The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Ladies and gentlemen present!

In the last two lectures I took the liberty of presenting Heraclitus as the representative of the deepest knowledge, the deepest wisdom, as it was at home in ancient Greece up to the fifth and sixth centuries. And I tried to present what has been handed down to us from him, that wisdom which Aristotle says is not something to be absorbed intellectually, and that within the circle in which this wisdom was cultivated, people allowed themselves to be initiated, that they participated in this experience with their own personal involvement. The purpose of this contemplation of Heraclitus was to show how far a single personality, such as Heraclitus, can come, and how, on the other hand, the teachings of such a personality lead into the deepest spiritual life, against the background of which Heraclitus also had his views.

Now I would like to add, as it were to supplement and confirm what I have said, some sayings, some doctrines of Heraclitus which show us quite clearly how directly from these views - as I took the liberty of developing last time - the whole essence of Heraclitus' world view flowed from the relationships of the external world to human consciousness itself.

I have shown that the essence of the Mysteries consisted first of all in the fact that all the views which the great masses had of the origin and nature of the external world are submerged in that view of man which the man of everyday life takes of his ego; that everything appears in a higher light, that man no longer seeks the light outside in space,

but within himself, that therefore the highest knowledge is no longer external knowledge of the world, but his own self-knowledge, that this "know thyself", which runs through Greek wisdom, is not something secondary, but the foundation stone of all Greek wisdom. Knowledge of God can be found in self-knowledge: That, after all, is the essence of the mystery teachings. If we are ultimately led back to our own self, to the soul as that which we find when we look within ourselves; if it is true that - as in the image of Sais - we find nothing but the human self, then this human self, which [man] believes to be enclosed in his bodily life between birth and death, is not a finite self, but this seemingly finite self, this enclosed self expands into the whole universe, so that it ultimately becomes nothing other than the self.

This is the deeper meaning underlying the mysteries. The cosmologies, the doctrines of the origin of the world, represent nothing other than the human being who is able to develop to the highest rungs of consciousness. If the self really is the ultimate being of the world, then one must say that this self has actually been present in what is called world creation, world development. That which constitutes the human being is not merely a reflection of the real, as is assumed in the theory of knowledge. It is assumed that the being of the world is complete and that the human being is nothing other than a mere mirror image. This [mirror image] ceases immediately when this self no longer appears as an individual being, but as a primordial being that has always been present in the whole process. It [is] therefore what man himself is.

Any external fact appears to the senses in a very specific way. Man's belief clings to sense knowledge. This [splits into individual events, into the individual beings] in space and in time. Now man takes this whole event out of time and immerses it in the fire of his consciousness. Only then does it become what it is in its

nature, so that the process of cognition is not merely something that runs alongside the world process, but something that is within it, that is there before it. Cognition is therefore not a repetition of the world process, but a deepening back into the primordial being of the world, into that which actually underlies the world. So whoever is convinced that he is not merely absorbing, but rather pouring out his own essence, connecting with the essence outside, recognizes himself in the world [...]. But man can only achieve this if he climbs up the various rungs [of spiritual development]. That Heraclitus saw in knowledge nothing other than the highest flowering that the world can bring forth, that he did not regard it as something that could also remain absent, emerges from what has come down to us from him. Knowledge appears to us [normally] as something that has been added to the whole world process by chance. That is not how it appears to Heraclitus. For him, the cognizing human being was the truly existing human being; and when we understand this, Heraclitus' worldview will become completely clear to us.

Until Pfleiderer, his worldview was not clearly recognized because man himself is in a constant state of flux. Pfleiderer could not think otherwise than that Heraclitus was caught up in a contradiction. He regarded the rising and falling, the coming and going, which Heraclitus imagined under the image of fire, as the eternal flow of things. The human ego, the human soul, is woven into the cosmic world process. And yet, says Pfleiderer, it is as if Heraclitus assumed an eternal soul. On the one hand we have the highest world principle, the primordial being, which completely excludes individuality, and on the other hand we have the human being, who nevertheless has a certain immortality. On the one hand we have the great world process in the continuous coming and going, and on the other hand the individual self, which is enclosed between birth and death, but can expand into the divine. The mystic, the initiate, differed from the ordinary person precisely in that the

observation of the world and the observation of one's own self was a contradiction for the latter and not for him. The essence of the Mysteries consisted precisely in the fact that through life within the Mystery world this contradiction ceased to be a contradiction. People were supposed to experience something that made the deep disharmony of the world disappear. The initiation, the participation in the Mysteries, was precisely the way to make the contradiction that clings to the ordinary view of things disappear. Thus for the mystics, for those who allowed themselves to be initiated, the ultimate goal was this: to no longer view in this way that which brings the greatest fear to ordinary people, because it apparently makes the physical sense world, the up and down world, the eternally coming events and deeds disappear as if into nothingness, this phenomenon of death. That was the goal of the mystic. The myst should be brought to the point of learning to understand this most terrible event not as that terrible event, but as a symbol of the deepest realization. So what was the most terrible, the most horrible thing for the ordinary person, he should see as an experience. That is why the god of death, Hades, was also the god of life, Dionysus. Death as a symbol, not as a fact, should be presented to the mystics. This is what hovers over all of Heraclitus' sayings, and they can only be understood from this point of view.

When Heraclitus says: corpses are to be regarded as ordinary things, nothing is to be given to the corpse - this takes you much deeper into the Heraclitean view. In Greek there is a certain temptation to compare the human body with the burial mound, because such a comparison can be brought about by a simple play on words. Som" means "body" and "sema" means "burial mound". This play on words was not only used by Heraclitus, but by all those who had anything to do with Greek wisdom. This word leads us much deeper into the matter. Heraclitus is thoroughly imbued with the view, which runs through the whole of Greek mysticism, that what the wise man calls "soul" rests in the body like the body in the burial mound. With an almost sublime word he says that the gods live that which for the ordinary being is death. The immortals live the death of mortals.

Here, in a saying of Heraclitus, we have another form of ordinary understanding, of ordinary Greek wisdom, which consists in seeing death as a symbol, not as a fact, because all the individual things of the external world lose the meaning they have for the everyday man, submerge into the spiritual world and become something completely different there. The things in their ordinary meaning are killed, die under the hand of the recognizing human being. They appear in their infinite, eternal meaning. That which the ordinary man calls life, that which for him is the most fruitful, the real, ceases to be the real. Thus that which the ordinary man calls life, that which the man calls sensuous reality, can be nothing other than that which first gains life and first causes the sensuous to die. That is why death becomes a symbol for this higher view. Now for Heraclitus another view is connected with this, with which he, I would like to say, at the same time also shows in himself what is the basic conviction of all mysticism, namely that of the infinity of knowledge. Those who cling to the ordinary wisdom of the day usually come to the conclusion that we cannot go beyond the sensual. We cannot penetrate into the fundamental being, into the "thing in itself", says [Kant]. Only a single real look into Heraclitus' basic view can show us that Heraclitus was much further along on this point than the followers of Kant's philosophy around the year 1900. Heraclitus is convinced that he who is really able to walk the path will achieve a deep inner experience as a result, which we also find again in the German mystics and especially in Tauler, that if we penetrate into the very essence of the soul, if we immerse ourselves completely in it, we will come to no limits. There are no limits to knowledge. The external things are closed.

We can only penetrate them according to our senses. However, at a certain depth of our self-knowledge, we can step out to even greater depths. There are no limits to knowledge, because self-knowledge cannot stand still. A God who knew everything, who knew everything, would be an obstacle for the mystic. Therefore, there cannot be an all-knowing and all-wise God. For the mystics, there must be something unfinished, there must be the possibility of becoming even more divine and ever more divine, of ascending to ever higher levels of perfection, of deepening more and more.

In this way, Heraclitus expands the world in the direction of self-knowledge to an infinite depth. This saves Heraclitus from any accusation that he said: "I know everything." - For he was also convinced of the impossibility of ever reaching a limit. This shows that Heraclitus also had the true, great, genuine humility that is the consequence of true, genuine self-knowledge, which can never be something perfect and complete. Thus we see that [there is] never despair of knowledge on the path that constitutes the fundamental nature of all mystical contemplation, but the true, genuine confidence that ever new, ever deeper knowledge can be achieved through continuous deepening. This is what underlies Heraclitus' worldview. And this conviction that comes over a person when he realizes this through continuous deepening into his inner being is what Heraclitus describes by saying that the soul strives more and more to come out of the wet into the dry. The wiser a soul is, the more it moves away from the wet, the drier it is. Wisdom passes through it like lightning.

This shows that Heraclitus had arrived at the point where all external views of the world are remelted in the fire of knowledge, where they begin a higher life. Now what initially appears to us as a contradiction dissolves into a higher harmony. The contradiction that exists [on the one hand] between the cosmological worldview, which sees the world before us in

steady coming and going, in a great world harmony, and [on the other hand] the [individual] human being, which is clamped between birth and death, and which then forms an encroachment into the world of man, is resolved by the fact that the [individual] being is only a truth for the lower levels of cognition and that this ceases for the higher [cognition]. [It also ceases] within the temporal life between birth and death, [when] the light of the eternal [shines] into the temporal life, so that it appears as one and the same with the temporal. When [in this way] individual human life appears as equivalent, as synonymous [with the eternal], then the contradiction ceases. This happens because Heraclitus, on the one hand, has a great harmony and, on the other, dissolves the individual entities as if into an immortal entity, as if into an eternal entity. To recognize is to live, and to live is to overcome a contradiction that exists from the beginning. Whoever believes that he can resolve a contradiction by spintizing the intellect will not get beyond the contradiction, will not be able to grasp the essence of mystical views. The mystic knows that there must first be a contradiction and that life consists in overcoming the contradiction in one's own life. This is what Heraclitus wanted to say with his various scattered sayings. But if we have a background in the Mysteries, we can combine these sayings and then get a coherent world view that shows us how this personality shines far into modern times, and that we can gain a great deal if we immerse ourselves in the philosophy of this wonderful personality, if we raise ourselves up by it.

Now a few words about the Greek mystery teaching after we have gone through Heraclitus, because I have to deal with the Orphic teaching together with the Pythagorean school, which spread at about the same time as the Orphic teaching had reached its height. This Orphic teaching also developed a mysticism, and this appears to us next to the

mysticism of the Pythagoreans like a light next to another light. [We have the Orphics on the one side and the Pythagoreans on the other. We get to know the confluence of these two currents about two hundred years later in the Platonic world views. In this, the two currents flow together.

There suddenly appears to us a higher balance between Pythagorean and Orphic mysticism. Greek mysticism had the goal of transforming the most terrible event, death as a fact [into a] symbol for knowledge that continues to deepen. This was only possible if the mystics were introduced step by step, on the higher levels of knowledge. They were led very slowly. The Pythagoreans also practiced slow guidance. It had to be this way because it was not a matter of logical penetration, but of a lively passage through the individual stages of knowledge.

When we look at the content of [their] worldview, the Orphics appear to us to be on a higher level of scientific development than what is contained in the Greek belief in the gods. When we consider the cosmogony of the Orphics, it initially appears to us as a description of external processes. It appears to us as nothing more than mythology translated into scientific language.

So in the profound Orphic world view we have given a world view which first of all regards time as that which existed in the beginning. So it was time from which everything has its origin. From time sprang the ether and chaos. The ether is roughly what we know from Heraclitus as fire. Chaos is the entire abundance and diversity of the material world.

From the connection of chaos with the ether, i.e. the most unlimited and [the] most solid, becoming thus arises with chaos. Becoming presented under an image is the direct outflow of the most rigid. It presents itself as giving birth, as bringing forth. It arises from the fluid. Becoming from the

limited and unlimited. From the egg, Chaos first gave birth to a male-female being. This brought forth from itself a mere female. And from these two emerged the first of what we encounter in Greek mythology as Uranos and Gaea. Uranos and Gaea are swallowed up by [Kronos], so that Zeus in turn absorbs all the earlier world entities that I have just mentioned, [...] and revives them through himself.

We can only translate this world-creation process into inner processes of consciousness. Thus, with this description of external facts, we have what should initially be held against the mystic. We must realize that for the mystic, time, Kronos, [...] has become a vivid experience as an existing emptiness, as that which is not yet, but which can produce everything from itself.

Unfulfilled time appears as the most congruent image of becoming. For consciousness, this can be translated into a state of consciousness with nothing other than memory, so that under Kronos we have to imagine nothing other than the eternal world memory. If we now translate the individual beings, not the state of consciousness of the individual beings, but if we imagine the humanly overcome being, then we attain a state of consciousness that exists only in memory, that things are behind and next to each other and can only be held in [coming] and going within time by connecting the individual with the other individual to the eternal world memory.

From this eternal world memory arises an eternal separation into the most solid and the most rigid.

Within the memory, no distinction can be made between the ether and chaos. This only happens when it becomes possible to distinguish between the material and the spiritual from the eternal. These two stand opposite each other in such a way that the spirit creates its own dualism. It is a matter of allowing consciousness to separate for itself. This creates the material and the spiritual, and

Through this, man first gains the possibility of recognizing something of the very lowest level of the world. The world is in an eternal becoming, and this is nothing other than the eternal transition from coming into being to passing away, from being to non-being. This eternal emergence of that which is not perceptible to the senses into a sensuous existence is the interplay between spirit and matter.

The highest spirits have made this interplay an integral part of the basic teachings. Let us stop here for a moment with Goethe. He is known to have written something about the metamorphosis of plants and animals. He was of the opinion that the beings of the animal and plant kingdoms come into being through the fact that everything is in a state of eternal transformation. Goethe came to this conclusion because he believed that there is a constant interplay between spirit and matter.

Goethe looks at a seed, a small material grain, it seems, a piece of formless matter, which is nothing more than matter, enclosed between certain boundaries. But is that the truth? The same thing that we have before us today as a small material particle will be before us in a very short time as a fully developed plant, with leaves and flowers. The fully developed plant and the small seed are in reality the same thing, one and the same at two different times. They are different in substance, but one and the same.

What is one and the same? The small seed is the same as the large plant. The whole plant is contained in spiritual form in the seed. The spirit has withdrawn into seclusion. This same spirit, which is sensualized in the plant, was already present. The spirit reveals itself in sensual existence and is later present in the plant.

In our world of the senses there is a continuous multiplicity of the spirit, which hides itself, withdraws into a point of matter and then spreads out again and becomes visible, so that what it previously kept invisible, it presents visibly before us. But only by distinguishing between the two entities of spirit

and matter are we able to penetrate this interplay. Seed and plant would fall apart. We would never be able to say that they are one and the same. We would not understand this. The one who cannot perceive soulfully will say: They have nothing to do with each other. The other will say: The whole plant already lies within the seed as the multiplying spirit, which is once in sensual existence and then withdraws again. Only by peeling apart the whole of reality into spirit and matter and following the interplay are we able to understand the interplay.

Then we have arrived at the state that presents itself to the physicians as a state of becoming and giving birth. This is nothing other than the mystery of the presence of the spirit in the real world. We can imagine this under the symbol of the egg, the thing that can bring forth another thing that is spiritually completely equal to it, but sensually different. Thus the whole manifold world no longer presents itself as it appears to the sensual imagination, but as it appears to the spiritual eye before the soul.

Now we have seen that what penetrates upwards is in the seed, then rises upwards, becomes a plant and has thus assumed sensual existence. If we have a plant before us, then the plant is still something that conceals the spirit, that has more spirit than it shows. A higher being, an animal, shows still more spirit; and even in man a great variety of spirit comes to a directly sensuous existence. But the whole essence of the spirit can only be perceived through spiritual work in self-knowledge, so that that which rests in the seed ultimately stands before self-knowledge in its true unveiled form as its own spiritual entity, and the consciousness that contemplates itself, the soul that faces itself, recognizes nothing other than in a revelatory way that which is generally hidden. The spirit that is in the seed is the same spirit that self-consciously confronts the other being, the male-female being that emerges in the multiplicity of the world.

Comprehending this being is a goal of the mystical worldview. It is to be grasped in such a way that the entire consciousness of the person stepping before it becomes spiritualized, that it becomes spirit, will, that it does not merely enter into the person, but presents itself to us illuminated in the outside world. This is what presents itself to the mystic, who now gives birth to the whole world of his own accord. So it is like Zeus, who represents the highest state of consciousness, who has devoured everything and himself.

So the whole cosmogony was nothing more for the mystic than a point of support for understanding the progress and deepening of man. Yes, but the concept is nothing but its own realization. Yes, there was the conviction that knowledge is not something that is added to the world, but that it is precisely the essence itself. The mystical experiences were to be brought to a higher level, for the mystic says that the spirit is present but not yet sensually present, like the spiritual in the seed, which has not yet spread into the plant, but has already been present as such. This is why all the Greek mystics say that the primordial being should not be sought in the past.

The cosmogony is not constructed in such a way that the primordial being stands there as creator, but appears as something in Greek mysticism that is finally climbed as a stage of cognition, so that the process of cognition within Greek mysticism is not a kind of communion, not a connection of man with the eternal world being, but an actual bringing forth. I emphasize: an actual bringing forth, so that for the Greek mystic the most perfect indeed appears as a sensual creation of the world. Sensual creation and spiritual perfection could coincide for the mystic.

The other side of the mystical world view, which did not seek to penetrate to the primordial being, but endeavored to recognize the world by delving into our inner world, emerges in the Pythagorean. One school endeavored to plant the seed in moist soil. The Pythagoreans did

not plant the seed in the soil, but invented a method of discovering the spiritual plant in the seed itself, without sinking the seed into the soil before bringing it to development. In what way? By bringing the seed [spiritually] to development. In what way they [...] wanted to discover the spirit in the seed, we will look at that next time.

Answer to the question:

The question of "where from" is an inherited question for humans. We ask because we see becoming in the process of becoming. We see the thing becoming more perfect. There can be no doubt that the sensual plant is more perfect than the seed. The later is contained in the earlier, only not in reality, but in a spiritual way. The word "beginning" is something future in the doctrines of the origin of the world. A final reflection of the approach of a perfect kingdom is present in early Christianity. It is the same as the kingdom of Zeus. There can be no cause without a corresponding effect. If we ask: Is the one there earlier than the other, it is only because we consider the one earlier. I add the force that is needed to write with a pencil because I feel it; and this expenditure of force is projected out into the world. I also find forces in the outside world. You humanize the outside world. I really put myself into things, I am really in them. The act that you carry out in your head is the initial force of the world. The "before and after" loses its meaning. The seed can look back to the plant that brought it into existence. Its own cause is already present as its own cause, but not in a sensual but in a spiritual way. Every thing is its own cause and does not have a cause. The effect produces itself. We call it force because it is sensual, dull striving. If we want

to imagine the power in the seed, that is already the plant.

If God were to divide his work into time, he would also have to strive for perfection. Only when he is elevated above time and space is everything there at the same time, then he is perfect. All opposites have a point where they meet. "To whom time is like eternity and eternity like time, he is freed from all conflict" [according to Jakob Böhme]. Eternity broken down into individual moments is time. Time summarized is eternity. The circle is limited, the straight line is unlimited, infinite. The Orphics did not arrive at the concept of numbers like the Pythagoreans.

Why did Plato give his views in conversations? He could not have presented it any other way. If you take Plato's "Phaidon" and follow it properly, you will find that it is a conversation between a Socratic initiate and a Pythagorean. The method of the Mysteries led to expression through conversation.

Our time is characterized by reform. Reform movements and reform efforts are everywhere. Dissatisfied with the existing, the traditional and unsatisfied with the experiences they have made, people are seeking to shape and develop something new and to seek their salvation in something different. And that is how it should be; because everything in the universe, the big picture, all cultures, the individual human being, everything is in the process of becoming, of developing, there is no standstill.

How great and powerful the ideas of the individual reformers often are, but how distorted and taken to extremes they are by the masses. Let us take one of our most outstanding reform movements. There is a movement that has not yet been noticed in any cultural epoch, [which seems very strange to some:] it is the “women's movement”.

The urge to take part in the great tasks of culture and social life drives women to struggle for recognition and equality with men. The times also force women to do so. They no longer want to rule in a smaller circle, tied to unsatisfactory circumstances or standing alone in the world, without a supportive job, without a life's work. No, she wants to work in the cultural life, standing on her own two feet, with the same rights as men. The wonderful ideal of a housewife, which Schiller so beautifully shows us in his “Glocke”: “And within reigns the chaste housewife,” is no longer an ideal for the vast majority of our female world.

But how misunderstood and extreme this urge for independence and freedom is. Because women have not yet grasped that it is not only self-confidence in professional life that makes women free and independent, or that arbitrary action falls within the sphere of freedom, but that above all we must become independent and free within ourselves, that only the thorough working through of our entire psychological life, the ennoblement and purification of our character, makes women independent and free beings. Then external circumstances may be as they may, they will have little influence. The attainment of inner independence gives a woman the right to external freedom and independence; and only then can she become a man's equal, but not his rival. Only spiritual science can show us the way to this true inner independence; all other striving for freedom leads nowhere.

Let us turn to another area, that of naturopathy. It has been found that many of today's illnesses can be traced back to our current cultural life. The struggle for existence hardly allows people to rest, much less to recover. It is believed that because our ancestors lived so completely in nature, in the fresh air, unencumbered by clothing, [and with a simple diet], this was the decisive factor for their health. And because medical science can no longer find the right solution in some cases, people believe that a “back to nature”, a life with nature, would be the healthiest thing. They take earth, water, air and warmth and apply them wherever they can, in all conceivable cases.

But they do not consider that man is an individual being who no longer has a relationship with all elements. For some, sunbathing is not at all appropriate, while for others, water cures can be extremely harmful. If, from a secret scientific point of view, people are to become healthy, then an individual approach will have to be taken. Each person will receive the cure that is beneficial to their innermost nature, their temperament, their entire character, their spiritual makeup.

However, the human being is always in the closest connection with the eternal laws and only according to these can a complete healing of the same, a complete harmony of the human being with his physical and psychological organism be established. There is no “back to nature” for the human being in the sense that he believes he sees the highest in nature, but only a “through nature to the spirit”.

Vegetarianism usually goes hand in hand with natural healing methods. It is believed that animal food contains something that is not beneficial to health, and it is believed that it would be more beneficial for humans to enjoy plant-based food. This view goes so far as to consider that even milk, and the cheese and similar products made from it, are not suitable for nutrition. Everywhere, people are turning to plant products to get the right variety and a complete substitute for meat. This way of life is indeed very beneficial, but whether everyone can do it for a long time is another question. Because a vegetarian diet without spiritual pursuit inevitably leads to illness. It is said that [vegetarianism was known in Greece centuries before Christ, and] that the great sage of antiquity, Pythagoras, was the founder of vegetarianism. But this begs the question: Who was Pythagoras and why did he live as a vegetarian? And this brings us to the realm of secret schools, the mysteries.

From time immemorial, secret schools have existed all over the world, whose members endeavored to penetrate into the hidden being of the world, to see behind the veil of the ephemeral, through strict self-discipline, diligent study, and meditation. In Greece, it was especially Pythagoras, one of the great initiates, who worked in this sense. He had gathered students around him, whom he introduced to the mysteries through rigorous trials. At the same time, he also issued strict dietary regulations. Intoxicating drinks were completely frowned upon. Likewise, the consumption of meat and legumes was strictly forbidden. Even in later times, all secret schools gave instructions for the students' way of life. For the student should learn to choose food according to the principles of spiritual knowledge. He must know that in what he takes in as nourishment lies the power of certain entities. And if man wants to become the ruler of his organism, he must consciously choose his food.

When one first understands which entities are attracted by this or that food, one also recognizes the importance of nutrition. In the past, even in the great religious communities, for example in Judaism and Catholicism, the effects of food were known. Non-compliance with the regulations was punished with expulsion from the community.

In Brahmanism, too, the time between Christmas and Easter was dedicated to Vishnu. Those who called themselves his servants celebrated this time by abstaining from all legumes, oil, meat, salt and intoxicating drinks, for example. In those days, there still existed a living sense of the connection between the microcosm and the macrocosm, and every adult member of the community was required to make himself more receptive to certain spiritual forces at very specific times, so that he might celebrate a rebirth and resurrection with all of nature. These were the times before Christmas and before Easter.

Now let us consider what nourishment actually is. Almost no other area attracts as much interest as nutrition; because the demands that today's world places on the individual's ability to perform, necessitate good [and strong] nutrition. We see that we need nourishment to sustain our body. Through nourishment we supply our body with building and sustaining forces. From an external scientific point of view, food is a supply of energy. But esoteric science says: the trinity manifests itself in all of nature. Every thing consists of form, life and consciousness.

Everything in nature is animated and spiritualized. We take our nourishment from the animal and plant kingdoms. The animal has its physical body, its etheric body and its astral body in the physical world; the group ego of animals is on the astral plane. When the animal is dead, the effect of the animal nature is not yet eliminated, because the principle of the animal continues to work after the animal's death.

The same applies to plants. The plant has its physical and etheric body on the physical plane, its astral body in the astral world, and the plant's I is in Devachan. The principle at work in the plant will also be effective after the preparation of the plant. But the nutritional effect extends not only to the physical and life body, but also to the other parts of the human being.

And now let us speak about nutrition in connection with our spiritual striving. Meditation and concentration exercises will be the main thing, [but how the striving person nourishes himself will not be as unimportant] when the work on the astral body begins.

Above all, it is important to avoid alcohol in any form; even alcohol-filled sweets can be very harmful. Alcohol and spiritual exercises lead to the worst paths! From a scientific point of view, the bad influence on brain function has already been proven; how much more should a person who directs all his striving towards the spiritual abstain from a pleasure that completely excludes the recognition of the spiritual.

The consumption of meat and fish is not advisable. In meat, man enjoys all the animal passion, and in fish, he enjoys the entire world Kama [...] with.

Mushrooms are extremely harmful. They contain inhibiting lunar energy, and everything that originated on the moon signifies rigidity. Legumes are also not very advisable because of their high nitrogen content. Nitrogen pollutes the ether body.

Let us single out some of the coarsest lower qualities and relate them to the various nutrients. If a person is very independent and tends to be very selfish, they should eat little concentrated sugar; because sugar promotes independence. On the other hand, if someone has no inner or outer support and always believes they need to lean on and be supported, they should eat plenty of sugar to become more independent. If someone is very much dominated by [anger], they should eat a lot of spices, especially salt and pepper, in their food. If someone is very inclined towards laziness and indolence, they should especially avoid nitrogenous food and choose fruit and vegetables as their food.

If someone wants to tackle the difficult problem of mastering the sexual passion – the passion that, when acted out in a base manner, degrades man below the animal, but when transformed brings him closest to his divinity – he should consume as little protein-rich food as possible. Excessive consumption of proteins causes the reproductive substances to become overabundant, and this makes it very difficult to control one's sexual passion.

If someone tends towards envy, resentment and deceit, cucumbers, gourds and all the tendril plants are not beneficial for them. You also have to be a little careful when enjoying fruit. People who are very prone to emotional enthusiasm should not enjoy melons. The sweet, intoxicating scent [of this fruit] obscures clear consciousness. Even very abundant apple consumption is not beneficial for everyone. In certain people, it increases the desire for power and often leads to rudeness and brutality. Cherries and strawberries are not digestible for everyone because of their high iron content. Bananas, dates and figs are more beneficial.

You can also make a certain selection when it comes to nuts. If someone wants to undergo a course of intellectual training, then above all they need a well-built, healthy brain. Rarely do parents in this day and age give their children such a well-built brain, and so it needs a supplement to strengthen the brain, and it is above all the hazelnut that provides the substance to build the brain. All other types of nuts are less valuable. Peanuts should be avoided altogether.

As for fats, we should give preference to butter made from milk. Hazelnut butter would also be advisable.

Now we come to the luxury foods: coffee and tea. Drinking coffee aids logical thinking. But drinking coffee alone will not make us logical thinkers, for there is more to it than that. In people who do not have a thinking mind, as is often the case with women, drinking too much coffee can lead to hysteria. Drinking tea produces good ideas. But one can also get good ideas through special exercises.

During the time of spiritual striving, it is especially necessary for a person to live in moderation! “Temperance purifies the feelings, awakens the ability, cheers the mind and strengthens the memory. Through temperance, the soul is almost freed from its earthly burden and thus enjoys a higher freedom,” says an old sage.

