The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If I attempt today to make the transition from the actual philosophical field to the field of the specialized sciences, then in our present epoch this transition is to be accomplished quite naturally through a consideration of the mathematical and physical, chemical, that is, the inorganic natural world , because by far the majority of present-day philosophical conceptions are constructed in such a way that philosophers base them on concepts and ideas gained from the field of science that is considered the most secure today, namely from mathematics and inorganic natural science.

If we wish to discuss the mathematical treatment of inorganic natural science, which is so popular today, we must always remember something that has already been mentioned in the opening speech: the connection that current thinking believes it can make with Kant, precisely with the introduction of mathematics into inorganic natural science, indeed into science in general.

What must be emphasized in this and also in a later context from the negative side, I say expressly from the negative side, has already been noticed by individual thinkers who are very far removed from the use of supersensible knowledge. Thus, the negative, that is, the rejection of the purely mathematical treatment of natural science, can be found, for example, in a thinker like Fritz Mauthner, who, out of a certain acumen in a negative sense, that is, in rejecting what appears as false claims of a false science, is not at all unhappy. And with regard to the question: What can current science not do? – we can learn a lot from a thinker like Fritz Mauthner, learning through the negative that he presents, and learning through the fact that he does not want to stop at this negative, but would like to advance to a positive realization.

Why shouldn't you also learn from such a negative thinker? If I was able to quote Ludwig Haller as saying yesterday that, in his opinion, Kant took the weapons from the arsenal of light to use them in the service of darkness, why should you not also borrow the weapons from the arsenal of darkness, even the deliberate darkness of knowledge as found in Fritz Mauthner, to use them in the service of light?

Attention is to be paid, as I said, to Kant's saying that there is only as much actual science in each individual discipline as there is mathematics in it.

If you study the history of the use of this Kantian saying up to the present day, you get an interesting example to answer the question of how to be a Kantian at all in modern times. For the people who refer to this saying believe that as much real science as there is mathematics in it is brought into every single science. But Kant means something quite different. Kant means: as much as he brings mathematics into science, that much is mathematics, that is, real science, and the rest is not science at all in the individual sciences.

You see, you become a Kantian if you thoroughly misunderstand a Kantian saying. For the Kantian approach in this area has something like the following logic: if I say, in a gathering in which there are a thousand people, there is as much genius in it as three ingenious people have contributed, I certainly do not mean that the thousand people have now been given the genius of the three people. Nor does Kant mean that the rest of science has acquired the scientific character of mathematics; rather, he means that only the small part that has remained mathematics even in the sciences is real science, but the rest is not science at all.

We must study such things seriously – and in an empirical age we must do so empirically, not a priori – so that such questions are not answered as they often are today, but so that we may come upon the truth.

Now, however, one can point out something else: the most outstanding mathematical thinkers of modern times define mathematics something like this: it would be the “science of sizes”. Well, today it is the science of sizes. But go back just a few centuries to the time when Cartesius and Spinoza found great satisfaction in presenting their philosophy “according to a mathematical method,” as they say, and you will find that what Cartesius and Spinoza wanted to bring into their philosophy as a mathematical method is quite different from what is to be brought into natural science as mathematics in more recent times.

If we go back to Descartes and Spinoza, we find that these two philosophers want to construct their philosophical system in such a way that there is just as much certainty in the transition from one proposition to another as there is in mathematics. That is to say, they want to build their philosophy according to the pattern of these mathematical methods; but not by introducing into their philosophy what is understood by mathematics today. So, by going back to Descartes and Spinoza, we have already associated a completely different meaning with the word mathematics. If we disregard the aspect that merely refers to quantities, we have associated the sense of the inner, secure transition from judgment to judgment, from conclusion to conclusion. We have considered the nature of mathematical thinking, not what we can call a science of quantities.

And let us go back even further. In ancient times, the word “mathematics” had a completely different meaning altogether. Then it was identical with the word science. This means that when one meant 'science', one spoke of 'mathesis' or 'mathematics', because in mathematization one found the certainty of an inner insight into a 'fact' present in consciousness. One associated the sense of 'knowledge' and 'science' with this word. And so a much more general concept has been transferred to the narrow field of the theory of quantities. Today we have every reason to remember such things, because we are faced with the necessity of looking again at what actually lies at the basis of mathematical thinking. What is the essential feature of mathematical thinking? The essential feature of mathematical thinking is precisely the transparency of the mathematical content of consciousness. If I draw a triangle and consider its three angles, alpha, beta, and gamma, and want to prove that the sum of these three angles is 180 degrees, then I do the following (see figure r): I draw a parallel to the base line through the uppermost point of the triangle, look at the ratio of the angles alpha and gamma to the alternate angles that arise at the parallel, and then, by observing how the three angles that arise at the parallel – gamma', alpha', and beta – are positioned in relation to one another and how they form an angle of 180 degrees, I have the proof that the three angles of the triangle are also 180 degrees. That is to say, what is present in the mathematical as a conscious fact right up to the lines of reasoning is manageable and accompanied by inner experience from beginning to end. And this is the basis of the certainty one feels in mathematical thinking: that everything that is present as a conscious fact is accompanied by inner experience right up to the judgment and the proof.

And when we then look at the external world, whose material foundations cannot be penetrated with such clarity, we still feel satisfied when observing external nature if we can at least follow its phenomena in the experience that first met us in clarity.

The certainty that one feels in this clarity of consciousness in mathematics becomes particularly apparent when one looks at what is universally recognized as a major advance in mathematics in the 19th century century: what emerged as “non-Euclidean geometry”, as “metageometry” in Lobatschewskij, Bolyai, Legendre and so on.

There we see how, based on the inner certainty of intuition, the Euclidean axioms are first modified and, by modifying the Euclidean axioms, possible other geometries than the Euclidean one are constructed, and how one then tries to cope with an inscrutable reality using what has been constructed as an extension of intuitiveness. All the ideas that have entered modern thought through this “meta-geometry” are basically factual proof of the certainty that one feels in the comprehensibility of mathematization.

And with regard to Euclidean space – for the spaces of the other geometries are simply other spaces – which is characterized by the fact that three coordinate axes perpendicular to one another have to be imagined , that what has been presented here as proof of the 180-degree nature of the three angles of a triangle applies to this Euclidean space. And everyone will realize that if the Euclidean axioms are modified, this may have a bearing on our space, in which we are – which is then precisely not Euclidean space, but perhaps an internally curved space – but that for Euclidean space, which can be comprehended, the Euclidean results must be assumed to be certain because of their comprehensibility. No one will doubt that.

And just when you see through these facts, then you will find: the application of mathematics to the field of natural science is based on the fact that one finds in the external world that which is first found internally, that, so to speak, the facts of the external world behave in such a way as corresponds to the mathematical results that we first found independently of this external world in inner contemplation.

But one thing is absolutely certain: I would say, the precondition for this inner vision of the mathematical is that this mathematical first appears to us as an image. The inner free activity of constructing, which we experience in mathematizing, is such an inner free activity only because nothing of what otherwise prevails within our human beingness, when, for example, we want or the like, following an instinct. From this, what arises as a stock of consciousness in the process of mathematization is, as it were, elevated to the point of becoming pictorial. In relation to what is “external natural reality”, the mathematical is unreality. And we feel the satisfaction in the application of the mathematical to the knowledge of nature precisely because we can recognize what we have freely grasped in pictorial form in the realm of being.

But precisely for this reason it must be admitted that on the one hand it is justified when such minds, which do not merely want to go to what natural reality as such shows in human observation as real, but want to go to the full, total reality, like Goethe, when such spirits — as Goethe particularly showed in his treatment of the “Theory of Colors” — do not want a total application of the mathematical to all of external reality. Goethe's rejection of mathematics arose precisely from the realization that, although what corresponds to the pictorial vividness of the mathematical can be found in external nature through mathematics, at the same time one thereby renounces everything qualitative. Goethe did not want to treat only the quantitative in external nature; he also wanted to include the qualitative.

On the other hand, however, it must be said that the whole inner greatness of mathematics is based on its pictorial nature, and that it is precisely in this pictorial nature that we must seek what gives it the character of an a priori science, a science that can be found purely through inner contemplation.

But at the same time, by mathematizing, one is actually outside of nature, in contrast to which mathematics is of particular interest. Nowhere does one grasp something that is effective in itself, but only the relationships of this effectiveness that can be expressed by mathematical formulas. When you calculate a future lunar eclipse in mathematical formulas, or, by inserting the corresponding variables in negative form, a lunar eclipse that has passed in the past, you must be aware that you never penetrate into the inner essence of what is happening, but only grasp the quantum of relationships with mathematical formulas from a certain point of view. That is to say, one must realize that one can never penetrate into the inner essential differentiation through mathematics if one understands mathematics in the narrow sense in which it is still often understood today.

But even within mathematics we can already see a kind of path that leads out of mathematics itself. From what I have just said, you can see that this path, which leads out of the mathematical, should be similar to the path we take when we submerge into nature, which has been thoroughly penetrated and is penetrating, with the purely pictorially mathematical, with the unpenetrated, ineffectively pictorially mathematical. There we submerge into something that, in a sense, intercepts us with our free mathematizing activity and constricts mathematical formulas into an event that is effective in itself, that is in itself something to which we have to say: we cannot fully grasp it with mathematics; in the face of the inner transparency of mathematics, this thing asserts its essential independence and its essential interiority.

This path, which is taken when one simply seeks the transition from the unreal mathematical way of thinking to the real scientific way of thinking, can in a certain way already be found today within the mathematical itself in a certain relation. And we see how it can be found if we look not outwardly but inwardly at the attempts that thinking has made in the transition from mere analytical geometry to projective or synthetic geometry, as presented by more recent science. I would like to explain what I mean by the sentence I have just uttered using a very elementary, an extremely elementary and well-known example of synthetic geometry.

When you do synthetic, newer projective geometry, you differ from the analytical geometer in that the analytical geometer works with mathematical formulas, that is, he calculates, counts, and so on. The synthetic geometer uses only the straightedge and the compass, and that which can arise in consciousness through the straightedge and the compass as a fact, which first emerges from intuition. But let us ask ourselves whether it also remains purely within intuition.

Let us imagine a line – what is called a line in ordinary geometry – and on this line three points. Then we have the following mathematical structure (see Figure 2): a line on which the three points I, II, III are located.

Now, there is – I can, of course, only hint at what I have to present here in the main lines, so to speak appealing to what you already know about the matter – there is another figure which, in a certain way, in its entire configuration, corresponds to the mathematical figure just drawn. And this other figure is created by treating three lines in a similar way to the way I have treated these three points here, and by treating a point in a similar way to the way I have treated the line here. So imagine that instead of the three points ], II, III, I draw three lines on the board, and instead of the line that goes through the three points, I draw a point (see Figure 3); and to create a correspondence, I take the point where the three lines intersect: I have drawn another figure here (Fig. 3). The point that I have drawn above with a small ringlet corresponds to the line on the left, the three, as they are called, rays that intersect at one point, and which I denote by I, II, III, correspond to the three points I, II, III, that lie on the line on the left (Fig. 2).

If you want to feel the full weight of this ruling, you have to take the exact wording as I have just pronounced it. You have to say: the point on the right (Figure 3), which I have marked with a small ring above, corresponds to the line on the left (Figure 2) on which the three points lie; and the rays I, II, III on the right correspond to the points I, II, III on the left. And in that the three rays I, II, III on the right intersect at the one point above, this intersection corresponds to the position of the three points I, II, III on the left on the straight line drawn on the left.

Thus stated, there is a very specific cognitive fact and a corresponding structure on the left opposite the structure on the right.

One can now – by remaining purely within the realm of the visual, that is, what can be constructed with compass and straightedge, without the need for calculation – proceed to the following state of consciousness: I draw a line again on the left, and again three points on this line (the lower line in Figure 4).

I have now – I ask you to please consider the way I express myself, which I will follow, as decisive for the facts – I have now drawn the line on the left, on which the three points i, 2, 3 are located. I will proceed and assume – please note the word I pronounce: “and assume” – I will proceed and then assume the following. I will connect the points to the left of one line with the points on the other line in a certain way and will thus obtain connecting lines that will intersect (see Figure 5). I will connect the point I with the point 3, the point III with the point i, the point I with the point 2, the point II with the point 1, the point III with the point 2, the point II with the point 3, and will get intersection points by these lines, which I can then again - I now assume - connect by a straight line. So my construction is carried out in such a clear and transparent way that I can actually do what I have just described. You can actually carry out this construction as follows (dotted line in Figure 5): You see, I have the three points of intersection, which I got in the way I described earlier, so that I can draw the dashed-dotted straight line through them.

I now assume that by adding another to the right-hand bundle of rays (Figure 3), as it is called, I have the same ratio in the ratio of the radiation as in the distance of the points lying on the left straight line. I shall therefore draw a second bundle of rays on the right (Figure 6), which, in relation to its radiating conditions, corresponds to the positional conditions of the points on the lines on the left. So I have drawn in another bundle of rays here (Figure 6) and call it I, 2, 3, assuming that i, 2, 3 corresponds to i, 2, 3 in relation to the points on the left.

And now I will perform the corresponding procedure on my two ray structures on the right, which I performed on my line and point structures on the left (Figure 5), only I have to take into account that a line on the left corresponds to a point on the right: while on the left I looked for a line connecting two points, on the right I have to look for a point that arises when two rays intersect. The intersection on the right should correspond to the connection on the left (the points of intersection in Figure 6 are marked by small circles, see Figure 7). You can see what I have done: if I connected III with i and 3 with I as points on the left, I brought I with 3 and i with III as lines to the intersection here on the right.

And if I have drawn two lines from the points on the left and brought them to the intersection at one point, I will now draw a line through the two points that I have obtained on the right (dotted line in Figure 7), and I will now carry out the same procedure with respect to the other rays. That is [the lecturer once again illustrates the correspondence between the circled intersections of Figure 7 and the connecting lines of Figure 5], I will bring II into intersection with i, I with 2, III with 2, II with 3; I will therefore look for the points of intersection on the right as I looked for the connecting lines on the left; and, as you see, I have sought these points of intersection on the right by bringing the rays to the intersection in order to draw lines through these points of intersection (dashed lines in Figure 7), just as I sought lines on the left by connecting the points in order to obtain the points of intersection of these intersecting lines (dotted lines in Figure 5).

The connecting lines – but the points of intersection that I obtained on the right – also intersect at a point indicated here by a small ring at the top (P in Figure 7), just as the three points that I obtained on the left lie on a straight line (dashed in Figure 5). That is to say, in the figure on the right, where lines are used instead of points and the connecting lines are intersections, I get a point where the three lines intersect, just as I got a line that passes through the three points on the left. I get a point for the line on the left.

Here I remain, proceeding purely from the realm of the intuitive, although within that which proceeds from intuition but which nevertheless leads to something else. And I ask you to consider the following. Suppose you look in the line, in the direction indicated by the (dashed) line on the left, which goes through the three points of intersection – Alpha, Beta, Gamma. Then you will look up at an intersection point that obscures the others, in relation to which the others are behind it (Figure 8). Here, in the line, you have not only “three points.” But as soon as you move on to a relationship of reality, something quite vivid occurs in relation to these three points: the point gamma is the one in front, and behind it are the points beta and alpha. You have clearly laid this out in the left-hand figure in the illustration.

If we now go through a completely legitimate procedure, which I have described, to the corresponding structure on the right, we have to consider a point instead of a line (P in Figure 9). When we consider this point, we must say that just as on the left an intersection point gamma arises from the connection of III with 2 and the connection of 3 with II, covering the other intersection points, so on the right the necessity arises to introduce what follows and thus, through the law of connection, to pass from the concrete to the non-concrete: On the right (Figure 9), the necessity arises to imagine the curled point (P) in such a way that the ray (Gamma), which is formed by connecting the points of intersection of the lines III and 2, II and 3, first intersects at the curled point with the ray (Beta) that is formed by the preceding ratio ( III with 1, I with 3); and we must imagine that within this curled point the intersections that arise through the three dashed lines also lie as three internally differentiated entities, just as on the left on the dash-dotted line the three points gamma, beta, alpha. That is, I must find the intersections arranged in the individual point on the right so that they coincide one above the other.

That means, in other words, nothing less than: Just as I have to think of the dashed-and-dotted line on the left in such a way that a front and back arises for the points gamma, beta, and alpha for an observing eye, so I have to think of a differentiation within the point, that is, a spatial expansion of zero, in all three dimensions. Seen from the way it has arisen out of this structure, I have to think of this point, not as something undifferentiated, but as having a front and a back. Here I am confronted with the necessity of not thinking of a point as neutral in all directions, but of thinking of the point as having a front and a back.

I am making a journey here, through which I am forced out of the free formation of the mathematical and into something where the objective passes over into an inner determination, into an inner being. You see, this journey is similar to the one through which I pass from the mathematically free formation to the acceptance of this formation from the inner determination within the natural order. And by passing from analytical to synthetic geometry, I get the beginning of the path that is shown to me from mathematics to inorganic natural science.

Then, basically, it is only a small step to something else. By continuing these considerations, to which I have now pointed, one can also come to an inner understanding of the following state of consciousness: if one pursues purely with the help of projective, synthetic geometry how a hyperbola relates to an asymptote, then one finds purely intuitively that on the one hand, say at the upper right, the asymptote ptote approaches the hyperbola but never reaches it, but you still get the idea that the hyperbola comes back from the lower left with the other branch, and the asymptote also comes back from the lower left with its other side. In other words, through this relationship between asymptote and hyperbola I get something that I could draw on the board for you in something like the following (Figure 10): at the top right, the asymptote, the straight line, approaches the hyperbola ever closer. I have added a shading there to express what kind of relationship the asymptote actually has to the hyperbola. It is getting closer and closer to him, it wants to get to him, it is getting closer and closer to the essence of its relationship to him. If you now follow this relationship upwards to the right, you will finally come to the conclusion, through purely projective thinking – I can only hint at this here – that the direction of the line that you have upwards to the right, be it the hyperbola or the asymptote, coming from the lower left, , coming from the lower left, the hyperbolast and the asymptote, and this in such a way that it leaves the hyperbolast more and more with its being in the hatched suggestion.

So that we can say: this asymptote has a remarkable property. As it ascends to the right, it turns towards the hyperbola with its relationship to the hyperbola; as it comes up again from the bottom left, it turns away from the hyperbola with its relationship to the hyperbola. This line, the asymptote, when I look at it in its entirety, in its totality, has a front and a back again. That is why I was able to draw the shading on one side one time and on the other side the next. I come again into an inner differentiation of the linear, as I come into an inner differentiation when I force the purely mathematical pictorial into the realm of natural occurrence. That is, I approach what occurs as differentiation in the natural occurrence when I want to grasp the mathematical structures themselves in the right way with the help of projective geometry.

What happens through projective geometry can never be done in the same way through mere analytic geometry. For mere analytic geometry, by constructing in coordinates and then searching for the end points of the abscissas and ordinates in its computational form, remains, in its form, completely outside the curve or outside the structure itself. Projective geometry does not stop at the curve and the figure, but penetrates into the inner differentiation of the figure: to the point where one must distinguish between front and back – to the straight line where one must also distinguish between front and back. I have only indicated these properties because of the limited time available. I could also mention other properties, for example, a certain curvature ratio that the point extended in the three spatial dimensions has within itself, and so on.

If you really follow the path from analytical geometry into synthetic geometry with an open mind, if you see how you are, I would say, caught up in something that already approaches reality is already approaching reality, how this reality is present in the external nature, then one has the same inner experience, exactly the same inner experience that one has when one ascends from the ordinary concept of the mind, from ordinary logic, to the imaginative. One must only continue in imaginative cognition. But one has given the beginning when one begins to move from analytical geometry to synthetic. One notices there the interception of what arises from the determination by external reality, after which one has grasped the result, and one notices the same in imaginative cognition.

And now, what is the opposite path within spiritual science to that which leads from ordinary objective knowledge to imaginative knowledge? It would be the one that led from intuition down to inspired knowledge. But there we already find that we are standing inside the real. For with intuition we stand inside the real. And we move away from the real. Descending from intuition to inspiration, we again move away from the real. And when we come down to imagination, we have only the image of the real within.

This path is at the same time the one that the real undergoes in order to become our object of knowledge. Of course, in intuition we are immersed in reality. We move away from reality to inspiration, to imagination, and arrive at our objective knowledge. We then have this in our present knowledge. We make the path from reality to our knowledge. In a sense, we first stand within reality and depart from this reality to arrive at unreal knowledge. On the path we take from analytical geometry into projective or synthetic geometry, we try to move in the opposite direction again, from purely intellectual analytical geometry to where we can begin to think in real terms if we want to achieve anything at all. We are approaching the re-realization of nature, which it undergoes by wanting to become knowledge, by realizing unreal knowledge.

You see, there is no need to assume that our modern spiritual science, as it appears here, wanted to do mathematics differently than mathematicians do when they do mathematics in their own way. There is no need to do much else in the fields that a quantitative natural science has already entered today, except to look for special experimental setups that lead from the quantitative into the qualitative. And when this external quantitative natural science today presents modern anthroposophy with its 'sound results', it is a bit like when someone reads a poem that touches on completely different regions, and someone says: Yes, I cannot decide through my state of mind whether one can live in a poem, but I know something for sure: that two times two is four! No one doubts that two times two is four; nor does anyone doubt what modern inorganic natural science provides who wants to advance to spiritual science. But there is no particular objection to the content of a poem, for example, if you hold up two times two is four to it.

What is at issue, however, is that the individual sciences should seriously and courageously take the path towards a true knowledge of reality that Anthroposophy offers, towards which they are already particularly tending, towards which they want to go. And while some people today, in fruitless scepticism, want to create darkness over what they, often rightly, perceive as the limits of knowledge of nature, anthroposophy wants to start to ignite the light of spiritual knowledge where natural science becomes dark.

And so it will perhaps not make much of a departure from the methods of the sciences mentioned today; but it will present the significance, the inner value of the sciences that have been spoken of today to humanity and will thereby ensure that people know why they penetrate into existence with mathematics, not just why they arrive at a certain certainty with mathematics. For in the end it is not a matter of developing mere products of certainty. We could close ourselves in the narrowest circle and go round and round in the narrowest circle if we only wanted to hold on to “the most certain”. Rather, it is a matter of expanding knowledge. But this cannot be found if one shies away from the path out of inner experience into the outer, into being differentiated in itself. This path is even hinted at in many ways in present-day mathematics and mathematical science. One must only recognize it and then act scientifically in the sense of this knowledge.

Closing Remarks on the Disputation

Dear attendees! Partly because of the late hour and partly for other reasons, I will not say much more than a few remarks related to what has been presented and discussed this evening.

I would like to return very briefly to the question regarding Professor Rein for the reason that one circumstance in this matter should be emphasized sharply.

I am well aware that not much of approval can be said about my “Philosophy of Freedom” by a Herbartian, especially one who has gone through the historical school. This was evident almost immediately after the publication of The Philosophy of Freedom in 1894. One of the first reviews that appeared was by the Herbartian Robert Zimmermann. But I must say that, despite the fact that this review was extremely critical, I was pleased with it because some really great points of view were put forward in opposition at the time. As to how necessary the relationship must be between a Herbartian evaluation and what my Philosophy of Freedom contains, I have not the slightest doubt. But it is a pity that I do not have Professor Rein's review of The Philosophy of Freedom here and could quote the passage as I would like to. It has just been brought to me, and I can therefore say some things even more precisely than would otherwise be possible on the basis of the review. So let me quote from this review, which begins with the words: “In times of such a low level of morality as the German people have probably never experienced, it is doubly important to defend the great landmarks of morality, as established by Kant and Herbart, and not to allow them to be shifted in favor of relativistic tendencies. The words of Baron von Stein, that a nation can only remain strong through the virtues by which it has become great, must be considered one of the most important tasks in the midst of the dissolution of all moral concepts.

The fact that a writing by the leader of the anthroposophists in Germany, Dr. R. Steiner, is involved in this dissolution must be particularly regretted, since one cannot deny the idealistic basic feature of this movement, which aims at a strong internalization of the individual human being, and in its plan of the threefold structure of the social body can find healthy thoughts that promote the welfare of the people. But in his book “The Philosophy of Freedom” (Berlin 1918), he takes his individualistic approach to such an extreme that it leads to the dissolution of the social community and must therefore be fought.

You can clearly see here that the “Philosophy of Freedom” is said to have emerged from the dissolution of all moral concepts and so on – and one can believe that, that it can be the opinion of one man.

Now, a large part of those present here know my views on scientific accuracy, on scientific conscientiousness, and above all, that one should first properly educate oneself about what one writes. To associate the Philosophy of Freedom, which appeared in 1894, even stylistically, with what is implied in the first sentences, is a frivolity. And such frivolity cannot be excused by the fact that the author, who works as a professor of pedagogy at a university, has by no means — as I believe has been said — “gone beyond the bounds of truly objective judgment.” The point is that we can only bring about a recovery of precisely those conditions, which have been discussed here this evening in a rather hearty way, if we do not make ourselves guilty of the same carelessness, but if we strictly exercise scientific conscientiousness precisely towards those who, by virtue of their office, have the task of educating young people. We must not allow those who have this profession to overlook the circumstances and times in which a work was written that they want to judge. That is the first thing I have to say.

Then there is the way of quoting. In this article you will find an incredible way of tearing sentences out of context and then not taking up what is said in my “Philosophy of Freedom”, but rather what the author of the article thinks he is entitled to take up, based on his own opinion, and what can be inferred from his interpretation of the sentences he has quoted.

Anyone who takes the trouble to really read The Philosophy of Freedom will see that it deals in a completely clear way with how to avoid the misunderstandings that Professor Rein criticizes when sentences are taken out of context in any way.

His description of how the Philosophy of Freedom is taken out of its historical context is matched by his placing it in impossible contexts: “If we listen to Dr. Steiner speak, we might be tempted to see him as an apostle of ethical libertinism. He also felt this and countered the objection, which goes: If every person only strives to live out and do as he pleases, then there is no difference between good action and crime. Every crookedness that lies in me has the same claim to be realized as the intention to serve the general good. Dr. Steiner seeks to refute this objection by pointing out that man may only claim the freedom demanded if he has acquired the ability to rise to the intuitive idea content of the world. To acquire this ability is the task of the anthroposophist, who is to rise to the standpoint of ethical individualism.

Now, please ask yourself whether someone is allowed to write such sentences as an assessment of Philosophy of Freedom. Philosophy of Freedom was published in 1894, before the term anthroposophist was coined. Professor Rein also places the “Philosophy of Freedom” in a milieu that was an impossible one for the “Philosophy of Freedom” at the time of its publication, apart from the trivialities that come later, where he speaks of it as an ethics for anthroposophists and angels and the like, and so on.

It is not at all my intention to cast a slur on what I might call the opposing point of view, but to show that this way of judging spiritual matters is part and parcel of the whole world of the person who has to leave our culture behind if the conditions that should be discussed here today are to improve. I may well say that I have carefully considered whether or not I should finally speak these words here. But it seems to me that the matter is important enough, and I believe that I have not crossed the boundary of objectivity, that I have actually confined myself essentially to characterizing the way of judging and not the “point of view” before you here. I know that it is always somewhat precarious to discuss family matters. However, I cannot change my approach, although I am not bound by it anyway, as I have no father-in-law among my colleagues!

Now I would like to make a few other comments, taking up a sentence that has also been discussed here today. Just to speak symptomatically, I would like to relate a small experience, but only to illustrate.

It has been said that it is true that not all students who come to a university or college are ready for that college; but the professors at the colleges cannot be held responsible for that, and these students are simply sent to them by the secondary schools. Yes, but I really could not help but think of a conversation that had once been held in my presence with one of the most famous literary historians at German universities. This literary historian was also on the examination board for grammar school teaching. – I don't really like to do it, but today times are so serious that one must also bring up such things. – He said: Yes, with these grammar school teachers, we know them, we have to examine them, but we sometimes have very strange thoughts when we have to let these camels out as grammar school teachers!

Well, as I said, it is just an illustration that I would like to give through this experience. I don't know if it speaks very strongly for the university teachers when an examiner and famous university teacher deigns to call the teachers of youth who are sent to the grammar schools “camels”. I'm not saying it, but the man in question did say it. I am only quoting. Well, every thought must be thought through to the end. And I believe that when the thought is thought through to the end, university teachers should not complain when incompetent high school graduates enter the university gates; after all, it was the university teachers who sent out the high school teachers who prepared these graduates for them. So in the end it is necessary, as I said, to think the idea through to the end. And that shows us that, if with some indulgence, we may already apply the concept of guilt in a certain respect.

But today some very strange words have been said, you see. And I must say that one of the strangest words, almost one of the little piquant ones, was this: that it was said that a university teacher had said: We expect deliverance from the student body! I am just surprised that he did not also say: From the moment we sit down on the school benches and promote the students to the professorship. You see, it is necessary to follow up the worn-out judgments that are buzzing around the present and that are nevertheless the cause of our current conditions. Of course, in doing so, one does not fail to recognize that there are exceptions and exceptions everywhere, and one can, for example, subscribe to much, very much, of what has been said with regard to art instruction at the academies. But on the whole, one must say that there is not so much reason to have good hopes for the future if one is not prepared to join forces, not only externally, through some association or the like, to join forces to move towards some vague goal, but when one is prepared – only when one is prepared – to truly engage in a thorough renewal and revival of our spiritual life itself. The actual damage is already encroaching on our spiritual life itself. And anyone who is familiar with the whole structure of anthroposophical life, how it has led, for example, to this School of Spiritual Science, certainly does not need to be told that “everyone must be free to express their worldview and to speak out of their own free conviction!” The many malicious natures who are here today to say all kinds of inaccurate things about the anthroposophical movement and related matters will immediately take advantage of this and say: These anthroposophists want their world view to be represented everywhere.

Now, the Waldorf school was founded by our community, without in any way founding a school of world view. The opposite of a world view school should be founded. This has been emphasized time and again. And anyone who believes that the Waldorf school is “an anthroposophical school” does not know it at all. And nor can it be said here at the Goetheanum that anyone is restricted in their free expression of their most deeply held convictions.

But what I will always fight for, despite all freedom, individuality and intellectualism, is scientific conscientiousness, thoroughness, being informed about what one is writing about, not just putting forward one's own opinion because one believes that under certain circumstances damage could arise from something that one has not really taken the trouble to understand, and from which one has plucked a few sentences in order to write an article.

I say this quite dispassionately. You know that I usually use the things that are done as “reviews” of anthroposophy only as a proximate occasion to characterize general conditions. I am not really interested in the personal attacks, only to the extent that they point to what needs to be changed in our circumstances. And here I do believe that the fellow student from Bonn, in his hearty way, has struck the right note, a right note to the extent that the students he meant really cannot find what they are looking for at the universities or colleges today.

But not “because of the curriculum”, not “because the right choices are not being made”, but because today's youth quite instinctively – without being fully aware of it – craves something from the bottom of their hearts that is not yet present within the general scientific framework, but which must be created within the general scientific framework. This is what awaits young people. This youth will certainly not fail to grasp with both hands when it is offered what it really wants: a truly new spirit. For such a new spirit is needed in the present.

This is basically the reason for the aversion to what emanates from anthroposophical spiritual science, even if one uses the phrase “one wants to accommodate every new thing”. When it asserts itself, then one does not do it after all. Because basically one cannot do it at all. It would be of no use to conceal these things in any way, but rather they must be pointed out clearly and distinctly.

Then the question of the World School Association was raised here. I believe I expressed very clearly what I have to say about this World School Association in terms of its intentions at the end of our last School of Spiritual Science course here in the fall. I then again expressed in roughly the same way the necessity of founding such a general world school association in The Hague, in Amsterdam, in Utrecht, in Rotterdam and in Hilversum: that the possibility of working in a world school association depends on the conviction that a new spirit must enter into the general school system spreading in as many people as possible. I have pointed out that today it cannot depend on founding schools here or there that would stand alone and in which a method is applied that is widespread in this or that respect, but that the school system of modern civilization must be taken into hand on the basis of the idea of a self-supporting, liberated spiritual life, the school system for all categories, for all subjects.

As far as I am aware, the words and calls that I have spoken so far are the only things I have to report on. These words were intended to find an echo in the civilized population of the present day. I have no such response to report. And I think the fellow student from Bonn spoke a true word when he pointed out that ultimately the student body from whose hearts he spoke here is in the minority. I think it is very, very much in the minority, especially in Germany. But also otherwise – I don't want to be unkind to anyone – otherwise, from where we are not far away at all. This is shown by the attendance at this college course. He said: the majority of the student body is asleep! Yes, it also rages at times. But one can also sleep while raging with regard to the things at stake.

And with regard to the matters for which this demand for the World School Association has been raised, everyone is also sleeping peacefully in the broadest circles. And it must be said: people have not yet really become accustomed to how necessary it is to bring anthroposophical work into modern civilization. We must become accustomed to it, and I long for the day when I can report more fully on the question of the world school association. Today I still could not say much more than what I said at the end of the School of Spiritual Science courses here last fall, although what I said was intended to allow something completely different to be reported today.

But the same applies to other things, and it is very difficult to raise awareness of the issues that really matter in today's world.

In a lecture in Berlin, after Lloyd George had called a general election in England in the wake of a strike that had already broken out, I pointed out that you don't achieve anything with such things, that it's just a postponement. It seems that people took it as a mere catchphrase at the time. Now, please, see for yourself today, you could have done so for a few days already, whether what I said back then was just a catchphrase or whether it was perhaps born out of a deeper understanding of social interrelations and the necessity of social interrelations.

The difficulty is that today there are so few people with the enthusiasm that really makes them feel inwardly involved with what they are saying. And so I am always pleased when young people come forward who have something to say about how they find what they are looking for here or there. For I believe that from such impulses will emerge what we need for all insight, for all understanding: inner participation, inner participation that knows how strong the metamorphosis must be that leads us from the declining forces of an old civilization to the impulses of the new civilization. Yes, we need conscientious understanding, we need penetrating insight. But above all, we need what youth could bring out of its natural abilities. But we need not only insight, not only penetrating understanding of the truth, in the broadest circles of present-day civilized humanity, we need enthusiasm for the truth!

