The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The scene from “Faust” just presented, which comes at the end of the second act of Part II, forms the bridge for Faust's entrance into ancient Greece. Those who have gone most deeply into Goethe's world-conception will see how, through it he has penetrated deeply into the spiritual, in both universe and the mystery of man, in so far as the latter is connected with what is spiritual in the universe. It should first be emphasised, on the one hand, that what Goethe meant by saying he had put a great deal in a veiled way into Part II of “Faust”, applies especially to this profound, most significant scene. In this second part of “Faust” there is much wisdom. On the other hand, when represented on the stage, this wisdom is able through its imagery to make a great appeal to the senses.

If we are to understand Goethe's Faust, particularly the second part, we must always keep these two aspects in mind. As Goethe says, the simple minded spectator of Faust will experience pleasure and aesthetic satisfaction in its series of pictures; the Initiate, however, is meant to find there profound secrets of life. If we start with what the pictures give us, this scene represents a festival of the seas to which Homunculus has been taken by Thales. This festival, however, contains a great deal that is veiled, and is meant actually to introduce the demonic powers dwelling in the sea,—that is, the spiritual powers.

Why does Goethe have recourse to the demonic powers of ancient Greece when wishing to lead Faust to the highest point of self-knowledge and self-understanding in human evolution? It may be stated that Goethe was perfectly clear that it is impossible for man ever to arrive at a true conception of his own nature by merely acquiring knowledge received through the senses and the understanding associated with them. True knowledge of man can only be imparted through true spiritual perception. So that all the knowledge and perception of man sought simply through the external physical world, to which the senses and the physical understanding are directed, is no real knowledge of man at all. Goethe indicates this by introducing Homunculus into his poem.

Now Homunculus is the result of the knowledge of man to which Wagner is capable of aspiring with ideally conceived physical means, such ideally conceived means as would. naturally be considered by ordinary science to be its goal, from which, however, no result can be expected either today or in the future. Goethe advances the hypothesis that it might be possible to produce a Homunculus in a retort, that is, to gain such complete knowledge of combining the forces of nature that a human being could be intellectually put together out of various ingredients. But it is no man who arises thus, even when all that can be attained in the physical world is thought out to the highest point of perfection—no man arises, no homo, but only a homunculus. Considered dramatically, this homunculus is simply the image of himself that a man can form with the help of his reason, of his ordinary earthly knowledge. How can this man-made image that is a homunculus provide a true conception of man? How can it be brought about that in this conception man does not stop short at the simple homunculus but pushes on to the homo? It is clear to Goethe that this goal can only be reached through knowledge acquired by the human soul and spirit when free of the body.

Now, by most various ways Goethe endeavours to reach the realm to which a human being must come if he wishes to acquire complete knowledge of man, that is, the knowledge acquired when free of the body. Goethe really wishes to show that it is possible too out of the body to gain knowledge, decisive knowledge, concerning the nature of man. He was by no means one of those who plunges lightheartedly into such matters. His whole life through he was striving to to make his soul more profound. For it was clear to him that when a man grows old, he does not live in vain, but that the forces of knowledge are always increasing, so that in old age it is possible for us to know more than in our youth. But he realised, also the problematic nature of the sojourn of soul and spirit outside the body. Hence he sought in the most varied ways to bring man, to his Faust, knowledge in the form of pictures, that we call Imagination. And he does this first in the Romantic Walpurgis-Night of Part I, and then again in the Classical Walpurgis-Night where he takes the Imaginations from ancient Greece, whither he would transport Faust. We might perhaps say that Goethe thinks that, when a man leaves the body in order to change Homunculus into Homo, into man, he has Imaginations appearing to different people in different forms. And, in the perception of the ancient Greeks, these Imaginations in some degree still approached spiritual reality. Setting before the soul the demonic world of ancient Greece, we can see how, in this traditional realm of myths, when outside the body with his soul and spirit, in highly developed atavistic clairvoyance, man contemplated nature from whose womb he sprang. I might therefore say that Goethe, not wanting to invent an imaginative world himself, calls in the Greek world in order to tell us that, whatever a man may contrive out of his ordinary knowledge, he still remains a Homunculus; if, however, he wishes to become a real man, he must first advance to the world of Imagination, Inspiration, and so on. That is how the nature of man should first be conceived.

Why does Goethe choose a sea-festival, or rather the dream of a sea-festival? To understand his feelings, we must take ourselves back into the conceptions of the old Greeks, to which Goethe himself went back in his representation of this gay feast. We must realise that, to the Greeks, there was a special significance in foresaking the land and sailing out to the open sea. The Greeks, like all ancient peoples, still lived in the outside world. Just as a change took place in these people when they forsook the level ground, the plain, and went up into the mountains—a change experienced by modern man in an abstract prosaic way—so the was some tremendous change in their soul on leaving dry land for the open sea. This feeling that the open sea has special power to release the soul and spirit from the body was universally experienced in olden times, and much is connected with the feeling.

I must ask you, my dear friends, to remember what an important part in the various symbols, on the path of knowledge, was played by the Pillars of Hercules in ancient myths. It was constantly said that when a man has gone through various stages of knowledge he sails, through the Pillars of Hercules. This meant that he sails out into the limitless, open sea, where he no longer feels himself within reach of any coast. For man today that has ceased to mean very much, but for the Greek it meant entering a completely different world. Once past the Pillars of Hercules, he became free of all that bound him to earth, above all through his bodily forces. In olden days, when everyday matters were still experienced by soul and spirit, sailing over the open sea wan felt as freeing one from the body.

Goethe's poetical works were not like those of lesser poets; he wrote out of his feeling for the cosmos, and when he speaks of all that he transposed into the Greek world, he transposes himself there with his whole soul. It is of this that we must constantly remind those who read Goethe as if he were any other poet—those who, whey they are reading Goethe, have no consciousness of having been carried into another world.

Now as the scene begins, we see the ‘alluring Sirens.’ Goethe presents a scene that, though externally in picture-form, might equally be one of everyday life. For the Sirens are collecting wreckage for the Nereids and Tritons. Considered from the other side, however, these alluring creatures, these voices, are not only within man but also outside him. They are the voices of different stages in the world, and on these stages, as I have often shown, inner and outer flow together. The Siren-sounds are those that entice the souls of men out of their bodies, and set them in the spiritual cosmos.

Let us sum up all this. First, Goethe shows a festival of the sea, or rather, dreams evoked during this festival. Secondly, this festival took place during the night, under the influence of the Moon. Goethe arranges everything to show that here it is a question of having to gain a conception independently of the body, a conception of the kind that would be attained consciously, outside the body, is then experienced in pictures. And now we see that, while on the one hand, Goethe wishes to satisfy those who keep to the superficial—this is not said in any belittling sense—by making the Sirens collect wreckage for the Nereids and Tritons who covet it, yet these Nereids and Tritons are on the way to Samothrace to seek the Kabiri and bring them to the festival of the sea. By introducing the Gods of the primeval Samothracian sanctuary into this scene, Goethe shows that he is touching upon the highest human and cosmic secrets. What, then, must take place when Homunculus is to become Homo, when the outlook of Homunculus is to become the outlook of Homo? What must then actually happen?

Now the idea of Homunculus, as understood within the world of the senses, must be taken out of that world and transposed into the world of soul and spirit where, between falling asleep and waking, man has his being. Homunculus must be taken into the world man experiences when, free of his body, he is united with the existence of soul and spirit. It is in this picture-world that we must now find Homunculus, he must then transfer this picture of Homunculus, he must then transfer this picture into that other world, the world of Imagination, Inspiration, and so forth. There alone can the abstract idea of Homunculus be grasped by the real forces of being, those forces that never enter human knowledge when we stop short at the understanding through the senses. When Homunculus, the idea of Homunculus, is separated from the body and transferred to the world of so and spirit, then in all earnestness everything becomes real. Then we have to come upon those forces that are the real ones behind the origin and evolution of man.

In all this Goethe is showing that he had a profound and significant comprehension of the Samothracian Kabiri, that he had a feeling how, in primeval times, these Kabiri were worshipped as guardians of the forces connected with the origin and evolution of mankind. Thus, by evoking from the age if atavistic clairvoyance, pictures of the divine forces associated with human evolution, Goethe was touching upon what is highest.

When dealing with the Samothracian Mysteries, the conception of the Greeks referred back to what was very ancient. And it may be said that the ideas about these Samothracian Mysteries about the Kabiri divinities, permeated all the various ideas the Greeks held about the Gods, all their ideas concerning the connection between these Gods and mankind. And the old Greek was convinced that his idea of human immortality was a legacy bequeathed to the Greek consciousness by the Samothracian Mysteries. It was to the influence of these Mysteries he felt he owed the idea of man's immortality, the idea of man's membership of the world of soul and spirit.

Goethe therefore wishes at the same time to suggest that, were the impulses of the Greeks, that are associated with the Kabiri of Samothrace, grasped in a state free of the body, perhaps the abstract human idea of Homunculus might be united with the true evolutionary forces of man. In the Greek consciousness there was definitely something that could live again, vividly, in Goethe when he touched on this profound mystery. To take an example, this may be seen in what the Greeks used to say of Philip of Macedonia how, by watching the Mysteries of Samothrace, he found Olympia. And the Greeks had in their consciousness how, at that time, the great Alexander decided to descend to these parents when coming to earth, when soul to soul before the divinities of Kabiri Philip of Macedon and Olympia found each other. Those things must be touched upon for the awe to be felt which the Greeks actually experienced when the Kabiri were in question, an awe shared later by Goethe.

From an external point of view they are simply ocean-deities. The Greeks knew that, in an age relatively not very ancient, Samothrace had been inundated, rent asunder, and reduced to confusion by most fearful volcanic storms. The nature-demons had shown their power here in such a terrific way that it still remained in historic memory among the Greeks. And in the woods, in the forests of Samothrace, at that time very dense, the Kabiren Mysteries were concealed. Among the many different names they bore is one Axieros; a second, Axiokersos; a third, Axiokersa; the fourth was Kadmyllos. And a vague feeling existed that there were also a fifth, sixth and seventh. But man's spiritual gaze was mainly fixed on the first three. The old ideas of the Kabiri centered round the secret of men's becoming; and the initiate it in to the holy Mysteries of Samothrace was supposed to come to the perception that what is seen spiritually in the spiritual world corresponds to what happens on earth when, for an incarnating soul a man arises, a man comes to birth. In the spiritual world the spiritual correlate of the human birth was supposed to be watched.

Through such vision, Goethe believed he could change the idea of a homunculus to that of homo. And it was to this vision the Samothracian Initiates were led. We cannot see a man in his true nature when we regard him as a being enclosed within his skin and when we are under the delusion that all we are concerned with in man stands before us in external, physical human form, visible to the external eye. Whoever wishes really to know man must go beyond what is enclosed within the skin and look upon the human being as extending over the entire universe. He must have in mind, what extends spiritually outside the skin.

Now many of the ideas about the Gods depend on this impulse of the Greeks to see the human being outside his skin. And connected with these ideas there was an exoteric and an esoteric side. The exoteric side of man's becoming related, however, to the whole of nature's becoming; the connection of man's becoming with the becoming of nature was involved when, later, the Greeks spoke of Demeter, of Ceres. The esoteric side of Ceres, of Demeter, of the world in its becoming, was the Kabiri. We must know how to look at him, if in any way we are to be able to penetrate the secret of man.

You see, to look at man simply as a figure standing on the physical earth is, really, to deceive yourself about him. For the human being has been united from a threefold stream, a trinity. And as three lights cast their beams on a point—a circle—and we see the fusion of the lights and then refuse to recognise how one, perhaps yellow, another blue, and the third of reddish colour flow together into one, refuse to see this harmony, preferring to believe that what has arisen from a mingling of lights is a unity and so deceive ourselves in believing this mixed product we see before us as man in his skin to be a unity. He is not a unity and if we take him for one we shall never read the secret of mankind. At the present time man is unconscious of not being a unity. But he was conscious of it while atavistic clairvoyance glowed warmly through human knowledge. Thus, the Initiates of Samothrace put men together out of Axieros standing in the middle, and the two extremes, Axiokersos and Axiokersa, whose forces were united with those of Axieros. We might say than that there are three—Axieros, Axiokersos, and Axiokersa. These three forces flowed together to form a unity. The higher reality is the trinity; the unity springs from the trinity. This is what comes before the eye of man.

It might also be said that the Samothracian Initiate learned to know man who stood, physically perceptible, before him. He was told: You must take away from this man the two extremes, Axiokersos and Axiokersa, that only ray into him. Then you can retain Axieros. So the matter stands thus: Of the three, Axieros represents the centre condition of the human being, and the others the two invisible ones, merely shine upon him.

Thus, in the Mysteries of Samothrace, man is shown to be a trinity. Goethe asks himself: Can the idea of the abstract Homunculus perhaps be changed into that of the complete Homo by turning to what, in the Samothracian Mysteries, was regarded as the secret of man—the human trinity? And he said: This trinity can only be arrived at as a conception when man, with his soul and spirit, leaves the body. This is what he told himself.

We must, however, always emphasise that, as regards spiritual perception, Goethe was only a beginner. What is so wonderful about all that Goethe stands for will, as I said recently, only be rightly understood when we think of it as being continually developed, being necessarily developed in order to lend to ever greater heights. In Goethe himself we have the theory of metamorphosis, from leaf to leaf, from the green leaf of the foliage to the coloured petal of the flower, or from the spinal vertebrae, perhaps, to the bones of the head—this secret, if rightly understood, leading from one incarnation to another, from one earth-life to another, as I have often shown you. Hence, from the standpoint of Goethe's own conception of the world, we may ask: How then should the Mystery of Samothrace be pictured today? The Samothracian Mystery, as such, with its Kabiri-symbolism of the secret of humanity, corresponds entirely with the atavistic clairvoyant world-conception; but the living content of knowledge at any one human period, cannot be continued on in the right way, and must be re-moulded. It is not suitable for a return to old conceptions adapted to a quite different state of human evolution; the conceptions must be transformed. The Samothracian Mystery has naturally only historical value. Today we should say: We represent how in the centre of the Representative of Man there stands Axieros, how he is encircled by Axiokersa, and how Axiokersos must be placed in connection with all that is earthly—thus giving us the Representative of Man, Lucifer and Ahriman. And here we have the re-moulding suited to the present age, and on into the future, of the holy Mystery of Samothrace.

It might be said: Were Goethe to appear among us today, wishing, in conformity with all that man has since won for himself, to tell us what is able to change Homunculus to Homo, he would point to the Representative of Man, surrounded by, and in combat with, Lucifer and Ahriman. I beg of you, however, not to make an abstraction of these things, not to apply the favorite modern method of settling these matters by a few abstract concepts, and taking them for symbols. the more you feel that a whole world, containing the secret of man, lies hidden in the figure of the Representative of Man in connection with Lucifer and Ahriman; the more you repudiate the pride, the unjustified, childish pride, of modern man in his abstract scientific concepts; the more you open your soul to a world giving you a view of this image of the mystery of man—then the nearer you come to this secret.

Spiritual Science meets with all kinds of opposition today. But one of its strongest opponents is man's desire for abstraction, his desire to label everything with a few concepts. Goethe's teaching is, in feeling, the exact opposite of this mischievous modern habit of pasting concepts everywhere. One has peculiar experiences in this regard. Men come to a movement like Spiritual Science from very different motives. There are many who wish to reduce everything to abstractions. For instance, man consists of seven principles—I once had the experience, a horrible experience, of someone explaining Hamlet by attributing to him the principle of Buddhi on one place, in another, Manes, and so on. That, my dear friends, is something much worse than all materialism. These quite abstract explanations, all this symbolising of an abstract nature is, regarded inwardly, much worse than any external materialism. Anyhow, we see that, in showing his Nereids and Tritons on the way to Samothrace to fetch the holy Kabiri, Goethe wished, above all, to raise the idea of Homunculus to a very high human plane.

And so, with regard to the Kabiri, we must experience what the ancient peoples did with regard to their deities. These deities of primeval peoples appear primitive to man today—mere idols. This is so because modern man has no understanding for idols. This is so because modern man has no understanding for all that flows out of elemental forces. Not even in art does man rise today to anything really creative. He keeps to a model, or judges what is represented for him in art by the question: Is it like?—Often indeed one hears the objection that it is not natural, because, among men today, there is very little real artistic feeling. In any case, whoever wishes to understand the sometimes grotesque looking figures of the ancient Gods, must try to form an idea of the beings belonging to the third elemental world, from which our world springs, on the one hand in its mineral, on the other, in its organic products.

You know how the scene begins. The Nereids and Tritons are on their way to Samothrace to fetch the Kabiri, amongst whom Homunculus is to be transformed into Home. In the meantime, while they are on their journey, Thales, who is to be the guide of Homunculus in becoming man, betakes himself to the old sea God, Nereus. It was Thales, the old philosopher of nature, whom first Homunculus had sought out. Now, Goethe is neither a mystic in the bad sense of the word, not a mere natural philosopher, when it is a question of finding reality. Hence Thales himself cannot be made to help Homunculus to become Home. Goethe had a deep respect for Thales conception of the world, but did not attribute to him the ability, the force, to advise Homunculus how to become man, complete man. For this, one should betake oneself outside the body to a demonic power—to old Nereus. Goethe brings the most various demonic powers to Homunculus. What kind of power is this Nereus? Now we can see this by the way the old sea-God speaks in Goethe's poem. It might be said that Nereus is the wise, prophetic, but somewhat philistine inhabitant of the spiritual world nearest man, the world man first enters on leaving the body. And, we ask, does he know at all how Homunculus is to become man? Nereus has indeed understanding, even to the point of prophetic clairvoyance; and he makes noble use of this understanding, but even so does not really succeed in reaching what is innermost in the human being. Because of this he feels men do not listen to him, do not heed his counsel. He has, as it were, no access to the human soul. On many occasions he has advised men, warned men; once he warned Paris against bringing so much misery on Troy, but to no effect. Now Nereus, since he is not hampered by a physical body, has developed on the physical plane to a very high degree human understanding that is possessed in a much less degree by man. But even with this understanding he cannot help Homunculus very far on the road to becoming Homo. What Nereus is able to say does not entirely meet the case. So by that nothing is actually gained for Homunculus' task.

Nereus says, however, that although he will not concern himself in giving Homunculus advice about becoming Homo, he is expecting his daughters, the Dorides (or Nereides). In particular, he expects Galatea, the most outstanding of them; for they are to attend the ocean-festival. Galatea! and Imagination of a mighty kind.

What the question is here, is to see how things are connected in the world. It is not very easy to speak on this point, because of the soul's desire today to reduce everything to abstractions. But anyone who looks into these matters may experience a great deal. There are, no doubt, well-intentioned people who say they believe in the spirit. Certainly, it is not a bad thing at least to believe in the spirit; but how do they answer the weighty question: What do you mean exactly by the ‘spirit’ in which you believe? What is the spirit? Spiritualists generally renounce all claim to learning anything of the spirit by doing much that is quite unspiritual. Spiritualism is the most materialistic doctrine that can exist. Certain souls more finely tuned speak indeed of the spirit, but what is it exactly that they have i mind when so speaking? That is why very modern and sceptical minds prefer to forgo the spirit—I mean, of course, only in thought—prefer to give up the spirit as against what can be known today through the senses. Read the article called “Spirit” in Fritz Mauthner's Dictionary of Philosophy; there you will probably be able to get bodily conditions but not those of the head.

Now, you see, in Spiritual Science one should rise above all this abstract talking, even if it is about the spirit. Follow what is said in Spiritual Science, and you will see how it rises progressively as we work. Everything is drawn upon that, step by step, can lead into the actual spiritual world. What is said is not merely the spoken word but derives its force from a method of comparison. Only think how, by the very way Spiritual Science is presented here, it becomes comprehensible that man is pursuing a certain path in life, in the physical body. Read, for instance, what is given comprehensively in the October number of Das Reich (1918). It is shown there how, and by means of what forces, a human being while quite a child has the closest affinity to the material world; how in middle life his soul gains in importance; how in later life he becomes spiritual. This, however, he often does not recognise because he is not prepared for it. He becomes spiritual as the body falls into decay, as the body becomes dry and sclerotic the spirit becomes free, even during the waking condition. Only, a man is very seldom conscious of what he is able to experience if he grows old with a certain gift. I mean here with a gift of the spiritual; that is to say if, not simply growing decrepit in body, he experiences the soul becoming young, becoming spirit.

This makes us realise, my dear friends, that the spirit cannot be seen in an old man or old woman; naturally it is invisible. The decrepit body can be seen but not the spirit growing young and fresh. Wrinkles may be perceived in the flesh of the cheeks, but not the growing fullness of the spirit; that is supersensible. We can, however, indicate where the spirit may be found here in the world where we are leading our everyday existence. And if we then say: The whole of nature is permeated by spirit, we reach the point when we realise that outside in nature where the minerals and plants make manifest the external world, there dwells something of the same force into which we men and women grow as we become old. There you have the visible expression of it. To say, in a pantheistic way, that outside lives the spirit, means nothing at all, because spirit then remains a mere word. But if we say, not in a direct abstract way, but with the necessary and various details: To find the force that as you grow old is always becoming stronger in you, look to the innermost and most active of the forces of nature—then we are speaking of a reality. The essential thing is to set the one force by the side of the other, and to notice the place of each. These things can be livingly realised by turning one's gaze to the force-impulses in the whole connection of a physical human being's descent to earth—from conception, throughout the embryonic life till birth. The dull, dry-as-dust scientist stops short at this force; it is true, he examines it punctiliously but only in his own way, and then comes to a standstill. When a man is able to survey the world from the standpoint of Spiritual Science, he knows, however, that this force is also present in other places. Acting more quickly, the very same force makes itself felt when you wake in the morning, when you wake out of sleep. Exactly the same force, though in a more tenuous form, is present, as the one leading from conception through the embryonic life to birth; it is the identical force. This force is not only in you, in your innermost being; it is diffused outside, throughout everything and every process in the whole wide cosmos.

This force is the daughter of cosmic intelligence. You see, if we wish to describe these things, we must touch on many matters that, today, are quite out of the ordinary. What then does the modern scientist do, when wishing to come upon the secret of physical germination? He uses the microscope; he examines the germ-cell under the microscope, before it is fertilised, after it is fertilised, and so on. He has no feeling that what he thus examines in the smallest object under the microscope is constantly before his eyes in the macrocosm. The very same process that goes on, for example, in the womb of the mother, before and during conception, and during the whole embryonic life, this same process, this very same process, goes on macrocosmically when, after the seed has sunk down into the earth, the earth sends forth the little plant. The warmth of the womb, the warmth of the pregnant mother, is exactly the same as is the sun outside for the whole vegetation of the world. It is important to be able to realise that what can be seen in the smallest object under the microscope, can be looked upon macrocosmically all around in the external world. When we wander about among he growing plants, we are actually in the womb of the world. In short, the force underlying the becoming of man is outside in the whole macrocosmic world, seething and weaving there. Imagine this force personified, imagine this same force of human becoming grasped spiritually in its spiritual counterpart outside the human body, and you have Galatea, with those akin to her, her sisters, the Dorides. In these Imaginations we are led into a mysterious but quite real world. This is one of the most profound scenes written by Goethe, who was conscious that, at the most advanced age, man may have a premonition of these secrets of nature.

There is something overwhelmingly significant in Goethe beginning Faust in his youth and then, shortly before the end of his life, writing such scenes as are now being shown. For sixty years he was striving to find the way of putting into outward form what, at the beginning of that time, he had conceived. He draws upon everything he considers relevant to raise the idea of Homunculus to the idea of Homo, and to present man's becoming outside the body, in all its mystery. He draws upon the Kabiri Mystery, and the mystery of becoming man as it appeared in the figure of Galatea. And he knows that reality is so all-embracing, so profound, that the Imaginations awakened by the Kabiri impulses, by the Galatea-impulse, can do no more than hover on its surface. The mystery is far greater than what can be contained even in such impulses.

Goethe himself tried every means of approaching the secret of life in a true and living way. Thus he evolved his theory of metamorphosis, in which he follows up the different forms in nature—how one form develops out of another. Now Goethe's theory of metamorphosis must not be regarded in and abstract way. He shows us this himself. It is perhaps because it can only be conceived and brought to man's soul in a world-outlook free of the body that, with his theory of metamorphosis Goethe approaches what was atavistically experienced in the old Proteus-myth. Perhaps Proteus, who in his own becoming takes on such different forms, perhaps through his experiences it would be possible to find how Homunculus can become Homo. (You know how, in this scene, Goethe introduces him, and we present him, as tortoise, man, dolphin, three forms appearing one after another.)