If a person were to eat a lot and often, they would not be able to produce any fruitful thoughts. This is because if digestion takes up a lot of energy, there is no strength left for thinking. Precisely those people who filled the world with the products of their minds lived on a very meager diet. Schiller, Shakespeare and many other poets, to whom we owe magnificent works, worked their way through severe privation. The mind is never as clear as after a long fast. Also in the history of religious orders and in the biographies of the saints, one finds numerous examples of the effects of an abstemious life. The greatest saints lived only on fruits, bread and water, and no miracle-working saint would be known to have shown divine powers in action at an opulent meal. Also, all the great sages of antiquity were known for their temperance.

When the human being goes further in his spiritual striving, when the laws of truth and good flow more and more into the I, when the rays of the great spiritual sun flood and illuminate the I more and more, then the conscious working through of the life or etheric body begins.

The eternal essence of man, that which goes from embodiment to embodiment, lives itself out in each new embodiment in such a way that it causes a certain interaction of the four limbs (physical, etheric, astral body and I) of human nature, and from the way these [four] limbs interact, the temperament of the human being arises. Depending on which of these elements is particularly prominent, a person will approach us with this or that temperament. Whether the forces of one or the other prevail and predominate over the others, the peculiar coloring of human nature depends on this, which we call the peculiar coloring of temperament. There are four main temperaments: the choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, and melancholic temperaments. These are mixed in the most diverse ways in the individual human being, so that one can only speak of the fact that this or that predominates in a person. When a person works on himself, he brings harmony, order, and balance to these temperaments. Although spiritual exercises will be the main thing in working with the temperaments, how a person nourishes himself will also be important.

If the physical principle predominates in a person, this often becomes a kind of obstacle in development. But man must be master of his physical body if he wants to use it. Man is not able to use his instrument completely, so that the other principles experience an obstruction and disharmony arises between the physical body and the other limbs.

When the melancholic person works on himself, he should only eat food that grows very close to the sun. Food that grows far away from the earth, that has ripened under the full power of the sun, would be fruit food. Just as the spiritual sun glows and illuminates a person through spiritual exercises, so too should the solidifying and congealing tendencies in the melancholic be permeated and interwoven in the physical through the solar forces contained in fruit nutrition.

In the phlegmatic person, where the etheric body predominates, which keeps the individual functions in balance, where the inner life, which is limited in itself, generates inner comfort, and the person lives in this inner comfort preferentially, so that he feels so good when everything is in order in his organism, and is not at all inclined to turn his inner interest outward or even to develop a strong will: such a person should eat food that does not grow under the earth. Especially not foods that often take two years to flourish before they come to the surface; for example, a phlegmatic person should not eat black salsify. The seed of this plant takes so long to open up to external forces, and a phlegmatic person also needs a lot of work before they take an active interest in the outside world. The principle of this plant would only increase their inner complacency.

For sanguine persons, where the astral body predominates, where a person takes an interest in an object but soon lets it go, where a quick arousal and a rapid transition to another object is evident, even root vegetables should be chosen as food. One could almost say that a sanguine person must even be tied to the physical through food, otherwise his ease of movement could take him too far. So here, vegetables that thrive underground are even recommended.

When the ego is predominant, when the ego works with its powers in a particular way, and dominates the other elements of human nature, then the choleric temperament arises. The choleric person must above all beware of heating and exciting foods. Anything that is irritating and strongly spiced is extremely harmful to him.

One would assume that with higher development, temperament no longer plays a major role and that diet no longer has any influence. At the mastery level, this is indeed the case, because the master needs no solid food, nor will temperament influence or control him anymore. But he will use the temperaments to be effective in the physical world. He will use the choleric temperament to perform his magical acts; he will let the events and occurrences of the physical world pass by like a sanguine; he will behave like a phlegmatic in the enjoyment of life; and he will brood over his spiritual insights like a melancholic. But it will be a little while before we get there!

We should try to harmonize our whole life with our spiritual aspirations. Not just a small part of the day should be lived according to our ideals, but we should organize our occupations accordingly, choose our tasks with this in mind, and even regulate our nutrition in this way, striving to become a harmonious and established person, in order to then be able to engage in life to the best of our abilities. Life gives us nothing, everything must be achieved.

Goethe's beautiful saying belongs here:

“A serious will,
A persistent striving,
Is the only thing that leads you to your goal.
The purpose is no mere accident,
And life gives back only
What you gave to it.”

I will have to organize the reflections we are now cultivating here in such a way that today I present the arguments developed yesterday in a broader way, in order to then come to a certain preliminary conclusion tomorrow. Therefore, today's lecture will have more of an episode to it.

In the present, one has a great deal of reason to reflect on this or that, including current events, if one does not intend to oversleep the most important impulses of our time. Particularly striking in the present, and, I would say, challenging questions is the phenomenon, which is well known to you, that in the broadest sense, the most monstrous dishonesty has taken hold in this present time, that precisely where the comprehensive plays out today, dishonesty is present. Such things, such an effective and drastic occurrence of untruthfulness, then also prompts spiritual scientific investigation into all kinds of related matters. And there, one can say, one often encounters in particular the fact, which I have also touched on here several times, that what is usually communicated as human history is a kind of fable convenante. It is not so much a matter of the facts that are communicated not being considered correct to a certain extent, but other facts – you will recall that I recently discussed here how the most profound influences of a person from Roman history have simply been erased – they are simply erased. The Church has erased an enormous amount of facts from history because it was important to the Church that certain facts not come to the knowledge of men.

Yesterday, we again spoke from one point of view about the period that introduced the Greco-Latin cultural period, about the important period in the 8th century BC. It is a time from which not much of the historical traditions speak. The historical traditions are already very, very uncertain, but a personality shines out from the beginning of this epoch, who has wrested considerations of the most diverse kind from very, very many people. The name of Pyzbagoras stands out from the time of origin, that is, after the 8th century BC, and with it the name of the Pythagorean School. And yesterday I pointed out what Pythagoras was able to receive from the remnants of the ancient Egyptian mystery truths, what these things were that Pythagoras was able to receive.

Now it is not only interesting to look at what Pythagoras and his students said and did, which was very incisive, because they not only developed a teaching activity, but also an extensive political activity. What Pythagoras and his students did is interesting, but it is also significant to consider the world that, in a sense, surrounds this Pythagorean activity, the world from which later Greek culture also grew, which had already absorbed a certain influence of that which, illuminated by special splendor, one finds in Pythagoras. If we take the life that later developed into Greek and Latin, in the 7th, 6th, and 5th centuries BCE, and we locate it on the Greek peninsula and the neighboring countries and the Italian peninsula, then, if you look at things not in terms of historical fable convenue, but if you look at them in the light of truth - and spiritual scientific research must always contribute to this - you will notice that one characteristic of humanity was very widespread in this life. There was hardly a time when so much lying occurred as during this period in the Mediterranean countries. The lies that people told one another were a very striking characteristic of the whole of that life out of which the later Greek and Roman civilizations developed.

There is no need to deceive ourselves in such matters. All that we see developing in Roman civilization—the tremendous beauty, the admirable sum of imaginative creations of Greece, the greatest sum of abstractions that the world has ever seen— , all of this grows out of the same soil as the plant world grows out of fertilizer, out of a soil that extends over the Mediterranean countries, out of a soil that is inhabited by people who are full of the addiction, the passion of lying. This is something that is not emphasized by history, but it must be understood if one wants to properly understand the declining third post-Atlantic cultural period. We are dealing with the declining third post-Atlantic cultural period, coming from earlier centuries and millennia to the eighth century BC. And the people who were the cultural bearers of the declining third post-Atlantic cultural period were essentially great liars. This is also the epoch in which the ability I spoke to you about yesterday developed in a very special way, and which is so extraordinarily interesting: the ability to form language out of the cosmic of reason. And the greatest talent was present precisely at that time, in addition to such things as I discussed yesterday in the great addiction to lying.

In these matters, one must not be deceived if one wants to see reality, just as one must not be deceived about the fact that the violet, which blossoms in spring, will wither away again and already carries within itself the forces of the ephemeral while it blossoms beautifully and gloriously. In the violet, one has, so to speak, successive formative and destructive forces. In human life, especially in the great life of humanity, we see this very, very often, even at the same time. We do not grasp reality if we do not grasp the necessity for such things to develop side by side: evolution and devolution, the possibility of having a constructive effect, as in the formation of language, for example, and at the same time that devastating effect, which has a destructive effect on spiritual life.

This is, so to speak, the other side of what I discussed with you yesterday. There is also a bright side. This bright side is of an even more spiritual-scientific nature. I already pointed out yesterday that it would not be possible to speak with such certainty about the things of language formation that we discussed yesterday if the life of man after death did not give one clear proof of it, in that what is composed here in life, for example, from individual word atoms or parts of words, is in turn dissolved. And this disintegration of words, this atomization of words, plays a significant role in the life of the dead. In a sense, the dead person lives from this atomization of words. And the dead person has the most definite feeling that he was cut off from the spiritual world in which he finds himself after his death by forming words out of sounds, out of letters, during his life, that is, before his death. The dead person has the feeling that language is, so to speak, a carpet that was laid in front of the spiritual world during life. And in the disentanglement of this carpet, in the disintegration of words, he has the feeling that he is now entering the spiritual world again. Therefore, one of the characteristics of the dead person is to dissolve, to pull apart, to disintegrate into their component parts the human passions that the person in question has encountered during the time between birth and death. The dead person, for instance, experiences a very solemn, great feeling when he succeeds in acquiring a certain understanding through such dissolution. I have often told you that the moment of death is, in a way, something frightening for the life here in the physical body. People also like to turn their faces away from death. After death the vision of death is always there – I have emphasized this often enough – but it does not mean anything terrible then; but by looking at his own death from the other side of life, there is always the certainty in this vision that he is an ego and remains an ego. I have emphasized this often.

But now it is a matter for the 'dead man to understand that which is revealed to him in the sight of death from the other side of life. He understands this better and better by the fact that, depending on whether he has spoken this or that language, he dissolves these or those words. The ancient Hebrews, and to a certain extent the Romans, had their so-called sacred name, the unutterable name of God, Yahweh. For the Hebrews, this unutterable name consisted of a certain combination of sounds that we perceive as five vowels, which were thought of as connected during physical life. Even in the Roman Jovis, Jupiter, only another form of the name of Jahwe is hidden; fundamentally, in relation to the five vowels, it is connected in a certain way in Jovis. In the dissolution of that which was connected here in this name of God, the dead man lived, and by dissolving the vowels that were composed in life, the meaning of death was also revealed to him at the same time, one could say. One must only try to fathom the revelation of this meaning of death in the right way. One must understand that this meaning of death is revealed to the dead through the dissolution of the holy name into its components, which then fade away and fade away into the world. The dissolution of this holy name is connected with the understanding of the spiritualization of death. It is a concept that is extremely difficult to describe. Death, viewed from the other side, can be called spiritualization. By looking at death from the other side, this sight is connected with the emergence of spirituality. And in the dissection of the word after the vowels, the spiritual reveals itself out of the decay that death signifies. Decay is at the same time the birth of the spiritual, the emergence of the spiritual. While we perceive decay in an unpleasant way, as something ugly, like any destruction, when seen from the other side, this destruction reveals itself as a spiritual illumination, which is then understood in the fading away. It is as if the sacred word resounded and radiated far and wide, and in radiating out dissolved into its vocalic components, which are then audible as if coming from the periphery of the world, and then make audible the meaning of death, the spiritual meaning of death.

This will already suggest to you that it is justified, just as one speaks of the members of human nature here in life – physical body, etheric body, astral body and I – to speak of the members of human nature that human nature has between death and a new birth. For inasmuch as I have, as it were, presented to you the central phenomenon that man continually has between death and a new birth, this unveiling of the spiritual meaning of death itself, the question must arise: What does this world, which is said to be revealed to people after death, actually look like? But this cannot be grasped other than by getting to know something of the nature and essence of the human being itself.

Today, let us first try to describe the dead in the same way as one would otherwise describe the living. We can begin with that part of the dead person that still has a great deal of connection – not kinship, but connection – with what a person experiences here between birth and death. So we are dealing here with the first part of human nature, which we can also call the ego, as we call, so to speak, the highest part of human nature between birth and death. We shall now omit the fact that immediately after death it still has the cover of the etheric body, which is then detached, and still has the cover of the astral body, which is also detached over time; these are components that, so to speak, do not belong. When we speak of the dead person, the only thing that can be recognized as the dead person's very own element is the ego. I said that there is a connection with the ego of earthly life, but not an actual kinship; for in fact, after death, this ego presents itself in a completely different way than the ego is experienced between birth and death. Between birth and death, the ego is, so to speak, something fluid, something that feels the power to change every day. Just think how terrible it would be in your physical life between birth and death if you were unable to grasp the thought: I did something bad yesterday, but I can make amends for it, I can do something good in return. Or if you, even younger, would have to say: I have learned little, but I cannot learn anything new. At no moment in life between birth and 'death is the ego so fixed that it could not, so to speak, be changed from within by its own willpower. That which you experience as the ego after death is something that has become fixed, that has taken on certain characteristics that cannot be changed immediately; it remains as it is. The transformation of the ego, which is in a state of constant flux during life between birth and death, into a fixed entity in which nothing can change, and which remains as it has formed itself during life, is the essential thing that must be grasped in order to understand this ego after death. There can be no question of development after death, which we must indeed speak of for the ego between birth and death. After death, the ego is, so to speak, a fixed spiritual entity that arises out of the vision of death itself, and nothing about this ego can be changed. One could say, if one wanted to express this matter in a more or less banal way: after death, man is condemned to view all the details of his life as something fixed. Just as you, when you look over a field, see the nearby plantings and the distant plantings next to each other, and as you see nothing fluid in them, but a fixed, extensive, and enduring structure, so you see the whole course of your course of your life, but not in such a way that what is in front is always obliterated by what is behind, as it is in the life of the physical body. You see it as a permanent, concrete field in which you cannot change anything at first merely by looking at it. It would also be bad for the dead person if that were not the case; for his gaze, the gaze of the dead person, is actually primarily absorbed by this ego. He is as if transfixed in this ego. And if this ego were to disappear, it would be for the dead person just as if the surrounding world of the senses were to disappear for the living. The individual human being in his ego is actually, if I may express it thus, as important to himself — but in saying this we are speaking an important truth — as the whole world of the senses, which we as human beings have in common, is for the human being here in physical life. A tremendous abyss would open up, an abyss of nothingness, if we were not able to see the frozen ego, the ego frozen from the liquid state, after death.

Secondly, we have a kind of spiritual being that we can also call a spirit self by analogy with what we already know. So, as the second link of the human being after death, we have a kind of spiritual being. This spiritual being is mainly perceived by the human being in such a way that this awareness of the spirit self arises from within. While the I presents a kind of external view, the consciousness of this spirit self arises from within. And to the same extent that one feels that this spirit self comes to life, to the same extent the beings of the higher hierarchies emerge from consciousness so that one knows that they are there. I call this, therefore, the spirit-self. I must define it exactly as I now write it on the blackboard, otherwise I would be writing something inaccurate for you.

What I have written now gives the facts quite correctly. You have the feeling that there is a being from the hierarchy of the Angeloi, from the hierarchy of the exusiai, that is now directing its gaze to your ego. By directing your gaze to the I, either through some being of a hierarchy or through the fact that you know that your gaze is now directed to the I through a being of the other hierarchy, you get to know this hierarchy within the activity of your spiritual self. So you get to know the hierarchies through your own activity. Through your spiritual self you begin to find yourself in the company of the hierarchies. And while before this spirit self lights up, you still have the feeling that only you are dealing with it, directing your gaze at your own ego, you get the feeling more and more clearly that more and more entities of the higher hierarchies are taking care of you and interfering with your looking, directing your gaze. By developing your higher sensory activity, you feel more and more that the beings of the higher hierarchies are co-operating with you in this sensory activity. What would be unbearable for a person in the sense world here, becomes the very element of life for a person in the state after death.

Imagine you are standing here at the window looking out and observing the surroundings. One of you stands there and wants to look at the surroundings, and the first person sitting here goes over, turns your head to one side so that you look at something in that direction; a second person goes over, turns your head up a little so that you look at something else; a third person in turn a little around, so that you look at something else, and so the whole company sitting here would approach you from behind, and you would only have the aspect of your surroundings outside in that what is sitting here inside would constantly turn your head towards it. Do not think of this now from the outside, but as an inner experience, as an inner feeling. Then you have something that is quite analogous to this experience, which you have as your spiritual self. You become more and more immersed in the life of the higher hierarchies by the fact that these higher hierarchies come into your line of vision.

In the dissolution of words, of which we have already spoken, the beings of the higher hierarchies are already at work. That is one aspect of what is experienced. But it is the continuous enrichment of life that arises from gradually becoming more and more familiar with the hierarchies. And in a very similar way, one becomes acquainted with the beings with whom one has been somehow karmically connected before death. And there one feels that one is, so to speak, guided and directed. That is what can be said about the second link of the human being in the life between death and a new birth.

The third link is something that might at first seem a little shocking to a person's understanding. One gradually feels, by living into this life after death, permeated by a certain power, I might perhaps say, by a context of powers. By first feeling that the hierarchies approach and guide one in the supersensible activity of the senses – if I may use the expression – one gradually feels that these hierarchies imbue one with power and give one power. One gradually feels filled with this power, which the hierarchies infuse along with themselves, by implanting themselves in one, by instilling their nature in one. One feels this power gradually. One feels that one is not only directed by the hierarchies to this or that, but one feels that one oneself becomes inwardly filled with power through this activity of the hierarchies, which initially appears as an activity that mediates vision. One feels the forces of the cosmos, really the cosmos within oneself, flowing in like invigorating juices. But now, what is shocking, is that the forces that one now feels flowing into oneself are of a very peculiar kind. They are forces that are not at all constructive at first, but rather dissolving and destructive for what we call life here in the physical world. One gradually feels filled with cosmic, death-bringing world power.

It is important to take in such strange ideas, because only in this way can the spiritual world be truly understood. Imagine for a moment that you, in your spiritual and soul essence, are gradually filled with forces, by becoming aware of them within yourself: Through these powers, everything that lives here on earth would be killed if you were to touch it. — So, thirdly, you clothe yourself in what I can call, in analogy to something we already know, the spirit of life. You clothe yourself in something that can be called the spirit of life, but which derives its main properties from the fact that it is deadly to that which can otherwise be called the power of the life body. And you acquire a third link to your being, through which you are able to kill any etheric body that comes your way. Everything you touch through this link of your being becomes dead in the sense in which one speaks of death here on earth. And by killing through the powers you receive, you awaken spiritual substance from what you have killed, initially actually soul substance. It is a remarkable experience, which consists in the fact that through the touch of the living, the living is killed, but from this killing, soul-like arises, soul-like is released. It is a killing, but at the same time it is a release of the soul-like from the bonds of life. So that one can say: The spirit of life kills earthly life, releasing the soul in it. And one comes to this strange experience through the fact that in life, in the living, the soul is, as it were, enchanted, and that through this process, which is practiced after death, the enchanted soul is released from the living. One might be inclined to see something terrible and unappealing in the killing, in which, after all, the power we are talking about essentially works. This is not the case for life after death, because in killing, in the killing power, lies the continuous illumination of the soul, because through this the continuous arising of the soul is ignited. But the dead must be aware of this: not only must he always look to the death he himself has undergone, but he must also be aware that what is the essence of his death, so to speak, spreads over the foundation of everything he now experiences in the spiritual world. It is as if one now lived in the spiritual world in such a way that one can say: Here in this spiritual world, spiritual forms arise continually, initially actually soul forms; the soul shines forth in the most diverse ways. But if one were to inquire what the soil is from which all these soul forms sprout, it is this killing power that we have just discussed. So this life-destroying power, which is found here on earth, is our essential soul, which we have to acquire between death and a new birth, just as we have to acquire our physical body here in life.

As a fourth link, I can say, again in analogy to what we already know: the spiritual man. This spiritual man is felt to be something that one is inclined to count towards oneself in the time between death and a new birth, in that now, with the forces that are already being instilled through the hierarchies, as I have described, the possibility is now instilled in one, not only to kill, destroy, dissolve life - what one calls life here on earth - but also to destroy forms or to transform them into others. [It is written on the blackboard:]

1. The ego
2. The spiritual self
3. The spirit of life
4. The spiritual man.

directed by the hierarchies to the ego kills earthly life, releasing the soul in him.

It is naturally becoming more and more difficult to describe these things. But essentially the power of this spiritual man, as one has it between death and a new birth, consists in doing the opposite activity - if I may express it this way - of all that could be called: producing forms in the broadest sense. Here, if I want to concentrate on a specific example, I draw triangles, squares, and so on. After death, by virtue of the forces that are developed here, one 'redraws', one dissolves all that has been drawn, the forms. But the peculiar thing is that this does not just mean that one redraws something, but that at the same time it is a cosmic activity. One is now part of the cosmic activity, one is linked to the cosmic activity. For this dis-forming, this dis-solving of forms, is a cosmic activity, and man, by acquiring, after being imbued with the spirit of life, this power of dis-solving, has become part of the cosmic world. He works within the cosmos.

What we call destruction and downfall here on earth has a lot to do with formation and development in the spiritual worlds, and vice versa. What appears here as destruction, as demise, as a dissolving of forms and signs, has much to do with the genesis in the other, in the spiritual worlds. So that when I speak of dissolving of forms and signs, I am not speaking of demise in the spiritual world, but only of demise in the soul world, whereas I am speaking of the emergence of spiritual novelty in the spiritual world.

These things are connected with many secrets in the world. Today they approach southern Italy from central Italy; as you approach southern Italy, you come to areas that are poor, not particularly fertile, where few natural resources are available to people. These are the same areas where Pythagoras worked at the time of the rising of the fourth post-Atlantic period. And Pythagoras' effectiveness was at that time in the midst of the most fertile, richest, lushest areas. As short as the time has been since that epoch: by pointing out this very spot on earth where Phythagoras worked, one has transformed the transformation from a fertility and lushness that went to the degree of Sybatis, the Sybaris into poverty, even to the emergence of worrying disease phenomena. In place of the burgeoning, abundant life that existed in those times, of which only a little history remains, something develops that, compared to that abundant, burgeoning life, is also a poverty of nature. And it is really most interesting to observe such transitions in the outer world. In this outer world, the process of becoming is constantly giving rise to decay. People, in their historical research, do not think far enough to properly link the continuous process of becoming with decay. In the midst of the luxuriant abundance, in which there was a great deal of lying, Pythagoras developed his activity, and this activity continued after his death. And that which Pythagoras and the Pythagorean souls had to do after death is in many ways connected with what manifested itself in the decline of the flourishing, sprouting life in the midst of which Pythagoras was. Pythagoras and the souls of his followers were not entirely uninvolved in the work of destruction that took place in the post-Pythagorean period. And if you want to understand the world as a whole, you just have to realize that from the different aspects here between birth and death and between death and new birth, things look quite different. He who would commit an outrage if he were to artificially undermine abundant, burgeoning life here is, as it were, only doing something that happens in the sense of eternal necessity when he participates in such a work in the life between death and new birth, which here obviously means destruction.

With the third post-Atlantic period, something should also perish, and that left its shadows. Much should perish in a different area than the one just discussed. And it is essentially connected with this decline of the third post-Atlantean epoch that there was so much lying at that time. People lied on earth because, as I explained to you yesterday, they were still in contact with the cosmic powers. But the cosmic powers that were involved in the evolution of the earth before the 8th century BC were often lying powers. Demonic liars were active in the sphere into which the human being's soul developed by developing words in the way I discussed yesterday. He had to, as it were, plunge the head of his soul into a sphere in which he could do so: the sphere of cosmic reason. But when he put the head of his soul into it, there was in it that Ahrimanic power, which expressed itself in the activity of innumerable demons of lies. And out of this same source, out of which the speech-forming power of that time was drawn, out of the same power developed on the soil of Mediterranean culture this enormous power, this gigantic power of lying. Men lied because the demons who were connected with those other demons who inspired the speech-forming faculty were liars. And these demonic liars, who were of an Ahrimanic nature, had the task of bringing to destruction that which had to be destroyed in order that the third post-Atlantean period might go down and the fourth post-Atlantean period might come up.

The world is organized according to necessity, and one must look to this necessity if one wants to answer the great question that we posed yesterday at the beginning of our reflections, the great question of the connection between the moral and the ideal with the natural event. I will talk about this further tomorrow, in order to bring these reflections to a small conclusion for the time being.

Dear guests!

As I have the pleasure of continuing this winter the lectures that I was able to begin last year, I have set myself the task of making the period that precedes the one I considered last year the subject of our contemplation, of considering it in so far as in this period lie the seeds of everything that later medieval mysticism produced in the first place.

[The booklet of last year's lectures, which is now being published, deals with German mysticism from Meister Eckhart to Angelus Silesius]. Mysticism is to be understood by itself through the tremendously high spirits of the personalities who belong to this mysticism. If one delves into the peculiarities of the mystical teachings, if one gets to know the character of these teachings, the German mystics and the contemporaries of the German mystics, one can understand them personally and their teachings from within oneself. However, a completely different light is thrown on this later mysticism and its basically thoroughly esoteric teachings if one considers the preconditions underlying the Greek Mysteries and the Mysteries of the first Christian centuries.

First of all, German mysticism is linked to the mystery teachings, not only to what St. Augustine teaches, but also to the teachings of Scotus Eriugena, who was basically, more or less unconsciously, the great teacher of these mystics - of Nicholas Cusanus, Angelus Silesius, Meister Eckhart. So I think you get a completely different picture if you look at things from the Greek mysteries. Greek mysticism is an ancient primordial doctrine whose origins are lost in Greece itself until the eighth century BC.

However, these mystery teachings have [received] important influences from all mystery teachings: from the Egyptian, Persian and also Indian mystery teachings.

The Greek mystery teachings are very complicated. In order to gain an insight, [I first give] a historical view, because only through the certain historical facts can one penetrate into the actual basic wisdom of these teachings. I would therefore like to penetrate more from the outside to the inside: first the historically established, in order to then penetrate more and more into the actual secret knowledge of these Greek mysteries.

If we look at the matter historically, there were enormous difficulties until a few decades ago, because although we knew what a tremendous impression had been made on those who had been touched by [the Mysteries], we had no testimony from those who had been initiated. A testimony that must satisfy all would be that people of the Greek and Latin contemporaries saw their wisdom. But what the basis of this primordial wisdom may have consisted of is something we have not been able to understand properly until recently.

It is easier for us [to understand this] because we know how to see one of these spirits, who was deeply initiated, in the right light, who in the past, at least from our Western point of view, was taken for a philosophical thinker, which, however, according to our current knowledge, he was by no means just that.

I am referring to Heraclitus, who lived around the year 500 B.C. and who was deeply involved in the Greek mystery teachings because he was one of the initiates in Ephesus. Today we have a completely different idea of why this Heraclitus was called the "Dark One" right up to our own time. It is difficult to understand. Difficult, not because he wrote in a language that is difficult to understand. Because it is not his language that is difficult, but the actual inner meaning of what he has to say. It is not difficult in the sense that you cannot understand what he is saying, but in the sense that you have to know from which original wisdom he has grown. If you want to understand his teachings, you have to know from which primordial wisdom they were born.

So he lived [in the transition from the sixth to the fifth century] before the birth of Christ. What is said of him is that he taught that fire was the primordial principle, just as Thales had established water as the primordial principle. He also taught that everything "is in eternal flux, there is no "being, but an eternal "becoming. This is illustrated by the fact that he says that you cannot step into the same river twice. And so it is with all events in the world, with all facts.

Man, too, is in "eternal becoming. He is a different person at this moment than he was a quarter of an hour ago. Everything is in an eternal course, in 'eternal flux'. This is what is usually put forward by Heraclitus.

We now have two books which are still [a beginning], but which already show a deeper understanding. That is the German book by Lassalle and then the book by [Bywater]. Both must be consulted if one wants to understand Heraclitus. But Pfleiderer wrote what forms the basis of Heraclitus' understanding. He was able to write this because he still came from the Hegelian school and therefore still had an understanding of it. Pfleiderer pointed out in a really energetic way that Heraclitus was not a philosopher like Anaxagoras or Parmenides and others. These were thinkers that we can compare with other philosophers. Heraclitus should not be placed in this category, but must be understood in the context of the entire Greek spirit. He himself belonged to the family of the [Kodrides], he was the head of a branch of the Eleusinian Mysteries, in which the purest and noblest cult was cultivated in that century. These mysteries, which we shall gradually become acquainted with, were regarded by those contemporaries who knew anything about them as places where one could find the greatest possible satisfaction of all human spiritual needs.