[ 1 ] Man learns to know the outer side of nature through perception; its deeper-lying driving powers reveal themselves within his own inner life as subjective experiences. In philosophical contemplation of the world and in artistic feeling and creating, his subjective experiences permeate his objective perceptions. What had to split itself into two parts in order to penetrate into the human spirit becomes again one whole. The human being satisfies his highest spiritual needs when he incorporates into the objectively perceived world what the world manifests to him within his inner life as its deeper mysteries. Knowledge and artistic creations are nothing other than perceptions filled with man's inner experiences. In the simplest judgment about a thing or event of the outer world, there can be found a human soul experience and an outer perception in inner association with one another. When I say that one body strikes another, I have already brought an inner experience into the outer world. I see a body in motion; it hits another one; this one also comes into motion as a consequence. The content of the perception cannot tell me more than this. I am not satisfied by this, however. For I feel that still more is present in the whole phenomenon than what mere perception gives me. I reach for an inner experience that will enlighten me about the perception. I know that I myself can set a body into motion by applying force, by striking it. I carry this experience over into the phenomenon and say that the one body strikes the other. “The human being never realizes just how anthropomorphic he is” (Goethe, Aphorisms in Prose, Kuerschner edition, Vol. 36, 2, p. 353). There are people who, from the presence of this subjective component in every judgment about the outer world, draw the conclusion that reality's objective core of being is inaccessible to man. They believe that man falsifies the immediate and objective factual state of reality when he lays his subjective experiences into reality. They say that because man can picture the world to himself only through the lens of his subjective life, all his knowledge is only a subjective, limitedly human one. Someone, however, who comes to consciousness about what manifests itself within the inner life of man will want to have nothing to do with such unfruitful assertions. He knows that truth comes about precisely through the fact that perception and idea permeate each other in the human process of knowledge. It is clear to him that in the subjective there lives what is most archetypically and most profoundly objective. “When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels himself in the world as though in a great, beautiful, worthy, and precious whole, when his harmonious sense of well-being imparts to him a pure free delight, then the universe, if it could experience itself, would; as having achieved its goal, exult with joy and marvel at the pinnacle of its own becoming and being.” The reality accessible to mere perception is only one half of complete reality; the content of the human spirit is the other half. If no human being ever confronted the world, then this second half would never come to living manifestation, to full existence. It would work, it is true, as a hidden world of forces; but the possibility would be taken from it of revealing itself in its own form. One would like to say that, without man, the world would reveal an untrue countenance. The world would be as it is, through its deeper forces, but these deeper forces would themselves remain cloaked by what they bring about. Within man's spirit they are delivered from their enchantment. Man is not there in order merely to make a picture for himself of a completed world; no, he himself works along with the coming into being of this world.

[ 2 ] The subjective experiences of different people take different forms. For those who do not believe in the objective nature of the inner world, that is one more reason to deny man the ability to penetrate into the being of things. For how can something be the being of things which appears to one person one way and to another person another way. For the person who recognizes the true nature of the inner world, there follows from the differences of inner experiences only that nature can express its rich content in different ways. The truth appears to each individual person in an individual garb. It adapts itself to the particularities of his personality. This is especially the case with the highest truths that are most important to man. In order to attain them, man carries over into the perceptible world his most intimate spiritual experiences, and along with them what is most individual in his personality. There are also generally accepted truths that every human being takes up without giving them an individual coloring. These are, however, the most superficial and trivial ones. They correspond to the general characteristics of man as a species which are the same for everyone. Certain qualities that are the same in all human beings also produce the same judgments about things. The way people regard things according to measurement and number is the same for everyone. Therefore everyone finds the same mathematical truths. But within the particular qualities by which the individual personality lifts himself from the general characteristics of his species, there also lies the basis for the individual forms which he gives to truth. The point is not whether the truth appears differently in one person than in another but rather whether all the individual forms coming into view belong to one single whole, to the one unified ideal world. The truth speaks different languages and dialects within the inner life of individual people; in every great human being it speaks an individual language which belongs only to this one personality. But it is always one truth which speaks there. If I know my relationship to myself and to the outer world, then I call it truth. And in this way each person can have his own truth, and it is after all always the same one.” This is Goethe's view. The truth is not some petrified, dead system of concepts, capable of assuming only one form; it is a living sea, within which the spirit of man lives, and which can show on its surface waves of the most varied form. “Theory, in and for itself, is of no use, but only inasmuch as it makes us believe in the connections of phenomena,” says Goethe. He values no theory that claims completeness once and for all and is supposed to represent in this form an eternal truth. He wants living concepts by which the spirit of the individual person, according to his individual nature, draws his perceptions together. To know the truth means for him to live in the truth. And to live in the truth is nothing other than, when looking at each individual thing, to watch what inner experience occurs when one stands in front of this thing. Such a view of human knowledge cannot speak of limits of knowing, nor of a restriction of knowing imposed by man's nature. For the questions which knowledge, according to this view, poses itself do not spring from the things; they ale also not imposed upon man by any other power lying outside of his personality. They spring from the nature of his personality itself. When man directs his gaze upon a thing, there then arises in him the urge to see more than what approaches him in his perception. And as far as this urge reaches, so far does his need for knowledge also reach. Where does this urge originate? Actually only from the fact that an inner experience feels itself stimulated within the soul to enter into a connection with the perception. As soon as the connection is accomplished, the need for knowledge is also satisfied. Wanting to know is a demand of human nature and not of the things. These can tell man no more about their being than he demands from them. Someone who speaks of a limitation of knowledge's capabilities does not know where the need for knowledge originates. He believes that the content of truth lies stored up somewhere, and that in man there lives only the indistinct wish to find access to the place where it is stored. But it is the very being of the things that works itself out of the inner life. of man and strives to where it belongs: to the perception. It is not after something hidden that man strives in the knowledge process but rather after the balancing out of two forces which work upon him from two sides. One can well say that without man there would be no knowledge of the inner life of things, for without him there would be nothing there through which this inner life could express itself. But one cannot say that there is something in the inner life of things which is inaccessible to man. The fact that still something else is present in things than what perception gives him, this man knows only because this something else lives within his own inner life. To speak of a further unknown something in things means to make up words about something which is not present.

[ 3 ] Those who are not able to recognize that it is the language of the things which is spoken in the inner life of man are of the view that all truth must penetrate into man from outside. Such persons hold fast either to mere perception and believe they can know the truth only through seeing, hearing, touching, through gathering together historical events, and through comparing, counting, calculating, weighing what is taken up out of the world of facts; or they are of the view that the truth can come to man only when it is revealed to him in a way set apart from knowledge; or, finally, they want through forces of a particular kind, through ecstasy or mystical vision, to come into possession of the highest insights which, in their view, the world of ideas accessible to thinking cannot offer them. In addition, metaphysicians of a particular sort connect themselves to those who think in the Kantian sense and to the one-sided mystics. To be sure, these seek through thinking to form concepts of the truth for themselves. But they seek the content for these concepts not in the human world of ideas but rather in a second reality lying behind the things. They believe themselves able, through pure concepts, either to determine something certain about a content of this kind or, at least, through hypotheses, to be able to form mental pictures of it. I am speaking here, to begin with, about the kind of people mentioned first, the fact fanatics. Every now and then they become conscious of the fact that, in counting and calculating, there already takes place with the help of thinking a working through of the content of perception. Then, however, they say that this thought work is merely the means by which man struggles to know the relationship of the facts. What flows from thinking in the act of working upon the outer world represents to them something merely subjective; they consider to be the objective content of truth, the valid content of knowledge, only what approaches them from outside with the help of thinking. They catch the facts, to be sure, in the net of their thoughts but allow objective validity only to what is caught. They overlook the fact that what is thus caught by thinking undergoes an exposition, an ordering, an interpretation, which it does not have in mere perception. Mathematics is a result of pure thought processes; its content is a spiritual, subjective one. And the mechanic, who pictures the processes of nature in mathematical relationships, can do this only under the presupposition that these relationships are founded in the nature of these processes. But this means nothing other than that within perception a mathematical order is hidden which only that person sees who has developed the mathematical laws within his spirit. Between the mathematical and mechanical perceptions and the most intimate spiritual experiences, however, there is no difference in kind but only in degree. And man can carry other inner experiences, other areas of his world of ideas over into his perceptions with the same justification as he does the results of mathematical research. The fact fanatic only seems to ascertain purely outer processes. He usually does not reflect upon' his world of ideas and its character as subjective experience. His inner experiences are also bloodless abstractions, poor in content, which are obscured by the powerful content of facts. The illusion to which he surrenders himself can last only as long as he remains at the lowest level of interpreting nature, as long as he merely counts, weighs, and calculates. At the higher levels the true nature of knowledge is soon borne in upon him. But one can observe about the fact fanatics that they stick primarily to the lower levels. They are therefore like an aesthetician who wants to judge a piece of music only by what can be calculated and counted in it. They want to separate the phenomena of nature from man. Nothing subjective must flow into observation. Goethe condemns this approach with the words, “Man in himself, insofar as he uses his healthy senses, is the greatest and most accurate physical apparatus that there can be, and that is precisely what is of the greatest harm to modern physics, that one has, as it were, separated experiments from man and wants to know nature merely through what manmade instruments show, yes wants to limit and prove thereby what nature can do.” It is fear of the subjective which leads to such a way of doing things and which comes from a misapprehension of the true nature of the subjective. “But man stands so high precisely through the fact that what otherwise could not manifest itself does manifest itself in him. For what is a string and all its mechanical divisions compared to the ear of the musician? Yes, one can say, what are the elemental phenomena of nature themselves compared to man who must first tame and modify them all in order to be able to assimilate them to some extent?” In Goethe's view the natural scientist should be attentive not only to how things appear but rather to how they would appear if everything that works in them as ideal driving forces were also actually to come to outer manifestation. Only when the bodily and spiritual organism of man places itself before the phenomena do they then reveal their inner being.

[ 4 ] Whoever approaches the phenomena in a spirit of observing them freely and openly, and with a developed inner life in which the ideas of things manifest themselves, to him the phenomena, it is Goethe's view, reveal everything about themselves. There stands in opposition to Goethe's world view, therefore, the one which does not seek the being of things within experienceable reality but rather within a second reality lying behind this one. In Fr. H. Jacobi Goethe encountered an adherent of such a world view. Goethe gives vent to his displeasure in a remark in the Tag- und Jahresheft (1811): “Jacobi's Of Divine Things made me unhappy; how could the book of such a beloved friend be welcome to me when I had to see developed in it the thesis that nature conceals God. With my pure, deep, inborn, and trained way of looking at things, which had taught me absolutely to see God in nature, nature in God, such that the way of picturing things constituted the foundation of my whole existence, would not such a peculiar, one-sidedly limited statement estrange me forever in spirit from this most noble man whose heart I revered and loved?” Goethe's way of looking at things gives him the certainty that he experiences an eternal lawfulness in his permeation of nature with ideas, and this eternal lawfulness is for him identical with the divine. If the divine did conceal itself behind the things of nature and yet constituted the creative element in them, it could not then be seen; man would have to believe in it. In a letter to Jacobi, Goethe defends his seeing in contrast to faith: [ 5 ] “God has punished you with metaphysics and set a thorn in your flesh but has blessed me with physics. I will stick to the reverence for God of the atheist (Spinoza) and leave to you everything you call, and would like to call, religion. You are for faith in God; I am for seeing.” Where this seeing ends, the human spirit then has nothing to seek. We read in his Aphorisms in Prose: “Man is really set into the midst of a real world and endowed with such organs that he can know and bring forth what is real and what is possible along with it. All healthy people are convinced of their existence and of something existing around them. For all that, there is a hollow spot in the brain, which means a place where no object is mirrored, just as in the eye itself there is a little spot that does not see. If a person becomes particularly attentive to this place, becomes absorbed with it, he then succumbs to an illness of the spirit, has inklings here of things of another world, which, however, are actually non-things and have neither shape nor limitations but rather, as empty night-spaces, cause fear and pursue in a more than ghost-like way the person who does not tear himself free,” Out of this same mood there is the aphorism, “The highest would be to grasp that everything factual is already theory, The blue of the heavens reveals to us the basic law of the science of colors. Only do not seek anything behind the phenomena; they are themselves the teaching.”

[ 6 ] Kant denies to man the ability to penetrate into the region of nature in which its creative forces become directly visible. In his opinion concepts are abstract units into which the human intellect draws together the manifold particulars of nature but which have nothing to do with the living unity, with the creative wholeness of nature from which these particulars really proceed. The human being experiences in this drawing together only a subjective operation. He can relate his general concepts to his empirical perception; but these concepts in themselves are no alive, productive, in such a way that man could see what is individual proceed out of them. For Kant concepts are dead units present only in man. “Our intellect is a capacity for concepts, i.e., it is a discursive intellect, for which, to be sure, it must be a matter of chance what and how different the particular thing might be which is given to it in nature and what can be brought under its concepts.” This is how Kant characterizes the intellect (¶ 77 of Critique of Judgment). The following necessarily results from this: “It is a matter of infinite concern to our reason not to let go of the mechanism of nature in its creations and not to pass it by in explaining them, because without this mechanism no insight into the nature of things can be attained. If one right away concedes to us that a supreme architect has directly created the forms of nature just as they have been from the very beginning, or has predetermined them in such a way that they, in nature's course, continually shape themselves upon the very same model, then even so our knowledge of nature has not thereby been furthered in the least; because we do not at all know that architect's way of doing things, nor his ideas which supposedly contain the principles of the possibilities of the beings of nature, and we are not able by him to explain nature from above downward, as it were (a priori)” (¶ 78 of the Critique of Judgment). Goethe is convinced that man, in his world of ideas, experiences directly how the creative being of nature does things. “When we, in fact, lift ourselves in the moral sphere into a higher region through belief in God, virtue, and immortality and mean to draw near to the primal being, so likewise, in the intellectual realm, it could very well be the case that we would make ourselves worthy, through beholding an ever-creating nature, of participating spiritually in its productions.” Man's knowledge is for Goethe a real living into nature's creating and working. It is given to his knowledge' 'to investigate, to experience how nature lives in creating.”

[ 7 ] It conflicts with the spirit of the Goethean world view to speak of beings that lie outside the world of experience and ideas accessible to the human spirit and that nevertheless are supposed to contain the foundations of this world. All metaphysics are rejected by this world view. There are no questions of knowledge which, rightly posed, cannot also be answered. If science at any given time can make nothing of a certain area of phenomena, then the reason for this does not lie with the nature of the human spirit but rather with the incidental fact that experience of this region is not yet complete at this time. Hypotheses cannot be set up about things which lie outside the region of possible experience but rather only about1 things which can sometime enter this region. A hypothesis can always state only that it is likely that within a given region of phenomena one will have this or that experience. In this way of thinking one cannot speak at all about things and processes which do not lie within man's sensible or spiritual view. The, assumption of a “thing-in-itself,” which causes perceptions in' man but which itself can never be perceived, is an inadmissible hypothesis. “Hypotheses are scaffolding which one erects before the building and which one removes when the building is finished; they are indispensable to the workman; only he must, not consider the scaffolding to be the building.” When confronted by a region of phenomena, for which all perceptions are; present and which has been permeated with ideas, the human spirit declares itself satisfied. It feels that within the spirit a living harmony of idea and perception is playing itself out.

[ 8 ] The satisfying basic mood which Goethe's world view has for] him is similar to that which one can observe with the mystics. Mysticism sets out to find, within the human soul, the primal ground of things, the divinity. The mystic, just like Goethe, is convinced that the being of the world becomes manifest to him in inner experiences. Only many a mystic does not regard immersion in the world of ideas to be the inner experience which matters the most to him. Many a one-sided mystic has approximately the same view as Kant about the clear ideas of reason. For him they stand outside the creative wholeness of nature and belong only to the human intellect. A mystic of this son seeks, therefore, by developing unusual states, for example, through ecstasy, to attain the highest knowledge, a vision of a; higher kind. He deadens in himself sense observation and the thinking based on reason and seeks to intensify his life of feeling. Then he believes he has a direct feeling of spirituality working in him, as divinity, in fact. He believes that in the moments when he succeeds in this God is living in him. The Goethean world view also arouses a similar feeling in the person who adheres to it. But the Goethean world view does not draw its knowledge from experiences that occur after observation and thinking have been deadened but rather draws them precisely from these two activities. It does not flee to abnormal states of human spiritual life but rather is of the view that the spirit's usual, naive ways of going about things are capable of such perfecting, that man can experience within himself nature's creating. “There are, after all, in the long run, I think, only the practical and self-rectifying operations of man's ordinary intellect that dares to exercise itself in a higher sphere.” Many a mystic immerses himself in a world of unclear sensations and feelings; Goethe immerses himself in the clear world of ideas. The one-sided mystics disdain the clarity of ideas. They regard this clarity as superficial. They have no inkling of what those persons sense who have the gift of immersing themselves in the living world of ideas, Such a mystic is chilled when he surrenders himself to the world of ideas. He seeks a world content that radiates warmth. But the content which he finds does not explain the world, It consists only of subjective excitements, in confused mental pictures, Whoever speaks of the coldness of the world of ideas can only think ideas, not experience them. Whoever lives the true life in the world of ideas, feels in himself the being of the world working in a warmth that cannot be compared to anything else. He feels the fire of the world mystery flame up in him. This is how Goethe felt as there opened up for him in Italy the view of nature at work, Then he knew how that longing is to be stilled which in Frankfurt he has his Faust express with the words:

Where shall I, endless nature, seize on thee?
Thy breasts are—where? Ye, of all life the spring,
To whom both Earth and Heaven cling,
Toward which the withering breast doth strain—

(Priest's translation)

[ 1 ] For a long time science came to a standstill in the presence of the organic. Its methods were not considered adequate to grasp life and its manifestations. Indeed, it was believed that every conformity to law such as is effective in inorganic Nature here ceases to exist. What was admitted with reference to the inorganic world—that a phenomenon is intelligible to us when we know its natural prerequisite conditions—was here simply denied. The organism was supposed to have been designed purposefully by the Creator according to a determinate plan. Each organ was supposed to have its predestined function; all questions here could be directed only to the discovery of what the purpose of this or that organ is; for what end this or that is present. Whereas, in the inorganic world, one gave attention to the prerequisite conditions of a thing, this was considered quite futile for the facts of life, and primary importance was attached to the purpose of a thing. Likewise in regard to the processes which accompany life, the question asked was not so much concerning the natural causes, as in the case of the physical phenomena, but these processes were supposed to be attributable to a special vital force. What was formed in the organism was supposed to be a product of this force, which simply took a position above other natural laws. In short, up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, science did not know how to deal with organisms. It was restricted to the sphere of the inorganic.

[ 2 ] In thus seeking the laws governing the organism, not in the nature of the objects, but in the thought which the Creator followed in forming them, men were cut off from any possibility of an explanation. How is that thought to be made known to me P I am limited to what I have before me. If this thing itself does not lay bare its laws within my thoughts, then my knowledge ceases. We cannot discuss in a scientific sense the divination of a plan held by a Being outside the thing itself.

[ 3 ] At the close of the eighteenth century, the point of view which almost universally prevailed was that there is no science which interprets the phenomena of life in the sense in which, for example, physics is an interpretive science. Indeed, Kant sought to give a philosophic basis for this opinion. He considered our intellect to be of such a nature that it can proceed only from the particular to the general. The particulars, the single things, are given to the intellect, he thought, and from these it abstracts its general laws. This form of thinking Kant called discursive, and he considered it the sole form belonging to man. Therefore, according to his opinion, there could not be any science except as regards those things in which the particular, of and for itself, is quite void of a concept, and is only subsumed under an abstract concept. In the case of organisms, Kant did not find this condition fulfilled. Here the single organism betrays a purposive—that is, a conceptual—arrangement. The particular bears traces of the concept in itself. But, according to the Königsberg philosopher, we are wholly lacking in capacity to grasp such an entity. We can understand only that in which concept and single thing are separated, where one represents the general, the other the particular. Nothing then remains for us but to make of the idea of purpose the basis for our observations of organisms: to deal with the creature as if a system of purposes lay at the basis of its phenomena. Thus Kant here established the unscientific scientifically, so to speak.

[ 4 ] Against such unscientific procedure Goethe protested vigorously. He could never see why our thoughts are not also qualified to ask in regard to the organ of a creature: “Whence comes it?” instead of, “What purpose does it serve?” This was in keeping with his nature, which always impelled him to look into every entity in its inner completeness. It seemed to him an unscientific form of observation to concern oneself only with the external purpose of an organ—that is, its usefulness to something else. What could this have to do with the inner essential nature of a thing? Therefore, it never concerns him to know for what purpose a thing serves, but always rather to know how it evolves. He wished to observe an object, not as a completed thing, but in its becoming, in order that he might know its primal origin. He was especially attracted to Spinoza because the latter did not give prominence to the external purpose of organs and organisms. Goethe demanded for the knowledge of the organic world a method which is thoroughly scientific in the sense in which that method is scientific which we apply to the inorganic world.

[ 5 ] Not with so much genius as in Goethe, yet none the less insistently, appeared the craving over and over again for such a method in natural science. Nowadays only a very small section of the scientists doubts its possibility. But whether the attempts which are being made here and there to introduce such a method have been successful or not,—this is naturally another question.

[ 6 ] First of all, a great error has been committed in this matter. It has been supposed that the methods of inorganic science should simply be transferred to the organic. The methods applied in the former field have simply been considered as the only scientific methods possible, and it has been thought that, if a science of “organics” is possible, it must be so in the same sense as physics. But the possibility has been ignored that the concept of the nature of science might be far broader than the definition “interpretation of the universe according to the laws of the physical world.” Even today men have not come to recognize this truth. Instead of seeking to learn what constitutes the scientific character of the inorganic sciences, and then seeking for a method which might be applied to the living world without sacrificing the requirements resulting from this inquiry, the laws discovered at those lower stages of existence are simply postulated as universal.

[ 7 ] But the inquiry should be, first of all, as to the basis upon which scientific thinking rests. In our treatment we have followed this principle. In the preceding chapter we have also learned that the conformity to law which characterizes the inorganic is not something isolated, but a special instance of all possible conformities to law. The method of physics is merely a special instance of a general scientific method of research in which consideration is given to the nature of the object under examination and to the field served by this science. If this method is extended to the organic, then the specific character of the latter is effaced. Instead of investigating the organic according to its nature, we force upon it a law alien to it. But so long as we negate the organic we shall never come to know it. Such scientific behavior merely repeats upon a higher plane that which it has gained on a lower plane; and, while it expects to bring the higher form of existence under these ready-made laws applicable elsewhere, this higher form eludes the investigator's efforts, since he does not know how to lay hold upon it and handle it according to its own characteristics.

[ 8 ] All this comes from the fallacious opinion that the method of a science is something external to the objects of that science, prescribed not by their nature but by ours. It is supposed that we must think about the objects in a certain manner, and indeed about all—the whole universe—in the same manner. Investigations are undertaken which are intended to show that, by reason of the nature of our minds, we can think only inductively, only deductively, etc.

[ 9 ] But in all this the fact is overlooked that the objects may perhaps refuse to yield to the methods of observation which we would vindicate upon them.

[ 10 ] That the charge which we make against the organic natural science of our time is fully justified—that is, that it carries over to organic Nature, not the scientific principle in general, but that of inorganic Nature—is evident if we glance at the opinions of the most distinguished of contemporary scientific theorists—Haeckel.

[ 11 ] When he requires of all scientific endeavor that “the causal interconnection of all the phenomena shall be made evident”—when he says: “If the psychic mechanics were not so infinitely complicated, if we were in position to survey fully the historic evolution of the psychic functions also, we should be able to reduce them all to a mathematical soul-formula”—it is clear what he wishes to do: to deal with the entire world according to the stereotyped pattern of the physical sciences.

[ 12 ] But this requirement is fundamental also in Darwinism, not in its original form, but in its contemporary interpretation. We have seen that the explanation of an occurrence in inorganic Nature means to show its derivation according to law from other sensible realities, to deduce it from other objects which belong like it to the sense world. But how does the contemporary science of “organics” apply the principles of adaptation and the survival of the fittest?—neither of which will be challenged by us as an expression of a complex of facts. It is supposed that the character of a certain species can be deduced from the external conditions under which it has existed, just as we can derive the heating of a body from the sunbeam falling on it. It is entirely overlooked that this character, according to its contentual characterizations, can never be derived as a result of these conditions. The conditions may have a definite influence, but they are not a creative cause. We are entirely safe in asserting that a species must so evolve under the influence of this or that set of facts as to develop this or that organ in a special way; but the essential (inhaltliche), the specific-organic, is not to be deduced from external conditions. Suppose that an organic entity had the essential characteristics abc and then evolved under definite influences so that its characteristics have assumed the particular form a'b'c'. When we take this influence into account, we shall understand that a has evolved into the form a'; b into b'; c into c. But the specific nature of abc can never be derived from external influences.

[ 13 ] Before everything else, we must direct our thought to this question: Whence do we derive the content of the general class of which we consider the single organic entity a particular instance? We know perfectly well that the specialization is due to the external influences, but the specialized form itself we must derive from an inner principle. The fact that this specialized form itself has evolved we can explain when we study the environment of the entity. Yet this special form is, none the less, something in and of itself; we find it possessed of certain characteristics. We see what is the essential matter. There comes into relation with the external phenomenal world a certain self-formed content which provides us with what we need in order to deduce these characteristics. In inorganic Nature we become aware of a certain fact and we seek a second fact and a third in order to explain this; and the result of the inquiry is that the first seems to us the inevitable consequence of the second. In the organic world this is not the case. Here we need still another factor besides the facts. We must conceive at a deeper level than the influences of external conditions something which does not passively allow itself to be determined by these conditions but actively determines itself under their influence.

[ 14 ] But what is this fundamental element? It cannot be anything else than that which appears in the particular in the form of the general. But what always appears in the particular is a definite organism. That basic element is, therefore, an organism in the form of the general: a general form of the organism which includes within itself all particular forms.

[ 15 ] This general organism we shall call, after the precedent of Goethe, the type. Whatever may be the meaning of the word typeaccording to its etymology, we use it in this sense intended by Goethe and mean by it nothing more than what is expressed. This type is not elaborated in all its entirety in any single organism. Only our rationalizing thought is capable of grasping this by abstracting it as a general image out of the phenomenal. The type is thus the Idea of the organism; the animality in the animal, the general plant in the specific plants.

[ 16 ] Under this term type we must not imagine anything fixed. It has absolutely nothing to do with what Agassiz, the most notable adversary of Darwin, called “an incarnate creative idea of God.” The type is something entirely “fluidic” out of which may be derived all separate species and families, which we may consider sub-types, specialized types. The type does not exclude the theory of descent. It does not contradict the fact that organic forms evolve one from another. It is only the rational protest against the idea that organic evolution proceeds merely in the successively appearing objective (sense-perceptible) forms. It is that which is basic in this entire evolution. It is the type that establishes the interconnection amid all the infinite multiplicity. It is the inner aspect of that which we experience as the outer forms of living creatures. The Darwinian theory presupposes the type.

[ 17 ] The type is the true primal organism; either primal plant or primal animal according as it specializes ideally. It cannot be any single sensibly-real living entity. What Haeckel or other naturalists look upon as the primal form is a form already specialized: the simplest form of the type. The fact that it first appears in the time sequence in the simplest form does not render it necessary that the forms appearing later in time are the results of the chronologically preceding forms. All forms are the results of the type; the first and equally the last are manifestations of the type. It is this type which we must take as the basis for a true organics, not undertaking simply to deduce the single species of animals and plants one from another. Like a red line does the type manifestitself through all the evolutionary stages of the organic world. We must firmly grasp it and then follow it in its course through all this great multiform kingdom. Then does this become intelligible. Otherwise, like all the rest of the world of experience, it disintegrates into a mass of unrelated units. Indeed, even when we believe we have reduced the later, more complex, compounded forms to the earlier simpler form, and that in the latter we have an original, we merely deceive ourselves; for we have simply derived one specialized form from another.

[ 18 ] Friedrich Theodor Vischer once expressed the opinion in regard to the Darwinian theory that it would render necessary a revision of our concept of time. Here we have arrived at a point which makes manifest to us in what sense such a revision would have to occur. It would have to show that the deducing of a later from an earlier is no explanation; that the first in time is not the first in principle. Every derivation must be out of what constitutes the principle, and at most it would be necessary to show what factors were effective in bringing it about that one sort of entity evolved in time before another.

[ 19 ] The type plays in the organic world the same role as that of the natural law in the inorganic. As the latter gives us the possibility of recognizing each single occurrence as a member of a greater whole, so the type puts us in position to look upon the single organism as a particular shaping of the primal form.

[ 20 ] We have already pointed out that the type is no circumscribed crystallized conceptual form, but is fluid: that it can assume the most manifold formations. The number of these formations is unlimited, because that by reason of which the primal form becomes a single specialized form has for the primal form no significance. The case is just like that of a natural law which controls innumerable single manifestations, because the special determinants which appear in the single instances have nothing to do with the natural law.

[ 21 ] But we are here dealing with something essentially unlike inorganic Nature. There our task is to show that a certain sensible fact can appear so and not otherwise because of the existence of this or that natural law. That fact and that law face one another as two separate factors, and no other mental work is required than that, when we behold a fact, we shall recall the law which is determinative. In the case of a living entity and its manifestations, the case is different. There our task must be to evolve the single form which meets us in direct experience from the type—which we must have apprehended. We must perform a mental process of an entirely different sort. We must not simply set the type as something finished, like a natural law, over against the single manifestation.

[ 22 ] That every body, unless prevented by some accompanying circumstance, falls to the earth in such a way that the distances covered in successive intervals of time are in the ratio 1:3:5:7 etc., is a definite law once for all fixed. This is a primal phenomenon which appears whenever two masses (the earth and bodies thereon) come into reciprocal relationship. If, now, a more special instance enters the field of our observation in which this law is applicable, we need only bring the sensibly observable facts into that relationship which gives us the law, and we shall find it confirmed. We trace the single case back to the law. The natural law expresses the interrelationship of the separate facts of the sense-world; but it continues to exist and confront the single facts. In the case of the type we must evolve out of the primal form each specialized instance that meets us. We must not confront the single forms with the type in order to see how the latter governs the former; we must cause the former to issue from the latter. Natural law governs a manifestation as something standing above this; the type flows into the single living entity, identifies itself with this.

[ 23 ] Therefore, a science of organics that sets out to be scientific in the sense in which physics or mechanics is scientific must show the type as the most universal form and then in various ideal separate forms. Mechanics also is such a grouping together of various natural laws in which the requirements of reality are presupposed theoretically throughout. The same must be true in organics. Here also, if we are to have a rational science, we must presuppose hypothetically determined forms in which the type takes shape. One must then show how these hypothetical forms can always be reduced to a definite form lying before our eyes.

[ 24 ] Just as we trace a phenomenon in the inorganic to a law, so here we evolve a specific form from the primal form. Organic science does not come about through the external comparison of special and general, but through the evolution of the former out of the latter.

[ 25 ] As mechanics is a system of natural laws, so organics must be a succession of forms evolved from the type; only that in the former case we bring together the single laws and arrange them into a whole, whereas here we must cause the single forms to proceed in living stream one from another.

[ 26 ] Here an objection may be raised. If the typical form is something altogether fluid, how then is it at all possible to set up a chain of special types in a series as the content of an organics? It may well be imagined that, in each special instance observed, a particular form of the type is to be recognized, and yet we cannot merely assemble such actually observed instances in the name of science.

[ 27 ] But we can do something else. We can allow the type to follow its course through the series of possibilities and then fix (hypothetically) in each case this or that form. In this way we arrive at a series of forms deduced by thought from the type, as the content of a rational organics.

[ 28 ] An organics is possible which will be scientific in the strictest sense just as mechanics is scientific. Only the method is different. The method of mechanics is that of proof. Each proof rests upon a certain rule. There always exists a definite presupposition (that is, prerequisites accessible to experience are given) and we then determine what occurs when these presuppositions are realized. We then comprehend a single phenomenon under the basic law. We think thus:—Under these conditions, the phenomenon occurs; the conditions are present and, therefore, the phenomenon must occur. This is the thought process we employ to explain an occurrence of the inorganic world when we meet it. This is the method of proof. It is scientific because it completely permeates an occurrence with the concept; because it brings about a coincidence of experience and thought.

[ 29 ] Through this method of proof, however, we can make no headway in the science of the organic. The type does not require that, under certain conditions, a definite phenomenon occur; it does not fix anything in regard to a relationship of elements mutually alien which confront one another. It determines only the conformity to law of its own parts. It does not point beyond itself like a natural law. The particular organic forms can be evolved only from the universal type-form, and every organic entity which appears in experience must coincide with some one of these derivative forms of the type. Here the evolutionary method must replace the method of proof. Here it is not to be established that the external conditions act upon one another in this way and for that reason bring about a definite result, but that a special form has been developed under definite external conditions out of the type. This is the radical difference between inorganic and organic science. This distinction is not made basic in any other method of research so consistently as in Goethe's. No one else recognized as Goethe did that an organics must be possible apart from all vague mysticism, without teleology, without the assumption of special creative thoughts. But neither has any one else more definitely rejected the demand to apply to this field the methods of inorganic science.

[ 30 ] The type, as we have seen, is a more complete scientific form than the primal phenomenon. Moreover, it presupposes a more intensive activity of our minds than that required by the other. In reflecting about the things of inorganic nature, our sense-perception provides us with the content. Here it is our sense-organization which yields to us what, in the case of the organic, we lay hold of only by means of our minds. In order to become aware of sweetness, sourness, warmth, light, color, etc., one needs only healthy senses. There we have to discover by means of thought only the form of the substance. But, in the type, content and form are intimately united one with the other. Therefore, the type does not determine the content in a merely formal way as does the law, but permeates it vitally from within outward as its very own. The task which is required of our mind is to participate productively in creating the contentual element while dealing with the formal.

[ 31 ] A mode of thinking in which the formal and the contentual appear in direct connection has always been called intuitive.

[ 32 ] Intuition appears repeatedly as a scientific principle. The English philosopher Reidt classifies as an intuition the act of creating a conviction of the real being of external phenomena directly from our perception of the phenomena (sense-impressions). Jacobi thought that in our feeling of God we are given, not merely this feeling, but the guarantee that God is. This judgment also is called intuitive. The characteristic of intuition, as we see, is that more must be given in the content than this itself; that one knows of a thought-characterization, without proof, merely through direct conviction. It is not considered necessary to prove such thought-characterizations as that of existence, etc. of the material of perception, but we are believed to possess these in inseparable unity with the content.

[ 33 ] But, in the case of the type, this is really true. Therefore it cannot furnish any means of proof but merely suggests the possibility of evolving each special form out of the type. For this reason, the mind must work with far greater intensity in apprehending the type than in grasping the natural law. It must create the content with the form. It must take upon itself an activity which is the function of the senses in inorganic science and which we call perception (Anschauung). The mind itself, therefore, must be perceptive on this higher plane. Our power of judgment must perceive in thinking and think in perceiving. Here we have to do with a perceptive power of thought, as was first explained by Goethe.¹² Goethe thereby pointed out as a necessary form of apprehension in the human mind that which Kant wished to prove to be quite unattainable by man because of the nature of his whole endowment.

