The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the scene in which he is the gravedigger's assistant, the poet has the Danish prince Hamlet speak about the value of the dead Caesar in view of a great and significant historical figure. The poet's Hamlet is disturbed and brooding:

The great Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole, well enough, from the harsh north.
Oh, that the earth, to which the world has trembled,
Might bar the wind and weather with a wall.

It is not surprising that these ideas should occur to Hamlet in memory of the great Caesar, when in his gloomy mind the thought could be conceived that of all the body, the human being, of all that exercised the power of the will, nothing remain of the body, of the human being, of all that exercised the power of will, nothing but a heap of external matter, which, broken down into its atoms and dissolved, could be used to “glue a wall” here or there; but this same train of thought is quite indicative of the prevailing mood of our time. There is an excellent manual by Huxley about physiology, in the sense of our current scientific understanding, which has also been translated into German. Right on one of the first pages, you will find a reference to the words of Hamlet that have just been spoken to you, but said in all seriousness at the end of the “First Lecture”:

It is impossible to follow with any degree of certainty these wanderings, which are more changeable and extensive than those devised by the ancient sages who believed in the doctrine of transmigration; but it is probable that sooner or later some, if not all, of the scattered atoms will be gathered into new forms of life. The sun's rays, penetrating the plant world, combine some of the wandering atoms of carbonic acid, water, ammonia and salts to produce plants. Plants are devoured by animals, animals devour each other, man devours both plant and animal; and so it is easily possible that atoms, which once formed an essential part of the busy brain of Julius Caesar, now enter into the composition of Caesar, the negro in Alabama, or of Caesar, the house dog of some English household.

We do not want to think dogmatically and reason logically, but consider how a distinguished nineteenth-century naturalist like Huxley could arrive at such conclusions based on his innermost feelings. We no longer want to ask: What becomes of the physical components when a person's body turns to dust? but we want to turn our attention to the will embodied in the human being, to his self-aware ego, and pay attention to the paths that this soul-spiritual takes, although otherwise the person feels compelled to ask, not which path the spirit takes, but which of the outer material takes.

We will soon see that there is an intimate connection between the prevailing mood of the time and the approval of winning the hearts of the people when they are told that they can become happy, or at least healthy, if they follow certain rules, eat only this or that, bathe in a special way, dress in a reformed manner, and so on; but But they react badly when one speaks to them of the fact that the spiritual content of ideas, truths, and insights with which we fill our soul become living forces to harmonize our inner being, our whole life, to make it strong and resistant to all possible attacks and to strengthen us to fulfill our life's tasks.

By way of explanation, I would just like to point out how fear and anxiety make people pale, how feelings of shame make them blush, and how the soul affects the body and also has a wider effect than is generally assumed. But if you continue to point out that the thoughts of a spiritual worldview lead us up to spiritual heights, that a correct way of thinking of this kind has a healthy effect on people, both spiritually and physically, we find strong doubt or outright disbelief in the vast majority of our contemporaries, and in many cases only because people of our time have become too lazy to think in order to apply the mental and spiritual effort necessary to work through such views. Both Huxley's book and the experiences to be made everywhere in life show in a characteristic way that our age has come to believe only in the outwardly material and the obvious. The nineteenth century brought us these conditions.

Spiritual science is now far from rejecting the tremendous achievements of natural science, which this century has handed down to us along with an almost incalculable wealth of facts. However, it is necessary to point out that certain concepts have crept into the hearts of people and become ingrained there, becoming, so to speak, fashionable, so that it is difficult for them to decide to believe in the spiritual without trying to imagine it materially. But as a result, humanity is threatened with a mental chaos in the near future, a confusion with regard to the most important things, of which I will pick out only one and therefore refer again to Huxley's “physiology”, namely the concept of life, as far as it is obvious and, so to speak, self-evident. So [there] is said:

But in reality, the immediate cause of death is always the cessation of the activities of one of three organs: the brainstem, the lungs or the heart.

Thus, a man can be instantly killed by injury to a part of the brain called [...] medulla, as can be caused by hanging or breaking the neck. Or death can be the direct result of asphyxiation by strangulation, hanging or drowning, or in other words by the inhibition of respiratory processes. Finally, death occurs immediately when the heart stops pumping blood around. These three organs, the brain, the lungs and the heart, are therefore somewhat fancifully called the triad of life.

Ultimately, however, life has only two feet on which it rests, the lungs and the heart; for death by the brain is always only the indirect consequence of the effect that injury to this organ has on the lungs or the heart. The brain's activities cease when either breathing or circulation has ended. But if blood circulation and respiration are artificially maintained, then one can remove the brain without causing death.

So if Huxley thinks he can preserve life with these means, then under certain restrictions there is no objection to it, but I would still like to raise the question of whether this can actually still be called life. Probably everyone present would say thank you for such a life. Therefore, a statement of this kind in a scientific work that delves deeply into the most essential concepts proves that today's world has forgotten how to think about concepts such as “life” in an accurate way.

But anyone who, as is right, realizes that the thoughts and feelings that we predominantly harbor can make the body healthy or sick will also soon become aware of how difficult it is to pass on clear concepts into the future. With inadequate concepts in our soul about life and death, about spirit and soul, we are placed in a state of mind that soon makes us doubt everything possible in us, paralyzes the spiritual forces in us and prevents us from adequately fulfilling our duties in life; more and more it will become desolate in the soul and spirit of man, such a one will finally be plunged into powerlessness and despair. The attentive observer foresees that humanity can be brought into a dire situation on this path, and he can see that the beginnings of this are already being made in some places, especially when the most advanced science is compatible with such concepts that have an almost murderous effect on our soul and spirit and thus also on our body.

Alongside this, something else arises, namely a need that is suppressed again by a chaos of concepts, but which nevertheless stirs anew in the soul and occupies the mind: people talk so much about development from imperfect life conditions to more perfect ones, but where it would be most necessary to talk about these things, people do not want to believe in them when it comes to the human soul. But this human soul has ever new needs from epoch to epoch, always wanting to live in more advanced circumstances; the soul of the twelfth century is still different from that of the nineteenth century. It is not a matter of external things, of schooling and erudition, but of the different way and conception of life that develops for the soul from epoch to epoch.

This evening, we can only touch on the subject of life; it is significant that almost every person feels the need to develop certain things emotionally and intellectually, which in earlier cultural epochs were accepted on trust. In the past, whole epochs were far more dominated by certain general judgments, and all souls were generally occupied with the same ideas. Today, on the other hand, the urge to be independent is increasingly asserting itself in the souls of people, to find the points of reference within themselves, to tap into themselves the reason and source of existence, in the face of moral commandments and judgments of all kinds.

Our time, however, suffers from the fact that many people allow this need to rest in many respects, or entirely, on the ground of the soul. It cannot arise because it is drowned out by the chaos of life; and such people then go under in their belief in authority - which seems all the more terrible because it invokes the materially intangible - by always repeating that “science” has established and proven this and that. The vast majority of people cannot follow up and investigate for themselves how it has been established, and that is why the authority of science has grown into a formidable general magnitude.

These two schools of thought are in conflict with each other. If spiritual science wants to establish a proper relationship with these two powers, it must pursue the strict goal of making it possible for people to satisfy, in the truest sense, the deep needs that arise within them. I would like to point out that in earlier decades, questions about the destiny of the soul, the origin of man, and the sources of all spiritual life were approached quite differently than they are today. I would like to draw your attention to a leading personality in whom this can be seen in his unique spiritual constitution, in his feelings and perceptions. Goethe, who I have in mind here, rarely expressed himself on this subject without any particular external inducement, but on the occasion of the funeral of Wieland, whom he greatly revered, he spoke to a person close to him about what he thought about the fate of the soul after death. Goethe replied to the question put to him:

[Wieland will now] do nothing small, nothing unworthy, nothing incompatible with the moral greatness that he has maintained throughout his life. [...] The destruction of such high powers of the soul can never be a question in nature under any circumstances; nature never treats her capital so wastefully [...] As for the personal survival of our soul after death, this is how it is in my view. It does not contradict the many years of observation that I have made about the nature of our and all beings in nature; on the contrary, it even emerges from them with new conclusiveness. But how much or how little of this personality deserves to continue, by the way, is another question and a point that we must leave to God.

Goethe then develops a certain hierarchy of souls, which he calls monads here, that makes them suitable for various activities; he considers these monads to be immortal and, in their higher development, to be actively involved in the development of the world system, and then continues:

I am certain that I have already been here a thousand times as you see me now and hope to come back a thousand more times. [...] But this does not mean that by limiting our observations of nature, limits are also set to our faith. On the contrary, given the immediacy of divine feelings in us, it can easily happen that knowledge must appear as a patchwork, especially on a planet that has been torn out of its full context with the sun, leaving all and any observation incomplete, which is precisely why it is only through faith that it receives its complete complement. [...] As soon as one starts from the principle that knowledge and faith are not there to cancel each other out, but to complement each other, then the right thing will be worked out everywhere.

Goethe actually mastered the natural science of his time; he also enriched it through a way of thinking that was alive in the spiritual. That is why it is all the more interesting to experience how all these things are reflected in Goethe's view, how the life of the soul after death could be shaped according to his needs, based on all his long personal and scientific life experiences, and to see how Goethe, according to his spiritual worldview, was far removed from the modern materialistic worldview that was increasingly being developed. So it is up to everyone to form an idea of the spiritual world view through their entire mental configuration.

At that time, the now widespread and scientifically promoted worldview of “monism” was not yet known. People were not yet so anxiously concerned that a gap should not open up between humans and higher animals [...]; rather, they believed in this gap in a physical sense, and if they wanted to bridge it, they thought in deeply materialistic terms [...]. People wanted to have something materially distinct, since they could not find it in the idea that something spiritual could be found as a distinguishing factor. So they searched the entire body, the soft tissues and the skeleton, and found a special intermaxillary bone in the upper jaw of animals, which humans apparently did not possess. With that, they believed that they had discovered the long-sought, exalted difference between humans and animals, and gullible, materialistically-minded people were inclined to accept this without further ado. Goethe studied these conditions and found that the premaxillary bone was present before birth, that is, in the developing human being, but that it gradually fused completely with the adjacent parts until birth. We find more details about this in Goethe's scientific writings, in which he devotes a special treatise with detailed illustrations to the study of the “ossis intermaxillaris” and defends his discovery against Soemmerring 1785 and Camper in special letters, in which he also emphasizes, however, that the difference between humans and higher animals is not to be found in the individual material, but in the spiritual, which towers mightily above the animal. If we take into account what Goethe – according to Johannes Falk – said on Wieland's funeral day about soul and spirit, their transformations and fates after death: how he had reflected during his long life, and when he now compares what he believes he has found with what can be observed scientifically, sensually, then the two are reconciled without contradiction. At that time, one could still say this as a scholar, as a true naturalist, without finding oneself in conflict with the views of the life of the soul in its special field and that of the material side of life. Even in the mid-nineteenth century, this was still the case with a pioneering naturalist who was mentioned by name, who did more than anyone else for the knowledge of the transformation of animal life forms, but who, by showing their development, came to the conclusion of saying:

I believe that all organic beings that have ever lived on this earth have descended from an original form, into which the Creator breathed life.

That was Charles Darwin. He, too, was able to look unhindered into the spiritual world without coming into conflict with the results of his research. It should be noted that the English original contains these words, but the first German translation and its subsequent editions do not. In such a short time, it was no longer possible to connect the view of the spiritual world with Darwinism, which was already much more harshly conceived. Thus, in all so-called popular presentations, we hear and read today that anyone who still clings to the influence of a spiritual world is a fantasist and a fool, since Darwin himself showed that everything spiritual is a function of the physical. Of course, nothing is easier than to refute spiritual science in this way if one translates it into the view. If this or that part of the brain becomes diseased, then, in a certain analogous relationship, the soul becomes ill; if the brain gradually wears out, then the soul is also worn away, and so the soul is to be thought of as inseparably united with matter as a form of expression. Darwin has, after all, done away with the spiritual world anyway - although this is not the case.

We live today in a time when it is already a serious pursuit of truth to make a confession, as Goethe did, and yet to come to terms with science, as Goethe did, who was able to maintain the soul as existing quite rightly. Today it seems impossible to reconcile external, material science and adherence to the spiritual world. Today we live in an age that has accumulated an almost unmanageable amount of empirical results, where it is impossible for the individual to find his way around the ever more and further divided scientific disciplines, where it is completely dizzy, to orient himself exactly about what science has “established”, just as it is difficult to determine for himself what gives him an accurate judgment, a healthy general view of spiritual science.

So here comes this spiritual science and claims that it possesses and applies the same way of thinking and logic as every other science of today, which not only assumes that the soul contains the normal power of knowledge of everyday and scientific life, which, so to speak, every normal can apply, but it adheres to the conviction that forces lie dormant in the human soul that can be developed so that life in the spiritual world will be revealed to the person concerned, as it is to the observer endowed with eyes and the other senses of the external, material environment.

Not everyone can develop their spiritual eyes and ears in life and become a spiritual researcher, but nor can everyone work in a laboratory, be an astronomer and so on, not everyone needs to work as a researcher in such ways. Only a few can achieve it to a sufficient extent, but they can proclaim it to others, and every person has something in their soul that prevents them from devoting themselves to all that is communicated in blind faith; these are: logic and a healthy sense of truth. The messages he receives can enlighten him; he can measure them against life, test them and gain experience from them, to see whether they have a healing and beneficial effect there and in themselves.

In this way spiritual science places itself in life. Through the power of his soul, the human being makes himself an instrument of spiritual scientific research. However, the demand that all results be proven to everyone with absolute certainty and at any time is just as impossible for spiritual science as it is for external material science and its researchers. The latter say that their science demands absolute objectivity, not inward-soul things and experiences, but anyone who speaks in this way does not know spiritual scientific research in its true essence.

When someone, apart from external impressions, delves into the inner soul life, he will first encounter his own inner soul experiences, which are different for each individual, but in reality the soul gradually takes different paths. The budding spiritual researcher will at first bring nothing to his fellow human beings that concerns him alone; he must first develop to the point where he feels that he has now entered with his ego into a completely new realm that has nothing to do with his personality as such. Then his spiritual insights will show the same objectivity as, for example, our sensory eye shows us that the rose before us is not green but red, as other healthy eyes can also see. Then the inner soul experience is transformed into complete objectivity, then the spiritual researcher feels that his experiences are independent of his subjective feelings, and he has attained a certainty in his vision from which the results of spiritual research have been proclaimed here on many occasions.

Our time demands objectivity. This must be respected, but first we must consider its effect in terms of a healthy sense of truth. After all, the entire body of external science speaks a clear language; for our time, it demands recognition of those results that are obtained through research methods as set out in “Mysterium des Menschen” by Ludwig Deinhard , wherein it is shown that science, which to some extent approaches spiritual science with its methods, nevertheless also achieves harmony between external research with its means and internal research through the method of spiritual science. The book shows us the need of the present time to get what is needed from the field of spiritual science, which makes it possible for man to place himself with certainty in the position he has to fill in life.

We have indicated that it is the spirit that gives strength to the human being, not a particular place of residence or a particular remedy, but in the long run only that world view that leads to the center of the spirit. The science briefly characterized above feels compelled to take on the role that natural science previously had for humanity.

Most of those present know how spiritual science demonstrates the truth of a concept, although a large part of the educated world shrugs its shoulders compassionately at it, namely re-embodiment. It may be recalled that speaking disparagingly about it will have the same fate as the assertion of the earlier natural science that hornets developed from a horse carcass, without their eggs, as was taught in the seventeenth and partly still in the eighteenth century , in which such assertions were systematically presented, so for example furthermore that from donkey carcasses wasps and so forth developed directly from river mud worms and even fish developed directly until Francesco Redi energetically objected to this and established the principle: Living things can only descend from similar living things; a view that is generally taken for granted today, not only for Du Bois-Reymond and Virchow, while Francesco Redi in the seventeenth century only barely escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno, because he was considered a heretic.

Today, the scientific opinion is that when a person is born, he is solely influenced by his inheritance from his ancestors; but this is an inaccurate observation. Spiritual science postulates that the soul unites with the physical body that the father and mother can offer it. The soul then develops this physical body and, in the further course of development, acquires the means from its surroundings. But the spiritual and mental can be traced back to earlier embodiments; and just as living things can only come from living things, so the spiritual and mental can only arise from the spiritual and mental. Thus, the present life on earth of each person is also the starting point for later lives on earth, and this is how the independence of the human soul is to be explained. The time will come, and it is not far off, when the abilities of a man of genius will no longer be traced back to his physical ancestors alone, as Goethe expresses it when he says:

From my father I have the stature,
the serious conduct of life,
from my mother the cheerful nature
and the desire to tell stories.
ancestor was the fairest's darling,
That haunts me now and then;
ancestor-woman loved jewelry and gold,
That may well twitch through the limbs.
Can the elements not
be separated from the complex,
What then is to be named
original about the whole thing?

Today, people like to point out that genius is not at the beginning, but at the end of a series of developments, and that proves that it is inherited. That's a nice argument! It should be the other way around, because the circumstances are not at all in this context. Man naturally acquires physical properties just as it is natural for him to get wet when he falls into the water. In order to save this strange theory, it is said that the qualities of the father, for instance, remained latent because they did not show up in the son as they did in him. A tile falling from the roof also has the latent potential to kill someone; with such strange assumptions, anything can be proved, and this is also the case with the potential that was not present in the ancestor but has shown itself in the descendant.

There is more sound research in the field of lower life forms. A poor school teacher [monk] in Austrian Silesia [Brno in Moravia] by the name of Mendel found out in his attempts to achieve plant hybridization that the expected properties did not appear in the next generation, but in the generation after that. So people used to be just as patient about actual inheritance as they have now generally disregarded it.

Scientific materialism calls the theosophists fantasists and dualists who understand nothing of monism when they hold the view that the soul uses the powers acquired in the last life to shape a suitable body with the material means at its disposal – a view that is also, and more purely, monistic, namely from the spiritual side. These twisted minds of the spiritual scientists will no longer be burned, we have become too humane for that, but they are trying to expose them to ridicule and destruction by making fun of them. One objection is usually raised against the return of the soul, namely that one cannot remember a past life; one knows nothing about it at all. A four-year-old child cannot yet do arithmetic either, but we allow for his development and in ten years he will be able to do arithmetic.

The same applies to our review of a past life, we are only at the beginning of our development, and here too, as in many other areas, it is at least conceivable that there will be progress before each soul comes to an ever-greater understanding of past lives. In the present life there are short periods of childhood that cannot be remembered, but nevertheless the present self was already present at that time. You will neither want nor be able to deny this, although you are unable to remember it. Thus, the possibility or impossibility of your remembering has nothing to do with your earlier real existence and with the past life of your soul in the decisive sense.

But why can't we remember earlier lives on earth? Our memory in the present body goes back to the point of development where the self experiences itself. At the beginning of our life on earth, this is not yet raised into consciousness, but the moment it happens coincides with the beginning of the possibility of remembering. Thus the ego forms, so to speak, the outer wall; as far as ego-consciousness exists, so far consciousness and memory extend. But from this also arises the possibility of treating this ego in such a way that it is transformed from the state in which it normally exists in man to a higher state. We must therefore overcome our present ego-consciousness; it is not easy to do so, and I will mention just one pointer.

We can free ourselves from looking backwards if we are able to look towards the future. To do this, we must accept everything that flows towards us from the present with composure and calmness, with equanimity, and revere the world's providence without worry. We must be unmoved by praise and blame, joy and pain; our soul must stand still, calmly awaiting everything, whether it portends life or death, pain or pleasure, while venerating the wisdom of the world's guidance. If we are indeed able to see such a perspective in the future, then the result will be a review of the past; our view will then expand first into the last previous and then into earlier earthly lives.

Although a knower today can confirm the suggested effect of such exercises, in addition to the many other necessary and more difficult works, it is easy to judge this as mere theory. But the knower, who speaks from his own experience, will not be deterred by this, whether one wants to hear him and judge his communications correctly, just as little as it deterred Francesco Redi when he was called a heretic, and just as it does not bother those who do spiritual science in a thorough way when they are called fantasists and twisted minds.

On further penetrating into the nature of cultural development, one will also come to the point of asking oneself: What is my position regarding the great development of humanity, especially regarding Christianity? Before Christ, many thousands of years of people had already lived; so what could those who lived with and after him base an advantage on to be allowed to take up the Christ impulse, and not also those who lived before Christ? Today humanity has advanced to such an extent that it can ask such profound questions. Especially in our time, when people are increasingly learning to think scientifically and historically, such questions must arise. Then spiritual science comes along and says: the same soul has lived through the events before and after the appearance of Christ. Such an objection does not exist for the spiritual scientific world view. It is the same souls that go to school in life before as well as after. These ideas, which partly show us relapses as well, will always give us courage and strength to face life anew, in which we can also recognize progress again in sufficiently long periods of time.

Those who have heard me speak on a number of occasions will know why spiritual science can afford to talk about all the branches of the natural sciences and to assess their methods, goals and progress. Goethe was able to say of himself that when he allowed his scientific gaze to ascend into lofty spiritual realms, he could still always recognize the natural sciences in the process. Spiritual science must always feel itself to be a ferment and work in this sense, so that the gulf between the spiritual and the external-materialistic view of science does not become too great, so that harmony can gradually come about, which is able to give the soul joy and strength, forces that offer the prospect of success and progress.

When it is emphasized that a healthy soul can only dwell in a healthy body, this is to be understood to mean that the healthy soul alone was able to prepare a healthy body as its dwelling, but not the other way around. Thus, spiritual science not only eliminates contradictions in theory, but also drives out all timidity and weakness of soul, so that humanity can then grow up healthy and strong to fulfill its tasks. Starting from social cooperation, a healthy ascent to the heights of material and especially spiritual development can then be achieved, as is destined for humanity. Man will then be more and more able to draw the spiritual secrets out of the spiritual worlds and transfer them into the physical world, thus fertilizing life there with them. But the soul is the place where both worlds touch. Humanity can become and remain strong and healthy if it allows what we can summarize in the words: “From worlds far away, mysterious and enigmatic

The rich abundance of material
It flows into the depths of the soul
From the heights of the world, full of content
The spirit's clarifying light.
They meet in man
To form a reality full of wisdom.

It is difficult to communicate with someone who expresses himself differently than we do. To clarify our own spiritual secrets, it is important to measure our own thinking, feeling, and willing against the spirits of others.

The usual newer historical research does not even know how to determine the lifetime of Zarathustra; they place him in the time of the Buddha, the ancient Greeks place them 5000 years before Christ: as far back as possible or not very far back. Theosophy places him in pre-Asian culture, but his influence can be seen into Christian times.

All soul life has been greatly modified, and the development of what has come into being is now a satisfying study. Man's spiritual development would have to undergo the same investigation to shed light; one has to go back to earlier states of mind, where people became aware of a different environment than they are now. There was a kind of clairvoyant consciousness, an often misused word, an image consciousness. The images that go up and down in the usual forms mean little, they are a leftover remnant of a completely different state of consciousness. The earlier image consciousness can be related to the external reality in the spiritual world behind the sensory world, when the object consciousness was still in its infancy, of an intermediate world between waking and sleeping, through symbols that related to the real spiritual world.

