To construct machines and instruments, telephones and the like, is a very different matter from a basic understanding of the sciences, let alone the ability to further their progress. A man may have no fundamental understanding of electricity and yet be able to construct electrical apparatus. Science in the real sense is, however, gradually declining and we have now reached a point where in its present form it must be given new life through spiritual science. In our fifth culture-epoch science is rolling downwards by its own momentum: when the ball can roll no further it will come to a standstill, as Brentano did. At this time, therefore, it is imperative that the ascent of humanity should be given a stronger and stronger stimulus. This will indeed take place, but only if efforts continue to be made to fertilise knowledge acquired from outside with what spiritual investigation has to offer.

As I have said before, a kind of repetition of the old Egypto-Chaldean epoch will become apparent during our own fifth epoch. This repetition is at present only just beginning. Indications of this might have become clear to you during this General Meeting. Think, for instance, of Herr Seiler's lecture on Astrology. You will have felt that as students of Spiritual Science you are able to apply to astrological concepts ideas which would be quite impossible for a conventional astronomer, who will inevitably treat anything connected with Astrology as nonsense. This has nothing to do with the intrinsic character of Astronomy. As a matter of fact, Astronomy is the science par excellence which lends itself readily to being led back again to spirituality; from what Astronomy has at present to offer it would be easy to pass to the basic truths of Astrology which is so often derided. What stands in the way is that the general attitude of mind is so far removed from any return to spirituality. It will take time to build the bridge between Astronomy and Astrology and meanwhile all sorts of theories will be devised in an attempt to give a purely materialistic explanation of the planetary movements, and so on. In the case of the chemical and biological sciences the bridge will be even more difficult to build.

The building of a bridge can be easiest of all in the domain of Psychology—the science of the soul. The first requisite will be to understand the conclusion of my lectures on ‘Psychosophy’ where I showed that the stream of soul-life flows not only from the past into the future but also from the future into the past. There are two streams of time: the etheric stream, flowing into the future, and the astral stream, moving from the future back into the past. It is unlikely that anyone in the world today will discover anything of this character without a spiritual impulse, but there can be no real grasp of the life of soul until we recognise that something is perpetually coming towards us from the future. This concept is essential. We shall have to rid ourselves of the mode of thought which looks only to the past when cause and effect are being considered. We shall have to learn to speak of the future as something real, something moving towards us, just as we trail the past behind us. It will be a long time before such concepts are accepted; but until they are there will be no real Psychology.

The nineteenth century produced a really bright idea: Psychology without Soul! People were very proud of it. Roughly, what it meant was that psychological study should be confined to the external manifestations of the human soul and should take no account of the soul itself from which they originated. A science of the soul without soul! As a method this might be possible; but the outcome, to use a rough analogy, is a meal without food. That is modern Psychology. People are anything but satisfied if you give them a meal with nothing on their plates, but nineteenth century science was wonderfully content with a Psychology without soul. Such a trend began at a comparatively early stage and spiritual life must flow as a strong impulse into this whole domain.

The old life has come to an end and a new life must begin. We must feel that there was given to us from the ancient Atlantean epoch a primeval wisdom which has gradually withered away and that in our present incarnation we are faced with the task of gathering a new wisdom for the men of a later time. To make this possible was the purpose of the Christ Impulse, and the activity and power of that Impulse will continually increase. It may be that the Christ Impulse will work most strongly when all tradition—in history too—has died away and men find their way to Christ Himself as the true reality.

You can see, then, that the course of post-Atlantean evolution and the life of an individual human being are comparable as Macrocosm with Microcosm. But the individual is in a strange situation. What is there left to him in the second part of his life but to absorb and assimilate what he acquired for himself in the first half? And when that is all used up, death follows. The spirit alone can be victorious over death and carry forward into a new incarnation what begins to decay after the half-way point of life has been passed. Development is on the ascent until the thirty-fifth year. After that there is decline. But it is precisely then that the spirit takes a hand. What it cannot incorporate into the bodily nature of man during the second half of life it brings to blossom in a later incarnation. As the body withers the spirit gradually comes to fruition.

The macrocosm of humanity as a whole reveals a similar picture. Until the fourth post-Atlantean epoch there is a youthful, thriving development of culture. From then onwards there is a decline—symptoms of death everywhere in the evolution of human consciousness, but at the same time the inflow of new spiritual life which will incarnate again as the spiritual life of humanity in the culture-epoch following our own. But man must work with full consciousness on what is subsequently to incarnate again. The rest will die away. We can look prophetically into the future and see the birth of many sciences seeming to benefit post-Atlantean civilisation although they belong to what is dying. But the life that is poured into humanity under the direct influence of the Christ Impulse will come to manifestation in the future just as the Atlantean knowledge came again to manifestation in the holy Rishis.

Ordinary science knows of the Copernican system only that part which is in process of dying. The part that will live on and bear fruit—and that is not the part that has been influential for four centuries—must now be mastered by men through their own efforts. Copernicanism as presented to-day is not strictly true. Spiritual investigation alone can reveal its real truth. The same holds good for Astronomy, and for everything else that is regarded as knowledge to-day. Science can of course be of practical use and as technology completely justified. But in so far as it pretends to contribute to human knowledge in its real form, it is a dead product. It is useful for the immediate handiwork of men and for that no spiritual content is necessary. But as far as it purports to have anything vital to say about the mysteries of the Universe it belongs to the culture that is dying. If knowledge of the mysteries of the Universe is to be enriched, the orthodox science of to-day must be imbued with life through the findings of Spiritual Science.

The foregoing lectures were intended as an introduction to the study of St. Mark's Gospel which we shall now begin. I had first to show how essential this greatest of all spiritual impulses was for human evolution just at the time when only the last, most tenuous threads of spirituality remained to mankind.

Those of you who have been attending my lecture cycles or single lectures on spiritual-scientific subjects have had various phenomena of the higher worlds presented from many different aspects, and various beings as well have appeared to us from one realm or another and were shown in different lights. In order to anticipate any possible misconceptions that might arise I should like to point out today that when these beings and phenomena are illuminated, now from one angle, now from another, a superficial view might see contradictions. But if you look more closely you will see that these complicated facts of the spiritual world can be clarified only by throwing light on them from many sides. It is necessary to say this because certain facts with which most of you are already familiar from one aspect must in part be illuminated today from another, a new angle. We need only turn to that most profound document of the New Testament, familiar as the Gospel according to St. John, and read the pregnant words with which we brought yesterday's discussion to a close, in order to sense the literally endless enigmas of cosmic and human evolution hidden in the opening words of this Gospel. In the course of our observations the opportunity may present itself to show why the great narrators of spiritual events often expressed precisely the mighty, comprehensive truths in such a concise, paradigmatical form as we find in the opening verses of the John Gospel. Today we will return to certain well-known facts of spiritual science, treating them from an aspect differing from yesterday's, and see in what form we meet them again in the Gospel of St. John. Let us take our point of departure from the most elementary facts of spiritual science, comparatively speaking.

As we know, man in his ordinary state consists of four principles: physical body, etheric or life body, astral body, and ego, and we know that his daily life alternates in such a way that during his waking hours these four members of his being are organically interconnected and interpenetrative in him, whereas during sleep, while the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed, the astral body and the ego bearer—we may call it simply the ego—are removed. Now, there is one point we must thoroughly understand today. In a man of our present stage of evolution we have before us this fourfold state as an inherent demand. As he lies in bed at night with only his physical and etheric bodies present he has, in a sense, the status of a plant; for the plant, as it appears in the outer world, consists only of physical body and etheric or life body; it bears no astral body or ego, and is thus differentiated from the animal and from man. The animal is the first in the scale to have an astral body, and man, an ego. Hence it can be said that during sleep, when his physical and etheric bodies alone remain in bed, man is in a sense a plantlike being. But again, he is not like a plant, and this must be rightly understood. In the present age a free and independent being having neither astral body nor ego, but consisting solely of etheric body and physical body, must have the appearance of a plant—must, in fact, be a plant. On the other hand man, as he lies asleep in bed, has grown beyond the status of a plant, because during the course of evolution he has added an astral body—vehicle of joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, impulses, desires, and passions—and also the vehicle of the ego. But the acquisition of a higher principle always involves a corresponding alteration in all that pertains to the lower principles. If an astral body were added to the plant we see today as a being of outer nature, if this astral body were not only to hover over the plant but to permeate it, then what we see penetrating the plant in its substance would have to become animal flesh. That is because upon entering, the astral body would transform the plant in such a way as to convert the substance into animal flesh. And the addition of an ego in the physical world would entail an analogous transformation.

We may therefore say that in a being like man, whose nature embraces not only a physical body but invisible, higher, super-sensible principles as well, the super-sensible members find expression in the lowest ones. Just as the inner qualities of your soul are superficially expressed in your features, in your physiognomy, so your physical body is an expression of the work performed by your astral body and ego; and the physical body does not represent merely itself: it stands as the physical expression of the human principles that are physically invisible. Thus the glandular system and all that pertains to it is an expression of the etheric body, everything connected with the nervous system is an expression of the astral body, and all that is comprised in the circulation is an expression of the ego bearer. So in the physical body itself we again have to take into account a fourfold organization; and only one who worships a crass materialistic world conception could classify the various substances in the human body as equivalent. The blood pulsating in our veins became the substance it is as a result of the fact that an ego dwells in us; the form and substance of the nervous system are due to the presence of an astral body; and the glandular system is the outcome of the etheric body.

If you will take all this into consideration you will readily see that between falling asleep at night and waking up in the morning the human being is really a contradiction in terms. One is inclined to call him a plant, yet he is not a plant because the physical substance of a plant lacks the expression of the astral body—the nervous system—as well as the expression of the ego—the circulatory system. A physical being such as man, equipped with a glandular, a nervous, and a circulatory system, can exist only by means of an etheric body, an astral body, and an ego; but in the night you forsake your physical and etheric bodies—that is, in as far as your astral body and ego constitute you a human being. You basely abandon them, as it were, making them into a self-contradictory being. Were nothing of a spiritual nature to intervene at this time, while you simply withdraw your astral body and ego from your physical and etheric bodies, you would find your nervous and circulatory systems destroyed when you woke up in the morning; for these cannot exist without your having an astral body and an ego within you. Therefore the following takes place, perceptible to clairvoyant consciousness:

In proportion to the withdrawal of the ego and astral body the clairvoyant sees a divine ego and a divine astral body enter into man. Actually there is during sleep, too, an astral body and an ego—or at least a substitute for these—in the physical and etheric bodies. When man's astral principle passes out, a higher one moves in—as does similarly a substitute for the ego. From this it is evident that within the realm of our lives, within their sphere, beings are at work that have no immediate expression in the physical world. What comes to expression in the physical world are minerals, plants, animals, and human beings. The last are for the moment the highest of the beings within our physical sphere, for they alone have physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego. The fact that in sleep the astral body and ego withdraw from the physical and etheric bodies shows us that even today the former retain a certain independence; that they detach themselves, so to speak, and can live for a certain length of time every day thus sundered from the physical and etheric vehicles.
At night, then, we have the following condition: Just as the human physical body and the human etheric body are by day the bearers of the human ego and the human astral body—in other words, of the innermost principles—so by night they become the bearers, or the temple, of higher astral and ego beings. Now we look with different eyes at the sleeper, for the astral principle within him is a divine-spiritual principle, and there is also an ego, but a divine-spiritual ego. In a sense it can be said that while we are asleep in respect of our astral body and ego, we are watched over and the structure of our organization is maintained by these beings that thus become a part of our life, beings that enter our physical and etheric bodies when we ourselves abandon these. A great deal can be learned from a fact of this sort; and especially if taken in conjunction with certain clairvoyant observations it can elucidate much concerning the evolution of man. What we shall now do is to correlate this difference between waking and sleeping with the great spiritual facts of evolution.

The astral body and the ego appear, to be sure, as the highest and most intimate principles of man's nature, but by no means do they prove to be the most perfect. Even to superficial observation the physical body is more perfect than the astral body. Two years ago I pointed out here¹ that the more closely we examine man's physical body, the more admirable it appears in its entire structure. Not only does the marvel of the human heart or the human brain when examined anatomically satisfy the mind's acute, intellectual thirst for knowledge, but whoever approaches these with his soul feels an aesthetic and moral uplift when he realizes how sublime and wise are the provisions made in this physical body. The astral body is as yet less advanced. It is the bearer of joy and sorrow, of impulses, desires, indulgence, and so forth; and we must admit that in order to satisfy his desires man turns to all sorts of things hardly calculated to further the wise and ingenious workings of the heart or the brain. His craving for enjoyment leads him to seek satisfaction in things like coffee, that are poison for the heart, thereby proving the astral body's craving for pleasures that harm the wisely contrived human heart; yet for decades the heart withstands such poisons consumed by man as a result of his astral body's craving for enjoyment.

This proves that the physical body is more nearly perfect than the astral body. At some time in the future the astral body will be incomparably the more perfect of the two, but at present the development of the physical body is the most advanced. That is because it is actually the oldest principle of man's nature. The physical body itself furnishes the evidence that it was worked upon long before our earth came into being.