[ 34 ] As the type in organic nature replaces natural law (the primal phenomenon) in the inorganic, so intuition (perceptive power of thought) replaces the power of judgment through proof (reflective judgment). As it has been supposed that the same laws may be applied to organic nature which are determinative at a lower stage of knowledge, so it has been supposed that the same methods hold good here as there. Both suppositions are fallacious.

[ 35 ] Intuition has often been treated with scant respect in science. It has been considered a defect in Goethe's mind that he expected to reach scientific truths by means of intuition. What is attained by way of intuition is considered by many persons as very important, to be sure, when this has to do with a scientific discovery. There, it is said, a chance idea often carries one farther than trained, methodical thought. For it is generally said to be an intuition when one has hit by chance upon something which is true but whose truth is discovered by investigators only in a roundabout way. It is always denied, however, that intuition itself can be a principle of science. Whatever intuition chances upon must afterward be proved—so it is thought—if it is to have scientific value.

[ 36 ] So Goethe's scientific achievements have also been looked upon as brilliant chance ideas which only later have attained to confirmation by the rigid methods of science.

[ 37 ] For organic science, however, intuition is the right method. It becomes quite clear, we believe, from our exposition that Goethe's mind, just because it was fundamentally intuitive, found the right way in organics. The method proper to organics harmonized with the constitution of his mind. For this reason it became all the clearer to him how far organics differs from inorganic science. The one became clear to him in connection with the other. For this reason he sketched with sharp lines the essential nature also of the inorganic.

[ 38 ] The slight value attached to intuition is due in no small measure to the fact that its achievements are not supposed to be deserving of that degree of confidence which is reposed in the achievement of knowledge through proof. Often only that which has been proved is called knowledge; all else is called belief.

[ 39 ] It must be borne in mind that intuition possesses a significance for the scientific attitude represented by the present writer (based upon the conviction that in thought we grasp in its very essence the central core of the world) altogether different from the significance it possesses according to the point of view which places this core of the world in a Beyond not accessible to our research. Whoever sees in this world lying before us, so far as we either experience it or penetrate it through thought, nothing more than a reflection, a copy of a Beyond, an unknown, an activating, which remains hidden behind this shell, not only at first glance but also in spite of all scientific research,—such a person can see only in the method of proof a substitute for our lack of insight into the real nature of things. Since he does not penetrate to the opinion that a thought-combination comes about through the essential content given in the thoughts themselves, and therefore through the thing itself, he necessarily thinks that he can support such combinations only on the ground that they harmonize with certain basic convictions (axioms) which are so simple as to be neither susceptible of proof nor in need thereof. If, then, a scientific postulate is offered him without proof—even one which in its whole nature excludes the method of proof—this seems to him to have been thrust upon him from without; a truth appears before him without his recognizing what are the grounds of its validity. He does not think he has an item of knowledge, an insight into the thing, but thinks he can only yield himself to a belief that some sort of reasons for this validity exists beyond the reach of his thought.

[ 40 ] Our view of the world is not exposed to the danger that it must look upon the limits of the method of proof as coinciding with the limits of scientific certitude. It has led us to the point of view that the central essence of the world flows into our thinking; that we do not merely think concerning the nature of the world but that thinking is an entrance into connection with the nature of reality. Intuition does not thrust a truth upon us from without, for from one point of view there is no such thing as an outer and an inner in the manner in which these are presupposed by the scientific attitude we have described, which is the opposite of our own. For us, intuition is the actual being-within, an entrance into the truth which gives to us all that comes in any way under consideration in regarding truth. It merges completely with what is given to us in our intuitive judgment. The characteristic which is significant in belief—that only existent truth is given us and not the reasons therefore, and that we lack a penetrating insight into the thing concerned—is here wholly wanting. Insight gained by way of intuition is just as scientific as that won by proof.

[ 41 ] Every single organism is the molding of the type in a special form. It is an individuality which governs and determines itself from a center outward. It is a totality complete in itself—which in inorganic Nature is true of the cosmos alone.

[ 42 ] The ideal of inorganic science is to grasp the totality of all phenomena as a unitary system, in order that we may approach each phenomenon with the consciousness that we recognize it as a member of the cosmos. In organic science, on the contrary, the ideal must be to have in the utmost entirety possible in the type and its phenomenal forms that which we see evolving in the series of single beings. Tracing the type back through all phenomena is here that which matters. In inorganic science the system exists; in organic the comparison (of each single form with the type).

[ 43 ] Spectral analysis and the perfecting of astronomy extend to the universe the truths attained on the limited sphere of the earth. Hereby these sciences approach the first ideal. The second will be fulfilled when the comparative method applied by Goethe is recognized in its full scope.

• 12. See footnote, p. 119.

[ 1 ] For a long time science stopped short of entering the organic realm. It considered its methods to be insufficient for understanding life and its manifestations. It believed altogether, in fact, that all lawfulness such as that at work in inorganic nature ceased here. What was acknowledged to be the case in the inorganic world—that a phenomenon becomes comprehensible to us when we know its natural preconditions—was simply denied here. One thought of the organism as having been purposefully constructed according to a particular design of the creator. Every organ's use was supposedly predetermined; all questioning here could relate only to what the purpose of this or that organ might be, to why this or that is present. Whereas in the inorganic world one turned to the prerequisites of a thing, one considered these to be of no consequence at all for facts about life, and set the primary value on the purpose of a thing. With respect to the processes accompanying life one also did not ask, as in the case of physical phenomena, about the natural causes, but rather believed one had to ascribe these processes to a particular life force. One thought that what takes form there in the organism was the product of this force that simply disregards the other natural laws. Right up to the beginning of the nineteenth century science did not know how to deal with organisms. It was limited solely to the domain of the inorganic world.

[ 2 ] Insofar as one sought the lawfulness of the organic, not in the nature of the objects but rather in the thought the creator follows in forming them, one also cut off any possibility of an explanation. How is that thought to become known to me? I am, after all, limited to what I have before me. If this itself does not reveal its laws to me within my thinking, then my scientific activity in fact comes to an end. There can be no question, in a scientific sense, of guessing the plans of a being standing outside.

[ 3 ] At the end of the eighteenth century the universally prevailing view was that there was no science to explain living phenomena in the sense in which physics, for example, is a science that explains things. Kant, in fact, tried to establish a philosophical basis for this view. He considered our intellect to be such that it could go only from the particular to the general. The particular, the individual, things are given to him, and from them he abstracts his general laws. Kant calls this kind of thinking “discursive,” and considers it to be the only kind granted to the human being. Thus, in his view there is a science only for the kinds of things where the particular, taken in and for itself, is entirely without concept and is only summed up under an abstract concept. In the case of organisms Kant did not find this condition fulfilled. Here the single phenomenon betrays a purposeful, i.e., a conceptual arrangement. The particular bears traces of the concept. But, according to the Königsberg philosopher, we lack any ability to understand such beings. Understanding is possible for us only in the case where concept and individual thing are separated, where the concept represents something general, and the individual thing represents something particular. Thus there is nothing left us but to base our observations about organisms upon the idea of purposefulness: to treat living beings as though a system of intentions underlay their manifestation. Thus Kant has here established non-science scientifically, as it were.

[ 4 ] Now Goethe protested vigorously against such unscientific conduct. He could never see why our thinking should not also be adequate to ask where an organ of a living being originates instead of what purpose it serves. Something in his nature always moved him to see every being in its inner completeness. It seemed to him an unscientific way of looking at things to bother only about the outer purposefulness of an organ, i.e., about its use for something other than it self What should that have to do with the inner being of a thing? The point for him is never what purpose something serves but always how it develops. He does not want to consider an object as a thing complete in itself but rather in its becoming, so that he might know its origins. He was particularly drawn to Spinoza through the fact that Spinoza did not credit organs and organisms with outer purposefullness. For the activity of knowing the organic world, Goethe demanded a method that was scientific in exactly the same sense as the method we apply to the inorganic world.

[ 5 ] Although not with as much genius as in Goethe, yet no less urgently, the need for such a method has arisen again and again in natural science. Today only a very small fraction of scientists doubt any longer the possibility of this method. Whether the attempts made here and there to introduce such a method have succeeded is, to be sure, another question.

[ 6 ] Above all, one has committed a serious error in this. One believed that the method of inorganic science should simply be taken over into the realm of organisms. One considered the method employed here to be altogether the only scientific one, and thought that for “organics” to be scientifically possible, it would have to be so in exactly the same sense in which physics is, for example. The possibility was forgotten, however, that perhaps the concept of what is scientific is much broader than “the explanation of the world according to the laws of the physical world.” Even today one has not yet penetrated through to this knowledge. Instead of investigating what it is that makes the approach of the inorganic sciences scientific, and of then seeing a method that can be applied to the world of living things while adhering to the requirements that result from this investigation, one simply declared that the laws gained upon this lower stage of existence are universal.

[ 7 ] Above all, however, one should investigate what the basis is for any scientific thinking. We have done this in our study. In the preceding chapter we have also recognized that inorganic lawfulness is not the only one in existence but is only a special case of all possible lawfulness in general. The method of physics is simply one particular case of a general scientific way of investigation in which the nature of the pertinent objects and the region this science serves are taken into consideration. If this method is extended into the organic, one obliterates the specific nature of the organic. Instead of investigating the organic in accordance with its nature, one forces upon it a lawfulness alien to it. In this way, however, by denying the organic, one will never come to know it. Such scientific conduct simply repeats, upon a higher level, what it has gained upon a lower one; and although it believes that it is bringing the higher form of existence under laws established elsewhere, this form slips away from it in its efforts, because such scientific conduct does not know how to grasp and deal with this form in its particular nature.

[ 8 ] All this comes from the erroneous view that the method of a science is extraneous to its objects of study, that it is not determined by these objects but rather by our own nature. It is believed that one must think in a particular way about objects, that one must indeed think about all objects—throughout the entire universe—in the same way. Investigations are undertaken that are supposed to show that, due to the nature of our spirit, we can think only inductively or deductively, etc.

[ 9 ] In doing so, however, one overlooks the fact that the objects perhaps will not tolerate the way of looking at them that we want to apply to them.

[ 10 ] A look at the views of Haeckel, who is certainly the most significant of the natural-scientific theoreticians of the present day, shows us that the objection we are making to the organic natural science of our day is entirely justified: namely, that it does not carry over into organic nature the principle of scientific contemplation in the absolute sense, but only the principle of inorganic nature.

[ 11 ] When he demands of all scientific striving that “the causal interconnections of phenomena become recognized everywhere,” when he says that “if psychic mechanics were not so infinitely complex, if we were also able to have a complete overview of the historical development of psychic functions, we would then be able to bring them all into a mathematical soul formula,” then one can see clearly from this what he wants: to treat the whole world according to the stereotype of the method of the physical sciences.

[ 12 ] This demand, however, does not underlie Darwinism in its original form but only in its present-day interpretation. We have seen that to explain a process in inorganic nature means to show its lawful emergence out of other sense-perceptible realities, to trace it back to objects that, like itself, belong to the sense world. But how does modern organic science employ the principles of adaptation and the struggle for existence (both of which we certainly do not doubt are the expression of facts)? It is believed that one can trace the character of a particular species directly back to the outer conditions in which it lived, in somewhat the same way as the heating of an object is traced back to the rays of the sun falling upon it. One forgets completely that one can never show a species' character, with all its qualities that are full of content, to be the result of these conditions. The conditions may have a determining influence, but they are not a creating cause. We can definitely say that under the influence of certain circumstances a species had to evolve in such a way that one or another organ became particularly developed; what is there as content, however, the specifically organic, cannot be derived from outer conditions. Let us say that an organic entity has the essential characteristics \(a\) \(b\) \(c\); then, under the influence of certain outer conditions, it has evolved. Through this, its characteristics have taken on the particular form \(a'\) \(b'\) \(c'\). When we take these influences into account we will then understand that \(a\) has evolved into the form of \(a'\), \(b\) into \(b'\), \(c\) into \(c'\). But the specific nature of \(a\), \(b\), and \(c\) can never arise as the outcome of external conditions.

[ 13 ] One must, above all, focus one's thinking on the question: From what do we then derive the content of that general “something” of which we consider the individual organic entity to be a specialized case? We know very well that the specialization comes from external influences. But we must trace the specialized shape itself back to an inner principle. We gain enlightenment as to why just this particular form has evolved when we study a being's environment. But this particular form is, after all, something in and of itself; we see that it possesses certain characteristics. We see what is essential. A content, configurated in itself, confronts the outer phenomenal world, and this content provides us with what we need in tracing those characteristics back to their source. In inorganic nature we perceive a fact and see, in order to explain it, a second, a third fact and so on; and the result is that the first fact appears to us to be the necessary consequence of the other ones. In the organic world this is not so. There, in addition to the facts, we need yet another factor. We must see what works in from outer circumstances as confronted by something that does not passively allow itself to be determined by them but rather determines itself, actively, out of itself, under the influence of the outer circumstances.

[ 14 ] But what is that basic factor? It can, after all, be nothing other than what manifests in the particular in the form of the general. In the particular, however, a definite organism always manifests. That basic factor is therefore an organism in the form of the general: a general image of the organism, which comprises within itself all the particular forms of organisms.

[ 15 ] Following Goethe's example, let us call this general organism typus. Whatever the word typus might mean etymologically, we are using it in this Goethean sense and never mean anything else by it than what we have indicated. This typus is not developed in all its completeness in any single organism. Only our thinking, in accordance with reason, is able to take possession of it, by drawing it forth, as a general image, from phenomena. The typus is therewith the idea of the organism: the animalness in the animal, the general plant in the specific one.

[ 16 ] One should not picture this typus as anything rigid. It has nothing at all to do with what Agassiz, Darwin's most significant opponent, called “an incarnate creative thought of God's.” The typus is something altogether fluid, from which all the particular species and genera, which one can regard as subtypes or specialized types, can be derived. The typus does not preclude the theory of evolution. It does not contradict the fact that organic forms evolve out of one another. It is only reason's protest against the view that organic development consists purely in sequential, factual (sense-perceptible) forms. It is what underlies this whole development. It is what establishes the interconnection in all this endless manifoldness. It is the inner aspect of what we experience as the outer forms of living things. The Darwinian theory presupposes the typus.

[ 17 ] The typus is the true archetypal organism; according to how it specializes ideally, it is either archetypal plant or archetypal animal. It cannot be any one, sense-perceptibly real living being. What Haeckel or other naturalists regard as the archetypal form is already a particular shape; it is, in fact, the simplest shape of the typus. The fact that in time the typus arises in its simplest form first does not require the forms arising later to be the result of those preceding them in time. All forms result as a consequence of the typus; the first as well as the last are manifestations of it. We must take it as the basis of a true organic science and not simply undertake to derive the individual animal and plant species out of one another. The typus runs like a red thread through all the developmental stages of the organic world. We must hold onto it and then with it travel through this great realm of many forms. Then this realm will become understandable to us. Otherwise it falls apart for us, just as the rest of the world of experience does, into an unconnected mass of particulars. In fact, even when we believe that we are leading what is later, more complicated, more compound, back to a previous simpler form and that in the latter we have something original, even then we are deceiving ourselves, for we have only derived a specific form from a specific form.

[ 18 ] Friedrich Theodor Vischer once said of the Darwinian theory that it necessitates a revision of our concept of time. We have now arrived at a point that makes evident to us in what sense such a revision would have to occur. It would have to show that deriving something later out of something earlier is no explanation, that what is first in time is not first in principle. All deriving has to do with principles, and at best it could be shown which factors were at work such that one species of beings evolved before another one in time.

[ 19 ] The typus plays the same role in the organic world as natural law does in the inorganic. Just as natural law provides us with the possibility of recognizing each individual occurrence as a part of one great whole, so the typus puts us in a position to regard the individual organism as a particular form of the archetypal form.

[ 20 ] We have already indicated that the typus is not a completed frozen conceptual form, but that it is fluid, that it can assume the most manifold configurations. The number of these configurations is infinite, because that through which the archetypal form is a single particular form has no significance for the archetypal form itself It is exactly the same as the way one law of nature governs infinitely many individual phenomena, because the specific conditions that arise in an individual case have nothing to do with the law.

[ 21 ] Nevertheless, we have to do here with something essentially different than in inorganic nature. There it was a matter of showing that a particular sense-perceptible fact can occur in this and in no other way, because this or that natural law exists. The fact and the law confront each other as two separate factors, and absolutely no further spiritual work is necessary except, when we become aware of a fact, to remember the law that applies. This is different in the case of a living being and its manifestations. Here it is a matter of developing, out of the typus that we must have grasped, the individual form arising in our experience. We must carry out a spiritual process of an essentially different kind. We may not simply set the typus, as something finished in the way the natural law is, over against the individual phenomenon.

[ 22 ] The fact that every object, if it is not prevented by incidental circumstances, falls to the earth in such a way that the distances covered in successive intervals of time are in the ratio \(1:3:5:7\), etc., is a definite law that is fixed once and for all. It is an archetypal phenomenon that occurs when two masses (the earth and an object upon it) enter into interrelationship. If now a specific case enters the field of our observation to which this law is applicable, we then need only look at the facts observable to our senses in the connection with which the law provides us, and we will find this law to be confirmed. We lead the individual case back to the law. The natural law expresses the connection of the facts that are separated in the sense world; but it continues to exist as such over against the individual phenomenon. With the typus we must develop the particular case confronting us out of the archetypal form. We may not place the typus over against the individual form in order to see how it governs the latter; we must allow the individual form to go forth out of the typus. A law governs the phenomenon as something standing over it; the typus flows into the individual living being; it identifies itself with it.

[ 23 ] If an organic science wants to be a science in the sense that mechanics or physics is, it must therefore know the typus to be the most general form and must then show it also in diverse, ideal, separate shapes. Mechanics is indeed also a compilation of diverse natural laws where the real determinants are altogether hypothetically assumed. It must be no different in organic science. Here also one would have to assume hypothetically determined forms in which the typus develops itself if one wanted to have a rational science. One would then have to show how these hypothetical configurations can always be brought to a definite form that exists for our observation.

[ 24 ] Just as in the inorganic we lead a phenomenon back to a law, so here we develop a specific form out of the archetypal form. Organic science does not come about by outwardly juxtaposing the general and the particular, but rather by developing the one form out of the other.

[ 25 ] Just as mechanics is a system of natural laws, so organic science is meant to be a series of developmental forms of the typus. It is just that in mechanics we must bring the individual laws together and order them into a whole, whereas here we must allow the individual forms to go forth from one another in a living way.

[ 26 ] It is possible to make an objection here. If the typical form is something altogether fluid, how is it at all possible to set up a chain of sequential, particular types as the content of an organic science? One can very well picture to oneself that, in every particular case one observes, one recognizes a specific form of the typus, but one cannot, after all, for the purposes of science merely collect such real observed cases.

[ 27 ] One can do something else, however. One can let the typus run through its series of possibilities and then always (hypothetically) hold fast to this or that form. In this way one gains a series of forms, derived in thought from the typus, as the content of a rational organic science.

[ 28 ] An organic science is possible which, like mechanics, is science in altogether the strictest sense. It is just that the method is a different one. The method of mechanics is to prove things. Every proof is based upon a certain principle. There always exists a particular presupposition (i.e., potentially experienceable conditions are indicated), and it is then determined what happens when these presuppositions occur. We then understand the individual phenomenon by applying the underlying law. We think about it like this: Under these conditions, a phenomenon occurs; the conditions are there, so the phenomenon must occur. This is our thought process when we approach an event in the inorganic world in order to explain it. This is the method that proves things. It is scientific because it completely permeates a phenomenon with a concept, because, through it, perception and thinking coincide.

[ 29 ] But we can do nothing with this proving method in organic science. The typus, in fact, does not bring it about that under certain conditions a particular phenomenon will occur; it determines nothing about a relationship of parts that are alien to each other, that confront each other externally. It determines only the lawfulness of its own parts. It does not point, like a natural law, beyond itself. The particular organic forms can therefore be developed only out of the general typus form, and the organic beings that arise in experience must coincide with one such derivative form of the typus. The developmental method must here take the place of the proving one. One establishes here not that outer conditions affect each other in a certain way and thereby have a definite result, but rather that under definite outer circumstances a particular form has developed out of the typus. This is the far-reaching difference between inorganic and organic science. This difference underlies no investigative approach as consistently as the Goethean one. No one has recognized better than Goethe that an organic science, without any dark mysticism, without teleology, without assuming special creative thoughts, must be possible. But also, no one has more vigorously rejected the unwarranted expectation of being able to accomplish anything here with the methods of inorganic science.^a7

[ 30 ] The typus, as we have seen, is a fuller scientific form than the archetypal phenomenon. It also presupposes a more a intensive activity of our spirit than the archetypal phenomenon does. As we reflect upon the things of inorganic nature, sense perception supplies us with the content. Our sense organization already supplies us here with that which in the organic realm we receive only through our spirit. In order to perceive sweet, sour, warmth, cold, light, color, etc., one need only have healthy senses. We have only to find, in thinking, the form for the matter. In the typus, however, content and form are closely bound to each other. Therefore the typus does not in fact determine the content purely formally the way a law does but rather permeates the content livingly, from within outward, as its own. Our spirit is confronted with the task of participating productively in the creation of the content along with the formal element.

[ 31 ] The kind of thinking in which the content appears in direct connection with the formal element has always been called “intuitive.”

[ 32 ] Intuition appears repeatedly as a scientific principle. The English philosopher Reid calls it an intuition if, out of our perception of outer phenomena (sense impressions), we were to acquire at the same time a conviction that they really exist. Jacobi thought that in our feeling of God we are given not only this feeling itself but at the same time the proof that God is. This judgment is also called intuitive. What is characteristic of intuition, as one can see, is always that more is given in the content than this content itself; one knows about a thought-characterization, without proof, merely through direct conviction. One believes it to be unnecessary to prove one's thought-characterizations (“real existence,” etc.) about the material of perception; in fact, one possesses them in unseparated unity with the content.

[ 33 ] With the typus this is really the case. Therefore it can offer no means of proof but can merely provide the possibility of developing every particular form out of itself. Our spirit, consequently, must work much more intensively in grasping the typus than in grasping a natural law. It must produce the content along with the form. It must take upon itself an activity that the senses carry out in inorganic science and that we call beholding (Anschauang). At this higher level, the spirit itself must therefore be able to behold. Our power of judgment must be a thinking beholding, and a beholding thinking. We have to do here, as was expounded for the first time by Goethe, with a power to judge in beholding (anschauende Urteilskraft). Goethe thereby revealed as a necessary form of apprehension in the human spirit that which Kant wanted to prove was something the human being, by his whole make-up, is not granted.

[ 34 ] Just as in organic nature the typus takes the place of the natural law (archetypal phenomenon) of inorganic nature, so intuition (the power to judge in beholding) takes the place of the proving (reflecting) power of judgment. Just as one believed that one could apply to organic nature the same laws that pertain to a lower stage of knowledge, so also one supposed that the same methods are valid here as there. Both are errors.

[ 35 ] One has often treated intuition in a very belittling way in science. One regarded it as a defect in Goethe's spirit that he wanted to attain scientific truths by intuition. What is attained in an intuitive way is, in fact, considered by many to be quite important when it is a matter of a scientific discovery. There, one says, an inspiration often leads further than a methodically trained thinking. One frequently calls it intuition, in fact, when someone by chance has hit upon something right, whose truth the researcher must first convince himself of by roundabout means. But it is always denied that intuition itself could be a principle of science. What occurs to intuition must afterward first be proved—so it is thought—if it is to have any scientific value.

[ 36 ] Thus one also considered Goethe's scientific achievements to be brilliant inspirations that only afterward received credibility through strict science.

[ 37 ] But for organic science, intuition is the right method. It follows quite clearly from our considerations, we think, that Goethe's spirit found the right path in the organic realm precisely because it was intuitively predisposed. The method appropriate to the organic realm coincided with the constitution of his spirit. Because of this it only became all the more clear to him the extent to which this method differs from that of inorganic science. The one became clear to him through the other. He therefore could also sketch the nature of the inorganic in clear strokes.

[ 38 ] The belittling way in which intuition is treated is due in no small measure to the fact that one believes the same degree of credibility cannot be attributed to its achievements as to those of the proving sciences. One often calls “knowing” only that which has been proved, and everything else “faith.”

[ 39 ] One must bear in mind that intuition means something completely different within our scientific direction—which is convinced that in thinking we grasp the core of the world in its essential being—than in that direction which shifts this core into a beyond we cannot investigate. A person who sees in the world lying before us—insofar as we either experience it or penetrate it with our thinking—nothing more than a reflection (an image of some other-worldly, unknown, active principle that remains hidden behind this shell not only to one's first glance but also to all scientific investigation) such a person can certainly regard the proving method as nothing but a substitute for the insight we lack into the essential being of things. Since he does not press through to the view that a thought-connection comes about directly through the essential content given in thought, i.e., through the thing itself, he believes himself able to support this thought-connection only through the fact that it is in harmony with several basic convictions (axioms) so simple that they are neither susceptible to proof nor in need thereof. If such a person is then presented with a scientific statement without proof, a statement, indeed, that by its very nature excludes the proving method, then it seems to him to be imposed from outside. A truth approaches him without his knowing what the basis of its validity is. He believes he has no knowledge, no insight into the matter; he believes he can only give himself over to the faith that, outside his powers of thought, some basis or other for its validity exists.

[ 40 ] Our world view is in no danger of having to regard the limits of the proving method as at the same time the limits of scientific conviction. It has led us to the view that the core of the world flows into our thinking, that we do not think about the essential being of the world, but rather that thinking is a merging with the essential being of reality. With intuition a truth is not imposed upon us from outside, because, from our standpoint, there is no inner and outer in the sense assumed by the scientific direction just characterized and that is in opposition to our own. For us, intuition is a direct being-within, a penetrating into the truth that gives us everything that pertains to it at all. It merges completely with what is given to us in our intuitive judgment. The essential characteristic of faith is totally absent here, which is that only the finished truth is given us and not its basis and that penetrating insight into the matter under consideration is denied us. The insight gained on the path of intuition is just as scientific as the proven insight.

[ 41 ] Every single organism is the development of the typus into a particular form. Every organism is an individuality that governs and determines itself from a center. It is a self-enclosed whole, which in inorganic nature is only the case with the cosmos.

[ 42 ] The ideal of inorganic science is to grasp the totality of all phenomena as a unified system, so that we approach every phenomenon with the consciousness of recognizing it as a part of the cosmos. In organic science, on the other hand, the ideal must be, in the typus and in its forms of manifestation, to have with the greatest possible perfection what we see develop in the sequence of single beings. Leading the typus through all the phenomena is what matters here. In inorganic science it is the system; in organic science it is comparison (of each individual form with the typus).

[ 43 ] Spectral analysis and the perfecting of astronomy are extending out to the universe the truths gained in the limited region of the earth. They are thereby approaching the first ideal. The second ideal will be fulfilled when the comparing method employed by Goethe is recognized in all its implications.

• a7. It is interesting to know that Goethe wrote yet another essay in which he developed further his thoughts in the first essay about experimentation. We can reconstruct this second essay from Schiller's letter of January 19, 1798. There Goethe divides the methods of science into: common empiricism, which stays with the external phenomena given to the senses; rationalism, which builds up thought-systems upon insufficient observation, which, therefore, instead of grouping the facts in accordance with their nature, first figures out certain connections artificially, and then in fantastic ways reads something from them into the factual world; and finally rational empiricism, which does not stop short at common experience, but rather creates conditions under which experience reveals its essential being. [This note was to the first edition. To this, Rudolf Steiner added the further note in the second edition to the effect that the essay he “here assumed hypothetically, was actually discovered later in the Goethe-Schiller Archives and was included in the Weimar edition of Goethe's works.”]

As a continuation of the last lecture I should like to draw your attention to certain matters which will throw light on Luther's place in history. From the outset I must make it clear that today's considerations of Luther will be from the point of view of spiritual science rather than that of religion.

What strikes one immediately when considering Luther in the light of spiritual science is the enormous importance the epoch itself had for his prominence and whole activity. The significance of the epoch is much greater in Luther's case than in the case of most other personalities in history. When we study Luther it is very important to be conscious of the epoch in which he appeared; i.e., the 16th century; which according to the spiritual-scientific view of history is very early in the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. This epoch, as we know, began in the 15th century and the preceding Graeco-Latin epoch began some eight centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha. Thus Luther appeared in history soon after the thoughts and feelings, characteristic of the Graeco-Latin epoch, were fading in civilized humanity. To the unprejudiced observer Luther appears at first sight to have a dual personality, but one comes—as we shall see—to recognize that the two aspects meet in a higher unity. It must be realized that there is much more to the history between the 14th and 16th centuries than modern historians are inclined to admit. Great transformation took place, particularly in the human soul; this is something taken far too little into account. The people of the 13th and 14th centuries still had a direct relationship with the spiritual world through the very constitution and disposition of their soul. This is now forgotten but cannot be emphasized enough. When, at that time, man turned his gaze to external nature, to the sky, to cloud formations and so on, he would generally speaking still perceive elemental spirituality. It was also possible for him to commune with the dead with whom he had karmic links to a far greater extent than is believed today. In this period there was still, inherited from an earlier different consciousness, an immediate recognition that the world seen through the senses is not the only world. The transition in consciousness to later times was far more abrupt than imagined. Natural science, in itself fully justified, was then in its dawn, it drew a veil as it were over the spiritual world behind the physical world. I can well imagine that a modern student of history, who is in the habit of accepting what is taught as absolute truth, will not believe such abrupt transition possible. He would find it neither historical nor substantiated by records. However, spiritual science reveals that at this time the human soul came completely within the confines of the physical world by virtue of changes in man's inner being.

We saw last time that woven into Luther's soul was the after-effect of what he had absorbed, in a former incarnation, in the pre-Christian Mysteries that prepared the way for Christianity. Nevertheless he was in the fullest sense a true man of his time inasmuch as in this, the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch, man's former connection with the spiritual world has grown dim. This is so even when the experiences had been as vivid as those of former initiates in the Mysteries. It must not be supposed however, that what has become dim, and therefore fails to become conscious knowledge, is not present and active. It has its effect when, as in Luther's case, the person concerned through his inner karma is sensitive and receptive to what wells up from the depths of his being without reaching full consciousness.

It is not difficult to recognize in Luther the effects of what I have indicated. They reveal themselves in the agonizing torments he went through. These inner torments, while being expressions of his own soul, assumed in his words and ideas the character of his time. They were in fact caused essentially by a kind of realization that man in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, the epoch of materialism, would be deprived of contact with the spiritual world. All the deprivation a materialistic age would inflict upon the deeper strata of the human soul weighed heavily upon Luther. Today one has to use different words from those he employed to describe what he felt so strongly. It is therefore not Luther's own words that I use in characterizing his inner experiences. But what he felt may be expressed in these words: What is to become of man when his vision is cut off from the spiritual world, as he is bound to forget what he formerly received from that world? If you imagine this feeling intensified to its limit you have the keynote of Luther's inner suffering. But why was it Luther who in particular felt this so intensely?

The reason is to be found in what I mentioned as the duality of his nature. Luther was on the one hand very much a man of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. But because he was also inwardly very much a man of the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch he felt with great intensity the deprivation which the people of the fifth epoch were already experiencing in his time, albeit not consciously. The duality in his nature was caused by the fact that—while being in complete accord with his own time, the fifth epoch—the teachings in the pre-Christian Mysteries had taken such deep roots in his soul that he inwardly felt as a man of the fourth epoch. He felt as related to the fourth epoch as an ancient Greek or Roman had felt. Odd as it may seem this had the effect that he could not understand the Copernican system of astronomy; i.e., a system based purely on physical calculations. This system, however, is in complete harmony with the outlook of the fifth cultural epoch but would have seemed meaningless in the fourth. This fact will seem strange to modern man whose view is that the apex of knowledge has been reached and that the Copernican system cannot be superseded. This is a shortsighted view as I have often pointed out. Just as today the Ptolemaic system is put to scorn, so will the Copernican be looked down upon in the future when it is replaced by another. However, in the fifth cultural epoch the very soul constitution of man enables him to have ready understanding for a system of movement of the heavenly bodies based entirely upon physical calculations.

Luther had no such understanding; to him the Copernican view seemed so much folly. He was little interested in the materialistic, purely spatial conceptions of the phenomena of the universe which occupied the human mind at the dawn of the fifth cultural epoch. Whereas the way man felt and experienced his place within that universe interested him greatly. However the relation to the world, which man perforce had to have, in the fifth cultural epoch was experienced by Luther with all the inner soul impulses of a man of the fourth-, the Graeco-Latin epoch.

Thus we see Luther on the one hand looking back at the way man was related to the spirituality of the Cosmos in the fourth cultural epoch. And on the other we see him looking ahead, being aware of the kind of experiences, feelings and conceptions to which man would be exposed by virtue of a relation to the cosmos which separates him from its spiritual reality. Thus Luther felt and experienced the fifth cultural epoch as a soul belonging to the fourth cultural epoch. The experiences man had to undergo in the fifth cultural epoch weighed heavily on his soul.

In order to have a clearer picture let us for a moment compare a modern man of average education with a man of the comparatively ancient time of the fourth epoch. The former's thoughts and feelings, his whole relation to the world is determined by the natural-scientific view of the world, whereas the latter's thoughts and feelings were determined by the fact that he was still aware of his connection with spiritual reality. What we designate as Imagination and Inspiration were particularly vivid for man at that time. It was a common experience that colors are not seen only through eyes, or sound heard only through ears. Man was aware that by inner effort he received pictorial and audible revelations from the spiritual world. Everyone was aware that a divine spiritual-world lived in his soul. Man felt inwardly connected with his God.

In the fifth post-Atlantean epoch man is subjected to a test and his communion with the spiritual world has to cease. In this epoch he has developed, through special methods and a special kind of knowledge, the possibility to observe the external phenomena of nature and their relation to his own being with great exactitude. But he no longer has vision of the spiritual world; no longer is there a path leading from the soul to the spiritual world.

Let us visualize these two types of human beings side by side. As we saw in the last lecture, Luther's knowledge and religious feelings concerning the spiritual world were not abstract; the spiritual world was not closed to him. He had a living communion with the spiritual world, more especially with evil spirits of that world. But that in itself is not an evil trait. Thus he knew of the spiritual world through direct experience, but he also knew that for mankind of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch this experience of the spiritual world was fading away and would gradually disappear altogether. It became a great riddle for Luther how the human beings of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch would cope with the deprivation of not beholding the spiritual world. As he contemplated the man of the fifth epoch his heart was overflowing with impulses brought over from his incarnation in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. These living forces constituted a powerful link with the spiritual world which caused Luther to sense its reality with great intensity. It made him feel that it was essential to awaken in man a consciousness of that reality. At the same time he was under no illusion that human beings incarnating during the coming epoch would lose all consciousness of the spiritual world. They would have nothing but their physical senses to rely on, whereas in earlier times knowledge of the divine-spiritual-world had been attained through direct vision and experience. All Luther could do was to tell mankind: If in the future you look towards the spiritual world you will find nothing, for the ability to behold it will have vanished. If you nonetheless wish to retain awareness of its existence then you must turn to the Bible, the most reliable record in existence, a record that still contains direct knowledge of the spiritual world which you can otherwise no longer reach. In earlier times one would have said: besides the Gospel there is also the possibility to look directly into the spiritual world. This possibility has vanished for mankind of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch; only the Gospel remains.