We have a [comprehensive] description of the impressions of contemporaries of what could be gained from the Mysteries. Most important, however, seems to me to be a testimony by Plutarch, who draws attention to this and says that these mysteries were actually only drawn down to a certain humanity. [Plato says]: Those who are initiated into the Mysteries are partakers of an eternal life, while the others, when they suffer death, must simply sink into the [mud].

How they understand the position of the Mysteries in relation to the scientific teachings, we get an idea from some passages in Aristotle. He says: "The participants in the Mysteries were less obliged to absorb a certain knowledge, less obliged to absorb certain substantive truths. These could also be acquired in other ways. They were more required to live within a certain circle of life and to absorb these things. - He therefore knew that it was not a question of teaching truth, but of experiencing truth. So it is not a question of having received truths, but of having lived them for such and such a long time and having lived with the truth in such circumstances. Life is what has been cultivated within the Mysteries. This is what Aristotle tells us.

Although [Pfleiderer] says that [Heraclitus] gave up the office of director in the branch of the Eleusinian Mysteries to his brother, we may assume that he was to be regarded as a leading personality and that he was one. And one thing indicates that he was one of the initiates. One work in particular, i.e. only individual pieces of this work, indicates this. The work was probably entitled "On Nature". This gives us an idea of what he said. He wrote this work in the temple of Artemis in [Ephesus] because he was convinced that he could only really find understanding in the circle of those around him. It should also be borne in mind that Heraclitus was not of a nature that wanted to engage with the views of the market, with views that prevailed among the masses. He did not mean only the quite banal truths of everyday understanding, of which he wanted to know nothing and which he considered to be a trivial matter, but he understood by it something that was far removed from the truth of an initiate. He also understood it to mean everything Homer said and all the Greek doctrines of the gods, which he rejected out of hand. He thought that it was best not to bother with Homer at all. Heraclitus is to be understood as if he detested the "great mobs" and led a detached existence.

We will gain a better understanding if we look at individual sentences of this work and examine these individual sentences. Here we have one that can illuminate Heraclitus' entire way of thinking in a flash: The senses, eyes and ears, are actually liars, and those who only want to experience through eyes and ears will never experience anything because they are barbarians of the soul!

We must not think that Heraclitus believes that the senses lie to us. No, he expressly emphasizes that it is through the eyes and ears that we get everything. We find mysteries everywhere, wherever we turn. He took the "everyday. That was mysterious enough for him, so he was less interested in seeking out the rarities, the oddities and solitudes of life. He believed that he who, like a blind man, like a dreamwalker, sees and hears only with his eyes and ears, is a barbarian of the soul, for whom it is impossible to awaken the soul to a higher existence. Heraclitus was convinced that all the views of the great multitude are nothing other than those gained through the external senses.

We must be aware that the religious views of Homer, Hesiod and other Greek poets also go back to deeper wisdom teachings that were found within the Mysteries and had been preserved there. But we must also remember that they had taken on a different form. Heraclitus reproached Hesiod in particular for the fact that he and other Greek poets had resorted to external forms, to pure sensory truths, and did not stand by the wisdom teachings that the Mysteries could have passed on to them. Heraclitus was initiated into the original form of wisdom teachings from which Greek mythology descends. Heraclitus, as a leader, was initiated into the ancient cults, in which the deepest foundations of Greek mythology were known in a completely different form.

We already have an idea of what was actually the keynote of what one was initiated into, even if there were people who did not yet know much about it; we come to this idea when we go into what is to be understood by the Greek mysteries. We learn [from Cicero] that these are not divine truths, but "natural ones". We must not misunderstand this. When it is said that we are not dealing with divine truths, we must realize that we could only be dealing with Greek gods. But it should be about deeper forces of nature, about the greatest that man can experience in a symbolic form, namely in the form in which the actual drama of man was experienced in the Greek mysteries. That which was to be revealed was the human being, self-knowledge.

This feeling of the whole person was a need: "Know thyself". That was the task the Mysteries had set themselves. Now Heraclitus stood within these mystery cults, and I therefore cite Heraclitus in order to gradually penetrate the mystery cults. I regard Heraclitus as an exquisite personality who was particularly deeply initiated into the secrets of the Mysteries. And on the other hand, he had a special ability to express the mysteries in a clear and classical way.

But now you can only understand Heraclitus if you look at him on the basis of what the Mysteries had offered him. The Mysteries were only accessible to select spirits. [However,] the mysteries we are told about were popular cults. The Eleusinian, the Orphic and so on, these were popular creations. That is why Heraclitus could have made the mistake of not wanting to know anything about all these mysteries. There are passages where he speaks just as sharply about the Mysteries as he did against Homer, Hesiod and others. On the one hand, he lays down his work in the temple of Artemis; on the other, he rejects these mystery cults.

If we now look at his words: 'There the Greeks celebrate Dionysus and depict him in obscene scenes - so that those who did not see deeper could actually only see something shameless in it. However, Heraclitus expressly emphasizes that these shameless scenes only appear shameless when viewed in their popular form, but that there is something important underlying them. - They can be forgiven because this Dionysus is nothing other than Hades.

On the one hand, Dionysus is the god of constant growth, the god of life, of pleasure, the god of debauched sex life. On the other hand, he also calls him the god of the underworld, the god of Hades. He regards these two as one and the same. The fact that Heraclitus regards the god of sprouting life and the god of death as one and the same entity is something he experienced within the mystery cults. The Mystery Cults were about evoking an idea that the common notion that life is in a perpetual oscillation must be overcome. Life comes and is replaced by death.

This idea, which man initially forms according to the impressions of his senses, is a first stage. This stage should be overcome. The matter will become even clearer to us if we consider a later word that I quoted from Jakob Böhme last year. It turned out that this word is nothing other than an interpretation of the Indian mysteries: "And so death is the root of all life."

Heraclitus saw that death is the same as life, and he therefore also saw the god of death in the god of life. He saw that there is no difference between life and death, saw that death is just another form of life. This is something that lives in the Mysteries and that also lives in Heraclitus. That is why Heraclitus says: By living [and by dying], we have living and dying in us. - Living is in dying and dying is in living.

Heraclitus, like the initiates, says: "Not once do we become and pass away, but we are in an eternal transformation, in an eternal weighing up and weighing down of all things." Even as the senses convey it to us. But he does not stop there, he says he sees how something new comes into being. He sees how death is only the great artifice to awaken life in the cosmos again and again.

This seems very simple in the ordinary world of imagination. But the great depth of feeling was awakened by the fact that people saw events through which they were taught how new things arise from death. It sticks much better when you perceive such processes with your senses, when you see them with your eyes. So sensual events were created in which one could recognize the great mystery of the equality of death and life.

This eternal being, this eternal life passing through life and death, is represented there. And when Heraclitus speaks of it and says that everything is in an eternal flow, then this appears to us as a deep basic current of his life. We also see that this "dark truth is born out of the deeper Greek wisdom of the mysteries. This mystery wisdom aimed to show that the sensory way of looking at things must first be overcome if the mystery character of truth is to emerge. This is the sentence: Life means nothing other than that we perceive with our eyes and ears what we can perceive. But we can also perceive this if we are animators of the soul.

For those who seek deeper wisdom, a time now begins in which that which is conveyed indirectly [through the senses] in the legends and myths comes to life inwardly. Nature does not begin to cease for him, nature does not begin to become colorless, as so many who cannot ascend think, because they only want to fill nature with dead, empty concepts. But Heraclitus says: one then receives a nature from the second degree, from second hand. - This is nothing other than what we find in later times as the nature reborn from the spirit, as it confronts us from the spirit of the German mystics. First it is gained from outside, then the spirit is sunk into it and emerges from it again.

This reborn nature is that which stands before Heraclitus as life, as a new nature. But it is not a life that has death and life in it, but that which has overcome death and life. That is the living thing in which he can see his god Dionysus and his god Hades as a unity. That is why he can also say that these gods are difficult to understand, because they are the expression of deep, profound truths. But these deeper truths are only accessible to those who perceive more deeply. To those who perceive only with the senses, they will remain a mystery, just as it will remain a mystery to them that the work [Heraclitus] had to be laid down in the temple of Artemis.

Pfleiderer, in what he wrote about this in his writings, said that Heraclitus had gained such views from the Greek mysteries. And I can say that we find these views again in Plato, then also in Pythagoras and others. These then passed over into the later views.

Now something else happens. We hear Heraclitus speak of Pythagoras as he spoke of Hesiod earlier. He says: "Much knowledge does not teach the mind, otherwise it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras - and enlivened them. Heraclitus was therefore convinced that Pythagoras did not belong to those who were initiated into the Greek mysteries. Pythagoras [of all people] was most interested in proclamation, like a scholar. He sought to gather his own wisdom from it: 'Much knowledge is a bad art.

Now, however, we must realize that what we know as Pythagorean views and mystery cults also contain wisdom, just as Heraclitus did. Pfleiderer could not solve the riddle that lies hidden here because Pfleiderer was not clear about the relationship of Heraclitus and Pythagoras to the Mysteries in antiquity. Heraclitus was initiated into the Greek primal mysteries, into those cults which can be traced back to the eighth century before the birth of Christ and then disappear, but which only lived in Greece itself. Heraclitus became acquainted with Pythagoras when Pythagoras was nothing more than a scholar; Pythagoras [later] became acquainted with wisdom in the Orient and was fertilized by it. Pythagoras then returned to Greece with this oriental wisdom and was then able to recognize what Heraclitus meant. Likewise Plato.

We therefore have a more comprehensive teaching of the mysteries with the Greeks, while with Heraclitus we have the oldest, the most original ones.

Heraclitus is said to have regarded fire as the origin of all things - on the one hand; the eternal becoming and undulating, the eternal flow, the basic characteristic of the world - on the other.

This was difficult to understand. It went so far that even Lassalle could not explain that Heraclitus understood fire as a symbol for something other than the becoming of the world. It is meant to symbolize the external weighing up and weighing down. But he meant that fire should be nothing other than an external symbol. Just as a lion [as] a symbol [of] bravery, Heraclitus would have used fire to mean the inner restlessness, the actual spirituality of things. We have never really got over this idea, because we have not exhausted the full scope of the fact that Heraclitus stood on the foundation of mystery wisdom. But if we try to do so, we will understand how he came to make the seemingly external material the primordial ground of the world. We can only understand why Heraclitus comes to the fire when we penetrate the mysteries. We need only go into the outer Orphic Mysteries. We then find that since the eighth century before the birth of Christ the view prevailed that fire arose from eternity, from eternity seen in the spirit. This fire is not only seen as an external substance, but at the same time as the spirit that permeates the whole world. Love on the one hand, spirit on the other. Within the Greek mysteries, "fire" also means "love" and "spirit". There was nothing other than this idea and that the external talk [about such a] restless element as fire is overcome when one no longer sees merely with the senses, but when one also sees with the spirit and grasps the spiritual. Thus for the seekers in the Mysteries [everything] was transformed into a supersensible, spiritual element. When they then spoke of fire, they were no longer speaking of something that they saw with their eyes and heard with their ears, but they were addressing the love that permeates the whole world; [it would have evaporated] into that. Therefore it must be clear to us that when Heraclitus speaks of fire, he does not mean ordinary fire. Thales, when he speaks of water, speaks of real water. But when Heraclitus speaks of fire, we must not understand such a substance by it as Thales does by water. We must seek out the meaning of it in order to know what he means by it. He speaks of nothing other than this nature reborn in the spirit. He expresses this only with the old familiar word "fire, and its meaning can be known to those who know the Greek mysteries. Only if you understand the matter in this way will you have a correct idea of it.

German scholars such as Schleiermacher, Pfleiderer, Teichmüller and others have pondered this for a long time. They have not been able to find a satisfactory explanation of how this inner spiritualized doctrine is connected with Heraclitus' view that everything derives from fire. But if [the] world [is] based on fire, there is no longer any difficulty.

We can only understand Heraclitus if we regard him as an initiate into the world of the Greek Mysteries, and conversely we can get an idea of what was sought in the mystery cults if we understand Heraclitus' teachings in the right way.

Now we will also understand what it means when Heraclitus speaks of fire and why he rebukes the Greek poets because they understand and describe the world in a completely external way. He rebukes Homer because he describes that there is fighting in the world, while people should strive for peace, since a peaceful state should be established in the world.

Heraclitus had another view that sprang from the Mysteries. In addition to the eternal One, the "eternal love, they also allow the strife, the "struggle to be born out of the primordial [existence]. Where there are opposites, balance can only be found in a higher harmony. Strife, says Heraclitus, is the father of all things. - Only from strife can a higher harmony emerge. The image [of the lyre and the bow, the image in which] forces that oppose each other [find their harmony] in a higher harmony, this image becomes the image of the world for him. Thus Heraclitus does not seek the primordial ground of the world in an empty harmonious unity. Rather, he seeks the greatest possible opposites and tries to dissolve them in a higher harmony. Now he rebukes the Greek poets for describing day and night, war and peace and so on. [Heraclitus says: God is day and night, God is war and peace. Hunger and satiety and so on. But he transforms himself. His views are like mixing [embers] with incense. One sight is called fire, love, the other is called fight and strife. - Heraclitus has been called the "Dark One"; fire is probably related to this. One may have called him this, the other that.

Heraclitus, however, also expresses the view that above the multiplicity of ideas that man can form about the primordial causes of existence, there is basically only one unified primordial all-being, that above the greatest opposites of existence there is only the greatest unity. Thus, on the one hand, he regards conflict as the essence of all things. In strife the opposites are at war with each other, but they dissolve in the highest harmony. Heraclitus only sees this ultimate insight realized in true self-knowledge. In this respect, Heraclitus is the first great personality to recognize that self-knowledge is the highest knowledge of the world. That is why we find in Heraclitus - anticipated by the Occident - the first important personality to recognize that the highest truths can be found within man himself, [that the true self is not the individual self. One has become myst]. Then Heraclitus says what the individual self is, and continues: "Since I have become a man, it is not the individual man who speaks, but the general spirit of the world, the Logos, who speaks in me. The Logos begins to speak when nature has been reborn in a higher nature. It then appears as self-knowledge. But this does not deliver the self of man, but the essence that underlies everything. That is why he says: The general world reason, the Logos, speaks from me. - And whoever has risen to this point of view is considered by him to be ten thousand. He also says that he only listens to the one who is an [excellent] one.

Now we also encounter in Heraclitus what we encounter in all such personalities, [and what probably sounds like arrogance and immodesty], in that he says: "I know everything." By this, however, he probably means nothing other than the following: When I was still a boy and a youth, I saw with sensual eyes and heard with sensual ears, I perceived with my senses. When I became a man, I saw things [as they are] in the second nature, [as they are] in the Logos. - But he was still limited. He therefore says: I did not mean that I was always seized by all wisdom. I meant: I know how to look at the universe. - He did not mean that he sees everything, nor that he sees more, he only meant that he sees what others see in a sensual way in a different, spiritual way. This became possible through self-transformation, through the transformation of the individual self into the universal self. He saw out of the universe into the universe. This is what Heraclitus believes he achieved when he said: "I know everything in myself [now]. - At the same time, he had reached the point where he could say that he had attained that intimate union with the higher self, where knowledge had been transformed, where it was no longer an external view of the things that confront you, but had taken on a different form, where knowledge had taken on the form that he had intimately united himself with things. [The lower cognition consists in the fact that we stand as individual human beings in outer space. The other consists in the fact that we stand outside of space, that we see with the eyes of the universe], so that this small self expands into the general world-self. We can use Goethe's words [with which he replies to the Philistine saying] "No created spirit penetrates into the interior of nature" etc. ["We think: place by place: ["We think: place by place we are within." So he says:] There is no within and no without; what is within is without and no without; what is within is without.

Heraclitus had reached this level of knowledge. He expresses it in an image [by] saying that he who sees as he does sees the world [with the gaze] of a child at play. This word has often been misunderstood. That the world is for him as the playing child sees the world is to be understood in such a way that just as the playing child has nothing to do with anything but itself, so that the toy belongs to it as it were, so that it accomplishes with it nothing other than what it itself needs, that it has no other purposes to accomplish, so also the man who has reached a higher stage is only subject and object, which have to do with each other, which are inwardly [enclosed] with each other. Heraclitus compares this with the image of the child at play. This is often interpreted in such a way that one says: He means that one must view the world aesthetically, as an artist. This is also the case in Kühnemann's book, where the matter is presented as if Heraclitus had only professed aesthetic views. This image [of the child at play] is intended to represent nothing other than the point at which the dividing wall between the personal self and the All-Self no longer exists.

So we have become acquainted with a personality who inspires tremendous interest, who appears of tremendous profundity and the greatest acumen at that time, but who is of great value because what has come down to us from this personality gives us the first insights into the Greek mysteries and shows us how they have manifested themselves over the centuries. It sheds light on this search for truth by the ancient Greeks.

Behind the outer Greek mysteries, and also behind the inner ones, are mysteries that still exist today.

Until Philon, the matter must be viewed historically; only from Philon onwards can it also be viewed inwardly.

[ 1 ] With Pherekydes of Syros, who lived in the sixth century B.C., a personality appears in the Greek intellectual-spiritual life in whom one can observe the birth of what will be called in the following presentation, “a world and life conception.” What he has to say about the problems of the world is, on the one hand, still like the mythical symbolic accounts of a time that lies before the striving for a scientific world conception; on the other hand, his imagination penetrates through the picture, through the myth, to a form of reflection that wants to pierce the problems of man's existence and of his position in the world by means of thoughts. He still imagines the earth in the picture of a winged oak around which Zeus wraps the surface land, oceans, rivers, etc., like a woven texture. He thinks of the world as permeated by spiritual beings of which Greek mythology speaks.

But Pherekydes also speaks of three principles of the world: Of Chronos, of Zeus and of Chthon.

[ 2 ] Throughout the history of philosophy there has been much discussion as to what is to be understood by these three principles. As the historical sources on the question of what Pherekydes meant to say in his work, Heptamychos, are contradictory, it is quite understandable that present-day opinions also do not agree. If we reflect on the traditional accounts of Pherekydes, we get the impression that we can really observe in him the beginning of philosophical thought but that this observation is difficult because his words have to be taken in a sense that is remote from the thought habits of the present time; its real meaning is yet to be determined.

[ 4 ] Pherekydes arrives at his world picture in a different way from that of his predecessors. The significant fact is that he feels man to be a living soul in a way different from earlier times. For the earlier world view, the word, “soul,” did not yet have the meaning that it acquired in later conceptions of life, nor did Pherekydes have the idea of the soul in the sense of later thinkers. He simply feels the soul-element of man, whereas the later thinkers want to speak clearly about it (in the form of thought) and they attempt to characterize it in intellectual terms. Men of earlier times do not as yet separate their own soul experience from the life of nature. They do not feel that they stand as a special entity beside nature. They experience themselves in nature as they experience lightning and thunder in it, the drifting of the clouds, the course of the stars or the growth of plants. What moves man's hand on his own body, what places his foot on the ground and makes him walk, for the prehistoric man, belongs to the same sphere of world forces that also causes lightning, cloud formations and all other external events. What he at this stage feels, can be expressed by saying, “Something causes lightning, thunder, rain, moves my hand, makes my foot step, moves the air of my breath within me, turns my head.” If one expresses what is in this way experienced, one has to use words that at first hearing seem to be exaggerated. But only through these exaggerations will it be possible to understand what is intended to be conveyed.

A man who holds a world picture as it is meant here, experiences in the rain that falls to the ground the action of a force that we at the present time must call “spiritual” and that he feels to be of the same kind as the force he experiences when he is about to exert a personal activity of some kind or other. It should be of interest that this view can be found again in Goethe in his younger years, naturally in a shade of thought that it must assume in a personality of the eighteenth century. We can read in Goethe's essay, Nature:

She (nature) has placed me in life; she will also lead me out of it. I trust myself into her care. She may hold sway over me. She will not hate her work. It was not I who spoke about her. Nay, what is true and what is false—everything has been spoken by her. Everything is her fault, everything her merit.

[ 5 ] To speak as Goethe speaks here is only then possible if one feels one's own being imbedded in nature as a whole and then expresses this feeling in thoughtful reflection. As Goethe thought, so man of an earlier time felt without transforming his soul experience into the element of thought. He did not as yet experience thought; instead of thought there unfolded within his soul a symbolic image. The observation of the evolution of mankind leads back to a time in which thought-like experiences had not yet come into being but in which the symbolic picture rose in the soul of man when he contemplated the events of the world. Thought life is born in man at a definite time. It causes the extinction of the previous form of consciousness in which the world is experienced in pictures.

[ 6 ] For the thought habits of our time it seems acceptable to imagine that man in archaic times had observed natural elements—wind and weather, the growth of seeds, the course of the stars—and then poetically invented spiritual beings as the active creators of these events. It is, however, far from the contemporary mode of thinking to recognize the possibility that man in older times experienced those pictures as he later experienced thought, that is, as an inner reality of his soul life.

[ 7 ] One will gradually come to recognize that in the course of the evolution of mankind a transformation of the human organization has taken place. There was a time when the subtle organs of human nature, which make possible the development of an independent thought life, had not yet been formed. In this time man had, instead, organs, that represented for him what he experienced in the world of pictures.

[ 8 ] As this gradually comes to be understood, a new light will fall on the significance of mythology on the one hand, and that of poetic production and thought life on the other. When the independent inner thought experience began, it brought the picture-consciousness to extinction. Thought emerged as the tool of truth. This is only one branch of what survived of the old picture-consciousness that had found its expression in the ancient myth. In another branch the extinguished picture-consciousness continued to live, if only as a pale shadow of its former existence, in the creations of fantasy and poetic imagination. Poetic fantasy and the intellectual view of the world are the two children of the one mother, the old picture-consciousness that must not be confused with the consciousness of poetic imagination.

[ 9 ] The essential process that is to be understood is the transformation of the more delicate organization of man. It causes the beginning of thought life. In art and poetry thought as such naturally does not have an effect. Here the picture continues to exert its influence, but it has now a different relation to the human soul from the one it had when it also served in a cognitive function. As thought itself, the new form of consciousness appears only in the newly emerging philosophy. The other branches of human life are correspondingly transformed in a different way when thought begins to rule in the field of human knowledge.

[ 10 ] The progress in human evolution that is characterized by this process is connected with the fact that man from the beginning of thought experience had to feel himself in a much more pronounced way than before, as a separated entity, as a “soul.” In myth the picture was experienced in such a way that one felt it to be in the external world as a reality. One experienced this reality at the same time, and one was united with it. With thought, as well as with the poetic picture, man felt himself separated from nature. Engaged in thought experience, man felt himself as an entity that could not experience nature with the same intimacy as he felt when at one with thought. More and more, the definite feeling of the contrast of nature and soul came into being.

[ 11 ] In the civilizations of the different peoples this transition from the old picture-consciousness to the consciousness of thought experience took place at different times. In Greece we can intimately observe this transition if we focus our attention on the personality of Pherekydes of Syros. He lived in a world in which picture-consciousness and thought experience still had an equal share. His three principal ideas—Zeus, Chronos and Chthon—can only be understood in such a way that the soul, in experiencing them, feels itself as belonging to the events of the external world. We are dealing here with three inwardly experienced pictures and we find access to them only when we do not allow ourselves to be distracted by anything that the thought habits of our time are likely to imagine as their meaning.

[ 12 ] Chronos is not time as we think of it today. Chronos is a being that in contemporary language can be called “spiritual” if one keeps in mind that one does not thereby exhaust its meaning. Chronos is alive and its activity is the devouring, the consumption of the life of another being, Chthon. Chronos rules in nature; Chronos rules in man; in nature and man Chronos consumes Chthon. It is of no importance whether one considers the consumption of Chthon through Chronos as inwardly experienced or as external events, for in both realms the same process goes on. Zeus is connected with these two beings. In the meaning of Pherekydes one must no more think of Zeus as a deity in the sense of our present day conception of mythology, than as of mere “space” in its present sense, although he is the being through whom the events that go on between Chronos and Chthon are transformed into spatial, extended form.

[ 13 ] The cooperation of Chronos, Chthon and Zeus is felt directly as a picture content in the sense of Pherekydes, just as much as one is aware of the idea that one is eating, but it is also experienced as something in the external world, like the conception of the colors blue or red. This experience can be imagined in the following way. We turn our attention to fire as it consumes its fuel. Chronos lives in the activity of fire, of warmth. Whoever regards fire in its activity and keeps himself under the effect, not of independent thought but of image content, looks at Chronos. In the activity of fire, not in the sensually perceived fire, he experiences time simultaneously. Another conception of time does not exist before the birth of thought. What is called “time” in our present age is an idea that has been developed only in the age of intellectual world conception.

If we turn our attention to water, not as it is as water but as it changes into air or vapor, or to clouds that are in the process of dissolving, we experience as an image content the force of Zeus, the spatially active “spreader.” One could also say, the force of centrifugal extension. If we look on water as it becomes solid, or on the solid as it changes into fluid, we are watching Chthon. Chthon is something that later in the age of thought-ruled world conception becomes “matter,” the stuff “things are made of”; Zeus has become “ether” or “space,” Chronos changes into “time.”

[ 14 ] In the view of Pherekydes the world is constituted through the cooperation of these three principles. Through the combination of their action the material world of sense perception—fire, air, water and earth—come into being on the one hand, and on the other, a certain number of invisible supersensible spirit beings who animate the four material worlds. Zeus, Chronos and Chthon could be referred to as “spirit, soul and matter,” but their significance is only approximated by these terms. It is only through the fusion of these three original beings that the more material realms of the world of fire, air, water and earth, and the more soul-like and spirit-like (supersensible) beings come into existence. Using expressions of later world conceptions, one can call Zeus, space-ether; Chronos, time-creator; Chthon, matter-producer—the three “mothers of the world's origin.” We can still catch a glimpse of them in Goethe's Faust, in the scene of the second part where Faust sets out on his journey to the “mothers.”

[ 15 ] As these three primordial entities appear in Pherekydes, they remind us of conceptions of predecessors of this personality, the so-called Orphics. They represent a mode of conception that still lives completely in the old form of picture consciousness. In them we also find three original beings: Zeus, Chronos and Chaos. Compared to these “primeval mothers,” those of Pherekydes are somewhat less picture-like. This is so because Pherekydes attempts to seize, through the exertion of thought, what his Orphic predecessors still held completely as image-experience. For this reason we can say that he appears as a personality in whom the “birth of thought life” takes place. This is expressed not so much in the more thought-like conception of the Orphic ideas of Pherekydes, as in a certain dominating mood of his soul, which we later find again in several of his philosophizing successors in Greece. For Pherekydes feels that he is forced to see the origin of things in the “good” (Arizon). He could not combine this concept with the “world of mythological deities” of ancient times. The beings of this world had soul qualities that were not in agreement with this concept. Into his three “original causes” Pherekydes could only think the concept of the “good,” the perfect.

[ 16 ] Connected with this circumstance is the fact that the birth of thought life brought with it a shattering of the foundations of the inner feelings of the soul. This inner experience should not be overlooked in a consideration of the time when the intellectual world conception began. One could not have felt this beginning as progress if one had not believed that with thought one took possession of something that was more perfect than the old form of image experience. Of course, at this stage of thought development, this feeling was not clearly expressed. But what one now, in retrospect, can clearly state with regard to the ancient Greek thinkers was then merely felt. They felt that the pictures that were experienced by our immediate ancestors did not lead to the highest, most perfect, original causes. In these pictures only the less perfect causes were revealed; we must raise our thoughts to still higher causes from which the content of those pictures is merely derived.

