The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Welcome, all who are present here! In this second lecture I would like you to consider that I had assumed last night, to hearing Dr Kolisko's lecture today, and not present it myself. Due to this it wasn't possible in this short time to quite sort out what I would say and I can only hope, as a whole, to roughly cover the details which Dr Kolisko wanted to convey to you.

When from the anthroposophical viewpoint the relationship of the animal world to the human world is spoken about, then it must be pointed out in particular how the present anthroposophical ideas relate historically to the Goethean world view—I have mentioned this twice here at least. The theme in question today, specifically the very first of Goethe's accomplishments in the natural scientific area, will come under scrutiny, namely in his treatise entitled: “Human beings, like the animals, are attributed with an intermaxillary jawbone in the upper jaw.” One needs to keep all the relationships in view when considering how Goethe came to this treatise on the basis of some anatomical and physiological studies and on which grounds of his approach to embryological studies he attributed this to.

During the time when Goethe, already as a young student and later as a friend who to a certain extent had made the Jena University Institute dependent on him, lived with these problems to which he was exposed, namely the problem of what the actual difference could be between human beings and animals. He noticed how people all around him were focused on discovering the difference within the form, within the human and animal morphology, of the differentiation between people, who should be, to some degree, the crown of creation, and the animal world. Also regarding the circumstances where the intermaxillary, which is clearly detached in all animals from any other jaw bone but which is not found in the human being as a separated bone, made people believe that this part of the head's development gave the decisive difference between humans and animals. Goethe didn't agree. He was of the opinion that man and animal were created according to their entire organisation in the same way, therefore such a detail could not indicate a differentiation. In addition, the intermaxillary bone in mature people grow together, so Goethe tried to show how this phenomenon relied only on later development because in the embryonic stage, human beings displayed the same relationship in their upper intermaxillary bone as in animals.

You only have to follow the enthusiasm with which Goethe pointed out to how lucky he was, that the human being actually has the intermaxillary jaw bone in common with the animals, and how out of the whole big picture of the morphology, no decisive difference between the human being and the animal could be found in a single detail. From the kind of limitation of man and animal as you find everywhere in the 18th Century, it could not be stated in this way—also for Anthroposophy it could not be stated in this way. What Goethe accepted was this: By the animal organisation developing up into the human organisation, details already in the animal organ formation were transformed and then gradually through its evolution created the possibility to make space for what is within man, and in such a way reveal the transformed animalistic organisation in the totality of man. Goethe thought only about the metamorphosed animal organisation within the human and not of an autonomously separated human morphology.

This, I might add, needs to be established as the foundation in the search for the differentiation, in the anthroposophical sense, between animal and human organisms. If an organisation itself, in its forms, only depends on the animal and the human metamorphosis, then one has to, if you are looking for differentiation, primarily watch the course of life of a person and of an animal, and gradually observe how the human being unfolds out of the functioning of his organs, and how an animal takes on form through his organs. In brief, one needs to search more from biological than from morphological regions.

Now, one can prepare, in a specific way, how to discover the understanding through biological differences, by finding a foundation in which the animal functions originate and which appears in both man and animal, and this relates to the sense organs. The sense organs, or better said, the functions of the sense organs are more or less vital in everything which takes place in the animal and human organisms. We may assume that in the simple nutritional processes in the lower animals, in the purely digestive processes, a function of a primitive sense happens, which, we say, is where taste experiences for instance happen more or less as a purely chemical function of metabolism. These things become increasingly differentiated the further one ascends the animal row, right up to the human being. We won't get anywhere if we go straight to the animal organisation to find something which does not have a sensory life. Certainly one could say: what for instance do the senses have to do with the development of the lymph and blood?

Today already there is talk from the non-anthroposophical scientists about subconscious processes in the human psyche, and as a result we will for the sake of brevity only hint at it, and not let it appear as something completely unauthorised when I say: What takes place in the mouth and palate as a taste experience, what takes place in the process and function with for instance the ptyalin, pepsin and so on, how can it not also take part in the subconscious? Why should—I say this as a kind of postulation—the experience of taste not continue through the entire organism and why should the subconscious experience of taste not happen parallel to the lymph and blood development in all organ processes? Through this we can follow the biological side of the human and animal organisations by looking at their sensory life.

The sense life unfolds—as I have indicated years ago how it is partially a fact of outer science—not only in the usually claimed five senses, but in a clear discernible number of twelve human senses. Now, we are only talking about human beings. For those who want to understand if one could speak about twelve senses in the same way as for five or six—from seeing, hearing smelling, tasting, feeling or touch—for those it is valid that one can speak for instance about the sense of balance, which we recognise inwardly whether we stand on two feet or only one, whether we move our arms in one way or the other, and so on. By our position as humans in the world, we are in equilibrium. This equilibrium we accept, although from a much duller position than that of our perceiving through the senses about what takes place in the process of seeing; so that we may speak about the sense of equilibrium as we speak about a sense of seeing. Let us be clear about this. When we speak about the sense of equilibrium we turn ourselves more towards our own organisation, we perceive inwardly, while with our eyes we look outwardly. However, this experience of equilibrium fosters its basis as a sense perceptible function. In the same way we can expand the number of senses on the other side. When we merely hear something, the function of the human organism is really different to when we, as it were, hear directly through the ear, and then explore what becomes indirectly perceptible to us, through speech. When we follow the words of others with inner understanding it doesn't involve mere judgement, but a process of judgement comes out of a perceptive process, a sense process; so we need to speak about it as having a sense of speech—or a sense of language, a sense of the word—just as we have a sense of hearing. In other words, we must, if we consider the words more anatomically-physiologically, presuppose there is within the human organization a special (sensory) organization which corresponds to the hearing of what had been spoken as well as hearing inarticulate sounds. We must assume a special organisation for the sense of speech, which is quite similar to a sensory organisation, for example the organisation of sight or of hearing.

We may also, when we go to work without prejudice, not say: we get to know that a person is standing in front of us, when we see there is something in the external space shaped like a nose, like two eyes and so on, and through an analogy conclude that a person is stuck in there, because we see that in us there is also a person, revealed outwardly through a nose, eyes and so on. Such an unconscious conclusion in reality doesn't form the basis; it is rather the direct entry into others which corresponds to something special within them which can be compared to a sensory organisation, so that we can speak about a sense of Self (Ichsinn). When we look through the functioning of people in this unprejudiced way, then we need to, with the same authorization with which we spoke about the sense of hearing, of taste and so on, speak about the organisation of perception for words, about an organisation of perception for thoughts, for an organisation of the Self—not for one's own self, because for one own Self it is dependent on something quite different. Further, we must speak about a sense of movement, because it is something quite different, whether we call it movement or rest. Likewise, we must speak about a sense of life—ordinary science already speaks partly about that.

When we determine the number of sense organisations, we arrive at twelve human senses. Of these, several are inner senses, because we involve the inner organism—how we feel and experience the sense or equilibrium, sense of movement and so on—while observing it. However, qualitatively the experience with observation of the inner organization remains the same for the seeing, hearing or taste processes. It is important to see things only in the right context.

If the starting point is from a human angle of a complete physiology of the senses then certain biological phenomena from the human realm, on the one side, and the animal realm on the other, reveal a particular meaning. This meaning can exist even if you admit to everything which has been presented by recent research, even from Haeckel, regarding the morphological and also physiological human organisation in relationship to that of the animal. Here the most impossible misunderstandings come about. It is believed, for instance, that Anthroposophy must oppose Haeckel, simply on the grounds that it rises from mere observation through the senses to the empirical observations of the spiritual; it is believed that Anthroposophy must from this basis change Haeckelism. No!—What needs to be changed in Haeckelism must be changed out of natural scientific methodology, so Anthroposophy doesn't need to argue here because one can have discussions, as scientific researchers, with Haeckel.

What Anthroposophy has to offer refers to quite other areas. It is correct to emphasize that by counting the bones of the higher animals, there's no differentiation to the number in humans. The same goes for the muscles. This gives no differentiation between human and animal organisations. If, however, we proceed biologically, we discover real differentiation. We find that we can attribute a special value to the essential way the human organism is placed differently in the cosmos to the animals. When we observe the higher animals, we have to admit that their essential aspect is that the axis of their backbone is parallel to the earth's surface while by contrast, humans in the course of their life make their horizontal spinal axis vertical, which means an important function in the life of humans are to stand upright.—I know objections can be raised: there are some animals which have more or less of a vertical spinal axis. This is not the salient point as to how it is excluded through outer morphology, but how the entire organisation is adjusted. We will also see how with certain animal, bird types or even mammals, where the spine can be brought into more or less of a vertical position, a kind of degenerative effect appears in their total predisposition, while with people there is already a predisposition for the spine to be vertical.

When I mentioned this some years ago in a lecture in Munich, a man educated in natural science approached me, who I could naturally understand quite well, and said: ‘When we sleep, we do have a horizontal spine.’—This does not matter, I replied, but what matters is in the relationship to the situation, let's say, of the bone in the leg or foot to the rest of the bodily structure and to the whole cosmic relationship of mankind, and how this is processed by the human or by the animal. Indeed, the human's spine is horizontal during sleep, but this position is outward; inwardly the human is so dynamically organized that he can bring himself into a condition of equilibrium where the spine is vertical. When animals come to such a state of equilibrium, they are degenerating in a certain sense, or they tend towards developing some human-like functions and as a result prove, what I want to present now.

We can say that by the human being purely functionally, out of the total dynamic of his being in the course of his first year of life, forming his spinal axis vertically, he has brought himself into another relationship of equilibrium cosmically than the animal. However, every being is created out of the cosmic totality, and one can say, and adapt—I don't want to enter further into this.

When we track the formation of single bones, for example the ribs or head bones further, then we also gain the morphological possibility of how the formation of ribs or head bones in a man or dog adapt to the vertical or horizontal spine. Because the human being finds himself in a vertical position he lives in contrast to the animal, who stands on four legs, in quite a different state of equilibrium, in quite a different cosmic relationship.

Now we must try to clarify the problem from the other side, what actually happens in the sense's processes in a person and what happens to him with reference to the sensory process. Due to our limited time I wish to speak only with indications, but this can also be translated into a completely precise biological-physiological terminology.

Let's take the process of seeing. We could create divisions into what the specific function of the organ of sight is, and into what happens further as a continuation within the physical; one could call it an analogy of the optical nerve of the eye which loses itself in the inner nervous system. Thus, we could differentiate, on the one side, the process of sight itself, and then everything connected to it in the totality of experience. In the direct present process of vision there is also the imminence of the image perceptibility; when we look at something then we don't separate the imagery from the vision. Turning our eyes away from what we looked at, we then retain a kind or imaginative remnant which clearly shows a relationship with the vision's observation. Whoever can really analyse this will see the differences between the imagined remnant obtained through the organ of vision as opposed to what happens with the hearing process. We have within us an experience of the process of sight, one could call it, in a dualistic way. First being more turned to what actually is observed through the senses and then turning again to the remnant within imagination which remains more or less as a manifested memory.

Let's take everything that lives in the inner image perceptibility of human beings, which depends on the five senses. The one which is the most dependable is of course the process of sight. Only a ninth of what is found through vision, is found through the hearing process. When we consider soul life, there is even less found in it than the seeing and hearing processes, and so on. We know, that in addition to the image perceptibility which leads to lasting memory, it also plays a role but in reality, less than with the seeing and hearing processes.

Now we can pose the question: Is there also for the more hidden senses, like the sense of equilibrium or sense of movement, this duality which is found in the observation perceptibility and image perceptibility? With a truly unbiased physiology and psychology the duality is there for instance in the sense of equilibrium, but the connection is seldom noticed. In the lectures I've just given, I spoke about the mathematical geometric relation of finding oneself upright in relationship to space. We construct relationships to space. What is it actually, that we are doing here? It is connected to the entire person just as it is when with the process of sight, the observed element is clearly separated from the image perceptibility, because we keep the imagination inside. We don't observe the colour outwardly but we experience the qualitative aspect of the colour, of colour tones, and what lives as a feeling, a feeling I have towards warm or cold colours strongly within myself.

We can now say the following: ‘I want to instantly see a show of all the soul images which I've acquired through my life, which I can see through my eyes.’ We would then enter into a visual system of the soul. We would, without having outer sight, rise inwardly into a kind of reconstruction of the visual process. If you apply this same kind of consideration to the sense of equilibrium, you obtain everything which you have experienced through the sense of equilibrium in your own organism, rising within, which corresponds to the geometry in outer life.¹ Mathematic and mechanistic laws have not been discovered by outer experience. Mathematic and mechanistic laws have been acquired though inward construction. If you want to recall mechanistic laws you have to access them through the image perceptibility of your sense of equilibrium. The entire human being becomes a sense organ and thus inwardly creates the other pole of what had been observed. For instance, we create mathematics and we believe we have a purely a-priori science. However, mathematics is no pure a-priori science. We don't notice that what we are experiencing as a sense of balance is what we translate into mathematical geometric imagination, like the observation through sight is translated into the imagination of the observed sight. Without noticing the bridge, we have created the sense of balance through maths or through mechanics.

When you think about this, you would understand the innermost relationship of the human organism with its position of equilibrium in the cosmos. Then you could say to yourself: With the animal, which stands on its four legs and which has been given its equilibrium position and sense of equilibrium, the animal must experience equilibrium in quite a different way within itself than a person does mathematically. We find the mathematical simply as a result of us being placed in the cosmos.

We talk about three dimensions because we are positioned in three dimensions in the cosmos. However, the vertical dimension we have only achieved in the course of life. We have placed ourselves into the vertical position. What we have experienced in our earliest childhood reflects later in us as mathematics; it only doesn't develop as quickly as the seeing process. The reflection of the experience of equilibrium goes on in the course of life. In childhood we have a very strong experience of the sense of equilibrium, when we go over from crawling to walking and standing. This reflects in later life and becomes visible as mathematics and mechanics. We often take mathematics as something woven out of ourselves. This is not so. It comes out of the observation of our organism. Why then are there certain thoughts which can be related to the cosmos, which then can create an entire construction in thought, a ‘thought-edifice?’ That is merely a result of human beings standing within the cosmos. When we now compare the position of equilibrium between the animal, in his relation to the cosmos, with that of the human being, then we could say: We have with the animal the bondage with the earth organisation and we have with the human being the uprightness, being ‘lifted-out’ of the earth organisation. What we express as individualized thoughts result from our human organisation having an individual position of equilibrium.

Thus, this actual act of placing oneself in the cosmos is not something which emerges from the organism itself as is found with the animals, but it is something formed within the human organism which is only achieved in the course of the first seven years of life, and goes right into the organs. As a result, we have this polarity between animals and humans that on the one hand humans stand upright and walk vertically. This is quite a cosmic position which lives in the human being, to which everything now has to adapt, and which distinguishes it from the animal. On the other hand, thoughts appear in the soul, thoughts which go beyond the sensual perception, beyond what is sensed with the five senses, extricating themselves from that. Just as the human being frees itself in its cosmic position from the earth, so the human thoughts extricate themselves from the bondage of the sense world, they become free in a certain way.

We must—for anthroposophy it is a definite but here I want to present it more as a hypothesis—we must see in the human being, through his upright spinal axis, a certain position of equilibrium which separates him from animals, and on the other hand we must regard thoughts of a particular imaginative form, as specifically human. Whoever examines such things from an Anthroposophic viewpoint—it could still become more or less relevant—will see how the human being's particular development of his sense of equilibrium and sense of movement achieve more towards a free system of thought than the case is through the eyes and ears, and we also gain insight of the human being requiring an inner organisation for this. The human being simply has an organisation within itself which is not yet found in the animal—this can also be proven materially—which simply supports ideas which are torn free from the earth's bondage to which the animal is bound, but which is limited by the special equilibrium position in humans. Therefore we can say: by the human standing upright, he has created an organ for abstract thinking.

So we have with the upright related organisation of human organs a different situation to those in the animals, which have organs too. Through the upright position the nerves and blood organisation work in a different way under the influence of the equilibrium position so that in the human something appears which can't be brought about in the animal. We discover this relationship really in the physical organization of humans and not as mere dynamism. This is of fundamental importance. Just imagine what happens in the evolution of an organization as a result of a change in their position of equilibrium, how it appears in the animal, how it is in the human being, what changes there for instance with reference to the upper and lower leg, hands and so on. Just imagine what it means that the human being is a two-hander and not a four-footer. The human being is fitted out with the same forms as the animal but they are in different positions and as a result are changed, metamorphosed forms. This can also simply be anatomically demonstrated if the necessary tools and experimental methods qualify. We are looking for such tools and experimental methods in our institute in Stuttgart. In any case before these methods can be empirically found externally, the differences need to be arrived at firstly through imaginative observation. Therefore, Anthroposophy is not useless with reference to research into the finer areas of the human, animal and plant forms, because science can't discover these things through imagination. Once they are discovered they can be verified by science.

When one looks at how another position of equilibrium reorganises the organs, one also finds that certain organs are changed in such a way that they become the human organ of speech and the organism becomes capable of creating speech.

Through this you have gained an insight into the extraordinary organisation of mankind, which has simply come about because of it being an upright being, having repercussions right into matter. Also in relation to the physiological organ of speech it has contributed—where an outer morphological distinction between man and animal can be determined—which after all shows the difference between man and animal biologically.

Here you have a few suggestions which can indicate the way how, in an outer lay method, research may be done which can also be actually researched scientifically. What I wanted to bring I could only briefly sketch here. However, continue to think about these ideas and the results will actually be a way for science to research the differentiations between the animal and human organisations in a biological relationship.

• 1. In the next few sentences some word-gaps followed in the stenographic text. The omissions were filled in with the help of the lectures of Dr Steiner on the 16th March 1921, 29 September, 1 and 3 October 1920 in GA 322

Our talks so far will have shown you the necessity of including exact knowledge of the physical human being when you prepare your lessons. The reason we consider such apparently remote matters is the important step our school is taking in adding a tenth grade class to the present elementary grades. In the tenth grade class we shall have girls and boys who are already more mature, who are at an age that will have to be treated especially carefully. I would like to spend the next few days in giving you a thorough understanding of this age when, as you know, important developmental stages occur.

You may well say that this is surely the business only of those who teach at this level. But this is not so. The teachers in our school must develop ever more into a complete organism, and all of you will, directly or indirectly, be concerned with all age groups, with the total education of every child.

However, before I address myself to the needs of the fourteen-, fifteen-, and sixteen-year-old students, I must today touch on some preliminary matters. During our meetings we shall then work on the tenth grade curriculum.

Let us, therefore, continue in the way we began during the last two days. I would like to impress on you the connection between the spirit/soul and the physical/corporeal aspects of the human being, especially of the child. Today’s culture regards spirit and soul merely intellectually. Our cultural life does not include an actual and living spiritual life. And in the mainly Catholic central European countries, Catholicism has assumed forms that are no longer true, so that even there one cannot expect any help regarding the religious mediation of spiritual life. The Protestant spiritual life has become more or less fully intellectualistic. As far as our school is concerned, the actual spiritual life can be present only because its staff consists of anthroposophists. We do not teach anthroposophy—our school must not represent a world conception—but through the way the teachers are acting, through their inner life, the soul and spirit elements enter the school as though through the imponderables of the soul.

When we now teach the various subjects expected of a school—reading, the thought processes in arithmetic, those in the natural sciences, everything that is of a cognitive nature—we give the children ideas and mental pictures. The ideas and mental images are for the child’s organism an activity that is quite different from physical/corporeal instruction—which, although it participates in the education of the thought processes, is also carried out independently. Physical/corporeal instruction is carried out quite independently in eurythmy, in physical education, and in instrumental music, but no longer in singing. Everything is, of course, relative. But there is a great difference, a polarity, between what the children are asked to do in these subjects—and also when they are learning reading and writing, when we strongly appeal to the physical activity—and what they are asked to do in subjects such as arithmetic, in which case the physical activity plays a subordinate role. In handwriting, on the other hand, physical activity plays a predominant part.

We should really go into details. Let me single out the subject of writing and show you the role physical activity plays. There are two types of people in regard to writing. (I believe I have already mentioned this to those of you who have attended previous lectures.) There are those who write as though the writing is flowing from their wrists. The forming of the letters is carried out from the wrist. Future business people are actually trained to write in this way. Their writing flows from their wrists, and this is all there is to it. That is one of the two types of people in regard to writing. The other type is disposed to looking at the letters. These people always contemplate what they write, deriving an almost aesthetic pleasure from it. These are the painter type, and they do not so much write from the wrist. Those of the first type do not paint.

I actually got to know the special training for people who are prepared for business. They are encouraged to put a kind of flourish to the letters. Their writing is characterized by continuous flourishes emanating from a certain swinging motion of the wrist. Taken to an extreme, this kind of writing will lead to something that is really quite awful. I know people who carry out all sorts of swinging motions with their pens in the air before they begin to write—a quite terrible thing when taken to an extreme.

We really ought to get people to write in a way that is akin to painting. Writing in that way is far more hygienic. When writing is accompanied by an aesthetic pleasure, the mechanical aspect is pushed into the body. It is the inner organism rather than the wrist that is writing. And this is most important, because the mechanical aspect is then diverted from the periphery to the whole of the human being. You will notice that when you teach children to write in this painting way, they will also be able to write with their toes. This would, in fact, constitute a triumph, a success—when a child is able to hold a pencil between the toes and form adequate letters. I do not say that this ability should be developed artistically. But we do have in such an instance a shifting of the mechanical activity to the whole human being. You will agree that in this regard most of us are extremely clumsy. Can you think of anyone who is able to pick up a piece of soap from the floor with his or her toes? To do this at least should be possible. It sounds grotesque, but it points to something of great significance.

We should cultivate this painting-like writing. It pushes the actual mechanical activity into the body, and the writer’s connection to the writing is brought to and beyond the surface. The human being is imparted into his or her environment. We should really get used to seeing everything we do, rather than doing things thoughtlessly, mechanically. Most people do write mechanically, thoughtlessly. Because writing is thus a manysided activity, we can, in a certain way, consider it as a significant aspect in our lessons. In arithmetic, on the other hand, the actual writing has a subordinate position, because with that subject it is the thinking that preoccupies the student.

We must now be quite clear about the processes taking place during reading. The activity of reading is initially spiritual and then continues into the physical body. It is especially the activities that are of a cognitive, mental/spiritual nature that considerably tax the delicate parts of the physical organization. You can picture, physiologically, the deeper parts of the brain, the white matter. The white matter is the actual, the more perfectly organized part of the brain. It is organized toward the more functional tasks, whereas the gray matter at the surface—which is especially well developed in humans—provides the brain’s nourishment. The gray matter has remained behind, in a very early stage of evolution. In regard to evolution, it is the deeper part of the brain that is more perfect.

If we teach a child to observe well, as in reading, we greatly tax the gray matter, engendering a very delicate metabolic process. And this delicate metabolic process then spreads throughout the organism. It is especially when we believe ourselves to be occupying the children mentally and spiritually that we affect their physical organism most strongly. The observation and comprehension during the reading of and listening to stories engender metabolic processes that tax the children to an inordinately strong degree. We could call what is happening the impression of the spiritual into the physical. A kind of incorporation of what we observe and comprehend during a story is necessary. Something akin to a physical phantom must develop and then impart itself into the whole organism. The organism is filled with delicate salt deposits. Not coarsely, of course. A salt phantom is imparted into the whole organism, and the necessity arises to dissolve it again through the metabolism.

This process takes place when the children read or listen to stories. When we believe ourselves to be occupying the mind and spirit in our lessons, we really evoke metabolic processes. And this must be considered. We cannot do anything else but to see to it that our stories and reading material are faultless in two respects. First, the children must be interested in the subject. Genuine interest is connected with a delicate feeling of pleasure that must always be present. That feeling expresses itself physically in very subtle glandular secretions that absorb the salt deposits caused during reading and listening. We must endeavor never to bore the children. Lack of interest, boredom, leads to all sorts of metabolic problems. This is especially the case with girls. Migraine-like conditions are the result of a one-sided stuffing of material that must be learned without pleasure. The children are then filled with tiny spikes that do not get dissolved. They tend toward developing such spikes. Yes—we must be aware of these problems.

Second, immediately connected with the metabolic problems arising from boredom is the unhappy situation that does not allow us enough time for everything we ought to do. We should really see to it that the currently available readers—which can drive you up the wall—are not used. The books I have seen in the classrooms are really quite awful.

We must not forget that we are preparing the children’s physical constitutions for the rest of their lives. If we make them read the trivial stuff contained in most readers we affect their delicate organs accordingly. The children will turn into philistines rather than into complete human beings. We must know that the reading material we give our children strongly affects their development. The results are unavoidable in later life.

I really would like to ask you to compile your own anthologies, including the classics and other worthwhile authors, and to refrain from using the available books. This additional effort is necessary. We must do something. It is, after all, the task of the Waldorf school to use methods different from those practiced elsewhere. What matters is that in reading or storytelling, and also in the presentation of the natural sciences, we take great care not to harm the children in these two ways.

Eurythmy and singing lessons can be said to be working in the opposite direction, engendering an organic process that is quite different. All the organs connected with these activities contain spirit. When the children are doing eurythmy they move, and during the moving the spirit in the limbs is streaming upward. When we ask the children to do eurythmy or to sing, we liberate the spirit. The spiritual, of which the limbs abound, is liberated—a very real process. In our singing and eurythmy lessons we release the spiritual from the children. As a consequence, the released or liberated spirit expects to be made use of after these exercises. I explained this to you in yesterday’s lecture in another connection. The spirit now also waits to be consolidated.

In singing, eurythmy, and physical education we spiritualize the children. They are quite different beings at the end of the lesson; there is much more spirit in them. But this spirit wishes to consolidate, wishes to remain with the children. We must not allow it to dissipate. We can prevent it from dissipating quite simply and effectively by making the children sit or stand quietly at the end of the lesson. We should try to maintain this calm for a few minutes. The older the children, the more important this will be. We should pay attention to these things if we wish to prepare the children in the best possible way for the following day. It is not in the children’s interest for us to let them rush out of the room immediately after a gym, singing, or eurythmy lesson. We should, instead, let them calm down and sit quietly for a few minutes.

In considering such matters we really touch on a cosmic principle. There are many and diverse theories about matter and spirit. But both, matter and spirit, contain something that is more than either of them, a higher element. We may say that if this higher element is brought to a state of calm, it is matter; if it is brought into movement, it is spirit. This being a high principle, we can apply it to the human being. Through the short period of calm following a gym, singing, or eurythmy lesson or other such activity, we produce in ourselves—for the spirit we have liberated—a delicate physical phantom, which then deposits itself in our organism for us to make use of. Knowing about this process can help us make discoveries that will have corresponding effects in our other interactions with the children.

We shall now consider further uses for this knowledge. There are children in our school with a very vivid imagination, and there are children with very little imagination. We need not jump to the conclusion that half of our students are poets and the other half not. We notice the difference not so much in the actual way the imagination shows itself but rather in the way memory develops. Memory is strongly related to imagination. We have some children—and we should notice them—who quickly forget what they have experienced and heard during a lesson, who cannot hold on to the pictures of what they have experienced, for whom the pictures disappear. And we have other children for whom the pictures remain, assume an independent life of their own, and surface continuously, cannot be controlled. We should be well aware of these two types of children. There is, of course, a whole range between these extremes. For children with a vivid imagination, memory causes the pictures to surface in a changed form. Most frequently, however, the pictures surface unchanged, as reminiscences. The children are then slaves to what they have experienced during their lessons. And then there are the children for whom everything disappears, evaporates.

It is now a matter of dealing with these two types of children appropriately. It is possible to occupy groups of children in the most diverse ways if we develop a routine in the best sense of the word—a routine in a spiritual sense. Children with poor memory, who have difficulty in getting the pictures to surface, should be made to observe better during reading. We should try to get them to listen better. With children who are slaves to their mental pictures, we should see to it that they become more physically active, mobile; we should make them concentrate more on writing. We could have two groups in the class—giving the children who are poor in imagination the opportunity for cultivating their reading and observation, while for the other group, the children with a vivid imagination, we could especially cultivate painting and writing. Naturally, it is a matter of degree, because everything is relative.

We can take this distinction further. (But the following observation is especially important: We can only gradually learn these things; we cannot cover everything during the first year.) Children who are poor in imagination—that is, children who cannot easily remember—should be asked to do eurythmy standing up, mainly with their arms. Children with a vivid imagination who are tormented by their mental pictures will benefit by moving the whole body, be it by running or by walking. This we can encourage. It really is very important that we pay attention to such matters.

In addition, we ought to know the value of the consonants for phlegmatic children who find it difficult to recall mental pictures, whereas the children who are tormented by their ever-surfacing mental pictures will greatly benefit from eurythmy exercises that concentrate mainly on vowel sounds. It can indeed be observed that vowel exercises have a calming effect on the rising mental pictures, while consonant exercises engender them. Acting on this knowledge can help both groups.

The same distinction applies to music lessons. Children poor in imagination and memory should be encouraged to play musical instruments; children with a vivid imagination should be occupied with singing. It would be ideal—if we had the necessary rooms—to teach both groups simultaneously, one in singing, the other in instrumental music. If we could practice a twofold method—listening to and making music—this would have a tremendously harmonizing effect on the children. It would be most valuable if we could make it possible to alternate between singing and listening: to let half the class sing and the other half listen, and then vice versa. This practice should really be cultivated, because listening to music has a hygienic, a healing effect on what the head is to do in the human organism; singing has a healing effect on what the body is to do in the head. If we carried out everything that we could in this way, we would have far healthier people about.

We are not really aware of the fact that we have regressed in human evolution. In the past, children were allowed to grow up without being educated; their freedom was not invaded. Now we violate this freedom when we begin to educate them in the sixth or seventh year. We must make up for this crime, this destruction of freedom, by educating them correctly. We must be quite clear that it is the manner of education, the “how,” that we have to improve if we wish to avoid a terrible future situation. It does not matter how much today people insist on stressing the cultural progress, the dwindling number of illiterates—they themselves are no more than imprints, the automata made by the schools. We must avoid this end, must not produce mere imprints in our schools. We must allow our children to develop in their individuality.