So you see that Luther spoke from the heart and in the spirit of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, but as someone who also belonged to the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. By means, still remaining from the fourth epoch, he wanted to draw attention to that which, because of his evolution, man in the fifth epoch could no longer reach. Luther may not have been conscious of these things exactly the way I describe them. However as things stood it is understandable that he, at the start of an epoch in which direct insight into the spiritual world would cease, pointed to the Gospel as the sole authority concerning the spiritual world. He wanted to emphasize that the Gospel was a special source of strength for mankind in the coming epoch.

Let us now turn our attention to something different. At the moment I am occupied with certain aspects of Christian Rosenkreutz and the “Chymical Wedding” by Johann Valentin Andreae and this brings certain things connected with the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries vividly before my soul. When one looks at those who during those centuries were engaged in science, one comes to realize that at that time knowledge of nature was alchemy in the best sense of the word. The natural scientist of today would have been an alchemist then. But to understand the spiritual aspect of alchemy it must not be thought of as connected with superstition or fraud. What were the alchemists attempting? They were convinced that there are other forces at work in nature besides those which can be discovered by external observation and experiment. They wanted to prove that while nature is indeed "natural" supersensible forces are at work in her.

To the alchemist it was obvious that, however firmly welded together the composition of a metal appeared to be, that composition could still be transformed into another. However they saw the transition as the result of a spiritual process, an effect of the spirit in nature. This is something that will be known again in future epochs, but in our time it is a deeply hidden knowledge. The alchemists were able to bring about alchemical processes which, if they could be demonstrated today, would greatly amaze modern scientists. In that earlier age it was part of man's knowledge that spiritual forces are at work in nature. The alchemical processes were brought about by manipulating those forces.

This knowledge inevitably had to be lost in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. A reflection still exists in religious conceptions of the universe. In the earlier centuries, right up to the 13th and 14th, what was taught concerning the Sacraments was different from what could be taught in the following centuries, though for Luther it was still vivid inner experience even if not a fully conscious one. But the experience, that spiritual forces were directly active in consecrated substance, was lost to the faithful. Today the teaching of the Catholic sacrament is something quite different than it was, for example the doctrine concerning the sacrament at the altar, when bread and wine are to be transformed through a mysterious process into real flesh and blood. When one discusses this issue with Catholic theologians the usual answer to modern man's objection is: If you do not understand that you have no understanding whatever of Aristotle's teaching on substances. Be that as it may, one has to say that in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch no real meaning can be connected with an actual transubstantiation; i.e., with real alchemy. Today this process takes place above material existence. Today when man receives the bread and wine these are not transmuted. The divine-spiritual reality of the Christ Being passes into man as he receives the bread and the wine.

This metamorphosis of the concept of the sacrament is also connected with the transition in man's evolution from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Luther, because of his very nature, had to speak out of the spirit of both epochs. He wanted to convey to man's soul the strength it had formerly gained from religious teaching. As the dawning natural science would never be able to acknowledge anything spiritual in matter, Luther sought to keep religious teaching aloof from the weakening effect of science. From the outset he kept spiritual issues strictly apart from physical processes. He thought of the latter, if not exactly as symbols, then at least as being merely physical.—It is not so easy to understand these things today but spiritual science must draw attention to them just the same.

We must envisage Luther turning his gaze, even if not fully consciously, towards the coming epoch spanning more than two thousand years, during which man would be able to experience something of the spiritual world only in exceptional cases and through special training. Historical personalities such as Luther must be seen in a wider perspective; their thoughts and actions must be seen as expressing the epoch in which they live. Luther as it were represented the human beings of his time, human beings to whom something was lost. What they had lost was caused by the fact that in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch human knowledge had assumed a form that made it impossible to strengthen the human soul, by means of the power inherent in knowledge itself, so that it could look into the spiritual world and have its own spiritual cognition. It is not normal for people of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch to have spiritual cognition through their own initiative. In his ordinary life in the fifth epoch man cannot be conscious of freedom in the real sense, of real freedom of will which is the ability to act directly out of that deepest region of the human soul where it is united with the divine. Today both freedom and knowledge are theoretical. As the fifth post-Atlantean epoch progressed the theory that there are limits to human knowledge has frequently been proclaimed. To speak of limits of knowledge in the sense of Kant³² or Dubois-Reymond³³ would have seemed meaningless in ancient times, even by the sceptics.

As mentioned already one should take what is said by a historical personality such as Luther as expressing the spirit of his epoch, not as having validity for all time. What Luther recognized as the outstanding characteristic of mankind in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch he interpreted in the light of Christianity. He understood it in the Christian, or better said Biblical sense, as a direct effect of original sin. The fact that man, out of his own forces, cannot attain either freedom, or knowledge of the divine, in the fifth epoch Luther saw as a direct outcome of original sin. Thus when he said that man was so corrupted by original sin that by himself he could not overcome it, Luther spoke a truth that holds good for the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. The force in man most closely bound up with his nature is the force that expresses itself in his will, in his actions. What a man does springs from the very center of his being. What he knows or believes is much more dependent on his environment, the time in which he lives and so on. In the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, the epoch of natural science and materialism, man is not able to perform actions that spring directly from the spirit. That in fact is the essential characteristic of this epoch. In the sixth post-Atlantean epoch it will again be different. But that man in the fifth epoch, in his ordinary consciousness, had lost the link connecting him with the spiritual world was also Luther's conviction.

Yet Luther was also aware that it is essential for man not to be torn out of that connection altogether. He saw that as an inhabitant of the external physical world man, through what he wills and does, has no connection with the Divine. He can only attain it if he regards this connection as something separate and apart from his external physical existence. From this thought originated the doctrine of salvation purely through faith. A typical man of the fourth epoch would have regarded salvation through faith alone as nonsensical. An ancient Greek or Roman would have found it meaningless if told that what he does, what he accomplishes in the world is not what gives him value in the eyes of the Highest Powers, but solely his soul's acknowledgement of the spiritual world. However, it is not meaningless to the man of the fifth epoch, for if his worth were dependent solely on what he accomplished in the physical world he would be in fact just a creature of that world. He would be more and more convinced that he merely represented the highest peak of the animal kingdom. Man had therefore to forge a link with the spiritual world by means of something that in no way linked him with the physical world. That something is faith.

What Luther thus impressed on his own and the following time could naturally not remain the only cultural influence in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. One may ask who at the present time is a Lutheran? The answer is that, inasmuch as he is a man of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, everyone is a Lutheran. Those with a sense for the subtle conceptual differences in world views will notice the enormous discrepancy between the views of a Catholic theologian in the 13th or 14th Centuries and those of his counterparts today. The reason is that the Catholic theologian of today is in reality a Lutheran, his outlook and impulses are those of a Lutheran. These are matters that go unnoticed because there is so little feeling for the inner truth of things, the attention is focused only on the external label applied to a person. It is after all merely an external matter that someone, because of family or some other connection, is entered in the Church register as Catholic or Protestant. What characterizes him inwardly is something quite different. The man of today who is truly of his time, who is stirred and influenced by what takes place, is inwardly a Lutheran. Like Luther he articulates the essence of the fifth epoch. Luther was especially suited to do so because of the characteristic duality of his nature. This made him question the fate of future mankind, but it also stirred in him an overwhelming impulse to speak to the people of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch with all the vigorous forces that he wanted preserved as they were in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. That he was able to speak in this way was due to the higher unity of his dual nature. He spoke out of the very souls of the people exposed to the conditions of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. He formulated and voiced the very concepts and ideas that stirred in them. But he also spoke so that everything he said was permeated with his impulse to preserve what had existed in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. That was the higher unity. However, the sixth post-Atlantean epoch could not be prepared within the fifth had the latter not been influenced by other cultural streams.

Thus we see that Lutheranism, in the way indicated, is more particularly an impulse of the fifth epoch, but other cultural streams make themselves felt. The most important for us is the one that came to expression in the German classical period: from Lessing to Herder, Schiller, Goethe and others. A remarkable phenomenon is the fact that we have in the same period a thoroughly Lutheran philosopher in Kant, whose concepts represent the very essence of Lutheranism. Schiller had at one time an inclination to follow Kant but found that he could not; and indeed no philosophic work better illustrates the striving to get beyond mere Lutheranism than Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. These letters—which are too little appreciated today—and also Goethe's Faust constitute as it were the apex of that other cultural stream. Both works stress that man must turn, not only to the Bible, but to the world and life itself in order to strengthen the human soul so that it can find, through its own forces, the path to the spiritual world. The concluding scenes of Faust represent the complete contrast to Lutheranism. Only a contrived interpretation could possibly bring Schiller's aesthetic letters, Goethe's Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily and the last scenes of Faust in line with Lutheranism. We see in these works the human soul attaining strength through an inner opposition to the natural-scientific interpretation of the world. And in this way it finds, through its own forces, the connection with the spiritual world.

Ideas concerned with the legend of “Dr. Faustus” emerged already in the 16th Century in opposition to Luther's strong proclamations, but these ideas could not yet gain ground… Luther's attention was focused on the man of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch who, though possessed by ahrimanic demons, yet refuses to acknowledge the, to Luther well known, devil. It is not really surprising that Ricarda Huch, after occupying herself so intensely with Luther, comes to place such great importance on his direct knowledge of the diabolical realm of the spiritual world. Bearing in mind the story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, it is indeed interesting that in our time it is a woman who has this yearning that man should again recognize the devil who—especially when his view of life is purely naturalistic—has him by the collar. In her book about Luther this longing comes to expression: that if only man could experience the devil it would awaken him to a consciousness of God.

This cry for the devil, expressed by Ricarda Huch lives in man's subconscious. It is a cry she wants mankind to hear. To understand Ricarda Huch is easy for someone who knows that in every laboratory, in every machine, in short in all the most important spheres of modern civilization, the actual devil is present and active. I say this in plain words for it would be much better for people to be aware of the devil rather than, unknown to them, he should have them by the collar.

Luther's consciousness of the devil was for him a living reality mainly because he still experienced the spiritual world as would a man in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. His vivid experience came to expression in his words, for he strove to make the man of the fifth epoch conscious of the devil by whom he was possessed without knowing it. Luther could not do otherwise than call up in the man of his time an awareness of the devil which differed from the way Faust experienced the devil. Faust deliberately sold himself in order to gain knowledge and power through the devil. Such a relationship to the devil was at first rejected in the 16th century. At that time only a negative submission to the devil could be envisaged. Goethe, and in fact already Lessing protested vigorously against that idea. One must ask why they had a different view of man's relation to the devil. It must be said that neither Lessing nor Goethe had the nerve openly to state their view of Faust's relation to the devil. Today it is much easier to speak openly of these things than it was at the time of Lessing and Goethe. An initiate may have wanted to tell his fellow men something different but if he had they would have torn him to pieces.

Let us attempt to understand Goethe's inner attitude to Faust. Goethe too had insight into the nature of man of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. He knew of man's close relationship to the devil in this epoch. He knew that whenever man's consciousness is restricted to the material alone the devil; i.e., ahrimanic powers are always present. This state of consciousness constitutes for these powers a door through which they gain entry. Ahriman has easy access to man whenever his consciousness is limited to the purely material aspect of things or dimmed down below normal, as can happen through organic causes, agitation, rage or other uncontrolled behaviour. Goethe's insight made it impossible for him to adopt the materialistic view generally held. While he knew that ahrimanic powers are universally present he could not in all honesty represent them as something to be avoided or rejected. On the contrary what he wanted Faust to attain he had to achieve through direct contest with the devil. In other words the devil must be made to surrender his power, he must be conquered. That is the real meaning behind Faust's struggle with the devil, the evil Ahriman or Mephistopheles.

Now let us turn to Schiller who tries to adopt Kant's philosophy but comes to recognize the futility of doing so. In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man he distinguishes between mere instinctive craving—which according to Luther arises from man's physical nature—and the spirit which reveals itself within his physical nature. A true Lutheran would say that man is addicted to his cravings and he cannot, through his own power, rise above them. Only faith can enable him to do so. He will then have been purified and redeemed through an externally existing Christ. Schiller said: No, something else is present in man: in the craving for freedom lives the power of the spirit which can ennoble the bodily cravings of man's physical nature. Schiller distinguishes physical nature, ennobled through the spirit, from the spirit becoming manifest through it. He shows that man is indeed separated from spiritual existence through matter, but that he nevertheless, out of himself, strives to reach the spirit by transforming matter; that is, physical existence, through inner alchemy.

One recognizes the spiritual greatness that could have enriched Western culture in works such as Schiller's aesthetic letters and also Goethe's Faust which presents in dramatic form the overcoming of ahrimanic powers in external life. What could have been achieved through the strong impulse towards the spirit contained in these works has not come about. And it fills one with pain and despair to see one's contemporaries turn instead, for their spiritual education, to such trash as the American “In Tune with the Infinite.”

I cannot refrain from repeating what happened to Deinhardt³⁴ of Vienna who wrote a very beautiful essay on Schiller's aesthetic letters in which he discusses the marvelous perspective their content opens up. I do not think anyone knows about Deinhardt today. He had the misfortune to fall and break his leg; when the doctor came he was told that he could not be healed because he was too undernourished. And so he died. But this small book by Deinhardt of Vienna is concerned with one of the deepest spiritual impulses that have sprung from Western culture. If only people would recognize and investigate what has actually germinated in Western culture we would cease to hear the empty phrase, “the best man in the best place,” and then people proceed, through lack of judgement, to select a nephew or a cousin as the best man in the best place. Continuously one hears it said that the right person for this or that position simply does not exist. That is not the case; what is lacking is rather people with judgement who know where to look. But that ability can only be attained through inner strength, developed by absorbing the spiritual impulses flowing through spiritual life. There is nothing abstract about what can be gained from great literary works. Rather they fill the human soul with spiritual impulses which further its development along the path that Goethe strode with such vigour, and whose goal he depicted with dramatic artistry in the last scene of his Faust. It has no meaning in our time to preserve the old just because it is old; but we must find those treasures of the past which contain seeds for the future. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the classic works of Goethe, Schiller and Lessing.

I wanted to show where Lessing, Goethe and Schiller belong in recent cultural development because it enables us to understand better their predecessor Luther. To understand a personality such as Luther it is necessary to understand what stirred in the depth of his soul and caused him to speak the way he did. I believe that if in the light of these thoughts you approach what, especially in our time, comes to meet us with such force in Luther, you will discover many things about him which I cannot go into now. I am convinced that it has a special significance to immerse oneself in Luther in the present difficult time. There is perhaps no one better suited to convey the many aspects of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch than Luther. He spoke so completely out of the spirit of the fifth epoch even though his words had their origin in the fourth epoch.

When faced with the way events are depicted in history we should sense how necessary it is to rethink them. We ought to sense that the present difficult time which has brought such misery upon humanity is the karmic effect of distorted, superficial thinking. We should sense that the painful experiences we go through are in many respects the karma of materialism. We must have the will to rethink history. I have often pointed out that history as taught today in elementary and secondary schools as well as in universities, perhaps particularly in the latter, is a mere fable, and is all the more pernicious for being unaware that it is but a fable that aims to present only external physical events. Should the events of the 19th century be presented just once as they truly were—merely those of the 19th century!—it would be an immense blessing for mankind. Referring to history Herman Grimm once said that he foresaw a time when those, now regarded as great figures of the 19th century, would no longer appear all that great, whereas quite other figures would emerge as the great ones from the grey mist of that century.

Because of the way history has come to be presented in the course of time the human soul must undergo a fundamental change in order to understand it properly. I have often said this but it cannot be stressed enough. Man's concepts nowadays lack the vigour and power required to cope with social needs, because they are based on such superficial views. This war is in reality waged because of shortsighted, obtuse and foggy ideas, and the men fighting it are in many respects mere puppets of those ideas. Today there is an incessant clamour for people's freedom, for international courts of arbitration and the like, all of which remains so many empty words because it makes no difference what is established as long as there is no deeper understanding of the real issues. Yet all these things could be achieved if, as is so greatly to be desired, spiritual science were able to rouse people to recognize the deeper impulses beneath the surface of ordinary life. But these things people today do not want to see. It is quite immaterial what is arranged whether in relation to war or to peace or whatever. What is needed is that our ideas, our understanding of the issues, cease to remain on the surface. One could wish that, just at this time, what Luther so forcefully proclaimed would be heard and understood. People would then come to recognize that in Luther spoke more than the man. In him the character of the epoch which began in the 8th century B.C. and ended in the 15th century A.D. united with the character of the epoch that followed; i.e., our own, which will endure for 2100 years.

In the true sense a historic personality is someone in whom there speaks a being from the Hierarchy of the Archai, a Time Spirit. Through such a personality the voice of the Spirit of the Time is heard. This must be recognized if one is to approach Luther with understanding.

• 32. Immanuel Kant 1724–1804 German Philosopher
• 33. Emil Du Bois-Reymond 1818–1896 German Physiologist
• 34. Heinrich Mariannus Deinhardt 1821–1879

Note: The transcript of the four “faculty” lectures are deficient. It shows not only noticeable gaps; the author of the transcript is also not familiar with the topic of the lectures. He often made summaries in haste as far as he understood the lecturer. That is why some connections shifted. Although notices of other participants were used, the deficiencies of the text could not be essentially corrected except for some big misunderstandings.

If the theosophical movement has to really intervene in the whole modern culture, it cannot limit itself unilaterally to spread any doctrine, to communicate knowledge concerning this or that, but it has to deal with the most different cultural factors and elements in the present. Theosophy should be no mere doctrine, it should live. It should flow into our acting, feeling and thinking. Now it is in the nature of things that such a movement addressing the heart of the modern culture immediately intervenes where we deal with the leadership in the spiritual life, if it should be capable of surviving. Where else should we look for the leadership of the spiritual life today than in our universities? There really all those should co-operate who work at least if you look at the matter idealistically as bearers of our culture, of our whole spiritual life, who work in the service of truth and progress and in the service of the spiritual movement generally. They should collaborate with young people who prepare for the highest tasks of life.

This would be the big and significant influence that the universities must have on the whole cultural life, the significant influence which comes from them as something authoritative because one cannot deny it, although one may also struggle against any authority in our time: our universities work authoritatively. And it is right in certain respect, because those who have to teach our young people about the highest cultural problems have to be determinative of all questions of the human existence. Thus it is really logical if the whole nation looks at that which the members of the faculties say in any question. That's how it is. Nevertheless, in all our faculties one regards what the university lecturer says about a matter as authoritative.

Thus it seems to me natural that we as theosophists ask ourselves once: how must we position ourselves to the different branches of our university life? No criticism should be offered to our university institutions; this should not be an object of this talk. What will be discussed in this and the following talks should simply give a perspective how the theosophical movement if it is really capable of surviving, if it can really intervene in the impulses of the spiritual movement , can possibly have a fruitful effect on our university life.

A university has four faculties: the divinity (in Germany theological) faculty, the faculty of law, the medical faculty and the arts (in Germany: philosophical) faculty. Indeed, as well as the high educational system is today, we have to include still other colleges in the sense of our present way of thinking and approach to life as a continuation of the university, as it were, namely the colleges of technology, the art colleges etcetera. That will be discussed later in the talk about philosophy. We have to deal with that faculty which in the first times, in the midst of the Middle Ages acquired a leading position in the modern education. In this time, theology at the universities was the “queen of sciences.” Everything that was otherwise done formed a group round the theological scholarship.

The university had arisen from that which the Church had developed in the Middle Ages: from the monastic schools. The old schools had a kind of supplement for that which one needed as worldly knowledge; however, the central issue was theology. These teachers, priests and monks who had experienced the clerical education were active until the end of the Middle Ages. Theology was called the “queen of sciences.” Is it now not quite natural, if you consider the matter in the abstract, ideally to call theology the queen of sciences, and had it not to be this queen if it fulfilled its task in the widest sense of the word? In the centre of the world that stands certainly which we call the primal ground of the world, the divine, in so far as the human being can grasp it. Theology is nothing else than the teachings of this divine. All other must trace back to divine primal forces of existence. If theology wants really to be the teachings of the divine, you cannot imagine it as that it is the central sun of any wisdom and knowledge, and that from it the strength and the energy is emitted to all remaining sciences. In the Middle Ages, it still was in such a way. What the great medieval theologians had to say about the world basically got its light, its most significant strength from the so-called holy science, from theology.

If we want to get an idea of this thinking and of this philosophy of life in the Middle Ages, we can do it with a few words. Any medieval theologian considered the world as a big unity. The divine creativity was on top, at the summit. Below, the single forces and realms of nature existed, dispersed in the manifoldness of the world. What one knew about the forces and realms of nature was the object of the single sciences. What led the human spirit to the clarification of the loftiest questions, what should lighten what the single sciences could not recognise came from theology. Hence, one studied philosophy first. It encompassed all worldly sciences. Then one advanced to the science of theology. The medical faculty and that of law stood somewhat differently in the university life. We can easily conceive an idea how these faculties interrelate if we look at the matter in such a way: philosophy encompassed all sciences, and the divinity faculty considered and dealt with the big question: what is the primal ground, and which are the single phenomena of existence?

This existence proceeds in time. There is a development to perfection, and as human beings we are not only put into the world order, but we ourselves co-operate in the world order. On the one side, the philosophical and the theological faculties consider that which is, which was, and which will be, on the other side, the medical faculty and that of law consider the world in its emergence, the world how it has to be led from the imperfect to the perfect. The medical faculty addresses more the natural life in its imperfection and asks how it should be made better. The law school turns to the moral world and asks how it must be made better. The whole life of the Middle Ages was one single body, and something similar must certainly come again. Again the whole unity, the universitas has to become a living body that has the single faculties as the members of the common life. The modern university is more an aggregate, and the single faculties do not deal a lot with each other. In the Middle Ages, everybody who studied at the university had to acquire a philosophical basic education, that which one calls a general education today, although one has to admit that just those who leave the university today are characterised by the absence of general education.

This was the basis of everything. Also in Goethe's Faust one finds said: the collegium logicum first, then metaphysics. Nevertheless, it is also correct that somebody who generally wants to be introduced into the secrets of the world existence, into the big questions of culture, must have a thorough education in the different branches of knowledge at first. It is no progress that this studium fundamentale has completely disappeared from our university education. In a large part is that which one can know lifeless nature: physics, chemistry, botany, zoology, mathematics etcetera. Not before the student had been introduced into the teachings of thinking, into the laws of logic, into the basic principles of the world or into metaphysics, he could ascend to the other, higher faculties. For the other faculties were called the higher ones with some right. Then he could advance to theology.

Someone who should be taught about the deepest questions of existence had to have learnt something about the simple questions of existence. But also the other faculties presuppose such an educational background. The situation of law and medicine would be much better if such a general previous training were maintained thoroughly, because someone who wants to intervene in the jurisprudence must know how the laws of the human life are generally. It must be understood lively what can lead a human being to the good or to the bad. You must be grasped not only in such a way as you are grasped from the dead letter of law, but you must be grasped like from life, like from something with which you are intimately related. These human beings must have the circumference first because the human being is really a microcosm in which all laws are living. Hence, one has to know the physical laws above all. Thus the university would have to be, correctly thought, an organism of the whole human knowledge. However, the divinity faculty would have to stimulate any other knowledge. Theology, the teachings of the divine world order, cannot exist at all unless it is inserted to the smallest and biggest of our existence, unless one deepens everything into the divine world order.

But, how should anybody be able to say anything about the divine world order who knows nothing about the minerals, nothing about the plants, animals and human beings, about the origin of the earth, about the nature of our planetary system? God's revelation is everywhere, and there is nothing that does not express the voice of the divinity. The human being has to link everything that the human being has and is and acts to these loftiest questions which the theological science should treat.

Now we must ask ourselves: does the divinity faculty position itself in this way in life today? Does it work in such a way that its strength and energy can flow from it to all remaining life? I would like to give no criticism, but an objective portrayal of the relations if possible. In the last time, even theology is brought somewhat into discredit, even within the religious movement. You have maybe heard something of the name Kalthoff (Albert K., 1850–1906, Protestant theologian) who has written Zarathustra sermons. He says that the religion must not suffer from the letters of theology; we do not want theology, but religion. These are people who are able to find the world of religious world view from their immediate conviction.

Now we ask ourselves whether this view can persist whether it can be true that religion without theology, sermon without theology is possible. In the first times of Christianity and also in the Middle Ages, this was not the case. Also in the first centuries of modern times, it was not in such a way. Only today, a kind of conflict has happened between the immediate religious effectiveness and theology, which has apparently turned away somewhat from life. In the first times of the Christianity, somebody was basically a theologian who could see up to the highest summits of existence because of his wisdom and science. Theology was something living, was something that lived in the first Church Fathers, that animated such spirits like Clement of Alexandria, like Origenes, like Scotus Erigena and St. Augustine; it was theology that animated them. It was that which lived like lifeblood in them. If the words came on their lips, they did not need to confide any dogma, then they knew how to speak intensively to the hearts. They found the words which were got out of any heart. The sermon was permeated with soul and religious currents. But it would not have been in such a way unless inside of these personalities the view of the loftiest beings in the highest form had lived in which the human being can attain this.

Such dogmatism is impossible which discusses every word in the abstract that is spoken in the everyday life. But somebody who wants to be a teacher of the people has to have experienced the highest form of knowledge with wisdom. He must have the resignation, the renunciation of that which is immediate to him; he must strive and experience what introduces him into the highest form of knowledge in loneliness, in the cell, far from the hustle and bustle of the world where he can be alone with his God, with his thinking and his heart. He must have the possibility to look up at the spiritual heights of existence. Without any fanaticism, without any desire, even without any religious desire, but in purely spiritual devotion that is free of everything that also appears, otherwise, in the longing of the religions. The conversation with God and the divine world order takes place in this lonesome height, at the summit of the human thinking.

One has to develop, one has to have attained resignation, renunciation to lead this lofty soliloquy and to have it living in oneself and to let work it as lifeblood in the words which are the contents of the popular doctrines. Then we have found the right stage of theology and sermon, of science and life.

Someone who sits below feels that this flows out of depths that it is got down from high scientific heights of wisdom. Then it needs no external authority, then the word itself is authority by the strength which lives in the soul of the teacher, because it settles in the heart by this strength to work with the echo of the heart. One achieved the harmony between religion and theology, and at the same time one tactfully distinguished theology and religious instruction. But anybody who has not climbed up to the theological heights who is not informed about the deepest questions of the spiritual existence will not slip that in his words which should live in the words of the preacher as a result of the dialogue with the divine world order itself.

This was really the opinion that one had in the Christian world view about the relation between theology and sermon for centuries. A good sermon would be that if a preacher steps only then in front of the people, after he has occupied himself with the high teachings of the Trinity of God, of the divinity and of the announcement of the Logos in the world, of the high metaphysical significance of Christ's personality. One must have accepted all these teachings that are understandable only for someone who has dealt with them for many, many years. These teachings may establish the contents of philosophy and other sciences at first; one has to make his thinking ripe for this truth. Only then one can penetrate these heights of truth. To someone who has achieved this, who knows something about the high ideas of the Trinity, of the Logos the Bible verses become something in his mouth that wins another liveliness than it has at first without this preceding theological schooling. Then he freely uses the Bible verses, then he creates that current from him to the community within the Bible verses which causes an influence of the divine creativity in the hearts of the crowd. Then he not only interprets the Bible but he handles it. Then he speaks in such a way, as if he himself had participated in the writing of the great truths which are written in this ancient religious book. He looked into the bases from which the great truths of the Bible originated. He knows what those have felt who were once much more influenced by the spiritual world than he is, and what is expressed in the Bible verses as the divine world government and human order of salvation. He has not only the word that he has to comment and to interpret, but behind him the great powerful writers stand whose pupil, disciple and successor he is. He speaks out of their spirit and he himself puts their spirit, which they have put into it, into the writing now.

This was the basis of developing authority in this or that epoch. As an ideal the human being had it in mind, it was often carried out. However, our time has also brought about a big reversal here. Let us consider the big reversal once again, which took place from the Middle Ages to the modern times. What happened at that time? What made it possible that Copernicus, Galilei, Giordano Bruno could announce a new world view? This new movement became possible because the human being approached nature immediately that he himself wanted to see that he did not rest on old documents as in the Middle Ages, but went straight to the natural existence. It was different in the medieval science. There the basic sciences were not derived from an unbiased consideration of nature, but from that which the Greek philosopher Aristoteles had schemed. Aristoteles was the authority during the whole Middle Ages.

One taught referring to him. The lecturer of metaphysics and logic had his books. He interpreted them. Aristoteles was an authority.

This changed with the reversal from the Middle Ages to the modern times. Copernicus himself wanted to scheme what is given by the immediate view. Galilei shone on the world of the immediate existence. Kepler found the big world law according to which the planets orbit the sun.

That's how it was in the past centuries. One wanted to see independently. One also told in anecdotes what occurred to Galilei: there was a scholar who knew his Aristoteles. One said something to him that Galilei had said. He answered that this must be different: I must have a look at Aristoteles, because he said it differently, and, nevertheless, Aristoteles is right. The authority was more important to him than the immediate view. But the time was ripe, one wanted now to know something independently. This does not require that everybody is immediately able to acquire this view fairly quickly, but it only requires that people are there who are able to approach nature that they are equipped with the instruments and tools and with the methods, which are necessary to observe nature. Progress thereby became possible. One can interpret what Aristoteles wrote; but one cannot progress thereby. Somebody can progress only if he himself progresses if he himself sees the things.

The past four centuries applied this principle of self-knowledge to all external knowledge, to everything that spreads out before our senses. First in physics, then in chemistry, then in the science of life, then in the historical sciences.

Everything was included in this self-observation, in the external looking of the sensory world. One withdrew from the principle of authority. What has not been included in this principle of own knowledge was the view of the spiritually effective in the world, the immediate knowledge of that which is there not for the senses, but only for the mind. Hence, something appears during the last centuries, concerning this science and wisdom of the mind that one could once not speak of. Now we could go back to the oldest times. We want to do it, however, only to the first times of Christianity. There we have a science of the divine, then a great doctrine of the world origin which reaches down to our immediate sensuous surroundings. If you look at the great sages of former centuries, you can see everywhere how this way is taken from the highest point down to the lowest existence, so that no gap is between that which is said by the divine world order in theology and what we say about the sensory world. One had a comprehensive view of the origin of the planets and our earth. But one does no longer need to inform this today. However, someone who observes the development in the course of time can also accept that one goes beyond our wisdom. Time goes beyond the form of our science as we have gone beyond the former forms.

What existed at that time was a uniform world edifice that stood before the soul, and the basis of the soul was the spirit. One saw the primal ground of existence in the spirit. That comes from the spirit which is not spirit. The world is the reflection of the infinite spirit of God. And then that comes from the spirit of God which we find as higher spiritual beings in the different religious systems and also that which is the most powerful on this world: the human being, then the animals, the plants and the minerals. One had a uniform world view of the origin of a solar system up to the formation of the mineral. The atom was chained together with God himself although one never dared to recognise God himself. One sought the divine in the world. The spiritual was its expression. Those who wanted to know something about the highest heights of existence strove for educating themselves in such a way that they could recognise the sensory world. They wanted to conceive ideas of that which is above the sensory world, of the spiritual world order. They could ascend from the simple sensory knowledge to the comprehensive knowledge of the spiritual that way. If we look at the ancient cosmologies, we find no interruption between the teachings of theology and what the single worldly sciences say about the things of our existence. Link is attached to link continuously. One had started from the core of spirit up to the circumference of our earthly existence.

One took another path in modern times. One simply directed the senses and what is regarded to be arms of the senses, as strengthening instruments of sense-perception, to the world. In brilliant, tremendous way one developed the world view that teaches us something about the external sensory world. Everything is not yet explained, but one can get an idea already today how this science of the sensuous things advances. However, something was thereby interrupted, namely the immediate connection between the world science and the divine science.

The picture of the world origin, of cosmology which is the most usual even today even if it is disputed, is found in the so-called Kant-Laplace world view. In order to orient ourselves, we want to say a few words about it to see then what signifies such a Kant-Laplace world view to us. It says: once there was a big world nebula, rather thin. If we could sit on chairs in space and watch, and if it were somewhat visible for finer eyes, this world nebula is organised perhaps because it cooled down. It establishes a centre in itself, rotates, pushes off rings which form to planets, and in this way you know this hypothesis such a solar system forms, which has the sun as a spring of life and heat. However, what is developed that way must find an end in such a way, as it develops. Kant and others admit that again new worlds form et etcetera.

What is now such a world view that the modern researcher tries to compose from the scientific experiences of physics, chemistry etcetera? This is something that would have to be sense-perceptible in all stages. Now try once to really imagine this world view. What is absent in it? The spirit is absent. It is a material process, a process which can happen in microcosm with an oil drop in water at which you can look with your eyes. The process of world origin is made sense-perceptible. The spirit was not involved in the origin of such a solar system. Hence, it is not surprising that the question is raised: how does life originate, and how does the spirit originate? Because one originally imagined the lifeless matter only which moves according to its own principles.

What one has not experienced one can get out impossibly of the concepts. One can only get out what has been put in. If one imagines a world system which is empty which is devoid of spirit, then it must remain inconceivable how spirit and life can exist in this world. The question can never be answered out of the Kant-Laplace theory how life and spirit can originate. The science of modern times is just a sensuous science. Hence, it has taken up that part of the world in its theory of world origin which is a section of the whole world. Your body represents you in your entirety as little as matter is the whole world.

Just as it is true that life, feelings, thoughts, impulses are in your body which one cannot see if one looks at your body with sensuous eyes, it is true that the spirit is also in the world. However, it is also true that the Kant-Laplace theory shows the body only. As little as the anatomist who shows the structure of the human body is able to say how a thought can arise from the blood and the nerves if he thinks only materially, just as little anybody who thinks the world system according to Kant-Laplace can get to the spirit one day. As little as somebody who is blind and cannot see the light can say anything about our sensory world, as little as anybody who does not have the immediate view of the spirit can explain that something spiritual exists besides the physical body. The modern science lacks in the view of the spiritual. The progress is based on its one-sidedness, just in this way the human being can reach the unilaterally highest height. Because science confines itself to the sensuous, it reaches its high development. However, it becomes an oppressive authority, because this science has founded ways of thinking. These are stronger than all theories, stronger than even all dogmas.