[ 17 ] Through progress into thought life, the world was now conceived as divided into a more natural and a more spiritual sphere. In this more spiritual sphere, which was only now felt as such, one had to conceive what was formerly experienced in the form of pictures. To this was added the conception of a higher principle, something thought of as superior to the older, spiritual world and to nature. It was to this sublime element that thought wanted to penetrate, and it is in this region that Pherekydes meant to find his three “Primordial Mothers.” A look at the world as it appears illustrates what kind of conceptions took hold of a personality like Pherekydes. Man finds a harmony in his surroundings that lies at the bottom of all phenomena and is manifested in the motions of the stars, in the course of the seasons with their blessings of thriving plant-life, etc. In this beneficial course of things, harmful, destructive powers intervene, as expressed in the pernicious effects of the weather, earthquakes, etc. In observing all this one can be lead to a realization of a dualism in the ruling powers, but the human soul must assume an underlying unity. It naturally feels that, in the last analysis, the ravaging hail, the destructive earthquake, must spring from the same source as the beneficial cycle of the seasons. In this fashion man looks through good and evil and sees behind it an original good. The same good force rules in the earthquake as in the blessed rain of spring. In the scorching, devastating heat of the sun the same element is at work that ripens the seed. The “good Mothers of all origin” are, then, in the pernicious events also. When man experiences this feeling, a powerful world riddle emerges before his soul. To find the solution, Pherekydes turns toward his Ophioneus. As Pherekydes leans on the old picture conception, Ophioneus appears to him as a kind of “world serpent.” It is in reality a spirit being, which, like all other beings of the world, belongs to the children of Chronos, Zeus and Chthon, but that has later so changed that its effects are directed against those of the “good mother of origin.” Thus, the world is divided into three parts. The first part consists of the “Mothers,” which are presented as good, as perfect; the second part contains the beneficial world events; the third part, the destructive or the only imperfect world processes that, as Ophioneus, are intertwined in the beneficial effects.

[ 18 ] For Pherekydes, Ophioneus is not merely a symbolic idea for the detrimental destructive world forces. Pherekydes stands with his conceptive imagination at the borderline between picture and thought. He does not think that there are devastating powers that he conceives in the pictures of Ophioneus, nor does such a thought process develop in him as an activity of fantasy. Rather, he looks on the detrimental forces, and immediately Ophioneus stands before his soul as the red color stands before our souls when we look at a rose.

[ 19 ] Whoever sees the world only as it presents itself to image perception does not, at first, distinguish in his thought between the events of the “good mothers” and those of Ophioneus. At the borderline of a thought-formed world conception, the necessity of this distinction is felt, for only at this stage of progress does the soul feel itself to be a separate, independent entity. It feels the necessity to ask what its origin is. It must find its origin in the depths of the world where Chronos, Zeus and Chthon had not as yet found their antagonists. But the soul also feels that it cannot know anything of its own origin at first, because it sees itself in the midst of a world in which the “Mothers” work in conjunction with Ophioneus. It feels itself in a world in which the perfect and the imperfect are joined together. Ophioneus is twisted into the soul's own being.

[ 20 ] We can feel what went on in the souls of individual personalities of the sixth century B.C. if we allow the feelings described here to make a sufficient impression on us. With the ancient mythical deities such souls felt themselves woven into the imperfect world. The deities belonged to the same imperfect world as they did themselves.

The spiritual brotherhood, which was founded by Pythagoras of Samos between the years 549 and 500 B.C. in Kroton in Magna Graecia, grew out of such a mood. Pythagoras intended to lead his followers back to the experience of the “Primordial Mothers” in which the origin of their souls was to be seen. It can be said in this respect that he and his disciples meant to serve “other gods” than those of the people. With this fact something was given that must appear as a break between spirits like Pythagoras and the people, who were satisfied with their gods. Pythagoras considered these gods as belonging to the realm of the imperfect. In this difference we also find the reason for the “secret” that is often referred to in connection with Pythagoras and that was not to be betrayed to the uninitiated. It consisted in the fact that Pythagoras had to attribute to the human soul an origin different from that of the gods of the popular religion. In the last analysis, the numerous attacks that Pythagoras experienced must be traced to this “secret.” How was he to explain to others than those who carefully prepared themselves for such a knowledge that, in a certain sense, they, “as souls,” could consider themselves as standing even higher than the gods of the popular religion? In what other form than in a brotherhood with a strictly regulated mode of life could the souls become aware of their lofty origin and still find themselves deeply bound up with imperfection? It was just through this feeling of deficiency that the effort was to be made to arrange life in such a way that through the process of self-perfection it would be led back to its origin. That legends and myths were likely to be formed about such aspirations of Pythagoras is comprehensible. It is also understandable that scarcely anything has come down to us historically about the true significance of this personality. Whoever observes the legends and mythical traditions of antiquity about Pythagoras in an all-encompassing picture will nevertheless recognize in it the characterization that was just given.

[ 21 ] In the picture of Pythagoras, present-day thinking also feels the idea of the so-called “transmigration of souls” as a disturbing factor. It is even felt to be naive that Pythagoras is reported to have said that he knew that he had already been on earth in an earlier time as another human being. It may be recalled that that great representative of modern enlightenment, Lessing, in his Education of the Human Race, renewed this idea of man's repeated lives on earth out of a mode of thinking that was entirely different from that of Pythagoras. Lessing could conceive of the progress of the human race only in such a way that the human souls participated repeatedly in the life of the successive great phases of history. A soul brought into its life in a later time as a potential ability what it had gained from experience in an earlier era. Lessing found it natural that the soul had often been on earth in an earthly body, and that it would often return in the future. In this way, it struggles from life to life toward the perfection that it finds possible to obtain. He pointed out that the idea of repeated lives on earth ought not to be considered incredible because it existed in ancient times, and “because it occurred to the human mind before academic sophistry had distracted and weakened it.”

[ 22 ] The idea of reincarnation is present in Pythagoras, but it would be erroneous to believe that he—along with Pherekydes, who is mentioned as his teacher in antiquity—had yielded to this idea because he had by means of a logical conclusion arrived at the thought that the path of development indicated above could only be reached in repeated earthly lives. To attribute such an intellectual mode of thinking to Pythagoras would be to misjudge him. We are told of his extensive journeys. We hear that he met together with wise men who had preserved traditions of oldest human insight. When we observe the oldest human conceptions that have come down to us through posterity, we arrive at the view that the idea of repeated lives on earth was widespread in remote antiquity. Pythagoras took up the thread from the oldest teachings of humanity. The mythical teachings in picture form appeared to him as deteriorated conceptions that had their origin in older and superior insights. These picture doctrines were to change in his time into a thought-formed world conception, but this intellectual world conception appeared to him as only a part of the soul's life. This part had to be developed to greater depths. It could then lead the soul to its origins. By penetrating in this direction, however, the soul discovers in its inner experience the repeated lives on earth as a soul perception. It does not reach its origins unless it finds its way through the repeated terrestrial lives. As a wanderer walking to a distant place naturally passes through other places on his path, so the soul on its path to the “mothers” passes the preceding lives through which it has gone during its descent from its former existence in perfection, to its present life in imperfection. If one considers everything that is pertinent in this problem, the inference is inescapable that the view of repeated earth lives is to be attributed to Pythagoras in this sense as his inner perception, not as something that was arrived at through a process of conceptual conclusion.

Now the view that is spoken of as especially characteristic of the followers of Pythagoras is that all things are based on numbers. When this statement is made, one must consider that the school of Pythagoras was continued into later times after his death. Philolaus, Archytas and others are mentioned as later Pythagoreans. It was about them especially that one in antiquity knew they “considered things as numbers.” We can assume that this view goes back to Pythagoras even if historical documentation does not appear possible. We shall, however, have to suppose that this view was deeply and organically rooted in his whole mode of conception, and that it took on a more superficial form with his successors.

Let us think of Pythagoras as standing before the beginning of intellectual world conception. He saw how thought took its origin in the soul that had, starting from the “mothers,” descended through its successive lives to its state of imperfection; Because he felt this he could not mean to ascend to the origins through mere thought. He had to seek the highest knowledge in a sphere in which thought was not yet at home. There he found a life of the soul that was beyond thought life. As the soul experiences proportional numbers in the sound of music, so Pythagoras developed a soul life in which he knew himself as living in a connection with the world that can be intellectually expressed in terms of numbers. But for what is thus experienced, these numbers have no other significance than the physicist's proportional tone numbers have for the experience of music.

For Pythagoras the mythical gods must be replaced by thought. At the same time, he develops an appropriate deepening of the soul life; the soul, which through thought has separated itself from the world, finds itself at one with the world again. It experiences itself as not separated from the world. This does not take place in a region in which the world-participating experience turns into a mythical picture, but in a region in which the soul reverberates with the invisible, sensually imperceptible cosmic harmonies. It brings into awareness, not its own thought intentions, but what cosmic powers exert as their will, thus allowing it to become conception in the soul of man.

[ 23 ] In Pherekydes and Pythagoras the process of how thought-experienced world conception originates in the human soul is revealed. Working themselves free from the older forms of conception, these men arrive at an inwardly independent conception of the “soul” distinct from external “nature.” What is clearly apparent in these two personalities—the process in which the soul wrests its way out of the old picture conceptions—takes place more in the undercurrents of the souls of the other thinkers with whom it is customary to begin the account of the development of Greek philosophy. The thinkers who are ordinarily mentioned first are Thales of Miletos (640–550 B.C.), Anaximander (born 610 B.C.), Anaximenes (flourished 600 B.C.) and Heraclitus (born 500 B.C. at Ephesus).

[ 24 ] Whoever acknowledges the preceding arguments to be justified will also find a presentation of these men admissible that must differ from the usual historical accounts of philosophy. Such accounts are, after all, always based on the unexpressed presupposition that these men had arrived at their traditionally reported statements through an imperfect observation of nature. Thus the statement is made that the fundamental and original being of all things was to be found in “water,” according to Thales; in the “infinite,” according to Anaximander; in “air,” according to Anaximenes; in “fire,” in the opinion of Heraclitus.

[ 25 ] What is not considered in this treatment is the fact that these men are still really living in the process of the genesis of intellectual world conception. To be sure, they feel the independence of the human soul in a higher degree than Pherekydes, but they have not yet completed the strict separation of the life of the soul from the process of nature. One will, for instance, most certainly construct an erroneous picture of Thales's way of thinking if it is imagined that he, as a merchant, mathematician and astronomer, thought about natural events and then, in an imperfect yet similar way to that of a modern scientist, had summed up his results in the sentence, “Everything originates from water.” To be a mathematician or an astronomer, etc., in those ancient times meant to deal in a practical way with the things of these professions, much in the way a craftsman makes use of technical skills rather than intellectual and scientific knowledge.

[ 26 ] What must be presumed for a man like Thales is that he still experienced the external processes of nature as similar to inner soul processes. What presented itself to him like a natural event, as did the process and nature of “water” (the fluid, mudlike, earth-formative element), he experienced in a way that was similar to what he felt within himself in soul and body. He then experienced in himself and outside in nature the effect of water, although to a lesser degree than man of earlier times did. Both effects were for him the manifestation of one power. It may be pointed out that at a still later age the external effects in nature were thought of as being akin to the inner processes in a way that did not provide for a “soul” in the present sense as distinct from the body. Even in the time of intellectual world conception, the idea of the temperaments still preserves this point of view as a reminiscence of earlier times.

One called the melancholic temperament, the earthy; the phlegmatic, the watery; the sanguinic, the airy; the choleric, the fiery. These are not merely allegorical expressions. One did not feel a completely separated soul element, but experienced in oneself a soul-body entity as a unity. In this unity was felt the stream of forces that go, for instance, through a phlegmatic soul, to be like the forces in external nature that are experienced in the effects of water. One saw these external water effects to be the same as what the soul experienced in a phlegmatic mood. The thought habits of today must attempt an empathy with the old modes of conception if they want to penetrate into the soul life of earlier times.

[ 27 ] In this way one will find in the world conception of Thales an expression of what his soul life, which was akin to the phlegmatic temperament, caused him to experience inwardly. He experienced in himself what appeared to him to be the world mystery of water. The allusion to the phlegmatic temperament of a person is likely to be associated with a derogatory meaning of the term. Justified as this may be in many cases, it is nevertheless also true that the phlegmatic temperament, when it is combined with an energetic, objective imagination, makes a sage out of a man because of its calmness, collectedness and freedom from passion. Such a disposition in Thales probably caused him to be celebrated by the Greeks as one of their wise men.

[ 28 ] For Anaximenes, the world picture formed itself in another way. He experienced in himself the sanguine temperament. A word of his has been handed down to us that immediately shows how he felt the air element as an expression of the world mystery. “As our soul, which is a breath, holds us together, so air and breath envelop the universe.”

[ 29 ] The world conception of Heraclitus will, in an unbiased contemplation, be felt directly as a manifestation of his choleric inner life. A member of one of the most noble families of Ephesus, he became a violent antagonist of the democratic party because he had arrived at certain views, the truth of which was apparent to him in his immediate inner experience. The views of those around him, compared with his own, seemed to him to prove directly in a most natural way, the foolishness of his environment. Thus, he got into such conflicts that he left his native city and led a solitary life at the Temple of Artemis. Consider these few of his sayings that have come down to us. “It would be good if the Ephesians hanged themselves as soon as they grew up and surrendered their city to those under age.” Or the one about men, “Fools in their lack of understanding, even if they hear the truth, are like the deaf: of them does the saying bear witness that they are absent when present.”

The feeling that is expressed in such a choleric temperament finds itself akin to the consuming activity of fire. It does not live in the restful calm of “being.” It feels itself as one with eternal “becoming.” Such a soul feels stationary existence to be an absurdity. “Everything flows,” is, therefore, a famous saying of Heraclitus. It is only apparently so if somewhere an unchanging being seems to be given. We are lending expression to a feeling of Heraclitus if we say, “The rock seems to represent an absolute unchanging state of being, but this is only appearance; it is inwardly in the wildest commotion; all its parts act upon one another.” The mode of thinking of Heraclitus is usually characterized by his saying, “One cannot twice enter the same stream, for the second time the water is not the same.” A disciple of Heraclitus, Cratylus, goes still further by saying that one could not even enter the same stream once. Thus it is with all things. While we look at what is apparently unchanging, it has already turned into something else in the general stream of existence.

[ 30 ] We do not consider a world conception in its full significance if we accept only its thought content. Its essential element lies in the mood it communicates to the soul, that is, in the vital force that grows out of it. One must realize how Heraclitus feels himself with his own soul in the stream of becoming. The world soul pulsates in his own human soul and communicates to it of its own life as long as the human soul knows itself as living in it. Out of such a feeling of union with the world soul, the thought originates in Heraclitus, “Whatever lives has death in itself through the stream of becoming that is running through everything, but death again has life in itself. Life and death are in our living and dying. Everything has everything else in itself; only thus can eternal becoming flow through everything.” “The ocean is the purest and impurest water, drinkable and wholesome to fishes, to men undrinkable and pernicious.” “Life and death are the same, waking and sleeping, young and old; the first changes into the second and again into the first.” “Good and evil are one.” “The straight path and the crooked . . . are one.”

[ 31 ] Anaximander is freer from the inner life, more surrendered to the element of thought itself. He sees the origin of things in a kind of world ether, an indefinite formless basic entity that has no limits. Take the Zeus of Pherekydes, deprive him of every image content that he still possesses and you have the original principle of Anaximander: Zeus turned into thought. A personality appears in Anaximander in whom thought life is borne out of the mood of soul that still has, in the preceding thinkers, the color of temperament. Such a personality feels united as a soul with the life of thought, and thereby is not so intimately interwoven with nature as the soul that does not yet experience thought as an independent element. It feels itself connected with a world order that lies above the events of nature. When Anaximander says that men lived first as fishes in the moist element and then developed through land animal forms, he means that the spirit germ, which man recognizes through thinking as his true being, has gone through the other forms only as through preliminary stages, with the aim of giving itself eventually the shape that has been appropriate for him from the beginning.

[ 32 ] The thinkers mentioned so far are succeeded historically by Xenophanes of Kolophon (born 570 B.C.); Parmenides (460 B.C., living as a teacher in Athens), younger and inwardly related to Xenophanes; Zenon of Elea (who reached his peak around 500 B.C.); Melissos of Samos (about 450 B.C.).

[ 33 ] The thought element is already alive to such a degree in these thinkers that they demand a world conception in which the life of thought is fully satisfied; they recognize truth only in this form. How must the world ground be constituted so that it can be fully absorbed within thinking? This is their question.

Xenophanes finds that the popular gods cannot stand the test of thought; therefore, he rejects them. His god must be capable of being thought. What the senses perceive is changeable, is burdened with qualities not appropriate to thought, whose function it is to seek what is permanent. Therefore, God is the unchangeable, eternal unity of all things to be seized in thought.

Parmenides sees the Untrue, the Deceiving, in sense-perceived, external nature. He sees what alone is true in the Unity, the Imperishable that is seized by thought. Zeno tries to come to terms with, and do justice to, the thought experience by pointing out the contradictions that result from a world view that sees truth in the change of things, in the process of becoming, in the multiplicity that is shown by the external world. One of the contradictions pointed out by Zeno is that the fastest runner (Achilles) could not catch up with a turtle, for no matter how slowly it moved, the moment Achilles arrived at the point it had just occupied, it would have moved on a little. Through such contradictions Zeno intimates how a conceptual imagination that leans on the external world is caught in self-contradiction. He points to the difficulty such thought meets when it attempts to find the truth.

One will recognize the significance of this world conception, which is called the “eleatic view” (Parmenides and Zeno are from Elea), if one considers that those who hold this view have advanced with the development of thought experience to the point of having transformed it into a special art, the so-called dialectic. In the “art of thought” the soul learns to feel itself in its self-dependence and its inward self-sufficiency. With this step, the reality of the soul is felt to be what it is through its own being. It experiences itself through the fact that it no longer, as in earlier times, follows the general world experience with its life, but unfolds independent thought experience within itself. This experience is rooted in itself and through it, it can feel itself planted into a pure spiritual ground of the world. At first, this feeling is not expressed as a distinctly formulated thought but, in the esteem it enjoyed, it can be sensed vividly as a feeling in this age. According to a Dialogue of Plato, the young Socrates is told by Parmenides that he should learn the “art of thought” from Zeno; otherwise, truth would be unattainable for him. This “art of thought” was felt to be a necessity for the human soul intending to approach the spiritual fundamental grounds of existence.

[ 34 ] Whoever does not see how, in the progress of human development toward the stage of thought experience, real experiences—the picture experiences—came to an end with the beginning of this thought life, will not see the special quality of the Greek thinkers from the sixth to the fourth pre-Christian centuries in the light in which they must appear in this presentation. Thought formed a wall around the human soul, so to speak. The soul had formerly felt as if it were within the phenomena of nature. What it experienced in these natural phenomena, like the activities of its own body, presents itself to the soul in the form of images that appeared in vivid reality. Through the power of thought this entire panorama was now extinguished. Where previously images saturated in content prevailed, thought now expanded through the external world. The soul could experience itself in the surroundings of space and time only if it united itself with thought.

One senses such a mood of soul in Anaxagoras of Clazomenae in Asia Minor (born 500 B.C.). He found himself deeply bound up in his soul with thought life. His thought life encompassed what is extended in space and time. Expanded like this, it appears as the nous, the world reason. It penetrates the whole of nature as an entity. Nature, however, presents itself as composed only of little basic entities. The events of nature that result from the combined actions of these fundamental entities are what the senses perceive after the texture of imagery has vanished from nature. These fundamental entities are called homoiomeries. The soul experiences in thought the connection with the world reason (the nous) inside its wall. Through the windows of the senses it watches what the world reason causes to come into being through the action of the homoiomeries on each other.

[ 35 ] Empedocles (born 490 B.C. in Agrigent) was a personality in whose soul the old and the new modes of conception clash as in a violent antagonism. He still feels something of the old mode of being in which the soul was more closely interwoven with external existence. Hatred and love, antipathy and sympathy live in the human soul. They also live outside the wall that encloses it. The life of the soul is thus homogeneously extended beyond its boundaries and it appears in forces that separate and connect the elements of external nature—air, fire, water and earth—thereby causing what the senses perceive in the outer world.

[ 36 ] Empedocles is, as it were, confronted with nature, which appears to the senses to be deprived of life and soul, and he develops a soul mood that revolts against this extirpation of nature's animation. His soul cannot believe that nature really is what thought wants to make of it. Least of all can it admit that it should stand in such a relation to nature as it appears according to the intellectual world conception. We must imagine what goes on in a soul that senses such a discord in all its harshness, suffering from it. We shall then be capable of entering into the experience of how, in this soul of Empedocles, the old mode of conception is resurrected as the power of intimate feeling but is unwilling to raise this fact into full consciousness. It thus seeks a form of existence in a shade of experience hovering between thought and picture that is reechoed in the sayings of Empedocles. These lose their strangeness if they are understood in this way. The following aphorism is attributed to him. “Farewell. A mortal no longer, but an immortal god I wander about . . . and as soon as I come into the flourishing cities I am worshipped by men and women. They follow me by the thousands, seeking the path of their salvation with me, some expecting prophecies, others, curative charms for many diseases.”

In such a way, a soul that is haunted by an old form of consciousness through which it feels its own existence as that of a banished god who is cast out of another form of existence into the soul-deprived world of the senses, is dazed. He therefore feels the earth to be an “unaccustomed place” into which he is cast as in punishment. There are certainly other sentiments also to be found in the soul of Empedocles because significant flashes of wisdom shine in his aphorisms. His feeling with respect to the “birth of the intellectual world conception” is characterized, however, by the thought mood mentioned above.

[ 37 ] The thinkers who are called the atomists regarded what nature had become for the soul of man through the birth of thought in a different way. The most important among them is Democritus (born 460 B.C. in Abdera). Leucippus is a kind of forerunner to him.

[ 38 ] With Democritus, the homoiomeries of Anaxagoras have become, to a considerable degree, more material. In Anaxagoras, one can still compare the entities of the basic parts with living germs. With Democritus, they become dead indivisible particles of matter, which in their different combinations make up the things of the outer world. They mix freely as they move to and fro; thus, the events of nature come to pass. The world reason (nous) of Anaxagoras, which has the world processes grow out of the combined action of the homoiomeries like a spiritual (incorporeal) consciousness, with Democritus, turns into the unconscious law of nature (ananke). The soul is ready to recognize only what it can grasp as the result of simple thought combinations. Nature is now completely deprived of life and soul; thought has paled as a soul experience into the inner shadow of inanimate nature. In this way, with Democritus, the intellectual prototype of all more or less materialistically colored world conceptions of later times has made its appearance.

[ 39 ] The atom world of Democritus represents an external world, a nature in which no trace of soul life can be found. The thought experiences in the soul, through which the soul has become aware of itself, are mere shadow experiences in Democritus. Thus, a part of the fate of thought experiences is characterized. They bring the human soul to the consciousness of its own being, but they fill it at the same time with uncertainty about itself. The soul experiences itself in itself through thought, but it can at the same time feel that it lost its anchorage in the independent spiritual world power that used to lend it security and inner stability. This emancipation of the soul was felt by the group of men in Greek intellectual life known as “Sophists.” The most important among them is Protagoras of Abdera (480–410 B.C.). Also to be noted besides him are Gorgias, Critias, Hippias, Thrasymachus and Prodicus.

The sophists are often presented as men who superficially played with their thinking. Much has been contributed to this opinion by the manner in which Aristophanes, the playwright of comedies, treated them, but there are many things that can lead to a better appreciation of the sophists. It is noteworthy that even Socrates, who to a certain limited extent thought of himself as a pupil of Prodicus, is said to have described him as a man who had done much for the refinement of the speech and thinking of his disciples.

[ 40 ] Protagoras's view is expressed in the famous statement, “Man is the measure of all things, of those that are, that they are; of those that are not, that they are not.” In the sentiment underlying this statement the thought experience feels itself sovereign. It does not sense any connection with an objective world power. If Parmenides is of the opinion that the senses supply man with a world of deception, one could go further and add, “Why should not thinking, although one experiences it, also deceive?” Protagoras, however, would reply to this, “Why should it be man's concern if the world outside him is not as he perceives and thinks it? Does he imagine it for anyone else but himself? No matter how it may be for another being, this should be of no concern to man. The contents of his mind are only to serve him; with their aid he is to find his way through the world. Once he achieves complete clarity about himself, he cannot wish for any thought contents about the world except those that serve him.” Protagoras means to be able to build on thinking. For this purpose he intends to have it rest exclusively on its own sovereign power.

With this step, however, Protagoras places himself in contradiction to the spirit that lives in the depths of Greek life. This spirit is distinctly perceptible in the Greek character. It manifests itself in the inscription, “Know Thyself,” at the temple of Delphi. This ancient oracle wisdom speaks as if it contained the challenge for the progress of world conceptions that advances from the conception in images to the form of consciousness in which the secrets of the world are seized through thought. Through this challenge man is directed to his own soul. He is told that he can hear the language in his soul through which the world expresses its essence. He is thereby also directed toward something that produces uncertainties and insecurities for itself in its experience. The leading spirits of Greek civilization were to conquer the dangers of this self-supporting soul life. Thus, they were to develop thought in the soul into a world conception.

In the course of this development the sophists navigated in dangerous straits. In them the Greek spirit places itself at an abyss; it means to produce the strength of equilibrium through its own power. One should, as has been pointed out, consider the gravity and boldness of this attempt, rather than lightly condemn it even though condemnation is certainly justified for many of the sophists.

This attempt of the sophists takes place at a natural turning point of Greek life. Protagoras lived from 480 to 410 B.C. The Peloponnesian War, which occurred at this turning point of Greek civilization, lasted from 431 to 404 B.C. Before this war the individual member of Greek society had been firmly enclosed by his social connections. Commonwealth and tradition provided the measuring stick for his actions and thinking. The individual person had value and significance only as a member of the total structure. Under such circumstances the question, “What is the value of the individual human being?” could not be asked. The sophists, however, do ask this question, and in so doing introduce the era of Greek Enlightenment. Fundamentally, it is the question of how man arranges his life after he has become aware of his awakened thought life.

[ 41 ] From Pherekydes (or Thales) to the sophists, one can observe how emaciated thought in Greece, which had already been born before these men, gradually finds its place in the stream of philosophical development. The effect thought has when it is placed in the service of world conception becomes apparent in them. The birth of thought, however, is to be observed in the entire Greek life. One could show much the same kind of development in the fields of art, poetry, public life, the various crafts and trades, and one would see everywhere how human activity changes under the influence of the form of human organization that introduces thought into the world conception. It is not correct to say that philosophy “discovers” thought. It comes into existence through the fact that the newly born thought life is used for the construction of a world picture that formerly had been formed out of experiences of a different kind.

[ 42 ] While the sophists led the spirit of Greece, expressed in the motto, “Know Thyself,” to the edge of a dangerous cliff, Socrates, who was born in Athens about 470 and was condemned to death through poison in 399 B.C., expressed this spirit with a high degree of perfection.

[ 43 ] Historically, the picture of Socrates has come down to us through two channels of tradition. In one, we have the figure that his great disciple, Plato (427–347 B.C.), has drawn of him. Plato presents his philosophy in dialogue form, and Socrates appears in these dialogues as a teacher. He is shown as the “sage” who leads the persons around him through intellectual guidance to high stages of insight. A second picture has been drawn by Xenophon in his Memorabilia of Socrates. At first sight it seems as if Plato had idealized the character of Socrates and as if Xenophon had portrayed him more directly as he had been. But a more intimate inspection would likely show that both Plato and Xenophon each drew a picture of Socrates as they saw him from a special point of view. One is justified, therefore, in considering the question as to how these pictures supplement and illuminate each other.

[ 44 ] The first thing that must appear significant here is that Socrates' philosophy has come down to posterity entirely as an expression of his personality, of the fundamental character of his soul life. Both Plato and Xenophon present Socrates in such a way that in him his personal opinion speaks everywhere. This personality carries in itself the awareness that, whoever expresses his personal opinion out of the true ground of the soul, expresses something that is more than just human opinion, something that is a manifestation of the purposes of the world order through human thinking. By those who think they know him, Socrates is taken as the living proof for the conviction that truth is revealed in the human soul through thinking if, as was the case with Socrates, this soul is grounded in its own substance. Looking on Socrates, Plato does not teach a doctrine that is asserted by contemplative thought, but the thought has a rightly developed human being speak, who then observes what he produces as truth. Thus, the manner in which Plato behaves toward Socrates becomes an expression for what man is in his relation to the world. What Plato has advanced about Socrates is significant and also the way in which he, in his activity as a writer, has placed Socrates in the world of Greek spiritual life.

[ 45 ] With the birth of thought man was directed toward his “soul.” The question now arises as to what this soul says when it begins to speak, expressing what the world forces have laid into it. Through the attitude Plato takes with respect to Socrates, the resulting answer is that in the human soul the reason of the world speaks what it intends to reveal to man. The foundation is laid with this step for the confidence expressed in the revelations of the human soul insofar as it develops thought in itself. The figure of Socrates appears in the sign of this confidence.