The modern doctrine of the origin of the world grew out of purely materialistic conceptions, and what it teaches is nothing but a materialistic fantasy; nor does it matter whether it is called the Kant-Laplace theory or, in the case of a later one, something else. For comprehending the outer structure of our world system these materialistic flights are undoubtedly useful, but they are of no avail in helping us understand anything higher than what the outer eye sees. Spiritual research shows that just as the human being passes from incarnation to incarnation, so a cosmic body like our earth has experienced other formations, other planetary conditions, in the remote past. Before our earth came into being it was in a different planetary state, the spiritual state science calls the “old Moon”.² This does not refer to our present moon but to an ancestor of our earth as a planetary being; and just as the human being has developed from an earlier form of embodiment into what he is today, so our earth has developed from old Moon to Earth: the old Moon is a sort of previous incarnation of the Earth. Going still farther back: a previous incorporation of the old Moon was the Sun—again not the present sun but an ancestor of our present earth; and finally, the precursor of this old Sun was the old Saturn. Those are the states our Earth passed through: a Saturn state, a Sun state, and a Moon state, and now it has reached its earth state.

The first germ of our physical body appeared on the old Saturn. In other words, while nothing of all that surrounds us today existed on that primeval cosmic body we designate the old Saturn (not the present planet)—nothing of our animal or plant life, or even of our mineral kingdom—yet there were the first rudiments of the present-day human physical body. This physical human body was constituted very differently from what it is today: it was present in its earliest germinal state, then developed during the Saturn evolution; and when the latter was completed the old Saturn passed through a sort of cosmic night in the same manner in which man passes through a devachan in order to reach his next incarnation. Then Saturn became the Sun; and as the plant arises out of the seed, so the human physical body reappeared on the old Sun. Gradually this physical body became permeated by an etheric or life body, so that on the old Sun the germinal physical body was joined by the etheric or life body. Man was then not a plant, but he had the status of a plant. He consisted of physical body and etheric body, and his consciousness resembled that of sleep, the consciousness of the carpet of plants that is spread out around us in the physical world today.

The Sun existence came to an end, and again there intervened a cosmic night, or world devachan, as we can call it. When the Sun had passed through this cosmic devachan it was transformed into the old Moon state. Again we find the human physical and etheric bodies that had entered on Saturn and the Sun respectively, but during the Moon evolution the astral body was added. Now the human being possessed a physical, an etheric, and an astral body. Thus you see that the physical body, having come into being on Saturn, was already passing through its third state on the Moon; and the etheric body that had been added on the Sun now rose to its second stage of perfection. The astral body, just engendered, was in its first stage in the Moon period.

Something now happened on the Moon that would not have been possible during the Saturn and Sun stages. While the latter had kept man a comparatively homogeneous being, the following event occurred when the old Moon was at a certain stage of development: The whole heavenly body split into two members, a sun and its satellite, the Moon; so that while in the case of Saturn and the Sun we have the evolution of a single planet, only the first part of the Lunar evolution can be thus characterized. That is because in the beginning everything that constitutes our present earth, sun, and moon was united in one primordial cosmic body in a single state, and then two bodies came into being. The sun that had its genesis at that time was not our sun, nor was it the old Sun, mentioned above: it was a special state that detached itself from the old Moon as a sun state; and along with it there came into being a planet, outside of the sun and circling it, which in turn we call the old Moon minus the sun; that is, the Moon.

Now, what is the significance of this division that took place in our earth's predecessor during the evolution of the old Moon? It lies in the fact that along with the sun the higher beings and the finer substances withdrew from the whole stellar mass as sun, while the coarser substances and the lower beings remained with the Moon. So during the evolution of the old Moon we have two heavenly bodies instead of one: a sun body, harboring the higher beings, and a Moon body, the dwelling place of the lower beings. Had the whole remained united, with no separation occurring, certain beings who developed on the sundered Moon could not have kept pace with the sun beings: they were not sufficiently mature, and therefore had to segregate, cast out, the coarser substances and build for themselves a sphere of action apart. Nor could the higher beings have remained united with these coarser substances, for it would have obstructed their more rapid progress. They, too, required a special field for their development, and that was the Sun.

Now let us turn to the beings dwelling on the old Sun and those on the old Moon, after the separation. We have learned that the potential human physical body had its inception during the Saturn state, that on the Sun the etheric body was added, and on the Moon, the astral body. Now, these human beings—or primeval men, if we may so call them—on the Moon had, in fact, remained with the Moon when it split off; and these were the ones who could not keep pace with the rapid development of the sun beings—those who had gone with the sun and now dwelt within the finer substances and matter on the sun. This also accounts for their becoming coarser during the Moon evolution. During this period, then, we have man in a state consisting of physical body, etheric body, and astral body; in other words, he had attained to the evolutionary stage of a present-day animal, for an animal has the physical, etheric, and astral bodies. But you must not imagine man on the old Moon as having been really an animal: his form was very different in appearance from anything in the present animal world, and it would strike you as utterly fantastic if I were to describe it.

Summing up, then: On the old Moon we find what may be called the ancestors of present-day man, equipped with physical, etheric, and astral bodies, in whom these principles tended to become rigid after the division—to become coarser than they would have become had they remained with the sun. But all that had split off with the sun had also passed through this threefold development, the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions. This, however, proceeded in the direction taken by the sun, whereas the ancestors of men followed the Moon. These beings that went with the sun show a threefold organism closely paralleling that of man. On the sun, too, were beings who had acquired three principles, so to speak; but these had become finer instead of coarser after the separation. Think of the process as follows: After the split the human forebears became denser beings than they were before, they tended to solidify; while corresponding beings on the sun became more rarefied. Through having acquired an astral body during the Moon evolution, man in a sense descended to the level of an animal; but the beings that did not take part in this development—those that carried the finer substances with them to the sun—became finer.

So while man was hardening on the Moon, being of lofty spirituality arose on the sun. In spiritual science this spirituality is designated the counterpart of what evolved on the Moon. On the Moon men developed up to the rank of the animal, so to speak, although they were not animals. Now, in dealing with the animal kingdom people have always quite justifiably distinguished between different grades of animals, and the animal men on the Moon appeared in three grades differing essentially from one another. In spiritual science these are termed the grades of the “Bull”, the “Lion”, and the “Eagle”. Those are typical configurations, as it were, of the animal world. The old Moon was inhabited by the three groups: Bull men, Lion men, and Eagle men.—Although these connotations apply in no way to our present bulls, lions, and eagles, the deteriorated character of those primordial Moon men which we call Lion-men is nevertheless expressed, to a certain extent, in the feline species; in the character of the hoofed animals there comes to expression the degenerated nature of the so-called Bull men, and so forth.—That describes the densified nature of man after a three-stage development.

But on the sun dwelt the spiritual counterparts of these, also consisting of three groups. While the development of the astral principle on the Moon was shaping these three different animal men, the corresponding spiritual men arose on the sun as Angelical beings, spirit beings. These, too, are known as Lion, Eagle, and Bull, but as the spiritual counterparts of the others. So when you contemplate the sun you see spiritual beings whom you envision as the beautiful prototypes conceived in wisdom, while on the Moon you find something like hardened replicas of what dwells on the sun.

But something in the nature of a mystery underlies all this. These images down on the Moon are not without connection with their spiritual counterparts on the sun. On the Moon we have a group of primordial men, the Bull men, and on the sun a group of spirit beings connoted “Bull spirits”; and there is a spiritual connection between prototype and image. That is because the group soul is the prototype and acts as such upon the images. The forces proceed from the group soul and direct the image down below: the Lion spirit directs the beings who, as Lion men, are its image; the Eagle spirit guides the Eagle men, and so on. If these spirits up above had remained united with the Moon, bound to their replicas and inhabiting them, their activity would have been paralyzed; they could not have exercised the forces needed for the salvation and development of the images. They understood that they had to foster on a higher level what was destined to evolve on the Moon. The Bull spirit felt, I must care for the Bull men; but on the Moon I cannot find the conditions for my own progress, hence I must dwell on the sun and from there send down my forces to the Bull men.—And the same applies to the Lion spirit, and the Eagle spirit.

That is the way evolution proceeded. Certain beings needed a sphere of action above those that were their physical images, so to speak. The latter required a lower, lesser field. In order to function effectually the spiritual beings had to sunder the sun from the Moon and then send down their forces from without. Thus we see on the one hand a development downward, so to say, and on the other, an upward trend.

The evolution of the old Moon (as a cosmic period) proceeds. By acting upon their images from without, the spiritual beings spiritualize the Moon, with the result that the latter can in time reunite with the sun. The prototypes take their images back into themselves, absorb them, as it were. Another world devachan comes about, a cosmic night. (This is also known as a pralaya, whereas stages like Saturn, Sun, and Moon are called manvantaras.) Following this cosmic night there issues out of the obscurity of the cosmic womb our Earth stage, whose mission it is to advance man to the stage at which he can add the ego, or ego bearer, to his physical, etheric, and astral bodies. In the meantime, however, all previous evolution must be repeated; for whenever a higher stage is to be reached a cosmic law demands the repetition of all that had already taken place. The Earth had thus to pass once more through the old Saturn stage: again the first potential beginnings of the physical body evolved as out of the cosmic germ; and then followed a repetition of the Sun and Moon stages.

At this time sun, earth, and moon still formed a single body; but now a repetition of previous events takes place: the sun again splits off, and again those loftier beings that need this higher sphere for their development depart with the sun, carrying with them the finer substances they need for creating their cosmic sphere of action. Thus the sun left the Earth, which at that time still bore the moon within its body, and took with it those beings who were sufficiently advanced to find their further development on the sun. You will readily imagine that among these beings were to be found primarily those that had previously functioned as prototypes. All these beings, who during the old Moon period had attained to adequate maturity, progressed rapidly, with the result that they could no longer live in the denser substances and among the earth-plus-moon beings: they had to detach themselves and establish a new existence on the sun—our present sun.

Who were these beings? They were the descendants of those who, back in the old Moon state, had developed on the sun as the Bull, Lion, and Eagle spirits; and the loftiest of these, the most advanced, were those who had merged within themselves the natures of Eagle, Lion, and Bull in a harmonious unity. They are the beings that can be connoted human prototypes—spirit men in the true sense of the term. Keep in mind that among the spiritual beings, who during the old Moon period were to be found on the sun as Bull, Eagle, and Lion spirits, some had attained to a higher plane of development, and these are the Spirit Men proper whose dwelling place is now principally the sun. They are spiritual counterparts, so to speak, of what is in the process of evolution down below on the severed earth-plus-moon; but those that are developing down there are the descendants of the beings that had lived on the old Moon. Now, you can imagine that since a certain condensation, a solidification of these beings had already set in on the old Moon, a tendency to condense, to solidify, to dry out would be all the more pronounced in their descendants. Indeed, a sad and dreary period commenced for this sundered portion which then comprised earth-plusmoon. Above, on the sun, an ever fresher and livelier development, ever fuller life; below, on the Earth, misery and barrenness, steadily increasing rigidity.

Something now occurred without which evolution would have been brought to a standstill: the moon as we know it today separated from the earth-plus-moon body, and what remained is our present earth. In this way the coarsest substances withdrew before rendering the earth completely hard, and the latter was saved from total desolation.

To summarize all this: At the beginning of our Earth evolution the Earth formed one body with our present sun and moon. Had the Earth (earth plus moon) remained with the sun, man would never have been able to reach his present stage of development: he could not have kept pace with a development such as the beings on the sun needed. What developed up there was not man as he is on earth, but his spiritual prototype of which, as he appears in his physical body, he is really but an image. And on the other hand, had the moon remained within the earth, man would have gradually dried out and mummified, and have found no possibility of further development on Earth. The Earth would have become a barren, arid cosmic body; and in place of human bodies as we know them today, something like lifeless statutes would have developed, growing up out of the ground like desiccated men. This was prevented by the secession of the moon, which withdrew into cosmic space and took with it the coarsest substances. That made it possible for an ego to be added to the physical, etheric, and astral bodies already present in the descendants of the old Moon beings; and because the forces of sun and moon acted from without and there held each other in balance, man could experience fructification by the ego.

The earth was now the scene of further human evolution. All that had come over from the old Moon represented in a certain respect a devolution, a development into a lower stage; but now there appeared a new impetus, an impulse upward.—And in the meantime the progress of those corresponding spiritual beings who had remained with the sun steadily continued.

Let us suppose we have a block of hard iron before us and that our muscles are of average strength. We pound and hammer the iron, trying to beat it flat, but we cannot manage to give it any form until we have softened the substance by heat. Something of this sort happened to the earth after the densest substances had withdrawn with the moon. Now the earth beings could be formed, and now the sun beings again took a hand—those beings who as early as the old Moon state had intervened there from the sun as the group souls. Before the moon split off, substances were too dense; but now these beings asserted themselves as forces that gradually shaped and developed man to his present form.

Let us examine this more closely. Imagine you could have stood on this ancient heavenly body that consisted of earth-plus-moon. You would have beheld the sun out in space; and if you had been clairvoyant you would also have seen the spiritual beings described above. On the Earth you would have perceived a sort of solidification, of desolation, and it would have struck you that all about was nothing but aridity and death on the Earth; for the forces of the sun could gain no influence over all this that was on its way to becoming a great cosmic graveyard.—And then you would have seen the body of the moon detach itself from the Earth. You would have seen the substances of the earth becoming malleable and plastic, with the result that the forces descending from the sun were once more able to act. And you would have seen the Bull, Lion, and Eagle spirits regaining their influence over the human beings that were their images. You would have understood that the moon, isolated, had lost some of its harmful influence through its withdrawal, for thenceforth it could act only from a distance; and that in this way the earth was rendered capable of receiving what the spiritual beings had to give. Tomorrow we shall see what sort of a picture presents itself to the clairvoyant when he traces the more remote phases of evolution in the akashic record.