A certain ability is achieved at the expense of another. We have to go back up, but to a form of clairvoyance imbued with intellectuality. First the intellect was lost. Myths, sagas, legends are the oldest records of ancient clairvoyance. The images of the gods in mythology were initially only images. There were two spiritual currents: one from ancient India, the other, more northern, from ancient Persia. These went alongside one another in the older millennia, flowing together in ancient Greek culture. That is why the pessimism of the ancient Indians is so characteristic. The ancient Indian found it uncanny when he saw spiritual beings behind external things. He called them asuras. The last impulse of this, which was therefore so significant, appeared in Buddha. Through an unspiritual tendency towards the inner, he was transported into Maya, and so he had to come out of it into Nirvana. Nirvana has nothing of what the senses offer. Nirvana is the last great call of the senses as this development of humanity is felt to be a descent. This too is shot through with pessimistic anti-reality muzzling.

In ancient Greece, this submergence was not felt in quite the same way. In the Dionysian culture, the Greeks felt what was not yet present in the culture transplanted to Greece from ancient India. Zarathustra developed precisely the opposite, the Persians wanted to lend a hand to direct reality, a transition to a new, joyful future for humanity. He had gained something new, new human soul forces. Zarathustra pointed out to the Persian people that the physical world is not only Maya. To him, the outer world was like the garment of a spiritual world, the sensual world like a carpet. The spiritual world lies behind the sensual world; the spiritual world is behind everything. This is not only meant as a pantheistic reference to spiritual wisdom, but as a concrete insight into the spiritual world. Behind the most important sensual reality, the spiritual importance is hidden. And just as the sun has its great aura, so does man have his small aura: Ahura Mazdao, later Ormuzd. He no longer finds the good through mere mystical insight. These are dying forces, therefore the devas are evil to him, the asuras are the right thing.

This reversal can be explained from the development of culture. Ahuras are the Indian Asuras. There is spirituality in and behind all sensuality, especially behind the center. The Greek Apollo is the Greek translation of the Mazdao culture. Both currents came together when the greatest impulse for humanity came, in Christ.

At that time, in Zarathustra's time, completely different signs were needed, a completely different writing to make sense of this. This ancient writing was in the heavenly bodies. Zarathustra attributed both contradictions to something higher. He needed symbols. During the day, the sun passes through part of the zodiac; the day sun is Ormuzd, the night sun is Ahriman. Ormuzd is associated with one half of the zodiacal signs and Ahriman with the other. There is a common basis for good and evil. In an ever-widening arc, the circle becomes flatter and flatter, finally becoming a straight line, infinity. A circle with an infinite diameter is a representation of the infinite passage of time. The past holds back, the future is for progress, uplifting. The entire zodiac is actually a line, imagined as a minimized circle. “Zaroana akarena” is the image of infinite time.

Thus, the writing in the stars represents what is in the spiritual world. Zoroaster is not an abstract spirit who only moves in generalities; that is why lower spirits are under Ormuzd. Today's man is comfortable and wants to ascend to the highest God right away. The six or seven Amschaspands were, as it were, messengers. Goethe mentions in his Faust: Sons of the gods, preserve the beautiful, and so on. It is the same. Ahriman also has five to six evil spiritual entities; that makes twelve in total.

Each constellation is an expression of one of the forces. Ormuzd, for example, works through [the] lion as a good disposition, through the ram as wisdom. In this way, the spiritual beings enter into people, as it were. But people are not as wise as their little finger, which knows that it is nothing without the whole organism. So the powers of the human soul enter into the person and continue in the person, becoming materially condensed in what is in the person. Thus, a person can be an Ormuzd or an Ahriman person. The new physiology, which dissects the human being, says [anatomically and physiologically]: twelve pairs of brain nerves emanate from the brain. Thus, the materialized twelve Amshaspands have been found again after millennia. Both ages join hands.

There are 28 to 31 Izeds, spirits that perform subordinate functions that are effective in the cosmos and in human nature. In the human head, these are the mental abilities [= the Amshaspands] and the abilities that emanate from the spinal nerves and, for all I care, return [the Izeds]. Then, in the Feroars, we see the spiritual archetypes that underlie everything else.

Plato says: All sensual things are based on archetypes. But here it is meant more abstractly. Plato speaks of the spiritual world, Zoroaster of the spirit world. But Plato still had a living feeling for today's views. Zoroaster saw in the outer light what is inner wisdom, as does spiritual science today.

Pythagoras learned from the Persians the correct attitude towards the spiritual and the moral world. This is quite different from the way it is in Egypt or in the Dionysian mysteries. There, the masculine and the feminine, Osiris - Isis, Apollo - Aphrodite, are valid. Such sexual opposites can be found everywhere. Even with the ancient Hebrews, Lucifer, evil, is indicated by the feminine. Only Zoroaster has it the other way around, taking the organic, moral contrast of good and evil in images, not from nature.

Therefore, Zoroaster must be important in the present day in order not to reduce everything to the opposites of the sexes, as it is today. Hence the scent that emanates from Zoroastrianism. Through purification, through moral cleansing, heroic, moral strength develops, not philistine morality like today's. The ancient Persian is not contemplative, he is hardworking, lays his hands on the treasures of the earth. Thus he becomes the companion of Ormuzd, who always wrestled with Ahriman. Such was the case with this simple cultured people. Through moral purification the obstacles are overcome.

I will speak, come and listen to what is highest in the world. I speak not of it with an evil tongue, but of the opposite. Listen to what I mean, otherwise you will hear bad things at the end of the world. – Thus speaks Zoroaster. It is not enough to study the Gathas literally; one should put oneself in Zoroaster's feelings and thoughts. This requires a sense of history. One should be grateful to Ahriman.

The subject of our lecture today may at first seem surprising. But Theosophy does not just want to bring messages of supersensory research, but wants to let them flow into human life, bringing strength and the joy of working for life. It wants to be a kind of art of living, albeit under certain conditions. It is not something that wants to be quickly established, but rather, Theosophy draws from sources of deep knowledge. Therefore, it cannot seek to win over many people; it is not a doctrine that wants to be promoted with fanaticism to broad circles. [A movement of this kind must keep its distance from fanaticism.] The theosophist must make the opposite of fanaticism his most important quality – [understanding of people should be the theosophist's hallmark.] He must be able to penetrate [into the souls of others], into the souls of opponents [and gain understanding for the justified refutations].

And who would want to deny that there is much to be said against Theosophy in a deeply justified way? After all, Theosophy or spiritual science speaks of the most sacred and dignified matters, and does so more to the heart than to reason. And the heart is easily inclined to surrender to things that might speak of an increase in vitality. To penetrate into the depths of what Theosophy means, a long journey is necessary, which by no means all those who agree with the Theosophical life out of the heart take.

If someone approaches Theosophy in our time, it must be admitted that this is very difficult. One concern after another piles up. Therefore, a scientifically educated person in particular cannot easily find his way around – with a genuine sense of truth. In addition, there are many things today that are called Theosophy, but which are not very useful. Therefore, the elementary principles of what we would like to call Theosophy should be described first, [before moving on to the concerns].

First of all, we must be clear about the structure of the human being. Man does not consist only of the physical body, not only of what we can perceive with our brain-bound mind, but it must be asserted that the physical body is integrated with a sum of higher, supersensible , namely, first of all, the etheric or life body, by which the physical body is permeated throughout. The etheric body ensures that the physical body does not follow the forces of the external physical world. It only follows these forces when it is abandoned by the etheric body at death. Then the physical forces act on the components of the human body and cause them to disintegrate and dissolve. The existence of this etheric body can be determined through clairvoyant research. But it can also be seen that it is necessary, that we need a fighter against the otherwise inevitable physical decay. Other living beings are also endowed with an etheric body as long as they are living beings. Plants also have it.

In addition to this, human beings also have a consciousness soul or an astral body. This we have in common with the animal world. It is the carrier of all the drives, passions and desires we have in our lives. What we no longer have in common with animals is what we call our human sense of self. The fact that we can say “I” to ourselves makes us human beings the pinnacle of creation. From the moment when the child becomes capable of saying “I” to itself, our human consciousness, our memory begins. We therefore distinguish between a physical body, etheric body, astral body and the I.

But that is not the only way in which Theosophy differs from the generally held view. It also considers the inner core of a person's being, the I, to be more than just an earthly existence between birth and death. Theosophy seeks to show that not everything that is expressed through the I in a person has been determined in just one lifetime. Rather, this central core of the human being comes from earlier stages of existence. In a sense, the human being forms his own body before he fully enters it with his sense of self. Then there is the further claim of Theosophy: After death, the human being only discards his physical shell, but the core of his being also lives on after physical death, only to enter into a renewed physical life later on.

The changing fortunes of human beings can only be understood by grasping the repeated lives of the same human being on earth. We see one person living a miserable and unhappy life, while another is happy. Science must ask about the causes of this tremendous inequality of life's destinies. Spiritual science claims that a person has built his own destiny in his previous life; depending on how he lives now, his following destiny in the future life will be shaped.

That it can be so is already evident to a certain degree from the course of his present life. If someone emigrates to America, for example, his fate will essentially be shaped by what he was in Europe. What he has learned here will be very important for his progress and the way he lives over there. Whether he was a shoemaker or a banker here, for example, will have a very significant influence on the way he lives his life over there. But after he has been in America for a while, he will have learned new things and will have become a different person. In order for a person to mature, different destinies are necessary; this cannot possibly all happen in a single life between birth and death. The fruits of our previous lives ripen for us in the present life, and what we learn now will benefit our later life.

Theosophy thus teaches the immortality of the central core of the human being. Between death and a new birth, the soul goes through very different, purely spiritual states of longer duration.

Regarding the state of sleep, Theosophy says that in this state, the physical and etheric bodies remain in the bed; the astral body and the ego, that is, that which is the carrier of consciousness, emerges and lives during sleep in supersensible worlds.

The whole appears as a closed system. We will see in what way theosophy draws its knowledge of this system. This happens through clairvoyant research. How do you acquire this ability? It can be said that these clairvoyant powers can be awakened in man through meditation. In this way, the soul can be made into an instrument of spiritual research, and indeed into a research that is just as exact and methodical as the research that chemists and physicists use physical means for to study matter. In this way, dormant powers are brought to the surface within the human being. We recall Goethe's words about the spiritual eyes and spiritual ears that can be opened in man.

Having said this, we turn to the objections to Theosophy. Of course, we cannot exhaust all the objections to Theosophy. We will only consider a few that may present serious and significant difficulties for an honest conviction. If you are completely under the spell of modern science, you may come to the following conclusion when you first study Theosophy; you can [rightly] say: Yes, I believe that women who are not critically minded [who do not critically examine science but follow the urge of the heart] and have not learned to think logically, can have their world puzzles solved by this spiritual science. And, as far as I am concerned, the same applies to men who do not know science. Just note this: you believe that you need an etheric body as the carrier of the life forces in the body. Do you not know that you are thereby amateurishly reaching back into the time when it was assumed that organically formed substances could not be produced in the laboratory, but only in the living organism? Therefore, in those days, it had to be assumed that special vital forces were at work in all living things. But progressive research [in the nineteenth century] has shown that the simplest of these substances can be produced in the laboratory by purely chemical means, just as they can in a living organism. This dealt a fatal blow to the old doctrine of the life force – vis vitalis – or life ether, because it proved, albeit initially only in the simplest of organisms, that the organic structure of nature is built in the same way as the non-living, inorganic. It is a very serious and worthy thought that once the beginning of the chemical production of the organic has been made, it will continue, even if few substances can be produced in this way at present. This is experimental proof that the same laws apply to the inanimate as to the animate. It is therefore ignorance when Theosophy still speaks of the fact that life in a body can only be explained by a life body. Such a researcher can say: What subtle research had to gradually strive to elucidate, you theosophists simply want to make easy with your fantastic life body. You claim that it is visible to the supersensible faculty of cognition, but the above proves that it is not needed at all, it is not necessary. But it must be a serious first requirement for serious knowledge that it makes no unnecessary assumptions. He who weighs things as theosophists should do, should feel that there is much earnestness and dignity in such an objection.

But let us look further. Theosophy claims that an astral body and an ego are needed to explain the phenomena of consciousness. We can indeed concede what even strict researchers such as Du Bois-Reymond say, that what we experience in us as inner life is not possible from purely material processes within the brain. So let us assume that we have to do without an explanation for the time being and write the famous “Ignorabimus” below it. But is it justified to say that when something different, something supersensory, emerges from matter, that this is an independent entity? An opponent of Theosophy could say this with some justification. He could point to magnetic forces, which do indeed emanate from an inorganic substance, the magnet, and are bound to it. So after all, a supersensible power such as magnetism is produced out of material substance. Furthermore, it is no different with the development of the other forces, for example, with the force of gravity that is bound to the planets. Why should it not be the same with what we scientifically know as states of excitation of the brain, and what takes place in the consciousness and inner life of man? There is absolutely no compulsion to explain the phenomena of consciousness differently. Even what has not yet been researched can be explained in this way. In any case, the hasty assumption of an astral body to explain these processes is amateurish. Even where we are still forced to remain ignorant, we must wait patiently for serious research to say something about it.

What used to be the horror of horrors in science, the so-called theory of potentialities [in psychology], lies behind us. There, a system was built on the premise that if the soul can think, then it has the potential to think. It can feel, so it has the potential to feel. According to this, the soul was a system of nothing but nested concepts of capacity, without realizing that they had not explained anything, but had only put words in the place of something. Now the opponent can say: Isn't your astral and etheric body just as much something nested and unrecognized as the old doctrine of capacity was? Such a thing can rightly be objected.

So Theosophy is not for someone who stands on the ground of in-depth modern scientific knowledge. To such a person, Theosophy appears to be somewhat dilettantish compared to the demands of rigorous research. Furthermore, Theosophy says: During sleep, the astral body and the ego leave the human body with the consciousness. Since they are not present with what remains in bed, they must still be found somewhere. Where else should they be present than in a spiritual world? On the other hand, serious science asks: Is it necessary to invoke a special, supernatural explanation for this state of sleep when the scientifically given explanations are sufficient? It is perfectly possible to explain sleep quite simply. The scientifically applied method views the matter quite differently. It says: When we are awake, the organism wears out. Toxins are formed as a result of the activity carried out by the excited brain during the waking state. When so many toxins have accumulated, they kill consciousness through mechanical or chemical action, which means that sleep sets in. Now it is not the organs that otherwise generate consciousness that are at work, but other organs that continue to work in the human being, which in turn destroy the poisons in the body that the activity of the organs of consciousness has produced, and so on. Such a self-regulatory hypothesis is entirely possible. But if it is possible to explain the alternation of sleep and waking with it, then it is not permissible to say anything else about it. The theosophical theory is at least a daring assumption. The true facts will only be able to be explained gradually, and until then one must stick to the obvious and simplest explanation of these phenomena.

What about the theosophical assertion of the repetition of earthly lives? Theosophy shows how man develops from childhood; this cannot possibly be explained by mere inheritance. Children of the same parents are fundamentally different, and so on. Therefore, something must be added that is not inherited, that is already present in the life germ of the newborn human being, and that can only be explained by repeated lives on earth. For example, twins can be different despite simultaneous inheritance.

The scientific objection to this is as follows: What constitutes the essence of a person is not something that is inherited from a single father or mother, but from a long chain of ancestors. If Theosophy now says: If you attribute everything to heredity, why is there any individuality at all in the development of each person? The objection is as follows: People must therefore be different because so many different influences flow into each individual's life, [which has a transforming effect on people from early childhood on]. Genius is a particularly good example of this. It emerges, endowed with special qualities, which we can, however, already find in the various ancestors. In the case of genius, they are then combined as a grand total. Brentano explains the soul work in geniuses as being able to quickly piece thoughts together, and thus only in a certain increase over ordinary human thought activity. This easier mobility in the brain molecules can only be inherited. The spiritual researcher says, however, This is actually not very logical. The genius is at the end of an inheritance line; it should be at the beginning of the same if it is to be inherited by the descendants. The objection [against this] of the easier excitability in the brain of the genius must apply, and it can therefore be concluded on the part of science: this increased excitability causes the brain to wear down more quickly. Is it any wonder that the reproductive process is affected in a genius, because his brain wears down more quickly? This is a legitimate objection. However, modern science is particularly suspicious of what is referred to as clairvoyant talent. We have to admit that extrasensory experiences do exist. Such perceptions are different from natural perception. This also occurs pathologically in what we usually call hallucinations, for example. It is therefore not surprising when the scientist says: Where is the possibility to recognize the truth and establish objective facts? How do we know that these are not simply subjective experiences? The strict scientist is careful to only call scientifically that which can be objectively verified. But the strict scientific epistemological methods are not applicable to the results of training in the humanities. What supposedly presents itself to the clairvoyant is only a world of images. Even in pathological conditions, it is only reminiscences of reality. It turns out, for example, that clairvoyants have only been able to see a train since trains have existed. In books about clairvoyant experiences, we only ever find what was actually present at the time, combined just a little differently. After all, it is combined from the warmth and cold, light and shade of real life. For example, it is said that the astral body is blue, red, yellow and so on, just like the known physical paints. These are the colors of the physical as they are seen, so nothing new. Such appearances have a pathological background, are only hallucinations and really add nothing new to our knowledge. The mere ability to combine external properties is quite sufficient to explain them.

Theosophists must understand that such objections arise from the deepest, most earnest deliberation of precisely the most serious contemporaries. Those who have grown old in scientific ideas are not easily convinced by theosophical objections.

But Theosophy also comes with religious, moral and ethical ideas and impulses. Can that be right?

The first objection that comes to mind is this: if Theosophy views life in such a way that the present life is seen as the result of past experiences, then interest in life itself wanes. Such a view thus amounts to an education in fatalism. It is a paralysis of life when you can think, “I have time; there are many lives ahead of me.” The objection is actually trivial to take, but it is practically correct, because people are indeed casual by nature.

And the prospect of a supersensible world, how does it express itself ethically? Necessarily in such a way that interest in practical life diminishes. You can see this, for example, in the artist who does not want to devote himself to the practical. Such a view of life makes one ascetic, hostile to life, and paralyzing instead of stimulating. One often sees wonderful people among the Theosophists who live in a kind of cloud-cuckoo-land. Women in particular are easily found to have become self-indulgent and out of touch with reality. This cannot be logically refuted, but only through life itself.

Furthermore, one could say: You have made ethics a result of selfishness. Whoever does good, according to your view, expects a reward in karmic compensation. Whoever does evil, or wants to do evil, refrains from it out of fear of the corresponding evil in the next life. So the doctrine of karma is actually a doctrine of education? A higher form of selfishness! What a person sows, he must reap - [this] is ultimately a selfish principle of life. Thus, Theosophy is also ethically and morally life-threatening.

Furthermore, you transfer divine world justice into the human being himself by letting him work out his destiny in various earthly lives. You thereby transfer that which otherwise lives in the Godhead outside of us as a punishing or rewarding God into the human being himself. Man is thereby deified. Where is the free love of God when the divine is transferred into one's own inner being? Into the inner being of man? - The opponent can say: It is in contradiction to a truly religious world view when one transfers the self-sacrifice of God, the redemption of man out of divine grace, into the inner being of man himself.

Such objections could be multiplied many times over. Devotion to an external God is a fundamental condition of ethics and religion, and this finds no justification in Theosophy. This is how it can be expressed; and we must learn to understand this fully as Theosophists, only then can we keep ourselves free from fanaticism. Only the most important guidelines could be given here. They should also teach us tolerance towards our opponents. We should not try to beat them out of the field, but above all strive to learn to understand them.

Let us now show by way of example how this is to be understood. In 1868, the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann wrote a book called “The Philosophy of the Unconscious”. Although some of it is unmethodical and flawed and not useful to us, it is based on certain spiritual principles and touches on deep existential issues. This book caused quite a stir when it was published. It was, after all, the time of the reign of the most blatant materialism. This book strangely touched the fanatical materialists such as Haeckel and other Darwinists. They found the book extremely amateurish. Many counter-writings against the book were published. But one anonymous refutation caused a particularly great stir. It presented everything that could be objected to Eduard von Hartmann's book in such a methodical and complete way, and with such keen insight, that Oscar Schmidt, for example, said: “It's a shame that the unknown author didn't identify himself.” Haeckel himself said, “He should identify himself, and we will consider him one of our own.” Soon the second edition of this writing was necessary. This time the anonymous author named himself: it was Eduard von Hartmann! This second edition did not have the same success with Hartmann's opponents – [their praise soon died down.]

This is a good example of how one can see beyond one's opponent and judge more correctly in the opponent's interest than the opponent himself.

Much more could be said, but for now we must be satisfied with what has been said. It does not take the worst to be seen sprouting from Theosophy. We must therefore endeavor to learn to understand our opponents.

I have tried to show how Theosophy can be refuted. The day after tomorrow it should become clear whether the refutation is final or whether, nevertheless, reasons can be put forward that will be valid against this fight - which, as we have seen, can be waged with a certain justification.

It could be called frivolous if we first tried to refute Theosophy and then tried to justify it, since the lecturer apparently does not believe in the refutation itself.

But I believe in it in all seriousness! It is not a matter of refuting refutations for me, but rather I would like to use it to point out important things about great riddles of knowledge. In a certain sense, I believe in the correctness and weight of the objections raised. To illustrate what I mean, I would like to tell you a little story.

In a village, the young son of a family was chosen to get the daily rolls needed for the family from the baker. He was always given [ten] kreutzers for the trip. This young son was not very good at math and therefore didn't care much about how many rolls he got for the six kreutzers. Now, however, a foster son came to live with the family for a while, and he was good at math. This foster son now started calculating how many rolls he could get for six. Since a roll cost two kreutzers in that town, he should have gotten five rolls. But the boy had brought six rolls. The foster son was surprised and said: “That's not right, two times five is ten. So he only gets five rolls.” But the next day there were six rolls again, despite the foster son's correct calculation. How did this fit together? It was customary in that place to give a roll for every ten kreutzers. There the puzzle was solved. So it was true, even though the calculation was correct. The result of the calculation had nothing to do with the correctness of the matter. Both were correct in themselves, although they did not agree with each other. Just as I myself believed in the correctness of the calculation as the little boy I was, so I also believe today in the correctness of the objections to Theosophy that I put forward. Objections and refutations have a certain quality, namely that they can be correct without the matter itself necessarily being wrong. Perhaps I will be reproached for one thing, namely, that I present some things in a lively way and speak with the same pathos for and against.

But if the things themselves are right, then they can also be presented with the same vivacity. It is generally easier and more convenient to criticize than to justify. I would like to illustrate this with an example.

The editor-in-chief of a major newspaper had the intention of publishing an interesting weekly supplement. However, there were only a few suitable editors for such a paper who could write in a witty and interesting enough way to really captivate the audience he was aiming for. But since he was a clever man, he knew how to help himself. A number of talented young gentlemen were employed to do nothing all week but sit in coffee houses and read newspapers, and then they simply had to refute every article that interested them. With what was collected, the man filled his weekly paper, and it was read with pleasure and sold well, because a witty critique is something that appeals to people. Something of a critic tingles in every soul. In this occupation, the young gentlemen have all become brilliant polemicists and some of them now hold respected positions.