[ 46 ] In ancient times the Greek consulted the oracles in the most important questions of life. He asked for prophecy, the revelation of the will and the opinion of the spiritual powers. Such an arrangement is in accord with the soul experience in images. Through the image man feels himself bound to the powers holding sway over the world. The oracle, then, is the institution by means of which somebody who is especially gifted in that direction finds his way to the spiritual powers better than other people. As long as one did not experience one's soul as separated from the outer world, the feeling was natural that this external world was able to express more through a special institution than through everyday experience. The picture spoke from without. Why should the outer world not be capable of speaking distinctly at a special place? Thought speaks to the inner soul. With thought, therefore, the soul is left to its own resources; it cannot feel united with another soul as with the revelations of a priestly oracle. To thought, one had to lend one's own soul. One felt of thought that it was a common possession of all men.

[ 47 ] World reason shines into thought life without especially established institutions. Socrates felt that the force lives in the thinking soul that used to be sought in the oracles. He experienced the “daimonion” in himself, the spiritual force that leads the soul. Thought has brought the soul to the consciousness of itself. With his conception of the daimonion speaking in him that, always leading him, told him what to do, Socrates meant to say, “The soul that has found its way to the thought life is justified to feel as if it communicated in itself with the world reason. It is an expression of the high valuation of what the soul possesses in its thought experience.”

[ 48 ] “Virtue,” under the influence of this view, is placed in a special light. Because Socrates values thought, he must presuppose that true virtue in human life reveals itself in the life of thought. True virtue must be found in thought life because it is from thought life that man derives his value. “Virtue is teachable.” In this way is Socrates' conception most frequently expressed. It is teachable because whoever really seizes thought life must be in its possession. What Xenophon says about Socrates is significant in this respect. Socrates teaches a disciple about virtue and the following dialogue develops.

Socrates: Do you believe there is a doctrine and science of justice, just as there is a doctrine of grammar?
The disciple: Yes, I do.
Socrates: Whom do you consider now as better versed in grammar, the one who intentionally writes and reads incorrectly, or the one who does so without intention?
The disciple: I should think the one who does it intentionally, for if he meant to, he could also do it correctly.
Socrates: Does it not seem to you that the one who intentionally writes incorrectly knows how to write, but the other one does not?
The disciple: Without doubt.
Socrates: Who now understands more of justice, he who intentionally lies or cheats, or he who does so inadvertently?

Socrates attempts to make clear to the disciple that what matters is to have the right thoughts about virtue. So also what Socrates says about virtue aims at the establishment of confidence in a soul that knows itself through thought experience. The right thoughts about virtue are to be trusted more than all other motivations. Virtue makes man more valuable when he experiences it in thought.

[ 49 ] Thus, what the pre-Socratic age strove for becomes manifest in Socrates, that is, the appreciation of what humanity has been given through the awakened thought life. Socrates' method of teaching is under the influence of this conception. He approaches man with the presupposition that thought in life is in him; it only needs to be awakened. It is for this reason that he arranges his questions in such a way that the questioned person is stimulated to awaken his own thought life. This is the substance of the Socratic method.

[ 50 ] Plato, who was born in Athens in 427 B.C., felt, as a disciple of Socrates, that his master had helped him to consolidate his confidence in the life of thought. What the entire previous development tended to bring into appearance reaches a climax in Plato. This is the conception that in thought life the world spirit reveals itself. The awareness of this conception sheds, to begin with, its light over all of Plato's soul life. Nothing that man knows through the senses or otherwise has any value as long as the soul has not exposed it to the light of thought. Philosophy becomes for Plato the science of ideas as the world of true being, and the idea is the manifestation of the world spirit through the revelation of thought. The light of the world spirit shines into the soul of man and reveals itself there in the form of ideas; the human soul, in seizing the idea, unites itself with the force of the world spirit. The world that is spread in space and time is like the mass of the ocean water in which the stars are reflected, but what is real is only reflected as idea. Thus, for Plato, the whole world changes into ideas that act upon each other. Their effect in the world is produced through the fact that the ideas are reflected in hyle, the original matter. What we see as the many individual things and events comes to pass through this reflection. We need not extend knowledge to hyle, the original matter, however, for in it is no truth. We reach truth only if we strip the world picture of everything that is not idea. [ 51 ] For Plato, the human soul is living in the idea, but this life is so constituted that the soul is not a manifestation of its life in the ideas in all its utterances. Insofar as it is submerged in the life of ideas, it appears as the "rational soul” (thought-bearing soul), and as such, the soul appears to itself when it becomes aware of itself in thought perception. It must also manifest itself in such a way that it appears as the "non-rational soul” (not-thought-bearing soul), As such, it again appears in a twofold way as courage-developing, and as appetitive soul. Thus, Plato seems to distinguish three members or parts in the human soul: The rational soul, the courage-like (or will-exertive) soul and the appetitive soul. We shall, however, describe the spirit of his conceptional approach better if we express it in a different way. According to its nature, the soul is a member of the world of ideas, but it acts in such a way that it adds an activity to its life in reason through its courage life and its appetitive life. In this threefold mode of utterance it appears as earthbound soul. It descends as a rational soul through physical birth into a terrestrial existence, and with death again enters the world of ideas. Insofar as it is rational soul, it is immortal, for as such it shares with its life the eternal existence of the world of ideas.

[ 52 ] Plato's doctrine of the soul emerges as a significant fact in the age of thought perception. The awakened thought directed man's attention toward the soul. A perception of the soul develops in Plato that is entirely the result of thought perception. Thought in Plato has become bold enough not only to point toward the soul but to express what the soul is, as it were, to describe it. What thought has to say about the soul gives it the force to know itself in the eternal. Indeed, thought in the soul even sheds light on the nature of the temporal by expanding its own being beyond this temporal existence. The soul perceives thought. As the soul appears in its terrestrial life, it could not produce in itself the pure form of thought. Where does the thought experience come from if it cannot be developed in the life on earth? It represents a reminiscence of a pre-terrestrial, purely spiritual state of being. Thought has seized the soul in such a way that it is not satisfied by the soul's terrestrial form of existence. It has been revealed to the soul in an earlier state of being (preexistence) in the spirit world (world of ideas) and the soul recalls it during its terrestrial existence through the reminiscence of the life it has spent in the spirit.

[ 53 ] What Plato has to say about the moral life follows from this soul conception. The soul is moral if it so arranges life that it exerts itself to the largest possible measure as rational soul. Wisdom is the virtue that stems from the rational soul; it ennobles human life. Fortitude is the virtue of the will-exertive soul; Temperance is that of the appetitive soul. These virtues come to pass when the rational soul becomes the ruler over the other manifestations of the soul. When all three virtues harmoniously act together, there emerges what Plato calls, Justice, the direction toward the Good, Dikaiosyne.

[ 54 ] Plato's disciple, Aristotle (born 384 B.C. in Stageira, Thracia, died 321 B.C.), together with his teacher, represents a climax in Greek thinking. With him the process of the absorption of thought life into the world conception has been completed and come to rest. Thought takes its rightful possession of its function to comprehend, out of its own resources, the being and events of the world. Plato still uses his conceptual imagination to bring thought to its rightful authority and to lead it into the world of ideas. With Aristotle, this authority has become a matter of course. It is now a question of confirming it everywhere in the various fields of knowledge. Aristotle understands how to use thought as a tool that penetrates into the essence of things. For Plato, it had been the task to overcome the thing or being of the external world. When it has been overcome, the soul carries in itself the idea of which the external being had only been overshadowed, but which had been foreign to it, hovering over it in a spiritual world of truth. Aristotle intends to submerge into the beings and events, and what the soul finds in this submersion, it accepts as the essence of the thing itself. The soul feels as if it had only lifted this essence out of the thing and as if it had brought this essence for its own consumption into the thought form in order to be able to carry it in itself as a reminder of the thing. To Aristotle's mind, the ideas are in the things and events. They are the side of the things through which these things have a foundation of their own in the underlying material, matter (hyle).

[ 55 ] Plato, like Aristotle, lets his conception of the soul shed its light on his entire world conception. In both thinkers we describe the fundamental constitution of their philosophy as a whole if we succeed in determining the basic characteristics of their soul conceptions. To be sure, for both of them many detailed studies would have to be considered that cannot be attempted in this sketch. But the direction their mode of conception took is, for both, indicated in their soul conceptions.

[ 56 ] Plato is concerned with what lives in the soul and, as such, shares in the spirit world. What is important for Aristotle is the question of how the soul presents itself for man in his own knowledge. As it does with other things, the soul must also submerge into itself in order to find what constitutes its own essence. The idea, which, according to Aristotle, man finds in a thing outside his soul, is the essence of the thing, but the soul has brought this essence into the form of an idea in order to have it for itself. The idea does not have its reality in the cognitive soul but in the external thing in connection with its material (hyle). If the soul submerges into itself, however, it finds the idea as such in reality. The soul in this sense is idea, but active idea, an entity exerting action, and it behaves also in the life of man as such an active entity. In the process of germination of man it lays hold upon material existence.

While idea and matter constitute an inseparable unity in an external thing, this is not the case with the human soul and its body. Here the independent human soul seizes upon the corporeal part, renders the idea ineffective that has been active in the body before and inserts itself in its place. In Aristotle's view, a soul-like principle is active already in the bodily element with which the human soul unites itself, for he sees also in the bodies of the plants and of animals, soul-like entities of a subordinate kind at work. A body that carries in itself the soul elements of the plant and animal is, as it were, fructified by the human soul. Thus, for the terrestrial man, a body-soul entity is linked up with a spirit-soul entity. The spirit-soul entity suppresses the independent activity of the body-soul element during the earth life of man and uses the body-soul entity as an instrument. Five soul manifestations come into being through this process. These, in Aristotle, appear as five members of the soul: The plant-like soul (threptikon), the sentient soul (aisthetikon), the desire-developing soul (orektikon), the will-exerting soul (kinetikon) and the spirit-soul (dianoetikon). Man is spiritual soul through what belongs to the spiritual world and what, in the process of germination, links itself up with the body-soul entity. The other members of the soul come into being as the spiritual soul unfolds itself in the body and thereby leads its earth life.

With Aristotle's focus on a spiritual soul the perspective toward a spiritual world in general is naturally given. The world picture of Aristotle stands before our contemplative eye in such a way that we see below the life of things and events, thus presenting matter and idea; the higher we lift our eye, the more we see vanish whatever bears a material character. Pure spiritual essence appears, representing itself to man as idea, that is, the sphere of the world in which deity as pure spirituality that moves everything has its being. The spiritual soul of man belongs to this world sphere; before it is united with a body-soul entity, it does not exist as an individual being but only as a part of the world spirit. Through this connection it acquires its individual existence separated from the world spirit and continues to live after the separation from the body as a spiritual being. Thus, the individual soul entity has its beginning with the human earthly life and then lives on as immortal. A preexistence of the soul before earth life is assumed by Plato but not by Aristotle. The denial of the soul's preexistence is as natural to Aristotle, who has the idea exist in the thing, as the opposite view is natural to Plato, who conceives of the idea as hovering over the thing. Aristotle finds the idea in the thing, and the soul acquires in its body what it is to be in the spirit world as an individuality.

[ 57 ] Aristotle is the thinker who has brought thought to the point where it unfolds to a world conception through its contact with the essence of the world. The age before Aristotle led to the experience of thought; Aristotle seizes the thoughts and applies them to whatever he finds in the world. The natural way, peculiar to Aristotle, in which he lives in thought as a matter of course, leads him also to investigate logic, the laws of thought itself. Such a science could only come into being after the awakened thought had reached a stage of great maturity and of such a harmonious relationship to the things of the outer world as we find it in Aristotle.

[ 58 ] Compared with Aristotle, the other thinkers of antiquity who appear as his contemporaries or as his successors seem to be of much less significance. They give the impression that their abilities lack a certain energy that prevents them from attaining the stage of insight Aristotle had reached. One gets the feeling that they disagree with him because they are stating opinions about things they do not understand as well as he. One is inclined to explain their views by pointing to the deficiency that led them to utter opinions that have already been disproved essentially in Aristotle's work.

[ 59 ] To begin with, one can receive such an impression from the Stoics and the Epicureans. Zeno of Kition (342–270 B.C.), Kleanthes (born 200 B.C.), Chrysippus (282– 209 B.C.), and others belong to the Stoics, whose name was derived from the Hall of Columns in Athens, the Stoa. They accept what appears reasonable to them in earlier world conceptions, but they are mainly concerned with finding out what man's position is in the world by contemplation of it. They want to base on this, their decision as to how to arrange life in such a way that it is in agreement with the world order, and also in such a way that man can unfold his life in this world order according to his own nature. According to them, man dulls his natural being through desire, passion and covetousness. Through equanimity and freedom from desire, he feels best what he is meant to be and what he can be. The ideal man is the “sage” who does not hamper the process of the inner development of the human being by any vice.

[ 60 ] As the thinkers before Aristotle were striving to obtain the knowledge that, after him, becomes accessible to man through the ability to perceive thoughts in the full consciousness of his soul, with the Stoics, reflection concentrates on the question as to what man is to do in order to express his nature as a human being in the best way.

[ 61 ] Epicurus (born 324 B.C., died 270 B.C.) developed in his own way the elements that had already been latent in the earlier atomistic thinkers. He builds a view of life on this foundation that can be considered to be an answer to the question: As the human soul emerges as the blossom of world processes, how is it to live in order to shape its separate existence, its self-dependence in accordance with thinking guided by reason? Epicurus could answer this question only by a method that considered life only between birth and death, for nothing else can, with perfect intellectual honesty, be derived from the atomistic world conception. The fact of pain must appear to such a conception as a peculiar enigma of life. For pain is one of those facts that drive the soul out of the consciousness of its unity with the things of the world. One can consider the motion of the stars and the fall of rain to be like the motion of one's own hand, as was done in the world conception of more remote antiquity. That is to say, one can feel in both kinds of events the same uniform spirit-soul reality. The fact that events can produce pain in man but cannot do so in the external world, however, drives the soul to the recognition of its own special nature. A doctrine of virtues, which, like the one of Epicurus, endeavors to live in harmony with world reason, can, as may easily be conceived, appreciate an ideal of life that leads to the avoidance of pain and displeasure. Thus, everything that does away with displeasure becomes the highest Epicurean life value.

[ 62 ] This view of life found numerous followers in later antiquity, especially among Roman gentlemen of cultural aspiration. The Roman poet, T. Lucretius Carus (95–52 B.C.), has expressed it in perfect artistic form in his poem, De Rerum Natura.

[ 63 ] The process of perceiving thoughts leads the soul to the recognition of its own being, but it can also occur that the soul feels powerless to deepen its thought experience sufficiently to find a connection with the grounds of the world through this experience. The soul then finds itself torn loose from these grounds through its own thinking. It feels that thinking contains its own being, but it does not find a way to recognize in its thought life anything but its own statement. The soul can then only surrender to a complete renunciation of any kind of true knowledge. Pyrrho (360–270 B.C.) and his followers, whose philosophical belief is called scepticism, were in such a situation. Scepticism, the philosophy of doubt, attributes no other power to the thought experience than the formation of human opinions about the world. Whether or not these opinions have any significance for the world outside man is a question about which it is unwilling to make a decision. [A true skeptic is agnostic on a subject. Doubt denotes an opinion for which a burden of proof is needed. Skepticism should be neutral – e.Ed]

[ 64 ] In a certain sense, one can see a well-rounded picture in the series of Greek thinkers. One will have to admit, of course, that such an attempt to connect the views of the individual thinkers only too easily brings out irrelevant aspects of secondary significance. What remains most important is still the contemplation of the individual personalities and the impressions one can gain concerning the fact of how, in these personalities, the general human element is brought to manifestation in special cases. One can observe a process in this line of Greek thinkers that can be called the birth, growth and life of thought: in the pre-Socratic thinkers, the prelude; in Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the culmination; after them, a decline and a kind of dissolution of thought life.

[ 65 ] Whoever contemplates this development can arrive at the question as to whether thought life really has the power to give everything to the soul toward which it has led it by bringing it to the complete consciousness of itself. For the unbiased observer, Greek thought life has an element that makes it appear “perfect” in the best sense of the word. It is as if the energy of thought in the Greek thinkers had worked out everything that it contains in itself. Whoever judges differently will notice on closer inspection that somewhere in his judgment an error is involved. Later world conceptions have produced accomplishments through other forces of the soul. Of the later thoughts as such, it can always be shown that with respect to their real thought content they can already be found in some earlier Greek thinker. What can be thought and how one can doubt about thinking and knowledge, all enters the field of consciousness in Greek civilization, and in the manifestation of thought the soul takes possession of its own being.

[ 66 ] Has Greek thought life, however, shown the soul that it has the power to supply it with everything that it has stimulated in it? The philosophical current called Neo-Platonism, which in a way forms an aftermath of Greek thought life, was confronted with this question. Plotinus (205–270 A.D.) was its chief representative. Philo, who lived at the beginning of the Christian era in Alexandria, could be considered a forerunner of this movement. He does not base his effort to construct a world conception on the creative energy of thought. Rather, he applies thought in order to understand the revelation of the Old Testament. He interprets what is told in this document as fact in an intellectual, allegorical manner. For him, the accounts of the Old Testament turn into symbols for soul events to which he attempts to gain access intellectually.

Plotinus does not regard thought experience as something that embraces the soul in its full life. Behind thought life another life of the soul must lie, a soul life that would be concealed rather than revealed by the action of thought. The soul must overcome the life in thought, must extinguish it in itself and only after this extinction can it arrive at a form of experience that unites it with the origin of the world. Thought leads the soul to itself; now it must seize something in itself that will again lead it out of the realm into which thought has brought it. What Plotinus strives for is an illumination that begins in the soul after it has left the realm to which it has been carried by thought. In this way he expects to rise up to a world being that does not enter into thought life. World reason, therefore, toward which Plato and Aristotle strive, is not, according to Plotinus, the last reality at which the soul arrives. It is rather the outgrowth of a still higher reality that lies beyond all thinking. From this reality beyond all thought, which cannot be compared with anything that could be a possible object of thought, all world processes emanate.

Thought, as it could manifest itself in Greek spiritual life, has, as it were, gone through a complete revolution and thereby all possible relationships of man to thought seem to be exhausted. Plotinus looks for sources other than those given in thought revelation. He leaves the continuing evolution of thought life and enters the realm of mysticism. It is not intended to give a description of the development of mysticism here, but only the development of thought life and what has its origin in this process is to be outlined. There are, however, at various points in the spiritual development of mankind connections between intellectual world conceptions and mysticism. We find such a point of contact in Plotinus. His soul life is not ruled only by thinking. He has a mystical experience that presents an inner awareness without the presence of thoughts in his soul. In this experience he finds his soul united with the world foundation. His way of presenting the connection of the world with its ground, however, is to be expressed in thoughts. The reality beyond thought is the most perfect; what proceeds from it is less perfect. In this way, the process continues down into the visible world, the most imperfect. Man finds himself in this world of imperfection. Through the act of perfecting his soul, he is to cast off what the world in which he finds himself can give him, and is thus to find a path of development through which he becomes a being that is of one accord with the perfect origin.

[ 67 ] We see a personality in Plotinus who feels the impossibility to continue Greek thought life. He cannot find anything that would grow as a further branch of world conception out of thought itself. If one looks for the sense in which the evolution of philosophy proceeds, one is justified in saying that the formation of picture conception has turned into that of thought conceptions. In a similar way, the production of thought conception must change again into something else, but the evolution of the world conception is not ready for this in the age of Plotinus. He therefore abandons thought and searches outside thought experience. Greek thoughts, however, fructified by his mystical experiences, develop into the evolutionary ideas that present the world process as a sequence of stages proceeding in a descending order, from a highest most perfect being to imperfect beings. In the thinking of Plotinus, Greek thoughts continue to have their effect. They do not develop as an organic growth of the original forces, however, but are taken over into the mystical consciousness. They do not undergo a transformation through their own energies but through nonintellectual forces.

Ammonius Sakkas (175–242), Porphyrius (232–304), Iamblichus (who lived in the fourth century A.D.), Proclus (410–485), and others are followers and expounders of this philosophy.

In a way similar to that of Plotinus and his successors, Greek thinking in its more Platonic shade continued under the influence of a nonintellectual element. Greek thought in its Pythagorean nuance is treated by Nigidius Figulus, Apollonius of Tyana, Moderatus of Gades, and others.

• [ 3 ] 1. This book, which is to give a picture of the world and life conceptions of the nineteenth century is, in its second edition, supplemented by a brief account of the preceding philosophies insofar as they are based on an intellectual conception of the world. I have done this because I feel that the ideas of the last century are better shown in their inner significance if they are not taken by themselves, but if the highlights of thought of the preceding ages fall on them. In such an “introduction” not all the “documentary materials” can be given that must form the basis of this short sketch. If I should have the opportunity to develop the sketch into an independent book, it would become clear that the appropriate basis really exists. I also have no doubt that others who want to see in this sketch a suggestion for new viewpoints will find the documentary evidence in the historical sources that have been traditionally handed down to us.

[Ladies and gentlemen present!

The last time I drew attention to the fact that I wanted to talk about Pythagorean teaching. Pythagoras had founded a school in Lower Italy. It was not so much a school, but rather a discipleship whose spiritual leader was Pythagoras. He formed a doctrine. We can no longer say how much of it belonged to Pythagoras and how much to his disciples.

The world view of the Pythagoreans emerges before us, and this shows itself to be one of the most profound world views we have. Since it is very important for us to really introduce the things we are dealing with, I would like to introduce a modern Pythagorean before I mention Pythagoras himself, a Pythagorean who lived in Germany himself and whose world view always seems to me like a forecourt to Pythagoras.

You can understand this world view much better if you are familiar with the works and views of Baron von Hardenberg - Novalis, a poet of a thoroughly mystical nature. No one who knows his writings will doubt this.

Take his "Apprentices at Sais". This is something that can only be understood in its esoteric meaning. But anyone who knows the personality of Novalis - he was born in 1772 and died in 1801, so he was 29 years old - will understand this. This Novalis seems to have remained the most innocent youth throughout his life. He seems to us more like the revelation of an unearthly individuality than an earthly personality. It is quite impossible to understand that this immersion, this contemplation, could have been acquired in his immense youth.

When we read his "Heinrich von Ofterdingen", we find that he drew from direct sources, from the sources of mysticism. He then incorporated these into his novel "Heinrich von Ofterdingen" and thus showed that he understood the mysticism of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. If we look at his basic ideas, we will find a certain similarity with other mystics.

He searched for the "Blue Flower. People have often mocked this "Blue Flower. We will understand each other better if we remember Goethe's "Prophecies of Bakis", where he speaks of the serpent's thread and the flower, where he says that man can walk the path that is long and narrow. When man then walks this path, he sees knots before him. He also sees the knot in which lives are tied together. Behind him, he trails a snake. The snake disappears and the knot transforms into a flower in front of him.

This image, which Goethe repeatedly refers to, is egoism, the approach to the highest spirituality or deepest knowledge. The symbol for this is the "blue flower. It is also a symbol of that which arises for man as an entanglement of life when he progresses along the path of knowledge. It is this "Blue Flower" that Novalis has in mind for his Heinrich von Ofterdingen.

We also find this flower in Master Klingsohr, who can prophesy. The future lies open before him. Goethe says: The future also lies open before him who really has a complete overview of the past. [...] - Master Klingsohr reveals the future to Heinrich von Ofterdingen. This satisfies him to such an extent that he is able to see the individualized Blue Flower in the daughter, as he has progressed so far that he can see the highest in the female being.

Matilda dies away from Henry of Ofterdingen. He decides to die after his beloved. For him, reality turns into a dream. What he was previously inclined to regard as a dream, the higher spiritual world, is now reality. He no longer finds this highest in the individual being, but he

finds it in other beings as well. He finds a second girl. It is the same for him. He finds Mathilde again in Cyane. She is like a new embodiment of him. He lives a life of the afterlife.

We find the idea of this in his "Apprentices of Sais". A beautiful fairy tale is woven into it about the boy Hyacinth, who loves the girl Rosenblüthe. Only the trees and birds of the forest know of this love. Then we find Hyacinth changed. He is overcome by a longing to seek something deeper. He leaves Rosenblüthe without sufficient reason. Then he comes to the evil old man, who plants in him the longing to seek the mother of all things, or the veiled maiden. He sets off on his journey to the temple of Isis, comes upon an image, and when he unveils it, he finds nothing but roses. [He finds the beloved as the solution to the riddle, as the veiled image of Sais.

This is reminiscent of the higher concept of "Know thyself", as he expressed it in an epigram. He stands before the veiled image at Sais. He lifts the veil and - wonder of wonders - he finds himself. A magical individualism consists in the fact that one can find the infinite in the finite, [that one can turn the spirit into immediate reality].

So in Novalis we undoubtedly find a mystical personality. So if we assume that in Novalis we are dealing with a deep-seated, mystical nature, and if we then get to know him, he does not appear to us as a mystic, as he has just been described, but as a resurgent old Pythagorean disciple.

When we let Novalis pass us by, when he seems more like a memory, and when we then see how this touch of the earthly, how this personality nevertheless stands firmly in life, has tendencies that we would least expect to find in such romantically inclined natures, then we are referred to the Pythagoreans as to fleeting ghosts.

We must by no means equate this view and philosophical contemplation, as we have it of Romanticism in him, with the view of the other Romantics, with contemporaries of his who lack any depth. Friedrich Wilhelm Schlegel or Tieck, [E-T.A.] Hoffmann and so on must not be confused [with him]. But anyone who allows Novalis to have an effect on them will not be tempted to make such a confusion. What is astonishing about Novalis - despite his [poetic] nature - is that he is one of the most enthusiastic admirers of everything mathematical. He has a thoroughly educated, mathematical psyche, an immediate revelation of what he calls the magical in nature. In this he finds the law of the spirit. That which he who wishes to enter the higher regions would like to leave behind, we find in Novalis as the main thing, as that which led him to emphasize the magical in his [idealism]. In the concatenation of basic mathematical concepts he sees the most intriguing revelation of the mystery of the world. He sees free matter at the bottom of things. Mathematics is the foundation on which existence rests, it is therefore nothing other than the highest form, the purest form of spirituality.

If we find this as the basis of his view, then he appears to us as a representative of Pythagoreanism. We can understand Pythagoreanism much better if we imagine it like Novalis. The Pythagorean soul must be imagined in this way, then we arrive at where Novalis stands; [just as] Pythagoras was able to arrive at the view that the basic structure, the basic essence, the basic spirit of the universe is actually given in the connection between numerical quantities and spatial quantities in this harmony.

If we want to gain an insight into a Pythagorean soul from the first elementary beginnings, we must imagine it in the following way. The pupil was led up step by step to the knowledge to which he was to come. He was guided in a very careful way. The first was mathematical knowledge, the second astronomical. Astronomy was preferably mathematical. The regularity resulted from the numerical relationship in the universe. He was first introduced to these numerical relationships. Then he was gradually led on to the knowledge of man himself. The fulfillment of the desire "Know thyself" [came] last. First he was introduced to mathematics.

How can one imagine that man can actually come to the idea that mathematics is the spiritual foundation of the entire universe? How can this be imagined in the form of harmony, formed in space and time? If we immerse ourselves in those areas of space and time which outwardly already show a regular grouping, such as the movement of the celestial bodies, if we immerse ourselves in that, then we have basically given nothing other than an embodied mathematics, an embodied arithmetic, in this construction of the celestial vault that we perform in our minds.

No human being can actually find anything of a mathematical structure, of a spatial structure of geometric figures in the world and in reality, if he has not first formed these mathematical figures in his mind. If someone described a circle or an ellipse, we would not know what it is that he is describing as an object. We would be able to trace the line in the various places in space and connect these places. But we would not be able to connect a concept with the whole line that describes the object if we had not already formed the concept. We can draw a star and then think about what kind of line the star describes. But only then can we find the figure if we already have it in our minds. The same is also the case with other things, even if we take the numerical relationships. We will only recognize the objects outside in space in their certain mutual numerical relationships, in their numerical diversity, if we have formed these relationships in our minds. If we know that 2 x 2 = 4, then we can also recognize it outside in space. We would not be able to connect any concepts with reality, we would not be able to grasp them at all, they would pass us by like nothing, they would not be there for us at all, if we had not formed the images in a purely spiritual way in our psyche.