We know that during the old Saturn stage the first beginning of the human physical body was formed. What today we see as the physical human form first took shape on Saturn as though emerging from cosmic chaos. Then came the Sun stage during which the etheric body was added to the physical; and on the old Moon these were joined by the astral element in the case of those beings who continued their development on the sundered Moon, as well as of the spirits who had remained with the sun. On the sun dwelt the spiritual prototypes, on the Moon, their counterparts on the animal level; and finally, upon the Earth there had gradually evolved a condition under which man was once more able to receive into himself the astral element developed on the sun during the Moon evolution, an element that now acted in him as a force.

Let us now trace these four states. The exalted power which during the Saturn stage provided the spiritual germ of the physical human form is called by the author of the John Gospel the Logos. The element that was added on the Sun and merged with what had arisen on Saturn he designates Life, known to us accordingly as the etheric or life body. And what was subjoined on the Moon he terms the Light, for it is the spiritual light, the astral light. On the severed Moon this astral light effected a hardening, but on the sun itself, a spiritualization. What was thus engendered as spirit could and did continue to develop; and when the sun again split off, the principle that had evolved during the third stage shone into men, but man was as yet unable to see what thus shone in from the sun. It took part in the shaping of man, acted as a force; but man could not see it.

What we have in this way come to recognize as the essence of the Saturn evolution we can now express in the words of the Gospel of St. John:

In the beginning was the Logos.

Now we pass to the Sun. To denote what came into being on Saturn and was further developed on the Sun, we say, the etheric body was added:

And the Logos was Life.

On the Moon the astral element entered into both the physical and the spiritual aspects of men:

Within the animated Logos Light arose.

When the separation occurred the light developed in two directions: on the sun into a clairvoyant light, among men into darkness. For when man was to receive the light he, who was the darkness, comprehended it not.

So if we illuminate the John Gospel by means of the akashic record, what we read concerning cosmic evolution is a follows: In the beginning, during the Saturn evolution, everything had come into being out of the Logos; during the Sun evolution, Life was in the Logos; and out of this living Logos there arose Light during the Moon evolution. Finally, out of the living, light-filled Logos there appeared on the sun, during the Earth evolution, the Light in heightened luster—but men walked in darkness. And the beings who had become the advanced spirits of Bull, Lion, Eagle, and Man, shone down as light from the sun to the earth and into the forms of men that were taking shape. But these were the darkness, and they could not comprehend the light that shone down upon them.—Naturally we must not think of this as the physical light, but rather, as the Light that was the sum of the radiations from the spiritual beings, the spirits of Bull, Lion, Eagle, and Man, who constituted the continuation of the spiritual evolution of the Moon. It was the spiritual Light that streamed down. Men could not receive it, could not comprehend it. Their whole development was advanced by it, but without their consciousness taking part. The light shone in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

Thus paradigmatically does the writer of the John Gospel present these great verities; and those versed in such matters have ever been called the “servants or ministers of the Logos as it was from the beginning.” He who speaks thus was such a minister or servant of the Logos as it was from the beginning; and in the Luke Gospel we find what is basically the identical disposition. Just read understandingly what the writer of the Luke Gospel says: his purpose is to report events as they occurred from the beginning, even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of the Word.

And we believe that these documents were written by servants of the Word, or the Logos. We learn to believe this when by means of our own spiritual research we see what took place, when we see how our Earth evolution came about by way of Saturn, Sun, and Moon. And when we then find that we can rediscover, independent of all documents, what is presented in the comprehensive words of the John Gospel and in the words of the Luke Gospel, we learn anew to appreciate these documents and to find in them their own evidence that they were written by those who could read in the spiritual world. They provide a means of communication with men of remote times whom we can face, in a sense, and say, We recognize and know you—because what they knew we have found again in Spiritual Science.

• 1. Cf. Lectures delivered in Whilhelmshöhe near Kasel, June 16-19, 1907.
• 2. In his translation of Occult Science, an Outline, by Rudolf Steiner, Mr. Henry B. Monges provided an ingenious device for eliminating the confusion that arises so easily in connection with the study of planetary evolution. The following footnote, quoted from Occult Science, explains it.
  
  In order to make clear the difference between the designations for the Planetary Evolutions and our present planetary bodies, which bear the same names, the following device has been determined on: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan printed in italics with initial capitals designate the great cosmic planetary cycles of evolution. In the Sun evolution, after the separation of the main cosmic body into two parts, the designation is Sun and Saturn, spelt with capitals, but not with italics. In the Moon evolution, when a separation takes place, the remaining body is spelt Moon, with an initial capital, the separating planetary sun is spelt with small letters. In the Earth evolution, the separated planetary bodies are spelt as is customary: The planets Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury with initial capitals; sun, moon, earth with small letters.”
  
  The device is gratefully adopted in this translation

There are certain deeper questions of karmic connection concerning more especially our human influence upon karma, particularly upon that of other people, and concerning also the changing of the direction of karma, be it to a greater or less extent. Such questions as these one can neither answer nor even give an idea of how they ought to be answered, without touching, as we shall today, upon certain important secrets of our world existence. They may perhaps arise out of what has been said, if we follow up what has been broached and had light thrown upon it from one side or another.

We may ask what happens in a person's karma when by reason of his previous acts or experiences there has arisen a necessity for illness to compensate for these acts and experiences, and this person is really healed through human assistance by means of remedies or other intervention. What does this signify and in what way is such a fact related to a deeper conception of karmic law?

Now I will begin by saying that in order to throw any important light at all upon this question, things must be touched upon which are far removed from the science and the present thought of today and which may, so to say, only be spoken of amongst Anthroposophists who, having absorbed some of the truths relating to the deeper foundations of existence, have already prepared themselves for such things, and have acquired a perception of how things which today can only be indicated, may nevertheless be fully proved. I should like, however, to take this opportunity of asking one thing of you. I am today compelled to talk about the deeper foundations of the earth's existence which I shall endeavour to express as precisely as possible. But this would be wrong if it were used in another connection or spoken of without any connection at all, and would lead to one misunderstanding after another. I ask you for the present just to accept it only, and make no other use of it. I must also make a point, regarding these things, that they should not be handed on; that no one should consider them as a teaching which may in any way spread further; for only the connection justifies such a statement, and such a statement is justifiable only when it is backed by the consciousness that can coin suitable words to express thoughts of this kind.

We are now speaking, on the one hand, of the deeper nature of material existence, and on the other, of the nature of soul existence. We must today acquire a deeper comprehension of what pertains to the soul and to the material world. This is, indeed, necessary for a quite definite reason—for the reason given in the previous lectures when we said that the soul of man can penetrate more or less deeply into matter. We described yesterday the nature of the male by saying that in a man the soul penetrates deeper into matter, while in the female the soul holds back in a certain way and is more independent of matter. We saw that much of karmic experience depends upon how the penetration of the soul into matter takes place. We saw also how certain illnesses in one incarnation appear as the karmic consequences of errors made by the soul in former incarnations when it worked at its deeds, experiences and impulses. Then on the way between death and a new birth the soul acquired the tendency to transform into matter that which was formerly only a characteristic, a mere influence in the soul; so it now permeates the body. Because the human being is then permeated by a soul which has also absorbed either the luciferic or ahrimanic influence, the human substance will in consequence be damaged. Here is to be found the cause of illness, and we may therefore say: In a sick body there dwells a damaged soul which has come under a wrong influence—a luciferic or ahrimanic influence; and the moment we are able to remove these influences from the soul, the normal relationship of soul and the body should come about, and health should be re-established. What then is the relation between these two members of the earthly human existence of which we are now speaking, matter and soul? What are they in their deeper nature?

The man of the present day is generally of the opinion that the answer to the question, ‘Of what does matter consist? What is the soul?’—if it could be given at all—must prove to be the same all over the world. I do not think it would be easy for him to understand that for the beings who lived upon the old Moon, the answer to these questions must be quite different from those of beings who live upon the Earth. For existence is so much in the throes of evolution, that even the ideas may alter which a being may have about the deeper foundations of his own nature; so that the answer to this question, ‘What is matter, what is the soul?’ must also vary. It must at once be emphasised that the answers which will be given are only those which the earth-man can make, and are of significance only to the earth-man.

A person will at first judge ‘matter’ according to what confronts him in the external world in the shape of different beings and things, and everything which makes an impression upon him in any way. Then he discovers that there are different sorts of matter. But I need not go very far into that, for you may find in all the ordinary books those expositions which could be given here if we had time enough. These differences in matter present themselves to man when he sees the different metals, gold, copper, lead, and so on, or when he sees anything that does not belong to this category. You know, too, that chemistry traces these different materials back to certain fundamental substances of matter, called ‘elements.’ These elements, even in the nineteenth century, were still considered to be substances possessing certain properties which did not admit of being further divided. But in the case of a substance such as water, we are able to separate it into hydrogen and oxygen, yet in hydrogen and oxygen themselves we have substances which, according to the chemistry of the nineteenth century, were incapable of being further divided. One could distinguish about seventy such elements. You will doubtless also know that owing to phenomena which have been produced in connection with a few special elements—radium, for instance—and also owing to various phenomena produced in the study of electricity, the idea of the elements has been shaken in many ways. One has come to the conclusion that the seventy elements were only temporary limitations of matter, and that one could trace back the possibility of subdivision to a fundamental substance, which then through inner combinations, through the nature of its inner elementary being, manifests at one time as gold, at another time as potash, lime, and so on.

These scientific theories vary; and just as the scientific theories changed in ‘each fifty years’ of the nineteenth century, so it came about that certain physicists saw in matter certain entities which are charged with electricity; just as the ionic theory is now in fashion—for there are fashions in science—in the same way at no distant future other scientific methods will exist, and our idea of the constitution of matter will be quite different. These are facts. Scientific opinions are changeable, and must be changeable, for they depend altogether upon those facts which are of significance for one particular epoch. The teachings of Spiritual Science on the other hand continue through all ages—as long as there are civilisations on the earth—and will continue as long as these civilisations exist. It has always had the same comprehensive view regarding the nature of material existence and matter; and in order to lead you on to what Spiritual Science looks upon as the essential part of matter and of substance, I should like to say the following:

You all know that ice is a solid body—not through its own nature, but through external circumstances. It at once ceases to be a solid if we raise the temperature sufficiently; it then becomes a fluid substance. Therefore it does not depend upon what is in a substance itself as to what form it takes in the external world, but upon the entire conditions of the universe surrounding it. We can then further bring heat to this substance, and out of the water we can, after a certain point, produce steam. We have ice, water, steam, and through the raising of the temperature we have caused what we may describe as ‘the appearance of matter in manifold forms.’ Thus we have to distinguish in matter that the appearance it presents to us does not come out of an inner constitution, but that the manner in which it confronts us depends upon the general constitution of the universe, and that one must not isolate any part of the whole universe into individual substances. Now the methods of modern science cannot reach where Spiritual Science is able to reach. The science of today can never, by means of the methods at its disposal, bring the substance of ice—which, when the temperature is increased, is first made fluidic and then turned into steam—into the final condition attainable on earth, into which every substance can be transmuted. It is not possible today, by scientific means, to bring about conditions which show that ‘if you take gold and rarefy it as far as it can be rarefied upon the earth, you will bring it at last to a state which could equally be reached by silver or by copper.’ Spiritual Science can do this because it is based upon the methods of spiritual research; is thus able to observe how, in the spaces between substances, there is always a uniform substance everywhere which represents the extreme limit to which all matter is reducible. Spiritual research discovers a condition of dissolution in which all materials are reduced to a common basis, but what then appears there is no longer matter, but something which lies beyond all the specialised forms of matter around us. Every single substance, be it gold, silver, or any other substance, is there seen to be a condensation of this fundamental substance, which is really no longer matter. There is a fundamental essence of our material earth existence out of which all matter only comes into being by a condensing process, and to the question: What is this fundamental substance of our earth existence, Spiritual Science gives the answer: ‘Every substance upon the earth is condensed light.’ There is nothing in material existence in any form whatever which is anything but condensed light. Hence you see that to those who know the facts, there can be no necessity for such a theory as that of the ‘vibration hypothesis’ of the nineteenth century. Therein one sought to find light by methods which themselves are coarser than the light itself. Light cannot be traced back to anything else in our material existence. Wherever you reach out and touch a substance, there you have condensed, compressed light. All matter is, in its essence, light.

We have thus indicated one side of the question from the point of view of Spiritual Science. We have seen that light is the foundation of all material existence. If we look at the material human body, that also, inasmuch as it consists of matter, is nothing but a substance woven out of light. Inasmuch as man is a material being, he is composed of light.

Let us now consider the other question: ‘Of what does the soul consist?’ If we were to make research in the same way, by means of the methods of Spiritual Science, into the substance, into the really fundamental essence of the soul, then it would appear that just as all matter is compressed light, so all the different phenomena of the soul upon earth are modifications, are manifold transformations of that which must be called, if we truly realise the fundamental meaning of the word: love. Every stirring of the soul, wherever it appears, is in some way a modification of love, and if the inner and the outer are, as it were, intermingled, impressed into one another in man, we find also that his outer bodily part is woven out of light, and his inner soul is woven spiritually out of love. Love and light are, indeed, in some way interwoven in all the phenomena of our earth existence, and anyone who wishes to understand things as explained by Spiritual Science, will first of all ask: To what extent are love and light interwoven?

Love and light are the two elements, the two component parts of all earthly existence: love as the soul part, and light as the outer material part.