One gets used to searching science in the sensuous, and thereby the fact creeps into the ways of thinking of the modern human being since four centuries that the sensuous became the only real to him. Hence, one generally believes that the sensory world is the only real one. Something that is justified as a theory became way of thinking, and someone who looks deeper into this thinking knows which infinitely suggestive strength such an active way of thinking has on the human beings for centuries. It worked on all circles. Like a human being who is exposed to suggestion, the whole modern educated humanity is exposed to the suggestion that only that which one perceives with the senses, can grasp with the hands is the only real. Humanity has given up from regarding the spirit as something real. But this has nothing to do with a theory, but only with the accustomed forms of thinking. These sit much, much deeper than any understanding. One can prove this by epistemology and philosophy which are not sufficiently developed in us, unfortunately. The whole modern science is influenced by these modern ways of thinking. With somebody who speaks today about the origin of the animals and about the origin of the world this way of thinking sits in the background, and he can't help giving such a colouring to his words and concepts that they make the powerful impression by themselves that it is real.

It is different with that which one merely thinks. One has to advance so far today to recognise the deeper reality in that which one only thinks. One has to become capable to behold the spirit. This is not to be attained with books and talks, not with theories and new dogmas, but with intimate self-education, which intervenes in the customs of the soul of the modern human being. The human being has to recognise first that it is not absolutely necessary to regard the sensuous-real as the only real, but he has to realise that he exercises something that was stimulated for centuries. One thinks this way. It flows into the original feeling of the human beings. These are not aware that they have illusions because they got them from the beginning. This impression works too strong, even on an idealist, so that he emphasises and lets flow the things into the souls of his fellow men that only the sensuous-real is the real.

With this transformation of the ways of thinking the development of theology took place. What is theology? It is the science of the divine as it is handed down since millenniums. It scoops from the Bible as the science of the Middle Ages scooped from Aristoteles. But it is just the teaching of theology that no revelation continues forever, but that the world and the words of the old revelations change. In the doctrine of the Catholic Church, the immediate spiritual life does no longer flow; it depends there on whether there are persons from who the spiritual life can still flow. If we grasp it this way, we have to say that also theology is subject to the materialistic thinking.

Once one did not understand the Six-day Work in such a way, as if it had happened purely materially in six days. One did not have the odd idea that one has not to study Christ to understand Him, but one has only pointed to the fact that the Logos was incarnated once in the human being Jesus. Unless one advanced so far, one did not arrogate a judgement to recognise what lived there from 1 to 33 A.D. Today one sees in Jesus – he is also called the “simple man from Nazareth” only a man like anyone, only nobler and more idealised. Theology has also become materialistic. These are the essentials that the theological world view does no longer look up to the summits of spirit, but wants to understand purely rationally, materialistically what happened historically. Nobody can understand the life work of Christ who looks at it only as history who only wants to know how that looked and spoke who strolled in Palestine from 1 up to 33 A.D. And nobody can make a claim to say that in him anything else did not live than in other human beings. Or is anybody able to argue away what he says: to me all power is given in heaven and on earth? But one wants to understand the matters historically today.

What was spoken in a speech on the 31st May, 1904 with a pastoral conference in Alsace-Lorraine is very typical. There a professor Lobstein from Strassburg held a talk Truth and Poetry in our Religion; a speech which is deeply likeable and shows how the materialistic theologian wants to find the way with the external research. Someone who approaches the Gospels with materialistic ways of thinking tries to understand first of all, when they were written. There he can rely only on the external documents, on that which the external history delivers as material. However, what was handed down comes basically from a much later time than it is normally assumed. If one takes the external word, one gets around to saying: the Gospels are inconsistent with each another. One has put together the three Synoptics who can be reconciled; one has to consider the St. John's Gospel separately. Hence, it has become for many something like a poem. One has also examined the epistles of Paul and has found that only this or that part is authentic. These facts constituted the basis of the religious research.

Hence, the religious history or dogma history became the most important science. Not the experience of the dogmatic truth is important today, but the religious history, the external representation of the events at that time. One wants to investigate this. However, it should not depend on this at all. This may be important to a materialistic history. but it is not theology. Theology does not have to investigate, when the dogma of Trinity originated, when it was pronounced first or was written down, but what it means, what it announces to us, what it may offer as living, as fertile to the inner life.

Thus it has come that one talks as a professor of theology about truth and poetry in our religion. One has found that there are contradictions in the writings. One has shown that some matters do not agree with the natural sciences; these are the miracles. One does not try to understand them, but one simply says that they are not possible. Thus one got around to introducing the concept of poetry in the Holy Scripture. One says that it does not lose any value, but that the story is a kind of myth or poetry. One must not be under the illusion that everything is fact, but one must come to recognise that our Holy Scripture is composed of poetry and truth.

This is based on a lack of knowledge about the nature of poetry. Poetry is something else than what the human beings imagine as poetry today. Poetry arose from the spirit. Poetry itself has a religious origin. Before there was poetry, there were already events like the Greek dramas to which the Greeks pilgrimaged like to the Eleusinian mysteries. This is the original drama. If it was practised, it was science for the Greeks, but also spiritual reality at the same time. It was beauty and art at the same time, however, also religious edification. Poetry was nothing else than the external form which should express truth of the higher plane, not only symbolically, but really. This forms the basis of every true poetry. Therefore, Goethe says: poetry is not art, but an interpretation of the secret physical principles that would never have become obvious without it. That is why Goethe calls only someone “poet” who is anxious to recognise truth and to express it in beauty. Truth, beauty and goodness are the forms to express the divine.

Hence, we cannot speak about poetry and truth in religion. Our time does no longer have correct concepts of poetry. It does not know how poetry streams from the spring of truth. Hence, every word wins something from it. We have to get again to the correct concept of poetry. We have to understand what poetry was originally and apply it to that which theology has to investigate. We probably say: ye shall know them by their fruits. Where to has theology got ? In a book which made a great stir in the last time, and which the people have accepted because a modern theologian has written it I mean What is Christianity? (1901) by Harnack (Adolf H.,1851–1930, Protestant theologian) there is a place, and this place reads: “the Easter message tells of the miraculous event in the garden of Joseph of Arimathea that, nevertheless, no eye has seen, of the empty grave into which some women and disciples looked, of the phenomena of the transfigured Lord glorified so much that his followers could not recognise him immediately , then also of speeches and actions of the risen Christ; the reports became more and more complete and confident. However, the faith in Easter is the conviction of the victory of the crucified over death, of God's strength and justice and of the life of that who is the first-born among many brothers. As to St. Paul, the basis of his faith in Easter was the certainty that “the second Adam” had come from heaven, and the experience that God revealed his son as a living one to him on the way to Damascus.”

The theosophical world view tries to lead the human beings upwards to understand this great mystery. The theologian says: Today we do no longer know what happened, actually, in the Garden of Gethsemane. We also do not know the quality of the messages about the events that the disciples deliver to us. We also do not know how to estimate the value of the words about the risen Christ in the epistles of Paul. We cannot cope with it. But one thing is certain: the faith in the risen Saviour started from these events, and we want to keep to the faith and do not care about its basis. You find a concept in the modern dogmatism that is strange for someone who looks for reasons of truth. One says: one cannot explain it metaphysically. No contradiction is possible, but also no explanation. There remains only the third, the religious truth.

In Trier, they once put up the Holy Robe of Jesus in the belief that the robe can work miracles. This belief has disappeared, because every belief can be held only by the fact that it is confirmed by experience. However, there remains the fact that some have experienced this; there remains the subjective religious experience.

Those who say this are allegedly no materialists. In their theory, they are not, but in their ways of thinking, in the way as they want to investigate the spiritual. This is the basis of the spiritual life of our idealists and spiritists. They all have accepted the materialistic ways of thinking. Also those are materialists who want to sit together in a meeting room and want to look at materialised ghosts. Spiritism has become possible because of our materialistic ways of thinking. Today, one visits the spirit materialistically. All idealistic theories are of no avail, as long as the knowledge of the spirit remains a mere theory, as long as it does not become life.

This requires a renewal, a renaissance of theology. It is necessary that not only faith exists, but that the immediate intuition flows in it with those who have to announce the word of the divine world order. The theosophical world view also wants to lead from the belief in the documents, in books and stories to an observation of the spirit by self-education. The same way which our science has taken shall be taken in the spiritual life, in the spiritual wisdom. We have to arrive at the experience of the spiritual again. Science, even wisdom, decides nothing here. Not by logic, not by contemplation you can investigate anything. The logic of your soul invents a sensuous world system. However, spiritual experience fills our understanding with real contents. It is the higher spiritual experience that has to fill our concepts with spiritual contents. That is why a renaissance of theology takes place only if one understands the word of the apostle Paul: all wisdom of the human beings is not able to understand the divine wisdom. Science itself is not able to do it. Just as little the external life can grasp this spiritual world. Any reflection cannot lead to the spirit; as little as anybody who sits on a distant island finds great physical truths without instruments and without scientific methods one day.

To the human beings something must occur that goes beyond wisdom that leads to the immediate life. As well as our eyes and ears inform us about the sensuous reality, we must experience the spiritual reality directly. Then our wisdom can reach it. Paul did never say: wisdom is the precondition to reach the divine. Not before we have found the whole world wisdom, we are able again to bring together the whole. Not before we have a spiritual system of world evolution again as we have a materialistic one on the other side we must not have the old faith, but behold, here and there , then the sensuous and the spiritual unite in a chain, and one will be able to descend again from the spirit to the teachings of the sensuous science.

The theosophical world view wants to bring that. It does not want to be theology, not a bookish knowledge and also not the interpretation of any book, but it wants experience of the spiritual life, it wants to give communications of the experiences of this spiritual life. The same spiritual strength also speaks to us today that once spoke with the announcement of the religious systems. It has to be the task of that who wants to teach something of the divine world order that he looks for the rise where he can speak again lonely in the heart with the spiritual heart of the world. Then the reversal takes place in our faculty which took place from the Middle Ages to the modern times in the fields of the external natural sciences. Then it occurs that if anybody announces anything of the spirit, and someone faces him with the words: however, one reads that differently in the scriptures, he eventually convinces him or not. Perhaps, he also says to him: however, I believe more in the scriptures than in that which quite a few people may tell about the immediate experience. But the course of the spiritual life cannot be impeded. May there be many inhibitions, may those be ever so reluctant who work for theology in the sense of the mentioned medieval follower of Aristotle today, the reversal which must take place here cannot be impeded. As knowledge has risen from faith up to watching, we also ascend from faith to the watching in the spiritual realm, and behold in theosophy. Then there is no belief in letters, no theology, then there will be lively life. The spirit of life will let those participate who can hear it. The word will forge ahead and find the popular expression. The spirit speaks of the spirit. Life will be there, and theology will be the soul of this religious life.

Theosophy has this vocation concerning the divinity faculty. If theosophy represents a movement that wants to be capable of surviving, that can make life and lifeblood flow into the letters of the scholarship, then we have a certain mission. Who understands the matter in such a way does not regard us as adversaries of those who have to announce the word. If the theologians seriously dealt with the intentions of the theosophical movement, if they got involved in our intentions, they would see something in theosophy that could inspire and animate them. Not fragmentation, but the deepest peace could be between the theologically and theosophically striving human beings. One will recognise this in the course of time. One will overcome the prejudices against the theosophical movement and understand how true it is what Goethe said:

Who has science and art,
Has religion too;
Who doesn't have both,
Shall have religion.

Theosophy does not fight against any religion in any way. Somebody is a right theosophist who wishes that wisdom may flow into those who are appointed to speak to humanity, so that it should not be necessary that there are theosophists who tell something about the immediate religious view. Theosophy can welcome the day with pleasure when one speaks of wisdom in the sites from which religion should be announced. If the theologians announce the right religion that way, one does no longer need theosophy.

A view of the world, as it is intended to be in spiritual science, must prove itself by giving people support for what they need in life. The support for life must be what we can call moral strength. But the support for life must also include, among other things, what we can call the inner soul-condition that can arise in a person from feeling that he is a member of the great cosmic whole, from feeling so incorporated into the cosmic whole that it corresponds to what one can call one's religious need. As for man's inner moral strength, Schopenhauer spoke an excellent word, even if the further remarks he made on these words in his own way seem quite disputable. He said: It is easy to preach morals, but to found morals is difficult. This is indeed a true saying of life. For in general, to recognize what is good, what the moral life demands of us, is relatively easy as a matter of intellect. But to draw from the primal forces of the soul those impulses that are necessary in man to place himself in the fabric of life as a morally powerful being, that is difficult. But that is what it means to found morality. To found morality is not merely to say what is good, what is moral. To found morality is to bring to man such impulses, which, by absorbing them into his soul life, become a real strength, a real efficiency in him.

Now, at the present stage of civilization, man's moral consciousness is embedded in the world in a very unique way, in a way that is not always fully consciously observed, but which is the reason for many uncertainties and insecurities that prevail in people's lives. On the one hand, we have our intellectually oriented knowledge, our insight, which makes it possible for us to penetrate into natural phenomena, which makes it possible for us to absorb the whole world into our imagination to a certain extent, which makes it possible for us, in an admittedly very limited way, as we have seen in the last two reflections here, to also make ideas about the nature of man.

Alongside what flashes up in us as our cognitive faculty, as everything that is, I would say, directed by our human logic, alongside all this, another element of our being asserts itself, the one from which our moral duty, our moral love, in short, the impulses for moral action, arise. And it must be said that modern man lives, on the one hand, in his cognitive abilities and their results, and on the other hand, in his moral impulses. Both are soul contents. But for this modern man, there is basically little mediation between the two, so little mediation that, for example, Kant could say: There are two things that are most precious to him in the world: the starry heavens above him, the moral law within him. But precisely this Kantian way of thinking, which lies dormant in the modern human being, knows of no bridge between what leads to knowledge of the world on the one hand and what moral impulses are on the other. Kant regards the life of knowledge in his Critique of Pure Reason and the moral life in his Critique of Practical Reason as if by chance.

And if we are completely honest with our sense of the times, we must actually say that there is an abyss here between two ways of experiencing human nature. Today's science, in forming ideas about the course of world evolution in the most diverse fields of knowledge, regards the workings of nature from the simplest living creatures, indeed from inorganic nature, right up to the human being. It forms ideas about how this world, which is directly before us, came into being. It also forms ideas about the processes by which the former end of this world, which is immediately before us, could take place. But now, from within man, who is nevertheless interwoven with this natural order, there wells up what he calls his moral ideals. And man perceives these moral ideals in such a way that he can only feel himself valuable if he follows these ideals, if there is agreement between him and these ideals. Man makes his value dependent on these moral ideals. But if we imagine that the forces of nature, which become accessible to man through his knowledge, are once upon a time approaching their end, where does today's sense of time leave what man creates out of his moral ideals, out of his moral impulses? Anyone who is honest, who does not shroud today's consciousness in nebulousness, must admit that, in the face of present-day scientific knowledge, these moral ideals are something by which man must guide himself in life, but by which nothing is created that could once triumph when the earth, together with man, comes to an end.

It is, for today's consciousness, one must only admit it, no bridge between the cognitive abilities that lead to natural knowledge and the abilities that govern us by being moral beings. Man is not aware of everything that goes on in the depths of his soul. Much remains unconscious. But what rumbles unconsciously down there asserts itself in life through disharmony, through mental or even physical illness. And anyone who just wants to see what is going on today without prejudice will have to say: our life is surging, and there are people in this life with all kinds of mental and physical contradictions. And that which surges up wells up from a depth in which something is indeed active that is like those weak human powers that cannot build a bridge between the moral life and the knowledge of nature. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science addresses these questions in the following way. It must abandon everything that is, on the one hand, only a theoretical view of external reality. It must therefore recognize everything that, as I explained in the last two lectures here, would like to exclude the human being from this view of nature, so that a true objectivity can arise.

What I characterized as the path to the spiritual world is presented, to summarize what I said earlier, in the following way: First of all, anyone who wants to enter the spiritual world must devote themselves to a certain inner soul-spiritual work. In my books, I have summarized this inner practice, this inner spiritual-soul work, as meditation and concentration work. This work enables people to relate to their imaginative life differently than they do in ordinary life when we observe natural phenomena or even social life. It is a complete being-with-the-ideas, which otherwise only accompany our outer impressions like shadows. Just as I said, we usually face people or nature or anything else in physical life with our feelings, with our sympathies and antipathies, and we face facts with our will emotions. How these ideas arise, that disturbs us, that challenges our sympathy and antipathy, that stimulates our entire life force. This becomes our destiny. While we are outwardly quite calm, inwardly we are going through something that is by no means weaker than what we otherwise go through as life's destiny in the outer world. We are, so to speak, doubling our lives. While we usually get excited, develop sympathy and antipathy, and assert volitional impulses only in the outer life, in relation to outer events, we carry what otherwise only occupies us in this outer material world into our inner life of thought. If we can do this — and everyone can do it if they practise as I have described in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' or in my 'Occult Science' —, if we can really carry this out, then there comes a moment for us when in which he not only has images of the world when he opens his senses, when he hears or sees, but where he has images purely from the life of imagination, so full of content images, if I may use the expression, so full of sap, as they otherwise only come to us through sensory perception. They come through this thus intensified and sharpened life of imagination. Without sensory perception, we live in a world of images, as they otherwise only come to us through sensory perception.

But another significant experience is linked to this – these things can only be understood as experiences; abstract logic, so-called reasoning does not lead to them. Another experience is connected to this: We learn through such practice what it means to develop a spiritual-soul activity independently of the physical activity. The moment comes for the human being when he can rightly admit to himself, if I may put it this way, that he is a materialist, however strange and paradoxical that may sound. At this moment he can say: yes, in ordinary life we are completely dependent on the tools of our body. We think through the instrument of our nervous system. But that is precisely what characterizes this outer life, that we traverse it only by developing the soul and spiritual when it avails itself of the bodily instruments. But the soul and spiritual is not dependent on merely availing itself of the bodily instruments. Through the efforts described, it can free itself from the physical tool, can become free of the body. No matter how much speculation and philosophizing one does with materialism, if one only brings against it what can be known from ordinary life, one will never refute it, because for ordinary life, materialism is right. Materialism can only be refuted through spiritual practice, by detaching the soul-spiritual from the bodily in direct experience. One visualizes – I called it imaginative visualization in the books mentioned – one visualizes, but outside of the body, whereby the “outside” is of course not to be imagined spatially, but independently of the body. This is one side of what one must get to know within anthroposophically oriented spiritual science in order to really build the bridge that cannot be built in the way we have described. What one attains in this way as the content of imaginative knowledge is not in the human body, but outside of it. This provides the practical explanation that our innermost being was in the spiritual-soul world before it clothed itself with this body. For one is not only outside of the body, one is outside of time, in which one lives with the body. In this way, one really experiences the prenatal, or let us say, the pre-physical conception in man. Just as a light from outside shines into the room, so our prenatal life shines into our present life in this imagination.

What shines in is not just thoughts, it has a living content. This living content reveals itself as something very special. It reveals itself as a certain, I might say, intellectual content. So, as we cultivate, sharpen and strengthen our imaginative life in the way I have described, we come out of ourselves into a will content that has something living about it at the same time. It is the will content that creates in us what clothes itself in the physical body, what we do not have through heredity, what we do not have at all from the physical world.

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not arrive at the realization of immortality through speculative processing of ordinary life, but rather through the cultivation of a cognitive faculty that is initially not present in ordinary life. What is particularly important for us today, however, is that in this way we reach beyond our physical body, even beyond the time in which our physical body lives. There one arrives at ideas that are still difficult for most people today to imagine, but which must become an important link in the evolution of humanity towards the future.

And now something very strange comes to light when one not only exercises on one side, that of the life of imagination, but also when one exercises on the side of the life of will. We human beings live, I would say, as Faust goes through life, saying, “I have only run through the world.” We run through the world. Of course, we undergo a development between birth and death, from month to month, from year to year, from decade to decade; but we undergo this development by, as it were, abandoning ourselves to external objectivity. Hand on heart, how many people do it differently than letting themselves be carried by life, be it by childhood, where adults educate them, or by later life and its fate? They become more perfect because the world makes them more perfect. But what do most people do differently, other than just abandon themselves to the stream of life? However, by abandoning oneself to the stream of life, one does not come to the spiritual path meant here. It is necessary that one takes self-discipline into one's own hands, that one actually works on oneself in such a way that one not only develops through the life that fate brings one, but that one develops further by making up one's mind: you want to implant this or that attitude. Now one works on implanting this attitude. One can undertake something on a small scale, one can do something on a large scale. But there is a big difference between just carrying out something in yourself, in the training of your own nature, by abandoning yourself to life, or taking this training of your own self into your own hands. By taking it into your own hands, you get to know the will in its effectiveness; because you learn to recognize what kind of resistance stands in the way of this will when you want to cultivate it in self-discipline. Oh, one gets to know all kinds of things in this way, one strengthens above all one's own powers of the spiritual-soul, and one will very soon notice when one exercises such exercises in self-discipline – but one must practice them for years – that one then acquires inner powers. These inner powers are of such a nature that we do not find them in outer nature. They are of such a nature that we do not find them in the ordinary life of the soul that we have carried within us before our exercises. We discover these forces only when we engage in such an inner exercise with ourselves. These forces are capable of something very definite: they are capable of absorbing into our own self, in a much more conscious way, the moral impulses that otherwise arise in the soul as if they were instinctive, as if they were indefinite and separate from the cognitive faculties. But understand me correctly, not into the self that we develop in our body, but into the self that we develop when we step out of our body with our imagination in the way described earlier. We cannot get the true form of the moral impulses into our sensual body, into our sensual perception; but we get what stands there so isolated that Kant presented it quite isolated as the categorical imperative, we get that into our self that has separated from the body.

And then what I have described earlier as imagination, as pictorial representations, becomes imbued with what one can call the objective power of moral impulses; it becomes imbued with moral inspiration. We now recognize that what wells up in us as moral imperatives, as moral ideals, is not rooted only in us, but in the whole of the world. We learn, by being outside of our physical being, to recognize that which does not appear in its true form within the physical organization, but in this true form, we recognize it through imaginative beholding, as objective forces of the world.

Such a vision can open up to a person who, with his or her healthy common sense, properly takes in what the spiritual researcher is able to say from his vision of the spiritual world. Anyone who imbues themselves with such a vision feels something very special about what today's popular public lectures are. It may sound strange when I say it, but I would like to say: anyone who unreservedly absorbs this inspiration in their imagination, which coincides with the moral forces that are present in human life, and imagines how can see through something like this in the present through spiritual knowledge, would like to think: if only such knowledge could take hold of people, at least as strongly as they are seized when they hear that X-rays or wireless telegraphy have been found! In view of what is taking place in the soul of a spiritual scientist, one would like to say: it is very necessary for present-day civilization that people should come to appreciate the spiritual forces for human strengthening that can be found in this way, just as much as what can be useful and beneficial in the outer life.

I believe that we have touched on an important challenge of civilization in the present day. The spiritual-scientific insights are, I repeat, not speculation, they are experiences. And the fact that so few people today accept them is because most people allow themselves to be blinded by materialistic scientific views, let their own prejudices stand in their way, do not apply their common sense, and therefore cannot properly

examine what the spiritual scientist says. They always say: we cannot see for ourselves what the spiritual researcher says. I would like to know how many people who believe in the Venus transits have ever seen a Venus transit! I would like to know how many people who say that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen have ever observed in a laboratory how to determine that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen and so on. There is a logic of common sense. Through it one can check what the spiritual researcher says. I certainly cannot paint illusions before those who use their common sense, nor can I talk fantasies to them, because they can use their common sense to see whether I speak like a dreamer or whether I speak in logical contexts, whether I speak like someone who puts forward one idea after another, as one does even in the most exact science. Anyone who acquires such a healthy knowledge and understanding of human nature will be able to distinguish whether he has a fantasist in front of him or a person who, by knowing how to clothe his view in healthy logical forms and not giving the impression of a dreamer in other ways, is to be taken seriously. We have to decide many things in life in this way; why should we not decide in this way the most important thing: insight into the order of the world? There is no other way for someone who cannot become a spiritual researcher themselves – but everyone can become a spiritual researcher to a certain extent, as I have explained in the books mentioned – to determine this; because spiritual science is something that is experienced, something that must be experienced, not something that is only achieved through logical conclusions.

So if you study worldviews, I would say the combination of imagination and inspired morality, you get to know something else, you learn to recognize what the contradiction is between so-called natural causality, natural necessity, and the element in which man lives as in his freedom. For it is only in the element of freedom that we can live with our moral impulses. We look out into the outer nature. Overwhelming for the view of nature that has developed over the last three to four centuries is what is called the necessary connection of the following with the preceding, what is called general causality. Thus, nature, including the human condition, presents itself as if everything were seized by a natural necessity. But then our freedom would be in a sorry state; then we could not act differently than the natural necessity in us compels us to act. Freedom would be an impossibility if the world were as the scientific view that has become popular in the last three to four centuries wants it to be.

But once we have gained the point of view that I have just described, the point of view of observation outside the human body, then everything that is permeated by necessity is, so to speak, presented as a kind of natural body. And this natural body produces a natural soul and a natural spirit in all possible places. The natural body is, as it were, that which has cast and thrown off the nascent world; the natural spirit, the natural soul, is that which grows into the future.

Just as, when I see a corpse before me, this corpse no longer has the possibility of following anything other than the necessities that have been determined by the soul and spirit that dwelled in it, so too that which is corpse-like in external nature has nothing in it of impulses as necessities. But in every place, what grows into the future springs forth. Our natural science has only been accustomed to observing the natural corpse, and therefore sees only necessity everywhere. Spiritual science must be added to this. It will see the life that is sprouting and has sprouted everywhere.

Thus man is placed, on the one hand, in the realm of natural causality and, on the other, in that which is also there but contains no causality. This contains something that is the same as the element of freedom we experience inwardly. We experience this element of freedom as I have described it in my Philosophy of Freedom when we rise to inwardly transparent, pure thinking, which is actually an outflow of our will activity. You can find more details in my Philosophy of Freedom.

Thus, what we gain by creating a possibility of knowledge for ourselves outside the human body carries us into a world where the contrast between natural necessity and freedom becomes explicable. We get to know freedom itself in the world. We learn to feel ourselves in a world in which freedom resides.

When I describe something like this to you, I do not do it just to show you the content of what I am describing, but I want to present it to you show you how man can enter into a certain frame of mind by absorbing knowledge drawn from such regions, by invigorating himself with such knowledge.

Just as we are imbued with joy when we experience an extraordinarily joyful event, as some people, when they have drunk so and so much Moselle wine, are completely imbued with the mood that comes from the Moselle wine, so too can a person's entire state of mind be seized by something so truly spiritual that it permeates the person. When has a person's state of mind been gripped by something, at first only in the outer life, but then in a shadowy way? When the categorical imperative or conscience moves in the face of moral obligations. But the content of this conscience now becomes clear and it will also take on a different emotional nuance. For what has actually happened – whether a person is a spiritual researcher himself, or whether he absorbs what the spiritual researcher brings through his common sense and incorporates it into his soul as insights – what has happened to the person? He has merged with something, has united with something, with which one only comes together when one goes out of oneself, when one alienates oneself from oneself. You will find no better, more realistic definition of love and the feeling of love than that which can be described as the state of mind that overcomes one when one penetrates, free of the body, into the entity of the outer world. If moral imperatives otherwise appear as a constraint, they can be cast in such a form that they appear imbued with the same mood that must permeate spiritual scientific knowledge. These moral impulses, these moral imperatives, can learn from the soul-attitude that comes to us through the assimilation of spiritual science; they can be warmed through by what must live in spiritual science in the highest sense: by love.

I tried to show this again in my Philosophy of Freedom, that love is the most dignified impulse for moral action in man. Within the modern development of the spirit, these things have already been spoken of more instinctively than can be the case today, when we can, if we want, have progressed in spiritual science. Kant once spoke of the compelling duty, of the, I would say, humanly restraining categorical imperative, which allows no interference of any sympathy. What one does out of moral duty, one does because one must. Kant therefore says: Duty, you exalted, great name, you carry nothing with you that means ingratiation or the like, but only the strictest submission. Schiller did not consider this slavish submission to duty to be humane. And he countered this Kantian argument with what he expressed so beautifully and so magnificently in his “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man”.

But we need only take a small epigram that Schiller coined in opposition to this rigorist, rigid concept of duty as propounded by Kant, and we have an important humanistic contrast with regard to the moral life: “I gladly serve my friends,” says Schiller, “but unfortunately I do it reluctantly. And so it often rankles me that I am not virtuous.” He believes that in the Kantian sense, one should not gladly serve one's friends, but rather submit to one's duty in obedience. But that which can make human life truly human is when we fulfill what Goethe says in a few monumental words: Duty, where we love what we command ourselves. But the mood to love what one commands oneself can only be kindled from that state of the human soul that comes about in the acquisition of spiritual science.

So when one delves into spiritual science, it is not something that runs alongside life, like preaching morals, but there is a development of strength within it that directly takes hold of the moral will. It is a grounding of morality. It is there that which pours into the human being the moral love. Spiritual science does not merely preach morals; spiritual science, when taken in its full seriousness, in its full power, grounds morality, but by not giving words of morality, but giving strength for virtuous love, for loving virtue.

Spiritual science is not just theory, it is life. And when one acquires spiritual science, it is not just a matter of reflection, it is something like absorbing life, like breathing. This is what spiritual science can offer modern civilization in the moral sphere, what it must offer. For in ancient times, as I indicated the day before yesterday, people also had a spiritual science, but it was instinctive. Where did the spiritual science of the ancient, millennia-old developing Oriental wisdom come from? It was a dull, dream-like visualization of the world. It came from human instincts, from human drives. This spiritual science was instinctive. People saw into nature through a kind of clairvoyance. And this clairvoyance was connected with their blood, was connected with their outer physicality. But the moral impulses of that time were also connected with this blood, with this outer physicality. Both came from one source. Humanity is undergoing a development and believes that we can be like people thousands of years ago; this is the same as believing that an adult man can be like a child. We can no longer stand on the standpoint of the primitive clairvoyant arts of the ancient Orient or ancient Egypt. We have advanced to Galileism, to Copernicanism. We have advanced to the point of observation that arises in the intellect. In those ancient oriental ways of looking at things, the intellect had not yet developed. But for that, we must also get the impulses for our moral action from the spirit, not from instinct. That is the worst thing today, that people, when they talk about ideals or impulses for life, always make everything absolute. When some party member or enthusiastic theorist appears on the scene today, dreaming of a thousand-year Reich, they say: I want this or that for humanity and they think to themselves that what they are saying is good for humanity in all times to come and for the whole earth. That it is good in the most absolute sense. Anyone who really looks into the life of developing humanity knows that what is good, what is valid for the world view, is always only appropriate for a certain age, that one must know the nature of this age. I have often said in earlier lectures here: spiritual science, anthroposophically oriented, as I express it here, does not imagine that it is something absolute. But it does believe that it speaks from the heart of the present and the near future, that it says for human souls what these human souls need in the present and in the near future. But she knows full well that this spiritual science: if in five hundred years someone will again speak of the great riddles of the world and of the affairs of humanity, he will speak in different tones, in a different way, because there is nothing absolute in this sense, nothing that lasts forever.

We are effective in life precisely because we are able to grasp it in its liveliness, in its metamorphosis, even where we stand in it. It is easier to set up absolute ideals in abstractions than to first get to know one's age and then, from the essence of this age, to speak what is appropriate for it. Then, when, through the assimilation of spiritual-scientific impulses, man, as has been said, permeates himself with what comes to him from the spirit, then he will know that he is spirit as man, is soul, then he will know that he lives through the world as spirit and soul. And then he will address every other human being as spirit and soul. One would be inclined to say that something tremendous will come about when this becomes spiritual science in human life, when it becomes an attitude that permeates human life to such an extent that one consciously encounters another human being as a riddle to be solved, because with each person one looks into infinity, into spiritual depths and abysses.

What emerges from this real observation of our fellow human beings as spirit and soul will give rise to social and moral forces that must form the basis for a real treatment of the burning social question of our time. I cannot imagine that those who see through the whole essence of the social question and at the same time let today's human condition take effect on them do not suffer certain mental anguish. We live in a time when the social question needs to be resolved in a certain way. We also live in a time when the promoters of the social order are inspired by the most anti-social instincts, when the demand for social organization of life seems to be in opposition to what lives in human souls as anti-social instincts. No matter how beautiful the programs may be that are drawn up, no matter how beautiful the ideas that are entertained as to what should be done to solve the social problem, a way to solve it can only be found when the spirit is seen, felt and sensed among people, when people treat each other with respect, protection, honor and love, and not just the physical part of their fellow human beings.

That is why I have called in my book “The Essentials of the Social Question” for the separation of spiritual life from the rest of social life, so that this spiritual life can be placed only on its own foundations, independent of the state and independent of economic impulses, purely of human nature. Only such a free spiritual life will truly spread social instincts, social views and attitudes among people. Social morality also depends on people taking in their spiritual state what can become them in the pursuit of what can be said from the research of spiritual science.

And that in which man must rest as a whole, worthy and dignified, so that he does not feel as a mere lonely wanderer, but as a member of the world, the religious element, can, in the sense that modern man needs it, only be kindled and fanned by that which is attained as an inner mood in the pursuit of spiritual science.

The events of the world order or of human development that religious feelings point to stand there as fact. The Mystery of Golgotha, for example, stands there as fact. What took place in Palestine at the beginning of our era, when the Christ came into the flesh in Jesus, is a fact. One must distinguish this fact, this objective fact, from the way in which man approaches the understanding and contemplation of such a fact. In the times when Christianity first spread, it was able to flow within the human attitudes that still came from the ancient Orient. What happened in Palestine as the event of Golgotha was understood with the ideas that in a certain way came from ancient times, from primitive human attitudes. For centuries, those who were able to do so were honest and sincere in their understanding of the event of Golgotha through such ideas. But then came the time when Galilean science arose, when Giordano Bruno overcame space in such a remarkable way for the human conception by showing that what is up there the blue firmament is only that which lives in ourselves, the boundaries that we ourselves set, while in a far-flung sea of space the stars are in infinity. All that Copernicus brought, all that has been brought to the newer world-picture of externals by the spirits who have lived up to the present day, has come. In this time men have inwardly become accustomed to a different way of looking at the world than that through which Christianity was first comprehended. In this time a new relation must also be won to the religious foundations of the evolution of mankind. The point is not to shake the facts on which the religious development of humanity is based. But the point is to appeal to modern human conscience in such a way that the man of today, out of his state of soul, can understand the Christ event as he must.