This is to show that it is not at all difficult to refute something, to criticize it, if you don't want anything more.

Our task today is more difficult, because we want to show how to establish the theosophy.

Let us first address the objection that it is amateurish to assume that an etheric body should be added to the physical body. I would remind you of what has been said about the life force theory, which has long been scientifically overcome. When it became possible to assemble material structures in the laboratory, the way was clear for the displacement of the life force. And it may be said that a time will come when it will also be possible to chemically produce higher and highest organic structures in laboratories. Therefore, it can only be described as ignorance when, in the face of such scientific progress, Theosophy still talks about a completely superfluous ether or life body.

However, one point should be emphasized. Many people consider the great Gotthold Ephraim Lessing to be an especially enlightened mind. Furthermore, one would certainly subscribe to the following sentence today: No one can be considered enlightened who is not opposed to belief in ghosts. But now Lessing says the following:

We no longer believe in ghosts? Who says that? Or rather, what does that mean?

[...] In this matter, on which almost as much can be said for as against it, which is not decided and cannot be decided, the currently prevailing way of thinking has given the reasons against it the upper hand; a few have this way of thinking, and many want to ; they make the noise and set the tone; the greatest multitude remains silent and indifferent, thinking one way or another, hearing in broad daylight with pleasure about the ghosts mocking and telling with horror at dark night.

There is no evidence against it, only our thought patterns have changed. The same applies to the life force theory. Our thought patterns about it have changed. However, this does not provide any proof against it.

And the same applies to the scientific objection: we do not need an etheric body. That is also just a change in thinking, which can change again into the opposite, as we can see often enough. In the past, people even believed that they could artificially create a whole, small human being, the so-called homunculus. Nevertheless, the above objection would apply even more, since we see that it is precisely the homunculus-believing human race that completely believes in a supernatural world. In a room with a lot of dirt, there are usually a lot of flies. In the past, this was explained by assuming that the flies came from the dirt. Now we know that dirt only creates the conditions; it makes it easy for flies to enter.

In the same way, owing to different habits of thought, it was formerly easy for the supersensible to enter into the sphere of human activity.

By chance I bought a Freidenkerkalender (Freethinker's Calendar) the other day, in which I found an essay by a freethinking person. This man is not opposed to Theosophy, of which he hopefully knows nothing, but he is against teaching children from an early age to believe in a supernatural world. Before falling asleep, one prays with them that a divine spirit will protect them, and so on. This is nonsense, against which the man seems to be very much opposed. He rails against it and says that today we should not want to force things on children that children do not have of their own accord. — It can only be recommended that we draw the obvious conclusion from this. Children do not come up with language on their own either. Therefore, the man should actually be opposed to teaching children language. But why has the man not drawn such conclusions? The reason is that this man is simply extremely opposed to everything supernatural. He wants to prove everywhere the falsity of the supersensible and therefore does not pay attention to logical arguments. To condemn everything supersensible has become a habit of thinking that he cannot get out of, even if he wanted to - but he does not want to. This is often the case in life. In the end, it is not logical arguments that decide the matter, but habits of thinking.

This raises the question: Is there a way to develop such thinking habits that can be developed into justified habits? Real science posits the principle that only those things should be put forward by the scientist that can be verified by anyone at any time. According to modern science, this is precisely what Theosophy cannot do. For Theosophy refers to sources that the soul develops through itself through the means of meditation. Intimate inner processes transform the soul, and then spiritual eyes and spiritual ears awaken in it. One no longer judges with the ordinary sensory instruments that are accessible to everyone. But strict science must exclude precisely what has only subjective validity.

This is an objection that can only be decided through experience. It must therefore be determined, firstly, whether it is true that science only decides objectively. Secondly, is it true that spiritual science decides subjectively?

Now, the first requirement does not apply to scientific research everywhere. In mathematics, for example, not everyone can verify the matter at any time. Everyone knows that the Pythagorean theorem is correct. But not everyone needs to be able to verify it. However, those who cannot verify it because they do not understand enough mathematics do not prove anything against it.

Mathematics, however, only brings truths that relate to relationships. But whether the results of mathematical science also relate to and prove true in the objective world [...] depends on other things.

Mathematical structures do not occur in nature. There is no such thing as a triangle in itself, nor a mathematically correct circle, and so on. This can never be represented externally, but it can be calculated and imagined internally.

Does this not agree with clairvoyant experience? [Only the lowest levels of the soul experience appear subjective. Those who go further always come to the same experiences. Mathematics is regarded as a living factor in the supersensible worlds, as Plato and others felt.

It can be said that the human organism is “I-ized” in the same way that one can say that God “geometrizes”.

I would like to give you an example of the effectiveness of the supersensible in the physical body. If we observe a person who strives for knowledge - not just a scientist, but a searching, wrestling, internalized soul - when we see such a person again after not having seen him for ten years, we notice a change in his features. We see, then, how the relatively small amount of supersensible work is externally imprinted on his body. Such a change can even indicate a certain kind of inner struggle to the psychologist. But there is a limit to the elasticity of the body. When there is no more room for the outer transformation of the features, then the solutions to the riddles with which one has been struggling come to the person. This can be clearly stated. Inner experience first expresses itself in the outer sensory world of the human being, only then can it enter into consciousness.

How does this compare to the experiences of a student of spiritual science?

The clairvoyant training must create conscious sleep states. By making consciousness possible even during sleep, it can bring powers into consciousness that would otherwise be too weak to do so. So only will-ideas that are not stimulated by anything external. Such training can take a long time. But when it becomes effective, a certain experience can be determined. For the student, inner experiences come, at first like a dream that cannot be grasped. One then feels a resistance from one's own brain. This gradually gives way. Then comes the time when one can transform what one has sensed into concepts. At first it is like a child, one does not really know about it, then it gradually increases to a conscious experience. The clairvoyant then experiences things that present themselves through themselves inwardly as immediate certainty, as inwardly objective. And all clairvoyants experience the same thing in this.

So what is spiritual science based on? Not on something that can be verified by everyone, but on the fact that there is a possibility to grow into the spiritual being itself and thereby draw truth directly from our inner being. Once you have realized that there is a supernatural, then the objections to it are quite different. They are objectively correct objections that cannot be refuted.

Take, for example, the objection that the theosophical explanation for the sleeping state is not needed at all because the self-regulator theory explains the processes much more simply. But there are other self-regulators besides sleep. The clock, for example, is an excellent self-regulator, but – as no one will deny – it can only come about through the activity of thought, through the mind of the watchmaker. Why should the same not also apply to humans? We see, then, that the objection itself is correct, but that it is not at all applicable, since nothing can be decided by it.

But there are still the ethical and moral objections to Theosophy. What about them? The objection to the doctrine of karma, that it can lead to selfishness because good deeds are followed by reward and bad deeds by punishment, is in a way true. It can lead to someone not doing good for the sake of good, but for the sake of reward. Now Schopenhauer once said: “Preaching morality is easy, justifying morality is difficult.” With a mere moral sermon that man should do good, you won't achieve much in general. It's a bit like if someone were to say to the stove: “Dear stove, it is your destiny, your moral duty, to heat the room; so please, be so good and act accordingly.” If nothing else happens, it will probably remain cold inside the stove. But if you take wood and light a fire in the stove, you will achieve the purpose of the stove more quickly and effectively.

Of course, preaching helps people a little more than a stove, but usually not much more. Justifying morals – igniting the inner fire in people – is more important. So let the law of karma first quietly work on people's selfishness and thus ignite them for good. The main thing is that the purpose is achieved. One could also say of a couple that they only educate their children well out of selfishness. Should they therefore rather not do so? The main thing is that the children become well-behaved people as a result of the good education. Even if the parents have only thought of themselves and the personal comforts that well-behaved children can bring them, love for the educational work will come naturally. Thus, goodness can initially arise from selfish motives, and then, through the habit of doing good, selflessness will arise naturally from selfishness.

Now, let us take the case of someone who says, “We will come back anyway, so why bother now? I want to enjoy my life now, I still have time in later life to become a decent person.” If we believe in the law of karma, we must realize that such an attitude will have its consequences for the next life. The consequence will be that his present behavior, even his intention to become decent, will make it difficult for him.

Then we have other objections. It is said that the clairvoyant borrows his ideas only from the physical world, just as in hallucinations. These are only reminiscences of ordinary sensual things, but clothed in fantastically confused form, just as, for example, primitive religions derive their idea of God from man, and so on.

Now, however, a spiritual connection between three people can be proven by clairvoyance, one of whom is dead. There are many such well-attested experiences. I will tell you, as I always do, only one real event that happened exactly as it happened and can be verified.

A couple lived with their son, but the son became ill and died after one day. That was a heavy blow for the parents. They were therefore very busy with the son. After months, both parents dreamt the same dream. The son appeared to them and told them that he had been buried alive. They told each other about the dream the next morning, and it turned out that they had both experienced the same thing in their dream, that they had both had the same dream. They now wanted to be sure and have it dug up. Unfortunately, the authorities prevented the digging, but the fact remains that both had the same dream. Now a dream is not yet reality, but in such cases dreams are the realization of what shines into consciousness from the supersensible worlds.

How this is to be understood can be seen from the well-known dream of the farmer's wife who, in her dream, seems to hear an edifying sermon by the pastor and, upon awakening, hears the cock crow that has awakened her and thereby, in the returning consciousness of a sermon, has aroused the image of a sermon, since she had thought of the pastor's edifying words before falling asleep. Dream images are determined by our attitudes and experiences. From this it is clear that even clairvoyant descriptions, despite being given in everyday images, can contain correct, supersensible experiences. Otherwise one could also say: I see nothing in a book but black letters and printer's ink. What you read from it, I cannot find in it at all.

This may be true for someone who cannot read within, but in terms of content, it is out of the question for someone who has learned to read.

We now come to the religious objections: from the self-deification of man through theosophy. The fact that one transfers God into one's own inner being, while true religiosity requires devotion to an external God, leads to self-exaltation, in that it tempts man to say: I am a god myself.

This is again a not entirely unjustified objection. But we can also say what, based on a living feeling, expresses the theosophical truth. You have a divine spark within you, undeveloped, in a germinal state. You must develop this more and more. It is therefore a breach of duty against the God in you if you do not constantly strive for perfection.

It is not enough for the theosophist to passively surrender to God – as some pious Christians do – but he must demand active devotion, as the Pauline saying goes: “Not I, but the Christ in me”.

So then, deification looks somewhat different, because it constantly leads to impulses for perfection, transforming man's self-righteousness into an eternal imperative of duty.

Here again you see: the objection need not be refuted, nevertheless what Theosophy has to say stands on solid ground. For it is true: the seeking soul does not have to deny itself when it longs for immortality, but finds outside what lives within itself.

From the lectures that I have been privileged to give here over the course of many years, it will have become clear that the world view from which the content of these lectures was drawn is based on a very specific, one might say, attitude, or at least that at least one such attitude is associated with that world view, which can be more closely defined by saying: It is not possible to give a correct lecture within theosophy or spiritual science if the soul is not imbued with a certain tolerance towards every system of belief, an inner tolerance that can bring a devoted understanding to every kind of belief. For the actual school of thought that comes into consideration within spiritual science only makes sense if it is kept far removed from everything that can be called fanaticism and sectarianism. Such things are so widespread in our time that when someone views the world from his own point of view, he is apt to think that anyone with a different line of thought must be a blockhead, or at least lacking in earnest sense of truth or in powers of perception and conscientiousness. For external reasons alone, it would be a pity if Theosophy were to pay homage to such fanatical sentiments, because it must be admitted that, to gain a thorough and comprehensive grasp of the Theosophical world-view, a great deal of patience and time is necessary for those who wish to penetrate deeply into it. large part of our contemporaries who draw their convictions from spiritual science or theosophy do not do so on the basis of a thorough knowledge of all the underlying principles of truth, but rather, understandably, form their convictions out of certain emotional and sentimental interests. This does not mean that the latter are denied their right! Naturally, everyone has a personal right to their own conviction, but it is equally impossible to thoroughly defend the spiritual science world view if the conviction has been gained only in this way. Moreover, since it is only possible to become familiar with spiritual science through difficult, dedicated work, it is understandable that some of our contemporaries feel repelled by Theosophy, and as a rule these are not the people with the worst sense of truth.

We must find it understandable that, as things stand, those of our contemporaries who draw their convictions from science and culture will have difficulties upon difficulties to come to Theosophy; for such people in particular, refutations and contradictions pile up in abundance in the face of what confronts them as Theosophy. But to speak of ill will would be contrary to the tolerance that Theosophy should always practice. Therefore, the task for this evening should be to give a picture of the doubts that may confront the honest seeker of truth when he approaches Theosophy, and then the task for the lecture the day after tomorrow - “How to Justify Theosophy” - is how such doubts can be dispelled.

Even if today's lecture appears to be somewhat disconcerting, that is because it is intended to put itself in the opponent's shoes and present the main lines of his well-founded doubts and refutations. This will also best achieve what is to be shown, namely that the objections of the opponents should be taken as seriously as possible. I do not want to present my opinion, but to make a serious attempt to put myself completely in the position of the opponent, without touching on those lightly-worded objections that are already answered by saying that the opponent should try to get to know Theosophy more closely. Thus, I do not want to address the immature, but rather the concerns that really arise for those who, from the culture of the present, want to take note of the theosophical worldview and then cannot go along with Theosophy, because otherwise they would have to break with everything with everything that arises from the culture of the present, a culture whose reasons cannot be refuted, and which must rather raise justified and thoroughly justified objections, which Theosophy as such must recognize without being able to refute them to the same extent.

Therefore, I would first like to present an extract of the theosophical worldview to you, in the way that it has already been explained in as much detail as possible in many lectures. First of all, in Theosophy you will find the assumption of a supersensible world behind the world of the senses and the mind. Then Theosophy invokes certain methods of research that differ from what is taught in our time by the methods of research and thinking. The world of the senses, it is said, teaches that it is explainable from within itself and for this purpose does not need to seek a supersensible world behind it. Or the opinion is expressed by others that a supersensible world must indeed be assumed behind the sensory world, but that man cannot penetrate it, hence the limits of knowledge must be assumed.

Theosophy emphasizes that man, with his ordinary consciousness, is dependent on the external world of the intellect and, in addition to this, on that of the inner observation of the soul, but that it is also possible to bring the inner life of the soul to a high level of development. When this happens through certain inner exercises, the practitioner, if he practices in the right way and with sufficient persistence, will encounter a high transcendental world from the depths of his soul as he develops his spiritual and mental faculties, so that the sufficiently advanced researcher in the field of the spiritual world can recognize transcendental facts. Then a person developed in this way will be able to think about the nature of man differently than the ordinary consciousness is able to do, which can only recognize the part of the environment that can be perceived by the senses.

Now, however, Theosophy teaches that with heightened consciousness, three supersensible parts can be recognized in the human being itself. Namely, the “etheric body” is said to still be active in the physical human body as the actual animator and shaper of the physical body, which can also be found in animals and even in plants, and which works to ensure that the substances composing the outer body do not follow their otherwise inherent forces and laws as long as they are under the influence of the ether body in the organism, but only after death, when they are left to themselves again. Theosophy or secret science recognizes a third aspect of human nature in the so-called astral body; every living being that develops consciousness does so through the powers of the astral body, which permeates the physical and etheric bodies, which we find in humans and animals, but not in plants. Human nature, however, has a fourth element, the so-called ego, which elevates man from animality and thereby presents him as the crown of earthly creation.

Further pursuit and deeper penetration into the knowledge of man reveals that man differs essentially from the sleeping when awake; spiritual science teaches that in the latter, the astral body with the ego separates from the physical and etheric bodies, and these latter two go into the spiritual world. But in this world, both are then surrounded by darkness from falling asleep to waking up, since for the normally developed person without his physical-etheric tools and without the tool of his mind, nothing is perceptible, and with these only in the physical world, because he does not yet possess any organs for recognizing the spiritual world.

In this view of waking life, spiritual science points out that everything a person has experienced through his senses in his mind, and everything that has happened to him as luck or misfortune, has been deposited in his soul, which carries it through the gate of death in the higher spiritual limbs of the human being. These remain with the human being in a certain way, namely as the I, the astral body and as the essence of the etheric body. With these elements of his being, the human being undergoes experiences in the spiritual world after death, in which he then gathers strength from everything and processes it in a unique way, in order to then, after a longer or shorter time, be able to move back into a physical body that is made available to him within the line of inheritance. In this way it will receive certain qualities from the parents, but the essential abilities will be formed in it, that is to say in its physical body and the next higher members, by its own spiritual-soul core, which his life between death and a new birth, in the purely spiritual world, under different physical and earthly conditions, had further experiences that led him to develop powers that made him suitable for a new life on earth. Everything that the person has experienced in the way of important thoughts, impulses and feelings carries over into a new life, so that this, in its peculiarity, is partly a consequence of the previous life(s).

The various elements of human nature belong to several worlds; the spiritual-mental is of earlier origin than the physical-etheric part, so that we can speak of a spiritual-mental world preceding the physical world, which is, as it were, an earlier embodiment of our earth planet. We must turn our gaze to this and many other things, as well as to the future formations of the same, in order to get an idea of the basis of theosophical science.

If a person with a serious scientific mind approaches such ideas, they will get the impression that everything that the humanities and science of the last few centuries have researched has been turned upside down, for example the fact that the physical body, in all its organs, is permeated by an etheric body, which is seen as the carrier of life. Should not anyone who has immersed themselves in science, especially that of the last two centuries, say that with such a view, Theosophy adopts an amateurish position that is not justified by anything, because what is this etheric body if not the resurgence of the vital force that has been broken since the eighteenth century? The chemical compounds, mixtures and separations can be explained by the forces that can be recognized in chemistry and physics! Apart from these, certain compounds of substances are also seen to occur that are only seen to form in the living organism, not in the external, non-organic nature; hence it was said in the past that there is a life force in the living organism that permeates the organs of the same in a peculiar way.

In the nineteenth century, science made progress with Liebig and Wöhler, namely in that these two researchers also produced in their laboratories those compounds that apparently could only form in the living organism, without claiming the organism's supposed life force. What was more natural than to assume that, once such compounds had been produced outside the organism, they would also have come about inside the living organism without the help of the assumed life force? If science were sufficiently developed, there would be no reason to assume that further, more complicated substances could not be produced in the future, and indeed in the laboratory, without the help of the so-called life force.

If we continue this train of thought, we must eventually be convinced that the living organism also contains only those forces that can be found in the natural world, so that with sufficient scientific progress, even simply organized living beings could be represented! It should be readily admitted that the fact that this possibility does not yet exist does not in any way contradict the possibility of such hopes at a later stage. What, then, is the etheric body of theosophy other than a transfer of the life force long since rejected by science? What else is apparent than that theosophy does not know the above-indicated scope of scientific discoveries and the well-founded prospects associated with them? Nothing but pure lay thinking, only dilettantism is the assumption of an etheric or life body.

This objection is fully justified from our intellectual culture, and a serious scientist cannot lightly dismiss it.

But if we now look at what we have characterized as the astral body, the vehicle of consciousness, we see that these appearances of consciousness present themselves as supersensible experiences, and everything we know of thoughts, sensations, feelings, and impulses of the will belongs to the supersensible world. Nineteenth-century natural scientists also went this far; one need only recall the famous speech given in 1872 by Du Bois-Reymond in Leipzig on the limits of natural knowledge. According to the then prevailing view, the brain was thought to be composed of atoms, so it was not possible to penetrate to an understanding of how the appearances of consciousness should arise from the constant or changing position of these atoms. This radical difference between external appearances was already seriously noticed by natural scientists at that time, who took into account substances and supersensible soul experiences. The latter were regarded as constant accompaniments of the former. The life of ideas changes, for example, with a greater or lesser influx of blood to the brain, so that the phenomena of consciousness are bound to material processes, and the natural scientist therefore finds no difference between such phenomena and, for example, the force of gravity, which is also supersensible and can only be perceived in its effects, not itself, just as supersensible as consciousness. It is bound to substances that attract each other in inverse proportion to the square of the distances and in direct proportion to the masses [...].

Accordingly, for example, Benedict says in his 'Seelenkunde': The phenomena of consciousness within our soul life are no different in their attachment to the substances of our body than gravity, magnetism, [electricity] and the like; why should not such or similar forces emanate from our brain as those forces as accompanying phenomena of material processes? The sentence cannot be defended against exact scientific reasoning, that the phenomena of the soul are something other than the accompanying phenomena of matter. And we must admit: Benedict's principle is one that a person from the point of view of contemporary culture cannot easily get away from, but instead would have to accept that the soul forces of man would be released in death, and in the same way, gravity would have to be be able to break away in the destruction of the material, in order to pass in the meantime into a special realm, a kind of gravity realm [gravity heaven], until it finds an opportunity to reincarnate in a new material. That is a logical objection that a scientific conscience cannot easily get over.

Let us turn to what Theosophy says about the phenomena of sleeping and waking; in contrast to this, the modern scientist believes that the explanation is completely in the air that a supersensible part of the being emerges from the sleeping person. We will therefore try to explain sleeping and waking on the assumption that soul processes are bound to the substances of the body like gravity is bound to every physical substance. We therefore assume that the waking activity, through its wear and tear, leads the human organism to a state where the individual organs are no longer able to maintain waking consciousness, namely in such a way that certain poisons are produced and accumulated, which ultimately cause the person to fall asleep. Because consciousness is thus extinguished during sleep, the purely [animalistic], or rather, [vegetative] activity of the human being sets in, which works out the fatigue or toxin substances again, so that he is regenerated and can enter into the consciousness of waking again.

Thus, we would have a self-regulating mechanism in sleep and wakefulness throughout life. This is an explanation that is entirely in line with our materialistic way of thinking. Hypotheses of this kind can be justified in detail, if erroneous, but because of materialism; it depends here mainly on whether they can be thought logically without the assumption that when you fall asleep something goes out of the person and returns to him when he wakes up. So, from its point of view, scientific thinking must reject the theosophical explanation of sleeping and waking.

In the doctrine of repeated lives on earth, we find ourselves on completely uncertain ground with regard to the latter conditions, while spiritual scientific thinking can only conceive of the present life as the effect of previous lives. But there are also models in natural science thinking that point to this, so that, for example, according to the so-called biogenetic law, all animals and humans must go through all stages of their ancestors' earlier development. human germ shows fish forms 21 days after fertilization, indicating that in times long past, his bodily ancestors were fish-like; thus, there is a certain indication in the present developmental process of earlier bodily conditions. This is how one could characterize old developmental states. Nevertheless, it soon becomes apparent that it is not possible to explain all the characteristics of a person from his ancestors, but only by assuming a spiritual-soul core of being, for example by pointing out that children of the same parents should actually be much more similar than twins usually are.