So it is that the Pythagoreans could say: That which I see outside must also be contained in a certain way in my mind. What emerges from the source point of my soul is the same as what I perceive outside as the primordial ground of the world itself. The Pythagoreans thought about this more deeply and said to themselves: "It is impossible that two things that are completely separate from each other, spirit outside and world inside, [merely] exist side by side [and do not agree]. The coincidence would only have meaning if what is in the spirit is exactly the same as what is outside in space. If the circle, the ellipse that I perceive within me, the numerical relationships, are the same as those outside, which I see in the outer world, then it makes no sense at all if [the Pythagorean] does not have something that he forms within himself. If he sees the spirit of things and has it within him, then it has only one meaning.

Therefore the Pythagorean did not initially think like the philosophers of the nineteenth century under the influence of Kant. He did not ask: How is it that my imagination inside me corresponds to the things outside? My experience is quite different. That is the unquestionable unity of what is outside and what is in my mind. This is how the Pythagorean thinks.

It makes no difference whether I take the ideas of the Pythagoreans' astronomy or apply the new ones. It doesn't matter at all. So when the Pythagorean sees the celestial body describing an orbit in the form of an ellipse, it is a direct experience for the Pythagorean that the ellipse that he perceives within himself and the ellipse that exists outside as the orbit of a star are not two ellipses, but only one. And that is experience.

Schelling also expressed this, and this makes the matter clear in the simplest way. He has taken up the "power of attraction that physicists have always [known]. They imagined that objects exert a force of attraction on each other. The earth attracts the moon, the sun attracts the earth. When the sun attracts the earth, it acts on the earth. It is difficult to attribute an effect to a body where it does not exist. But the fact is that when a body acts on the earth, it is on the earth. A body is where it acts. The boundary of light is not the boundary of the real sun. The sun is in the entire space where it exerts its gravitational pull. The space that the earth fills is also part of solar space.

Imagine this Schellingian idea as [already] underlying the Pythagorean doctrine. The human spirit fills the entire world space. It is not enclosed in a single organism. The spirit is where it perceives.

For the philosophers of the nineteenth century who followed Kant, the question is this: How is it that the mind perceives what is outside it? - The Pythagorean does not say this at all: How is it that the mind perceives that which is apart from it? The Pythagorean says: If the mind perceives an ellipse in the sky, then it is a fact that the mind is not enclosed in the organism, that it is not there where it perceives with the senses, but that it is there where it perceives [mentally]. The limit of the spirit is not the sense, but the spirit is where it perceives. - There is a separation between the numerical relationships in space and what exists in our head as numerical relationships, which does not exist for the Pythagoreans. The Pythagoreans do not recognize the idea that man is initially a sensual, finite being, enclosed with the psyche in a fabric that connects the senses with the outside world. This gives people today the impression that the mind is also enclosed in [a] housing.

When other philosophers take this for reality and ask: "How is it that we perceive external things?", the Pythagoreans take the opposite view. They do not ask: How is it that the mind is enclosed in such an organism? - It is perhaps better that I do not say "individual", but "individual being". This then leads to an understanding of a world view such as the Pythagorean one. It leads to an understanding that can only be grasped if one sees in the mathematical that which constitutes the basic structure in the universe, and which, if one thinks of the whole world as filled with spirit, constitutes the basic structure of the spirit itself.

So we actually have in the basis of the thing that can be perceived with the senses deep down, on a lower level, in the spatial-temporal of the universe, commonalities that can be expressed through spatial sizes and numerical ratios, that which appears to the spirit on a higher level. The spirit has a numerical, geometrical basis. The spirit has its origin where things are regular. The spirit grows out of the mathematically constructed world. Therefore [the Pythagorean] seeks the primordial grounds of existence in the mathematically constructed world.

I have pointed out that there is a difference between the Greek worldview, as represented by Heraclitus, and the Pythagorean one. At the time, I constructed my remarks in such a way that they came back to Goethe's basic view. I said then that Goethe says that the seed and the plant are one and the same being. The material seed contains everything that is still in it in complete concealment. It is the same as the fully developed plant. The plant is not in it, but it has the sense that in a spiritual way the plant is the same in every form as in another form, so that the plant with its foliage and petals, with its whole fruit and with all that is in it, is to be regarded as that which has become material, materially, which is in the seed in an ideal way. Goethe therefore says that the seed is the whole plant, except that the spirit is still concealed behind it. That which is ideal in the seed becomes material reality in the whole plant.

The same image can be applied to the whole world. One can understand the world by observing it in its highest state, by immersing oneself in its blossom and fruit, in the human soul, by studying the "Know thyself" and going to the human being. There, where the purely spiritual-soul then appears directly, i.e. in the deepening, in the direct immersion into the self, one can first look for a world view, a world view. But you can also examine a seed. You can find ways and means to examine the seed. One can assume that what lies in the seed is already indicated and that the world view that is gained from the human being is the highest. The Pythagoreans do not seek man where he is soul, nor where he appears as spirit, but where he is apparently not spirit at all, where he apparently is not at all. The Pythagorean seeks certain reality through indifferent numbers. And that is why he seeks the spirit where he already knows the spirit. That is why he also finds the primal source, the basic structure of existence, in mathematics.

I just wanted to say that this world view of the Pythagoreans can only be understood if one understands the immersion of Novalis, which must be understood mathematically - of Novalis, who was of a thoroughly poetic nature and as such was what literary history calls a "Romantic", yet was rooted in such laws that he could see strict mathematics as the primal source of existence. That is why the Pythagoreans, because their spirit was powerful enough, were able to find spirit in the relationships of numbers. They started from the lowest level of the spiritual. Just as the seed is not yet a plant, but can become a plant, so they ascended from the seemingly unspiritual to the spiritual.

This is what can make us understand the whole world view of the Pythagoreans. The Pythagorean worldview is usually presented as if it were the numerical aspect of the world that led the Pythagoreans to regard number as the origin of things. And one cannot quite imagine what they meant by that. I must confess that if we follow what is written in the textbooks and read that the Pythagoreans regarded number as the origin of all things, it would seem meaningless to me. Only if I imagine how it is in reality, if I assume that they grew up in a completely different theory of knowledge, can I understand what they meant. Their view is simply described by the word: the Pythagorean did not look for the spirit where it appears to be a sensual entity, but where he perceives it as something that fills the whole of space.

That is one side of the Pythagorean world view, that is the reason why they descended to numbers and geometric shapes. On the other hand, the reason is also because they found something in these numbers and geometric figures that they could address as spirit.

What do geometric or mathematical ratios mean? Anyone who can only imagine a circle or an ellipse when they are drawn on the blackboard cannot be said to have any idea of the real geometric or mathematical relationships. If he has to put five peas or beans on the table when he wants to imagine the number <>, we cannot say that he has an idea of the real numbers.

On the contrary, we are aware that what we call a circle, what we call an ellipse, can only be represented approximately in material reality. We know that the material circle we draw is only an approximation of what we can create in our minds. We also know that what the celestial bodies in outer space describe is only an approximation of a circle. However, it is the same law that governs the creation of the world as the law that governs us when we imagine a circle in our minds, when we no longer need to deduce the spiritual from the sensual. That is why mathematics would be the best thing to introduce us to the spiritual. This is also why the Pythagoreans placed the highest value on mathematics. So if you really want to recognize the spirit, you have to be able to disregard everything sensual. You must be able to realize that it is not what you draw on the blackboard with chalk that is a real circle, but what remains for the spirit without the chalk drawing on the blackboard. Using the salt cube, it was possible to show that the cube is something completely different from the [salt] cube. In this way, the pupils could be shown that the spiritual - also of other things - can only be understood if the sensual remains absent. This is easy to show with the salt cube. The spiritual content is not the same as the outer cube.

But if we understand this for the whole sum of world phenomena, if we understand that the spiritual can be detached from the material, then this leads us up to higher levels. Everyone admits that mathematics has nothing to do with the things of the world, but with the spiritual. But if this goes further up, people confuse the spirit with reality

A strange document on the confusion of the spirit with reality has just come out these days. A book has been published entitled "Kritik der Sprache" (Critique of Language) by Fritz Mauthner, which aims to show how all our knowledge floats in the air, how nothing is given to us but the sensory world, and if we disregard the sensory world, we have nothing more in our imaginary world than empty words.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is something that someone who is unable to detach the spirit of things at a higher level of reality, as he can do with mathematical entities, can very easily come to. He who has no intuition, who does not really have from the source point of his spirit what he has to hold up to things, who is sterile and barren, who cannot fill his soul with spiritual realities, believes that he has nothing more when he goes beyond [the sense world] than words. Instead of a "critique of knowledge, he writes a "critique of language.

The book comprises two volumes. It seems to me as if someone wanted to write a critique and had not mastered what he wanted to criticize. He confuses what the mind adds to the formations. What Mauthner gives would be - compared to what spiritual content can and should give - a critique of pencil drawing. It shows how much the pencil is capable of depicting circles. Thus sterile views cling to those who are unable to feel the true content. He does not know that the spirit gradually acquires the ability to ascend to the higher realms of existence and is aware of its difference from material things at every stage of spiritual life, just as the mathematician is able to detach the spiritual, the spiritual from things, i.e. to advance from what is not yet spirit to the immediate God in the world.

This was something that the Pythagoreans sought to achieve step by step by trying to lead the student from the lower to the higher. They were convinced that by ascending from the lower to the higher, man was not merely having an experience within himself, but was fulfilling a task in the universe itself. They were convinced that he was doing something in the world, they were so convinced that they only compared the ascent with the numerical relationships themselves. They said to themselves: The individual human being who perceives is apparently a duality. The perceiver and the perceived. These two great opposites stood for the Pythagoreans at the basic level of their table of knowledge.

But they said to themselves: All this is only apparent because man does not stand on the highest level of perfection, but on the lower levels. The perceiving and the perceived must be overcome if they are to become one. Thus the Pythagorean imagines that, just as now in human cognition, unity triumphs over duality, over what is separate in the world, the Pythagorean must imagine everything according to numerical relationships and specifically again in such a way that what is separately a duality presents itself to him as unity.

Now the Pythagorean is convinced that the whole multiplicity of the world, the fact that there are many things in the world, derives only from the fact that man first sees the appearance, not the thing, that he does not see things as they are, but that he sees them as they are not, because of the limitations of his own existence. He sees that this multiplicity, when he overcomes appearance, then presents itself in reality, in truth, as unity. What man ultimately achieves is the primordial unity, the primordial One of the world, and the Pythagorean also sees this as the foundation from which everything springs.

This is what makes it possible for man to perceive something in space. This is the general unity of the world, but man can only gradually ascend to it. What is revealed last is there first, and that is because it is a member of this multiplicity. After it has been placed in a corner for a while, it integrates itself into the world structure and becomes one with the world harmony. The numerical harmony, the geometric regularity of the world view embraces the human being. And so he finds it by integrating himself into the structure of numbers. Therefore, the Pythagorean can say that all good, all virtue consists in man overcoming appearances and finding numerical, geometric regularity, whereby he integrates himself into the great world existence.

Thus man appears to himself like a tone in harmony, and because he appears to himself like a tone in harmony, he has to give himself the right tone and the right proportion. He does not fulfill a task for himself, but fulfills a moral task. If he does not fulfill it, then he is not in the right numerical proportion. He has something to [contribute] not to himself, but to the whole structure of the world. Through every transgression, man brings upon himself an unlimited responsibility, and, recognizing this, he should strive more and more to attain the mood that he has to fulfill in the great music of the world.

So to the Pythagorean, what is spread outside in space and time appears as a moral task itself. For the Pythagoreans, the moral task is not to be understood as a mathematical one on a higher level. The mathematical task is that he discovers the world space, but in such a way that he is thereby integrated, that he is thereby integrated like a tone in the world music, like a number in the law of numbers. He then discovers that when he does something - because he is not just his own redeemer - it is not just important for himself, but something that concerns the whole universe. The spirit is not only in me, but also where it works. He then sees that the spirit not only has to work on its own moral perfection, but also on the harmonization of the whole universe. When the Pythagorean imagines the harmony of the universe in such a way that he thinks of the world as permeated by musical tones, by music of the spheres analogous to music itself, this happens because music is based on tonal relationships.

The Pythagorean translates this by saying: Just as the tonal relationships become perceptible to our senses as a harmony of tones, there is also a harmony of tones, a music of the spheres in the world, which acts like the numerical relationships in the world. But if it does not find the right numerical relationship, the right tonal relationship to the world within itself, then it disturbs the harmony of the world.

This is why the insights of the Pythagoreans had to lead to the strictest educational system. The Pythagorean is aware, when he teaches the individual this or that, that he is taking upon himself a responsibility, not only towards that person, but towards the whole universe.

Answer to the question:

Everyone's special disposition enables them to gain knowledge of the spirit. The Pythagoreans endeavored to create this possibility for everyone.

[Mathematical ideas are only easy to prove because they are simple, almost without content.

For those, however, who are not at all suited from the outset to immerse themselves in the content of the world, the best and safest school will be to go through mathematics. Plato therefore demanded a thorough knowledge of mathematics from his students. Otherwise it might not have worked for everyone. I would like to explain this to someone who has gone through the Pythagorean school: Let's imagine a person who can only feel. Such an organism would be able to perceive geometric shapes and also be able to conceive of numbers. In fact, blind and deaf people have been taught these relationships and turned into accomplished mathematicians. Such an organism can also arrive at music in a mathematical way. The numerical relationships only appear to him in a shadowy way. Now let us imagine that such a person suddenly hears. He will then perceive the same thing that he had previously understood. He now perceives it with his ears. It is the same with the blind. Through an explanation of the vibrations of the world, he can get an idea of the colors through the numerical relationships. The Pythagorean should now also bring the higher senses to rise. It is the same thing as when a mathematician comes to a musician who is constructing his work himself and calculates it for him. Then the musician can say: "Stay away from that. If you have the necessary receptivity, you can have perceptions even without mathematical representation.

I have contrasted two currents. One current within Hellenism, which starts from Heraclitus, and the other, which starts from Pythagoras. Heraclitus and Pythagoras stand before us as two who have the same object. Heraclitus, as it were, as the composer, Pythagoras as the one who mathematically calculates his subject. It is the same with us as with Pythagoreanism. You first have to teach the blind and the deaf and then you can lead them to higher levels.

Mathematical concepts devised by humans are often confirmed in the outside world. In the case of electricity, people calculate that this or that must be one way or the other. If you then carry it out in reality as an experiment, it must agree [with the calculation].

I would like to cite a famous conversation between Schiller and Goethe. Goethe and Schiller left a scientific lecture together and got into a conversation about what they had heard. In the course of the conversation, Goethe took a piece of paper and drew a symbolic plant, an ideal plant, saying: "This plant is actually in every plant. Every plant is actually an individual embodiment of this general plant. To which Schiller replied: Yes, but that's just an idea! To which Goethe replied: But then I see my ideas with my eyes.

[Or let's take a] triangle [it is presumably drawn]: The angles add up to 180 degrees. Because we have seen a triangle, we can form a quadrilateral by connecting the blue one with the green one. This can be extended in the mind. We can move from the triangle to the square. But we cannot go from one shade of color to another. We can only perceive sensually what belongs to the world of the senses. In mathematics, the spiritual is the easiest to grasp. The mathematical is the most spiritual.

You don't know how to perceive sounds from numerical relationships? Sounds are not perceived [with the ears], only thought. Composers who become deaf therefore only have a surrogate. It is the same as when we deduce one mathematical entity from another. It is not [sensory] perception, but a mental experience.

The sensual is transformed [into the spiritual], it is elevated.

Studying mathematics makes no difference, but recognizing the essence of mathematics does. The most superficial person just splashes and splashes around in the primordial being. Someone can also have studied mathematics. Goethe studied little mathematics. But no one understood the essence of mathematics more than he did. Goethe arrived at his magnificent world of metamorphoses precisely because he had such a great idea of the nature of mathematics, even though he was only able to arrive at the [gap in the transcript] theorem.

He who can make razors may not be able to shave, and he who can shave usually cannot make razors. Thus the mathematician who knows mathematics [only] in form need not know its meaning and its application to the primal being.

Let now try to get further in the method by keeping one eye in future on the curriculum and the other on what will form the subjects of the curriculum. It does not immediately have everything in it which it ought to contain, for we build up the method of our observations by degrees.

We have already begun to consider the lessons for the various ages. How many stages of teaching can we differentiate during the school course? We have learnt that an important break occurs towards the age of nine, which enables us to affirm: if we get a child under the age of nine we shall be concerned with the first stage of school-teaching. What subjects shall we then teach? We shall take the artistic element as our point of departure. We shall study music and painting-drawing with the child as we have discussed. We shall gradually allow writing to arise from painting-drawing. We shall therefore gradually evolve the written forms from the drawn forms and we shall then go on to reading.

It is important for you to understand the reasons for this procedure: it is important that you do not first take reading and then tack writing on to it, but that you go from writing to reading. Writing is, in a sense, more living than reading. Reading isolates man very much, in the first place, and isolates him from the world. In writing we have not yet ceased to imitate world-forms, as long as we derive it from drawing. The printed letters have become extraordinarily abstract. They have arisen, of course, without exception from written letters. Consequently, we re-create them in our teaching from the written letters. It is quite correct to preserve intact, in teaching writing at least, the thread which connects the drawing forms with the written letters, so that the child still always feels in some degree the original image behind the letter. In this way you overcome the abstract character of writing. When man adjusts himself to writing he is obviously assimilating something very foreign to the universe. But if we link the written forms with the universal forms—with f = fish, etc.—at least we lead man back again to the world. And it is very important indeed that we should not wrench him away from it. The further back we go into the history of civilization the more living do we find this relation of man to the world. You only need to picture a scene in your soul to understand what I have just said: Transport yourself to ancient times and imagine, in my place, a Greek rhapsodist is reciting Homer to his audience in the manner of those days, between song and speech which we have lost, and imagine, sitting next to this rhapsodist, someone taking down the recital in shorthand. A grotesque scene, and impossible, quite impossible. Impossible for the simple reason that the Greek had quite a different kind of memory from ours and was not dependent on the invention of anything so far-fetched as the forms of shorthand to enable him to remember the revelations to men in language. You see from this that an unusually disturbing element is bound to be constantly interfering with our culture. We need this disturbing element. We cannot, of course, dispense with shorthand in our civilization. But we should be aware that it is a disturbing influence. For what actually is the significance of this appalling short-hand-copying in our civilization? It simply means that in our civilized life we are no longer capable of adjusting ourselves to the right rhythm of waking and sleeping, and that we employ the hours of sleep in doing all kinds of things which implant in our soul-life things which from its very nature it cannot assimilate. With our shorthand-copying we keep stored up what we should do better to forget if only left to ourselves. That is, we artificially maintain in a waking condition in our civilization things which disturb it as much as the nocturnal cram of over-eager students upsets their health. That is why our civilization is no longer healthy. But we must be clear in our minds that we have already crossed the Rubicon of the Greek age. A Rubicon was crossed then, on the far side of which humanity still had a quite sound civilization. Civilization will continue to grow unhealthier and people will more and more have to turn the process of education into a process of healing of the ills created by their surroundings. As to this there is room for no illusions. That is why it is so infinitely important to link up writing with drawing again, and to teach writing before reading.

Arithmetic should be begun somewhat later. This can be adjusted according to outer necessities as there is no point marked for it in life evolution itself. But into this complete plan there can always be inserted at the first stage a certain study of foreign languages, because this has been made essential by civilization. At this stage these foreign languages must only be studied in the form of practice of speaking.

Only in the second stage, from nine to about twelve, do we begin to develop the self-consciousness more. And we do this in grammar. At this point the human being is already capable, because of the change which he has undergone and which I describe to you, of absorbing into his self-consciousness the significance of grammar. At this point we take “word teaching” in particular. But we also embark on the natural history of the animal kingdom, as I showed you with the cuttle-fish, mouse, and human being. And only later do we add the plant kingdom.

Further, at this stage in the life of the human being we can go on to geometry, whereas we have hitherto restricted the elements of geometry to drawing. In drawing, of course, we can evolve for him the triangle, the square, the circle, and the line. That is, we evolve the actual forms in drawing, by drawing them and then saying: “This is a triangle, this is a square.” But what geometry adds to these, with its search for the relations between the forms, is only introduced at about nine years of age. At the same time, of course, the foreign language is continued and becomes part of the grammar teaching.¹

Last of all we introduce the child to physics. Here we come to the third stage which goes to the end of the elementary school course, that is to fourteen and fifteen years of age. Here we begin to teach syntax. The child is only really ready for this at about twelve years of age. Before this we study instinctively those elements of language which the child can make into sentences.

Here, too, the time has come when, using geometrical forms, we can go on to the mineral kingdom. We take the mineral kingdom in constant conjunction with physical phenomena which we then apply to man, as I have already explained: light refraction—the lens in the eye. The physical aspect, that is, and the chemical. We can also go on to history. All this time we study geography, which we can always reinforce with natural history by introducing physical concepts and with geometry by the drawing of maps, and finally we connect geography with history. That is, we show how the different peoples have developed their characteristics. We study this subject throughout these entire stages of childhood, from nine to twelve, and from twelve to fifteen. The foreign language teaching is, of course, continued and extended to syntax.

Now naturally various things will have to be taken into account. For we cannot take music with little beginners who have come to us, at the same time and in the same classroom as a lesson with other children for whom everything should be quite still if they are to learn. We shall therefore have to arrange the painting and drawing with the little children as a morning lesson and music late in the afternoon. We shall also have to divide up the space available in the school so that one subject can be taken side by side with another. For example, we cannot have poems recited aloud and a talk about history going on if the little ones are playing flutes in the next room. These matters are involved in the drawing up of the time-table and we must carefully take into account, when we organize our school, that many subjects will have to be arranged for the morning and others for the afternoon, and so on. Now our problem is: to be able, with our knowledge of these three stages in the curriculum, to pay attention to the greater or lesser aptitudes of the children. Naturally we shall have to make compromises, but I will now assume rather ideal conditions and throw light later on the time-tables of modern schools for the purpose of striking an adequate balance. We shall generally do well to draw a less sharp distinction between the classes within the different stages than we draw at the transition from one stage to the next. We shall remember that a general move up can actually take place only between the first and second, and between the second and third stage. For we shall discover that the so-called less-gifted children generally speaking understand things later. Consequently, in the years comprised in the first stage we shall have the intelligent children who can simply understand more quickly and who assimilate later, and the less able, who have difficulties at first but at last understand. We shall definitely make this discovery and must not therefore form an opinion too early as to which children are unusually able and which are less able.

Now I have already emphasized the fact that we shall, of course, get children who have gone through the most various classes. Dealing with them will be all the more difficult the older they are. But we shall nevertheless be able to remould to a great extent whatever about them has been badly started, provided that we take enough trouble. We shall not delay, after having done what we have found important in a foreign language, in Latin, French, English, Greek, to go on as soon as possible to what gives the children the greatest imaginable pleasure: to let them talk to each other in class in the language concerned and, as teachers, to do no more than guide this conversation. You will discover that it gives the children really great pleasure to converse with each other in the language concerned and to have the teacher confining himself to correcting their efforts or, at the most, guiding the conversation; for example, a child who is saying something particularly tedious is diverted to something more interesting. Here the presence of mind of the teacher must do its quite peculiar work. You must really feel the children in front of you like a choir which you have to conduct, but you have to enter into your work even more intimately.

Then comes the point to ascertain from the children what poems or other memorized reading passages they have previously learnt, that is, what treasure they can produce for you from the store of their memories. And with this store in the child's memory, you must link every lesson in the foreign language, especially grammar and syntax, for it is of quite particular importance that anything the children have learnt by heart—poems, etc., should be remembered. I have said that it is not a good thing to abuse the memory by having written down the sentences which are formed during grammar lessons to illustrate rules. These may well be forgotten. On the other hand, the points learnt from these sentences must be applied to the store of things already memorized, so that this possession of the memory contributes to the mastery of the language. If, later, you are writing a letter in the language, or conversing in it, you should be able rapidly to recall a good turn of phrase from things once learnt in this way. The consideration of such facts is part of the economy of teaching. For we must know what makes the teaching of a foreign language particularly economical and what wastes time. Delay is caused by reading aloud to the children in class while they follow in the books in front of them. That is nothing but time stolen from the child's life. It is the very worst thing that you can do. The right way is for the teacher to introduce the desired material in the form of a story, or even for him to repeat a reading passage verbatim or to recite a poem, but to do this without book himself, from memory, and for the children to do nothing at the time but listen to him; not, that is, follow his reading: then, if possible, the children reproduce what they have listened to, without first reading it at all. This is valuable in teaching a foreign language. In teaching the mother tongue it need not be so carefully considered. But in a foreign language greater regard must be paid to making things intelligible by speech and to aural comprehension, rather than to visual comprehension. Now when this has been sufficiently practised, the children can take the book and read after you, or, if you do not abuse this suggestion, you can simply give them for homework to read in their book the passage taken orally in school. Homework in foreign languages should first and foremost be confined to reading work. Any written work should really be done in the school itself. In a foreign language the least possible amount of homework should be given, none before the later stages, that is, before thirteen, and then only work connected with real life: the writing of letters, business correspondence, and so on. Only, that is, what really happens in life. To have compositions written in a foreign language during school hours, compositions unrelated to life, is really, in the deepest sense, a monstrosity. We ought to be content with work of a letter-character, concerned with business and similar things. At the most we should go as far as cultivating the telling of pieces of narrative. In the elementary school, to fourteen, we should practise, far more than the so-called free composition, the recounting of incidents that have occurred, of experiences. Free composition does not really belong to this elementary school course. But the narrative description of things seen and heard certainly does belong there, for the child must learn this art of reporting; otherwise he will not be able to play his proper social part in human social life. In this respect our cultured folk to-day only see half the world, as a rule, and not the whole.

You know, of course, that experiments are now being carried on in the service of criminal psychology. These experiments are planned, for example—I will take a case—in this way. Everybody to-day tries to ascertain facts by means of experiment. Somebody decides to undertake a course of lectures. The experiments are carried out in connection with advanced education and are held in the universities. In order to organize this course of lectures as an experiment the following arrangement is very carefully made beforehand with a student, or “listener,” as he is called: “I, as Professor, will mount the platform and will say the first few words of a lecture.—Good, write that down.—At this moment you jump on to the platform and tear from its hook the coat which I have previously hung up.” The listener then has to carry out accurately some plan as arranged. Then the professor behaves accordingly. He makes a rush at the student to prevent him from unhooking the coat. The next step is then arranged: we have a free fight. We decide on the exact movements to be made. We study our part carefully and learn it well by heart, in order to enact the whole scene as arranged. Then the audience, which knows nothing of this—all this is only discussed with a “listener”—reacts in its own way. This is impossible to calculate. But we will try to draw a third person into the secret, and he now carefully notes the reaction of the audience. Well, there is the experiment carried out. Afterwards we have an account of the scene written down by the audience, by every single listener.

Such experiments have been carried on in universities. The one which I have described has, in fact, been tried, and the result was as follows: In an audience of about thirty people, at the most four or five gave an accurate account of the occurrence. This can be verified because everything was previously discussed in detail and carried out according to plan. Hardly a tenth of the spectators write out the experiment correctly. Most of them make absurd statements when surprised by an occurrence of this kind. In these days, when experiments are popular, such incidents are staged with great enthusiasm, and the important scientific result is obtained that the witnesses who are called up in a court of law are not reliable. For when the educated people of a university audience—they are, after all, all “educated” people—respond to an incident in such a way that only a tenth of them write anything true about it and many of them write quite senseless stuff, how are we to expect of the witnesses in a trial an accurate account of what they saw perhaps weeks or months ago? Sound common sense is aware of these facts from experience. For after all, in life, too, people report on what they have seen almost always incorrectly, and very seldom accurately. You simply have to scent out whether a matter is being reported wrongly or rightly. Hardly a tenth of what people say around you is true, in the strict sense of being a report of what happened in actual fact.