Those who say that a new path must also be sought to the old facts on religious ground mean it most honestly and reverently with regard to religion. Spiritual science, oriented towards anthroposophy, will be the best preparation for understanding Christianity or other religious content in a modern way. Those who do not honestly mean it with religious life do not admit this, because they want to preserve ways to the foundations of religious life to which man today, when he otherwise pays homage to the views of his time, cannot pay homage.

We have come to materialism in modern times. Certainly, different types of people have become the instigators of materialism; but among these people there are also those who have retained certain old habits of life in the development of humanity, habits of life that have led to a monopoly being given to the denominations for everything that can be said about the spirit and soul. Because the confessions alone had the right to decide what should be believed about the spirit and soul, natural science was left without a spirit to guide its research. Today, natural science believes that it has taken on this form because it had to, when researching nature, one must exclude the spirit. Oh no, natural science has become so because in earlier times it was forbidden to research nature with spirit, because the church had to decide about spirit and soul. And today, people continue the habits and even trumpet them as unprejudiced scientific judgment.

One only has to look at such researchers, who in the sense of materialistic research must be highly praised, as for example at the Jesuit priest and ant researcher Wasmann, the excellent materialistic researcher in the field of natural science, a researcher who, however, does not allow a grain of spirit to flow into what dogma is. Spirit and soul must be excluded. Therefore: external science is materialistic. The founders of the religions of the book are not in the least the originators of modern materialism. However paradoxical it may sound today, it is true: because the church did not allow the spirit to be brought into the contemplation of nature, natural science has become spiritless. The others have only adopted this as a habit. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must bring the spirit back into the study of nature. Let me say once more: this spiritual science is not based on the idea that spirit only makes occasional or brief visits, as in materialism, so that man can convince himself that there is a spirit. No, this spiritual science wants to show that in the small and large, in all material things, there is always and everywhere spirit, that one can always and everywhere follow the spirit. But because spiritual science oriented to anthroposophy always and everywhere investigates spirit in the most material form, it shows that there is no such thing as a material substance that is independent of spirit, just as there is no ice that is independent of water. Ice is transformed water, water that has cooled down; matter is spirit that has solidified. One must only explain it in the right way in each individual case. By showing, as everywhere, where there is matter, where there is outer life, there is spirit, and by leading man to connect with the ruling spirit, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science also provides the impetus for a real religious deepening today.

But one experiences many things in this field. You see, an experience of a man who is even well-intentioned is the following. Someone says: I cannot examine spiritual science as Steiner presents it; it may contain truths, but it should be kept very far from all religious life, because religious life must represent a direct relationship, a direct unity of man with God, far from all knowledge. And now the person in question says, very strangely: in our time we have too much of religious interest, of religious experience; people just always want to experience something religious. They want to have religious interest. You don't need any of that in religion. In religion, you only need direct unity with God. Away, says the churchman in question, with all religious interest, with all religious experience.

Now, an unprejudiced person must say today that even if people still long for an unclear religious experience, even if they still awaken an unclear religious interest in themselves, that is precisely the beginning of the yearning to really find a way into the religious element, as I have described it to you now. Whoever is honest and sincere about religious life should take hold of that urge for religious interest and religious experience. Instead, the clergyman condemns religious experience and religious interest. The question today is whether real religious understanding is to be found in those who speak as they do or in those who try to speak as I have spoken to you today. However, you also have to recognize people by their fruits.

In a recent lecture, a man who is also a churchman, but also a university professor, tried to refute anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Two young friends of mine were in this lecture, and they were able to speak afterwards in the discussion. Because of the context, these two young people, who had absorbed the impulses of spiritual science well, brought forward words from the Bible to prove how what is written in the Bible, if properly understood, agrees with what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has to say in this area. And at one point the chairman, who was a real churchman, didn't know what else to do but say, “Here Christ errs!” It could be retorted, “So you believe in a God who errs!” A fine religious sentiment. It produces strange blossoms today. Religious sentiment is only genuine when it enters into real moral life. There one certainly has strange experiences. I now find it pretty much the most disgusting thing that can be said about what appears as a social consequence in this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, from beginning to end, and that it has been lied about by a whole series of German newspapers. But people today find it compatible with morality to say that the following can happen as a moral consequence of religious practice. Recently, a canon, that is, a churchman of the Catholic kind, gave a lecture in a city about the spiritual science presented here, and at the end he said: find out from the opposing writings what kind of worldview the man represents, because you are not allowed to read his own writings and those of his followers. The Pope has forbidden Catholics to read them.

The recommendation to get to know something from the evil-intentioned, from the most malevolent opposing writings, is the moral consequence of some religious practices of the present day. No wonder that what we have experienced in the last five years has poured out over the world from such underground life. Or was it not a surfacing of lies and hatred of humanity and much more that was rooted and still is rooted in the depths of human souls? Should not the fact that one has experienced give cause to seriously consider whether a thorough re-education is not necessary? Has not something like world-historical immorality come to the surface of world history in the present? Or is it religious sentiment that has been acted out in the world in the last five years? Those attitudes that have not had centuries, but millennia, to work on improving humanity, are now seeing their fruits! Nineteenth-century theology no longer recognizes anything of the spirituality of the event of Golgotha. This spirituality, this divine Christ in the man Jesus, will be rediscovered through the path of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. From there, he will again enter into human souls, to prompt them not merely to preach morality, but to establish within themselves the right instinctive motivation for moral action and work in the world. Is there not an obvious need for renewal and reconstruction? Does this necessity not emerge when one looks at the events of the last five to six years? Do we not see the fruits of that which has been living under the surface for centuries and has now come to the surface? Should this not be proof that thorough religious and moral work is necessary?

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science would like to collaborate on this work, the necessity of which any unbiased person must admit today if they are not asleep in their soul within the great events of the time. And anyone who wants to criticize it, who wants to condemn it, should first raise the fundamental question: does it honestly want to collaborate on the real progress of humanity? And only when he has conscientiously informed himself about it so that he can form an opinion about it, will it become clear to what extent this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has the right to participate. Because it wants to honestly and sincerely participate in the necessary progress, in the necessary rethinking and relearning of humanity.

Tips to the close coherence of the human being with the physical life appear repeatedly. If we find such hints in scientific writings about variations of the grain prices within certain periods and one points in this regard to the changes of the glaciers or of the water gauge of the Caspian Sea, it seems at first sight that one could not relate these things seriously. However, always-new relations as well as also their confirmations are found. One will still be able to ascertain many facts and some mistakes will have to be eliminated, but science has furnished evidence for the mysterious interaction. Many such events relate to the activity of the sun, among other things also to the increasing and decreasing number and size of the solar spots. Their maxima and minima appear with a certain regularity. After about 11 1/9 years, such a maximum can be determined in each case. Furthermore a comparison of the observations which have been done up to now shows that, perhaps, one could also calculate on a period of twenty-two and a half years.

One cannot deny changes of the climatic conditions, caused by the activity of the solar spots. It seems that a maximum of the solar spots causes a decreased heat emission of the sun, which causes big changes then in nature. Thus, for example, the good wine years followed themselves in indeed varying distances of eleven years. How the 35-year period of Brückner's (Eduard B., 1862–1927, geographer, meteorologist, glaciologist and climate scientist) climate variations relate to it, is not yet determined scientifically.

Science also relates the ice ages—it assumes four of these immense changes of the face of the earth—to the solar activity and the position of the earth's axis. Thus, the wholly mechanical thinking relates the events on the sun to the earth evolution. In other times, one regarded these matters in another way which science discounts with its feeling of superior wisdom.

However, what we must feel if we see how one of the greatest scholars and such a careful thinker like Aristotle speaks of the fact that according to ancient doctrines the stars are gods. All remaining that folk lore tells about the gods is worthless and added by the people. Aristotle expressed himself with care concerning this doctrine, but he treats it as something that one must face with esteem and reverence.

Such an echo of ancient wisdom on which the modern naturalist looks down with a shrug has also survived in astrology in mutilated, brainless way, however, it leads still back to the old wisdom of humanity. It is not easy to make clear what such old wisdom contains. Today the human being regards the stars and the earth as wholly physical bodies wandering through the space. He says that it was a childish idea to think that the other world bodies could signify anything for the human destinies. At that time, one felt just different if one compared the human being with the remaining world. One did not think of bones, muscles and senses, but of the feelings and sensations that lived in him. The stars were to him the bodies of spiritual-divine beings, and he felt penetrated by their spirit.

Whereas today the human being recognises that mechanical forces are effective in the solar system, at that time he saw mental-spiritual forces working from star to star. The great initiates taught not wholly mathematical forces, but effects based on wholly spiritual forces from star to star.

It is quite comprehensible that this world feeling has changed in our materialistically coloured worldview, but only someone who believes that the view of the last fifty years is valid for good, can close his heart against the idea of that which lived in the not materialistic but spiritual experience of the world. This also applies to the view, which puts the earth in the centre of creation.

In the context with the existence of Christ on earth one explains that this earth is only a grain of sand among the other stars and, hence, nobody can assume who is not prejudiced in terrible hubris that just to this unimportant earth a divine being descended. Not from nothing, this change took place. At that time, the human beings raised their eyes to absorb the spiritual content of the space, and were not yet far advanced concerning the control of the physical space. With the emergence of the materialistic worldview, the physical world has been conquered most extensively. We do not want to criticise, but to understand how this change took place. It was initiated for a long time, but just in the 19th century, it made miraculous advances.

The modern worldview faces us crystal clear in Kant and his followers. The picture that they made of the origin of the solar system is known in general: in order to illustrate the formation of a heavenly body, one pours a drop of oil in some water in a vessel. One brings it in a rotary movement. Smaller and bigger spherical parts thereby separate. As well as here these oil particles, the worlds went adrift from the primeval nebula.

I only need to mention that in the 19th century the admirable advances of the natural sciences and astronomy corrected the worldview of Kant and Laplace and continued it in changed form, however, the main features remained the same. The great discovery by Kirchhoff (Gustav Robert K., 1824–1887, German physicist) and Bunsen (Robert B., 1811–1899, German chemist), the spectral analysis, also seems to confirm this, while they could detect a big number of those mineral materials that compose our earth on the other heavenly bodies. On the sun itself, one has detected more than two thirds of all known elements. It is very typical and more significant that one of the best experts of this worldview (Simon Newcomb, 1835–1912, Canadian astronomer) pronounced the sentence: if one pursues the figure of the world edifice, it turns out that the primeval nebula formed with a necessity similar to that of a functioning clock, which shows that one has winded up it once.

You can visualise the emergence of the world body by that experiment. However, the logical thinking demands to think all things to an end. Then it turns out that one has forgotten something, namely just the most important by which the globules separate. By the movement that the experimentalist carries out! However, one forgets him applying the results of this experiment to the hypothesis of the emergence of the heavenly body. One completely ignores this “trifle” with the worldview proven this way. One wants to know nothing about the experimentalist. Without being opponent of modern natural sciences, you can put this question to yourselves.

One can completely stand on the ground of scientific thinking without forgetting the uncomfortable experimentalist. He is the spirit who stands behind everything, the sum of the spiritual beings who reveal their nature in the phenomena of the sense-perceptible world, as the results of exact research of spiritual science can show them. Spiritual science does not need to deny anything that modern science has investigated. It admits its results completely, as far as these are obtained by strict and objective observation, experimentation and thinking. It recognises the necessity of such, only to the sense-perceptible world directed research. However, it also knows that the time has come where humanity must be pointed to the fact that the spirit is the reason of all matter and that the matter is the external expression of the spiritual beings.

Spiritual science looks not only at the mechanical processes of attraction and repulsion; it examines which spiritual forces correspond to them. In order to gain a living picture of the plant according to its method at first, one has to proceed as follows:

The plant turns its root downward, its stalk upwards. We see two forces active, one of which assigns itself to the centre of the earth whereas the second tries to wrest the plant from the earth's tentacles. Someone who does not look at the plant only with the outer eye realises how root and blossom show the expression of both forces. Supersensible forces of attraction and repulsion are active here. The former ones come from the earth, while the other forces shine down from the sun. If the plant only faced the solar forces, its development would happen very fast, it would develop leaf by leaf and atrophy, if the other force were absent, the restraining force working from the earth.

Thus, the plant becomes the result, the expression of the forces of sun and earth. We do no longer regard it as a separated thing. It appears as a being that is a member of the entire earth organism, as the hair is a part of the human organism. The earth becomes a living entity, a manifestation of the living, of the spiritual, as the human being is the expression of soul and spirit.

The animal is more independent, not as plant and hair only a part of an organism. It owes its partial independence that the animal soul ensouls it. This is, in contrast to the human soul that is an individual soul, a group soul. The animal is its revelation and relates to it like the finger to the entire organism. The animal is thereby less tied to the earth organism.

In order to understand this, one must think that the spiritual research recognises the forces of attraction and repulsion as the earthly images of that which corresponds in the spiritual to these forces causing the planetary motions, which the Kant-Laplace worldview knows, with all its later modifications and additions, like gravity. These as well as its consequences arise as facts of the sensuous observation of the things. Their spiritual prototype that causes and carries the physically discernible appearance is also a fact, which arises as a result to the exact spiritual research. The animal group souls orbit their planets, and thereby the animal realm is independent from the planet. Any planet has its plant realm in common with the solar system with which it is connected. However, any planet has its own orbital forces and thereby its own animal realm, as far as it is able to have the animal realm.

If one looks at the human being now, one must draw the attention to a fact that is deeply significant. As an embryo, the human being is subject to the lunar influence. The human embryo needs ten lunar months for its development. Lunar forces control it, as long as the human being does not yet appear as an independent being. The creative plant forces that press forward to the blossom and fruit are solar forces. The human body depends on the moon as far as it concerns its form. These formative forces relate to the solar forces in a certain way. Sun and moon form the contrast of life and form necessary for the human development. If only the persisting lunar forces were effective, any other development would be excluded and a kind of lignification would take place, while the solar forces solely would lead to combustion. The light that shines from the moon is not only reflected sunlight, but it contains formative forces. The sunlight is not only light, but forces of light, of too intense light, so that the human being would be immediately very old after his birth [if he were exposed to it only]. The human form is the result of the moon, his life that of the sun.

The spectral analysis can recognise the mineral-chemical compounds of the sun, not the spiritual forces of vitality, which flow down to the earth. With the help of the telescope, one sees the moon only as stiffened heavenly body, not the formative spiritual force. In the sun, the physical researcher recognises glowing gas masses, flooding movement, metals surging up and down, solar spots and protuberances, but not the body of a spiritual being, the regent of the processes of life. This is a chapter of a new research that only starts developing and has to conquer field by field only. Nevertheless, these things are of the highest significance.

Goethe is one of the first modern naturalists who saw more than only mechanical-physical processes in the light without receiving acknowledgement. Already years ago, on the occasion of a birthday celebration of Goethe I pointed to the fact that Schopenhauer deplored bitterly that those who celebrated Goethe did very wrong by him concerning his theory of colours. The scholars speak only reluctantly about that. For the physicist it is more a nice, poetic but impossible thought compared to the wholly physical theory of colours. However, spiritual science stands completely different towards that. If once the time is ripe to understand Goethe's theory of colours properly, one will also realise that the light consists not only of seven basic colours, of material oscillations, but that behind the earthly light life is flowing down from the sun. Then one also understands what Goethe meant if he says of the rainbow colours that they are deeds of the light.

From the stars, from the sun and moon flow not only light beams, but spiritual life streams down to us. As long as one only sees the physical light, one cannot understand this, because one can guess the spiritual only with artistic imagination, can experience it in the sensuous-extrasensory beholding as a picture by spiritual research.

The human being is a multi-membered being. If he sleeps, only his physical and etheric bodies rest in the bed. The astral body with the ego separates from the lower members and lifts out itself in the spiritual world. It receives forces, more elated ones than the human being gets from the sun and moon during the day.

Because the astral body is integrated in the much lighter substantiality of the astral world, the stars can influence it stronger. As in the wake state the physical forces work on the physical body, the stars work on the astral body now, because the human being is born out of the universe, by the same universal spirit as the starry sky.

If we raise the eyes to the sun, moon and stars that way, we can understand which forces work there, get to know the spiritual in the universe.

We cannot guess a manlike universal God, however, we can guess the spiritual forces behind the universal nebula and realise only in which way the worlds originate. We start experiencing the forces of leading beings behind the working forces.

Schiller thought also that way calling to the astronomers who investigate the physical stars only: “Do not chat so much to me about nebulae and suns! Is nature only great, because she gives you to count them? True, your object is the most elated one in space; but—friends—the elated does not live in space.”

If we look only at the outer forces, we do not find the elated. However, if we search the spiritual, and return from the immense universe to ourselves, we are able to see a drop of the spiritual life in ourselves that flows through the space.

If we face the heavenly bodies with such attitude, we understand Goethe's word better: oh, what they would be, the countless millions of suns, if they did not reflect themselves in the human eye and did not delight a human heart at last?

It could sound presumptuous, and, nevertheless, it is modest if we understand it properly. If we look up at the sun from which life streams go out it works so powerfully that we could not stand them if the lunar forces did not paralyse them. Thus, we see the spirit in the universe; however, we know that we have organs with which we can perceive the spirit in the universe. Then we let it reflect in the organs as the sun is reflected to which we can also not see directly, but its shine is reflected in the waterfall, as well as it is expressed in Goethe's words where he lets Faust say, after he has led back him again to the life on earth:

I am content to have the sun behind me.
The cataract there storming through the cliff—
the more I watch it, the more is my delight.
From fall to fall it swirls, gushing forth
in streams that soon are many, many more,
into the air all loudly tossing spray and foam.
But see how, rising from this turbulence,
the rainbow forms its changing-unchanged arch,
now clearly drawn, now evanescent,
and casts cool, fragrant showers all about it.
Of human striving it's a perfect symbol—
ponder this well to understand more clearly
that what we have as life is many-hued reflection.

(Faust II, Verses 4715–4727)

Anyone who wishes to attach any value to the form of spiritual-scientific world view that I will be speaking about today and tomorrow will need to familiarize themselves with the peculiar contradiction inherent in the development of humanity, namely that a spiritual current, a spiritual impulse, can be eminently timely from a certain higher point of view, and that this timeliness is nevertheless at first sharply rejected by contemporaries, rejected in a way that one might say is thoroughly understandable.

The impulse for a new view of the universe of space, which Copernicus gave at the dawn of the new era, was timely from the point of view that the development of humanity at the time of Copernicus made it necessary for this impulse to come. This impulse proved to be quite untimely for a long time to come, in that it was opposed by all those who wanted to hold on to old habits of thought, to prejudices that were centuries and millennia old. To the followers of spiritual science, this spiritual scientific world view appears to be in keeping with the times, and it is out of date from the point of view of those who still judge it from that perspective. Nevertheless, I believe that in the course of today's and tomorrow's lecture I will be able to show that in the subconscious depths of the soul of contemporary humanity there exists something like a yearning for this spiritual-scientific world view and something like a hope lives for it:

As it presents itself at first, this spiritual science wants to be a genuine continuation of the scientific work of the spirit, as it has been done in the last centuries. And it would be quite wrong to believe that this spiritual science somehow developed opposition to the great triumphs, to the immense achievements and the far-sighted truths that natural scientific thinking of the last centuries has brought. On the contrary, what natural science was and is for the knowledge of the external world, that this spiritual science wants to be for the knowledge of the spiritual world. In this way, it could almost be called a child of the scientific way of thinking, although this will still be doubted in the broadest circles today.

In order to give an idea, not a proof, but initially an idea that should lead to understanding, the following is said about the relationship between the spiritual science meant here and the scientific world view: If we look at the great, powerful of the development of natural science knowledge in the last three to four centuries, we say that on the one hand it has brought immeasurable truths across the broad horizon of human knowledge, and on the other hand that this thinking has been incorporated into practical life. Everywhere we see the benefits of this in the fields of technology and commerce, which have been brought to us by the laws and insights of natural science that have been incorporated into practical life. If we now wish to form an idea of the attitude of spiritual science to these advances, we can begin by making a comparison. We can look at the farmer who cultivates his field and reaps the fruits of the field. The greater part of these fruits of the field are taken into human life and used for human sustenance; only a small part remains. This is used for the new sowing of the fruits. Only the latter part can be said to be allowed to follow the driving forces, the inner life and formative forces that lie in the sprouting grain, in the sprouting fruit itself. What is brought into the barns is mostly diverted from its own developmental progress, is, as it were, led into a side stream, used for human food, and does not directly continue what lies in the germs, what the own driving forces are.

Thus, the spiritual science referred to here appears to be more or less what natural science has brought in the way of knowledge in recent centuries. By far the greatest part of this has rightly been used to gain insight into external, sensual-spatial facts, and has been used for human benefit. But there is something left over in the human soul from the ideas that the study of nature has provided in recent centuries that is not used to understand this or that in the sensual world, that is not used to build machines or maintain industries, but that is brought to life so that it is preserved in its own right, like grain that is used for sowing again and allowed to follow its own laws of formation. man imbues himself with the wonderful fruits of knowledge that natural science has brought forth, when he allows this to live in his soul, when he has a feeling for asking: How can the life of the soul be illuminated and recognized through the concepts and ideas that natural science has provided? How can one live with these ideas? How can one use them to understand the main driving forces of human soul life? If the human soul has a feeling for raising these questions with the spiritual treasure acquired, not in theory but with the full wealth of soul life, then what can only now, in our time, when science has been cultivated on its own ground, so to speak, for a while, merge into human culture.

And in another respect too, this spiritual science can be called a child of the scientific way of thinking, only the spirit must be investigated in a different way from nature. Precisely if one wants to approach the spirit with the same certainty, method and scientific basis as natural science approaches nature, then one must transform scientific thinking and shape it in such a way that it becomes a suitable tool for the knowledge of the spirit. These lectures will share some insights into how this can be achieved. Especially when one is firmly grounded in natural science, one realizes that the means by which it works cannot be used to gain spiritual knowledge. Time and again, enlightened minds have spoken of the fact that, starting from the firm ground of natural science, man must recognize that his power of knowledge is limited. Natural science and Kantianism — to mention only these — have contributed to the belief that the cognitive powers of the human mind are limited, that man cannot penetrate through his knowledge into the regions where the source lies, to which the soul must feel connected; where man realizes that not only the forces that can be grasped by natural science are at work, but other forces as well. In this respect spiritual science completely agrees with natural science. Precisely for the cognitive abilities that natural science has magnified, and on which natural science must also stop as such, there is no possibility of penetrating into the spiritual realm.

But in the human soul lie dormant other cognitive faculties, cognitive faculties that cannot be used in everyday life and in the hustle and bustle of ordinary science, but that can be brought forth from this human soul and that, when they are brought forth, when they are, as it were, from the hidden depths of the human soul, then they make something different out of the person: they permeate him with a new kind of knowledge, with a kind of knowledge that can penetrate into areas that are closed to mere natural science. It is (I attach no special value to the expression, but it clarifies the matter) a kind of spiritual chemistry through which one can penetrate into the spiritual regions of existence, but a chemistry that only bears a similarity to external chemistry in terms of secure logic and methodical thinking: it is the chemistry of the human soul itself. And from this point of view, in order to make ourselves understood, I will say the following by way of comparison: when we have water before us, this water has certain properties. The chemist comes and shows that this water contains hydrogen and oxygen. Take hydrogen: it burns, it is gaseous, it is quite different from water. Would someone who knew nothing about chemistry ever be able to tell from looking at water that it contains hydrogen? Water is liquid, does not burn, and even extinguishes fire. Hydrogen burns, is a gas. In short, would someone be able to tell from looking at water that it contains hydrogen? Nevertheless, the chemist comes and separates the hydrogen from the water. Man can be compared to water as he appears in everyday life, as he appears to ordinary science. In him are united the physical and the bodily and the spiritual-soul. External science and the world view that is based on it are quite right when they say: Yes, this person standing before us cannot be seen to have a spiritual-soul within him; and it is understandable when a world view completely denies this soul-spiritual. But that is just as if one were to deny the nature of hydrogen.

However, there is a need for proof that the spiritual-soul can really be represented separately from the human being, separate from the physical body, in spiritual-soul chemistry. This can be. That there is such a spiritual-mental chemistry is what spiritual science has to say to mankind today, just as Copernicanism had to say to a surprised mankind that the earth does not stand still, but moves around the sun at a furious pace, but the sun stands still. And just as Copernican writings were on the Index until well into the 19th century, so too will the insights of spiritual science be on the Index of other worldviews for a long time to come. These are worldviews that cannot free themselves from centuries-old prejudices and habits of thought. And the fact that this spiritual science can already, to a certain extent, touch hearts and souls, that it is not exactly outside the search of our time, we have a small proof of this, which I do not want to boast about, but which may be mentioned as a testimony to, I would say, the hidden timeliness of spiritual science in souls. Are we indeed in a position, already in our time, to build a free school of spiritual science on free Swiss soil; and can we not see, through the understanding of the friends of this spiritual current, the emblem of the same in the new architectural style of the double-domed rotunda, which is to rise from Dornach's heights, near Basel, as a first external monument to what this spiritual science has to offer to modern culture? That this building is already being erected, that the forms of its domes are already rising above the rotunda, allows us today to speak of spiritual science with much more hope and inner satisfaction, despite all the opposition, despite all the lack of understanding that it encounters and must still encounter in wide circles.

What I have called spiritual chemistry is certainly not something that can be achieved through external methods that can be seen with the eyes and that are brought about by external actions. What can be called spiritual chemistry takes place only in the human soul itself, and the procedures are of an intimate soul-spiritual nature, procedures that do not leave the soul as it is in everyday life, but which affect this soul in such a way that it changes, that it becomes a completely different tool of knowledge than it usually is. And they are not some kind of, one might say, miraculous exercises, some exercises taken from superstition, which are thus applied in spiritual chemistry, but they are thoroughly inner, spiritual-soul exercises, which build on what is also present in everyday life: powers of the soul , which are always there, which we need in everyday life, but which, in this everyday life, I would say, are only used incidentally, but which must be increased immeasurably, must strengthen themselves into the unlimited if man is to become truly a spiritual knower.

The one power that is active in our whole soul life, more incidentally, but must be increased immeasurably, we can call it: attention. What is attention? Well, we do not let the life that flows past the soul shape itself; we gather ourselves up inwardly to turn our spiritual gaze to this or that. We pick out individual things, place them in the field of vision of our consciousness, and concentrate the soul forces on these details. And we may say: Only in this way is our soul life, which needs activity, also possible in everyday life, that we can develop such an interest that highlights individual events and facts and entities from the passing stream of existence. This attention is absolutely necessary in ordinary life. One will understand more and more, especially when spiritual science also penetrates a little into the soul, that what people call the memory question is basically only an attentiveness question, and that will throw important light on all educational questions. One can almost say that the more one endeavors to put the soul into the activity of attentiveness again and again, already in the growing and also in the later human being, the more the memory is strengthened. Not only does it work better for the things we have paid attention to, but the more often we can exercise this attention, the more our memory grows, the more intensively it develops. And another thing: Who has not heard today of that sad manifestation of the soul that could be called the discontinuity of consciousness? There are people today who cannot look back on their past life and remember it in its entirety, who do not know afterwards: You were with your ego in this or that experience; who do not know what they have been through. It may happen that such people leave their home because they have lost the consistency in their mental experience; that they leave their home without rhyme or reason, that they go through the world as if with the loss of their own self, so that it takes them years to find their self again and to be able to pick up where their self left off. Such phenomena would never lead to the tragedy that they often do if it were known that this integrity, this consciousness of being fully aware of oneself, also depends on the correct development of the activity of attention.

Thus, the exercise of attention is something we absolutely need in our ordinary lives. The spiritual researcher must take it up, develop it into a special inner soul strengthening, deepen it into what could be called meditation, concentration. These are the technical terms for the matter. Just as in our ordinary life, prompted by life itself, we turn our attention to this or that object, so the spiritual researcher, out of inner soul methodology, turns all soul powers to a presentation, an image, a sensation, a will impulse, an emotional mood that he can survey, that is quite clear before his soul, and on which he concentrates all the soul's powers; but he concentrates in such a way that he has suppressed, as only otherwise in deep sleep, all sensory activity directed towards the outside world, so that he has brought all thinking and striving, all worries and affects of life to a standstill, as otherwise only in deep sleep. In relation to ordinary life, man does indeed become as he otherwise does in deep sleep; only that he does not lose consciousness, that he keeps it fully awake. But all the powers of the soul, which are otherwise scattered on external experience, on the worries and concerns of existence, are concentrated on the one idea, feeling or other that has been placed by will into the center of the human soul life. As a result, the powers of the soul are concentrated and that which otherwise only slumbers, only works for this life as it were between the lines of life, that power is brought to the fore, is shaped out of the human soul; and it actually comes about that through this inner strengthening of the human soul in the concentrated activity, in the attention increased to the immeasurable, this soul learns to experience itself in such a way that it becomes capable of consciously tearing itself out of the physical-sensual body, as hydrogen is dissolved out of water by the chemical method.

However, it is an inner soul development that takes years if the spiritual researcher wants to enable his soul to tear itself away from the physical body through such attention and concentration exercises. But then the time comes when the spiritual researcher knows how to connect a meaning to the word, oh, to the word that sounds so paradoxical to today's world, to the word that seems so fantastic to this world: I experience myself as a spiritual being outside of my body and I know that this body is outside of my soul – well, like the table is outside of my body. I know that the soul, inwardly strengthened, can experience itself in this way, even if it has the body before it like a foreign object, this body with all the destinies that it undergoes in the ordinary outer life. In what he otherwise is, the human being will completely express himself as a spiritual-soul entity separate from his body. And this spiritual-soul entity then displays very different qualities than it does when it is connected to the physical-sensual body and makes use of the intellect bound to the brain.

First of all, the power of thought detaches itself from physical experience. Since I do not want to speak in abstractions, but rather report on real facts, please do not be put off by the fact that I want to describe, unembellished and without prejudice, what may still sound paradoxical today. When the spiritual researcher begins to associate a meaning with the word: You now live in your soul, you know that your soul is a truly spiritual being in which you experience yourself when you are outside of your senses and your brain, then he initially feels with his thinking as if outside of his brain, surrounding and living in his head. Yes, he knows that as long as one is in the physical body between birth and death, one must return again and again to the body. The spiritual researcher knows exactly how to observe the moment when he, after having lived with the pure spiritual-soul, returns with his thinking to his brain. He experiences how this brain offers resistance, feels how he, as it were, submerges with the waves of his earlier, purely spiritual life and then slips into his physical brain, which now, in its own activity, follows what the spiritual-soul accomplishes. This experience outside of the body and this re-immersion into the body is one of the most harrowing experiences for the spiritual researcher.

But this thinking, which is purely experiencing itself and takes place outside the brain, presents itself differently from ordinary thinking. Ordinary thoughts are shadowy compared to the thoughts that now stand before the spiritual researcher like a new world when he is outside his body. Thoughts permeate each other with inner pictorialness. That is why we call what presents itself to the spiritual eye: imaginations - but not because we believe that these only contain something fantastic or imagined, but because what is perceived there is actually experienced is experienced, imagined; but this imagination is an immersion in the things themselves, one experiences the things and processes of the spiritual world, and the things and processes of the spiritual world present themselves in imaginations before the soul. —- Thus thinking can be separated from the physical-bodily life, and the spiritual researcher can know himself in a world of spiritual processes and entities.

But other human faculties can also be detached from the purely physical and bodily. When the thinking is detached, the spiritual researcher experiences himself first in his purely spiritual and soul-like essence, after all that has been described so far. But what he experiences there with the things and processes in the spiritual world is a completely different way of perceiving than the ordinary perception. When we usually perceive things, they are there and we are here; they confront us. This is not the case from the moment we enter a spiritual world in our spiritual and soul experience, which arises around us with the same necessity as colors and light arise around the blind man when he has undergone an operation. No, we do not experience the spiritual world in the same way as the external world. This experience is such that one does not merely have the things and beings of the spiritual world before one, but one submerges oneself in them with one's entire being. Then one knows: one perceives the things and beings by having flowed into them with one's being and perceiving that which is in them in such a way that they reproduce themselves in the images that one sees. One feels that all perception is a reproduction. One feels that one is in a state of constant activity. Therefore, one could call this revival of the imaginative world of thought a spiritual mimic, a spiritual play of expressions. One tears oneself out of the bodily with its soul-spiritual; but this soul-spiritual is in perpetual activity and submerges into the processes of the spiritual world and imitates what lives in them as their own powers; and one feels so connected with the beings that one can compare this submerging with standing before a person and intuiting what is going on in his life, and having such an inner experience of it that one would show the expression of sorrow in one's own countenance if the other were sad, and show the expression of joy in one's own countenance if the other were joyful. Thus one experiences spiritually and soulfully what others are experiencing; one becomes the expression of it oneself. In the spiritual countenance, one expresses the essence of things. One is driven to active perception. One may say: spiritual research makes quite different demands on the human soul than external research, which passively accepts things. The soul is required to be inwardly active and to be able to immerse itself in things and beings and to express itself in the way that things present themselves to it.

Just as the power of thought, as a spiritual-soul power, can be separated out of the physical-bodily in spiritual chemistry, so can another power, which man otherwise only uses in the body, which, so to speak, pours itself into the body, be separated out of this body. However strange it may sound, this other power is the power of speech, the power that we otherwise use in ordinary life when speaking.

What happens when we speak? Our thoughts live within us, our thoughts vibrate with our brain; this is connected to the speech apparatus, muscles are set in motion; what we experience inwardly flows out into the words and lives in the words. From the point of view of spiritual science, we must say that in speaking we pour out what is in our soul into physical organs. The detachment of the speech power from the physical-sensory body arises from the fact that the human being increases attention, as described, and adds something else – again, an activity that is usually already present and must also be increased to an unlimited degree. This power is devotion.

We know it in those moments when we feel religious, when we are devoted to this or that being in love, when we can follow things and their laws in strict research, when we can forget ourselves with all our feelings and thoughts. We know this devotion. It actually only flows between the lines of ordinary life. The spiritual researcher must increase this power to infinity; he must strengthen it without limit. He must indeed be able to give himself up to the stream of existence in such a way as he is otherwise only given up to this stream of existence – without doing anything himself to what he experiences – in deep sleep, when all the activity of his limbs rests, when all the senses are silent, when man is only completely given up and does nothing; but then he has lapsed into unconsciousness in his sleep. But if a person can bring himself by inner volition to do it again and again as an exercise for his soul, to suppress all sensory activity, to suppress all movement of the limbs, to transfer his physical-sensual life into a state that is otherwise only in deep sleep, but to remain awake, to keep his inner and develops the feeling of being poured into the stream of existence, wanting nothing but what the world wants with one: if he evokes this feeling again and again, but evokes it apart from attention, then the soul strengthens itself more and more.