But all this will not suffice for scientific thinking, which objects that every human being must arise from the mixing of the characteristics of father and mother in their mutual interaction, so that accordingly children of different ages of the parents would have to take different forms, since they would have arisen from the most diverse mixing ratios. Furthermore, at the present stage of advanced research, or precisely despite it, scientific thinking can say: Who should be able to assess the fine structures of the mixing germ?

In addition, it seems frivolous to the modern, materialistic thinker to want to trace the most diverse properties back to earlier lives; because first you would have to eliminate everything that happened in early childhood. Thus, for example, in the case of a sculptor, one would be tempted to trace an outstanding talent back to a past life, whereas it could just as easily be explained by the fact that the person in question had frequent and stimulating contact with sculptures and artists in his youth. (We no longer know for sure, but it had an effect on the subconscious.) You can never be too careful in gathering all the relevant information, in order to provide the appropriate and correct explanation.

In science, there is something called a useful working hypothesis. For example, sunlight used to be seen as the radiation of a fine luminiferous substance that travelled from the sun to the planets, including our earth. But since this could not explain all the phenomena of light, the hypothesis or theory of the cosmic ether was adopted, although no one can directly prove whether a substance flows or the ether moves in waves. But if the undulation theory is correct, then it can be used to explain the phenomena of light and colors and to predict them under certain conditions. Even if the processes take place differently, this theory proves to be useful. It is similar with the Darwinian theory, which cites fish as an intermediate link in the development of humans; it is, after all, possible to understand, for example, the fins of fish as the original limb for the locomotor organs of higher animals and so on, and to bring the lower animals in their development to higher ones in the most diverse organic areas through this explanatory hypothesis with humans in connection.

The assumption of repeated lives on earth could prove fruitful in explaining happy or unhappy physical and social living conditions. But seriously, one cannot treat reincarnation and karma in the same way that a natural scientist proceeds with his working hypotheses, because in natural science we have only one explanation for many phenomena; we trace many phenomena back to a single principle. Thus, as already indicated, the higher animals can be traced back to fish-like ancestors, an assumption that can be elevated to a law through an infinite number of cases and traced back to a single principle. On the other hand, with every human being, we would have to come up with a new hypothesis for each of the many previous lives; if a natural scientist were to attempt this in his field, it would be declared absolutely inadmissible, since, on the contrary, he endeavors to find a common explanation for as many individual events as possible. The idea that all human beings live according to karma is only an abstraction, because each person must be traced back to their own past life. In this way, one could, in the most diverse ways, create justified difficulties from conscientious thinking, raising countless objections from a scientific point of view.

But special objections arise for the materialistic-scientific thinker when he observes how the spiritual researcher invokes a higher, spiritual vision, which the researcher tells him can only be formed through higher soul powers, whereby this spiritual scientific method of the researcher is diametrically opposed to the materialistic-scientific requirement that at any place, at any time and for any person, provided that the essential prerequisites are met, a verification of the established claim should be possible, quite independently of the processes in the interior of his soul. These are completely irrelevant for the scientific researcher for the application of his research method; rather, the second and third researchers should be able to determine the same as the first. This fundamental requirement is contrary to the spiritual scientific method, according to which something can be researched by developing subjective psychic powers; but this is unacceptable to the scientific researcher; the results of such a research method are unprovable to him. He can therefore only classify them in the realm of mere belief, to which everyone can relate as they wish. Thus, all this appears unacceptable to the materialistically thinking person, and to anyone who approaches Theosophy with his own methods and then experiences what and how it researches and teaches.

Numerous other objections arise in the moral, religious and spiritual spheres of life. It is objected that in the theosophical view, what we experience is a consequence of previous lives, and the thoughts and actions of the present life are the cause of the phenomena of the coming life; it is objected that such a view leads to an egotistical morality and conduct if evil is to lead to something that must be compensated for by pain and so on, while good would bring happiness and joy. Would not a selfish morality develop if, for the reasons indicated, one refrained from evil and practiced good? Compared to such a selfish conception of morality, what we encounter from the materialistic view of morality seems like heroism, which assumes that with death the phenomena of consciousness are extinguished like a flame whose fuel has been consumed; a view that assumes that the deeds of the individual gain nothing for himself, but that their consequences, good and evil, flow only in the general world process. Even if this theory can be refuted, it still depends on external reality, not on logical reasons, but on the effect that such a theory has in life.

Among noble minds in the West, we find the views of materialistic morality described above, for example in the Munich Frohschammer, who put forward a very noteworthy moral objection when he said: What does the constant recurrence of a spiritual-soul core lead to? To the view that precisely that which we here in life regard as one of the noblest relationships, namely the love between the sexes, provides the cause for repeatedly, without end, imprisoning one soul after another in a physical body; therefore, I consider reincarnation morally reprehensible. Anyone who devotes themselves to the contemplation of the transcendental world, who turns away from the external world and falls into a state of estrangement from it through a life-denying asceticism, will by no means consider reincarnation to be an ethical or moral teaching. The personal experiences of the spiritual researcher can and will easily be met with contradiction, and how can we be sure that these subjective experiences are not just an illusion?

Such a view is also theoretically refutable, but for anyone who is trying to decide whether or not to turn to Theosophy, such doubts weigh very heavily on the soul, especially when they are combined with Kepler's example, who, as we know, also practised astrology, a peculiar form of astronomy involving high spiritual concepts. We learn from him how he was repeatedly compelled to cast horoscopes for prominent personalities, and then wondered anxiously whether he should explain the future events in full or rather communicate them in veiled terms. So we can see that even the great Kepler, despite his scientific conscience, sometimes comes close to charlatanry. Abysses of a peculiar kind open up at the transition from an old to a new science, at the boundary of which stands the figure of Kepler. If such a significant man is, as is thought, not always protected from dubious obscurities, how is an ordinary person to develop the steadfast qualities when he reaches supersensible insights in an unfree and often immature state, in order to be the bearer of an immovable sense of truth under all circumstances!

Thus, the fear arises that clairvoyant qualities, when penetrating into higher spiritual worlds, lead to dishonesty as a side effect of such abilities, and opponents of Theosophy therefore say: “Morally contestable is even the method, not the development itself, which is supposed to lead to seeing into higher worlds.” Thus, for example, we see how Faust is accompanied by Mephistopheles, the bearer of magical powers; we can sense how close this comes to him when Goethe has him say:

If I could remove magic from my path, forget the spells altogether...

What is not readily within a person thus approaches him from outside as a temptation to immorality.

In religious terms, it is one of the noblest or perhaps the noblest view of man that he stands before a divine being that has created and redeemed him. What does Theosophy make of this supreme divine being? It regards the soul and spiritual core of the self as a spark in the totality of the divine being; the human ego does good and evil, bears the redemption within itself and does not look up to the God of retributive justice, who is instead relocated in one's own soul and can lead the human being to a delusion of unjustified esteem. The core of feeling and perception of religion, the sense of childship, is therefore in danger of being perverted into a worship of self-righteousness.

Thus we have seen how the theosophical line of reasoning and general view of the world and life, and so on, is incompatible with that of other thinkers. For example, human conscience cannot be understood externally, but here the scientific thinker says – compare the book on conscience by Dr. Paul Ree – that conscience is the final result of human development. In the face of this view, spiritual science has to develop an inner tolerance and not describe the opponent as a drip or even as a malicious person, but it should respond to his objections, which seem worthy of consideration due to their weight. Present-day scientists are indeed demanding completely different ways of proving the supersensible truths of the higher worlds, for example in the way shown by Ludwig Deinhard in the first half of his book 'The Mystery of Man', where he leads to the assumption of survival after death and to an understanding of the survival of the same individuality, which is identical with that of the physical-earthly life. This path has often been tried by honest scholars, and we can see that all of them are led from the same established phenomena to the same hypothesis, that after death man exists as a spirit.

For example, the so-called cross-correspondence could make a significant impression on researchers working in this field, in which two or more people, prompted from the depths of their souls, write down the same thing, which then collectively points to a recently deceased personality who was a leader or enthusiastic participant in a movement that had set itself the goal of researching such relationships and it borders on the conscientiousness of the argumentation and the completeness of the same, as the natural scientist demands in his field of phenomena, when in such a cross-correspondence a lady in India sends the messages from the spiritual world that have come to her through the use of her hidden powers of the soul to a personality in London, at an address that is given to her in the same occult way and vice versa. Now there are two types: on the one hand, there are people who allow themselves to be convinced of the existence of a transcendental world by means of processes that border on scientific methods, such as Weber and Zöllner; on the other hand, there are people like the philosopher Wundt, who believed that the researchers mentioned earlier are not entitled to draw such momentous conclusions from the observed phenomena, that the scholar is too gullible and naive for observation and judgment, and that the conjurer is the most suitable examiner for this. He points to the events in a meeting in which samples of excellent mind reading were demonstrated by a medium who had both eyes carefully bound, and in which the impresario was given the information to be transmitted on pieces of paper. The impresario then apparently energetically signaled the medium what was written down and then asked what was on the piece of paper. The medium then stated this with great certainty. Careful observation ruled out any agreed signals, and yet the medium reproduced the most peculiar and intricate messages. The explanation of this phenomenon was provided by a conjurer who recognized the impresario as a ventriloquist whose medium, without speaking herself, only moved her lips during the messages. Professor Weber, who, as already indicated, was keenly interested in the study of occult phenomena and supersensory worlds, had convinced himself of their reality through his experiments; he once saw a sleight of hand artist operating with a banknote, which he made grow to enormous size before the eyes of his audience, without the help of four-dimensional forces, but only by using his sleight of hand skills. Weber was extremely affected when he saw this. Therefore, skepticism may arise when it comes to scrutiny by scholars.

In the first-mentioned experiment of cross-correspondence, one does not even need to raise the objection that someone in India might have read the address of a lady in London without remembering it, and might unconsciously remember this fact from it; one could indeed completely repeat the whole experiment to eliminate such doubts. But apart from that, if one wants to prove something through experiments with such writings, especially that a deceased personality still lives as an individuality in a spiritual world, one is easily tempted to want to prove too much, since the possibility must be admitted that the effect, even of a deceased person, on people still living as a spiritual movement that continues to vibrate after their death, and therefore the premature proof of identity has been questioned. Just as electric waves can be spread over the whole earth by wireless telegraphy, so it is conceivable that the activity and thinking of a person could continue to have an effect for years after his death without the help of mechanical aids, without it being necessary to assume the survival of a human individuality after death.

Thus, as we have already heard in the short time of this lecture, there are objections upon objections, without these themselves being chosen as easy objections, so that one would have to take the view that Theosophy cannot be reconciled with present-day science. In the next lecture, the attempt will be made to show whether this test cannot be made in another way.

To illustrate this in advance, it may be recalled that when Hartmann's “Philosophy of the Unconscious” was published in 1867, in which, among other things, the unsuitability of the purely materialistic view, for example that of Darwin, was shown, there was a storm of indignation among natural scientists, in which the arguments of Hartmann's work were described as dilettantism. Many refutations appeared, among them one entitled: “The Unconscious from the Point of View of Descent...”. In it, everything that could possibly be said against the “Philosophy of the Unconscious” was collected. This writing appeared as the best against Hartmann's presumptions, and Ernst Haeckel said that he himself could not write anything better than the anonymous author of this excellent refutation. Then Eduard von Hartmann himself named himself as the author, the storm of approval soon ceased, and people no longer wanted to recognize him as a member of the materialistic school of thought after he had shown that he could say everything that could be said by the opposing side if he were to take the position of his opponents.

But is it the case that such objections can or cannot be upheld, or, in the former case, is there a possibility for Theosophy to establish its case and refute the objections? We must therefore try to gain a point of view within spiritual science from which Theosophy can be established. If this is possible, then it will become clear whether the arguments put forward in this way are appreciated by the opponents of Theosophy, whether it is actually able to refute the objections of these loyal opponents and to show what it still has to say.

If, the day before yesterday, we tried to put ourselves in the position of our opponents of the theosophical or spiritual scientific worldview, and if today the latter worldview is to be presented to you in its main forms, , I would ask you not to interpret my task as an attempt to dismantle piece by piece what was built up the day before yesterday, that is, to play a kind of game with concepts; for that would seem frivolous to me. It has already been emphasized that it was not a matter of randomly listing what is said in lightly-worded objections to Theosophy by people who have no good will to familiarize themselves with the content and essence of these worldviews , but it has been emphasized that only those reasons should be put forward that must be regarded as serious, weighty objections and that make it difficult for today's cultured people to approach Theosophy with their innermost convictions, despite their goodwill.

But since those who have heard me give lectures of a theosophical nature before can assume that I am not trying to refute Theosophy, today everything presented should be seen as a kind of refutation of the day before yesterday, and I ask that you bear in mind that I have to strike a different tone than I would for other lectures explaining the theosophical truths. Otherwise, factual evidence was presented to support the Theosophical truths; what will be said today is to be countered more in a logically judgmental way to that of the day before yesterday, from a more abstract point of view, which will appear quite understandable in view of the objections that have been raised, within certain limits, as justified.

In itself, it seems strange to try to present arguments for and against a matter that is claimed to be and must be part of our cultural heritage; strange because it could easily lead to the judgment that a conviction established for one person cannot be assumed for others. The decision is often quite difficult, so that first of all attention must be drawn to the question of the conclusiveness of human reason for or against a matter. Only then is it possible to ask whether so much really depends on the conclusiveness of human reason alone, whether this alone can decide for or against a matter with its reasons, or whether this does not happen in such an immediate way.

Everyone knows that something can be put forward with great acumen until one realizes that the evidence that initially seems so convincing is no longer sufficient when the scope of vision is broadened. Therefore, the question arises as to whether it is the evidence alone that leads people to decide whether to accept or reject something. It might seem easy to judge that a thing is right when the evidence speaks for it and wrong when it speaks against it, but we recognize from cultural history that, over the course of time, people have by no means been decisive in the evidence that could be presented for or against a thing, but it came and still comes down to things that are more decisive than evidence of human reason when it comes to believing that something is true.

This may be illustrated by the following example: This year, for the first time, a so-called freethinker's calendar appeared, in which there is also an argument from an author whose love of truth should be unconditionally recognized; this author says that one should not teach one's children anything that is based on ideas of divine or other transcendental things. The writer of the article in question takes a monistic-materialistic point of view and believes he must speak out against beliefs of a supernatural kind, such as the existence of the soul, God and so on. In doing so, he refers to something that can be said to carry great weight for many thinking people, namely, that children should be taught nothing but what could be developed from their natural human nature; on the other hand, to bring something from supersensible worlds into their development is something alien, because left to themselves, they would come to the sensual world. This makes sense to modern pedagogical people who do not see the child as a sack that can be randomly filled with ideas and so on.

Such views may seem quite natural and appropriate to anyone, and such a presentation will also appear to the reader of the calendar as absolutely flawless evidence. But as difficult as it is to refute the author with all the means of his point of view, the judgment changes when one broadens one's horizons. If, for example, a child were raised on a desert island where one could prevent it from learning the language of people, the question seems quite natural: Should one maintain the principle established earlier and offer the child nothing but what his nature already provides by itself, it would be almost impossible for such a child to learn to speak. It follows that when thinking, all relevant factors must be taken into account.

Great people have always recognized as a fundamental principle the endeavor to keep their thinking free and independent in this direction, to grasp their ideas on the broadest possible horizon. An example of the way such people think, which should apply to thinkers and personalities who are undoubtedly regarded by most as very impartial thinkers, and whom the most enlightened minds of the present are accustomed to recognize as theirs, easy to cite a multitude of examples from experience that demonstrate that human superstition clings to many things that actually exist but are only conceived erroneously; for example, many people believe in spirits that are independent of the physical body. By contrast, it seems obvious to some that one must be bereft of all enlightenment if one does not doubt the existence of such disembodied spirits. Many of those who accuse such believers of crass superstition invoke Lessing as the pioneer of modern thought; we can fully endorse this assessment in the sense that he derived the nature of his thinking from a broad horizon. He says:

We no longer believe in ghosts? Who says so? Or rather, what does that mean? Does it mean something like this: We have finally come so far in our insights that we can prove the impossibility of it; certain irrefutable truths that contradict belief in ghosts have become so common knowledge, are so constantly present even to the meanest man, that anything that argues with them must necessarily appear ridiculous and absurd to him? That cannot be what it means. We do not believe in ghosts now, so it can only mean: in this matter, about which almost as much can be said for as against it, which is not decided and cannot be decided, the currently prevailing way of thinking has given the reasons against it the upper hand; a few have this way , and many seem to want it; these make the noise and set the tone; the majority is silent and indifferent and thinks one way today and another tomorrow, hearing with delight in broad daylight mocking of ghosts and telling of them with horror in the dark of night. What are we to say about a legend of modern thought presented in this way? Does he have a crass superstition if he wants to accept other views and fields of knowledge as logically reasoned arguments, if he expresses his opinion to the effect that these gain or lose weight depending on whether one broadens or narrows one's horizons? In the former case, completely new possibilities immediately arise. It is not the weight of the evidence that has decided the question in favor of the existence of spirits, but the habit of thinking, which is directed to facts that take away the evidence of their existence. So you have to try to convey what leads people to give their views a probative force, a weight.

What matters are our thought habits, and here we will be able to see that there would and actually are apparently weighty reasons against rejecting the etheric body as taught by Theosophy.

Spiritual science tells us that this etheric body permeates the physical body and treats its own and absorbed substances in such a way that the organism can live. The objection was raised that chemical science is capable of producing certain chemical compounds outside of a living organism in the laboratory, and that it is therefore concluded that all of these processes and compounds that can be observed in a living organism are now also caused by the same external forces, and that it is expected that at least the simplest living organisms can be produced in the laboratory at some point. On the basis of these facts and considerations, the concept of the etheric body is therefore considered unscientific; for no one has the right to doubt that science will not be able to produce life phenomena and living things in the future.

All this is not based on reasons and proofs, but on habits of thought. This can be proved historically. In the past, no one doubted the supernatural origin of life, because the alchemists, for example, and all the other scholars of earlier centuries believed that they could produce a whole “homunculus” from the necessary substances in the laboratory; a strange phenomenon! What was necessary for such thinkers – who we should not simply dismiss out of hand as fools, considering that in the future we will not be seen as greater fools for having been short-sighted enough to consider them as such – what was necessary for them to assume so that we would no longer see an insoluble contradiction? We must embrace the idea that life is everywhere, not only limited to living organisms and their possibilities of inheritance, but that it can occur in all suitably combined substances, where one need only assume that life is present - if only given the opportunity to unfold in one way or another. If anything alive comes into being, it cannot be assumed that only what is present in a particular place comes into being, just as flies do not simply arise out of the dirt, which they soon appear on. If we bring together the necessary substances under the appropriate conditions in the laboratory, we can do nothing but provide the opportunity for life to come to them. In doing so, however, we must not limit the concept of life to the living organisms that have crystallized out of the available substances, since life is omnipresent and takes every opportunity to express itself, for example, as a germ in properly arranged substances.

Such a view is unusual for our time, but it cannot be logically dismissed. In a way, it is difficult to arrive at a comprehensive idea of life through the methods of Theosophy; to help you, I would like to start with a point made the day before yesterday to lead you to the concept and acceptance of the etheric body.

It has been said that there is a way to explain waking and sleeping differently than Theosophy does, by stating that the astral body with the ego slips out of the physical body, which remains united with the ether body, and that these latter two parts of the being are then united in the spiritual world during sleep. In contrast to this, it seems perfectly logical when the phenomenon of sleep is presented in such a way that during waking hours in the sensory world, through his intellectual and muscular activity, man accumulates so-called fatigue substances in his organs, which no longer enable him to develop the strength to continue to live while awake. The countervailing forces of the organism then assert themselves, the consciousness of being awake extinguishes, and those forces then restore the organism during sleep, so that it is able to work again with full vigor with all its organs and so on. Many naturalists think that the alternating state of sleeping and waking is based on a self-regulation of the healthy organism, so that it is not necessary to assume that, to explain sleep, a spiritual part separates from the physical-etheric body, removes from it, and both parts unfold a restorative activity - without any actual self-awareness.

Such an objection can be a stumbling block for someone who wants to turn to theosophy, and such an objection should therefore not be underestimated by a conscientious person. But even if we assume that the organism is a self-regulating system in terms of sleeping and waking, that the disturbances caused in the organs by fatigue are compensated for by the restoration of the vital forces, the question must still be raised, and as a matter of principle and fundamental: What can the organism do for its organs during sleep? It must be the result of a special life activity when the eyes, ears, brain, nervous system and other internal organs are endowed with new life force during sleep. But what is the nature of this restoration of organic activity? Is it something like that which is otherwise in the organism, for example, that of the constantly active human lungs, which take care of breathing, since they must also be imbued with the inner organic life with nourishment and organic forces? This inner organic activity, which nourishes the lungs, cannot alone be the cause of the movement; and the absorption of oxygen from the air by the lungs themselves cannot be replaced by this inner nutrition, for it has nothing to do with it. The same applies to the brain and nervous system, which are also supplied and nourished internally. But the internal restoration of the brain and nervous system that occurs during sleep has just as little in common with the sensations and perceptions that flow through our senses and the thoughts that flow through our brain.

Thus, the inner organic activity cannot give anything that makes the senses and brain thinking, feeling organs, otherwise something could be provided by the sleeping person in relation to his soul, just as if one wanted to determine something about the inner nature of oxygen through the inner organic nutrition of the lungs. Therefore, we can rightly say: by supplying its organs with inner organic power, our organism has given nothing that is capable of filling them with their own ideas, and so it has given the lungs nothing at all to supply them with oxygen again and again. Thus, what is felt, what is the content of the soul, comes to man from a completely different source.

Accordingly, it is indisputable to speak of the fact that something absolutely different is present in the waking person than in the sleeping person, just as water (H> O) is present in the form of the separate parts hydrogen (H) and oxygen (O); water cannot be represented if only hydrogen (H) is present without oxygen (O). So we must also supply the sleeping person, who is present without spiritual content, that is, from the outside, which complements him to wakefulness.

Now we must be clear about the fact that even the positivist thinkers such as [Hume] do not claim that what we call “I” can be found in any kind of organic activity. In itself, it always finds only warmth, cold, pleasure, pain, joy, pain, affection, aversion, and so on. The ego thus lives and is bound to such activities; it must draw these into the organism when it wakes up, as oxygen must be brought to hydrogen (O + 2H = H, O) to form water.

With such considerations one remains in agreement with the natural scientific views and methods; other world views, which do not act in this way, are thereby in contradiction with their own facts, with the correctly observed facts of natural science and the methods of the same, which they literally sin against. Theosophy does not pay homage to dualism, just as one will not call a person a dualist who sees in water not an absolute unity but a substance that has formed from hydrogen and oxygen or can be broken down into these two. There is no contradiction between theosophy and natural science; both stand on the firm ground of facts, but it depends on their interpretation.

From this point of view, we are justified in saying that everything that has direct existence in itself must be examined in isolation from the organism, so that we must therefore approach the human spiritual content separately from its physical organism.