But Goethe felt that there were still limitations to his theory of metamorphosis. Surely, you may say, a man with such profound, such fundamental knowledge, as Goethe could see what follows from this theory; with it one can watch one leaf of a plant changing into another, up to the petal of the flower, the spinal vertebrae transforming themselves into the bones of the head, the skull-bones? But Goethe—anyone who has worked on Goethe's world-conception knows how he wrestled in this sphere—Goethe knew he could go no farther. Yet he felt: There is something beyond all this.—We know what that something is—the head of the present man is the metamorphosis of the body of the previous man, the man of an earlier life on earth; the rest of his body in this earth-life will, in the next life, become the head. There, for man's life, we have metamorphosis—the crown of metamorphosis. He draws on what he feels about Proteus, but that can lead only to raising the idea of Homunculus to that of Homo. Goethe felt he had made a great beginning with the Protean idea of metamorphosis, but that this had to be developed were Homunculus to become Homo. Goethe in all honesty represents poetically both what he can and what he cannot do, and we see deep into his soul. It is no doubt, easier to picture an abstract, perfect Goethe and to assure ourselves he knew everything. But No! Goethe becomes all the greater by our recognising the limitations he himself so honestly admits, as may be seen, for instance, in his not allowing Proteus—that is, the way he conceives his theory of metamorphosis—to give counsel regarding Homunculus becoming Homo.

Goethe strove, indeed, form the most varied directions to approach this becoming—this growing to true man. For him, artistic conception was not, as it is for so many, fundamentally abstract. He considered that everything expressed in works of art was part of all that is creative in the world. Into this scene he puts all that was to have led him to his heart's desire—to fathoming the mystery of becoming man. As he stood before the Greek works of art, or rather, the Italian work which made Greek art real for him, he said to himself: I am an the track of what the Greeks were doing in the creation of their works of art; they acted in accordance with the same forces as does nature, in her creations. And he had the experience that, if the artist is a true artist, he unites himself in marriage, as it were, with the forces creating in nature; he creates his forms, and all that can be created artistically, out of what is working in the arising, the growing, of plants of animals, of man. But in all this there is still no inner knowledge. That is what Goethe had to admit to himself. The creative forces present themselves to our vision, allow us to feel them, but in metamorphosis we do not go right within them.

There next appear the Telchines of Rhodes. They are such great artists that, naturally. all external human art seems small in comparison. They forged Neptune's trident. They were the first who tried to represent Gods in human form, that is, to create man out of the actual cosmic forces. This art of the Telchines comes nearer reproducing man's becoming, but does not quite reach it. This is what Goethe is wishing to tell us. He expresses it through Proteus who says finally: Even this does not lead to the real mystery of man.

Thus does Goethe wish to evoke a true feeling that there are two worlds—the waking world of day, and the world that is entered when man is free of the body, the world he would see if, during sleep he became awake to this body-free condition. Everything of the kind that he would say, is indicated by Goethe in this scene most delicately and sublimely. Take, for example, the passage where the Dorides bring in the sailor-lads; read the works in which the world is described, how the physical world is set beside the world entered when man is free of the body—how this is pictured in the Dorides set beside the physical sailor boys. They have found each other and yet not found each other. Human beings and spirits meet one another, yet do not meet; they approach each other and remain strangers. In this passage, the relation of the two worlds is wonderfully indicated. Everywhere Goethe endeavours to show how essential it is to place oneself into the spiritual world to find what makes Homunculus into Homo. At the same time he delicately indicates how physical world and spiritual world are together yet apart.

One might say that in his artistic representation, Goethe sees—or rather, makes us see—how Homunculus can become Homo if the soul approaches the intimate mystery of the Kabiri, if it approach what Nereus evoked in his daughter Galatea. All that is active in the true art that works out of the cosmos. But, alas, it is as if one were grasping after reality in a dream, and the dream immediately fades away. It is as though one wished to hold fast what welds together the physical and the spiritual worlds. The Gods will not suffer it; the worlds fall apart.

This difficulty of knowing the spirit is the fundamental experience, the fundamental impulse in the soul of one who watches this scene with true understanding. It is this that leads Goethe to his mighty finale—the shattering of Homunculus against the shell-chariot of Galatea, the shattering that is at the same time an arising, a coming into being, the ascent into the elements, which is a finding of the self in reality.

We will speak again tomorrow of this conclusion of the scene, in connection with its representation.

This is lecture 6 of 18 from the volume: Spiritual and Social Transformations in Human Evolution.

You must remind yourselves that as well as living through his life here between birth and death, man passes again and again through the life between death and a new birth. Just as here on earth we have experiences through the instrumentality of our body, we also have experiences between death and a new birth, and these experiences are by no means without significance for what we do during our earthly existence in the physical body. But neither are they without significance for what happens on earth as a whole. For only part—and indeed the rather lesser part—of what happens on the earth originates from those who are living in the physical body. The dead are perpetually working into our physical world. The forces of which man is unwilling to speak to-day in the age of materialism are nevertheless at work in the physical world. Our physical environment is fashioned and permeated not only by the forces emanating from the spiritual world, from the Beings of the higher Hierarchies, but forces proceeding from the dead also penetrate into what surrounds and overtakes us here. So that a full and complete survey of man's life is possible only if we look beyond what can be told us by knowledge obtained through the senses and through history, here on earth.

The existence of such forces is in the end the one and only thing that can explain man in his whole being and the whole course of human evolution on the earth. A time will come in the physical evolution of the earth—it will be after the year 5,700—when, if he fulfils his rightful evolution, man will no longer tread the earth by incarnating in bodies derived from physical parents. In that epoch, women will be barren; children will no longer be born in the manner of to-day, if evolution on the earth takes its normal course.

There must be no misunderstanding about such a fact as this. Something else, for example, might come about. The Ahrimanic Powers, which under the influence of the impulses working in men to-day are becoming extremely strong, might succeed in preventing earth-evolution in a certain respect. It would then become possible for men—by no means for their good—to be held in the same form of physical life beyond this time in the sixth or seventh millennium. They would become much more like animals, while continuing to be held in the grip of physical incarnation. One of the endeavours of the Ahrimanic Powers is to keep humanity fettered too long to the earth in order to divert it from its normal evolution.

However, if men really take hold of the best possibilities for their evolution, then in the sixth millennium they will enter for a further 2,500 years into a connection with the earthly world of such a kind that they will, it is true, still have a relationship with the earth, but a relationship no longer coming to expression in the birth of physical children. In order to make the picture graphic, I will put it like this: In clouds, in rain, in lightning and thunder, man will be astir as a being of spirit-and-soul in the affairs of the earth. He will pulsate, as it were, through the manifestations of nature; and in a still later epoch his relationship to the earthly will become even more spiritual.

To speak of any such matters to-day is possible only when men have some conception of what happens between death and a new birth. Although there is not complete conformity between the way in which, between death and a new birth to-day, man is related to earthly conditions and the way in which he will be related to them when he no longer incarnates physically, there is nevertheless a similarity. If we understand how to imbue earth-evolution with its true meaning and purpose, we shall enter permanently into the same kind of relationship with earthly affairs that we now have only between death and a new birth. Only our life between death and a new birth in the present age is, shall I say, rather more essentially spiritual than it will be when this relationship is permanent.

Without the science of Initiation, understanding of these things lies leagues away. Most people to-day still persist in believing that the essential way to acquire knowledge of the science of Initiation is to amass all kinds of spiritual experiences, but not by the path that is proper for us in the physical body. Even the experiences gained by spiritualistic methods are apt to be valued more highly to-day than those which can be understood by the healthy human reason. Everything that is discovered by an Initiate, and can be communicated, is intelligible by the normal, rightly applied, human reason if only the necessary efforts are made. It is a primary task for the Initiate, also, to translate what he is able to proclaim out of the spiritual world into a language intelligible to human reason. Much more depends upon such translation being correct than upon the fact of having experiences in the spiritual world.

Naturally, if one has no such experiences, there is nothing to communicate. But crude experiences which arise without healthy reason being applied to their interpretation are really worthless, and have not the right significance for human life. Even if people were able to have many super-sensible experiences, but disdained to apply healthy reason to them, these experiences would be of no use whatever to humanity in the future. On the contrary, they would do serious harm, for a super-sensible experience is of use only when it is translated into the language that human reason can understand. The real evil of our time is not that men have no super-sensible experiences; they could have plenty if they so wished. Such experiences are accessible, but healthy reason is not applied in order to reach them. What is lacking to-day is the application of this healthy human reason.

It is of course unpleasant to have to say this to a generation that prides itself particularly on the exercise of this very reason. But at the present time it is not super-sensible experience that is in the worst plight; it is healthy logic, really sound thinking, and above all, too, the force of truthfulness that are worst off. The moment untruthfulness asserts itself, the super-sensible experiences fade away without being understood. People are never willing to believe this, but it is a fact.

The first requirement for understanding the super-sensible world is the most scrupulous veracity in regard to the experiences of the senses. Those who are not strictly accurate about these experiences can have no true understanding of the super-sensible world. However much may be heard about the super-sensible world, it remains so much empty verbiage if the strictest conscientiousness is not present in formulating what happens here in the physical world.

Anyone who observes how humanity is handling palpable truth today will have a sorrowful picture! For most people are not in the least concerned to formulate something they have experienced in such a way that the experience is presented faithfully; their concern is to formulate things as they want them to be, in the way that suits themselves. They know nothing about the impulses that are at work to beguile them in one direction or another away from a faithful presentation of the physical experience.

Leaving aside trifling matters, we need only observe the impulses which arise from ordinary human connections in life and prompt men to ‘varnish’ the truth in one respect or another. Further, we need only realise that the majority of people to-day are not speaking the truth at all about certain things, because of national interests or the like. Anyone who has national interests of some kind at heart can neither think nor say anything that is true in the sense in which truth must be conceived to-day. Hence the truth is virtually never uttered about the events of the last four or five years, because people everywhere speak out of one or other national interest.

What must be realised is that when a man desires to approach the super-sensible world, infinitely much depends upon such things. In times when procedures such as I characterised at the end of the lecture yesterday are possible—can you believe that many avenues to the truth lie open?¹ They certainly do not. For those who wallow in such swamps of untruthfulness as were disclosed yester-day, spread fog which completely shuts off what should be grasped as super-sensible truth by the healthy human reason. There is equal unwillingness to perceive that straightforward, candid relations between man and man must prevail if super-sensible truths are to penetrate in the right way into the social life. One cannot ‘varnish’ truth on the one hand and, on the other, wish to understand matters of a super-sensible nature.

When they are put into words, these things seem almost matters of course, but actually they are so little matters of course that everybody to-day ought constantly to repeat them to himself. Only so can there gradually be achieved what is necessary in this domain. As I said here recently, the essential principle of social community is that it must be founded upon confidence, in the sense indicated. This must be taken in all earnestness. In very many respects this confidence will also be necessary in the future with regard to paths of knowledge. The attitude adopted towards those who are in a position to say something about the science of Initiation should be to examine their utterances with the healthy reason only, not with sympathy, antipathy or the like, nor in the mirror of personal feeling. It must at all times be realised that the Anthroposophical Society should become in the real sense a bearer of super-sensible truths into the world. Thereby it could achieve something extraordinarily necessary and significant for the evolution of mankind.

But it must be remembered that to have experiences in sensible spheres is obviously a matter to be taken in earnest. I told you some time ago how a friend of our Movement, shortly before he died from the effects of war-wounds, wrote lines in which, in the very face of death, he speaks of the air becoming hard, granite-like.

I said at the time that this is an absolutely true experience.² Think only of the most elementary experiences connected with crossing the Threshold of the spiritual world and you will be able to gauge the importances of these things. In our life by day—or also by night, for then there is electric light—the sun, the light of the sun, illumines the objects around us; the sunlight makes them visible. In a similar way the other senses become aware of surrounding objects. If I limit myself at the moment to the example of the sunlight, directly the Threshold is crossed man must become one with the light in his inmost being. The light cannot enable him to see objects because he has to pass into the very light itself. Objects can be seen with the help of the light only as long as the light is outside. When man is himself moving together with the light, the objects illumined by it can no longer be seen. But when, in his being of soul, he is moving in the light itself, then for the first time he becomes aware that thinking is, in reality, one with the light weaving in the world.

Thinking that is bound up with the body is proper to physical life only. Directly we leave this body, our thinking loses definition; it weaves into the light, lives in the light, is one with the light. But the moment our thinking is received into the light, it is no longer possible to have an ego as easily as man has one between birth and death, without doing anything towards it. His body is organised in such a way that his being reflects itself through the body, and he calls this mirror-image his ego. It is a faithful mirror-image of the real ego, but it is a mirror-image, a picture only, a picture-thought, a thought-picture. And the moment the Threshold is crossed, it streams out into the light.

If another anchorage were not now available, man would have no ego at all. For this ego, this ‘I’, that he has between birth and death, is furnished for him by his body. He loses it the moment he leaves the body, and then he can be conscious of an ego only by becoming one with what may be called the forces of the planet especially the variations of the planet's force of gravity. He must become so entirely one with the planet, with the earth, that he feels himself to be a part of the earth, as the finger feels itself to be a member of the human organism. Then, in union with the earth, it is possible for him again to have an ego. And he perceives that just as here in earthly life he makes use of thinking in the physical body, after earthly life he can make use of the light.

From the standpoint of Initiation, therefore, one would have to say: Man is united with the earth's force of gravity and through radiating light concerns himself with the things of the world. Applied to the experience beyond the Threshold, this would express the same fact as when one says here on earth: Man lives in his body and thinks about the things of the world. Of the life between birth and death we say: Man lives in the body and concerns himself with things through thinking.

As soon as he leaves the body, we must say: He is united with the earth's force of gravity or with its variations, with electricity or magnetism, and through radiating light, inasmuch as he is now living in the light, concerns himself with the things of the world.

When things that have been illumined in this way—instead of being merely thought about, as is generally the case—are put into words, they are entirely comprehensible to the healthy human reason. And even the Initiate, if he has not developed his reason in the right way, gains nothing whatever from his super-sensible experiences. When someone to-day—please take what I am now saying as a really serious matter—has learnt to think in a way perfectly adapted to meeting the demands of school examinations, when he acquires habits of thought that enable him to pass academic tests with flying colours—then his reasoning faculty will be so vitiated that even if millions of experiences of the super-sensible world were handed to him on a platter, he would see them as little as you could physically see the objects in a dark room; for that which makes men fit to cope with the demands of this materialistic age darkens the space in which the super-sensible worlds come towards them.

Men have become accustomed to think in the one and only way that is possible when thinking is based on the bodily functions. This kind of thinking is ingrained in them from their youth onwards. But healthy human reason does not unfold on bodily foundations; it unfolds in free spiritual activity. And even in our Elementary Schools to-day children are educated away from free spiritual activity. The very methods of teaching hinder the development of free spiritual activity. Dare one incur the responsibility of concealing from the world these vital truths of the age? People may not realise why it was thought necessary to set into active operation an institution such as the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. But through this Waldorf School some at least of the children of men will be given a real chance to discard the bigotry of the times and to learn how to move in the element of thinking that is truly free. As long as such things are not regarded in this serious light, we shall make no progress.

Now I would like to call your attention to another tendency which is still far too common. Because people are tired of the old in its ordinary form, they like to get hold of something new; but for all that they want the new to be somehow veiled, whenever possible, in all the old, habitual conceptions. I have known many people—and it is well to be under no delusion about these things—who have realised that anthroposophical Spiritual Science is endeavouring to promulgate something true and right about Christianity, about the Mystery of Golgotha. But among them were some for whom this was right only because it exposed them to less disapproval in Church circles; hence they found Anthroposophy more opportune than some other form of spiritual science holding a different view of Christianity. In anthroposophical Spiritual Science the one and only question is that of truth; but with some people it has not always been a question only of truth, but often only of opportunism. Naturally it is unpleasant nowadays to have to witness the attitude to truth adopted by the representatives of the religious confessions and ultimately by their congregations who are also influenced by it. This is a trend of the times that must be kept clearly in view.

If it is desired to approach the super-sensible world in the right way, we must have interest in all things—but never mere curiosity. People are so ready to confound curiosity with interest. They must learn not only to think differently but to feel differently about all things. If anthroposophical Spiritual Science were ever to be given a mantle suitable for the atmosphere of coffee-parties or what corresponds to them nowadays, this would by no means conduce to the fulfilment of its task—for this task is of grave moment.

The reason for the hostility that is asserting itself at the present time in such ugly forms is simply this: People realise that here it is not a matter of a sect, or of a happier “family circle” such as many desire, but that something is truly striving to activate the impulses needed by the times. But what interest have the majority of people to-day in these impulses? If only they can bask in happiness or have something in the nature of a new religion! This egoism of soul, which impels very many people to anthroposophical Spiritual Science, must be overcome. Interest in the great affairs of humanity is necessary for any true understanding of Anthroposophy.

These great concerns of the life of humanity are clearly to be discerned in the most seemingly trivial facts of life. But in one respect our whole life of perception and feeling must change if we want so to orientate healthy human reason that it functions in the right stream of Spiritual Science. Let me repeat: The whole of our life of soul must change in one particular respect if our healthy human reason is to function within the stream of spiritual life that is to be brought to mankind through Anthroposophy. What is the orientation given us here on earth by the culture that is smothered in materialism? Our orientation is such that we feel ourselves as bodily men—with bones, muscles, nerves. And our body acts as a mirror, reflecting the image of our ego to us—schematically, like this:

Your true being is somewhere in spiritual regions. Here, in the physical world, is your body. It becomes a mirror, reflecting back to you the image of the ego. The ego itself is here (= = =), but the image of the ego is reflected back to you by the body. You know of this ego-image when you look at the body with that centre of your being of which most people at present know nothing, but in which they nevertheless live. So the ego, together with the thoughts, feelings and impulses of will, is mirrored by the body. Behind this ego-image is the body, and man calls these mirrored images his soul; behind the soul he perceives the body and uses it as his support.

But this picture: There, down below, is the body; there the ego emerges ... this picture must be entirely changed. It is a picture perceived in complete passivity, and is indeed perceived only because the body is behind it. We must learn to perceive quite differently. We must learn to perceive: You are there in your spiritual world, a world in which there are no plants, minerals and animals, but Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, and the other Beings of the Hierarchies; in them you live. And because these Beings permeate us through and through, we ray forth the ego:

We ray forth this ego from the spiritual world. We must learn to feel this ego, to feel that we have within us the ego behind which stand the Hierarchies, just as the body, composed of elements of the three kingdoms of nature, is behind the ego that is an image only. We must pass out of the passive experience into activity in the fullest sense. We must learn to feel that our real ego is brought into being out of the spiritual world. And then we also learn to feel that the mirror-image of our ego is brought into being for us out of the body that belongs to physical existence.

This is a reversal of the usual feeling, and to this reversal we must habituate ourselves. That is the important thing—not the amassing of facts and data. They will be there in abundance once this reversal of feeling has been experienced. Then, when thinking is active in the real sense, those thoughts are born which can fertilise social thinking. When the ego is allowed to remain a mirror-image, thinking can take account only of those social matters which are (as I said yesterday) merely the outcome of changes in phraseology. Only when man is active in his ego can his thoughts be truly free.

In past centuries, not so very long ago, this freedom in thinking was still present in men, although springing, it is true, from atavistic qualities of soul. Instinctively, they regarded it as an ideal to achieve this freedom in their thinking, whereas we have to achieve it in the future by conscious effort. There is an outer illustration of this. Just look at the diplomas conferring the Doctor's degree at universities in Middle Europe. As a rule, people are made not only Doctors, but Doctors and Masters of the Seven Liberal Arts—Arithmetic, Dialectic, Rhetoric, and so on. This no longer means anything, for the Seven Liberal Arts are nowhere included in the curriculum of modern universities. It is a relic, a heritage from an earlier period when through university life men strove to liberate their thinking, to develop a life of soul able to rise to truly free thinking.

At the universities to-day the degrees of Master of the Liberal Arts and Doctor of Philosophy are still conferred. But this is no more than a relic, for nobody understands what the Liberal Arts really are. They are justly named ‘Arts’ because they were pursued in a sphere lying above that of sensory experience, just as the artist's imagination unfolds freely and independently of material existence. The degrees inscribed in university diplomas once represented a reality, just as many other things still surviving in the formula current at universities were once realities. The title, Magister Artium Liberalium, is a very characteristic example.

This living grasp of the self (Sicherfassen) must again be achieved. But it goes against the grain, because people to-day prefer to move about on crutches instead of using their legs. Their ideal is to have what they are to think conveyed to them by the outer, material facts. It is unpleasant for them to realise that thinking in the true sense must be experienced in free spiritual activity, because it means tearing themselves away from the convenient things of life, from all props, all crutches in the life of soul. Whenever things are said from the standpoint of a kind of thinking that has nothing whatever to do with the sense-world, but in complete freedom creates out of intuitions, people do not understand it. My Philosophy of Spiritual Activity was not understood because it can be grasped only by one who is intent upon unfolding really free thoughts, one who is truly and in a new sense a ‘Master of the Liberal Arts’.

These are the things that must be understood today with the right feeling and with the earnestness that is their due. Especially to the English friends who are here for a short time only, I want to say this: The Building we have erected on this hill must be regarded as an outer beacon for the signs of the times. This Building stands here in order that through it the world may be told: If you go on thinking in the old way, as for four centuries you have become accustomed to think in your sciences, you will condemn humanity to destruction. With the help of crutches you may seek in the easy way to establish principles of social life, but in so doing you will only be preserving what already has death within it.

For the life of soul to-day it is essential to unfold thinking that is as free as are those forms out of which, in architecture, sculpture or painting, the attempt has been made to create this Building. Its purpose is that at one spot on the earth these things shall be said not through words alone, but also through forms. Men should feel that here, through these forms, something different from what can be heard elsewhere in the world to-day is intended to be said, and also that what is said is urgently necessary for the further progress of mankind in respect of knowledge and social principles, in respect of all the sciences and of all branches of social life.

• 1. Steiner was quoting scurrilous statements based on deliberate falsification published in newspapers in Germany about the alleged political aims, methods and activities of the Threefold Commonwealth Movement at the time it was founded. He also referred to articles in a Roman Catholic periodical, and to a book by a Professor of Psychology containing false information about Anthroposophy.
• 2. See lecture given at Dornach, 15th November, 1919: “An impression of this nature must be understood. ... For in wrestling to acquire the wisdom needed for the future, one of the most frequent experiences is this: the surrounding world presses in upon one, as if the air had suddenly hardened to granite. The reason for these things can be known, for it need only be remembered that it is the striving of the Ahrimanic Powers to cause the earth to become completely rigidified.”

My dear friends,

Once again there comes to life in our hearts the verse that has resounded through the centuries, of the Divine Mysteries manifesting in the Heights and of the peace on Earth for men of good-will. And at this moment I imagine, especially in our time, the question will arise within our hearts: What then does mankind need, over the whole Earth's round, for the prospering of earthly evolution and of that peace of which the Gospel tells? Well, my dear friends, we have been speaking for weeks past of what is needful to mankind all the Earth over, especially in this our time—questionable as it is and so fraught with questions. And if we would gather up into a single sentence what has been passing through our souls in recent weeks—then we may say: It is necessary for men to strive ever more and more for a full mutual understanding.

This quest of a true mutual understanding among men coincides with what we explained yesterday as to the fundamental impulse underlying what we here call Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. Anthroposophical Spiritual Science strives for an insight into those things which can only be seen by spiritual vision in the world and in the evolution of the world. What is it that shall come to birth in human souls through this cosmic understanding? It is the true—not the apparent and illusory, but the true content of the social demands of the present time, and it consists in calling forth mutual understanding among men. We must strive for this understanding of humanity over the whole Earth—strive for it on the one hand with sincerity and on the other hand with strength. And this can only be done today with an active spiritual life, I mean a spiritual life which does not merely wish to devote itself to the world passively, but seeks to be inwardly active, partaking in the inner impulses of all existence and so arriving at an understanding of the world and man. Yesterday I told you, we are living in an age when new revelations of the Spirit are penetrating through the veil of outward phenomena. We cannot take this truth too earnestly. For he alone who takes it in full earnest will prove equal to the task which our age requires, of every single human being who claims to be awake in life.