Now, however, another fact comes in. For both these elements, light and love, which would otherwise be side by side throughout the great course of the world existence, there must be found an intermediary, weaving the one element into the other—light into love. This must needs be a power which has no particular interest in love, which thus weaves light into the element of love—a power which is interested only in causing the light to be spread abroad to as great an extent as possible, and therefore causes light to stream into the element of love. Such a power cannot be terrestrial for the earth is the Cosmos of Love; and its mission is to weave love in everywhere. Anything, therefore, which is bound up with the earth existence can have no interest which is not to some degree influenced by love.

It is the luciferic beings which act here—for they remained behind upon the Moon upon the Cosmos of Wisdom. They are particularly interested in weaving light into love. The luciferic beings are everywhere at work when our inner part which is actually woven out of love comes into any sort of connection with light, in whatsoever form it may be found; and we are confronted with light in all material existence. Wheresoever we come into connection with light, the luciferic beings enter, and the luciferic influence becomes woven into love. In that way man first, in the course of his incarnations, entered the luciferic element. Lucifer has woven himself into the element of love; and all that is formed from love has the impress of Lucifer, which alone can bring us what causes love to be not merely a self-abandonment, but permeates it in its innermost being with wisdom. Otherwise, without this wisdom, love would be an impersonal force in man for which he could not be responsible. But in this way love becomes the essential force of the Ego where that luciferic element is woven, which otherwise is only to be found outside in matter. Thus it becomes possible for our inner being which, during earth existence, should receive the attribute of love in its fullness, to be permeated besides by everything that may be described as an activity of Lucifer, and from this side leads to a penetration of external matter; so that which is woven out of light is not interwoven with love alone, but with love that is permeated by Lucifer. When man takes up the luciferic—element, he interweaves into the material part of his own body a soul which is, it is true, woven out of love, but into which the luciferic element is interwoven. It is that love which is permeated with the luciferic element, which impregnates matter and is the cause of illness working out from within. In connection with what we have already mentioned as being a necessary consequence of an illness proceeding from a luciferic element, we may say that the ensuing pain, which we have seen is a consequence of the Luciferic element, shows us the effect of the working of the karmic law. So the consequences of an act or a temptation coming from Lucifer are experienced karmically and the pain itself indicates what should lead to the overcoming of the consequences in question.

Now ought we to help in such a case or not? Ought we in any way to cancel what has pressed in from the luciferic element with all its consequences working out in pain?

Remembering the answer to our question as to the nature of the soul, it follows of necessity that we have the right to do this only if we find the means, in the case of a man who has the luciferic element in him which caused his illness, to expel that luciferic element in the right way. What is the remedy which exerts a stronger action, so that the luciferic element is driven out. What is it which has been defiled by the luciferic element on our earth? It is love! Hence only by means of love can we give real help for karma to work out in the right way. Finally we must see in that element of love which has been psychically influenced by Lucifer resulting in illness, a force which must be affected by another force. We must pour in love. All those acts of healing dependent upon what we may call a ‘psychic healing process’ must have the characteristic that love is part of the process. In some form or other all psychic healing depends on a stream of love, which we pour into another person as a balsam. All that is done in this domain must finally be traced back to love; and this can be done. Even if we set simple psychic factors in action; if we assist another, perhaps, only to overcome depression, this can be traced back to love. All arises from the impulse of love, from simpler processes of healing, to that which is often, in amateur fashion called ‘magnetic healing.’ What does the healer communicate to the one to be healed? It is, to use an expression of physics, an ‘interchange of tensions.’ Certain processes in the etheric body of the healer create with the person to be healed a sort of polarity. Polarity arises just as it would arise in an abstract sense, when one kind of electricity, say positive, is produced and then the corresponding electricity—the negative—appears. Thus polarities are created, and this act must be conceived as emanating from sacrifice. One evokes in oneself a process which is not intended to be significant to oneself only, for then one would call forth one process only; in this case, however, the process is intended in addition to induce a polarity in another person, and this polarity, which naturally depends upon a contact between the healer and the person to be healed, is, in the fullest sense of the word, the sacrifice of a force which is no other than the transmuted action of love. That is what is really active in these psychic healings—a transmuted power of love. We must clearly understand that without this fundamental love-force the healing will not lead to the right goal. But these processes of love need not always run their course [so] that the person is fully aware of them with his ordinary day-consciousness; they run their course also in the region of the subconscious. In that which is considered as the technique of the healing process, even to the way in which the movements of the hands are made, and technically reduced to a system, we have the reflection of a sacrificial act. Therefore even where we do not see the direct connection in a process of healing, when we do not see what is being done, we have, nevertheless, before us an act of love, although the action may be completely transformed to a mere technique.

Since the soul consists fundamentally of love, we can assist with psychic factors. And these processes apparently lie very near the periphery of human nature, and by such factors of healing that which in its essence consists of love is enriched by what it requires in the way of love. Thus on the one side we see how we can help, so that, after being caught in the toils of Lucifer, the sufferer is able to free himself again. Because love is the fundamental essence of the soul, we may, indeed, influence the direction of karma.

On the other hand, we may ask, what has become of the substance woven from light in which the soul dwells?

Take the body—the outer man in his material part. If through a karmic process there had not been imprinted from out of the soul into matter a love substance such as is permeated by Lucifer or Ahriman; if a pure love substance only had poured in, it would not have been impurifying, or damaging to the substance woven out of light. If love alone were to flow into matter, it would then so flow into the human body that the latter could not be damaged. It is only because a love which has absorbed luciferic or ahrimanic forces can penetrate that the substance woven out of light becomes less perfect than it was originally intended to be. Therefore it is only through pouring into man of the luciferic or ahrimanic influences during his consecutive incarnations, that the human organisation is not what it might be. If it were as it ought to be, it would manifest healthy human substance; but because it has absorbed the activities of Lucifer and Ahriman, sickness and disease result.

How can we draw from outside those influences which have flowed in from an imperfect soul, that is, from a wrong love substance? What happens to the body by this influx of something which is faulty? According to Spiritual Science something happens which turns light in some way into its opposite. Light has its opposite in darkness or obscurity. Everything really presenting itself—strange as it may sound—as the defilement of that which is woven out of light, is a darkness woven out of a luciferic or ahrimanic influence. Thus we see darkness woven into the human substance. But this darkness was only thus interwoven because the human body has become the bearer of the Ego that lives on through the incarnations. This was formerly not there. Only a human body can be subject to this corruption, for such a corruption was formerly not contained in that which was woven out of light.

Man today draws the base of his material life out of what he has gradually rejected in the course of evolution—that is, the animal kingdom, the vegetable kingdom, and the mineral kingdom. These also contain the different substances woven out of light for earth existence. But in none of these substances are there any of the influences which, in the course of human karma have acted on the organism through the soul. In the three kingdoms around us, therefore, man cannot through his luciferic or ahrimanic influence, as emanating from his love forces, have a defiling effect. Nothing of him is here. And what in man has been defiled is spread around him in all its purity. Let us consider a mineral substance, a salt or any other substance which man has also within him, or might have within him. But in him it is interwoven with the love substance defiled by Lucifer or Ahriman. Outside, however, it is pure. Thus every substance outside is distinguished from that which man bears within him. Externally it is always different from what it is in man, because in him it is interwoven with the ahrimanic or luciferic influence. That is the reason why, for everything of external substance which can be more or less defiled by man, there must be something which can be found externally representing the same thing in its pure condition. That which exists in the world in its purity, is the external cure for the corresponding substance in its damaged state. If you apply this in the right way to the human being, you then have the specific for the corresponding injury.

Thus we find in quite an objective way, what may be applied to the human body as a remedy. Here is the injury characterised as a form of darkness—and that which is not yet dark as the outer woven pure light; and we see why we are able to remove the darkness to be found in man if we bring pure substance woven from light to bear upon him. Thus we have a specific remedy for the injury. Now attention has often been drawn to the fact that Anthroposophists in particular should not fall into the narrow-minded error of denying that in such cases there really is a specific remedy against this or that injury, or which beneficially affects this or the other organ. It has often been said that the organism has within it the forces with which to help itself. Even although the Vienna School of Nihilistic Therapeutics may be right in its assertion that by calling up the opposing forces we can bring about a cure, we may nevertheless help on the cure by specific remedies. Here we see a parallel which one may describe from Spiritual Science.

From what I have said about diphtheria, for instance, you may gather that the karmic causes have in this case particularly affected the astral body. Now closely related to the astral body is the animal kingdom You will always find in those forms of illness closer connected with the astral body, that medical science, unconsciously driven by a dim impulse, seeks for remedies from the animal kingdom. For such illnesses whose causes lie in the etheric body, science seeks for remedies out of the vegetable kingdom. An interesting lecture might be given about the relation of the purple foxglove to certain illnesses of the heart. These are things which, inasmuch as they are based on truth, are not right for five years only—as one doctor states—and then begin to be wrong—as in the case when only external symptoms are taken into consideration. But there is a certain treasure of remedies which can always in some way be traced back to some connection with Spiritual Science, which have been inherited without any knowledge whence they came. Just as today the astronomers do not know that the theory of Kant and Laplace came from the mystery schools of the Middle Ages, so people do not know whence came these real valuable remedies. Causes of illness, which are connected with the nature of the physical body, lead to the use of remedies from the mineral kingdom.

A simple consideration of these analogous views will provide a fingerpost for these matters. Through his connection with the surrounding world, man can be helped from two different sides: on the one hand bringing him transmuted love from the psychic method of healing and on the other hand by bringing him transmuted light in various ways by those processes which are connected with external methods of healing. Everything which can be done is brought about either by inner psychic means—by love—or by the external means of densified light. When one day science has advanced so far as to learn to believe in the super-sensible and in the saying: ‘Matter is a form of condensed light,’ then a spiritual light will be thrown by these words upon the systematic research on external remedies. Hence we see that what during long ages, from the mystery schools of old Egypt and old Greece, was gradually added to the treasure of healing is not mere nonsense, but that in all these things there is a sound kernel. Anthroposophy does not exist in order to attack a certain school of medicine, and to say, ‘There they give people poisons!’ The word poison today works as a suggestion, and people do not reflect how relative this word is. For what is ‘poison’? Every substance may be a poison. It is only a question of the methods of healing and of how much is taken at a time. Water is a strong poison, if one takes ten bucketfuls at one time. The results of this, considered chemically, are not very different from what they would be if one gave a person any other substance. It depends always upon the quantity, for all these ideas are relative.

From what we have gone into today, we can be glad that for every injury we can do to injure our body, there is to be found in surrounding nature, which now appears to us as the world, that which will make it whole again. It is also a beautiful relationship that we have for the external world, and we may rejoice not only because we see the beautiful flowers and the mountains glowing in the sunlight, but also because our surroundings are so intimately connected with what is in man himself, good or bad. We can rejoice in nature, not only for what appeals at first sight, but the deeper we go into what has condensed into external material existence, the more we shall find that this nature which causes us to rejoice has within it at the same time the mighty healer for all the damage man can cause himself. Somewhere in nature the remedy is concealed. It is a question, not only of understanding the language of the healer, but also of obeying it and really carrying it out. Today it is in most cases impossible for us to hear the voice of healing nature because our misunderstanding of light, and the darkness which has penetrated into knowledge has in many respects brought about conditions preventing us from hearing. Therefore we must clearly understand that where in one case no help can properly be given, where, on account of karmic connections, some suffering may not properly be lessened, this does not mean that it absolutely could not be done.

Here again we see a remarkable connection which allows us to perceive the whole great world, inclusive of mankind, as One Being. In the sayings: ‘Matter is woven light,’ and ‘the soul is in some way or other diluted love,’ are to be found the keys of innumerable secrets of earth existence. But these hold good only for the earth existence, and would not concern any other domain of the world existence. Thus we have shown nothing less than that we, if in any way we alter the direction of karma, unite ourselves in one or the other case with the elements composing our earth existence: on the one side with light which has become matter—and on the other side with love which has become soul. We either draw the remedies out of our surroundings, out of the condensed light, or out of our own soul by the healing loving act, the sacrificial act, and we then heal with the soul-forces obtained from love. We unite ourselves with what is most deeply justified upon the earth, when, on the one hand, we unite ourselves with light and on the other with love. All earth conditions are in some way conditions of balance between light and love and everything unhealthy is a disturbance of that balance. If the disturbance is in love, we can then help by unfolding the forces of love; and if the disturbance is in light, we can then help by somehow providing for ourselves, out of the universe, that light which is able to dissolve the darkness within us.

These are the fundamental ways of help, and we see again how everything depends upon the balance of opposites. Light and love are polar opposites and on their being interwoven depend ultimately all the psychic and material processes of our life. Therefore in all the spheres of human life, evolution continues from epoch to epoch with the balance inclining first to one side and then swinging back to the other, so that evolution resembles the surging of waves. This motion of an unstable equilibrium throws light even on the most complex processes of civilisation. Take a period when certain injuries entered into the evolution of mankind because man contemplated only [the] inner and neglected the outer, for example, in the Middle Ages. It was then that through the blossoming of the mystical side, the external remained unheeded and errors occurred not only in knowledge but in action. Then followed the age that was repelled by mysticism, and was attracted by the outer world so as to make the pendulum swing to the opposite side.

Here is the transition from the Middle Ages to modern times and many such disturbances of the balance, manifest in different ways.

In this connection I should like to note that just in such times as our own, a characteristic in many people is that they completely forget, and pay no attention to, that which one may call ‘the consciousness of a super-sensible world.’ They pay no attention whatever to the fact that there is a spiritual world, and they therefore turn away their thoughts from it. In such an age—or in all such ages—there is always in certain respects a counterpart to be found. I should like to show you this in a very simple manner.