This brings us to the justification of what asserts itself as the esoteric method of Theosophy, but which, in accordance with its peculiar nature, must break with the demand of natural science to a certain extent, namely, that spiritual life should be able to be observed at any time and by any person. One can only look at it in its own inherent laws. The spiritual researcher must bring about a process in his own spiritual life that is uninfluenced from the outside, by bringing certain ideas into his observation through meditation, concentration and his will, which alone appear to be suitable for esoteric research. He detaches the soul from its connection with the body, as it were, dissecting the soul and thereby making a process from the inner life of the soul that can be clearly seen and need only be symbolic. [Otherwise, the person is stimulated by external processes, but in order to free the soul from the physical, one uses one's own will to place an idea, preferably symbolic ideas, at the center of one's mental activity in meditation.] The only difference from external knowledge is that the relationships of the mental activity to something else are not taken into account in terms of content. For example, in meditation the thoughts need not depict something that really exists, as the so-called Rosicrucian cross, a black cross framed by seven red roses, does not need to be, but we only ask: What does such an idea do in the soul, what does it contribute to our development? What the thoughts accomplish in our soul is what matters.

When we allow such things to take effect on us, we get to know the activity of the soul in the spiritual world. A state similar to that of sleep occurs for the soul, without, however, consciousness ceasing; the content of this is given to it as a supersensible one, whereby the researcher recognizes the supersensible world in its reality. It could be objected that this is only a subjective process of the soul, but for the real connoisseur of such processes this objection does not apply: for him, these are just as the insights of mathematical truths, such as for example that the sum of the three angles of a plane triangle is always equal to 2 R = 180°, a truth that one recognizes purely within the soul; the fact that others also consider it to be true or not contributes nothing to the knowledge of this mathematical truth; it proves itself in itself. It is just as foolish to say that when someone comes to mental processes through certain exercises, it is only a subjective certainty of their own soul.

When someone begins with exercises of a mental nature, they initially encounter all sorts of pitfalls, errors, and self-deceptions; only these are subjective. Beyond that, after sufficient progress, the certainty arises that one has something objective before one, or rather experiences it within oneself. These are no longer subjective convictions. This would be an objection as if one wanted to say that one should not do mathematics, because it causes difficulties of a subjective nature; nevertheless, something objective can be demonstrated at the end of the path.

But someone might raise yet another objection, namely, that the path to supersensible knowledge cannot be compared to that of mathematical knowledge, because the latter only has a formal value. The realization that 3 x 3 = 9 does not prove that there are 3 x 3 things = 9 things in the world, or that the sum of the three angles in a plane triangle is equal to 180°, would not exist in reality in this way, so there must be no supersensible facts corresponding to the inner-soul processes. Are such facts present or not?

It would have to be shown that not only do we humans think mathematics, but that mathematics itself also works outside of us, as Plato says, for example: “God does geometry!” If we acknowledge this, then the mathematical laws are real and present in the world. So, too, the correctly perceived soul processes must be present outside as real things. Thus, for example, we find only within us what we call an “I” in its inner development and what coincides with our soul content of thoughts, feelings, will and so on. Is it not just something subjective? What guarantees its objectivity? Does it also work and weave in the outside world? Between birth and death, human beings develop in such a way that they remember back to a certain point in their youth. Their memory does not reach back to before this point, although no one would claim that it did not arise until the fourth or fifth year of life; after all, they had already been alive for several years before that. Human consciousness must develop in such a way from that point on that it first had to arise.

But what was in the human being before as ego content? We can answer this: In the first years of childhood, the human being develops the convolutions of his brain, and only when this work is done, when the tool of the intellect has been chiseled out by the individuality, only then does the ego consciousness arise for the human being himself; it corresponds to the tool that is now available and this to the developing ego. Thus, Theosophy shows that everything that is later experienced purely internally was previously worked out by our brain. The child's first life shows that its brain is “I-ized”; what later becomes the content of the soul was previously creatively present in the human being, in the first years as an external aura and later as an internal one.

These processes fulfill what we need to prove, namely externally, what was previously there internally. The following experiment may clarify this: When the spiritual researcher applies all his exercises to himself and places his soul under the influence of the same, he will eventually notice that he awakens with his soul slipping out of the physical-etheric body sheaths - a process that was otherwise only possible by falling asleep. In the first stage, the spiritual researcher experiences independence from his physical body. He then knows that he experiences the following within himself: I perceive a content independently of the organs of my body, but I cannot conceptualize this content because these are bound to the brain, and it is a tormenting inner state for me, which is also taken over into the ordinary bodily consciousness. In terms of the expression of his higher spiritual experiences, man then has something idiotic.

If the required exercises are continued with iron energy, then what has been released in the increasingly independent soul in terms of supersensible experiences goes as a force effect into the physical body and expressed in concepts what was previously experienced only spiritually without the involvement of the brain, just as the child gradually develops its brain to express what it later wants to express as an experience. - So one proceeds in stages. The spiritual and soul essence must have been present from the very first formation of the body, since it is supposed to work from the spiritual world on its further development. And so it works into the physical organization with its forces, which it draws from the stored and processed resources of previous earthly lives.

Thus we see: anyone who wants to arrive at an understanding of the self must necessarily deal with the objections of the doubters in order to recognize their true significance, and he is forced to seek out broader points of view. But no one should lightly condemn those who cannot approach theosophy.

Furthermore, the day before yesterday, important objections were raised in the ethical, moral and religious sense; it was argued that belief in karma, with its rewards and punishments, could make people selfish, and it must be admitted that such narrow views can in some way lead to selfishness. But here I would like to refer to Schopenhauer, when he says:

It is easy to preach morals, but to establish morals is difficult!

The latter means to present those things that lead to moral behavior. If this is possible for Theosophy, then outsiders may say that karma produces egoists, considering that this need only be a transitional state, with the awareness of a sense of poetic justice through different lives on earth. For example, parents want to educate their children properly so that they can support and care for them in their old age. This is selfish, but it does have the effect that such children become proper people, that parents see their hopes fulfilled and experience joy in the children's hard work; thus their selfishness is transformed into an inclination for the unselfish joy of their children's good progress and personal development.

Thus, for example, in a somewhat crude illustration of karma, it is said that a person's good deeds bring reward, while evil deeds result in pain and suffering. If a person acts accordingly, even if he is also influenced by selfishness, the good will have a reciprocal effect on him, and he will gradually become a non-selfish person.

Morality can only be justified by starting from true, egoistic human nature and taking karma into account; this then gradually transforms the egoistic person into a moral, selfless one.

If someone were to raise a different moral objection, namely, that some parents love their children as part of themselves, as heirs to their own qualities, and that it would be unreasonable or even impossible for them to accept or even imagine that a spiritual-soul core that is foreign to them would come down from spiritual worlds to oppose, as it were, their physical parents, we can reply that a deep inner affinity existed which led the child to this particular couple as a consequence of loving relationships of a higher kind that existed even before birth and developed the powers that enabled the spiritual-soul part of the being to reach its parents in particular – powers that developed from earlier earthly lives and also enable further favorable further development only with the body inherited from its parents.

If someone says that by reincarnation man ascribes a kind of self-righteousness to himself, without emphasizing his childship to God, and thus places himself in opposition to the just God, then with a broader horizon one can say: If man feels that the divine power is at work in him, it would be would be downright incomprehensible not to ascribe to oneself a divine essence that must and can be developed ever higher from life to life, because otherwise one commits a sin as soon as one thinks one should deny the spark of God within oneself, when, instead of developing it, one distorts it into a caricature. So the most possible approach to the divine ideal is a sacred religious duty of the theosophist.

We want to take into account all the objections of our opponents, but we also want to note in the pros and cons that this is not easily overcome by proofs and contradictions, but by broadening our horizons in our soul life beyond all narrowness in our culture. This is what Theosophy or spiritual science should bring to people of our culture and then lift them up beyond the mere physical-sensual world.

If someone now attempts to draw on the supersensible world in further developing and closely connecting with laboratory methods for their results and insights, they may apply some of these successfully but fail with others. This would be the same as when doubts arise about certain scientific facts and it is realizes that individual details are not correct in their interpretation and application; but in this way the view gained can, when the various facts are lined up, condense into a justified hypothesis, which is varied, gradually develops better and better and, in its entirety, supported by more frequent confirmation, ultimately becomes a theory. Then we have to say that the objection that some people make, that such hypotheses of supersensible worlds contradict all previous views, is just as weighty as that of a famous Academy of Sciences [in Paris], which wanted to reject the existence of meteorites when they were reported to have fallen, even if the stones themselves were presented.

Thus, in this case from the distant past, as in the present, it is not the facts that need to be corrected, but the perceptions; that is, the horizons of people must expand under the influence of spiritual science in their research and conviction. We are dealing here with a spiritual realm that has its own laws, which are different from those of the material realm, for the latter only show coming into being and passing away. If we emphasize the seemingly trivial fact that the soul processes in the brain work in a certain way like gravity in the material masses, then we can also admit that this gravity, if the earth could sleep, would show itself independently, and furthermore rightly assume that it will outlast matter as an independent force. We can also express those truths in this way:

The things in the vastness of space speak to the human soul;
the soul can hold them in the course of time!
But the human soul lives in knowledge,
unlimited by the vastness of space
and unperturbed by the course of time,
In the realm of eternity
And finds in the spirit realm
The very deepest reason for its own being.

Today I have the task of saying something about the nature of spiritual-scientific knowledge. The point is that here we have been speaking of spiritual-scientific knowledge in such a way that it is not so much the field that has been considered as the nature of the knowledge. For example, today's psychology is not a spiritual science in our sense, because the way psychology is treated and practised today, as only external observation, is actually a soul teaching without soul. In the official science of the soul, one finds how ideas connect to sense perception, etc. But for those who demand spiritual science in a different sense, official psychology is barren; one cannot know anything about the fate of the soul, for example after death, through it. It is possible to penetrate into the nature of the spiritual and human soul to such an extent that one can say something about the fate of the soul.

Spiritual science is misunderstood from many sides, from those who believe they are standing on the firm ground of a religious system or of science. Spiritual science, as advocated here, has basically nothing to do with religious beliefs and all religious systems. Spiritual science regards what lies in religious beliefs as a field of research and seeks what lies within them. You could just as easily call botany a meadow or a field, as you called theosophy a religious confession.

300 to 400 years ago, natural science was in such a state that great thinkers [such as] Kepler et cetera had abandoned sensory observation. Sensory observation cannot lead to truth in the field under discussion. Spiritual science wants nothing more than to fathom the highest, most valuable insights using the same logical paths as scientific insights. The botanist must bring the end of plant formation into a whole organic entity with the beginning: development from seed to flower and fruit and again to seed, etc. Goethe expressed the development of man towards old age and the decision. The spiritual and soul-like is like a seed; he says that in old age one becomes a mystic. But Goethe did not mean by “mystic” what is today understood as nebulous, but rather that man becomes more and more mature through his experiences and actions, he matures and forms the fruit of his life. We recognize this particularly by what we do wrong, but usually cannot repeat it. Experience and strength accumulate in man, which he does not use, and these strengths have their highest elasticity and are most mature immediately before death; they form the seeds, the spiritual-soul germs. The ideas and impulses in man do not pass away; they have inner effectiveness, inner activity and must continue to work. These combine to form the spiritual and soul germ, and that which has inner activity, inner strength and inner truth is what Goethe calls the mystical, and the person who grows old is what he calls a mystic.

It is different in youth: then we see what lives in the soul shooting outwards; it pushes outwards; one is an idealist, active, effective, not a mystic; from the first hour of physical existence, the soul shoots into outer activity, into outer formation, education, like the germination power in the plant. This fact escapes external psychology, the view that a spiritual-soul core lives in us, which becomes more and more impulsive towards old age and then undergoes an intermediate state, in order to penetrate into external life again afterwards. The consistent development of the methods of today's psychology, as begun by Franz von Brentano, of strictly scientific methods, will and must lead to the doctrine of reincarnation. However, for this to happen, it is necessary for man to transform himself into an instrument.

How do we understand, recognize anything at all? If we can know how things, how a work of art, is composed, if we are able to follow it in its becoming, in composition, when man himself is present. But it is not so with nature, as Goethe says; not the becoming, the become, appears before us, and the other meaningful word of Goethe's is: we do not understand the become.

But there is something where we are present in the process of becoming. Man alternately passes through the state of sleep and the state of wakefulness. What tires him? It tires him when he wears out part of his conscious activity. There is no fatigue when you let your thoughts wander freely, consciously dreaming while awake; that does not tire you. But thinking, where the conscious will is involved, it is the conscious will that makes us tired, that wears us out. Sleeping in a railroad car is not the same as resting in bed at home. Here the organism rests, while in the railroad the body remains in motion. The imposed movement contradicts the innate forces of the organism. Every time an activity is imposed on the organism from the outside that it does not have by its own nature, fatigue sets in; this is also the cause of seasickness. Every night during sleep, a becoming, an arising occurs in our organism that restores what we have previously worn out. We are in the process of becoming, but we are not aware of it.

But this is what spiritual science strives for: that people develop in such a way that they can be consciously aware of this becoming. Through meditation and concentration, they can consciously fall asleep – which, of course, is not falling asleep: you live within yourself without using your thoughts or your organism. But at first he experiences this as a miserable state, because he perceives his own brain, for example, as an obstacle; he must first work on the brain from the spiritual-soul, so to speak rework it, in order to express through the brain what one experiences spiritually and soulfully. In this process, the teacher is consciously involved in the process of becoming and works in the same constructive way on the body and the organism as the soul and spirit work on the child's organism in the process of becoming.

If one compares children whose parents are still living with those whose parents have already died, the trained observer can make many an interesting observation. For example, the teacher wants to stimulate something in a child who has lost his father early, and cannot make any progress. The sympathies and antipathies that the father had are incorporated into the child's state of mind. One can rediscover the father's sympathies or antipathies towards the mother or towards others, or the sense of how the father wanted to educate the child. Thus, pronounced antipathies, etc., occur in a striking way in the child, as a continued effect of the dead. It is the spiritual soul of the father that affects the spiritual soul of the child.

Spiritual science will not be guided by prejudices or aversions, but these will be guided by the impulses that spiritual science gives to human life.

Raphael's father was not a great painter, but when he died – Raphael was eleven years old at the time of his death – he was able to live out and develop what was in him that could not have developed in the material realm, unhindered by the physical, and this radiated into the spiritual and soul life of the boy Raphael and enabled him to overcome obstacles.

Just as our hearts and lungs do not tire because they are in harmony with the rhythm of the world, so our soul and spirit, when they live in the spiritual world, are brought into harmony with the rhythm that is their own; our feeling, sensing, thinking is imbued with this rhythm; Theosophy has a healing effect. Man is provided with a spiritual leader, which no longer lets him rush along unconsciously like a driverless locomotive, but spiritual science can be something for the soul: that it knows that it is integrated into the spiritual-soul world, and that its thoughts are connected to world thoughts, will.

Faust wants to expand his self into a kind of spiritual organism; he feels within himself the forces of the cosmos. [So one can say:]

In your thinking live world thoughts, etc.

When spiritual science is discussed today in the sense in which it is meant here, one can often experience that people not only express opposing views on this or that conceptual point, but also turn against it in an almost passionate way, as if it were something that would arise from the arbitrariness of this or that person and should only be brought into the world through this arbitrariness. Anyone who has a little overview of intellectual life as it has developed up to the present day, as it has been preparing for a long time, will very soon be able to see that this spiritual science or spiritual research is not just about something that merely needs to arise from the arbitrary intentions of some mind, but something that wants to meet the urge, the longing of the time. And anyone who is perhaps able to look a little deeper into this urge, this longing of the time, will also be able to perceive, with some attention, how those impulses that lead, indeterminately and still today as if instinctively, , will in the future become ever more definite and definite, ever more significant and ever more intense; so that spiritual research, in the way it is meant here, corresponds to an urge of the times. It is the task of today's and tomorrow's lectures, which I have the honor of giving to you, to present this.

It is basically quite easy to understand that today people carry around many popular beliefs and ideas that they have constructed for themselves in order to build a world view; but they object when spiritual research wants to enter into the spiritual life of the present day and assert that, in addition to what human understanding can comprehend, in addition to what the ordinary mind, which finds its fulfillment in the comprehension of scientific research, can comprehend, that in addition to all this, there is something in man that is designated by names that are so horrible for many, such as “etheric body,” “astral body,” and “ego carrier,” so that man does not only consists of the substances of the external world, but that he should also carry within himself supersensible elements, such as the supersensible etheric body, or the astral body, which is completely supersensible and underlies the physical organization, and the carrier of the actual ego, the deepest fundamental essence of man.

It is just as easy to scoff, just as easy to construct apparent refutations from popular concepts against such knowledge; and when, in addition, spiritual scientific research wants to use its methods to explore the conditions of life and existence of human nature, wants to show that it wants to reach beyond birth and death, beyond what the senses and ordinary science can explore, then such an assertion seems to contradict everything we are accustomed to reading or hearing today.

And yet, through this spiritual research, attention must be paid to what Lessing has already more or less externally incorporated into our spiritual life; and it must be enlivened by spiritual research.

This spiritual research must show man that in his supersensible members there are powers to be found that extend beyond this earth-life; so that one has to speak not only of one, but of repeated earth-lives, so that man man, in his entire existence, has to survey his being through spiritual science: forward beyond birth, initially into his spiritual existence; then into earlier earth lives, and again into the future, into later earth lives.

For spiritual science, the entire existence of a person can be broken down into successive earthly lives, which are separated from one another by that which lies between death and a new birth: by a purely spiritual existence in supersensible worlds.

At first, modern man may have many objections to this penetration into the spiritual world; it seems quite fantastic to him. And precisely those who know the conditions and foundations of spiritual science will find it understandable that much resistance can arise in the modern soul against such assertions. And so we find among the objections the assertion: We overlook existence, and what first presents itself to our senses shows us that we have a closed world in sense existence, which can be known from within ourselves.

That was the endeavor of a number of great, serious thinkers in the second half of the nineteenth century: to exert all the powers of thought to explain from within what presents itself to the intellect of man! Much has been done in the course of the nineteenth century to establish such a worldview, to give it moral supports, moral goals, and also to give comfort to the human soul from it. And it is not the worst souls that have striven for a materialistic, positivistic worldview.

This is one of the types of resistance that one encounters when talking about spiritual research or spiritual science.

The second is something that one finds in people who have a different conviction, namely that behind this sensual world lies a supersensible world, people who recognize such a supersensible world but who cannot admit that the powers of human knowledge and the possibilities of human research are suitable for penetrating into the supersensible existence.

Whether they are doubts or objections from the philosophical side, esteemed attendees, the great philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte said everything necessary against all these objections many years ago, a century ago, , when he, in the way that one could say it at the time, gave lectures at the newly founded University of Berlin in 1811 and 1813 and clothed in words that which can be seen through the spirit. Right at the beginning, Johann Gottlieb Fichte said to his audience: Imagine a crowd of people who were born blind and still live as blind people, and one of them would be a seer who speaks of light and colors. Then these people would say: He is talking about something fantastic that does not exist.

From their point of view, they are right, because what can be known about a world depends on whether the person has the organ to perceive it. A supernatural world can only be admitted by someone who, as Goethe put it, has the spiritual eye to see this world as a reality.

Now, the way in which this spiritual science or spiritual research is presented in modern literature is not limited to merely presenting the results, or what has just been indicated in a few words. The literature not only presents the results of the research, but you can also find, for example, in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds,” and in the second part of my “Occult Science in Outline,” how the human soul comes to truly develop within itself the organ to look into the spiritual world. And this organ is accessible to everyone if they only go the right way.

If someone is born blind, it can be said that he may be denied the ability to recognize light and colors for life. With the spiritual eye, however, it is possible for everyone to awaken it; there are powers within everyone that are dormant.

Since today we are to speak about the “task of spiritual science for the future”, we can only briefly touch on what the goals and nature of this spiritual science itself are. Something of what is pushing towards this spiritual science is, so to speak, everywhere [decided], wherever you look, especially in the best minds of the preparing new time, the preparing spiritual future.

Among the many things that could be mentioned, let me just quote the well-known saying of Goethe, where he says, based on a long life of experience, through a penetrating observation of the reality of existence – you can find the passage in “Conversations with Eckermann” – he said: “One may have gone through many things in life, may have faced existence in many ways – in old age one will become a mystic.

And because Goethe held this view, he also had his Faust end as a mystic at the end of the second part of “Faust”, even though he also portrayed him as a practical soul.

What does Goethe actually mean when he says that people become mystics in old age? Basically, anyone can experience this by comparing the whole mood, the whole state of their soul, in their youth and then when they reach a certain age: you have gone through life, formed a certain view, certain inner views, to which you develop a very specific relationship, an emotional and sensory position.

In youth, [goals and] ideals, worldviews can gush forth – views of the world gush forth; one can have the feeling: they are there, raised up out of you. And when one looks back to childhood in particular, one can see how one cannot yet speak of how the soul and the body give rise to activity and expressiveness. What the human being can observe in himself in youth emerges from the indeterminate foundations of the soul life.

Later on, we can see that what we have achieved within ourselves emerges from the soul. But then comes the time when more and more of what is unfolding in the world around us is consciously reflected in the soul, and we know that what we have experienced is now drawing together in our soul in such a way that it can shed light on other things. You become richer inside.

How fresh you feel inside in old age indicates what kind of views you projected out of yourself in your youth. In old age, you become much more independent of the physical. One has an inner experience that every human being can have, even without spiritual science: the experience of becoming independent of one's soul, of one's physicality, of one's personality. And this inwardness, Goethe sensed it when he said that one becomes a mystic in old age. He meant: one has a spiritual form from which one can shed light on the outside world.

And if you examine, I would say, the intention of this Goethean soul, especially at this point, you can say: He felt it, as in youth, so to speak in the earlier human ages, one lives in harmony with what one is also externally, physically. The body grows, becomes stronger and stronger; all the individual functions become stronger. This happens in every life. Every human being reaches what can be called a peak in life, and every human being reaches what can be called a decline. We all feel the decline of life. But it is precisely during the decline of physical life that we feel more and more this inner richness, as we are allowed to ascribe more inner judgment to the world; we feel the inner independence from the outer decline.

If we have developed healthily, we feel that we become fuller, richer in content, when we describe the descent of life. That is where the question comes from, independently of all things, the question of what comes after death, after we have passed through the gate of death - after we pass through the gate of death into the spiritual world?

The objective, independent of the personal, is precisely that you say to yourself: You accumulate a wealth in your entire life that is ever increasing. And when life has become richer and richer, more and more full of content, then it loses the body. Does what one has collected go through one's whole life, does it go into nothingness? That is the question - not the one that is caused by the fear of death, or by some subjective feeling, but when such forces become ever richer and richer, then the question arises: should they disappear into nothingness when a person walks through the gate of death? No. We can perceive in ourselves how, basically, something within us, which is our inner soul core, works on our outer, physical existence throughout our entire life. We can best recognize this when we observe the changing states between waking and sleeping and ask ourselves what occurs there.