But the two exercises - the one with attention and the one with devotion - must be done separately from each other; because they contradict each other. If attention requires the highest level of concentration on one object - deep meditation - then devotion, passive devotion to the flow of existence, requires an immense increase in the feeling that we find in religious experience or in other devotion to a loved one. The fruits that man draws from such an immeasurable increase of devotion and attention are precisely that he separates his spiritual-soul life from the physical-bodily. And so the power that otherwise pours into the word, that is activated by it not remaining within itself but setting the nerves in motion, this power can be separated from the outer speech activity and remain within itself in the soul-spiritual. In this way, the power of speech – we can call it that – is torn out of its sensual-physical context, and the person experiences what, in Goethe's words, can be called spiritual hearing, spiritual listening.

Once again, the human being experiences himself outside of his body, but now in such a way that he submerges himself in things and perceives the inner essence of things; but also perceives it in such a way that he recreates it within himself, as with an inner gesture, not just with a facial expression, but with an inner gesture, as with an inner gesture. The soul-spiritual, torn out of the body, is thus activated, as when we are tempted, through a special disposition in relation to our talent for imitation, to express through our gesture what occupies us. What is done only by special talents, the soul, which is torn out of the body, does in order to perceive. It plunges into things, and it actively recreates the forces that are at play within them. All this perception in the spiritual world is an activity in which one engages, and by perceiving the activity in which one has to place oneself, because one recreates the inner weaving and essence of things, one perceives these things. In the outer, sensory world, hearing is passive; we listen. Speaking and hearing flow together in spiritual hearing. We immerse ourselves in the essence of things; we hear their inner weaving. What Pythagoras called the music of the spheres is something that the spiritual researcher can truly achieve. He immerses himself in the things and beings of the spiritual world and hears, but also speaks by uttering. What one experiences is a speaking hearing, a hearing speaking in immersing oneself in the essence of things. It is true inspiration that arises.

And a third inner activity, a third kind of inner experience, can come over the spiritual researcher if he continues to develop increased attention and devotion. What occurs to and in the spiritual researcher as he experiences himself outside his body, I would like to discuss it in the following way.

Let us consider the child. I cannot speak about this in detail, I only want to hint at what is important for the purpose of today's lecture: it is a peculiarity of the growing human being that he must give himself his direction in space, that he must give himself the way in which he is placed in space, in the course of childhood. The human being is born unable to walk or stand, initially, as we say here in Austria, having to use all fours. Then he develops those inner powers that I would call powers of uprightness, and through this something comes to the fore in man that so many deeper minds have sensed in its significance by saying: because man can rise in the vertical direction, he knows how to direct his gaze out into the vastness of the celestial space, his gaze does not merely cling to earthly things. But the essential thing is that through inner forces, through inner strength and experience, man develops out of his helpless horizontal life, so to speak, into an upright vertical life. The scientist will readily understand that the inner activity of man is something quite different from the hereditary forces that give the animal its powers of orientation in the world. The forces at work in the animal that bring the animal in this or that direction to the vertical act quite differently in man, in whom a sum of forces is at work that pulls him out of his helpless situation and that works inwardly to instruct him in the direction of space through which he is actually an earthly man in the true sense of the word, through which he first becomes what he is as a human being on earth. These forces work very much in secret. One can only cope with them when one has already delved a little into spiritual science; but it is a whole system, a great sum of forces. They are not all used up in the childlike period of man, when he learns to stand and walk. There are still forces of this kind slumbering within man; but they remain unused in the outer life of the senses and in the outer life of science.

Through the exercises of increased attention and devotion performed by the soul, the human being becomes inwardly aware of how these forces that have raised him as a child are seated within him. He becomes aware of spiritual powers of direction and of spiritual powers of movement, and the consequence of this is that he is able to add to the inner mimic, to the inner play of the features, to the inner ability to make gestures, to the inner gesture, also the inner physiognomy of his spiritual and soul life. When the soul and spirit have emerged from the physical body, when a person begins to understand as a spiritual researcher what is meant by the words: 'You experience yourself in the soul and spirit' — then the time also comes when he becomes aware of the forces that have raised him up, that have placed him vertically on the earth as a physical, sensual being. He now applies these powers in the purely spiritual-soul realm, and this enables him to use these powers differently than he does in his ordinary life; he is able to give these powers other directions, to shape himself differently than he did in physical experience during his childhood. He now knows how to develop inner movements, knows how to adapt to all directions, knows how to give his spiritual self different physiognomies than as an earthly human being; he is able to delve into other spiritual processes and beings; he knows how to connect that he transforms the powers which otherwise change him from a crawling child to an upright human being, that he transforms these in the inner spiritual things and entities, so that he becomes similar to these things and entities and thus expresses them himself and perceives them through this. That is real intuition. For the real perception of spiritual entities and processes is an immersion in them, is an assumption of their own physiognomy. While one experiences the processes in the beings through inner mimicry, while one experiences the mobility of the spiritual beings by being able to recreate their gestures; one is now able to transform oneself into things and processes, one is able to take on the form of the spiritual, and in so doing one perceives it, that one has become it oneself, so to speak.

I did not want to describe to you in general philosophical terms the way in which the spiritual researcher enters into the spiritual worlds. I wanted to describe to you as concretely as possible how this spiritual-soul experience breaks away from the bodily, from physical-sensory perception, and submerges into the spiritual world by becoming active in it. But this has become evident, that every step into the spiritual world must be accompanied by activity, that we must know with every step that things do not reveal their essence to us, but that we can only know that about things and processes of the spiritual world, which we are able to recreate, to search for, by being able to behave actively perceptively. This is the great difference between spiritual knowledge and ordinary external knowledge: that external knowledge is passively surrendered to things, while spiritual knowledge must live in perpetual activity, man must become what he wants to perceive.

Even today, or one could also say, even today, one is forgiven when one speaks of a spiritual world in general. People still put up with that. But it still seems paradoxical in our time that someone can say: A person can detach themselves from all seeing, hearing, all sensory perceptions, all thinking that is tied to the nerves and brain, and then, while everything that is experienced in physical existence disappears completely before them, can feel surrounded, know that they are surrounded by a completely new, concrete world, indeed, by a world in which processes and beings are purely spiritual, just as processes and beings in the physical world are physical. Spiritual science is not a vague pantheism, it is not a general sauce of spiritual life. In the face of spiritual science, if one speaks only of a pantheistic spiritual being, it is as if one said: I lead you to a meadow, something sprouts there, that is nature; then one leads him into a laboratory and says: That is nature, pan-nature! All the flowers and beetles and trees and shrubs, all the chemical and physical processes: Pan-Nature! People would be little satisfied with such Pan-Nature; because they know that you can only get along if you can really follow the individual. Just as little as the external science speaks of Pan-Nature, just as little spiritual science speaks of a general spirit sauce; it speaks of real, perceptible, concrete spiritual processes and entities. It must not be afraid to challenge time by saying: Just as we, when we are in the physical world, first see people around us as physical beings among, one might say, the hierarchies of physical beings, of minerals, plants, animals and human beings, the same fades from our spiritual horizon when we immerse ourselves in the spiritual world; but spiritual realms and hierarchies emerge: beings that are initially the same as human beings, beings that are higher than human beings; and just as animals, plants and minerals descend from human beings in the physical world, there are beings and creatures ascending from human beings into higher realms of existence, individual, unique spiritual entities and creatures.

How the human soul places itself in the spiritual world, what its life is like within this spiritual world according to spiritual research, which in principle has been indicated today; how the human soul has to live in this spiritual world when it lays aside the physical body at death, when it traverses the path after passing through the gate of death, in a purely spiritual world, will be the subject of the day after tomorrow. The lecture the day after tomorrow will deal with individual insights of spiritual science about this life after death.

What spiritual science develops as its method – well, you notice it immediately – it differs very significantly from what our contemporaries can admit as such, based on the thought habits that have formed over the centuries and which are just as stuck in relation to this spiritual science as the thought habits of past centuries were stuck in relation to the Copernican world system. But how should spiritual science think about the search of our time if it wants to understand itself correctly and behave correctly towards this search of our time?

The first objection that can so easily be made from our time is that one says: Yes, the spiritual scientist speaks of the fact that the soul should first develop special powers; then it can look into the spiritual world. But for the one who has not yet developed these powers, who has not yet mastered the art of forming mental images, of separating thought, of separating the powers of speech, of separating the powers of spatial orientation, of separating the powers of orientation in the world of beings, the spiritual world would be of no concern to him! Such an objection is just like that of someone who would say: For someone who cannot paint, pictures are of no concern. — That would be a pity. Only someone who has learned to paint can paint pictures. But it would be sad if the only pictures a person who could paint could understand were those that had to do with the world of nature. Of course, only the painter can paint it; but when the picture stands before man, it is the case that the human soul has the very natural powers within itself to understand the picture, even if it is not able to paint it. And the human soul has a language within itself that connects it to the living art. Such is the case with spiritual science. Only he who has become a spiritual researcher himself can discover and describe the facts, processes and entities of the spiritual world; but when the spiritual researcher endeavors — as has been attempted today, for example, with regard to the spiritual scientific method — to clothe what he has researched in the spiritual world in the words of ordinary thoughts and ideas , then what he gives can be grasped by every soul, even if it has not become a spiritual researcher; if it can only do away with all that comes from contemporary education, from education that pretends to stand on the firm ground of natural science, but in truth does not stand on it at all, but only believes it. If only the soul can rid itself of all prejudices, if it can truly devote itself to the contemplation of a picture as impartially as the mind researcher knows how to tell, then the result of spiritual research can be understood by every soul. Human souls are predisposed to truth and to the perception of truth, not to the perception of untruth and falsity, if only they clear away all the debris that accumulates from prejudice. Deep within the human soul is a secret, intimate language, the language by which everyone at every level of education and development can understand the spiritual researcher, if only they want to.

But this is precisely what the spiritual scientist finds in the search of our time. In past centuries, people believed that they could only know something about the spiritual world through religious beliefs; in recent times, these souls have been able to believe that certain knowledge can only be built on external facts; in our time, souls do not yet know this in their superconsciousness, as one might say – what they can realize in concepts and ideas and feelings, it is not yet settled -, but for the spiritual researcher it is clear: we live in a time in which, in the depths of human souls, in those depths of which these souls themselves do not yet know much, longing for spiritual science, hope for this spiritual science, is being prepared. More and more it will be recognized that old prejudices must vanish. Especially in regard to thinking many things will be recognized. Thus there will still be many people today, especially those who believe themselves to be standing on firm philosophical ground, who will say: Has not Kant proved it, has not physiology proved it, that man cannot penetrate below the sense world with his knowledge? And now along comes a spiritual science that wants to refute Kant, wants to show that what modern physiology so clearly demonstrates is not correct! Yes, spiritual science does not even want to show that what Kant says from his point of view and what modern physiology says from its point of view is incorrect; but time, the still secret search of time, will learn that there is another point of view regarding right and wrong than the one we have become accustomed to. Let us see how the real practice of life – the practice of life that is the fruitful one – relates to these things.

Someone could prove by strict arguments that man with his eyes is incapable of seeing cells, for example. Such a line of argument could be quite correct, as correct as Kant's proof that man, with the abilities that Cart knows, cannot penetrate into the essence of things. Let us assume that microscopic research did not yet exist and it was proved that man cannot see the smallest particles. This may be correct. The proof can be absolutely conclusive in every respect and nothing could be said against the strict proof that man with his eyes cannot see the smallest partial organisms of the large organisms. But that was not the point in the real progress of research; there it was important to show, despite the correctness of this proof, that physical tools can be found, microscope, telescope and others, to achieve what cannot be achieved at all demonstrably if the abilities remain unarmed, which man has. Those are right who say: Human abilities are limited; but spiritual science does not contradict them, it only shows that there is a spiritual strengthening and reinforcement of the human powers of cognition, just as there is a physical strengthening, and that despite the correctness of the opposite train of thought, fruitful spiritual research must place itself precisely beyond such correctness and incorrectness. People will learn to no longer insist on what can be proved with the limited means of proof available; they will realize that life makes other demands on the development of humanity than what is sometimes called immediately and logically certain.

And another thing must be said if the real, not merely the imagined, search of the time is to be related to what spiritual research really has as its task, as its goal. Once again, reference may be made to the truly tremendous progress of natural science. It is not surprising, in view of these great and powerful advances in natural science, that there are minds today that believe they can build a world structure on the firm ground of natural science, which, however, does not reflect on such forces as have been discussed today. Today there is a widespread, I might say materialistically colored school of thought; but it calls itself somewhat nobler because the term 'materialistic' has fallen out of favor: the monistic school of thought. This monistic school of thought, whose head is certainly the important in his scientific field Ernst Haeckel and whose field marshal is Wilhelm Ostwald. This school of thought attempts to construct a world view by building on the insights that can be gained purely from the knowledge of nature. The search of the time will come to the following conclusion in relation to such an attempt: as long as natural science stops at investigating the laws of the outer sense existence, at visualizing the connections in this outer sense existence of the soul, as long as natural science stands on firm ground. And it has truly achieved a great thing; it has achieved the great thing of thoroughly extinguishing the light of life of old prejudices. Just as Faust himself stood before nature and resorted to an external, material magic, so today, anyone who understands science can no longer resort to such material magic. But it is something else that spiritual life itself, in the ways that have been characterized, imposes an inner magic on the soul. But against all these superstitious currents of thought, against everything that seeks to explain external nature in the same way that we might explain a clock, by saying that there are little spirits inside it, and against every explanation of nature that finds this or that being behind natural phenomena, natural science has achieved great things in negation, and as a worldview. And let us take a look at how the so-called scientific view of nature works, as long as the minds can deal with eliminating the old, unhealthy concepts of all kinds of spiritual beings that are invented behind nature. As long as a front can be made against such spiritual endeavors, a scientific worldview thrives on fighting what had to be fought.

But this fight has in a sense already passed its peak, has already done its good; and today the search of the time goes to ask: By what means can we build a world view in which the human soul has space in it? Since this scientific worldview, this Haeckel-Ostwald materialism fails completely when the person understands himself correctly. It will become more and more evident that the champions of the purely materialistic world-view, in their capacity as soldiers, are great in combating ancient superstition, but that they are like warriors who have done their duty and now have no talent for developing the arts of peace, for developing industry, for tilling the soil. Natural science should not be belittled when it becomes a world view in order to combat superstitious beliefs. As long as such world view thinkers can stop at the fight, they still have something in the fight in the soul that sustains them, but when the person then wants to build a real world view in which the soul has a place, then they are like the warrior who has no talent for the arts of peace. He stands before the question of his soul, let us say, in the peacetime of worldly life, and an image of the world does not build itself up.

Such a mood will assert itself more and more in the souls; the spiritual researcher can already see these moods in the depths of the souls. Where these souls know nothing about it, the longings for what spiritual research wants to bring to the world prevail. That is the secret of our time. But if, from a higher point of view, one might say, it is thoroughly in keeping with the times, this spiritual research world view is out of touch with many contemporaries who do not yet look deeply into what they themselves actually want. Therefore, this spiritual science initially brings a world view that is seen as if it does not stand on firm scientific ground. The other world view, that of so-called monism, wants to be built solely on the foundation of external science. This world view, one can see today from its reverse side, where it must lead if the soul really wants to see its hopes and longings fulfilled. In the activity of spiritual research, of which has been spoken, what really elevates the soul to the spiritual community arises for the soul, the spiritual world arises in perceptible activity, in active perception. Through spiritual science, man can again know of the true spiritual world, of spiritual reality. The so-called monistic world view has nothing to say about this. The spiritual search of our time.

But this seeking of our time, this seeking of human souls, cannot be suppressed, and so some of our contemporaries have already become accustomed to placing their thoughts about spiritual things within themselves in such a way that these thoughts run like scientific thoughts: that the external is observed in passive devotion. What has happened? The result is that a part of our contemporaries — those who occupy themselves with it, they know it — have fallen into the habit of wanting to look at the spiritual as one looks at the sensual. I am not saying that some things that are absolutely true cannot come about in this way; but the method of such an approach is different from that of spiritual science. What is called spiritualism wants to look at spiritual beings and processes externally, without active inner perception, without rising into the spiritual worlds, externally passively, as one looks at physical-sensory processes. Whose child is purely external, we may say materialistic spiritualism? It is the child of that school of thought that takes the so-called monistic point of view and succumbs to the superstition of materialism, the mere workings of external natural laws. What — some contemporary will say — spiritism, a child of Haeckel's genuine monism? — The search of the time will be convinced that it is just with this child as with other children. Many a father and mother has the most beautiful ideas about all the things that should develop in a child, and yet sometimes a real rascal can arise. What monism dreams of as a true cultural child is not important; what is important is what really arises. Mere belief in the material will produce the belief that spirits too can only operate and reveal themselves materially. And the more pure monistic materialism would grow, the more spiritualist societies and spiritualist views would flourish everywhere as the necessary counter-image. The more the blind adherents of the Haeckel and Ostwald direction will succeed in pushing back true spiritual science in matters of world view, the more they will see that they will cultivate spiritualism, the other side of true spiritual research. As firmly as the spiritual researcher stands on the ground of the researchable, the knowable, the knowable spiritual life, he can no more follow the method that wants to materialize the spirit and passively surrender to what is spirit, while one can only experience it in the active.

But I would also like to characterize the quest of our time, which cannot yet be understood in terms of another. A man who deserves a certain amount of esteem as a philosopher has written a curious essay in a widely read journal. In it he writes, for example, that Spinoza and Kant are quite difficult for some people to read. You read yourself into them; but the concepts just wander around and swirl around – well, it is certainly not to be denied that it is so for many people when they want to read themselves into Kant or Spinoza, that the concepts swirl around in confusion. But the philosopher gives advice on how this could be done differently, in line with the search of our time. He says: Today we have a device, a technical advance, through which what is presented to the soul in the merely abstract thoughts of Kant and Spinoza can be brought to the soul quite vividly, so that one can passively surrender to it in perception. The philosopher wants to show in a kind of cinematograph how Spinoza sits down, first grinds glass, how then the idea of expansion comes over him - this is shown in changing pictures. The picture of expansion changes into the picture of thinking and so on. And so the whole ethics and world view of Spinoza could be vividly constructed in a cinematographic way. The outer search of the time would thus be taken into account. It is remarkable that the editor of the journal in question even made the following comment: “In this way, the age-old metaphysical need of man could be met by an invention that some people consider to be a gimmick, but which is very much in keeping with the times.

Now, from a certain point of view, it might be entirely appropriate to the search of our time, but only on the surface, if one could read Spinoza's “Ethics” or Kant's “Critique of Pure Reason” in front of the cinematograph. Why not? It would take into account the passive devotion that is so popular today. It is so loved that one cannot believe that the spiritual must have a reality into which one can only find one's way by taking every step with it. That one expresses in oneself, in one's spiritual soul, what the essence of things is, that our time does not yet love. Let us take a look at a billboard! Let us try to guess the thoughts of the people standing in front of it. Not many people will go to a lecture where there are no slides, but only reflections that the souls also create the thoughts that are put forward, as opposed to a lecture where spiritual and psychological matters are supposedly demonstrated in slides, where one only has to passively surrender.

Anyone who looks into the search of our time, where it asserts its deepest, still unconscious hopes and longings, knows that in the depths of the soul, the urge for activity still rests; the urge to find itself again as a soul in full activity. The human soul can only be free, with a secure inner hold, if it can develop inner activity. The human soul can only find its way and find its bearings in life by becoming conscious of itself, by realizing that it is not only that which is passively given to it by the world, but by knowing that it is present when it is able to experience in activity; and of the spiritual world it can only perceive that of which it is able to take possession in activity. In reflecting on what spiritual science offers, the process of comprehension must develop into active participation; but in this way spiritual science becomes a satisfaction of the deepest, subconscious impulses in the souls of the present, and in this way it meets the most intimate search of our time. For with regard to the things touched on here, our time is a time of transition. It is easy to say, even trivial, that we live in a time of transition, because every time is a time of transition. Therefore, it is always correct to say that we live in a time of transition. But if one emphasizes that one lives in a time of transition, it depends much more on what any given time is in transition from. If we now want to describe our time in its transition, we have to say: it was necessary - because only through this could the natural sciences and what has been achieved through them come about - that for centuries humanity went through an education towards passivity; because only in this way, through devotion to materialistic truths, could it be achieved what had to be achieved, especially in the field of natural science. But the fact is that life unfolds in rhythms. Just as a pendulum swings up and then swings down again, swinging to the opposite side, so too must the human soul, when it has been educated in a justifiable way for a period of time to be faithfully and passively devoted, pull itself together again in order to find itself again; in order to take hold of itself, it must pull itself together to become active. For what has it become through passivity? Well, what it has become through passivity, I will say it unashamedly with a radical-sounding sentence that will certainly sound much too paradoxical to many. But on the other hand, it is precisely the assimilation of spiritual science that shows, as it actually is only the fact, that one does not pull oneself together to face the consequences of the scientific world view if one does not emphasize this radical result. They lack the courage to draw the real consequences, even those who claim to stand solely and exclusively on the ground of what true science yields. If they had this consistency, then one would hear strange words murmured through the seeking of the time.

The Old Testament documents begin with words – I do not want to talk about their inner meaning today; everyone may take the words as they can take them; some may consider them to be an image, others an expression of a fact: everyone can agree on what I have to say about these words – the words are: “You shall be as God, knowing – or discerning – good and evil!” The words resound in our ears, from the beginning of the Old Testament. However you look at it, you have to admit that it expresses something momentous for human nature and the human soul. It is attributed to the tempter, who approaches man and whispers in his ear: “If you follow me, you will be like a god and distinguish good from evil.” It will be possible to surmise that the inclination not only towards good would not express itself in man without this temptation; that without this temptation the inclination would have arisen only towards good, so that all human freedom is in some way connected with what these words express. But they do express that man was, as it were, invited by the tempter to look beyond himself as a different being from what he is: to behave like a god towards good and evil. As I said, however you may think about these words and the tempter, I am certainly not demanding today that you immediately accept him as a real being – although it is quite true for those who see through things, the word: “The devil is never felt by the people, even when he has them by the collar.” But he who is able to eavesdrop a little on the search of the time, hears today in this search of the time his whispering again. It is drawing near. Call it a voice of the soul or whatever you will: there it is — it can be said without any superstition. And for those who have the courage to draw the final consequences of a purely scientific worldview, it brings forth words of great peculiarity, of a strange wisdom. It is just that the people who claim to be on the basis of pure science do not have the courage to draw the final conclusion. They do include in their feelings and thoughts the belief in a distinction between good and evil, which they would actually have to deny if they wanted to be purely on the basis of science. It is a fact that as soon as one places oneself on the ground of mere natural science, not only does the sun shine equally on good and evil, but according to the laws of nature, evil is performed from human nature just as much as good. And so he, the tempter, drawing the conclusion, whispers to man: Don't you see, you are just like highly developed animals. You are like animals and cannot distinguish between good and evil. — This is what makes our time a time of transition, that the tempter speaks to us again in our time with the opposite voice to that with which he spoke according to the Old Testament: You are only developed animals and so, if you understand yourselves, you cannot make any distinction between good and evil.

If one had the courage to be consistent, it would be the expression of a pure, passively surrendered worldview. That time be spared from this voice – let it be said merely figuratively – that knowledge of spiritual life be brought into the seeking of the time: that is the task, that is the goal of spiritual science. Those who still fight against this spiritual science today from the standpoint of some other science will have to realize that this fight is like the fight against Copernicanism. Now that we are also being noticed more in the world through the building of our School of Spiritual Science in Dornach, which used to ignore us, the voices of our opponents are growing louder. And when I recently objected in the writing: “What is spiritual science and how is it treated by its opponents” that the opponents of spiritual science today stand on the same point of view as the opponents of Copernicus, one who felt affected rightly said: Yes, the only difference would be that what Copernicus said are facts, while spiritual science only puts forward assertions. He does not realize, the poor man, that for people of his mind the facts of Copernicanism at that time were also nothing more than assertions, empty assertions, and he does not realize that today he calls empty assertions what, before real research, are facts, albeit facts of spiritual life. And so one can find objections raised by both the scientific and religious communities regarding this spiritual science. Just as people said at the time of Copernicus, “We cannot believe that the Earth revolves around the Sun, because it is not in the Bible,” so people today say, “We do not believe what spiritual science has to say, because it is not in the Bible.” But people will come to terms with what spiritual science has to say, as they came to terms with what Copernicus had to say.

And again and again we must remember a man who was both a deeply learned man and a priest, who worked at the local university and who, when he gave his rector's speech about Galileo, spoke the beautiful words: At that time, the people who believed that religious ideas were being shaken stood against Galileo; but today – as this scholar said at the beginning of his rectorate – today the truly religious person knows that every new truth that is researched adds a piece to the original revelation of the divine governance of the world and to the glory of the divine world order. Thus one would like to make the opponents of spiritual science aware of something that could well have been, even if it was not really so. Let us assume that someone had stepped forward before Columbus and said: We must not discover this new land, we live well in the old land, the sun shines so beautifully there. Do we know whether the sun also shines in the newly discovered land? So it is that those who believe their religious feelings disturbed by the discoveries of spiritual science appear to the spiritual scientist in the face of his religious ideas. He must have a shaky religious concept, a weak faith, who can believe that the sun of his religious feeling will not shine on every newly discovered country, even in the spiritual realm, just as the sun that shines on the old world also shines on the new world. And anyone who faces the facts impartially can be sure that this is so. But in its quest, when time becomes more and more imbued with spiritual science, it will be touched by it in a way that many today still cannot even dream of.

Spiritual science still has many opponents, understandably so. But in this spiritual science one does feel in harmony with all those spirits of humanity who, even if they have not yet had spiritual science, have sensed those connections of the human soul with the spiritual worlds that are revealed through spiritual science. In particular, with regard to what has been said about the new word of the tempter, one feels in harmony with Schöller and his foreboding of the spiritual world. Through his own scientific studies, Schiller has gained the impression that he has to lift man out of mere animality and that the human soul has a share in a spiritual world. On the soil of spiritual science, one feels in deep harmony with a leading spirit of the newer development of world-views when one can summarize, as in a feeling, what today wants to be expressed with broader sentences, with the words of Schiller:

Now the dull barrier of animality fell,
And humanity stepped onto the cloudless brow!
And the exalted stranger, the thought,
Leaped out of the amazed brain!

In confirmation that animality receded and that the human being belongs to a spiritual world, in confirmation of such sentences, spiritual science today stands before the quest of our time.

The expansion, the strengthening, the securing of this innermost essence, this spiritual inner essence of the soul, is to be offered to the search of the time through spiritual science.

I have already presented some of the answers to the question: Why is spiritual research misunderstood? — in the lecture I gave here a few weeks ago on “Healthy Soul Life and Spiritual Research”. Today I would like to consider other points of view which may provide a more comprehensive answer to the question posed. Naturally, in view of the attitude of the esteemed audience, who are accustomed to finding it in these lectures, it cannot be my intention today to go into individual attacks here and there on what is called spiritual research here. If out of wounded ambition or other motives, here and there perhaps even from the ranks of those who previously believed themselves to be quite good exponents of this spiritual science, then these are matters which, when examined more closely, show just how insignificant such objections actually are in the face of the great tasks that spiritual research has to fulfill. Therefore, the necessity to deal with one or other of them can only arise here and there for external reasons. As I said, it is not my intention. My intention is to show how one can really have difficulties in understanding the spiritual science meant here, how it can be difficult for the soul to bring understanding to spiritual science, from the education of the times, from what one can acquire in terms of habits of thought, of feelings, of feelings of world view from our present time, how it can be difficult for the soul to understand spiritual science. In a sense, I do not want to explain the unjustified objections in their reasons, but rather the objections that arise from the times to a certain extent, one might say, completely justified objections, those objections that are understandable for a soul of the present.

Spiritual science is not only confronted with objections that arise from other currents of thought in the present day; spiritual science, it can be said, still has almost all other currents of thought opposed to it in a certain way, precisely from the point of view that has just been mentioned. When materialistic or mechanistic world-views arise, or, as one would like to express it today in a more educated way, monistic world-views, opponents arise who start from a certain spiritual idealism. The reasons such spiritual idealists have to put forward for their world view against materialism are, as a rule, extraordinarily weighty and significant. These are objections, the significance of which can certainly be shared by the spiritual researcher, who can certainly understand them and grasp them in the same way as someone who proceeds merely from a certain spiritual idealism. The spiritual researcher, however, does not speak about the spiritual world merely in the way, for example, that spiritual idealists of the ilk of Ulrici, Wirth, Immanuel Hermann Fichte — who, however, as we saw yesterday, does go into it more deeply — and others do. He does not speak merely in abstract terms, hinting that there must be a spiritual world behind the sensual world; he cannot leave this spiritual world undefined, cannot grasp it in mere concepts, he must move on to a real description of the spiritual world. He cannot merely content himself with a conceptual allusion to an unknown spiritual world, as the spiritual idealists would have it. Rather, he must provide a concrete description of a spiritual world that is revealed in individual entities that have not physical but purely spiritual existence ; in short, he must present a spiritual world that is as diverse and as full of content as the physical world is, and should actually be much, much fuller of content if it were described in reality. And when he not only speaks of the fact that there is a spiritual world in general that can be proven by concepts, but when he speaks specifically of a spiritual world as something credible, as something that can be perceived just as the sensory world , then he has as his opponents not only the materialists, but also those who only want to speak about the spiritual world in abstract terms from the standpoint of a certain spiritual-conceptual idealism. Finally, he has opponents among those who believe that spiritual science can affect any kind of religious sentiment, who believe that religion is endangered, that their religion is endangered when a science of the spiritual world appears. And there are many other individual currents that could be mentioned, which basically the spiritual scientist has to oppose in the manner indicated, and still understandably so today. So these are important objections, justified to a certain extent from a certain point of view, and I would like to discuss them by name.

And there is the first objection to the aspirations of spiritual science, which is particularly significant in our time, and which comes from the natural scientific world view, the world view that seeks to create a world view based on the progress of modern natural science, which is justifiably seen as the greatest triumph of humanity. And it must be said again and again that it is difficult to realize that the true spiritual researcher, after all, denies absolutely nothing, absolutely nothing at all, of what legitimately follows from the results of modern science for a world view; on the contrary, he stands in the fullest sense of the word on the ground of this newer natural science itself, insofar as it is a legitimate basis for a world view.

Let us look at this newer direction in natural science from a certain point of view. We can only emphasize individual points of view. In this way we are confronted with all those people who justifiably cause difficulties for spiritual science, because they say: Does not modern natural science show us, through the marvel of the human nervous system, and in particular the human brain, how what the human being experiences spiritually is dependent on the structure and functions of this nervous system and this brain? And it is easy to believe that the spiritual researcher wants to deny what the natural scientist has to say from his field of research. Only the amateur spiritual researcher and those who want to be spiritual researchers, but basically can hardly claim the dignity of an amateur, do much harm, because true spiritual research is always confused with its charlatan or amateurish activities. It is difficult to believe that, for example, with regard to the significance of the physical brain and nervous system, the humanist actually has more in common with the natural scientist than the natural scientist himself.

Let us take an example. I deliberately do not choose a more recent example, although with the rapid pace of modern science, many things change quickly and older research is easily overtaken by later research. I deliberately choose not to choose a more recent example, which could also be done; instead, I choose the distinguished brain researcher and psychiatrist Meynert, because I would like to take as my starting point what he had to say about the relationship between the brain and the life of the soul based on his brain research. Meynert is very knowledgeable about the human brain and the human nervous system in both healthy and diseased states. His writings, which set the tone in his field at the end of the nineteenth century, must command the greatest respect from anyone who becomes familiar with them. Not only for the purely positive research, but also for what such a man has to say on the subject. And this must be emphasized: when people who have easily acquired some kind of spiritual-scientific world view, without knowing anything, without ever having looked through a microscope or a telescope or without having done something that would even remotely give them the opportunity to get an idea of this miraculous structure of the human brain, for example, when such people speak of the baseness of materialism, then one can understand, on the other hand, with the conscientiousness of the research and the care of the methods, that one does not want to get involved at all with what is being said from the apparent spiritual-scientific side. When someone like Meynert studies the brain, he first finds that the outer layer of the brain consists of a billion cells in a highly complex way — Meynert estimates that there are about a billion of them —, all working together work into each other, sending their extensions to the most diverse parts of the human body, sending their extensions into the sensory organs, where they become sensory nerves, sending their extensions to the organs of movement, and so on. To such a brain researcher it then becomes apparent how connecting fibers lead from one fiber system to the other, and he then comes to the conclusion that what the human being experiences as a world of ideas, what separates and connects in concepts, in ideas, is separated and connected when the external world makes an impression through his sense organs, is absorbed and processed by the brain, and that it produces what are called soul phenomena from the way it is processed. When even philosophers come and say: Yes, but the phenomena of the soul are something quite different from movements of the brain, from some processes in the brain, — when even philosophers come and speak like that, then it must be said against it that what arises out of the brain as the life of the soul for such a researcher does not arise in a more marvelous way than, let us say, a clock, for example, in which one does not assume that a special soul-being lives inside it and gives the time; or, let us say, a magnet that attracts a body out of its purely physical powers. What there proves to be active as a magnetic field around the physical body – why, if we understand it in terms of greater complications, should that not be born out of the brain, the human soul life? In short, we must on no account belittle what comes from this side. Under no circumstances may we deny its justification without going into the matter in greater detail. One can scoff at the idea that this brain, by unwinding its processes, is supposed to produce the most complicated mental life, but one can equally find in nature an abundance of such processes, where one will not a priori speak of an underlying mental life. Not by starting from preconceived opinions, but by also engaging with what is justified in the minds of those who have difficulty in approaching spiritual research. Only in this way, I would say, can order and harmony be created in the confused minds of worldviews.

Thus there is no reason why that which is understood in the ordinary sense of life as the life of the soul should not be produced by a mere mechanical process, in so far as it takes place in the mechanics of the brain and nervous system. The nervous system and the brain can be so intricately arranged that the unrolling of its processes results in the soul life of man. Therefore, no one who merely has a naturalistic way of looking at things will be able to dispute the legitimacy of a scientific, materialistic world view. And it must be said that precisely because natural science has achieved such perfection and such a justified ideal in its field, it is actually difficult for spiritual science today to confront natural science, for the simple reason that the spiritual scientist must have the ability and capacity to fully recognize the justified things that come from this side. But for that reason it must be emphasized again and again that a mere composition of what is derived from the observation of nature, even if it extends to our own human life, can never, never be used to create a spiritual world view. If we want to get to the life of the soul, then this life of the soul must be experienced in itself, then this life of the soul must not flow from external processes, then one must not say that the brain cannot produce the soul processes of its own accord, but one must experience the soul processes.