If you will think back over many things which we have considered in the last few weeks, you will realize that this understanding of man over the whole Earth cannot be attained so easily as many people think. We have tried to throw light on the peculiarities of the groupings of peoples in the Western and Eastern regions of the Earth and in the Middle. Without letting sympathies or antipathies come into play in the very least, we have tried to understand what are the deepest characteristics of the peoples of the West, the Middle and the East respectively. Why did we do so? To take an example, we pointed out that our age is characterized especially by the development of intellectuality, and that in the Western—especially the English-speaking—peoples, this intellectuality comes to expression in such a way that it acts, as it were, instinctively. Whereas in the Middle peoples, intellect does not work instinctively—in fact, to begin with, it is not innate in them at all; they must acquire it by education. This, we showed, is a very significant difference between the peoples of the West and of the Middle. Thereafter we pointed to the peoples of the East and we said: There, the evolution of intellect comes to expression in such a way that, to begin with, the Eastern peoples actually recoil from it. They are loath to awaken this intellectuality to life within them; they want to preserve it for the knowledge of the Spirit-Self in the future. We pointed to other differentiations also, over the earth. Today let us ask ourselves: Why do we indicate these differentiations? Why do we seek from our point of view to characterize the different groups of people over the Earth? We do so, my dear friends, because in future the mere “Love one-another” will no longer suffice. In future, men will only attain mutual understanding as to their several tasks over the whole Earth if they know what is working in one or in another territory of the Earth. They must be able to look consciously at the several characteristics of the different groups of people. Once we can rise to the inner feeling, which is indeed essential to such understanding, this understanding will indeed be brought about. The feeling to which I refer, my dear friends, is this; the moment we begin to characterize human beings all the Earth over in this way, we must rid ourselves of the impulse to judge and value in the way we judge and value an individual human being as to his moral qualities. In seeking to characterize the nations it simply will not do to judge of their worth as we do in the case of a single human being. It is the very essence of the evolution of the individual human beings on Earth, that man develops the moral qualities as an individual being. Morality can only be evolved by the individual, not by groups of human beings. It would be the worst of illusions if we continued to believe that groups of human beings—or, as one likes to call them nowadays, nations—can enter into a like relationship to one another as man to man. One who can understand concretely what groups of human beings (nations, too, therefore) are in reality, will see the nations guided, as you know from our lecture cycle on the Folk Souls, by those Beings of the Hierarchies whom we call Archangels. He will never ascribe to the mutual relationship of nations that which he must see in the relation of one human being to another. What the nations are, they are in face of the Divine Beings. Here there arises a very different valuation from that which obtains as between man and man. It is for this very reason that man becomes an individual in the course of his evolution. He wrests himself free from the mere folk or nation, so that he may enter fully into what we call the moral order of the world. This moral order of the world is a concern of the individual man.

Such things must be understood by real spiritual knowledge. The true progress of Christianity itself in our time consists in this. I said the other day: We are living in a time when the Spirits of Personality rise in a sense to creative activity. They become Creators. This is exceedingly important, for inasmuch as they become Creator-Spirits there penetrates through the veil of phenomena what we described yesterday as a new revelation. The Spirits of Personality, therefore, are taking on the character of Creators. They become different in a sense from what they were before. They in their being take on a character like that which certain other Spirits (the Spirits of Form) possessed, for earthly evolution, since Lemurian times. This means that in a certain sense man will henceforth confront an altogether changed world-picture. We must become conscious of this, for this is the great thing in our time. Man is beginning to confront an altogether changed world picture, one that comes forth—to use a Goethean expression—out of the gray depths of the Spirit. If we look back with Spiritual Science into the historic evolution of mankind—we may look back into pre-Christian times—the farther we go back, the more we find that men possessed in an old instinctive way an extensive cosmic knowledge, which inspires us with all the greater reverence the more we learn to know it. For the seer it becomes a fact that at the outset of earthly evolution an immense Wisdom was poured out as it were over the earthly life of man. In course of time this Wisdom gradually filtered away. And strange as it may sound, my dear friends, yet it is true, it had reached a kind of zero level at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha came with a blessing to mankind. During that time all that humanity had known in former ages fell into a kind of chaos in the consciousness of man. Those who have understanding of these matters express themselves with perfect agreement on this fact. During that time, they say, the evolution into which man is woven had reached once more the point of utter ignorance. Yet into this gray ignorance which overlay mankind there fell the greatest earthly revelation—the Mystery of Golgotha—the starting point of new knowledge, new revelations for humanity.

Nevertheless, through many centuries, as concerns man himself, the dark gray ignorance persisted in a sense. It does enlighten us, my dear friends, in the deepest sense, if, looking back on the last two thousand years, we ask ourselves with understanding: What, after all, did men produce out of themselves during these last two thousand years? All they possessed by way of Wisdom (independent of the Mystery of Golgotha) was old tradition—inheritance from old traditions. Let us understand one another aright. Needless to say, I will not say humanity has had no Wisdom at all during the last two thousand years, nor will I cast aspersions on the Wisdom which they had. The point is this: The Wisdom that was present in the old pre-Christian times—whose relics are still observable in the last centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha—this Wisdom was seen, albeit instinctively, seen in the Spirit of the olden times. Now however they had lost the power of relating themselves, with independent spiritual vision, to the content of the cosmic Wisdom. What had existed in olden times was preserved, as it were, in a historic memory. Even the Mystery of Golgotha, as I said yesterday, was clothed in the old Wisdom, expressed in the conceptions of the old-remembered Wisdom.

All this went on through many centuries. An advance-guard—albeit only an advance guard—for a renewed penetration of man into Cosmic Wisdom emerged in the mode of thought of modern Natural Science. True, to begin with it emerges in an apparently godless form; yet it is so. It is something which man seeks to acquire by his own activity of soul. Have I not often emphasized that for the future men must learn to regard the spiritual world anthroposophically, even [as], since Copernicus, they have regarded the purely mechanical, external order of Nature? To learn to behold the Divine just as men learned to behold the outer mechanical aspect of the universe since Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno—this is the task that must permeate us if we would come to a true understanding of our time.

Of course there are many things against this true understanding of our time. Towards such understanding, as you know, such things are necessary as are said for instance in my book on Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment where we have shown what ways the soul must take to penetrate into the spiritual world even as Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno sought to penetrate the outward mechanical order of Nature. Those who have no deeper understanding for human aspirations may well be astonished that the most vigorous opposition arises out of the spirit of the old religious faiths (if we may call them so) against this endeavor to show what ways the human soul must take to find the spiritual world. It is especially so when the old spirit appears in the form of Jesuitism.

Among the many stupid accusations which have appeared in three articles in the Stimmen der Zeit this year, the following also occurs: “The Church,” they say, “forbids this treatment of the human soul to find the paths into the spiritual world.” My dear friends, for many a modern believer in authority this may sound like something new; but they fail to remember that the very same Church also forbade the researches of Copernicus and Galileo! The Church dealt with external scientific research in exactly the same way. We need not therefore wonder if it metes out the same treatment to the inner researches of spiritual science. It is only remaining true to its old habits. Even as the Catholic Church rebelled until 1827 against the Copernican doctrine, so it rebels against the conscious penetration into the spiritual world. This penetration into the spiritual worlds is no mere talking in abstractions; it is something real and concrete. It means that we transcend in fact once more the state of dark, gray ignorance and penetrate with knowledge into the underlying spiritual content of the world. Was it not also part of this gray ignorance that man looked out upon the world and saw the nations—the groups of human beings—and spoke of them as of a formless chaos. They spoke of the peoples of the West, of the Middle and of the East, but they did not distinguish nor characterize them. At best they knew that the leaders of the nations were Archangeloi, but they did not strive really to know the specific characters of the several nations—of the Archangeloi themselves. This belongs to the new revelation:—we must now observe and understand how the several Archangeloi are working over the face of the Earth. And this will be a real enrichment of man's consciousness all the Earth over. Through the very inability to rise from the dead level of gray ignorance to real differentiation, the gulf has been brought about which I described yesterday, between the subject of the Sunday sermons and what is regarded as the business of everyday life in the outer world. Within the sphere of the religious faiths they talk about the Divine World and its relation to mankind, but all this talking proves too feeble to penetrate the life and business of men on Earth. It can say no more to them than “Love one another,” which is about as sensible as if I were to say to the stove: Warm the room, that is your duty as a stove. Such teaching has not power really to take hold of the hearts of man. They cannot unite their knowledge of everyday affairs with what is brought down to them in this way as abstract precepts, customs, dogmas about the spiritual world. This gulf is there, my dear friends, and the religious faiths would only like to hold it fast.

The strangest flowers spring from the presence of this gulf and from the conscious desire to maintain it. The Jesuits, for instance, object to anthroposophical Spiritual Science because it looks for something in the human being which is capable of inner evolution so as to lead man to the Divine. To do so, they say, is heretical, for the Church teaches us and forbids us to say anything different from this—that God in His Being has nothing to do with the world, nay more, that in substantial identity He has nothing to do with the soul of man. He who declares that the soul of man bears something of the Divine Being within it in any respect whatever, is for the Catholic Church—as conceived by the Jesuits—a heretic.

Into such statements is instilled the inmost tendency of that Church, which is not to let the human beings reach to the Divine but to shut them off from it. Dogma itself assumes a form such as to prevent man from reaching the Divine. No wonder, therefore, since they have not been permitted to reach to the Divine, if in the fifth Post-Atlantean age (which had to bring the Spiritual Soul, once and for all) World-knowledge has become not a Divine but a pure Ahrimanic knowledge. For that which is recognized as Natural Science today is a purely Ahrimanic achievement. We have often characterized it thus. Strange, that the Catholic Church should prefer the Ahrimanic Natural Science to the anthroposophical; for the Ahrimanic Natural Science is no longer considered heretical today, while the anthroposophical Natural Science is anathematized.

A truly enlightened man of today needs to be clear about these things. He must recognize that the same thing must now need to be undertaken on the path of the Spirit as has hitherto been undertaken on the path of Nature. Only so can the path of Nature be saved from its aberration into a purely Ahrimanic realm. It has already suffered this aberration, because in fact the path of the Spirit could only be added to it at a later stage. But from now onwards and for the future of mankind, the path of the Spirit must be added to it, so that Natural Science may be lifted again to its Divine Spiritual height; so that the life in which we live between birth and death be reunited with the life of which the science of the Spirit has to tell, namely that life in which we live in the time between death and a new birth. Yet this will only happen in our time if we have the will really to understand this life all the Earth over, to understand it as it works in man himself.

Moreover we can only understand the single human being if we understand the character of human groupings. Only so shall we be enabled to see into the true reality.

Not long ago I drew your attention to a strange fact which may well surprise many people. I will repeat it briefly. You know that here in Switzerland there lived a worthy philosopher, Avenarius, who undoubtedly regarded himself as a good, law-abiding bourgeois citizen; who did not think himself in the remotest degree a revolutionary. He founded a school of thought written in so difficult a language that very few people can read it. Moreover, writing a rather more popular language, but in a similar sense, there lived a philosopher in Vienna and in Prague—Ernst Mach, who equally regarded himself as a good law-abiding citizen. Truly, neither of them has a vein of revolution in them. Yet the fact is, these two philosophers have become the official philosophers of the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks have adopted them as their State Philosophers—so we may put it, if we do not misunderstand the expression. True, Avenarius and Mach would turn in their graves if they were to discover that they are now looked up to by the Bolsheviks as their State Philosophers. As I said on the former occasion, we only do not understand such a phenomenon because we confine ourselves to abstract logic instead of holding fast to the logic of realities, the logic of facts, the logic of things seen. Though you may think that this lies far afield from your point of view, I will nevertheless refer to it again from another aspect. In particular, I will mention one point in the philosophy of Avenarius which may help us to answer the interesting questions: How could it be that Avenarius and Mach became the State Philosophers of the Bolsheviks? The very fact is after all significant enough of the utter confusion of our time.

Avenarius, you see, raises various questions. If we spoke in his technical language—of “introjections” and the like, of all the purely epistemological concepts he evolved—we should be speaking a pretty unintelligible language for most people. Yet in this unintelligible language he raises a question which is after all very interesting from the point of view of Spiritual Science. Avenarius asks: If a man were all alone in the world, would he still speak of the distinction between that which is in his own soul and that which is outside in the world? Would he still distinguish the subjective and the objective? Richard Avenarius is clever enough to declare: We are only tempted to speak of the difference between “subjective” and “objective” through the fact that we are not alone in the world. When we stand face to face with another man, we assume that that which we carry in our brains—of a table or of any other object—is in him too. By projecting into his brain the same picture which we carry in ourselves, the whole thing acquires a picture-like character, and this leads us to distinguish the things in our soul from the things outside—the things that we confront. Avenarius opines that if there were not other people outside us in the world we should not speak of the differences between that which is in our own soul and that which is outside us. We should regard ourselves as one with the things, merged with the things of the world. We should not distinguish ourselves from the world.

We may truly say, my dear friends, from a certain point of view Avenarius is right in his assertion, but from another point of view appallingly mistaken. It is indeed of some importance that in the course of our earliest childhood (though in our conscious memory we know nothing of that time) we came into touch with human beings. Our whole ideation—our whole way of thinking—was influenced by this. It is quite true, things would be very different if we had not come into touch with others; but they would not be as Avenarius supposes. He who can apprehend the underlying facts by spiritual vision arrives at the real truth. Our whole world-picture would indeed be different if at the time in life when we cannot yet think consciously we did not meet with other human beings. But this is the curious thing, my dear friends. The different world-picture which we then should have would contain the spiritual Beings who underlie the world. It would not be as Avenarius supposes. Incidentally, what a dreadful abstraction! We should not fail to distinguish ourselves from the world if we were alone in the world and there were no other human beings. Behind the minerals and plants (for there would have to be no animals, they too would disturb the world-picture by their presence) we should perceive the Divine-Spiritual World. In other words, my dear friends, our living-together with other men is the reason why, in the ordinary way of life, we do not perceive the spiritual world behind the plants and minerals. Our fellow-men place themselves before this spiritual world and hide it from us. Think what this means! At the cost of not perceiving the Divine world of the Hierarchies, we acquire all that comes to us through our living together with other men on the physical Earth. Our fellow-men place themselves before the world of the Gods and hide it from us, as it were. Naturally, Avenarius was unaware of this, hence he carried the question in an entirely wrong direction. He imagined that if no human being were there we should see ourselves unseparated from the world—should not distinguish ourselves from the world. The truth is we should distinguish ourselves—not indeed from other men or from plants and minerals—but from the Gods whom we should then have all round us. That is the truth.

If you consider this you will realize what is very important to realize in our time. Strange to say, it is in many respects our destiny today! Precisely the most penetrating spirits of our time will often touch on the most vital questions—yet always so as to lead them in the most wrong direction, so as to lead away from the perception of the Spirit. It would indeed be difficult to lead away from the perception of the Spirit more radically than Avenarius does. His philosophy is extremely sharp-witted—written with all the refinement of professorial language—and it is therefore well-adapted to lead men away from the Spirit in a state of sleep. And when men are led asleep away from the Spirit they regard this leading away from the Spirit as a necessity—a kind of mathematical necessity. So long as they do not observe that they are being led away from the Spirit, they take it all as scientifically proven. That is the one thing, my dear friends.

Here we have a philosopher (and much the same could be said of Mach) the inmost nerve of whose thought is to found a system which shall lead man radically away from the Spirit. In Bolshevism, my dear friends, the intention is to found a social order to the exclusion of all things spiritual—to group mankind in their social life so that the Spiritual plays no part in it at all. That is the real inner connection of the two, and it makes itself connection of the two, and it makes itself felt in the logic of facts. Not for a mere external reason but by a deep inner kinship, Avenarius and Mach became the State Philosophers of the Bolsheviks.

You see, it is quite possible—with judgments that are prevalent today—to stand more or less fixedly before these things in blank astonishment. How do the Bolsheviks come to have Avenarius and Mach as State Philosophers? For us however it is possible even now to see the real inner connections. Only to do so, we must look for the underlying spiritual facts, as we have done in this instance, where we perceive how it would be in reality if man [were] alone on the physical Earth without any other men. There are many facts and phenomena entering into our life today—especially in the mutual relationships of men—which paralyze men's minds to contemplate, because they can gain no understanding of them without Spiritual Science. I have just given an instance from the spiritual life; quite everyday facts, however, might also be mentioned in this way.

Do not imagine that it was so in all ages. Such phenomena also existed in ancient times, but they were instinctively intelligible to men—intelligible by the old instinctive clairvoyance. Then, through the long gray period of ignorance, such phenomena were absent from the mutual intercourse of men. Now they are making their appearance once more. Not that the souls of men are evolving; the world is evolving. The world itself is changing, and it reveals its change to begin with in the mutual intercourse of men. In the next epoch it will also reveal the change in the relation of man to the other kingdoms of Nature. Life will remain unintelligible to men, in the present and in the immediate future, so long as they are unwilling to consider it through Spiritual Science. Illusion after illusion will take hold of the soul, if man will not have recourse to the spiritual-scientific concepts. There are some here present to whom at the outbreak of the present War-catastrophe I repeated one thing again and again. It is quite possible, I said, to write of the so-called world-historic facts of the last few centuries according to the records in the archives—by looking up the records and writing histories in the style of Ranks of the rest. But of the outbreak of this War-catastrophe it is impossible to write so. However much they delve into the archives, if they do not observe what was the mood of soul of those who were concerned in the outbreak of this War, and how this mood of soul gave entry for the Ahrimanic powers into the Earth's affairs, and how thereby the causes of this War-catastrophe came from an Ahrimanic side—if, in a word, they are willing to observe the starting-point of this catastrophe with Spiritual Science, it will remain forever dark. This War-catastrophe, my dear friends, is a real challenge to mankind, to learn from it. Much can be learned from what happened during the last four or five years as a consequence of the preceding events. Above all things, we should learn to put certain questions, not so one-sidedly as heretofore, but in keeping with the real needs of the time.

As I have often said, we have no reason to comfort ourselves too lightly about the misfortunes of our time, still less to shut our eyes to them. But we have also no reason to be pessimistic. Only consider the following. We can say to ourselves: immense and terrible events have taken place in the last four or five years over the Earth. And yet, what is the essential thing in all these terrors? It is what human souls have experienced through them. That is the essential thing—what human souls have experienced through these events, with respect to their soul's evolution, needless to say throughout all Earth-existence. Seen in this light, a question fraught with deep significance emerges. The question is strange and paradoxical, but so only because it is fraught with such deep meaning, unaccustomed to our everyday thought. Could we really desire that mankind should have lived on without any such catastrophe, in the way they had grown accustomed to live until the year 1914? Can we really say that that would have been desirable? In putting this question I may be permitted once again to point to what I said before the outbreak of this War, in my lecture cycle at Vienna (April 1914, Cycle XXXII). I said: If we really see what is living in the world of man today, the mutual relationship of men, their social life, appears to us like a social carcinoma—a cancerous growth—eating its way through mankind. Men had only shut their eyes to this carcinoma of the social commonweal. They were unwilling to look the real facts in the face. No one who sees things at their deepest could say that it would have been good for mankind to go on in that way. For on the lines which I have indicated they would have gone more and more downhill, farther and farther from the Spirit. And as to those to whom we look with souls full of pain—the millions who have been swept away from the physical plane by this dread catastrophe and who are now living on as souls—they it is who ponder most of all how different now their situation is, inasmuch as they are spending the rest of their life in the spiritual world; how different it would have been if their Karma had still kept them on the physical Earth.

Sub specie aeterni—from the aspect of eternity—things after all appear quite different, and this must not be left unsaid. Only on the other hand we must not take these things lightly or superficially. True as it is, it is infinitely sad that this catastrophe has taken place, yet it is no less true, my dear friends; by this very catastrophe man has been preserved from an appalling downfall into materialism and utilitarianism. And though it does not yet show itself today, yet it will show itself—above all in the Middle Countries and the East, where, in place of an order that had been imbued with materialism, a state of chaos is now developing. Truly we cannot refer to this chaos without an undertone of pain and suffering. I mean the social chaos which has overcome the Middle and Eastern countries, and that shows outwardly little prospect of transforming into any kind of harmony. And yet there is another aspect. Wherever this chaos exists, the world in the near future will give men very, very little through the purely physical plane. The blessings of the physical plane will truly not be great in the Middle and the Eastern countries. Of all that can be given to man so that he feels his life sustained by external powers—of this there will be precious little. Man will have to take hold of himself in his own soul in order to stand fast, and in the very act of doing so he will be able to set forth along the path into the spiritual world. He will resolve to go towards the Spirit, whence alone the salvation of the future can come. This, my dear friends, will be the essential thing for the future. Our outer bodily existence will, as it were, be slipping away from us. The outer bodily nature, as I said yesterday, will no longer be so sound and healthy as in times past; it has more death in it than it had in bygone ages. The content of the World-riddle is not to be found with that with which our bodily nature is connected; no, we must rise into the spiritual world to find the necessary impulse, and also the impulse which we need for the social order. This insight will arise when men are able to find as little as possible in the physical world. For the physical world itself will only be able to assume a form of harmony when it seeks for this form out of the spiritual life.

The Bible, my dear friends, in its first pages, does not tell us that is was Lucifer or Ahriman who drove man out of Paradise; it was the Jahve—God Himself who did so. And as we know, this very expulsion from paradise signifies man's becoming free—the conscious experience of freedom by mankind. The possibility, the seed of freedom, was given by the expulsion from Paradise. Is it then contrary to the Biblical wisdom if we say: Once more, it was Divine Wisdom which drove men out of the present age that was leading them down into materialism and utilitarianism, thus planting seeds, which, spiritually taken hold of, can really help the world. It sounds to us out of the painful depths of the last four-and-a-half years: “Spiritual life is wishing to reveal itself through the veil of the outward phenomena; men shall learn through misfortune to turn their eyes to these revelations of the Spirit, and it will be for their salvation.”

This too is a language which will seem paradoxical to many a modern man and yet, it is the language which Christ Himself is guiding us to speak. Today it lies inherent in the very progress of Christianity to grasp the Christian truths in a new way. This can only be done if they are taken hold of spiritually. The Mystery of Golgotha, my dear friends, is a spiritual event which has entered into the evolution of the Earth. It can only be fully understood by a spiritual way of knowledge. As in the last resort it was through misfortune that mankind found the Christ, we too shall have to seek through our misfortune for the Christ through the new way of comprehension.

I admit, my dear friends, this is no ordinary comfort. Yet if we are ready to put all trivialities aside in the deeper sense of the word it is after all no little comfort, nay perhaps, it is the only comfort in our time, worthy of the dignity of man. It is not the kind of comfort which says to man: Only wait, and without your cooperation all the divine things will be vouchsafed to you! Rather does it say: Make use of your own forces, and you will find that the God is speaking and abounding in your souls. Then, through this God, you will also find the God in the great Universe, and—which is the most important—you yourselves will be able to work in communion with Him. We must depart from the mere passive attitude to super-sensible knowledge. Man must bestir himself within to find himself, and as he does so, recognize himself as part of the World-Order. Let the religious faiths rebel, which want to make things nice and comfortable for lulling a man's spirit to sleep in clouds of incense (I speak figuratively) so that he may then find his way to the Divine passively and without active cooperation on his part. Let them rebel however much against the call that now springs forth out of the spiritual worlds!—“Man shall now look for his true worth in inner spiritual activity—in the active inner development of spiritual life!”

This, my dear friends, must be; and it must be so especially if we are to reckon with the social demands of our time. I have said so already in these weeks. We are living—at any rate, a great part of our educated humanity are living—from the achievements of Greek culture; but we do not always remember how these achievements, by which we live, were created. Greek civilization was unfolded on a basis of slavery. A great proportion of mankind had to live as slaves in order to bring about at all what we now feel as the blessings of Greek culture. Let us face the fact fully and clearly. All that Greek Art, Greek learning signifies—all this and many other things arose on the foundation of slavery. Then, my dear friends, we shall ask ourselves with renewed intensity: What is it that has brought about the inner change? We today no longer think as did the great philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, who took slavery as an absolute matter of course. At that time it went without saying, even for the wisest of men, that nine-tenths of mankind must live as slaves. For us today it no longer goes without saying. On the contrary, we regard it as an offence against the dignity of man that anyone should think so. What was it then that brought it about for Western humanity—this radical change in men's way of thought? It was Christianity which freed men from slavery and led them to recognize, at least in principle, that all men are equal before God, as to their soul. For this was the principle which uprooted slavery out of the social order of mankind. But as we know—for we must refer to it again and again from many points of view—one thing has been left behind until our day. It is that of which I told you that it is the salient point in the consciousness of the modern working man. One thing has been left behind, namely the possibility—in our social order—for a part of the human being to be bought as a commodity and sold by himself as a commodity. Moreover it is a part of man that takes its course in his very body. The salient point of the social question—the perpetual irritant, the thing that continually incites—is the fact that human labor-power can be paid for. This too creates at the very foundations of all our social order the character of Egoism. For egoism cannot but prevail in the social (I say once more, in the social order—please understand me aright) if to obtain what he requires for his own needs a man must get his labor paid for. He is obliged to earn for himself.