This issue becomes especially important when we make use of artificial methods such as learning by rote or by heart. In repeating something in this way the children transmit the content of what they have learned from the soul and spirit to the physical organism. What is learned by heart must first be understood. But during the process of learning by heart the children gradually slither into an ever more mechanical, physical way of learning. This is the way along which the content of learning is taken—from the initial subjective element to the objective element.

We must be honest in such matters. When the content is taken to the objective level, we must make the children listen to themselves, must make them aware that they are hearing themselves speak. We must bring the children to the point that, to the same extent as they recite the lines, they listen to themselves. We can succeed in this if, for example, the children differentiate the sounds they produce. We tell them: “What you are speaking is all about you, and you can hear it.” We must try to get the children to the point that they can hear themselves speak.

But this is not enough. Something else is even more important. We shall never succeed in letting the children find the transition from having the content of the words in their thoughts and feelings to learning it by heart if we do not appeal most strongly to their feelings before the memorizing begins. The children must never be asked to learn anything by heart before they have a deep feeling for all the details contained in the words—especially a feeling that allows them to relate to the content in the right way.

Let us consider an extreme case. Let us think of a prayer. The children should, when asked to learn a prayer, be urged to be in a mood of devotion. It is up to us to see to this. We must almost feel a horror if we teach the children a prayer without first establishing this mood of reverence or devotion. And they should never say a prayer without this mood. We should thus not make the children recite a lovely poem without first arousing in them a faint smile, a pleasure or joy; we should not order them to have these feelings but rather allow the content of the poem to awaken them. This principle applies to other subjects as well.

Much harm has been done to humankind during the course of evolution. Certainly, things have improved a little in this respect. But my generation remembers the way children were made to memorize, for example, historical dates and other facts. I myself remember history lessons during which teacher and children read a paragraph in a textbook and the children were afterward supposed to remember it; they simply learned it by heart. I heard an intelligent boy speak of the “Car of Jerusalem” instead of the “Czar of Russia”! He did not notice the gaffe during his mechanical recital of a passage in the book. This is not an isolated case. This method of learning things by heart in such subjects as geography and history has greatly contributed to our present cultural decadence.

It is essential to prepare the children correctly for such things that are to be learned by heart: prayers and poems. Their feelings must be engendered, the feelings they must have when they listen to themselves. Especially during the saying of a prayer, the children must have the feeling: “I grow above myself. I am saying something that makes me grow above myself.” This mood must apply to everything that is beautiful and graceful.

The mood also affects the physical organism, has a hygienic significance, because every time we teach something of a tragic or exalted nature we affect the metabolism. Every time we teach something of a graceful, dainty nature we affect the head, the nerve-sense organism. We can thus proceed in a hygienic way. Children who are flippant, light-headed, who are always bent on sensations, we shall try to cure by producing in them the mood they must have for something of a sublime, tragic nature. This will already be beneficial. We must pay attention to such matters in our lessons.

You will be able to do this if you yourselves have the right attitude to your teaching. Every now and then, in an almost meditative way, you ought to answer the question: How does my teaching of history or geography affect the children? It is necessary for us as teachers to know what we are doing. We have spoken about the way history and geography ought to be taught, but it is not enough to know it; it must be recalled in brief meditations. Does the teacher of eurythmy, for example, know that he releases the spirit from the children’s limbs? Does the teacher, during a reading lesson, know that she incorporates the spirit in the children?

If the teacher becomes aware of these things, she will almost see that when she is reading in the wrong way, when she bores the children, they will tend toward metabolic illness; she will feel that by making a child read a boring piece of literature, she actually produces a diabetic in later life. She will then develop the right sense of responsibility. By occupying the children continuously with boring material, you produce diabetics. If you don’t calm the released spirit after a physical exercise or a singing lesson, you produce people who lose themselves in life.

It is extraordinarily important that teachers thus occasionally reflect on what they are doing. But the reflection need not be oppressive. The teacher who is primarily concerned with reading will through it develop the feeling that she is actually continuously incorporating something, that she is working at the physical organism, and that she makes the children, through the way they are reading, into physically strong or weak adults. The teacher of handwork or crafts will be able to say to himself that he affects especially the spiritual in the children. If we let the children do things in handwork or crafts that are meaningful, we shall do more for the spirit than if we let them do things that are generally believed to be spiritual.

Much can be done in this direction, because much of what the children are doing nowadays in handwork is quite wrong. We can work in a more positive way that will have especially good results. I immediately noticed the children in Dornach making pillows, little cushions, which they then embroidered. If the embroidery is merely arbitrary, it isn’t really a cushion. The embroidery must be such that it invites the ear to lie on the cushion. The children seemed to especially enjoy making tea cosies. But they must be made properly. If I am to open the cosy at the bottom, the movement of my hands must be continued in the embroidery; the embroidery must indicate the opening of the cosy. But the children have been so ruined by the conditions of our time that they embroider the bottom of their cosies like this:

This is the wrong way round. The drawing must show where the opening is. When embroidering the top of a blouse or shirt, the children must learn that the embroidered band at the throat must widen toward the bottom and narrow toward the top. An embroidery on a belt must immediately show that it opens to both sides simultaneously; it must be widest at the center. Everywhere the children should learn to find the correct form.

Very much can be achieved by these things if we do not so much bother about the eye, but produce them in the feeling. You must get the children to feel what their design indicates: it widens at the bottom, it presses down from above. This must be translated into feeling; we must get, what the hands are supposed to do, into the hands. The human being is here essentially fully occupied in his whole being, thinks with his whole body. We really must try to see to it that such things are felt. The handwork lessons must be directed to feeling. The child should, when embroidering a corner, have the feeling: this corner must be embroidered in such a way that, when I put my finger into it, it can’t get through. If it happens to be something else, the embroidery must indicate this. This is the way we ought to teach. The handwork teacher can then say: I teach in a way that I especially engender the children’s spiritual activity. No teacher needs to feel that he or she occupies an inferior position in the school.

The mode of expression in which we use to abridge or to simplify somewhat our ideas, when we say etheric body, astral body, etc., can be traced back to the imprint of these higher bodies in the realm of physical functions. Nowadays, people are not very ready to link up expressions in the realm of physical functions with the spiritual foundations of existence. But this must be done if medical thinking and conception are to become permeated with Spiritual Science. For instance, it will be necessary to study in detail the exact manner of the interaction between what we term the etheric body and what we term the physical. You have learned that this interaction is at work in man and we have just dealt with its coming into a kind of disorder in relation to the influence of the astral body. But the same interaction also takes place in extra-human nature.

Think this out thoroughly to its conclusion, and then consider that you are gazing profoundly into the relationship between man and nature. Man is surrounded—let us choose this one thing to begin with—by all the earth's flora in their many species, which he perceives through his different senses. You can at least admit the possibility of an interplay between the flora and all that our earthly atmosphere contains, in the first place, and all that lies outside this earthly sphere, in the planetary and astral regions, in the second place. In considering the flora, suppose the earth's surface to be here (See Diagram 15)—then we can say that the plants refer us to the atmospheric and astral regions (in the literal sense of a pointing to the stars, to the extra-telluric). And even apart from occult research, we can intuitively sense a living interchange between what manifests in blossom-bearing and fruit, and what flows into them from the whole wide universe. (Of course you must make use of a certain intuition here; but as I have already remarked, you will not get very far in medicine without intuition.) Let us Suppose that having realised the external cosmic interplay, we turn our thoughts to our own inner being. There, too, we shall find a certain relationship to that which surrounds us. Just as the etheric and the physical are closely united in in the plant-world, so must we surmise a certain kinship between this union and the manner of connection of the etheric and the physical in man himself.

How then can we speak concretely about this relationship of the etheric with the physical? From the abstract point of view, we can say that the etheric is nearer to the astral than to the physical; for the etheric is open to the forces from above. But we must expect also some relationship between the etheric and the physical. So we must take this two-sided kinship and must look for something which guides us to it. I shall try to do this in the most concrete manner possible.

Walk through an avenue of lime trees in bloom, and try to visualise what happens as you pass between the trees, enveloped in the scent of the lime blossoms. Realise that something is taking place between this fragrance of the limes in flower and, so to speak, the nerve ramifications in your olfactory organs. Turning your conscious thought to this process of perception, you become aware of a certain opening-out or release of the capacity for smelling, which meets the scent of the lime blossom. And you conclude that a process takes place through which an internal sphere in yourself opens to meet something outside, and that the two combine in some way to produce something by virtue of their inner kinship. So you must say that what is diffused in the air as scent from the lime trees—arising without a doubt from an interplay between the flowers and the whole extra-terrestrial environment as they open out towards it—is inwardly felt by you through your sense of smell. There you undoubtedly have something that passes from the etheric body to the astral, for otherwise you could not perceive it, and there would only be the mere process of life. The perception of smell itself proclaims the participation of the astral body. And that which reveals the kinship with the external world, simultaneously shows that the production of the sweet fragrance of the lime blossoms is the polar process to that taking place in your olfactory organs. The fragrance flowing from the blossoms shows the interaction of the plant-etheric with the astral element that embraces it and fills the surrounding universe. So in our sense of smell, we have a process that enables us to take part in the relationship between the plant-life of the earth and the astral element outside the earth.

Now take the sense of taste, and, as an example, something not unlike the scent of the lime blossom, though appealing to another sense, say the flavour of liquorice or of sweet ripe grapes. Here we have to do with a process in our taste organ in contrast to that of smell. You know how closely related they are; and you will also realise the resemblance between what happens functionally in the two cases. But you must, at the same time, understand that tasting is a much more organic and internal process than smell. Smelling is far more a surface activity; a participation in extra-human processes widely diffused in space. But that is not so with taste. Taste reveals certain properties inherent in the substances themselves, and therefore closely interwoven with matter. You can learn more of the internal quality of plants by taste than by smell. Call some intuition to your aid and it will help you to know that all connected with the solidification of matter in plants, and all that is revealed in the organic processes of solidification, is disclosed if we taste the contents of the plant. The essential nature of the plant defends itself against solidification and this is manifested in the tendency of the plants to be fragrant. So you really cannot doubt that taste is a process associated with the relationships of the etheric and the physical.

Now compare smell and taste. As you react to the plant-world through both these senses, you experience the twofold relationship which the etheric has to the astral on one side and to the physical on the other. You literally enter the etheric, or its expression, if you study these two processes of taste and smell. Where they occur in man, there is a physical revelation of the etheric in its dual relationship to the physical and the astral. When we examine what takes place in the acts of tasting and smelling, we live, so to speak, near the surface of man. Our task today is to pass beyond the abstract, mystical view and to approach the concrete grasp of spiritual truth, so that a true science may be fertilised by spiritual science. What can it avail people to listen to perpetual talk of the need to grasp the Divine in man, if they only understand by that a purely abstract Divinity? This method of approach only becomes fruitful if we can consider concrete instances in detail, and trace, say, the interiorisation of outer processes. For example, if we trace in smell and taste the etheric element which is external yet related to man, we perceive, in what is, perhaps, the crudest of our upper sensory processes, the interiorisation of external processes. It is so extremely important for our time to get beyond mere abstract and mystical notions.

Now you are fully aware that in nature every process tends to pass over into another, to be metamorphosed into some other process. Take what we have just said, for instance, that the sense of smell is located more on the surface of our organism, (See Diagram 16) while that of taste is more inward (we are speaking here with reference to the plant-world). Both these sense activities occur within the etheric, which opens into the astral on the one hand and solidifies into the physical on the other. The sense of smell reaches outwards towards the evanescent scent of the flowers, while that of taste lives in the process that opposes aromatisation, and interiorises that which externally produces solidification. When we carefully examine smell and taste, we find that in them the outer and the inner merge, as it were.

But in nature, all processes merge into others. Consider again the aromatic qualities of plants, through which, in a certain sense, they tend away from solidification and towards diffusion even so to speak, going beyond their limits in striving towards the active the amateurish term—into the atmosphere, so that this bears in itself some of the plant existence in the aroma. The phantoms of the plants are still bound up with the aroma. What actually happens when the plant pours its fragrant phantoms into the air, frustrating the process of solidification, and sending forth from the blossoms something that tended to become blossoms too? Simply a process of combustion held back. If you picture to yourself the further metamorphosis of this aromatic activity, you reach the conclusion that it is a combustion that is held back. Compare the process of combustion proper, with the aromatisation of plants. They are two metamorphoses of the same unity. I would even say that combustion is aromatisation on another level.

Let us now see what is in plants that produces flavour. It is more deep-seated and does not urge the dispersal of formative forces into the air like a phantom, but gathers them together that they may be used to build up the internal structure. If you follow up this formative activity with your taste, you come to the process lying below solidification in plants, i.e. to salification, which is a metamorphosis, on another level, of solidification (See Diagram 16). In plants, therefore, we find a strange metamorphosis. The aroma-process directed upwards is, in a certain sense, suspended combustion, which may lead to the initial stages of combustion (for processes of efflorescence are combustion processes). While in the downward tendency you have solidification and salification, and what you taste is something that is held back on the way to salification. But if saline substance is deposited in the tissues of the plant itself, it is something that has gone a step beyond the path of plant-formation; the plant has pressed the phantom of its form down into its actual being.

Here we have the “ratio” for finding remedies and light is thrown on the whole plant-kingdom because one now begins to realise what takes place there. I must again emphasise that this consideration of concrete facts is the only thing that can help us.

To find the next step, you need only remember that wherever it is possible, and from motives of opportunism in a higher sense, I shall link up what I have to explain with current ideas. Thus you should be in a position to build the bridge between what spiritual science is able to give and what is taught by external science. Naturally the contents of the following paragraphs could be stated in a more strictly spiritual-scientific way. But I will connect my remarks with the customary ideas of modern science, because they exist. The physiologist today keeps to the material that lies before him; the spiritual scientist does not need this material before him in the same way, for he does not use the method of dissection. We need not imitate the methods which over-rate anatomical inspection, yet we must reckon with the fact that they have been used and that their results have been established for some time. They will only cease to be employed when natural science has been fertilised to some extent by spiritual science.

Let us examine the close relationship, to which spiritual science will give the key, between the process taking place within the eye, and the processes of smell and taste—particularly of the latter. Let us compare the ramifications of the nerve of taste into neighbouring tissues, with the optic nerve within the eyeball. The relationship is so close that we could hardly avoid looking for an analogy with the process of taste, if we wanted an inward characterisation of the process of sight. Of course the nerve of taste is not continued into anything like the highly intricate structure of the eye, which is situated in front of the retina, and therefore sight is in many ways different.

But what begins as the process of sight, behind the wonderful instrument of the physical eye, has a close inner relationship to the process of taste. I mean that in the act of seeing, we are performing a transformed tasting, metamorphosed because the organic processes of taste are supplemented by the processes due to the intricate structure of the eye. In each one of our senses, we must distinguish between what our organism brings to meet the outer world and what the outer world brings to meet our organism. We must look at the inner process that takes place when the blood runs into the choroid of the eye, where the organism works into the eye. This process is more pronounced in certain animals, which not only have our ocular apparatus but the pecten and the xiphoid processes as well. Now the latter are organs of the blood circulation thrusting the ego forward into the interior of the eye, whereas with us, the ego recedes leaving the eyeball inwardly free. But by means of the blood, our whole organism works through the eye into the whole process of vision. And there, within the process of vision, the transmuted tasting is present. Therefore we may call sight metamorphosed tasting. And in our diagram (See Diagram 16), we have to put sight as metamorphosed tasting above taste and smell.

The processes of taste and of sight correspond to something external that co-operates with something internal. Thus the, process of taste must metamorphose itself upwards; sight is the upper metamorphosis of taste. Now there must also be a complementary downward metamorphosis of the process of taste, diving down into the lower bodily sphere. In the visual process we raise ourselves to the external world; the eye is enclosed in a bony socket, it belongs to the outside; it is a very external organ, built in accordance with the external world. Now we turn to the opposite direction and imagine the metamorphosis of the process of taste downwards into the depths of the organism. Here we come to the opposite pole of the sense of sight; we find, as it were, what corresponds in the lower part to the visual process in the upper part of the body. And this will throw much light upon our further inquiries.

In tracing the metamorphosis of the process of taste downwards, we find the digestive function.

You can only come to an inner understanding of this function, by recognising it, on the one hand, as a metamorphosed continuation of the process of taste, and on the other, as the complete polar opposite of the exteriorised process of sight. For the exteriorised visual sense enables you to recognise what in the outer world around you corresponds to digestion, of what digestion is an organic interiorisation. On the other hand, you become aware to what extent digestion must be called akin to the process of taste. It is not possible to understand the more intimate activities of our organism, in so far as they focus in the digestive process, unless you visualise that entire process as follows: good digestion is founded on capacity to taste with the whole alimentary tract, and bad digestion results from an incapacity of the whole tract to carry out this function of tasting.

Let us remember now that the process we are considering divides itself into taste and smell. As we have pointed out, taste is more involved in the relationships of the etheric with the physical: and smell, on the other hand, in those of the etheric with the astral. The continuation of the process of taste downwards into the organism is likewise bifurcated. This appears in the tendency of the digestive function towards faecal excretion, while on the other hand, we have excretion through the kidneys in the form of urine.

The two bifurcations, upper and lower, are exactly complementary. There are two polar opposites, one dividing upwards into taste and smell, while downward you have the division into digestion proper, and into that function which separates from mere digestion and is based on the more intimate activity of the kidneys and is accessory to their work in the body.

Thus it becomes possible to regard all that happens within our bodies, bounded by the surface of our skin, as an introverted external region. Every continuation upwards leads into the external world; man opens himself up to the exterior in this region.

Now we can follow the matter up in another way. There is, again, a faculty in us which lives in our soul, but is bound to the organism, not bound indeed in any materialistic sense, but in that peculiar sense of which you know from other lectures. For in thinking and the forming of “representations,”¹ (see Diagram 16) we have a metamorphosed seeing, once more turned inward in a certain sense.

Just consider for a moment how many of the representations you use in thinking are simply continuations of visual images; compare for a moment the soul-life of the congenitally blind or deaf person with your own! In thinking we have an interiorised continuation of seeing. And we may even find light thrown upon the remarkable interaction between the anatomy of the head and brain, and the process of thought itself. (This would furnish fine material for medical essays!) When we carefully examine our thinking processes, especially the connection between the powers of combination and association and the cerebral structure, we come upon formations resembling a transformation of the olfactory nerve. So we may say that from an internal point of view, our discontinuous, analytic thinking is very like its counterpart, seeing. But the combination of “things seen,” the association of representations, resembles smell in its internal organic formation. This contrast is expressed in a remarkable way in the anatomical structure of the brain.

Thus we find thinking and representation as the one end of a metamorphosis. What then may be regarded as the complementary interiorised process? Remember the power of representation can be termed a transformed sight; something that is exteriorised in sight and radiates back into the interior in thought. In thinking we try to reverse our vision, as it were, and to direct it again into the organism. So its polar opposite will be a process that does not in any way try to lead into the interior, but to lead out. This polar opposite is the process of evacuation—the conclusion of digestion. (See Diagram 16). Thus evacuation becomes the counter-image of representation. Here you have in a more intimate aspect what I have already dealt with from the standpoint of Comparative Anatomy, when I tried to show the close relationship between the so-called mental (spiritual) capacities of man and the regulated or non-regulated process of excretion; basing my argument on anatomical structure and the existence of the flora of the intestines.

Here is the same truth revealed by another approach. In thought we have an internal continuation of sight, and in evacuation an external continuation of digestion. Now refer to what we said before, that the aroma process in plants is a suspended combustion, and their solidification a suspended salt-process. This again throws light on what takes place within the body! Only—we must be clear that a reversal takes place. In representation, we have the sense of sight reversed and turned inwards, while in the lower bodily sphere there is a reversal towards the outside. So we have to recognise the relationship of the upper process to salification and of the lower to combustion, or to “fire.” (See Diagram 16). So if you apply a suitable remedy containing aromatisation and suspended combustion in plants, to the hypogastrium, you will help and relieve it. Conversely, if you apply to the upper part of man what tends to keep back or to interiorise the salt-process within the plant, you will give help in this sphere also. This rule we shall have to discuss and apply in detail.

Thus the whole external world may reappear in our human interior. And the more deeply internal the process, the greater the need to find its external analogue. We must see something very closely akin to the aromatic and combustion processes—but akin in the sense of polarity—in the activities of the digestive organs, especially of the kidneys. Again in the upper region, from the lungs upward, through the larynx into the head, we must see something related to the tendency to salt formation in the plant; all this tends to salification in man. We might even say, or rather we can say, that if we have once acquired a knowledge of the different ways in which plants absorb and collect salt, we need only look for their analogies in the human organisation. We have dealt with this in general today, and we shall go on to consider it in detail.

With this you have a basic principle for the whole of plant therapy. You have a general picture of the whole process of mutual action and reaction between the interior and the exterior world. But you will already be able to see some specific applications. Take, for instance, some of the odours which even as such are linked with taste, so that they may be fully experienced if the plant is not only sniffed, but chewed. Then we find a synthesis of smell and taste, aroma and flavour, as for instance in balm or ground ivy. In such cases we find that in the scent there is already an element of salification; there is a collaboration between the saline and aromatic tendencies. And this is an indication of their correspondence in the organism, an indication that balm, for instance, is suitable for the external organs and the chest, whereas such very fragrant forms as lime or rose blossom are akin to that which lies deep within the abdomen or in the neighbourhood of the abdominal wall.

All the organs and functions of our upper sphere in the regions of the smell and taste activities, are interlocked with a life-process, which can be so termed in a deeper sense—i.e.—respiration (See Diagram 16). Let us look for the polar complementary activity; it must be something branching from the digestive process, before digestion passes into evacuation, and be the polar counterpart of “representation.” Yet it must be something organically adjacent to the process of digestion, just as respiration is organically adjacent to the process of smell and taste. So we find the converse of respiration in the lymph and blood processes, in the process of blood formation and especially in what branches off and is pushed inward from the digestion, i.e., the processes in the lymphatic glands and similar organs contributing to blood formation. Here then are two polar processes; the one branching from the digestive system, the other from the more external sensory processes; one, respiration, in the second line behind the sensory organs; and the other situated just in front of where the digestive process leads to excretion—the process of blood and lymph. It is remarkable how, starting from actual processes, we come to an insight into the whole human being, whereas in current medicine man is studied only from the organs, considered externally. Here, however, we take our start from the processes and we try to understand the individual person out of the whole relationship between man and the external world. We find interactions that directly depict the etheric activities in man; and these have been our object of study today. And the two processes of breathing and blood formation meet again in the human heart itself. The whole outside world (including man) appears as a duality that is dammed up in the heart, and in it strives for a kind of equilibrium.

Thus we come to a remarkable picture, the picture of the human heart, with its interiorising character, its synthesis of everything that works from outside into our bodies. Outside in the world there is an analysis, a scattering, of all that is gathered together in the heart (See Diagram 17). You come here to an important conception that might be expressed thus: You look out into the world, face the horizon and ask:—What is in these outer surroundings? What works inwards from the periphery? Where can I find something in myself that is akin to it? If I look into my own heart. I find, as it were, the inverted heaven, the polar opposite. On the one hand you have the periphery, the point extended to infinity, on the other you have the heart, which is the infinite circle concentrated to a point. The whole world is within our heart. To use an illustration, perhaps one that is somewhat crude:—Picture to yourselves man standing looking on into the infinite expanses of the world; perhaps standing on a high hill, looking out and around. And suppose that the tiniest dwarf imaginable is put in the human heart. Try to realise that what the dwarf sees within the heart is the complete inverted image of the universe, contracted and synthesised. This is perhaps purely a picture, a kind of imagination. But if righty conceived and taken up, it can work as an orderly regulative picture, a regulative principle, that is able to guide us, and to help us rightly to combine our isolated attainments of knowledge.

Most of the foundations for our special studies and inquiries have now been laid down, and they will be the basis for answering the many questions you have addressed to me.

• 1. The term “representation” renders the German Vorstellung better than the usual translation “idea,” which is ambiguous.

There is so unendlessly much one could relate about the connection between the hygienic-therapeutic and eurythmy. Today we want to take into consideration that part of the physiological which we discover in the proximity of the spiritual when we contemplate a eurythmic exercise. Of course, all that which can he observed in this connection in artistic eurythmy will be encountered in an intensified form when one makes the transition from artistic eurythmy to the fortified eurythmy we have become acquainted with in these days. Nevertheless, the essence of that which concerns us can already be discovered purely artistically in a performance of eurythmy and the physiology corresponding to it then sought out. Let us try this by carrying out the following.

Perhaps Mrs. Baumann will be so good and perform the poem “Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh” alternately in vowels and in consonants, while you (Frau Dr. Steiner) recite it.

Now let us make clear to ourselves what is taking place here, proceeding however very exactly. What is happening? A poem is recited. The person who does the eurythmy listens—he is the one who comes for us into consideration physiologically. That is the first matter of importance. He doesn't speak himself, he listens. That is essential. He listens to something which is in essence the meaningful word, a meaningful association of words. He listens to something in which the activity of thought and of mental representation are alive. What he perceives outwardly is the activity of mental representation clothed in an association of sounds. That is something which man in his waking, daytime existence often does, is it not? But what actually takes place when he does it? If you consider the process from a psychologic-physiologic point of view you will easily discover that a light, partial sleep overtakes the listener. The “I” and the astral body glide over what they are taking in, they live into it. In listening man steps out of himself slightly. He is overcome by a condition which is similar and then again dissimilar to sleep. It is similar to sleep in that the “I” and astral body are slightly disengaged, dissimilar in that they remain receptive, perceptive and self-aware. Thus the process is extraordinarily similar to imagination. It is a subtle, conscious imagining that is still strongly suppressed in the subconscious. Such is the process at hand.

To every such process is a reaction within the human being himself; we take this into account as well. Let us look at what takes place in the person who is not reciting. What does he do when he listens? He brings his etheric body into motion. The etheric body reacts. in fact the etheric body takes up those movements which it carries out—only much more weakly—when the person is asleep and has left his etheric body behind in the physical body. When the human being is asleep the etheric body is considerably more active than when he is awake. During this dampened sleep taking place in the listener the movements of the etheric body are awakened to a greater degree. These movements of the etheric body can be observed. Thus in the listener one has a person demonstrating in a heightened manner the movements which the human being carries out otherwise in a a weakened form in sleep. Thus you can study in the listener, who promptly performs them for you, ether movements of the human being in sleep. It isn't at all necessary to study the person while asleep; one can study the etheric movements of the human being when listening and has in fact here the heightened movements of the etheric body in sleep. One studies these movements and has them carried out by the physical body. That is to say one allows the physical body to glide into all those etheric movements which one has studied in the manner just described. Thus in eurythmy one does what the human being carries out with his etheric body constantly while listening. You can see what is actually taking place.

Now that we have observed what actually occurs, its effect will become apparent as well. The result is that by means of the physical movement one carries over into consciousness what otherwise occurs unconsciously. One stimulates the astral body and the ego by means of this detour through the physical body and strengthens them. But what happens as a result of this? When the astral body and the ego are strengthened in this manner their activity becomes similar to the activity in the child and still growing person as it occurs naturally. You are calling upon the forces of growth in the human being. You are working directly into the person's forces of growth. If the person is still a child and shows signs of being retarded in his growth, you can stimulate his growth in this way. If the person is no longer a child, and the forces of growth have already diminished, or if the person is actually in the second half of his life, one calls upon the youthful forces, the rejuvenating forces in him which, however, cannot contribute to his growth since the human organism is, of course, fully developed. We can expedite a child in his growth or combat his abnormal growth by having him do eurythmy. In the case of the fully-grown person the inner organism presents too great a resistance to the outer organism for us to be able to make him grow. Nevertheless, we can still introduce these forces of growth. The result is that they crash against the resistance of organism and metamorphose; that means that they activate in their metamorphosed state the plastic force of the inner organs. They stimulate the plastic force of the inner organs and these inner organs learn to breathe better and to better digest. They are encouraged to fulfil the necessary activity of the human organism in its entirety.

When artistic eurythmy is performed one should not think of it in the first instance as curative eurythmy; nevertheless, in the moment a person begins to be abnormal in any way it will have a curative effect. We have already seen the examples where when the usual eurythmy is reinforced, the reaction which follows is naturally also strengthened and we can form a mental picture of how this eurythmy affects the plastic qualities of the organization.

You can understand that the habitual practise of eurythmy activates the plasticity of the organs, their plastic force, and that as a result the human being becomes internally a better breather, a better person, if I may express myself so, in respect to his inwardly oriented digestion. He becomes a person who has his whole organism more within his own discretion. He becomes an inwardly more agile person. And to become a true artist is nothing other than to make the inner man more flexible, plastic, agile. That can be seen when one sculpts, for example. One cannot sculpt properly if in experience one cannot transpose oneself for example into the figure that one is developing plastically, if one cannot bring to life in oneself the forces that are building the figure, that express themselves in the figure. If, however, one sees the human organism itself as an implement and carries out what corresponds within, then what is the case in outward artistry is in a higher degree the case here as well for at this point one can do nothing other than to call forth internally what corresponds to the outward movement.