When there are people upon the physical plane who are so absorbed in the physical that they completely forget the spiritual, then a contrary tendency appears among those souls who are living in the spiritual world between death and a new birth—a tendency which works over from the physical into the spiritual plane—impelling them to occupy themselves with the influences which act out of the spiritual world into the physical. It is this which brings about in the physical world the intervention by souls who are still in that state before birth. These souls work down into the physical world according to the means which offer and they are able to work indirectly through persons who are more sensitive to such influence from the spiritual world. In order to make this clearer, one must not accept everything that purports to be a revelation from a Spiritual world. We must distinguish the real characteristic cases in which the dead are anxious show in a palpable manner that there is indeed a spiritual world. Because there are so many people completely in the dark, who have woven so much darkness into themselves that they wish to know nothing about the spiritual world, there are, on the other hand, among the dead many who have the impulse to work into the physical world. Such things generally occur when nothing is done deliberately to bring them about on the physical plane and they occur without special preparation.

You will find much proof of these things collected in the book by our friend, Ludwig Deinhard, Das Mysterium des Menschen (The Mystery of Man). Here much has been collected and systematised which is just what one needs, and which in the scientific literature of to-day is so scattered that it is impossible for everyone to gather it together. Therefore it is a good thing to have in this book a collection of these spiritual facts, which, as you now see, are eminently characteristic of one aspect of our age. You will find very aptly described in this book the characteristic fact of an investigator, who by materialistic methods had in his earth life endeavoured to give every possible proof of the spiritual world—I mean the late Frederick Myers—and who after his death was strongly impelled to show to mankind by means of radiations from the spiritual world and by the help of the spiritual world, what he had endeavoured to do when here.

This is intended to illustrate how in the world and in world affairs we see continual disturbances of the balance, and then again the efforts for the restoring of the balance.

This continual disturbance and restoration of the balance between the two elements of light and love is fundamental for us; and in human karma, from incarnation to incarnation, both work to restore the disturbed condition. Karma, working its serpentine way through incarnations is just such a disturbed balance, until man, after all his incarnations, shall at last create the final balance which can be reached upon earth. Having fulfilled his mission on earth, he evolves then into a new planetary form.

I have endeavoured to set forth a few facts, without which a deeper establishment of karmic connections and laws would be impossible. I have not shrunk from touching to-day upon those mysteries for which our modern science will not for a long time be ripe: Matter is in reality woven light, and that which belongs to the soul is in some way or other refined love. These are ancient occult sayings, but they are sayings which will for all time remain true and will prove fruitful for human evolution, not only for knowledge, but also for human work and action.

During the second half of last year, it became my duty to carry on some occult research into life between death and a new birth. We have, it is true, already described what has to be considered there, but a complete knowledge of this part of human life, a real penetration therein, is only possible if one carries on research into it from the most diverse points of view. Though everything found in the writings and cycles about this theme is correct, still to all this may be added that which must be said tonight and perhaps also the day after tomorrow about the subject.

When the human being has stepped through the portals of death—that is, when he has laid aside his physical and his ether body—the soul during the first interval of time is particularly taken up with memories of the span of life it spent on earth. We know, of course, that the soul requires a certain amount of time to free itself from all that connects it with the last earthly life. Now, let us present this process of growing out of the preceding life on earth as it relates to the whole of the universe, to the world.

When the human being leaves his physical body and his ether body, and thus lives only in his astral body, which we may also call the soul body, a complete spatial expansion takes place, one might say: a dilatation of his being into the far reaches of space; this takes place not merely after death, but also in sleep. Every night we really expand over the stellar spaces. After death, we expand slowly and gradually in such a way that we must seek the substance of our soul—for we cannot now say: the substance of our body—in the circumference of the earth, at first far beyond the atmosphere. Farther and farther it expands, until we (though it may sound paradoxical, it comes to that) have expanded the life of our soul over the whole expanse of the sphere which in the end corresponds to the moon's orbit around the earth. We grow so large that the boundary of our being is the orbit of the moon. As long as we thus grow larger, that which we may call the Kamaloka-time prevails. That is the time of inner connection with the preceding life on earth.

Then, however, the expansion goes on. The human being expands in fact out into the world of the stars, and then the time begins when he expands so far that the outer boundary of his being; may be designated as the orbit which, in astronomical terms, is described by Venus, in occult terms by Mercury. Now, the condition of life for man, after he has left the sphere of the moon, depends on the kind of life he led here between birth and death. When he carries his life into the universe to the sphere of Mercury, then he may live there in Such a way that he can easily find contact with people with whom he lived on earth, with whom his soul was united on earth; or, on the other hand, it may be man's fate to have difficulties in finding such contacts—that is to: say, to be condemned to loneliness in expanding his life thus into the sphere of Mercury. And it depends on the way in which he has led his life on earth whether he feels that he is destined to loneliness, or, if one may use the term, to sociability. A person who in life has not cared to awaken in his soul moral feelings a moral way of thinking, a moral mood, benevolence, sympathy—a person who has developed this only to a small extent—feels doomed to loneliness after death when he expands to the sphere of Mercury. And it is difficult for him to find other souls with whom he is united. A person who has developed much sympathy, a moral way of thinking, will live companionably with other souls as he expands to the sphere of Mercury. Thus it is given into our hands to arrange our life between death and a new birth. The sphere of Mercury—in occult terms—is therefore the sphere in which our moral qualities are expressed. It also is the sphere in which what we have developed in the way of moral qualities becomes effective in still another manner.

Another aspect to be considered is the fact that precisely during this passage through the sphere of Mercury (in occult parlance) we have the after-effect of having been in the life between birth and death a conscientious human being, or one lacking conscientiousness. You see, everything that happens in the world here in physical life receives its direction or its causation from the spiritual world. We have several times considered the natural death from old age, which has to occur for man because it is what really must happen to him in order that life may take its right course from incarnation to incarnation. But as we know, there is not merely this death from old age, well founded in evolution; there is also a death which befalls the human being in the flower of youth, even in childhood. There are in the world manifold illnesses, epidemics, and so forth playing a part in human life. And they are not merely the effect of physical causes, but they are ordained, directed from the spiritual world. And this actually comes from the region of Venus, that belt around the earth which, however, in occult parlance we call the sphere of Mercury. That is, if we take the radius from earth to Venus and draw a circle—quite without considering astronomical relations—that, then, is the sphere of Mercury (we mean a circle, not around the sun, but, around the earth); and in this belt, in the space occupied by this plane, there lie the forces by which illnesses and death are directed on earth: death in so far as it does not occur as natural death from old age, but in an irregular manner. Certain spiritual beings are operative there, those beings whom occultism designates as the spirits of illness and death. An individual who (in occult parlance) enters the realm of Mercury after having spent his life on earth as a person without a conscience, condemns himself to become a servant of these—as we may well call them—evil spirits of illness and death, while he is going through this realm. Indeed, we do not have a conception, an impression, of what is meant by a “lack of conscience” until we know this fact. Lack of conscience sentences a human being to bear the yoke of these evil spirits in the realm of Mercury for a time between death and a new birth. And when those forces are developed which are sent from the surrounding realm to the earth so that epidemics, illnesses, take place, so that death at the wrong time takes place, then these souls “without conscience” must cooperate as servants of the spirits of illness and death who send these forces into our physical world.

Something else happens when a trait which is very widespread on earth has its after-effect all the way up to this sphere: laziness. Our life is really conditioned by laziness. Innumerable things would be done differently by men if they were not lazy. Also by laziness, the human being sentences himself to become for a time in the sphere which has just been discussed the servant of those powers which are subordinate to Ahriman, and which we may designate as the powers of hindrance—that is to say, of those spirits who hinder work on earth. Servants of the spirits of hindrance we become for a definite period of time, more or less prolonged, through everything we have poured into our soul by laziness. In this way, we get a conception as to how those forces which we have developed in our soul during our physical life have their effect in that life between death and a new birth.

The next sphere to which the soul expands is designated in occultism as the sphere of Venus. [astronomically: sphere of Mercury.] We prepare ourselves for it by religious qualities, a religious attitude. A human being who has developed in the time between birth and death an attitude which causes his soul to look toward the spiritual primordial powers and primordial forces of the world—such a person is able to be a social being in the sphere of Venus, so that he lives together with other human beings with whom his soul has established relationship on earth. But also other spirits of the Higher Hierarchies enter from then on into the human sphere, and man lives there with spirits of the Higher Hierarchies if he has developed a religious attitude, religious sentiments, religious feelings. On the other hand, if here on earth he has not brought his soul into contact with religious impulses, he sentences himself to loneliness, to seclusion, to tormenting loneliness. If he has been an atheist here on earth, then he will be a completely isolated individual after reaching the sphere with which we are concerned here. And it must be said that those people who today foster an irreligious attitude condemn themselves to complete loneliness. Those, for instance, who unite in the Monist Society, inhibit their inner freedom of movement, and because they have found themselves united here under that “flag,” they sentence themselves to sit each in his own cage, each separate from the other.

The next sphere into which we enter is the sphere of the Sun. Again circumstances are different from those known to physical astronomy. We obtain this sphere if we draw a line between the earth and the sun—that is, if we use this line as the radius and draw a circle around the earth. In the spiritual world, conditions do differ from those in the physical world. We expand to the extent of this sphere after having gone through the sphere of Venus. For this sphere, the preparation valid for the sphere of Venus no longer holds good. For the Venus sphere, we may be prepared in such a way that we find contact with all those souls with whom we have established religious fellowship in the life between birth and death. In the sphere of Venus, human beings are so to speak confined in regions like the regions in which on earth peoples, races, live together. Thus there are in the Venus-sphere regions in which those persons find each other who are related through their religious feelings. This is not sufficient for the sphere of the Sun. In the sphere of the Sun the feeling of loneliness prevails if the human being was prepared on earth only for a certain kind of religious feeling in his soul. In the sphere of the Sun, a person is a social being only when he has developed, in the best sense of the word, an understanding of every religious feeling; when, so to speak, he has developed a deeper tolerance for all religious Systems on earth. Up to our time, since the Mystery of Golgotha, the exoteric Christian faith has been more or less sufficient, for this Christian faith contains in a certain way, though in quite a different way, an understanding of other systems of religion which far transcends that involved in a limited religious system. We can easily convince ourselves of this. Many other religious systems are still confined to certain regions of the earth, and if we wish to see, we can very easily note how the adherent of Hinduism, of Buddhism; and of other faiths; will indeed speak of the equal validity of all religions and of a wisdom common to all religions ... but if we consider more deeply what he means, we find that he means his own religion exclusively. In the last analysis, he demands of other people that they should acknowledge his own religion. That is what he then calls the equal validity of all religions. Read theosophical periodicals originating in India. There, the East Indian religion is considered the one religion, valid for the world, and those who do not accept this are said not to be honest theosophists. Primitive Christianity from the beginning has not been attuned to this idea, especially where it has become occidental religion. If things were in the Occident as, they are in India, we would have today a religion of Wotan; that would be then, what Hinduism is for the orient. The Occident, however, has not taken up the religion, which has evolved from it, but from the beginning the religion of a founder who has lived outside of the Occident, of the Christ Jesus. Unegotistically, the Occident has received a religion into its very being. That is a difference in principle, and in the very essence of Christianity there lies a true tolerance for every religious system, even though this essence may have been little understood by occidental Christians.

In fact, for the Christian, everyone is a Christian, no matter what he may call himself. And it is nothing but narrow-mindedness, if one wants to spread Christian dogma everywhere. Broad-mindedness is something quite different. If one considers the Hindu, the Chinese, the Buddhist, if one enters into the deeper elements of their being, one will find everywhere the beginnings of Christianity and will stress in everything they themselves think the beginnings of Christianity, without having to mention the name of the Christ. But this more narrow Christianity, as it is given today to man between birth and death, is only one preparation for the sphere of the Sun: another thing is necessary—that which we designate in the right, the true sense, as Theosophy. [Rudolf Steiner was talking to members of the Theosophical Society.—Ed.] It gives us an inner comprehension of all religious systems on earth, of their very essence. If we acquire this understanding here on earth, then we prepare ourselves in the right way for the sphere of the Sun. This understanding of the different religions and of the Mystery of Golgotha, of the Christ impulse, is necessary for us if we are not to become hermits in relation to other human souls and in relation to the spirits of the Higher Hierarchies in the sphere of the Sun, between death and a new birth.

When we come into the sphere of the Sun between death and a new birth, we find there two things. The first thing we find is something we can express only in an image: we find an empty throne, an empty World-Throne. And that which we may seek on this empty World Throne we can find only in the pictures of the Akashic Record. On this throne, which we find empty during the time we pass between death and a new birth, the Christ once sat within the Sun sphere. He expanded into the earth sphere through the Mystery of Golgotha, and since that time the inhabitants of the earth must gain here on earth an understanding of the Christ impulse, and must keep this impulse in their memory. Then they will be able to recognize the image which appears in the Akashic Record while gaining a living experience of the Sun sphere. He who has not attained this understanding here on earth will not recognize who at one time was sitting on the throne, and what is preserved as an image only. And he cannot find his way within the Sun-sphere between death and a new birth. There we see why it is the mission of the souls of men on earth to seek here for themselves the connection with the Mystery of Golgotha as we seek it in our spiritual movement. Through this, we keep between death and a new birth the memory of the Christ Impulse, and do not become hermits in the sphere of the Sun, but social beings, by reason of the forces which we have taken with us; so that in a way, by our own strength which we brought with us, we bring to life the image—which is now merely an image in the Sun-sphere—of the Christ. And we must take so much strength with us from the time on earth that this strength remains with us also for the subsequent time, and cannot be lost.