This is the next and necessary stage—after the overcoming of slavery—it must be made impossible for any man's labor to be a commodity. This is the true salient point of the social question, and it is this which the new Christianity will solve. In recent lectures I have told you something of the solving of the social question. For that three-folding of the social order, of which I told you there, sets free the commodity from the labor-power of man. In future, men will only buy and sell commodities—outer objects, things separate from man himself—which (as I wrote already in my essay on Theosophy and the Social Question which appeared in 1905) one man will work for another from motives of brotherly love.

It may be a long way to go to attain this end. Yet this and this alone will solve the social question. Whoever will not believe today that this must come about in the world-order is like a man who would have said, at the time of the origin of Christianity: “Slaves there must always be.” Even as he would have been wrong at that time, so likewise today the man is wrong who says: “Labor must always be paid for.” At that time it seems unimaginable that a certain number of men should not be slaves. Not even Plato or Aristotle could conceive it. Today the cleverest of men cannot conceive a social order wherein Labor would have quite another value—quite another meaning than of being paid for. Needless to say, even then the product will proceed from the labor, but the product alone will be able to be bought and sold. Socially, this very fact will be the salvation of men.

To realize these things it is indeed necessary to have the knowledge of spiritual vision, the logic of things seen. Without it humanity will not go forward. The logic of spiritual vision is the fuel to create what must arise among mankind in future, namely that human love which springs from the understanding between man and man. Strange as it sounds, my dear friends, today, when all manner of atavistic remnants are still there in men in one way or another—today everything is still regarded with sympathies and antipathies. So it is, for instance, when we explain such distinctions as I here did a little while ago. I said that of the three members of human nature the Western peoples are called especially to develop the abdominal nature, the Middle peoples the heart-nature and the Eastern peoples the head nature. Nowadays, such things are nearly always treated as judgments of relative value, in one way or another. At least, somewhere inside him every man still has a little pigeon-hole where he does so. Such valuation must absolutely cease, for this very vision of the differentiations of mankind over the whole Earth's sphere will become the basis of sympathetic, understanding love. From understanding, not from ignorance, true human love—reaching over the whole Earth—will spring, during this age of the Spiritual Soul. Then will men know, over the whole Earth, how to find themselves in Christ. Christ is no concern of one nation or another. He concerns all mankind; but to recognize this, many an illusion must first give way.

Men must be able to raise themselves, to look without illusions into the true nature of things. Today, in many spheres of life, they are unwilling to do so. And yet, I know I am speaking in the spirit of the true Christmas peace in placing the following paradox before you. My dear friends, you know well that I am not speaking of the individual human beings but of the nations as a whole when I refer to these differentiations. It is so easy to misunderstand these things unless one has good will. As I have pointed out so often, the single human individuality who grows out of the nation is not intended; only nations as such. I beg you to bear this in mind when I now say the following:—

You see, my dear friends, let us consider the one or other of the judgments which have been passed during the last four years on the countries, or States, of the Middle of Europe. I can thoroughly understand such feelings. I do not want to say anything in the least against those who are filled with enthusiasm for the Entente. Far be it from me—everyone has his opinion, and that is justified from a certain point of view. But, my dear friends, suppose we now look away from the opinion which prevailed in the past few years and consider its prolongation in the present time. Then after all, perhaps we may find something rather hard for understanding. For we may ask ourselves: Is it necessary for the judgments which were passed, while the potentates of the middle countries held the reins of power, to be continued now? Nay is it necessary to do all that one can—and by the most refined of methods—so as to be able to prolong these judgments? Is it necessary? Is it equally explicable? Superficially considered, it is certainly not so easy to explain as many such things were before. More deeply considered however, it is still explicable, my dear friends. More deeply considered we can understand it—albeit not out of the character of the individuals (for the individuals themselves in Western countries will want to bring about a healing of these matters). Those, however, whose judgments merely spring from their respective nationalities, or rather, national prejudices—they have in their subconsciousness something which we may characterize as follows:—

Some weeks ago I explained that in our conception of the world and notably our way of thinking at the present time much that belongs to the Old Testament is still alive, while the essential nerve of Christianity has only entered to a slight extent as yet. Now it is characteristic of Jahve-worship that it concerns all those things to which we do not bring ourselves up between our birth and death, but which are given to us as an inheritance—i.e., the things which lie inherent in our blood, which in the normal course only have influence on us while we sleep, while we ourselves are outside the body. This Jahve-conception still lives and throbs in our time to a very large extent, and it can only rise into the Christ-conception if we turn in this intellectualistic age with all our power to the conquest of the spiritual world, not through birth, not through what is inspired into us with our birth, but through our own self-education in this life. Now by nature the West is not predestined to pass from the service of Jahve to that of Christ. Such predestination only begins in the Middle of Europe and goes towards the East. This applies once more, needless to say, not to the individual but to the nation. Hence, my dear friends, the characteristic form of Wilsonian thought, steeped as it is entirely in Old Testament conceptions. However much it may deny the fact, the form of thought stands out as though it would fain exterminate what is trying spiritually to emerge in the Middle Countries and in the East. Hence it is outwardly so hard to understand. Under all manner of pretexts, these people still prolong the same hostile spirit, though they have swept away what they professed they wanted to sweep away, and only the peoples themselves are left, against whom—so they assured us—they had no ill intentions. They do so because in reality they are resisting what has arisen in spiritual evolution in the Middle Countries and in the East during the last few centuries, which, nonetheless, is necessary to mankind. Subconsciously, they want to expunge it. They do not want to enter into these things.

We are now living in a most important crisis of the world. I have often heard people ask; how is it that the men of the West especially the English and the French—have such a dreadful hatred of the Germans? There is a very simple answer, my dear friends, and yet it is an exhaustive answer. Man always sees himself differently (especially himself as member of a nationality) than he sees his fellow men. I can assure you, my dear friends, such thoughts as Mach had when he got into the bus or walked along the street are very often there in the subconscious lives of men. You know how Mach himself relates the story. Once, very tired, he got into a bus and did not notice that there was a mirror on the side opposite the door. Someone else, he thought, got in at the same time from the other side, and he said to himself: What a horrid old schoolmaster that is! He knew himself very little in his outward person and when he saw himself he did not like it at all.

Now, my dear friends, observe the spiritual history of Middle Europe—not in its more intimate features but as a whole. Down to Lessing, far down into the last third of the 18th century, the Germans took pains to be like the French. You could see it in everything. From a certain moment onward (approximately in the 12th century) till far beyond the middle of the 18th century, the Germans endeavored to be like the French—to behave in such a way that they also might become Frenchmen. What the French could not see in themselves—or, if they saw it, were inclined to rate it highly—all this they hated with a dreadful hatred when they saw it in the imitation. Unconsciously, man does indeed practice a strange form of self-knowledge. At bottom, in their deepest being, the Germans were never hated by the French. The French only hated themselves when they saw their mirrored image in the German soul.

Since then a very remarkable English influence has arisen, the extent of which is by no means adequately realized. The English naturally see themselves just as little as Mach did; but they notice themselves well enough when they see themselves in this mirrored image which has entered so strongly into the German soul since the 18th century. It is the Englishman whom they now judge in the German. There is the simple psychological solution, my dear friends. If the world-crisis had not arisen, this state of affairs would have gone on for a long time, and we should have a great mixture, as it were a broth, out of which single individualities would nevertheless have arisen, possessing the intimate qualities of the true German. Now, however, out of the world-crisis, chaos and misfortune will cause to arise what must arise: that which was always present, though under the power of the West it was unable to unfold. These are the real facts. There is no ground for pessimism, even in Middle Europe. We must only dive to the deeper foundations which underlie the process of evolution.

My dear friends, what the Entente Powers are doing today may appear thus, or thus. It matters very little how it appears, for at the bottom of their hearts they are wanting what is quite impossible. They are wanting to prevent the rise of something which absolutely must unfold in the Middle of Europe and in the East, for it is connected with the spiritual progress of mankind; it cannot be prevented. But it must also call forth this, my dear friends:—If man is to take the future of the Earth in earnest he must truly have faith in the Spirit; only out of the power of the Spirit will there come what must come, even for the solving of the burning social needs of our time. In the machine age it was necessary for these 50 million invisible human beings—that is to say, human beings visible as machines—to arise, so that men might gradually learn to feel that they must not be paid like machines are paid. And it was also necessary for this appalling catastrophe to arise, wherein the machine age has celebrated its greatest triumphs. Out of this catastrophe man will begin to unfold his real strength, and as he does so, he will gain a certain power once more to unite himself with the Divine and Spiritual. If we may now compare what many people have rightly called the most appalling event in the Earth's history with the beginning of Earth-evolution we may say: just as it was no mere misfortune for men to be driven out of Paradise, so too it is no mere misfortune that such a catastrophe has overtaken mankind.

In the end, my dear friends, the most valuable truths are paradoxes today, as I have often pointed out, we may well say: Men were so infamous as to nail to the Cross the greatest Being Who ever appeared on the Earth—Jesus Christ. They killed Him. We may well say that it was infamous of them. And yet this Death, my dear friends, is the very content of Christianity; for through this Death there took place what we call the Mystery of Golgotha. Without it there would be no Christianity. This Death is the good fortune of men; this Death is the abounding strength of earthly man. So paradoxical are things in their reality. For on the one hand we may say: how infamous it was of men to nail Christ to the Cross; and yet, with this Death—this nailing to the Cross—the greatest event on Earth is brought about. A misfortune is not always merely a misfortune; often it is the starting-point for the achievement of human greatness and of human strength.

A great deal of course could still be added to all that I have touched upon in these lectures, but we shall endeavour today to conclude them with a summary of the whole subject.

The approach we have taken throughout these lectures raises an important issue: What is the attitude to Anthroposophy, to spiritual investigation as presented by Anthroposophy? What is the position in regard to the understanding of anthroposophical teachings seeing that few today can have immediate access to spiritual exercises and practices which enable them to perceive and test thoroughly for themselves the anthroposophical descriptions of other worlds? This is a question that lies close to the hearts of those who feel an urge and even a longing to take up Anthroposophy. But this question is always seen in a false light, and is the more likely to be misinterpreted precisely because they are unable to grasp the right procedures such as I have advocated in these lectures.

People may ask: what is the use of all these descriptions of the spiritual world if I cannot look into that world myself? I should like, therefore, to touch upon this question in my cursory analysis today.

It is not true to say that one cannot acquire an insight into anthroposophical teachings and an understanding of them unless one can investigate the spiritual world oneself. I t is essential to distinguish, especially at the present time, between the actual discovery of facts relating to the different worlds and the comprehension of those facts. This distinction will be clear to you when you recall that man, as we know him today, belongs in fact to different worlds and that his experiences are derived from different worlds. Man as he is constituted today acquires his stock of knowledge and his consciousness of everyday existence in the course of his day to day experiences. During his waking life this consciousness which was the starting-point of our enquiry gives him a certain perspective over a limited field, over that aspect of the world that is accessible to sense-observation, and which can be grasped and interpreted by means of the intellect which he has developed in the course of evolution.

With his understanding man penetrates in his dreams into this world concealed behind the phenomenal world, in a vague, indefinite way as I have already pointed out. In his psychic life man contacts the world through which he passes between death and rebirth only in dreamless sleep, where he is surrounded by spiritual darkness and where he lives out a life which normally he cannot recall.

Man knows three states of consciousness—waking, dreaming and deep sleep. But he does not live only in the worlds to which this threefold consciousness gives access, for he is a being whose kingdom has many mansions. His physical body lives in a different world from his etheric body, his etheric body again in a different world from his astral body and both live in different worlds from the Ego.

And this threefold consciousness—clear waking consciousness, dream consciousness and sleep consciousness (one would like to say absence of consciousness but one can only describe it as diminished consciousness)—belong to the Ego as it is today. And this Ego when it looks inwards has also three states of consciousness. When it looks outwards, it knows waking (day) consciousness, dream consciousness and sleep consciousness. When it looks inwards, it knows clear intellectual consciousness; a sentient consciousness, a sentient life, though this is far more opaque and dreamlike than one usually imagines; it knows als1˃ a sentient life and finally the dim, twilight will-consciousness that resembles the state of deep sleep. Normal consciousness can no more explain the origin of willing than it can explain the origin of sleep. When a man performs an act of will it is accompanied by a thought which is clear and lucid. He then shrouds this thought in feeling which is more indefinite. The thought that is imbued with feeling passes down into the limbs; the process cannot be experienced by normal consciousness. To the kind of investigation of which I spoke yesterday and the day before, willing presents the following picture: whilst a thought wills something in the head and is then transmitted to the whole body through feeling, so that a man wills in the whole of his body, something akin to a delicate, subtle and intimate process of combustion sets in meanwhile.

When man develops Initiate-consciousness he is able to experience this life of will which is subject to the influence of warmth, but it remains wholly subliminal to ordinary consciousness. This is merely one instance which shows how what lies in the subliminal consciousness can be raised to the level of Initiate-consciousness.

When the information in the book I mentioned yesterday is made progressively more accessible to the public, people will realize that when we contemplate with Initiate-consciousness an act of will performed by man, we have the impression that we are watching the lighting of a candle or even the kindling of a warmth-giving light. Just as we have in this instance a clear picture of the external phenomenon, so we shall be able to see the thought as it is precipitated into the will. We then say: the thought develops feeling and from feeling—it follows a downward direction in man—proceeds a sensation of warmth, a flame in man. And this flame wills; it is kindled by degrees. We can represent schematical1y this normal consciousness in the following way:

Now although, in order to investigate the spiritual world, we must of necessity direct our consciousness to that world which we seek to apprehend cognitively, none the less, if the fruits of our investigations are to be communicated honestly, the ideas communicated verbally must be expressed in the language of other forms of consciousness.

You can now understand, perhaps, that this is a twofold process. In the first place, for example, we investigate the world of the human organs as I explained yesterday. We investigate the phenomena in question by utilizing the emergent forces in man as he draws near to the spiritual world during the course of his life. We then discover the relevant facts as they are revealed to the understanding. And there are men in the world who are aware of these facts and who communicate them to the world. When they are imparted to the world by such men they can be comprehended by normal consciousness if we look at them with the necessary objectivity. In the course of human evolution there has always been a minority who devoted themselves to investigation of the facts relating to the spiritual world and who then communicated to others the fruits of their investigations.

Now one factor today militates against the acceptance of such knowledge, namely, that as a rule people grow up in a social environment and under an educational system that conditions their habitual responses to such an extent that they can believe only in the world of fact, in the sensory world, and the rational information derived from the world of the senses. This habit is so strongly ingrained that people are inclined to say: At the university there are graduate members of the teaching faculty who, in addition to teaching, investigate certain factual aspects of the phenomenal world or confirm the findings of other research workers in this field. Everyone accepts their findings. Even though one does not investigate the facts oneself, one still believes in them. This boundless credulity is reserved especially for modern science. People believe things which, to those who have insight, are not only problematical, but definitely untrue. This situation stems from centuries of education. I would like to point out that this form of education was unknown to men of earlier centuries. They were far more inclined to believe those who made researches into spiritual facts since they still preserved something of the old insight into, and participation in the spiritual world that was consistent with their will and feeling. Today people are strangers to such knowledge. They are accustomed to an outlook which on the Continent is more theoretical and in England and America more practical, and which has now become firmly established.

On the Continent there exist detailed theories about these matters whilst in England and America there is an instinctive feeling for them which is by no means easy to overcome. During the course of centuries mankind has become inured to a scientific outlook that is related to the phenomenal world and has come to accept the findings of astronomy, botany, zoology and medicine, for example, in the form in which they are presented in recognized schools or centres of learning. A chemist, for example, undertakes a piece of research in his laboratory. People have not the slightest understanding of the technique involved. The work is acclaimed and they unhesitatingly declare: “Here is truth, here is knowledge that makes no appeal to faith.” But what they call knowledge is, in effect, an act of faith.

And amongst the methods adopted for investigating the phenomenal world, for ascertaining the laws of the phenomenal world through the instrument of reason, not a single one gives the slightest information about the spiritual world. But there are few who can afford to dispense wholly with the spiritual world. Those who do so, are not honest with themselves, they persuade themselves into it. Mankind feels an imperious need to know something about the spiritual world. As yet men ignore those who can tell them something about the spiritual world as it is known today, but they are prepared to listen to historical traditions, to the teachings of the Bible and sacred scriptures of the East. They are interested in these traditional writings, because otherwise they cannot satisfy their need for some sort of relationship to a spiritual world. And in spite of the fact that both the Bible and the Eastern scriptures have been investigated only by individual Initiates, people claim that they reflect a different kind of outlook, which bears no relationship to the knowledge of the phenomenal world, scientific knowledge, and depends upon faith and appeals to faith. And so a rigid line of demarcation is set up between science and belief. Men refer science to the phenomenal world and belief to the spiritual world.

Amongst the theologians of the Evangelical Church on the Continent—not amongst the theologians of the Roman Catholic Church who have retained the old traditions, and who do not accept the dichotomy of the Evangelicals or the natural scientists—there exist innumerable theories showing that there are definite boundaries to knowledge and thereafter faith steps in. They are convinced there can be no other possibility.

England is less hag-ridden because theorizing is unpopular. Here the traditional attitude is, on the one hand, to listen to what science has to say, and, on the other hand, to live reverently—I will not go so far as to say sanctimoniously—in faith and to keep the two spheres rigidly apart.

For some time past, laymen and scholars have adopted this point of view. Newton laid the foundations of a theory of gravitation, i.e. of a conception of space which, by its very nature, excludes any possibility of a spiritual outlook. If the world were as Newton depicted it, it would be devoid of spirit. But no-one has the courage to admit it. One cannot imagine a divine-spiritual Presence that lives and moves and has its being in the Newtonian world.

But not only the devotees of these ideas ultimately accept a conception of space and time that excludes the spiritual, but also those who undertake independent research work. Newton offers an excellent example of the latter, for he not only laid the foundation of a world-outlook which excluded the spiritual, but at the same time in his interpretation of the Apocalypse he fully accepted the spiritual.

The links between knowledge of the phenomenal world and knowledge of the spiritual world have been severed. Today the theorists set out to give solid proof of this dichotomy and every effort is made to inoculate the thoughts and feelings of those who distrust theory with this idea, so that ultimately they become conditioned.

On the other hand, man's intelligence, power of comprehension and ideation, his capacity for ideas, have today reached a point where, if he keeps them under conscious control, he can grasp by reason, though he cannot investigate by reason, the teachings of Initiation Science.

It is essential that the following point of view should find wider acceptance: that investigations into the spiritual world must be undertaken by those who, in their present life on Earth are able to call upon forces from earlier incarnations, for it is these forces which release the necessary powers for spiritual investigation; and further, that the results of these investigations shall be accepted by increasing numbers of men and incorporated into ideas which are comprehensible; and that, when the results of spiritual research are accepted by healthy understanding, a way is prepared for these other men, by virtue of this understanding, to have real experience of the spiritual world. For I have often said that the healthiest way to enter the spiritual world is first of all to read about it or to assimilate what we are told about it.

If we accept these ideas, they become inwardly quickened and we attain not only to understanding, but also to clairvoyant vision in accordance with our karmic development. In this respect we must give serious thought to the idea of karma. Today man is not concerned with karma; he believes that just as we analyse sulphur in the laboratory, so we can analyse by laboratory techniques the origin of so-called trans-normal phenomena; and that, as with sulphur, we must subject the individual who manifests abnormal forms of knowledge to experimental tests.

But mineral sulphur has no karma. Only the sulphur associated with the human body has karma, for only human beings are subject to karma. We cannot assume that it is part of man's karma to be experimented upon in a laboratory which would be a necessary prerequisite if the investigations were to have any value.

For this reason we have need of Spiritual Science. It would first of all be necessary to enquire into the karmic conditions which enable us to gain knowledge of the spiritual world through the agency of another. I have explained this clearly at the end of the later editions of my book Theosophy. But mankind today is not yet ready to accept this idea, not from incapacity, but from conservatism; but it is of immense significance.

It is essential to realize that we must not immediately undertake investigations into the spiritual world; but on the other hand if we do not adopt undesirable practices, such as experimenting with karma when there is no karmic necessity, or with mediums whose procedure we do not understand; and if we rely upon the everyday consciousness, which is the right condition of consciousness for this world, then we will attain to a perfect understanding of the communications of Initiation Science. We are greatly mistaken if we imagine that we cannot have such an understanding without first being able to experience the spiritual world for ourselves. To say, “what avails the spiritual world, if I cannot experience it for myself?” is to encourage yet another of the errors commonly committed today. This is to commit one of the greatest, most dangerous and most obvious of errors and must be clearly recognized by those who are associated with a Movement such as the Anthroposophical Society.

Man's existence here on the physical plane is bound up with existence in other worlds. To the unprejudiced mind this can be explained by the fact that man's experiences, as seen in the light of total human experience, are such that, in relation to the most vital questions in life they meet with incomprehension on the part of the ordinary daily consciousness because they appear unrelated, whereas in certain instances they are in effect closely associated.

In this brief account, therefore, I should like first to speak of man's entrance into the physical world and his exit, of birth and death.

Birth and death, the two most momentous events of our life on Earth, appear to ordinary consciousness to be isolated phenomena. We associate all that precedes birth, all that is related to human incarnation, with the beginning of our life on Earth, and death with its end. They appear to be dissociated. But the spiritual investigator sees them drawing ever more closely together. For if we take the path leading to the Moon mysteries and woo the night into the day in the manner described yesterday, then we perceive how, during the processes of birth, the physical body and etheric body progressively grow and flourish: how they develop out of the germ, gradually assume human form, and how during earthly life their vitality progressively increases up to the age of thirty-five, when it gradually decreases and a decline sets in. This process, of course, can be observed externally. But he who follows the lunar path, which I described yesterday, perceives that whilst the cellular life of the physical and etheric bodies grows, develops and assumes embryonic form, another form of life, which in Anthroposophy we call the astral body and Ego, is subject to the forces of decay and death.

When we uncover the hidden recesses of life—I gave a concrete description of this yesterday—we become aware of the birth of the physical and etheric and the death of the astral and Ego. We perceive death interwoven with life, the winter of life allied to its springtime.

And again, when we observe man with Initiate-consciousness, we are aware that, as his body declines, there is a burgeoning of the Ego and the astral from the thirty-fifth year onwards. This burgeoning life is retarded by the presence of dying forces in the physical and etheric being. Nevertheless a definite renewal does take place. And so by means of spiritual investigation we come to recognize the presence of death in life and life in death. Thus we prepare ourselves to trace back that which is seen to be dying at the time of birth to its pre-earthly life where it is revealed in its full significance and greatness.

And because we perceive the gradual burgeoning of the astral and Ego within the declining etheric and physical (for they are imprisoned within the etheric and physical), we prepare ourselves to follow them into the spiritual world after their release from the physical and etheric bodies at the moment of death. Thus we see that birth and death are interrelated, whilst to ordinary consciousness they appear to be isolated events.

All this information which is revealed by spiritual investigation can be grasped by ordinary consciousness as I indicated in the first part of today's lecture. At the same time one must be prepared to abandon the demands of ordinary consciousness for factual or scientific proof.

I once knew a man who maintained that, just as a stone falls to the ground, so if I pick up a chair and let go, it also falls to the ground since everything is subject to gravitation. Wherefore if the Earth is not supported, as it is claimed, it must of necessity fall. But he failed to realize that objects must fall to the ground because they are subject to the gravitational pull of the Earth, that the Earth itself however moves freely in space like the stars which mutually support and attract one another.

Those who, like the modern scientist, demand that proof must be supported by the evidence of the senses resemble this man who believed that the Earth must fall unless it is firmly underpinned. Anthroposophical truths are like the stars which mutually support each other. People must be prepared to see the whole picture. And if they can do this by means of their normal understanding they will begin really to grasp anthroposophical ideas such as the interrelationship of birth and death.

Let us go a little further and take the case of the man who is well grounded in the principles of modern science, but whilst alert and receptive to anthroposophical ideas has not yet learned to take the whole man into consideration, but only the separate organs in the manner described yesterday.

Through this knowledge of the organs acquired in the course of Initiation we are not only aware of birth and death, but of something quite different. In the light of this knowledge of the organs, birth and death have lost their usual significance, for it is only the whole human being who dies, not his separate organs. The lungs, for example, cannot die. Science today dimly realizes that when the whole human being has died, his single organs can be animated to a certain extent. Irrespective of whether a man is buried or cremated, his separate organs do not die. The individual organs take their path into that sphere of the Cosmos to which each is related. Even if man is buried beneath the earth, every organ finds its way into the Cosmos through water, air or warmth, as the case may be. In reality they are dissolved, but they do not perish; only the whole human being perishes.