An external, experimental science cannot answer this. But how does spiritual science answer it? We enter the human being as he falls asleep, and he feels how he becomes more and more alienated from the forces through which he moves his limbs; he feels himself escaping from the earthly-bodily. But at the moment this happens, consciousness is extinguished. Spiritual research says: something very special is happening: the physical body and the etheric body remain in bed; but what we call the astral body and the ego carrier withdraw from the moment of falling asleep until the moment of waking up. Only the inner forces of these are not awakened; that is why the darkness of unconsciousness then spreads around the person.

Spiritual research shows that the forces in this astral body and this I-bearer of the human being, which are so weak in ordinary everyday life that the person cannot be aware of them during sleep, can be kindled.

This is done by means of real spiritual methods. It is done through what is called meditation and concentration. If a person brings it upon themselves to make themselves an instrument for the truths of the spiritual world, they can do so through meditation and concentration.

Much is needed for this. Only one example will be given here. Imagine that you have a glass that is empty and one that is a quarter full of water, and you pour water from the full glass into the empty glass, and you now imagine that that this happening does not bring about what usually happens, namely that the glass from which he pours becomes emptier, but that by pouring into the other glass, the glass from which he pours becomes fuller and fuller!

We have to form such allegorical ideas ourselves, without claiming that they are real. If a person always remains within his reason and is aware that his idea is allegorical, he can have a certain feeling about it. This can then express a higher truth, for example about human love.

Love is a concept that is virtually impossible to penetrate. But you can express individual qualities of love in symbols.

He who pours the mild powers of his love into a heart in need of love will notice that he loses none of his power of love, but that through this giving his power becomes greater and greater. He will be able to use the symbol of the glass for this love, which does not become emptier by pouring into another, but fuller.

And when man then draws together all his thoughts, concentrating them on such a symbol, when man has the patience to concentrate his soul forces again and again on such an inner life of thought, then he evokes the slumbering forces from his soul and attains a state in which he becomes a true instrument for beholding the world behind sense perception.

In this state, the human being then comes to truly experience, outside of his body, that in which he otherwise only exists in sleep; and he can bring about states that are not sleep but are similar to sleep in that he is outside of himself, having moved out of himself with the astral body and the ego. Then he is in the spiritual world. The spiritual world then reveals itself to him. The self-experiment is then also proof that he lives in the supersensible reality. And then the person realizes that he is that which does not depend on the instrument of the body, but rather forms this very form of the body.

And when this spiritual eye opens, then he notices, as the child enters the world through birth, this supersensible working and forming in man.

Only then are the things that external research brings to light explained, when we are able to notice how the more and more distinct physiognomy of the child develops out of the more and more distinct physiognomy of the child, how speech develops, how the brain develops more and more, how the upright gait is achieved.

The spiritual researcher shows who is actually the real worker in the whole process of human development.

The spiritual does not develop out of the physical, [not out of a single germ] at birth or conception, but the spiritual researcher can observe how the spiritual emerges from the spiritual world and how it first creates the physical body.

In this way, one follows the human being beyond the bounds of life, as one does in nature, as one does with plants, where one follows the germ from one year to the next; one follows the end and connects it to the beginning. One follows the germ as it develops into the plant. The spiritual researcher does not merely follow the supersensible human being in its life between birth and death, but follows it beyond the gate of death. What Goethe says, the mystical, is followed by the person who knows that what reproduces itself is the spiritual. And he sees how it becomes more and more independent and independent when the body decays.

Just as the seed remains when everything else withers and then develops into a new plant, so it is with the spirit. And while more and more of our physical shell is lost with age, this spiritual part becomes stronger and stronger, and in such a way that it has become rich through all its experiences, and is now able to do what it could not do at the beginning of life.

At the beginning of life, it has built a [certain] body. During life, one experiences that one can no longer use this in death. But in the inner soul, there are the seeds for building a new life. And by passing through the gateway of death, we can see how the forces for building a new life have grown stronger.

And so, through spiritual research, we can see how man is ready to build a new body by gathering strength between birth and death to build a new body for himself.

The spiritual researcher applies exactly the same methods that are used to observe nature externally; only he applies them in such a way that the person who wants to apply them must develop the organs for supersensible vision. Then what he explains becomes comprehensible to those who cannot yet see into the spiritual world, comprehensible from everything that is in harmony with the phenomena of external life.

Thus it becomes comprehensible that this teaching of the return of man, of the creative soul that lives in him and is not limited by birth and death, may at first seem fantastic. Then, from today, man reaches a certain point in his view of the world, to that point that is like the dawn in which Giordano Bruno stood.

How did he stand there - Giordano Bruno - when he made his knowledge independent of science? If today natural science must rely on that which is based on the external, then one need only say: Even before Copernicus, before Kepler, before Galileo, people directed their minds out into space and found the law of the world just as it took place outside their external senses; and he - Giordano Bruno - replaces the external law with his inner vision. They stopped at the sensory view, those who observed the spreading of the wide celestial spheres and saw the blue vault of heaven as resting on a disk.

What did Giordano Bruno say against this view? He said: What you see as the blue vault of heaven is only through the limitation of your eye. From every point, the eye looks into an infinite world! He said that on the basis of Copernicus. And Copernicus had not prepared a system based on sensory experience, but what Copernicus gave in his system, he had through thinking, through the inner power of the human soul.

Thus the soul must not rely on what science presents as knowledge. And on the basis of the inner powers, Giordano Bruno was able to say: What you perceive with your senses, this outer vault of heaven, is nothing more than the boundary of your vision!

The spiritual researcher says: the boundary of birth and death, and that we believe that human beings are enclosed within these boundaries, can certainly be compared with the “borders” in the sky that were assumed on the basis of sensory perception before the Copernican worldview. And just as Giordano Bruno does, spiritual science points out into the infinite vastness of the human soul. And just as the blue vault of heaven comes from the fact that the senses do not see further, so the belief that life is limited by death comes from the fact that limited vision does not see further than physical death.

Many today stand with spiritual science at the same point where natural science stood three centuries ago; and the longing of the present time, of our time, pushes against these processes. Whoever follows the course of thought in recent times sees how natural science and thinking have progressed from triumph to triumph - thinking that is linked to natural science and to external perception. Anyone who follows this path will certainly be an admirer of natural science when it comes to the development of the scientific, and nowhere is the spiritual science concerned with struggling against the wonderful successes of natural science. But when this natural science comes before your soul, then something else comes before the human being in relation to human life.

I do not want to theorize here; let us consider a specific case. It was in February 1901 when a star suddenly appeared in the sky, only to disappear the very next day. After appearing brightly lit, the next day it had hardly any perceptible light left.

No matter how right the scientific hypothesis may be, how does the scientific mind view this star? It imagines that there is a double star, that one star will collide with the other and spray and dissolve into a nebula. A bright flare-up from the collision, then a brightening, a dimming from the spraying.

And how does the scientific mind approach this strange mystery? If we think entirely in the stream of thought that has been woven through Giordano Bruno and Copernicus, then two world bodies collide. Giordano Bruno describes the view into the infinite vastness, the sun with its planets, on which beings live. Worlds collide there. Millions of creatures may perish in such a collision. All this life is founded in what is a flicker and in the spraying and is destroyed. What does science possibly tell us about what is going on up there in the external mechanical collision? There, cosmic bodies disintegrate into nebulae, and from this nebula a new solar system will form, plants will develop, later animals, human forms - until such a collision occurs again.

Such knowledge is available to the thinking that is linked to science. - One should not say anything against the greatness of this thinking. How can one not admire this thinking — what has been achieved in the nineteenth century through spectral analysis, through the advances in biology. But in addition to this, which we have just placed before our souls, there is something else that can show us how powerless all thinking is, which has just formed itself on this flashing and dispersing star event.

When we see a mother living with her child, we see her experiencing how the soul of the child works its way up; we see this mother connected with the first stages of maturation, the attempts at speaking and walking; we see her united with the child in love; we then see this mother at the child's deathbed, seeing the child die. We see the mother's grief and feel the question arise within us: Why was it born? And what is it about the soul that entered into the birth, that gave me such intimate joy, that has now disappeared into nothingness?

There we have the question of life. And we know, my dear attendees, that we encounter such questions at every turn, questions that cannot be answered by the outer senses, but that can be seen living in a corner of the soul.

And now let us look beyond what natural science can tell us about the entire world system, and we feel powerless in the face of the questions concerning the human soul. Such things cannot be dispelled by impassive staring; such things are what life repeatedly presents to our soul.

When millions of living beings are dead, perish through a collision - what science can tell us about all this coming into being and passing away of beings and what they are, it does not come close to what a human heart asks when it sits at the deathbed of a loved one and wonders about the fate of life!

If we observe the thinking and activity of the time, today, in relation to these things, a great change presents itself to us in comparison to the past. We need only go back to the time of Goethe to see how even the most enlightened researchers - apart from the French moralists - affirm something similar to the history of creation and say: It was simply the life of what is presented today as knowledge. What was in the Mosaic creation story then?

Man is in the spiritual world, and only later is the material added. This world view gave man a picture of the world in which man was already in it, and it was such that it said to this human soul: What so wonderfully enters into life belongs to the first substance of the earth - and you yourself belong to it.

And more and more, a world view is emerging in its place that only sees mechanical world events. You see a star formation disintegrate and imagine that a new world is forming, just as you imagine that a new planetary system is forming. I have often used the image of what happens when you take a certain substance, an oily substance that forms drops, cut a sheet of paper in half and push it through the large droplet as an equatorial plane, then stick a needle into the sheet of paper, start turning it, and then see how small droplets actually separate. And in this way you actually see something like a planetary system unfolding on a small scale, as it unfolds on a large scale outside. And who wouldn't believe in it?

It has only one fault: when showing something, one must not forget the most important things, one must not forget that nothing would come into being if the teacher were not there and turning! So one does not fully represent it if one forgets the main factor: the driving force! So even theoretically this “world system” has a hole.

But then it becomes completely inexplicable how this world soul can tie itself to what is developing, so that it may one day step out of its nothingness onto this scene.

And more and more, this view has developed that only the mechanical is called upon to explain the world. From ancient times until our own, it has become more and more a kind of belief that all phenomena need only be explained mechanically. The whole of human life itself has gradually become mechanical.

And so it has come about that the time has come when the soul, with its questions, stands incomprehensibly before what modern thinking is able to see, and knows of no bridge to what science says. And while the soul wonders – spiritual science has an answer!

There was a time in the nineteenth century when it was seriously believed that thoughts arise from the brain, when one spoke of thoughts as brain vibrations. How could it ever come about that movements in the brain could be directly related to thoughts? Where did all this mechanical science come from in the first place?

And so it came about that in more recent times, due to the necessary conditions of this time, the ability of the old times to look into the spiritual was lost. People did not recognize the essence of thoughts; they did not know how to look at a thought. And so one could believe that in the physical body, where the soul is embedded, alone the essence of man lies. But even if one disputes this soul away, it is still there, and it presents itself in the modern progress of the world. - Therefore, in the course of time, the urge had asserted itself to consult other effective beings than the mechanical ones.

How did an important historian and art connoisseur, Herman Grimm, face life in his time? He knew nothing of spiritual science, but he had set himself a great task, which he shared with those who wanted to listen to him. He once explained this plan to me; everything he gave us in detail was only to be part of a larger plan. He wanted to work on a great work in which he wanted to explain that it is not mechanical forces that are at work in the whole of the existence of the world, but “creative imagination”! That which is creative imagination in man is creative power outside of him - so he said.

And there was a philosopher in the nineteenth century: Jakob Frohschammer, in Munich, who sought to present this human imagination as the most essential thing. When he shows that not only the forces in which the microscopist believes today are formed in the embryo, but also suspects creative imagination as a formative force, this corresponds to the urge at that time to also find something spiritual, to turn one's gaze to the active, the creating spirit, which shows itself as going beyond arising and ceasing, in the midst of the triumphs of science. For arising and passing away is tied to the appearance of nature; while the creative spirit is that which remains.

And in our time we see how serious people feel that, although one must proceed in accordance with modern science wherever natural phenomena are concerned, the soul cannot but rise up into the spiritual that lives and permeates the world.

Today, one can observe an interesting phenomenon. In every train station bookstore, you can now get a strange book: This book, despite containing many inaccuracies, is an important phenomenon of the time; it is called: “On the criticism of time,” by Walter Rathenau. This book was written by a “practitioner of life” who sees this mechanization everywhere in scientific and intellectual life with the naked eye and who, especially in the first chapters of this book, presents a magnificent account of how human concepts have become mechanical, how social life has become mechanical.

He presents all this with the stylus of the man of sense, of the man who looks at reality. But it is precisely such a practitioner of life, who is seized by the living essence of the soul, who shows us the urge and yearning for the spiritual in our time. There you will find, for example, meaningful passages. The soul calls out for what is spiritual:

It longs for a meaning that lies beyond what can be proven [...]. The time is looking [...] for its soul.

It is looking for its soul, the time - so he thinks,

and will find it; admittedly against the will of mechanization. This epoch

—ours—

was not interested in developing the soul in man; it aimed to make the world usable and thus rational, to push back the boundary of wonder and to conceal the otherworldly —

to understand the truths.

Nevertheless, we are surrounded by mystery as ever. It emerges from every smooth surface of thought, and from every everyday experience it takes just one step

to penetrate

to the center of the world. The three emanations of the soul: love of creature, of nature, and of divinity, could not be robbed by mechanization of the individual life; for the life of the whole, it was volatilized into insignificance. Humanitarianism sank to cold pity and compulsory welfare, and yet it signifies the ethical summit of the entire epoch; love of nature became a sentimental Sunday pleasure; love of God, obscured by the regimentation of mythological-dogmatic rituals, entered into the service of interests in this world and the next and was thus suspected not only by ignoble natures.

There is probably no single path by which it would not be possible for a person to find his soul [...]. But humanity will not take any detours. There will be no prophets and no religious founders [...]. No unified art of the world will bring its soul, because art is [already] a mirror [...] of the soul, not its originator.

So a “life practitioner” speaks of the soul's yearning and longing. Much in the book is wrong; but one thing is true: those who feel this way feel that the truth of the soul is no longer spoken of in our time. Religious founders are rejected. He feels that even an exoteric teaching is no longer accepted.

But the striving of the time itself is to reconnect the soul to the spiritual.

And this longing is met by what spiritual science has to offer. Spiritual research shows that man can find within himself such an unfolding of the forces slumbering in his soul that he can directly immerse himself in what surrounds us supernaturally. And then the gaze into these vastness conquers the material.

We look out and feel not only the human body embedded in physical existence, but through it the soul embedded in spiritual existence. We expand our view beyond birth and death.

Just as natural science has broadened our view beyond the blue vault of heaven – just as natural science says: this limit that man has set for himself must be broadened, so spiritual science says: what the mechanical science, what the mechanical worldview — which only comes from limited human knowledge itself —, expanded human knowledge will go beyond that, will go beyond this boundary, just as natural science went beyond the boundary of the blue vault of heaven.

Just as spiritual science sees the urge and yearning for its soul in our time, just as “time seeks its soul”, so it will continue to develop the life of this soul, will strive for a further development of it.

A world view built on fantasy cannot endure; Herman Grimm's problem could never have been solved. But we see how, in those who have retained the freshness of this yearning of the soul, the desire arises to look out into the spiritual and soul that is outside in the world. And we know that we are part of it, just as our body is part of the material.

Spiritual science wants to give people what the soul desires. And if we ask: What will spiritual science have to do in the future? When all people who feel a longing in themselves for the soul's origin and destiny ask questions, we will point not to abstract concepts, but to the hungry souls, and seek to give these hungry souls what they clearly show they desire.

Spiritual science does not speak of vague brotherly love, but of standing by people in such a way that it wants to give what is longed for by the human soul. Then one may hear this or that objection, ridicule and worse – one will find it understandable precisely as a spiritual researcher, will be able to understand the people who, from their point of view, cannot do otherwise today than the opponents of natural science did centuries ago: holding heresy trials. Of course, they do not build bonfires anymore, but they act according to the fashions of the time: they treat people who are striving for the truth as fantasists and seek to vilify them through ridicule and blasphemy.

But that does not bother those people, because for them, the only thing that matters about the truth is that it - the truth - shows itself to the soul as justified through its own essence, and that it can indeed promote, fertilize, and elevate this life, and endure before life.

That the latter can happen will be the subject of tomorrow's lecture, which will in a sense be a continuation of today's.

With regard to the truth, it can be said that the one who presents the truth as has just been discussed can say to himself: Of course, all human striving has always been subject to error, and much of it will easily be able to creep into what the spiritual researcher seeks, even for him, as an error. He is well aware that error can creep in more easily than in the external world of the senses. But no matter — if only the mind is there to seek the truth, then even the smallest thing that happens in this field can be compared with the great things that have happened in the service of science. Whether people ridicule the truth or not is not important. For only two things are possible: either what is being spread is error – then it will be eradicated by the striving, truth-seeking mind, by the truth-seeking mind of man, for the truth-seeking human will not tolerate error – or if it is the truth, then no ridicule, no unjustified personal objections, nothing at all will be able to stop this truth, which has the power to triumph!

In world history, it is also the case that [it sometimes happens that] things [and] beings can be proclaimed. But with regard to the truth, it may be said: No matter which way you turn your back on it, no matter where people may oppose it, and however deeply the truth may be buried in the deepest shafts, all this will be overcome! For the truth has always found a way to penetrate back into humanity and be useful and beneficial and continue its triumphal march through the development of the human spirit.

Dear attendees! In yesterday's lecture, I tried to show that the aims and essence of spiritual research, as it is meant here, correspond to the urge and yearning of the present time, that they essentially meet the needs of human souls, which have been preparing for a long time up to our present day and which are now clearly perceptible to everyone who wants to see, to everyone who just wants to understand themselves correctly. One can now, especially when considering the question of the significance of this spiritual research or spiritual science for life, for the immediate, one might say fully active life of the human being, take up yesterday's remark, because one can best understand the significance of a thing for life when one first sees certain urges and needs arising from life that this thing demands. Today, many people expect a [satisfying] worldview. Spiritual research or science will provide it.

What the soul needs when its I wants to develop its character is what many people today expect from a kind of conclusion that can be drawn from the truly advanced natural science of our time. For certain things this is certainly justified; however, an attentive observation of what is happening in our time clearly shows us how many things cannot be achieved in this way, how the life of the present so longingly, so strongly longs for a research, for the spirit.

Many facts could be cited; only one of the most recent will be presented here. On September 18 at the Naturalists' Assembly in Münster, Professor von Wettstein gave a lecture on the importance of biology, the science of life, for culture and life; that is, [he pointed out] with complete justification, how one could see in the course of the nineteenth century that a worldview should be given in a popular way that should be based on the achievements of natural science. And he emphasized how natural science has progressed steadily, and how it had to be broken by science with what was to be shown for the human soul in the materialistic age; and with full justification, he endeavored to remain calm in observing the fact and not to draw hasty conclusions about those world-view questions that may very much enter into the realm where human thinking goes astray into what is indeed unjustified.

In fact, spiritual science wants nothing more than to follow such advice in its own way and in its own field; not by arriving at the truth of life through all kinds of conclusions and circumstantial evidence of the world view from external sensual facts , but by awakening the slumbering powers of the soul, that which Goethe describes as “spiritual eyes”, observing what is behind the world of the senses, behind being in the senses in general, and with which the human soul thinks itself connected.

This is what our time and life craves. And if spiritual science is about fathoming the truth, then the way in which it can relate to life in a way that fertilizes and heals it must be such that every soul finds satisfaction. Therefore, this demand may well be made in response. And here one thing can be said: spiritual science must fulfill one thing if it is to meet the needs of life: it must have the power, independently of a certain higher education, independently of the development of this or that fact of science, independently even of a certain height of philosophical worldview, to also enter into the simplest mind that has to do its daily work as a human being and does not have time to deal with this or that individual science in a detailed way. Spiritual research must be generally accessible. In order to avoid being misunderstood, I would like to add that spiritual research must be in complete harmony with the science of the time, and must not contradict its just demands. The strictest researcher with his strictest demands may come, and spiritual science must be able to answer to him. And anyone who engages with the serious literature of spiritual science will see how this can be.

But it is also important that it brings things to light that every soul, regardless of education, can understand. And here I would like to respond, not with a theory, but with a kind of fact. I would like to mention not a fact that is taken directly from spiritual science itself, but a fact that actually points to something that happened before spiritual science emerged, but which shows how souls that long for an inclination towards the spiritual world understand each other in a remarkable way, regardless of their level of education. I will cite something that bears witness to such understanding, and which will occur to an increased degree when spiritual science becomes more and more established in the souls that need it.

Moriz Carriere, one of the most amiable and thoughtful philosophers of the present day – it can only be noted here that he was one of those who always held philosophy's idealism in high regard at a time when materialism was sweeping in over the great questions of world view – of his work on the cultural development of humanity, he not only shows how the spiritual works in the development of humanity, but also how true science can be reconciled with the genuine needs of the soul in terms of the big questions of existence, and with the relationship between world view and religion. Now Moriz Carriere himself relates a remarkable experience that he had just as he was trying to show how the spiritual works in the pursuit of human development, and how the great figure of Christ Jesus in particular fits into human development. Then he received a series of manuscript pages in the mail. They came from a simple man. His name was never known either. His name was Karl Zeuner. At a time when the waves of revolutionary life were running high, he had somehow broken the law and was imprisoned. He was thrown into prison. And now he tells how he despaired of the friends who had striven with him for external goals, of the remnants of what was left to him from the religious education of the school, how he was lonely. He recounts how he then heard a familiar song from afar in his prison. He recounts how that inspired his soul, how special powers stirred in his soul. He wrote down thoughts that gradually came to his reawakening soul in prison.

Right when you start reading these pages, you come across strange sentences, especially at the beginning. He says something like: “When I look at my own soul and then at what surrounds me, I feel in my soul the same essence that lives in all things outside, and I feel in my own soul like a part of the whole world soul.” And from there he starts to form his ideas about the course of world history, describing how the spirit in people, who have gradually developed, is active.

Why did Moritz Carriere find this so surprising? It is surprising when you compare these pages of the simple man with what Moritz Carriere wrote based on a knowledge of contemporary science and studies of the cultural development of the world. If you take his main ideas, they are almost an agreement down to the last word between the two, the simple man and the highly educated philosopher. The simple man in his solitude, who only calls upon his innermost soul forces, writes something that is the same as what the philosopher draws from the wells of learning. That is, when he comes to questions of worldview, if a person only wants to search, there is an understanding between the one who searches in his soul and the one who searches this path on the basis of comprehensive learning.

This shows us how understanding through the spirit is possible between the most educated and the simplest, most primitive soul. And if in a particular case it was possible even without spiritual science, on the basis of certain concepts and ideas, then we may say: Firstly, the promotion of such an agreement corresponds to an urge of our present life. It corresponds to the spirit of our time that souls of all stations and degrees of education should communicate about their deepest needs; and secondly, such communication will be all the more necessary when souls need not come to the spirit through concepts and ideas that they squeeze out of their inner being – which are like shadows compared to what spiritual science has to give – but through spiritual science, this will be achieved all the more.