If you would be so good we will do the poem again now, this time with only the vowels. So that the emphasis is on the vowels alone. (Miss Wolfram and Frau. Dr. Steiner)

What I have just said about the physiology of eurythmy is specialized here. When only the vowels are carried out then that which I have characterized does not come to expression in its entirety. What I characterized is correct when someone speaks and the movements for consonants and vowels are made alternately. For what we have just done is that which I said not entirely correct: it will have to be specialized. Here very specific, differentiated movements have been performed all of which prove to be movements within the etheric body having primarily to do with what lies in the rhythmic system. Thus we must fasten our attention on that system which—as an etheric system—participates especially when vowels are spoken. When a person listens to vowels—which occurs of course in so specialized a manner only in eurythmy and to which for this reason attention must be drawn as it is here especially important therapeutically—when one recites a simple sequence of vowels for this person, or when one has him carry out such movements, in which case he would be listening to the movements which are the forms of expression for the vowel element while doing eurythmy—then, in the normal person listening to vowels those movements of the the etheric body corresponding to the rhythmic system become active in the way described earlier. And now you have the person doing eurythmy carry out in turn those movements through which he glides with his physical body into the movements which are otherwise manifest in the etheric body when vowels are heard. That is how the matter is specialized. In this way in particular those organs which belong to the rhythmic system are stimulated to respiration and inward digestion. These organs are strengthened; in them the appeal goes out to the forces of growth in the growing child or to the plastic forces which have their resistance within the organization of the fully grown adult.

This will serve as an introduction to the physiology of the vowels in eurythmy. Thus in applying to therapeutic ends everything derived from the vowel-element in eurythmy you will be able to affect the rhythmic organs in particular.

Now perhaps Mrs. Baumann will do the same poem once again consonantally. A mere glance will testify to the radical difference between the consonants and the vowels as they are carried out eurythmically. The difference is indeed thoroughly radical. If we wish to study what we have just seen we will have to make clear to ourselves how the matter would lie if in ordinary listening we were to hear only the consonants. For civilized man that is seldom so, but among less civilized peoples it is sometimes the case that they must listen to much of a consonantal nature. The consonantal world in speech is appreciably richer among less civilized peoples, and the transition from one consonant to another is stronger and unilluminated by a vowel lying between. You will find it possible to observe this up to and even within Europe. just look at words written in the Czech language and you will see just what combinations of consonants are present. To be sure when the words are spoken the vowel element sounds within these combinations of consonants, but it permeates them only as a continuous, hardly differentiated undercurrent. And if you listen to Czech you will say to yourself: to listen to this consonantal element is entirely different from listening to a language that is thoroughly permeated by vowels. Thus one has to do with quite another process here which can be characterized best in the following manner.

As an ordinary listening process this process calls forth strongly those movements of the etheric body which are otherwise actually carried out in the case of physical movements. They are retained and so, while listening to consonants, the human being lives in a certain tension. Unconsciously he would like to be imitating outwardly, physically, when he listens to consonants, but he holds back. The situation is alive with tension: a state of pacification prevails, but an artificially induced pacification, called forth by the power of one's own ego in opposition to those movements which demand to be carried out. Volition dammed up within itself is manifest when consonants are heard. Therefore you will find that listening to consonants is inwardly exceptionally invigorating. If one has an eye for it one can study how peoples such as the Czechs comport themselves inwardly—how, the human being deports himself in his interior in relation to these tensions, these aggressive forces once one knows that they are built up out of the consonantal element of the language. It is a continual curbing of what unceasingly strives to become physical movement.

Once again it is for the human being a stepping-out, a going over into the condition of sleep, and this going out, this transition into sleep is extraordinarily interesting. Consider the human being schematically: head, rhythmic system, limb-metabolic system. In listening to consonants it is primarily the limb-metabolic system that is engaged. The person wants to move his limbs, wants to break into movement, but the movement is converted into tension. He passes as it were into a state of sleep which actually does not take place in other respects, for the ego and the astral body—which go out in ordinary sleep—remain within the organism. One even tries to bring about a sort of artificial sleep for the limb-metabolic system in this case. But when one falls asleep in the limb-metabolic system to a degree, a strong reaction makes itself evident. This reaction consists of dreaming. However, at the moment one's consciousness is not so organized that one can dream. Dreams come into being that play about the human being. (orange). They affect the outer astrality and the outer ether. People who listen to consonants reinforce the aura in their proximity. This expresses itself in turn in its polarity: what remains here in the subconscious as polar content plays about the head as a volition-feeling factor and penetrates into the organism of the head. (violet). Therefore you may notice an intensification of wilfulness and caprice in people who are accustomed to living in the consonantal element. Dreams transformed into will play through the organism of the head.

What are dreams transformed into will from a physiological point of view? If one examines the etheric-physical correlative, it is essentially what is plastically at work in the organization of the head. The plastic effect on the organization of the head is pre-eminent and in this manner it will be possible to activate to a degree the organization of a head which is retarded. If one has to do with a feeble-minded person, or with someone where it can be demonstrated physically that his head organism is not in order, one should let him do consonants in eurythmy.

Then one engages oneself with those forces which otherwise work as dream-like will in the entire remaining limb-metabolic system, which stimulate there the organization and preserve its activity. One makes the heads of imbeciles and those who are otherwise retarded in their head-organization more active. Thus one can employ this sort of eurythmy to arouse curative forces for the organization of the head, particularly when one carries it out in the intensified form, with the strengthened form of the consonants of which we have heard in the last few days. It is natural that when one wishes to consider the physiology of eurythmy one should keep the active moving human being in view. In ordinary physiology one actually does not pursue physiology at all: even when an experiment is conducted on the living one proceeds from the mechanical; or one starts with the corpse and draws conclusions about physiology in actuality. One then arrives at something which one has inferred. If one wishes to attain to a physiology of these processes, what one otherwise infers must be read from inner activity of man. And it will be seen how this sort of study will quicken the whole of physiology. Consider alone the following: what is the process of digestion as observed in the living human being? It is metabolic activity which thrusts itself into the rhythmic activity, which unfolds in the direction of the rhythmic. Digestive activity is metabolic activity which is caught up to a degree by the rhythm of the circulatory organs. A continuing process, which is a combination of the metabolic activity and rhythmic activity (completed by the German editor) is taking place here. When the rhythm pulses up against it, what is metabolic activity in the lymph is caught up into the rhythm of the organs of circulation and pulled along with it. The more chaotic activity—the chaos astir in the movement of the lymph—is taken over into the rhythm of the circulatory system. Physically human volition lives there where the chaos of the lymph goes over into the regular rhythmic functioning of the circulatory system. One must distinguish this activity of will, which consists in the continual transition taking place between the chaotic vigour in the lymph and the rhythmically regular, harmonising activity present in the circulatory being, from the outer activity into which it however pours. It is, nevertheless, in this way that the inner world of man lying within the skin brings itself into harmony with the outer being of man. Through the subordination of his personal being man encorporates himself into the being of the outer world. Therefore, when one influences this activity through eurythmy—as we have seen with the consonants—one counters in fact the human being's tendency to become self-willed, to become egoistic, and his tendency to become organically egoistic as well. What does it actually mean when man becomes egoistic? Organically expressed it means that the force of plasticity in the organs is diminished and the rigidifying, crystallizing tendency takes the upper hand. The organs no longer want to be modellers, they want to become more crystalline. By means of consonantal eurythmy this tendency can be counteracted.

Here you have an insight deep into the human organism. Egoists are always people whose organs threaten to take on a proper wedge form. They want to become wedges, to become crystalline, where as in the case of people who are pathologically self-less, these organs expand. They have no crystallizing agency; they have plastic forces and become round. That is also a pathological condition. It is always the swing of the pendulum from one extreme to the other to which one must pay heed.

Consider what spiritual activity is: when man thinks and from out of his thinking feels—that is designated spiritual activity in normal life. It is carried out by the most physical part of the head organism and is for precisely this reason the sublimating spiritual activity, the individualizing on the one side, the abstractly felt on the other. When the human being carries out this activity, what happens then? He draws out of his organism the force that enables him to encorporate him-self into the outer world. He draws out of himself the force that, pathologically, entices him to expand. He makes a crystallizer of himself when he is spiritually active. Certain peoples, the more northern peoples in particular, have developed a strong instinctive consciousness of these matters. Today they have as yet no inclination to introduce eurythmy in accordance with this instinctive consciousness. They employ instead what is more outwardly physiologic, Swedish gymnastics and so on. Nevertheless they make decided use of the characteristic alternating effect, by alternating the activity which the children must carry out in scientific study in school—when they must think and so on—with what diverts them to movement. They expect every teacher to be a gymnastic teacher as well and require on the other hand that the gymnastic instructor stands at the spiritual level of the child. Such things should be taken into consideration in an advanced civilization. However if I may make a statement that may appear to be a bit nasty, but is really meant only to enlighten, one must have time if one wishes to take these matters into account instinctively. Such things must be carried out by those peoples who take less part in the process of civilization, who live a life apart, more for themselves, and who are thus able to gradually develop instinctively that which has to do with the rhythm of spiritual and physical activity. The Swedes and the Norwegians who lead a more isolated existence, for example, can put such ideas into practice instinctively particularly well. For others the practice of such matters must be more conscious since these peoples are more engaged in the world processes in general—people, for example, who must concern themselves—as was of late very much the case—with making war and so on. These peoples must see these matters much more consciously. And those nations that stand in the centre of the world's movement, who must take part in its affairs while the world turns around them so to speak, they will soon see what they will get themselves into if they do not turn to these things consciously, how they will gradually degenerate. That is something which Switzerland in particular should take to heart.

These things can be observed to play a part in the state of the world as a whole. The general conditions prevailing in the world are, of course, the result of human activity and even today they proceed more from unconscious human activity than from conscious activity. We are given the task, however, to gradually transmute the unconscious activity of man into conscious activity.

How does this spiritual activity work in man? It awakens the crystallizing forces. In people with weak egos it strengthens the “I”, it makes the ego more egoistic. In people who effuse organically because they are not sufficiently egoistic we will find it necessary to activate the forces of egoism not for the benefit of the soul, but for the body. We could stimulate them by outward means as well; it would be natural to advise people who effuse organically to consume substances containing sugar. However, they sometimes have an antipathy towards them—a fact which gives expression to the true state of affairs.

However, that is something of much less interest to us at the moment. What interests us just now is that through the vowel element in eurythmy one has the possibility of working most effectively in this direction; one can bring the human being organically to himself through the vowels. One can awaken the forces which bring him to himself organically. For certain people that will be most necessary, among them the sleepy headed people. One will find that the alternation between the two, between the vowels and the consonants in eurythmy, will work favourably as well as it enduces a living rhythm in the human being such as should exist between opening oneself to the world and retracting into oneself. That will be called forth by alternating consonantal and vowel elements in eurythmy.

It is, of course, particularly important, when one intends to apply eurythmy for therapeutic purposes, to make one's own what I would like to call this physiologic-psychologic perception of what actually takes place. One should understand that the person who does consonantal eurythmy tends to call forth around himself a sort of aura which works back on him and brings him out of an egoless mingling with the world; in the case of the person who does vowels in eurythmy, his aura is drawn together, densified in itself, which is, of course, always the case with spiritual activity as well, and that the inner organs are thus stimulated to bring the person to himself.

Pedagogically considered, alternating between the lessons one would place more in the morning hours where more mental work would be done and the lessons in which there would be more movement and where a great deal of eurythmy would be done calls forth rhythmic activity in the growing child that has an extraordinarily beneficial effect; all the detriments that are of necessity incurred through an improportionate mental exertion are balanced out again by doing eurythmy. For this reason eurythmy has an especially beneficial function within the curriculum as a whole.

That which I have to say about eurythmy particularly to the physicians I will convey in the course of my lectures to them. Thus we conclude our consideration of eurythmy as such here. Tomorrow there will be two consecutive medical lectures where the eurythmists are not present.

My dear Friends,

I will begin by placing before you what we may call the “Ur-phenomenon”—primary phenomenon—of the Theory of Colour. By and by, you will find it confirmed and reinforced in the phenomena you can observe through the whole range of so-called optics or Theory of Colour. Of course the phenomena get complicated; the simple Ur-phenomenon is not always easy to recognize at once. But if you take the trouble you will find it everywhere. The simple phenomenon—expressed in Goethe's way, to begin with—is as follows: When I look through darkness at something lighter, the light object will appear modified by the darkness in the direction of the light colours, i.e. in the direction of the red and yellowish tones. If for example I look at anything luminous and, as we should call it, white—at any whitish-shining light through a thick enough plate which is in some way dim or cloudy, then what would seem to me more or less white if I were looking at directly, will appear yellowish or yellow-red (Figure IVa).

This is the one pole. Conversely, if you have here a simple black surface and look at it directly, you will see it black, but if you interpose a trough of water through which you send a stream of light so that the liquid is illumined, you will be looking at the dark through something light. Blue or violet (bluish-red) tones of colour will appear (Figure IVb). The other pole is thus revealed. This therefore is the Ur-phenomenon: Light through dark—yellow; dark through light—blue.

This simple phenomenon can be seen on every hand if we once accustom ourselves to think more realistically and not so abstractly as in modern science. Please now recall from this point of view the experiment which we have done. We sent a cylinder of light through a prism and so obtained a real scale of colours, from violet to red; we caught it on a screen. I made a drawing of the phenomenon (see Figure IIc and Figure IVc). You will remember; if this is the prism and this the cylinder of light, the light in some way goes through the prism and is diverted upward. Moreover, as we said before, it is not only diverted. It would be simply diverted if a transparent body with parallel faces were interposed. But we are putting a prism into the path of the light—that is, a body with convergent faces. In passing through the prism, the light gets darkened. The moment we send the light through the prism we therefore have to do with two things: first the simple light as it streams on, and then the dimness interposed in the path of the light. Moreover this dimness, as we said, puts itself into the path of the light in such a way that while the light is mainly diverted upward, the dimming that arises, raying upward as it does, shines also in the same direction into which the light itself is diverted. That is to say, darkness rays into the diverted light. Darkness is living, as it were, in the diverted light, and by this means the bluish and violet shades are here produced. But the darkness rays downward too, so, while the cylinder of light is diverted upward, the darkness here rays downward and works contrary to the diverted light but is no match for it. Here therefore we may say: the original bright light, diverted as it is, overwhelms and outdoes the darkness. We get the yellowish or yellow-red colours.

If we now take a sufficiently thin cylinder of light, we can also look in the direction of it through the prism. Instead of looking from outside on to a screen and seeing the picture projected there, we put our eye in the place of this picture, and, looking through the prism, we then see the aperture, through which the cylinder of light is produced, displaced (Figure IVc). Once again therefore adhering strictly to the facts, we have the following phenomenon: Looking along here, I see what would be coming directly towards me if the prism were not there, displaced in a downward direction by the prism. At the same time I see it coloured.

What then do you see in this case? Watch what you see, state it simply and then connect it with the fundamental fact we have just now been ascertaining. Then, what you actually see will emerge in all detail. Only you must hold to what is really seen. For if you are looking thus into the bright cylinder of light—which, once again, is coming now towards you—you see something light, namely the cylinder of light itself, but you are seeing it through dark. (That there is something darkened here, is clearly proved by the fact that blue arises in this region). Through something darkened—through the blue colour, in effect—you look at something light, namely at the cylinder-of-light coming towards you. Through what is dark you look at what is light; here therefore you should be seeing yellow or yellowish-red—in a word, yellow and red,—as in fact you do. Likewise the red colour below is proof that here is a region irradiated with light. For as I said just now, the light here over-whelms the dark. Thus as you look in this direction, however bright the cylinder of light itself may be, you still see it through an irradiation of light, in relation to which it is dark. Below, therefore, you are looking at dark through light and you will see blue or bluish-red. You need but express the primal phenomenon,—it tells you what you actually see. Your eye is here encountered by what you would be seeing in the other instance. Here for example is the blue and you are looking through it; therefore the light appears reddish. At the bottom edge you have a region that is lighted up. However light the cylinder of light may be, you see it through a space that is lit up. Thus you are seeing something darker through an illumined space and so you see it blue. It is the polarity that matters.

For the phenomenon we studied first—that on the screen—you may use the name “objective” colours if you wish to speak in learned terms. This other one—the one you see in looking through the prism—will then be called the “subjective” spectrum. The “subjective” spectrum appears as an inversion of the “objective”.

Concerning all these phenomena there has been much intellectual speculation, my dear Friends, in modern time. The phenomena have not merely been observed and stated purely as phenomena, as we have been endeavouring to do. There has been ever so much speculation about them; indeed, beginning with the famous Newton, Science has gone to the utter-most extremes in speculation. Newton, having first seen and been impressed by this colour-spectrum, began to speculate as to the nature of light. Here is the prism, said Newton; we let the white light in. The colours are already there in the white light; the prism conjures them forth and now they line up in formation. I have then dismembered the white light into its constituents. Newton now imagined that to every colour corresponds a kind of substance, so that seven colours altogether are contained as specific substances in the light. Passing the light through the prism is to Newton like a kind of chemical analysis, whereby the light is separated into seven distinct substances. He even tried to imagine which of the substances emit relatively larger corpuscles—tiny spheres or pellets—and which smaller. According to this conception the Sun sends us its light, we let it into the room through a circular opening and it goes through in a cylinder of light. This light however consists of ever so many corpuscles—tiny little bodies. Striking the surface of the prism they are diverted from their original course. Eventually they bombard the screen. There then these tiny cannon-balls impinge. The smaller ones fly farther up, the larger ones remain farther down. The smallest are the violet, the largest are the red. So then the large are separated from the small.

This idea that there is a substance or that there are a number of substances flying through space was seriously shaken before long by other physicists—Huyghens, Young and others,—until at last the physicists said to themselves: The theory of little corpuscular cannon-balls starting from somewhere, projected through a refracting medium or not as the case may be, arriving at the screen and there producing a picture, or again finding their way into the eye and giving rise in us to the phenomenon of red, etc.,—this will not do after all. They were eventually driven to this conclusion by an experiment of Fresnel's, towards which some preliminary work had however been done before, by the Jesuit Grimaldi among others.

Fresnel's experiment shook the corpuscular theory very considerably. His experiments are indeed most interesting, and we must try to get a clear idea of what is really happening when experiments are set up in the way he did. I beg you now, pay very careful attention to the pure facts; we want to study such a phenomenon quite exactly. Suppose I have two mirrors and a source of light—a flame for instance, shedding its light from here (Figure IVd). If I then put up a screen—say, here—I shall get pictures by means of the one mirror and also pictures by means of the other mirror. Such is the distribution you are to assume; I draw it in cross-section. Here are two looking-glasses—plane mirrors, set at a very small angle to one another,—here is a source of light, I will call it L, and here a screen. The light is reflected and falls on to the screen; so then I can illumine the screen with the reflected light. For if I let the light strike here, with the help of this mirror I can illumine this part of the screen, making it lighter here than in the surrounding region. Now I have here a second mirror, by which the light is reflected a little differently. Part of the cone of light, as reflected from here below (from the second mirror) on to the screen, still falls into the upper part. The inclination of the two mirrors is such that the screen is lighted up both by reflection from the upper mirror and by reflection from the lower. It will then be as though the screen were being illumined from two different places. Now suppose a physicist, witnessing this experiment, were thinking in Newton's way. He would argue: There is the source of light. It bombards the first mirror, hurling its little cannon-balls in this direction. After recoiling from the mirror they reach the screen and light it up. Meanwhile, the others are recoiling from the lower mirror, for many of them go in that direction also. It will be very much lighter on the screen when there are two mirrors than when there is only one. Therefore if I remove the second mirror the screen will surely be less illumined by reflected light than when the two mirrors are there. So would our physicist argue, although admittedly one rather devastating thought might occur to him, for surely while these little bodies are going on their way after reflection, the others are on their downward journey (see the figure). Why then the latter should not hit the former and drive them from their course, is difficult to see. Nay, altogether, in the textbooks you will find the prettiest accounts of what is happening according to the wave-theory, but while these things are calculated very neatly, one cannot but reflect that no one ever figures out, when one wave rushes criss-cross through the other, how can this simply pass unnoticed?

Now let us try to grasp what happens in reality in this experiment. Suppose that this is the one stream of light. It is thrown by reflection across here, but now the other stream of light arrives here and encounters it,—the phenomenon is undeniable. The two disturb each other. The one wants to rush on; the other gets in the way and, in consequence, extinguishes the light coming from the other side. In rushing through it extinguishes the light. Here therefore on the screen we do not get a lighting-up but in reality darkness is reflected across here. So we here get an element of darkness (Figure IVe). But now all this is not at rest,—it is in constant movement. What has here been disturbed, goes on. Here, so to speak, a hole has arisen in the light. The light rushed through; a hole was made, appearing dark. And as an outcome of this “hole”, the next body-of-light will go through all the more easily and alongside the darkness you will have a patch of light so much the lighter. The next thing to happen, one step further on, is that once more a little cylinder of light from above impinges on a light place, again extinguishes the latter, and so evokes another element of darkness. And as the darkness in its turn has thus moved on another step, here once again the light is able to get through more easily. We get the pattern of a lattice, moving on from step to step. Turn by turn, the light from above can get through and extinguishes the other, producing darkness, once again, and this moves on from step to step. Here then we must obtain an alternation of light and dark, because the upper light goes through the lower and in so doing makes a lattice work.

This is what I was asking you most thoroughly to think of; you should be able to follow in your thought, how such a lattice arises. You will have alternating patches of light and dark, inasmuch as light here rushes into light. When one light rushes into another the light is cancelled—turned to darkness. The fact that such a lattice arises is to be explained by the particular arrangement we have made with these two mirrors. The velocity of light—nay, altogether what arises here by way of differences in velocity of light,—is not of great significance. What I am trying to make clear is what here arises within the light itself by means of this apparatus, so that a lattice-work is reflected—light, dark, light, dark, and so on.

Now yonder physicist—Fresnel himself, in fact—argued as follows: If light is a streaming of tiny corpuscular bodies, it goes without saying that the more bodies are being hurled in a particular direction, the lighter it must grow there,—or else one would have to assume that the one corpuscle eats up the other! The simple theory of corpuscular emanation will not explain this phenomenon of alternating light and dark. We have just seen how it is really to be explained. But it did not occur to the physicists to take the pure phenomenon as such, which is what one should do. Instead, and by analogy with certain other phenomena, they set to work to explain it in a materialistic way. Bombarding little balls of matter would no longer do. Therefore they said: Let us assume, not that the light is in itself a stream of fine substances, but that it is a movement in a very fine substantial medium—the “ether”. It is a movement in the ether. And, to begin with, they imagined that light is propagated through the ether in the same way as sound is through air (Euler for instance thought of it thus). If I call forth a sound, the sound is propagated through the air in such a way that if this is the place where the sound is evoked, the air in the immediate neighbourhood is, to begin with, compressed. Compressed air arises here. Now the compressed air presses in its turn on the adjoining air. It expands, momentarily producing in this neighbourhood a layer of attenuated air. Through these successions of compression and expansion, known as waves, we imagine sound to spread. To begin with, they assumed that waves of this kind are also kindled in the ether. However, there were phenomena at variance with this idea; so then they said to themselves: Light is indeed an undulatory movement, but the waves are of a different kind from those of sound. In sound there is compression here, then comes attenuation, and all this moves on. Such waves are “longitudinal”. For light, this notion will not do. In light, the particles of ether must be moving at right angles to the direction in which the light is being propagated. When, therefore, what we call a “ray of light” is rushing through the air—with a velocity, you will recall, of 300,000 kilometres a second—the tiny particles will always be vibrating at right angles to the direction in which the light is rushing. When this vibration gets into our eye, we perceive it.

Apply this to Fresnel's experiment: we get the following idea. The movement of the light is, once again, a vibration at right angles to the direction in which the light is propagated. This ray, going towards the lower one of the two mirrors, is vibrating, say, in this way and impinges here. As I said before, the fact that wave-movements in many directions will be going criss-cross through each other, is disregarded. According to the physicists who think along these lines, they will in no way disturb each other. Here however, at the screen in this experiment, they do; or again, they reinforce each other. In effect, what will happen here? When the train of waves arrives here, it may well be that the one infinitesimal particle with its perpendicular vibrations happens to be vibrating downward at the very moment when the other is vibrating upward. Then they will cancel each other out and darkness will arise at this place. Or if the two are vibrating upward at the same moment, light will arise. Thus they explain, by the vibrations of infinitesimal particles, what we were explaining just now by the light itself. I was saying that we here get alternations of light patches and dark. The so-called wave-theory of light explains them on the assumption that light is a wave-movement in the other [ether?]. If the infinitesimal particles are vibrating so as to reinforce each other, a lighter patch will arise; if contrary to one another, we get a darker patch.

You must realize what a great difference there is between taking the phenomena purely as they are—setting them forth, following them with our understanding, remaining amid the phenomena themselves—and on the other hand adding to them our own inventions. This movement of the ether is after all a pure invention. Having once invented such a notion we can of course make calculations about it, but that affords no proof that it is really there. All that is purely kinematical or phoronomical in these conceptions are merely thought by us, and so is all the arithmetic. You see from this example: our fundamental way of thought requires us so to explain the phenomena that they themselves be the eventual explanation; they must contain their own explanation. Please set great store by this. Mere spun-out theories and theorizings are to be rejected. You can explain what you like by adding things out of the blue, of which man has no knowledge. Of course the waves might conceivably be there, and it might be that the one swings upward when the other downward so that they cancel each other out. But they have all been invented! What is there however without question is this lattice,—this we see fully reflected. It is to the light itself that we must look, if we desire a genuine and not a spurious, explanation.

Now I was saying just now: when the one light goes through the other, or enters into any kind of relation to it, it may well have a dimming or even extinguishing effect upon the other, just as the effect of the prism is to dim the light. This is again brought out in the following experiment, which we shall actually be doing, I will now make a drawing of it. We may have what I shewed you yesterday—a spectrum extending from violet to red—engendered directly by the Sun. But we can also generate the spectrum in another way. Instead of letting the Sun shine through an opening in the wall, we make a solid body glow with heat,—incandescent (Figure IVf). When we have by and by got it white-hot, it will also give us such a spectrum. It does not matter if we get the spectrum from the Sun or from an incandescent body.

Now we can also generate a spectrum in a somewhat different way (Figure IVg). Suppose this is a prism and this a sodium flame—a flame in which the metal sodium is volatilizing. The sodium is turned to gas; it burns and volatilizes. We make a spectrum of the sodium as it volatilizes. Then a peculiar thing happens. Making a spectrum, not from the Sun or from a glowing solid body but from a glowing gas, we find one place in the spectrum strongly developed. For sodium light it is in the yellow. Here will be red, orange, yellow, you will remember. It is the yellow that is most strongly developed in the spectrum of sodium. The rest of the spectrum is stunted—hardly there at all. All this—from violet to yellow and then again from yellow to red—is stunted. We seem to get a very narrow bright yellow strip, or as is generally said, a yellow line. Mark well, the yellow line also arises inasmuch as it is part of an entire spectrum, only the rest of the spectrum in this case is stunted, atrophied as it were.

From diverse bodies we can make spectra of this kind appearing not as a proper spectrum but in the form of bright, luminous lines. From this you see that vice-versa, if we do not know what is in a flame and we make a spectrum of it, we can conclude, if we get this yellow spectrum for example, that there is sodium in the flame. So we can recognize which of the metals is there.

But the remarkable thing comes about when we combine the two experiments. We generate this cylinder of light and the spectrum of it, while at the same time we interpose the sodium flame, so that the glowing sodium somehow unites with the cylinder of light (Figure IVh). What happens then is very like what I was shewing you in Fresnel's experiment. In the resulting spectrum you might expect the yellow to appear extra strong, since it is there to begin with and now the yellow of the sodium flame is added to it. But this is not what happens. On the contrary, the yellow of the sodium flame extinguishes the other

yellow and you get a dark place here. Precisely where you would expect a lighter part you get a darker. Why is it so? It simply depends on the intensity of force that is brought to bear. If the sodium light arising here were selfless enough to let the kindred yellow light arising here it would have to extinguish itself in so doing. This it does not do; it puts itself in the way at the very place where the yellow should be coming through. It is simply there, and though it is yellow itself, the effect of it is not to intensify but to extinguish. As a real active force, it puts itself in the way, even as an indifferent obstacle might do; it gets in the way. This yellow part of the spectrum is extinguished and a black strip is brought about instead. From this again you see, we need only bear in mind what is actually there. The flowing light itself gives us the explanation.

These are the things which I would have you note. A physicist explaining things in Newton's way would naturally argue: If I here have a piece of white—say, a luminous strip—and I look at it through the prism, it appears to me in such a way that I get a spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, dark blue, violet (Figure IVi). Goethe said: Well, at a pinch, that might do. If Nature really is like that—if she has made the light composite—we might well assume that with the help of the prism this light gets analyzed into its several parts. Good and well; but now the very same people who say the light consists of these seven colours—so that the seven colours are parts or constituents of the light—these same people allege that darkness is just nothing,—is the mere absence of light. Yet if I leave a strip black in the midst of white—if I have simple white paper with a black strip in the middle and look at this through a prism,—then too I find I get a rainbow, only the colours are now in a different order (Figure IVk),—mauve in the middle, and on the one side merging into greenish-blue. I get a band of colours in a different order. On the analysis-theory I ought now to say: then the black too is analyzable and I should thus be admitting that darkness is more than the mere absence of light. The darkness too would have to be analyzable and would consist of seven colours. This, that he saw the black band too in seven colours, only in a different order,—this was what put Goethe off. And this again shews us how needful it is simply to take the phenomena as we find them.

Today I would like to examine certain other aspects of our subject.

I have often dealt with the genius of language, and you know from my book Theosophy that we refer to real spiritual entities when we speak of spiritual beings in an anthroposophical context. Thus “genius of language” designates the spiritual entity behind any specific language, an entity with whom man can become familiar and through whom he can receive, from the spiritual world, strength to express his thoughts which, at the outset, are present in his earthly self as a dead heritage from that higher world. It is, therefore, appropriate for anthroposophical students to seek, in the formation of language, a meaning which is independent of man because rooted in the spirit.