Death, then, can only have meaning in relation to the whole human being. In the animal the organs die, whereas in man they are dissolved into the Cosmos. They dissolve rapidly. Burial is the slower process, cremation the faster. We can follow the individual organs as they take their path towards the infinite, each towards its own sphere. They are not lost in infinity, but return in the form of the mighty cosmic being whom I described to you yesterday. Thus, as we observe the organs with Initiate-consciousness, we see what really befalls the organs at death, namely, this streaming out of the organs into those regions of the Cosmos to which they are severally related. The heart takes a different path from the lungs; the liver from lungs and heart. They are dispersed throughout the Cosmos. Then the Cosmic Man appears; we see him as he really is, integrated in the Cosmos. And in the vision of this Cosmic Man we become aware of what is the source of successive incarnations, for example. We need this vision which has its origin, not in the whole man, but in the perception of the several organs, in order to be able to recognize once more, clearly and distinctly, the karmic return of former Earth lives in the present life.

It is for this reason that those who approached the spiritual world through the Moon path, mystics, theosophists, and so on, perceived the strangest phenomena—human souls as they had lived on Earth, gods and spirits—but could neither recognize nor decide what they were, nor give any definite assurance whether they were in the presence of Alanus ab Insulis, Dante or Brunetto Latini. Sometimes the entities were given the most grotesque appellations. And they were unable to determine whether the incarnations they contacted were their own or other people's, or what they were.

Thus the spiritual world is associated with the realm of Moon consciousness that has been wooed into the day; then, under the influx of the Venus impulses, this vision is lost and we now behold the spiritual world in its totality, but without that clear definition which it should possess. It is in this realm that we first begin to realize man's situation in the world as a whole and his position as a cosmic being.

In this connection, however, we cannot escape a tragic realization. For if man were simply the complete physical man he appears to be here on Earth, what a virtuous, docile and noble being he would be! Just as little as we can investigate death with normal consciousness—we can always understand death in the sense already suggested—just as little can we discover by means of the ordinary consciousness why human beings, with their candid faces—and there is no denying they have candid faces—have a capacity for evil. It is not the whole man who can become evil. His outer tegument, the skin, as such is noble and good; but man becomes evil through his individual organs; in his organs lies the potentiality for evil.

And thus we come to recognize the relationship of the organs to their respective cosmic spheres and also from what spheres obsession with evil originates; for fundamentally, obsession is inherent in the slightest manifestation of evil.

Thus our knowledge of the total man reveals first, birth and death; secondly, a knowledge of his organization reveals his relationship to the Cosmos in health and disease, namely, evil.

And so we can only perceive spiritually that Figure who experienced the Mystery of Golgotha when we are able to behold Cosmic Man through human organology. For it was as Cosmic Man that Christ came from the Sun. Until that moment He was not earthly man. He approached the Earth in cosmic form. How can we expect to recognize Cosmic Man if we have not first prepared ourselves to understand Cosmic Man as he really is! It is precisely out of this understanding of the Cosmic Man that Christology can grow.

Thus you see how true paths lead into the spiritual world, to a knowledge of birth and death and of the relationship of the human organism to the Cosmos, to the recognition of evil and to knowledge of Christ, the Cosmic Man. All this can be understood, when it is presented in such a way that the various aspects are shown to support each other. And the best means of finding one's own way into the spiritual world is through understanding and by meditating upon what is understood. Other rules for meditation then serve as additional supports. This is the right path into the spiritual worlds for human beings today. On the other hand, all experimenting with other paths which fail to use and maintain the normal channels of consciousness, all experimenting with trance conditions such as mediumism, somnambulism, hypnotism and so on, all investigation into world-events that cannot be apprehended by a consciousness that is a travesty of modern natural science—all these are false paths, for they do not lead into the true spiritual world.

When man is sensitively aware of the findings of spiritual investigation, namely, that through knowledge of the organs the Cosmic Man returns, that this “return” can to some extent lead to an understanding of Christ when all that is disclosed to occult investigation and insight is admitted into the Initiate-consciousness and becomes an integral part of his sentient life, then, through feeling, the Divine manifests in the terrestrial. And this is the province of art.

Through feeling, art embodies half consciously that which man receives from the spiritual world along those paths of return of which I have spoken. In all ages, therefore, it was those who were predestined to do so by their karma, who clothed the spiritual in material form.

Our naturalistic art has abandoned the spiritual approach. Every high point in the history of art depicts the spiritual in sensuous form, or rather raises the material into the realm of the spiritual. Raphael is valued so highly because, to a greater degree than any other painter, he was able to clothe the spiritual in sensuous representation.

Now in the course of the history of art there existed a general movement which tended more to the plastic or graphic arts. Today we must once again inject new life into the plastic arts, for the immediacy of the original impulse was lost years ago.

For centuries the impulse towards music has been growing and expanding. Therefore the plastic arts have assumed a musical character to a greater or lesser extent. Music, which includes also the musical element in the arts of speech, is destined to be the art of the future.

The first Goetheanum at Dornach was conceived musically and for this reason its architecture, sculpture and painting met with so little understanding. And for the same reason, the second Goetheanum will also meet with little understanding because the element of music must be introduced into painting, sculpture and architecture, in accordance with man's future evolution.

The coming of the figure of Christ, the spiritually-living figure, which I referred to as the culminating point in human evolution, has been magnificently portrayed in Renaissance and pre-Renaissance painting, but in future will have to be expressed through music.

The urge to give a musical expression of the Christ Impulse already existed. It was anticipated in Richard Wagner and was ultimately responsible for the creation of Parsifal. But in Parsifal the introduction of the Christ Impulse into the phenomenal world where it seeks to give expression to the purest Christian spirit, has been given a mere symbolic indication, such as the appearance of the Dove and so on. The Communion has also been portrayed symbolically. The music of Parsifal fails to portray the real significance of the Christ Impulse in the Cosmos and the Earth.

Music is able to portray this Christ Impulse musically, in tones that are inwardly permeated with spirit. If music allows itself to be inspired by Spiritual Science, it will find ways of expressing the Christ Impulse, for it will reveal purely artistically and intuitively how the Christ Impulse in the Cosmos and the Earth can be awakened symphonically in tones.

To this end we only need to be able to deepen our experience of the sphere of the major third by an inner enrichment of musical experience that penetrates into the hidden depths of feeling. If we experience the sphere of the major third as something wholly enclosed within the inner being of man and if we then feel the sphere of the major fifth to have the characteristic of “enveloping,” so that, as we grow into the configuration of the fifth, we reach the boundary of the human and the cosmic, where the cosmic resounds into the sphere of the human and the human, consumed with longing, yearns to rush forth into the Cosmos, then, in the mystery enacted between the spheres of the major third and major fifth, we can experience musically something of the inner being of man that reaches out into the Cosmos.

And if we then succeed in setting free the dissonances of the seventh to echo cosmic life, where the dissonances express man's sentient experiences in the Cosmos as he journeys towards the various spiritual realms; and if we succeed in allowing the dissonances of the seventh to die away, so that through their dying fall they acquire a certain definition, then in their dying strains they are ultimately resolved in something which, to the musical ear, resembles a musical firmament.

If, then, having already given a subtle indication of the experience of the ‘minor’ with the ‘major,’ if, in the dying strains of the dissonances of the seventh, in this spontaneous re-creation of the dissonances into a totality, we find here a means of passing in an intensely minor mood from the dissonances of the seventh, from the near consonance of these diminishing dissonances to the sphere of the fifth in a minor mood, and from that point blend the sphere of the fifth with that of the minor third, then we shall have evoked in this way the musical experience of the Incarnation, and what is more, of the Incarnation of the Christ.

In feeling our way outwards into the sphere of the seventh, which to cosmic feeling is only apparently dissonant and that we fashion into a ‘firmament,’ in that it is seemingly supported by the octave, if we have grasped this with our feelings and retrace our steps in the manner already indicated and find how, in the embryonic form of the consonances of the minor third, there is a possibility of giving a musical representation of the Incarnation, then, when we retrace our steps to the major third in this sphere, the “Hallelujah” of the Christ can ring out from this musical configuration as pure music.

Then, within the configuration of the tones man will be able to conjure forth an immediate realization of the super-sensible and express it musically.

The Christ Impulse can be found in music. And the dissolution of the symphonic into near dissonance, as in Beethoven, can be redeemed by a return to the dominion of the cosmic in music. Bruckner attempted this within the narrow limits of a traditional framework. But his posthumous Symphony shows that he could not escape these limitations. On one hand we admire its greatness, but on the other hand we find a hesitant approach to the true elements of music, and a failure to achieve a full realization of these elements which can only be experienced in the way I have described, i.e. when we have made strides in the realm of pure music and discover therein the essence, the fundamental spirit which can conjure forth a world through tones.

Without doubt the musical development I have described will one day be achieved through anthroposophical inspiration if mankind does not sink into decadence; and ultimately—and this will depend entirely upon mankind—the true nature of the Christ Impulse will be revealed externally.

I wish to draw your attention to this because you will then realize that Anthroposophy seeks to permeate all aspects of life. This can be accomplished if man, for his part, finds the true path to anthroposophical experience and investigation. It will even come to ~ass that one day the realm of music shall echo the teachings of Anthroposophy and the Christian enigma shall be solved through music.

With these words I hope to have concluded what I could only indicate in these lectures, to indicate the purposes I had in view.

I should like to add, however, that I hope to have succeeded in awakening in your souls some recognition of anthroposophical truths; and that these truths will grow and multiply and fertilize ever wider fields of human life.

May this cycle of lectures be a small contribution to the far-reaching aim which Anthroposophy sets out to achieve.

TODAY I am simply going to add to what we talked about yesterday, and if possible, I would like to take up a new topic tomorrow.

In the fourth lecture in this series, I stressed that finding the right perspective is essential to understanding any subject, whether it is the world in general, an individual human being, social interactions, or any series of interrelated facts. The belief that the truth can be arrived at by proceeding to draw logical conclusions from some arbitrary point of departure is the source of a great many errors. If we really want to understand something, the first thing we have to do is to work out the right point of view from which to approach it. We must realize that finding the right perspective is essential to any studying we do; attempting to understand a subject by approaching it from an arbitrary starting point actually causes a lot of mistakes.

However, if people who are aware of the principle of first discovering the right perspective became acquainted with the psychoanalytic theory's point of departure and proceeded from there, the results would be quite different. They might incorporate certain materialistic affectations into psychoanalytic theory to begin with, but they would soon be forced to adopt purer and nobler means of understanding simply through having made the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious mind. They would realize that dragging in points of view of the sort we mentioned before is not objective but a sign of arbitrary emotions belonging to subjective human nature.

The most significant aspect of any true study is that it tends to lead us far beyond our original point of departure. Rather than incorporating our own subjective impulses into the subject, we are guided and spurred on by the subject itself. Eventually, every true student becomes aware of how truly necessary this principle is. It is indispensable in making any spiritual scientific world view into a reality and equally indispensable to the structure of a society in which such a world view is to be fostered. We must finally realize that we have to take anthroposophy seriously and give it the respect it deserves. That is, we must not incorporate previous subjective habits into things belonging to our spiritual scientific philosophy, but must rather let ourselves be guided by what that philosophy requires. For example, in everyday life someone may be in the habit of always arriving late instead of at the specified time. In ordinary bourgeois life, that habit may be merely unpleasant or less than advantageous for that person's advancement, but in our anthroposophical movement, the whole way we deal with spiritual scientific truths ought to make that kind of behavior an inner impossibility except in cases of dire necessity.

In the past few days, we have talked a lot about dignity—not only the essential dignity of spiritual science itself, but also the dignity of our own interactions within the Society. We saw how important it is for us to spend time together as members among ourselves, with no one else present. Of course, making sure we arrive on time is a superficial thing, but in the past few days people have still been coming late, even though the lectures started at twenty past six. If we carry on like that, my friends, we will never even be able to begin to realize the ideal of our Society. In the somewhat attenuated circumstances that come about when we cannot be sure that members will not continue to arrive once we have begun, we will never be able to rule out the possibility of having uninvited guests in our midst. It is simply inconsiderate to come late to a Society function when the Society needs to make sure that everyone present is actually a member; that is, when some of us have to go to the extra effort of keeping an eye on the people entering until all members are present. When the people standing at the door have come in, we need to be able to shut the doors and know that everyone is here.

It should certainly not be necessary to make a special point of talking about things like this, but in spiritual science we have to be guided by the concept of symptomatology, which simply means that any being tends to act the same way in important instances as it does in less significant ones. People who don't even manage to arrive on time for meetings will also not be able to act out of the requisite sense of responsibility when it comes to something important. A great deal of the damage that has become so blatantly evident lately has come about because people were not particular enough about certain things. It is really important for us to conduct the practical affairs of anthroposophy with the conscientious exactitude I just mentioned. We have seen an example of how we as members of a spiritual scientific society interact on an ordinary everyday basis; this example, although very mundane, is nonetheless indicative of what spiritual science requires of us.

In our efforts to find the right perspective on what we have spoken about aphoristically so many times in the past few days, the main thing we have to keep in mind is that the structure and organization of the world as a whole consists of expressions and revelations of real spiritual entities. They are present behind the revealed world, which conceals them from our perception. As you know from many previous lectures, these beings are constantly in movement, constantly inwardly active. At the moment, I am not talking about any particular movement, but about their inner activity as a whole. We have to imagine a certain degree of complexity in this movement if we want to understand how the beings that stand behind certain phenomena relate to the phenomena themselves. The following example will be familiar to you from previous anthroposophical lectures.

We know that our physical evolution began during the ancient Saturn period and that it continued during the Sun period, when etheric development set in, and so on. But what does our physical development on ancient Saturn mean in relation to the structure of the cosmos as a whole? It would be totally inaccurate to take our physical nature as it is now and assume that if we imagine it in a much more primitive and simplified form, that's what the physical human being would have looked like during the Saturn stage. Nothing could be further from the truth. Perhaps it will help you understand this if I tell you that there is absolutely nothing in the present-day physical world, nothing on the physical plane as it exists now, that bears the slightest resemblance to human physical existence during the Saturn stage of evolution. In none of the forms and facts of the physical world as we know it now is there any trace of what human physical development was like during that evolutionary period. So if we want to understand this ancient form of our physical existence, we must make the effort to do so with a soul and spirit freed from the physical and etheric bodies.

I will call the world in which we understand the makeup of our earliest potential for physical existence during the Saturn stage [writes on the chalkboard] the world of the perception of physical human nature on Saturn. For the time being, let me just say that we must leave the physical body and undergo a higher form of development in order to achieve an understanding of structures corresponding to physical human nature during the Saturn stage.

Next, let us consider human physical existence during the Sun period, which represents a progression of physical evolution from the Saturn stage. It is impossible to understand our physical Sun nature with our present-day physical organs of perception. Once again, we must ascend into the spiritual world, but not as high as the level required for comprehending human physical nature during the Saturn period. In other words, we are able to investigate our physical Sun nature at a somewhat lower level. We can call this [writes on the board] the world of the perception of physical human nature on the Sun.

For investigating physical human nature as it evolved during the Moon period, a still less elevated level of perception is required. As soon as we become capable of body-free perception, we are able to comprehend everything that corresponds to our physical Moon nature. Let us call this third stage in the relationship of the human being to objective fact [writes on the board] the world of the perception of physical human nature on the Moon.

Continuing in the same vein, we come to our physical nature during the Earth stage of evolution. In order to understand this, we do not even need to leave the physical body; we can grasp it with our physical organs of perception. This level of cognition is the natural one for human beings during life on Earth, and we can call it [writes on the board] the world of the perception of physical human nature on Earth.

So, my friends, we have looked at four different levels of the worlds of perception, levels that can also be called [writes on the board] physical plane, soul world or astral plane, spirit world or Devachan plane, and higher spirit world or higher Devachan plane.

If you follow what I have been describing, you will know that we have to place the physical human being of the Saturn stage here, the physical Sun-human here, the Moon-human here, and the earthly physical human being here [small circles]. This in no way contradicts our usual concepts, but is indicated quite clearly in my book An Outline Of Occult Science, where I described at length how what we recognize as human physical nature at the Moon stage is not to be observed on the physical plane, but at a higher level, and so forth. [ Note 1 ] It's all explained there very clearly.

Today we know that human beings have descended during the course of their physical evolution [line connecting the small circles]. The human being, to the extent that we are speaking of our present-day physical nature, is a descending spiritual being. This is one of the basic ancient principles of any spiritual science. Thus, when considering our physical body, we must realize that everything we can see of it at this Earth stage in evolution is that aspect of ourselves that has descended the furthest.

However, there is also something concealed in the physical body. It conceals something that is actually Moon-like in nature, something more hidden that is Sun-like in nature, and something still more deeply hidden that is Saturn-like in nature. Thus, within the revealed physical body, inner character and inner essentiality are concealed. In a sense, we can actually perceive only a quarter of our physical body. The other three quarters are concealed behind the perceptible body and are nobler and more spiritual in nature than the aspect visible on the physical plane.

Looking at any part of our physical body as it exists now on the physical plane, we have to realize that all our physical organs are in constant inner movement; they are constantly descending and evolving from the spiritual toward the physical. We must understand that as they are growing and developing into their proper form on the physical plane, all our organs are involved in a descending course of evolution. They are in the process of evolving downward from a more spiritual form of existence to a more material one.

In assessing the nature and character of anything belonging to a human being, we must be guided by the rule of always finding the right point of view. We are led to the right perspective when we realize that from a certain point of view—the one I have been discussing today—physical human nature is in a process of descent. Therefore, when we look at human development from childhood to maturity, the childhood stage of evolution must be regarded as more spiritual and the mature stage as more material, since a descent from the spiritual to the material has taken place in between. We will not understand human physical development if we look at it from any other point of view. It is only possible to understand it if we are aware that a descent of the physical human being takes place during growth and development, that a growing human being allows something spiritual to descend deeper into matter.

The same principle applies to the world as a whole. Thus, we also speak of cultural evolution. For instance, once upon a time there was an ancient Indian cultural epoch that evolved into the ancient Persian epoch, then into the Egypto-Chaldean-Babylonian epoch, then into the Greco-Latin epoch, and finally into our own cultural epoch. However, we also know that former cultural epochs continue to exist alongside more recent ones. I have showed you how this manifests in language.

Applied to the human being, this can show us how physical organs that have proceeded further along the course of descent can exist side-by-side with others that are still at earlier stages. We will gradually come to see that according to this principle, we can distinguish two systems of organs within the human being, although for today, I will only point this out aphoristically.

Let us first consider our senses and all the organs that allow us to have sensory perceptions. In terms of their physical structure, these sense organs are all at a certain level; the spiritual has streamed downward to a certain level in these organs. I'll make you a diagram of that [sketches on the board]. Now, we said that human nature in its entirety consists of a downward flow; it is moving in this direction [arrow]. The upper horizontal mark indicates the position of the senses within this downward flow, so we must think of all the organs of sensory perception as being at level A.

Next, let's look at a different system of organs, for instance the respiratory system. In order to consider this, too, from the right point of view, we must find the level to which it has descended. Eventually, we will find that the respiratory system stopped at level B. While our sensory system descended to level A, our respiratory system continued to descend until it reached level B.

As you might imagine, this process of descent can go on still further, so there could even be a system of organs that has descended still further, to level C. And in fact, our sexual organs have done just that.

Eventually, our physical evolution reached its lowest point and a gradual re-ascent began. However, we will not be able to talk about that today. I will indicate the lowest point of descent with this curved shape at the bottom of the diagram. This is where the earthly process of descent stopped. You can tell from all this that our sensory organs are much more spiritualized than our respiratory organs and everything else. And, as we will come to understand ever more clearly, our sexual organs represent the lowest level of descent. Therefore, all other components of our physical human nature are more spiritual than that particular system of organs.

That was easy enough to understand, wasn't it? However, the point I want to make is that psychoanalytic theory, that disgusting philosophy, has been incapable of becoming aware of this simple fact. Psychoanalysts claim that all of people's actions, including mystical experiences, are nothing more than transformed sexual energies. Psychoanalysts, or we might even say materialists in general, take sexuality as their starting point and explain all other human phenomena as metamorphoses of sexuality. I have already pointed out how in Freud's theory everything that happens in a person's life is explained in terms of transformed sexuality. For example, that babies suck on pacifiers is explained as an expression of infantile sexuality, and so forth.

But what is the truth of the matter? In reality, my friends, any other human daily activity is more spiritual than sexual activity, and to arrive at the right perspective on this subject, we have to look at things the other way around. Any attempt to explain what people do by dragging in sexuality and eroticism is completely wrong. The right way of looking at things is to explain sexuality as the transformation of higher human activities into their lowest earthly form.

Since I have been forced to mention the ghastly claims of the psychoanalysts because they are an unavoidable phenomenon of our times, let us take a look at one of the worst of them, namely their contention that the loving childhood relationship of a boy to his mother or a girl to her father is actually a sexual relationship. Psychoanalysts claim that a girl's feelings for her father and a boy's for his mother are sexual feelings, and that boys always view their father as a rival and are unconsciously jealous of him; girls, so they say, are similarly jealous of their mother. This is one of the most terrible of the distortions psychoanalysts have perpetrated. In their writings, as you know, they have even used this assumption as the basis for explaining certain literary works such as the story of Oedipus. [ Note 2 ]

In looking for the right perspective on this subject, we need to ask how adult sexuality develops. As we have seen, it comes about through something spiritual sinking down into matter. Our adult sexuality comes about through the descent of something that was spiritual when we were children. The correct approach is to avoid getting anything not specifically sexual mixed up with sexuality, either consciously or unconsciously, and to realize that sexuality is not yet present in children. Only when we are fully aware of all the ramifications of this can we find the right perspective on the matter. This is an extremely important point with regard to the education of children, because all kinds of things can go wrong if childish mischief is automatically interpreted as premature sexuality. All kinds of things other than sexuality can be the reason for children misbehaving. Claiming that there is already a sexual side to a child's character is just about the same as insisting that tomorrow's rainy weather is already inherent in today.

By now you will have realized what we are dealing with here—the perspective that has been applied is totally upside down and backward. Coming to such a distorted perspective does not happen naturally, but only by forcing the issue and arbitrarily dragging in our instincts. The whole psychoanalytic approach is tinged with the lowest human instincts; it turns the world upside down. Such an interpretation of the mother-daughter or father-son relationship can only come about if the researcher's subjective instincts get mixed up with the objective course of the investigation. Consequently, in this instance (providing we go about it with all due exactitude), it is perfectly all right to apply expressions usually reserved for subjective human actions. While it would be foolish to apply subjective expressions to a legitimate and objective science, it is possible to do so in this case without relinquishing the objectivity of our point of view.

Just imagine someone believes that the hands of a clock are turned by little demons sitting inside—we would call that foolish, of course. Clocks are mechanical devices; there are no little devils inside. Reacting to it objectively, however, we would never say that the person who attributes the clock's functioning to demons is insulting the clock. But when psychoanalysts attribute this sort of sexuality to children, instinctual subjectivity invades their theory. Then it is justified to use subjective expressions and say that the psychoanalytic theory insults human nature. We must make an effort to be truthful and call a spade a spade. In our materialistic world, a number of people have made it their task to cultivate a theory that demeans not only individuals, but human nature in general, to the extent that their whole scientific theory is nothing more than a compilation of insults. When a sufficient number of people realize that this is happening, we will start to see psychoanalytic theory for exactly what it's worth. Then we won't be merely peddling with words any more, but will be able to see things as they are. That's how we can come to clarity on this issue.

Only after we have completely understood everything we have discussed today can our understanding be allowed to lead to name-calling. When we call psychoanalysis a smutty theory, that obviously really is name-calling; however, our insight into the objective fact of the matter is what compels us to call it by this name. After all, it would not be right for the criticism to come from the same kind of subjective instincts as the theory itself.

The unique thing about spiritual science, however, is that an apparently abstract theory is transformed into justified feelings and reactions. Those who have gone through a real struggle to understand what psychoanalysis actually is can freely call it a smutty theory without losing their objectivity. It is as objective to call psychoanalysis a smutty theory as it is to say that canvas is white and charcoal black. It is objective terminology derived from true insight into human nature in its totality.

The purpose of our spiritual scientific philosophy is to deepen our concepts, and not only our concepts but our whole character, my friends. If we say that a Society intended as the vehicle for this philosophy must be a living organism, then we must also be able to see how the emotions expressed within the context of the Society also develop out of this spiritual scientific philosophy, so that even a radical expression such as “smutty theory” can only be applied when it is firmly rooted in spiritual science and when no personal instincts play a part in its use.

I am sure we will soon find an opportunity for further discussion of related matters.

The ability to perceive karmic connections in human life demands a clear understanding of laws and conditions of existence with which, generally speaking, the man of modern times is entirely unfamiliar. For into the karmic connections extending from one earthly life into another, spiritual laws are working, spiritual laws which will be totally misconstrued if they are associated in the very slightest degree with causation similar to what is meant when we speak in the ordinary way of ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ in the world.