This means that our time in particular is faced with the challenge of finding a way to achieve general understanding of the fundamental questions of existence, and we have arrived at the gateway to their practical solution through spiritual science.

This means that spiritual science is able to intervene directly in life. However, there is an objection to this spiritual science, as some people emphasize, especially when it comes to putting this generally understandable knowledge in its proper perspective. They say: Yes, but first it is taught that the one who penetrates into the spiritual world awakens the slumbering soul. And what is said in my “Knowledge of Higher Worlds” requires a long journey before one can gain insight into this spiritual life. How can one speak of general comprehensibility when only one who has transformed one's soul can penetrate it?

This objection is understandable and yet not entirely justified, because this is a necessary requirement for the spiritual researcher to establish the facts of the spiritual world for himself. The spiritual researcher can investigate spiritual facts that are important for life. He can then formulate them, express them in words, concepts and ideas, and communicate them to the general public. Spiritual training is necessary for research; but when these facts are there and, formulated in concepts, words and ideas, then even the simplest mind can understand them, anyone can understand them. Nothing more is needed than to surrender to these ideas, concepts and words without prejudice; for it is the case with these spiritual facts that when we let these ideas take effect on us, they prove themselves. They can give us everything we need from them for the purposes of practical life — the upliftment, strengthening and recovery of our health that we require from them. What true spiritual researchers can give to the world can always be tested by science! These things may not, of course, stand the test of superficial criticism, but they can stand the true test. But what more or less everyone says and feels is that they have to admit a general turning of human knowledge towards the higher world. But as soon as one goes into the details of spiritual research, as soon as one begins to describe the observations of the spiritual world, to describe what happens between death and a new birth, what is called the development of humanity, according to the impulses given by spiritual science. In short, when details are given, our contemporaries still often recoil. They seek a general indication, without this - they admit - human life, the strengthening, healthy one, could not exist. But when one goes into details, when one describes the nature and things of the spiritual world, then the same objection immediately arises: no one can penetrate up there, we cannot know anything about that. Here we are at the point, honored attendees, where spiritual science will first have to make itself understood to what are indeed expressed needs of life, but what one only wants in generalities.

Let me give you another specific example of how humanity is seeking a new answer to the needs of the soul. The former president of Harvard University, USA, spoke of it, calling it the need for a new religion. Spiritual science does not want to found a new religion; spiritual science has nothing to do with forming sects; it wants to understand the old ones, wants to explore in the spiritual what the human soul needs. Our contemporaries believe that this urge for spiritual research is an urge for a new religion. Dr. Eliot has pointed out how our needs in life are pushing us towards spiritual science. Dr. Eliot, who was at the forefront of science for a long time and was president of a university, expressed the following in essence: People have always assumed that the soul is different from the body, although it is inherent in it. Everyone believes that there is in man a living, ruling, peculiar essence or spirit, which is himself. This is something as fundamentally real as the body. It is the most active part of the human being and is recognized as such: and this has always been the case and will always be the case.

When one hears such words, one can conclude that even people who have a broad education have this urge and aspiration.

Many examples could be given; everywhere one will see that the spirit is indicated out of the need for life, not out of knowledge, but in a peculiar way that shows what aversion still exists to the details of how they are to be presented through spiritual science.

When someone, like Dr. Eliot, points out the needs of the time, then this reference is somewhat as if one were to say with regard to natural science: No one can deny that there is a nature, a nature that brings forth beings in space, a nature that causes events to occur in time that have a beginning and an end, and so on. Someone who points to nature in this way can be compared to someone who points to the spirit as Dr. Eliot does. But can anyone be satisfied with the fact that there is a nature with various living beings and events?

What is satisfying is that a person can go out and perceive the individual concrete entities. Not the abstract satisfies people, but the details; facts must come before our soul. What could never satisfy anyone in relation to nature is what should still satisfy many in relation to the spiritual – an empty generality, an abstraction.

But people still refuse to go into the details, the details, the facts of the spiritual world, which shine out of spiritual science just as the individual facts of nature shine out of natural science.

Spiritual science today stands on the same ground as natural science did four centuries ago, when it began to look at nature through its means. While yesterday it was pointed out that one goes into the details of natural scientific matters, today it must be pointed out that one must first get used to thinking about the details of spiritual life in the same way as about the details of natural processes; and how it is not enough to know that there are general natural products, how the natural scientist must distinguish, for example, between oats and wheat, so man will also need more and more the details of spiritual facts. Just as one cannot approach natural needs in the same way with wheat and oats, so one cannot approach spiritual needs with general references to the spiritual world. When this or that consolation is needed or when this or that character trait is to be poured into the soul, then details and facts must be given. This is the path that spiritual science has to take. And because this tendency towards the general dominates the world today, we see from the individual things that are demanded how, although people admit that their present life contains a yearning for the spirit, which has a fertilizing effect on the soul that it fills when it is satisfied, no one can say anything accurate about the most essential things, because people generally resist the individual.

From this speech by Eliot, we can also take out another sentence in which he talks about how the spiritual worldview that is being built seems to apply to all the scientific achievements of the new era, and will deal with joy and life.

He thus opposes old age, death, and so on. We have before our eyes a distancing from death and mourning, death and sin, on the part of those who tell people what the life of the soul should be when they have passed through the gate of death. Dr. Eliot demands that all this is unnecessary in the new world view, that it should be concerned with life and joy. This is entirely in keeping with the outlook of our time, which focuses on the living deed and sees reasons to make life strong and joyful. That is fully justified. It is also justified to say that the new view of life must deal with life and joy; and in contrast to this, the sentence sounds wonderful: the new world view should ignore death and mourning. There is still a weighty objection: however much human thinking does not want to deal with it, death and mourning will deal with man and show their existence to man, and life will always demand, so that one can understand it, to know something about death and its riddles, and joy will demand forces that lift us up again when mourning weighs us down.

But this is precisely the aim of spiritual science: to awaken in the soul that which brings one to the justified, certain conviction that what is human existence in its true nature is not part of the external sensual world, but is of an eternal nature, passing from life to life. And this realization of the deepest life in its individual life will only bring the knowledge of true life that Eliot demands, because as knowledge it knows how the truly living always conquers death. And this knowledge will know how to draw out of the depths of the soul the forces that arise from the spiritual and that know how to lift us up again when the outer life depresses us through grief or something else.

We can take a fact from human life, a fact from the spirit of our time, and then draw our conclusions as to what the life of the individual can get from the results of spiritual research.

Everyone experiences that their life has a youth, progresses, and that a point of culmination is finally reached, and that they then descend again. They experience how gradually withers that which they call their physical body. A superficial science has just concluded from this fact that the spiritual depends on the physical. Because the brain withers so that an external stimulus of the intellect is not possible, one draws the conclusion that the soul-spiritual withers with the physical. This is as if one concludes from the unusability of a piano that the player would no longer be there.

If spiritual science is allowed to flow in, what it knows from the spiritual world, then the soul will have powers towards old age, which intervene in life in a healing way. In my little writing about the education of the child, you can see how spiritual science also intervenes in the details of practical education. How often one hears people giving all kinds of educational advice. Those who know life are often alarmed by such general sentences and rules, and those who follow the literature attentively will see how inadequate these reformist ideas of today are for the growing human being. But when one knows from spiritual research how, under completely different conditions, the human being grows up in the different years and periods of his life, how the physical body develops up to the seventh year, how then the educational measures have a completely different effect in the seventh to fourteenth years, when the etheric body is forming, and from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year, when the astral body develops. Only when one knows how these epochs in human life are differentiated, and how the human being progresses in precisely differentiated stages, only then is one able to establish such principles from the nature of the human being that truly bring forth what lies in the soul. The future will show how life can be enriched by such pedagogy, which is taken from spiritual science; for anyone who approaches life in such a way that the conditions are created for us to give the soul the forces that awaken life at certain times must then always see for himself what spiritual science can become for all people. Wherever the human being stands, he cannot only acquire theoretical knowledge. Instead, spiritual science gives the human soul truly spiritual substance, spiritual nourishment that works in the soul and is digested, if I may use the trivial expression, and always keeps the soul soft, inwardly active, full of content, and aware of itself. This is knowledge that is needed in life and will be needed more and more.

Then, when life begins to decline, when wrinkles start to appear on our faces and our hair begins to turn white, then we not only have theosophical knowledge, but, through a spiritual-scientific view of life, we carry within us a living core that is full of content, experiences itself more and more as the outer shell falls away, and the human being feels within: You lay aside the shell and the body, the physical, but within you carry the strength to go through the spiritual world, to get new strength there for building a new life. Saying this to yourself inwardly gives security.

This applies in general to all people. In a sense, spiritual science will help people more and more to overcome what must naturally arise if one does not feel the living spirit.

Another fact that is particularly important in our time is nervousness. In a certain way, everyone today feels what is meant by the age of nervousness, because it is inwardly connected with certain concepts that have been formed. How often does a person feel this or that powerlessness, this or that fault, this or that vice, in the sense of the materialistic world view, so that the person looks at his ancestors, at his line of inheritance.

In poetry, it is often depicted how a person, feeling burdened by his ancestors, says to himself: This is inherited disposition, this cannot be changed. The product of such a state of mind is weakness, desolation - no observer should fail to see how this actually makes people weak.

Today, one encounters strange experiences. Materialistic researchers, in particular, speak of the nervousness of our time, as materialistic explanations have always done. Only recently a book was published by an Austrian scholar who, curiously enough, attributes the whole predisposition with one expression: that everything in man is based on the physical and chemical composition of his organism, even his character. And if you read the book further, something strange happens: the author gives advice. You would think that you could expect some kind of remedy to be taken to help with the chemical-physical imbalance; the gentleman in question does not recommend any pills, at least not for many cases, but rather recommends strengthening the character through moral means, through all kinds of soul things!

We do not want to argue with our time in such areas. We want to focus our attention on the question: where should the things be taken from that make a person who is desolate with this or that ailment - physical-chemical conditions that make up his character - where should the means be taken to make him a fighter against his nervousness, against his neurasthenia?

Spiritual science will answer: When people realize that it was just as much a mistake to claim that the complex of characteristics of the child arises solely from the inheritance from the parents, when one draws that conclusion, it is just as much an error of observation as it once error of observation when in the sixteenth century, and even in the seventeenth, it was said, and not only laymen but also learned researchers believed it, that higher animals, even fish, can arise from inanimate substance.

And there was a great revolution when the Italian naturalist Francesco Redi stated: Living things can never arise from non-living things. Living things can only arise from living things. With great difficulty, Francesco Redi escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno.

The same must be said for the spiritual and soul: the spiritual and soul can only emerge from the spiritual and soul. We look back to the spiritual and soul, which is the seed in earlier times for our present life. We feel the injustice of what we carry within us as fate, as predispositions, as spiritual-soul possessions, being supposed to be only something inherited from our ancestors, and we recognize that it is rooted in the spiritual that we acquired in earlier times. Then the human being becomes aware that there is something in him besides the inherited traits. And to the extent that he recognizes this, he need not look at his inherited traits and say to himself, “I have to bear these.” No, the spiritual researcher, when he has recognized his soul core, must seek to strengthen his powers and help them develop.

In this way spiritual science will have an effect on life, making it healthy, and the individual will place himself firmly in life.

This basically indicates the other result of life research: the social. Our time has initially only the tendency - albeit justified - to study the external arrangement, how one should make this or that institution so that people can find their existence. The inner tendency brings spiritual science, how people should bring their inner being out, in order to grow into life and stand in life.

All this will include the fact that this time must become aware that it is not dealing with dead theory in spiritual research, but that life forces themselves are being awakened. As a result, the age will recognize the reality of what comes from spiritual science, will experience it, because spiritual science will grasp itself in life. Thus the human being who carries spiritual science within himself will face life in a different way, which is impossible without spiritual science, but which life will foster more and more. When the spirit, the soul, is grasped as reality, when it is realized that the soul is reality, then there will no longer be a lack of understanding for the serious fact of life that out of a healthy, powerful grasp of the soul's core, forces also flow that can protect the outer physical body from damage, weakness, and even illness.

In this respect, the view of our time is shown in the common use of a saying that is, however, increasingly dying out: “A healthy soul dwells in a healthy body,” which means that if you just make the body healthy, then a healthy soul dwells in the body. In spiritual science, this will be understood quite differently, that a healthy soul dwells in a healthy body, because the innermost soul, in its health, forms the physical life in the body. People will recognize the healing powers that spiritual science instills into the soul, although not with the means that people want to use for recognition today, because today they will look and say: There is a person who has studied spiritual science but still became ill. The answer to this is that spiritual science or spiritual research has not yet come very far in terms of its dissemination, and secondly, of course, nothing can be done directly against external damage to the physical body if this damage comes only from the physical, just as you cannot heal a broken leg from the soul.

But there is also something that we recognize through the peculiar way in which the insights of spiritual research work, that the soul transforms back to an external coexistence with existence, as it had before the alienation from nature. We see in the child, and also in the animal, an instinctive growing together with the existence of the spiritual world. We see how the animal does not eat too much, how the instinct is healthy, but we see how certain things are conditioned in the cultural human being by the fact that he is alienated from nature. Sometimes one can look at this with a shudder, how humanity is moving away from this direct experience and coexistence with existence. Just the other day I saw a person who weighed out a certain amount of food for each meal. In the current transformation into a purely mechanical science, we even treat the human stomach and digestive tract like retorts. There it remains - the mechanical - not only in science, there it goes over into the treatment of human life. In contrast to this is the stream of spiritual research. With knowledge, the human being returns to existence in such a way that he instinctively protects himself in the higher sense from that which should not be. And then, of course, the healing effect of spiritual research will have to be assessed somewhat differently than it is today.

If questions now arise, such as: How many illnesses does the healing of spiritual science actually protect us from? — is difficult to answer, because the illnesses don't come; nevertheless, it is more reasonable that man, by living in the instinct life, is protected by spiritual science from illnesses than that he has to heal himself afterwards. Thank God, it cannot be proven, because the result is that these damages no longer occur.

Thus we see how a return to nature, in the very modern sense, is brought about for life through spiritual science. Much more could be said; in the end everything would clearly indicate that spiritual science brings about healing, advancement in life, and the right place in life, in the natural context of life.

Thus not only knowledge, the most valuable possession, but significant consequences for life are brought about by spiritual science, consequences that one can only imagine when one considers them as they have been, albeit only briefly, hinted at today. But all this will come about because man will penetrate into the spiritual worlds, not only in general, but by recognizing the individual spiritual facts. Just as he speaks not only of general nature in nature, but recognizes the details, the individual minerals, the individual plants and the individual animals, so he will also recognize the spiritual world in its details. Then the spiritual nature around him will be as nature itself is meant to foster, fertilize and even sustain physical life.

Then man will feel himself embedded in the spirit as he otherwise feels embedded in the physical in the substances of nature. One will learn to feel that one lives in the spirit as one lives in the physical. Just as one feels the processes that take place outside in the universe in the physical organism, one will feel the spiritual relationships, to grief and joy, to suffering and desire, to desire and contemplation in their own world, and life will find that which promotes life and health from the spirit.

That is what can be hoped for from spiritual science, because this spiritual science is to fulfill the soul's desire to feel at one with everything that is going on in the universal spiritual realm. When man will no longer think that everything is just an event, a life, what is going on in him, and his will like a power that has no significance for the environment, when he will know that what is going on in him is as interconnected with the spiritual as with the physical of the physical body, then man will receive strength and power, health through such science health; then will man find what I sought to indicate in my drama 'The Test of the Soul', as a soul expresses this sense of security in the spiritual, that man knows himself in the spirit, experiences himself in the spirit, thinks in the spirit and really breathes in it and in this real breath of life attains a life-filled existence.

This soul health will emanate from spiritual science when it is fulfilled, when it is given through spiritual science, which is expressed in those words, where it is said what can take place in a seeking soul. What has been said today can be summarized in what a soul that feels at home in the spirit can say to itself:

In your thinking live world thoughts

— do not dwell in man merely temporarily, but are eternal world thoughts —

In your feeling weave world forces
In your will work world beings.
Lose yourself in world thoughts
experience yourself through cosmic powers,
create yourself from will-beings.
Do not end with what is worldly remote,
through the play of thought-dreams – –;
begin in the expanses of the spirit,
and end in the depths of your own soul: –
you will find divine goals,
recognizing yourself within yourself.

Dear attendees! Since I have repeatedly been allowed to speak in this city about topics of spiritual research, it will not be inappropriate to address the important question of where the truths of this spiritual research come from and where the sources of error lie. This must be recognized as something important, especially with regard to supersensible research, since orientation regarding truths and errors in every field of human life is of undeniable importance, and since, as is easy to see, in a field that takes us into such uncertain and error-prone regions, this orientation is of particular necessity. Spiritual research leads us to those areas from which the most important questions and riddles of life arise, initially less those questions and riddles of life that arise from the various fields of science - these are actually, insofar as we are dealing with science in the ordinary sense of the word, much more remote than the questions and riddles of spiritual research, which we encounter, so to speak, at every step we can take in life. In a sense, these riddles and questions of life can beset us at every moment of our existence. If we look at what spiritual research can give to life, albeit from a broad perspective, it initially comes down to two important questions. The first question is contained in the significant word 'man's fate'; the other is contained in the word that is so closely connected with all man's longings, with all his doubts, with all his hopes: the word 'immortality'. It is not as if spiritual research were exhausted by answering the two questions or riddles indicated, but the wide field of this research interests wide circles above all because its results are summarized in an appropriate answer to these questions.

Human destiny! What questions and what riddles lie in these words. We see a human being born into existence. We can predict from the little caring environment he has around him that hardship and misery will accompany his existence. And when we see him growing up with only limited mental abilities and emotional traits, we can say that he will perhaps become a rather unhelpful member of human society and that in many respects he will perhaps be a burden to himself and a torment to his soul. On the other hand, we see a person come into life surrounded by caring hands from the very beginning. We may see certain special gifts and abilities emerging in him early on, and we can predict that he may spend his life in happiness, that he can become a useful member of human society, that he may experience his life in enthusiasm and inner bliss, and all this suggests the question of why, which external science can answer so little.

The other question is that of immortality. It comes to us from life, but at first it confronts us in an egotistical way: that man desires survival after this life from his hopes, his longings, from a satisfied or unsatisfied life. Frequently, this question is raised out of selfish desires; but it need not be so. It can approach us as objectively as any other scientific question. We see this particularly when we consider how, in the course of the nineteenth century, more and more people had to break with the old traditions and beliefs, who not only doubted the survival of human activity after death, but who even believed that they had certainty that with death, consciousness of the human being closes forever, that the soul life, so to speak, gives itself up in it. Such people often belonged to spiritually highly striving beings. They said to themselves: I do not claim an egoistic survival after death; I can resign myself to the thought that what I have worked for will be handed down to humanity after my death. Selfless devotion of their acquired knowledge and the happiness they had experienced was their endeavor when the gate of death closed before them.

It is precisely in the face of such a world view that the question of immortality approaches us in a truly scientific way, for we can indeed say: Is it compatible with all that we otherwise know as the laws of existence, that the human being really is approaching a conclusion in his work and striving when the gate of death closes? Perhaps one could agree with such devotion for ethical reasons, but from the point of view of the laws of world economy it is different. We need only have a little feeling for what is achieved in the world by human souls, and we will say to ourselves: In the course of human life, the powers of the souls themselves create substantial facts, facts that, since the souls are individual, take on an individual character. We cannot readily see such individual creations, as they arise from the human soul, incorporated into the general stream of human development without having to admit that the world economy has a break, for we must feel that the best, the noblest, the most important thing our soul can work for is individual, in the sense that only the one soul can work for it within itself. We may give much to the general public, but our best would completely disappear from the world when the human being ceased to exist, when the gates of death closed. Without taking into account our desires, our hopes and longings, we are faced with the necessity of contemplating the immortal in human nature in the face of all that is mortal.

So the question arises before our soul, but if this question is to be answered, a science is needed that goes beyond the sensual, beyond the outer, physical nature. For nothing can give us an answer as to why these or those facts present themselves to us when we enter life. The question of destiny is not answered by physics and natural science. These must remain indifferent when they consider their facts, how these facts approach human hearts and souls. The why cannot fall within the scope of external science, nor can the question of immortality, since science depends on concepts of the mind that are bound to the instrument of the brain. What it can observe arises with death, disappears with death; if it cannot penetrate into the [gap in the transcript], we have no hope of seeing the question of immortality answered by it.

The way in which attempts are now being made to find answers to such questions in the present day (through spiritual science) is, however, not at all popular in the present day. Prejudice after prejudice favors a spiritual research activity; and perhaps the reasons will emerge from the lectures themselves, why there is so much resistance in the wider circles of the present, one may say, not only theoretical resistance, but even hatred, against what is emerging in a scientific way as spiritual research, in order to solve the characterized riddles of life and to find many other things that are connected with them.

Today we will talk about how man can truly look into the worlds from which the answers to such questions arise. We cannot get by in this world with the ordinary powers by which we know the outer world; and if man were not able to develop other powers than the ordinary powers of knowledge, there would be no possibility for him to penetrate into such worlds. All questions converge in the one: Is there a possibility for man to develop other powers of knowledge than those which [outer] science uses, which are thus exhausted in the observation of the senses and the mind bound to the brain? If man were only a being of the senses, it would be impossible for such powers to exist. Only someone who admits that the sense body of man, that which one can see with the eyes or grasp with the hands, is permeated by another entity, a supersensible entity, can come to the assumption of such powers. And basically, a logical certainty that it is so is provided by a very everyday observation, the kind of observation that is only rarely made because man does not consider what he experiences all the time to be worthy of special observation.

The mystery of death remains interesting for people because it comes unexpectedly, suddenly, and frighteningly; but what happens every day in the same way, the state of transition between waking and sleeping, is paid less attention to; nothing comes up to people that awakens uncertainty in them, because the same thing happens to them again and again in this state of transition. But for those who want to undergo a deeper observation of life, it is precisely the state of change [between waking and sleeping] that becomes particularly significant. We can say: Would it not be logically absurd to think that what takes place in the soul in terms of passions, drives and desires, longings and hopes, images and ideas from morning till evening, that all this sinks into nothingness when we fall asleep and is recreated from nothingness when we wake up? That would be absurd; nevertheless, no external sensory observation, no mind bound to the brain, will ever find in the sleeping human body that which surges up and down in the soul during wakefulness.

So at least initially the hypothesis can be put forward that there is a spiritual element in human nature that leaves it during sleep and moves back into it when we wake up, when the human body is then left by the soul, this inner truth moves into spiritual worlds during sleep. When sleep is over, the spiritual element comes back from the spiritual world into the physical body. This cannot be observed with the mind, but it will become clear if one only thinks logically. Now, of course, such an assumption can only be valid, only then convincing, if one can grasp that which is invisible and leaves the human body during sleep, if one can prove its real reality. How this happens is what we will now deal with.