We find a second thing in this sphere of the Sun, a second throne: and it is now occupied by a real being, by Lucifer. And so, between death and a new birth, when we have reached the sphere of the Sun as it has been described, we feel ourselves on the one hand in the presence of Christ, on the other in the presence of Lucifer. If we had not received the Christ impulse, Lucifer alone would have to become our leader. But if we have received the Christ impulse, then we are, on the far voyage through the universe, under the leadership on the one hand of the Christ impulse, on the other of Lucifer; for we also need him for the ensuing times. We also need Lucifer, for he leads us in the right way through the lower spheres of the universe, at first as far as the Mars-sphere.

That is the next sphere to which we expand between death and new birth. In order that Lucifer may lead us in such a way as is fitting for us men, we must have the Christ impulse as a counterbalance; then the Lucifer impulse is salutory for us; otherwise it is evil for us. Another thing has become necessary: in the sphere of Mars, we must have the possibility of taking into account, with our whole being, certain changes which have occurred on Mars in the course of recent centuries. These changes may be described in about the following way. Every heavenly body is related to every other heavenly body through the agency of certain forces; all heavenly bodies stand in a certain relation to the earth. From them the forces radiate. In fact, from Mars and its sphere not only does the light effect radiate, which comes to the earth, but from it also spiritual forces radiate. If we go back to earlier centuries, we find that the forces radiated from Mars which inspired men to that which human beings needed in earlier times: physical forces, to further the evolution of mankind. It is not merely a myth but an occult truth that what has developed as warlike force and warlike complication in the world, what has made man energetic, courageous through centuries and millennia, stems from an influx of the forces of Mars. But such is the life of a planet that its forces go through an ascending and a descending development. And Mars has changed in a certain way its mission during the last centuries. The warlike forces that are developed now are the ebbing warlike life of the previous centuries; new life from inciting forces of Mars does not flow in any longer. For at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Mars had reached a decisive point, a point which, in the life of Mars, may only be compared to the time when the earth had come to a decisive point, the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. It is a fact of immense importance upon which we touch here. Mars went through a decisive period. That fact was known within the earth-mysteries, in which the decision is made for the great spiritual concerns of earth-existence. That is to say, since the twelfth century, the decisive preparations have been made within the mystery development of the earth in order to take into account the change in the Mars-sphere. The forces which Mars was to send out to bring courage and energy to earth, were past for Mars: they were no longer destined to penetrate to the earth. But by the fact that Mars has gone through such a crisis, there came a change for the souls who live between death and a new birth, in the experiences they would have to go through in the Mars-sphere after death. That is to say: When man goes beyond the sphere of the Sun, forces radiate into the essence of his soul, forces which already have a significance for the next incarnation. The soul who passed through the sphere of Mars in the early times, before the seventeenth century, came into contact with those forces which permeated it with courage and energy. Lucifer was the leader to the sources of courage and energy. But the souls who came in later times could no longer find the characteristic forces: Mars was then going through its crisis. Where, within the Mysteries, the great spiritual decisions are made, there one does not take into consideration merely human life between birth and death, but also its salvation or perdition between death and a new birth; that is, in the Mysteries one sees to it that those things are infused into the spiritual culture of mankind which cause the souls after death to go through the different spheres in the right way.

If we wish to comprehend the meaning of the happenings in the Mars-sphere, we must consider the following. A great decisive matter confronts the Rosicrucian Mysteries because one had to consider that for the development of the earth, very special times were ahead: the times of external material culture, of external material triumphs. We cannot oppose these: though they bring nothing spiritual, we must of necessity experience this time of machines, airplanes, and other inventions. But these times bring a kind of death of the soul. We cannot oppose them, we must gain a living experience of them.—The materialistic era had to come, but it always was the endeavour of higher spiritual beings to create a counter-balance against this materialistic era. When we consider all that has come to light in the development of the earth as a counter-balance against materialism, we have as the last and most significant phenomenon Francis of Assisi; that Francis of Assisi who, in his entity as Francis of Assisi, turned away from all external life, who led in Assisi that life which is known to you and which has been painted so wonderfully by Giotto on the walls of the church of Assisi ... so that even today when these pictures have been painted over so often, life yet radiates movingly from the walls. And even though that place also has gone through a development tending toward materialism, we will have to say: the region around the town of Assisi still is pervaded by the spiritual atmosphere of Francis, that atmosphere which has assimilated the elements of a life alien to the world, but on intimate terms with the soul, not merely with the human soul, but with the soul of Nature. In the cycle Man in the Light of Occultism, Theosophy and Philosophy you may read that wonderful poem into which Francis of Assisi poured what he felt toward the soul of Nature and of Nature's beings. One may say that no poet has found more beautiful accents, and perhaps only Goethe has found again accents as beautiful about the life of Nature. What is the cause of all this? The cause of all this is the fact that Francis of Assisi in his previous incarnation, in the seventh, eighth century, in a Mystery School near the Black Sea, was the pupil of an individuality who was no longer incarnated in a physical body.

This is a noteworthy matter. Francis of Assisi, in his immediately preceding incarnation, had lived in this School of Mysteries, and with other disciples he was a disciple of a being who then worked only in the spiritual body among the pupils including Francis of Assisi. And this was none other than the Buddha, who we know was incarnated for the last time as Gautama Buddha. Nevertheless, he continued to be active in the spiritual body. We know that as a spiritual being he was present at the birth of the child Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel. He has continued to be active in the School in which Francis of Assisi lived in his previous incarnation. There the latter assimilated the impulses of his life so intimately associated with the soul, of that life which was to lead men away from everything that was to spread out on earth, which was to lead away from the purely materialistic life. And all this remained in Francis of Assisi. We see the after-effects of this in the Francis of Assisi incarnation. But it could not come about that on earth, in the era which had the materialistic mission, many souls should join a Francis of Assisi community. Those could not do this who had to progress with the time. So, in a way, a conflict was created. It could not come about that on one side there was only exterior, material culture, on the other disciples of Francis of Assisi. Although Francis of Assisi is great and powerful, on the one side, yet on the other the rules he gave could not be of use for ensuing times. How only could it come about? What had to happen on earth?

This has been established in significant perspectives in the Rosicrucian Mysteries since the twelfth century. There it was said; The human being will have to work with the earthly body, will have to gain a living experience in an external way of the material existence between birth and death, and he will have to go along with the triumphs of this material existence. But for every soul who becomes inured, intimate with material existence, a possibility must be created to have, with part of its nature, an understanding for the inner experience of that which lies in the teachings of Francis of Assisi. It is precisely this which constitutes the essence of progress of souls on earth: that these souls must increasingly develop so to speak two natures, the farther they go into the future; that we with the organs of our soul shall be able to take hold of the impulses of existence on earth, so that we may become familiar with them; but that we should be able to develop within ourselves moments and hours in which we can be given over in solitude to the life of the soul itself. While we become more open to the world and more familiar with it, we must at the same time have hours when we can become familiar with our soul. While on the one hand we follow Edison, we must be able to become quietly, in our hearts, disciples of Francis of Assisi or of his great teacher, the Buddha. Thus every human being must be able to feel even if he is being pushed into material life. And for this development the preparation had to be given in the Rosicrucian Mysteries. Christian Rosenkreuz had the mission to care for it.

How can all this be brought about? Only through the fact that a certain period of the life between death and a new birth may be used for the soul in a very definite way. They said to themselves in the Rosicrucian Mysteries: Mars, so to speak, loses his old task; let us give him a new one.—With the beginning of the seventeenth century, at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Buddha who had apart from this completed his last incarnation on earth, was sent to Mars, to the sphere of Mars, and one may say, speaking quite correctly: At that precise time the Buddha accomplished for Mars something similar to what the Christ accomplished on earth—only in a larger measure—in the Mystery of Golgotha. That which had always emanated from Mars, and was part of its essence, that very thing the Buddha transformed by his sacrifice. He transformed the whole nature and essence of Mars. For Mars, the Buddha has become the great Redeemer. It was a sacrifice for him. You only have to remember how the Buddha arose to the point of expounding the doctrine of giving the message of universal peace, of harmonious existence. He was then transferred into that planetary sphere from which the force of aggressiveness originated. He, the Prince of Peace, crucified himself, so to speak, though not through the Mystery of Golgotha. In this way, something else is brought into the Mars-sphere: Mars is permeated by the essence of the Buddha. As on earth the substance of the Christ has flowed out from the Mystery of Golgotha, so the peace substance of the Buddha flows into the Mars-sphere, and since then is in the Mars-sphere.

It was thus that they spoke within the Rosicrucian Mystery. In consequence of the sending of the Buddha, human souls could live for some time between death and a new birth in the sphere of Mars, after they had found themselves in the Sun-sphere and had borne the Christ Impulse up to that sphere. After the soul has entered there through the right permeation with the Christ Impulse, and through the guidance of Lucifer, the soul comes out farther into the sphere of Mars; and precisely in our time, an event occurs in the Mars-sphere, which previously could not take place: the souls are permeated by that which no longer can occur on earth,—they are permeated by the Buddha—Francis of Assisi—element. Between death and a new birth each soul—if it is prepared in the right way—can go through that which has become living experience on earth, as in a last blossoming, in the soul-life of Francis of Assisi, but which since that time cannot have a proper home on earth. The human soul by experiencing the sphere of Buddha in the life between death and a new birth can acquire there the strength that will enable it to do what has just been said: it may enter by a new birth into a purely material existence, may be thrown into a terrestrial existence which will be more and more materialistic, and yet will be able to develop forces in another part of the entity of the soul so that it may be given up to the world of the spirit and of the soul. This is the truth about the secrets which are hidden between death and a new birth.

Then, we expand farther and farther into the reaches of the stars, to Jupiter, Saturn, and farther. What has been described now, occurs only, in fact, with the most advanced souls. Those souls which have not fulfilled the conditions and will not fulfil them until later—such souls, in the life between death and a new birth, come into contact only with the spheres nearest the earth. They also go through the other spheres, but in a certain unconscious state akin to sleep. In the outer spheres, in the spheres beyond the sun, the forces are gathered which man must acquire in order to be able to work, to collaborate, in building up a new body as he approaches a new birth. What man consists of has not merely been acquired on earth. It is the greatest short-sightedness of materialists to believe now that man is a creature of the earth. If man builds himself up in this way with the forces which are given to him, if he builds himself up in the most comprehensive meaning of the word, these constructive forces are cosmic forces which man first had to acquire for himself. While expanding, between death and a new birth, to the Sun-sphere, he still has contact with the forces which are after-effects from his previous life. The forces he needs in order to work into the sphere of the earth whatever can construct his physical body out of the surrounding spheres, those forces he must extract from the forces which meet him outside of the Sun-sphere. The human being really must expand into the cosmos between death and a new birth; he then must live with the cosmos, for on earth alone the forces are lacking which really can bring forth the human being. No new human being ever could result from the human germ which originates from the combination of the two sexes, if the following were not to take place.

There is in existence this small human germ. With this human germ unites something immeasurably great and significant, something which had first expanded in a mysterious way into infinite reaches of the world, and then contracted again. After man expands to the spheres of the stars, he begins to contract again. He goes through the spheres of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, and Moon, becoming ever smaller and smaller. And as he grows smaller, he takes into himself the spiritual forces of the cosmos. And he grows ever smaller and smaller. And that which is finally compressed, compacted into a small spiritual globe, that has been actually condensed from an immense dilution. And this now unites with the physical globe which is the germ cell, and fertilizes it by forces from the spiritual realms. Thus we see how man enters existence by birth.

After having gone through his previous death, he expanded into the distant spaces of the universe, became so to speak a giant globe. In spirit, he was together with spiritual beings and facts; then he compresses himself again, becomes ever smaller and smaller, until the time has come when, by the forces inherent in him, lie unites with physical matter. That which forms, together with the human germ cell, the human body, has been brought in from the cosmos. From this human germ cell, even if it were fertilized, nothing could result that might live on earth, if the compressed spirit-globe could not unite with it; this can be ascertained by occult investigation. And what only could result from this human germ-cell? From it only the foundation for the senses and the nervous system could result, but nothing that is capable of living, such as the body of man which must build itself up around the senses and the nervous system; the former does not originate with father and mother. Earth can give the forces for the senses, the nervous system. What grows organically around them, must be brought in from the cosmos. And when finally the time comes when a new science will grasp the processes in the human germ-cell according to the application of occult knowledge, then human beings who think clearly will be able to understand what they now cannot grasp in any scientific presentation. Whether you read Haeckel's sparkling discussions of this matter, or others, you will find everywhere that things are not understandable by themselves. What one does not know is the fact that a third force unites with that which comes from father and mother. The third force comes in from the cosmos. Only one certain group of people know—or today we may say, knew—of this secret, but this state of affairs is coming to an end now. Children and their nurses and educators mention it—or, at least it was mentioned, when they related that the stork or some other sort of being brings in an element by which human beings can enter the world. That is only a metaphoric expression for a spiritual occurrence, but it is more intelligent than what intelligent people maintain today. For our time, however, it is regarded as enlightened to explain human conditions in a materialistic way. This metaphoric presentation really still should have an effect on the children's souls, on their imagination! People do say: The children no longer believe in the stork—because those who tell this fairy-tale no longer believe it themselves. But those who today become anthroposophists believe in the stork, and they will soon find that in this metaphoric presentation a good interpretation is given of spiritual happenings.