In order to understand the real nature of karmic connections we must, in the first place, have a clear and exact perception of what is happening within man behind the sphere of his ordinary consciousness. And it is only by observing the being of man as revealed to super-sensible cognition, to Initiation-knowledge, that such understanding can be attained.

Let us therefore consider to-day how the attainment of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition makes it increasingly possible for man to recognise how he lives, as man, within the whole cosmos. This will enable us to continue the study of certain matters that were touched upon in recent lectures and will eventually lead to an understanding of karma.

It has often been said, even in public lectures, that at the stage of Imaginative Cognition a tableau of the present earthly life spreads out before man. A vista of his life lies before him in mighty pictures and he is able to behold things that cannot be yielded by memory in the ordinary sense.

In this vista which opens out as a result of the striving for Imaginative Knowledge, man is, to begin with, entirely within his physical and etheric bodies, but through the appropriate exercises he makes himself completely independent of everything by which impressions are transmitted to him from his physical body. In the activity of Imaginative Cognition man is therefore independent of his sense-impressions, and also of his intellectual knowledge. He lives entirely in the etheric body and the memory-tableau lies outspread before him.

We can therefore say: man is now living in the super-sensible, inwardly detached from his physical body. And in point of fact it would not be so difficult as it actually is for the majority of people to acquire this faculty of Imaginative Knowledge, if only there were a stronger inclination to break through the inner link between the life of soul and the physical body.

It is, of course, comparatively easy to break through the link with direct sense-perception. But remember that a man is also connected with his physical body through the attitude and tenor of soul he acquires in his earthly life. After all, our moods of soul are also dependent upon the physical body, are essentially influenced by the physical body. When a man ascribes one thing or another to his capacities, his talents or other qualities of soul, this is all connected with his experiences in the physical body. If he is to acquire the faculty of genuine Imaginative Knowledge he must free himself from all this; and if he succeeds, even if only for a moment, he knows what Imaginative Knowledge is and the life-tableau begins gradually to unfold.

It is necessary to bear in mind the difference between the condition of being bound up with the physical body and thus living within it, and the condition of being independent of the physical body but for all that remaining within it. There is a real difference, and it is the latter condition that obtains in the activity of Imaginative Knowledge. We remain within the physical body, we do not leave it, but we are nevertheless independent of it.

When you remain with your soul and spirit within the physical body, then you fill the physical body, even if you are not bound up with it. I will illustrate this diagrammatically.—

Let us think, first, of man's ordinary, everyday condition. Take this (a) to represent the physical body (inner curves), this the etheric body (outer curves) and this the soul and spirit (short branching lines).

The etheric body is connected everywhere with the physical body through the muscles, bones and nerves. These connections are everywhere, proceeding from the etheric body to the physical body. Now picture to yourselves that you have a porous clay vessel and you pour liquid into it. The liquid fills the pores and runs out into the porous clay. But it may also happen that your vessel is not porous and in that case none of the liquid is absorbed; the liquid will then be in the vessel but there will be no channels into the clay walls. In the activity of Imaginative Knowledge man is in this sense within his body but the etheric body does not enter into the muscles, the bones and so forth. This condition can be indicated by (b) in the diagram. Physical body; then etheric body which is now on its own; and within, the soul and spirit. All that has happened is that the etheric body is now inwardly detached. The result of this detachment will of course be perceptible when returning to the previous condition. It is therefore only natural that when a man really tries to make himself free of his physical body but remains within it, as is the case in the activity of Imaginative Cognition, he is aware not only of exhaustion but of actual heaviness. He becomes intensely aware of his physical body because he has now to make his way into it again.

This is the condition obtaining in the activity of Imaginative Cognition but not in that of Inspiration, Inspired Knowledge. In the activity of Inspired Cognition—which begins, as I have described to you, with consciousness that has been emptied of images—man is outside his physical body with the soul and spirit. Thus (c) in the diagram represents the soul and spirit outside the physical and etheric bodies.

The outer configuration must therefore be the same as in sleep. Knowledge through Inspiration is possible only when with his ego and astral body a man can be outside the etheric body.

And now, when he returns into his physical and etheric bodies, he notices the presence there of something else; the physical and etheric bodies are not at all as he is accustomed to know them; something is there within them. This is very important, because knowledge of it gives an indication of the whole process of Initiation.

At first, a certain difficulty is experienced in coming back into the physical and etheric bodies after the state of Inspiration, because there is the feeling of diving down into something quite different.

Remember what I told you yesterday about the backward survey of the memory-tableau. If this memory-tableau is blotted out in the activity of Inspired Knowledge, we perceive what it is that is present there within the physical body. And when the memory-picture of the phase between birth and the 7th year, until the time of the change of teeth, is blotted out, we perceive that within this physical body there was an Angelos, an Angel! We actually behold there a Being of the Third Hierarchy. So that what happens is this. We succeed in getting outside the physical body and then return into it as into our house and home ... and lo! we meet our Angel there when we look back upon the phase of life from birth until the 7th year.

Knowledge of such truths existed in the days of the ancient, instinctive clairvoyance, knowledge which took different forms in the various epochs of evolution; and these truths were taken into account in establishing certain customs and usages.

In olden times men were fully conscious that the giving of names should conform with spiritual realities. Generally speaking, people to-day are indifferent about the kind of names their children receive. For some the only consideration is whether the name has a pretty sound. There is often an element of coquetry in giving a name to a child; people ‘fancy’ the name. But in olden times men were mindful of the child's relation to the spiritual world and chose the name accordingly. In an epoch, for example, when a prophetic being was venerated under the name of ‘Elisha’, girls were sometimes named ‘Elisa-beth’, that is to say, the ‘house of Elisha’. In this way expression was given to the hope that by placing a child in the world with this name, the grace of the prophet would be ensured. And so the names were given with this aim in view.

What were the grounds for this? It was known that when man has been outside his body and then returns into it, he sees himself as the bearer of spiritual Beings. And the whole conception that little children, especially, are guarded by their Angel originates in the fact that when with Initiation-knowledge we look back upon the phase of life from birth to the 7th year, we experience what I described yesterday by saying that when this phase in the memory-tableau is blotted out, the Hierarchy of the Angeloi, that is to say, the deeds and activities of the Moon-sphere shine through.

Again, when we look back upon the phase from the 7th to the 14th years and then return into the body, we find an Archangelos. This Archangel is of course also present within the human being from birth until the 7th year, but we do not find the Archangel when we are looking back only at the phase between birth and the 7th year.

And so when we return into the body after having been outside it, we become aware that there, within the body, are Beings of all the higher Hierarchies. But this form of self-knowledge, the knowledge that the body is the bearer of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies, cannot be acquired in any other way than by having first been outside the body and then returning into it again.

This can be understood only when it is connected with another fact. I have told you that the many stars in the heavens are but the outer signs of colonies of gods. Where the stars sparkle in the heavens there are, in reality, colonies of spiritual Beings. But you must not imagine that these gods have their consciousness only in Venus, or only in the Sun, or in Mercury, or in Sirius. They have their main habitation, the focal point of their existence in these several spheres, and this is true of all spiritual Beings of the cosmos who have anything to do with the earth. But it is impossible to say of their existence in the cosmos that they have their dwelling-place only in Mars, only in Venus, and so forth. Paradoxical as it will seem, I am nevertheless obliged to say that the Divine Beings who belong to the earth and who people Mars, Venus, Jupiter or another of the planets—also the Sun—would be blind if they inhabited only one of these spheres. They would live, they would be active—just as we can walk about and take hold of things even if we have no eyes; but they would not see—I mean, of course, in the way in which Divine Beings ‘see’—they would lack a certain faculty for perceiving what is happening in the cosmos. But this, my dear friends, will lead you to ask: Where, then, is the eye of the gods, where is their organ of perception? This organ of perception is provided by the Moon, our neighbour in the cosmos—in addition to all its other functions. All the Divine Beings belonging to the Sun, to Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, have their eye in the Moon and are at the same time in the Moon.

And now think of some of the things of which we have spoken here from time to time. Take only one fact. The Moon was once part of the earth, and separated from the earth only in the course of time. Before the separation of the Moon, therefore, the eye of the gods was bound up with the earth; the gods beheld the cosmos from the earth. Hence at that time the great primeval Teachers too were able to impart their wisdom to mankind. For in that they were living on the earth, and the Moon was still within the earth, they could gaze into the cosmos with the eye of the gods. When the Moon departed, remembrance of this vision of the gods remained with them for a time; thus they could behold, in remembrance, what was now seen with the eye of man, and could communicate this to the gods. But the primeval Teachers themselves had then to make their way to the Moon, where they are to this day, and to found a colony there in order to be able to see with the eye of the gods.

And now turn your minds to something else. From the Moon, Jahve reigned over the heart and soul of the Jewish people, and those of the primeval Teachers who were still associated with the cult and the teaching of Jahve united with him in the Moon, in order to look out into the cosmos through his eyes. In time to come the Moon will again be united with the earth and then it will be possible for man on the earth to gaze into the cosmos with the eye of the gods. Vision of the cosmos will then be a natural human faculty.

It is only by understanding these things that we can come to know the nature of the universe. For only when man views the universe in this way can he have any true conception of the function of the Moon.

And now we have the reason why freedom, free spiritual activity, can be unfolded in earthly life. As long as the Moon was connected with the earth, as long as the primeval Teachers taught men out of their store of remembrance, and as long as this teaching was preserved in the Mysteries—actually until the 14th century A.D.—all wisdom consisted in what had been seen with the eye of the gods. Only since the period I indicated to you, only since the year 1413, has it become utterly impossible for the earth to see with the eye of the gods. So that with the development of the Consciousness Soul, freedom begins to be within the reach of men.

But in point of fact man is on the earth only in the activity of sense-perception and intellectual knowledge, for the latter is also bound up with the physical body. The truth of the matter is as follows. Let us picture the human being. It is only in his sense and intellectual knowledge that he extends beyond the Hierarchies who are within him. In respect of all that lies behind his intellect, he is filled with the Third Hierarchy; in all that lies behind his feeling, he is filled with the Second Hierarchy; in all that lies behind his willing, he is filled with the First Hierarchy.

We are therefore in very truth within the Hierarchies and it is only in respect of our sensory organs and intellect that we extend beyond their realm. It is actually as though we were swimming, with the head rising a little out of the water. With our senses and our intellect we rise out of the ocean of the activities of the Hierarchies.

All this we find when, having experienced the reality of perception outside the body, we return again into the body. And then we find that in very truth man is the House of the Gods.

Something else will now be clear to you. When the gods desire cosmic vision, they gaze through the eye of the Moon. But when they desire to behold the cosmos from the earth—whereby an entirely different aspect is revealed—then they must look from out of man. The human race is the other eye of the gods!

In very ancient times it was natural for man to be able to see with the eye of the gods because the Moon was within the earth. And he will be able to do so again when in future time the Moon and the earth are re-united. Through Initiation, however, through becoming aware on returning into the body that the gods are present there, and through coming to know these gods, man learns to behold the world through the “eye of man.” Thus Initiation reveals to man what in earlier times was revealed to the gods through the eye of the Moon.

What we do with our everyday consciousness, the intentions we form, and so forth—all this depends upon ourselves; but our karma is shaped and fashioned by the Hierarchies within us. They are the architects and shapers of an entirely different World-Order, a World-Order belonging to the soul, to the moral sphere of life. This is the other aspect of man, the aspect of the Hierarchies who are within him.

As long as we remain at the stage of Imaginative Knowledge we are convinced, as we look back over our own earthly life, that we are a unity; we are also convinced that certain actions in life are free, because they proceed from this unity. With Imaginative Knowledge we perceive little of our karma. When we reach the stage of Inspired Knowledge, however, and then return into the body, we feel ourselves divided into a world of countless Hierarchies. We return into the body and at first do not know our identity. Are we the Angel, are we a Being of one of the Hierarchies, one of the Dynamis, or Exusiai? We are divided into a world of Beings, dazed by the multiplicity of our nature, for we are one with all these Beings.

At this point the appropriate exercises must make a man so inwardly strong that he can assert his unity over against this multiplicity. And then—it is of course all an after-effect of the life between death and rebirth—he perceives how karma is shaped by the interweaving activities of the many Beings within him. Countless Divine Beings take part in the shaping of human karma. It is therefore true to say that man leads an earthly life in the real sense only in respect of his intellectual and sensory activity. In the activity of his life of feeling and of will—yes, and even in a more remote and hidden activity of thought—man shares in the life of the gods. In a hidden thought-activity he shares in the life of the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai; in respect of what is hidden in his life of feeling he shares in the life of the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes; and in respect of his will he shares in the life of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

What we call human destiny is therefore an affair of the gods and as such it must be regarded.

But what does this mean for earthly life? If a man cannot accept his destiny with inner composure, if he rebels against his destiny, if—from his personal point of view of course—he is discontented with it, if he brings his destiny into confusion by subjective decisions, then it is as though he were continually disturbing the gods in the shaping of his destiny. Destiny can of a truth only be lived through in the right way when life is accepted with inner composure and tranquillity. To feel and perceive how destiny works is something that brings with it hard and heavy tests for human nature. If a man can succeed in taking his destiny earnestly, this experience will give him a strong and deep impulse to live in communion with the spiritual world. And life itself will unfold in him a feeling for connections of destiny, of karma.

Men of the modern age have to a great extent lost this sensitivity, this delicacy of perception; their perceptions have become crude. But suppose there is someone who looks back with more delicate perception upon the relationship he had with a human being who was an example to him in his youth—a teacher, perhaps. People do not always feel contemptuous about those who were their teachers; many look back with inner happiness to those who educated them. When this is so, the recollection can deepen into a very intimate experience. It may come to us that between our 7th and 14th years, for example, we always felt obliged to do whatever this revered teacher did; or we may realise that when this teacher told us something we felt as though we had already heard it, as though it were just being repeated. It is actually one of the most beautiful experiences in life when we remember something of this kind, feeling that it was repetition. And then it strikes us that something must underlie this experience. Healthy human reason will tell us that there is nothing to account for it in the present earthly life, and then the same reasoning faculty points us to previous lives. There are indeed many whose attention is directed in this way to earlier lives on earth.

Now what does it mean when we can look back to a teacher with feelings like these? It means that in our present life destiny has led this teacher to us. It is our karma to have such a teacher and it points to a previous earthly life.

As a rule—and this is shown by occult observation—as a rule it is not the case that in the previous earthly life the teacher was also our teacher; the relationship then was quite different. From a teacher we receive thoughts, ideas, even if they are clothed in the form of pictures; in true education we receive thoughts and ideas. When this is the case it points back, as a rule, to a relationship where feelings, not thoughts, were communicated by the person in question; there was less opportunity for receiving thoughts from him, but feelings were communicated—feelings which can be transmitted in so many different ways. And the same may apply to the present and a future earthly life.

Let us suppose that in this present life a man feels drawn by warm, inner sympathy to some other person with whom life does not bring him into specially close contact, whom he merely meets but to whom he is strongly drawn. In such a case it may happen that these feelings of sympathy lead to the other becoming his teacher in a later-life.

What, then, has actually happened? When feelings of sympathy and attraction towards another person unfold in a man, this is the result of what the Beings of the Second Hierarchy—the Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai—unfold in and around the human being.

Then, in the next life, when the influence does not work by way of the feelings but by way of thoughts and ideas, this means that the Beings of the Second Hierarchy have given over what they wrought in a preceding life, to the Beings of the Third Hierarchy, to the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai; and it is they who are now working within the human being.

When, therefore, our karma unfolds from one earthly life to another, this means that actual deeds are passed on from one Hierarchy to another and that in the cosmos, in the spiritual cosmos, something of immense significance is taking place.

In looking at a man's destiny we gaze, as it were through a veil, into a wide vista of cosmic happenings. If we can become conscious of this, the impression will be one of tremendous power. You have only to picture it to yourselves, entering into it with the right feeling and understanding.

Imagine now that you are observing the manifestations of destiny in the life of a human being. This should never be done in a spirit of indifference, for in observing the destiny of a human being we are in truth beholding deeds which have poured from the highest Hierarchy into the lowest Hierarchy, and again from the lowest into the highest Hierarchy. We are gazing upon a weaving activity of life in the ranks of the Hierarchies when we study the destiny of a human being. It is something that must be contemplated with deep piety and veneration, because as we behold this destiny the world of the gods lies manifest before us.

This was the feeling I tried in some measure to convey when I was writing the Mystery Plays. Throughout the Plays you will find scenes that have their setting in earthly life and others that have their setting in the spiritual world. And I have also made it evident how not only the higher Hierarchies but elemental beings, also the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers, mingle in the living, weaving deeds that flow from above downwards and from below upwards when the destiny of man is being fulfilled.

Think of the scenes when Strader and Capesius are within the super-sensible world in quite different forms of existence but for all that the same individuals. This is only the other side of man's life which is just as truly part of him—the side that belongs to the world of the gods and not to the world of the minerals, the animals, the plants, the mountains, the clouds, the trees and so forth. To learn to contemplate the destinies of human beings with reverence and awe—that too is something that the times demand of us. It is a dreadful experience to read biographies from the pens of materialistically-minded authors to-day, for they write without an iota of reverence for the destiny of the one whose life they are narrating. Of a truth it would be well for biographers to realise that when they intrude into the life of a human being, even if only for the purpose of describing it, they are coming into invisible contact with all the Hierarchies.

Deliberations of this kind lead us to the ‘feeling’ side of Anthroposophy. We realise that everything offered to us in Anthroposophy must also move our feelings. For in Anthroposophy it is not merely a question of acquiring knowledge; feelings about the world are quickened within us, feelings which alone can enable us to find our rightful place in life. And without such feelings we cannot truly understand or perceive the laws by which the karma of man is pervaded.

The constitution, the entire life, of the human soul we conceive much too simply as we human beings of the present time, of the nineteenth, twentieth century experience this. What we learn from external history is in great measure only outside occurrence, far less the history of the human soul itself. The changes which occur with the soul life of the human being are considered very little. Now, it must be borne in mind that earlier periods did not have the same occasion for giving attention to this history of the human soul life as does the present time. For the present time, which, when we consider it as a long historical epoch, began in the first third of the fifteenth century,—this present epoch presents man with very special responsibilities, such as he can discharge only by means of his consciousness, whereas earlier responsibilities could be discharged by means of certain instinct, even though an instinct humanly formed. We have heard in various ways and perhaps read in cycles, how in ancient times man possessed a kind of instinctive clairvoyance, but how the evolution of humanity has consisted in the loss of this instinctive clairvoyance, and that in its place has appeared the contemporary constitution of soul, which is intellectual in character and has developed primarily the human understanding. I do not say that for this reason the capacities of feeling and volition have not been active in the human being, but what constitutes the greatest thing in our contemporary civilization, what we experience at the present time more than anything else, this calls upon the understanding, upon the capacity for conception. But the present day human being has good reason for asking the question what significance an intellectual civilization possesses for the human soul. This question can be completely answered only if one gives a little attention to that reference to the pre-earthly human life to which attention was directed yesterday in a different connection.

As human beings of the present time, we experience concepts as something very abstract, as something that we do not experience in the same degree as that in which concepts were experienced in the time of the ancient instinctive clairvoyance by human beings. And if, from these abstract, intellectualistic concepts, we look at pre-earthly human existence, we find that something entirely different existed in place of what is today abstract thinking. Moreover, since we possessed no body, no organism, in the pre-earthly life, as we still possessed only the soul-spiritual nature, thoughts were something entirely different. Thoughts then still possessed a soul life. We then experienced a thought in such a way that we knew that thoughts are spread everywhere in the entire world, and we draw these out of the world into our own life of soul.

Today the view of the human being is that thoughts are something which he creates with his brain. This is just as clever as if a person taking a glass of water to himself should believe that the water comes out of his tongue, is not taken in from without. In reality, thoughts are something active, living, the working forces in the whole world, and we simply draw them out of the world. Our organic system is only the vessel into which we draw the thoughts by means of our ego. But the erroneous idea that we of ourselves create the thoughts, to this error one can surrender oneself only during the earthly life between birth and death. As long as we live in the pre-earthly existence, it is clear that the realm of thought completely fills everything in our surroundings just as air does during our existence between birth and death. We know that, so to speak, we breathe in thoughts and again breathe them out, that they are something active, productive. It is of the utmost importance that we become aware that the forces of thought are something quite different in the pre-earthly life and in the earthly existence. When we come upon a corpse somewhere in the world, we do not say to ourselves that this corpse could have been brought into its present form by any kind of forces which we call forces of nature. We know it is the residue of a living human being. The living human being must necessarily have been in existence there; a force of nature can never give to a corpse the form in which it exists. The corpse can be nothing else than the residue of a living human being.

What we are able to observe in regard to the life of thinking in the human being as we possess this in the earthly existence gives us a basis upon which to understand that the forces of thought we develop during the earthly life do not come into existence of themselves in our physical organism, but that they are the residue of living forces we possessed in the pre-earthly existence. With the same certainty with which one says that the corpse is the dead residue of a living person he can say also that abstract thinking such as we have at the present time is the dead residue of what we possessed during the pre-earthly existence in living thought.

The living thought dies as we are born—or as we are conceived—and what becomes effective in us as forces of thinking is the corpse of that living thinking which we possessed during the pre-earthly existence. We do not quite rightly understand the earthly thinking until we look upon it as the residue of the pre-earthly thinking, just as we look upon the corpse as the residue of a living person. This awareness of human thinking, which is the residue of a living thinking, must gradually more and more permeate humanity; only then will one look upon oneself in the right way as a human being; then will one look back in the right way to the pre-earthly existence as one looks back from the corpse, in which only the forces of nature are existent, to the living human being, in whom loftier forces are alive. But one considers this entire thing in the right light only when one knows that this thinking, as we possess it at the present time, tending only toward abstraction, we developed first since the fifteenth century. Naturally, it evolved in various ways in the various individual races and groups of human beings, but in general the situation has been such for civilized humanity that humanity has evolved to this dead thinking in the first third of the fifteenth century; that this thinking became ever more and more completely dead until a certain culmination of this condition of deadness came about exactly in the last third of the nineteenth century.

Indeed, if we look further back in the course of evolution, we find that in these ancient times the human souls, as they passed through conception and birth, brought over into the earthly existence something out of the pre-earthly life. The living nature of ancient myths, ancient popular legends, the ancient formative forces of the soul which are by no means the same as our present activity in phantasy, could not have developed if something had not streamed in from the living pre-earthly existence, if earthly thinking had already become entirely abstract. Indeed, it can be said in a certain sense that even at present there remains a final residue of pre-earthly thinking in the period of childhood, although this is lost in the course of life. But those human beings of a more ancient time were entirely different from contemporary human beings in their entire life of soul. Just imagine quite truly that we could experience at the present time this living thinking, could experience still such clairvoyance as the human soul possessed in ancient times, that you experienced imaginations, that these imaginations could affect you so powerfully that they would appear to you as revelations of divine-spiritual forces. You would never arrive at a consciousness of freedom. The true feeling of freedom developed for the first time in civilized humanity. The fact that man has been able to become free he owes to the circumstance that living thinking is not active at least in his waking state, but a dead thinking into which he injects whatever he wishes out of his free will. Man does not think as he thought at an earlier time; he himself begins to think. But beginning oneself to think means to inject human will into this thinking, and when man finds a dead thinking he can pour his free will into this thinking. Thus man had to advance to dead thinking in order to become a free being in the course of earthly evolution.

You see that, if we consider in the same way the evolution of the human soul life, it becomes clear to us that there is meaning in the formation of the whole human evolution on earth.

But we will now once more return to somewhat earlier times. That which occurred as a deadening, an abstracting, an intellectualizing of thinking in the first third of the fifteenth century had been in the course of preparation for a long time very gradually beforehand. Such things do not occur all at once but pass through a preparation, pass through a certain beginning finally to reach the highest point. Now it is clearly to be seen that the first beginning toward this abstract thinking occurred in the fourth Christian century. I mean that in the fourth Post-Christian century there began the first trace becoming dominant in human consciousness that man believed he creates his thoughts. This could not have been thought by a Greek. The Greek was altogether conscious still of a certain living quality of this thinking and was conscious that thoughts exist everywhere within things; that he simply draws them himself out of things. The opinion that man creates his thoughts came about through the fact that thoughts became ever more and more lifeless. And these lifeless thoughts, with which one can, so to speak, do whatever one will, made their appearance for the first time in the fourth Christian century. This proceeded gradually still further until, in the fifteenth century, the consciousness (which we still possess today) clearly took on its form.