Let us observe how a person presents themselves when they are asleep. We become unable to move our external limbs. All the senses die away, the body is overcome by a heaviness, the powers that it has in the waking state are withdrawn from it. We see, so to speak, our body falling away from us as we fall asleep. But we also perceive how consciousness dies with this loss of physicality, how it slowly fades and is then surrounded by complete darkness. But if the soul-spiritual, which permeates the body during the day, is present, then we have to say that it is not capable of developing inner forces during sleep, not even the kind of forces that could give it inner knowledge of itself. It is so weak in the normal human being that it cannot become aware of itself if it does not have the instrument of the body. If such a spiritual-soul element is present, for the real, that it feels that it is losing its body, then we must say: this is of such a nature that it needs the tool of the body to develop consciousness, to evoke forces. And when it is left to itself, it is not strong enough to develop an inner life; it can only do so if it opposes the resistance of the body.

But this does not mean that proof of its existence has been provided. This proof will only be provided if man can succeed in making this inner life, which otherwise makes use of the body, so strong that it can develop inner life and consciousness even without the bodily. Even for the proof of the spiritual and soul life, everything depends on whether the human being can develop a spiritual life without the help of this outer corporeality, of sensory perceptions. What would such a spiritual life be like? It would be something similar to sleep and yet different from it. When we fall asleep, we feel our inner life cease, our consciousness fade away. It fades away because the external sensory impressions are silent. We would have to be able to artificially induce this moment through arbitrariness, that is, be able to silence the external sensory impressions and still evoke a state that is not unconsciousness but is consciousness. This state is or would be similar to sleep in that we command all external senses and the brain to stand still and yet consciousness does not occur. The spiritual researcher must bring about this state in himself.

We will understand this best if we compare it to another state that is similar and yet quite different. When man is able to develop spiritual-soul forces outside of his body, to perceive in a spiritual world, then he penetrates into a world that lies beyond the mind bound to the brain, beyond the senses; then a supersensible world speaks to him in his being, as the senses speak to his being when he makes use of the senses. In this way man would become a spiritual researcher; and if such a world could be experienced in this way, then man would penetrate into the spiritual world, then proof would be supplied that everything outwardly visible is based on a spiritual substance. If this is the case, then this spiritual must always be there, then the visible world that surrounds us must be based on a spiritual. The only reason for this is that it does not show itself because we cannot perceive it. We experience the invisible spiritual world like a blind person experiences colors.

Now there is a state that is not considered in spiritual science, that is not applied by it, but that can serve us in our understanding of the actual spiritual state in the present, that is the state that is usually referred to by the term 'mediumship'. Please do not misunderstand me; the human being as a medium is not, as the spiritual researcher wishes, to come to a conclusion. How does human nature become a medium? Mediumistic experiences are brought about by the fact that the ordinary expressions of the soul, the life of will, the life of feeling, are suppressed by some process or other, so that the person is as if put into a kind of sleep. Under certain conditions, however, human nature can be induced to make statements, even to speak and write, without the person knowing about it and without consciously observing the processes. Thus, spiritual expressions can occur that can only be attributed to an entity whose intelligence has descended. Nor should one be advised to do what is called the development of mediumistic qualities. They are present in some personalities even without special training.

Let us consider again: What happens to a person who, in this way, comes to spiritual expressions as a medium? His own soul life is tuned down, completely extinguished, that is, his conscious soul life; he knows nothing of his revelations. We find something there that can otherwise only come from the conscious soul. We can say that we see there what is the everyday expression, how it spreads like a veil over the subconscious soul activity, which in turn is connected with the physical body and expresses itself when the conscious soul activity is suppressed. Thus, soul activity rests in the depths of human nature; we can bring it out when we make conscious soul activity completely passive.

This is not the way of spiritual science; but it shows us not only that there is soul activity where there is consciousness, but also that spiritual-soul activity is in human nature and shows itself when we suppress consciousness. This process, which produces the medium, is exactly the opposite of what should happen for the spiritual researcher. While the soul activity, the consciousness, is being reduced for the medium, it must be strengthened for the spiritual researcher, and this is done by the person evoking intense soul processes, soul processes that are usually referred to as 'concentration of thought', 'meditation' or 'contemplation'. These processes, which we shall endeavor to explain more fully, take place in an inwardly active spiritual life and ultimately lead to certain states of mind that represent three stages, three stages that one ascends to fully enter the spiritual worlds.

I ask you not to be put off by the words. The words used here are not used in the sense in which they are not liked to be heard in ordinary life. So you must not understand anything by them other than what I will explain afterwards.

We can describe the three stages as imagination, inspiration and intuition. All three stages are achieved by an increase in the life of the soul, by an inward strengthening. When a person lives in the ordinary, everyday life with nature and other people, he gets his impressions through the senses and then processes them with the mind. In this way, a person is concerned above all that what he imagines, senses and feels corresponds to external things; he forms such ideas to which he can attach the hallmark of truth through agreement with the outside world. As long as he remains in this state, an inner, spiritual life cannot develop. A certain concentration, meditation, that is, contemplation, must occur.

In order to avoid abstractions, we shall give a brief and precise description of how such an inward arousal of higher spiritual powers is achieved. (Please refer to my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds?”). What is described in this book will be hinted at here. Concentrated thinking proceeds in such a way that one first tries to free oneself from all external sensory impressions, to develop strong powers to keep one's eyes from colors and light. All sensory impressions must be suppressed so that one becomes completely inattentive and uninterested in the outside world. Then, through special training of the will, one silences all the memories that have accumulated in the course of one's life. One tries to become free of all worries and suffering; in a word, one tries to be within oneself. What kind of exercise of the will is needed to find such a state can also be seen in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds?”.

It is possible to make the will so strong that the outer senses and the mind are silent. Just as one can learn in ordinary life to turn one's attention away from objects, so one can arbitrarily suppress all impressions from outside by strengthening one's willpower. On the one hand, this brings about a moment similar to falling asleep; however, it must not come to unconsciousness. This is achieved by taking, through the power of the soul, into one's own soul, images that one has prepared for oneself. Such images are best when they do not correspond to any external events or things.

We will now place such a particular image before our souls, an image that is one of many thousands that the spiritual researcher uses for himself, but which can show the principle: that a person imagines he has two glasses in front of him, one filled with water and the other empty. He pours, so we want to imagine, from the filled glass into the empty some water, but this would not make the filled glass emptier and emptier, but always fuller and fuller, and the more we pour out, the fuller it becomes. It is an absurd notion, but it can be an allegorical notion for something that confronts us enigmatically in life. What is meant here is what we call love. Does the loving soul, which lovingly gives to the needy, which, so to speak, gives from itself what is contained within it, does it become emptier because of this? No, what is given out of love always makes us fuller and richer. That is the quality of love, that we give our own being and yet become richer and richer.

If we imagine this property of love through the symbol of the water glasses just characterized, then we have done something similar to what we did in geometry. If we look at a circular medal, we can put it down and then imagine a circular shape. So you can be completely unaware of the intrinsic nature of a thing, but you can visualize and draw the circular shape and completely disregard what you have in front of you. In the circle, everything that relates to the circular nature becomes clear. Figuratively, you have extracted something that is in this thing. This is how one visualizes things in geometry, and one also does this in spiritual research in a higher sense.

You extract from a process the nature of love, which encompasses such mystery and unfathomability that no human being can exhaust it, you take out the quality of becoming ever richer and you focus the soul on the symbol. You can also form other symbols. Such images are better for the meditative life than representations taken from the external world; in them, the soul still clings to the external world. But if we choose such images that have nothing to do with the external world, then we can live with distraction from everything external in our inner life. We live there when we direct all our soul powers for a while towards the one image. We can also use other symbols for such inner work, and the spiritual researcher has to do such an exercise a thousand times. Wisdom as such is not luminous, but we can imagine it under the image of a luminous sun and surrender to the symbol that expresses the idea of inner warmth. We can experience something in the process that we also feel when we imagine wisdom inwardly. We can also imagine love for the warmth spreading throughout the world.

Many, many examples of such images could be given. Someone could easily come along and say: So the spiritual researcher wants to indulge in ideas that are not true! But they are also not there to depict something external; they do not want that, but they want to bring the soul life within them to activity. While in our everyday life, or when we are occupied with scientific matters, we may have content in our soul that we cannot see, while our soul life is spread over many things, in meditation we draw together all our soul forces and focus them on this one idea; this makes it particularly strong when we make an effort to hold on to this idea and do not let anything else into our soul for a long time.

For the actual accomplishment of the matter, comprehensive inner measures are necessary, which you can also find in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds.” Especially effective are moral intuitions, impulses of the will, which the soul symbolically visualizes and to which it surrenders with the same love and enthusiasm that are otherwise awakened by things that stimulate us from the outside and make an impression on us. All training for true spiritual research is based on this kind of strengthening of the inner life, [in a] gathering of all the soul into a single idea; at times one works on this idea. This is meditation. And this meditation rises to contemplation when we are able to dwell vitally in such an inner soul content for a longer period of time, as we are otherwise in a comfortable space with our physicality. When we come to bring ourselves equally consciously into such a voluntarily induced state of soul, then we live in inner contemplation. Through this, that which in human nature is not dependent on the tool of corporeality is inwardly activated.

This provides real proof that there is such an inner spiritual realm, and it brings us closer to proving that it is something real that withdraws during sleep, that it is only too weak in ordinary life, but shows itself inwardly animated when we bring it to inner activity through such exercises as those described.

When a person has practiced this for a while, the point is reached when he finds that even when he does not artificially conjure up such images, does not artificially conjure up the symbols, his inner life is prepared in such a way that it generates such images from the subconscious, so to speak. This is the important moment, it is like a rebirth of the soul's life when, without our artificially inducing it, we see image after image emerging from the depths of our soul, emerging before us like a second world, a world outside the world.

But now the important thing begins, so that man may be led to the truths and not to the errors of spiritual research. A world of images rises from the depths of the soul, a world of images that someone who is not familiar with these things, but is familiar with today's view of such conditions, will take as visions, hallucinations, delusions. Today's world view believes that in such things, which go beyond ordinary life, it can only perceive the pathological. But the path to the truth of spiritual research consists in the fact that it can only emerge from a practiced life of the soul that knows how to distinguish between delusions and realities, including those in the realm of the soul. Therefore, every genuine schooling in spiritual research must lead to the moment when the described occurs, a strong inner will can be made in the person who wants to become a spiritual researcher, a decision that will not be present if the condition occurs pathologically.

This can be seen by observing ordinary life. Many of you will have noticed how people with a morbid mental life, when they have delusions, are far more convinced of the truth, of the reality of their own ideas, than of the reality of the outside world. It is often easy to dissuade people from a conviction, but with someone whose mental life is a morbid one, it would be a wasted effort. What happens then? What happens is that what a person has created through the power of his own soul life, he loves out of a strong feeling; in his imagination he also brings with him the longing for it to be reality, and so a world is built up before him, but one that he has only created himself. As soon as a person takes such a world as truth, he cannot be a spiritual researcher. Such a strong willpower is necessary when, through meditation training, the images that we call imaginations arise; a strong resolve is needed that is precisely opposed to unhealthy ideas, that now says to itself: All that you feel rising up in you as a world of images, even without your intervention, is nothing more than a mirror image of your own soul life. What you have within you, you have brought forth through your own efforts, and it presents itself to you. They are nothing but shadowy images of your own being. And it is not only the ability that belongs to the spiritual researcher, that one can bring it to the point where imagination occurs, more important is the strong will training in the face of this world, to always hold fast to the images of enchanting beauty, that they are only shadowy images of our own self.

This mistake is repeatedly made by those who have not undergone proper training and who, for whatever reason, come to a certain inner vision of images: they mistake this world for a real world because it can be a beautiful one, because in it, the human being feels happy. A spiritual researcher must be able to dispense with such a way of thinking. What must be formed in the course of training is the strong decision, and when this decision itself is made into a kind of meditation, when one repeatedly immerses oneself in this decision and applies all the soul's powers to all as shadow images, then this determination is strengthened and one acquires the ability to erase the imaginative world again; one can erase it again through an inner strength; then one has reached an important stage of spiritual research.

What you can achieve is as follows: you can say that it can be compared to what we call forgetting our thoughts in ordinary life. You know that everything you have experienced rests in your consciousness. How could a person live if all his experiences, pain and joy, were always present in his memory? But you know that what has long been forgotten can from time to time be recalled in the soul. Just as an idea from ordinary life plunges into oblivion, so too must the whole imagination be pushed into oblivion, into the unconscious, through the strong willpower discussed. This requires a strong mastery of the human being over himself, because the human being is intimately connected with what he has produced through his power. He has achieved a strong victory over himself when he is able to erase everything he has produced on the first level of spiritual knowledge.

Only then do we live in our true self, only then have we developed stronger forces within us than before. If we cannot do this, we know that we are still too weak to truly penetrate into spiritual worlds. Experiencing truths in the spiritual world is only possible if the experiences are brought about through spiritual training. When we have succeeded in doing this, then the images come up again in a completely different way – like forgotten images come up again, but in the same way as they were – so the imaginations come up again in a changed way. Before, they were images, like visionary or fantastic images; afterwards, they come up in such a way that we know we are now dealing with a real world, with a supersensible world. Before, they were images; now they are processes that are real, like the processes of the sense world.

Now someone might say that one could indeed now indulge in self-suggestion. What gives us assurance that things are real when we have become so master of ourselves? Yes, the way we experience things - nothing else can give us assurance, but this is the same way that gives us proof of the realities of the external, sensual life. There is no other proof! This can best be appreciated by pointing out Schopenhauer's main error. One can fully acknowledge a mind like Schopenhauer's even when pointing out his main error. When he says that the world around us is only in our imagination, then he makes this mistake, because one can distinguish in the world - but only who distinguishes life - whether something is imagination or reality. Imagine glowing iron. You will not get burned by imagining it. But if you perceive and touch the real glowing iron, you will get burned by it. Nothing can prove reality to us as much as direct experience. Full experience is the only thing that gives proof of reality. It has been said: Why should not what comes before the soul be suggestion, since man so easily succumbs to suggestion? One can imagine drinking lemonade; there is no reality here, but one enjoys the taste of the lemonade as if it were reality. One can admit this, but it is not a matter of a partial experience, but of a full experience. One can experience the taste in one's imagination, but one's thirst is not quenched by it! The full experience, the quenching of thirst, presupposes reality, not imagination.

Just as man can only receive the evidence of reality through experience in the external sense world, so he only acquires the ability to distinguish between reality and deception in the spiritual world through strict spiritual training. In the manner described, the spiritual researcher comes to a stage where he is confronted with a new kind of being, of facts that lie behind the sense world. By strengthening the life of the soul, real spiritual eyes are created in one's own soul life, so that man may find a new world.

Also with regard to his own life, man can only come to reality through such imagination. If a person first forms such imaginations, as they have been described, with regard to his own life, if he imagines this or that in a symbolic way, what he has experienced, if he meditatively delves into his own past life, then this life can come to his soul in a kind of images. If he is then able to gain control over these images, if he can erase this life by conjuring it up before his soul, he has won the victory over himself. Just as he [now] sees something occurring externally that is real, but he has erased everything that is connected with his present life – when he follows this process, he comes to something that belongs to him but not to his present life. There he actually ascends to what we call his previous life on earth, and he arrives at the realization of his previous lives on earth. For this is what spiritual science leads us to: our previous earthly lives, and in so doing it provides us with proof that our entire life, in repeated earthly lives and in the intervening periods in the purely spiritual realm, is a continuous process. This idea may be unappealing to the mind, but it is something that will become part of our culture in the future.

But then the question of fate dissolves in a strangely strange way, in that we know: this is not the first time we have lived this life and we still have many more lives on earth ahead of us. Back then, [in earlier lives on earth], we prepared ourselves for what now determines our destiny. And the question of immortality gains its proper illumination when we look at the gate of death in such a way that we pass through it, then live in a purely spiritual world, in order to enter a new life on earth with all that we have acquired, which yields the fruits of earlier lives. Then we are not talking in general terms about immortality, which is composed limb by limb. We gain from the certainty that we see our own lives, certain abilities that teach us to see that another and yet another life must follow. Thus genuine spiritual scientific research leads us to the truth, but the right path must be taken in the sense indicated.

All such knowledge then leads further to that stage where we not only see what arose in images, but also acquire the ability to experience in a non-pictorial way, so to speak: inspiration. Through inspiration, we penetrate into the meaning of things and entities, and through intuition, the next level of inner life, we become one with things, we experience what lies invisibly in things as spirit.

One can say in response to such an argument: Yes, when the spiritual researcher enters into a spiritual world and can say from this spiritual world how the riddle of fate is to be solved, can say: Yes, an immortal lives in you – this applies only to the spiritual researcher. That is not the case. The truth about the nature of spiritual research must also become clear if it is to become a factor in our culture.

What does the spiritual researcher gain when he enters higher worlds? He comes to recognize his essential soul core, to be able to say to himself: When the hair turns pale, when the body gradually withers, then a soul core weaves within me, which I feel becoming stronger and stronger, acquiring strength in life, then living in an intermediate life [between death and a new birth], and then coming to life again in a new earthly life. One could say: Only the spiritual researcher can experience this certainty. What then do other people have to gain from it, who can only use their intellect? If we want to recognize this, we have to realize that everything that the spiritual researcher brings is nothing other than the experience of the spiritual world. But an urge and an impulse asserts itself in him immediately; it is the urge to bring down everything one experiences in the spiritual world into the concepts of the real world. The true spiritual researcher is not satisfied with his journey into the spiritual worlds until he can clothe in logical forms what he knows from the spiritual worlds — so that his experiences are understandable to all people. And the spiritual researcher has no certainty about immortality, no certainty about destiny, until he can express his experiences in general ideas and concepts.

How does he relate to his ideas then? He relates to them as a painter who is learning to paint, who is learning how to handle colors, who is learning everything that belongs to the art of painting, relates to the picture that he brings onto the canvas. What the painter learns is all his own business at first. But then the picture is before us. Two people can stand before this picture. One may be inclined to spiritualize everything, then he will understand the secrets that the person has placed in the picture. The other would only look at the color combinations in the picture. Just as the painter relates to his picture and is not satisfied until his skill is reflected in it, so the spiritual researcher relates to his experience when he has conveyed it to other people in an understandable way. This picture, when it is painted by the true spiritual researcher, is such that every understanding observer who stands before it can understand it - explanations would only disturb, because the picture must be grasped inwardly. If a person has only enough impartiality and free power of judgment, he can accept it as a mental image, which he can absorb; he then has everything that the spiritual researcher was able to fathom in the spiritual world. One must be clear about the fact that in what the spiritual researcher puts into his picture, there is nothing that cannot be grasped with the mind, with the means of healthy thinking.

Everything we need for the strength of life, everything we need at all, cannot come to us through the research of science, but through spiritual science - through what we absorb when the spiritual researcher presents his perceptions in ideas. The strange thing is that the spiritual researcher does not receive what he needs for his life through his research, but through what he can have in common with ordinary people: Only when the spiritual researcher has made the seen comprehensible to other people does he gain security in life, orientation in relation to fate and satisfaction. Through spiritual research, one gains insights into the entire world; but what the research can be, the spiritual researcher cannot gain from it if it cannot be presented in comprehensible forms. And the spiritual researcher cannot be served by anything other than what he can make useful to the non-spiritual researcher. There must be spiritual researchers; and you will see from my book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds” that every person can come to a certain level of this knowledge. In order to acquire what the soul needs for the security of life, for the joy of living, for the security of its roots in the immortal, what the soul needs so that man can look forward to old age with peace of mind, can be recognized through the results of spiritual research, and in this the spiritual researcher attains nothing more than the other; and only then does the spiritual researcher have something of his ideas when he has presented them in the forms of common sense.

That is the truth about spiritual research; that is the truth about the relationship of spiritual research to life, and it must be firmly held that from this spiritual research itself only that has value which can be so placed in life. The spiritual researcher who can live in the spiritual world may see many things, but what he sees there has value only if he can also judge it. Some people can indeed come to visions through exercises if they do not go through everything that has been characterized as the true way today; they can come to see many things – but what value, what significance the vision has, whether it has any truth value, can be quite unknown to them personally. One must first be able to judge what one sees; one must first be able to appreciate it in its significance for life. But where does one gain this possibility? Through nothing other than the power of judgment and morality that one has already acquired in ordinary life before entering the spiritual world. He who has a moral sense will enter the spiritual world with it and be able to judge things rightly. The one who is foolish or immoral will only be able to judge what he sees wrongly. Therefore, a person's value is not increased if he is able to see the supernatural through all kinds of means. Even the spiritual researcher is only valuable through that which makes a person valuable, through sound judgment and moral strength. But the havoc that unhealthy judgment and immorality wreak when the spiritual researcher enters the spiritual worlds with them will be shown to us tomorrow when we speak of the errors of spiritual science.

The question could be raised: Yes, but what then are the truths of spiritual research? Just as it is impossible to list the truths of another science in an hour, it is equally impossible to list the truths of spiritual science in an hour. It should be shown how man comes to the truth in spiritual research and not to error, how man, through the development of the forces slumbering in him, creates spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, to use Goethe's words, in order to see into a spiritual world. Now one cannot say that this is a rule as truth, that this is a rule as error; one can only say that the soul of man will mature on this path to see truths and not errors. This path should be spoken of today. Tomorrow the sources of error will be clearly explained. Today's and tomorrow's lectures belong together. Today's lecture should show how the human soul can strengthen itself spiritually in order to perceive the spiritual world, just as the eye and the mind can perceive the sensual world. In this way, the human soul perceives everything. That it is born out of the external world of the senses and at the same time [is] in the spiritual being, a saying by Goethe tells us:

If the eye were not sunlike,
How could we behold the light?
If the power of God did not live in us,
How could we be enraptured by the divine?

It is true, in ourselves there must be an eye, with all its power, for us to behold the light; the eye must be solar. And for a person, there must be an inner activity of God's life so that he can perceive God.

But such a saying in the Goethean sense is not meant as it would be said by [Schopenhauer], for example: the world is a representation. We would be far from the meaning of Goethe's saying if we believed that we should create the whole external world only as an imitation of the inner world, as some philosophers claim. This must be said, as Goethe says: Man would have no eyes if sunlight did not permeate space. And just as it is true that we only recognize light through the eye, it is equally true that we only have an eye because light floods space, for it is light that has brought out the eye in the first place. Beings that had eyes but have lived in caves for many generations lose the organ of the eye, the eyes atrophy. The eye is a creature of light. Thus the fact that we have organs for light, through which we can have it, is at the same time proof of the existence of light. The fact that man can experience spiritual things in himself, that he can awaken supernaturality in himself, is proof that the supernatural is not only in him and that he does not dream it, but that the spiritual that interweaves all space and time has brought forth the spiritual in us in the first place, as light brings forth the eye.

Thus we can supplement Goethe's beautiful saying, which points us to our inner light and sun, to our inner divinity, with a saying that is from the inner spirituality of man for the outer reality of the spiritual. We can summarize the result of our reflection on the reality of that spiritual in which we rest, as we rest as sense beings in the material world; we can summarize it by juxtaposing Goethe's saying with the other saying:

If the world were not [endowed with the sun],
How could eyes blossom for the being?
If existence were not God's revelation,
How could people come to be filled with spirit?