I have already drawn attention to the peculiar way the German language designates the beautiful and its opposite. We speak of the opposite of the beautiful (das Schoene) as the ugly or hateful (das Haessliche). Were we to denote the beautiful in the same way we would call it—since the opposite of hate is love—the lovely or loving. As it is, we make a significant difference. In German the word beautiful (das Schoene) is related to shining (das Scheinende). The beautiful shines; brings its inner nature to the surface. It is the distinguishing quality of the beautiful not to hide itself, but to carry its essence into outer configuration. Thus beauty reveals inwardness through outer form; a shining radiates outward into the world. If we were to speak, in this sense, of beauty's opposite, we would call it the concealed or non-radiant, that which holds back its being, refusing to disclose it in any outer sheath. To put it another way, “the beautiful” designates something objective. If we were to treat its opposite just as objectively, we would have to speak of concealment, of something whose outer aspect belies what it really is. But here subjectivity enters, for we cannot love what conceals itself, showing a false countenance; we must hate it. In this way the ugly calls up quite a different emotional reaction than the beautiful; we do not respond to it out of the same recesses of our nature.

Thus the genius of language reveals itself. And we should ask: When in the broadest sense we strive for the beautiful in art, what is our goal? The very fact that the German word for “beautiful” proceeds outward (as its opposite suggests a remaining within our emotions, our hate) means that the beautiful bears a relation to the spiritual outside us. For what shines? What we apprehend with our senses does not need to shine for us; it exists. It is the spiritual that shines, radiating into the sensory, proclaiming its being even in the sensory. By speaking objectively of the beautiful, we take hold of it as a spiritual element which reveals itself in the world through art. The task of art is to take hold of the shining, the radiance, the manifestation, of that which as spirit weaves and lives throughout the world. All genuine art seeks the spirit. Even when art wishes to represent the ugly, the disagreeable, it is concerned, not with the sensory-disagreeable as such, but with the spiritual which proclaims its nature in the midst of unpleasantness. If the spiritual shines through the ugly, even the ugly becomes beautiful. In art it is upon a relation to the spiritual that beauty depends.

Proceeding from this truth, let us consider one of the arts: painting. Recently we dealt with it insofar as it reveals the spiritual-essential through shining color. In ancient times man, by surrendering in the right way to the genius of language, showed his inner knowledge of color in his vocabulary. When an instinctive clairvoyance prevailed, he felt that metals revealed their inner natures in their colors, therefore gave them, not earthly names, but names connecting them with the planets. Otherwise people would have felt ashamed. For man looked upon color as a divine-spiritual element bestowed upon earthly substances only in the sense of our recent lectures. Perceiving the gold in gold's color, he saw not merely the earthly in that metal but the sun proclaiming itself from the cosmos in its gold color. Indeed, from the very start man saw something transcending the earthly in the colors of earthly objects. But it was only to living things that particular colors were ascribed, for living things approach the spirit in such a way that the spiritual shines forth. Animals were felt to have their own colors because in them the spirit-soul element manifests directly.

In ancient times, when man's artistic sense was not outward but inward, he painted not at all. To paint a tree green is not true painting for the reason that however well one imitates her, nature is still the essential thing; nature is still more beautiful, more vital; it needs no copy. A real painter never imitates. He uses an object as a recipient or focus of the sun, or to observe a color reflex in that object's surroundings, or to catch, above it, an interweaving of light and darkness. In other words, the thing painted is merely an inducement. For example, we never paint a flower standing in front of a window; we paint the light which, shining in at the window, is seen through the flower. We paint the sun's colored light; catch the sun.

In the case of a person, this can be done still more spiritually. To paint a human forehead the way one believes it should look is nonsense; this is not painting. But to observe how the sun rays strike that forehead, how color shows up in the ensuing radiance, how light and darkness intermingle, to capture with one's paint brush all that interplay: this is the task of the painter. Seizing what passes in a moment, he relates it to the spiritual.

If, with a sense for painting, we look at an interior view, the matter of most importance is not the figure or figures therein. I once accompanied a friend to an exhibition where we saw a painting of a man kneeling before an altar, his back toward us. The painter had given himself the task of showing how sunlight falling through a window struck the man's back. My friend remarked that he would much rather see a front view. Well, this was only material, not artistic, interest. He wanted the painter to show the man's character, and so forth. But one is justified in doing this only if one expresses all perceptions through color. If I wish to paint a human being sick in bed with a certain disease, and study his facial color in order to apprehend how illness shines through the sensory, this may be artistic. If I want to show, in totality, the extent to which the whole cosmos manifests in the human flesh color, this may also be artistic. But if I try to imitate Mr. Lehman as he sits here before me, I will not succeed; moreover, this is not the task of art. What is artistic is how the sun illumines him, how light is deflected through his bushy eyebrows. Thus for a painter the important thing is how the whole world acts upon his subject; and his means of holding fast to a transitory moment are light and darkness, the whole spectrum.

In times not so long ago one could not imagine a presentation of Mary, the Mother of God, without a face so transfigured it had passed beyond the ordinary human state; a face overcome by light. One could not imagine her clothed otherwise than in a red garment and blue cloak, because only so is the Mother of God placed rightly into earthly life; the red garment depicting all the emotions of the earthly, the blue cloak the soul element which weaves the spiritual around her; the face permeated and transfigured by spirit, overcome by light as a revelation of the spirit. We do not, however, properly and artistically take hold of these truths if we stop with what I have just described. For I have translated the artistic into the inartistic. We feel them artistically only if we create directly out of red and blue and the light by experiencing the light, in its relationship to colors and darkness, as a world in itself. Then colors speak their own language, and the Virgin Mary is created out of them.

To achieve this one must live with color; color must become emancipated from the heavy matter opposing its innermost nature. Palette colors are alien to true painting in that, when used on a plane surface, they have a down-dragging effect. One cannot live with oil-based colors, only with fluid colors. When a painter puts fluid colors upon a plane, color—owing to the peculiar relationship between man and color—springs to life; he conceives out of color; a world arises out of it. True painting comes into being only if he captures the shining, revealing, radiating element as something living; only if he creates what is to be formed on the plane out of this element. For to understand color is to understand a component part of the world.

Kant once said: Give me matter, and out of it I shall create a world. Well, you could have given him matter endlessly without his ever being able to make a world out of it. But out of the interplaying medium of color a world of sorts can indeed be created, because every color has direct relationship with something spiritual. In the face of present-day materialism, the concept and activity of painting have—except for the beginnings made by impressionism and, still more, by expressionism—been more or less lost.

For the most part modern man does not paint, he imitates figures with a kind of drawing, then colors the surface. But colored surfaces are not painting for the reason that they are not born out of color and light and darkness.

We must not misunderstand things. If somebody goes wild and just lays on colors side by side in the belief that this is what I call “overcoming drawing,” he is mistaken. By “overcoming drawing” I do not mean to do away with drawing, but to let it rise out of the colors, be born from the colors. Colors will yield the drawing; one simply has to know how to live in colors. Living so, an artist develops an ability—while disregarding the rest of the world—to bring forth works of art out of color itself.

Look at Titian's “Ascension of Mary.” This painting stands at the boundary line of the ancient principle of art. The living experience of color one finds in Raphael and, more especially, in Leonardo da Vinci, has departed; only a certain tradition prevents the painter from totally forsaking the living-in-color.

Experience this “Ascension of Mary.” The green, the red, the blue, cry out. Now take the details, the individual colors and their harmonious interaction, and you will feel how Titian lived in the element of color and how, in this instance, he really created out of it all three worlds.

Look at the wonderful build-up of those worlds. Below, he has created out of color the Apostles experiencing the event of Mary's ascension. One sees in the colors how these men are anchored to the earth; colors which convey, not heaviness in the lower part of the painting, only a darkness which fetters the watching ones to earth. In the color-treatment of Mary one experiences the intermediate realm. A dull darkness from below connects her feet and legs with the earth; while, above her, light preponderates. This third and highest realm receives her head and radiates above it in full light, lifting it up. Thus are set forth, through inner color experience, the three stages of lower realm, middle realm, and the heights where Mary is being received by God the Father.

To understand this picture we must forget everything else and look at it solely from the standpoint of color, for here the three stages of the world are derived from color not intellectually but artistically. True painting takes hold of this world of effulgent shining, of splendid manifestation in light and darkness and color, in order to contrast what is earthly-material with the artistic. But the artistic is not permitted to reach the spiritual. Otherwise it would be not “shine” but wisdom. For wisdom is no longer artistic, wisdom leads into the formless and therefore undepictable realm of the divine.

With artistry like Titian's in “The Ascension of Mary,” we feel, on beholding the reception of Mary's head by God the Father, that now we must go no further in the treatment of light; we must halt. For we have reached the limit of the possible. To carry it further would be to fall into the intellectualistic, the inartistic. We must not make one stroke beyond what is indicated by light, rather than contour. The moment we insist on contour, we become intellectualistic, inartistic. Near the top this picture is in danger of becoming inartistic. The painters immediately after Titian fell prey to this danger. Look at the depiction of angels right up to the time of Titian. They are painted in heavenly regions. But look how carefully the painters avoided leaving the realm of color. Always you can ask yourself in regard to these angels of the pre-Titian age, and of Titian too: Couldn't they be clouds? If you cannot do that, if there is no uncertainty about existence, being, or semblance, shine, if there is an attempt fully to delineate the essence of the spiritual, artistry ceases.

In the seventeenth century it was otherwise, for materialism affects the presentation of the spiritual. Now angels began to be painted with all kinds of foreshortenings, and one can no longer ask: Couldn't that be clouds? When reason is active, artistry dies.

Again, look at the Apostles below: one has a feeling that in this “Ascension of Mary” only Mary is really artistic. Above, there is the danger of passing into the formlessness of pure wisdom. If one attains the formless one attains, in a certain sense, the zenith of the artistic. One has dared to press forward boldly to the abyss where art ceases, where the colors disappear in light, and where, if one were to proceed, one could only draw. But drawing is not painting. Thus the upper part of the picture approaches the realm of wisdom. And the more one is able to express, in the sensory world, this wisdom-filled realm, and the more the angels might be taken for billowy clouds shimmering in light, the greater the art.

Proceeding from the bottom of the picture to the really beautiful, to Mary herself rising into the realm of wisdom, we see that Titian was able to paint her beautifully because she has not yet arrived at, but only soars up toward, the realm of wisdom; and we feel that, were she to rise still higher, she must enter where art ceases. Below stand the Apostles. Here the artist has tried to express their earth-fettered character. But now a different danger threatens. Had he placed Mary further down, he could not have depicted her inward beauty. If Mary were to sit among the Apostles, she could not appear as she does as a kind of balance between heaven and earth; she would look different. She simply does not fit among the Apostles with their brownish tones. Not only are they subject to earthly gravity; something else has entered: the element of drawing takes hold. This you can see in Titian's picture. Why is it so?

Well, brown having already left the realm of color, it cannot express Mary's beauty; something not belonging entirely to the realm of the beautiful would be injected. If Mary stood or sat among the Apostles and were colored as they are, it would be a great offense. I am now speaking only of this picture and do not maintain that when standing on earth Mary must be in every instance, artistically speaking, an offense. But in this picture it would be a blow in the face if Mary stood below. Why?

Because if she stood there colored like the Apostles we would have to say that the artist presented her as virtuous. This is the way he presents the Apostles; we cannot conceive of them otherwise than looking upward in their virtue. But this for Mary would he inappropriate. With her, virtue is so self-evident that we must not express it. It would be like presenting God as virtuous. If something is self-evident, if it has become the being itself, we must not express it in mere outer semblance. Therefore Mary soars up into a region beyond all virtues, where we cannot say of her, through colors, that she is virtuous, any more than we can say of God that He is virtuous. He may, at most, be virtue itself. But this is an abstract, philosophical statement having nothing to do with art. With the Apostles, however, the artist succeeded in representing, through his color treatment, virtuous human beings. They are virtuous.

Let us look at how the genius of language reflects this truth. Tugend (virtue, in German) is related to taugen (to be fit, in German). To be fit, to be able to cope with something morally, is to be virtuous. Goethe speaks of a triad: wisdom, semblance and power. Art is the middle term: semblance, the beautiful; wisdom is formless knowledge; virtue is power to carry out worthwhile things effectively.¹

Since ancient times this triad has been revered. Once, years ago, a man said to me—and I could appreciate his point of view—that he was sick and tired of hearing people speak of the true, the beautiful and the good, for anyone in search of an idealistic expression mouthed the phrase. But in ancient times these realities were experienced not externally but with complete soul participation. Thus in the upper region of Titian's picture we see wisdom not yet transcendent, radiating artistically because of the way it is painted. In the middle, beauty; below, virtue, that which is fit. What is the inner nature of the fit? Here is manifest the genius, the profundity, of the languages active among men. If we proceeded in an exterior way we might be reminded of a certain hunchback who went to church and listened to a priest describing quite externally how everything in the world is good and beautiful and fit. Waiting at the church door, the hunchback asked the priest: You said the idea of everything is good—have I, too, a good shape? The priest replied: For a hunchback you have a very good shape.

If things are considered as externally as this, we shall never penetrate to the depths. In many fields modern observation proceeds so. Filled with external characteristics and definitions, men do not know that their ideas turn round and round in circles.

In respect to virtue it is not a question of fitness for just anything, but of fitness for something spiritual, so that a person places himself into the spiritual world as a human being. Whoever is a complete human being by reason of his bringing the spiritual not merely to manifestation but to full realization through his will is—in the true sense—virtuous. Here we enter a region which lies within the human and religious, but no longer within the artistic, sphere, and least of all within the sphere of the beautiful. Everything in the world contains a polarity. Thus we can say of Titian's picture: Above Mary he is in danger of passing beyond the beautiful, there where he reaches the abyss of wisdom. Below, he comes to the brink of the other abyss. For as soon as a painter represents the virtuous, meaning that which man realizes through his own being, out of the spiritual, he again leaves behind the beautiful, the artistic. The virtuous human being can be painted only by characterizing virtue in its outer appearance, let us say by contrasting it with vice. But an artistic presentation of virtue as such is no longer possible.

Where in our age do we not forsake the artistic? Simple life conditions are reproduced crudely, naturalistically, without any relation to the spiritual, and without this relation there is no art. Hence the striving of impressionism and expressionism to return to the spiritual. Though in many cases clumsy, tentative, exploratory, it is better than the inartistic copying of a model.

Furthermore, if one grasps the concept of the artistically-beautiful, one can deal with the tragic in its artistic manifestations. The human being who acts in accordance with his thoughts, who lives his life intellectualistically, can never become really tragic. Nor can the human being who leads an entirely virtuous life. The only tragic person is one who in some way leans toward the daimonic, that is to say, toward the spiritual, whether in a good or bad sense. Today in this age when man is in the process of becoming free, daimonic man, that is man under the influence of tutelary spirits, is an anachronism. That man should outgrow the daimonic and become free is the whole meaning of the fifth post-Atlantean age. But as he progresses in freedom the possibility of tragedy diminishes and finally ceases. Take ancient tragic characters, even most of Shakespeare's: they have a daimonism which leads to the tragic. Wherever man had the appearance of the daimonic-spiritual, wherever the daimonic-spiritual radiated and manifested through him, wherever he became its medium, tragedy was possible. In this sense the tragic will have to taper off now; a free mankind must rid itself of tutelary spirits. This it has not yet done. On the contrary, it is more and more falling prey to such forces.

But the great task and mission of the age is to pull human beings away from the daimonic towards freedom. The irony is that the more we get rid of the inner daimons which make us tragic personalities, the less do we get rid of external ones. For the moment modern man enters into relation with the outer world, he encounters something of the nature of daimons. Our thoughts must become freer and freer. And if, as I say in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, thoughts become will impulses, then the will also becomes free. These are polaric contrasts in freedom: free thoughts, free will.

Between lies that part of human nature which is connected with karma. And just as once upon a time the daimonic led to tragedy, so now the experiencing of karma can lead to inmost tragedy. Tragedy will flourish when man experiences karma. As long as we live in our thoughts we are free. But the words with which we have clothed our thoughts, once spoken or written, no longer belong to us. What may happen to a word I have uttered! Having absorbed it, somebody else surrounds it with different emotions and sensations, and thus the word lives on. As it flies through the world it becomes a power proceeding from man himself. This is his karma. Because it connects him with the earth, it may burst in on him again. Even the word which leads its own existence because it belongs not to us but to the genius of language may create the tragic. Just in our present time we see mankind at the inception of tragic situations through an overestimation of language, of the word. Peoples wish to separate themselves according to language, and their desire provides the basis for the gigantic tragedy which during this very century will break in upon the earth. This is the tragedy of karma. If past tragedy is that of daimonology, future tragedy will be that of karma.

Art is eternal; its forms change. And if in everything artistic there is some relationship to the spiritual, you will understand that with the artistic we place ourselves, creatively or through enjoyment, in the spirit world. A real artist may create his picture in a lonely desert. He does not worry about who will look at his picture or whether anybody at all will look at it, for he creates within a divine-spiritual community. Gods look over his shoulder; he creates in their company. What does he care whether or not anybody admires his picture. A person may be an artist in complete loneliness. Yet he cannot become one without bringing, by means of his creation, something spiritual into the world, so that it lives in the spirituality of the world. If one forgets this basic connection, art becomes non-art.

To create artistically is possible only if the work has a relationship to the world. Those ancient artists who painted pictures on the walls of churches were conscious of this fact; they knew that their murals stood within earth life insofar as this is permeated by the spirit; that they guided believers.

One can hardly imagine anything worse than painting for exhibitions. It is horrible to walk through a picture or sculpture gallery where completely unrelated subjects appear side by side. Painting lost meaning when it passed from something for church or home to an isolated phenomenon. If we paint or view a picture in a frame, we can imagine ourselves looking out through a window. But to paint for exhibitions—this is beyond discussion. An age which sees value in exhibitions has lost its connection with art. By this can be seen how much waits to be done in culture if we would find our way back to the spiritual-artistic. Exhibitions must be overcome. Of course some individual artists detest exhibitions. But today we live in an age when the individual cannot achieve very much unless his judgment grows out of a world-conception permeating fully free human beings; just as world-conceptions permeating people in less free ages led to the rise of genuine cultures. Today we have no real culture.

Only a spiritual world-conception can build up true culture, the indubitably artistic.

• 1. The English word virtue, derived from the Latin vir, man, carries a similar connotation of power. (Translators)

My lecture today will be, in a certain respect, the opposite of yesterday's, since I shall have something to say about what can be seen supernaturally in the way I characterized it yesterday. However, I will have to ask for your indulgence, since I can naturally only highlight a few aphorisms from the unlimited fields of anthroposophical research. So today's lecture will be a kind of collection of details picked out as examples.

What is achieved for the human being through the three supersensible levels of knowledge that I characterized yesterday is that he can step before the soul's eye as a complete human being. I have already mentioned the first supersensible level of knowledge, the level of imaginative knowledge. And I already indicated yesterday how, through this imaginative knowledge, the organism of time can be seen, which is found in us human beings as the first supersensible entity, the formative forces body that exists in time and that organizes us, but as a supersensible organism organizes us in the time between our birth or conception and death. But I have also noticed that the moment imaginative knowledge begins to take effect, the difference between subjective and objective ceases to a certain extent, so that at the same time as we are spiritually contemplating our formative body, we are also standing in the midst of the entire etheric activity of the world; that we become, as it were, a member of the etheric cosmic organism and then stand out less, secrete less out of this cosmic etheric organism than we do in our physical organism in relation to the other natural facts and beings that surround us in the physical-sensual world.

When we then ascend to the inspired knowledge characterized yesterday, we extend our vision beyond what is in us between birth and death. We expand our vision to include what can be called the actual soul being of the human being, and we learn to recognize this soul being in the development in which it stood within a spiritual-soul environment before it descended into a physical human body.

By further developing this inspired knowledge into what I characterized yesterday as intuitive knowledge, one comes to know in the image the fact of death, the transition of our soul organism through the gate of death into a spiritual-soul world. So that the knowledge of the eternal nature of the human soul is joined by the knowledge of immortality and the unborn. At the same time, however, in this moment, by rising to intuitive knowledge, we see the true form of our ego, of our self. I will speak about this vision of the self again, preferably also in tomorrow's lecture. But you can see from what I have characterized that we come to the vision of a purely spiritual world, first of all of our own spiritual-soul being with its surroundings. Now, during our life on earth, we already have a definite share in this spiritual-soul world. It is always there. It is always around us, as already emerged from what was characterized yesterday. We have a share in it through our total human experience. This total experience breaks down into the waking state and the sleeping state, with the dream states in between.

When one speaks of waking and sleeping, one is actually touching on a very significant riddle of existence, especially in human life. This riddle has been tackled in many ways, including by purely physical research. And as in other fields, in this too, no amateurish opposition should be made against what is put forward by natural science with a certain right. But these scientific hypotheses (and they are mostly hypotheses that have been put forward in this regard; I do not need to list them, because today I will stick more to the positive anthroposophical results in my presentation) these scientific hypotheses always start from certain assumptions that, one might say, can be partially, but not totally, held even in the simplest, unbiased observations of life. For example, when explaining the transition from wakefulness to sleep, fatigue is usually given the greatest importance. And one often sees in fatigue - not always, because there is also a correct insight in science - a kind of cause for the transition to sleep. Now, I have known reindeer that, without having acquired any reason to be particularly tired during the day, fell asleep at the first words of my evening lecture, and not only on this, indeed more understandable occasion, but also fell asleep during many an extraordinarily stimulating sonata. So that just a simple, unbiased observation of life can tell you that fatigue is not necessarily the only reason, the only cause for the state of sleep. I think that anyone who takes even a little time to observe the phenomena of life, quite apart from any extrasensory research, as I will characterize it later, must observe how there is something in sleeping and waking that is connected with the human being, as it is in the physical world, in such a way that sleeping and waking belong to this being as a rhythm of life. Just as the pendulum swings to one side and then to the other, so we must assume that the human being's overall experience in these two states, waking and sleeping, is like a pendulum-like rhythm. I am not offering this as proof, but as something that one might come up with as a possible interpretation. But this will lead us to the next stage, if I now, from the direct view that can be acquired with the help of the three levels of knowledge that I characterized yesterday, first of all present the state of sleep and wakefulness in a soul-spiritual way.

When we are in imaginative knowledge, we get to know the etheric body, the formative forces of the human being. That is, we learn to look at what is in us as the first supersensible being. We then get to know the actual soul that flows into our physical body through birth or conception and also into this formative forces body. We get to know this soul-like quality as it flows out through death into a spiritual world again. We get to know this through inspired knowledge. And we then get to know the actual I-being, I would like to say, the deepest center of our human being through intuitive knowledge.

If we now apply these three insights to our observations of sleeping and waking, it becomes clear to us that the human being is only fully awake during the waking state, when he is fully aware of his mental life, so to speak, and that he is normally the physical body, the spatial body, the etheric body, the temporal body, the actual soul-being, which I referred to yesterday as the astral body, and the I. As a physical being, the sleeping person still has only the body of formative forces within them. Essentially, the soul, the astral body and the I have emerged from the physical body and the body of formative forces, which can now be observed through ordinary external sensory perception and imaginative perception. And from falling asleep to waking up, they are in the same sphere in which they were before the human being descended from the spiritual-soul realm into a physical embodiment on earth. So that the four members of the human being, that is, the physical body, the temporal formative forces body, then the ego and the astral body, the actual soul, are separated from each other in twos.

But now, if we want to understand how the state of sleep relates to the state of wakefulness, we must gain an inner vision, also to be attained through the stages of knowledge that are characterized, of what is actually present during sleep, let us say for the time being. The physical body of space only carries out what the body of time is. All the processes that the physical body carries out in this ether body, from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up, can continue. These are all the processes that are connected with the plastic development of the human being, for example during childhood, and that are connected with nutrition and metabolism. But those processes that are connected with imagination, thinking, feeling and willing cannot be carried out. Man falls asleep into a state in which the life of imagination is dimmed, in which feelings are silent, where his will becomes powerless to somehow carry out something in the physical world through the physical body and etheric body.

If we now observe through supersensible knowledge that which has gone out of the physical body and etheric body, as I, as an astral body, that is, as a vehicle of thinking, feeling and willing, we find, above all, that the conscious activity of waking has sunk into an unconscious one, and that the human being is in an unconscious state. Therefore, one can only see through supersensible knowledge from the outside what has gone out of the physical body and the etheric body.

If one wants to characterize what is actually outside of the physical man, then one must compare it with something else. When a person is in a completely dreamless sleep, it can only be compared to the same activity that is present in the waking person's will, in the impulses of the will. The impulses of the will — I characterized this yesterday — also run in the waking person in such a way that the consciousness, the consciousness living in thoughts, has no knowledge of the inner nature of this will. I said yesterday that we plan to do something, for example, to raise our arm. We have the thought. How the thought then flows down into our organism, how the will takes hold of the arm – if I may express myself trivially – is something of which one also has no idea in waking life for the ordinary consciousness. The arm is raised. We only see the result again. The mental image of the result is a new mental image. During waking hours, we have as little idea of what lies between the mental image of the result and the mental image of the intention as a volitional impulse as we have no idea in our ordinary consciousness of what goes on in deep, dreamless sleep. But for supersensible observation, what is present as I and astral body, in addition to the physical body and the etheric body, is in sleep exactly in the same activity as will is during waking. A decided volition expresses itself. The activity of imagination is subdued. We shall explain shortly why this activity of imagination is subdued. That for which we already sleep while awake is quite active, only it is outside the body. It cannot move the arms or legs, cannot use the body as a tool for the will, but this will is powerfully present. And what then is the most important characteristic of this will? It is desire, which can then increase to become the wish and the other various nuances that one is familiar with. From the moment one falls asleep until one wakes up, desire is active in that which is outside of the physical body. And one must ask oneself: What is desire directed towards? When one can observe this streaming and swirling and surging of desire in the soul-being outside of the physical body through supersensible knowledge, then one is led to the question: What is this desire, this longing directed towards? It is directed towards nothing other than the physical body, towards regaining possession of the physical body. From the moment of falling asleep until the moment of waking up, the human being unconsciously wants to get back into his physical body and into his etheric body because he is outside of it. And then another question arises. These questions only arise, of course, when one applies imaginative, inspired and intuitive knowledge. The other question that arises is: Why does this soul-filled person not immediately satisfy the desire to return to his physical body when he is outside of it? The reason for this, and this is explained to us in the moment of falling asleep, is that the human being, when awake, when he has taken hold of his physical body as a being of soul, as I and astral body, becomes tired of this physical body, which, after all, connects him to the outside world; because in a certain sense he is saturated with this possession after a certain time. Not just the possession of the interior of the physical body. This physical body carries the sense organs. Through them one comes into contact with the outside world. One's self and the astral body merge with sounds and colors, one's self merges with the words one hears from other people. If you do not want to be absorbed and have no possibility to escape in any other way from the impressions coming from the outside world, then you withdraw from the impressions of the outside world by falling asleep, just like the reindeer I was talking about. So that from falling asleep to waking up, in the human being as a spiritual being, satiation with the physical body and desire for the physical body pulsate together. And only when the satiation has completely disappeared can desire triumph over satiation, and the person wakes up and returns to the physical body. There is not enough time to describe why you wake up when the alarm clock goes off, for example, and the like, or why some people cannot sleep. These things can also be experienced, but I can only describe the principles and the generalities.

When we consider the alternating states of sleeping and waking, we are actually dealing with an oscillation between an inner inclination of the human soul to be in the physical body and no longer to be in it; we are dealing with a feeling of being oversaturated, hence the going out of the physical body, and with a renewed desire for the physical body. This desire for the physical body is particularly interesting for supersensible research to study. For this desire for the physical body is also discovered to a particularly intense degree at the time when the soul, bending down from the spiritual-soul world to earth, is again approaching a physical embodiment. Between death and a new birth, that is, on the way to a birth, the soul develops in such a way that, out of all the states it has gone through before, it develops, above all, a certain emptiness towards its spiritual environment and an intensely strong will element, namely the desire for the physical earth. So that we can study the last states that the soul goes through when it draws to an earth life, in a sense between falling asleep and waking up.

So we have an explanation that simply arises for supersensible research, which does not start from the physical of the alternating state of sleeping and waking, but rather recurs to the soul; which explains waking up above all as the satisfaction of the desire for the physical body, which explains falling asleep from a soul oversaturation of the physical body. We arrive at soul qualities and explain the change between sleeping and waking from the soul.

If we then look at dreaming – initially one-sidedly, because, as I said, we cannot explain everything today – we look at dreaming when waking up. As we observe the human soul with its swirling will-being from falling asleep to waking up, we see that thoughts begin to flash to the same extent that the human being returns to his etheric body and his spatial body, his physical body. During normal waking up, it is the case that the person relatively quickly slips into their etheric body and their physical body. In these he has the tools for his thinking, feeling and willing. Thinking, which is subdued during sleep, makes use, when the person returns to his physical body, primarily of the senses and nervous system as external tools. Feeling, which is also dampened during sleep, is submerged upon awakening in everything that is rhythm in the physical organism, for example, the rhythm of breathing, blood circulation, and also the rhythm of metabolism. There is rhythm there too. In fact, the rhythm of metabolism already plays a part in the circulation. So that one can observe how that which is thinking disposition, thinking power in the soul, submerges into the nervous system, and that which is feeling nature submerges into the rhythmic system. And with regard to the will nature, which is thus mainly active during sleep and is connected with the metabolic activity, I would like to say that there is no boundary between inside and outside. During sleep, the human being is indeed outside of his physical body, and everything outside is will, but this will passes through the boundary of the body with regard to the metabolism, also striking into the body through the boundary of the body, and during sleep the activity of the will also encompasses the metabolic system. It is only out of sensory activity and thinking, but with its will nature, the human being is completely immersed in its metabolic system.

Now one can observe how, so to speak, the human being with his soul essence descends into his etheric and physical body. If it happens that, due to some abnormality – although they coincide spatially, this can be the case – the etheric body is seized before the spatial body, then the human being does not immediately enter his body completely. He only submerges into the etheric body. The etheric body then takes up the liquid components of the body, and only the soul, which comes from the solid components, really remains outside. But the moment when the human being has not yet fully taken hold of the physical body, but has only taken hold of the etheric body, that moment is when the soul, emerging from the state of sleep, can only make partial use of the physical and etheric bodies, and that is when dreaming arises. Full waking only arises when the physical body is fully seized, that is, when all the organs of will and especially the sense organs are fully seized. So it is a partial seizure of the physical body when dreaming occurs.