Thus we have contemplated the cosmic aspect of life between death and a new birth; the day after tomorrow we will more particularly touch upon the human aspect of practical life.

But now we will consider one more thing. Kant once, following truly, one might say, an inspiration, made this significant statement:

“Two things have made a great impression on me: the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.”

This statement may seem significant to the occultist. For what is the strange relation that exists between the starry sky and that which is best in the life of our soul? Both are one and the same. We expand between death and a new birth as far as the starry sky, and we bring its forces into life and feel them as the most significant forces of our soul. No wonder! We are, indeed, the external images of the heavens. We look up to the starry sky where we were between death and a new birth, and we see that which we have taken into ourselves. No wonder that we feel at one with that which lives in us as guidance for the life of our soul and that which radiates into us from the starry sky, and which we feel effective in us when we appeal to the deepest life of our soul. The starry sky is one and the same with us, and we with it, when we contemplate our existence as a whole.

Thus we must tell ourselves that such an anthroposophical contemplation does not merely give us that which we may call understanding, knowledge, in the usual every-day meaning. It really gives us moral strength and support in the feeling that the whole universe lives in us. And gradually we see ourselves permeated by the universe when we go through life between death and a new birth. Truly, it is hidden to the external eye, this life between death and a new birth; but that also is hidden which in the depth of our soul's existence drives us, impels us. And yet it is in us, it is effective in us and gives us our strength, this our best being. We carry the heavens within us because we experience them before we enter into our physical existence. We then feel the obligation to make ourselves worthy of these heavens which have done so much for us that we owe to them our entire inner being.

More of this the day after tomorrow, when we shall contemplate life more under the aspect of man, and from a point of view which affects rather the practical activity of life.

Let us once more call up before our souls whither modern Initiation leads, after the first steps to Imaginative knowledge have been successfully taken. A man then comes to the point where his previous abstract, purely ideal world of thought is permeated with inner life. The thoughts coming to him are no longer lifeless, passively acquired; they are an inward world of living force which he feels in the same way as he feels the pulsing of his blood or the streaming in and out of the air he breathes. It is therefore a question of the ideal element in thinking being replaced by an inward experience of reality. Then indeed the pictures that previously constituted a man's thoughts are no longer mere abstract, shadowy projections of the outside world, but are teeming with an inward, vivid existence. They are real Imaginations experienced in two dimensions, as indicated yesterday, but it is not as though a man were standing in front of a painting in the physical world, for then he may experience visions, not Imaginations. Rather is it as though, having lost the third dimension, he were himself moving about within the picture. Hence it is not like seeing something in the physical world; anything that has the look of the physical world will be a vision. Genuine Imagination comes to us only when, for example, we no longer see colours as we do in the physical world, but when we experience them. What does this mean?

When you see colours in the physical world, they give you different experiences. You perceive red as something that attacks you, that wants to spring at you. A bull will react violently to this aggressive red; he experiences it far more vividly than does man, in whom the whole experience is toned down.

When you perceive green, it gives you a feeling of balance, an experience neither painful nor particularly pleasant; whereas blue induces a mood of devotion and humility. If we allow these various experiences of colour to penetrate right into us, we can realise how it is that when anything in the spiritual world comes at us in the aggressive way red does in physical life, it is something corresponding to the colour red. When we encounter something which calls up a mood of humility, this has the same effect as the experience of blue or blue-violet in the physical world. We can simplify this by saying: we have experienced red or blue in the spiritual world. Otherwise, for the sake of precision, we should always have to say: we have experienced something there in the way that red, or blue, is experienced in the physical world. To avoid so many words, one says simply that one has seen auric colours which can be distinguished as red, blue, green, and so on.

But we must realise thoroughly that this making our way into the super-sensible, this setting aside of all that comes to us through the senses, is always present as a concrete experience. And in the course of this experience we always have the feeling I described yesterday, as if thinking had become an organ of touch extending throughout the human organism, so that spiritually we feel that a new world is opening out and we are touching it. This is not yet the real spiritual world, but what I might call the etheric or formative-forces world. Anyone who would learn to know the etheric must grasp it in this way. For no speculation, no abstract reflection, about the etheric can lead to true knowledge of it. In this thinking that has become real we live with our own formative-forces or etheric body, but it is a different kind of living from life in the physical body. I should like to describe this other way by means of a comparison.

When you look at one of your fingers, you recognise it as a living member of your organism. Cut it off, and it is no longer what it was; it dies. If this finger of yours had a consciousness, it would say: I am no more than a part of your organism, I have no independent existence. That is what a man has to say directly he enters the etheric world with Imaginative cognition. He no longer feels himself as a separate being, but as a member of the whole etheric world, the whole etheric cosmos. After that he realises that it is only by having a physical body that he becomes a personality, an individuality. It is the physical body that individualises and makes of one a separate being.

We shall indeed see how even in the spiritual world we can be individualised—but I will speak of that later. If we enter the spiritual world in the way described, we are bound at first to feel ourself as just one member of the whole etheric Cosmos; and if our etheric body were to be cut off from the cosmic ether, it would mean for us etheric death. It is very important to grasp this, so that we may understand properly what has to be said later about a man's passage through the gate of death.

As I pointed out yesterday, this Imaginative experience in the etheric, which becomes a tableau of our whole life from birth up to the present moment of our existence on Earth, is accompanied by an extraordinarily intense feeling of happiness. And the flooding of the whole picture-world by this inward, wonderfully pleasurable feeling is a man's first higher experience.

We must then be able—as I also mentioned yesterday—to take all we have striven for through Imagination, through our life-tableau, and make it all disappear at will. It is only when we have thus emptied our consciousness that we understand how matters really are in the spiritual world. For then we know that what we have seen up to now was not the spiritual world, but merely an Imaginative picture of it. It is only at this stage of empty consciousness that—just as the physical world streams into us through our senses—so the spiritual world streams into us through our thinking. Here begins our first real experience, our first real knowledge, of the objective spiritual world. The life-tableau was only of our own inner world. Imaginative cognition reveals only this inner world, which appears to higher knowledge as a picture-world, a world of cosmic pictures. The Cosmos itself, together with our own true being, as it was before birth, before our earthly existence, appear first at the stage of Inspiration, when the spiritual world flows into us from outside. But when we have arrived at being able to empty our consciousness, our whole soul becomes awake; and in this stage of pure wakefulness we must be able to acquire a certain inner stillness and peace. This peace I can describe only in the following way.

Let us imagine we are in a very noisy city and hear the roar of it all around us. This is terrible—we say—when, from all sides, tumult assails our ears. Suppose it to be some great modern city, such as London. But now suppose we leave this city, and gradually, with every step we take as we walk away, it becomes quieter and quieter. Let us imagine vividly this fading away of noise. Stiller and stiller it becomes. Finally we come perhaps to a wood where all is perfectly silent; we have reached the zero-point where nothing can be heard.

Yet we can go even further. To illustrate how this can happen, I will use a quite trivial comparison. Suppose we have in our purse a certain sum of money. As we spend it from day to day, it dwindles, just as the noise dwindles as we leave the town. At length comes the day when there is nothing left—the purse is empty. We can compare this nothingness with the silence. But what do we do next if we are not to grow hungry? We get into debt. I am not recommending this; it is meant only as a comparison. How much have we then in our purse? Less than nothing; and the greater the debt, the more we have less than nothing.

And now let us imagine it to be the same with this silence. There would be not only the absolute peace of the zero-point of silence, but it would go further and come to the negative of hearing, quieter than quiet, more silent than silence. And this must in fact happen when, in the way described yesterday, we are able through enhanced powers to reach this inner peace and silence. When, however, we arrive at this inner negative of audibility, at this peace greater than the zero-point of peace, we are then so deeply in the spiritual world that we not only see it but hear it resounding. The world of pictures becomes a world of resounding life; and then we are in the midst of the true spiritual world. During the moments we spend there we are standing, as it were, on the shore of existence; the ordinary sense-world vanishes, and we know ourselves to be in the spiritual world. Certainly—I will say more of this later—we must be properly prepared so that we are at all times able to return. But there is something else to come—an experience previously unknown. Directly this peace is achieved in the empty consciousness, what I have described as an inwardly experienced, all-embracing, cosmic feeling of happiness gives way to an equally all-embracing pain. We come to feel that the world is built on a foundation of cosmic suffering—of a cosmic element which can be experienced by the human being only as pain. We learn the penetrating truth, so willingly ignored by those who look outside themselves for happiness, that everything in existence has finally to be brought to birth in pain. And when, through Initiation-knowledge, this cosmic experience of pain has made its impression upon us, then out of real inner knowledge we can say the following:

If we study the human eye—the eye that reveals to us the beauty of the physical world, and is so important for us that through it we receive nine-tenths of the impressions that make up our life between birth and death—we find that the eye is embedded in a bodily cavity which originates from a wound. What was done originally to bring about the eye-sockets could be done to-day only by actually cutting out a hollow in the physical body. The ordinary account of evolution gives a much too colourless impression of this. These sockets into which the eyeballs were inserted from outside—as indeed the physical record of evolution shows—were hollowed out at a time when man was still an unconscious being. If he had been conscious of it, it would have involved a painful wounding of the organism.

Indeed, the whole human organism has been brought forth out of an element which for present-day consciousness would be an experience of pain. At this stage of knowledge we have a deep feeling that, just as the coming forth of the plants means pain for the Earth, so all happiness, everything in the world from which we derive pleasure and blessing, has its roots in an element of suffering. If as conscious beings we could suddenly be changed into the substance of the ground beneath our feet, the result would be an endless enhancement of our feeling of pain.

When these facts revealed out of the spiritual world are put before superficially-minded people, they say: “My idea of God is quite different. I have always thought of God in His power as founding everything upon happiness, just as we would wish.” Such people are like that King of Spain to whom someone was showing a model of the universe and the course of the stars. The King had the greatest difficulty in understanding how all these movements occurred, and finally he exclaimed: “If God had left it to me, I would have made a much simpler world.”

Strictly speaking, that is the feeling of many people where knowledge and religion are concerned. Had God left the creation to them, they would have made a simpler world. They have no idea how naive this is!

Genuine Initiation-knowledge cannot merely satisfy men's desire for happiness; it has to guide them to a true understanding of their own being and destiny as they come forth from the world in the past, present and future. For this, spiritual facts are necessary, instead of something which gives immediate pleasure. But there is another thing which these lectures should indeed bring out. Precisely by experiencing such facts, if only through knowing them conceptually, people will gain a good deal that satisfies an inward need for their life here on Earth. Yes, they will gain something they need in order to be human beings in the fullest sense, just as for completeness they need their physical limbs.

The world we meet in this way when we go on beyond Imagination into the stillness of existence, out of which the spiritual world reveals itself in colour and in sound—this world differs essentially from the world perceived by the senses. When we are living with it—and we have to live with the spiritual world when it is present for us—we see how all sense-perceptible, physical things and processes really proceed from out of the spiritual world. Hence as earthly men we see only one half of the world; the other half is occult, hidden from us. And through every opening, every happening, in the physical-material world, one might say, this hidden half reveals its spiritual nature first in the pictures of Imagination, and then through its own creative activity in Inspiration. In the world of Inspiration we can feel at home, for here we find the origins of all earthly things, all earthly creations. And here, as I have indicated, we discover our own pre-earthly existence.

Following an old image, I have called this world, lying beyond that of Imagination, the astral world—the name is not important—and what we bring along with us from that world, and have carried into our etheric and physical bodies, we may speak of as our astral body. In a certain sense, it encloses the Ego-organisation. For higher knowledge, accordingly, the human being consists of four members: physical body, etheric or formative-forces body, astral body, and Ego-organisation. Knowledge of the Ego, however, entails a further super-sensible step, which in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, I have called “Intuition”. The term Intuition may easily be misunderstood because, for example, anyone with imaginative, poetic gifts will often give the name of intuition to his sensitive feeling for the world. This kind of intuition is only a dim feeling; yet it has some relation to the Intuition of which I am speaking. For just as earthly man has his sense-perceptions, so in his feeling and his will he has a reflection of the highest kind of cognition, of Intuition. Otherwise he could not be a moral being. The dim promptings of conscience are a reflection, a kind of shadow-picture, of true Intuition, the highest form of cognition possible for man on Earth.

Earthly man has in him something of what is lowest, and also this shadow-picture of what is highest, accessible only through Intuition. It is the intermediate levels that are lacking in him; hence he has to acquire Imagination and Inspiration. He has also to acquire Intuition in its purity, in its light-filled inner quality. At present it is in his moral feeling, his moral conscience, that he possesses an earthly image of that which arises as Intuition. Hence we can say that when a man with Initiation-knowledge rises to actual Intuitive knowledge of the world, of which previously he has known only the natural laws, the world becomes as intimately connected with him on earth as only the moral world is now. And this is indeed a significant feature of human life on Earth—that out of a dim inner presentiment we connect with the highest realm of all something which, in its true form, is accessible only to enhanced cognition.

The third step in higher knowledge, necessary for rising to Intuition, can be achieved only by developing to its highest point a faculty which, in our materialistic age, is not recognised as a cognitional force. What is revealed through Intuition can be attained only by developing and spiritualising to the highest degree the capacity for love. A man must be able to make this capacity for love into a cognitional force. A good preparation for this is to free ourselves in a certain sense from dependence on external things; for instance, by making it our regular practice to picture our past experiences not in their usual sequence but in reverse order.