But in the case of this experiment people only half-achieve their aim: they emphasize the half which, if one uses sound common sense, can be left out of the calculation, for the other half is more important. We ought to see that our civilization develops in such a way that more reliance can be placed on witnesses and that people speak the truth more and more. But to achieve this aim we must begin with childhood. And for this reason it is important to give descriptions of what has been seen and heard rather than to practise free composition. Then there will be inculcated in the children the habit of inventing nothing in life or, if need be, in a court of law, but to relate the truth about external physical facts. In this field, too, the will-element ought to be considered more than the intellect. In the case of that audience I took, with the previous discussion of the experiment and the deductions made after it from the statements of the spectators, the aim was to find out how far people are liars. This is quite conceivably understood in an intellectually minded age like our own. But we must convert the intellectually minded age back to the will-element. For this reason we must notice details in education, such as letting the children, once they can write, and particularly after twelve years of age, tell about what they have really seen, and not practise free composition to any great extent in the elementary school,² for it does not really belong to this stage of childhood.

It is further particularly important in a foreign language gradually to bring the children to the point of being able to reproduce in a short story what they have seen and heard. But it is also necessary to give the children orders: “Do this, do that”—and then let them carry these out, so that in such exercises in class the teacher's words are succeeded less by reflection on what has been said or by a slow spoken answer than by action. That is, the will-element, the aspect of movement, is cultivated in the language lesson. These, again, are things which you must think over and absorb, and which you must take especially into account in teaching foreign languages. We have, in fact, always to know how to combine the will-element with the intellect in the right way.

It will be indeed important to cultivate object lessons, but not to make them banal. The child must never have the feeling that what we do in our object lessons is simply obvious. “Here is a piece of chalk. What colour is the chalk? It is yellow.—What is the chalk like at the top? It is broken off.” Many an object lesson is given on these lines. It is horrible. For what is really obvious in life should not be turned into an object lesson. The whole object lesson should be elevated to a much higher level. When the child is given an object lesson he should be transported to a higher plane of the life of his soul. You can effect this elevation particularly, of course, if you connect your object lesson with geometry.

Geometry offers you an extraordinarily good opportunity of combining the object lesson with geometry itself.

You begin, for instance, by drawing on the board a right-angled isosceles triangle (∆ Ð Ð’ C in the given figure) and make the children realize—if you have not already taught it—that AC and BC are the sides which contain the right-angle and AB is the hypotenuse. Then you add a square underneath, adjacent to the hypotenuse of the right-angled triangle and divide it by its diagonal lines. (Dr. Rudolf Steiner used colours to mark the various parts.) Now you say to the child: “I am going to cut out this part here (∆ A Ð’ D) and put it to one side of our figure (follow the arrow). Now I take another part (∆ B D F), bring it also to the side, and place it above the other one already removed (follow the arrow). So I have set up a square composed of the two triangles and you can see that it is equal to the square on one of those sides of the original right-angled triangle which contain the right-angle. At the same time it has the size of half the area of the square on the hypotenuse.”

Now you do the same on the other side (follow the arrows to the left) and finally prove that the square on the hypotenuse equals in area the sum of both the squares on the sides of the right-angled triangle which contain the right-angle.

Schopenhauer in his day was furiously angry because the theorem of Pythagoras was not taught like this in the schools, and in his book Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (“The World as Will and Idea”), he says as much in his rather

drastic way: “How stupid school is not to teach things of this kind simply, by placing one part on top of another, and making the theorem of Pythagoras clear by observation.” This only holds, in the first place, of an isosceles triangle, but exactly the same can be done for a scalene right-angled triangle by fitting one part over another as I have explained. That is an object lesson. You can turn geometry into an object lesson. But there is a certain value—and I have often tested it myself—if you wish to give the child over nine a visual idea of the theorem of Pythagoras—in constructing the whole theorem for him directly from the separate parts of the square on the hypotenuse. And if, as a teacher, you realize what is taking place in a geometry lesson, you can teach the child in seven or eight hours at the most all the geometry necessary to introduce a lesson on the theorem of Pythagoras, the famous Pons Asinorum. You will proceed with tremendous economy if you demonstrate the first rudiments of geometry graphically in this way. You will save a great deal of time and, besides that, you will save something very important for the child—which prevents a disturbing effect on teaching—and that is: you keep him from forming abstract thoughts in order to grasp the theorem of Pythagoras. Instead of this let him form concrete thoughts and go from the simple to the composite. First of all, as is done here in the figure with the isosceles triangle, you should put together the theorem of Pythagoras from the parts and only then go on to the scalene triangle. Even when this is practised in pictures in these days—for that happens, of course—it is not with reference to the whole of the theorem of Pythagoras. The simple process, which is a good preparation for the other, is not usually first demonstrated with the isosceles triangle and only then the transition made to the scalene right-angled triangle. But it is important to make this quite consciously part of the aim of geometry-teaching. I beg you to notice the use of different colours. The separate surfaces must be coloured and then the colours laid one on top of the other.

1. (Until the ninth year of age.)
   Music. Painting with drawing.
   Writing. Reading.
   Foreign languages. A little later, arithmetic.
2. (Up to the twelfth year of age.)
   Grammar. (Parts of Speech: Word Teaching.)
   Natural history of the animal kingdom and of the plant kingdom.
   Foreign languages. Geometry.
   Physics.
3. (To the end of the elementary school course, age fourteen.)
   Syntax.
   Mineralogy.
   Physics and Chemistry.
   Foreign languages.
   History.

• 1. See the Table at the end of this lecture.
• 2. Up to fourteen.

Already eight days ago, I have drawn your attention to the fact that just someone who stands within spiritual science is not surprised at all, if this spiritual science finds opposition and lack of understanding from the most different viewpoints of the present. Now I will not consider it as my task to discuss single oppositions or single viewpoints from which such misunderstandings and oppositions result; since there is another viewpoint, which one can take up as position considering this matter. This is to try to uncover the roots of any possible opposition against spiritual science. If one understands these roots, some opposition also becomes explicable. Now I would not like to define what I communicate as spiritual science as identical with that what one calls “theosophy” from this or that side. Since this offers little incentive to agree anyhow with it. However, not from the viewpoint of the contemporary prejudice that occupies the name theosophy but from ajustified viewpoint, spiritual science represented here can be called theosophical. With it, the topic of this evening justifies itself which shall explain the relation between theosophy and that what rebels in the human nature against this theosophy. One can call it a mood in the human soul that one can find easily, that turns against theosophy because of passions, of emotions, often, however, also because of a certain faith that I call antisophy here.

If you contemplate what I have said eight days ago, you remember that spiritual science or theosophy attains its knowledge if the human soul simply does not stop where it stands in the everyday life, but if it goes through a development by its own impulse and activity. From the indications which I have done in the first talk we have realised that the human soul comes by such a development to an inner constitution, different from that of the everyday life that its feeling and position in the world are different from that in the everyday life. Something is born as it were in the human soul by the development meant here that is like a higher self in the usual self that is equipped with higher senses that perceive a real spiritual world. The theosophical knowledge can only attained by developing the corresponding soul condition. However, one realises at once that a certain requirement forms the basis of the just said, a requirement that remains no big requirement for someone who practises the specified way really. What appears as a requirement becomes a real experience, an experienced fact for him. It appears as requirement what lives strictly speaking in every human soul as longing; it appears as requirement that the human being if he descends only deeply enough in his soul finds something in it that connects him with the divine-spiritual primordial ground of existence. Nevertheless, it is the goal and the longing of any self-conscious soul to find the point in its own self where it is rooted in the divine-spiritual primordial ground. Theosophy consciously confesses to this goal. One could grasp “antisophy” accordingly very easily in an idea, in a concept. It would be the opposition against everything that lives in the longing with the goal to grasp that deep point in the human soul where this human soul is connected with the everlasting primordial sources of existence.

How can such antisophy develop in the human soul? One could believe at first that it is paradoxical that an opposition may get up against that what one would have to appreciate as the noblest pursuit of the human soul. However, lo and behold, just spiritual science shows that antisophy is not anything quite arbitrary in the human soul, but on the contrary, it belongs to its nature in a certain respect. The human being is not theosophically minded from the start; he is antisophically minded from the start. One must go into some knowledge of spiritual science if one wants to appreciate this apparently paradoxical dictum properly.

If the spiritual researcher attains the other constitution of his soul, he enters into a real spiritual world. Then before his spiritual view, the outer nature is extinguished as it were. It still exists only as memory, and a real spiritual world appears in which the human soul is to be recognised not only in the time between birth or conception and death, but also it is to be recognised in the time between death and the next birth. I have already drawn your attention to the repeated lives on earth in the last talk. The human being is referred to that existence in which he is a spirit among spirits in which he is after death. This world is experienced as for the outer senses the outer nature is experience; in this world is the soul with those forces which face the human being not only in the usual consciousness, but compose this usual consciousness. Yes, this world builds up the tools of the usual consciousness and the complete corporeality with the whole nervous system. It becomes true for the spiritual researcher that we are built up as human beings not only by the force of inheritance, but also by that which intervenes in the system of these physical forces which descends from spiritual-mental regions. It is a system of spiritual forces that seize the physical organisation, and develops what we should become according to our former lives on earth. Spiritual science extends the memory about which I have spoken last time. It goes beyond the present earth existence to regions of spiritual experience.

If we consider the world and the human development in such a way, a certain border faces the soul in particular. The separating line lies in the first childhood of the human being. There we see the human being living in the very first childhood like in a dreamlike life that only must appropriate the full clearness of self-awareness, of remembering experiences. A vague consciousness is that of the first childhood. The human being sleeps or dreams, so to speak, into existence, and that by which we feel, actually, as human beings, our developed inner life with its distinct centre of self-consciousness only appears only at a certain turning point of our childhood. What presents itself in the sense of spiritual science before this turning point?

If the spiritual researcher looks at the child, before it has come to this turning point, he beholds the spiritual forces working that have descended from the spiritual world and have seized the organism to form it plastically in accordance with the former lives on earth. Because all spiritual forces that constitute the human soul pour forth into everything that lives in the organism that forms the organism, constructs, and organises it that way, it can become later the tools of the self-conscious being. Because all soul forces are used for the construction of this organism, nothing remains that could deliver a clear self-consciousness anyhow in the very first childhood. All soul forces are used for the construction of the organism; and a consciousness that uses itself for the construction of the organic being can be only dreamlike, however, is in a large part a sleeping consciousness.

What happens now with the human being at that turning point about which I have spoken?

There more and more resistance comes up from the organism, from the body gradually. One could characterise this resistance in such a way that one says that the body hardens gradually; in particular the nervous system hardens, the soul forces can no longer process it completely plastically, it offers resistance. That means that only a part of the soul forces is able to work in the human organisation; the other part is rejected as it were, cannot find working points to work on this human organisation. I may use a picture to show what goes forward there. Why can we see ourselves in the mirror standing before it? Because the beams of light are reflected by the shining surface. In the bare glass, we cannot see ourselves because the beams of light go through. The same applies to the child in its first age: it can develop no self-consciousness because all soul forces go through as the beams of light pass the glass. Only when the organism has hardened, a part of the soul forces is rejected, as well as the beams of light are thrown back by the reflecting glass. There the soul life reflects in itself; and the self-reflective soul life that experiences itself in itself is the emerging self-consciousness. This constitutes our real human experience on earth. Thus, we live if we arrive at the marked turning point in this reflected soul life. What does mean the development of the spiritual researcher now compared with this soul life?

This development is really a leap over an abyss. It is in such a way that the spiritual researcher must leave the region of the rejected soul life, and he must penetrate into those creative, formative soul forces that are before this turning point. The spiritual researcher has to immerse himself with the full consciousness in that which he has developed in the reflected soul life. There he submerges in those forces that build up the human organism in the tenderest infancy that one can no longer perceive because the organism transforms into a mirror. Indeed, the development of the spiritual researcher must overcome this abyss. From that soul life that is rejected by the organic nature, he must enter into the creative spiritual-mental life. He must advance from the created to the creative. Then he perceives something particular, if he submerges in those depths that are as it were behind the organic mirror.

Then he perceives that point where the soul unites with the creative origin of existence. However, besides, he still perceives that this rejection is meaningful. If the turning point had not taken place, the rejection would not happen; then the human being could never have attained the complete development of the clear self-consciousness. In this respect, the life on earth is the development of self-consciousness. The spiritual researcher can penetrate into the region, which, otherwise, the human being experiences only as a dream, by the fact that he has only got the preconditions of it within the life on earth that he has educated himself to self-consciousness, and then he penetrates into that region with this self-consciousness which one experiences, otherwise, without self-consciousness. However, it is evident from that that the most valuable that the human being can obtain for the life on earth is the awake self-consciousness that is normally secluded from the experience of the roots of existence. In the everyday life and in the usual science the human being lives within that what interweaves his soul life after this turning point. He must live in it, so that he can arrive at his goal on earth. One does not say with it that he is not allowed as spiritual researcher to leave it and to look around in the other region where his roots are. — I would like to express myself in such a way: the human being must leave the region of the creative nature to face and to find himself in his nature rejected in itself compared with the spiritual-mental nature that is connected with the sources of existence.

Because of this task on earth, the human being is really put outside of that region in which he must find as a spiritual researcher what can be found within spiritual science. If the human being — without the spiritual-scientific training — confused one day what he can experience in the one or in the other region, he would never be able to stand firmly in the world. The whole sensory existence of the human being is based on the fact that he is just put out of that where the sources and roots of existence where the spiritual world is to be found in their intimacy. The more the human being wants to live in the sensory world, the more he must leave the higher world. Our usual practical knowledge has just its strength because the human being has left this world.

Is it surprising on the other hand that the human being also learns to appreciate at first what he has, while he is expelled from the spiritual world? He does not stand in the spiritual world during his life. He had to put out this to live his earth existence suitably. He appreciates everything quite naturally at first that is not connected with the source of existence. Thus, it is natural that he refuses immediately to hear anything of the spiritual world within which he is not at first. Because of his life, he is not attuned to acknowledge what connects him with the core of the world but to acknowledge what holds him together in himself, as far as he stands beyond this spiritual-mental world. The human being is antisophical in the usual life, he is not attuned theosophically, and it would be naive to believe that the usual life could not be tuned antisophically. It can only be tuned theosophically if like a memory of a lost native country the longing in the soul emerges at first — and then more and more the desire originates to penetrate into the origin of the spiritual-mental world independently.

One must attain the theosophical attitude from the antisophical attitude at first. This is internally rather contrary to many souls. In our age where the outer civilisation has such wondrous achievements, a natural propensity has developed for the outer experience that forces back this longing. Just in our time, it is very comprehensible that the human soul is tuned antisophically. However, one must really acknowledge the necessity of a theosophical deepening of humanity on one side in the whole nature of the human development and on the other side just in that what presents itself today. Since so many things face the beholder of the human spiritual development. I would like to point to one thing that can show that in our time an antisophical attitude is natural.

Diogenes Laertius (Greek biographer, third century AD, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers) tells that once Pythagoras who was considered as a very wise man by the ruler of Phlius, Leon, was asked by him how he positioned himself in life, how he felt in life. Pythagoras is said to have said the following: life seems to me like a festival. People come who take part as fighters in the games; others come to make profit as traders; but there is a third sort of people, they come only to look at the thing. They come neither to participate personally in the games, nor to make profit, but to look at the thing. Life appears that way to me: the ones follow their pleasure, the others follow their profit; however, there are those like me who call myself a philosopher as a researcher of truth. They look at life; they feel transferred as from a spiritual home onto earth, they look at life to return to this spiritual home.

Now one must take such a quotation as a comparison, as a picture, of course. One would probably get the entire view of Pythagoras first if one added something without which this quotation very easily could be interpreted as if the philosophers were only the gazers and good-for-nothings of life. Since Pythagoras thinks of course that the philosophers can be useful with their looking not only for their fellow men, while they stimulate them to look, but while they search what is not directly useful for life. However, this leads to the roots of existence, so that that what is considered as “of no avail” leads to the everlasting in the human soul. One would have to add this. However, Pythagoras believed to express something particular, namely that one finds the impulse to immerse oneself in the forever imperishable in that what does not deliver anything useful in the development of the human soul in the outer use but in himself; and that one must develop something in the soul that can be applied not in the outer life directly, but that the human soul develops due an inner desire. The recognition of such a pursuit is found with Pythagoras in olden times.

We glance now at a phenomenon of the modern time which I do not mention in order to mention philosophical oddities, but because it is typical for the way of the cultural life of our time.

A worldview has spread from America to Europe that one calls pragmatism. This worldview appears rather weird compared with that what Pythagoras demands from a worldview. Whether something that the human soul expresses as its knowledge is true or wrong for others, this worldview of pragmatism does not ask at all, but only whether a thought that the human being develops as a worldview is fertile and useful for life. Pragmatism does not ask whether something is true or wrong in any objective sense, but, for example, it asks for the following. We immediately take one of the most significant concepts of the human being: should the human being think that a uniform self is in him? He does not perceive this uniform self. He perceives the succession of sensations, mental pictures, and ideas and so on. But it is useful to understand the succession of the sensations, mental pictures and ideas in such a way as if a common self exists; the internal conception is arranged thereby, the human being thereby accomplishes what he accomplishes from the soul like from a downpour; life is not fragmented thereby. We go to the highest idea. For pragmatism, it does not depend on the truth content of the God concept at all, but it asks, should one conceive the thought of a divine being? It answers, it is good that one has the thought of a divine being, if one did not believe the thought that the world is ruled by a divine old being, the soul would remain hopeless; it is good for the soul accepting this thought.— There one interprets the value of the worldview in a quite contrary sense as Pythagoras did. With him, the worldview should interpret what is not for the benefit of life. However, presently a worldview spreads out, and one can expect that it will seize many heads, which almost says — and in practice it has already done it: valuable is what is thought as if it exists, so that life proceeds most profitably for the human being!

We realise that the human development took place in such a way that one almost considers the opposite of a worldview as correct that one regarded as right, so to speak, at the beginning of the European philosophy. The human attitude developed from the Pythagorean theosophy to the modern pragmatic antisophy. Since this pragmatism is absolutely antisophy because it considers mental pictures of something supersensible under the viewpoint of practical value and benefit for the sensory world. It is significant that towards our time the antisophical mood penetrates the human souls. That is widespread today what once Du Bois-Reymond, a brilliant representative of natural sciences, explained on a naturalists' meeting in Leipzig (1872) in his ignorabimus speech! Du Bois-Reymond (Emil Heinrich Du B. R., 1818-1896) admits explaining it brilliantly that science has only to deal with the principles of the outer world of space and time, and never even with the slightest element of the soul life as such. Later Du Bois-Reymond even spoke of “seven world riddles” —the nature of matter and energy, the origin of motion, the origin of life, the apparently teleological arrangements of nature, the origin of simple sensations, the origin of intelligent thought and language, and the question of freewill. He says that science cannot grasp them because it must rely on “naturalism.” At that time, Du Bois-Reymond finished his explanations quite typically, while he meant that one would have to penetrate into something else if one even wanted to understand the slightest element of the soul life: may they attempt it with the only way out, with that of supra-naturalism. He added the meaningful words, not as an argument, but as something that he asserts out of his mood quite dogmatically: save that science ends where supra-naturalism begins.

What does such an addition mean compared with the other sentence that one must recourse to supra-naturalism, save that science ends where supra-naturalism begins? One can do a peculiar discovery if one looks around in the scientific life of the present. In order to prevent misunderstandings from the start, I note that these talks are intended here in no way as opposition against the contemporary science, but that I hold them in full recognition of this science, — in so far as it remains in its limits. I must say this because some people assert repeatedly that I hold these talks here in an anti-scientific sense.

However, this is not the case. Although an entire recognition of the great results of modern science forms the basis of all that I say here, nevertheless, I must draw your attention to the fact that one can strictly prove the following: one cannot find the smallest justification in science for the statement that science ends where supra-naturalism begins. You find no justification. One discovers that such a statement is done without any justification, out of a mood, out of an antisophical mood. Why does one make such a statement? Again, spiritual science can give information about that. One can externally understand such a mood due to everything that I have explained today. However, I have to assume something. There are many subconscious experiences in the human soul. There are depths of the human soul life that do not become concepts, mental pictures, acts of volition, at least not conscious ones, but only in the character of the human soul life. There is a subconscious soul life; and everything is there that can be in the conscious soul life. However, emotions, passions, sympathies and antipathies which we feel in the usual life consciously can also be in the subconscious regions, they are not perceived in it, but have an effect in the soul like a natural force, — save that they are mental and not physical. There is a whole region of the subconscious soul life.

The human being asserts, believes, and means many things not because he is completely aware of their premises; but he believes and means them from the subconscious soul life because unconscious emotions, inclinations urge him. Today even the empiric psychology already gets the idea that that what the human being asserts does not completely lie in the mere reason, in that what the human being consciously surveys. A whole branch of modern experimental psychology deals with it. Stern (presumably William S., 1871-1938, psychologist) is a representative of this direction which shows how the human being has something even in the most scientific statements that is coloured by his sympathies and antipathies, by his inclinations and emotions. The outer psychology will prove gradually that it is a prejudice if anybody believes that he could really survey everything in the everyday life or in the usual science that induces him making his statements. It is no longer an absurd statement today if one characterises the just mentioned discovery: where supra-naturalism begins, science ends. Indeed, this Du Bois-Reymond pronounces it as a basic mood, but it is also a basic mood of countless souls that know nothing about it. That is not surprising if one understands it as emerging from the subconscious soul life. Nevertheless, how does it emerge? What urges the soul to allege the sentence as a dogma: science ends where supra-naturalism begins?

What worked in the subconscious soul life of Du Bois-Reymond at that time, and what works today in the subconscious soul lives of many people who have the greatest say in life if the sentence is felt, as if it forms the basis of them subconsciously? Spiritual science gives the following answer.

We know an emotion very well which we call fear, fright, or timidity. Any human being knows when fear appears in the usual life. There are quite interesting scientific investigations about such emotions like fear; so, for example, I recommend to everybody to have a look at the excellent investigations of the Danish researcher Lang (Carl Georg L., 1834-1900) about the emotions; among them are also those about fear, timidity and so on. If we experience fear in the usual existence, something occurs — in particular if the fear reaches a certain level — that dazes the human being so that he does no longer control his organism completely. One becomes “frozen in shock,” one has a particular countenance, but all kinds of particular concomitants of fear also appear in the bodily life. Science has already described these concomitants quite well, as for example the mentioned researcher. Such fear has an effect down to the vessels of the person and presents itself symptomatically. Bodily changed conditions and the need in particular to hold fast onto something appear with fear. Many a man who was frightened said, I fall over. This points deeper to the nature of frightening than one normally thinks. This is because the organism suffers changes if the soul experiences fright. The forces of the organism are concentrated convulsively upon the nervous system; this is overloaded as it were with soul strength; certain vessels thereby tense up, and then this tension cannot have any effect.

However, spiritual research investigates the human soul when it is thinking and imagining, given away to the outer nature. One can investigate the nature of that activity in which a soul is which leaves the remaining body alone, in certain state and turns the outwardly directed thinking to the outer experiment, to the outer observation. If one faces the picture of such a human being spiritual-scientifically, it is just the same as that of a human being who is in light fright. As paradoxical this sentence sounds, it is in such a way that the distraction of the soul forces from the whole organism causes something quite similar as fright, as numbing fright. That “coolness” of thinking which one must generate in the scientific observation, as paradoxical it sounds, is related to the fright, in particular to the fear. A concentrated researcher who really lives in his scientific thoughts is in a state that is related to fear if his thoughts are directed outwardly or if he reflects about something that is in the outside world. This dedication to the outside world differs from the spiritual-scientific development as far as the latter is based on the fact that the soul activities are detached from the brain. Thus, that does not happen what is caused by a one-sided convulsive effort of the soul activity and letting one part of the body activity flow at the expenses of the other. This state, related to fear, produces what I have characterised just now. Of course, everybody can deny this fear, because it appears in the subconscious. However, it exists even more certainly there. In a certain respect, the researcher who turns his eye upon the outside is perpetually in such a mood that in the subconscious regions of his soul life the same prevails that consciously prevails in a soul that is in fear. I say something now that sounds simple that is not meant simply that can lead to an agreement because of its simplicity.

If anybody is frightened, he can come very easily to the mood that one can call with the words: I must hold fast onto something, because, otherwise, I fall over! This is the mood of the scientific researcher as I have described it just now. He must concentrate upon the one-sided thinking; he develops fear subconsciously and needs the outer sensory matter to which he can stick, so that he does not sink into the subconscious fear which — if it does not advance to theosophy —finds nothing to which it can stick and which, otherwise, sticks to the matter. Give me something that is in the outer material to which I can stick! This mood lives in the sub-consciousness of the usual scientist. This leads to the subconscious emotions to accept as science only what allows no fear because one holds fast onto the materialistic creation of the world. This gives the antisophical mood: where supra-naturalism begins, science ends — ends to which one can stick.

However, with it I have characterised something that must exist understandably in an age where one demands to be taken up in the outer observation and in the outer nature in many a respect. I indicate something with it that lives not in the single human beings personally. However, it lives in all who develop an antisophical mood now whether one says that theosophy is something that flies over science, that it leaves the reliable ground of science, or whether one says: theosophy leads only to inner or outer nonsense; nothing is scientifically reliable in these fields. One has to develop a mere faith which comes from here or there.

Whether anybody says, my family arrangement is torn if a family member confesses to theosophy, or whether another says, if I dedicate myself to theosophy, the fun of life is spoilt, —both views are not correct, of course, but one says something like that out of a certain mood. They dress the antisophical mood up. This antisophical mood is comprehensible. Since nothing is more comprehensible than the antisophical mood to the theosophically feeling human being who knows that the human soul must always search the coherence with the world for the sake of its welfare and health with which it is connected in its deepest roots. Any kind of opposition, any kind of misunderstanding is comprehensible. Someone who alleges such misunderstandings should consider always that he says nothing surprising —no matter how angry he may be against theosophy —to the theosophical feeling human being because the theosophist can understand him. He differs from the theosophical feeling human being only by the fact that that who rages in such a way normally does not know, why he does it because the origins are in his sub-consciousness which stimulates the antisophical mood of its own accord. The theosophically minded person can know at the same time that this antisophical mood is the most natural of the world as long as one has not understood the noblest pursuit of the human soul. One does not show that one has well judged, that one has thought logically, if one is in the antisophical mood, but only that one has not yet taken the step to understand that theosophy speaks out of the sources of existence.

Someone who is not a spiritual researcher can also understand this theosophy, can fully accept it and make it the elixir of his soul life. Why? Because that what the spiritual researcher experiences beyond the usual sensory experience can be expressed in the same language in which the experiences of the everyday life and science are expressed. I take care just in these talks that I use the same language for the spiritual regions —not the outer language, but the language of the thoughts-, as the outer science uses it. Indeed, one can experience the weirdest things, for example, that one cannot recognise the language with the adversaries of theosophy, which they accept for the outer life and science if they hold forth about the spiritual field.

Theosophy can give the human being a coherence with the primary source of his existence; it can make him aware of that point where the depths of his soul are connected with the depths of the world. Because the human being grasps the divine-creative forces in theosophy that organise him, he stands with theosophy within that world power which can give health and strength, assurance and hope and everything that it needs for life. As the human being penetrates with theosophy into the creative source of existence, he also penetrates into the creative source of existence concerning his moral life. Existence is increased in the best sense. The human being feels his determination, his value in theosophy, however, he feels his tasks and duties in the world too because he finds himself connected with that in which he is, otherwise, an unaware member only. The life beyond this source, the life in antisophy obliterates the existence of the soul. Strictly speaking, any barrenness of the soul, any pessimism, any scruples on existence, any incapability to manage his duties, any lack of moral impulses arise from the antisophical mood. Theosophy is there not to give any admonitions and the like but to point to the truth content of life.

Someone who recognises this truth content finds the impulses of life in the outer and moral fields. Theosophy raises the human soul to that level which it must have. Since it gives the soul that by which it really feels as transported into a foreign land to which it had to come. Since theosophy is not hostile to earth. If the human being understands himself with it, he understands himself in such a way that he must ascend again to the world where he has his roots where his home is in which he must be to attain his full human development. From this knowledge of its home that theosophy can give, optimism, life knowledge, clarity about its duties, about the impulses of life can flow to the soul— which always remain dark under the antisophical mood even if one believes that they are bright and clear. Theosophy creates that mood which can become a monistic mood, a feeling one with the spirit living and interweaving in the world. Theosophy means being in the spirit, so that one knows: the spirit penetrating any existence invigorates and pulsates through that what lives and weaves in me.