But precisely when one observes this coming over through dreaming in supersensible research - and one can observe this dreaming very particularly through imaginative knowledge; it is not itself dreaming, it is a more fully conscious knowledge than the ordinary day-knowledge of normal consciousness, but one can observe particularly what actually takes place objectively in the dream – one can observe how the human soul takes hold of the physical apparatus, because in the present human life, when the soul is removed from the physical apparatus, it is not strong enough to carry out the thinking activity. It needs, so to speak, the physical tool as a support to carry out the thinking activity. So that in the moment when the human being submerges into the physical tool, thinking is really carried out through the physical tool.

But then, when one also observes feeling through inspired knowledge, both the feeling that is completely subdued during sleep and the feeling in the waking state, which is also a kind of dream-like state – feelings are not as fully conscious as mental images – then one does indeed come to significant differences between thinking and feeling. Only now do you notice these differences. When thinking, it is the case that, when one observes the thinking person with imaginative knowledge in a waking state, the nervous system is continually active during the thinking. The nervous system is in a mobile plastic state, so that basically, for the most part, everything of the soul sinks into the nervous system. When passing from sleep to wakefulness, that part of the soul that becomes a thinker in man disappears. It disappears into the sensory nervous system. This is not the case with feeling human beings. The part of the soul that constitutes the feeling human being submerges into everything that is a rhythmic organism in man, but not completely. One can even say, although this is only an approximation, that just as much of the soul remains outside the physical and etheric bodies as submerges. There is a continuous back and forth between the soul and the body in this feeling activity. And this continuous back and forth is expressed in the rhythmic system.

And the part that makes up the will of the human soul also submerges into the physical body during waking, but it does not submerge in the same way that thinking submerges into the nervous system. It submerges into the physical organism and into the formative forces, but it does not connect with them. Although it slips into the physical body, it remains separate and is a distinct being. Thus one can say that in the waking state, the human being has a remarkable polarity. If we look primarily at the nervous sensory organism, we find that it is developed in such a way that in the waking person the soul is completely submerged. It has almost completely disappeared into the organism as a thinking soul. And when we look at the workings of the will in the waking person, we actually see this will as something separate, alongside the physical processes in the physical organism. These then take place as two activities, although in the same space, but as strictly separate activities. So that it is only through such research methods that we actually gain an insight into how the human being, as a being of will, is involved in his body in a completely different way than he is involved as a thinking being.

This, however, becomes particularly clear when we approach the observation of the waking person with truly developed imaginative and intuitive knowledge. Once you have completed the exercises I mentioned yesterday, you are able to observe yourself from the outside. The thinking is strengthened. This makes it independent of the physical body. In ordinary consciousness, the human being must completely immerse himself in his physical body, that is, in the nervous sensory apparatus. But the achievement of supersensible knowledge consists in learning to think without this physical apparatus. That is the essential thing. We are too weak as sleeping human beings in our normal consciousness to be able to gather up in our sleep that which is soul-like, so that it develops in itself the activity of thinking without the support of the body. The success of the exercises described yesterday consists precisely in the soul becoming so strong that it can think without the body. But in this state, in which it can think without the body, it can see the body. Just as one sees something that is outside of oneself, as one knows that one sees the table with one's eyes, so for imaginative and inspired and intuitive knowledge one looks back to the physical and etheric bodies. As a being of soul, one is only within oneself, one is now conscious of what one is otherwise unconscious of in sleep. And now something very peculiar occurs. It occurs that one does not see everything of this physical body, but only the nervous system can be objectively seen, or rather seen by the soul. The human being, seen entirely from the outside, is a nervous-sensory being. Its nervous system, together with the senses, becomes visible from the outside. I emphasize this because it has played a role - not in these evening lectures, but in many of the daytime lectures - I emphasize that not only the so-called sensitive nerves become visible, but also the so-called motor nerves, and that it is precisely at this stage of knowledge that direct observation leads to the research result: there is no fundamental difference between the so-called sensitive and the so-called motor nerves. The sensitive nerves are there to mediate our perception of the external world through our senses; the motor nerves, which are also sensitive nerves, are there so that we can perceive the position and presence of our limbs within ourselves. The fact that we have an inner perception of ourselves is conveyed by the motor nerves, which are actually sensitive nerves in this respect. Such research results arise from the path of soul research.

So we have now come to the point where we have what belongs to the human nervous system in the broadest sense as an objective thing. On the other hand, everything that belongs to the metabolic system is not present as an objective. It is present in intuition as a purely spiritual being. There the material disappears, and one now learns to recognize this peculiar process in the waking human being, this total process that actually takes place there. One learns to recognize it in this way: if one first gradually orientates oneself through imaginative knowledge, one comes to understand how one moves out of the physical body, now not unconsciously as when falling asleep, but consciously, as one feels this lifting out, especially from the brain. Then, by passing over to inspired knowledge, one arrives at a point where, in addition to this lifting out of the brain, one still notices how the brain now becomes something outside of one. And then one arrives at intuition, one really arrives at objectively seeing what one has before one as the human sensory-neural apparatus. But now one also sees the whole process of ordinary thinking.

Yesterday I emphasized the importance of the person's common sense remaining intact while they develop the second personality, the observing personality, in anthroposophical research. The ordinary personality remains intact, otherwise the person does not become a supersensory cognizer, but a hallucinator. By observing how one comes out of it, logical thinking, which otherwise adheres to the sensory world, remains in the brain. One rises out of the brain only with what one is as a higher, soul-filled being. That is why we see in the entire nervous-sensory apparatus not a lump that lies there, but a process, something that is constantly happening, that is constantly a process. You see that when you look back. Something very strange then emerges, which fundamentally illuminates our entire knowledge of the world. It turns out that in our nervous-sensory being – I apologize if I now say something terribly heretical, it only appears so; it also arises directly from the consistent continuation of scientific thinking into the spiritual world – out of the spirit, which also comes across when we wake up in the morning, when the soul enters the physical body, material-spiritual particles are stored between the parts that only relate to the material, which are deposited and generated directly from the spirit itself. One witnesses the emergence of matter, even the plastic formation of matter in the human sensory apparatus. Matter arises out of spirit. According to his spiritual soul, man not only becomes an inhabitant of his nerve-sense apparatus, but, by storing matter that forms directly out of spirit, he becomes creative of matter. This is heretical because it goes against a principle of today's natural science, which only does not go to its ultimate consequences, those that extend to all beings - and the world consists of all beings, not just of inanimate facts and inanimate beings. This natural science has abstracted from the processes of the inorganic world and, at most, from the plant world, the so-called law of the conservation of energy and matter. As if the substance were there once and for all and would only be rearranged in this way. In a sense, this is the case in all other natural kingdoms. In man, however, there is actually a real creation of matter through the nerve-sense apparatus. But we can state - read the first pages of psychologies that are written today out of incomplete knowledge - that the law of the conservation of matter also applies to man. This is based on an illusion. The law applies, but how? If we look with intuitive knowledge at the workings of the will in the human organism, that is, in the metabolic organism, the part of the organism that consists of metabolism, then matter is continually being destroyed through a process that I would call an organic combustion process. And so, while man develops thinking in normal consciousness, matter creation takes place; while man develops will, matter destruction takes place. The healthy human life is based on the fact that, as it were, the left balance beam corresponds to the right, in the human being it constantly balances itself in the whole of life – matter is created during the thinking, and matter is destroyed, used up, hurled back into nothingness through the will process. And so it seems as though the law of conservation of matter also applies to the human organism, because as much matter is created and formed as is plasticized. By extrapolating such a law as the law of conservation of matter, which is quite correct, and applying it to the human being, we are able to gain a true insight into the very specific nature of the human being in its connection with the physical and with the soul-spiritual. In a sense, the human being becomes transparent in this way. But what path does one actually follow?

If one follows today's physiology, whose methods in external relationships are not at all to be challenged by me – they have their great merits and results, but these results are for the most part questions again, and in turn pose riddles – if one merely these external methods of research to follow the human organism, then one has only one side of the human being, and then one must put forward hypotheses as to the actual cause of what happens in the metabolism, as to the cause of what happens in the nervous process. These hypotheses actually tend to presuppose something unknown, which perhaps only exists in a lawful connection. That is what materialists believe. But in reality, one does not arrive at what the metabolism and the nervous process depend on through such hypotheses, but only through direct observation of the spiritual and soul-like itself.

And so you see that with regard to man, only total research, which does not sin against natural science but simply continues natural science, is able to put into perspective what otherwise only physiology and biology bring to light, by starting with the whole person. And this research does indeed lead to the extraordinarily important result that I presented in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Mysteries of the Soul) a few years ago, after it had been the subject of thirty years of intensive research: the result is that the human being is a threefold creature. The being, which is mostly a nervous-sensory apparatus, is the carrier of the thought life in the waking state. Then the human being is a rhythmic being - breathing, circulation rhythm, other rhythms - and that is the carrier of the emotional life. Finally, the human being is a metabolic being, but the limbs are also part of the metabolic organism. Metabolism is only an inward continuation of what takes place in the limbs. Metabolism is the carrier of the will element. This has nothing to do with the nervous system, but only with the processes of metabolism.

Thus we come to recognize the human being as a threefold creature. The actual inner essence of the human being is based precisely on the fact that he is such a threefold creature, in that he has in his nervous-sensory apparatus that into which the thinking part of the soul is completely immersed, so that in terms of thinking we may actually be the greatest materialists. And today's psychology also comes to see in the brain, the various structures of the brain, true images of the thought life. It does not succeed in this for the emotional and will life, as she herself admits. One sees that one can be the most materialist with regard to the life of ideas, but one does not get along with pure materialism. It is not possible to do so if one imagines the brain in such a way that on the one hand one has the brain as a finished organ and on the other hand one has somehow the soul, which now uses the brain to shape thoughts. It is not like that at all. Rather, it is the case that thoughts have an existence of their own. It is just too weak to be active, for example, when the soul's part of the soul does not have the brain, as in sleep. But when the soul seizes the brain, it does not use it as a finished organ, but it is constantly developing in this brain what is happening in the brain as a process. These furrows are a perpetual process. This is at the same time the activity of the soul. Therefore, when we examine the brain, we can only do so if we have a mental image of the brain as a reflection of the soul, insofar as the soul is a thinking being. This is more important than one might think. This is immediately confirmed when you open up any brain physiology today and see how things have already been researched. And when you see the effects of these different brain areas, they are not at all such that you can see how the soul could make use of them, but they are such that they actually reflect the life of the soul: they are images of the life of the soul.

So that one can say: the brain is actually like an imagination of the soul's life that has been realized, that has become matter. It is an image, whereas the rhythmic organism has not brought it to the point of an image. The metabolic organism has brought it least of all to this, being something entirely unplastic, something unpictorial. We can understand the brain in the way it is constructed if we grasp it as an image of the soul life. And only then will brain physiology be on a healthy foundation, when we are able to understand the brain in this way, as materialized imaginations. On the other hand, one will not be allowed to understand the rhythmic organism, for example, as a materialized imagination, but here one has an inspiration that takes place externally in the process, in the process, where the spiritual and the material continually interact in rhythm. And in the metabolism, we have a continuous transition from matter to spirit, from spirit to matter, towards one pole and then the other.

It must be said that even today it is somewhat awkward to express these things. For naturally, if one is only within the field of biology and physiology, which have not yet become consistent with themselves, one sees such things as fantasies, or even worse. But when these things are known, one has the obligation to stand up for the known truths.

And from the human being, the other parts of our entire world being can then be reached. Let us go down from man to animal, for example. First of all, we need to really get to know the animal, not just talk about it from the outside, but really get to know it. If we want to truly recognize the human being in terms of his or her essence, we have to speak of a threefold being, but the three parts do not exist side by side. An unspiritual professor wanted to ridicule the threefold nature of the human being by saying: Steiner differentiates between the head, chest and stomach human. – As if these three members were juxtaposed like three boxes or cabinets standing on top of each other! That is not the case at all. The head is primarily a nervous-sensory organ, but the rhythmic and metabolic systems play into it; the chest is primarily a rhythmic organism, but the other parts of the body play into it; and so does the metabolism. The three members are interrelated, not separate. Those who characterize them as separate, whether as supporters or opponents, do not get it right.

Now, the situation changes immediately when we move from humans to animals. The animal is not a three-part organism. This is particularly evident when we look at it with imaginative, inspired and intuitive knowledge. Strictly speaking, the animal is a two-part organism. In the animal, the rhythmic organism continually plays a role in the nerve-sense organism, on the one hand. So that? at the head pole of the animal, there is not such a differentiated sense organism as in humans. There is less differentiation, less separation of the nerve-sense apparatus from the rhythmic apparatus. It is a nerve-sense organ that is constantly pulsed by the rhythmic life. And the metabolic organism is in turn pulsed by the rhythmic organism. The rhythmic organism is not as distinct from the other two systems as it is in humans. The human being has the thinking organism, the nerve-sense organism, then the rhythmic organism and the metabolic organism. The three organ systems are relatively distinct from each other. In animals, the nervous-sense organism and the metabolic organism are present, but they form direct polarities. The rhythmic organism is not so strictly separated, but is more absorbed in the other two systems, so that in animals one has a kind of twofold organism.

What is essential in the formation of the human being is not that his head tends to have a special formation, but that which tends to have a special formation in the human being is his rhythmic organism. This becomes independent. As a result, it expels, on the one hand, the head organism in a more differentiated way than in the animal, and, on the other hand, the metabolic organism. So that in turn, there is a more intensive metabolism in man than in the animal, where the rhythmic organism continually plays into the metabolism.

When we study the animal and human organizations in this way, we come to the conclusion that the human being is a different being as a metabolic organism than as a nervous-sensory organism. In the nervous-sensory organism, the soul is completely submerged. So what do we have in our consciousness? Our mental images, our thoughts. Yes, we feel a certain unreality towards thoughts. Thoughts are only images. The most perfect part of the human being is the head organism, but the soul-spiritual is most deeply submerged in the physical. We can be most materialistic in relation to the organization of thinking, the nerve sense organism. For what remains of the spirit in us are only images. In thoughts we have images of reality. He who understands how the spirit is completely diluted to the point of images – if I may say so – and thus lives as spirit in the waking person, will indeed see in the thought life of man a clear proof that there is spirit in man, but he will not address the thoughts themselves as spirit, but will address the thoughts as images that the spirit produces by mostly immersing itself in the nervous sensory apparatus and only reflecting back what remains as an image and arises in consciousness as a thought. One learns to see right through human nature and, accordingly, animal nature as well.

But then, when one has come to know the human being in this way, through imaginative, inspired, intuitive knowledge, when one has come to see the human being as a spiritual-soul being, when he is outside of his organism, when he is asleep ; if one can achieve self-knowledge through imagination, inspiration, intuition, that is, self-knowledge for the human being when he is outside of his physical body, then the difference between subjectivity and objectivity ceases to exist. Outside of the body, we then belong to the cosmos. If we can recognize ourselves by looking back at ourselves, then we can also observe in the cosmos. And then such observations arise that provide us with a real cosmology, a cosmosophy, as I have tried to give in my book “The Secret Science”. These are direct results of observations made by imagination, inspiration and intuition outside the physical human body. And the correlate to this is the complete knowledge of the human being.

It would now be interesting to extend this observation to the plant and mineral kingdoms. However, there is no time for that today. I would just like to point out a few other areas. I can only give examples. I would like to start from how we can follow the metamorphosis of the human organism in this way, how we can see how, on the one hand, the human being, in his material organization as a nerve-sense human being, is a result of the soul-spiritual life, and how, on the other hand, as a metabolic organism, he is not such a result. For the spiritual life continually burns matter, especially when it is most active as a spiritual life. We see how man metamorphoses, and in such a way that he materializes, spiritualizes, spiritualizes. When one is able, through supersensible knowledge, to follow this transformation of the organs through metamorphosis, then one learns to follow it not only with regard to their healthy state, but also with regard to their diseased state. In this regard, I would like to point you in just one direction.

In the moment when, through the empty consciousness mentioned yesterday, one gets to know the spiritual world around oneself, everything that was previously only the object of sensory observation becomes the object of spiritual observation. As the human being appears spiritualized when viewed in this way, so the whole world, the cosmos, is ensouled, spiritualized before the spiritual gaze of the human being. Then, for example, the sun, which we see through ordinary observation and also through ordinary science as this firmly defined, sharply contoured body, appears in what it presents to us physically, to the eye, as a physical organism. On the other hand, there is a spiritual solar element that is not confined to this part of space that we see with our physical organs, but that, as a solar element, fills the entire cosmos that is accessible to us. This solar element permeates all realms of nature, including the human being. It is something that works in the human being. And just as we otherwise study in physics, how the ethereal sunlight penetrates through the eye, how we study the effects of light through what is similar to the physical apparatus of the eye or to the eye itself, so we can now also study the spiritual part, the solar, the spiritual part of the solar activity. But we encounter this again in all the inner organs of the human being. And we become aware that a large part of the organs – actually all organs, but the different organs to a greater or lesser extent – have a life that springs, sprouts and pushes towards growth, a life that ascends towards a single pole. This begins with a lesser sprouting and sprouting power and increases with sprouting and sprouting power in the formation of growth, in promoting nutrition, also in digestion, consumption and so on.

On the other hand, there is a descending life in all organs, a degenerative one. Every evolution is opposed by a devolution or involution. The ascending life of the organs we have within us is worked on by the sun-like element spreading through the cosmos. The descending life can be observed particularly in the brain. Because brain matter is continually being molded through the activity of thinking, there must also be a continual breaking down, precisely from the brain. And the moon-like has to do with these degenerative forces. For the moon is not only that which it appears to us physically, but the physical is only the physical embodiment of that which, as a moon-like quality, permeates the entire cosmos accessible to us. This penetrates into us and into all realms of nature. But by being able to study, we say, in the kidneys, the heart, the lungs, in every single organ, the solar process and the lunar process, the ascending and the descending, the fruitful, growing and the degenerating, by this we understand the individual organ from the cosmos. There will be no complete, total physiology until we understand all the organs of the human being in their ascending and descending life from the spirit of the cosmos.

And in the same way as from the solar and lunar, we can also understand the inner organs of the human being from other impulses of the cosmos. That which is healthy belongs to the ascending life, that which is diseased to the descending life. Centripetal and centrifugal forces depend on other impulses in the cosmos than the solar and lunar ones. I just wanted to mention this as an example. These solar and lunar influences also creep into the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms, into all realms of nature. This leads to the study that culminates in the following: I study a human organ in a particular metamorphosis. I find that it is not in a normal state. For example, the human respiratory organs are not in a normal state, but rather as in the case of hoarseness, of a cold. I study this state. In layman's terms, I would say that I study the state of a cold. What is present in the human being? It is actually that which should otherwise be limited to the human senses, which should only prevail as forces in them, so to speak, has slipped down into the respiratory organs. They metamorphose pathologically so that they become too much like sensory organs. The sensuality that should otherwise only be in the sensory organs slips down into the respiratory organs. They sporadically become sensory organs, which makes them ill. Why is this? It is because that which can otherwise have a particularly strong effect in the sensory organs, the moon-like or sun-like, predominates. This is then transferred from the cosmos to the air, to other climatic conditions, so that such pathological metamorphoses arise from the human being's environment.

And now I observe something in the outer world of nature. For example, I look at the lilac, a violet flower with special petals. When one studies this plant, gets to know it inwardly, one finds that in it are active those forces which have an effect in precisely the opposite sense to the solar and lunar, as that which has a morbid effect in the interior of man when he has a cold, in the case I have described. And one learns to recognize how the peculiar interaction of sulfur-like forces with etheric oils in the lilac plant is in a polar opposite relationship to that which develops pathologically in the organism.

If we learn to recognize the metamorphosis of the human organs through the spirit, and if we learn to recognize the particular effects of the forces of the environment through the spirit of the cosmos, then we arrive at a rational materia medica and a rational therapy. We can now state, just as in other sciences, where we really have an overview of things, not just trial and error, which remedy may be suitable for this or that disease. I can only sketch the process. But in this respect, anthroposophy can shine a light everywhere. It does not have to rely on mere trial and error of this or that remedy for this or that disease, but one can see the connection between the remedy and the disease from the spirit of the cosmos. This is a very simple case. But it can be applied to the whole of pathology and therapy. Today I can only hint at the axiomatic, but in this direction, in anthroposophy, we already have a fully developed pathology and therapy. There are also institutes where things can be empirically verified and where one can be convinced that those remedies that are drawn from knowledge of spirit and nature prove to be effective, if, on the other hand, one is only able to diagnose the diseases correctly. Anthroposophy does not find such things in a botched, dilettantish, lay manner. It recognizes what medicine has achieved, and only builds further. But it is possible to build further, and much can be gained for the benefit of sick and healthy humanity if we continue to build on medicine in this way. In this way, as in so many other areas that I cannot touch on today, anthroposophy leads directly into the most important areas of life.

Now, finally, just a few examples of how to arrive at anthroposophical research results. I regret that I cannot cite more, but I would like to give at least a few disparate examples so that you can see how our scientific spirit can actually become universal by being shaped anthroposophically.

History, for example, is usually viewed in such a way that one records external facts or takes what is available in the way of documents about external facts, and perhaps draws a few conclusions about the spirit of the age from these. After all, it comes down to this: “What you call the spirit of the times is the lords' own spirit, which is reflected in the times”. But one believes oneself to be quite objective in history when one puts together a course of history from external documents. But when one ascends to such a realization, as I characterized it yesterday and as I have shown today with individual examples of its application, then one also comes to really observe from the other, the spiritual side. After all, we have perceptions of the natural side. We do not need to search for them. We have to strengthen our thinking to such an extent that it can organize and master the perceptions, so that through observation and experimentation the perceptions reveal their laws. But on the side of the spirit! Yes, since the old, intuitive insights, which were not fully conscious, as are today's anthroposophical insights, since they have only become traditional and can no longer be handled by people, the spiritual has basically lost its entire content, however little one wants to admit it today. It is interesting, though, that within German intellectual life, where one always draws the final consequences in this direction, on the side of intellectualism, there is a philosopher, Fritz Mauthner, who has taken Kant even further than Kant by writing a “critique of language” in which he attempts to prove that we actually have no spiritual content, that in what we say about things we can only say words. Critique of language - not critique of reason! And that is not even so unfounded. Fritz Mauthner, however repulsive his “criticism of language” may be, is only more honest than the others for the person who sees something in the real world. The others just do not admit to themselves that they only have words when they speak of thinking, feeling and willing. For these words must first be given a content again through supersensible knowledge. They have no content in the psychologists either. Take a modern psychology and read an explanation of what a thought is. They talk about thoughts because they have the word “thought” from ancient times, but there is nothing more in it in terms of the spiritual. We must first come to an understanding of this. And we will only come to that when we develop the slumbering powers in the human soul as I have described it yesterday. Then one will be able to follow the laws of spiritual development of humanity in a similar way to the way one follows the physical laws in natural science.

For example, there is the biogenetic law, which Haeckel strongly emphasized. Certainly, this has undergone various corrections. I am familiar with the current state of research regarding the biogenetic law. But essentially one can say that in the morphological stages that the human embryo goes through from conception to birth, until it is a fully formed human being, the formation of the individual animal forms is repeated. When the human germ is three weeks old, it resembles a fish, then it becomes more and more similar to other animal forms. It is an approximate law. The ontogeny, the development of the individual being, is an abbreviated repetition of the phylogeny, the development of the whole tribe, it is said.

Now, even if this law has to be corrected to a certain extent, it still provides a suggestion for establishing a certain connection between external physical perception and organic beings. But on the other hand, the aspect of human development in its historical becoming can be similarly arrived at through such a lawful connection. Anyone who has reached a certain age will indeed come to this - but human life as a whole belongs to the human being. Therefore, what can be observed in oneself only in later old age is also peculiar to the human being; one can see something very remarkable through unbiased observation, which is then confirmed and made clear through supersensible knowledge, if one is capable of it. One notices that, as a person approaches old age, all kinds of abilities may be present. These abilities actually want to develop inwardly, but they cannot come out. In today's human being, there is such a strong calcifying tendency that certain formative powers of the inner being cannot come out. They only hint at themselves. That is why people who are truly suited to self-knowledge inwardly today feel that, as they age, certain abilities slip away from them, abilities that actually want to develop but are overgrown by the hardening organism and cannot come out. And if we pursue this further, we go back in the development of humanity to times when these abilities could still emerge, when the human organism was still different from what it is today. Today, superficial views of nature believe that the human organism is quite the same as it has always been, as it was, for example, in ancient Egypt and before. No one considers that even in historical and prehistoric times, the human organism in its inner, deeper structure, its histology, is constantly changing, becoming stiffer and more sclerotic. So that if we go back to older times and follow what people in later ages have produced in literature, poetry and art, we also find empirical confirmation of what I am saying now. If we go back in time, we find that people in fact went through a certain development into a much older age, where their physical and mental development went hand in hand. Today, this is actually only present in youth. With children, we see very clearly: mental abilities develop in parallel with physical abilities. When the child changes teeth, a strong psychological change takes place. This happens again at puberty. Those who still have a sense of observation for such things will also find, at the beginning of the 1920s, that psychological changes still occur in parallel with physical changes in people. But then it all becomes very blurred. Towards the end of the twenties, it stops altogether for today's human being. In a sense, the human being becomes stationary in terms of his intellect and his capacity for feeling. He develops a spiritual life, and he can even perfect it, but the body no longer supports him in it. He no longer undergoes the same development.

If we go back to the Greeks – and with the methods I have described, we can also observe the past of historical life spiritually and directly, just as we can observe our own psychological past before birth or conception – by observing Greek life back in our imagination, actually produced a Aeskulap, a Sophocles, a Phidias, then one comes to the conclusion: the whole soul-body life of man must have been different, there must have been a different way of feeling and living into the world. But this can be traced back to the fact that in Greece, until the mid-thirties, the physical body was as it is with us only in youth. A person today, at the end of the twenties, who stops receiving support for their spiritual life from their physical body, had something during the Greek era until the mid-thirties, in the whole ascending life, whereby the physical body supported them. And if we go back further, two or three millennia before the Mystery of Golgotha, we find people - anthroposophical research can recognize this through direct observation - who, well into their forties, are as dependent on their bodies as a child is on his or her parents until sexual maturity. We find that in prehistoric times, people experienced their bodies into old age.

But what does that mean? It means that we experience our body as it grows, up to the age of thirty-five. When it is in decline, in degeneration, it no longer participates with the soul. We perceive nothing through the power of the body. Precisely when the body decays, we no longer perceive through it. At that point we have already become independent of the body. Yes, anyone who studies the Vedas with their wonderful flow, with what lives in them, and who finds their way into their remarkable spirituality, which also lives in similar spiritual creations, will also find external confirmation of what anthroposophical research can say.

There were times, ancient times in the evolution of humanity, when man, in his body, not only had an entity in the ascending life that worked in parallel with his soul. In the ascending life we are half-stunned by the sprouting, sprouting life, so that we do not look into the spiritual world, while, as the body decays, we see all the more spiritually in the decaying body with the soul. There were times when man still experienced his disintegrating body, and by looking in the disintegrating body, he saw with the soul all the more spiritually. In that world period – one would like to describe it today as prehistoric, as if it had been primitive, but it was not – people still lived in their fifties and sixties in such a way that their spiritual life was dependent on the participation of physical development, and now of descending development. As a result, there was a certain mood in these old people. When one was young, when one was still a child or a youth or a maiden, one looked up to the old people and said to oneself: Oh, these old people, they experience through growing old something that one can only know as an old person. They grow into a spiritual world while their body decays. In the most ancient patriarchal times, people looked up to the elderly and said to themselves: They grow into a divine spiritual world simply by virtue of their physical development. Oh, they also approached old age quite differently, knowing: If I grow old, I will become a wise man. There were exceptions, of course, but there are exceptions among the young today as well. Imagine the mood that pervades a society when you look up to the patriarchs in this way because they can have something that you cannot have in your youth.

Thus we see epochs in historical humanity, where humanity becomes younger and younger, if I may express it that way. First, people went through the physical up to their old age. Then we see people who experienced physical exertion into their forties, then the Greeks, who experienced it into their thirties, and thus only just avoided the cliff, that great turning point, where they could see into the decaying body and thus express that wonderful harmony of body and soul in their works of art.

Now humanity has become even younger. This expression is not used quite correctly. What I mean is that they consciously experience physical conditions up to the age of twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Humanity will become ever younger and younger in this respect.

So while we say, with regard to our physical development as an embryo, that we repeatedly carry within us the physical tribal development from the simplest to the most perfect living being — the embryo goes through this from beginning to end — the reverse development takes place for the life of the soul. We as humanity experienced life into old age in earlier times. Then it recedes. People become mobile, inwardly and spiritually alive through their bodies only in their youth. This is what one notices as one grows older and actually wants to shape out what once really shaped out when the physical organization was still different. And just as the human embryo in the third week is like an earlier state, so is the soul development of humanity in its present state as if earlier states had degenerated, been lost. It is a retrogression. While the development of the embryo, now in the physical sense, is an upward development, the spiritual development is a retrogression. This is connected with the whole development of mankind. Whereas man was formerly dependent on the body in the historical development, he is more and more dependent on emancipating the soul from the body. The bodily element works in him more and more only as a youthful bodily element. This means that he is instructed to do that which he used to develop in himself through the powers of the body, now through spiritual-soul development from within, so that what the body does not give us in old age, the soul must carry us into old age.