But what resulted from this in the evolution of humanity? In the fourth Post-Christian century occurred the beginning of an intellectual, abstract thinking. This means, however, nothing else than that the Mystery of Golgotha, the appearance of Christ upon the earth, occurred during a time when the human soul was still filled with living thoughts. In this respect much has been lost to humanity in the matter of its consciousness. It is true that humanity has in this way achieved freedom, but very much, nevertheless, has been lost. When Christ appeared upon the earth he was received by a certain number of human beings who still possessed an inwardly living, active thinking, who still possessed in their thinking a residue of the pre-earthly existence. And these persons related themselves to the Mystery of Golgotha in a manner entirely different from that of the human beings of a later time. Just think for a moment, that till this period, human beings said to themselves—they did not clearly express this; everything was then enveloped in pictures, but the consciousness was there—I am now upon the earth; I have as an earthly human being my thinking; but this directs me backward through birth and conception into the pre-earthly existence, into a different world; it is out of this that I have descended. Man felt himself here as a projection of what he was in the pre-earthly existence. Human beings of that time knew quite clearly that with the earthly existence they were continuing an earlier, pre-earthly existence, even though in that time human beings saw into the pre-earthly existence as if through a glass, darkly. This consciousness, that man is a being descended from the heavens to the earth, disappeared in its essence during the fourth Post-Christian century.

From this point of view also was conceived the event of Golgotha. If mention was made to these persons by initiates—who were at that time still in existence, not possessed of such wisdom as were the initiates of the ancient mysteries, but still having at least a residue of the ancient mystery wisdom,—if mention was made by them of the Christ, their answer was that Jesus Christ had been at home previously in the same world in which we also were present before we descended to the earth; there He was also. That was His world; only He had never previously left that world. It is indeed a characteristic of earthly human beings that they had to descend to the earth since very early times; there they went away from the Christ in order to come down to the earth. If, then, mention was made in the ancient mysteries of the Christ—indeed, mention was constantly made of the Christ in the ancient mysteries, although He was not called by the name “Christ”—then thought had to be directed to the pre-earthly existence; it had to be said to human beings: If you wish to know something of the Christ, you must not hold fast to your earthly consciousness, but must look upward to the pre-earthly existence.

Indeed, we must introduce something from this pre-earthly existence in order to understand what I wish to bring out today. Standing here upon the earth as earthly human beings, we look up to the sun, we form conceptions of the sun, we even develop hypotheses regarding it: that this sun is a ball of gas or something similar. Indeed, from the earthly point of view it is inevitable that one forms such conceptions; but people believe that this could be the same from all possible points of view. Before we descended to the earth, then also we saw the sun, but out of cosmic spaces, from the other side, as it were. The sun was not then a physical object but a gathering of spiritual Beings, and the most significant among these Beings for humanity before the Mystery of Golgotha was the Christ. Thus one may also make the following statement: when in the pre-Christian time people were initiated into what later was transformed into the Mystery of Golgotha, it became clear to them that human beings beheld the sun in the pre-earthly existence and became aware of the Christ; that, when man then descended to the earth, he saw the sun from the other side, but the Christ was concealed from him: only through mystery wisdom could he be guided to the Christ. This was experienced in the first period of Christian evolution as the nature of Christianity: that the great Sun Spirit now no longer remained the Sun Spirit, but had left through the Mystery of Golgotha those regions through which the human being can pass only outside the physical body, and had come into the earthly existence; that He was the only divine-spiritual Being who had ever entered upon earthly existence. We meet—although only by means of spiritual research—with persons even in the first period of Christian evolution who felt very deeply in their inner being that Christ, came out of the sphere of spirits who did not need to pass through birth and death, for whom birth and death are only a metamorphosis, had descended and passed through birth and death. This descent of Christ to the earth was the entire essential feeling experienced during the first period in Christian evolution. This descent was far more important for human beings of that time than what followed after the descent. The fact that Christ wished to be in a community with human beings, that He desired to share in the two most significant experiences—birth and death—this was felt in circles of the initiates as the genuine religious impulse. This was possible only because man still possessed some degree of inner, living thinking; because until the fourth Christian century thinking had not yet been entirely paralysed, had not become entirely abstract, because it still filled the human being as does breathing at the present time in a physical relation. For this reason it was felt that Christ had carried out the human destiny of the descent, which the other spiritual-divine beings had not done for the reason that being born and dying are not characteristic of the gods, but only of human beings. This is the magnificent element in the belief of initiates in the first Christian centuries: that they felt Christ had really become a human being, had really taken upon himself human destiny; that He is the only one of the divine-spiritual beings who had shared this destiny with man.

Now, however, it is necessary that the truth become clear to the human soul that this soul of man, in the degree that it belongs to the world of pre-earthly existence, cannot really die. For this reason has come about what we associate with the resurrection of Christ: the victory of Christ over death, symbolizing the victory of every human soul over death. And the ancient idea, I should like to say, of the state of being unborn has blended with the new idea of resurrection which had previously existed but not with the same intensity. Since the Event of Golgotha has come about, this became in a way the expression for what is most important of all in the earthly evolution of man.

While thinking was still living, man felt not the least fear of death; this was not for him an extraordinary occurrence. This is something of the utmost importance in the history of human evolution, that death was viewed by man as something entirely different, something obvious, whereas, as man suffered the loss more and more of the consciousness of a pre-earthly existence, abstract thinking, with the physical body as its instrumentality, brought about more and more fear of death and the belief that death is something final. Ancient humanity had little need for the idea of resurrection, but rather that of the descent to the earth in common with the Christ. As, however, human beings have advanced further and further into abstract thinking, they needed more and more a view out of the earthly existence, a view in the direction of immortality. This outlook is bestowed upon humanity through viewing in the right way the fact of Christ's resurrection. This fact I have set forth in books, lectures, and cycles of lectures many times over. Both facts—the descent of Christ to birth and death and the fact of His resurrection, the fact of victory over death—until the fourth Christian century, this could be clear to humanity in its feeling nature, since living thinking was then still in existence. After the fourth Post-Christian century, as abstract thinking developed further and further, humanity became less and less capable of connecting thoughts with the content of the Mystery of Golgotha. It has actually been the destiny of humanity in its evolution that, during the period in which man achieved through abstract thinking his own freedom, the understanding of Christ Jesus, which had existed during the earliest Christian centuries, had to disappear. That is, because of the fact that those writings designated as the Gnostic, a term which has become almost contemptuous, have been almost utterly eliminated except for a few residues with which very little can be accomplished. What had been thought by those persons in the first centuries who still possessed some knowledge of living thinking was destroyed. This we know only through writings of their opponents. Just imagine what the situation would be if, through some kind of accident, all anthroposophical books and other writings should disappear, and that the nature of anthroposophy would have to be adjudged only on the basis of writings by its opponents. Just so much is known today by people who depend upon external documents regarding Gnosis. That most extraordinary understanding of Christ by Gnosis, enclosed within itself, was lost to humanity. Most of all did that awareness completely disappear that the Christ had something to do with the sun, and that He had descended to the earth and passed on Golgotha through a destiny common with that of humanity. All of these relationships, especially the feelings associated with such things, were lost to humanity. More and more there came about the abstract interpretations, the abstract thoughts.

One of those who struggled out of the character of that period toward an understanding of Christianity is to be seen in Augustine. In this Augustine we see a spirit who could no longer understand the ancient form of the conception of nature. You know that Augustine is said to have been a Manichean. Augustine narrates this himself. But all that lies back of these things can no longer be rightly seen through by means of external thinking. What Augustine called Manicheanism, what is called at present the teaching of Mani, is only the degenerate outcome of an ancient teaching which conceived the Spirit only as creative and knew no difference between matter and spirit. No spirit was existent that did not create and what it created was seen by the human being as matter. Just as little conception did these ancient times have of mere matter; on the contrary, spirit existed in everything. This was something that Augustine could not understand. What Gnosis understood, and what was no longer understood later; what our own period does not at all understand,—this is true: no matter exists of itself; this was known by the Manicheans and they beheld the descent of Christ in the light of this view. Augustine could no longer make anything out of this; the time had passed, the possibility of making anything out of it, because the documents had been destroyed and the ancient clairvoyance had been blotted out. Thus Augustine, after long intense superhuman struggle arrived at the decision that he could not of himself attain to truth, but must adjust himself to what the Catholic church prescribed as truth: to submit himself to the authority of the Catholic church. And this mood—consider it at first as a mood—remained, contained alive especially for the reason that thinking became ever more abstract. In reality it was only slowly and gradually that thinking was disabled.

And the Scholastics in their greatness—they really are great—still lived within a trace of knowledge that thinking on the earth was derived from a super-earthly thinking, that man lived within a heavenly thinking. Within this evolution however the possibility was gradually more and more completely lost to conceive the Event of Golgotha as something alive. It is actually true that the advanced theology of the nineteenth century, because it desired to be scientific in the modern sense, lost the Christ; that theology was happy to have at last instead “the simple man of Nazareth”. Christ was now “the loftiest human being on earth.” Of the Christ indwelling within Jesus no conception could any longer be formed.

Thus the evolution since the fourth Post-Christian century has consisted of a gradual loss of the connection of man with the Christ in that living form as it was conceived by many persons during the first centuries of Christianity. Thus it came about, moreover, that the content of the gospels was less and less understood. You see, the human beings who lived during the first centuries of Christianity would have considered it utterly astonishing to speak of contradictions in the gospels. It is as if some one was familiar with the picture of a human being taken from the front and that a photograph was brought to him taken in profile, and if he should say: “This cannot be a picture of the same person”—thus would it have appeared to persons of the first Christian centuries if one had spoken to them of contradictions in the Gospels. They knew very well that the four Gospels simply present a picture taken from four different points of view. The human being of the present time would say that these are exceptional presentations, that they are from all different sides. In the spiritual world everything is far richer; in the spiritual world photographs would have to be taken from various sides as one has four Gospels. More and more arrived the time in which nothing was known any longer in the ancient sense of the Event of Golgotha. But this Event of Golgotha is of such a nature as can be conceived only from a spiritual point of view. It is indeed interesting that the historians generally slip around the Event of Golgotha. We have now the historian Ranke, considered a distinguished writer of history, who declares actually that one does not mention this, just omits it. If one omits from history the most important thing of all, no history can come into existence. Even if a person has no connection with the spiritual world and thus cannot understand the Mystery of Golgotha, he would still have to admit its tremendous influence. But history is written at the present time without mention of the enormous influence of the Mystery of Golgotha. The capacity has ever more and more disappeared to view the Mystery of Golgotha in the right manner.

We can view the matter, however, from entirely different points of view; we can say to ourselves: in the course of evolution humanity arrived at the necessity of having Christ in its midst. Gradually more and more human beings lost the consciousness of their belonging to the pre-earthly existence. This was no longer in their view; finally human beings knew only that they existed after their birth on the earth. Then the Christ came to them, in order to make manifest to them through His descent that there is a pre-earthly existence; in order to bestow upon them an understanding of what no longer lived within their own consciousness. Since human beings no longer possessed this relation in their own consciousness they were to achieve a new connection through their relation to Christ, who had passed through the Event of Golgotha. The Christ had, in a sense, bestowed Himself upon humanity in that period during which the epoch was gradually to arise for humanity to ascend to freedom. As thinking now became more and more abstract there was no longer any possibility to view in thinking the Mystery of Golgotha. But the content of the New Testament history was so enrapturing, so appealing to the human heart, that even by reason of the purely external traditions that which could no longer be grasped by thought still continued to exist for a certain time.

If we survey the first period during which Christianity was spreading out, we see that traditions existed which, in the final analysis, were derived from the Gospels, that the child-like heart took possession more and more of the picture of the Palestine events; but we see at the same time how a cognitional experience of the Mystery of Golgotha was being lost. In the same degree in which dead thinking came about, there was overshadowed also the child-like memory of the Palestine time; human beings lost their connection with Christ Jesus and people were happy when the connection with the human being Jesus could still be maintained. And now we are within our own present time; here, in reality—although it is not yet observed—the consciousness of the connection with Christ Jesus has already disappeared. In tradition human beings still hold fast to the doctrines and have no living inner connection with Christ Jesus. One need only observe how external the festivals of the year have become. How external the Easter festival has become for human beings of the present time, whereas this Easter festival was such for human beings of an earlier time that men experienced in deepest inwardness what can be called memory of the Mystery of Golgotha. Christ had given Himself to human beings in a time when humanity had to develop its consciousness of freedom. This had in a certain sense been developed. But this would become merely external if the relation with the Christ could not be found again. This cannot be found unless we begin to seek for a spiritual knowledge. Spiritual knowledge, as this is sought by anthroposophy, will find again the relation with the Christ. This relation can be found only spiritually. What occurred on Golgotha is not merely an event that has laid hold upon the physical, earthly history of humanity, but also a spiritual event. No one can understand the Event of Golgotha who does not understand it in the spirit. Anthroposophical spiritual science, therefore, is at the same time preparation for a new understanding of the Christ and of the Mystery of Golgotha. Indeed, when we consider this fact, we are reminded of the deeply significant Gospel statement: “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world”. And there certainly shines out from this expression that He was not there only when the Event of Golgotha occurred; that he remains with human beings as a spiritual being, who can be found in the spirit. We need not consider as spiritual, therefore, only what radiates out of the Gospels, but we know that Christ is with us, that when at present, provided with spiritual knowledge, we listen to what is manifest concerning Him out of the spiritual world, this is a manifestation of Christ. This is the manifestation of Christ just as much as what we gain when we look into the Gospels.

“I have many things still to say unto you but you could not bear them now”,—this is a reference to the time when Christ is again to be seen. And now this time approaches; it is already here. Humanity would lose the Christ if it were not possible again in a new way, in spiritual knowledge, to gain the Christ. In this way must much more become understandable to us which in an earlier time was connected with the Mystery of Golgotha, but has been lost because the spiritual understanding of it has been lost. How people struggle with the present intellectualism with the statement said to have been spoken by Christ that the Kingdom of God had come down to the earth, that an entirely new life was to begin. It is so immensely clever to say at the present time that everything on the earth has remained, after all, such as it was before. This is obviously clever, but the other question must be put in the spirit of this statement of Christ: is one really speaking in a truly Christian, spiritual understanding in supposing that any kind of external spiritual kingdom was to be set up? An external spiritual kingdom would be, of course, physical. This contradiction, you see, is not observed. But it is extremely conspicuous that people have become extraordinarily clever at the present time and still this cleverness cannot be justified even in its own realm.

I should like to call your attention to something very interesting, even though this really separates us from our actual theme. The Vienna geologist, Eduard Suess, a distinguished research scientist, says in his book The Countenance of the Earth that this countenance of the earth must have been entirely different, stones much more living than at present, that man is walking at the present time really upon a dead earth. The clods over which we walk belong to a dying world. Geology assumes that the earth was once far more living and has gradually passed over into the dead state. Suess says in regard to an entirely different area what Christ said concerning the spiritual life of the earth. If only this were true, that the earth will fall to pieces in a far distant future time when it will be reduced to dust in the cosmos, if what occurs to the human being did not occur to the earth—that the body becomes dust, but the spirit lives further—then all of us would be included in this turning into dust. With this earth we are beholding what leads over into the Jupiter existence; we look already toward a new earth.

With regard to the physical, this view of the turning of the earth into dust is true; with regard to the spirit-soul something different is valid. For the ancient initiates of the time of the Mystery of Golgotha it was quite clear that with the ancient civilization, the ancient mysteries, things had come to an end. The manner in which the ancient human beings had lived with their gods had come to an end; the manner in which they had lived with manifestations of nature had come to an end. But the gods bestow upon human beings the possibility of approaching a future in the spirit. What was acquired in ancient times as knowledge out of the earth belongs to the path; a new time must arrive in which the human being must bring about a kingdom by means of his own will, in which man shall give life again to a dead thinking by means of his own forces. This was a prophecy at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. This kingdom came about also in an external way, it is to be understood, to be accepted, only by human beings of the present time. At the present time we must feel that the Kingdom of Heaven of which Christ speaks must by seen by us upon the earth as the Christ works upon the earth. This must be the fulfilment upon the earth, and the fulfilment of this Kingdom of Heaven must be earnestly conceived precisely in our present time. We experience in all areas that the human being is beginning to confront the peril of being cut off from the spiritual world and from his own being if he does not find access to the spiritual world.

This week something will be given in the communications addressed to members in these columns, which may serve to bring us to a further understanding of the weekly ‘Leading Thoughts’.

The understanding of anthroposophical truth can be furthered if the relation which exists between man and the world is constantly brought before the human soul.

When man turns his attention to the world into which he is born and out of which he dies, he is surrounded in the first place by the fullness of his sense-impressions. He forms thoughts about these sense-impressions.

In bringing the following to his consciousness: ‘I am forming thoughts about what my senses reveal to me as the world’, he has already come to the point where he can contemplate himself. He can say to himself: In my thoughts ‘I’ live. The world gives me the opportunity of experiencing myself in thought. I find myself in the thoughts in which I contemplate the world.

And continuing to reflect in this way, he ceases to be conscious of the world; he becomes conscious of the ‘I’. He ceases to have the world before him; he begins to experience the self.

If the experience be reversed, and the attention directed to the inner life in which the world is mirrored, then those events emerge into consciousness which belong to our life's destiny, and in which our human self has flowed along from the point of time to which our memory goes back. In following up the events of his destiny, a man experiences his own existence.

In bringing this to his consciousness: ‘I with my own self have experienced something that destiny brought to me’, a man has already come to the point where he will contemplate the world. He can say to himself: I was not alone in my fate; the world played a part in my experience. I willed this or that; the world streamed into my will. I find the world in my will when I experience this will in self-contemplation.

Continuing thus to enter into his own being, man ceases to be conscious of the self, he becomes conscious of the world; he ceases to experience himself, he becomes feelingly aware of the world.

I send my thoughts out into the world, there I find myself; I sink into myself, there I find the world. If a man experiences this strongly enough, he is confronted with the great riddles of the World and Man.

For to have the feeling: I have taken endless pains to understand the world through thinking, and after all there is but myself in this thinking—this gives rise to the first great riddle. And to feel that one's own self is formed through destiny, yet to perceive in this process the onward flow of world-happenings—this presents the second riddle.

In the experience of this problem of Man and the World germinates the frame of mind in which man can so confront Anthroposophy that he receives from it in his inner being an impression which rouses his attention.

For Anthroposophy asserts that there is a spiritual experience which does not lose the world when thinking. One can also live in thought. Anthroposophy tells of an inward experience in which one does not lose the sense-world when thinking, but gains the Spirit-world. Instead of penetrating into the ego in which the sense-world is felt to disappear, one penetrates into the Spirit-world in which the ego feels established.

Anthroposophy shows, further, that there is an experience of destiny in which one does not lose the self. In fate, too, one can still feel oneself to be active. Anthroposophy points out, in the impartial, unegoistic observation of human destiny, an experience in which one learns to love the world and not only one's own existence. Instead of staring into the world which carries the ego on the waves of fortune and misfortune, one finds the ego which shapes its own fate voluntarily. Instead of striking against the world, on which the ego is dashed to pieces, one penetrates into the self, which feels itself united with the course of events in the world.

Man's destiny comes to him from the world that is revealed to him by his senses. If then he finds his own activity in the working of his destiny, his real self rises up before him not only out of his inner being but out of the sense-world too.

If a person is able to feel, however faintly, how the spiritual part of the world appears in the self, and how the self proves to be working in the outer world of sense, he has already learned to understand Anthroposophy correctly. For he will then realise that in Anthroposophy it is possible to describe the Spirit-world which the self can comprehend. And this will enable him to understand that in the sense-world the self can also be found—in a different way than by diving within. Anthroposophy finds the self by showing how the sense-world reveals to man not only sense-perceptions but also the after-effects of his life before birth and his former earthly lives.

Man can now gaze on the world perceptible to his senses and say: It contains not only colour, sound, warmth; in it are active the experiences passed through by souls before their present earthly life. And he can look into himself and say: I find there not only my ego but, in addition, a spiritual world is revealed.

In an understanding of this kind, a person who really feels—who is not unmoved by—the great riddles of Man and the World, can meet on a common ground with the Initiate who in accordance with his insight is obliged to speak of the outer world of the senses as manifesting not only sensible perceptions but also the impressions of what human souls have done in their life before birth and in past earthly lives, and who has to say of the world of the inner self that it reveals spiritual events which produce impressions and are as effective as the perceptions of the sense-world.

The would-be active members should consciously make themselves mediators between what the questioning human soul feels as the problems of Man and the Universe, and what the knowledge of the Initiates has to recount, when it draws forth a past world out of the destiny of human beings, and when by strengthening the soul it opens up the perception of a spiritual world.

In this way, through the work of the would-be active members, the Anthroposophical Society may become a true preparatory school for the school of Initiates. It was the intention of the Christmas Assembly to indicate this very forcibly; and one who truly understands what that Assembly meant will continue to point this out until the sufficient understanding of it can bring the Society fresh tasks and possibilities again.

[ 1 ] This week something will be given in the communications addressed to members in these columns, which may serve to bring us to a further understanding of the weekly ‘Leading Thoughts.’

[ 2 ] The understanding of anthroposophical truth can be furthered if the relation which exists between man and the world is constantly brought before the human soul.

[ 3 ] When man turns his attention to the world into which he is born and out of which he dies, he is surrounded in the first place by the fullness of his sense-impressions. He forms thoughts about these sense-impressions.

[ 4] In bringing the following to his consciousness: ‘I am forming thoughts about what my senses reveal to me as the world,’ he has already come to the point where he can contemplate himself. He can say to himself: In my thoughts ‘I’ live. The world gives me the opportunity of experiencing myself in thoughts. I find myself in my thoughts when I contemplate the world.

[ 5 ] And continuing to reflect in this way, he ceases to be conscious of the world; he becomes conscious of the ‘I’. He ceases to have the world before him; he begins to experience the self.

[ 6 ] If the experience be reversed, and the attention directed to the inner life in which the world is mirrored, then those events emerge into consciousness which belong to our life's destiny, and in which our human self has flowed along from the point of time to which our memory goes back. In following up the events of his destiny, a man experiences his own existence.

[ 7 ] In bringing this to his consciousness: ‘I with my own self have experienced something that destiny brought to me,’ a man has already come to the point where he will contemplate the world. He can say to himself: I was not alone in my fate; the world played a part in my experience. I willed this or that; the world streamed into my will. I find the world in my will when I experience this will in self-contemplation.

[ 8 ] Continuing thus to enter into his own being, man ceases to be conscious of the self, he becomes conscious of the world; he ceases to experience himself, he becomes feelingly aware of the world.

[ 9 ] ‘I send my thoughts out into the World, there I find myself; I sink into myself, there I find the World.’ If a man experiences this strongly enough he is confronted with the great riddles of the World and Man.

[ 10 ] For to have the feeling: I have taken endless pains to understand the world through thinking, and after all there is but myself in this thinking—this gives rise to the first great riddle.

[ 11 ] And to feel that one's own self is formed through destiny, yet to perceive in this process the onward flow of world-happenings—this presents the second riddle.

[ 12 ] In the experience of this problem of Man and the World germinates the frame of mind in which man can so confront Anthroposophy that he receives from it in his inner being an impression which rouses his attention.

[ 13 ] For Anthroposophy asserts that there is a spiritual experience which does not lose the world when thinking. One can also live in thought. Anthroposophy tells of an inward experience in which one does not lose the sense-world when thinking, but gains the Spirit-world. Instead of penetrating into the ego in which the sense-world is felt to disappear, one penetrates into the Spirit-world in which the ego feels established.

[ 14 ] Anthroposophy shows, further, that there is an experience of destiny in which one does not lose the self. In fate, too, one can still feel oneself to be active. Anthroposophy points out, in the impartial, unegoistic observation of human destiny, an experience in which one learns to love the world and not only one's own existence. Instead of staring into the world which carries the ego on the waves of fortune and misfortune, one finds the ego which shapes its own fate voluntarily. Instead of striking against the world on which the ego is dashed to pieces, one penetrates into the self, which feels itself united with the course of events in the world.

[ 15 ] Man's destiny comes to him from the world that is revealed to him by his senses. If then he finds his own activity in the working of his destiny, his real self rises up before him not only out of his inner being but out of the sense-world too.

[ 16 ] If a person is able to feel, however faintly, how the spiritual part of the world appears in the self, and how the self proves to be working in the outer world of sense, he has already learned to understand Anthroposophy correctly.

[ 17 ] For he will then realise that in Anthroposophy it is possible to describe the Spirit-world which the self can comprehend. And this will enable him to understand that in the sense-world the self can also be found—in a different way than by diving within. Anthroposophy finds the self by showing how the sense-world reveals to man not only sense-perceptions but also the after-effects of his life before birth and his former earthly lives.