In ordinary passive thinking we may be said to accept world events in an altogether slavish way. As I said yesterday: In our very thought-pictures we keep the earlier as the earlier, the later as the later; and when we are watching the course of a play on the stage the first act comes first, then the second, and so on to a possible fifth. But if we can accustom ourselves to picture it all by beginning at the end and going from the fifth act back through the fourth, third, second, to the first, then we break away from the ordinary sequence—we go backwards instead of forwards. But that is not how things happen in the world: we have to strain every nerve to call up from within the force to picture events in reverse. By so doing we free the inner activity of our soul from its customary leading-strings, and we gradually enable the inner experiences of our soul and spirit to reach a point where soul and spirit break loose from the bodily and also from the etheric element. A man can well prepare himself for this breaking away if every evening he makes a backward survey of his experiences during the day, beginning with the last and moving back. When possible even the details should be conceived in a backward direction: if you have gone upstairs, picture yourself first on the top step, then on the step below it, and so on backwards down all the stairs.

You will probably say: “But there are so many hours during the day, full of experiences.” Then first try taking episodes—picturing, for instance, this going up and down stairs in reverse. One thus acquires inner mobility, so that gradually one becomes able to go back in imagination through a whole day in three or four minutes.

But that, after all, is only the negative half of what is needed for enhancing and training spiritually our capacity for loving. This must be brought to the point when, for example, we lovingly follow each stage in the growth of a plant. In ordinary life this growth is seen only from outside—we do not take part in it. We must learn to enter into every detail of plant-growth, to dive right down into the plant, until in our own soul we become the plant, growing, blossoming, bringing forth fruit with it, and the plant becomes as dear to us as we are to ourselves. In the same way we can go above the plants to picture the life of animals, and down to the minerals. We can feel how the mineral forms itself into the crystal, and take inward pleasure in the shaping of its planes, corners, angles, and having a sensation as of pain in our own being when the minerals are split asunder. Then, in our souls, we enter not only with sympathy but with our will into every single event in nature.

All this must be preceded by a capacity for love extending to mankind as a whole. We shall never be able to love nature in the right way until we have first succeeded in loving all our fellow-men. When we have in this way won through to an understanding love for all nature, that which made itself perceptible first in the colours of the aura, and in the resounding of the spheres, rounds itself out and takes on the outlines of actual spiritual Beings.

Experiencing these spiritual Beings, however, is a different matter from experiencing physical things. When a physical object is in front of me, for example this clock, I stand here with the clock there, and can experience it only by looking at it from outside. My relation to it is determined by space. In this way one could never have any real experience of a spiritual Being. We can have it only by entering right into the spiritual Being, with the aid of the faculty for loving which we have cultivated first towards nature. Spiritual Intuition is possible only by applying—in stillness and emptiness of consciousness—the capacity for love we can first learn in the realm of nature. Imagine that you have developed this capacity for loving minerals, plants, animals and also man; you are now in the midst of a completely empty consciousness. All around is the peace which lies beyond its zero-point. You feel the suffering on which the whole existence of the world is founded, and this suffering is at the same time a loneliness. Nothing yet is there. But the capacity for love, flowing up from within in manifold forms, leads you on to enter with your own being into all that now appears visibly, audibly, as Inspiration. Through this capacity for love you enter first into one spiritual Being, then into another.

These Beings described in my book, Occult Science, these Beings of the higher Hierarchies—we now learn to live in our experience of them; they become for us the essential reality of the world. So we experience a concrete spiritual world, just as through eye and ear, through feeling and warmth, we experience a concrete physical world.

If anyone wishes to acquire knowledge particularly important for himself, he must have advanced to this stage. I have already mentioned that through Inspiration pre-earthly spiritual existence rises up in our soul; how in this way we learn what we were before we came down into an earthly body. When through the capacity for love we are able to enter clairvoyantly into spiritual Beings, in the way I have described, there is also revealed that which first makes a man, in his inner experience, a complete being. There is revealed what precedes our life in the spiritual world; we are shown what we were before ascending to the last spiritual life between death and rebirth. The preceding earthly life is revealed, and, one after another, the lives on Earth before that. For the true Ego, present in all the repeated lives on Earth, can manifest only when the faculty for love has been so greatly enhanced that any other being, whether outside in nature or in the spiritual world, has become just as dear to a man as in his self-love he is dear to himself. But the true Ego—the Ego that goes through all repeated births and deaths—is manifest to a man only when he no longer lives egotistically for momentary knowledge, but in a love that can forget self-love and can live in an objective Being in the way that in physical existence he lives in self-love. For this Ego of former lives on Earth has then become as objective for his present life as a stone or a plant is for us when we stand outside it. We must have learnt by then to comprehend in objective love something which, for our present subjective personality, has become quite objective, quite foreign. We must have gained mastery over ourselves during our present earthly existence in order to have any insight into a preceding one.

When we have achieved this knowledge, we see the complete life of a man passing rhythmically through the stages of earthly existence from birth or conception till death, and then through spiritual stages between death and rebirth, and then returning again to Earth, and so on. A complete earthly life reveals itself as a repeated passing through birth and death, with intermediate periods of life in purely spiritual worlds. Only through Intuition can this knowledge be acquired as real knowledge, derived directly from experience.

I have had to describe for you—in outline to begin with—the path of Initiation-knowledge that must be followed in our time, at this present stage of human evolution, in order to arrive at true spiritual knowledge of the world and of man. But as long as human beings have existed there has been Initiation-knowledge, although it has had to take various forms in different evolutionary periods. As man is a being who goes through each successive earthly life in a different way, conditions for his inner development in the various epochs of world-evolution have to vary considerably. We shall be learning more about these variations in course of the next few days; to-day I should like to say only that the Initiation-knowledge which had to be given out in early times was very different from what has to be given out to-day. We can go back some thousands of years, to a time long before the Mystery of Golgotha, and we find how greatly men's attitude to both the natural world and the spiritual world differed from that of the present time, and how different, accordingly, was their Initiation-knowledge from what is appropriate today.

We have now a very highly developed natural science; I shall not be speaking of its most advanced side but only of what is imparted to children of six or seven, as general knowledge. At this comparatively early age a child has to accept the laws relating, let us say, to the Copernican world-system, and on this system are built hypotheses as to the origin of the universe. The Kant-Laplace theory is then put forward and, though this theory has been revised, yet in its essentials it still holds good. The theory is based on a primeval nebula, demonstrated in physics by an experiment intended to show the earliest conditions of the world-system. This primeval nebula can be imitated experimentally, and out of it, through the rotation of certain forces, the planets are assumed to have come into being, and the sun left behind. One of the rings split off from the nebula is thought to have condensed into the shape of the Earth, and everything else—minerals, plants, animals, and finally man himself—is supposed to have evolved on this basis. And all this is described in a thoroughly scientific way.

The process is made comprehensible for children by means of a practical demonstration which seems to show it very clearly. A drop of oil is taken, sufficiently fluid to float on a little water; this is placed on a piece of card where the line of the equator is supposed to come; a pin is run through the card and the card is whirled round. It can then be shown how, one after another, drops of oil detach themselves and rotate, and you can get a miniature planetary system out of the oil, with a sun left in the middle. When that has been shown to us in childhood, why should we think it impossible for our planetary system to have arisen out of the primeval nebula? With our own eyes we have seen the process reproduced.

Now in moral life it may be admirable for us to be able to forget ourselves, but in a demonstration of natural phenomena it is not so good! This whole affair of the drop of oil would never have worked if there had been no-one there to twirl the pin. That has to be taken into account. If this hypothesis is to hold good, a giant schoolmaster would have had to be there in the Cosmos, to start the primeval nebula revolving and keep it turning. Otherwise the idea has no reality.

It is characteristic of this materialistic age, however, to conceive only a fraction of the truth, a quarter, an eighth, or even less, and this fraction then lives with terribly suggestive power in the souls of men. Thus we persist to-day in seeing one side only of nature and of nature's laws.

I could give you plenty of examples, from different spheres of life, clearly showing this attitude towards nature: how—because a man absorbs this with the culture of the day—he considers nature to be governed by what is called the law of cause and effect. This colours the whole of human existence to-day. At best, a man can still maintain some connection with the spiritual world through religious tradition, but if he wishes to rise to the actual spiritual world, he must undertake an inner training through Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition—as I have pictured them. He must be led by Initiation-knowledge away from this belief in nature as permeated throughout by law, and towards a real grasp of the spiritual. Initiation-knowledge to-day must aim at leading men from the naturalistic interpretation of the Cosmos, now taken for granted, to a realisation of its spirituality.

In the old Initiation-knowledge, thousands of years ago, the very opposite prevailed. The wise men of the Mysteries, the leaders in those centres which were school, church, and art-school at the same time, had around them people who knew nothing of nature in the Copernican sense, but in their soul and spirit had an instinctive, intimate experience of the Cosmos, expressed in their myths and legends, which in the ordinary civilisation of to-day are no longer understood. About this too we shall have more to say. The experience that men had in those early days was instinctive; an experience of soul and spirit. It filled their waking hours with the dreamlike pictures of imagination; and from these pictures came the legends, the myths, the sayings of the gods, which made up their life. A man looked out into the world, experiencing his dreamy imaginations; and at other times he lived in the being of nature. He saw the rainbows, the clouds, the stars, and the sun making its speedy way across the heavens; he saw the rivers, the hills arising; he saw the minerals, plants, animals.

For primeval man, everything he saw through his senses was a great riddle. For at the time of which I am speaking, some thousands of years before the Mystery of Golgotha—there were both earlier and later times when civilisation was different—a man had an inward feeling of being blessed when dreamlike imaginations came to him. The external world of the senses, where all that he perceived of rainbow, clouds, the moving sun, and the minerals, plants, animals, was what the eye could see, while in the starry world he saw only what the pre-Copernican, Ptolemaic system recorded. This external world presented itself to people generally in a way that led them to say: “With my soul I am living in a divine-spiritual world, but there outside is a nature forsaken by the gods. When with my senses I look at a spring of water, I see nothing spiritual there; I see nothing spiritual in the rainbow, in the minerals, plants, animals, or in the physical bodies of men.” Nature appeared to these people as a whole world that had fallen away from divine spirituality.

This was how people felt in that time when the whole visible Cosmos had for them the appearance of having fallen away from the divine. To connect these two experiences, the inward experience of God and the outer one of a fallen sense-world, it was not merely abstract knowledge they needed, but a knowledge that could console them for belonging to this fallen sense-world with their physical bodies and their etheric bodies. They needed a consolation which would assure them that this fallen sense-world was related to all they experienced through their instinctive imaginings, through an experience of the spiritual which, though dim and dreamlike, was adequate for the conditions of those times. Knowledge had to be consoling.

It was consolation, too, that was sought by those who turned eagerly to the Mysteries, either to receive only what could be given out externally, or to become pupils of the men of wisdom who could initiate them into the secrets of existence and the riddles that confronted them.

These wise men of the old Mysteries, who were at the same time priests, teachers, and artists, made clear to their pupils through everything contained in their Mysteries—yet to be described—that even in this fallen world, in its rising springs, in the blossoming trees and flowers, in the crystal-forming minerals, in rainbow and drifting clouds and journeying sun there live those divine-spiritual powers which were experienced instinctively in the dreamlike imaginations of men. They showed these people how to reconcile the godforsaken world with the divine world perceived in their imaginations. Through the Mysteries they gave them a consoling knowledge which enabled them once more to look on nature as filled with the divine.

Hence we learn from what is told of those past ages—told even of the Grecian age—that knowledge now taught to the youngest children in our schools, that the sun stands still and the earth circles around it, for instance, is the kind of knowledge which in the old Mysteries was preserved as occult. What with us is knowledge for everyone was for that age occult knowledge; and explanations of nature were an occult science. As anyone can see who follows the course of human development during our civilisation, nature and nature's laws are the chief concern of men today; and this has led the spiritual world to withdraw. The old dreamlike imaginations have ceased. A man feels nature to be neutral, not entirely satisfying, belonging not to a fallen, sinful Universe, but to a Cosmos that by reason of inner necessity has to be as it is. He then feels more sharply conscious of himself; he learns to find spirituality in that one point only, and he discovers an inner urge to unite this inner self with God. All he now needs—in addition to his knowledge of nature and in conformity with it—is that a new Initiation-knowledge shall lead him into the spiritual world. The old Initiation-knowledge could start from the spirit, which was then experienced by people instinctively, and, embodied in the myths, could lead them on to nature. The new Initiation-knowledge must begin with a man's immediate experience to-day, with his perception of the laws of nature in which he believes, and from there it must point the way back to the spiritual world through Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition.

Thus, in human evolution, a few thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, we see the significant moment of time when men, starting out from an instinctive experience of the spirit, found their way to concepts and ideas which, as the most external form of occult science, included the laws of nature. To-day these laws of nature are known to us from childhood. In face of this indifferent, prosaic attitude to life, this naturalism, the spiritual world has withdrawn from the inner life of man. Today, Initiation-knowledge must point back from nature to the spirit. For the men of old, nature was in darkness, but the spirit was bright and clear. The old Initiation-knowledge had to carry the light of this brightness of the spirit into the darkness of nature, so that nature too might be illumined. Initiation-knowledge to-day has to start from the light thrown upon nature, in an external, naturalistic way, by Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Galileo, Kepler, Newton and others. This light has then to be rescued, given fresh life, in order to open the way for it to the spirit, which in its own light must be sought on the opposite path to that of the old Initiation.