In this way, pedagogy must be transformed, all human development must be transformed. Yes, when we get to know such laws – and there are many such laws that act as impulses in the development of humanity and of history – then we also have the opportunity to learn something very profound for human life from the study of history, which is now spiritualized. The necessity for the present-day organization of pedagogy and didactics in relation to pedagogy and didactics in earlier epochs of human development arises simply from the fact that humanity draws less and less from the physical development of the body in old age and more and more from the physical development of youth. and more and more on the physical development of young people; that it must therefore replace what no longer comes naturally by working into the body through the development of the spirit. If we find the right pedagogy, the right methodology to bring the soul to life, then we educate and teach in such a way that, for example, we do not simply receive concepts at school that are ready-made, with ready-made contours. That would be like keeping one's hands and arms as small as when one was a child throughout one's entire life. If we want to teach a child ready-made definitions and concepts, it is as if we wanted to keep the limbs of a human being fixed so that they cannot grow. We have to teach children such concepts, mental images and feelings that live and grow, so that by the fortieth or sixtieth year they are no longer the same as they were in their early years, through their own inner growth. This possibility exists. This is the aim of the pedagogy of the Waldorf school. It is not just about the child, but about the whole human being; it asks how the child must be educated so that it can benefit from the education throughout its life; so that the child does not have to say to itself when it is thirty years old: Now you have learned, but your concepts have remained childish dwarfs; they do not grow. One must convey such vivid mental images, concepts and impulses to the child that they are in a state of growth and will only be properly developed at a later age. In this way, one can learn intensively for life, directly from real, spiritualized historical observation. And when it is said today that people do not learn from history, it is because there is not much to learn from it, since it does not say much except for the compilation of data given for earlier epochs, which, however, are composed only of external appearances. Anthroposophically oriented observation also leads into the interior here, in that it provides perceptions in which the spiritual entities are not merely words, but also have spiritual substance.

So I could only show you in sketchy examples how the research results of anthroposophy look. They are such that we first get to know the human being, that we get to know the universe from the human being, that we also arrive at a corresponding practice of life through the correct application of the higher insights to the human being, a practice of life that extends into social life, as I tried to show with the example of education. So we may think in a similar way with regard to this reflection, as I have already said at the end of another reflection: Anthroposophy does not want to be a theory, does not want to be a one-sided teaching, but wants to be something that is drawn from life and can therefore, because it is drawn from the full life, from the bodily, soul and spiritual life, in turn serve the full life of man. For only then will a worldview truly serve life, when it is life itself. For this must be kept in mind: not abstract thoughts, which are inwardly dead in themselves – tomorrow I will have more to say about the deadness of thoughts – not thoughts that are dead, but only thoughts that are pulsating with life can also serve life. Only a worldview that does not live in dead thoughts, but is itself life, can serve life, because only life itself can be the true servant of life.

Tomorrow I shall begin my discussion of the problems related to the connection of the spiritual scientific impulses with various unclarified tasks of the present time, and the influence that spiritual science must exert on individual, especially scientific, problems. Then I should like to refer to what I may call, in the sense of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch, the karma of human vocation.

Today I shall take as my point of departure something that seemingly has little to do with that theme, but it will afford an opportunity to connect various related matters. I shall endeavor to point out the element in Goethe's life that characterizes him especially as a personality of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, and much to which I have recently referred will, of course, be echoed in my remarks. I should like to bring before your souls the very facts pertaining to this personality that will enable anyone to distinguish important phenomena of the advancing post-Atlantean cultural epoch. In relation to the spiritual interests of humanity, the life and personality of Goethe are comprehensive and decisive to an extent that can hardly be ascribed to any other individual. Still, it may also be said that, in spite of much that has occurred, his life and personality have had the least possible effect on our lives. This, however, must be attributed to the very nature of our modern culture. It may be asked how it can possibly be said that the life of Goethe has remained without effect. Are not his works known? Has not an edition of his works, consisting of hundreds of volumes, been published recently? Did not his published letters number six or seven thousand by the turn of the century, and today number almost ten thousand? Is there not a wealth of literature concerning Goethe, one might almost say in every civilized language? Do not his works continue to be produced on stage? Is not his major work, Faust, brought again and again before the minds of men?

Now, I have often referred recently to the strange error of an illustrious contemporary scholar, which is really far more symptomatic of the character of our time than one might assume. A dominant scientist, this scholar speaks of the significance of the scientific world conception in such a way that he presents it as being the most brilliant, not only of our age, but of all ages in human history. He concludes that although it is hard to prove that we live in the best of all worlds, it is certain to the scientist, at least, that today we humans live in the best of all epochs, and we might exclaim in the words of Goethe:

‘Tis delightful to transport
Oneself into the spirit of the past,
To see in times before us how a wise man thought,
And what a glorious height we have achieved at last.’¹

This noted scientist² is gravely in error; he presents this as his own innermost sentiment and believes that he is thereby associating himself with Goethe, who is renowned for his knowledge of the world and of man. But he is really associating himself with Wagner, whom Goethe sets up as a foil to the Faust figure. Yet such a blunder contains at least a good bit of the honesty of our age because this person speaks more genuinely than the numerous people who, in quoting Goethe, have Faust on their tongues, but really have an undisguised Wagner attitude of mind. As a basis for subsequent reflections, let us, then, bring up before our mind's eye the life of Goethe as a spiritual phenomenon.

If we wish to study human life in connection with the important question of destiny, if we study the questions of karma, we should remember that Goethe was born in a city and under conditions clearly of much meaning for his life. The family of Goethe's father had come to Frankfurt in the seventeenth century, whereas his mother's family, the Textors, was old, established, and highly respected, so much so that from it the mayors of Frankfurt were chosen. This fact alone signifies the respect enjoyed by the family at that time. Goethe's father was a man with an extraordinarily strong sense of duty, but for a man of his time, he also possessed a broad range of interests. He had traveled in Italy and representations of important Roman creations, about which he liked to talk, hung on all the walls of his Patrician Frankfurt home. What was dominant in the French culture of his time completely permeated the life of Frankfurt and most intimately influenced Goethe's home. The important world events were part of the life in his home, and his father took a deep interest in them. Goethe's mother, moreover, was a woman of the most spontaneous human sentiment, sharing directly in everything that connects human nature with the legendary, the fabulous, everything that lifts man aloft above the commonplace as if on the wings of poetic fantasy.

In Goethe's boyhood days it was much more possible to grow up unconfused by those disturbing influences that affect children today because they are dragged into school at a relatively early age. This did not happen to young Goethe; he developed extraordinarily freely in his parents' home under the austere but never harsh influence of his father and his poetically endowed mother. In later years he could recall with inner happiness these years of his boyhood and childhood that led to a ripe humanness. Many things that we read today in Goethe's story of his life, Poetry and Truth, though decked out in a somewhat pedantic humor, have more meaning than may be supposed. In telling how he practiced the piano,³ there is a profoundly human significance; the fingers of his hands, as if playing mythological roles, become soul-endowed, independent figures. They become Thumbling, Pointerling—I say this without sentimentality—and acquire certain mystical relations to the tones. This indicates how Goethe was to be guided into life as a complete human being. Not only a piece of this man, the head, should be guided, as so often happens, one-sidedly into life to be followed by the support of the rest of the body, developed through all sorts of athletics and sports; but, on the contrary, the body permeated by spirit to its very fingertips should be related with the outer world.

We must take into account from the very first the marked individuality of the innate endowments and nature of Goethe. From his earliest youth, everything pointed to a definite orientation of his life. As he grows in childhood, he is just as strongly inclined to follow with complete absorption the charming and stirring fairy tales and other narratives of his mother, thus even as a boy bringing his fantasy into living activity, as he is also inclined to escape from her and especially from his austere father. Slipping away into the narrow alleys, he would observe all sorts of things and also become entangled in varied situations through which he experienced in vital sentiments and emotions much that is stored up in human karma. His stern father guides the boy in a certain matter-of-fact way to what people in those days thought could provide support and direction in life. The father is a jurist who has grown up among, and is permeated with, Roman points of view; the son's soul, too, absorbs these views. In this process, however, through viewing the works and treasures of Roman art that represented what is essentially Roman, there was kindled in the boyish soul a certain aspiration for what had been created in the culture of Rome.

Everything tended to situate Goethe in a quite definite way within the life of his time. In this way, he became, between the third and fourth centuries of the fifth post-Atlantean period, a personality bearing within him all the impulses of that period. Early on, he becomes a self-sustained personality, living out of his own nature, free of everything that binds a man in a fixed, pedantic way to those certain forms of one or another group of social ties. He learns to know social relationships in such a way that they affect him, but he is not united with them. He always keeps a certain isolated pedestal upon which he stands and from which he can establish connections with everything. From the very beginning, however, unlike so many others, he does not excessively identify himself with anything or with the environing circumstances. To be sure, all this results from a peculiarly favorable karma in which, when considered objectively, we shall find a solution for profound questions and problems regarding karma in general.

After Goethe had been introduced by his father to the field of jurisprudence, he was sent to the University of Leipzig, which he entered in 1765 at a relatively early age. We must not forget that when he joined this university life he was not tormented and exhausted by those strenuous exercises that must be suffered for an even longer period of time by young people in our day who are trying to pass the battery of final examinations at the conclusion of high school, the Abitur. After having passed their examinations, these young people are anxious to wipe the most recent learning experiences from their minds and enter a university in order to enjoy life. No, young Goethe had not entered the University of Leipzig simply to idle away his time but, nevertheless, he was not above skipping lectures and using the time saved for something else, as was done by many students. However, as he enlisted in the lofty and famous scientific life of the university, he came into circles that had never failed to awaken a longing in him whenever he had heard about them. Indeed, he knew above all that the famous Gottsched⁴ worked at the university, Gottsched whose head held all the learning of the time and who expressed it in writing and orally to those associated with the contemporary culture of Leipzig. To be sure, Lessing's⁵ great impulse was still to be felt in Leipzig, but it was natural for Goethe to think that the lofty Gottsched would introduce him to the entire scope of contemporary wisdom, enabling him to study conjointly jurisprudence and philosophy and whatever else a man of the world might derive from theology and learning regarding supernatural things.

Goethe, however, who possessed without doubt a certain sense for aesthetics, was slightly disillusioned when he first called on Gottsched. He appeared at Gottsched's door. I do not know whether or not the servant sensed something of Goethe's nature, but he admitted him directly into the presence of Gottsched without taking the time to announce him in the proper manner. So Goethe came upon the great man without his wig, standing there quite baldheaded. To a learned man in the year 1765 this was something quite dreadful. Goethe, who was sensitive to such things, had to witness how Gottsched seized his wig with a graceful turn and jammed it on his head, and how with his other hand he slapped his servant on the face. Goethe's enthusiasm was a little chilled. But he was still more chilled by the fact that Gottsched's entire demeanor corresponded little with that for which he longed.

Nor did Gellert's⁶ moralistic lectures speak to him of the comprehensive intellectual horizons he desired. Therefore, he soon turned his attention more to the medical and scientific lectures, which were in a way continued in the home of Professor Ludwig, where he took his lunch and where much of a similar nature was discussed. It cannot really be said that Goethe “studied thoroughly jurisprudence, medicine, philosophy and, unfortunately, also theology”⁷ in Leipzig, but he got a view of them and, most important, it was in Leipzig that he absorbed many a scientific concept of his time. After having busied himself with the sciences, having experienced various aspects of life, and having been involved in various affairs, he then became so ill that he stood face to face with death. Such things must be taken fully into account by one who considers the human being in a spiritual scientific way. We must realize how much passed through his soul as he actually faced death because of extremely severe and recurring hemorrhaging. He was weakened, had to return home, and could not resume his university studies for some time.

When Goethe did continue his studies in Strassburg, he joined the circle of an important personality who became of exceptional significance to him. In order to judge with what feelings he met this personality, we must recall that, when he returned to Frankfurt under the influence of those inner experiences through which he had passed in Leipzig when he was face to face with death, he had already begun to enter more deeply, through association with various persons, into a mystical experience and a mystical conception of the world. He had immersed himself in mystic, occult writings and sought in a youthful way to elaborate a systematic world conception that took its point of departure in mystical—one might say, mystic-cabalistic—points of view. Even then he endeavored to learn “what secret force/ dwells in the world and rules its course”⁸ and to open himself to the influence of “every working force and seed.”⁹ He was unwilling merely “to trade in words,” as he had seen this done in Leipzig.

Then he came to Strassburg where he could again attend lectures on science, and this is what he did at first. Jurisprudence, which was so dear to his father but less so to him, would be taken care of somehow, no doubt, but his most urgent impulse was to investigate how various laws of nature conform to one another. As he was once ascending a flight of stairs, he met a personality who immediately made a tremendous impression on him, not only through his external appearance, but also through an inner light that radiated through a highly intelligent countenance. Externally, a man approached him who had, indeed, somewhat the appearance of a priest, but who wore his long overcoat in such a curious way that the train was stuffed into his hind pockets. The man who made such a grand impression on¹⁰

Goethe now entered vitally into all that then stirred tempestuously in Herder, and that was indeed a good deal. One might say that Herder bore within him an entirely new world conception. Basically, what had never before been undertaken, Herder bore it brilliantly within himself; that is, the endeavor to trace the phenomena of the world from the simplest entity, the simplest lifeless thing, through the plant world to the animal kingdom, on to man, to history, and even to the divine governance of the world in history. At that time, Herder's mind already harbored a vast, comprehensive view of the world, and he spoke with enthusiasm about his new ideas; but he also on occasion spoke with indignation against all pedantic, traditional ideas. Many of these conversations with Herder animated Goethe. That everything in the world is in process of evolution and that a spiritual plan of the universe sustains all evolution was a connection Herder perceived as no one ever had before. But this was still growing in him, and he had not yet expressed it on paper. Goethe received it in this state of being born and shared in Herder's aspiration, contemplation, and struggle. We may say that Herder wished to trace the evolution of the world from a grain of dust through all the kingdoms of nature up to God. He then did this in a splendid comprehensive fashion, as far as was necessary at that time, in his incomparable work, Ideas for a Philosophy of Human History. Here we can really see that Herder's mind grasped everything that was then known of the facts of nature and of the human realm, but all this knowledge was condensed into a world conception permeated with spirit.

Beside this, Goethe received through Herder an idea of Spinoza's contribution to the evolution of a new concept of the world, and this worked on him. The leaning that Goethe showed throughout his life toward Spinoza¹¹ was planted in him at that time in Strassburg by Herder.¹²

Herder was an enthusiastic admirer of Shakespeare,¹³ which was something unheard of at that time. Just think how this peculiar polarity of souls must have worked between Herder and Goethe when Goethe, yearning to perceive these things that contemporary culture could not give him, found in Herder a revolutionary spirit of the first rank storming the culture of his day. Up to that time Goethe had learned to revere that art of form that is found in Corneille and Racine,¹⁴ and had taken all this in as one takes in things that are said to be the most important in the world. But he had absorbed all this with a certain inner indignation. When Herder introduced him to Shakespeare, it worked on his mind like a breath of fresh air. Here was a poet free from everything formal—who created characters directly from human individualities; who possessed nothing of all the unity of time, place, and action that Goethe had learned to value so highly, but who presented human beings in his plays. We may say that a revolutionary cultural mood came to life in Goethe, now baptized in the name of Shakespeare, which we may express thus: I want to comprehend what constitutes the human being himself, not how he is put into the interrelationships of the world by formal rules and laws, or by the network of unities of situation, time, place, and action.

In this regard, he was able to become acquainted with men then in Strassburg who sought to look into the deeper and more intimate aspects of the life of the soul. One of them was the remarkable Jung-Stilling,¹⁵ for example, who was studying the occult aspects of the life of the soul and knew how to describe them thoroughly. His life history, his description of what he calls the “gray man” who rules in the subterranean sphere of the earth, belongs among the finest descriptions of occult relationships. It may be said that Goethe was introduced by Herder to all that belongs to the life of nature and history, the aesthetic in life, and by Jung-Stilling to the occult aspects of human life, with which he had already familiarized himself in Frankfurt through an exhaustive study of Swedenborg.¹⁶

Such ideas fermented in Goethe's mind in connection with what had been passed on to him as the laws of nature while he was attending lectures on the sciences in Strassburg. Then he began to see the great problems and questions of human life. He looked deeply into what can be cognized and what can be willed by man, and into the relation between human nature and universal nature. Earlier in Frankfurt he had become acquainted with the work of Paracelsus¹⁷ in connection with all this. And thus, a profound longing to perceive “every working force and seed” took a hold of him, especially in Strassburg along with all that he otherwise experienced there.

It must not be imagined that, in Strassburg, Goethe simply trifled away his time during his frequent visits to the pastor's home in Sesenheim,¹⁸ although I certainly do not want to deprecate the importance of these visits. He was always capable of uniting life in the depths of man's will and cognition with life in association with the immediately human and ordinary, and with every human destiny.

After he had defended his dissertation, he became a sort of Doctor of Jurisprudence—Licentiate¹⁹ and Doctor of Jurisprudence. He thereby satisfied his father and could return home. The practice of law began, but there was a notable disharmony in the soul of this man who had to study legal documents at the Supreme Court in Wetzlar that were often literally hundreds of years old. There “law and rights like an endless illness” dragged along their weary way. Even in later times much of this sort of thing could still be experienced elsewhere. In a place where I grew up—permit me to interject this—I was able to experience the following. In the 1870s when I was a boy, we once heard that a man was to be imprisoned—in the seventies! He was a much respected man who had a rather large business for such a place. He was imprisoned for a year and a half, I think, because in 1848 he had thrown stones at an inn during the revolution! The lawsuit had actually continued from 1848 when, as a young boy, this person had thrown stones at an inn, until his present age. In 1873 he was imprisoned for a year and a half. It was, perhaps, not so bad then as when Goethe studied the documents at the Supreme Court, but it was still bad enough.

Goethe's work gave his father immense pleasure, and he shared with counsel and help the problems Goethe had to solve with the dusty documents. This is not to say, however, that Goethe was lacking in skill as a lawyer. That was by no means the case. He made his contribution as an attorney and his work at that time belies the recurring belief that a great spirit, living in the world of ideals, must be deficient in practical life. He was not at all lacking as an attorney. When lawyers these days point to their busy schedules and call attention to the fact that they have no time to read Goethe's works, one should point out to them that Goethe was unquestionably just as good a lawyer as they. That can be documented, as can many things related to his work. But in addition to being just as practical as only a practical man can be, Goethe at this time also carried within him the idea for his book, Götz von Berlichingen.²⁰ Indeed, he bore within him the idea for his Faust, too, which had already emerged in Frankfurt from his scientific studies and later from his acquaintance with Herder and Jung-Stilling.

Götz von Berlichingen—Gottfried von Berlichingen—evidences at once, as Goethe forms it into a work of art, what his own nature really was. Goethe's way of being introduces a new element into the intellectual activity of humanity. As artist or poet, he cannot be compared with Dante, Homer, or Shakespeare. He stands in a different relationship to poetic creation, and this is bound up, in turn, with the way his mode of being relates to the age in which he lives. This age, as it was expressed in his immediate, and also in his more comprehensive, environment, did not permit such a spirit as his to blend wholly with the period. The life of the state that we today take for granted did not exist around him. After all, he lived in a region where certain territories had, to a high degree, taken on individual forms. How this came about is not important, but he did not live in a large state. No great all-encompassing conformity spread over the area where he lived and grew up. The life about him was not narrowly organized and thus he could experience it everywhere in its individual manifestations and simultaneously expose himself to its universal meaning. And this is what distinguishes Goethe from other poets.

One day a book came into his hands that is, indeed, badly written but that interested him immensely. It was Autobiography of the Iron-handed Gottfried of Berlichingen, which dealt with that strange individual who participated in so many events of the sixteenth century, but whose part in them was of such a peculiar nature. When we read this autobiography, we see how, under the Emperor Maximilian and Charles the Fifth, he came into contact with every possible kind of person and took part in every possible kind of quarrel and battle during the first half of the century.

His activities, however, always come about in such a way that he takes part in one event, is wholly involved in it and expresses himself completely therein. Then he becomes involved in another event in an entirely different role; he is drawn into that, fights for the most varied issues, and is later captured. After he has bound himself by an oath not to take any further part in quarrels and is thereby left at peace in his castle in middle South Germany, he becomes involved in the peasant uprising. All this, however, occurs in such a way that we see he is never forced by the events; but what holds these disparate episodes together is really his personality, the character of Gottfried himself. When one reads the autobiography of this man, I will not say that the events in which he is involved bore one to death, but we are not really interested in his quarrels and battles. Yet, in spite of all the boredom of the single events, we are always interested in his personality, so strong in character and so rich in content.

These traits, however, are just what attracted Goethe to Gottfried of Berlichingen. Thus, he could see the substance, the life, and the struggle of the sixteenth century concentrated in one personality as he could never otherwise have seen it. This was what he needed. To him, this meant taking up history and becoming acquainted with it. The way in which one or another historian, after having searched through attics and wastebaskets, telescopes together in a few “pragmatic maxims”²¹ individual historical periods would certainly not have suited Goethe. But to see a man standing alive in the midst of it, to see reflected in a human soul what is otherwise not of special interest, this had some meaning for him. He took this tedious, badly written autobiography of Gottfried of Berlichingen, read it, and really changed its content remarkably little. For this reason, he called the first version of this drama, if we choose so to designate it, The History of Gottfried of Berlichingen with the Iron Hand, Dramatized. He did not use the term drama, but dramatized. He had really only dramatized the history of Gottfried of Berlichingen, but in such a way that the whole period became alive through this man. Bear in mind, it was the sixteenth century, the time of the dawn of the post-Atlantean epoch. Goethe perceived this time through the character of Gottfried of Berlichingen, the man who grew up in middle South Germany.

At that time a fragment of life had already passed through Goethe's mind that is historical but seen really within actual life, not in what is “historic.” It would not have been possible for him then, with all those problems of humanity in his mind to which I have alluded, to take just any individual and dramatize his life according to history. However, to dramatize the stammering autobiography of a being who worked upon him with complete humanness in such a way that it would reflect the dramatic art as revealed to him through the reading of Shakespeare, that was something he could do. So he became known in certain circles that were interested in this sort of thing since he had lifted a fragment of the past, which was a book sealed with seven seals, into his own present world. Of course, just as little was then known about what Goethe disclosed by means of the badly written history of Gottfried of the Sixteenth Century as is known today by many a pastor about the super-sensible life.

Goethe had taken hold of human life. He had to, since his life style was one that made him blend with life as it revealed itself directly to him. To be sure, he continued to stand on an isolated pedestal, but as life touched him, he became one with it.

Goethe was to be brought into union with life in still another way. There is little conception today of something that constituted a profound trait of the soul life in the so-called cultured world surrounding Goethe. People had become bound, as it were, to what had come about since the sixteenth century. In public life, the laws and statutes had been handed down like an inherited disease,²² but the souls of men were, nevertheless, touched in a certain way by what we recognize as the impulse of souls of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. The result was that, for the most deeply endowed natures, a profound disharmony ensued between what they sensed within the soul and what took place in the external world. This, to be sure, led to a marked sentimentality in experience.

To sense as strongly as possible how wide the gulf was between the actual world and what a true and warm human soul could feel, to express this contrast with all possible emphasis, was felt by many to be a profound necessity. The eye was directed toward the life of the world in which various ranks of society and the people with their various interests lived. But they often had little soul contact with each other in this public life. Yet, when these human beings were alone, they sought for a special life of the soul existing apart from external life, and for them to be able to say to themselves that this external life was wholly unlike all that the soul would strive after and hope for was felt to be a great relief. To get into such a sentimental mood was a characteristic of the age. Life, as it was publicly manifest, was felt to be bad and defective. People strove to search for life where it had not been besmirched by indifferent public existence, and where they could really enter in a vital way into the silent working and weaving of the world of nature, the peaceful life of animals and plants.

From this a mood gradually arose that affected many cultured spirits. To be able to weep over the disharmonies of the world afforded a tremendous satisfaction. Those writers were especially honored whose works tended to induce a flood of tears to fall upon the pages that were being read. To be unhappy constituted for many the very happiness for which they longed. Someone takes a walk in the forest; he then returns and, sitting quite still in his room, reflects: “How many, many little flowers and tiny worms that I did not notice and trod under foot have sacrificed their lives to this walk of mine!” Then he weeps hot tears into his handkerchief over the discord between nature and human life. Letters written to beloved friends who were as sentimental as the writer begin with such expressions as “Dearly beloved Friend,” and this, too, is moistened by a tear that falls on the paper and hastens away with the letter as a precious testimony to the friend.

This life still permeated a large part of the cultured world in the second half of the eighteenth century. It also surrounded Goethe, and he had much understanding of it, for there was much truth in this feeling of the disharmony between the frequently unconscious or vague feelings of the soul and what was afforded by the outer world, and Goethe could feel the truth in it. In those days, the silent plan of life between souls was not at all similar to what took place in the world as a whole. He had to go through this because he could be, and needed to be, touched by everything. But, in his contact with these things, he had to draw health-giving forces from his inner self repeatedly.

And thus in his youthful novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, he wrote himself free of this whole temper of the age, which we call Siegwart,²³ or Werther, fever, and which had taken possession of a large part of educated society. In the figure of Werther he concealed to such a degree as to come near to suicide what he had shared of this sentimental mood and the disharmonies of the world. It is for this reason that he has Werther end his life through suicide. It is well to consider that, on the one hand, it was possible for Goethe to be bound up with everything in the souls of those about him, even though he was so firmly rooted in his own individuality. On the other hand, what he was writing about cleansed his soul and at the same time became a work of art. After he had finished Werther, he was completely cured of him, whereas in many cases other persons were only then possessed because through the influence of the Werther, Werther fever raged in the most widespread circles. Goethe, however, was cured.

In estimating such things, we must not overlook the fact that Goethe possessed a broad inner horizon so that he could, in a sense, live within himself in polaric contrasts. He went through the Werther sickness and wrote himself free of it through The Sorrows of Young Werther. Yet, there is truth in what he wrote to a friend at that time. He sketched a picture of his loftily sentimental mood, but also said there was a Goethe other than the suicidal Goethe who harbored thoughts of hanging himself and who entertained thoughts for which he ought to be hanged. There was also a carnival Goethe,²⁴ who could put on all sorts of masks and disguises, and this Goethe also really lived artistically. We need only allow the more or less fragmentary dramatic creations of that time, Satyros and Pater Brey, to work upon us, and we shall be able to sense the scope of his inner life: on the one hand, the sentimentality of Werther, on the other, the humor of the Satyros and Pater Brey.

Satyros, the deified forest devil who develops a veritable pantheism and does not enjoy the fruits of culture, wants to return to nature in genuine Rousseau fashion. Raw chestnuts—what a royal repast! Such is the ideal of Satyros. But he is really a philosopher of nature who is quite familiar with its secrets, and—if you will excuse me—he wins his followers especially among women, is deified, but finally behaves quite badly. Here all false yearning after authoritarian belief is ridiculed with immense humor. Then in Pater Brey we see the cult of false prophets play a part and, under the mask of holiness, do all kinds of things. This, indeed, is not ridiculed but objectively presented with much humor. Here Goethe is a humorist in the most vital sense—a blunt humorist, expressing it all from the same constitution of soul that created Werther. He was able to do this not because he was superficial but because he was profound enough to grasp the polarities of human life.

Especially the Werther book gained Goethe a far-reaching reputation. It became well-known rather early,²⁵ and it was really this work that led the Archduke of Weimar to take an interest in him. The Gottfried of Berlichingen made a decided impression, but not among those who then considered themselves capable of understanding culture, art, and poetry. “An abominable imitation of bad English works; a disgusting platitude,” said an eminent man of the time about this book.²⁶

It was in 1775 that Goethe was able to transfer his activities to a different field of operation, to Weimar. The Duke of Weimar²⁷ became acquainted with Goethe and called him there, where he became the minister of state.

Nowadays, after the event, people have the feeling that Goethe had already written the Gottfried of Berlichingen, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and even carried with him to Weimar a large part of his Faust; they see in all this his most important accomplishment. He himself did not consider them to be of first importance at that time, but they were only the scrapings of his life. The Duke, likewise, did not appoint him court poet, but minister of state, which caused the pedants in Weimar to be beside themselves with anger. The Duke had to address a sort of epistolary decree to his people in which he justified himself by saying that Goethe was in his eyes simply a greater man than the pedants. The fact that he was made minister of state without having been previously—what shall I say?—under-councillor and upper-councillor, required at least some justification from the Duke, and that is what he produced.

Goethe was by no means a bad statesman and performed his ministerial duties not as part time work, but as matters of first importance. He was a far better statesman than many a minister who was not a Goethe in our sense. Anyone who personally convinces himself—as I may say with all modesty that I have done—of the way in which he performed his ministerial obligations will know that he was an excellent minister for the Duchy of Sachsen-Weimar and was completely devoted to his duties. Being a minister was his chief occupation, and he achieved a good deal during his ten years in this capacity.

He had brought with him a part of his Faust, which is listed in the collected works under the delectable title, The Primordial Faust (Ur-Faust). All that we might call the upward vision of Faust was already alive in this version. How directly had Faust been taken from the life that touches every human soul!

In Weimar it was evident again that Goethe could not be completely captured by his environment. We often become acquainted with persons who are, in greater or lesser degree, merely the exponents of their files. Goethe, however, was not merely the exponent of the numerous documents he drew up as a Weimar functionary. In addition, he acclimated himself to the conditions in Weimar and, even though he remained on his isolated pedestal, he was nevertheless touched by everything human. The immediately human took form with him as art. Thus we see how the character of a woman, Frau von Stein,²⁸ with whom he formed a friendship, became a life problem for him. It was fundamentally his immediate view of her character that was the cause of his dramatizing the figure of Iphigenia. He wished to put into artistic form what worked on him in the character of Frau von Stein, and the legend of Iphigenia was only the means for solving this life problem. The relationships at the Weimar court, his life with Duke Karl August, whose character was so strangely endowed, his view of the fate of the Duchess, and other connected circumstances, all became problems to him. Life became a question. He again needed a subject in order to master these relationships in an artistic way, and to do so he took that of Tasso. It was, however, really the Weimar situation that he artistically mastered.