[ 18 ] Man can now gaze on the world perceptible to his senses and say: It contains not only colour, sound, warmth; in it are active the experiences passed through by souls before their present earthly life. And he can look into himself and say: I find there not only my ego but, in addition, a spiritual world is revealed.

[ 19 ] In an understanding of this kind, a person who really feels—who is not unmoved by—the great riddles of Man and the World, can meet on a common ground with the Initiate who in accordance with his insight is obliged to speak of the outer world of the senses as manifesting not only sense-perceptions but also the impressions of what human souls have done in their life before birth and in past earthly lives, and who has to say of the world of the inner self that it reveals spiritual events which produce impressions and are as effective as the perceptions of the sense-world.

[ 20 ] The would-be active members should consciously make themselves mediators between what the questioning human soul feels as the problems of Man and the Universe, and what the knowledge of the Initiates has to recount, when it draws forth a past world out of the destiny of human beings, and when by strengthening the soul it opens up the perception of a spiritual world.

[ 21 ] In this way, through the work of the would-be active members, the Anthroposophical Society may become a true preparatory school for the school of Initiates. It was the intention of the Christmas Meeting to indicate this very forcibly; and one who truly understands what that Meeting meant will continue to point this out until sufficient understanding of it can bring the Society fresh tasks and possibilities again.

[ 22] May the Leading Thoughts to be given in this number proceed, therefore, out of this spirit.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 23 ] 62. In our sense-perceptions, the world of the senses bears on to the surface only a portion of the being that lies concealed in the depths of its waves beneath. Penetrative spiritual observation reveals within these depths the after-effects of what was done by souls of men in ages long gone by.

[ 24 ] 63. To ordinary self-observation the inner world of man reveals only a portion of that, in the midst of which it stands. Intensified experience in consciousness shows it to be contained within a living spiritual Reality.

[ 25] 64. The destiny of man reveals the workings, not only of an external world, but of the man's own Self.

[ 26 ] 65. The experiences of the human soul reveal not only a Self but a world of the Spirit, which the Self can know by deeper spiritual knowledge as a world united with its own being.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 27 ] 66. The Beings of the Third Hierarchy reveal themselves in the life which is unfolded as a spiritual background in human Thinking. In the human activity of thought this life is concealed. If it worked on in its own essence in human thought, man could not attain to Freedom. Where cosmic Thought activity ceases, human Thought-activity begins.

[ 28 ] 67. The Beings of the Second Hierarchy manifest themselves in a world-of-soul beyond humanity—a world of cosmic soul-activities, hidden from human Feeling. This cosmic world-of-soul is ever creative in the background of human Feeling. Out of the being of man it first creates the organism of Feeling; only then can it bring Feeling itself to life therein.

[ 29 ] 68. The Beings of the First Hierarchy manifest themselves in spiritual creation beyond humanity—a cosmic world of spiritual Being which indwells the human Willing. This world of cosmic Spirit experiences itself in creative action when man wills. It first creates the connection of man's being with the Universe beyond humanity; only then does man himself become, through his organism of Will, a freely willing being.

In the middle one of these three lectures there are a number of anthroposophical truths in particular that I would like to develop for you. We shall then see what a great impact on a person's everyday life these particular truths have, and that is what we will talk about tomorrow. Today I just want to draw you attention to some deeper aspects of the being of man.

People very often do not ask the question as to which of man's forces are used to acquire knowledge of supersensible worlds. They try to answer this question merely by saying that there is a possibility of acquiring supersensible knowledge by means of certain forces in man. But what the actual connections are between these forces and man's being, they do not usually ask. That is why so little importance is attached to making knowledge of supersensible worlds really fruitful in ordinary life. It can be said that supersensible knowledge is becoming more and more essential to man, just in our time. In that case it is vital to understand what its connection is with ordinary everyday life.

As you know, the first of the capacities that leads man into supersensible realms is the force of Imagination, the second capacity is the force of Inspiration and the third capacity the force of Intuition. The question now is whether these capacities need concern us at all except in their connection with knowledge of supersensible worlds or whether these capacities have any part to play in the rest of man's life?—You will see that the latter is the case. As my little book Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy tells you, we can see human life running its course in three stages: from birth to the change of teeth, from the change of teeth to puberty, and from puberty till about the twenty-first year. If you do not regard man purely superficially you will be struck by the fact that the nature of man's development is entirely different in the three different seven-year stages. The pushing through of our permanent teeth, as I have often mentioned, is connected with the development of forces that are not merely confined, let us say, to our jaws or their neighbouring organs, but fill our whole physical body. There is work in progress within our physical body between birth and the seventh year, and this work comes to an end with the pushing through of our permanent teeth.

It is obvious that the forces doing this work of developing the physical body are supersensible, isn't it? The perceptible body is only the material in which they work. These supersensible forces, active in the whole of man's organisation during the first seven years of his life, become, as it were, suspended when their purpose has been achieved and the permanent teeth have appeared. At the age of seven these forces go to sleep. They are hidden within the being of man; they go to sleep within him. And they can be drawn forth from your being when you do the sort of exercises I describe in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds as leading to Intuition. For the forces that are applied in the acquisition of intuitive knowledge are the same forces that you grow with at the time of life when this growth culminates in the change of teeth. These sleeping forces that are active within the human body until the seventh year are the forces you use in supersensible knowledge to reach Intuition.

Now the forces that are active from the seventh year to the fourteenth year and go to sleep at puberty in the depths of the body, are drawn forth and form the power of Inspiration. And the forces that in bygone times used to be the source of youthful ideals between the fourteenth and the twenty-first year—it would be too much of an assertion to say that this still happens today—the forces that create organs in the physical body for these ideals of youth, are the same forces you can draw forth from their state of slumber and use for the acquisition of Imagination.

From this you will see that the forces of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition are not just any old forces got from we do not know where, but are the same forces as those we grow with from our birth to the age of twenty-one. So the forces that live in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition are very healthy forces. They are the forces a human being uses for his healthy growth and that go to sleep within his body when the corresponding phases of growth are completed.

I have just shown you the connections between the forces of supersensible knowledge and man's everyday existence. Something similar, though, can be said about the forces of man's normal nature, man's nature as it appears in ordinary life. Only there it is not so obvious. A very important force in ordinary life—and we have discussed it many times—is the force of memory. The power of memory is active within us when, as we say, we remember something we have experienced. But, as you all know, there is something peculiar about the power of memory. We have got it and yet we haven't got it. Many a person struggles at some moment of his life to try and remember something that he cannot remember. This wanting to remember but not being able to remember entirely, arises through the fact that the force we use in our souls to remember with is the same force that transforms the food we eat into the kind of substances our body can make use of. If you eat a piece of bread and this bread is transformed inside your body into the sort of substance that serves life, this is apparently a physical process. This physical process, however, is governed by supersensible forces. These supersensible forces are the same forces you use when you remember. So the same kind of forces are being used on the one hand for memory and on the other hand for the assimilation of foodstuffs in the human body. And you actually always have to oscillate a bit between your soul and your body if you want to dwell in memory. If your body is carrying out the process of digesting too well, you may find you will not be able to draw enough forces away from it to remember certain things. There is an inner struggle going on the whole time in the unconscious between a soul process and a bodily process every time you want to remember something. Looking at memory is the best way to understand how absurd it is basically, from a higher point of view, for some people to be idealists and other people materialists. The assimilation of foodstuffs in the human body is doubtless a material process. The forces controlling it are the same as the forces at work in a process of ideas, namely the force of memory. You only see the world aright if you see it as being neither materialistic nor idealistic, but are capable of following up the ideal aspect of what is presented in a material way and following up the material aspect of what is presented as idea. The spiritual quality of a world conception is hot being able to say 'Over there is base materialism, which is for the 'dregs' of humanity, and over here is idealism, which is for the elect—and the speaker usually includes himself among these—but the essential quality of a really spiritual world conception lies in its capacity to take what it has grasped in the spirit and bring it down into material existence so that material existence can be understood and not despised. That is the fallacy of many religious denominations, that they despise material existence instead of understanding it and looking for the spirit within it.

The crux of the matter is really to go into these things, and not, as is still largely the case, to deal in empty phrases where mysticism is concerned. After having as it were shown you how these things can really be gone into, I would now like to bring something of very great importance. When people speak of material existence and supersensible existence they usually speak of them as though material existence were spread out in the world and as though supersensible, non-perceptible existence were somewhere behind or above this. If you imagine you simply have physical-perceptible existence on the one hand and supersensible existence on the other, you will never understand man. There is no way of really grasping man if you look at things from the point of view of the perceptible world versus the supersensible world. In reality it is like this: The world of the senses and the world in which we work and live socially are spread out around us. Let us represent diagrammatically by means of this line this world that is spread out around us (see horizontal line of drawing). You will only have a complete picture of what is actually there in the world if you imagine that there are forces above this line, supersensible forces (red side). We neither perceive these supersensible forces by means of our ordinary senses nor by means of our intellect bound to our ordinary senses. We perceive only what is in the realm of this line.

But there are forces under this line as well. If we actually want to include the whole of the imperceptible or spiritual realm we must speak of subsensible as well as supersensible forces. So we must imagine that there are also subsensible forces here (orange side).

Thus we have the sense world, supersensible forces and subsensible forces. Where does man himself, as an ordinary person, belong? The part of him you see standing in front of you belongs entirely to this line. But supersensible forces from one side and subsensible forces from the other side work into the part of man that belongs to the line. Man is the result of supersensible and subsensible forces. Now which of man's forces are supersensible and which are subsensible? All the forces connected with understanding are supersensible, that is, everything we make use of for understanding. And these are the same forces that also form our head. So we can say that the supersensible forces are the forces of understanding.

Now subsensible forces also work into man. What kind of forces are these? These are will forces. All the will forces, everything in man that is of the nature of will, is subsensible.

An obvious question is where do these subsensible forces, these will forces, come from? They are the same forces as the forces of the planets, that is, from our point of view, the forces of the earth. Yes indeed, the forces of the earth are perpetually working into man. And it is our forces of will that are connected with these forces of the planets, these forces of the earth. The forces of understanding come to us from the world's periphery, and pour into us as it were from outside, from the outside of the planet. The forces of will enter into us from the planet itself. This is how the forces of our own planet earth live within us. The moment we enter birth the forces of planet earth are active within us.

The question now arises as to how this activity is distributed. There is a considerable difference in this respect in the first, second and third stage of life, that is, up till the seventh year, the fourteenth year and the twenty-first year. The will working in us up till the seventh year works entirely from out of the planet's interior. It is very interesting to see spiritual-scientifically that in everything working in the child up till the age of seven it is the forces of the earth's depths that are active. If you want to see an actual manifestation of the forces of the earth's interior, then make a study of everything going on in the child up till the age of seven, for these are the forces from within the earth. To delve down into the earth to find the forces of the earth's interior would be absolutely wrong. You would only find earth substances. The forces that are active in the earth come to manifestation in the work they do in the human being up till his seventh year. And from the seventh to the fourteenth year it is the forces of the encircling air that work in man, forces that still belong to the earth, to the earth's atmosphere. These are predominantly at work in everything developing in the human being between seven and fourteen. Then comes the most important stage of all, from fourteen to twenty-one. At this stage the subsensible passes over into the supersensible. Here a kind of balance is created between the subsensible and supersensible. Now the forces of the earth's whole solar system work at organising the human being.

So we have the earth's interior in the first period of life; encircling air in the second period of life, that is, what the earth itself is embedded in. The forces streaming down from cosmic spaces in so far as these cosmic spaces are filled with our own actual planetary system, up till the twenty-first year. Not until the age of twenty-one does man tear himself away, as it were, from the influences brought about in him from outside by the planets and the planetary system belonging to these.

Please notice that in everything I have referred to as having an influence on man, bodily influences are of course included. They are bodily processes that the forces from the planet's interior bring about up till the seventh year. They are bodily processes that are formed by the circulating air in connection with the breathing and so on between the seventh and the fourteenth year. There is no doubt that they are bodily processes, in fact actual transformations of bodily organs are brought about; everything being connected with man's growing and becoming larger. Thus man grows beyond all this work being done on him by the earth; all this ceases at twenty-one.

What happens then, however? What happens after twenty-one? Up till twenty-one we draw on what comes from the earth and its planetary system in the way we have described. We build up our constitution with the earth's help. Then, after we have reached the age of twenty-one, we have to draw on ourselves. We gradually have to release what we have put into our organism from out of the forces of the planet and the planetary system.

Activities going on in the blood forces always used to ensure that this happened in the past. As you will probably know, man has not learnt to release the planetary forces, himself, after the age of twenty-one. And yet he has been doing so. He did it as an unconscious process. The capacity was in his blood. It was built into him to do it. The important change in our present time—and the present extends over a long period of several centuries, of course—is that man's blood is losing the capacity to release what we have put into the organism in this way, before twenty-one

The important changes taking place in humanity at the present time are based on the waning of the forces in the blood. These things cannot be testified by external anatomy and physiology; to do that they would need to investigate bodies from the tenth or ninth centuries in order to discover that blood was different then. And they would not even have had the chemical tests to do it. But through spiritual science we can know with certainty that man's blood has grown weaker. And the great turning-point when human blood began to grow weak lay in the middle of the fifteenth century.

What are the consequences? The consequences of this are that what we cannot carry out unconsciously any more by means of our blood, we have to carry out consciously. We have to educate ourselves to do consciously what was simply done unconsciously by man's blood in the past. For the strength in our blood is in the process of fading away. What would happen if a time were to come when human beings completely lost hold of their youth, and were unable to draw on their youthful forces, if there were no means of resorting to doing consciously what was once done unconsciously by the blood?

You must not take these things in a purely theoretical way, of course. As theories, they may be interesting, but to take them as theories is not enough. Nowadays they have to be put into practice, for they are connected with the practical matter of the evolution of mankind. They must be put into practice to the point of making us conscious that man's whole educational system has to change. We have to help man to develop a strong, conscious capacity to re-experience later in life, as though with the force of elemental memory, what he has received in his youth.

Everywhere, people are still working contrary to this requirement. For instance they are proud of the visual aids used in primary school education, and they attach great importance to getting down to the mental level of the child as far as possible, and not teaching him anything that extends beyond his mental capacity. They actually rig up calculating machines so that they can teach the children to do all kinds of sums by counting balls. Nothing must go beyond the child's mental capacity. These visual aid lessons get frightfully trivial and trite. It is bound to lead to nothing but commonplace concepts if they avoid giving the child anything beyond its own mental capacity. People who do this, thoroughly overlook an important yet subtle observation of human life.

Supposing a child is taught in such a way that he takes a particular thing in, not because it is absolutely on his own mental level, but because his teacher's warmth of enthusiasm gets passed on to him, and the child takes the thing in because the teacher in his enthusiasm tells him about it. The child takes it in just because it lives in the warmth emanating from the teacher. If the child absorbs something that reaches beyond his understanding, purely because of the infectious quality of his teacher's enthusiasm, he will not yet understand what he has taken in, as people say in superficial life. Yet what he has taken in lives in his soul. At the age of thirty the grown-up will remember what the child took in, perhaps at the age of ten. He re-experiences it. He has become mature now, and he can understand what he is able to release from the depths of his soul; he can understand the thing he was taught purely through the force of enthusiasm, and which he is now able to release from his mature mind. You know, these are the most valuable moments in life, when your mental life does not have to be restricted to what comes to meet you from outside, but you re-experience what you took in in your younger days with inadequate understanding, and which you can now release and absorb with your more mature mind. The more care you take that the child does not just get the sort of lessons where it matter-of-factly takes in what it understands—for that will disappear with the passing years, and neither joy nor enthusiasm will come from it later—the more you will be doing for the person's later development; for lessons taken in purely through the teacher's warmth are life giving when they are re-experienced.

Nowadays this is of particular importance in teaching- In earlier times it was not so important, for in those days the releasing was carried out by the blood, whereas now it has to be brought to consciousness. It certainly makes a difference if you understand the kind of things that are being put to practical use by spiritual science. Because if you understand them in the right way you will find an opportunity somewhere in life of making practical use of them for the good of humanity. In this case, if you understand it properly, you will find an opportunity to make use of the fact that our blood is becoming weak, by attaching all the more importance to the teacher's capacity for enthusiasm.

But people are so little aware nowadays of what is at stake. For standardised education still plays a great part, that is, the kind of education that works with a whole set of standard rules. Education is learnt, how to teach a child is learnt, how to arrange the lesson is learnt. Comparing this with our present day consciousness it would be like learning that man consists of carbohydrates, protein and so on—these are our constituents and they undergo such and such changes inside our body, and we cannot eat before we have understood this; for we do not eat in a physiological sense until we understand it.—I told you once, and you may even have experienced this yourselves—, that you can already come across a thing like this:—You visit someone who has a scale standing beside his plate, and he carefully puts a piece of meat on the scales to find out how much it weighs, for he may only eat a piece of meat of a quite specific weight. Physiology already determines his appetite. But not everybody does it this way yet, thank goodness! It is important to understand that physiology is not part of the eating process but covers other aspects, and that a person can eat without having studied physiology, the physiology of the nutritional process. But we do not take it for granted that we also ought to teach, that is, teach in a living way, without having absorbed standardised education. This standardised education is exactly the same thing to a good teacher as the aesthetics of colour is to an artist. He can have studied aesthetics of colour very well, but he will not be able to paint because of that. The ability to paint comes from an entirely different quarter from the study of the aesthetics of colour. The ability to teach comes from an entirely different quarter from the study of education. The important thing, today, is not to give would-be teachers a seminar of some sort of standardised education that prescribes dogmas, but to give them the sort of thing that makes them become teachers and educators in the same way as people become artists or botanists. It is that the educator has to be born in a person and not that education has to be learnt.

What has to be understood just because of this very change in man's set-up is that education has to be a real art. In the time of transition people were at sixes and sevens as to what to do about education. That is why they invented so many abstract educational systems. The essential thing today, however, is to give people a real knowledge of man, especially if they are teachers. You see, if you possess this real knowledge of man and work out of it with children, a remarkable thing will happen: Let us suppose you are a teacher and have your pupils in front of you. If you are a student of standardised education, the kind that follows the rules, then you will know exactly how you have to teach, because you will have learnt the rules. You will teach according to these rules, today, just as you taught according to these rules yesterday and will teach according to them tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. But if you are the artist kind of teacher you are not nearly so well off. For now you cannot teach yesterday, today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow according to the same rules, but have to learn from the child afresh each time, how he has to be taught; it must be man's own nature every time that determines what you do. And it is ideal if the teacher can teach the way the child tells him to teach, and can keep on forgetting actual education and has not got a clue about the rules. For the moment the child stands in front of him again he will again be electrified by the growing child and will know what he has to do with him.

You must pay attention to the way things have to be said, to the way things have to be spoken about today. You cannot speak about these things today in such a way that they can be put into so and so many satisfying principles, but you can only speak about them by pointing to something alive, something that cannot be reduced to abstract principles but which is alive and produces ever more life. That is the crux of the matter. That is why spiritual science is needed in actual life today, because spiritual science is not merely for the head but is for the whole of man and releases will impulses. Indeed it ought to enter into many realms of life, so that impulses of will are eventually brought into every sphere of human activity.

I have demonstrated this in one particular realm of life, namely education, and shown how the education of children under the age of twenty-one can be made to bear fruit for later life. People do not receive an education only up to the age of twenty-one, though, for education carries on throughout the whole of life. But this only happens in a healthy way if people learn from one another.

This too was done by the blood in earlier ages of history. When people met in social life they used to learn things from one another unconsciously, some people learning more and others less, according to the way their blood worked. But our blood has grown weak and has lost its power. This activity, too, has to be replaced by more consciousness. People must achieve the art of acquiring relatively more for themselves from other people compared with what they produce from out of themselves. In earlier times it was sufficient to rely on life. The blood did everything. Now it is essential for people really to develop a sense for the other person's being. This will come about as a matter of course if people steer their thoughts in the direction of spiritual science. Different kinds of thoughts are stimulated with spiritual science than without it.

You will not doubt this fact, for the way spiritual science is received by people who do not want to know anything about their thoughts shows that spiritual scientific thoughts are different from thoughts without spiritual science. It is necessary to develop a totally new way of thinking. The kind of thinking we develop when we accustom ourselves to working with supersensible thoughts is the kind of thinking that has an effect on our organism. And when I told you today that memory is the same force that transforms food into substances man needs for his organism you will no longer be astonished to find that other forces can be transformed in man, like for instance the force with which we understand supersensible things being the same one that helps us to know the human being better than we would know him if we had no healthy longing for supersensible knowledge.

You people study what is in my Occult Science, and to do that you have to develop certain concepts that most people would still call 'Utter madness'. A few days ago I got yet another letter from someone studying Occult Science, and he says that nearly every chapter is pure nonsense. You can understand people saying it is pure nonsense. Why, it is quite obvious that they often say it these days. Yet these people who do not put themselves out to accept the kind of concepts that lead to Saturn, Sun, Moon, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan, and do not get down to developing ideas about a world that is not limited to the senses will also not acquire any knowledge of man. They do not see the human being in the other person but notice at the most that one person has a more pointed nose than the other, and one has blue eyes whereas the other has brown. But they notice nothing of man's inner being that manifests as his soul and organises his body. The same force which enables us to take an interest, and I am not saying now that it enables us to have supersensible occult powers, but the same force that enables us to take an interest in supersensible knowledge also gives us the kind of knowledge of man that we need today.

You can set up the most grandiose social programmes and develop the finest social ideas, but if people shy away from acquiring any knowledge of man and do not see any real humanity in one another, they will never be able to bring about social conditions. They cannot produce social conditions unless they establish the possibility that people can be social. But people cannot be social if they do not see the human quality in one another, but live entirely within themselves. Human beings can only become social if they really meet one another in life, and something passes between them. This is the root of the social problem. Most people say of the social question nowadays, that if certain things were arranged in such and such a way people would be able to lead a social existence.—But it is not like that. If things are arranged like that, social people will be good people in a social sense, and anti-social people will be anti-social with any sort of arrangement.

The essential thing is to make the sort of arrangements that allow for human beings to develop really social impulses. And one of these social impulses is knowledge. But as long as you go on educating people, for instance, with an eye to their becoming clerks or army officers or some other kind of civil servant, you will not educate them to recognise the human quality in others. For the sort of education that is good for becoming a clerk or an officer only helps you to see clerks and officers in other people. The kind of education that makes human beings of people also enables them to recognise people as human beings. But it is impossible to recognise people as human beings if you do not develop a sense for supersensible knowledge. And the realm in which supersensible knowledge is most indispensable is in the art of education. Therefore the natural scientific, materialistic way of thinking has done more damage in the field of education than anywhere else. And here you can experience the most amazing things.

In every department you find well-meaning people today, who want to reform everything, even revolutionise them. But if you talk to these people about these things, something very strange transpires. They will admit quite honestly to a particular conviction about reforming things. Yet one of them who happens to be a tailor will ask you how his existence as a tailor is going to be affected when things change. And another person, who is, let us say, a railway clerk, asks you how his life as a railway clerk is going to suffer when things are changed.—These are only given as examples to show you that people are perfectly in agreement that everything should be changed as long as nothing changes and everything remains exactly the same. The vast majority of people today are convinced that everything must stay exactly the same when it changes. Make no mistake about the fact that the sort of social improvement people long for today is of extremely abstract dimensions. People long for a great deal, but nothing must change where their comfort is concerned.

And this is particularly true where it is a of people taking an inner step into an entirely new situation. Nevertheless the essential thing is that people open themseIves to the possibility of making the transition to thinking in quite a new way about man changing himself in his innermost being.

All sorts of questions arise from these considerations, questions that are absolutely pertinent to life. What we must realise is that we have constructed a deeper foundation for these questions, by saying that although certain forces appear to be of a spiritual-soul nature, they also come to expression in our bodily nature. For the capacity is terribly lacking today, to bring down to a material level what we think of on a spiritual level. Not until we are capable of bringing down on to a material level what we think of as being spiritual shall we be able to grasp the actual nerve of the social question.

Thus it is virtually a matter of aiming towards a way of thinking that really develops a knowledge of man that is at one and the same time a social impulse. A way of thinking based on anything else is not adequate. A mentality based on the life of the state or the life of economics creates clerks and officers. But the sort of mentality we need creates human beings. This can only be the sort of thought life that breaks away from the sphere of economics and the life of the state. That is why our Threefold Social Organism had to happen. We had to show in a radical way that any kind of dependency of thought life on economics or on the life of the state had to stop, and thought life had to be set up on its own basis. Then thought life will be able to give economics and the life of the state what economics and the state cannot give to the life of thought.

That is the important thing, that is what is vital! Whole human beings will only arise again when we work out of an independent life of thought.