In a certain area, everyone can experience the soul independently of the brain processes. This is in the moral area, in the area of the moral life. And here it is clear from the outset that what shines forth to man as moral impulses cannot result from any unwinding of mere brain processes. But I say explicitly: what can arise in man as moral impulses, insofar as the will, insofar as feeling is at work in them, insofar as the moral is experienced. So in this area, where the soul must grasp itself in its immediacy, everyone can come to realize that the soul has a life of its own, independent of the body. However, not everyone has the ability to add to this inner grasping, to this inner strengthening of the soul in the moral life, what Goethe, for example, added in the essay on 'Contemplative Judgment' mentioned yesterday, but also in many other places in his works. Not everyone can say, as Goethe did from the depths of his inner experience: If, in the moral world, we can rise to impulses that work independently of the body, then why should this soul not be able, with regard to other spiritual things, as Goethe says in contrast to Kant, to “bravely endure the adventure of reason” — as Kant called all going beyond sensory perceptions? That means not only to proceed to a spiritual-soul life by inwardly experiencing how moral impulses arise from the depths of the soul, and not from the life of the brain, but also to have other spiritual experiences that testify to the soul's spiritual perception with spiritual organs, just as we perceive the sensual with sensual organs. But for this to happen, the ordinary life in the world, to which one passively devotes oneself, must be supplemented by another, a life of inner activity. And this is what is lost today for many who have become accustomed to having the truth dictated to them from somewhere. They want something that appears from outside, something that can be based on solid ground, rather than inner experience. What is experienced in the soul itself seems to them to be something that is arbitrarily formed within, not firmly supported by anything. What should be true should be firmly based on what is externally established, to whose existence one has contributed nothing oneself.

This is indeed the right way to think in the field of natural science. Into the study of nature one will only bring all kinds of useless stuff if one adds all kinds of fantasy products to what the external senses offer and what one can get from the observed external sense material through the experiment or through the method. On the ground of natural science, this is fully justified. But we will see shortly how little it is justified on the ground of spiritual research. But even if one engages with the justified aspects of the scientific world view, one can see how it becomes weak through this unaccustomed effort of inner self-exploration, how it becomes weak when it is supposed to perform an activity that is indispensable if one wants to make even a little progress in spiritual science. To advance in spiritual science, it is not necessary to do all kinds of nebulous things, to train oneself to have certain clairvoyant experiences in the ordinary sense of the word, through hallucinations, through visions and so on — that is not the first thing, nor is it the last; that has already been discussed in the lecture on 'Healthy Soul Life and Spirit Research'. But what is indispensable if one is to arrive at a deeper understanding — I do not want to say, at becoming a justified follower — of spiritual science, that is a thinking that has been worked through, a really worked through thinking. And the cultivation of thinking suffers to a great extent from the fact that one has become accustomed to observing only the form of appearance. Outwardly, in the sensual world, in external observation or in experiment, one abandons oneself to what external nature expresses, and in this field one represents what experiment says. One does not dare — and yet one is right in this area — to say anything as a summarizing law that is not dictated from outside. But the inner activity of the soul suffers from this. Man gets used to becoming passive; man gets used to trusting only what is, as it were, interpreted and revealed to him from outside. And seeking truth through an inner effort, through an inner activity, that falls completely out of his soul habit. But it is necessary above all when one enters spiritual science that thinking is worked out, that thinking is so worked out that nothing escapes one of certain lightly-donned objections that can be made, that above all, that one foresees what objections can be made; that one makes these objections oneself in order to gain a higher point of view, which, taking the objections into account, would find the truth. I would like to draw your attention to one example, as an example among hundreds and thousands that could almost be suggested by Meynert. The reason I do this is because I was just allowed to mention to you that I consider Meynert to be an excellent researcher, so that it cannot be said that I am somehow belittling people here. When it comes to refutation, I do not choose people whom I hold in low esteem, but precisely people whom I hold in the highest esteem.

In this way, we encounter Meynert, for example, in how he conceives of the formation of the perception of space and time in man. Meynert says: Let us suppose – and this example is particularly relevant to us now – that I listen to a speaker. I will gain the idea that his words are spoken little by little, in time. How does this idea arise, Meynert asks, that one has the notion that words are spoken little by little, in time? Well, you can imagine that Meynert is talking about all of you who understand my words in such a way that they appear to you bit by bit, in time. Then he says: Yes, this time only arises through the brain's perception; that we think of one word after the other, that only arises through the brain's perception. The words come to us, they come to our sense organs, they go from these sense organs in a further effect to the brain. The brain has certain internal organs through which it processes the sensory impressions. And there arises - internally - through certain organs the conception of time. The conception of time is thus created there. And so all perceptions are created from the brain.

That Meynert does not just mean something subordinate can be seen from a certain remark in his lecture “On the Mechanics of the Brain Structure,” where he talks about the relationship between the outside world and the human being. He says that the ordinary, naive person assumes that the outside world is as he creates it in his brain. Meynert says: “The daring hypothesis of realism is that the world that appears to the brain would also exist before or after the existence of brains.” However, the structure of the brain, which is capable of consciousness, which allows the same to be considered responsible for shaping the world, leads to the negation of this hypothesis. That is to say: the brain constructs the world. The world as man imagines it, as he has it before him as his sensory world, is created by processes of the brain, from within. And so man not only creates the images, but he also creates space, time, infinity. For all this, Meynert says, certain mechanisms of the brain exist. From this, man creates, for example, time.

It is a pity that in such lectures, which of course have to be short, one cannot always go into all the individual transitions of these thoughts. That is why some things may appear opaque. But the actual crux of such a way of thinking will be apparent. It must be said that as soon as one is on the way to regarding the brain as the creator of the soul-life as it is found in man in the beginning, then what Meynert says is entirely justified. It lies on this path; one must arrive at it. And one can only avoid such a conclusion if one has a thinking process so well developed that the often very simple counter-arguments immediately come to mind. Just think what the conclusion would be if Meynert's argument were correct: you are all sitting there, listening to what I am saying. Your brain organizes what I say in time. Not only does your auditory nerve convert it into auditory images, but what I say is organized in time. So you all have a kind of dream image of what is being spoken here, including, of course, the person standing in front of you. As for what is behind it, naive realism, says Meynert, assumes that there stands a man like yourselves who speaks all this. But there is no compulsion here; for this man with his words, you create him in your brain; there may be something quite different behind it.

The simple thought that must impose itself, that it also depends on the fact that, for example, I now arrange my ideas in time myself, so that time does not just live in your brain with you, but that time already lives in it, as I place one word after the other – this easily attainable thought does not come at all if you drill in a certain direction. That time has an object, that it lives out there, can be easily seen in the case I have mentioned. But once you are in a certain direction of thought, you do not see left or right, but continue in your direction and arrive at extremely sharp and highly remarkable results. But that is not the point. All the ingenious results that may arise in the course of such a train of thought can be strictly proved, the proofs may strictly interlock. You will never find a mistake in Meynert's thinking if you go on in his stream. But what matters is that thinking is so thoroughly worked through that the counter-arguments can be dealt with, that thinking finds out of itself what throws the whole stream out of its bed. And this, to make thinking so mobile, so active, is precisely what prevents the very justified immersion in the external world, as science must strive for. Therefore, as you can see, this is not a subjective difficulty, but a very objective one, due to the times. This can be experienced in all possible fields.

For more than a hundred years, philosophers have been gnawing away at the old Kantian word with which he wants to unhinge the concept of God. If you merely think of a hundred dollars, they are not a single dollar less than a hundred real dollars. A hundred thought, a hundred possible dollars are exactly the same as a hundred real dollars! On this, that conceptually, mentally, a hundred possible dollars contain everything that a hundred real dollars contain, Kant builds his entire refutation of the so-called ontological proof of God's existence. Now, anyone with agile thought will immediately come up with the most definite objection: for someone with agile thought, with developed thought, a hundred imaginary thalers are, in fact, exactly one hundred thalers less than a hundred real thalers! They are exactly one hundred thalers less. The point is to be made aware of how one has to think, not just that what one thinks can be logically proved. Of course, Kant's fabric of ideas is so firmly supported that only with the utmost acumen can logical errors be detected in it. But what matters is not just to have in mind what arises within certain habitual currents of thought, but to have thought worked out so that one's thinking is truly within the objective world, so that one's thinking is not just within oneself but within the objective world, so that the counter-instances flow to one from the objective world itself. Only a mature thinking can achieve such counter-instances, and only through this does one's thinking acquire a certain affinity with the thinking that objectively pulses and permeates the world.

I said that it is important to grasp the soul in action, so to speak. What is really at issue is that when man wants to grasp the soul, he does not merely draw conclusions based on the fact that it is impossible to develop soul life from the brain and its processes; rather, this soul life must be experienced directly, independently of brain life. Then one can speak of soul life. Today, people look at this inner active experience as if something were being built up inwardly only in the imagination, whereas the true soul researcher knows exactly where imagination ends and where, through the development of one's own soul life, where he does not spin out of fantasy, but where he has connected with the spiritual world and draws from the spiritual world itself that which he then expresses in words or concepts or ideas or images. Only in this way will the soul be able to gain knowledge of itself.

I will now have to develop what appears to be a rather paradoxical view, but a view that must be expressed because it can really shed light on the nature of spiritual research. From what I have said before, you can already see that the spiritual researcher is not at all averse to the idea that the brain produces certain ideas from within itself, so that the soul life that can arise without inner participation can really only be a product of the brain. And a certain habit, which has arisen precisely through the formation of the present, consists in the following: For the reasons indicated, a person becomes averse to seeking anything that he is to consider true through inner activity. He condemns all of this as fantasy or reverie, and then he brings it not only theoretically in his views, but practically to the point that he really excludes what the soul works out in itself, that he excludes it as much as possible in his work towards a world view. When one excludes the life of the soul in this way, the ideal that emerges is the picture of the materialistic world view. What does one actually do when one excludes this inner life? Yes, when one excludes this inner life, it is roughly the same as when one releases one's bodily-physical life from the life of the soul. Just as the watchmaker who has worked on the watch, who has worked his thoughts into it, leaves the watch to itself when it is finished and the watch itself then produces the phenomena that were first placed into it by the watchmaker's thoughts, so the life of the soul can indeed continue, continue in the brain, without the soul being present. And with the present system of education, people are becoming accustomed to this. They not only become accustomed to denying the soul, but actually to eliminating the soul; in short, not to respond to it through inner activity, but to rest on the laurels of what is merely produced by the brain. And the paradox that I want to say is that the purely materialistic world view, as it appears, is in fact a brain product, that it is in fact automatically generated by the self-movement of the brain. The external world is reflected in the brain, which passively sets the brain in motion, and this materialist world view arises. The strange thing is that the materialist is quite right for himself if he has first eliminated the soul life. Because he has taken pure brain-life as his basis, nothing else can appear to him but pure brain-life, which then produces soul-life out of itself, as roughly formulated by the naturalist Carl Vogt: the brain sweats out thoughts, just as the liver sweats out bile. Those thoughts that arise in the field of materialism are indeed sweated out. The image is crude, but they do indeed arise from the brain, just as bile comes out of the liver. This is how errors arise. Errors do not arise simply from saying something wrong, but from saying something right that is valid in a limited field, that is even valid in the only field one wants to have.

The materialistic world view comes not from a logical error, but from the tendency of the mind not to exert itself intellectually, not to deepen its thinking, as has been explained here in the last lectures, not to stir up its inner soul life, but to abandon itself to what the body can do. The materialistic world view does not come from a logical error, but from the tendency of the mind not to be inwardly active at all, but to abandon itself to what the body says. This is the secret of the difficulty in refuting materialism. If someone who does not want to engage his soul life excludes activity from the outset and basically finds it more comfortable to produce only what a brain produces, then it is not surprising that he gets stuck in the realm of materialism. He cannot accept, however, that this brain itself — thank God he has it, because he would not be able to create it with all his materialistic world view! — that this brain itself is created out of the wisdom of the world and that it, because it is created, built up out of the wisdom of the world, is so arranged that it in turn can work like a clock; so that it can be entirely material and produce through itself. This wisdom is a kind of phosphorescence, a phosphorescence that is in the brain itself; it brings out what has already been put into it spiritually. But the materialist does not need to concern himself with this, but simply leaves to what has condensed out of the spiritual, I might say into matter, and which now, as with the work of the clock, produces spiritual products.

You see, the spiritual researcher is so grounded in the justified view of nature that he is compelled to utter something that might seem as paradoxical to some people as what has just been said. But you can see from this that one must already go into the nerve of spiritual science if one wants to judge this spiritual science. And it is also understandable to find, because what can be said again is so well founded, - it is also understandable that so many objections and misunderstandings arise. Spiritual research that is taken seriously is all too easily confused with all that is done in a dilettante manner and which can very easily be mistaken for true, thorough spiritual research. I have often been reproached for the fact that the writings I have written on spiritual science are not popular enough, as they say; that the lectures I give here are not popular enough. Well, I neither write my writings nor give my lectures in order to please anyone, to speak to anyone's heart as they want it to be; but I write my writings and give my lectures as I believe they should be written and given so that spiritual science can be presented to the world in the right way. In older times there was also spiritual science - I have mentioned this often - although spiritual science had to change through the progress of humanity and at that time came from different sources than the spiritual science of today. From the outset, only those who were considered mature were admitted to the places where spiritual science was presented. Today, such an approach would be quite nonsensical. Today we live in public life, and it is taken for granted that what is being investigated is carried into public life, that all secrecy and the like would be foolish. This secrecy cannot be any more than what is otherwise present in public life today: that those who have already studied something are then offered the opportunity to hear something further in more detailed lectures. But that is also done at universities, and in the whole of external life. And when people talk about some kind of secretive behavior, it is just as unjustified and unfounded as when people talk about secretive behavior in university lectures. But so that not everyone who does not want to make an effort to penetrate the subject can penetrate it in so-called popular writings that are so easy on the eye, or rather believe they can penetrate it, the writings are written and the lectures are held in such a way that some effort is necessary and some thought must be applied on the way into the secret science. I am fully aware of how prickly and scientific some of the things I present are for those who do not want such prickly science. But it must be so, if spiritual science is to be properly integrated into the spiritual culture of the present time. It is not surprising that when people here and there, in small or large groups, devote themselves to spiritual science without having any knowledge of the progress of science in our time and with a desire to speak with a certain authority, they are denounced by scientists. Something special, something significant must be seen in the form in which the messages are given. This must be seen in that inner activity, activity of the soul, is necessary in order to see how the soul itself lives as something that uses the body as an instrument, but that is not the same as the physical.

Now, if we look at all this correctly, where do the misunderstandings come from? When the soul develops, when it develops the forces slumbering within it, as has been explained here several times, then the first of these slumbering forces is the power of thought, which must be developed in the way that has just been indicated again. If the soul wants to develop the forces lying dormant in it, it needs a certain inner strength, a certain inner power. It must exert itself inwardly. This is not what people like under the influence of the present time, this inward exertion. Artists are the ones who like it most. But even in the field of art, people have now progressed so far that they would rather just copy nature, having no idea that the soul must first strengthen itself inwardly, must first work inwardly to add something special and new to mere nature. So the power of thinking is the first thing that must be strengthened. Then, as the lectures of the last few weeks have shown, feeling and will must also be energized. And this energizing, that is what it is actually called, that one says: Yes, everything in this spiritual science arises only in an inward way. People shy away from the idea of acquiring strength through something inward, and they do not even consider the considerable difference that must exist between the perception of external nature and the perception of the spiritual world.

Let us take a good, hard look at this difference. What difference arises? With regard to external nature, our organs are already given to us. The eye is given to us. But Goethe has now spoken the beautiful word: “If the eye were not solar, how could we see the light?” As true as it is that you would not hear me if I did not speak, that you must first come to me with your listening in order to understand what is being said, so true is it for Goethe that the eye arose from sunlight itself, light itself, albeit indirectly through all kinds of hereditary and complicated natural processes, the eye has arisen, that the eye not only creates light in the Schopenhauerian sense, but that it itself is created by light. That is to be firmly held. But one could say: thank God for those who want to be materialistic: they no longer need to create their eyes, because these eyes are created out of the spiritual; they already have them, and by perceiving the world, they use these already finished eyes. They direct these eyes towards external impressions, and the external impressions are reflected; with the whole soul they are reflected in the sense organs. Let us assume that a human being could only experience the development of the eye with his present consciousness. Let us assume that. Let us assume that a human being enters nature as a child, with only the predisposition for the eyes. The eyes would have to arise through the influence of sunlight. What would take place in the growth of the human being? The result would be that through the sunbeams, which are not yet visible themselves, the eyes would be brought out of the organization, and by sensing: I have eyes, he senses light in the eye. By knowing the eye as his, as his organization, he senses the eye living in the light. In this way, it is basically the same with sense perception today: the human being experiences himself by experiencing in the light. With his eye in the light, he experiences what has been developed through sense perception, where, as I said, thank God, we already have our eyes.

But this must also be the case with spiritual research. There must really be brought out of the still unformed soul the organic, there must first be brought out spiritual hearing, spiritual seeing. The organic, the spiritual eye, the spiritual ear, as it were, must first be brought out of the inner being, to use these expressions of Goethe's again and again. There one must really feel one's way in the spiritual world by developing one's soul, and then, by feeling one's way in it, one forms the organs, and in the organs one experiences the spiritual world just as one experiences the physical-sensual world in the organs of the physical body. So first of all that which man already has here for sense perception must be created. He must have the power to create the organs first in order to experience himself in the spiritual world through these organs.

What stands in the way of this is what can truly be called nothing more than the inner weakness of the human being that has been produced by today's education. Weakness, that is what holds man back from taking hold of his inner being in the same way that one takes hold of something with one's hands. It is a foolish expression to say, but let us say it, to take hold of one's inner being in such a way that it is really active inwardly, as it would be if one first created hands to touch the table. So he creates his inner being to touch what is spiritual, and with the spiritual he touches spiritual. It is weakness, then, that keeps men from penetrating to real spiritual research. And it is weakness that gives rise to the misunderstandings that stand in the way of spiritual research: inward weakness of soul, an inability to see the possibility of reshaping the inwardly material into inwardly spiritual organs in order to grasp the spiritual world (because we still have traces of Faustism). That is one thing.

And there is a second point, which can be understood if one is willing to do so: Man always has a strange feeling about the unknown; above all, he has a feeling of fear about the unknown. Now, in the beginning, everything that can be experienced in the world of the senses is a complete unknown, which cannot only be explored in the spiritual world, but about which one must also speak when speaking of the spiritual world. One has a fear of the spiritual world, but a fear of a very special kind, namely a fear that does not come to consciousness. And how does the materialistic, the mechanistic, the, as one says today, “educated” — materialistic it is, after all! — monistic world view arise? It arises from the fact that there is fear in the soul of that breakthrough of sensuality, because one is afraid precisely of the fact that if one breaks through to the spiritual through sensuality, one comes into the unknown, into nothingness, as Mephistopheles says to Faust. And Faust says: “In your nothingness I hope to find the All.” Fear of what can only be sensed as the nothing, but a masked fear, fear that wears a mask! It is necessary to realize that there are subconscious or unconscious soul processes, soul processes that proliferate down there in the soul life. It is remarkable how people deceive themselves about many things. For example, it is a very common delusion to believe that one does not really want something out of a very thick selfishness, but one wants it out of selfishness. Instead, one invents all sorts of excuses about how selflessly, how lovingly one wants to do this or that. In this way, a mask is placed over the egoism. This occurs particularly often, for example, in societies that come together to cultivate love. Yes, one can even make studies about such masking of egoism quite often. I knew a man who repeatedly stated that what he was doing, he was doing entirely against his actual intention and against what he loves; he was only doing it because he considered it necessary for the good of humanity. I kept saying: Don't fool yourself! You are doing it out of your own selfishness, because you like it, and then it is better to admit the truth. Then you are on the ground of truth when you admit that you like the things you want to do and do not keep any such mask.

Fear is what leads to the rejection of spiritual science today. But this fear is not admitted. They have it in their soul, but they do not let it up into their consciousness and invent reasons, reasons against spiritual science, proofs that man must immediately begin to fantasize when he leaves the solid ground of sensual observation and so on. Yes, they invent very complicated proofs. They set up entire philosophies, which in turn can be logically incontestable. They invent entire philosophical worldviews that actually mean nothing more to those who have insight into such things than that everything they invent – be it transcendental realism, empiricist realism, be it more or less speculative realism, metaphysical realism, and whatever these “isms” are called – arises from fear. These “isms” are invented and worked out from very strict lines of thought. But at bottom they are nothing more than the fear of setting the soul on the path that leads to experiencing in its concreteness what one feels to be the unknown. These are the two main reasons for the misunderstanding of spiritual science: weakness of the soul life, fear of the supposed unknown. And anyone who understands the human soul can analyze today's worldviews in terms of it. On the one hand, they arise from the impossibility of strengthening thinking itself in such a way that the counter-instances immediately reach it, and on the other hand, there is the fear of the unknown. Sometimes, because of the fear of penetrating into the so-called unknown, one even lets the unknown be unknown, and many say: Yes, we admit: behind the world of the senses there is still a spiritual world, but man – we can prove this strictly – cannot penetrate into it. Most people then start, when they want to prove something, with the words, “Kant already said,” because they always assume that the person to whom they say, “Kant already said,” does not understand anything about Kant. So people invent proofs that the human mind cannot penetrate into the world that lies behind sensuality. These are only excuses, however ingenious they may be, excuses for fear. But they do assume that there is something behind sensuality. They call this the unknown and prefer to found an agnosticism in Spencer's sense or in some other sense, rather than find the courage to really lead their soul into the spiritual world. |

Recently, a strange Weltanschhauung has come into being, the so-called Weltanschhauung of the “as if.” It has even been transplanted into Germany. Hans Vaihinger has written a thick book about the Weltanschhauung of the “as if.” In this philosophy of life, one says: Man cannot say that such concepts as the unity of his consciousness really correspond to reality, but man must look at the phenomena of the world as if there were a unified soul, as if there were something at the basis of it all that is conceived as a unified soul. Atoms – the as-if philosophers cannot deny that no one has ever seen an atom and that one must think of the atom in such a way that it cannot be seen, because even light is only supposed to arise through the vibrations of the atom. At least the as-if philosophers do not speak of the fable of the atomic world that still haunts this or that corner. But they say: Well, it just makes it easier to understand the sensory world if we think of the sensory world as if atoms existed.

Those who have an active soul life will notice the difference between moving with their active soul life in a spiritual reality, in the unified soul weaving, or merely asserting a concept in external, intellectual realism, as if the phenomena of human activity were summarized by a soul being. At least if one really stands on the practical ground of world-views, one will not be able to apply the as-if philosophy well. For example, a philosopher who is highly esteemed today is Fritz Mauthner, who is regarded as a great authority because he has finally transcended Kantianism. Whereas Kant still conceived of concepts as something with which reality is summarized, Mauthner sees language merely as that in which the world view is actually concluded. And so he has now happily brought about his “Critique of Language” and written a thick “Philosophical Dictionary” from this point of view, and above all acquired a following that regards him as a great man. Well, I do not want to go into Fritz Mauthner today, I just want to say: one could now try to apply the as-if philosophy to this Fritz Mauthner. One could say: let's leave it open whether the man has spirit, has genius, but let's look at what he is spiritually as if he had spirit. You will see, if you go about it sincerely, that you will not succeed. The 'as if' cannot be applied where the thing does not exist.

In short, it is necessary, to say it once more, to get to the root of spiritual science itself and that one knows precisely in spiritual science what this spiritual science must recognize as justified on the ground on which misunderstandings can arise. For, however much these misunderstandings are misunderstandings on the one hand, it is equally true on the other hand that these misunderstandings are nevertheless justified if the spiritual scientist is not fully able to think along with what the natural scientist is thinking. The spiritual researcher must be able to think along with the natural scientist. Indeed, he must even be able to test the natural scientist at times, especially those who always emphasize standing on the firm ground of natural science. Admittedly, even if one only tests it superficially, as it stands with an apparently purely positivistic world view, which rejects everything spiritual, then the following becomes apparent. As you know, I do not underestimate Ernst Haeckel where the esteem is justified; I fully recognize him. But when he speaks of Weltanschauung, it is precisely in this that his weakness of soul reveals itself, which is not capable of pursuing anything but the one path he has taken. And here we come upon an example that must be emphasized again and again when one is seriously concerned with the present time. We come upon the infinitely widespread superficiality of thinking and the general dishonesty of life. For example, we see how Ernst Haeckel points out that one of the greatest authorities to which he himself refers is Karl Ernst von Baer. And again and again we find Karl Ernst von Baer cited as a man who is supposed to prove the purely materialistic world view that Haeckel derives from his research. How many people go to gain insight into what is actually behind today's scientific endeavor? How many people go and touch something like this? How many people stop to consider that Haeckel writes: Karl Ernst von Baer can be seen as someone who speaks in the way that Haeckel derives from it! So one naturally believes that Baer speaks in the way that Haeckel can derive from it. Well, I will read you a few passages from Karl Ernst von Baer: “The earth is only the seedbed on which the spiritual heritage of man proliferates, and the history of nature is not only the history of progressive victories of the spiritual over matter. That is the fundamental idea of Creation, to the end of which, no, for its accomplishment, it causes individuals and generations to fade away and builds the future on the scaffolding of an immeasurable past.

Haeckel constantly cites this wonderful, spiritual view of the world! We must pursue scientific development. If only this were the case to some extent today with those who want to be called to it, one would not have to struggle so terribly against the superficiality that produces the countless prejudices and errors that then stand in the way of such a pursuit as spiritual science as misunderstandings.

Or let us take a look at an honorable man in the nineteenth-century quest for a worldview: David Friedrich Strauß, an honorable man – they are all honorable, after all! Starting from other views, he ultimately wants to place himself entirely on the ground: The soul is only a product of the material. Man has emerged entirely from what today's materialism wants to call nature. When one speaks of will, there is no real will, but rather brain molecules somehow revolve, and then the will arises as a haze. In this context, David Friedrich Strauss says: “In man, nature has not only wanted upwards in general, it has wanted beyond itself.” That is: nature wills! One has arrived at the point where one can be a materialist without even taking his words seriously. Man is denied the will because man is supposed to be like nature, and then one says: that nature has willed. One can easily pass over such a matter. But anyone who is serious about striving for a worldview will realize that such things are the source of countless aberrations and that these things are instilled into the public consciousness. And from what then arises from this instillation, misunderstandings arise regarding true spiritual science and true spiritual research.

And from the other side come the objections of those who profess this or that religious creed and believe that their religion is endangered by the coming of a spiritual science. I must emphasize again and again: it is the very same people who opposed Copernicus, Galileo and so on, who objected that religion would be endangered if it were to be proposed that the earth moves around the sun. One can only say to these people: how timid you actually are within your religions! How little you have grasped your religion if you are immediately afraid that your religion could be endangered if anything is researched! I always have to mention that theologian, who remained a good theologian and a devout follower of his church, who was a friend of mine, who was then elected rector of the University of Vienna in the 1990s and who, in his speech, which he gave about Galileo, said: “There were once people – we know that within a certain religious community these people existed until 1822, when it was allowed to believe in the Copernican world view! – there were once people who believed that something like the Copernican or Galilean world view could endanger religions. Today we have to be so far, said this theologian, this devout priest and follower of his church until his deathbed, that we find religion in particular to be deepened, strengthened by the fact that we look into the glory of the works of the Divine, that we learn to recognize them more and more. That was Christian talk!

But more and more people will emerge who say: Yes, this spiritual science says this or that about Christ; one should not say that. We imagine the Christ to be like this or like that. One can even come and tell these people: We do indeed accept what you say about the Christ, exactly as you say it. We just see a little more. We do not see this Christ as just a being, as you do, but as a Being, even as a cosmic Being, who gives the earth meaning and significance in the whole universe. But you are not allowed to do that. You are not allowed to go beyond what certain people see as the right thing. Spiritual science provides insights. Through the realization of the truth, one can never want to somehow justify something that is called a religious creation, even though there will always be fools who say of spiritual science that it wants to found a new religion. Spiritual science does not want to found a new religion. Religions are founded in a completely different way. Christianity was founded by its founder through the Christ Jesus living on earth. And just as little as any science will explain the Thirty Years War when it recognizes it, so it will explain just as little anything else that was there in reality. Religions are based on facts, on facts that have happened. Spiritual science can only claim to understand these facts differently, or perhaps not even differently, but only in a higher sense than one can without spiritual science. But it is equally true that, whether from a high or a low point of view, by understanding the Thirty Years' War, one does not somehow establish something in the world that is connected with the Thirty Years' War. It is always the superficiality that sometimes also feels limited in its perceptions and does not want to engage with the things that are actually at stake. If one were to engage with spiritual science, one would recognize that although the materialistic worldview may easily lead people away from religious feeling and religious contemplation, spiritual science establishes precisely that in man which can be a deeper religious experience, but only because it lays bare the deeper roots of the soul and thus leads man in a deeper way to an experience of that which has emerged externally and historically as religion. Spiritual science will not found a new religion. It knows only too well that Christianity once gave meaning to the earth. It will only try to deepen this Christianity more than others who do not stand on the ground of spiritual science can deepen it. From materialism, however, something like this has been achieved, as, for example, David Friedrich Strauß concluded, who calls the belief in resurrection a humbug and then says: The resurrection had to be put forward, because Christ Jesus said many noble things, said many truths. But if you say truths, says David Friedrich Strauß, you do not make a special impression on people; you have to embellish it with a great miracle, the miracle of the resurrection. But then all Christian development would be a result of humbug! That, indeed, is what materialism has brought. Spiritual science will not do that! Spiritual science will try to understand from its very foundations that which lives in the mystery of resurrection, in order to present to mankind, which has now advanced and can no longer understand it in the old way, that which materialism has called a humbug, in the right way. But the aim here is not to engage in religious propaganda, but only to draw attention to the significance of spiritual science and to the misunderstandings that stand in its way and that stem from an assumed religious life.

Today, people have not yet reached the point where materialism would have a bad moral result on a large scale, but it would soon have it if people could not penetrate the spiritual self-active foundations of the soul life through spiritual science. Spiritual science will also mean something for what humanity needs as a moral life, which can give people a rebirth at a higher level of this moral life.

These things can only be characterized in general terms. Time does not permit a detailed description. I have tried to at least characterize some of the misunderstandings that are repeatedly found when spiritual science is judged. I would never want to engage with what arises from the general superficiality of our time, at least not in the sense of refuting anything. Sometimes one could at most engage with it in the sense of providing a little material to make people smile or perhaps even laugh.

As I said, one cannot engage with the kind of superficiality that is spreading today and that is, in a sense, setting the tone because printing ink on white paper still has a great magical effect. But insofar as the objections that are made, even if they say nothing at all, are instilled into the public, one must speak of them. And the misunderstandings that arise from what comes out of such instilling are what one has to struggle with at every turn today if one takes something like spiritual science seriously. Again and again one encounters objections that do not arise from some activity of the soul, but are instilled by the general superficiality that reigns and lives in our time. But anyone who is familiar with spiritual science knows, as I have often explained here, that this spiritual science must and will develop in the same way as everything that, in a sense, must incorporate something new into the spiritual development of humanity. From a certain point of view, such an encounter was granted to the newer natural scientific world view until it became powerful and could work through external power factors and no longer needed to work merely through its own power. Then the time comes when, even without the soul being activated, world views can be built on such factors that have power. Is there a big difference between two things? Those who today base their monistic world-views on many grounds consider themselves wonderfully exalted, sublimely above those who may stand on the ground of a religious-theological world-view and, in the opinion of the former, are quite dogmatically limited, swearing only by authority. For anyone who looks into the way in which misunderstandings arise, it is of no great merit in terms of what the human soul really works for, whether one swears by the church fathers Gregory, Tertullian , Irenaeus or Augustine, and also look upon them as authorities, or whether one looks upon the church fathers Darwin, Haeckel, Helmholtz, insofar as they are really church fathers, and swears by them. What matters first is not whether one swears by one or the other, but what matters is how one stands in the process of acquiring a world view. And in a higher sense, in a much higher sense than mere abstract idealism could, the following will apply to spiritual science: at first it will be met with misunderstanding and error everywhere; but then what at first appeared as fantasy, as reverie, will become a matter of course. This is how it was with Copernicanism and Keplerism, and how it is with everything that is to be incorporated into the spiritual development of mankind. At first it is nonsense, then it becomes a matter of course. This is also the fate of spiritual science.

But this spiritual science has something important to say to humanity, as can be seen from everything I have said in other lectures and will probably also emerge from today's lecture. It has something to say to humanity that points to the living entity that makes a human being a human being in the first place: it does not present itself to him for passive contemplation, does not reveal itself to him from the outside, but he must grasp it himself in a living way, he can only recognize its existence through his own activity. We must overcome the weakness that regards everything as fantasy whose existence cannot be grasped in passive surrender, but only in active inner cooperation with the whole of the world. Only when he realizes that knowledge of it can only become his if it becomes active knowledge will man know what he is and what his destiny is. The spirit already has the strength to struggle through, and it will struggle through against all misunderstandings that are justified in the sense intended today, and all the more so against those that arise from the superficiality of the time. For it is a beautiful saying, which Goethe claims is in harmony, as he himself says, with an ancient sage:

If the eye were not solar,
How could we behold the light?
If the god-own power were not in us,
How could we delight in the divine?

The divine spiritual essence that weaves and lives through the world is that from which we originated, emerged. Our material world is also born of the spiritual. And only because it is already born and man does not need to produce it in his own activity, does man, if he is a materialist, believe in it one-sidedly today. The spiritual must be grasped in living activity. The divine spiritual must first weave itself into the human being, the spiritual sun must first create its organs in the human being. Thus one could modify Goethe's saying by saying: If the inner eye does not become spirit-like, it can never behold the light that is the essence of the human being. If the human soul cannot unite with that from which it has come from eternity to eternity, with the Divine-Spiritual, which is one being with its own being, then she will be unable to grasp the glimpse of light into the spiritual, then the spiritual eye will not be able to arise in her, then she will never be able to delight in the Divine in the spiritual sense, then the world will be empty and barren for human knowledge. For we can only find that in the world for which we create the organs for.

If the outer physical eye were not sun-like, how could we behold the light? If the inner eye does not become spirit-sun-like, we can never behold the spiritual light of the human entity. If man's own inner activity does not become truly spiritual and divine itself, then never can that which makes him a true human being, the spirit of the world, which lives, weaves and works through the world and comes to human consciousness in him, even if he does not come to God-consciousness, never can that come through his soul's pulsations.

On March 23 and 24, I will speak here again, tying in with Nietzsche's tragic world view with Wagner and about some more intimate, more precise truths that can lead the human soul to truly break through the world of the senses and enter into the living spiritual life. I will then speak in more detail about this path of the human soul into the spiritual world than has been possible so far.