It is, of course, impossible to enter here into the many details of Goethe's mental life, yet I wish to place these facts before you in order that we may form a spiritual scientific contact with them as examples. Even in the most early period of his stay in Weimar, through the various circumstances into which he was brought, the possibility arose of deepening his studies in natural science by independent work. He continued his plant studies and began anatomical studies at the University of Jena. He endeavored in everything to confirm in detail the ideas of the universal interrelationships he had received from Herder. He wished to study the connections within the plant kingdom and what was spiritually alive in plants. He wished to hold the kinship among the animals before his mind and to find the path upward from them to man. He wished to study the idea of evolution in direct connection with actual natural objects. You see, Goethe had taken up Herder's great idea to study the evolutionary phrases of all entities, a unitary spiritual process of becoming. In this thought he and Herder then stood practically alone because those who dominated the intellectual life of the time thought quite otherwise; everything was pigeonholed.

All intellectual activity can be found to work in two polaric directions: toward separation and toward union. It was important for Goethe and Herder to bring unity into diversity and multiplicity; others were simply content with neat classifications and clever division. For these people, the problem was to show, for example, how man is distinguished from the animal. Man, it was said, has no intermaxillary bone in the upper jaw in which the incisors are rooted, but only a unitary jawbone; only the animals have an intermaxillary bone. Goethe was certainly not materialistically inclined, and he had no desire to establish materialism. The thought, however, that the inner harmony of nature could not be confirmed because of such a detail offended his intelligence. He therefore undertook to prove, in opposition to all scientific authorities, that man also has an intermaxillary bone, and he succeeded. He thus arrived at his first important scientific treatise entitled, An Intermaxillary Bone Is to Be Ascribed to Man as Well as to the Animal.²⁹ He had thereby introduced a single detail into the evolution of thought with which he opposed the entire scientific world, and which is now an obvious, undisputed truth.

Goethe appears, not as the poet of Werther, of Gottfried, and of Faust, or as the poet in whose head Iphigenia and Tasso came into being, but as one possessing a profound insight into the interrelationships of nature, so that he now studies and labors as a genuine research scientist. We have here, not a one-sided scientist, poet, or minister; he is a complete human being aspiring in all directions.

Goethe lived in Weimar for about ten years and then could no longer suppress his yearning to go to Italy. So in the late eighties he undertook a journey to Italy as if it were an escape. We must not forget that he then, for the first time, entered into situations that he had longed for and cherished from his earliest youth. This was his first introduction to the world at large; you must remember that he had never before seen any other large city except Frankfurt. We must also not forget that Rome was the first city through which he viewed the theater of world history. This must be included in his life and also that he felt the whole stream of life pulsating in Rome as it had risen in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Goethe united what then worked upon him as world history with the comprehensive world conception germinating in his mind. He traced the idea throughout the multiplicity of forms of plants, stones, and animals he had compared, and now followed them over the Apennine peninsula. He endeavored to confirm the idea of the "archetypal plant" over the broadest area and was able to do so. Every stone and plant interested him. How the multifold comes into form as the unit, this he allowed to work upon him.

Goethe also exposed himself to the influence of the great works of art, which revealed to him ancient Hellenism in its last feeble outgrowth. As he directed his objective glance over the multiplicity of nature, so also could he feel in the depths of his soul all the intimacies of the great art of the Renaissance. One need only read the words he spoke upon viewing Raphael's Saint Cecilia in Bologna, how, as he looked at it, he experienced in a wonderfully profound and intense manner all those feelings that lead man out of the sensory world into the super-sensible. One need only read in his Journey to Italy how, as he gradually deepened his ideas of nature, he sensed in the presence of works of art that man really creates such works only when art works creatively from the depths of life. Greek art, he said, now became clear to him: “I have an intimation that they proceed according to the same laws by which nature proceeds and which I am tracing,”³⁰ and “These lofty works of art, being also the highest works of nature, have been created by man according to true and natural laws. Everything arbitrary, all mere fancy, falls away; there³¹ So he wrote to his Weimar friends.

Goethe took into himself something stupendous, and what he had previously felt and surmised now took form. Scenes of great importance in his Faust were composed at this time in Rome. Iphigenia and Tasso had already been sketched and partly completed in Weimar. Now he rewrote them in verse. As he exposed himself constantly to classic works of art, he was now able to find the classic style that he wished to pour into these works. This was a regeneration, an actual rebirth of the soul, that he experienced in Italy. Thus, something peculiar now took form in his soul. He sensed a profound contrast between the aspirations of his age in what he had observed in his environment and what he had learned to feel as the loftiest expression of the purely human.

Goethe returned to Weimar to the world where works had been produced that entranced everybody. Schiller's The Robbers,³² Heinse's Ardinghello, and other such literary reproductions seemed to him barbaric stuff; they contradicted everything that was now rooted and living in his soul. He felt within like an utterly lonely person and had, indeed, been almost completely forgotten when a path was opened for the friendship with Schiller.³³ The approach was difficult because nothing was more repugnant to him when he first returned than Schiller's youthful works. But the two men discovered one another, and in such a way as to establish a bond of friendship almost without counterpart in history. They stimulated one another, and Hermann Grimm rightly remarks that in their relationship we have, not only Goethe plus Schiller, but Schiller plus Goethe as well.³⁴ Each became something different through the other; each enriched the other.

Profound, all-embracing human problems arose in the soul of Goethe and Schiller. What had to be resolved by the world in a political way—the vast problem of human freedom—was present before their minds as a spiritually human problem. Others gave much thought to the question of how an external institution that would guarantee man freedom in his life could be established in the world, but to Schiller the problem was: how does man find freedom within his own soul? He devoted himself to this problem in developing his unique work, Letters Regarding the Aesthetic Education of Humanity. For Schiller the question was how man guides his soul above himself, from the ordinary status of life to a higher status. Man stands, on the one hand, within sensory nature, said Schiller; on the other, he stands face to face with the realm of logic. In neither is he free. He becomes free when he enjoys and creates aesthetically, when his thoughts develop in such a way that they are under compulsion, not of logic, but of taste and inclination, and at the same time, free of the sensible. Schiller demanded a middle position.

These Letters Regarding the Aesthetic Education of Humanity of Schiller belong among mankind's most cultivated writings. But it was a question, a human riddle, that he and Goethe had faced in thought. Goethe could not penetrate this problem philosophically in abstract thoughts as Schiller had done. He had to attack it in a living way, and he resolved it comprehensively in his own way in the fairy tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. When Schiller undertook to show philosophically how man ascends from ordinary life to a higher life, Goethe undertook to show in his fairy tale, through the interplay of spiritual forces in the human soul, how man evolves spiritually from an everyday soul life to a higher one. What Schiller brought to light in a philosophic, abstract way, Goethe presented it in a magnificent visible form in this fairy tale. This he attached to a description of external life in his novel-like piece Conversations of German Emigrants. There really came to life in the inspired friendship between Goethe and Schiller all that man proposes to himself in riddling questions about life, and that is related to Faust's explanation of why he turned to a magic interpretation of the world:

[That I might]
Her vital powers, her embryo seeds, survey,
And fling the trade in empty words away.³⁵

Whoever penetrates the intellectual exchanges between Goethe and Schiller and sees what at that time came to life in the spirit of these two men receives through it as yet unrecognized and unrealized spiritual treasure—a treasure which manifests the aspirations of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch in an extraordinary manner. The innermost concern of the two was manifested through the way in which Schiller undertook to solve the riddle of man philosophically in his Aesthetic Letters, the way Goethe addressed himself to the realm of color in order to oppose Newton, and the ways he depicts the evolution of the human soul in the fairy tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. All this comprises comprehensive questions that were destined, it would seem, to be of vital concern to but a few people.

Even though we have wished thus far to touch only upon such facts as bear upon the life of Goethe, it must also be remarked that, although many people nowadays believe they are capable of speaking about him, for many this Goethe period belongs to the past and is a book sealed with seven seals. In a certain sense, we may really feel pleased when someone is quite honest about this. It was, of course, narrow-minded of the famous scientist Dubois-Reymond³⁶ to deliver his discourse Goethe and No End. The same man, a rector of a university, who had previously described the limitations of a knowledge of nature and had made so many remarkable physiological discoveries, delivered his discourse on Goethe and No End! His remarks were narrow-minded because they arose from the opinion: “Yes, so many people talk about one who, after all, was only a dilettante; Goethe, the universal dilettante, is forever the subject of discussion. But how much have we since acquired about which he was, of course, totally ignorant—the cell theory, for example, the theory of electricity and advances in physiology!” All that was present in Dubois-Reymond's mind. “What was Goethe in comparison? People talk about his Faust as if he had given us an ideal of humanity.”

Dubois-Reymond cannot see that Goethe really did set before us an ideal for humanity. He asks: “Would it not have been better to make Faust greater than Goethe made him and more useful for humanity? Goethe places before us a wretched fellow”—Dubois-Reymond did not use this expression but what he says is approximately the same—“a wretched fellow who cannot even master his own inner problems. Then, if Faust had been a virtuous fellow, he would have married Gretchen instead of seducing her; he would have invented the electric generator and the air pump and have become a famous professor.” He says quite literally that if Faust had been a decent man, he would have married Gretchen and not seduced her. He would have invented the generator and air pump and would have performed other services for humanity and not have become such a debauched genius who got involved in all sorts of spiritistic nonsense.

Such a rectoral address, heard at the close of the nineteenth century, was certainly narrow-minded. Yet at least it is honest. We could wish that such honesty might appear more often; it is delightful because it corresponds with the truth. Thrice mendacious, however, is much of the laudation for Goethe and Faust that is brought forth by people who are happy “only when they find earthworms.” The quotations from Goethe that we often hear are really only spiritual earthworms even though they are Goethe's own words.

Precisely through the relationship of our time with such a spirit as Goethe's is it possible to study the deep untruth of the present age. Many people do nothing more than “trade in words,”³⁷ even trade in the very words of Goethe, whereas his world conception contains an element of everything that leads to and must come to birth in the future evolution of mankind. As we have already suggested, this element not only unites with spiritual science, but is by its very nature already tied to spiritual science.

• 1. These words are spoken by Faust's student Wagner in Faust, Part I, lines 570–573. The German text reads as follows:
  
  Verzeiht: Es ist ein gross Ergotzen
  Sich in den Geist der Zeiten zu versetzen
  zu schauen, wie vor uns ein weiser Mann gedacht,
  und wie wir's dann so herrlich weit gebracht.
  
  
  The German word "Ergötzen" connotes a passive and fleeting delight and is a contrast to the activating joy (“Erquickung“) Faust experienced in line 568. Wagner's conclusion in line 573 symbolizes the shallow optimism of the materialistic Enlightenment. Wagner himself is incapable of true spiritual perception.
  
  Except when noted otherwise, quotations of Goethe's works are from translations by Ann Swanwick.
• 2. Svante Arrhenius (1859–1927), Swedish physicist, chemist, and astronomer, was the author of Die Vorstellungen vom Weltgebdude im Wandel der Zeiten [Conceptions of the Structure of the World in the Changing Course of the Ages] (Leipzig, 1908). The foreword of this book contains the quote from Faust.
• 3. See Goethe's Poetry and Truth, IV.
• 4. Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–1766) was a writer and a Professor of Literature in Leipzig. He is best known for his efforts to reform the German theater and for having established rules for drama that conformed to French models.
• 5. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) was the foremost poet and critic of the German Enlightenment.
• 6. Christian Fiirchtegott Gellert (1715–1769) was a Prussian poet of the German Enlightenment.
• 7. Faust, Part I, lines 1-3. Faust reviews his past education and questions his knowledge.
• 8. The translation is from Walter Kaufmann, Goethe's Faust (Anchor Books: 1963), p. 95. This pronouncement in the third scene of Part I, lines 382–383, reveals Faust's search for a cohesive spiritual force that holds the universe together. Later in the poem he admits that he has been seeking this knowledge through alchemy.
• 9. Lines 384–385 in Faust, Part I; cf. footnotes 8 and 35. The German word “Samen“ [seed] refers to a term used in alchemy, but it is not certain that the word “Wirkungskraft“ [working force] does. Some scholars think Goethe invented the word.
• 10. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) was a famous German theologian and cultural philosopher.
• 11. Baruch Spinoza (1632–77) was a Dutch philosopher, a rationalist, and a monist. His Ethics, published posthumously in 1677, exerted a profound influence on Goethe.
• 12. In the introduction to Goethe's Scientific Writings I (1883), pp. LV-LVIII, Rudolf Steiner depicts Goethe's relationship to Spinoza. Fritz Jacobi helped to deepen Goethe's knowledge of Spinoza's philosophy in the summer of 1774. After Goethe and Herder had renewed their friendship in Weimar, the two men and Frau von Stein studied Spinoza together. Goethe the Scientist (New York, Anthroposophic Press, 1950).
• 13. William Shakespeare (1564–1616).
• 14. Pierre Corneille (1606–1684) established a theory of French tragedy. Jean Baptiste Racine (1639–1699) was a famous writer of French classical tragedy.
• 15. Heinrich Jung-Stilling (1740–1817) was a German physician and writer.
• 16. Emanuel von Swedenborg (1688–1772) was a Swedish natural scientist and theosopher.
• 17. Paracelsus, Theophrastus von Hohenheim (1493–1541) was a Swiss physician, natural scientist and alchemist.
• 18. The reference is to Goethe's relationship with the pastor's daughter, Friederike Brion (1752–1813).
• 19. Goethe received the degree of “Licentiate of Law,“ a title which in Germany was regarded as being equal to the doctorate. From then on, Goethe used the title, “Doctor juris.“
• 20. Götz von Berlichingen (1480–1562) came from an old Swabian family. He became the leader of the peasant uprising in 1525, fought against the Turks in 1542, and against France in 1544. His autobiography was published in 1731.
• 21. The reference is to Faust, Part I, line 584: “mit trefflichen Maximen.“ Faust, in lines 575–585, replies to Wagner's remarks (cf. footnote 1):
  
  My friend, the times that antecede
  Our own are books safely protected
  by seven seals. What spirit of the time you call
  Is but the scholar's spirit, after all,
  In which times past are now reflected.
  In truth, it is often pathetic,
  And when one sees it, one would run away:
  A garbage pail, perhaps a storage attic
  At best a pompous moralistic play
  With wonderfully edifying quips,
  Most suitable to come from puppets' lips.
  
  
  The translation of these lines is by Walter Kaufman (cf. footnote 8); he renders “pragmatic maxims“ with “edifying quips.“
• 22. Faust, Part I, lines 1972–1975, trans. by Walter Kaufmann. Mephisto says to the freshman student:
  
  The laws and statutes of a nation
  Are an inherited disease,
  From generation unto generation
  And place to place they drag on by degrees.
• 23. Siegwart, a sentimental novel by Johann Martin Miller, was published 1776, two years after Goethe's Werther, and immediately became a best seller.
• 24. The reference is to Goethe's letter from Frankfurt to Countess Auguste von Stollberg-Stollberg, dated February 13, 1775.
• 25. Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther was published in 1774. One year later, Goethe received Duke Kark August's invitation to Weimar and arrived there on November 7, 1775.
• 26. Frederick the Great in De la litterature alemande (1780).
• 27. Karl August, Duke of Weimar (1757–1828), son of Duchess Anna Amalia.
• 28. Charlotte Freifrau von Stein (1742–1827).
• 29. This treatise was written in 1784 and was published in Jena in 1786.
• 30. Goethe's letter from Rome, dated January 28, 1787.
• 31. Goethe's letter from Rome, dated September 6, 1787.
• 32. The Robbers had been published in 1781. In his Glückliches Ereignis [Happy Event] (1817), Goethe writes: “After my return from Italy, where I had endeavored to educate myself to a more definite and pure understanding of all branches of the arts and where I did not care what in those days was going on in Germany, I discovered that some recent, as well as some older, poetic works were in high repute and had widespread appeal. Unfortunately, they included some works that I found extremely disgusting such as Heinse's Ardinghello and Schiller's The Robbers.“
• 33. Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805) was a dramatist, poet and historian and is regarded as one of the greatest German literary figures.
• 34. Hermann Grimm in the 21st “Goethe“ lecture: “When two superbly gifted men combine in common endeavors, their strength is not doubled but multiplied fourfold. Each one has the other invisibly next to himself. The formula would not read G + S, but (G + S) + (S + G). The strength of one accrues to the strength of the other.“
• 35 Faust, Part I, lines 384–385. The German text reads as follows:
  
  
  Schau alle Wirkungskraft und Samen
  Und to nicht mehr in Worten kramen.
  
  
  The Kaufman translation (cf. footnote 9) of this passage, although preferable as a whole, leaves “Wirkungskraft und Samen“ [vital power and embryo seed] untranslated and renders the two lines as follows:
  
  
  Envisage the creative blazes
  Instead of rummaging in phrases.
  
  
  To do justice to Steiner's remarks, I have here used Ann Swanwick's translation of these two lines. (P.M.)
• 36. Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1818–96) was a physiologist in Berlin.
• 37. Cf. footnote 35.

[ 1 ] Numerous facts lead us to perceive that the philosophical wisdom of the Greeks stems from the same basic conviction as does mystical cognition. We can understand the great philosophers only when we approach them with the feelings gained from observation of the Mysteries. How reverently Plato speaks of the “secret teachings” in the Phaedo: “And it appears that those men who established the Mysteries were not unenlightened, but in reality had a hidden meaning when they said long ago that whoever goes uninitiated and unsanctified to the other world will lie in the mire, but he who arrives there initiated and purified will dwell with the gods. For as they say in the Mysteries, ‘the thyrsus-bearers are many, but the mystics few;’ and these mystics are, I believe, those who have been true philosophers. And I in my life have, so far as I could, left nothing undone, and have striven in every way to make myself one of them.”¹⁰—Initiation can be discussed in this way only by someone who has placed his own striving for wisdom entirely at the service of the conviction engendered by initiation. And there is no doubt that a bright light is cast upon the words of the great Greek philosophers when they are illuminated by the Mysteries.

[ 2 ] A saying which has been handed down about Heraclitus of Ephesus (535–475 B.C.) gives a clear indication of his relationship to the essence of the Mysteries, saying that his thoughts are “a path which is difficult to travel,” that anyone who approaches them uninitiated will find only “obscurity and darkness,” but that on the other hand they are “brighter than sunlight” for the person who is introduced to them by a mystic.¹¹ When it is said of his book that he placed the latter in the temple of Artemis,¹² this means that he could be understood only by initiates. (Historical evidence of Heraclitus' relationship to the Mysteries has already been contributed by Edmund Pfleiderer. See his book, Die Philosophie des Heraklit von Ephesus im Lichte der Mysterienidee, Berlin 1886.) Heraclitus was called “The Obscure” because only the light of the Mysteries provided the key to his conceptions.

[ 3 ] Heraclitus strikes us as a personality with the most serious attitude toward life. If we know how to conjure up his appearance, we see in his physiognomy that he bore within him the most intimate experiences of cognition which he knew could only be indicated, not expressed, by words. From the soil of such a conviction sprang his famous saying, “Everything is in a state of flux,” which Plutarch interprets in the following words: “It is impossible to step twice in the same river nor is it possible to lay hold twice of any mortal substance in a permanent state, by the suddenness and swiftness of the change in it there comes dispersion and at another time, a gathering together; or rather, not at another time nor later, but at the same instant it both settles into its place and forsakes its place; it is coming and going.”¹³ The man who thinks in this way has seen through the nature of transitory things. He has felt urged to characterize in the sharpest words the essence of transitoriness. Such a characterization cannot be made unless the transitory is measured against the eternal. In particular this characterization cannot be extended to man unless his innermost being has been penetrated. Heraclitus does extend this characterization to man: “Living and dead are the same and so are waking and sleeping, youth and age. For the one in changing becomes the other, and the other, changing, again becomes the one.”¹⁴ Full cognition of the illusory character of the lower personality is expressed in this sentence. He speaks of this even more forcibly: “There is life and death in our life, just as in our death.” What does this mean except that life can be valued more highly than death only when seen from the point of view of the transitory. Death is decay to make room for new life, but the eternal lives in the new life as in the old. The same eternal appears in transitory life as in death. When man has grasped this eternal he looks upon death with the same feelings as he looks upon life. Only if he is unable to awaken this eternal within himself does life have a special value for him. The sentence, “Everything is in a state of flux” may be trotted out a thousand times, but if it is not spoken with a feeling for this content it is void of meaning. Cognition of eternal creation is valueless if it does not cancel out our dependence upon earthly creation. Heraclitus means to repudiate the lust for life which presses after transitory things with the saying, “How shall we say of our daily life: ‘we are,’ when we know that from the standpoint of the eternal: ‘we are and we are not.’” (Heraclitus, Fragment No. 81)¹⁵ “But Hades is the same as Dionysus,” states another of the Fragments of Heraclitus.¹⁶ Dionysus, the god of lust for life, of germination and growth, to whom the Dionysian festivals were dedicated, is for Heraclitus the same as Hades, the god of annihilation and destruction. Only one who sees life within death and death within life, and in both the eternal which is infinitely above life and death, his gaze alone can behold in the right light the disadvantages and advantages of existence. Then the disadvantages find their justification, for the eternal lives in them also. What they appear to be from the standpoint of the limited lower life is only illusory: “For men to get all they wish is not the better thing. It is disease that makes health a pleasant thing; evil, good; hunger, surfeit; and toil, rest.” “Sea water is the most pure and the most polluted; for fishes it is drinkable and salutary, but for men it is undrinkable and deleterious.”¹⁷ Heraclitus intends primarily to point out not the transitory quality of earthly things, but the splendor and majesty of the eternal. Heraclitus spoke vigorously against Homer, Hesiod and the scholars of his day. He wished to point out the manner of their thought which clings only to the transitory. He did not want the gods furnished with attributes taken from the transitory world. And he could not respect as the highest a science which investigated the laws of the growth and decay of things. For him the eternal speaks through the transitory. He has a deeply significant symbol for this eternal: “The harmony of the world is of opposite tensions, as is that of the lyre or bow.”¹⁸ How much is contained in this pictured Unity is attained by the striving of forces in opposite directions and the harmonization of these diverging forces. One tone contradicts another, yet together they achieve harmony. If we apply this to the spiritual world we have the thought of Heraclitus: “Immortals take on mortality, mortals immortality; death is the eternal life of mortals, earthly life the death of immortals.”¹⁹

[ 4 ] To cling to the transitory with his cognition is the original fault of man. Thereby he turns away from the eternal. Through this, life becomes a danger to him. What happens to him comes to pass through life. But it loses its sting when he no longer values life as absolute. Then his innocence is restored to him. It is as though he could return from the so-called seriousness of life to childhood. How much that is play to the child is taken in all seriousness by the adult! The one who knows, however, becomes like a child. “Serious” values lose their worth when seen from the standpoint of the eternal. Life then appears as a game. Therefore Heraclitus says, “Eternity is a child at play; it is the dominion of a child.”²⁰ Where does the original fault lie? It consists in taking with the utmost seriousness those things to which this seriousness should not be attached. God has descended into the world of things. Whoever receives these things without God receives them seriously as the “Tombs of God.” He should play with them like a child and employ his seriousness to draw out of them the God who sleeps spellbound within.

[ 5 ] Burning, yes, scorching is the effect which contemplation of the eternal has upon ordinary assumptions about things. The spirit dissolves the thoughts of sensuality; it melts them. It is a consuming fire. This is the higher sense of the thought of Heraclitus, that fire is the archetypal substance of all things. Certainly this thought is to be taken first in the sense of an ordinary physical exploration of the phenomena of the world. But no one understands Heraclitus who does not think about him in the way that Philo, who lived at the time of the birth of Christianity, thought about the laws of the Bible. He says, “There are people who take written laws only as pictures of spiritual teaching. They search out the latter with great care and despise the former. I can only censure such people for they should take care of both: the cognition of the esoteric sense and the observation of the exoteric.”²¹—We pervert the thoughts of Heraclitus if we argue whether by his concept of fire he meant physical fire, or whether for him fire was only a symbol of the eternal spirit which dissolves and reforms material things. He meant both and neither, because for him the spirit also lived in ordinary fire. The force physically active in fire lives on a higher plane in the human soul, melting sense-bound cognition in its furnace and allowing contemplation of the eternal to emerge from it.

[ 6 ] Heraclitus in particular may easily be misunderstood. He allows strife to be the father of things,²² but to him it is the father only of “things,” not of the eternal. If there were no polarities in the world, if the most manifold conflicting interests did not exist, the world of growth would not exist, nor would the world of decay. What reveals itself, however, in this, what is diffused in it, is not strife; it is harmony. Just because strife is in all things, the spirit of the sage is to move over all things like fire, transforming them into harmony. This point throws light on one of the great thoughts of Heraclitean wisdom. What is the personal essence of man? The above passage contains the answer of Heraclitus. Man is a mixture of conflicting elements, into which God is descended. This is the condition in which he finds himself. Further, he becomes aware of the spirit within him, the spirit which is rooted in the eternal. This spirit, however, is born for him personally out of the conflict of the elements. This spirit should also pacify the elements. In man, nature creates beyond herself. It is the same unique force which has begotten the conflict, the mixture, which, filled with wisdom, is to remove this conflict again. There we have the eternal duality which lives in man, the eternal contradiction in him between temporal and eternal. Through the eternal he has become something quite definite, and out of this he should create something higher. He is both dependent and independent. He can participate in the eternal spirit which he beholds only to the extent of the mixture the eternal spirit has produced in him. Just because of this he is called upon to form the eternal out of the temporal. The spirit works in him. But it works in him in a special way. It works out of the temporal. It is the peculiarity of the human soul that something temporal works like something eternal, that it leavens and strengthens like an eternal quality. This makes the human soul similar to a god and a worm at the same time. Because of this man stands midway between God and animal. This leavening and strengthening force in him is his daemonic element. This is what strives beyond him from within. Heraclitus points to this in a striking way: “Man's daemon is his destiny.”²³ (Daemon is meant here in the Greek sense. In the modern sense we would say spirit.) Thus for Heraclitus what lives in man extends itself far beyond the personal. This personal element is the bearer of a daemonic element. This element is not confined to one personality and the death and birth of the personality have no significance for it. What connection has this daemonic element with what in the form of personality comes into existence and decays? The personal element is only a form of appearance for the daemonic. The bearer of such cognition looks forward and backward beyond himself. That he experiences the daemonic element in himself is to him evidence of his own immortality. Now he may no longer ascribe to this daemonic element the single task of filling out his personality. For the personality can be only one form of appearance of the daemonic element. The daemon cannot confine itself within one personality. It has the force to animate many personalities. It can go from personality to personality. This premise of Heraclitus gives rise as a matter of course to the great thought of reincarnation. Not, however, to the thought alone, but to the experience of reincarnation. The thought is only the preparation for the experience. Whoever becomes aware of the daemonic element within himself does not discover it to be an innocent primary element. He finds that it has characteristics. How has it come by these? Why have I tendencies? Because other personalities have already worked upon my daemon. And what will become of the effect which I produce on the daemon, if I may not assume that its task is exhausted in my personality? I prepare for a later personality. Something which is not the same as a divinity, something which reaches beyond me, introduces itself between me and the cosmic unity. My daemon introduces itself. As my today is but the result of yesterday, and my tomorrow will only be the result of my today, so my life is the continuation of another, and will be the basis for another. As physical man looks backward on numerous yesterdays and forward to numerous tomorrows, so the soul of the sage beholds numerous lives in the past and numerous lives in the future. What I acquired yesterday in the way of thoughts and accomplishments, I use today. Is it not so with life? Do not men set foot upon the horizon of existence with the most varied faculties? Whence comes this variety? Does it come out of nothingness?—Our natural science congratulates itself on banishing the miracle from our conceptions of organic life. David Friedrich Strauss (see Alter und Neuer Glaube, Old and New Faith) considers it a great achievement of modern times that we no longer think of a perfect organic creature being miraculously created out of nothingness. We grasp perfection when we are able to explain it as an evolution out of imperfection. The structure of the ape is no longer a miracle if we may assume, as ancestors of the ape, primitive fish which have gradually transformed themselves. Let us agree to accept for the spirit what seems to us right with regard to nature. Is the perfected spirit to have the same origin as the imperfected spirit? Is Goethe to have the same disposition as any Hottentot? The spirit of Goethe cannot have the same spiritual predispositions as an aborigine, any more than a fish has the same predisposition as an ape. The spiritual ancestry of Goethe's spirit is different from that of the aborigine. The spirit has grown like the body. The spirit in Goethe has more predecessors than that in the aborigine. Let us take the teaching of reincarnation in this sense. Then we shall no longer find it “unscientific.” On the contrary, what is found in the soul will then be explained in the right way. What is given will not be accepted as a miracle. That I can write is the result of the fact that I have learned to do so. One who has never held a pen in his hand cannot sit down and write. But someone or other is supposed to have a “spark of genius” in some purely miraculous way. No, this “spark of genius” must also be acquired; it must be learned. If it makes its appearance in a personality, we call it a spiritual element. But first this spiritual element also had to learn; in an earlier life it has acquired for itself the “ability” it has in a later one.