The best human spirits still felt one with this theosophyeven if they did not always ascend to that what can be given in the beginning of the twentieth century as world knowledge. If Fichte (Johann Gottlieb F., 1762-1814, German philosopher) tries to outline the nature of the human ego with sharp lines of thought, he gets a mood from quite different lines of thought as they are explained here which crystallised in the words: the human being who experiences himself in his ego really experiences himself in the spiritual world. This is the theosophical mood. This is something that has coined the nice words from this theosophical world consciousness just in Fichte. These words appear as a necessary consequence of the theosophical world consciousness. It is brilliant how Fichte coined some sentences in his lectures The Vocation of the Scholar (1794). There he summarises again that about which he had thought very much and that appears like a theosophical mood in the words: if I have recognised myself in my ego, being within the spiritual world, then I have also recognised myself in my vocation! We would say, I have found the point where it is connected in its own being with the roots of the world being. Fichte continues saying: “I lift my head boldly up to the menacing rocky mountains, and to the raging water fall and to the crashing clouds swimming in a fire sea and say: I am everlasting and resist your power! Everything shall fall down onto me, and you earth and you heaven intermingle in the wild tumult, and you all elements foam and rave and grind the last solar mote of the body which is mine —my will with its steady plan shall hover over the leftovers of the universe boldly and coldly. Since I have grasped my vocation, and it is more permanent than you are; it is everlasting and I am everlasting as it is.” This word comes from a theosophical mood. On another occasion, when he wrote the preface of his Vocation of the Scholar he spoke the meaningful words against the antisophical spirit: “We know the fact that ideals cannot be shown in the real world, we know it maybe as well as they do, maybe better. We state only that reality is assessed by them, and must be modified by those who feel the strength in themselves. Assuming that they could also not convince themselves of it, they lose very little, because they are what they are; and, besides, humanity loses nothing. It becomes only clear that one does not count on them in the plan of improving humanity. This will continue its way without doubt; the benevolent nature may rule and give them rain and sunshine, digestible food and undisturbed circulation of their juices, and, besides — clever thoughts!”

One feels united in the theosophical mood, even if spirits of the past times could not speak about the spiritual world in such a concrete way as it is possible today, one feels united with these human beings who had this theosophical mood. Therefore, I feel always in harmony with every word, with every sentence with Goethe and particularly with the theosophical mood that vividly penetrates everything that he thought and wrote. Thus, he could also say an appropriate word with reference to the theosophical and antisophical mood, a word with which I would like to finish this consideration about Theosophy and Antisophy. Goethe had heard a rather antisophical word which originated from a brilliant, significant spirit, from Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777, Swiss naturalist and poet). However, Albrecht von Haller lived in an especially antisophical mood, although he was a great naturalist of his time; nevertheless it is an antisophical word when he says:

No created mind penetrates

Into the being of nature.

Blissful is that to whom

She shows her appearance only.

Goethe felt this as antisophical mood, even if he did not use the words theosophical and antisophical. He characterises the impression somewhat drastically which Haller's antisophical words made on him. He expressed the fact that the soul has to lose itself under such an approach, so to speak. It would have to lose the strength and dignity that are given to it to recognise itself:

Indeed

To the Physicist

“No created mind penetrates

Into the being of nature.”

O you Philistine!

Do not remind me

And my brothers and sisters

Of such a word.

We think: everywhere we are inside.

“Blissful is that to whom she shows

Her appearance only!”

I hear that repeatedly for sixty years,

I grumble about it, but covertly,

I say to myself thousand and thousand times:

She gives everything plenty and with pleasure;

Nature has neither kernel nor shell,

She is everything at the same time.

Examine yourself above all,

Whether you are kernel or shell.

You will have seen from these lectures, which lay down methods of teaching, that we are gradually nearing the mental insight from which should spring the actual timetable. Now I have told you on different occasions already that we must agree, with regard to what we accept in our school and how we accept it, to compromise with conditions already existing. For we cannot, for the time being, create for the Waldorf School the entire social world to which it really belongs. Consequently, from this surrounding social world there will radiate influences which will continually frustrate the ultimate ideal time-table of the Waldorf School. But we shall only be good teachers of the Waldorf School if we know in what relation the ideal time-table stands to the time-table which we will have to use at first because of the ascendancy of the social world outside. This will result for us in the most vital difficulties which we must therefore mention before going on, and these will arise in connection with the pupils, with the children, immediately at the beginning of the elementary school period and then again at the end. At the very beginning of the elementary school course there will, of course, be difficulties, because there exist the time-tables of the outside world. In these time-tables all kinds of educational aim are required, and we cannot risk letting our children, after the first or second year at school, fall short of the learning shown by the children educated and taught outside our school. After nine years of age, of course, by our methods our children should have far surpassed them, but in the intermediate stage it might happen that our children were required to show in some way, let us say, at the end of the first year in school, before a board of external commissioners, what they can do. Now it is not a good thing for the children that they should be able to do just what is demanded to-day by an external commission. And our ideal time-table would really have to have other aims than those set by a commission of this kind. In this way the dictates of the outside world partially frustrate the ideal time-table. This is the case with the beginning of our course in the Waldorf School. In the upper classes¹ of the Waldorf School, of course, we are concerned with children, with pupils who have come in from other educational institutions, and who have not been taught on the methods on which they should have been taught.

The chief mistake attendant to-day on the teaching of children between seven and twelve is, of course, the fact that they are taught far too intellectually. However much people may hold forth against intellectualism, the intellect is considered far too much. We shall consequently get children coming in with already far more pronounced characteristics of old age—even senility—than children between twelve and fourteen should show. That is why when, in these days, our youth itself appears in a reforming capacity, as with the Scouts (Pfadfinder) and similar movements, where it makes its own demands as to how it is to be educated and taught, it reveals the most appalling abstractness, that is, senility. And particularly when youth desires, as do the “Wandervögel,” to be taught really youthfully, it craves to be taught on senile principles. That is an actual fact to-day. We came up against it very sharply ourselves in a commission on culture, where a young Wandervögel, or member of some youth movement, got up to speak. He began to read off his very tedious abstract statements of how modern youth desires to be taught and educated. They were too boring for some people because they were nothing but platitudes; moreover, they were platitudes afflicted with senile decay. The audience grew restless, and the young orator hurled into its midst: “I declare that the old folks to-day do not understand youth.” The only fact in evidence, however, was that this half-child was too much of an old man because of a thwarted education and perverted teaching.

Now this will have to be taken most seriously into account with the children who come into the school at twelve to fourteen, and to whom, for the time being, we are to give, as it were, the finishing touch. The great problems for us arise at the beginning and end of the school years. We must do our utmost to do justice to our ideal time-table, and we must do our utmost not to estrange children too greatly from modern life.

But above all we must seek to include in the first school year a great deal of simple talking with the children. We read to them as little as possible, but prepare our lessons so well that we can tell them everything that we want to teach them. We aim at getting the children to tell again what they have heard us tell them. But we do not adapt reading-passages which do not fire the fantasy; we use, wherever possible, reading-passages which excite the imagination profoundly; that is, fairy tales. As many fairy tales as possible. And after practising for some time with the child this telling of stories and retelling of them, we encourage him a little to tell very shortly his own experiences. We let him tell us, for instance, about something which he himself likes to tell about. In all this telling of stories, and telling them over, and telling about personal experiences, we guide, quite un-pedantically, the dialect into the way of educated speech, by simply correcting the mistakes which the child makes—at first he will do nothing but make mistakes, of course; later on, fewer and fewer. We show him, by telling stories and having them retold, the way from dialect to educated conversation. We can do all this, and in spite of it the child will have reached the standard demanded of him at the end of the first school year.

Then, indeed, we must make room for something which would be best absent from the very first year of school and which is only a burden on the child's soul: we shall have to teach him what a vowel is, and what a consonant is. If we could follow the ideal time-table we would not do this in the first school year. But then some inspector might turn up at the end of the first year and ask the child what “i” is, what “l” is, and the child would not know that one is a vowel and the other a consonant. And we should be told: “Well, you see, this ignorance comes of Anthroposophy.” For this reason we must take care that the child can distinguish vowels from consonants. We must also teach him what a noun is, what an article is. And here we find ourselves in a real dilemma. For according to the prevailing time-table we ought to use German terms and not say “artikel.” We have to talk to the child, according to current regulations, of “Geschlechtswort” (gender-words) instead of “artikel,” and here, of course, we find ourselves in the dilemma. It would be better at this point not to be pedantic and to retain the word “artikel.” Now I have already indicated how a noun should be distinguished from an adjective by showing the child that a noun refers to objects in space around him, to self-contained objects. You must try here to say to him: “Now take a tree: a tree is a thing which goes on standing in space. But look at a tree in winter, look at a tree in spring, and look at a tree in summer. The tree is always there, but it looks different in winter, in summer, in spring. In winter we say: ‘It is brown.’ In spring we say: ‘It is green.’ In summer we say: ‘It is leafy.’ These are its attributes.” In this way we first show the child the difference between something which endures and its attributes, and say: “When we use a word for what persists, it is a noun; when we use a word for the changing quality of something that endures it is an adjective.” Then we give the child an idea of activity: “Just sit down on your chair. You are a good child. Good is an adjective. But now stand up and run. You are doing something. That is an action.” We describe this action by a verb. That is, we try to draw the child up to the thing, and then we go from the thing over to the words. In this way, without doing the child too much harm, we shall be able to teach him what a noun is, an article, an adjective, a verb. The hardest of all, of course, is to understand what an article is, because the child cannot yet properly understand the connection of the article with the noun. We shall flounder fairly badly in an abstraction when we try to teach him what an article is. But he has to learn it. And it is far better to flounder in abstractions over it because it is unnatural in any case, than to contrive all kinds of artificial devices for making clear to the child the significance and the nature of the article, which is, of course, impossible.

In short, it will be a good thing for us to teach with complete awareness that we are introducing something new into teaching. The first school year will afford us plenty of opportunity for this. Even in the second year a good deal of this awareness will invade our teaching. But the first year will include much that is of great benefit to the growing child. The first school year will include not only writing, but an elementary, primitive kind of painting-drawing, for this is, of course, our point of departure for teaching writing. The first school year will include not only singing, but also an elementary training in the playing of a musical instrument. From the first we shall not only let the child sing, but we shall take him to the instrument. This, again, will prove a great boon to the child. We teach him the elements of listening by means of sound-combinations. And we try to preserve the balance between the production of music from within by song, and the hearing of sounds from outside, or by making them on the instrument.

These elements, painting-drawing, drawing with colours, finding the way into music, will provide for us, particularly in the first school year, a wonderful element of that will-formation which is almost quite foreign to the school of to-day. And if we further transform the little mite's physical training into Eurhythmy we shall contribute in a quite exceptional degree to the formation of the will.

I have been presented with the usual time-table for the first school year. It consists of:

Religion—two hours a week.

The mother tongue—eleven hours a week.

Writing—there is no figure given for the number of hours, for it is included in the mother tongue.

Then:

Local geography—two hours² a week.

Arithmetic—four hours a week.

Singing and gymnastics together—one hour a week.

We shall not be guilty of this, for we should then sin too gravely against the well-being of the growing child. But we shall arrange, as far as ever it is in our power, for the singing and music and the gymnastics and Eurhythmy to be in the afternoon, and the rest in the morning, and we shall take, in moderation—until we think they have had enough—singing and music and gymnastics and Eurhythmy with the children in the afternoon. For to devote one hour a week to these subjects is quite ludicrous. That alone proves to you how the whole of teaching is now directed towards the intellect.

In the first year in the elementary school we are concerned, after all, with six-year-old children or with children at the most a few months over six. With such children you can quite well study the elements of painting and drawing, of music, and even of gymnastics and Eurhythmy; but if you take religion with them in the modern manner you do not teach them religion at all; you simply train their memory and that is the best that can be said about it. For it is absolutely senseless to talk to children of six to seven of ideas which play a part in religion. They can only be stamped on his memory. Memory training, of course, is quite good, but one must be aware that it here involves introducing the child to all kinds of things which have no meaning for the child at this age.

Another feature of the time-table for the first year will provoke us to an opinion different from the usual one, at least in practice. This feature reappears in the second year in a quite peculiar guise, even as a separate subject, as Schönschreiben (literally, pretty writing = calligraphy). In evolving writing from “painting-drawing” we shall obviously not need to cultivate “ugly writing” and “pretty writing” as separate subjects. We shall take pains to draw no distinction between ugly writing and pretty writing and to arrange all written work—and we shall be able to do this in spite of the outside time-table—so that the child always writes beautifully, as beautifully as he can, never suggesting to him the distinction between good writing and bad writing. And if we take pains to tell the child stories for a fairly long time, and to let him repeat them, and pay attention all the time to correct speaking on our part, we shall only need to take spelling at first from the point of view of correcting mistakes. That is, we shall not need to introduce correct writing, Rechtschreiben (spelling), and incorrect writing as two separate branches of the writing lesson.

You see in this connection we must naturally pay great attention to our own accuracy. This is especially difficult for us Austrians in teaching. For in Austria, besides the two languages, the dialect and the educated everyday speech, there was a third. This was the specific “Austrian School Language.” In this all long vowels were pronounced short and all short vowels long, and whereas the dialect quite correctly talked of “Die Sonne” (the sun), the Austrian school language did not say “Die Sonne” but “Die Sohne,” and this habit of talking becomes involuntary; one is constantly relapsing into it, as a cat lands on his paws. But it is very unsettling for the teacher too. The further one travels from north to south the more does one sink in the slough of this evil. It rages most virulently in Southern Austria. The dialect talks rightly of “Der SÅ«Å«n”; the school language teaches us to say “Der Son.” So that we say “Der Son” for a boy and “Die Sohne” for what shines in the sky. That is only the most extreme case. But if we take care, in telling stories, to keep all really long sounds long and all short ones short, all sharp ones sharp, all drawn-out ones prolonged, and all soft ones soft, and to take notice of the child's pronunciation, and to correct it constantly, so that he speaks correctly, we shall be laying the foundations for correct writing. In the first year we do not need to do much more than lay right foundations. Thus, in dealing with spelling, we do not yet need to let the child write lengthening or shortening signs, as even permitted in the usual school time-table—we can spend as long as we like over speaking, and only in the last instance introduce the various rules of spelling. This is the kind of thing to which we must pay heed when we are concerned with the right treatment of children at the beginning of their school life.

The children near the end of the school life, at the age of thirteen to fourteen, come to us maltreated by the intellectual process. The teaching they have received has been too much concerned with the intellect. They have experienced far too few of the benefits of will- and feeling-training. Consequently, we shall have to make up for lost ground, particularly in these last years. We shall have to attempt, whenever opportunity offers, to introduce will and feeling into the exclusively intellectual approach, by transforming much of what the children have absorbed purely intellectually into an appeal to the will and feelings. We can assume at any rate that the children whom we get at this age have learnt, for instance, the theorem of Pythagoras the wrong way, that they have not learnt it in the way we have discussed. The question is how to contrive in this case not only to give the child what he has missed but to give him over and above that, so that certain powers which are already dried up and withered are stimulated afresh as far as they can be revived. So we shall try, for instance, to recall to the child's mind the theorem of Pythagoras. We shall say: “You have learnt it. Can you tell me how it goes? Now you have said the theorem of Pythagoras to me. The square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.”

But it is absolutely certain that the child has not had the experience which learning this should give his soul. So I do something more. I do not only demonstrate the theorem to him in a picture, but I show how it develops. I let him see it in a quite special way. I say: “Now three of you come out here. One of you is to cover this surface with chalk: all of you see that he only uses enough chalk to cover the surface. The next one is to cover this surface with chalk; he will have to take another piece of chalk. The third will cover this, again with another piece of chalk.” And now I say to the boy or girl who has covered the square on the hypotenuse: “You see, you have used just as much chalk as both the others together. You have spread just as much on your square as the other two together, because the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.” That is, I make it vivid for him by the use of chalk. It sinks deeper still into his soul when he reflects that some of the chalk has been ground down and is no longer on the piece of chalk but is on the board. And now I go on to say: “Look, I will divide the squares; one into sixteen, the other into nine, the other into twenty-five squares. Now I am going to put one of you into the middle of each square, and you are to think that it is a field and you have to dig it up. The children who have worked at the twenty-five little squares in this piece will then have done just as much work as the children who have turned over the piece with sixteen squares and the children who have turned over the piece with nine squares together. But the square on the hypotenuse has been dug up by your labour; you, by your work, have dug up the square on one of the two sides, and you, by your work, have dug up the square on the other side.” In this way I connect the child's will with the theorem of Pythagoras. I connect at least the idea with an exercise rooted significantly in his will in the outside world, and I again bring to life what his cranium had imbibed more or less dead.

Now let us suppose the child has already learnt Latin or Greek. I try to make the children not only speak Latin and Greek but listen to one another as well, listen to each systematically when one speaks Latin, another Greek. And I try to make the difference live vividly for them which exists between the nature of the Greek and Latin languages. I should not need to do this in the ordinary course of teaching, for this realization would result of itself with the ideal time-table. But we need it with the children from outside, because the child must feel: when he speaks Greek he really only speaks with the larynx and chest; when he speaks Latin there is something of the whole being accompanying the sound of the language. I must draw the child's attention to this. Then I will point out to him the living quality of French when he speaks that, and how it resembles Latin very closely. When he talks English he almost spits the sounds out. The chest is less active in English than in French. In English a tremendous amount is thrown away and sacrificed. In fact, many syllables are literally spat out before they work. You need not say “spat out” to the children, but make them understand how, in the English language particularly, the word is dying towards its end. You will try like this to emphasize the introduction of the element of articulation into your language teaching with those children of twelve to fourteen whom you have taken over from the schools of to-day.

• 1. Dr. Steiner refers to the beginning of the Waldorf School when the higher classes were from the ages of 12 to 14.
• 2. The word hours is the translation of Schulstunden—50 mts. with intervals between.

It goes without saying that there is opposition [to spiritual science or theosophy is widespread], which is why [this] topic [was chosen] for today's lecture. Spiritual science [it is called] in relation to the constitution that the human soul must have in order to be theosophically minded. This mood is called theosophical in the same sense as it has been for centuries. [It is] that mood of the human soul through which it experiences the conviction that there is an inner core of being that can be reached by man, which is linked to the divine-spiritual that pervades and permeates the world. The theosophical mood gives a very general characteristic of knowing oneself as one with the cosmos.

[Gap in the transcript. What is spiritual scientific research?] There are certain soul activities through which the soul itself undertakes the experiment, whereby something like spiritual chemistry is brought about. This makes one so detached in soul and spirit from the physical and bodily that one connects a meaning with the words: I live, I feel myself spiritually independent of my body, so that I look at this body from the outside. Just as inorganic chemistry separates hydrogen from water, so spiritual chemistry separates the soul-spiritual from the physical-bodily. In this way, the human being experiences himself as having been emancipated threefold in the soul-spiritual. What is otherwise experienced in sleep, unconsciously, the spiritual researcher experiences consciously; for he works consciously, from outside, on the physical-bodily.

We can call this a conscious sleep experience. The physical body is like a mirror. The spent forces of the physical body are in a state of constant disintegration during wakefulness. The growth forces are depleted, hence [comes] sleep. The researcher consciously becomes acquainted with what then occurs during the replacement. A kind of reproduction occurs, a reawakening of pure growth forces.

The second thing is the wonderful mystery of the onset of physical life. The first periods of childhood appear to us like a dream. Our powers of consciousness are still as in dream life. We only remember back to a certain point in childhood, [to] where full self-awareness sets in. We can then say “I”. In these early days, the same powers and abilities are already present that will later break out. How are these powers present in the child? In such a way that they are used for the plastic development of the physical body. Only the formal, the form-like, has been inherited by the human being. He himself refines these plastic powers into individual talents. One can see this in the physical organization of a being who works plastically. One observes how this spiritual core descends from above and works into the inheritance from father and mother. I have said before that this core is the fruit of previous earthly experiences. A moment comes when the physical organization is, so to speak, hardened, to use a rough expression, so that the spiritual soul can no longer work plastically on it. This is comparable to standing in front of a mirror. If we can stand in front of it, we cannot go through it, but the reflection that arises in front of us is reflected back. The process just described can be compared to that. What has been flowing in earlier is now reflected back into itself. This is the emergence of self-awareness.

These forces are the same ones that work on our body. The spiritual researcher is in the spiritual world, knows that he is within the Divine-Spiritual that permeates the world. This spiritual-soul experience is the fruit of a soul practice full of renunciation that lasts for years and years. Thus, in what is reflected in the hardened organism, the spiritual scientist is absolutely on the ground of a theosophical view. We could not live this life without the soul-spiritual emerging from the soul's subconscious in its reflection. But at that moment it is only the part that is not allowed to penetrate into our work and creativity. It is the non-creative part. That remains with us for our everyday life. With this, we must turn our attention to what [gap in the transcript]. This is how it presents itself to the spiritual researcher at the moment of our life when we remember a later existence on earth; our spiritual and soul core is there, but it is covered by what can only experience itself in its self-reflection. We do not see what lies behind the reflecting surface as our spiritual and soul core.

Then it becomes clear that our spiritual and mental core is hidden within the physical organism, which acts like a mirror that covers everything. All diligence is based on developing this self-awareness. Our organism has to create something to cover the spiritual and mental core in order to be diligent in the world. This is the anti-osophical mood. It is no wonder that it is so. The spiritual researcher also has to make sure that this is intact in him. He has to forget his theosophical mood and behave exactly as if he were an anti-osophist.

Now it is always the case that abilities develop in a one-sided way. It is natural for most people to let the pendulum of their soul life swing according to the anti-sophical mood. This is rooted in human nature in the deepest sense. Life itself produces this; there is no need to be surprised. We may extinguish our consciousness of the spiritual for external purposes, But there are moments when every human being experiences a kind of yearning, a dawning of consciousness of his spiritual core. Then he is apt to let the theosophical mood enter into the anti-Sophical mood. In itself it is so understandable that this theosophical mood can be overgrown by the everyday mood. We therefore see the two currents: earlier the scientific, antisophical, now the theosophical longing of the soul in our time. The consequence of this is that the antisophical mood has taken hold in another current. You are probably familiar with the beautiful story of Pythagoras, who, when asked by Cleon why he was a philosopher, replied: “Human life seems to me like a fair, full of people who are supposed to buy and sell or enjoy games. But I am like someone who wants to see everything.” In our time, this saying can no longer be used in this way. But what is the meaning of the words? What did Pythagoras want to say with them? His saying is based on the feeling that man achieves something particularly valuable with knowledge that cannot be readily applied in outer life. To let the soul rule freely is a kind of theosophical mood. In our inclination, born of the theosophical mood, towards that which leads man away from the physical, we now transcend centuries.

But now the opposite of the above is coming from America: pragmatism in the form of many brilliant aphorisms. This attitude says: whether there is truth in a perception is not important, but whether what is perceived proves useful. For example, immortality: there is no need for objective reasons to prove it. But it makes life more secure, and a person becomes useful if they perceive it to be true. So we act as if a god et cetera were there. This attitude has found a kind of companion in the “Philosophy of As If”. The book is already in its second edition. While the author wrote the preface as a young man, he only completed the work itself after his retirement. This philosopher claims that whatever can be said about transcendental things can be regarded as if they were there. It is therefore the direct opposite of the theosophical sentiment of Pythagoras and Socrates, because that philosophy of “as if” knows no objective truths in the transcendental. The anti-Sophian mood is dominant today among certain leading minds, and it is to be found in the broadest scope of human mental life. I would also like to refer to some other significant minds, but I do not want this reference to be taken as a disparagement of intellectual capacities. I only mention the opponent because a certain acknowledgment can lie in the mention. I would like to remind you of the famous speech by the great physiologist Du Bois-Reymond about the limits of knowledge of nature. According to this attitude, the world is to be regarded only as an enormous mass of interacting atoms.

Where does a science based on such arguments end up? It says: we can understand the mathematical processes underlying the visible world, but not what matter is, not what consciousness is. What lies beyond the realm of the sensually perceptible is not only “ignoramus”, but “ignorabimus” – we will never know. It is characteristic that Du Bois-Reymond assigns a strictly defined area to science. But beyond that, there is supposedly nothing more to be known. Then, at the end of the speech, we find the following striking statement: “There are limits to our knowledge of nature. Supranaturalism would have to be applied to that which haunts space as matter. But here is how Du Bois-Reymond expresses it: Where supernaturalism begins, science ends. — This statement is eminently anti-sophistic. It virtually forbids man to penetrate to the spiritual core of his being.

As one searches in the broadest periphery today, one encounters this anti-sophistic mood everywhere in leading science. It is characteristic of our time. But the strange thing is that, despite all the great logic with regard to external science, despite all the education of human thought when it comes to the theosophical mood, an assertion pops up like a shot, a counter-assertion that is not even attempted to be justified. Is this justification omitted out of affect or out of antipathy towards the spiritual world? Where does this antipathy come from? Where it begins, it penetrates from the depths of the soul as an impulse with a certain passion.

I must mention here that there are subconscious depths of the soul life that are much greater than we suspect. Many things emerge from the subconscious that give impulses. Our entire, so mysterious, soul condition depends largely on the subconscious soul activity. Is the spiritual researcher able to explore this? He can explore it and substantiate it with expressions of the conscious soul life. We have many kinds of subconscious urges. One can clearly feel that a sentence like the one just mentioned by Du Bois-Reymond about supernaturalism emerges from the subconscious soul regions. [gap in the transcript]

Consider someone who is overcome by fear. There is great tension in their soul life; certain subconscious soul powers are vividly active. I would like to refer here to the excellent research by the Danish physiologist Lange. These phenomena can be scientifically proven. Fear affects the organic body down to the vessels, so that certain irregularities occur in the organism. When someone is in fear, it is very easy for him to get into the mood that can be described with the words: Above all, give me something to hold on to, otherwise I will fall over.

Let us observe a scholar who occupies himself only with science. His organism develops in such a way that a mood is awakened in him by his stay-at-home thinking, which can express itself like a sudden shock, like fear in increased measure. This mood of fear sits deep down in organic processes. What happens there are instinctual, subconscious forces.

The spiritual researcher must now move from the passive to the active. If one is primarily concerned with sensory perception, then it is precisely out of a subconscious mood of fear that one can come to such a conclusion: Give me something material that I can hold on to, otherwise I will fall. Materialism breeds fear. It breeds the belief that you are only in front of a reality when you are in front of something you can hold on to in space. So the anti-sophical mood, as a mere belief in sensual quality, is basically nothing more than a mood of fear. You will have to get used to the fact that this is true, however paradoxical it may sound. The “Ignorabimus” has the same reason: fear. The anti-soph falls over when it has nothing to hold on to as reality. This shows us what we have to hold on to if we want to explore the reasons for the anti-sophic mood.

Never can it be missing [...] that this soul of mine, like a compressed ball, suddenly springs open and feels the longing for the home from which it comes.

These explanations should lead us not to disdain anti-philosophy, but to learn to understand it. The achievements of our time, especially the great technical ones, all that in a certain sense signifies the greatness of our time, needs an anti-philosophical mood as its correlate. But anti-philosophy will produce the theosophical mood as a natural reaction.

All those who have delved deeper into the knowledge of the world with all their soul have had the theosophical mood. The human soul cannot do without it. One must recognize that anti-philosophy may well produce efficiency in the outer life, but that in the long run man cannot be satisfied with it. The core of the soul proves to be the reality of human life and asserts itself from the deep sources of the soul. There will always be moments of celebration in life when the theosophical mood arises and rises. Then man is at one with all that is great and sublime in all times. Goethe, for example, was such a spirit. He, in particular, expressed the theosophical mood in many places.

Not a lesser man next to Goethe, but a great man, the naturalist Albrecht von Haller, who deserves the highest respect, made the following statement out of an anti-theosophical mood:

No created spirit can penetrate into the innermost nature
. Blessed is he to whom she only
The outer shell shows.

This is anti-philosophy. Only the shell, not the actual core, which is connected to the cosmic soul! Goethe sensed this as an anti-philosophical sentiment and, speaking from his theosophical perspective, said:

“Into the innermost part of nature,”
O you philistines! —
“No created spirit,“
May you and your brothers and sisters
Not remember me of such a word.

We think: Place by place
We are within.
“Happy the one to whom she only
Shows the outer shell!”
I hear this repeated for sixty years,
I curse it, but furtively;
Tell me a thousand, a thousand times:
She gives everything abundantly and gladly,
Nature has neither core
Nor shell,
She is everything at once;
You, above all, prove yourself,
Whether you are core or shell.