[ 7 ] In this way and no other did Heraclitus and the Greek sages conceive the thought of eternity. For them there was no question of the continuance of the actual personality. Let us refer to a saying of Empedocles (490–430 B.C.). Of those who regard something as a miracle, he says:

[ 8 ] “Fools! for they have no far-reaching thoughts—²⁴
Who deem that what before was not comes into being,
Or that aught can perish and be utterly destroyed.
For it cannot be that aught can arise from what in no way is,
And it is impossible and unheard of that what is should perish;
For it will always be, wherever one may keep putting it.
A man wise in such matters would never surmise in his heart
That as long as mortals live what they call their life,
So long they are, and suffer good and ill;
While before they were formed and after they have been dissolved
They are just nothing at all. ”

[ 9 ] The Greek sage did not raise the question whether there is an eternal element in man; he only asked of what does this eternal consist and how can man cherish and care for it within himself. For it was clear to him from the beginning that man lives as a creature midway between the earthly and the divine. There was no question of the divine existing outside and beyond earthly things. The divine lives in man; it lives there, but in a human way. It is the force which urges man to make himself ever more and more divine. Only a person who thinks in this way can say with Empedocles,

[ 10 ] “When, released from the body, you ascend to the free ether,
You will become an immortal god, escaping death.”²⁵

[ 11 ] What can happen to a human life from such a point of view? It can be initiated into the ordered cycle of the eternal. Forces must be present in it which are not brought into development by a purely natural life. And this life could pass by unused if these forces remained lying fallow. It was the task of the Mysteries to open them up, thereby likening the human to the divine. And the Greek sages also set themselves this task. Thus we understand Plato's words: “Whoever goes uninitiated and unsanctified to the other world will lie in the mire, but he who arrives there initiated and purified will dwell with the gods.”²⁶ Here we are dealing with an idea of immortality, the significance of which is determined within the whole cosmos. Everything man undertakes in order to awaken the eternal within himself he does in order to heighten the existence-value of the cosmos. As a cognizant being one is not an idle observer of the whole cosmos when he pictures to himself what would equally well be there without him. His power of cognition is a higher natural creative force. What lights up in him spiritually is a divinity which was spellbound before, and which without his cognition would have to lie fallow and wait for another deliverer. Therefore the human personality does not live within itself and for itself; it lives for the cosmos. Life extends far beyond individual existence when it is regarded in this way. Within the framework of such a conception we can understand sentences such as the following by Pindar, which gives us a glimpse of the eternal: “Happy is he who has seen those Mysteries ere he passes beneath the earth. He knows the truth about life's ending, and he knows that its first seeds were of God's giving.”²⁷

[ 12 ] The proud physiognomy and solitary manner of sages like Heraclitus are understandable. They could say proudly of themselves that much was revealed to them, for they did not ascribe their knowledge to their transitory personality at all, but to the eternal daemon within them. Their pride was of necessity stamped with the attributes of humility and modesty, which are expressed in the words: All knowledge of transitory things is in eternal flux like these transitory things themselves. Heraclitus calls the eternal cosmos a game; he could also call it the most profoundly serious thing. But the word serious has become worn out through being applied to earthly experiences. The game of the eternal grants man a security in life of which he is deprived by the seriousness arising out of the transitory.

[ 13 ] Another form of world-conception, different from that of Heraclitus, grew from the same foundation in the essence of the Mysteries, within a community founded by Pythagoras in lower Italy in the sixth century before Christ. The Pythagoreans saw the foundation of things in numbers and figures, whose laws they investigated mathematically. Aristotle says of them, “They were the first to advance the study of mathematics, and having been brought up in it they thought its principles were the principles of all things. Since of these principles numbers are by nature the first, and in numbers they seemed to see many resemblances to the things that exist and come into being—more than in fire and earth and water, such and such a modification of numbers being justice, another being soul and reason, another being opportunity—and similarly almost all other things being numerically expressible; since, again, they saw that the attributes and ratios of numerical scales were expressible in numbers; since, then, all other things seemed in their whole nature to be modeled after numbers, and numbers seemed to be the first things in the whole of nature, they supposed the demands of numbers to be the elements of all things, and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number.”²⁸

[ 14 ] The mathematical-scientific observation of natural phenomena must always lead to a kind of Pythagorean conception. If a string of definite length is struck, a certain tone is sent forth. If the string is shortened in definite numerical relationships, other tones come into being. The pitch of these tones can be expressed by numerical relationships. In physics color relationships also are expressed by numbers. When two bodies combine to form one substance this always occurs in such a way that of one substance one quite definite mass, expressible by number, combines with an appropriate one of the other substance. The Pythagoreans directed their observation upon such arrangements of measure and number in nature. Geometric figures also play a similar part in nature. For instance, astronomy is mathematics applied to the heavenly bodies. The point which became important to the thinking life of the Pythagoreans is the fact that man discovers the laws of numbers and figures entirely by himself, through his spiritual activity alone, and that when he looks out into nature the objects follow these laws he has established for himself in his soul. Man formulates for himself the concept of the ellipse; he establishes the laws of the ellipse. And the heavenly bodies move according to the laws he has established. (Of course we are not concerned here with the astronomical conceptions of the Pythagoreans. What could be said of them also applies to the Copernican conceptions in the connection under consideration here.) From this it follows immediately that the functions of the human soul are not a force apart from the rest of the cosmos, but that these functions are the expression of a law-abiding pattern which is interwoven with the cosmos. The Pythagorean said to himself: The senses show material phenomena to man. But they do not show the harmonious patterns which the objects obey. Rather, the spirit of man must first find these harmonious patterns within himself if he wishes to behold them outside in the cosmos. The deeper sense of the cosmos, that which reigns in it as eternal law-abiding necessity, becomes apparent as a present reality in the human soul. In the soul the meaning of the cosmos dawns. This meaning does not lie in what is seen, heard and touched, but in what the soul brings forth from its deep recesses into the light of day. The eternal pattern therefore lies hidden in the depths of the soul. Let us descend into the soul, and we shall find the eternal. God, the eternal cosmic harmony, is within the human soul. The soul is not confined to the physical body enclosed by man's skin. For in the soul are born the patterns according to which the worlds circle in space. The soul is not in the personality. The personality merely provides the organ through which what is interwoven with the cosmos can be expressed. Something of the spirit of Pythagoras is contained in the saying of the Church Father, Gregory of Nyssa: “It is said that human nature by itself is something small and limited, but the Godhead is infinite, and how has the infinite been embraced by something so tiny? And who says that the infinity of the Godhead was enclosed within the bounds of the flesh as in a vessel? For not even in our life is man's spiritual nature enclosed within the bounds of the flesh; on the contrary the physical body is limited by neighboring parts, but the soul expands freely over the whole of creation by means of the activity of thought.”²⁹ The soul is not the personality. The soul belongs to eternity. Taking this point of view, the Pythagorean also had to admit that only “fools” could suppose the qualities of the soul to be exhausted with the personality. For them also it depended upon the awakening of the eternal within the personal. To them cognition was communion with the eternal. The more a man brought this eternal into existence within himself the higher they valued him. The life of their community consisted in fostering this communion with the eternal. In order to lead the members of the community to such communion, the Pythagorean education was established. This education, therefore, was a philosophical initiation. And the Pythagoreans could very well say that by their mode of life they strove toward the same goal as the Mystery cults.

• 10. Plato, Phaedo, 69 C.
• 11. The anonymous epigram reads: “Do not be in too great a hurry to get to the end of Heraclitus the Ephesian's book: the path is hard to travel. Obscurity is there, and darkness devoid of light. But if an initiate be your guide, the path shines brighter than sunlight.” Anth. Pal. Book IX, 540 (Cf. also Diogenes Laertius IX, 16).
• 12. “Heraclitus lays down his book ceremonially in the temple of Artemis. So some people say, he has purposely written it obscurely, so that only the able would approach it.” (Cf. Kranz: Vorsokratische Denker, p. 84.)
• 13. Heraclitus, Fragments 40, 41. Cf. Note 5
• 14. Heraclitus, Fragment 78.
• 15. Heraclitus, Fragment 81.
• 16. Heraclitus, Fragment 127.
• 17. Heraclitus, Fragment 104, 52.
• 18. Heraclitus, Fragment 56 (Cf. 45).
• 19. Heraclitus, Fragment 67.
• 20. Heraclitus, Fragment 79.
• 21. Philo of Alexandria, De Migratione Abrahami, The Migration of Abraham, 89. (see Note 46 below)
• 22. Heraclitus, Fragment 44.
• 23. Heraclitus, Fragment 137.
• 24. Empedocles, Fragments 11, 12, 15, translated by John Burnet in his Early Greek Philosophy, Adam & Charles Black, London, 1952.
• 25. Empedocles, Fragment 112
• 26. Plato, Phaedo, 69 C.
• 27. Pindar, Fragment 137
• 28. Aristotle, Metaphysica A, Book I, Chapter 5.
• 29. Gregory of Nyssa (c 331–c 396), One of the four great Fathers of the Eastern Church, in Oratio catechetica magna, Chapter 10, modern edition edited by Krabinger, Munich, 1838.

One spring day in 1860, an autocratic Hungarian magnate, a certain Count Hoyos, who owned several large estates in Austria, dismissed his game-keeper, because this game-keeper, Johannes Steiner wanted to marry Franziska Blie, one of the Count's innumerable housemaids. Perhaps the old Count had a foreboding as to what a great spiritual revolution would be born of this marriage. (The baroque palace of Hom, where it happened, is still in the possession of the Hoyos family, and stands today just as it was one hundred years ago.) So Johannes Steiner had to look for another occupation, and got himself accepted as a trainee telegraphist and signalman by the recently opened Austrian Southern Railway. He was given his first job in an out-of-the-way request stop called Kraljevic (today in Yugoslavia), and there his first child, Rudolf, arrived on February 27, 1861. On the same day the child was taken for an emergency baptism to the parish Church of St. Michael in the neighboring village of Draskovec. The baptismal register was written in Serbo-Croat and Latin, and the entry still can be read today as of one Rudolfus Josephus Laurentius Steiner. “Thus it happened,” Rudolf Steiner writes in his autobiography, “that the place of my birth is far removed from the region where I come from.”

In later life, particularly in his lectures on education, Steiner frequently made the point that the most prodigious feat any man achieves at any time is accomplished by him in the first two or three years of his life, when he lifts his body into the upright position and learns to move it in perfect balance through space, when he forms a vital part of his organism into an instrument of speech and when he begins to handle and indeed to fashion his brain as a vehicle for thought. In other words, when the child asserts his human qualities which set him dramatically apart from the animals.

This initial achievement the boy Rudolf performed in Kraljevic. Kraljevic (meaning King's Village) is situated in the western outskirts of the vast Hungarian plain, the Puszta. Even today endless fields of maize and potatoes extend in every direction, and the solemn monotony of the country is more enhanced than relieved by the lines of tall poplars flanking the primitive, dead straight roads. It is basic three-dimensional space at its severest, domed over by the sky, which local people say is nowhere else so high nor so blue as over the Puszta. One might almost say that nature provided laboratory conditions in which the boy learned to stand, to walk, to speak and to think. One could justifiably say of Rudolf Steiner what the biographer, Hermann Grimm, said of Goethe: “It seems as if Providence had placed him in the simplest circumstances in order that nothing should impede his perfect unfolding.”

From the severity of the Puszta the family moved, when the boy was two years old, into one of the most idyllic parts of Austria, called “the Burgenland” since 1921. Comprising the foothills of the eastern Alps, it is of great natural beauty, very fertile, and drenched in history. It takes its name from the many Burgen, i.e. castles which at different times of history were erected on nearly every hill. During recent excavations coins bearing the head of Philip of Macedonia, the father of Alexander the Great, have been found near Neudörfl, where the Steiners now settled, and where a daughter and a younger son were added to the family.

The management of the Austrian Southern Railway seems to have taken a sympathetic view toward the promising boy, and agreed to move father Steiner as stationmaster to several small stations south of Vienna, so that the eldest son was able to attend good schools as a day student, and finally in 1879 could matriculate at the Technical University of Vienna, then one of the most advanced scientific institutions of the world. Until then Rudolf Steiner's school life had been fairly uneventful, except that some of his masters were rather disturbed by the fact that this teen-ager was a voracious reader of Kant and other philosophers, and privately was engrossed in advanced mathematics.

In his first year at the University Rudolf Steiner studied chemistry and physics, mathematics, geometry, theoretical mechanics, geology, biology, botany, and zoology; and while still an undergraduate two events occurred which were of far-reaching consequence for his further development.

In the train in which the young student travelled daily to Vienna he frequently met a curious personality, an herb-gatherer, who turned out to be a latter-day Jacob Boehme. He was filled with the most profound nature lore to which he had first-hand access. He understood the language of plants, which told him what sicknesses they could heal; he was able to listen to the speech of the minerals, which told him of the natural history of our planet and of the Universe. In the last winter of his public life, in December 1923, Steiner provided something of a historic background for this wisdom, notably in his lectures on the Mysteries of Eleusis. Steiner immortalized the herb-gatherer in his Mystery Dramas, in the figure of “Father Felix.” But “Father Felix” was instrumental in bringing Steiner together with a still more important and mysterious personality.

“Felix was only the intermediary for another personality,” Steiner tells us in his autobiography, “who used means to stimulate in the soul of the young man the regular systematic things with which one has to be familiar in the spiritual world. This personality used the works of Fichte in order to develop certain observations from which results ensued which provided the seeds for my (later) work ... This excellent man was as undistinguished in his daily job as was Felix.”

While these fateful meetings occurred on the inward field of life, a very consequential relationship developed on the outward field. The Technical University of Vienna provided a chair for German literature, which was held by Karl Julius Schröer, a great Goethe enthusiast and one of the most congenial interpreters of Goethe. Schröer recognized Steiner's unusual gifts, and anticipated that he might be capable of doing some original research in the most puzzling part of Goethe's works, i.e. his scientific writings.

Only two years ago, Dr. Emil Bock, of Stuttgart, Germany, one of the most eminent Steiner scholars, discovered the correspondence between Professor Schröer, Steiner, and the German Professor Joseph Kürschner, who was engaged in producing a monumental edition of representative works of German literature from the 7th to the 19th century. In the first letter of this correspondence, dated June 4, 1882, Schröer refers to Steiner as an “undergraduate of several terms standing.” He says that he has asked him to write an essay on Goethe and Newton, and if this essay is a success, as he thinks it will be, “we have found the editor of Goethe's scientific works.” Steiner was then twenty-one years of age. Schröer's letter is reminiscent of the letter Robert Schumann wrote to the great violinist Joachim, after he had received the first visit of the then twenty-one year old Brahms: “It is he who was to come.”

The introductions and explanatory notes to the many volumes of Goethe's scientific works which Steiner was now commissioned to write were much ahead of their time. They blazed a trail into the less familiar regions of Goethe's universal genius which only today begins to be followed up by other scholars.

The young Steiner wrote these, his first works, in outward conditions of great poverty. The family lived in two rooms, which are still shown today. The larger one of the two was kitchen, dining, sitting and bedroom for the parents and his younger brother and sister, and off this larger room a few steps led into a narrow, white-washed, unheated cubicle where the young Steiner worked as in a monk's cell. No wonder that a Viennese celebrity of the time refers to him in his memoirs as one “who looked like a half-starved student of theology.”

However, this first literary success led to Steiner's call to the central Goethe Archives at Weimar, where despite his youth he now became one of the editors of the great Standard Edition (Sophien Ausgabe) of Goethe's Complete Works. This concentrated occupation with Goethe, continued for seven years in Weimar, from 1889 to 1896, had a profound effect upon the unfolding of Steiner's own mind and philosophical consciousness. Goethe was the catalyst which released new mental and spiritual energies in Steiner s own personality. It was during these years that Steiner's fundamental philosophical works were conceived and written.

In 1886 he published An Epistemology of Goethe's World Conception. In 1891 his small concentrated thesis on Truth and Science earned him his Ph.D. In 1896 his comprehensive Philosophy of Spiritual Activity opened a completely new approach to the understanding of the human mind and the nature of thought. It represents the first really fresh step in philosophic thought and in the philosophic interpretation of the human consciousness since Kant. It is no wonder that in those years Steiner began to be looked upon in Germany as “the coming philosopher” upon whom before long the mantle of the dying Nietzsche would fall. But his genius led him a different way.

In his thirty-sixth year—“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,” as Dante calls it, Steiner moved to Berlin, and the next seven years were perhaps the most dramatic period in his life. His new position in Berlin was that of editor of the weekly, Das Magazin für Litteratur, founded in 1832 (something equivalent to the London Saturday Review). He wrote the leading article and the dramatic reviews, occupying in Berlin a position somewhat similar to that of Bernard Shaw (who was five years his senior), with his weekly dramatic criticism in the Saturday Review. This assignment brought Steiner into close social contact with the intellectual and artistic élite of Berlin at the time, and for some years he pitched his tent among them. In the last years of his life, during rare moments of relaxation, he would at times tell stories of this exciting and often amusing period.

Side by side with these literary circles, or perhaps in polarity to them, Steiner was also drawn by objective interest and personal attraction into the camp of Haeckel and the militant monists. To move in this manner abreast of the spirit of the time would be a most interesting experience for anyone. For Steiner it was more. And I must now touch upon that side of his life about which I shall have to speak presently in greater detail. From childhood while for others such “being involved in this or that fashion of thought would be no more than an ideology,” for anyone standing in the spiritual world it means, as Steiner says in his autobiography, that “he is brought close to the spirit-beings who desire to invest a particular ideology with a totalitarian claim.” Steiner refers to his experience as a “Soul's Probation” which he had to undergo. (He later chose The Soul's Probation as the title of one of his Mystery Dramas.) He speaks of the “tempests” which during those years in Berlin raged in his soul, a rare expression in the otherwise very even and dispassionate style of his autobiography. At the end of those “forty days in the wilderness”—which were in fact four years—the thunderclouds lifted, the mist cleared, and he stood, to use his own phrase. “in solemn festival of knowledge before the Mystery of Golgotha.” He had come to a first-hand experience of Christ and His active presence in the evolution of the world.

We have now reached the point where we must venture into the great unknown: Steiner the seer, the Initiate.

It is a plain fact that in some form or other spiritual knowledge has existed throughout the ages. Secret wisdom has never been absent from human history. But in Steiner it assumed a totally new form. In order to appreciate this revolutionary novelty, we must first have a picture of the old form.

The faculty of spiritual perception and secret wisdom is obtained through certain organs in the “subtle body” of man, to borrow a convenient term from Eastern Indian medicine. In Sanscrit these organs are called “chakrams,” generally translated into English as “lotus flowers.” They fulfill a function in the “subtle body” similar to our senses in the physical body. They are usually dormant today, but can be awakened. We can disregard for the moment the rites of Initiation which were employed in the Mystery Temples of the ancient world, and confine ourselves to the survival of more general methods which today are still practiced in many parts of the world. They all have one thing in common: they operate through the vegetative system in man, through bodily posture, through the control of breathing, through physical or mental exercises which work upon the solar plexus and the sympathetic nervous system. I realize that I am presenting a somewhat crude simplification. But nevertheless I am giving the essentials.

Steiner broke with all this. He began to operate from the opposite pole of the human organism, from pure thought. Thought, ordinary human thought, even if it is brilliant and positive, is at first something very weak. It does not possess the life, say, of our breathing, let alone the powerful life of our pulsating blood. It is, shall we say, flat, without substance; it is really lifeless. It is “pale thought,” as Shakespeare called it.

This relative lifelessness of our thoughts is providential, however. If the living thoughts filling the Universe were to enter our consciousness just as they are, we would faint. If the living idea in every created thing simply jumped into our consciousness with all its native force, it would blot us out. Fortunately, our cerebro-spinal system exerts a kind of resistance in the process; it functions like a resistor in an electric circuit; it is a sort of transformer, reducing the violence of reality to such a degree that our mind can tolerate it and register it. However, as a result, we see only the shadows of reality on the back wall of our Platonic cave, not reality itself.

Now one of the magic words in Steiner's philosophy with which he attempts to break this spell, is “Erkraftung des Denkens.” It means putting force, life into thinking, through thinking, within thinking. All his basic philosophic works, notably the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, and many of his exercises, are directed to this purpose. If they are followed, sooner or later the moment arrives when thinking becomes leibfrei, i.e. independent of the bodily instrument, when it works itself free from the cerebrospinal system.

This is at first a most disturbing experience. One feels like a man who has pushed off from the shore and who must now strive with might and main to maintain himself in the raging sea. The sheer power of cosmic thought is such that at first one loses one's identity. And perhaps one would lose it for good, if it were not for a fact which now emerges from the hidden mysteries of Christianity. One does not finally lose one's identity because He Himself has walked the waves and extended a helping hand to Peter who ventured out prematurely. Gradually the waves seem to calm down, and a condition ensues which Steiner expresses in a wonderful phrase: “Thinking itself becomes a body which draws into itself as its soul the Spirit of the Universe.”

This is a stage which, broadly speaking, Steiner had attained at the point of his biography which we have reached. Now he made a discovery which was not known to him before. He discovered that this “living thinking” could awaken the chakrams from “above,” just as in the old way they could be stimulated from “below.” Thought which at first in the normal and natural psychosomatic process “died” on the place of the skull, but which through systematic exercises had risen again to the level of cosmic reality, could now impart life to the dormant organs of spiritual perception which have been implanted into man by Him who created him in His image. From about the turn of the century Steiner began to pursue this path with ever greater determination, and gradually developed the three forms of Higher Knowledge which he called Imagination: a higher seeing of the spiritual world in revealing images; Inspiration: a higher hearing of the spiritual world, through which it reveals its creative forces and its creative order; Intuition: the stage at which an intuitive penetration into the sphere of Spiritual Beings becomes possible.

With these unfolding powers Steiner now developed up to his death in 1925, in twenty-five momentous years, that truly vast and awe-inspiring body of spiritual and practical knowledge to which he gave the name “Anthroposophy.” (Incidentally, this word was first coined by Thomas Vaughan, a brother of the English mystical poet, Henry Vaughan, in the 17th century.) Anthroposophy literally means wisdom of man or the wisdom concerning man, but in his later years Steiner himself interpreted it on occasion as “an adequate consciousness of being human.” In this interpretation the moral achievement of Steiner's work, his mission, his message to a bewildered humanity which has lost “an adequate consciousness of being human,” to which Man has become “the Unknown,” is summed up. This monumental work lies before us today and is waiting to be fully discovered by our Age—in some 170 books and in the published transcripts of nearly 6,000 lectures.

Three characteristic stages can be observed in Steiner's anthroposophical period. In a lecture given at the headquarters of the German Anthroposophical Society at Stuttgart (on February 6, 1923) he himself described these stages. Stage one (approximately 1901-1909): to lay the foundation for a Science of the Spirit within Western Civilization, with its center in the Mystery of Golgotha, as opposed to the purely traditional handing down of ancient oriental wisdom which is common to other organizations such as the Theosophical Society. Stage two (approximately 1910-1917): the application of the anthroposophical Science of the Spirit to various branches of Science, Art and practical life. As one of the milestones for the beginning of this second stage Steiner mentions the building of the Goetheanum, that architectural wonder (since destroyed by fire) in which his work as an artist had found its culmination. Stage three (approximately 1917-1925): first-hand descriptions of the spiritual world. During these twenty-five years of anthroposophical activity, Steiner's biography is identical with the history of the Anthroposophical Movement. His personal life is entirely dedicated to and absorbed in the life of his work.

It was during the last of the three phases that Steiner's prodigious achievements in so many fields of life began to inspire a number of his students and followers to practical foundations. Best known today are perhaps the Rudolf Steiner Schools for boys and girls, which have been founded in many countries and in which his concept of the true human being is the well-spring of all educational methods and activities. There are some seventy Steiner schools in existence with well over 30,000 pupils. A separate branch are the Institutes for Curative Education which have sprung up both in Europe and Overseas, and whose activities have been immensely beneficial to the ever increasing number of physically and mentally handicapped children and adults. Steiner's contributions to medical research and to medicine in general are used by a steadily growing number of doctors all over the world, and his indications are tested and followed up in a number of research centers and clinics. Another blessing for humanity flowed from his method of Biodynamic Agriculture, by which he was able to add to the basic principles of organic husbandry just those extras which, if rightly used, can greatly increase both fertility and quality without those chemical stimulants which in the long run poison both the soil and its products.

In the field of Art there is hardly an area he did not touch with the magic wand of creative originality. The second Goetheanum which replaced the first one destroyed by fire shows the massive use of reinforced concrete as a plastic material for architecture a generation before this use was attempted by others. Steiner's direct and indirect influence on modern painting with the symphonic use of color, on sculpture, on glass-engraving, on metal work and other visual arts is too far-reaching for anyone even to attempt to describe in condensed form. Students and graduates of the Steiner schools for Eurythmy and for Dramatic Art have performed before enthusiastic audiences in the cultural centers of the world, ably directed by Marie Steiner, his wife.

To those who have been attracted to this present publication by its title and its reference to Christianity, it will be of particular interest to hear that among those foundations which came into being during the last phase of Steiner's anthroposophical work was a Movement for Religious Renewal, formed by a body of Christian ministers, students and other young pioneers who had found in Rudolf Steiner “a man sent from God,” able to show the way to a true reconciliation of faith and knowledge, of religion and science. This Movement is known today as “The Christian Community” and has centers in many cities in the Old and New World. Apart from the inestimable help this Movement received from him in theological and pastoral matters, Rudolf Steiner was instrumental in mediating for this Movement a complete spiritual rebirth of the Christian Sacraments for the modern age and a renewal of the Christian priestly office.

Christianity as Mystical Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity holds a special place in the story of his remarkable and dedicated life. The book contains the substance of a series of lectures Rudolf Steiner gave in the winter of 1901–1902 in the “Theosophical Library” of Berlin at the invitation of the President, Count Brockdorff. This series had been preceded by another on the German mystics from Master Eckhardt to Jacob Boehme (published in the Centennial Edition of the Written Works of Rudolf Steiner under the title Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age) in which Steiner had ventured for the first time to present publicly some measure of his spiritual knowledge.

After these lectures on the mystics which was something of a prelude, Christianity as Mystical Fact now ushered in a new period in the understanding of the basic facts of Christianity as well as in Steiner's own life.

Compared with the free flow of spiritual teaching on Christianity offered by Steiner in his later works, the book may appear somewhat tentative and even reticent in its style. But it contains as in a nutshell all the essential new elements he was able to develop and unfold so masterfully in his later years.

Steiner considered the phrase “Mystical Fact” in the title to be very important. “I did not intend simply to describe the mystical content of Christianity,” he says in his autobiography. “I attempted to show that in the ancient Mysteries cult-images were given of cosmic events, which occurred later on the field of actual history in the Mystery of Golgotha as a Fact transplanted from the cosmos into the earth.”

It will not be out of place to round off this biographical sketch with a few personal reminiscences of the last four years of his life when I met Steiner as man and Initiate among his friends and students, and saw quite a good deal of him.

What was Rudolf Steiner like?—In the first place there was nothing in the least pompous about him. He never made one feel that he was in any sense extraordinary. There was an astonishing matter-of-factness about him, whether he spoke at a business meeting of the Anthroposophical Society, presided over faculty meetings of the Waldorf School^*, lectured on his ever increasing discoveries in the spiritual field, or spoke in public discussions on controversial subjects of the day.

I attended small lecture courses of less than fifty people, heard him lecture in the large hall of the first Goetheanum, was present at large public meetings when he expounded his “Threefold Commonwealth” ideas in the electric atmosphere of the Germany of 1923, during the occupation of the Ruhr and the total collapse of the German Mark. He was always the same: clear, considerate, helpful, unruffled. In those days he could fill the largest halls in Germany, and his quiet voice was strong enough to be heard without artificial amplification in the last rows of the gallery.

His hair remained jet black to the end; I cannot remember a strand of grey in it. His brown eyes, they sometimes had a shimmer of gold in them, looked with sympathy upon everything. And he possessed a wonderful buoyancy of carriage.

From 1913 Steiner lived permanently at Dornach, near Basel, Switzerland, in a house known locally as “Villa Hansi.” However, he spent most of his time in his studio, which was really nothing but a simple wooden building adjoining the large carpentry-shop where much of the woodwork of the first Goetheanum was prefabricated. In this studio he received an unending stream of callers. One would, perhaps, be shown into the room by a helping friend, but at the end he would always conduct one to the door himself. He put one at ease with such courtesy that one was in danger of forgetting who he was. And he gave the impression that he had no other care nor interest in the world than to listen to one's immature questions.

He would sit on a simple wicker chair, his legs crossed, perhaps occasionally moving one foot up and down. On the lapel of his black coat one might see a slight trace of snuff, because he indulged in the Old-World pleasure of taking snuff, but he neither drank nor smoked. I have never met anyone, and I am sure I shall never meet anyone who seemed so constantly at rest and in action simultaneously, all the time perfectly relaxed and absolutely alert.

The last summer of his life, in 1924, was the most prolific of all. He gave specialized courses on agriculture, on curative education, on Eurythmy. Then followed a summer school in August at Torquay in England; and when he returned to Dornach in early September, he increased his activities still further and gave as many as five, sometimes six different lectures each day. There was a daily course on the New Testament Book of Revelation for the priests of the Christian Community, another on pastoral medicine for priests and doctors combined, another on dramatic art, where I remember him one morning acting singlehanded the whole of Dantons Tod, a drama of the French Revolution by the German writer, Buchner. On another morning he acted the Faust fragment by Lessing. And in addition to all this, he also held lectures for the workmen of the Goetheanum.

Besides these specialized courses, the general lectures and other central activities of the Goetheanum School for the Science of the Spirit continued without interruption.

But the inevitable moment approached when even his resilient body showed the strain of his immense work. Sometimes for the period of a whole week he would hardly sleep more than two hours each night. I believe that he knew what he was doing. He well knew why he burned the candle not only at both ends but also in the middle.

My last memory of him is of the night when I was privileged, together with another friend, to keep vigil at the foot of his bed on which his body was laid out. It was the night before his funeral. The bed stood in his simple studio where he had been confined during the last six months of his life. Looking down on him was the great wooden statue of Christ which he had carved and nearly finished. Even in the literal sense of the word he had laid down his life at the feet of Christ.

The dignity of his features was enhanced by the marble whiteness of death. In the stillness of the night, with only a few candles burning, it was as if ages of human history converged to do homage. With a deep sense of reverence I wondered who he was. I am wondering still.

ALFRED HEIDENREICH

London, England
August 1961

• *. The first Rudolf Steiner School was called the “Waldorf School” because it was sponsored hy the Waldorf Astoria Cigarette Factory in Stuttgart, Germany, and its managing director, Dr. Emil Molt.